Old English language & literature
More general subjects:
The Legacy of Medieval Scandinavian Encounters with England and the Insular World
The Vikings had a major and lasting impact on the English language. This volume is a unique companion to the study of Anglo-Scandinavian language contact providing expert discussions of its contexts backgrounds and the considerable afterlife of its effects through the Middle Ages and down to the present day. It contains thirteen new articles by leading specialists in the fields of early medieval languages literature and history specially commissioned in order to explore as wide a range as possible of the historical and cultural contexts for Anglo-Scandinavian encounters in the Viking Age and the evidence for them. These essays analyse in detail the Old Norse influence on English offering studies of words and their meanings in their textual and literary contexts and including lexicography dialectology and syntactic research; they explore findings from archaeology inscriptions and place-names; and they situate Anglo-Scandinavian contacts in the larger multilingual multicultural contexts of the North Sea and Irish Sea worlds.
Cultural Models for Emotions in the North Atlantic Vernaculars, 700–1400
While the medieval regions that form modern-day Britain Ireland Iceland and the Scandinavian states were very much like today home to diverse ethnic and linguistic groups it is evident that the peoples who inhabited the north-western Atlantic seaboard at this time were nonetheless connected by key cultural environmental historical and ideological experiences that set them apart from other regions of Europe. This volume is the first to focus specifically on these cultural and linguistic connections from the perspective of the history of emotions. The contributions collected here examine cultural encounters among medieval North Atlantic peoples with regard to the gradual development of shared emotional models and the emergence of early cross-cultural emotional communities in this region. The chapters also explore how the folk psychologies illustrated in the oldest European vernacular writing traditions (Irish English and Scandinavian) bear witness to cultural models for emotions that first took shape in pre-Christian times.
The History of the Physiologus in Early Medieval England
The Physiologus is the ancestor of the bestiary a collection of chapters describing animal qualities and behaviours usually with an allegorical meaning which proliferated especially in England in the late Middle Ages. While much scholarly attention has been directed to the bestiary the history of the transmission of the Physiologus has hardly been investigated. Evidence of the circulation of this treatise in the early medieval period is certainly scanty since only two brief versions dating from this period have been preserved one in Old English and another one in Latin. However this monograph shows further proof of the knowledge of the Physiologus in Anglo-Saxon England. It also reveals the relationship of the only two surviving texts and their connection to the main Continental recension of the time. This study therefore demonstrates that the popularity of bestiaries in the later Middle Ages was largely due to the prominence that its predecessor the Physiologus enjoyed in the preceding period.
Traumas of 1066 in the Literatures of England, Normandy, and Scandinavia
1066 is one of the most well-known dates in English history: but how far do we understand the mental and emotional lives of those who experienced it? In just over a month England was rocked by two separate invasions multiple pitched battles and the deaths of thousands. The repercussions of these traumatic events would echo through the history and literature of northern Europe for centuries to come.
Drawing on studies of trauma and cultural memory this book examines the cultural repercussions of the year 1066 in medieval England Normandy and Scandinavia. It explores how writers in all three regions celebrated their common heritage and mourned the wars that brought them into conflict. Bringing together texts from an array of languages genres and cultural traditions this study examines the strategies medieval authors employed to work through the traumas of 1066 narrating its events and experiences in different forms. It explores the ways in which history and memory interacted through multiple generations of writers and readers and reveals how the field of trauma studies can help us better understand the mental and emotional lives of medieval people.
Old English Poetry from Manuscript to Message
By comparison with Latin Europe Anglo-Saxon civilization is notable for the amount of literature preserved in contemporary manuscripts in the vernacular language formerly called ‘Anglo-Saxon’ but now more usually called ‘Old English’. This literature includes some remarkable poetry which is the subject of the present collection of essays. Some of the earliest poems may well have been written at a time when northern England held the intellectual leadership of Europe. The approach is holistic investigating important issues in the manuscripts that affect the integrity of the texts to be studied or the way they relate to each other examining metrical issues that affect the way the poems are appreciated for their compositional skill studying particular textual problems that require elucidation or even emendation to make the meaning clear and finally offering readings of particular poems focussing on themes that are central to Old English poetry. A postscript examines Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky which is presented as a ‘Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry’.
