Vernacular Verse Histories in Early Medieval England and Francia: The Bard and the Rag-picker [Hardcover]

Introduction

Chapter One: Beyond Germanic Heroic Poetry: Poets, Historians, and the Gods of Our Fathers

Chapter Two: What We Talk About When We Talk About History: The Old English Vocabulary of Narrative and Historical Representation

Chapter Three: Truth is the trickiest: Vernacular Theories of Truth in Early Medieval Culture

Chapter Four: Why is There Something Rather than Nothing?: The Social Logic of Frankish Verse Histories

Chapter Five: Beowulf in Times of Anxiety: The Archaeology of Emotions in Old English Verse History

In a provocative take on Germanic heroic poetry, Taranu reads texts like Beowulf, Maldon, and the Waltharius as participating in alternative modes of history-writing that functioned in a larger ecology of narrative forms, including Latinate Christian history and the biblical epic. These modes employed the conceit of their participating in a tradition of oral verse for a variety of purposes: from political propaganda to constructing origin myths for early medieval nationhood or heroic masculinity, and sometimes for challenging these paradigms. The more complex of these historical visions actively meditated on their own relationship to truthfulness and fictionality while also performing sophisticated (and often subversive) cultural and socio-emotional work for its audiences. By rethinking canonical categories of historiographical discourse from within medieval textual productions, Vernacular Verse Histories in Early Medieval England and Francia: The Bard and the Rag-Picker aims to recover a part of the wide array of narrative poetic forms through which medieval communities made sense of their past and structured their socio-emotional experils$