Posted on September 6, 2024

University Cancels Anglo-Saxon ‘To Decolonise’ the Curriculum

Craig Simpson, The Telegraph, August 31, 2024

The term Anglo-Saxon has been removed from a University’s module titles to tackle “nationalist narratives”.

The University of Nottingham offers leading courses in Anglo-Saxon history and literature and is the only university in the country to offer a Viking Studies course.

But in a move to “decolonise the curriculum”, professors have renamed a masters course in Viking and Anglo-Saxon Studies as Viking and Early Medieval English Studies.

A module within the programme titled “Research Methods in Viking and Anglo-Saxon Studies” has also had the “Anglo-Saxon” term removed in favour of “Early Medieval English”.

It follows a similar move in the United States, where academics in particular have campaigned against the term “Anglo-Saxon” because it suggests a distinct, native Englishness.

The terminology of “Early mediaeval England” is the preferred replacement for “Anglo-Saxon” by academics concerned that the latter has become a phrase used by racists surrounding white identity.

These have largely been based in the US, where the term has been used to describe those descended from white early settlers.

The university has also said it is seeking to “problematize the term ‘Viking’” in its tuition.

An English literature module “A Tale of Seven Kingdoms: Anglo-Saxon and Viking-Age England from Bede to Alfred the Great” was also renamed “Early mediaeval England from Bede to Alfred the Great”.

It comes amid concerns over the connections of “race, empire, Nazism” to Norse culture and mythology.

The Nazis made use of Norse runic figures in their iconography, including the stylised “S” figures of the SS.

The move follows a pledge made in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests to decolonise the curriculum, a term denoting a move away from Western-centred material and the dominance of “white voices” in academia.

Teaching staff at Nottingham also ensure that module content aims at “undercutting nationalist narratives” and “essentialist ideas” about nationality, meaning the belief that English identity is distinct and confers fundamental characteristics.

In 2023, it was revealed that the University of Cambridge, home to a leading Anglo-Saxon department, was teaching students that Anglo-Saxons did not exist as a distinct ethnic group as part of efforts to undermine “myths of nationalism”.

As part of efforts to make teaching more “anti-racist”, courses aimed to explain that the Anglo-Saxons, Scottish, Irish and Welsh ethnic identities  were not “coherent”.

In 2024, Cambridge University Press’s long-running academic publication, Anglo-Saxon England journal, was renamed amid the ongoing debate about the nationalist overtones of Dark Age ethnonyms

The press said the new name would better reflect “international, interdisciplinary and rapidly evolving nature of research in this field”.

The term “Anglo-Saxon”  typically refers to a cultural group which emerged and flourished between the fall of Roman Britain, and the Norman conquest, when Germanic peoples – Angles, Saxons, and Jutes – arrived and forged new kingdoms in what would later become a united England. This was also the period of Old English epics such as Beowulf.

However, in  2019, the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists voted to change its name to the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England, “in recognition of the problematic connotations that are widely associated with the terms “Anglo-Saxon”.

This was triggered by the resignation from the society of the Canadian academic Dr Mary Rambaran-Olm, who has since written that the field of Anglo-Saxon studies is one of “inherent whiteness”.

While some have argued that a single term like “Anglo-Saxon” is inaccurate as the Dark Ages were a period of population change, including the Viking invasions, others maintain that the term remains useful historically and archaeologically.

A statement signed by more than 70 academics in 2020 argued that the furore over the term “Anglo-Saxon” was an American import, with an open letter stating: “The conditions in which the term is encountered, and how it is perceived, are very different in the USA from elsewhere.”