The changing History of English Poetry 1774–1871: language, literature and Anglo-Saxon whiteness

ABSTRACT

Race formation, canon formation, and the writing of linguistic history can all be understood as processes of standardisation that differentiate through inclusion and exclusion of selected characteristics (of a human group, language use, or literary work) in synchronic moments and artificially link those moments to create diachronic histories that can span millennia. As we will show in this essay, Thomas Warton’s The History of English Poetry, from the Close of the Eleventh to the commencement of the Eighteenth Century (1775–1778) enacts all three processes simultaneously in ways that are inextricably entangled, and structured by an ideology of standardisation.

KEYWORDS:

• Canon
• poetry
• language
• vernacular
• race

Thomas Warton’s The History of English Poetry, from the Close of the Eleventh to the commencement of the Eighteenth Century (1775–1778)¹ is unequivocally a canon-making project that aims to trace ‘the progress of our national poetry, from rude and obscure beginnings, to its perfection in a polished age’.² Warton did not get past the Elizabethan period, however, and the work was unfinished in his lifetime. The History was re-edited three times in the nineteenth century: in 1824 by Richard Price, in 1840 by Richard Taylor, and in 1871 by William Carew Hazlitt. As Hazlitt wrote, Warton’s was ‘the standard work’ on the history of English poetry throughout the nineteenth century.³ A roll call of significant nineteenth-century medievalist antiquarians and scholars including Frederic Madden, Thomas Wright, Francis Douce, Frederick Furnivall, John Kemble, Walter Skeat, and Henry Sweet contributed to the three re-editions produced that century. Warton is remembered as having made a substantial contribution to the canon of English poetry by making ‘imagination’ the ‘source of value’ and thus helping open up the way for Romanticism,⁴ but The History is typically accounted for as a single publication, with no attention paid to the ongoing process of canon formation in a century of re-editions.⁵ This chapter shows that these four editions of The History taken together are a microcosm of nineteenth-century thought about medieval and early modern poetry that displays how inextricable assessments of poetic value were from concepts of race and language. It considers formation of the English canon as inextricably linked to white Anglo-Saxon racial formation through processes of standardisation. The analysis focusses on paratextual rather than poetic material in The History, first offering an account of additions and excisions in each before examining Warton’s ideas about race, language and poetry and how they were nuanced, revised, and made increasingly to fit with contemporary Anglo-Saxonist theories throughout the nineteenth century.

Broad debates over the canon in literary studies since the mid-twentieth century are, as Toni Morrison writes, ‘most often understood as to be the claims of others against … white male origins and definitions’ of values and ‘whether those definitions reflect an eternal, universal, and transcending paradigm’ or mask an ideological programme.⁶ We consider canon formation as not only a process of selection and assignation of value, but as (in light of Michael Omi and Harold Winant’s theorisation of ‘racial formation’) part of ‘the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed and destroyed.’⁷ Race formation, canon formation, and the writing of linguistic history can all be understood as processes of standardisation that differentiate through inclusion and exclusion of selected characteristics (of a human group, language use, or literary work) in synchronic moments and artificially link them to create diachronic histories that can span millennia.⁸ As we will show in this essay, The History enacts all three processes simultaneously in ways that are inextricably entangled, and structured by an ideology of standardisation.

The ideological nature of ‘standard English’ and processes of standardisation are well established, as is the history of how they have shaped linguistic histories of English.⁹ As a concept, standard English is both impossible to locate empirically and coded as white.¹⁰ The reification and institutionalisation of ‘standard language’ through the literary canon, which occurred throughout eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editions of The History, perpetuates an image of raciolinguistic supremacy.¹¹ As Stephen J. Harris observes, the ‘English’ of ‘Old English literature’ reduces a varied past to a single word and ‘lends an uneasy sense of continuity to an ancient and varied body of texts [which] posit origins according to contemporary national or ethnic divisions.’¹² For Warton, ‘English’ referred to both the nation and the language simultaneously, and he ascribed, as we argue in this essay, to the contemporaneous view that there was a direct connection between race and language; the two have not yet been disconnected.¹³ Warton’s canon as formed in The History is ‘relatively more inclusive’ and has ‘greater plurality’ than other versions of an English canon,¹⁴ but that variety is in the period, style, and purposes of the Anglophone white male authors whose works were deemed to have aesthetic value. Through Warton’s work and its re-editions, we argue, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is made the standard origin of English race, language, and literature.¹⁵

Making English ‘Anglo-Saxon’

Anglo-Saxonism is well-established as having been key to the racial self-fashioning of American, English and Australian identities in the nineteenth century.¹⁶ Recent scholarship by Mary Rambaran-Olm, Adam Miyashiro and others has clearly demonstrated that its racial meanings: are strongly present in both contemporary and historical usage and that those usages are linked; that its modern invention, including through philology, was directly linked to by British and United States imperialism and settler colonialism.¹⁷ The History sits firmly within this context in all four editions considered in this essay. Warton’s formation of a poetic canon was also a formation of identity along specifically raciolinguistic lines; his work called into being a white English reader through the process of creating a poetic canon that reflected the ‘genius’ of the race. Warton’s project in The History was simultaneously aesthetic and racial; the two cannot be disconnected in his account of ‘the progress of our national poetry’. His use of the collective possessive pronoun imbricated his readers in an imagined ‘English’ diachronic racial, linguistic, and poetic community represented by and through the poetic canon. However, The History is rarely given more than a line or two in studies of Anglo-Saxonism,¹⁸ principally because Warton wrote that ‘the Saxon poetry has no connection with the nature and purpose of my present undertaking’ and has nothing to do with contemporary social institutions.¹⁹ This bald statement is belied by the significant attention that he pays to the supposed Gothic racial origins and character of the Saxons, as well as Saxon language and poetry from their arrival in Britain to the end of the twelfth century, which we discuss further below.

Warton, like many of his peers, was intimately concerned with the ideals of language usage.²⁰ Robert Rix highlights the nationalism built into Warton’s project, writing that ‘discovering and canonizing an English vernacular literature was a project of much importance’ to him.²¹ Warton subscribed to the notion that ‘to rank among the “best” writers, one needed to be an early writer,’²² demonstrating his deep interest in origins. Warton also placed high importance on ‘pure poetry’, particularly of ‘our only sublime and pathetic poets, Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton.’²³ This interest in origins and purity aligns closely with discourses of racial formation and identity. Linguistics became a major concern for Warton, as demonstrated by his constant praise of the ‘correctness’ of language,²⁴ such that History attempts to deliver a ‘teleological account of the ‘improvement’ of English literature.’²⁵ Race, language, and poetic value, then, were never meant to be separated in Warton’s canon.

