bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Anglo-Saxon carpentry
Authors: Hewett Cecil A.
Published: September 2008

During the last century there were vigorous arguments between architectural historians about whether any buildings had survived from before the Norman Conquest. Although as early as 1817 Thomas Rickman had given reasoned proof that at least a few stone buildings had survived, many writers followed John Henry Parker in maintaining that the Anglo-Saxons built only in wood and that all their buildings had vanished. But by the end of the century careful study had established over a hundred stone churches with features which could be claimed as Anglo-Saxon, and Baldwin Brown listed 182 in the first edition of his masterly treatise in 1903 and 238 in the second edition of 1925. In spite of more than a century's study of these churches, it still remains difficult to give precise dates to more than a few; in the great majority of cases it can be asserted only that they were built before the Norman Conquest and in some others only that their builders had not yet adopted the Norman style.
Self-contained units in composite manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon period
Authors: Robinson P. R.
Published: September 2008

Many medieval manuscripts are composite volumes, made up of a number of self-contained units which elsewhere I have called ‘booklets’. Such a unit originated as a small but structurally independent production containing a single work or a number of short works. Two of the earliest surviving examples, dating from the late eighth century, were produced on the continent. Each is a single gathering now bound with other gatherings into a codex: Merseburg, Stiftsbibliothek 105, fols. 85–105, containing Alcuin's Vita S. Vedasti and some of his homilies, and St Gall, Stiftsbibliothek 567, pp. 135–53, containing aVita S. Lucii. There is a fold in the centre of every page of both these quires, made after the text had been copied and not present in the other quires with which they are now bound. In both instances the completed quire was folded so that the verso of its last leaf became the outer pages or ‘cover’ of the resulting booklet. This ‘cover‘ is more soiled than the other pages in the quire, suggesting that the booklet once circulated independently of the other quires in the manuscript into which it is bound.
Manuscripts containing English decoration 871–1066, catalogued and illustrated: a review
Authors: Brownrigg Linda L.
Published: September 2008

In the period from Alfred's reign to the Norman Conquest scribes and artists in southern England once more achieved a high standard in bookmaking, comparable to the brilliant tradition which had been established in both the north and the south in the eighth century. Some codices survive which are rough in execution, written on poorly prepared membrane by unskilled hands, but the majority – by no means chiefly service books produced for ecclesiastical and royal patrons – demonstrate that by the end of the tenth century a large number of scribes understood the techniques of careful preparation of membranes and inks, had mastered the letter-forms of two scripts, Caroline minuscule and Anglo-Saxon square minuscule, and were disciplined to follow consistently a hierarchy of scripts for the openings of texts and major divisions, chapter titles, incipits and explicits. What remains must be only a fragment of the production of Benedictine monks and nuns, secular clerks and lay scribes. But however incomplete and unbalanced the evidence, the over-all level of accomplishment cannot be doubted.
‘Weapons’ in Beowulf: an analysis of the nominal compounds and an evaluation of the poet's use of them
Authors: Brady Caroline
Published: September 2008

The nominal compound and the correlative genitive combination occupy a major position in the vocabulary of Old Germanic poetry; a poet composing in any of the several languages was free to draw upon the basic stock of Primitive Germanic or West Germanic compounds or, because then as now the Germanic languages were compounding languages, to create his own compounds according to his need or skill. But, despite all the volumes that have been written about the morphology, relationships and classification of the compounds, both in Common Germanic and in the several languages, we still do not fully comprehend the nature, the semantic types, the full meanings of individual compounds or, above all, the uses to which the various poets put their compounds for informative and aesthetic purposes.
Cain's monstrous progeny in Beowulf: part I, Noachic tradition
Authors: Mellinkoff Ruth
Published: September 2008

One of the most distinctive features of Beowulf is the presentation of Grendel and his mother as members of Cain's monstrous progeny. What knowledge of a race (or races) of giants and monsters descended from Cain, and of their survival after the Flood, is the poet likely to have had? I take up the first part of this question in this article and the second part in an article to be published later in Anglo-Saxon England.
Wynflæd's wardrobe
Authors: Owen Gale R.
Published: September 2008

An Old English document, composed probably in the middle of the tenth century and extant in a not very careful, mutilated, eleventh-century copy, London, British Library, Cotton Charter, VIII, 38, lists the bequests of a woman named Wynflæd. The bequests of clothing in this will are particularly interesting. Anglo-Saxon testaments do not itemize elaborate garments as do some English wills of the later Middle Ages; they refer to clothing only rarely, and then sometimes in general terms. Wynflæd's will is unusual in mentioning several different items of clothing and in specifying them more precisely. Descriptive references to non-military clothing are uncommon in Old English texts generally. Although many garment-names are documented, some which occur only in glossaries or translations from Latin may never have been in common use in England and some words are of uncertain meaning. In most cases the sex of the wearer of a named garment and the relative value of the garment are unknown. The garment-names in Wynflæd's will, by contrast, refer to items of clothing which were certainly worn by women at a known date and were valuable enough to be bequeathed.
Bibliography for 1978
Authors: Berkhout Carl T. , Biddle Martin , Brown T. J. , Clayton Peter A. , Keynes Simon
Published: September 2008

