In his book Race of Nation: A Conflict of Divided Loyalties (1925), Italian–American lawyer and diplomat Gino Speranza (1887–1935) focuses on immigrants as a threat to American civilization. While Speranza claims that he holds “no brief for the superiority of Anglo-Saxon civilization,” he claims the US is an Anglo-Saxon country with an Anglo-Saxon civilization and “that people of Anglo-Saxon stock are the best adapted to running its government and shaping its special national life.” Speranza coins the term ‘nation-spiritual’ to distance himself from a very particular material, racialized, and conformist American identity that he details and promotes in his book; the term is, effectively, an ineffable shibboleth that can’t be specified because it is only available to the exclusive class of ‘true Americans’ (like Speranza) who, apparently, know it when they see it, or sense it, or feel it, and who arrogate to themselves the role of ‘decider’ of who ‘counts’ as a true American, and what the ‘essential principles and ideals of American life’ are.

This chapter examines the relationship between the Roman Empire and northern European ‘barbarian’ societies from the fourth to the mid seventh century, challenging the view that they were entirely separate. Instead, it argues that these regions remained deeply interconnected with Rome, even after the empire’s collapse. The discussion draws on archaeological evidence – settlements, burial customs and trade patterns – alongside historical sources like Gregory of Tours and Tacitus. Findings reveal growing Roman cultural influence in barbarian lands, reflected in changing burial rites, settlement structures and material culture. Roman imports in Germanic territories and diplomatic payments to frontier leaders further highlight this integration. The chapter contends that Rome’s fall was not a sudden rupture but a gradual transformation that reshaped northern Europe’s political landscape. The rise of new confederacies, including the Franks, Alamanni and Saxons, underscores this shift. Additionally, the chapter explores the spread of Christianity and its role in shaping post-Roman societies. Rather than viewing ‘barbarian migrations’ as simple population movements, the study emphasises a complex interplay of Roman policies, local power struggles and cultural evolution. A key takeaway is that Northern Europe’s integration into the post-Roman world was a fluid process, in which continuity and change coexisted.

The language of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry is notable for its imagistic intensity, for its intricate sonic patterning, and sometimes for its cryptic ambiguity. This chapter surveys several nineteenth-century contexts for Hopkins’s idiosyncratic diction. His interest in philology underlies his imitation of alliterative Anglo-Saxon verse and of the medieval Welsh system of versification known as cynghanedd, which involves complex structures of internal rhyme and consonant repetition. Additionally, like his contemporaries William Barnes and Thomas Hardy, Hopkins draws on regional dialect to capture the essences of certain landscapes, creatures, individuals, and trades. And given his predilection for neologizing and at times for elevating sonic gorgeousness over communicative clarity, he may also be read alongside Victorian nonsense writers such as Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. Ironically, Hopkins’s interest in the deep roots of English drives his radical linguistic innovation – and his obscure vocabulary can allow him to channel modes of divinely inspired expression.

Investigation of the Bee-nymphs of Mt. Parnassus and the ancestral Indo-European strain and Anatolian strains of divination introduced into European Hellas by migrant pre-Aeolian communities.

Medieval and modern accounts of old age are notable for the sheer abundance and diversity of the characteristics they identify. This chapter contemplates how contrasting qualities associated with old age actually connect in Old English poetry, dwelling particularly on the relationship between wisdom and sorrow, and introducing a new theoretical framework in the form of trauma theory. It points out the considerable presence of aged poets in the corpus, focusing particularly on Beowulf and Cynewulf’s epilogues. These texts stress that living into old age inevitably constitutes a kind of survival, one which involves witnessing destruction and terrible losses. The subsequently heightened intellectual, verbal, and creative capacity of the elderly sometimes resembles a kind of post-traumatic growth as understood within trauma theory. The parts of old age that are broadly positive (especially wisdom) and those that are negative (grief and loss) therefore emerge as inseparable.

The Venerable Bede’s epistemology was scholarly and experiential. His work drew on the combined riches of classical and patristic knowledge, as he encountered them at the monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow. Supported by lavish patronage, he turned these resources to the teaching, preaching, and exegesis of the scriptures. His writing on pain, pleasure, poverty, and preaching suggests that every faithful Christian has experiential access to unique knowledge. They may taste future joys, enter Christ’s mind, and glimpse the divine nature through embodied practices infused by grace. Yet access to such knowledge is unequal. ‘The perfect’, with their greater understanding and virtue, are best suited for shaping societal and ecclesial life. They meditate unceasingly on holy things, without care or need and with resources beyond the reach of most. Bede’s epistemological emphases were integrated in his self-image, as teacher and monk, and his teaching elaborated an influential ‘inequality regime’.

England was probably the first country in Europe to construct a sense of itself as a nation state, but even as it did so the boundaries of native tradition remained uncertain. In the sixteenth century two competing narratives of nationhood are visible, one British and the other Anglo-Saxon (Warner, Spenser, Drayton), and it is the second, more specifically English narrative that comes to supersede the British story (Shakespeare’s histories). Those narratives are complemented in the field of verse form by a further competition between art, represented by classical metres, and nature, represented by native English ‘rhyme’, in which the latter asserts its claims to literary status and value, and history and prosody then converge in the idea of the long line. The achievement of a sense of English national identity in literature is finally constructed as a triumph of nature over art (Daniel).

From the first century AD, Cambridge was raided, invaded and settled by different groups of people from overseas, for about a thousand years. The author charts how Cambridge changed, grew and shifted geographically: from Roman fort on Castle Hill to Anglo-Saxon town trading on Market Hill; from Viking port by Quayside to Norman stronghold with a motte and bailey castle on Castle Mound, occupied by the much-loathed Sheriff Picot. Local resistance fighters Boudicca and Hereward the Wake are included. Stephanie Boyd draws on evidence ranging from landmarks such as Devil’s Dyke, to local place-names and a rare bed burial at Trumpington Meadows, to piece together a picture of life in the local area more than a thousand years ago.

This chapter begins our examination of the origins of the common law. Many accounts – including that of Maitland – begin just before the Norman Conquest and explore how centralised authority had developed in the late Anglo-Saxon period. This is the focus of this chapter, which explores the debate as to the importance of this period by examining the characteristics of the late Anglo-Saxon legal system. This chapter will explore what the Anglo-Saxon inheritance was. The first section will look at the historical debate as to where the history of English law begins and the importance that should be placed on the Anglo-Saxon period. It will contrast the still influential approach of Maitland with more recent scholars, most notably Patrick Wormald. The second section will then outline what is considered to be the major achievement of the long Anglo-Saxon period as a whole: the move from feud to compensation. The third and final section will then explore how what we would call the legal system had developed by the end of the Anglo-Saxon period. It will ask what did William the Conqueror inherit and to what extent this provided some foundation for the English common law.