The History was a key text in processes of standardisation that made and re-made ‘Anglo-Saxon’ race, language, and literature in ways that reflected, reinforced and perpetuated colonial and imperial power structures, not only in its original published form, but in its various editions and re-editions. The standardisation of The History as an Anglo-Saxonist compendium throughout the nineteenth century is evinced by increasing use of the term over the three re-editions. Warton used it occasionally: about 5% of the uses of ‘Saxon’ are within the compound ‘Anglo-Saxon’ in his first edition. This increased to approximately twenty-five percent in the 1824 edition, forty percent in the 1840 edition, and fifty percent in the 1871 edition. While a complete, detailed analysis of Warton’s initial publication and each of the re-editions is beyond the scope of this article, in what follows we explore processes of standardisation in ethnonational poetic canon formation in the substantial editors’ prefaces added in 1824 and 1871, as well as in the notes, additions and revisions of sections of The History that relate to medieval poetry, particularly from the pre-Conquest period.

Price’s 1824 edition included notes from major figures in medievalist circles including Ritson, Ashby, Douce, and Thomas Park, some of which were written for it and some which were reprinted from the previous fifty years of commentary. Price and his contributors took The History from the realm of the gentleman antiquarian to that of the scholar of Germanic philology. The notes and other additions represent not only the scholarship at the time of printing, but some of the detailed, and at times heated, arguments of the period in which Anglo-Saxonism became a dominant ideology in British nationalism and imperialism, and the concomitant standardisation of English. The edition ran to four volumes, not least because of the very substantial notes and Price’s long preface in the first volume. Price had planned a section of pre-Conquest poetry but did not include it because of the work’s already significant length, pointing instead to other publications such as J. J. Conybeare’s Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry.²⁶ He nonetheless extended the English poetic canon by including a substantial section interpolated at the end of Warton’s first dissertation ‘On the Saxon Ode on the Victory of Athelstan.’²⁷ The aim was to make the ‘style of the Anglo-Saxon poetry … more apparent to the English reader’ and to pay ‘close attention … in rendering the grammatical inflexion of the text’—that is, it was a simultaneously literary and linguistic goal.²⁸ The notes in this section included several quotations of multiple lines from Beowulf in support of various readings on contested points, positioning the two poems as representative of a single coherent era of poetic style and language.

Taylor did not pen a framing preface for the 1840 edition, but instead reprinted Price’s, which he praised as ‘a very interesting view’ of Warton’s project.²⁹ He lauded Price’s ‘important corrections and additions’ and also made his own in order to ‘address Warton’s great carelessness as a transcriber’.³⁰ Taylor and his contributors (including major Anglo-Saxonist scholars Madden, Wright, Thorpe, and Kemble) added numerous notes, and accepted without demur Price’s variations on Warton’s theories on race, linguistic history and poetry. The 1840 edition was produced at least in part because Price’s was out of print, a fact that points to ongoing demand for The History and its lasting significance in canon formation throughout the nineteenth century. Taylor did not add examples of pre-Conquest poetry beyond those Price had included, but his standardising Anglo-Saxonism is illustrated by a short section he wrote. Taylor asserted that ‘Beow-ulf was the Beaw of the Saxon genealogies,’ and included a comparative table of heroic genealogies gleaned from Icelandic and Saxon English sources in support of his assertion.³¹ Taylor here attempts to attach English history to a poem already established in Price’s edition (and elsewhere) as representative of pre-Conquest poetry and culture and thus central to the standardising of the English canon as Anglo-Saxon.

Hazlitt’s 1871 edition included his own preface as well as a reprint of Price’s, and contained contributions from major figures of both Middle English and Old English scholarship including Frederick Furnivall, Skeat, and Sweet. He included Price’s preface alongside his own substantial commentary on both Warton’s and Price’s work and his own theories. Hazlitt made further substantial revisions to Warton’s text as well as glossing it with notes, and was scathing about earlier editions for not correcting Warton more carefully and introducing new errors.³² Hazlitt claimed, nonetheless, that his corrections were limited to ‘facts and figures only’ and not to Warton’s ‘opinions, sentiments and criticisms’.³³ This demonstrates Warton’s continued influence on the English poetic canon; indeed, his principle of locating value in the imagination and his belief that only a standard language could enable authors of genius to write the best poetry was upheld for more than a century. Hazlitt also commissioned a section by Sweet on ‘Anglo-Saxon literature’ which matched Warton’s style of interweaving framing commentary and extracts of poetry, and he replaced rather than revised Warton’s comments on poetry up to about the twelfth century. The inclusion and positioning of Sweet’s section and the weaving of the style into Warton’s symbolically complete the process of reframing, glossing and rewriting The History is one of canon, race, and linguistic formation that paints a picture of Anglo-Saxon poetry, people, and language as indivisible.

Standardising the canon

Race

In the second half of the eighteenth century, pseudo-scientific constructions of race emerged as the principal explanation of differences between human groups in Western thought.³⁴ A core belief that human groups with common ancestry shared heritable physical and non-physical traits synchronically and diachronically became firmly established.³⁵ This racial belief in the heritability and shared nature of non-physical traits is clear in Warton’s account of the early history of the Saxons. In his ‘Dissertation on the Origin of Romantic Fiction in Europe,’ he traced a racial lineage of direct descent from Goths to Saxons and English, identifying a love of poetry and particular poetic tendencies as Germanic characteristics. He claimed that the Saxons were descended from ‘Asiatic Goths’ from the Caucus region who, because of the encroachments of the Roman empire into their territories, migrated ‘in vast multitudes under the conduct of their leader Odin’ and settled in Scandinavia, bringing with them their own (runic) alphabet.³⁶ The Saxons ‘imported with them into England the old Runic language and letters’.³⁷ Language, here, is directly connected to race, as are the love of and talent for poetry. Warton’s dismissal of pre-Conquest poetry from the canon did not equate to disinterest, and he sought raciolingustic roots for ‘English’ there.

