Anglo-Saxon England consistently embraces all the main aspects of study of Anglo-Saxon history and culture. Articles in volume 32 include: On argumentation in Old English philology, with particular reference to the editing and dating of Beowulf; The earliest manuscript of Bede's metrical; The sources of the Old English Martyrology; The Old English Benedictine Rule: Writing for women and men; The trick of the runes in The Husband's Message; Illustrations of damnation in late Anglo-Saxon manuscripts; The use of writs in the eleventh century; Bibliography for 2002.

It is red-letter day in Anglo-Saxon studies when a previously unknown Old English text comes to light. In 2002, as the result of some outstanding scholarly detective work, a fragmentary homiliary, containing exegetical homilies for the Sundays after Pentecost, came to light in the Somerset County Records Office in Taunton. The manuscript apparently dates from the middle years of the eleventh century; but questions of when and where and by whom the homiliary was composed can only be answered by close philological study of the Old English text itself. The present volume of Anglo-Saxon England...

Ideas about the whole sweep of Anglo-Saxon history and in particular the importance of combining skills from many disciplines are at the centre of this volume. Walter Goffart invites us to think again about what Bede meant by ???the true law of history???, while Joanna Story argues that the early Frankish annals give us important insight into the raw material available to Bede. J. R. Madicott traces the rapid development of Mercian power in Bede??'s time, and a team of textual scholars and scientists report on their experiments to test the efficacy of Anglo-Saxon medical prescriptions. At the...

Anglo-Saxon England consistently embraces all the main aspects of study of Anglo-Saxon history and culture - linguistic, literary, textual, palaeographic, religious, intellectual, historic, archaeological and artistic. Articles in this volume include The nature of Christianity in Beowulf, Hidden glosses in manuscripts of Old English Poetry, The Maaseik embroideries, From ?palace? to ?town?: Northampton and urban origins, A new charter of King Edgar, From memory to record: musical notations in manuscripts from Exeter, Stylistic disjunctions in The Dream of the Rood and Feasts of the Virgin in...

This is the first book-length study of the poetic style of Aldhelm of Malmesbury, "the first English man of letters." Aldhelm is one of the earliest Anglo-Saxons whose writings survive, and the first to attempt to compose Latin metrical verse. Andy Orchard traces the sources and models for his idiosyncratic style and the nature and extent of his influence on later Anglo-Latin verse. The book will not only interest Anglo-Saxonists, but more broadly those interested in the wider fields of Classics, medieval Latin, oral tradition and poetics.

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...

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...

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...

This third edition of Peter Hunter Blair's classic account of Anglo-Saxon history includes a completely new introduction written by Simon Keynes. The first two chapters survey Anglo-Saxon England: its wars and invasions, people and kings. The remaining chapters cover specific aspects of its culture: Church, government, economy and literary achievement. Blair uses illustrations and a wide range of sources--documents, archaeological evidence and place names--to depict the period realistically. (Keynes has also prepared a thoroughly updated bibliography.) Second Edition Hb (1977): 0-521-21650-8...

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."