This is the first book to make a comprehensive study of Old English medical texts. Professor Cameron compares Anglo-Saxon medical practice with that of the Greeks and Romans from whom the Anglo-Saxons borrowed freely. He analyses the position of physicians in society, the conditions under which their patients lived and the effectiveness of their remedies. He examines the ingredients of Anglo-Saxon prescriptions, their therapeutic efficacy and availability. The role of magic in medicine is dealt with in depth, but found to have played less part in medical practice than has sometimes been...

Irish monks and missionaries played a crucial role in the conversion of the pagan Anglo-Saxons and in the formation of Christian culture in England, but the nature and extent of Irish influence on Old English poetry has remained largely undefined. Charles Wright identifies the characteristic features of Irish Christian literature which influenced Anglo-Saxon vernacular authors. Professor Wright traces the Irish background of the distinctive contents of Vercelli Homily IX and its remarkable exemplum, 'The Devil's Account of the Next World', and traces the dissemination of related stylistic and...

The Swedish invasion of 1655, known to Poles ever since as the 'Swedish deluge', provoked the political and military collapse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the second-largest state in Europe. Robert Frost examines the reasons for Poland's fall and the conduct of the war by the Polish government, and addresses the crucial question of why, despite widespread recognition of the shortcomings of the political system, subsequent attempts at reform failed. War has long been seen as crucial to the development of more effective systems of government in Europe during the seventeenth century,...

This book presents the two Old English versions of the colourful legend of the virgin martyr, St Margaret of Antioch, who became one of the most widely celebrated of medieval saints and the patron saint of childbirth. The two extant vernacular lives are published together, edited with a facing translation and commentary and introduced by extensive coverage of background sources, the state of the manuscripts, their language and the growth of the cult of St Margaret in Anglo-Saxon England. In addition there are printed fragments of a third version of the life and a Latin text from an...

The early medieval Vulgate Bible had no fixed textual form--multiple copying resulted in a multitude of forms. This book is the first to describe the transmission of the Vulgate Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon England. Following an introduction that explains the wider continental history in which the dissemination of the scriptures occurred, Richard Marsden analyzes nineteen surviving Latin manuscripts and further translations of scripture into Old English. His book illuminates important areas of monastic and intellectual life, and establishes textual history as a dimension of wider Anglo-Saxon...

The modern reader knows Old English poetry as a discrete number of poems, set up and printed in units punctuated as modern sentences, and with titles inserted by modern editors. Carol Braun Pasternack constructs a reading of the poetry that takes into account the format of the verse as it exists in the manuscripts. In a detailed analysis, which takes up issues current in poststructuralist theory, she argues that the idea of "verse sequences" should replace the "poem" and "implied tradition" should replace the idea of "the author."

This is the first extended study of the Old Testament poems of the Junius collection as a group. The circumstances surrounding their composition and transmission are mysterious: none is ascribed to a named author and none situated even relatively within the development of Anglo-Saxon Christian poetry. This book seeks to breach this critical impasse by allowing the Biblical content of the Junius poems to tell its own story. Paul G. Remley compares them with genuine early medieval texts that are most likely to have circulated in Anglo-Saxon centers and offers engaging exercises in hermeneutic...

Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury (668SH90), shaped the English Church into a structure it has retained for a millennium. Yet until recently he has remained a shadowy figure, whose early career in the Near East and at Rome has been unknown. In this book, which builds on the 1994 publication of previously unprinted Biblical commentaries from Theodore's Canterbury school, internationally distinguished scholars provide a fresh account of the career and writings of a unique personality who brought to Anglo-Saxon England the cultural heritage of Syria, Byzantium and Rome.

The cult of the Virgin Mary is associated by most medievalists with the twelfth and succeeding centuries. This book, however, provides a wide-ranging exploration of the cult in England from c. 700 to the Conquest. Interest in and devotion to Mary flourished in the late seventh and eighth centuries and, especially, in the period of the Benedictine reform from the mid-tenth century onwards. In this latter period Mary, as patron saint of almost all of the reformed houses, was the most important saint of the monastic movement. Dr Clayton describes and illustrates the development of Marian...

Richard North offers a complete revision of our view of Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian paganism and mythology in the pre-Viking and Viking age. He discusses the pre-Christian gods of Bede's history of the Anglo-Saxon conversion with reference to a god known as Ingui. Using expert knowledge of comparative literary material from Old Norse-Icelandic and other Old Germanic languages, North reconstructs the slender Old English evidence in an imaginative and original treatment of poems such as "Deor" and "The Dream of the Rood."