A New Commentary on the Old English ‘Prose Solomon and Saturn’ and ‘Adrian and Ritheus’ Dialogues
Who was not born was buried in his mother’s womb and was baptized after death? Who first spoke with a dog? Why don’t stones bear fruit? Who first said the word ‘God’? Why is the sea salty? Who built the first monastery? Who was the first doctor? How many species of fish are there? What is the heaviest thing to bear on earth? What creatures are sometimes male and sometimes female? The Old English dialogues The Prose Solomon and Saturn and Adrian and Ritheus critically edited in 1982 by J. E. Cross and Thomas D. Hill provide the answers to a trove of curious medieval ‘wisdom questions’ such as these drawing on a remarkable range of biblical apocryphal patristic and encyclopaedic lore.
This volume (which reprints the texts and translations of the two dialogues from Cross and Hill’s edition) both updates and massively supplements the commentary by Cross and Hill contributing extensive new sources and analogues (many from unpublished medieval Latin question-and-answer texts) and comprehensively reviews the secondary scholarship on the ancient and medieval texts and traditions that inform these Old English sapiential dialogues. It also provides an extended survey of the late antique and early medieval genres of ‘curiosity’ and ‘wisdom’ dialogues and florilegia including their dissemination and influence as well as their social and educational functions.
The Age of Alfred
Rethinking English Literary Culture c. 850–950
King Alfred the Great (r. 871–899) remains a key figure in English literary history. Although his reputation as a scholar who was personally responsible for the translation of a number of Latin works is no longer secure the figure of the wise king nevertheless casts a long shadow over vernacular writing from the late ninth century through to the twelfth. This volume takes stock of recent developments and debates in the field of Alfredian scholarship and showcases new directions in research. Individual chapters consider how English authors before during and after Alfred’s reign translated and adapted Latin works often in innovative and imaginative ways. Other contributions provide new contexts and connections for Alfredian writing highlighting the work of Mercian scholars and expanding the corpus beyond the works traditionally attributed to the king himself. Together these essays force us to rethink what we mean by ‘Alfredian’ and to revise the literary history of the ‘long ninth century’.
The Old English Life of Saint Pantaleon
British Library MS Cotton Vitellius D. xvii
The Old English Life of Saint Pantaleon survives in one eleventh century manuscript: it appears here for the first time in an easily available edition. This edition is based both on independent research and on the work of previous scholars. It is a challenging text from a much-damaged manuscript but well worth reading: it is interesting both from a linguistic point of view as a testimony of late Anglo-Saxon language and also as a sign of continental influence on Anglo-Saxon culture and of a change in literary taste in England on the eve of the Norman Conquest. It is preceded by a full introduction dealing with the history of the text from Greece to Western Europe and the context of its translation into Old English. The text is accompanied by copious notes dealing with difficult passages and it is made more accessible by a Modern English translation. The edition is completed by a 12th century Latin version which seems to be the closer to its Old English counterpart. The edition is completed by an Anglo-Saxon glossary.
Sermons, Saints, and Sources
Studies in the Homiletic and Hagiographic Literature of Early Medieval England
The corpus of sermons and saints’ lives from early medieval England in English and Latin is the largest and most varied of its kind from a contemporary European perspective. In recent years this extraordinary body of literature has attracted increasing attention as witnessed by an efflorescence of new editions translations commentaries essay collections dissertations and amply funded research projects such as the Electronic Corpus of Anonymous Old English Homilies (ECHOE) project based at the University of Göttingen.
