Some cultural-academic news this past week has not been without interest to me, given that it involves a handful of mostly-American professors – beginning with Dr Mary Rambaran-Olm, formerly of the ISAS, but now including also John Overholt at Harvard – calling for the retirement of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ from polite academic usage, based on the history of the term in racialist circles and its continuing use to marginalise women and scholars of colour. On the other side (of the pond, mostly) are scholars who believe that the politicisation of the term is silly. For academics living in the UK including Tom Holland, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is a value-neutral term that simply refers to the cultural and political period of their own history that preceded the Norman Conquest.
As is usual with these sorts of cultural-politics fights, I seem to be lacking a dog. (Don’t let the blog’s title fool you!) That’s not because of any lack of interest in things English and old, either, as my gentle readers will well be able to attest. In the interests of full disclosure, my preferred usages are ‘Old English’ (which is a readily-understood and handy term that is taken from linguistics to refer to all the related dialects spoken in the kingdoms of pre-Conquest England) and ‘pre-Schismatic English’ (because I happen to be Orthodox Christian and the Great Schism is a readily-available and -apt point of historical reference).
So I don’t really have any skin in the game for preferring to keep the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’, both because I don’t use it too often, and because (I admit) I laboured under the mistaken impression that it was an anachronism, imposed by later observers on a culture that considered itself ‘Ænglisc’. And yet my perspective, which comes from having studied Old English hagiography and other literature fairly intensely over the past year, comes closest to that of Dr Michael Wood.
Dr Wood agrees in the broad strokes with Dr Rambaran-Olm that something needs to change in how we study history in general. He does see certain problems in the ethnic makeup of university history and antiquities departments; he also sees some significant problems in the way these academic fields communicate with laypeople in the broader culture. The lexical differences between the way ‘Anglo-Saxon’ was used in the academy, and the way it was used in political discourse to shore up the illusion of ‘whiteness’, are reason enough not to dismiss Rambaran-Olm’s concerns out-of-hand.
But then he also notes that the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is in fact useful in the former setting, because it was authentic to how the Old English thought of themselves; because it was not an ethnic signifier; and because it indicates that the culture and outlook of pre-Conquest England was neither monolithic nor xenophobic. It was a land ‘of many different languages and customs’. ‘We may drop “Anglo-Saxonists”, then,’ Wood writes, ‘we may prefer “Early English” – but we cannot dispense entirely with “Anglo-Saxons”.’
The original migration consisted of settlers from three different places and tribes in Europe, for one thing – and then they were joined by Italians, Germans, Norsemen, Irish and Scots. He also dwells rather strongly on my very favourite point about Old England, which was that it had a deeply cosmopolitan and culturally-humble outlook. The Orthodox saints of Old England looked outward not only to Rome but also to Greece, to Palestine, to Syria, to Ægypt and to Africa. (Dr Wood name-drops both Saint Hadrian and Saint Theodore, and focusses on their paramount importance as educators in Old England!) The Old English did not pride themselves on being any better than anyone else; quite the contrary! They were eager to learn from their spiritual elders no matter where they came from – even from the Greek- and Syriac-speaking Christian East.
Dr Wood gently (a bit too gently, if you ask me) pushes back on what he seems to view as a certain streak of regressive fatalism in Dr Rambaran-Olm’s argumentation. He looks at the scholarship on Old England and does not necessarily see a field that is damnably mired in white supremacy. Instead, what he sees is a teachable moment in academia where studies of late-antique and mediæval Europe can really gain some traction in the broader culture – and not merely to bolster the nationalist-cæsarist turn in global politics. Here, I agree completely with him. It’s a dire necessity of our time to learn from the cultures that witnessed and survived the fall of Western Rome. We need to be examining carefully the coöperative solutions (the real Benedict Option!) and ascetic demands they made on themselves in order to do so. We shouldn’t be making concessions in the humanities to the radical-right sans-culottes and their myth-building exercises. Speaking as a descendant (and student) of these people – and also as a descendant of people who were very much not Anglo-Saxons – I think we need to be firmly on guard against engaging in this kind of erasure based on the surface-level political concerns of the moment. If there is any chance that ‘Anglo-Saxon’ might be reclaimed for its earlier, humbler, outward-facing meaning cited by Dr Wood, then that chance ought not to be thrown away.
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