Reviews for Poets and princepleasers

The average rating for Poets and princepleasers based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-02-12 00:00:00 Doug Knox This is a fair sized book and it comes with a few appendices, such as a gazetteer of churches dedicated to St Oswald. It's also a book of two halves in more ways than one. It can be split into essays about Oswald the king and Oswald the saint and you can also divide it into pre and post 1066 chapters. As a result I didn't feel the need to read all of the book. The making of Oswald's Northumbria (R Cramp) This is a good overview of early Northumbrian history and it's nice to see textual and archaeological evidence both used to such a degree. She makes the interesting point that despite Degsastan, Aethelfrith's children were still able to find refuge in Dal Riadan territory. It would be nice to know how this came about. Cramp also mentions that no high status burials have been discovered in Northumbria, but to be fair there don't appear to be many pagan kings who died peacefully during the right period for this. Aethelfrith would have been a good candidate, but it's unlikely that either Edwin or Raedwald would have wanted to give him a status enhancing/confirming burial in a barrow surrounded by lots of bling. Oswald 'most holy and most victorious king of the Northumbrians' (C Stancliffe) This essay is 50 pages of sheer joy and is almost worth the price of the book alone. Stancliffe uses a lot of Irish sources and that makes this a great success. It gives the research a greater depth than someone who mostly follows Bede and crikey does she make some interesting points. One thing that people don't always consider is the length of time Oswald was in exile. 17 years is a long time by anyone's count and Oswald probably didn't have a why aye man in him when he returned (I may be slightly paraphrasing what she said there). Hence Oswald's style of kingship may have followed a slightly different model, even allowing for the fact that elite societies in that part of Britain were all 'heroic' and had a similar economic base. There are some fascinating things said about Eadfrith being bumped off, the likely survival of British Christianity in Bernicia (including Melrose possibly being a British foundation) and a small paragraph of counterfactual history. This was a joy to read and I was making lots of notes. Where was Oswald Killed? (C Stancliffe) This one is all about the site of Maserfelth/Cogwy. Stancliffe makes a good riposte to Gelling's notion that Oswaldestreow was probably a late estate boundary marker, rather than commemorative of the battle. However, the claims of Makerfield is Lancs aren't really investigated beyond one footnoted sentence saying that the K has always been a hard one and so ruling it out and that's a bit of a shame. 90% of this short essay are all about showing the strength of the Oswestry claim and it is very persuasive. Membra Disjecta: the division of the body and the diffusion of the cult (A Thacker) This is about the dissemination of the Oswald's bits and his cult. Thacker shows the importance of the cult to the Bernician dynasty, discusses early clerical unease at warrior kings having cults (especially with a head as focal point) and then demonstrates how the multiple cultic centres (Hexham, Lindisfarne, Bamburgh and Bardney and the battlefield at Maserfelth itself) helped it to spread, as well as giving it resilience. This was helped by the Northumbrians taking the cult abroad with them when they popped off on a beano to the continent to evangelise the peeps over there. The centrality of the cult to the Mercians helped it to not only survive the Danes, but to prosper as Athelstan popularised it amongst his descendants. On a side note, 'membra disjecta' sounds like something painful, best avoided by men. Archaeology and the cult of St Oswald in pre-conquest Northumbria (E Cambridge) This is a difficult read. The author has a very dry style and some of the sentences are that boring you almost lose the will to live before you get to the end. To cut to the chase (something the author could learn to do if he wanted to please a few folk) the promotion of the cult had propagandistic overtones and a lot of the churches are outside of Bernicia with many in Northern Mercia and Deira. Following this essay, there are six chapters on St Oswald that are post conquest, set here and abroad, which I didn't read.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-07-27 00:00:00 Dan Walton An excellent collection of academic papers, given at a conference on Oswald, pretty well giving a snapshot of the scholarly thinking about him today. Even though they are academic papers, the scholars write clearly and well; there's nothing here to repel the non-specialist. The first two papers, by Rosemary Cramp and Clare Stancliffe, look at the historical Oswald and his world, giving a succinct overview of what we do know, what we may be able to recover and what we don't know about him, while the remainder of the papers are about the initiation and spread of the cult of St Oswald through Britain and Europe - somewhat less interesting to me. A fine contribution to Oswald studies.