Provides valuable new insights into the multi-layered and multi-directional relationship of law, literature, and social regulation in pre-Conquest English society.

A new, materialistic reading of the Alfredian corpus, drawing on diverse approaches from thing theory to Augustinian principles of use and enjoyment to uncover how these works explore the material world.

An examination of the depiction and representation of performative acts in Old English texts.

Interrogations of materiality and geography, narrative framework and boundaries, and the ways these scholarly pursuits ripple out into the wider cultural sphere are investigated in this book.

An exploration of how Æthelwold and those he influenced deployed the promotion of saints to implement religious reform.

This book provides new approaches to a range of Old English texts.

A consideration of the theme of demons as teachers in early English literature.

Essays demonstrating how the careful study of individual words can shed immense light on texts more broadly.

An examination of the extant pre-Conquest medical material, arguing that the texts are products of a sophisticated intellectual culture.

A fresh approach to the works and manuscripts of this influential monk, whose writings sunthesised some of the finest minds of the period.

A wide-ranging study of the significance of swords throughout the whole Anglo-Saxon period, offering valuable insights into the meaning of and attitude towards swords.

Multi-disciplinary investigation of Anglo-Saxon funerary traditions.

Fresh perspectives on the English clergy, their books, and the wider Anglo-Saxon church.

The first full-length study of the notion and concept of old age in early medieval England.

Since its inception in the nineteenth century, the genre of Anglo-Saxon charms has drawn the attention of many scholars and appealed to enthusiasts of magic, paganism, and popular religion. Their Christian nature has been widely acknowledged in recent years, but their position within mainstream liturgical traditions has not yet been fully recognised. In this book, Ciaran Arthur undertakes a wide-ranging investigation of the genre to better understand how early English ecclesiastics perceived these rituals and why they included them in manuscripts were written in high-status minsters. Evidence from the entire corpus of Old English, various surviving manuscript sources, and rich Christian theological traditions suggests that contemporary scribes and compilers did not perceive "charms" as anything other than Christian rituals that belonged to diverse, mainstream liturgical practices. The book thus challenges the notion that there was any such thing as an Anglo-Saxon "charm", and offers alternative interpretations of these texts as creative para-liturgical rituals or liturgical rites, which testify to the diversity of early medieval English Christianity. When considered in their contemporary ecclesiastical and philosophical contexts, even the most enigmatic rituals, previously dismissed as mere "gibberish", begin to emerge as secret, deliberately obscured texts with hidden spiritual meaning.Ciaran Arthur is a Research Fellow at Queen's University Belfast.

Robert D. Fulk is arguably the greatest Old English philologist to emerge during the twentieth century; his corpus of scholarship has fundamentally shaped contemporary understanding of many aspects of Anglo-Saxon literary history and English historical linguistics.
This volume, in his honour, brings together essays which engage with his work and advance his research interests. Scholarship onhistorical metrics and the dating, editing, and interpretation of Old English poetry thus forms the core of this book; other topics addressed include syntax, phonology, etymology, lexicology, and paleography. An introductory overview of Professor Fulk's achievements puts these studies in context, alongside essays which assess his contributions to metrical theory and his profound impact on the study of Beowulf. By consolidating and augmenting Fulk's research, this collection takes readers to the cutting edge of Old English philology.

Leonard Neidorf is a Junior Fellow at theHarvard Society of Fellows; Rafael J. Pascual is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard University; Tom Shippey is Professor Emeritus at St Louis University.

Contributors: Thomas Cable,Christopher M. Cain, George Clark, Dennis Cronan, Daniel Donoghue, Aaron Ecay, Mark Griffith, Megan E. Hartman, Stefan Jurasinski, Anatoly Liberman, Donka Minkova, Haruko Momma, Rory Naismith, LeonardNeidorf, Andy Orchard, Rafael J. Pascual, Susan Pintzuk, Geoffrey Russom, Tom Shippey, Jun Terasawa, Charles D. Wright.