The present collection of thirteen essays grew out of a 2022 conference sponsored by the ECHOE project on Old English anonymous homilies and saints’ lives and their sources and reflects the best of current scholarship on early medieval homiletic and hagiographic literature from England. This literature is central to an understanding of the spiritual imagination and social practices of non-élite audiences. Together they introduce new discoveries identify new sources edit new texts make new claims about authors revisers and textual relationships revise previous arguments about aspects of literary history and provide new interpretations of Old English and Latin sermons and saints’ lives. These studies show vividly how European learning influenced the liturgical practices and peripheral education of early medieval England.
Contributors include Helen Appleton Aidan Conti Claudia Di Sciacca R. D. Fulk Thomas N. Hall Christopher A. Jones Leslie Lockett Rosalind Love Hugh Magennis Stephen Pelle Jane Roberts Winfried Rudolf and Charles D. Wright.
Canterbury Glosses from the School of Theodore and Hadrian: The Leiden Glossary
The ‘Leiden Glossary’ provides a record of the understanding and interpretation of the patristic and grammatical texts studied at the Canterbury School of Theodore and Hadrian regarded by Bede as the high point of Christian culture in early Anglo-Saxon England. Each entry in the ‘Leiden Glossary’ is provided with detailed commentary on the sources consulted by the two Canterbury masters (earlier glossaries; Isidore; Eucherius) and the later uses of the glossary by compilers of the Epinal-Erfurt and Corpus glossaries. The ‘Leiden Glossary’ is thus a key witness to one of the greatest schools of learning in the early Middle Ages.
Sources of Knowledge in Old English and Anglo-Latin Literature
Studies in Honour of Charles D. Wright
This volume positions source scholarship as integral to an understanding of the transmission of knowledge across intellectual social and material networks in early medieval England. Essays in this collection situate source studies in Old English and Anglo-Latin literature within a range of theoretical and methodological approaches as varied as disability studies feminist theory history of science and network analysis tracing how ideas move across cultures and showing how studying sources enables us to represent the diversity of medieval voices embedded in any given text.
The essays in this volume extend the work of Charles D. Wright who mentored a generation of scholars in methodologies of source study. The essays are organized into three sections. The first demonstrates how source studies facilitate tracing ideas across space and time. The second explores what happens to texts and ideas when they are transmitted from one culture language or historical moment to another. The third shows how sources illuminate wider cultural discourses. The volume attests to the flexibility of source work for early medieval English literature and argues for increased access to the tools that make such work possible.
Visible English
Graphic Culture, Scribal Practice, and Identity, c. 700-c. 1550
Visible English recovers for the first time the experience of reading and writing the English language in the medieval period through the perspectives of littera pedagogy the basis of medieval learning and teaching of literate skills in Latin. Littera is at the heart of the set of theories and practices that constitute the ‘graphic culture’ of the book’s title. The book shows for the first time that littera pedagogy was an ‘us and them’ discourse that functioned as a vehicle for identity formation. Using littera pedagogy as a framework for understanding the medieval English-language corpus from the point of view of the readers and writers who produced it Visible English offers new insights on experiences of writing and reading English in communities ranging from those first in contact with Latin literacy to those where print was an alternative to manuscript. Discussing a broad range of materials from so-called ‘pen-trials’ and graffiti to key literary manuscripts Visible English provides new perspectives on the ways that the alphabet was understood on genres such as alphabet poems riddles and scribal signatures and on the different ways in which scribes copied Old and Middle English texts. It argues that the graphic culture underpinned and transmitted by littera pedagogy provided frameworks for the development and understanding of English-language literacy practices and new ways of experiencing social belonging and difference. To be literate in English it proposes was to inhabit identities marked by Anglophone literate practices.
