Anglo-Saxon England – serie

Several unusual fields of study are extensively explored in this volume: a distinctive politico-religious cult, penitentials, inscriptions, the Sutton Hoo whetstone and medical knowledge; while treatments of more 'standard' subjects like late Anglo-Saxon law, King Alfred's Boethius and Beowulf, lead to unusual conclusions. A phenomenon special to Anglo-Saxon England is given a full and separate treatment in a careful and imaginative analysis of the ecclesiastical and political significance of the cults of murdered royal saints. Elizabeth Okasha's Hand-List which has been indispensable to any work on Anglo-Saxon non-runic inscriptions for some time has been refreshed by the description and illustration of twenty-six additional items and by other addenda and corrigenda. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year's publications in all branches of Anglo-Saxon studies rounds off the book.

Four very different kinds of Anglo-Saxon thinking are clarified in this volume: traditions, learned and oral, about the settlement of the country, study of foreign-language grammar, interest in exotic jewels as reflections of the glory of God, and a mainly rational attitude to medicine. Publication of no less than three discoveries augments our corpus of manuscript evidence. The nature of Old English poetry is illuminated, and a useful summary of the editorial treatment of textual problems in Beowulf is provided. A re-examination of the accounts of the settlement in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle yields insights into the processes of Anglo-Saxon learned historiography and oral tradition. A thorough-going analysis of an under-studied major work, Bald's Leechbook, demonstrates that the compiler, perhaps in King Alfred's reign, translated selections from a wide range of Latin texts in composing a well-organized treatise directed against the diseases prevalent in his time. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year's publications in all branches of Anglo-Saxon studies rounds off the book.

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 'thelwold'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 principles of the modern study of pre-Conquest architecture; and the contemporary state of our knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon house. There is also a bibliography which lists all books, articles and reviews published in the field during 1971, and which is continued annually in the series.

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 Anglo-Saxon legal concepts; and scientific exposition in the early eleventh century. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year's publications in all branches of Anglo-Saxon studies rounds off the book (with a separate section onomastic section). There is also an index to volumes 6 - 10, complementing the index found in volume 5.

Among the diverse topics covered in this volume is a pioneer account of a unique group of Anglo-Saxon embroideries preserved on the continent and the publication of a previously unknown charter. Themes illuminated are as varied as the status of women, early urban history, the nature of medical collections, the standing of Marian feasts and the function of musical notation. The study of Old English poetry is advanced textually, codicologically, culturally, linguistically and critically. Innovation and established practice go hand-in-hand: a record of the first conference of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists and versions of six papers read at conference are included. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year's publications in all branches of Anglo-Saxon studies rounds off the book.

Was Old English metre really based on stress and rhythm? Do we really know that a particular glossed manuscript of a Latin curriculum author was used in an Anglo-Saxon classroom and, if so, how? How were disputes about bookland dealt with? What happened to the last male representative of the West Saxon royal line after the Norman Conquest? And what are the implications of the Taylors' great work on Anglo-Saxon architecture for related studies? These are among the challenging questions taken up in this book. The publication of findings concerning a striking sculptured stone unearthed at Repton and an interpretation of a panel on the Ruthwell Cross bring us close to some distinctive Anglo-Saxon ways of thinking. So do two source studies of vernacular prose, a demonstration of Aldhelm's interest in how a name is related to its referent, and a searching enquiry into early Anglo-Saxon kingship. Textual criticism and phonology are put to good use too. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year's publications in all branches of Anglo-Saxon studies rounds off the book.

Areas of study pursued in this book include a revealing grammatical document from eighth-century Northumbria; renewed excavations at Sutton Hoo are reported; the existence of an unnoticed late Old English prose version of parts of Gregory's Dialogues is pointed out. Fresh thinking is directed to topics as interesting and diverse as a design on the Sutton Hoo purse lid; the origin of a little-considered English decorated manuscript containing lives of saints now in Paris; the enigmatic poem Wulf and Eadwacer; word order as an element on Old English poetic style; surviving traces of the teaching which Theodore and Hadrian delivered in England; the career of a Latin text much studied in English schools for its difficult vocabulary; the political aspects of relic cults during the last century and a half of Anglo-Saxon monarchy; and the organization of the invading armies led by Swein Forkbeard and Cnut. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year's publications in all branches of Anglo-Saxon studies rounds off the book; there is also a comprehensive index to volumes 11-15.