Warton asserts that the Goths ‘planted in Scandinavia’ had ‘skill in poetry, to which they were addicted in a peculiar manner and which they cultivated with a wonderful enthusiasm,’ stating that this ‘is most worthy of our regard … in our present inquiry’ in a comment that belies his earlier statement that Saxon poetry was of no consequence to his project.³⁸ For their Scandinavian descendants, ‘a skill in poetry’ was ‘in some measure a national science’.³⁹ According to Warton, the Saxon’s ‘national love of verse and music still so strongly predominated’, even once Christian religion held sway, such that a new kind of poet, minstrels, replaced the scalds in later centuries down to Elizabeth I’s reign.⁴⁰ Warton’s racial conception of language and literature is further displayed when he draws a clear distinction between Celtic British and ‘the Scutes,’ who ‘conquered … and possessed’ Scotland and Ireland, whom he claims were probably originally Norwegian and therefore Goths.⁴¹ Warton’s account of the scalds concurs with that of many of his contemporaries, notably Thomas Percy whom he both summarised and quoted directly at length, and presents them and their tales as both markers and carriers of race.⁴² Heritability of non-physical traits – talent and love for poetry – is the central, structuring logic of Warton’s volumes which enabled him to form a canon featuring ‘plurality’, as Ross terms it, of poetic styles from across centuries.

None of Warton’s editors challenged the fundamental belief in race demonstrated in his writing or the way that he conceptualised it, either overtly or implicitly, although they rejected various of his supporting claims and suppositions. Like Warton, they typically demonstrate racial beliefs in discussions of other topics. Their notes on Warton’s theories of the origins of romance, in which his ideas about race are evident, are illustrative examples of the way race thinking pervaded their ideas and practice. Warton claimed that ‘romantic fictions’ were Eastern inventions and sought to balance his own earlier theory that they had become part of European culture through contact with Muslim conquerors of the Iberian peninsula⁴³ with the ‘northern theory’ of Percy which positioned them as essential characteristics of the Gothic race.⁴⁴ Price, Taylor, and Hazlitt were unanimous in their rejections of Warton’s theory that Islamic Arab influences introduced romance to the people of Europe.

By the 1820s, when Price’s edition was published, romance had undergone ‘Occidentalization’ and the ancient and medieval Gothic was, as John Ganim argues, often ‘associated with purity … discipline … and authenticity’ encompassing people and poetry alike.⁴⁵ Price rejected Warton’s claims about the origins of romance in ‘Oriental genius’ and attempted to identify explanatory historical contact between ‘East and West,’⁴⁶ arguing instead that they were common to fiction in general and ‘a leading characteristic of the mind’.⁴⁷ It is telling, however, that all of his comparative examples over tens of pages of discussion are from European cultures and that he uses a racial metaphor to explain ‘national’ differences in an era when race and nation could not be separated.⁴⁸ Taylor affirmed Price’s viewpoints through his unglossed reprinting, while Hazlitt added lengthy notes. He was highly critical of Warton’s theories, which he said were ‘founded on a confusion of ideas,’ but his critique is laden with the language of race: ‘in every race and branch of the race, no doubt, there were cherished mythic histories of the race itself.’⁴⁹ He followed Price’s argument in general terms and stated that ‘the notion of Romance having been introduced into the west by the Arabs is quite out of the question’ and ‘unsound’.⁵⁰ All three editions dismiss, actively or passively, the specific argument that demonstrated Warton’s racial thinking rather than the structure of that thought. Their collective rejection of Arabian Islamic influence works to paint a picture of the European Middle Ages as predominantly white and Christian. Warton’s theories on the origins of romance were, correctly, rejected and, in the process the ‘Saxon’ race was reformed through a standardising narrative that rejected external influence and contact and insisted on internal consistency.

Language

Warton’s theories of language were tied to his ideas about race; a relationship that is particularly clear in his account of linguistic history. He drew substantially on earlier work in the area following, for example, George Hickes’s schema in his division of Saxon language as into three ‘dialects’ based on historical ‘epochs’: ‘British Saxon,’ spoken 450 CE to 780 CE, or from the arrival of the Saxons in Britain to the ‘coming of the Danes;’ ‘Danish Saxon,’ from 780–1066; and ‘Norman Saxon’ from 1066 to ‘beyond the reign of Henry the Second’ in the late twelfth century.⁵¹ He did not include the text, but allowed that ‘a small metrical fragment of the genuine Caedmon’ was a surviving trace of British Saxon poetry, albeit embedded in a Danish-Saxon copy of Bede.⁵² Warton linked linguistic change to influxes of new words brought by successive conquerors, but he also suggested that some changes could occur without the influence of ‘foreign phraseology’ and people.⁵³ He wrote that the ‘corruption’ of the ‘Norman Saxon’ was not just because of new words being brought in by new people, but also due ‘to changes of its own forms and terminations.’⁵⁴ The argument that ‘structural changes in English’ result from internal rather than externally imposed stimuli was very significant in the historicisation of English driven by ideologies of standardisation in the nineteenth century.⁵⁵ This principle of internal linguistic change parallels progressivist concepts of race, like Anglo-Saxonism, that rely on simultaneous belief in continuity and change within a racial group.

Warton places high value on language that is internally consistent and regularised in any given synchronic moment, demonstrating a significant standardising orientation. The Danish Saxon, for example, had ‘uniform principles’, was ‘polished by poets and theologists’ and, despite being ‘corrupted by the Danes’, it ‘had much perspicuity, strength, and harmony’ and formed the ‘substance’ of the later Norman Saxon dialect.⁵⁶ He comments only in passing on the Angles and Jutes, pushing the historical narrative towards raciolinguistic uniformity: a footnote asserts linguistic similarity between the two peoples, and between them and the ‘antient Danish’, claiming that the ‘later Dano-Saxonic dialect … is so very similar to that language of the antient Angles’.⁵⁷ Suppression and discounting of dialect variation is an ideologically driven characteristic of standardising linguistic histories.⁵⁸ Warton constructs the Saxon language of his British and Danish periods as ‘standard’ language, spoken by a dominant racial group and used in social institutions such as the royal courts and monasteries.