Ideas of the World in Early Medieval English Literature
Across three thematically-linked sections this volume charts the development of competing geographical national and imperial identities and communities in early medieval England. Literary works in Old English and Latin are considered alongside theological and historical texts from a range of disciplinary perspectives. Accounts of travel foreign contacts conversion migration landscape nation empire and conquest are set within the continual flow of people and ideas from East to West from continent to island and back across the period. The fifteen contributors investigate how the early medieval English positioned themselves spatially and temporally in relation to their insular neighbours and other peoples and cultures. Several chapters explore the impact of Greek and Latin learning on Old English literature while others extend the discussion beyond the parameters of Europe to consider connections with Asia and the Far East. Together these essays reflect ideas of inclusivity and exclusivity connectivity and apartness multiculturalism and insularity that shaped pre-Conquest England.
Medieval Stories and Storytelling
Multimedia and Multi-Temporal Perspectives
The shaping and sharing of narrative has always been key to the negotiation and recreation of reality for individuals and cultural groups. Some stories indeed seem to possess a life of their own: claiming a peculiar agency and taking on distinct voices which speak across time and space. How for example do objects manuscripts and other artefacts communicate alternative or complementary narratives that transcend textual and linguistic boundaries? How are stories created reshaped and re-experienced and how do these shifting contexts and media change meaning?
This volume of essays explores these questions about meaning and identity in a range of ways. As a collection it demonstrates the importance of interdisciplinary and context-focused enquiry when approaching key issues of activity and identity in the medieval period. Ultimately the process of making meaning through shaping narrative is shown to be as vital and varied in the medieval world as it is today.
With a wide range of different disciplinary approaches from leading scholars in their respective fields chapters include considerations of art architecture metalwork linguistics and literature. Alongside examinations of medieval cultural productions are explorations of the representation and adaptation of medieval storytelling in graphic novels classroom teaching and computer gaming. This volume thus offers an interdisciplinary exploration of how stories from across the medieval world were shaped transformed and transmitted.
Meanings of Water in Early Medieval England
Water is both a practical and symbolic element. Whether a drop blessed by saintly relics or a river flowing to the sea water formed part of the natural landscapes religious lives cultural expressions and physical needs of medieval women and men.
This volume adopts an interdisciplinary perspective to enlarge our understanding of the overlapping qualities of water in early England (c. 400 – c. 1100). Scholars from the fields of archaeology history literature religion and art history come together to approach water and its diverse cultural manifestations in the early Middle Ages. Individual essays include investigations of the agency of water and its inhabitants in Old English and Latin literature divine and demonic waters littoral landscapes of church archaeology and ritual visual and aural properties of water and human passage through water. As a whole the volume addresses how water in the environment functioned on multiple levels allowing us to examine the early medieval intersections between the earthly and heavenly the physical and conceptual and the material and textual within a single element.
Settlements and Strongholds in Early Medieval England
Texts, Landscapes, and Material Culture
In recent years numerous advances in archaeological and historical studies have enhanced our understanding of the form and function of settlements and strongholds in the landscapes of early medieval England. Until now this groundbreaking work has not been matched in studies of early English literature where no concerted effort has been made to investigate how these findings can inform our understanding of their representation in texts - and vice versa.
This study shows that literary works offer considerable insight into the ways their authors readers and other audiences thought and felt about the constructed places and spaces in which they lived their lives. Covering a broad range of evidence from the end of Roman rule to the Conquest it is the first study of its kind to offer an interdisciplinary account of the relationship between the built environment as it appears in the material record and in a range of textual productions.
Settlements and Strongholds interrogates correlations and disjunctions between the stories found in the soil and in written works of various kinds focusing on vernacular texts and Latin works that informed their development. It argues for a deeper appreciation of the relationship between imaginative works and the material contexts in which they were created revealing the parallel development of ideas and concepts that were fundamental in shaping early medieval England.
Teaching and Learning in Medieval Europe
Essays in Honour of Gernot R. Wieland
Over the span of his career Gernot R. Wieland has been actively engaged in the contribution and promotion of the study of medieval literature particularly in Anglo-Latin and Old English. From his early work on glosses in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts to his later editorial work for The Journal of Medieval Latin Wieland has provided the field with diverse diligent and creative scholarship. The contributors of this volume pay tribute to the significance of Wieland’s teaching and learning in the literature of medieval Europe by presenting him with twelve essays on varied aspects of the subject.
