Anglo-Saxon saints' lives, history and national identity

In many works dealing with national identity and national consciousness it
has become commonplace to restrict discussion of these to the post-medieval
period. Indeed, following Benedict Anderson's influential Imagined Communities,
the very possibility of the nation is often predicated on the decline of the
Middle Ages (Anderson, 1991). This approach has been challenged and criticised
by many medievalists, who note that it is testimony to wider perceptions
of the homogeneous otherness of the medieval past Johnson, 1995; Davis,
1998). To quote Carolyn Dinshaw: 'In some very influential theoretical and critical work developing out of postmodernism, the Middle Ages is still made
the dense, unvarying, and eminently obvious monolith against which modernity
and post modernity groovily emerge' (1999, p. 15)...