This bibliography is meant to include all books, articles and significant reviews published in any branch of Anglo-Saxon studies during 1978. It excludes reprints unless they contain new material. It will be continued annually. The year of publication of a book or article is 1978 unless otherwise stated.
Identifiable books from the pre-Conquest library of Malmesbury Abbey
Authors: Thomson Rodney
Published: September 2008

The Benedictine abbey at Malmesbury in Wiltshire was one of that select group of English houses which could trace its history back to the golden age epitomized and chronicled by Bede. To Bede's older contemporary Aldhelm (ob. c.709) belongs most of the credit for setting the recently founded community on its feet and for making it a by-word throughout the British Isles for the pursuit of divine and secular learning.2During his abbacy Malmesbury eclipsed the reputations of the Irish schools and of Hadrian's Canterbury. At only one other point in its long history did the abbey attain a comparable reputation for learning, when it housed the monk William (c.1095–1143), whose career, intellectual interests and writings were consciously modelled upon the examples of Bede and Aldhelm.
Hrothgar's ‘sermon’ in Beowulf as parental wisdom
Authors: Hansen Elaine Tuttle
Published: September 2008

Until fairly recently modern commentators seem to have agreed that the gnomic sayings in Beowulf carry us away from the main current of the poem into the ‘doldrums of didacticism’. Now, however, at least two critics have suggested that these apparently trite old saws are in fact central to the epic and that they reflect a way of thinking about the aims and methods of literary composition that we no longer share. Instead of merely cataloguing their appearances, as earlier readers had done, Robert B. Burlin has persuasively shown us how the Beowulf poet uses at least some of the gnomic sayings effectively and skilfully to ‘give both shape and scope to his utterance…relating the actuality of his fiction to familiar universals in the appreciation of which his audience can easily concur’. Burlin himself does not set out to question the prevailing assumption that the gnomic sayings are ‘not in the same artistic league with the obliquity of the “digressions”’, but T. A. Shippey has gone on to point out that ‘they have power and beauty in their own right’. He also argues that the Beowulf poet was not especially original in his use of the gnomic sayings but in fact depended on their traditional function: ‘the poet was rightly but only exploiting…qualities incomprehensible to those who see them as linguistic phenomena devoid of social content’. Building on his own earlier work and on Burlin's analysis, Shippey suggests that the maxims in Beowulf reflect cultural ideals and that ‘they bind the characters, the poet, and the audience together in common assumptions too precious to be threatened, establishing what Professor Burlin calls “societal interdependence”, a theme very close to the heart of the poem’.
Byrhtferth of Ramsey and the early sections of theHistoria Regumattributed to Symeon of Durham
Authors: Lapidge Michael
Published: September 2008

It has long been recognized that the early sections of the so-calledHistoria Regum, a work attributed to Symeon of Durham(ob. c.1130) and preserved uniquely in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 139 (writtenc. 1164 at Sawley, Lancashire) at 5 3v–130v, originally constituted a separate work, probably composed in the pre-Conquest period and subsequently incorporated into theHistoria Regum. Thomas Arnold, who edited theHistoria Regumfor the Rolls Series in 1885, was persuaded ‘that the more attentively any experienced person may study the curious document between pages 14 and 94 [of the edition], the more firmly will he be convinced that it is a composition of the tenth…century’. His conclusions were based on the Latin style of the work, which he regarded as ‘pretentious and bombastical on the one hand, obscure and ineffectual on the other’ and which affiliated the work, in his opinion, with other Anglo-Latin works of the tenth century. Because he believed that certain passages in the work betrayed an origin in the congregation of St Cuthbert (then at Chester-le-Street), Arnold referred to the compiler of the early sections of theHistoria Regumas the ‘Cuthbertine’. His conclusions appear to have been accepted by later historians; for example, W. H. Stevenson (who referred to the early sections of the work as SD 1) wrote as follows: ‘we may readily grant that SD 1 was an older compilation, but the evidence that it was drawn up in the tenth century is, in the absence of a MS of that period, necessarily hypothetical’. No such manuscript has yet come to light, but in recent times Arnold's postulation of a tenth-century origin for the early sections has been accurately and comprehensively reinvestigated by Peter Hunter Blair. By a series of detailed stylistic arguments Hunter Blair has been able to show that the first five sections of theHistoria Regum(occupying pp. 3–91 of Arnold's edition) may reasonably be regarded as the work of oneauthor. These five sections are as follows: (1) Kentish legends, particularly pertaining to the Kentish martyrs Æthelberht and Æthelred (pp. 3–13); (2) lists of Northumbrian kings (pp. 13–15); (3)material derived from Bede, particularly theHistoria Abbatum(pp. 15–30); (4) a chronicle from 732 to 802 (pp. 30–68); (5) a chronicle from 849 to 887, based mainly on Asser (pp. 69–91). Hunter Blair also recognized that two passages had been interpolated at a later date into the material of these first five sections: one concerning the relics of Acca of Hexham (pp. 32–8), the other concerning those of Alchmund, also a bishop of Hexham (pp. 47–50); he reasonably suggested that these interpolations were added at Hexham in the early twelfth century. As to the date of compilation of the five early sections Hunter Blair was able to affirm, albeit cautiously, Arnold's suggestion of a tenth-century date, but he concluded that ‘in the end judgement will perhaps rest upon opinions about [their] latinity’.
Sprouston, Roxburghshire: an Anglo-Saxon settlement discovered by air reconnaissance
Authors: St Joseph J. K. S.
Published: September 2008

