The cult of saints was one of the most important aspects of life in the Middle Ages, and it often formed the nucleus of developing group identities in a town, a province or a country. The literature of Anglo-Saxon England is unique among contemporary European literatures in that it features a vast amount of saints' Lives in the vernacular. Of these Lives, Ælfric is the most important author, and his saints' Lives have never previously been explored in their contemporary setting. In this study, Gretsch analyses Ælfric's Lives of five important saints in the light of their cults in Anglo-Saxon England. This gives the reader fascinating glimpses of 'Ælfric at work': he adapts the cults and rewrites the received Latin hagiography of the five saints, with the result that each of their English Lives conveys a distinct message to the contemporary political elite and to a lay audience at large.

In this book, Scarfe Beckett is concerned with representations of the Islamic world prevalent in Anglo-Saxon England. Using a wide variety of literary, historical and archaeological evidence, she argues that the first perceptions of Arabs, Ismaelites and Saracens which derived from Christian exegesis preconditioned wester expressions of hostility and superiority towards peoples of the Islamic world, and that these received ideas prevailed even as material contacts increased between England and Muslim territory. Medieval texts invariably represented Muslim Arabs as Saracens and Ismaelites (or Hagarenes), described by Jerome as biblical enemies of the Christian world three centuries before Muhammad's lifetime. Two early ideas in particular - that Saracens worshipped Venus and dissembled their own identity - continued into the early modern period. This finding has interesting implications for earlier theses by Edward Said and Norman Daniel concerning the history of English perceptions of Islam.

How did the Anglo-Saxons conceptualize the interim between death and Doomsday? In this 2001 book, Ananya Jahanara Kabir presents an investigation into the Anglo-Saxon belief in the 'interim paradise': paradise as a temporary abode for good souls following death and pending the final decisions of Doomsday. She locates the origins of this distinctive sense of paradise within early Christian polemics, establishes its Anglo-Saxon development as a site of contestation and compromise, and argues for its post-Conquest transformation into the doctrine of purgatory. In ranging across Old English prose and poetry as well as Latin apocrypha, exegesis, liturgy, prayers and visions of the otherworld, and combining literary criticism with recent scholarship in early medieval history, early Christian theology and history of ideas, this book is essential reading for scholars of Anglo-Saxon England, historians of Christianity, and all those interested in the impact of the Anglo-Saxon period on the later Middle Ages.

This book, first published in 2000, discusses the attitudes towards Anglo-Saxons expressed by English poets, playwrights and novelists from the thirteenth century to the present day. The essays are arranged chronologically, tracing literary responses to the Anglo-Saxons in the medieval period, the Renaissance and also the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In earlier centuries the Ango-Saxons were often idealized representatives of happier times. Later, they became the epitome of a 'British' race, while an individual Anglo-Saxon, King Alfred, was inflated into a national hero. A final essay suggests the disappearance of any clear sense of the cultural roots of the English in the twentieth century. The contributors, who are specialists in their respective fields from Britain and the United States, draw on works that have frequently been ignored or overlooked. They address topical issues such as nationalism, cultural identity, myth, gender and contextualization.

Though best known today for his Old English homilies, the Anglo-Saxon scholar Ælfric also composed a Latin 'letter' to his fellow monks at Eynsham (Oxfordshire) containing a detailed outline of their daily and seasonal round of prayer and other duties. The document offers a rare glimpse of what ordinary monks in Anglo-Saxon England were expected to know and do. This 1999 book contains an edition of the Latin letters a textual commentary, and a complete English translation of the work. Dr Jones also provides substantial introductory chapters which establish the exceptional importance of the Eynsham letter for our understanding of late Anglo-Saxon monasticism and liturgy. The book will interest students of early medieval culture, monasticism and Church history.

This book examines descriptions of the natural world in a wide range of Old English poetry. Jennifer Neville describes the physical conditions experienced by the Anglo-Saxons - the animals, diseases, landscapes, seas and weather with which they had to contend. She argues that poetic descriptions of these elements were not a reflection of the existing physical conditions but a literary device used by Anglo-Saxons to define more important issues: the state of humanity, the creation and maintenance of society, the power of individuals, the relationship between God and creation and the power of writing to control information. Examples of contemporary literature in other languages are used to provide a sense of Old English poetry's particular approach, which incorporated elements from Germanic, Christian and classical sources. The result of this approach was not a consistent cosmological scheme but a rather contradictory vision which reveals much about how the Anglo-Saxons viewed themselves.

