Reading, literacy, and the writing of history in the 'Anglo-Saxon Chronicle'

Recent investigations of Anglo-Saxon literacy (and medieval literacy in general) have often tended to focus upon an illusory orality/literacy dichotomy, resulting in misapprehensions of medieval textual practice and anachronistic readings of medieval texts. In this dissertation, I examine the manuscript record of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in order to attempt a more faithful reconstruction of Anglo-Saxon textual practice, leading to corrective, less anachronistic readings of the Chronicle's texts. Beginning with an examination of the ways in which previous approaches to the Chronicle have, with very few exceptions, been colored by ideas of textuality springing from the introduction of print technology, I demonstrate a method of reading the Chronicle's texts which avoids the mediation of print bias, chiefly through a reexamination and reappraisal of the manuscript record itself. By investigating the Chronicle's transmission, layout, and textual variation in its prose, genealogical, poetic, and Latin contents, I argue that a more careful understanding of Anglo-Saxon textual practice enhances our understanding of Anglo-Saxon literacy by demonstrating that it did not rely upon orality to nearly the degree previously asserted. At the same time the investigation demonstrates how the collection of historical documents we call the Chronicle developed into a powerful cultural expression of English nationalism through the invasions and conquests of both the Danes and the Normans.