Talk:Henry of Huntingdon
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography. For more information, visit the project page. | ||
| Stub | This article has been rated as stub-Class on the Project's quality scale. [FAQ] (If you rated the article, please give a short summary at comments to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses.) |
||
 |
An appropriate infobox may need to be added to this article, or the current infobox may need to be updated. Please refer to the list of biography infoboxes for further information. |
 |
It is requested that a picture or pictures of this person be included in this article to improve its quality. |
- contribution to ongoing political debates about ethnicity, nationality, and the justification of rule over England and Wales.
Not sure I understand what this means, nations did not yet exist, ethnicity in terms of the 11th century?
--Stbalbach 16:53, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC)
-'natio' is a term that does exixt by the 12th century of Henry's writing, although certainly not in modern nation-state conceptions. But my point is that Henry picks up Bede's pro-English/anti-British (welsh) agenda, and adapts it to a post-Conquest model valourising the Normans. That is, he writes a history with the Conquests as a teleological, historical inevitability. But this inter-ethnic debate (English/Welsh/Norman) is also a continual point of reference, discussion, anxiety, and ideological agenda for William of Malmesbury, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Gerald of Wales, basically _everyone_ writing history at the time. Something along those lines is what I'm trying to communicate.
--Lutefish (or, sig-less me...)
Yeah, i understand what your saying, there was a big resurgence in interest in (re)discovering Englands past after the Norman Conquest. 19th century historians (such as Stubbs) believed it was a nationalistic/ethnic reasons such as you have described here (19th century was big on viewing the middle ages as the creation of national ethnicity). There are more recent views, I wrote a quick blurb about it in English historians in the Middle Ages:
- After the Norman Conquest there was an explosion of interest in English history. It has been theorized this was due in part to the native English desire to reclaim their cultural identity from the debacle of 1066. As well the new Norman rulers were interested in discovering who it was they had reigned over, which fueled demand for legends of Englands early Kings, such as Geoffrey’s King Arthur.
(this is sourced from Robert Bartletts England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings (2000) and I could probably dig up more expansion on it). I tend to like this explanation better as it speaks more to the people of the time, then to our own nationalistic interpretations, the concept of a nation did not emerge until the 14th-16th centuries and national ethnicity much later still.
--Stbalbach 04:07, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Bartlett is usually exceptionally good, but I have to say the quote/summary your provide there (and the book, generally) is disappointing. The book, I feel, at once shows of Bartlett's vast knowledge of the field, and his ability to analyse details and tease out connections brilliantly, yet still disappoints in what I feel are its rather banal conclusions. For the summary you offer, Geoffrey's Arthur doesn't hit the historiographical battlefield as an English king until the end of the 13th C; the transgressive aspect of Geoffrey's HRB is precisely the assertion of Welsh historical legitimacy and sovereignty. As far as the 'rediscovery' of the English past post-Conquest, I tend to steer away from such explanations. 1066 may have been traumatic, but was hardly sufficient to force a 'reclamation' of a cultural identity ('Englishness') that never disappeared; the question, as I see it, was how hybridity, multilingualism, and multiple ethnic identities (especially those intersecting the lines of power in State and Church) could be performed and played out. I'm happy to ditch 'nationality' if you feel (probably rightly) the term is far too overdetermined and fraught to convey the fairly straightforward sense in which I'm trying to use it, but I do think ethnicity is a key concept here.
--[User: Lutefish|Lutefish]] 08:53, 28 Feb 2005 (EST)
