Jay Paul Gates and Brian O'Camb have edited a stimulating and timely collection of ten essays covering various aspects of the ways medieval authors and audiences, ca.1000–1600, attempted to understand the early medieval English past. The essays in Remembering the Medieval Present highlight the value that later generations attached to their constantly evolving and individualized versions of the imagined early English past. They showcase numerous examples of how identifying alterations to perceived narratives of the past help the modern reader to better understand the cultural capital of historical knowledge in political, intellectual, religious, and cultural spheres.

Gates and O'Camb explain that the contributing authors do not seek to identify any single conceptualization of early English identity. Instead, they identify a range of contexts in which “invocations” of an “often fictionalized and politically or socially weighted past” (3) became valuable to the resolution of particular contemporary concerns. Their essays provide new case studies for exploring discourses on early English identity by such scholars as Stephen Harris, George Molyneaux, and Kathleen Davis, and discussions on the ways that later generations perceived and used this imagined identity, notably Elaine Treharne, Renée Trilling, and the excellent The Long Twelfth-Century View of the Anglo-Saxon Past, edited by Martin Brett and David A. Woodman (2015).

A range of methodological approaches features across the chapters, with several key themes emerging across the discussions. Medieval concepts of community and identity are evident in almost every discussion, ranging from those by Nicole Marafioti, Erin Michelle Geores, and Gates on the ways early English parallels informed legal and political discourses in times of national crisis, to those by Maren Clegg Hyer and Cynthia Turner Camp on the ways early medieval models informed the institutional history and foundation narratives of later religious communities. Readers will find considerable discussion on the development of English language and literature in the central Middle Ages, with notable contributions by Carla María Thomas, O'Camb, and Eric Weiskott highlighting the ways in which forms, genres, models, and even individual words summoned the cultural capital that came attached to perceptions of early England. Weiskott's comprehensive summary of Bede as prophet in later medieval English texts includes an edition of the text Bede's Prophecy (283–86) dated to 1399–1400, providing a particularly important resource for further scholarship on this theme. All of the chapters make strong contributions on the ways that the past was conceptualized in medieval England. In particular, Kathleen Smith offers a remarkable insight into the levels of historical knowledge and criticism that might be expected of a fourteenth-century audience, and shows some of the ways in which Chaucer's literature fostered ideas of the past on literal, allegorical, and metaphysical levels. Notable throughout is the range of texts and associated venues through which later medieval audiences might have been able to generate their ideas about the past. These include extended historical and hagiographical writings, law codes, romance, and various forms of poetry, demonstrating clearly that we need to think more holistically about the extent to which medieval people had the appetite and opportunity to think critically about their past.

The editorial and production standards are high throughout this volume. Citations are given in original languages (including Latin and Old and Middle English) and with accompanying translations in almost every chapter (but not all). A more consistent approach to subheadings might have benefited the reading of the chapters in which they do not feature.

These are minor criticisms of what is an excellent collection of essays. In their “Statement on the Anglo-Saxon Discussion” produced immediately prior to publication and included in the ebook version but not in the hard copy, Gates and O'Camb acknowledge that perceptions of the early medieval English past have been subject to contentious debate in recent years—the most prominent example being the decision, late in 2019, to change the name of the International Society for Anglo-Saxon Studies to the less politically charged title, International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England. Gates and O'Camb note that they would have preferred to have broadened their discussions in light of this debate but could not do so in time for publication. Nevertheless, Gates and O'Camb have edited an essay collection that accurately demonstrates the fallacy of any perceived monolithic version of early English history and identity, with expert contributions highlighting the idiosyncrasy of historical identities and the various receptions, alterations, and enhancements of these identities almost from the moment they were first conceived. In a thought-provoking afterword added after the debate about the new name for the International Society for Anglo-Saxon Studies, Irina Dimitrescu and Mary Kate Hurley reiterate the principal themes of the essays, concluding with an impassioned appeal against misusing certain perceptions of the early medieval past in the public sphere, and this is possibly one of the most pertinent contributions made by the entire volume. Dimitrescu and Hurley rightly observe that “What they seek to deploy monolithically, scholarship can reveal as constructed and reshaped by later periods” (293) and remind us that, as shown by the chapters featured in this book, “the force of temporality—the interpretations of time—was also deployed in the past itself” (294). Whatever the future direction of the discussion on early English identity, Gates and O'Camb and their contributing authors have given us much to think about in this fascinating essay collection.