Crop-marks revealing an archaeological site at Sprouston (NT 758362), Roxburghshire, the subject of this paper, were observed and photographed from the air on 22 July 1964, but the character of the site did not become evident until further observations were made in August 1970. In the flying programmes of the Committee for Aerial Photography of the University of Cambridge Sprouston has been photographed from the air on fourteen subsequent occasions. The vertical and oblique photographs, III in all, in the University Collection, together with oblique photographs taken during the last few years by staff of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments for Scotland, are the sole source of information about the site. No trace of any of the features to be described is ordinarily visible on the surface, as is only too apparent from walking over the ground.
Histories and surveys of Old English literature: a chronological review
Authors: Calder Daniel G.
Published: September 2008

Literary history emerges when critical readers in sufficient number move beyond primary recognition of individual texts into a secondary awareness of a scheme, a sense of the connections that exist between these texts.1 Literary history considers the development of a whole body of literature, tracing multifarious influences and innovations through time. In the course of Anglo-Saxon studies the slow and sporadic reappearance of the literary remains resulted in the late nourishing of a schematic or historical overview. As Wellek reminds us, ‘the antiquarian study of Anglo-Saxon remained…outside the main tendency towards literary history’2 that occurred in late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century England. So, too, the special quality of Old English poetry itself contributed to the laggard creation of a history. It is difficult to map the path of a literature in which all dating is only good guessing and in which a tenaciously conservative oral—formulaic style makes attempts at suggesting influence hazardous.
Bibliography for 1980
Authors: Berkhout Carl T. , Biddle Martin , Brown T. J. , Clayton Peter A. , Coutts C. R. E. , Keynes Simon
Published: September 2008

This bibliography is meant to include all books, articles and significant reviews published in any branch of Anglo-Saxon studies during 1980. It excludes reprints unless they contain new material. It will be continued annually. The year of publication of a book or article is 1980 unless otherwise stated. There is a separate section for onomastic studies for the first time. The arrangement and the pages on which the sections begin are as follows:
The study of Latin grammar in eighth-century Southumbria
Authors: Law Vivien
Published: September 2008

Insular Latinity – its origins, characteristics, affiliations and dissemination – has attracted much attention in the last decade. One area which has benefited from this increased interest is the investigation of the Latin grammars written by Insular scholars: consider, for example, the editions of Insular grammatical writings recently published in the Corpus Christianorum Series Latina. But it is noteworthy that the Anglo-Latin grammarians have profited far less from this upsurge in interest than their Irish counterparts. Although Anglo-Latin as well as Hiberno-Latin texts have been among those recently edited, and have been the subject of several specialized studies, they have failed to excite scholarly attention to the same extent as the Irish works. Their origin, history, relationship and cultural context have not yet been satisfactorily established. Studies such as the series of articles by Louis Holtz, tracing the evolution of the study of grammar in Ireland and the relationship of the surviving texts to one another, are lacking for the Anglo-Latin grammarians. Yet the unknown factors in early England are scarcely fewer. To take one example, the fundamental problem of the rôle of the Irish in the creation of an Anglo-Latin grammatical tradition has hardly been touched upon. Indeed, that the Anglo-Saxons can even be credited with a grammatical tradition of their own has been questioned. Too often, the few surviving Anglo-Latin grammars are held up as an isolated phenomenon and contrasted with the prolific outpourings of a diligent host of Irishanonymi. It is the purpose of this article to investigate the evidence for the study of Latin grammar in England south of the Humber up to the time of its best-known manifestations, the grammars of Tatwine and Boniface, in the early eighth century.
Bald'sLeechbook: its sources and their use in its compilation
Authors: Cameron M. L.
Published: September 2008

Among the surviving medical writings in Old English, Bald'sLeechbookholds a deservedly important place. It is preserved uniquely in London, British Library, Royal 12. D. xvii, a manuscript which may be dated on palaeographical grounds to the mid-tenth century (s. xmed), and which may arguably be attributed to a scriptorium at Winchester.1Linguistic evidence suggests that this manuscript is in turn a copy of a manuscript written perhaps half a century earlier. Although it is written by one scribe throughout, the manuscript contains three distinct books. A metrical colophon at the end of the second book contains the hexameter ‘Bald habet hunc librum Cild quem conscribere iussit’. Neither Bald nor Cild can be identified, and the ambiguity ofconscriberein medieval Latin makes it difficult to determine whether Bald ordered Cild to compile the book or simply to transcribe it. (Because of this ambiguity, I shall refer to the person responsible as the ‘compiler’.) In any case, it is clear that the first two books form a distinct unit, and it is these two books that are customarily described as Bald'sLeechbook2(a practice I shall follow in the present essay). The third book is a collection of medical recipes, of lesser scholarly import, entirely separate from and unrelated to Bald'sLeechbook; it will not be discussed further here.
Bibliography for 1982
Authors: Berthout Carl T. , Biddle Martin , Blackburn Mark , Brown T.J. , Coutts C.R.E. , Keynes Simon
Published: September 2008

