S. E. Kelly - Böcker

The charters from the archive of St Augustine's Abbey, many very early indeed, provide crucial evidence about the history of the Anglo-Saxon church in Kent and the development of the documentary in process. A high proportion of the thirty-nine pre-Conquest charters which are edited in this volume, together with fourteen from another early foundation at Minster-in-Thanet, date from the seventh and eighth centuries.The editor's Introduction sets the documents in their historical and diplomatic contexts and analyses the extent and nature of the contamination by later medieval scholars of the abbey. A detailed commentary is also provided on each text and important topics such as lost charter, the sequence of abbots, Kentish Kings and so on are discussed in separate appendices.This is the largest and most important collection to be published in the Anglo-Saxon Charters series.

The latest volume of Anglo-Saxon charters covers the pre-Conquest archive of Shaftesbury Abbey in Dorset, founded by King Alfred and destined to be of great importance in the medieval period. The majority of the thirty surviving documents date form the tenth century, with the last a charter of Cnut from 1019. The present edition addresses the extensive corruption introduced into the surviving texts by repeated earlier copying, particularly in the vernacular boundary clauses.This is a very important collection providing almost the only evidence for the history of Shaftesbury in the Anglo-Saxon period.

Malmesbury Abbey was one of the few English minsters which had a continuous existence from the seventh to the sixteenth century, and the Malmesbury archive is a particularly important witness to the history of Wessex and the West Saxon church in the pre-Viking period. More than half of the surviving charters purport to date from the seventh and eighth centuries, many of them directly associated with Malmesbury's most celebrated abbot, the scholar and poet Aldhelm. This volume is the first scholarly edition of Malmesbury's pre-Conquest charters.The Malmesbury archive poses a particularly difficult editorial challenge, since the manuscripts are generally late and the abbey's scribes were prone to forgery and the 'improvement' of their muniments. Although the abbey had its own celebrated post-Conquest historian in William of Malmesbury, regrettably little detailed information has survived about the early history of the monastery. Nevertheless, analysis of the charters has made it possible to build up a fairly coherent picture of Malmesbury's development in the first four centuries of its existence. This volume provides an important background to William of Malmesbury's De gestis pontificorum Anglorum, and includes significant new material for the study of William's use of historical documents.Charters of Malmesbury Abbey is comprised of editions of thirty-five charters and also a small group of separate boundary surveys, with expert detailed commentaries on their historical and topographical importance. The charters are prefaced by a lengthy introduction which presents a new synthesis of the history of the abbey and an extensive bibliography.

Glastonbury Abbey was the wealthiest and most influential monastery in later Anglo-Saxon England. It was a noted centre of scholarship, and claimed ancient origins which were later extravagantly embellished to link the house with such luminaries as St Patrick, St David and King Arthur. The historiographical evidence for Glastonbury is particularly challenging, because the accounts of the monastery's early history were revised and interpolated over centuries, as the legends grew. There are also complications in the study of its archive: the manuscripts are mostly late and corrupt, and the whole is overshadowed by the contents list of a lost cartulary (the Liber Terrarum), which included many more early charters than now survive. The present volume is the first critical edition of the sixty-one surviving charters from the abbey's pre-Conquest archive, which date from the later seventh century to the reign of Cnut. The texts are edited to a high standard, with comprehensive commentaries that include translation and elucidation of the Old English boundary clauses, and authoritative assessments of authenticity. There is a long introduction with analysis and synthesis of the documentary evidence for Glastonbury's history in the Anglo-Saxon period and for the accumulation of its endowment, including a section on William of Malmesbury's works on Glastonbury. The volume concludes with a series of appendixes which present all the evidence for the lost charters in the Liber Terrarum and in other sources.