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The extensive English wetlands known as the Fens—including but not limited to the islands of Ely, Crowland, March, Wisbech, Spalding, and Whittlesey—complicate definitions of island, mainland, and sea. Unsuited for conventional farming and difficult to govern, with easy access to the ocean, the Fens often stood as a region apart. Fenland was a haunt of outlaws, a base for rebels, and an incubator of both political and ecclesiastical counter-cultures. The Neolithic causewayed enclosures of the Welland Valley, the Bronze Age wooden platform at Flag Fen, and the great monastic houses and churches that dot the islands and Fen-edge provided actual and conceptual spaces for contestation, where identities and categories were both problematic but negotiable in the margins between wetland and dryland. Stories told within and without the Fens about saints (Guthlac and Pega) and outlaws (from Hereward the Wake to the eighteenth-century Fenland Tigers) mark the Fens as a place useful to think with and in.

“Mucking Up”
Lowell Duckert, West Virginia University

“Animal Husbandry at the Fenland Edge: Zooarchaeology from Middle Saxon Brandon”
Pam Crabtree, New York University

“Life on the Edge of the Fen: Using Excavation Evidence from Anglo-Saxon Oakington to People the Past”
Duncan Sayer, University of Lancashire

The Fenland Symposium features presentations by experts in both literature and archaeology who will speak on the importance of the Fens as both a place and as an idea in English society from ancient times to the present. The discussion will be moderated by Jeremy DeAngelo and Thomas Leppard, postdoctoral fellows at the Center for Cultural Analysis. Reception to follow.