Domesday Now: New Approaches to the Inquest and the Book - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783273003 ISBN 13: 9781783273003

Publisher: Boydell Press, 2018

Synopsis

Compiled from the records of a survey of the kingdom of England commissioned by William the Conqueror in 1085, Domesday Book is a key source for the history of England. However, there has never been a critical edition of the text and so, despite over 200 years of intense academic study, its evidence has rarely been exploited to the full. The essays in this volume seek to realize the potential of Domesday Book by focussing on the manuscript itself. There are analyses of abbreviations, letter forms, and language; re-assessments of key sources, the role of tenants-in-chief in producing them, and the nature of the Norman settlement that their forms illuminate; a re-evaluation of the data and its referents; and finally, fresh examinations of the afterlife of the Domesday text and how it was subsequently perceived.
In identifying new categories of evidence and revisiting old ones, these studies point to a better understanding of the text. There are surprising insights into its sources and developing programme and, intriguingly, a system of encoding hitherto unsuspected. In its turn the import of its data becomes clearer, thereby shedding new light on Anglo-Norman society and governance. It is in these terms that this volume offers a departure in Domesday studies and looks forward to the resolution of long-standing problems that have hitherto bedevilled the interpretation of an iconic text.

DAVID ROFFE and K.S.B. KEATS-ROHAN are leading Domesday scholars who have published widely on Domesday Book and related matters.

About this title

About the Author

Dr K S B Keats-Rohan is Director of the Linacre Unit for Prosopographical Research and Fellow of the European Humanities Research Centre, University of Oxford.

Review

Despite the unabated interest in, and studies of, the Domesday inquest and the documents that resulted from it, there remains a lack of scholarly agreement on the purpose for either the inquest or the texts. The contributors to i>Domesday Now have come to the consensus that the way forward is through a new critical edition of Domesday. Their essays in this volume present new categories of evidence that lay the scholarly foundation for that new edition. . . . Indeed, the variety of essays in Domesday Now demonstrates the potential for work with the aid of such an edition, and points to riches yet to be discovered. COMITATUS

About this edition

• Publisher: Boydell Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1783273003
• ISBN 13: 9781783273003
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 352
• Editor: Roffe David, Keats-Rohan K S B