Doing comparative history really highlights how differently historiographical traditions approach similar sources.
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Or some edition somewhere. But tbh, there is a lot less material. Ireland doesn't have a Bede equivalent, but the sagas and annals and hagiographies present a fair amount of historical info.
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England has Gildas, Bede, the ASC, a few hagiographies, laws and letters, amongst others. But in terms of piecing together info, we have massive gaps. Bede's great for a lot of stuff but he doesn't talk about everything, and obviously he privileged certain info over others.
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Our lack of info on Mercia is well-documented, but for the other Saxon kingdoms, Lindsey, East Anglia...well, a lot of it comes down to archaeology, what Bede says and what the ASC says but that's about it. It's very hard. There are good overviews of the various kingdoms but
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I've had a lot of problems with approaching singular entries in the ASC. People like to focus on the cultural milieu of the ASC, the MSS relationships, language, and maybe a few notable entries but otherwise it feels like there really isn't much on it.
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Maybe there are articles or books that I'm missing, but I've been doing a lot of looking around and I'm not finding a lot. And what about these Northumbrian annals from the 8th century? They get mentioned here and there, but I didn't even realize that they were probably early
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Until very recently, when I was reading on Symeon of Durham and the continuation of bede's relation to two MSS of the ASC.
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It just doesn't get highlighted anywhere, at least not in a way that I've seen.
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Also, later hagiographies: I've had a hell of a time trying to sort out the hagiographies on Dunstan, and when they date. I still haven't figured it out. I wrote down something ages ago about how one of his hagiographies preserved an inauguration. I just need it for a footnote.
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But I can't find anything now, and I'm trying to find anything on it but I can't, because people also use the Vita Oswaldi for histories on Dunstan so it's just ?????
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Also, a bugbear: what Wessex was doing circa 900 cannot without a doubt be applied unilaterally to Mercia and Northumbria and elsewhere 800 down. It might, but assuming so is a fallacy and also makes it out to appear that the English kingdoms from the late 6th c
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and up can just be sort of absorbed into a unit, and while they obviously shared a culture, history, language, etc. there were regional cultural differences as there always are everywhere on Earth.
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End of conversation
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