The principal emphasis of this book is the relationship between England and its neighbours in the pre-Conquest period. It brings together fresh information of England's place in the early medieval world, with essays concentrating on finance and trade, travel, learning and education. A detailed analysis of the Old English vocabulary for money and wealth shows different usage over two centuries reflects a developing awareness, particularly on the part of AElfric, of the relationship between wealth and power. Medical recipes in Bald's Leechbook, which stipulate the use of exotic spices from...

Place-names, charters, coins and manuscripts are among the forms of evidence studied in this second volume. The topics range from the course of English settlement in the south-east to the power and influence of a leading aristocratic family in the tenth century and the possible presence of Jews in England in the eleventh. An important liturgical manuscript, the Bosworth Psalter, is more securely localized; the exemplars of the Vercelli Book and its probable area of origin are clarified. Several motifs in Old English literature are elucidated, and the influence of Christian doctrine on the...

This book illustrates some of the exciting paths of enquiry being explored in many different fields of Anglo-Saxon studies - archaeology, legal history, palaeography, Old English syntax and poetic, Latin learning with its many reflexes in Old English prose literature, and others. In all these fields it is clear that fresh perspectives may be achieved by examining even well-known objects and texts in the light of modern approaches and scholarship. Several studies concentrate on aspects of early Anglo-Saxon civilization: the settlement at Mucking, Essex; the iconography of the famous gold coin...

Evidence presented in this book reveals unsuspected aspects of the influence of Aldhelm's Latin poetry in early medieval Spain.

That Alcuin addressed to the monks of Lindisfarne the question, ???What has Ingeld to do with Christ????, is a much repeated dogma in Old English studies; but in this book close examination of the letter in question shows that it was addressed not to Lindisfarne nor to a monastic community, but to a bishop in Mercia. That ???Ult??n the scribe??? was responsible for some of the most lavishly illuminated Anglo-Saxon manuscripts is shown to be another untenable dogma. Fresh perspectives from interdisciplinary study: the ???beasts-of-battle??? typescenes which are characteristic of Old English...

One of the most important primary sources for our knowledge of Anglo-Saxon England is the charters and manuscripts which survive from the period before 1066. In the present book, two complementary essays treat the charters of mid tenth-century English kings, bringing previously unknown documents to light, establishing the circumstances in which they were produced, and demonstrating that changes in practice in the royal chancery had far-reaching effect on all aspects of Anglo-Saxon script and book production. The question of the medieval representation of women is illuminated by a study of the...

Our knowledge of Anglo-Saxon England depends wholly on the precise and detailed study of the texts that have come down to us from pre-Conquest times. The present book contains pioneering studies of some of these sources which have been neglected or misunderstood. A comprehensive study of a group of lavish gospelbooks written under the patronage of a late Anglo-Saxon countess, Judith of Flanders (sometime wife of the Earl Tostig who was killed at Stamford Bridge in 1066) shows the importance of these artefacts and provides fresh understanding of the transmission of the gospels in late...

Material evidence brought to light in this book includes a niello disc from Limpsfield Grange (Surrey) and two fragments of a composite Old English homily discovered in Westminster Abbey. Many previously accepted scholarly positions are reassessed and challenged. A comprehensive assessment of the palaeography of the Exeter Book situates it in the context of late tenth-century book production, and shows that there are no grounds for thinking that the manuscript originated in Exeter itself and that its origin must as yet remain unknown. As always, the interpretation of Old English poetry...

In the present volume, the two essays that frame the book provide exciting insight into the mental world of the Anglo-Saxons by showing on the one hand how they understood the processes of reading and assimilating knowledge and, on the other, how they conceived of time and the passage of the seasons. In the field of art history, two essays treat two of the best-known Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. The lavish symbol pages in the ???Book of Durrow??? are shown to reflect a programmatic exposition of the meaning of Easter, and a posthumous essay by a distinguished art historian shows how the...

The discovery in Sonderhausen of a fragmentary psalter glossed in Latin and Old English allows fresh inferences to be drawn regarding the study of the psalter in Anglo-Saxon England, and of the transmission of the corpus of vernacular psalter glosses. A detailed textual and palaeographical study of the Wearmouth-Jarrow bibles leads to the exciting possibility that the hand of Bede can be identified, annotating the text of the Bible which he no doubt played an instrumental role in establishing. Two Latin texts from the circle of Archbishop Wulfstan are published here in full, whilst...