This book provides an edition, with a facing translation and detailed commentary, of the three apocryphal gospels of Mary written in Old English. The gospels, which deal with Mary's birth, childhood, death and assumption, are found in manuscripts in Oxford and Cambridge, but have never been treated as a group before, and have been almost totally neglected by English scholars. An extensive introduction covers the origins and development of the apocrypha and their influence in Anglo-Saxon England.

This book discusses the attitudes toward Anglo-Saxons expressed by English poets, playwrights and novelists from the thirteenth century to the present day. The essays are arranged chronologically, tracing literary responses to the Anglo-Saxons in the medieval period, the Renaissance, and also the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The contributors, who are specialists in their respective fields from Britain and the United States, draw on works that have frequently been ignored or overlooked. They address topical issues such as nationalism, cultural identity, myth, gender and...

This book is concerned with the pictorial language of gesture revealed in Anglo-Saxon art, and its debt to classical Rome. The late Reginald Dodwell, an eminent art historian, notes a striking similarity of both form and meaning between Anglo-Saxon gestures and those in illustrated manuscripts of the plays of Terence, which, he argues, reflect actual Roman stage conventions. The extensively illustrated volume illuminates our understanding of the vigor of late Anglo-Saxon art and its ability to absorb and transpose continental influence.

Describes the early conversion to Christianity of the pagan peoples of an area stretching from Stratford-upon-Avon to Offa's Dyke.

This is a major work by Ian Maclean exploring the foundations of learning in the Renaissance. Logic, Signs and Nature offers a profoundly learned, compelling and original account of the range of what was thinkable and knowable by learned medics of the period c.1530-1630. This is a study of great significance to the history of medicine, as well as the history of European ideas in general.

Katherine Scarfe Beckett is concerned with representations of the Islamic world in Anglo-Saxon England. Using a variety of literary, historical and archaeological evidence, Beckett argues that the first perceptions of Arabs, Ismaelites and Saracens were derived from Christian exegesis. These perceptions preconditioned Western expressions of hostility and superiority towards peoples of the Islamic world, and these received ideas prevailed over actual experience.

The literature of Anglo-Saxon England is unique among contemporary European literatures in that it features a vast amount of saints' lives in the vernacular. This study analyzes the most important author Aelfric's lives of five important saints in the light of their cults in Anglo-Saxon England, providing the reader fascinating glimpses of 'Aelfric at work'. He adapts the cults and rewrites the received Latin hagiography so that each of their lives conveys a distinct message to the contemporary political elite as well as to a lay audience at large.

In this book, Scarfe Beckett is concerned with representations of the Islamic world prevalent in Anglo-Saxon England.

This book explores the foundations of the intellectual renaissance in late-tenth-century England, including both the English Benedictine reform and the establishment by AEthelwold, Bishop of Winchester, of his influential school. The early stages of AEthelwold's scholarly career are explored and new light is shed on the role which King AEthelstan's cosmopolitan court played. Two widely influential Old English texts are definitively attributed to AEthelwold and his circle, which attest to the importance that the reformers attached to the vernacular.

This innovative collection of essays aims to redefine the limits of Old English scholarship by studying some of the latest reworkings of texts composed earlier in the Anglo-Saxon period and their implications for the development of literary production across time. The essays in the volume constitute new work on a wide range of texts, including homilies, saints' lives, psalters and biblical material; some focus on individual manuscripts incorporating paleographic and orthographic studies; others use modern critical theory to examine later Old English texts; and all highlight the need to...