Persuasive Agency of Objects and Practices in Alfred the Great’s Reform Program

Georgina Pitt is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. Her research focuses on the early medieval period, across the disciplines of history, literary studies, and archaeology. She has published on Alfredian reform, Sutton Hoo, and the medieval experience of war.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsAuthor’s NoteAbbreviationsPrelude. The Enigmatic Alfred JewelChapter 1. IntroductionChapter 2. Military Innovation: Performing Alfredian IdeologyChapter 3. Alfredian IdeologyChapter 4. Alfredian Learning and Its Implications for Alfredian ReformChapter 5. Text-Bodies: A Crucial ActantChapter 6. Social Practices: Routinized Ways of Doing ThingsChapter 7. The Enigmatic Alfred Jewel: A Powerful Player in Alfredian ReformCoda. Looking Forward: Alfred’s SuccessorsBibliographyIndex

Georgina Pitt’s study of the literature, material culture, and military reforms connected to Alfred the Great offers a multifaceted interpretation of learning and politics in Wessex and its neighbors in the late ninth century. This clearly written and engaging book will be of great use to historians and literary scholars alike. At the heart of Pitt’s book is the idea of persuasion, indicated in the “Persuasive Agency” of the title. Alfredian persuasiveness, Pitt suggests, is made up of the qualities of friendliness, informality, and accessibility. This friendliness, a recurring theme throughout Pitt’s book, is closely linked to loyalty, which is at the core of Alfredian ideology, as Pitt sees it. Through the ideology that she identifies, Pitt draws together all aspects of what she views as Alfred’s reform program: his military reforms, the educational program, his law-code (known as the domboc), the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (ASC), the translations attributed to or commissioned by the king, and the conceptualization of his subjects as the Angelcynn. The coherent unification of all these different aspects of Alfred’s reign is facilitated by Pitt’s use of assemblage theory, which supports the identification of different actants in an assemblage.[...]This study offers a phenomenological approach to Alfred’s reign integrated with assemblage and social practice theory. With this book, Pitt demonstrates how these theories can be used productively for the study of a particular moment in medieval history. The great success of this theoretical approach is the drawing together of the seemingly quite disparate elements of Alfred’s reign into what can be seen as a coherent and organized reform program. Pitt’s book represents an important contribution to Alfredian studies, and, in its effective use of assemblage and social practice theory, to the fields of medieval history and literature more broadly.