Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury (668SH90), shaped the English Church into a structure it has retained for a millennium. Yet until recently he has remained a shadowy figure, whose early career in the Near East and at Rome has been unknown. In this book, which builds on the 1994 publication of previously unprinted Biblical commentaries from Theodore's Canterbury school, internationally distinguished scholars provide a fresh account of the career and writings of a unique personality who brought to Anglo-Saxon England the cultural heritage of Syria, Byzantium and Rome.

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...

Four very different kinds of Anglo-Saxon thinking are clarified in this volume: traditions, learned and oral, about the settlement of the country, study of foreign-language grammar, interest in exotic jewels as reflections of the glory of God, and a mainly rational attitude to medicine. Publication of no less than three discoveries augments our corpus of manuscript evidence. The nature of Old English poetry is illuminated, and a useful summary of the editorial treatment of textual problems in Beowulf is provided. A re-examination of the accounts of the settlement in Bede??'s Historia...

Among the diverse topics covered in this volume is a pioneer account of a unique group of Anglo-Saxon embroideries preserved on the continent and the publication of a previously unknown charter. Themes illuminated are as varied as the status of women, early urban history, the nature of medical collections, the standing of Marian feasts and the function of musical notation. The study of Old English poetry is advanced textually, codicologically, culturally, linguistically and critically. Innovation and established practice go hand-in-hand: a record of the first conference of the International...

Was Old English metre really based on stress and rhythm? Do we really know that a particular glossed manuscript of a Latin curriculum author was used in an Anglo-Saxon classroom and, if so, how? How were disputes about bookland dealt with? What happened to the last male representative of the West Saxon royal line after the Norman Conquest? And what are the implications of the Taylors??? great work on Anglo-Saxon architecture for related studies? These are among the challenging questions taken up in this book. The publication of findings concerning a striking sculptured stone unearthed at...

Areas of study pursued in this book include a revealing grammatical document from eighth-century Northumbria; renewed excavations at Sutton Hoo are reported; the existence of an unnoticed late Old English prose version of parts of Gregory's Dialogues is pointed out. Fresh thinking is directed to topics as interesting and diverse as a design on the Sutton Hoo purse lid; the origin of a little-considered English decorated manuscript containing lives of saints now in Paris; the enigmatic poem Wulf and Eadwacer; word order as an element on Old English poetic style; surviving traces of the...

This volume offers fundamental evidence and discussion illuminating a wide range of important subjects: possible influence of Cicero on Bede??'s attitude to rhetoric; the probability that Theodore and Hadrian brought a glossary from Italy to England; the traditional concept of the narrator in Old English poetry; the nationality of the author of the Old English poem Genesis B; the conceptions of history controlling the Old English Orosius; the establishment of Square minuscule as the standard English script of the tenth century; criteria for distinguishing between Anglo-Saxon script written in...

This volume explores many fundamental questions regarding Anglo-Saxon history. Among those considered is the question of did the earliest English prose really divide into a Mercian tradition and a separate West Saxon one? What is the full roll-call of extant texts containing late Old English ???Winchester??? words? How far was Anglo-Saxon medicine hocus-pocus and how far the fruit of deliberate experimentation? How much Greek vocabulary was known in Anglo-Saxon England, and how was it known and how used? How did Anglo-Saxon land law work in practice? Advances in scholarship, application of...

This volume makes important contributions to our stock of primary manuscript evidence: it recovers parts of six previously unrecorded charters and analyses two sets of fragments, each unique in its own way two leaves of Old Testament text written in Mercia or Canterbury early in the ninth century and six leaves of a missal written at Worcester in the mid-eleventh century. Significant issues in both ecclesiastical and secular history are tackled too the location of Lindsey, the fate of Rutland during the Scandinavian invasions and settlements, and the state of our knowledge of the archaeology...

The principal emphasis of this book is the relationship between England and its neighbours in the pre-Conquest period. It brings together fresh information of England's place in the early medieval world, with essays concentrating on finance and trade, travel, learning and education. A detailed analysis of the Old English vocabulary for money and wealth shows different usage over two centuries reflects a developing awareness, particularly on the part of AElfric, of the relationship between wealth and power. Medical recipes in Bald's Leechbook, which stipulate the use of exotic spices from...