Provides a new way of understanding how people became English during the Anglo-Saxon period by tracing the links between Englishness and the body in the texts and culture of this time.

Jacqueline Fay is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Arlington. She is the author of articles on early medieval medical texts, historical works, and saints' lives, among other topics, and also associate editor for Old English and Old Norse of the five-volume Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Medieval British Literature (2017) and co-editor of A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). Her recent work concentrates on the relationship of the human and non-human in early medieval England, in particular re-reading the interactions between texts and plants, animals, and objects.

• Introduction: Materializing Englishness


• 1: The Workings of Soil in Early English Hagiography


• 2: Stones, Books, and the Place of History around A.D. 900


• 3: The Trans-Planted Politics of Eleventh-Century England


• 4: Beowulf and Ethnic Matters


• Conclusion


• Works Cited