This bibliography is meant to include all books, articles and significant reviews published in any branch of Anglo-Saxon studies during 1982. It excludes reprints unless they contain new material. It will be continued annually. The year of publication of a book or article is 1982 unless otherwise stated.
The nature of Christianity in Beowulf
Authors: Irving Edward B.
Published: September 2008

Readers of Beowulf are now in apparent agreement that the frequent Christian references in the poem fit easily and naturally into their contexts and give every sign of being simply an unconscious part of the normal language and thought of the poet. We must make the customary proviso, to be sure, that by ‘poet’ we have in mind the final reteller of some older pre-Christian story or stories now beyond recovery. The old Monkish Interpolator who used to be hauled out and execrated by scholars for smearing his despicable Christian Colouring like graffiti over a noble pagan monument has vanished like the ghost he always was. He has, however, now been replaced by equally busy Monkish Extrapolators working tirelessly to insert large sections of the Patrologia Latina somewhere between the lines of Beowulf. In doing so, they take advantage of the undeniable fact that the early Middle Ages provided an ample supply of patristic material, to argue (I think indefensibly) that it must have been put to use – that no vernacular poet could have fought off the urge to wrap any plain tale he had to tell in rich folds of typology, allegory and deeper meanings.
The state of the Beowulf manuscript 1882—1983
Authors: Kiernan Kevin S.
Published: September 2008

There is a lingering notion among Beowulf scholars, despite Chauncey Tinker's effort to dispel it eighty years ago, that the Beowulf manuscript is slowly but inexorably crumbling away in its modern home in the British Library. The gloomy news for a general audience is that the manuscript, ‘charred at the edges by the fire’ that decimated the Cotton Library in 1731, ‘continues to deteriorate year by year’. A scholarly audience gets the same impression from Norman Davis, who gives us a reproduction of an old transliteration beside new photographs of the manuscript. He says, ‘Zupitza's transliteration … has permanent value as a record of what he could see in the manuscript in 1880–2’, a comment that certainly implies that Zupitza was able to see more in the manuscript a century ago than we can see today. In fact, with the aid of modern artificial lighting, notably fibre-optic and ultra-violet light, we can see far more in the manuscript today than Zupitza was able to see in 1882.
Hidden glosses in manuscripts of Old English poetry
Authors: Bammesberger Alfred
Published: September 2008

The editorial history of Old English poetry has known two extremes in its attitude to the transmitted manuscript readings. Whereas Franciscus Junius in his Caedmonis Monachi Paraphrasis Poetic a Genesios ac Praecipuarum Sacrae Paginae Historiarum, abhinc annos M.LXX. Anglo-Saxonice Conscripta & nunc Primum Edita (Amsterdam, 1655) aimed essentially at reflecting the readings of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11, and was by and large successful in transcribing what the manuscript offered, by the middle of the nineteenth century at the latest an entirely different approach had become predominant. By then it had become clear that our manuscripts are by no means authors' originals; in the course of transmission numerous errors have crept into them. Since it was undeniable that in the copying process errors had occurred it was considered imperative to try to restore the original versions.
The Maaseik embroideries
Authors: Budny Mildred , Tweddle Dominic
Published: September 2008

Among the relics in the treasury of the church of St Catherine at Maaseik in Limburg, Belgium, there are some luxurious embroideries which form part of the so-calledcasula(probably ‘chasuble’) of Sts Harlindis and Relindis (pls. I–VI). It was preserved throughout the Middle Ages at the abbey church of Aldeneik (which these sister-saints founded in the early eighth century) and was moved to nearby Maaseik in 1571. Although traditionally regarded as the handiwork of Harlindis and Relindis themselves, the embroideries cannot date from as early as their time, and they must have been made in Anglo-Saxon England. Indeed, they represent the earliest surviving examples of the highly prized English art of embroidery which became famous later in the Middle Ages asopus anglicanum.
From ‘palace’ to ‘town’: Northampton and urban origins
Authors: Williams John H.
Published: September 2008

In the second half of the twelfth century Northampton was one of the largest and wealthiest towns in all England. This represented, however, only a transient phase, since by the early part of the fourteenth century the town had assumed a more modest position. As a result of a series of disastrous fires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, little now survives to remind us of Northampton's former medieval glories, and its earlier development has been until recently but dimly perceived. Over the last decade, however, archaeological and other research has facilitated the identification of elements of continuity in the upper Nene basin (in which Northampton lies) stretching back several thousand years. In particular it is now possible to demonstrate that the late Saxon borough emerged as the culmination of a gradual evolutionary process throughout the Anglo-Saxon period rather than as the result of a single dramatic act of foundation. This has important implications for ideas relating to the re-emergence of towns in the ninth and tenth centuries and is particularly significant in that Northampton has no obvious major Romano-British antecedent.
A friwif locbore revisited
Authors: Fell Christine
Published: September 2008