This book explores the foundations of the intellectual renaissance in tenth-century England, including both the English Benedictine reform and the establishment by Æthelwold, Bishop of Winchester (963–84), of the most influential school in late Anglo-Saxon England. The vital early stages of Æthelwold's scholarly career are explored for the first time, particularly his formative years in King Æthelstan's entourage and his period of study at Glastonbury. Light is shed on the contribution which Æthelstan's cosmopolitan court made to intellectual and spiritual life. Based on a wide range of evidence Dr Gretsch assigns to Æthelwold two influential texts: an interlinear translation of the psalter and a vast corpus of Old English glosses to Aldhelm's prose De virginitate. These glosses are shown to have played a pivotal role in the development of the vernacular as a medium for scholarly discourse.

This 1998 book is a clear and accessible account of early Germanic alliterative verse which explains how such verse was treated by the Beowulf poet. There are differences of poetic style between Beowulf and the otherwise similar verse of ancient Scandinavia and continental Europe. Such distinctions have intrigued scholars for over a century, but Russom is the first to provide a systematic explanation of Old English, Old Norse, Old Saxon, and Old High German alliterative metres. The system of alliterative rules described by Russom derives from ordinary language; the rules change with language over historical time, rather than persisting as arbitrary restrictions. Once the relations between language and metre are identified, it is possible to see how language change yielded the divergent metrical practices which gave each tradition its special character. Russom's results should interest scholars of Old English and related Germanic languages, as well as linguists and those concerned with poetic metre.

This book explores ideas of community and the relationship of individuals to communities widely evident in Old English poetry. It pays particular attention to the context in which major poetic manuscripts of the late Anglo-Saxon period were received, a time when concerns about community appear to have been of special urgency. The book identifies key features of the audience or readership of Old English poetry in this period, and relates the interests of these groups of people to themes reflected in the poetic texts. Magennis analyses a wide range of poems and examines the imagery on which they draw, concentrating particularly on depictions of hall (including feasting and drinking), stronghold, city and landscape. In a poetry in which communal structures are typically associated with male ideals of warriorship and fellowship, the position and treatment of women is also shown to merit close consideration.

This is an extended study of the Old Testament poems of the Junius collection as a group. The circumstances surrounding their composition and transmission are mysterious: none is ascribed to a named author and none situated even relatively within the development of Anglo-Saxon Christian poetry. This book seeks to breach this critical impasse by allowing the biblical content of the Junius poems to tell its own story. Paul G. Remley compares them with genuine early medieval texts that are most likely to have circulated in Anglo-Saxon centres, and sets out the full range of variants. He offers engaging exercises in hermeneutic and reader-response criticism. The introductory chapter reviews five centuries of Anglo-Saxon history. All citations of Old English, Latin, and Greek texts are accompanied by modern English translations, making the book accessible to general readers as well as specialists.

Peter Clemoes brings a lifetime's close study of Anglo-Saxon texts to this appreciation of Old English poetry, with an alternative interpretation which relates the poetry to both the entire Anglo-Saxon way of thinking and the structures of its society. Clemoes proposes a dynamic principle of Old English poetry, very different from the common notion of formulas slotted into poems for stylistic variation. In extended discussions of particular poems and images as well as of changes in language, he shows how the poetic medium became a vehicle for increasing transformation to Christian literacy and to that religion's conceptions of the natural world, morality, and individuality. Carefully thought out and elegantly written, this book is also accessible to students: its numerous quotations are accompanied by modern English translations.

The Laterculus Malalianus, a historical exegesis of the life of Christ, appears to be the only complete text to survive from the hand of Archbishop Theodore at Canterbury. Its language, style and intellectual frame of reference are thus of great importance for establishing the nature and scope of teaching at Canterbury, the first school of Anglo-Saxon England. This edition, with translation and commentary, is the third volume in this series to offer a reassessment of Canterbury as a major seat of learning, together with Bernhard Bischoff's and Michael Lapidge's edition of the biblical commentaries from the Canterbury school and Michael Lapidge's edited collection of essays on the life and influence of Archbishop Theodore. In the introduction Jane Stevenson examines the intellectual milieu of this work, argues the case for attribution to Theodore, and suggests the need for a complete rethinking of the basis of Anglo-Saxon culture.

Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury (668–90), was a monk of Greek origin and extraordinary learning, who shaped the English Church into a structure it retained for a millennium. Yet until recently his early career has been unknown. This book builds on the publication of previously unprinted biblical commentaries from Theodore's Canterbury school, and establishes Theodore's cultural and spiritual background and the formation of his learning. Scholars provide a fresh account of Theodore's career and writings on diverse subjects, revealing a unique personality who brought to Anglo-Saxon England the cultural heritage of Syria, Byzantium and Rome.

