ON 23 JANUARY 1045 King Edward married Edith, daughter of Earl Godwine. That marriage and that woman are the subjects of this paper. Edith's biography could be told very briefly. She was the daughter of Earl Godwine of Wessex and his Danish wife, Gytha; she was educated, or raised, at the nunnery of Wilton; she married Edward in 1045. Specific events, especially datable events, in her career are few. They include her marriage in 1045; her expulsion from court in 1051 and return in 1052; possibly some involvement in the events of 1066, after the death of her husband; and possibly in those which began before his death, leading to the Norman Conquest. Certainly she survived Edward as a widow for nearly ten years, living at Winchester or Wilton. She died in 1075, when she was honoured by William the Conqueror with burial alongside Edward in Westminster Abbey

These are the bare bones of a life, and ones which centre on the dramatic events of 1051 and 1066. The reconstruction of that life in greater detail is a challenging task, given the nature of our sources, and especially given the absence of material for so many of the questions which we would now wish to answer. One route to understanding Edith and her life is to approach it by asking what it meant to be a king's wife and queen in mid-eleventh-century England. This involves adding to those bare bones, with evidence from Domesday Book, charters and other sources which provide precious information about her lands and patronage. Such material allows us to see something of her role in the rule of eleventh-century England and of her activities as a royal wife and queen. Consideration of Edith thus involves contextualising exiguous information. It must also entail careful scrutiny of some of the most well-known things about her. This is especially the case when dealing with the nature of her marriage to Edward, an issue which became central to later stories about the saint/king. Here the question is not so much what can we make of little, but wariness about the little we think we know. On that marriage, and more generally, we need to pay particular attention to one source – the one which Edith herself commissioned – the work we now know as The Life of King Edward who rests at Westminster (the Vita Edwardi).

The writing of history, and the uses of history, are currently topics of great interest to medieval historians. It is an interest shared by historians of early medieval Europe: by those concerned with the making of peoples, what is sometimes termed ‘ethnogenesis’, and by those interested in political legitimation. History is seen as the story or myth which defines groups; more debatably as the common shared memory by which groups define themselves. These functions of the remembered past can, it is argued, be tapped or manipulated for specific purposes, including and especially for legitimacy. Common to all this work is the perception of the power of the past, its significance for those living in the present, including for their own sense of themselves and their identity. This perception thus casts the writing of history, and the production of it, as at least potentially political acts. Whether consciously or unconsciously, to a greater or lesser extent, the writing of history is seen as an activity in which power is exercised, an ideological, though not necessarily a crudely propagandist, activity. The fact of the writing of history, and not merely the facts which that writing records, is now recognized as a potential source for our understanding of political attitudes, of group and individual identity, if not of group formation itself.

Medievalism is currently defined as the use of and responses to the medieval past, ‘at all periods since the sense of the medieval began to develop’, and the scholarly study of these responses. It is a topic of considerable contemporary academic interest. In 2004–05 the Liverpool Centre for Medieval Studies organized a series of lectures on this theme, under the general heading of ‘The Making of the Middle Ages’. This volume is the result. The original series included lectures considering the making of the middle ages on Merseyside (Wawn and Mills). This theme has been reinforced by three essays specially commissioned for this volume (Wilson, Morris and Sharples). The result is a collection which contributes to the study of medievalism in general, and one which provides a particular, and more unusual, focus on its local and regional dimensions.

Medievalism, as a term, is not new. It was in use in the second half of the nineteenth century, as the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionarymakes clear. The dictionary defines ‘medioevalism’ [sic] as both the ‘system of beliefs and practice characteristic of the Middle Ages’ and ‘the adoption of or devotion to medioeval [sic] ideas or usages’, i.e. the middle ages as they were, and the middle ages as utilized by later ages. The dictionary drew its examples from the nineteenth century, a heyday of enthusiasm for the middle ages. At that date the term was used in both senses, as the dictionary's examples indicate; and, as its definitions make clear, medievalism often meant not only a response to the medieval past, but a very positive one.

John Ruskin, for example, in his Lectures on Architecture and Painting (1853), saw medievalism as a period in the history of art: ‘You have then three periods: Classicism, extending to the fall of the Roman Empire; Medioevalism, extending from that fall to the close of the fifteenth century; and Modernism’. In 1873 John Addington Symonds referred to Renan's view that ‘a sentiment of the infinite’ was the chief legacy of medievalism to modern civilization. For Ruskin, Symonds – and Renan – medievalism not only had a chronological signification, but was associated with the aesthetic, spiritual and cultural aspects of a historical period, associations which have persisted.

FOR A BIOGRAPHER of eleventh-century English queens, the work of Frank Barlow must be a constant point of reference. His writing on the eleventh century, and in particular his biographies of eleventh-century rulers, is the essential starting point for anyone assessing English politics at this date. His view that early medieval biography was both possible and useful has acted as a stimulus to all of us who followed him along that difficult path. His biography of Edward the Confessor was not only a personal guide, but also a spur to my own attempt to produce a similar work on Edward's wife and queen, Edith. His fundamental edition of a text closely associated with Edith, the contemporary Life of King Edward, is the basis on which any study of Edith has to be built, and both he and his edition were constant intellectual companions in my own efforts to recreate Edith's life. An academic career pursued in Exeter may have stimulated his own interest in Edith: Exeter was part of the eleventh-century queen's dower. The location certainly added an extra piquancy to the challenge of writing about the writing of queens' biographies. This essay is thus offered as a tribute to Frank Barlow and his work, by way of a reflection on my own practice. What follows is not a new insight into early medieval queens and their lives, but a ‘theory of practice’, or rather a ‘theory of past practice’.