The early medieval Vulgate Bible had no fixed textual form - multiple copying resulted in a multitude of forms. Examination of the complex patterns of variation may illuminate important aspects of monastic, ecclesiastical and intellectual history. This book is the first to tackle questions about the transmission of the Vulgate Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon England. Following an introduction which explains the wider continental context in which the dissemination of the Latin scriptures occurred, Richard Marsden goes on to analyse twenty surviving Anglo-Saxon manuscripts including the Codex...

This book explores ideas of community and of the relationship of individuals to communities widely evident in Old English poetry. It pays particular attention to the context in which major poetic manuscripts of the late Anglo-Saxon period were received, a time when concerns about community appear to have been of special urgency. The book identifies key features of the audience or readership of Old English poetry in this period, and relates the interests of these groups of people to themes reflected in the poetic texts.

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...

This study theorizes how Old English poetry functioned for readers of tenth-century manuscripts. Coupling the rigour of formalist analysis with the innovations of post-structuralist concepts, Professor Pasternack maps the codes and conventions that guided readers in their construction of poems. She defines the verse as 'inscribed', situated between oral and written discourse. Altering our vision of individual poems, which to date has been based on modern printed editions, she coins the terms 'movement' and 'verse sequence' to reconceptualize the poetry according to its presentation in...

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 has been ascribed to a named author and none attributed reliably to the period of the development of Anglo-Saxon Christian poetry, from the seventh to tenth centuries. Old English Biblical Verse 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, of the books of Genesis, Exodus and Daniel,...

This volume includes the first edition of a previously unknown text that throws new light on the intellectual history of early medieval Europe. The Biblical commentaries represent the teaching of two gifted Greek scholars who came to England from the Byzantine East: Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury and his colleague Hadrian. They taught the Bible to a group of Anglo-Saxon scholars, who recorded their teaching. The resulting commentaries constitute the high point of Biblical scholarship between late antiquity and the Renaissance. The edition is introduced by substantial chapters on the...

A substantial study of the Latin poetry of Aldhelm, 'the first English man of letters'.

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.

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...

Radical reinterpretation of Old English poetry and its relation to Anglo-Saxon thought and society.