This volume offers fundamental evidence and discussion illuminating a wide range of important subjects: possible influence of Cicero on Bede's attitude to rhetoric; the probability that Theodore and Hadrian brought a glossary from Italy to England; the traditional concept of the narrator in Old English poetry; the nationality of the author of the Old English poem Genesis B; the conceptions of history controlling the Old English Orosius; the establishment of Square minuscule as the standard English script of the tenth century; criteria for distinguishing between Anglo-Saxon script written in England and script written by Anglo-Saxons on the continent; the grounds for claiming that certain surviving pre-Conquest manuscripts were once at Glastonbury; the extent of the circulation of Prudentius's Psychomachia in Anglo-Saxon England; the regional distribution of names of different origins among the moneyers of the Anglo-Danish era. Early and late periods and north and south thus find a place in this searching treatment of intellectual, cultural and settlement issues. The usual comprehensive bibliography rounds off the book.

This volume explores many fundamental questions regarding Anglo-Saxon history. Among those considered is the question of did the earliest English prose really divide into a Mercian tradition and a separate West Saxon one? What is the full roll-call of extant texts containing late Old English 'Winchester' words? How far was Anglo-Saxon medicine hocus-pocus and how far the fruit of deliberate experimentation? How much Greek vocabulary was known in Anglo-Saxon England, and how was it known and how used? How did Anglo-Saxon land law work in practice? Advances in scholarship, application of modern scientific knowledge of a type not normally available, fresh directions of thought, original analysis, stricter criteria and additions to the stock of primary evidence all characterize this book. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year's publications in all branches of Anglo-Saxon studies rounds off the book.

This volume makes important contributions to our stock of primary manuscript evidence: it recovers parts of six previously unrecorded charters and analyses two sets of fragments, each unique in its own way - two leaves of Old Testament text written in Mercia or Canterbury early in the ninth century and six leaves of a missal written at Worcester in the mid-eleventh century. Significant issues in both ecclesiastical and secular history are tackled too - the location of Lindsey, the fate of Rutland during the Scandinavian invasions and settlements, and the state of our knowledge of the archaeology of the Five Boroughs of Leicester, Derby, Nottingham, Stamford and Lincoln. Vernacular literature receives its fair share of attention as well: the relationship between author and audience is examined in the cases of a biblical poem and of the prose homiliary which is still least well understood among the principle ones extant. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year's publications in all branches of Anglo-Saxon studies rounds off the book.

The principal emphasis of this book is the relationship between England and its neighbours in the pre-Conquest period. It brings together fresh information of England's place in the early medieval world, with essays concentrating on finance and trade, travel, learning and education. A detailed analysis of the Old English vocabulary for money and wealth shows different usage over two centuries reflects a developing awareness, particularly on the part of 'lfric, of the relationship between wealth and power. Medical recipes in Bald's Leechbook, which stipulate the use of exotic spices from Arabia, have stimulated a fascinating essay on how these ingredients may have made their way from Arabia and the Mediterranean to England. Other essays in this wide-ranging book examine the Old English Rune Poem in the context of its two later Scandinavian analogues; the use in England of Jerome's Hebracium translation of the psalter; and the study in English schools of the difficult verse of Abbo of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year's publications in all branches of Anglo-Saxon studies rounds off the book.

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 poetry is considered in a survey of scholarly opinion and in a lively discussion on Beowulf. Bede's achievements as a scholar and teacher are examined 1300 years after his birth. The bibliography, noting all contributions to Anglo-Saxon studies in 1972, continues the annual series begun in volume 1.

