Brennan, Roland K. Brennan;
(2021)
Pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon Worship: A Semantic Study.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
This thesis pursues two aims. First, to reconstruct the pre-Christian meanings of 18 Old English word-families that belong to the semantic field of worship in the Anglo-Saxon literary record. The ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons migrated to Britain in the fifth century; they began to adopt Christianity with the arrival of Roman missionaries at the end of the sixth century and the Christianisation process was politically completed by the end of the seventh century. This study’s reconstructive task aims to describe the cultural facts of religious worship during this target period of two-and-a-half centuries, when these settlers in Britain practiced traditional heathen cults, through comparison of the Old English corpus data with the linguistic testimony of other early Germanic languages, further interpreted in light of relevant historical and archaeological testimony. The second aim is to characterise how the Christianisation process affected vernacular terminology for religious worship at large, through considering the relative situation of the relevant word-families. It will be argued that Christianisation introduced new conceptual categories that practically re-centred the idea of ‘worship’ away from its pre-Christian basis in technical and communal procedure, together with an ideological binary that defined correct forms of worship against their opposites. It will further be argued that this process occurred in two distinct phases, each characterised by different priorities: the first phase was led by the missionaries, who had to present Christianity as a more effective new cult by the standard of pre-Christian religious norms; the second phase followed the establishing of a native clerical infrastructure, during which time vernacular terminology was more holistically renovated under the influence of the Christian text.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon Worship: A Semantic Study |
| Event: | UCL (University College London) |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2021. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10138133 |
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