The Reigns of Edmund, Eadred and Eadwig, 939-959
Title Details

236 Pages

23.4 x 15.6 cm

8 b/w illus.

Series: Anglo-Saxon Studies

Series Vol. Number: 48

Imprint: Boydell Press

The Reigns of Edmund, Eadred and Eadwig, 939-959

New Interpretations

Edited by Mary Elizabeth Blanchard and Christopher Riedel

  • Description
  • Contents
  • Author
Essays highlighting the importance of three kings - Edmund, Eadred and Eadwig - in understanding England in the tenth century.

Much scholarly attention has been devoted to both the expanding kingdom of Alfred the Great, Edward the Elder, and Æthelstan, and to the larger and integrated realm of their more distant successors, Edgar and Æthelred II. However, the English kingdom in the 940s and 950s, and its three kings, Edmund (939-946), Eadred (946-955), and Eadwig (955-959), the men who inherited and held together the kingdom created by their immediate predecessors, have been somewhat neglected, with little research being dedicated to these men as kings, or the era in which they ruled.

This volume offers a variety of approaches to the period. Its contributors bring to light royal legal innovations to ecclesiastical law, oaths, heriot, complex factional politics, including the crucial role of queens, differing perspectives on the final era of an independent northern kingdom of York, and developments in literary culture outside the domineering trend of the later monastic reformers.
Introduction - Mary Elizabeth Blanchard and Christopher Riedel
1. Forgetting Kings: The First 100 Years of Historiography of Eadred's and Eadwig's Reigns - Alison Hudson
2. King and Church in the Laws of King Edmund - Nicole Marafioti
3. Edmund's Oath of Loyalty in Perspective: Innovation, Emulation, and a French Prince - Isabelle Beaudoin
4. 'Both to Bind and to Loosen': Royal Power and the Heriots of Ealdormen and Bishops - Stuart Pracy
5. The Many Kings of Archbishop Wulfstan I - Andrew Rabin
6. Going North: Revisiting the End of Northern Independence - Neil McGuigan
7. Eadgifu at Eadred's Court: the Expansion of and Limits on the Role of Mater Regis - Mary Elizabeth Blanchard
8. Eadwig Has a Threesome: Sex and the Breaking of Authority in the Tenth Century - Katherine Weikert
9. London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian D. XV: A Priest's Book from before the Benedictine Reform? - Gerald Dyson

MARY ELIZABETH BLANCHARD is an early medieval historian at Ave Maria University specializing in tenth- and eleventh-century England with specific focus on prosopography and activities of the secular and ecclesiastical elites.

CHRISTOPHER RIEDEL teaches medieval & ancient history at Albion College and is completing a biography on Æthelwold of Winchester.

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February 2024

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Title Details

236 Pages

2.34 x 1.56 cm

8 b/w illus.

Series: Anglo-Saxon Studies

Series Vol. Number: 48

Imprint: Boydell Press