Content area
Full Text
Ben Snook, The Anglo-Saxon Chancery: The History, Language and Production of Anglo-Saxon Charters from Alfred to Edgar, Anglo-Saxon Studies 28 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2015). 234 pp. ISBN 978-1-78327-006-4. ?60.00.
The author offers two distinct, albeit overlapping, formulations of his main aims: 'The chief purposes of the present study ... will be to examine the literary dimensions of these documents, to present tenth-century Anglo-Saxon charters as works of Anglo-Latin literature, and, by examining the intellectual hinterlands of their writers, to elevate those writers from being mere anonymous draftsmen to being authors in their own right' (p. 7); 'above all, it is the purpose of this study to work out what [the] message [of charters] was, who [their] audience was likely to have been and why charters became so central to the exercising of royal power in the tenth century, and to locate them more firmly in the intellectual history of ninth- and tenth-century England' (p. 27). The agenda thus defined is an ambitious one. It should be said at once that the author pursues it with considerable success.
The introduction sets the scene by contrasting the clarity of prose that one might expect in a diploma with the bombastic style of Aldhelm of Malmesbury (d. 709/10), noting how the manner of the latter first began to infect that of the former in a Mercian document of 840. Chapter 1 then explores the influence of this Mercian style on the charters of Wessex from the ninth to the tenth centuries, arguing that where Alfred the Great had used literary translations to communicate with his subjects, Edward the Elder deployed charters for the same purpose. Chapter 2 explores how Athelstan further exploited charters, the product...