Chapter 73 of the laws ‘þe Æðelbirht cyning asette on Agustinus dæge’ reads ‘Gif friwif locbore leswæs hwæt gedeþ, xxx sell' gebete.’ The sole manuscript evidence for the laws of Æthelberht is in the early-twelfth-century Textus Roffensis; since this is so late, the manuscript word division is not necessarily significant. For what it is worth, two of the three crucial words are written locbore and les wæs, but it is not absolutely clear whether friwif is intended as one word or two. The elements are divided by the smallest of spaces. Friwif and locbore do not occur elsewhere in the laws; les wæs occurs also at Æthelberht, ch. 3, written lyswæs. Comparatively recent texts and translations can be found in editions of the Anglo-Saxon laws by Thorpe, Liebermann and Attenborough, and, translation only, in Dorothy Whitelock's English Historical Documents (probably the most widely used and certainly the most readily accessible of the four). The earliest of these editors, Thorpe, avoids the difficulties by leaving certain problematical words in the original: ‘If a free-woman loc-bore commit any leswe let her make a bot of xxx shillings.’ Liebermann offers: ‘Wenn eine Freie, eine Lockenträgerin, etwas Unzüchtiges thut, büsse [ihr Schander ihrem Vormunde] 30 Schll’, where, as Attenborough subsequently and charmingly explains, ‘Liebermann understands as the subject of gebete not the woman, but the man with whom she misconducts herself.’ Attenborough's own translation agrees grammatically with Thorpe's: ‘If a freeborn woman, with long hair, misconducts herself, she shall pay 30 shillings as compensation.’ Whitelock has a minor variant: ‘If a freewoman, with long hair, commits any misconduct, she is to pay 30 shillings compensation.’
Feasts of the Virgin in the liturgy of the Anglo-Saxon church
Authors: Clayton Mary
Published: September 2008

By the end of the Anglo-Saxon period six feasts of the Virgin were celebrated in England; this large number represents an honour granted to no other saint. The feasts in question – the Purification, Annunciation, Assumption, Nativity, Presentation in the Temple and Conception – did not originate in England, however. Before turning to the English evidence, therefore, it is necessary to consider the background of Marian feasts at Rome and elsewhere in the context of the development of ritual from the seventh century to the eleventh.
Variant versions of Old English medical remedies and the compilation of Bald'sLeechbook
Authors: Meaney Audrey L.
Published: September 2008

Over a hundred years ago, T. O. Cockayne published hisLeechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcraft of Early England, in which he edited the texts of all the medical writings in Old English he could find. It is massive in its scope, and no modern scholar is ever likely to produce its equal. Yet we, metaphorically standing on Cockaynes's shoulders, and equipped with aids provided by more recent research, are able to examine more closely than he could some of the special features of the field which he revealed to us. Its English substrata have been comparatively neglected, however, and therefore I propose in this paper to examine closely the relationships of the hundred or so medical remedies in Old English which have been preserved – usually in different manuscripts – in two or three versions so close that it is obvious, even on a superficial view, that they either derive from the same English original, or are copied the one from the other. These remedies usually begin by specifying the ailment for which they are recommended, and then go on to set out the ingredients and method of making the appropriate herbal concoction. Nearly all the repeated remedies are found at least once in theLeechbookmanuscript, now London, British Library, Royal 12. D. xvii, and so I will begin by describing it, and use it as the basis of the argument. Then I will describe briefly in turn the other manuscripts in which the remedies are found, discussing as I proceed those with minor parallels to Bald'sLeechbook; and then, separately and in detail, the important duplications in the two final manuscripts under consideration. It may thereafter be possible to draw some conclusions about the method of compilation of Bald'sLeechbook.
Bede the grammarian and the scope of grammatical studies in eighth-century Northumbria
Authors: Irvine Martin
Published: September 2008

The last works which Bede lists in the catalogue of writings at the end of the Historia Ecclesiastica are his grammatical treatises, and he groups them together, indicating a unity of genre or function:

Librum de ofthographia alphabeti ordine distinctum.
A third Old English translation of part of Gregory's Dialogues, this time embedded in the Rule of Chrodegang
Authors: Langefeld Brigitte
Published: September 2008

Gregory's Dialogues are a hitherto unnoticed source of the final chapter of the enlarged version of the Rule of Chrodegang of Metz. The chapter in question, no. 84 or 86 depending on the recension of the Latin text, is preserved in the following manuscripts (the letters in brackets are the sigla used for these manuscripts throughout this article):

Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 1535 (P), 113V–149V. Second quarter of the ninth century, possibly written at Fécamp. Latin text only, 86 chapters.
The traditional narrator and the ‘I heard’ formulas in Old English poetry
Authors: Parks Ward
Published: September 2008

In the process of literary interpretation no critic can afford to overlook the rôle of the poetic narrator. While poetic and narrative statements (as it is commonly argued) designate their meaning largely in accordance with the conventions of language and literary discourse, linguistic criteria alone cannot determine the attitude of the speaker towards what he says; and this attitude constitutes a crucial element in the meaning of the statement as a speech act or utterance. Indeed, as users of language, all of us habitually include considerations of speaker intentions in our standard operations of interpreting as well as producing discourse. Can the speaker be trusted? Does he speak ironically or sincerely? Is he trying to achieve some aim in relation to the hearer other than that which his act of communication ostensibly purports? Entailed in any act of communication, this dimension of interplay between speaker and statement is inevitably involved in literary discourse as well, since obviously we do not always take literary statements at face value. One of the primary tasks confronting the literary critic, then, in Old English poetry or any other body of work, lies in determining the character of the narrator and the parameters of his functioning.
The metre of Genesis B
Authors: Lewis David J. G.
Published: September 2008

