History of Old English Literature

The AuthorsR. D. Fulk is Class of 1964 Chancellor’s Professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of, among others, The Beowulf Manuscript (2010) and An Introduction to Middle English (2012), and co-author or editor of Eight Old English Poems (2001), A Grammar of Old English, Volume 2: Morphology (2011), Klaeber’s Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg (4th edition, 2008), and The Old English Canons of Theodore (2012). Christopher M. Cain is an associate professor of English at Towson University in Towson, Maryland. He has published on Old English and Anglo-Latin in Studies in Philology, JEGP, The Review of English Studies, and Philological Quarterly, among others. He is the co-editor (with Geoffrey Russom) of Studies in the History of the English Language III—Managing Chaos: Strategies for Identifying Change in English (2007), and is a contributor to The Year’s Work in Old English Studies. Rachel S. Anderson is Associate Professor of English at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

"A new generation of students and their professors will undoubtedly apprecite the currency of what has proven to be a widely respected, comprehensive historical treatment of Old English literature." (Choice, 1 December 2013)

• List of IIIustrations viPreface to the First Edition (2003) viiPreface to the Second Edition ixAbbreviations xIntroductionAnglo-Saxon England and Its Literature: A Social History 11 The Chronology and Varieties of Old English Literature 422 Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts 583 Literature of the Alfredian Period 834 Homilies 1125 Saints’ Legends (Rachel S. Anderson) 1336 Biblical Literature 1577 Liturgical and Devotional Texts 1778 Legal Texts 2119 Scientific and Scholastic Texts 22710 Wisdom Literature and Lyric Poetry 24111 Germanic Legend and Heroic Lay 27812 Additions, Annotations, and Marginalia 329Conclusion Making Old English New: Anglo-Saxonism and the Cultural Work of Old English Literature 354Works Cited 367Index 481