Includes bibliographical references and index.

Front Matter -- Copyright Page -- Acknowledgements -- Figures and Tables -- Abbreviations -- List of Contributors -- Introduction: Anglo-Saxon Predecessors and Precedents / Jay Paul Gates and Brian O’Camb -- The Legacy of King Edgar in the Laws of Archbishop Wulfstan / Nicole Marafioti -- Exile and Migration in the Vernacular Lives of Edward “the Confessor” / Erin Michelle Goeres -- Quidam proditor partis Danicae: Aelred’s Re-Imagining of the Anglo-Saxon Past / Jay Paul Gates -- The Hermitic Topos: “Selling” Shared Sanctity to Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, and English Audiences / Maren Clegg Hyer -- Looking for Holy Grandmothers in Late Medieval Nunneries / Cynthia Turner Camp -- Peace Weaving and Gold Giving: Anglo-Saxon Queenship in Havelok the Dane  / Larissa Tracy -- Writing, Rewriting, and Disrupting the Anglo-Saxon Past in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale / Kathleen Smith -- The Case of Poema Morale: Old English Homiletic Influence in Early Middle English Verse / Carla María Thomas -- The Familiar Wisdom of Treasured Friends and the Landscape of Conquest in The Proverbs of Alfred  / Brian O’Camb -- The Idea of Bede in English Political Prophecy / Eric Weiskott -- Afterword / Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Kate Hurley -- Back Matter -- Bibliography -- General Index.

This volume of essays focuses on how individuals living in the late tenth through fifteenth centuries engaged with the authorizing culture of the Anglo-Saxons. Drawing from a reservoir of undertreated early English documents and texts, each contributor shows how individual poets, ecclesiasts, legists, and institutions claimed Anglo-Saxon predecessors for rhetorical purposes in response to social, cultural, and linguistic change. Contributors trouble simple definitions of identity and period, exploring how medieval authors looked to earlier periods of history to define social identities and make claims for their present moment based on the political fiction of an imagined community of a single, distinct nation unified in identity by descent and religion. Contributors are Cynthia Turner Camp, Irina Dumitrescu, Jay Paul Gates, Erin Michelle Goeres, Mary Kate Hurley, Maren Clegg Hyer, Nicole Marafioti, Brian O’Camb, Kathleen Smith, Carla María Thomas, Larissa Tracy, and Eric Weiskott.