Genesis B has been almost completely ignored in studies of Old English prosody, most notably by the modern ‘schools’ of Alan Bliss and John C. Pope. Bliss regarded the work, a 617-line interpolation in the Old English Genesis, as ‘untrustworthy’ for the purpose of metrical examination, while Pope excluded it from his examination of Old English hypermetric verse ‘because it is translated from Old Saxon, and retains some of the peculiarities of the latter’. E. G. Stanley expressed similar doubts: ‘Old Saxon verse and the verse of Genesis B (which appears to be an Anglo-Saxon offshoot of it) are only with difficulty to be accommodated within any4 set of rules derived from the metrical practice of the vast majority of the Anglo-Saxon poets’. In his edition of the poem Timmer believed that a metrical comparison of lines 790–817a and the corresponding lines of the Old Saxon Genesis corroborated his view that the interpolation was the work of a continental Saxon who had transliterated the original Old English with minor adjustments, a view supported by a more recent syntactic study.
An Anglo-Saxon fragment of Justinus'sEpitome
Authors: Crick Julia
Published: September 2008

In 1910, Samuel Brandt published a description and photograph of a fragment of Justinus'sEpitomeof theHistoriae Philippicaeof Pompeius Trogus. The leaf, whose present location is unknown, belonged at that time to the collection of Ernst Fischer at Weinheim. Fischer dated its script, an Anglo-Saxon minuscule, to about AD 800, which, as Brandt observed, would mean that it antedated the earliest known manuscripts of the text, which are ninth-century. Although E. A. Lowe indicated in hisCodices Latini Antiquioresthat the fragment was lost, it has continued to attract scholarly attention. Professor Bernhard Bischoff suggested that the fragment could be identified with a copy of Justinus listed among the books of Gerward, palace librarian of Louis the Pious. This implied connection with the Carolingian court, taken together with Alcuin's naming of Justinus's work among the books described in the poem on York and his later association with the Carolingian court, has raised the possibility of an English origin for the Weinheim manuscript and therefore also for the earliest known branch of the text. As L.D. Reynolds remarked, ‘This fragment has a significance quite out of keeping with its size.’
Two pre-Conquest manuscripts from Glastonbury Abbey
Authors: Carley James P.
Published: September 2008

The earliest identified surviving manuscripts from Glastonbury Abbey date from the ninth and tenth centuries, but there are reliable post-Conquest traditions claiming that valuable books were found at the monastery as early as the reign of Ine, king of the West Saxons (688–726). By the tenth century at the latest there are reports of an ‘Irish school’ at Glastonbury, famous for its learning and books, and St Dunstan's earliest biographer, the anonymous. B., relates that Dunstan himself studied with the Irish at Glastonbury. During Dunstan's abbacy (940–56) – that is, at the period when most historians would place the beginnings of the English tenth-century reform movement – there was a general revival at Glastonbury which included a concerted policy of book acquisition and the establishment of a productive scriptorium. Not surprisingly, Dunstan's abbacy was viewed by the community ever afterwards as one of the most glorious periods in the early history of the monastery, especially since the later Anglo-Saxon abbots showed a marked falling off in devotion and loyalty to the intellectual inheritance of their monastery. Æthelweard and Æthelnoth, the last two Anglo-Saxon abbots, were especially reprehensible, and confiscated lands and ornaments for the benefit of their own kin. Nor did the situation improve immediately after the Conquest: the first Norman abbot, Thurstan, actually had to call in soldiers to quell his unruly monks. In spite of these disruptions, a fine collection of pre-Conquest books seems to have survived more or less intact into the twelfth century; when the seasoned traveller and connoisseur of books, William of Malmesbury, saw the collection in the late 1120s he was greatly impressed: ‘tanta librorum pulchritudo et antiquitas exuberat’.
The Anglo-Saxon manuscripts of Prudentius'sPsychomachia
Authors: Wieland Gernot R.
Published: September 2008

According to his own testimony, the fourth-century Spanish poet Prudentius devoted himself to writing only late in life. ThePraefatioto his works provides all the biographical details which we have of him: he was born in 348, the year in which Salia was consul (lines 25–6: ‘Sub quo [=Salia] prima dies mihi/ quam multas hiemes uoluerit’), he appears to have studied rhetoric (lines 8–9: ‘mox docuit toga infectum uitiis falsa loqui’), possibly practised law (lines 13–4: ‘Exim iurgia turbidos/ armarunt animos’), became governor of two cities (lines 16–7: ‘Bis legum moderamine/ frenos nobilium reximus urbium’) and finally was taken into the emperor's service (lines 20–1: ‘pietas principis extulit/ adsumptum propius stare iubens ordine proximo’). The exact date of his death is unknown, but it appears to have been before 410 because his writings, especially theContra Symmachum, still praise a victorious Rome that had not yet been sacked by Alaric.
The Old Frisian component in Holthausen'sAltenglisches etymologisches Wörterbuch
Authors: Bremmer Rolf H.
Published: September 2008

