Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-v5vhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-25T14:12:10.813Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Hereward the Dane and the English, But Not the Saxon: Kingsley's Racial Anglo-Saxonism

from II - Interpretations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2013

Michael R. Kightley
Affiliation:
University of Alabama at Birmingham
Get access

Summary

Charles Kingsley belongs to that particular class of nineteenth-century gentleman who was extraordinarily famous in his own time, but who has since faded into relative obscurity. When he is now remembered, it tends to be for his children's book The Water-Babies, or for his controversial debate with John Henry Newman. What is rarely remembered is that Kingsley held the Regius Chair of Modern History at Cambridge for nine years, starting in 1860. “Modern History” meant post-classical, and so in these years, Kingsley engaged directly in the discourse of medieval English and Old North studies, producing a significant work of early medieval history: a series of lectures on the interactions between the Germanic tribes and the Roman Empire, which was subsequently published in 1864 under the title The Roman and the Teuton. In the same period, he also produced an equally important work of historiography: a Conquest-era romance about the English resistance fighter Hereward the Wake. This potent position as popular fiction writer, with one foot nonetheless firmly grounded in the discourse of medieval studies, establishes him as a perfect example of what Allen J. Frantzen calls a “gatekeeper” of medieval knowledge, someone who selectively filters and transmits this knowledge to popular audiences. One of the most important aspects of this gatekeeping comes in terms of his racial medievalism, and more specifically, his racial Anglo-Saxonism. This article has, therefore, two main focuses: first, the influence of medieval studies on Kingsley's theorizations of the English race, and second, his transmission of this racial thinking to broader audiences via The Roman and the Teuton and Hereward the Wake: “Last of the English.”

Type
Chapter
Information
Studies in Medievalism XXI
Corporate Medievalism
, pp. 89 - 118
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×