One of the most exciting developments in recent literary studies bases interpretation on a new understanding of bodily aspects of text. The method employed here views the body as a text to be read. Though the approaches of these essays are widely varied, three concerns figure and refigure themselves throughout the book: the gendered body and the copied book as locus of pain, pleasure, and desire. They will be of immense interest to medievalists and other scholars of language, philosophy, history, art history, and gender studies.

Reading Old English Texts focuses on the critical methods currently being used and developed for reading and analyzing writings in Old English. It is the first collection of its kind in the field and is a timely book, given the explosion of interest in the theory, method and practice of critical reading in recent years. Each chapter engages with current work on Old English texts from a particular methodological stance. The authors are all expert, but are also concerned with explaining their method and its application to a broad undergraduate and graduate readership.

This volume presents a semi-diplomatic edition of the text of MS C (London, British Library Cotton, Tiberius B.i). Usually referred to as the Abingdon Chronicle', it was substantially copied in the mid-eleventh century and continued to be so sporadically thereafter; the supplement to its abrupt ending by a twelfth-century reader suggests that it was still of interest in the period after the Conquest. The C-text is an important source of information for the reign of Edward the Confessor, and it brings a unique political perspective to the ascendency of Godwine and his sons.The traditional...