Bibliography
  1. Home
  2. Bibliography
  3. New perspectives on medieval Scotland, 1093–1286
  4. Hammond (Matthew) 2013b

Hammond, Matthew, “Introduction: The paradox of medieval Scotland, 1093–1286”, in: Matthew Hammond (ed.), New perspectives on medieval Scotland, 1093–1286, 32, Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013. 1–52.

  • article in collection
Citation details
Contributors
Article
“Introduction: The paradox of medieval Scotland, 1093–1286”
Work
Pages
1–52
Year
2013
BibTeX
Description
Abstract (cited)
It is not the least of the paradoxes in the history of the British Isles that it was in the kingdom of the Scots – the very area in which the English kingship did not directly impose its military and political power and in which English settlers and institutions were absorbed comfortably into the existing society and polity – that the English language and with it English culture arguably made its greatest and most enduring advances in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.It was this quotation from Rees Davies's masterful The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles 1093–1343 (2000) that first gave voice to the notion of the ‘paradox of medieval Scotland’, a notion which we took as the title of the project that led to this book. Davies was concerned with showing that an expansive socio-cultural and linguistic ‘Anglicisation’ was harnessed by the Anglo-Norman and Angevin kings to establish a ‘first English empire’ across Britain and Ireland in the central middle ages. Tempered by a hard-edged ethnic worldview which cast the Celtic-speaking peoples of Wales, Ireland, and Scotland as backward and uncivilised, this expansion was ultimately the victim of its own paradox, resulting in an incomplete conquest and fourteenth-century ‘ebb tide’ which left behind messy bifurcated societies in Wales and Ireland and lingering ethnic prejudice everywhere. Davies described this process of Anglicisation as the British Isles's experience of the much wider phenomenon of Europeanisation, which Robert Bartlett had recently outlined.
(source: CUP)
Subjects and topics
Headings
Scotland 11th century 12th century 13th century
web page identifiers
Contributors
C. A., Dennis Groenewegen
Page created
September 2013, last updated: June 2020
Retrieved from ‘https://codecs.vanhamel.nl/index.php?title=Hammond_(Matthew)_2013b&oldid=197635’