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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’.
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.
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.
Anglo-Latin and its Heritage
Essays in Honour of A.G. Rigg on his 64th Birthday
For some 40 years A.G. Rigg has been defining the field of later Anglo-Latin literary scholarship a task culminating in his History of Anglo-Latin Literature 1066-1422. Anglo-Latin and its Heritage is a collection of thirteen essays by his colleagues and students past and present which pays tribute to him both by exploring the field he has defined and by making forays into its antecedents and descendants. The first section “Roots and Debts” includes essays on the migration of classical and late antique motifs and patterns of thought into early medieval Latin and concludes with an essay which shows how a 12th-century writer reached back into that earlier period for stylistic models. The central section of the book “Anglo-Latin Literature 1066-1422” concentrates on Anglo-Latin writers of the period most studied by Rigg himself and the seven essays in this section include analyses of poetic style and borrowing; discussions of patterns of reading; and essays which read Anglo-Latin works through their specific historical and cultural contexts. Two of the essays are elegant translations of significant Anglo-Latin poetic works. The final section of the book “Influence and Survival” offers three essays which consider Anglo-Latin literature in the late medieval and post-medieval world from an edition of a Latin source for a late Middle English saint’s life; through an account of the migration of Latin texts into the royal libraries of Henry VIII; to the concluding essay which explores a “mechanical” means of producing perfect Latin hexameter. A complete bibliography of Rigg’s works closes the volume. The chronological and methodological range of the essays in this collection is offered as a fitting tribute to one of Anglo-Latin’s most learned and indefatigable scholars.