The publication of the first fascicule of the TorontoDictionary of Old Englishbears witness to the fulfilment of many vows made at symposia in the past. One of these was to abandon the practice of Bosworth—Toller of providing entries with etymological information. To meet trie objections raised against this policy at the secondDOEconference in 1970, Christopher Ball assured the audience that entries would contain etymological information only if it would be impossible to establish the meaning of a word otherwise. ‘Frivolous’ etymology, as Ball termed it, such as linking OEfōtto Latinpedem, would be omitted. The editors ofDOEwill have been confirmed in their attitude by the fact that in those years Dr Alfred Bammesberger announced a plan for a new etymological dictionary for Old English. Since then, besides numerous articles, he has published a volume ofBeiträge Zu einem etymologischen Wörterbuch des Altenglischen. In the preface to this book, Bammesberger stresses that the preparation of such a new dictionary is a project which will not be completed in the immediate future. So, for the time being, the comparist will have to make do withBTand Ferdinand Holthausen's etymological dictionary of Old English. This seems an appropriate time, therefore, to focus our attention on that component of Holthausen's dictionary which concerns the closest relative of English, (Old) Frisian: not least because Holthausen himself devoted so much attention to it.
The botanical lexicon of the Old EnglishHerbarium
Authors: D'Aronco Maria Amalia
Published: September 2008

Recent research has established beyond question that, in the study of medicine at least, Anglo-Saxon England was far from being ‘a backwater in which superstition flourished until the mainstream of more rational and advanced Salernitan practices flowed into the country in late medieval times’. On the contrary, Anglo-Saxon medicine was at least at the same level as that of contemporary European schools. In ninth-century England the medical works inherited by ‘post-classical Latin medical literature (which included translations and epitomes of Greek and Byzantine medical authorities)’ were not only well known, but served as the basis for original reworking and compilation, as the example of theLæcebocshows. More important, it was in pre-Conquest England that, for the first time in Europe, medical treatises were either compiled in or translated into a vernacular language rather than being composed in Latin or Greek. Ancient medicine made substantial use of drugs obtained from plants; and therefore, since the sources of Anglo-Saxon medical lore were in Latin (or in Greek: but invariably known through the medium of Latin), it is not surprising that most medicinal herbs used in the preparation of Old English prescriptions were not indigenous to England or even to continental Germany. And since such medicinal herbs were not indigenous to northern Europe, it is evident that, in using them, speakers of vernacular languages were obliged to create a vocabulary appropriate to denote them.
A Frankish scholar in tenth-century England: Frithegod of Canterbury/Fredegaud of Brioude
Authors: Lapidge Michael
Published: September 2008

In 948 King Eadred of Wessex conducted a military campaign in Northumbria against Eric Blood-Axe. During the course of this campaign the minster church at Ripon – which had been founded by St Wilfrid and which housed his remains – was burnt down. This unfortunate incident was used as the pretext for a notoriousfurta sacra: the relics of St Wilfrid were seized and were duly conveyed to Archbishop Oda of Canterbury. In order to celebrate the acquisition of these distinguished relics, Oda built a new altar in honour of St Wilfrid and commissioned a member of his Canterbury household, one Frithegod, to compose a poem in honour of St Wilfrid. Frithegod responded by producing theBreuiloquium uitae Wilfridi, a poem of some 1,400 Latin hexameters which is closely based on the early eighth-century proseVita S. WilfridibyStephanusor Stephen of Ripon. Since the poem bears in its closing lines a dedication to Archbishop Oda, it must have been finished before the archbishop's death on 2 June 958; in other words, it was written between 948 and 958.
Winchester and the standardization of Old English vocabulary
Authors: Hofstetter Walter
Published: September 2008

Over a century ago Eduard Dietrich noted that Æfric, pupil of Bishop Æthelwold and educated at Winchester, consistently used certain words (e.g.ælfremed, (ge)gearcian, (ge)fredan) in preference to synonyms (e.g.fremde, (ge)gearwian, (ge)felan) commonly found in other writers. The small number of words given by Dietrich as characteristic of Æfric's usage has been increased as a result of some lexical studies of more recent date. Karl Jost, for example, notes, among several other peculiarities of his vocabulary, Æfric's exclusive use ofbehreowsianandbehreowsunginstead of their synonymshreowsianandhreowsung.Hans Schabram's study of the Old English terminology forsuperbiashows that Ælfric's language displays a remarkable uniformity in the almost exclusive choice ofmodigand its derivatives. One of the results of Elmar Seebold's work on the Old English equivalents forsapiensandprudensis to show that Ælfric always employedsnotorandsnotornesto express the concepts ‘prudens’ and ‘prudentia’. Furthermore, in his study of the Old English vocabulary forcorona, Josef Kirschner argues that Ælfric's almost exclusive use ofwuldorbeagforcoronain a figurative-religious sense (e.g. ‘corona vitae aeternae’, ‘corona martyrii’) suggests a deliberate attempt to standardize vocabulary.
The Latin textual basis of Genesis A
Authors: Remley Paul G.
Published: September 2008