According to Warton, the language of the Norman Saxon period was ‘extremely barbarous, irregular, and intractable’ and ‘adulterated with French.’⁵⁹ Its failings, he suggests, were partially due to the nature of Norman French, which he describes as the ‘confused jargon of Teutonic, Gaulish, and vitiated Latin’.⁶⁰ Warton argues that Saxon was suppressed after the Conquest by use of French and Latin by royalty and the nobility, in monasteries, schools and universities, and legal contexts. He suggests that due to the ‘prevalence of the commons, most of whom were of English ancestry, the native language gradually gained ground’.⁶¹ This account again links language continuity and revival in social significance directly to race in a standardising narrative. In contrast to the epochal dialects of earlier eras, he constructs Norman Saxon as specifically ‘vernacular Saxon’ with terminology and positioning that is still problematically used in contemporary scholarship.⁶²

Warton placed a transition from ‘Saxon’ language to ‘English’ toward the end of the twelfth century with this re-emergence of the ‘vernacular’ in a move that helped justify his gestures toward ‘Saxon’ poetry without actually including it in his canon of ‘English’ poetry. He asserted that this early English ‘was rough and unpolished’ to the degree that poets such as Robert Grosseteste and Piers Langtoft wrote in French instead.⁶³ He claims they could do so because they were educated in Paris, a claim that allowed him to excise Anglo-Norman verse from the canon of ‘our poetry’ in another deeply ideological standardising move that worked to assert a singular linguistic history for England.⁶⁴ English poets writing in French, Warton said, slowed the ‘progressive improvement of the English language,’⁶⁵ although he allowed that they contributed something by providing models for later translators.⁶⁶ Saxon, then, was appropriate to its own time but required civilising contact in later periods in order for ‘our language’ and ‘our poetry’ to progress and their full capacity to be realised; this also required a process of standardisation. Vernacular language, for Warton, could not produce poetry worthy of inclusion in the canon except as evidence of linguistic ‘progress’ and traces of racial imaginative capacity.

Warton’s claims about pre- and post-Conquest language were part of significant debates that extended over decades. Price engaged substantially with them in a standardising argument around spelling, pronunciation, grammar, and linguistic change, rejecting, for example, Warton’s epochal structure of ‘the Anglo-Saxon language antecedent to the Conquest’ as ‘arbitrary’.⁶⁷ Price’s position demanded continuity wherever it could be found, and his theories of Germanic race and language could not allow for substantial linguistic, social or cultural change to occur as a result of contact with, or conquest by, another Germanic people (as he considered the Danes to be). He expanded Warton’s very brief comment on internal linguistic change in ways that clearly demonstrate a raciolinguistic standardising ideology. He wrote that ‘an influx of foreigners, or a constant intercourse and dependence upon them, may corrupt the idiom of a dialect to a limited extent’ but asserted that this would ‘neither confound the original elements of which [… a language] is composed, not destroy the previous character of its grammar,’ and claimed the English language would have changed in the same ways ‘if William and his followers had remained on their native soil’.⁶⁸ His evidence for this was that English shared internal changes with all peoples and languages of ‘low German’ stock.⁶⁹ This account is profoundly standardising, as well as racialised and racializing, in that it aligns precisely with progressivist theories of racial development that underpinned nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism.

Taylor reprinted Price’s preface with the addition of a small number of his own notes, demonstrating broad agreement with Price’s claims about raciolinguistic history. His few signed interventions support Price’s standardising ideology. Price argued strongly for consistency and coherence in ‘Saxon’ grammar, countering positions taken by other scholars who suggested it was fragmented and disorganised.⁷⁰ Layamon’s Brut was a focal point in their contestations; Taylor added a note to this section of his reprint of Price’s preface pointing to recent publications and a forthcoming edition by Madden which he said ‘will throw much light on the early history of our language’.⁷¹ Although Taylor does not make an overt statement of his own, in context the note adds scholarly weight to Price’s side of the argument, not least by positioning it as in line with contemporaneous thought.

Hazlitt likewise ascribed to a standardising raciolingustic ideology. Where Price and Taylor had largely confined their arguments to adding layers of paratext, Hazlitt made substantial revisions that further standardised ‘Anglo-Saxon’, including by excising Warton’s epochal schema of linguistic change resulting from external influence. Hazlitt’s revised version of the history of English poetry began with a single-page linguistic history by Furnivall of ‘our mother tongue’ from origins in Scandinavia ‘from whence the first Teutonic settlers came to people our England,’ bringing with them ‘legends of their continental homes’ and the poem that ‘is our national epic:’ Beowulf.⁷² This racialised account of language and poetry was followed by an equally brief sketch of ‘the continuous changes in our language’ into a new set of epochs that were almost entirely decoupled from the movement of peoples: ‘Anglo-Saxon or Old English … up to 1100 A.D.;’ ‘Semi-Saxon or Transition English … 1150–1250,’ Early English, 1250–1500 A.D.,’ and ‘Middle English, 1500–620 A.D’.⁷³ The grounds for this classification are grammatical inflexions and, in ‘Early English … French importations’ into a language that he believed to be, until that time, ‘almost whole Anglo-Saxon’.⁷⁴ Hazlitt also substantially rewrote Warton’s comments on post-Conquest language in England to significantly downplay the importance of French and challenge or dismiss many of Warton’s historical claims about both Norman and Saxon language use and practices.

Grammar was of great significance in debates over linguistic and change, as evidenced by Hazlitt and Furnivall’s delineation of linguistic epochs noted above. Price echoes Warton’s assertions about the regularity of pre-Conquest Saxon grammar, claiming that ‘Anglo-Saxon’ language could be easily seen to regularly ‘conform’ to ‘standards’ of grammar and that it had a ‘general spirit of uniformity’.⁷⁵ In this, he argued vehemently against earlier scholars, including Ritson and the Anglo-Saxonist Sharon Turner, who argued that ‘our language’ before the Norman Conquest lacked consistent grammar so badly that its written forms could not be understood properly even in its own time, much less the modern period.⁷⁶ Taylor supported Price’s position by reprinting the relevant section of his preface without contradiction or comment, as did Hazlitt. Hazlitt’s theorisation of a ‘Transition Period’ of significant grammatical change between 1100 and 1250 develops a narrative where change is confined to a relative short period, but also distilled into orderly rules of practice such as ‘the genitive cases of the pronouns are becoming more possessives.’⁷⁷ ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is thus made standard English: it is singular, can be identified only in written forms which are claimed to accurately represent a standard pronunciation, and conforms to grammatical rules. This standardisation of language as internally consistent, coherent, and productive of its own change is a process of raciolinguistic formation that produced ‘Anglo-Saxon’ as a people as well as a language.

