On this day in 988, Archbishop Dunstan died. In this blog post, medieval scholar Eleanor Parker calls him "one of the greatest saints of Anglo-Saxon England - statesman, archbishop of Canterbury, scholar, monk, musician, metal-worker, and noted tormenter of devils."
Well, there's a resume!
The blog post talks about the history of Dunstan's time, the tumultuous tenth century, tumultuous in England, at least. It was a time of Viking raids--but not constant raids. During the times of no raiding, could people relax or did they always know the raids would start again?
It was also a time of internal fighting, with battles between Scotland and northern England. To read the timeline in this Wikipedia article exhausts me. But I remind myself that medieval war wasn't relentless, the way our more modern wars could be. I imagine that civilian populations might not have known much at all about those battles that are listed.
It was a time of monastic developments, with new orders founded and old monasteries and abbeys resurrected. Was this renewed interest because of the constant state of war?
Despite my knowledge of English literature, I don't really know much about this time period. My knowledge of English literature in any kind of deep way begins with Chaucer, who lived from 1343-1400. Most of us think of the post-Roman, pre-Chaucer time period as the Dark Ages, but historians have often pointed out the limits of that term. Saint Dunstan shows that the time was much more complex.
No comments:
Post a Comment