The annals of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle are fundamental to the study of the language, literature, and culture of the Anglo-Saxon period. Ranging from the ninth to the twelfth century, its five primary manuscripts offer a virtually contemporary history of Anglo-Saxon England, contribute to the body of Old English prose and poetic texts, and enable scholars to document how the Old English language changed.

In Families of the King, Alice Sheppard explicitly addresses the larger interpretive question of how the manuscripts function as history. She shows that what has been...

Isidore of Seville (circa 570-636) was the author of the Etymologiae, . the most celebrated and widely circulated encyclopaedia of the western Middle Ages. In addition, Isidore's Synonyma were very successful and became one of the classics of medieval spirituality. Indeed, it was the Synonyma that were to define the so-called 'Isidorian style, ' a rhymed, rhythmic prose that proved influential throughout the Middle Ages.

Finding the Right Words is the first book-length study to deal with the transmission and reception of works by Isidore of Seville...

While there is little evidence of formal rhetorical instruction in Anglo-Saxon England, traditional Old English poetry clearly shows the influence of Latin rhetoric. Verse and Virtuosity demonstrates how Old English poets imitated and adapted the methods of Latin literature, and, in particular, the works of the Christian Latin authors they had studied at school. It is the first full-length study to look specifically at what Old English poets working in a Latinate milieu attempted to do with the schemes and figures they found in their sources.

Janie Steen argues that, far...

The question of whether or not our decisions and efforts make a difference in an uncertain and uncontrollable world had enormous significance for writers in Anglo-Saxon England. Striving with Grace looks at seven authors who wrote either in Latin or Old English, and the ways in which they sought to resolve this fundamental question. For Anglo-Saxon England, as for so much of the medieval West, the problem of individual will was complicated by a widespread theistic tradition that influenced writers, thinkers, and their hypotheses.

Aaron J Kleist examines the many factors that...

Thomas A. Bredehoft's Early English Metre is a reassessment of the metrical rules for English poetry from Beowulf to Layamon. Bredehoft offers a new account of many of the most puzzling features of Old English poetry - anacrusis, alliteration patterns, rhyme, and hypermetric verses - and further offers a clear account of late Old English verse as it descended from the classical verse as observed in Beowulf. He makes the surprising and controversial discovery that ?lfric's alliterative works are formally indistinguishable from late verse.

Discussing the early Middle...