This book illustrates some of the exciting paths of enquiry being explored in many different fields of Anglo-Saxon studies - archaeology, legal history, palaeography, Old English syntax and poetic, Latin learning with its many reflexes in Old English prose literature, and others. In all these fields it is clear that fresh perspectives may be achieved by examining even well-known objects and texts in the light of modern approaches and scholarship. Several studies concentrate on aspects of early Anglo-Saxon civilization: the settlement at Mucking, Essex; the iconography of the famous gold coin struck in the name of Bishop Liudhard; the early Anglo-Saxon law on adultery; and a reconstruction of an early Anglo-Saxon copy of the Heptateuch. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year's publications in all branches of Anglo-Saxon studies rounds off the book, with a five-year index to volumes 16-20 (previous indexes being in volumes 5, 10 and 15).

The vitality of Anglo-Saxon studies is reflected in the continuing acquisition of fresh knowledge and perspectives gained from the combination of disparate but complementary skills and disciplines. Evidence presented in this book reveals unsuspected aspects of the influence of Aldhelm's Latin poetry in early medieval Spain. The many non-runic inscriptions which have been discovered since 1980 are catalogued and analysed. Comprehensive analysis of a little-understood Latin source of the Old English medical treatise known as Bald's Leechbook throws light not only on the English text but also, surprisingly, on the transmissional history of the Latin source. The decoration of an important manuscript from the early tenth century, the Tanner Bede, is set in the context of tenth-century developments in manuscript illumination, and the analysis of the Regularis concordia from an architectural point of view permits fresh understanding of the layout of monastic churches in the later Anglo-Saxon period. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year's publications in all branches of Anglo-Saxon studies rounds off the book.

That Alcuin addressed to the monks of Lindisfarne the question, 'What has Ingeld to do with Christ?', is a much repeated dogma in Old English studies; but in this book close examination of the letter in question shows that it was addressed not to Lindisfarne nor to a monastic community, but to a bishop in Mercia. That 'Ultán the scribe' was responsible for some of the most lavishly illuminated Anglo-Saxon manuscripts is shown to be another untenable dogma. Fresh perspectives from interdisciplinary study: the 'beasts-of-battle' typescenes which are characteristic of Old English poetry are studied in the wider context of other European literatures. The nasty Viking habit of murdering hostages by throwing bones at them (as happened to St 'lfeah) is illuminated by a wide-ranging study of analogues in Scandinavian literatures. Characteristic features of Aldhelm's enigmata are elucidated by the study of Byzantine riddles, thereby revealing a link between England and the Greek orient. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year's publications rounds off the book.

One of the most important primary sources for our knowledge of Anglo-Saxon England is the charters and manuscripts which survive from the period before 1066. In the present book, two complementary essays treat the charters of mid tenth-century English kings, bringing previously unknown documents to light, establishing the circumstances in which they were produced, and demonstrating that changes in practice in the royal chancery had far-reaching effect on all aspects of Anglo-Saxon script and book production. The question of the medieval representation of women is illuminated by a study of the difficulties which a well-known monastic author, 'lfric, faced in characterizing an Old Testament heroine who used her body to achieve her ends, while a number of traditional assumptions about the property rights of divorced women in England are freshly challenged by close philological analysis of surviving law-codes. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year's publications in all branches of Anglo-Saxon studies rounds off the book.

Our knowledge of Anglo-Saxon England depends wholly on the precise and detailed study of the texts that have come down to us from pre-Conquest times. The present book contains pioneering studies of some of these sources which have been neglected or misunderstood. A comprehensive study of a group of lavish gospelbooks written under the patronage of a late Anglo-Saxon countess, Judith of Flanders (sometime wife of the Earl Tostig who was killed at Stamford Bridge in 1066) shows the importance of these artefacts and provides fresh understanding of the transmission of the gospels in late eleventh-century England. Close analysis of the Libellus 'thelwoldi, a neglected Latin translation of a late tenth-century documentary record of the estates acquired by the redoubtable Bishop 'thelwold for Ely Abbey, throws significant light on the operations of the laws of land tenure in the late tenth century. These and other more traditional lines of enquiry are the focus of this book. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year's publications in all branches of Anglo-Saxon studies rounds off the book.

