The contents of this first volume typify the range of interests that will be covered throughout the series. The topics treated include the first two centuries of Christianity in East Anglia; geographical knowledge in King Alfred's court; the part played by Bishop AEthelwold's school at Winchester in the period of tenth-century monastic reform in standardizing the vernacular and in studying and composing Latin poetry; allegory in Old English literature; the place of origin of the Book of Kells; the source of a fourteenth-century Icelandic saga writer's picture of Edward the Confessor; the...

Among topics covered in this volume, two important authorship questions are settled; the discovery of a major Northumbrian settlement is reported; the conceptions of Old English literature which have prevailed during the last three hundred years are paraded for critical inspection and substantial contributions are made to our knowledge of subjects as diverse as a monastic library of the first rank, eighth-century Latin poetic activity, metrical technique and literary convention in our greatest surviving vernacular poem; the family basis of political power in the tenth century; late...

Place-names, charters, coins and manuscripts are among the forms of evidence studied in this second volume. The topics range from the course of English settlement in the south-east to the power and influence of a leading aristocratic family in the tenth century and the possible presence of Jews in England in the eleventh. An important liturgical manuscript, the Bosworth Psalter, is more securely localized; the exemplars of the Vercelli Book and its probable area of origin are clarified. Several motifs in Old English literature are elucidated, and the influence of Christian doctrine on the...

The materials studied in this volume extend from small pieces of evidence made to reveal Frankish influence on the beginnings of Bath Abbey to a post-Conquest gradual recognized as unique testimony to the pre-Conquest music of Christ Church, Canterbury. An arcane style of Latin poetry much in vogue in tenth-century England is given a full account; likewise an eleventh-century Canterbury copy of a large anthology of Latin poetry for classroom use is properly described. A discussion of the aesthetic principles governing the use of colour in Anglo-Saxon manuscript illumination raises artistic...

Manuscripts are the form of evidence most studied in this volume: the likely seventh- and eighth-century English ownership of a fifth-century copy of a Hieronymian commentary is meticulously reconstructed; an edition and full discussion of the eighth-century Anglian collection of royal genealogies and regnal lists advance our understanding of this difficult material; and it is shown that most of the drawings in the Junius codex of Old English poetry probably derived from an illustrated copy of an Old Saxon poem on Genesis which came to this country in the middle of the ninth century....

What scientific observations is Bede likely to have brought to bear on the Easter controversy? What interest did the Anglo-Saxons take in precious stones and what did they know about them? Are heroic values rejected in one of Cynewulf's poems? What was Anglo-Saxon carpentry like? These are among the questions taken up in this volume. Observations to determine the day of the equinox in Bede's Northumbria; Anglo-Saxon lapidary knowledge (particularly in the Old English Lapidary); lists of saints' resting-places as an aspect of the cult of saints in the intellectual and social life of...

Through close analysis and careful weighing of evidence the authors of this volume tackle a wide range of questions in Anglo-Saxon history and culture and often arrive at opinions different from those generally accepted. Contributions are made on subjects as diverse as the Anglo-Saxon settlement, early Northumbrian history, the 'weapon' vocabulary of Beowulf, world history in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a woman's stock of clothes in the mid-tenth century and vernacular preaching before AElfric. Historical studies are represented by an examination of the position of the aetheling in matters of...