Some of the most celebrated passages of Old English poetry are speeches: Beowulf and Unferth's verbal contest, Hrothgar's words of advice, Satan's laments, Juliana's words of defiance, etc. Yet DirectSpeech, as a stylistic device, has remained largely under-examined and under-theorized in studies of the corpus. As a consequence, many analyses are unduly influenced by anachronistic conceptions ofDirect Speech, leading to problematic interpretations, not least concerning irony and implicit characterisation.
This book uses linguistic theories to reassess the role of Direct Speech in Old English narrative poetry. Beowulf is given a great deal of attention, because it is a major poem and because it is the focus of much of the existing scholarship on this subject, but it is examined in a broader poetic context: the poem belongs to a wider tradition and thus needs to be understood in that context. The texts examined include several major Old English narrative poems, in particular the two Genesis, Christ and Satan, Andreas, Elene, Juliana and Guthlac A.

Elise Louviot is a Lecturer at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne (France) and a specialist of OldEnglish poetry. Her research interests include orality, tradition, formulas and the linguistic expression of subjectivity.

For people in the early Middle Ages, the earth, air, water and ether teemed with other beings. Some of these were sentient creatures that swam, flew, slithered or stalked through the same environmentsinhabited by their human contemporaries. Others were objects that a modern beholder would be unlikely to think of as living things, but could yet be considered to possess a vitality that rendered them potent. Still others were things half glimpsed on a dark night or seen only in the mind's eye; strange beasts that haunted dreams and visions or inhabited exotic lands beyond the compass of everydayknowledge.
This book discusses the various ways in which the early English and Scandinavians thought about and represented these other inhabitants of their world, and considers the multi-facetednature of the relationship between people and beasts. Drawing on the evidence of material culture, art, language, literature, place-names and landscapes, the studies presented here reveal a world where the boundaries between humans, animals, monsters and objects were blurred and often permeable, and where to represent the bestial could be to hold a mirror to the self.

Michael Bintley is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Literature at Canterbury Christ Church University; Thomas Williams is a doctoral researcher at UCL's Institute of Archaeology.

Contributors: Noel Adams, John Baker, Michael D. J. Bintley, Sue Brunning, László Sándor Chardonnens, Della Hooke, Eric Lacey, Richard North, Marijane Osborn, Victoria Symons, Thomas J. Williams

In the twelfth century, a version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was rewritten at Peterborough Abbey, welding local history into an established framework of national events. This text has usually been regarded as an exception, a vernacular Chronicle written in a period dominated by Latin histories. This study, however, breaks new ground by considering the Peterborough Chronicle as much more than just an example of the accidental longevity of the Chronicle tradition. Close analysis reveals unique interpretations of events, and a very strong sense of communal identity, suggesting that the construction of this text was not a marginal activity, but one essential to the articulation of the abbey's image. This text also participates in a vibrant post-Conquest textual culture, in particular at Canterbury, including the writing of the bilingual F version of the Chronicle; its symbiotic relationship witha wider corpus of Latin historiography thus indicates the presence of shared sources. The incorporation of alternative generic types in the text also suggests the presence of formal hybridity, a further testament to a fluid and adaptable textual culture. Dr Malasree Home teaches at Newcastle University.

The principal aim of this book is to assess Anglo-Saxon charters from a 'literary' point of view. In the ninth century, a new and highly complex Latin style started to appear in Anglo-Saxon charters: rather than writing traditional, straightforward legal language, the authors of these documents turned to their Anglo-Saxon literary heritage for inspiration, and began to fill their charters with complex and archaic vocabulary, extensive metaphors and lurid imagery. Dr Snook offers a thorough discussion of why and how this seemingly inappropriate style was adopted, throwing light on a range of broader issues, including the place of the documents in the wider intellectual history of tenth-century England, and their role in promoting the ideologies of different Anglo-Saxon kings. Benjamin Snook gained his doctorate from Cambridge University.