Material evidence brought to light in this book includes a niello disc from Limpsfield Grange (Surrey) and two fragments of a composite Old English homily discovered in Westminster Abbey. Many previously accepted scholarly positions are reassessed and challenged. A comprehensive assessment of the palaeography of the Exeter Book situates it in the context of late tenth-century book production, and shows that there are no grounds for thinking that the manuscript originated in Exeter itself and that its origin must as yet remain unknown. As always, the interpretation of Old English poetry figures largely in this book. One of the most intriguing of the Old English riddles is explained convincingly. The influence of Aldhelm's Latin poetry on Old English verse is also convincingly demonstrated. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year's publications rounds off the book; and a full index of the contents of volumes 1-25 is provided, with a separate index to volumes 21-25. (Previous indexes have appeared in volumes 5, 10, 15 and 20.)

In the present volume, the two essays that frame the book provide exciting insight into the mental world of the Anglo-Saxons by showing on the one hand how they understood the processes of reading and assimilating knowledge and, on the other, how they conceived of time and the passage of the seasons. In the field of art history, two essays treat two of the best-known Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. The lavish symbol pages in the 'Book of Durrow' are shown to reflect a programmatic exposition of the meaning of Easter, and a posthumous essay by a distinguished art historian shows how the Anglo-Saxon illustrations added to the 'Galba Psalter' are best to be understood in the context of the programme of learning instituted by King Alfred. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year's publications in all branches of Anglo-Saxon studies rounds off the book.

The discovery in Sonderhausen of a fragmentary psalter glossed in Latin and Old English allows fresh inferences to be drawn regarding the study of the psalter in Anglo-Saxon England, and of the transmission of the corpus of vernacular psalter glosses. A detailed textual and palaeographical study of the Wearmouth-Jarrow bibles leads to the exciting possibility that the hand of Bede can be identified, annotating the text of the Bible which he no doubt played an instrumental role in establishing. Two Latin texts from the circle of Archbishop Wulfstan are published here in full, whilst disciplined philological and historical analysis helps to clarify a puzzling reference in 'thelbert's law-code to the early medieval practice of providing food render for the king. Finally, the volume contains two pioneering essays in the histoire des mentalités. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year's publications in all branches of Anglo-Saxon studies rounds off the book.

This volume is framed by articles that throw interesting light on the achievement and reputation of the greatest of Anglo-Saxon kings - Alfred. It opens with a wide-ranging study of the literary and archaeological evidence for the novel design of Alfred's ships, design which in later times led to his being regarded as the father of the English navy. The book closes with a survey of the development of the Alfredian legend from the tenth to the twentieth century, with material drawn from a wide variety of different sources, including art and literature, much of which may be unfamiliar to students of Anglo-Saxon England. Between these two articles on King Alfred lies a variety of studies which illustrate Anglo-Saxon England's aim of encouraging the interdisciplinary study of surviving records. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year's publications in all branches of Anglo-Saxon studies rounds off the book.

The editorial policy of Anglo-Saxon England has been to encourage an interdisciplinary approach to the study of all aspects of Anglo-Saxon culture. This approach is pursued in exemplary fashion by many of the essays in this volume. Fresh light is thrown on the dating and form of Cynewulf's poem The Fates of the Apostles through a comprehensive study of the historical martyrologies of the Carolingian period on which Cynewulf is presumed to have drawn. The literary form of 'lfric's Preface to his translation of Genesis is illustrated through a wide-ranging study of the rhetorical genre of preface-writing in the early Middle Ages (the genre which subsequently was known as the ars dictaminis), and the problems which 'lfric faced and solved in composing a Life of St 'thelthryth are illustrated through detailed comparison of the sources which he utilized. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year's publications in all branches of Anglo-Saxon studies rounds off the book.

The Anglo-Saxons' sense of the past, their colour vocabulary and their ties of kinship are among the topics considered in this third volume. Evidence for contemporary ecclesiastical architecture is extracted from an Anglo-Latin poem and evidence for the post-Conquest Anglo-Saxon emigration to Byzantium from an Icelandic saga. A prominent critic of Old English literature provides a reconsideration of The Seafarer. A review article surveys the work of the previous twenty years on Anglo-Saxon charters. The bibliography lists all books, articles and significant reviews published in any branch of Anglo-Saxon studies during 1973.

