This article explores the ninth-century embassy to India purportedly sent by King Alfred, examining the evidence for this voyage, as well as its context, feasibility and credibility. It is argued that India, rather than Judea, was the intended destination of the alms dispatched to St Thomas and St Bartholomew in 883, given contemporary Anglo-Saxon knowledge of the lives of these two saints, and that such a destination would fit with the intellectual climate of Alfred’s court and be a suitable symbolic gesture. A journey to India would have a good context in the evidence for both a Syriac Christian community and a significant shrine of St Thomas in southern India that people from early medieval Europe might visit, with the likely location of the shrine being investigated. The archaeological and documentary evidence for the availability of early medieval trade routes to India is also analysed, as are the identities of Alfred’s emissaries.

Among little-known fragments of sacramentaries, two examples in insular half uncial in German libraries offer us significant evidence of the activities of early English missionaries and scribes. The first has long been known in German as the Sacramentary of Boniface, and its unique and archaic content shows it is among the only surviving evidence of liturgical practice in England itself in the eighth century. The second, in scattered fragments from the monastery of Groß Sankt Martin in Cologne, offers an important witness of the Gelasian of the eighth century (as distinct from the Old Gelasian Sacramentary), a compilation exclusively known on the Continent. Liturgical evidence offers a framework to go beyond the uncertain attempts to date and localize the particularly conservative script of these fragments. Analysis of their content shows how English scribes made a decisive input to the transformations of the continent’s liturgy and the dissemination of new forms of mass book.

This essay sets out an analysis of how forgery was produced at Westminster Abbey in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, using the material evidence of the pseudo-original charters rather than the much-used textual evidence. The focus of this study thus lies on how the parchments were prepared, how the seals were used, and what techniques the scribes used to produce archaizing scripts, which are not usually prominent in analysis of charters and related materials. This shows that individual scribal habits shaped how the forgeries were made, but, perhaps more importantly, that there were distinctive practices seen in the forgeries which differed from how authentic originals were made. It is argued that these differences reflect how the scribes envisaged the forged documents would be used, and their knowledge that these usages would differ from those of authentic originals.

In a puzzling passage from his computistical handbook, Byrhtferth of Ramsey asks his students to imagine the Venerable Bede sitting in Moses’ tabernacle and teaching them about the calculation of time. This article considers how Bede was portrayed as a mediator of divine wisdom about computus in Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion and Epilogus, culminating in Bede’s elevation to the eternal space of the tabernacle. Building on Mary Carruthers’ ‘machines of meditation’ and Faith Wallis’ work on Byrhtferth’s diagrams as ‘visual exegesis’, it argues that a collection of riddling references to the tabernacle across Byrhtferth’s canon amount to a cosmography in which the tabernacle is conceived as an exegetical model for God’s presence in time and space.

Although Oxford, Bodleian Library, Tanner 10 has been studied extensively, unresolved questions remain regarding its localization, its repair, the contemporaneity of the scribes, and the variations between their work. Framing an approach via eventful palaeography and writing as a social practice, this essay raises questions about the use of evolutionary metaphors and systems of classification borrowed from the natural sciences to describe manuscripts. It argues that a complete understanding of Tanner 10 has been hampered by the limited treatment of scribes three, four and five. This essay re-examines Tanner 10 thoroughly – with equal attention to the work of all five scribes – to argue that Scribes 1, 2, 4 and 5 were working contemporaneously, and that some similarities between Scribes 1 and 5 have been overlooked. It then provides arguments for dating Scribe 3’s intervention to the second half of the tenth century, possibly in Dorchester or Abingdon.

This essay revisits the hypothesis that Bede modelled his story of Cædmon on that of Muḥammad in CE 610. It is argued that the pilgrim Arculf, who visited Jerusalem in around 680, transmitted the Prophet’s story to Abbot Adomnán in Iona in 683–6, and that Adomnán passed it to Bede with his De locis sanctis in Jarrow in 688. It is shown that Bede’s knowledge of the religion that became Islam was limited and that his attitude towards ‘Saracens’ remained neutral until around 715, when the news about the Arabs’ occupation of Seville, city of Isidore, would have reached him in Northumbria. Despite evidence for Bede’s later hostility to the Arabs, my essay claims that he continued to regard Muḥammad’s story as suitable because his reading of Acts and the Pauline epistles primed him to accept all vernacular languages, including Arabic, as a medium for the word of God.