Poetry

The substantial raciolinguistic histories in Warton's Dissertations and text that framed the extracts of poetry all served the key purpose of creating a paradigm that would make ‘rude’ poetry not only accessible and palatable to his readers in their ‘polished age’ of refined taste, but also part of their heritage.⁷⁸ Saxon love of and talent for poetry, as discussed above, is constructed by Warton as a defining racial characteristic, but Saxon poetry did not conform to contemporary taste. This presented a difficulty that he got around, in part, by saying a great deal but providing no examples except a modern prose translation of an ode which extols King Athelstan’s victory over a Viking army, as noted above.

Continuity was critical to Warton’s project, albeit at times in tension with the idea of progress. Although he claims that the Saxon’s conversion to Christianity less than two centuries after their possession-taking in Britain ‘abolished in some measure their native and original vein of poetic fabling’, he also asserts that characteristically Saxon poetic features frequently appear in the religious verse of the pre-Conquest period. Key evidence for this is located in the Latin writing of Henry of Huntingdon, who, Warton reports, ‘complained’ about its ‘extraneous words and uncommon figures’, all of which were ‘scaldic expressions or allusions’.⁷⁹ The period of Norman Saxon is thus constructed as a ‘vernacular’ time when English poets were not only unable to write in English, but also unable to read the poetry of the past successfully because they could not recognise its imaginative qualities as a result of their disconnection from English language. Warton used ‘Saxonisms’ as a disparaging term in his discussion of the period that he positioned as English, but which also served him as evidence of sustained racial capacity for poetic expression, and ‘abound[ed], more or less, in every writer before Gower and Chaucer’.⁸⁰ Saxonisms in poetry, then, are markers of both continuity and slow progress that are appropriate and praiseworthy up to about the end of the twelfth century by Warton’s account, but which unfortunately linger due to the lack of ‘polish’ given to English language resulting from the predominance of French in the later period.

Warton found praiseworthy moments that enabled him to fit a few examples of twelfth- and thirteenth-century poetry into the English canon. A description of spring, for example, ‘displays glimmerings of imagination, and exhibits some faint ideas of poetical expression’.⁸¹ One poet was allowed ‘genius’, and individual poems are described as not ‘unpleasing’ and ‘tolerably harmonious’.⁸² Warton offered diversity of versification as evidence of sustained English poetic production, even if much of it was unworthy of inclusion in the canon.⁸³ His account of Norman Saxon poetic form found pre-Conquest roots, French inspirations, and continuity. He attempted to locate Alexandrine forms in poetry he dated to the pre-Conquest period, a move that suggests a desire on his part to make it palatable to contemporary taste.⁸⁴ He considered ‘our earliest poets’ to have an ‘excessive attachment’ to rhyming ‘without producing any effect of elegance, strength, or harmony’, a propensity he argues is also displayed in ‘Runic odes’.⁸⁵ Warton’s instances of mild praise are left intact by Price, Taylor, and Hazlitt, but Price and, in particular, Hazlitt also made substantial standardising additions and revisions.

Price echoes Warton’s general claims that language must be of a particular, standard, quality before it can produce good poetry, but his very different raciolingustic history both enabled and demanded that poetic value be found much earlier. Price praised ‘the order and regularity preserved in Anglo-Saxon composition, the variety of expression, the innate richness, and plastic power with which the language is endowed,’ using terms that echoed his comments about grammar.⁸⁶ To Warton’s section on Norman Saxon poetry he added very substantial notes of his own and others on the dating of poems, identifying source manuscripts more exactly according to contemporary holdings and practice, noting and including similar poems, and highlighting uses of runic or ‘Saxon’ letters which Warton had claimed had fallen out of use even before the Conquest. He did not pass comment there on Warton’s assessment of the poetic qualities of the verses that were included. He did, however, add a separate section ‘On the Lais of Marie de France’ at the end of Warton’s first dissertation alongside his ‘Note On The Saxon Ode On the Victory of Athelstan’. In Price’s hands, the lais enable reassertion of a standardising diachronic linguistic history: ‘the English language of Henry the First could not have differed materially from the Anglo-Saxon of Alfred’.⁸⁷ Price, then, can be seen to be extending the canon of English poetry back several centuries through his standardising additions to Warton’s volumes. Taylor’s edition follows Price’s closely, including by reprinting the notes intact, with additions that brought specific points of knowledge up to date but did not revise Price’s edition in the substance of its raciolinguistic canon formation. His edition actively engages with and perpetuates standardising ideology through this repetition.

Hazlitt’s willingness to significantly alter Warton’s material is in full play in the section on eleventh-to-fourteenth-century poetry. It manifests in ways that valorise ‘Anglo-Saxon’ versification and position it firmly as the origins of the long English poetic canon. There is nothing of the begrudging occasional praise or gestures to French models of verse in Hazlitt’s edition; rather, his additions both regularise and standardise ‘Anglo-Saxon’ verse on its own terms in ways that align strongly with contemporaneous racial theories. Hazlitt entirely removed Warton’s section on Norman Saxon poetry, including his theories about verse form and rhyme with their foregrounding of possible French connections. He replaced much of it with Sweet’s section on ‘Anglo-Saxon literature’ up to 1100,⁸⁸ the account of changes in grammatical form in the ‘Transition period’ 1100–1250 noted above, and a list of ‘Early English Poems’ in the second volume of the edition. The process of standardising re-Warton’s English canon to ‘Anglo-Saxon’ was completed with Hazlitt and Sweet’s rewriting of the original text.

Sweet’s opening statement is profoundly racial and standardising (witness, for example, his remark that ‘the forms of traditions of Anglo-Saxon poetry are those which are common to all the old Germanic nations’).⁸⁹ In Sweet’s hands, Warton’s scaldic traces, bemoaned as barbarous ‘Saxonisms’ with a regrettable presence in English to Chaucer’s time, become ‘poetic words and phrases’ and ‘an essential feature of Anglo-Saxon poetry’.⁹⁰ He gives a two-page summary of ‘the essential element of Anglo-Saxon versification’ attributing strict rules and general conformity to them, stating that this is ‘always regulated by the metrical feeling of the poet, and taking so-called ‘national-epic’ Beowulf as a representative illustration.⁹¹ There are, he allows, ‘traces of rhyme’, in contrast to Warton’s dismissive critiques of its supposed mis-use.⁹² Warton, here, is corrected out of his own canon in a reconstruction so invested in standardisation that it erases the incorrect opinion entirely.

