Cambridge University in the UK is now demystifying national “myths” around the country’s early medieval past in its curriculum.
The university’s Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic historical studies, ASNC, has among its aims to “dismantle the basis of myths of nationalism,” particularly surrounding the Anglo-Saxons.
The department’s curriculum “covers the history, society, and culture of the medieval Scandinavian peoples (the Norse) and their actions and interactions in Britain, Ireland, Western and Eastern Europe and the North Atlantic during the period 793-1066,” which is also sometimes called the Viking Age, though the department qualifies that “this is a very Anglo-centric definition.”
“Several of the elements discussed above have been expanded to make ASNC teaching more anti-racist.” Information provided by the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic (ASNC) to the Telegraph explained its approach to teaching the subject.
“One concern has been to address recent concerns over use of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and its perceived connection to ethnic/racial English identity,” it further stated.
“Other aspects of ASNC’s historical modules approach race and ethnicity with reference to the Scandinavian settlement that began in the ninth century,” it added. “In general, ASNC teaching seeks to dismantle the basis of myths of nationalism—that there ever was a ‘British’, ‘English’, ‘Scottish’, ‘Welsh’ or ‘Irish’ people with a coherent and ancient ethnic identity—by showing students just how constructed and contingent these identities are and always have been.”
The term Anglo-Saxon has become embroiled in identity politics especially within the academy in recent years.
The International Society of Anglo-Saxonists changed its name to the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England in 2019, “in recognition of the problematic connotations that are widely associated with the terms ‘Anglo-Saxon’.”
The change followed Canadian academic Mary Rambaran-Olm’s resignation from the society. She later disparaged the field as one of “inherent whiteness.”
“The Anglo-Saxon myth perpetuates a false idea of what it means to be ‘native’ to Britain,” she wrote in the Smithsonian magazine.
At the same time, other academics have argued that the furor over the term is merely an American import that UK researchers should not let influence them. In the U.S., where racism against black people was institutionalised until the 1960s and where Irish and Italian immigrants had faced religious and ethnic discrimination in the 19th century, the term is used in the expression White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant, or (WASP), to describe an elite class of Americans based on the country’s origins as a British colony.
“The conditions in which the term is encountered, and how it is perceived, are very different in the USA from elsewhere,” a statement signed by more than 70 academics in 2020 argued. “In the UK the period has been carefully presented and discussed in popular and successful documentaries and exhibitions over many years.”
“The term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is historically authentic in the sense that from the 8th century, it was used externally to refer to a dominant population in southern Britain. Its earliest uses, therefore, embody exactly the significant issues we can expect any general ethnic or national label to represent,” the statement read.
