University of Cambridge

Post-Doc, Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic

British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow

Clare Hall

About

I am currently working on a textual and historical re-examination of the Odense hagiographies of king Knud IV of Denmark, the oldest surviving narrative writings in Latin letters composed in Scandinavia.

Two accounts of Knud's life and death were produced between 1095 and 1117: the anonymous Passio sancti Canuti regis ('Passion of St Canute, King and Martyr') and Ælnoth of Canterbury’s Gesta Swenomagni regis et filiorum eius et passio gloriosissimi Canuti regis et martyris ('Deeds of King Sweno-Magnus and his Sons, and the Passion of the Most Glorious Canute, King and Martyr').

These two narratives describe, from conflicting perspectives, the murder of Knud at Odense in 1086, and the early development of his cult. They reflect the concerns and self-interest of rival communities at Odense: a college of secular clerics at the royal church of St Alban, where Knud died, and a fledgling priory established by a party of monks from Evesham at the new cathedral church of St Knud, to which the saint's relics had been transferred in 1095.

The Odense texts embody the formation of new ideologies, institutions and political relations in post-Viking Denmark, as succeeding rulers in a new royal dynasty, and different constituencies within the emergent Danish church, struggled to fix, maintain and articulate their authority. The cult of Knud and the two narratives to which it gave rise also reflect the impact in Denmark of English churchmen, and the reformulation of post-Conquest English ecclesiastical traditions and preoccupations in a new environment.

The project -- which will come to an end in 2013 -- will lead to the publication of new editions of the two texts, and to explore their broader contexts in the history and textual culture of Scandinavia, the North Sea region, and Europe in the decades around 1100.

I maintain a broad interest in the history and literature of Viking Age and medieval Scandinavia, pursuing research on skaldic poetry, constructions of the past in Old Norse-Icelandic narrative literature, and various aspects of northern European history from the eighth century to the twelfth. My doctoral thesis (University of Toronto, 2007) was a study of competitive interactions between Scandinavian skaldic poets from the late ninth century to the thirteenth, and I am a contributor to the ongoing international collaborative editing project Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages (for which I have in hand a new edition of the poetic material in Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar).

From 2004–2008 I lectured in medieval history at the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, providing all teaching in the department's BA courses on Scandinavian history in the Viking age, and providing MPhil supervision.

In 2010-11 I stood in for Professor Rosamond McKitterick in the MPhil in Medieval History at the Cambridge Faculty of History, convening the early medieval seminar 'The Carolingians and their neighbours'.

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