Warton’s principle that ‘imagination’ is the ‘source of value’ in poetry finds flight in Sweet’s racial account of Anglo-Saxon verse.⁹³ Warton had struggled to balance this idea with his neoclassical principles of regularity and technical skill, but Sweet had no such conflicting pressures. He asserted that ‘simplicity and freedom of form’ was ‘characteristic of the earliest poetry of all the Teutonic nations,’ a claim and language that resonates profoundly with long-standing beliefs that that race had an inherent love of liberty. This supposed broad racial trend, for Sweet, was most fully realised in ‘Anglo-Saxon poetry,’ the ‘leading principle’ of which ‘is to subordinate form to matter … purely technical poetry … is not known’.⁹⁴ Comparison with Scandinavian, Greek and Roman verse finds them all lacking while, for Sweet, ‘Anglo-Saxons’ preserved ‘technical simplicity and developed not only an elaborate epic style’ but also ‘produced lyric and didactic poetry of high merit … at least as early as the beginning of the eight century’.⁹⁵ Poetic achievement, here, is a product of race generated at the nexus of form, language, and genius. In four nineteenth-century re-editions The History went from a publication that did not include ‘Saxon poetry’ because it ‘has no connection with the nature and purpose’ of the volumes to one that positioned Anglo-Saxon poetry as the sublime point of origin for the English canon.⁹⁶

Conclusion

Warton’s ‘national’ canon called into being a people as well as a poetic canon and in doing so contributed to a much wider social, cultural and political process. The mutually constitutive process of racial and canon formation continued with each nineteenth-century re-edition through a combination of reiteration, reframing, and removal of previous ideas and evidence to suit theories and knowledge current to each. The History became ‘a bloated compendium encrusted with all the quarrelsome learning of a century of antiquarian dispute and fact-grubbing’ – that is to say, an archive of how medieval studies scholarship and literary canon formation were active parts of and inextricable from white Anglo-Saxon racial formation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.⁹⁷ It has been excluded from the ‘canon’ of medieval studies in twenty-first-century scholarship principally because of Warton’s errors and editorial practices rather than because of its embedding of structural racism into the English canon.⁹⁸ The racism of ‘Anglo-Saxon’, its impacts and implications have been a major focus of important anti-racist work in medieval studies in recent years.⁹⁹ Warton’s The History is a peripheral text in Anglo-Saxonism at best, a relic of attitudes to pre-Conquest England that were already being supplanted when it was published and which the volumes did not consistently uphold. It nonetheless profoundly embedded standardising raciolinguistic ideology deeply in the canon of English poetry, and this was exploited in the re-editions as part of the process of formation of Anglo-Saxon. It is difficult to see that The History would have been the ‘the standard work,’ on the history of English poetry a century after its first publication had it not already been so significantly part of that process.¹⁰⁰

Although Anglo-Saxonist scholarship that employs the language and concepts of biological race explicitly and approvingly has for the most part ceased since at least the second half of the twentieth century, there remains an ‘entrenched culture of patriarchal, heteronormative white supremacy’ in medieval studies.¹⁰¹ White supremacists, whatever their relationship with the academy, appropriate the medieval past and its artefacts; Europe during the period known as the Middle Ages was much more racially, socially and culturally diverse and connected to the rest of the globe than the ‘whites only’ space of pure origins about which they fantasise. They cannot be said, however, to appropriate ‘Anglo-Saxon’ because that concept was, in its essence, developed for and with them, as is exemplified by a hundred years of raciolinguistic canon formation through The History.

Medieval literary studies is coming late to the canon wars in its grappling with the legacies of foundational racialisation compared to many other fields that engage in linguistic and literary studies. Despite significant recent scholarship and advocacy, particularly by scholars of colour including but not only those cited in this essay, pressing problems remain for scholars in the field, as is demonstrated by a glance at the contents page of the latest edition of that canonical teaching anthology of the English canon The Norton Anthology: it begins with ‘Caedmon’s Hymn’ and extracts from Beowulf – that is, in the (Anglo-)Saxon where first Warton and later Sweet began their raciolinguistic poetic canons. The editors write that ‘Caedmon’s Hymn’ is the ‘oldest surviving poetic text in a dialect of Old English’ and observe that it ‘pre-dates the emergence of England as a nation’ a comment that aligns strongly with Warton’s position.¹⁰² The comment is new to this edition, although inclusion of the poem is not, and is a very mild contestation of contemporary versions of the raciolinguistic logics that position the poem as the origin of English poetry. No mention is made of race in the preface of a volume that ‘substantially expanded the representation from Canada, Ireland, the Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand, India, and South Africa’,¹⁰³ all nations where English is spoken because of the British imperialism and settler colonisation that Anglo-Saxonism sought to justify; in most of those nations Anglo-Saxon is a settler colonial ideology directly linked to white identities.¹⁰⁴ The Norton Anthology of Poetry is representative here of a structuring principle in English canon formation that The History helped to embed: language and literature start with the Middle Ages. In the midst of substantial scholarship seeking to deconstruct the medieval English literary canon and reveal and redress its selective, ideological inclusions and exclusions, the origins of the poetic canon established by raciolinguistic Anglo-Saxonism remain firmly in place. Rather than seeking to reform it to be more inclusive and diverse, we might do better to revolt, as scholars such as Mary Rambaran-Olm, M. Breann Leake, and Micah James Goodrich have suggested.¹⁰⁵ In other words, we ought to seek reasons to study and teach medieval literature that resist not only the conventional content but the very idea of an English canon with medieval roots.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Subsequently abbreviated to The History.

2 Thomas Wharton, The History of English Poetry, 3 vols (London: J. Dodsley, 1774), I, p. ii.

3 William Carew Hazlitt, ‘Preface to the Present Edition’, in William Carew Hazlitt (ed.), The History of English Poetry, 4 vols (London: Reeves and Turner, 1871), I, pp. v–xvi (ix).

4 Trevor Ross, Making of the English Literary Canon: From the Middle Ages to the Late Eighteenth Century (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1998), pp. 266–67. On Warton and the Gothic imagination see also Joseph M. Levine, Humanism and History: Origins of Modern English Historiography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 190–213.

5 For example, Jonathan Brody Kramnick, Making the English Canon: Print-Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). David Matthews notes the re-editions without detailed exploration in The Making of Middle English, 1765–1910 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 31.