The pre-eminence of Anglo-Saxon England in its field can be seen as a result of its encouragement of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of all aspects of Anglo-Saxon culture. Thus this volume includes an important assessment of the correspondence of St Boniface, in which it is shown that the unusually formulaic nature of Boniface's letters is best understood as a reflex of the saint's familiarity with vernacular composition. A wide-ranging historical contextualization of The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle illuminates the way English readers of the later tenth century may have defined themselves in contradistinction to the monstrous unknown, and a fresh reading of the gendering of female portraiture in a famous illustrated manuscript of the Psychomachia of Prudentius (CCCC 23) shows the independent ways in which Anglo-Saxon illustrators were able to respond to their models. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year's publications rounds off the book; and a full index of the contents of volumes 26-30 is provided. (Previous indexes have appeared in volumes 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25.)

One of the most important manuscripts surviving from pre-Conquest England receives penetrating analysis by several scholars. The 'Junius Manuscript' is evaluated from a number of intersecting perspectives, including codicology, decoration, script and punctuation; the confluence of these permits a fresh and convincing dating of this crucially important witness to Old English poetry. This demonstration is strikingly corroborated by an independent analysis of the textual transmission of one of the poems contained in the manuscript - Daniel - which is analysed in connection with another poetic version of the same biblical text, here entitled Three Youths, preserved in the 'Exeter Book'. 'lfric's conception of the creation and fall of the angels is also studied, and this takes us back to a poem in the 'Junius Manuscript', that known as Genesis A. It is shown that 'lfric's conception of the angels, which has no antecedent in the Bible itself, could possibly have been framed by his reading of Genesis A. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year's publications is provided.

Throughout the centuries of its existence, Anglo-Saxon society was highly, if not widely, literate: it was a society the functioning of which depended very largely on the written word. All the essays in this volume throw light on the literacy of Anglo-Saxon England, from the writs which were used as the instruments of government from the eleventh century onwards, to the normative texts which regulated the lives of Benedictine monks and nuns, to the runes stamped on an Anglo-Saxon coin, to the pseudorunes which deliver the coded message of a man to his lover in a well-known Old English poem, to the mysterious writing on an amulet which was apparently worn by a religious for a personal protection from the devil. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year's publications in all branches of Anglo-Saxon studies rounds off the book.

It is red-letter day in Anglo-Saxon studies when a previously unknown Old English text comes to light. In 2002, as the result of some outstanding scholarly detective work, a fragmentary homiliary, containing exegetical homilies for the Sundays after Pentecost, came to light in the Somerset County Records Office in Taunton. The manuscript apparently dates from the middle years of the eleventh century; but questions of when and where and by whom the homiliary was composed can only be answered by close philological study of the Old English text itself. The present volume of Anglo-Saxon England contains a printed edition of this interesting text, and detailed philological analysis leads to the extraordinary hypothesis that the text may have been composed by someone whose native language was not English, and who was apparently unfamiliar with the mainstream of English homiletic composition, best illustrated in the work of 'lfric. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year's publications in all branches of Anglo-Saxon studies rounds off the book.

Ideas about the whole sweep of Anglo-Saxon history and in particular the importance of combining skills from many disciplines are at the centre of this volume. Walter Goffart invites us to think again about what Bede meant by 'the true law of history', while Joanna Story argues that the early Frankish annals give us important insight into the raw material available to Bede. J. R. Madicott traces the rapid development of Mercian power in Bede's time, and a team of textual scholars and scientists report on their experiments to test the efficacy of Anglo-Saxon medical prescriptions. At the other end of the period, Gale R. Owen-Crocker shows how the birds in the margins of the Bayeux Tapestry are used to comment on the narrative of the Norman Conquest, while Rebecca Rushforth finds evidence for continued post-Conquest interest in the descendents of the royal house of Wessex. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year's publications in all branches of Anglo-Saxon studies rounds off the book.

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 questions not usually considered separately. The corpus of known Anglo-Saxon moneyers is further rectified; late Anglo-Saxon metal-work is surveyed; two decades of post-Stenton debate about the Viking settlements are reviewed; a system of standardizing short titles for Old English texts is presented and there is the usual bibliography of the previous year's corpus of Anglo-Saxon studies.