The model of the Conquest of 1066 bringing England into Europe still prevails in literary history. This framework positions England as influenced by the Continent, usually a shorthand for France, rather than being integral to a more broadly conceived Europe which is not the same without it. This chapter uses a discussion of the Vita Ædwardi Regis, a text written at the behest of Queen Edith, wife then widow of Edward the Confessor, to challenge this narrative. The Vita Ædwardi is a key example of the intellectually demanding, innovative and politically weighty texts commissioned by royal women of both the West Saxon and Norman dynasties. Its timing, begun on the cusp of the Norman Conquest and completed in its wake, sharply illustrates that the international horizons of English literary culture predate 1066 and that women, in particular, determined those horizons.

Many factors have come together to occlude what is in fact a surprisingly obvious story, about the international dimensions of the development in eleventh-century England of a model of queenship to which literary patronage was central. These occluding factors include nationalizing literary history, disciplinarity, periodization, established models of lay learning, and our still gendered assumptions about Latin literary culture, despite many years of groundbreaking feminist scholarship. This story of the consequences of royal female patronage is exciting precisely because it evades so many of our modern paradigms for understanding high medieval literary culture, within which we do not normally situate pre-Conquest England. Thus, it requires that we rethink accepted narratives not just of literature in England from Alfred to 1066 but also of medieval European literature more broadly. From this perspective, the Vita Ædwardi, and other texts from eleventh- and early twelfth-century England, reveal how attending to women in literary history does not simply provide a missing piece or two, but crucially demands a more fundamental remapping. The need for this remapping is well known, but the determining role of women's literary patronage risks being missed when we look at the study of the literary culture of eleventh-century England, since national literary history, periodization and disciplinarity need to be rethought at the same time as gender. The innovations of the Vita Ædwardi, which form the subject of this chapter, offer us an especially acute instance of the transforming role of women in literary history and the part conquest played in this.

This book spans one thousand years of historical writing and thought in England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. It begins, at its early limit, with Gildas (fl. 500–550 ce), whose De excidio Britanniae (The Ruin of Britain) took the demise of the Roman empire as its beginning point for a history of the Britons. It charts, at its outer chronological limit, the transition from manuscript to print and from medieval to Reformation historiography.

Like the medieval histories that comprise its subject, this volume seeks to give a shape – or many shapes – to the past. One of the challenges, however, of describing medieval historical writing is the capaciousness of historia as a premodern concept. In the Middle Ages history writing did not belong to any particular genre, language, or class of texts.

The vernacularity of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle can seem to isolate it from contemporary European history-writing and to invite literary interpretations which emphasize its preoccupation with ‘Englishness’. This chapter focuses on form and social networks at three key points in the keeping of the Chronicle: its inception in Alfred’s cosmopolitan court, Æthelweard’s late tenth-century Latin translation for his cousin Matilda, abbess of the Ottonian nunnery of Essen, and the bringing together of the Old English Orosius and the Chronicle in the mid-eleventh century to create an ambitious universal chronicle. The Chronicle emerges as embedded within the multilingual fabric of Europe, from Ireland to the Bosporus, and alert to the linguistic politics of history-writing across the Latin West.

London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. i contains an early eleventh century copy of the Old English Orosius (fols. 3r–111v) which was joined, c. 1045, with the C version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (ASC) (fols. 115v–164r). The C Chronicle is prefaced by two Old English poems known as the Menologium (fols. 112r–114v), a calendar poem and Maxims II (fols. 115r–115v), a collection of precepts offering proverbial wisdom. The aim of this chapter is to open up the political and intellectual impetuses behind this mid eleventh century act of compilation. Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, the most recent editor of C, incisively characterized the product of this compiling as ‘a book of histories’. Tiberius B. i, although produced in England and in the vernacular, will emerge as poised on the cutting edge of wider developments in eleventhand twelfth-century European historiography – and in particular in relation to developments in universal history, which we more readily associate with Latin history-writers of the German Empire.

The methodology of this chapter entails the tight integration of codicological and textual analysis with evidence of the political and intellectual engagements of the compiler of Tiberius B. i to argue that the additions of poetry and chronicle to the Orosius c. 1045 produced a coherent and unified text. I will build on Stephen Baxter's persuasive study of how ASC C promoted the interests of Earl Leofric of Mercia and his family amidst the bitter factionalism of the mid eleventh century to consider very precisely how the whole Orosius–poetry–ASC compilation, and not just C, aimed to intervene directly in politics on behalf of Leofric in the specific context of the Anglo-Saxon court of the mid 1040s. That innovative and intellectually demanding history-writing, such as Tiberius B. i's creation of a vernacular universal chronicle, was an active and effective political discourse has much to tell us about pre-Conquest English literary culture and its place within a wider European context.

Within that wider European context, Tiberius B. i does not lose relevance as a result of its vernacularity. Set alongside contemporary German Imperial texts, it brings insight into the relationship of universal chronicles to the politics of empire and the place of compilation in the writing of history.