6 Toni Morrison, Mouth Full of Blood: Essays, Speeches, Meditations (London: Vintage, 2019), p. 162. See also, for example, E. Dean Kolbas, Critical Theory and the Literary Canon, Critical Theory and the Literary Canon (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001); Philipp Löffler, ‘The Practice of Reading and the Need for Literary Value’, in Philipp Löffler (ed.), Reading the Canon: Literary History in the 21st Century (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2017), pp. 1–20.

7 Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (New York, NY: Routledge, 1994), p. 55.

8 We draw on Geraldine Heng’s account of race in The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 33. For cognate accounts of linguistic history and canon formation see, respectively, Tim Machan, ‘Chaucer and the History of English’, Speculum, 87.01 (2012), pp. 147–75; and Kramnick, Making the English Canon.

9 Jonathan Rosa, ‘Standardization, Racialization, Languagelessness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies across Communicative Contexts’, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 26.2 (2015), pp. 162–83; Jim Milroy, ‘Historical Description and the Ideology of the Standard Language’, in Laura Wright (ed.) The Development of Standard English, 1300–1800: Theories, descriptions, conflicts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 11–28.

10 Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa, ‘Undoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Language Diversity in Education’, Harvard Educational Review, 85.2 (2015): 149–71 (150).

11 Shyama Rajendran, ‘Undoing “The Vernacular”: Dismantling Structures of Raciolinguistic Supremacy’, Literature Compass, 16 (2019): 1–13.

12 Stephen J. Harris, Race and Ethnicity in Anglo-Saxon Literature (New York, NY: Taylor & Francis, 2003), p. 8.

13 Bill Ashcroft, ‘Language and Race’, Social Identities, 7.3 (2001): 311–28. On the construction of Old English as white and male through the literary canon, see Erik Wade, ‘Representation and Inclusion in the Old English Classroom.’, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching, 27.2 (2020), pp. 19–40 (pp. 5–6).

14 Ross, Making of the English Literary Canon, p. 129.

15 We put quote marks around ‘Anglo-Saxon’ in this essay to draw attention to its specific construction as a racial term; all the editions of The History use it. On the racial implications of ‘Anglo-Saxon’, see Mary Rambaran-Olm and Erik Wade, ‘The Many Myths of the Term “Anglo-Saxon“’, Smithsonianmag.com, 2021 <https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/many-myths-term-anglo-saxon-180978169/> [Date accessed: 19 August 2021]; David Wilton, ‘What Do We Mean By Anglo-Saxon? ‘Pre-Conquest to the Present, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 119.4 (2020), pp. 425–54.

16 See Hugh A. MacDougall. Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons (University Press of New England, 1982); Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Harvard University Press, 1986); Reginald Horsman, ‘Origins of Racial Anglo-Saxonism in Great Britain Before 1850’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 37.3 (1976): 387; Louise D’Arcens and Chris Jones, ‘Excavating the Borders of Literary Anglo-Saxonims in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Australia’, Representations, 121.1 (2013): 85–106.

17 Catherine E. Karkov, Anna Kłosowska, and Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, Disturbing Times: Medieval Pasts, Reimagined Futures (punctum books, 2020); Adam Miyashiro, ‘Our Deeper Past: Race, Settler Colonialism, and Medieval Heritage Politics’, Literature Compass, 16.9–10 (2019): Critical Race and the Middle Ages: 1–11 at https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12550 [Date accessed: 15 December 2023]; Eduardo Ramos, ‘Philology and Racist Appropriations of the Medieval’, Literature Compass, 20.7–9 (2023): https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12734 [Date accessed: 15 December 2023]; Mary Rambaran-Olm, Necessary Housework: Dismantling the Master's House (Public Books, 2021); Mary Rambaran-Olm and Erik Wade,‘What’s in a Name? The Past and Present Racism in “Anglo-Saxon” Studies’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 52 (2022), pp. 135–53; Wilton, ‘What do we mean by Anglo-Saxon?’

18 See, for instance, Dustin M. Frazier Wood, Anglo-Saxonism and the Idea of Englishness in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York, NY: Boydell, 2020), p. 29.

19 Warton, The History, I, p. vi.

20 Robert Folkenfilk, ‘Folklore, Antiquarianism, Scholarship and High Literary Culture’, in John Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780 (Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 602–22.

21 Robert W. Rix, ‘Romancing Scandinavia: Relocating Chivalry and Romance in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, European Romantic Review, 20.1 (2009): 3–20 (p. 16).

22 Folkenflik, ‘Folklore,’ p. 610.

23 David Fairer, ‘Poetry’, in David Womersley (ed.), A Companion to Literature from Milton to Blake (Oxford: Blackwell, 2017), pp. 560–74 (p. 561).

24 Folkenflik, ‘Folklore’, p. 618.

25 Ibid.

26 Richard Price, ‘Editor’s Preface’, in Richard Price (ed.), The History of English Poetry, 4 vols (London: Thomas Tegg, 1824), I, pp. 11–123 (p. 46).

27 The poem is now generally known as The Battle of Brunanburh and was given in modern English prose translation by Warton. See Richard Price, ‘Note by the Editor on the Saxon Ode on the Victory of Athelstan’, in Price (ed.), The History, 1824, I, pp. lxxxvii-cii.

28 Price, ‘Note by the Editor’, The History, 1824, I, p. lxxxvii.

29 Richard Taylor, ‘Advertisement’, in Richard Taylor (ed.), The History of English Poetry, 4 vols (London: Thomas Tegg, 1840), I, pp. iii–iv (p. iii).

30 Ibid.

31 Richard Taylor, ‘Note on the Northern Genealogies,’ in Richard Taylor (ed.), The History of English Poetry, 1840, I, pp. 95–96.

32 Hazlitt, ‘Preface to the Present Edition’, I, p. vi.

33 Ibid., p. xi.

34 On the history of race as a scientific concept, see Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York, NY: Norton, 2010).

35 Robert Wald Sussman, The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 16.

36 He was careful to clearly separate the Saxons from later invaders from the East whom he said were also called Goths but were, in fact, different races. Warton, The History, I, Dissertation I, n.p. Warton’s volumes were not fully paginated. His front matter was paginated with Roman numerals, the three dissertations were unpaginated, and ‘The History of English Poetry’ was paginated with Arabic numerals. We follow this practice in our citations.