Received scholarly opinion regards Genesis A as an Old English versification of the Latin text of Genesis in Jerome's Vulgate revision of the bible. This view has prevailed in modern editions of the poem, which normally print a critical text of the Vulgate Genesis in their apparatus. The textual basis of Genesis A is perhaps ‘vulgate’ in character in so far as the poem renders Genesis readings that were commonly known in Anglo-Saxon England, but the identification of this base text with that of the Hieronymian Vulgate remains an untested hypothesis. Ten years ago A. N. Doane printed a list of readings in the Old English text which show affinity with the ancient versions of Genesis that emerged before the completion of Jerome's translation, readings associted with the Vetus Latina or Old Latin bible. Doane did not, however, challenge the long-standing belief that Genesis A follows a single, lost exemplar that contained in all essentials the text established by Jerome. The present study attempts to survey, without any preconceptions, all the details in the poem that might derive from Latin sources; its intention is to make a first step towards the recovery of the Latin textual basis of Genesis A.
A handlist of Anglo-Saxon lawsuits
Authors: Wormald Patrick
Published: September 2008

There is no acknowledged corpus of Anglo-Saxon lawsuits. Scholars have had the benefit of Bigelow's Placita Anglo-Normannica for over a century, and this will soon be superseded by the definitive edition which has occupied Professor van Caenegem since 1952. But the nearest that Anglo-Saxonists have come to a counterpart is the set of thirty-five ‘Select Cases in Anglo-Saxon Law’ appended to the Essays in Anglo-Saxon Law, which four of Bigelow's fellow Bostonians published as a symbolic, if apparently unintended, celebration of America's origins in centennial 1876. The limitations of this admittedly useful exercise extend beyond the facts that three of its cases are not Anglo-Saxon at all, and that its editors were unable to distinguish between the Latin names for Dover and Canterbury. Since then, the selections of Harmer, Robertson and Whitelock have made many more texts generally available, but without isolating the procedural records from other ‘historical documents’. Mean-while, the English evidence was ignored in the impressive list which Hübner intended as the basis of Placita section in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica: that august institution has tracked Germanic footsteps across the Alps, the Rhine, the Pyrenees and even the Straits of Gibraltar, but it as seldom followed. the Anglo-Saxons across the North Sea.
Early Latin loan-words in Old English
Authors: Wollman Alfred
Published: September 2008

It is a well-known fact that Old English is rich in Latin loan-words. Although the precise number is not yet known, it is a fairly safe assumption that there are at least 600 to 700 loan-words in Old English. This compares with 800 Latin loan-words borrowed in different periods in the Brittonic languages (Welsh, Cornish, Breton), and at least 500 early Latin loan-words common to the West Germanic languages. These rather vague overall numbers do not lend themselves, however, to a serious analysis of Latin influence on the Germanic and Celtic languages, because they include different periods of borrowing which are not really comparable to each other. The basis of these estimates, moreover, is often not stated very clearly. Although the establishment of a complete list of Latin loan-words in the various Germanic languages is adesideratum, it can only be achieved in a later stage of our studies.
The ‘baptism of tears’ in early Anglo-Saxon sources
Authors: O'loughlin T. , Conrad-O'Briain H.
Published: September 2008

In an article published in 1986 Michael Lapidge1 noted the occurrence of the term Umbrensium (from Humbrenses/Umbrenses) in both the U-text of Theodore's Indicia2 and the anonymous, eighth-century Whitby Vita S. Gregorii.3 This is by no means the only point of contact between the two works. Perhaps the most memorable episode in the Vita S. Gregorii is that of Gregory's weeping for the soul of Trajan, his tears having the effect of baptizing the dead emperor.
What has Ingeld to do with Lindisfarne?
Authors: Bullough Donald A.
Published: September 2008

In the course of a long letter written in 797 to Speratus, bishop of an unnamed English see, Alcuin declares:

Verba Dei legantur in sacerdotali convivio: ibi decet lectorem audiri, non citharistam, sermones patrum, non carmina gentilium. Quid Hinieldus cum Christo?

Nowhere else in the substantial corpus of his letters does Alcuin name a known figure in early Germanic legend and literature – the Ingeld ofBeowulfandWidsith– or refer specifically to the vernacular literature of his home country. Unsurprisingly, since the publication of the first complete and correct text of the letter in 1873, this passage has been quotedin toto(in varying translations) or alluded to in virtually every history of Old English literature and every commentary onBeowulf. Jaffé, however, in the notes he left with his transcript when he died prematurely in 1870, had proposed an identification of the addressee, Speratus, with Bishop Hygbald of Lindisfarne, recorded from 780 to 803. Dümmler adopted Jaffé's view in his editions of the letter: and he has been followed without demur by every subsequent scholar who has quoted or referred to it. Furthermore, for most of the century it has been tacitly assumed that the letter was directed not merely to the bishop in person but also to the community of which he was head – a monastic one, even after the disasters of 793; and that Alcuin's exhortations, whether or not they were a response to the actual practice of Lindisfarne and other Northumbrian houses, are evidence of the acceptability (and indeed, cultural importance) of secular vernacular verse in eighth-century English monasteries.