The Norman Conquest in English History: Volume I: A Broken Chain?

by George Garnett Narrated by Nigel Patterson

Overview

The Norman Conquest in English History, Volume 1: A Broken Chain? pursues a central theme in English historical thinking over seven centuries. Covering more than half a millennium, this first volume explains how and why the experience of the Norman Conquest prompted both an unprecedented campaign in the early twelfth century to write (or create) the history of England, and to excavate (and fabricate) pre-Conquest English law.



George Garnett traces the treatment of the Conquest in English historiography, legal theory and practice, and political argument through the middle ages and early modern period, examining the dispersal of these materials from libraries after the dissolution of the monasteries, and the attempts made to rescue, edit, and print many of them in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. These preservation efforts enabled the Conquest to become still more contested in the constitutional cataclysms of the seventeenth century than it had been in the eleventh and twelfth. The seventeenth-century resurrection of the Conquest will be the subject of a second volume.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"This first volume of George Garnett's projected tripartite study is an important contribution to a growing literature on later English perceptions of the Norman Conquest." — Ian King, Cambridge University, Parliamentary History

"This study is the fruit of meticulous archival research and analysis of printed and manuscript sources produced over nearly six centuries. The book strikes an impressive balance between legal history and the history of historiography...." — Parliamentary History

"As these long and deep influences imply, the Conquest in the intellectual mind of the nation is a truly vast topic, one whose tentilla reach into the historical crevices of many centuries. Only a brave historian would have undertaken it – and only a brilliant one could have done it justice. George Garnett has done it justice." — Alex Burghart, Times Literary Supplement

Product Details

BN ID:	2940176079760
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	10/26/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

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