This volume includes the first edition of a previously unknown text which throws light on the intellectual history of early medieval Europe. The biblical commentaries represent the teaching of two gifted Greek scholars who came to England from the Byzantine East. Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury (668–90) and his colleague Hadrian (d. 710) taught the Bible to a group of Anglo-Saxon scholars, who recorded their teaching. The resulting commentaries illustrate the high point of biblical scholarship between late antiquity and the Renaissance. The commentaries, found by Professor Bischoff in Milan in 1936, constitute one of the most important medieval texts discovered this century. The edition is introduced by substantial chapters on the intellectual background of the texts and their manuscript sources. The Latin texts themselves are accompanied by facing English translations and extensive notes.

Aldhelm of Malmesbury has been described as 'the first English man of letters'. He was the first Germanic author to compose extensively in Latin metrical verse, and his Latin works were amongst the most influential in Anglo-Saxon England. Aldhelm can also be considered the best-read of Anglo-Saxon poets, in both senses of the phrase: he read most and was most read. In this first book-length study of Aldhelm's poetic art Andy Orchard traces the sources and models for Aldhelm's idiosyncratic style, as well as the nature and extent of his influence on later Anglo-Latin verse. Aldhelm's innovations in Latin verse technique are emphasized, in particular his special debt to the specific techniques of Old English vernacular verse.

This is the first book to make a comprehensive study of Old English medical texts. Professor Cameron compares Anglo-Saxon medical practice with that of the Greeks and Romans from whom the Anglo-Saxons borrowed freely. He analyses the position of physicians in society, the conditions under which their patients lived and the effectiveness of their remedies. He examines the ingredients of Anglo-Saxon prescriptions, their therapeutic efficacy and availability. The role of magic in medicine is dealt with in depth, but found to have played less part in medical practice than has sometimes been thought. Special attention is given to surgery, bloodletting, gynaecology and obstetrics. Professor Cameron concludes that Anglo-Saxon medicine, on the evidence of surviving texts, was as good as any previously practised in Western Europe. The author has written with the needs of medical historians and non-specialist readers as well as Anglo-Saxonists in mind. The numerous quotations from the surviving texts are given in English as well as in the original languages.

Irish monks and missionaries played a crucial role in the conversion of the pagan Anglo-Saxons and in the formation of Christian culture in England, but the nature and extent of Irish influence on Old English poetry has remained largely undefined. Charles Wright identifies the characteristic features of Irish Christian literature which influenced Anglo-Saxon vernacular authors. Professor Wright traces the Irish background of the distinctive contents of Vercelli Homily IX and its remarkable exemplum, 'The Devil's Account of the Next World', and traces the dissemination of related stylistic and thematic material elsewhere in Old English literature, including other anonymous homilies such as Beowulf and the Solomon and Saturn texts. As a full-length study of Irish influence on Old English religious literature, the book will appeal to scholars in Old English literature, Anglo-Saxon studies, and Old and Middle Irish literature.

This book argues that the formal art of the Old English epic Beowulf is shaped and determined by the poetic language which the poet inherited from the traditional, oral culture of Anglo-Saxon England. The patterns of metre and alliteration exhibited in the poem were not imposed by the poet on his language, but were part of the language which he spoke, the rules of which constituted his metrical grammar. Professor Kendall investigates the constraints of syntax, metre and alliteration which govern the formal art of Beowulf. He shows how the half-lines of the poem, which are the basic units of composition, are marked by the metrical grammar for placement in the verse clause; he also establishes conditions for the presence or absence of alliteration, which enable him to say whether in any given instance the alliterative device is a mandatory function of the rules of the metrical grammar or an option exercised by the poet. Professor Kendall alters traditional views of metre; he concludes the book with a complete index of scansion according to the rules he has established.

Even the Venerable Bede knew little about the two Anglo-Saxon kingdoms described in this book. In the sixth and seventh centuries the pagan peoples of the Hwicce and Magonsaetan occupied the frontier from Stratford-upon-Avon as far as the Welsh kingdoms west of Offa's Dyke. They retained their own kings, aristocracy and independent monasteries into the eighth century. Using archaeological, place-name and historical sources, Dr Sims-Williams describes the early conversion to Christianity of these people, the origins of the dioceses of Worcester and Hereford, and the precocious growth of Anglo-Saxon monasticism. Drawing on many neglected documents he reveals a wide range of Continental, Irish and Anglo-Saxon influences on the church and shows that the monasteries were as varied in character as the Northumbrian foundations described by Bede.