37 Warton, The History of English Poetry, I, Dissertation I, n.p.

38 Ibid.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid.

42 On Percy’s ideas about Gothic language, literature, and race see Helen Young, ‘Thomas Percy’s Racialization of the European Middle Ages’, Literature Compass, 16 (2019), pp. 1–11: https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12543 [Date accessed: 15 December 2023].

43 He had previously made this argument in Observations on the Faerie Queene (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1754).

44 On medievalism, orientalism, and histories of romance see John M. Ganim, Medievalism and Orientalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

45 Ganim, Medievalism and Orientalism, pp. 35–36.

46 Price, ‘Editor’s Preface’, I, p. 24.

47 Hazlitt, ‘Preface to the Present Edition’, I, p. 28.

48 Variation in ‘popular fictions … will hardly afford a stronger contrast in their lineaments, than the physical differences displayed in the conformation of the human frame’ from Greece to the Arctic. Price, ‘Editor’s Preface’, p. 53.

49 Hazlitt (ed.), The History, 1871, I, Dissertation I, p. 91, n. 1. The layering of notes in the various editions at times obscures authorship. Where notes, or sections of notes, are signed we give the author in addition to the editor of the edition. Where authorship is not clear, the relevant editor is listed.

50 Ibid., p. 92.

51 Warton, The History, I, pp. 1–2. Hickes’s ideology of language, particularly his concerns about ‘mixed’ languages being barbarous, likely also influenced Warton. On Hickes’s ideology, see Christopher M. Cain, ‘George Hickes and the “invention” of the Old English Dialects’, Review of English Studies, 61.252 (2010), pp. 729–48 <https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgq029>.

52 Warton, The History, I. p. 1.

53 Ibid., I, p. 7.

54 Ibid.

55 Milroy, ‘Historical Description’, p. 17.

56 Warton, The History, pp. I, 2.

57 Ibid., p. 30.

58 Tim William Machan, ‘Chaucer and the History of English,’ Speculum, 87.1 (2012), pp. 147–75 (pp. 149–51); Milroy, ‘Historical Description’, pp. 18–20.

59 Warton, The History, I, p. 2.

60 Ibid.

61 Ibid., p. 6.

62 Ibid., p. 5. On modern use of ‘vernacular’ and ideologies of standardisation see Rajendran ‘Undoing “The Vernacular”’.

63 Ibid., pp. 85–86. Warton praised Latin poetry by English authors from the period in his ‘Dissertation on the Introduction of Learning into England,’ but does not consider it English poetry.

64 Warton, The History of English Poetry, I, p. xiii. On the progressive removal of Anglo-Norman from English linguistic and poetic histories see Helen Young and Stephanie Downes, ‘Anglo-Norman in Exile: The Early Critical Reception of Piers Langtoft’s Chronicle’, The Medieval Journal, 4.2 (2014), pp. 103–22.

65 Warton, The History, I, p. 88.

66 Ibid., 87.

67 Price (ed.), The History, 1824, I, p. 2, n. 1.

68 Price, ‘Editor’s Preface’, pp. 108–9.

69 Ibid., p. 110.

70 Ibid., pp. 106–108.

71 Taylor (ed.), The History, 1840, I, p. 84, n. 176. The note is signed R.T.

72 Ibid.

73 Ibid.

74 Ibid. Hazlitt expanded on this schema in his own very substantial and often undifferentiated revision of Warton’s text in the same volume, pp. 22–27.

75 Price, ‘Editor’s Preface’, p. 112.

76 Ibid., p. 107.

77 Hazlitt (ed.), The History, 1871, II, 26.

78 Warton, The History, I, p, ii.

79 Ibid., Dissertation I, I, n.p. Italics original.

80 Ibid., p. 49.

81 Ibid., pp. 28–29.

82 Ibid., p. 30–31.

83 Ibid., p. 32.

84 Ibid., p. 7–8. His chief method of dating is the presence of ‘Norman terms’ (p. 7) which he glosses as ‘Gallo-French’ (p. 11).

85 Ibid., pp. 21–22.

86 Price, ‘Editor's Preface’, p. 112.

87 Richard Price, ‘On the Lais of Marie de France’, in Price (ed.), The History (1842), I, pp. lxxiv-lxxxvi (p. lxxxv).

88 Henry Sweet, ‘Sketch of the History of Anglo-Saxon Poetry’, in Hazlitt (ed.), The History (1871), II, pp. 3–33.

89 Ibid., p. 3.

90 Ibid., p. 5.

91 Ibid., pp. 3–5.

92 Ibid., p. 5.

93 Ross, Making of the English Literary Canon, pp. 266–67.

94 Sweet, p. 5

95 Ibid., p. 6.

96 Warton, The History, I. p. vi.

97 Matthews, The Making of Middle English, p. 31.

98 David Matthews, Medievalism: A Critical History (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), p. 176.

99 Some example include Donna Beth Ellard, Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, postSaxon Futures (punctum books, 2019); Dorothy Kim, ‘The Question of Race in Beowulf’, JSTOR Daily https://daily.jstor.org/the-question-of-race-in-beowulf/ ; Miyashiro, ‘“Our deeper past”;; Rambaran-Olm and Wade, ‘What’s in a Name?’; Wade, ‘Representation’.

100 William Carew Hazlitt, ‘Preface to the Present Edition’, in William Carew Hazlitt (ed.), The History of English Poetry, 4 vols (London: Reeves and Turner, 1871), I, pp. v–xvi (p. ix).

101 Mary Rambaran-Olm, M Breann Leake, and Micah James Goodrich, ‘Medieval Studies: The Stakes of the Field’, Postmedieval, 11.4 (2020), pp. 356–70 (p. 359) <https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00205-5> [Date accessed: 15 December 2023].

102 Margaret Ferguson, Tim Kendall and Mary Jo Salter, ‘Preface’, in Margaret Ferguson, Tim Kendall and Mary Jo Salter (eds), The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 6th edition (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Son, 2018), pp. lxi–ixv (p. lxi).

103 Ibid.

104 Adam Miyashiro, ‘Reading the Runes: “Anglo-Saxon Studies,” Race and Colonialism’, in Catherine Karkov, Anna Kloskowska and Vincent W. J. van Gervan Oei (ed.), Disturbing Times: Medieval Pasts, Reimagined Futures (punctum books, 2020), pp. 321–25 (p. 324).

105 Rambaran-Olm, Leake, and Goodrich, ‘Medieval Studies’.