The first section of the volume aims to honour Wieland’s contributions to the study of medieval glossing. It deals with the history of glossing from early medieval Latin literature to late Middle English grammatical texts as well as the early interpretative history of Walter of Châtillon’s Alexandreis and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britannie. The following section corresponds with Wieland’s interest in Anglo-Saxon literature with essays on the bilingual letters of Ælfric of Eynsham the poetry of Alcuin of York and the Old English Hexateuch. The second half of the volume which examines elements of Latin literature from the eleventh to the fourteenth century is divided into two sections containing essays that well represent Wieland’s diverse philological and literary interests in medieval Latin. The third section of the volume on the texts and contexts of Latin literature presents essays on the books of Abbot Maiolus of Cluny on scholastic virtues of good teaching and on Walter Map’s Dissuasio Valerii. The final section on the texts and manuscripts of Latin literature provides editions of and commentaries on a Latin-Greek phrase-book a treatise on the firmament of Genesis 1:6.
With these contributions this volume honours the research interests of a great teacher and learner of the Middle Ages: Gernot Weiland.
Verbal and Visual Communication in Early English Texts
When reading a text our understanding of its meaning is influenced by the visual form and material features of the page. The chapters in this volume investigate how visual and material features of early English books documents and other artefacts support - or potentially contradict - the linguistic features in communicating the message. In addition to investigating how such communication varies between different media and genres our contributors propose novel methods for analysing these features including new digital applications. They map the use of visual and material features - such as layout design or choice of script/typeface - against linguistic features - such as code-switching lexical variation or textual labels - to consider how these choices reflect the communicative purposes of the text for example guiding readers to navigate the text in a certain way or persuading them to arrive at a certain interpretation. The chapters explore texts from the medieval and the early modern periods including saints’ lives medical treatises dictionaries personal letters and inscriptions on objects. The thematic threads running through the volume serve to integrate book studies with discourse linguistics the medieval with the early modern manuscript with print and the verbal with the visual.
Conceptualizing the Enemy in Early Northwest Europe
Metaphors of Conflict and Alterity in Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, and Early Irish Poetry
Despite the prominence of conflicts in all mythological and heroic literature perceptions of these conflicts and their participants are shaped by different cultural influences. Socio-economic political and religious factors all influence how conflict is perceived and depicted in literary form. This volume provides the first comparative analysis to explore conceptions of conflict and otherness in the literary and cultural contexts of the early North Sea world by investigating the use of metaphor in Old English Old Norse and Early Irish poetry. Applying Conceptual Metaphor Theory together with literary and anthropological analysis the study examines metaphors of conflict and alterity in a range of (pseudo-)mythological heroic and occasional poetry including Beowulf Old Norse skaldic and eddic verse and poems from the celebrated ‘Ulster Cycle’. This unique approach not only sheds new light on a wide spectrum of metaphorical techniques but also draws important conclusions concerning the common cultural heritage behind these three poetic corpora.
Sensory Perception in the Medieval West
What was it like to experience the medieval world through one’s senses? Can we access those past sensory experiences and use our senses to engage with the medieval world? How do texts objects spaces manuscripts and language itself explore define exploit and control the senses of those who engage with them?
This collection of essays seeks to explore these challenging questions. To do so is inevitably to take an interdisciplinary and context-focused approach. As a whole this book develops understanding of how different fields speak to one another when they are focused on human experiences whether of those who used our sources in the medieval period or of those who seek to understand and to teach those sources today.
Articles by leading researchers in their respective fields examine topics including: Old English terminology for the senses effects of the digitisation of manuscripts on scholarship Anglo-Saxon explorations of non-human senses scribal sensory engagement with poetry the control of sound in medieval drama bird sounds and their implications for Anglo-Saxon sensory perception how goldwork controls the viewing gaze legalised sensory impairment and the exploitation of the senses by poetry architecture and cult objects.