Is Anglo-Saxon becoming a banned phrase? Cambridge journal is accused of pandering to 'mad Americans' after ditching the term from its title

“Anglo-Saxon” does in fact seem to be a bit of a misnomer.  Although not mentioned by the Venerable Bede, it would seem that Frisians were the major group in the invasion of post-Roman Britannia, with the Saxon presence not much more than a token  one.  The closest languages to modern English are Friesian ones.  I cover all that in more detail below:

https://dissectleft.blogspot.com/2019/02/are-we-anglo-saxons-really-anglo.html

Cambridge has been accused of pandering to ‘mad Americans’ after its university press ditched the term from the title of a world-leading journal.

Anglo-Saxon England, which has been running since the 1970s, was renamed Early Medieval England and its Neighbours by Cambridge University Press during a relaunch earlier this week.

The university said the title change represented the ‘international, interdisciplinary and rapidly evolving nature of research in this field’.

But author and historian Dominic Sandbrook criticised it, saying it was made because the publisher ‘didn’t have the courage to say no to a handful of mad Americans’.

The term Ango-Saxon is often thought to have a different meaning in the United States as it has been used by white-supremacists to describe white people of British origin.

And in 2019 the International Society of Anglo-Saxonist voted to change its name to the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England due to the ‘problematic connotations’ associated with the term.  

David Abulafia, Professor Emeritus of Mediterranean History at Cambridge University today joined criticism of the change.

He told the Telegraph: ‘The journal should glory in its distinguished reputation rather than trying to reinvent itself under a bland new name dictated by a passing fashion for dropping the term Anglo-Saxon.’  

Wanjiru Njoya, a former lecturer at Oxford and Exeter, has also criticised it on social media.

She posted ‘now Cambridge has changed the name of their journal from ‘Anglo-Saxon’ to ‘Early Medieval’ while sharing a news story on how the term was being changed to make teaching at Cambridge anti-racist.

Early Medieval England and its Neighbours is a world-leading journal that includes a variety of works by academics in Cambridge’s Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic.

The department previously tried to ‘dismantle the basis of myths of nationalism’ by teaching students that Anglo-Saxons were not a distinct ethnic group.

The term has typically reffered to a cultural group of people who emerged in the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Norman Conquest.

A spokesperson for Cambridge University Press said: ‘The journal will continue to welcome and use the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ as it publishes a broad range of high-quality scholarly research on England, its closest geographic and intellectual neighbours, and their wider cultural contacts from the 5th to the 11th century.

‘The new title reflects the breadth of that scholarly work, and is one part of a broader relaunch of the journal, which is now Open Access, will have more regular publications, and take on an expanded scope, with the aim to solidify the journal’s position as the foremost in this rich field.’

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13401749/Anglo-Saxon-Cambridge-pandering-Americans.html

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