This article considers the role of the F-scribe of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in relation to charter production and within Christ Church cathedral more generally. I begin by examining a series of writs issued in the names of kings from Edward the Confessor to Henry II. I argue that these originate with the bilingual 1100 issue by Henry I for Archbishop Anselm, with chronologically earlier material confected or adapted to provide missing precedent. Through analysis of unusual features of the language perpetuating through the set, I argue that the F-scribe drafted the Henry I issue himself. I further argue that he was also the compiler of the Anglo-Norman cartulary, and demonstrate that the F-text of the Chronicle was likely completed prior to its making. The cartulary’s unusual focus reflects a concern which aligns with the office of cantor, and adds weight to Peter Baker’s suggestion that the F-scribe acted in that capacity.

A review of the material within the detached seals (Sceaux détachés) section of the Archives nationales (Paris) recently led to the discovery of a well-preserved, detached impression of the seal of Edward the Confessor. Although the impression in question was already known to scholars, it had been registered as missing since the 1980s and presumed lost. The authors take the opportunity of its felicitous rediscovery to discuss the impression, its iconography and its wider documentary context. As a pendant majesty seal, the impression attests to the adoption of new iconographic motifs and sealing practices in England in the immediately pre-Conquest years. Yet in adjusting these for use on the writ-charter – itself a distinctively English innovation – the seal is also highly innovative, pointing toward future developments in both British and continental European diplomatic.

This article describes Rome, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Vitt. Em. 1452 + Durham (North Carolina), Duke University, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Lat. 140, a copy of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum made at Nonantola, north-central Italy, in the first third of the ninth century. The manuscript’s complex provenance history has meant its existence has only fleetingly been acknowledged in scholarship on the Historia ecclesiastica, which has failed to recognise it contains a copy of the Old English version of Cædmon’s Hymn, the third oldest, after those in the Moore and Leningrad Bedes, and the earliest surviving text of the Northumbrian eordu recension. The article presents a diplomatic transcription of this new text of the Hymn, as well as a new critical edition, stemma, and history of the eordu recension. We also discuss its likely punctuation, which, uniquely for Old English, seems to have consisted in interword interpuncts.

The Franks Casket contains an unconventional depiction of the Romulus and Remus myth: a recumbent she-wolf poised above an inverted runic label ᚹᚣᛚᛁᚠ (wylif). The twin boys suckle her in an aerial manner. Above them, a second wolf hovers; both creatures lick the boys with elongated tongues. Several studies have pointed to Book 8 of the Aeneid, which describes how the mother-wolf ‘shapes’ the boys with her tongue. But mysteries remain: why is the mother-wolf reclining rather than upright in this image? And what about the presence of the second wolf? This essay argues that there are further details in the Aeneid and its late antique commentary tradition that can shed light on this panel’s artistry. The artist’s adaptation of nuanced classical allusion is furthermore strong enough to shed light on the circulation of Virgilian commentaries in early medieval Northumbria and reveal aspects of the intellectual milieu that helped produce the casket.

The literary importance of English in twelfth-century England is by now well established. However, English also continued to play an important part in literary exchanges across the North Sea. This is illustrated by a surviving Old Norse translation of Ælfric’s Old English sermon De falsis diis, alongside a partial adaptation of his De auguriis. De falsis diis euhemerizes Classical gods and equates them to Norse gods, which its translation reframes as an exploration of pre-Christian Scandinavian history. Due to the perceived insularity of English in the Middle Ages, this translation has been seen as an isolated effort. Yet it not only fits with extensive English influence on twelfth-century Old Norse homily-writing, but must also be set alongside the translation of Old English genealogies including pre-Christian gods in Old Norse historiography. Together with wider, multilingual Anglo-Scandinavian literary contacts, these texts demonstrate the sustained importance of English in a multilingual literary network.