Richard Rawlinson Center Series – serie

Æthelflæd (ca. 870–918), political leader, military strategist, and administrator of law, is one of the most important ruling women in English history. Despite her multifaceted roles and family legacy, however, her reign and relationship with other women in tenth-century England have never been the subject of a book-length study. This interdisciplinary collection of essays redresses a notable hiatus in scholarship of early medieval England. Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, and Women in Tenth-Century England argues for a reassessment of women’s political, military, literary, and domestic agency. It invites deeper reflection on the female kinships, networks, and communities that give meaning to Æthelflæd’s life, and through this shows how medieval history can invite new engagements with the past.

This interdisciplinary volume collects original essays in literary criticism and literary theory, philology, codicology, metrics, and art history. Composed by prominent scholars in Anglo-Saxon studies, these essays honor the depth and breadth of Patrick W. Conner’s influence in our discipline. As a scholar, teacher, editor, administrator and innovator, Pat has contributed to Anglo-Saxon studies for four decades. It is hard to say which of his legacies is most profound.

This book traces the development ofhypermetric verse in Old English andcompares it to the cognate traditions of OldNorse and Old Saxon. The study illustratesthe inherent flexibility of the hypermetric lineand shows how poets were able tomanipulate this flexibility in differentcontexts for different practical and rhetoricalpurposes. This analysis shows what degree ofcontrol the poets had over the traditionalalliterative line, what effects they were ableto produce with various stylistic choices, andhow attention to poetic style aids literaryanalysis.

Cognitive approaches to early medieval texts have tended to focus on the mind in isolation. By examining the interplay between mental and physical acts deployed in Old English poetry and prose, this study identifies new patterns and offers new perspectives. In these texts, the performance of right or wrong action is not linked to natural inclination dictated by birth; it is the fruit of right or wrong thinking. The mind consciously directed and controlled is open to external influences, both human and diabolical. This struggle to produce right thought and action reflects an emerging democratization of heroism that crosses societal and gender boundaries, becoming intertwined with socio-political, soteriological, and cultural meaning. In a study of influential prose texts, including the Alfredian translations and the sermons of Ælfric, alongside close readings of three poems from different genres –The Seafarer, The Battle of Maldon, and Juliana–, Ponirakis demonstrates how early medieval authors create patterns of interaction between the mental and the physical. These provide hidden keys to meaning which, once found, unlock new readings of much studied texts. In addition, these patterns of balance, distribution, and opposition, reveal a startling similarity of approach across genre and form, taking the discussion of the early medieval conception of the mind, soul, and emotion, not to mention conventional generic divisions, onto new ground.

The eight essays in The Recovery of Old English consider major aspects of the progress of Anglo-Saxon studies from their Tudor beginnings until their coming of age in the second half of the seventeenth century.

The eight essays in The Recovery of Old English consider major aspects of the progress of Anglo-Saxon studies from their Tudor beginnings until their coming of age in the second half of the seventeenth century.

Cotton Claudius B.iv, an illustrated Old English Hexateuch that is among the treasures of the British Library, contains one of the first extended projects of translation of the Bible in a European vernacular. Its over four hundred images make it one of the most extensively illustrated books to survive from the early Middle Ages and preserve evidence of the creativity of the Anglo-Saxon artist and his knowledge of other important early medieval picture cycles. In addition, the manuscript contains the earliest copy of Ælfric’s Preface to Genesis, a work that discusses issues of translation and interpretation.

Cotton Claudius B.iv, an illustrated Old English Hexateuch that is among the treasures of the British Library, contains one of the first extended projects of translation of the Bible in a European vernacular. Its over four hundred images make it one of the most extensively illustrated books to survive from the early Middle Ages and preserve evidence of the creativity of the Anglo-Saxon artist and his knowledge of other important early medieval picture cycles. In addition, the manuscript contains the earliest copy of Aelfric's Preface to Genesis, a work that discusses issues of translation and interpretation.

While the essays offered in this collection vary in subject, discipline, and methodological approach, they center on the interpretation of the material world, whether that materiality appears in literature, stone, or the artifacts removed from an archaeological dig. The essay deal mainly with the Germanic and Celtic worlds, but incorporate motifs from Eastern Christian and Roman cultures. Contributors address the themes of time in history; societal and ideological change and continuity; iconic style and polysemous textuality; symbolic and representational interpretation; gender-specific economic production; definitions of social and political structures; and social processes of eclecticism and adaptation. Hence the approaches are interdisciplinary, contextual, comparative, and fluid in their integration of texts and images where the text represented is as crucial to the meaning as is the image or object; they therefore represent the study of the material culture of the Anglo-Saxon period at its best. The variety of disciplines represented in the essays and the range of topics covered by the individual scholars give some indication of the enormous scope of the scholarship of Rosemary Cramp, in whose honor this volume was produced. Readers will find that the subjects dealt with resonate with each other in interesting and complex ways. It is an invaluable contribution to scholars of Anglo-Saxon culture and archaeology.

Robert Deshman wove together a dense and tightly structured nexus of Early Christian, Carolingian, Anglo-Saxon, and Ottonian manuscript illuminations, ivories, textiles, mosaics, and wall paintings on the one hand, and contemporary exegetical, liturgical, and political writings on the other. In so doing, he ultimately demonstrated the intrinsic connections among visual culture, theology, philosophy, political theory, and ecclesiastic doctrine and practice. Although he used the word only once in his own writings, at the very end of his career, Deshman was truly an interdisciplinary scholar of the first order. The thirteen articles collected in this volume were published between 1971 and 1997 (four posthumously) in six different journals and four edited books. Reprinting them is meant not only to make the articles more accessible but also to present a cohesive body of work (primarily on Anglo-Saxon art) that as a whole has yet to be surpassed or methodologically replaced in the scholarly literature.

The collection opens with Gneuss's Rawlinson Center lecture, delivered just a few months prior to the Handlist's publication. The lecture is followed by essays by Donald Scragg and Thomas N. Hall that examine the scribes, contents, circumstances of production, and intended uses of selected manuscripts from the late Anglo-Saxon period. Four essays follow, by Kees Dekker, Rebecca Brackmann, Aaron J Kleist, and Rolf H. Bremmer Jr., investigating the fates of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts at the hands of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century antiquaries. The resulting collection addresses the concerns of Anglo-Saxon manuscript studies today, which have been given new energy by the publication of the Handlist.

In The Third Gender, McDaniel addresses the idea of the "third gender" in early hagiography and Latin treatises on virginity and then examines Aelfric's treatment of gender in his translations of Latin monastic Lives for his non-monastic audiences. She first investigates patristic ideas about a "third gender" by describing this concept within the theoretical frameworks of monasticism and then turns to creating a historical and theological cultural context within which to locate an interpretation of Aelfric's portrayals of male and female saints.