Wisdom, kingship and royal identity: An examination of the discourse on kingship and rulership in the Anglo-Saxon era

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine Anglo-Saxon concepts of kingship and royal identity during the establishment of the West Saxon dynasty as the ruling house of a new English monarchy. I will argue that the aggressive expansionist program of the West Saxon kings, who occupied a unique position as the only independent English rulers left in the land, necessitated a new ideology of kingship and a new basis for political legitimacy.;King Alfred began a process of expansion that would culminate in the unification of political authority under a West Saxon dynasty. However, it was the scholars of his court, such as Asser and the authors of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, who constructed an ideology that would reflect and reinforce this new political reality. The profound reconceptualization of kingship and its ideological underpinnings present in these works were then reinforced by Old English poets who fashioned poetic specula principum in support of the new dynasty and its ideology.;This new ideology of kingship, created by Alfred's court upon a Carolingian model and further developed by his successors, emphasized the importance of wisdom over the militaristic function of kingship. I will argue that the promotion of a royal ideology formed around sapientia was part of a larger process directly related to the growing power and unification of different tribal identities under a single ruler. In addition to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Asser's Life of Alfred, I will demonstrate, through close textual analysis, that the epic poem Beowulf, the Old English Andreas, and other poems from the Anglo-Saxon corpus contain ideological constructs that are part of a change in the understanding of the nature of Anglo-Saxon kingship. The authors of these works used the concept of sapientia as a unifying principle, an ideological construct that superseded tribal divisions and allowed for the acceptance of a West Saxon king by the wide variety of people being ruled by the House of Wessex in the ninth and tenth centuries.