The politics of being Norman in the reign of Richard the Fearless, Duke of Normandy (r. 942–996)
In 966, by the end of the reign of its third duke, Richard I, Normandy had overcome the crises that had beset it in the middle of the century. Much of this success came from the coherence of its ruling group, which expressed itself partly in terms of ‘Norman’ identity. This article uses Dudo's history of the dukes and Richard's charters to argue that ‘Norman’ as a political identity was a deliberate creation of the court of Richard I in the 960s, following the perceived failure of his and his father's policies of assimilation into Frankish culture.
Scandinavian Component in Anglo-Saxon and Norman Identities
The article provides an analytical review of contemporary British historiography in the field of Anglo-Saxon and Norman ethnicity. On the one hand, modern scholars shift the focus on periphery and frontier regions of the kingdoms of Scotland and England and the Duchy of Normandy; on the other hand, the concept of “Atlantic archipelago” emphasizes the specificity of insular variant of ethno-political development. The phenomenon of “the Norman world”, encompassing whole communities and territories inhabited by the Normans, is a fertile ground for realization of such “regional” approach. Both its strengths and limitations can be seen in the fundamental study “Heirs of the Vikings: History and Identity in Normandy and England, c. 950 — c. 1015” by Katherine Cross. She demonstrates that the denotation of the term “Norman” was not stable, and its interpretation was determined by the historical memory of a concrete region or community. Comparing two regions where, on the one hand, a complex ethnic landscape had been preserved by the 10th–11th centuries, and where, on the other hand, centralizing tendencies of the ambitious ruling dynasties had been developing, K.Cross seeks answers to the question “Why and how did Viking identity come to mean different things in England and Normandy?” The comparative approach to exploring Norman and English identities chosen by the author is realized exclusively on the basis of textual evidence: genealogies, ethnogenetic narratives, hagiography and charters. The analysis of “ethnic” discourse of the sources carried out by K.Cross is a vital, yet intermediate step towards a more fundamental debate.
The Invention of the Jewish People
'All modern nation states have a story of their origins, passed down through both official and popular culture, and yet few of these accounts have proved as divisive and influential as the Israeli national myth. The well-known tale of Jewish exile at the hands of the Romans during the first century AD, and the assertion of both cultural and racial continuity through to the Jewish people of the present day, resonates far beyond Israel's borders. Despite its use as a justification for Jewish settlement in Palestine and the project of a Greater Israel, there have been few scholarly investigations into the historical accuracy of the story as a whole. In this bold and ambitious new book, Shlomo Sand shows that the Israeli national myth has its origins in the nineteenth century, rather than in biblical times - when Jewish historians, like scholars in many other cultures, reconstituted an imagined people in order to model a future nation. Sand forensically dissects the official story - and demonstrates the construction of a nationalist myth and the collective mystification that this requires. A bestseller in Israel and France, Shlomo Sand's book has sparked a widespread and lively debate. Should the Jewish people regard themselves as genetically distinct and identifiable across the millennia - or should that doctrine now be left behind and if the myth of the Jewish state is dismantled, could this open a path toward a more inclusive Israeli state, content within its borders?'