This book translates and comments on a selection of Old English poems that modern scholars identify as "wisdom" texts. These comprise collections of maxims, philosophical and cosmological speculation, and historical meditation. Composed by monastic authors from the ninth to the eleventh centuries, they mingle orthodox Christian beliefs with pre-Christian sensibilities embedded in the linguistic texture of Anglo-Saxon verse itself. Their preoccupation with how the human psyche responds to the challenges of incarnate life in space and time lends them a wide-ranging interest for students of...