Historical imagination in/and literary consciousness: The afterlife of the Anglo-Saxons in Middle English literature
The long-held belief that the Norman Conquest represented a cultural apocalypse has been challenged by scholars who have emphasized continuity and gradual change as opposed to the agonistic model that formerly placed a crisp border between the AngloSaxon period and the arrival of the Normans.
The Virtuous Pagan in Middle English Literature
From the first through the fourteenth centuries, a succession of solutions to the problem of these virtuous pagans evolved. For the Early Church, an attractive solution was that Christ descended into Hell to convert the souls he found there.