In the course of this book Professor Cross presents the discovery of the actual manuscript source for the Old English versions of two biblical apocrypha, namely The Gospel of Nichodemus and The Avenging of the Saviour. In collaboration with four other scholars, Professor Cross explores the implications of this discovery, at present unique in the field of Anglo-Saxon studies. Here for the first time parallel editions of the relevant Latin and Old English texts are given, together with modern English translations.

Focusing on England, this volume investigates written communication in the two centuries before and after the introduction of printing. It explores the boundaries between script and print and considers the relationship of these media with the culture of speech. Contributors consider the applications of script and print by a variety of individuals, groups and communities in the spheres of religion, law, scholarship and politics. They also reassess long-standing assumptions about the impact of printing and the historical divisions it had come to represent.

A fine research tool which has so many applications. SPECULUM

Following her vital cataloguing of the surviving 200+ manuscripts of the Historia Regum Britanniein Volume III, Julia Crick has been able in Volume IV to present the information which the manuscripts contain both about the textual development of Geoffrey's History and about its circulation and audience. Crick begins by exploring the evidence for grouping the manuscripts. External evidence such as associated texts found frequently with the Historiais compared with the internal evidence of textual disruption, the notorious dedications, rubrication and trial passages collated from each...

Biography is one of the oldest, most popular and most tenacious of literary forms. Perhaps the best attested narrative form of the Middle Ages, it continues to draw modern historians of the medieval period to its peculiar challenge to explicate the general through the particular: the biographer's decisions to impose or to resist the imposition of order on biographical remnants raise issues which go to the heart of historical method. This collection, compiled in honour of a distinguished modern exponent of the art of biography, contains sixteen essays by leading scholars which examine the...