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 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,...

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.

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

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...