In this nuanced portrait of Athelstan, Sarah Foot offers the first full account of the king ever written.
Sarah Foot Books
Sarah Foot's work delves into the perceptions and uses of the past in the early medieval West. She is a recognized authority on early monastic life in Anglo-Saxon England. Her scholarship offers deep insights into how history was understood and utilized during this formative period. Foot holds a distinguished professorship in Ecclesiastical History at Oxford University.
How was history written in Europe and Asia between 400-1400? How was the past understood in religious, social and political terms? And in what ways does the diversity of historical writing in this period mask underlying commonalities in narrating the past? The volume, which assembles 28 contributions from leading historians, tackles these and other questions. Part I provides comprehensive overviews of the development of historical writing in societies that range from the Korean Peninsula to north-west Europe, which together highlight regional and cultural distinctiveness. Part II complements the first part by taking a thematic and comparative approach; it includes essays on genre, warfare, and religion (amongst others) which address common concerns of historians working in this liminal period before the globalizing forces of the early modern world.