bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Five Boroughs of the Danelaw: a review of present knowledge
Authors: Hall R. A.
Published: September 2008

The increase in urban archaeological work during the last twenty years has both illuminated many facets of pre-Norman life and demonstrated the development of individual sites to an extent hardly conceivable before. Nevertheless, the only well-defined group of sites to have received concentrated attention has been theburhsof Wessex. Prompted by Biddle's work at Winchester and Hill's elucidation of theBurghal Hidage, the establishment of a network of fortified centres and its development into an urban hierarchy in which the component sites variously played commercial, industrial, administrative and ecclesiastical roles has been charted in some detail. Beyond the frontiers of Wessex, Atkin has drawn together the available data from East Anglia. Rahtz has briefly presented the excavated evidence from the towns of the West Midlands, ‘English Mercia’; within the area of Mercia that was to become the south-eastern Danelaw (Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire and Northamptonshire), Williams has surveyed the new evidence for the urban development of Northampton, the best understood centre in the region, while Haslam has suggested that Bedford and Cambridge are examples of a group of sites, numbering a dozen or more and spread across pre-Viking Mercia, where urban origins can be traced back to deliberate foundation by Offa. North of the Humber, York has a singular position; it is the only important Northumbrian urban centre mentioned in late Anglo-Saxon historical sources, and seems to have achieved a sustained regional preeminence greater even than that of Winchester in Wessex. It has recently been reviewed; there is also a recent study of London.
The lost cartulary of Abbotsbury
Authors: Keynes Simon
Published: September 2008

The buildings and lands of Abbotsbury abbey in Dorset were acquired by Sir Giles Strangways soon after the dissolution of the abbey in 1539, various records pertaining to the abbey's estates seem to have passed into Sir Giles' possession at about the same time. Among these records was a cartulary, which is known to have belonged to Sir Giles' descendant, Sir John Strangways, in the seventeenth century, but which is said to have been destroyed when parliamentary forces set fire to Sir John's house at Abbotsbury during the Civil War. It is possible, however, to reconstruct something of the nature and contents of the lost cartulary from the writings of certain seventeenth-century antiquaries, and in the process to recover parts of the texts of six Anglo-Saxon charters whose existence has not previously been recorded.
Bald'sLeechbookand cultural interactions in Anglo-Saxon England
Authors: Cameron M. L.
Published: September 2008

The Old English medical records are rich in materials which contain evidence for contacts between the Anglo-Saxons and other cultures. For example, in 1945 Howard Meroney collected the various loan translations of Irish words found in the medical charms in theLeechbook, Lacnungaand other Old English texts. It is an interesting exercise to speculate on how Irish charms such as these, in Old Irish, got into the Old English medical repertory in their pristine form, whereas most of the Latin medical charms were translated straightway into English. It is customary to suppose that the Anglo-Saxons picked them up from Irish teachers in their monasteries, but there may be other explanations. Recently, while I was reading theHisperica famina(in Michael Herren's translation), I came across references to young ‘visitors’, students who wandered about the Irish countryside begging for food and shelter among the country people, with whom they had difficulty communicating; as one of them is made to say:

Who will ask these possessors

to grant us their sweet abundance?

For an Ausonian chain binds me;

hence I do not utter good Irish speech.
Place-names as a reflection of cultural interaction
Authors: Fellows-Jensen Gillian
Published: September 2008

In a series of sketches by Elizabeth Gaskell, which appeared in Charles Dickens's weekly periodical Household Words between 1851 and 1853, the small Cheshire town of Knutsford was immortalized under the name Cranford. Mrs Gaskell, who had spent most of her childhood in Knutsford, knew the town and its inhabitants intimately and she returned to it as the setting for some of her later works, in which she called it ‘Eccleston’, ‘Dunscombe’ and ‘Hollingford’. Each of these four fictional names is convincing enough as the name of a small provincial town. Three of the names, indeed, are borne by settlements elsewhere in England, and the fourth, ‘Hollingford’, is close enough in form to the genuine names Hollington and Hollingworth to be acceptable. On her marriage, Elizabeth Gaskell had moved from Knutsford to Manchester and she exploited this commercial city, too, as the setting for some of her works. Her first published novel, Mary Barton (1848), actually bore the subtitle ‘A Tale of Manchester Life’, but in later works the city appears under the fictional names ‘Drumble’ and ‘Milton’. Milton is a name which occurs quite frequently in England, although never as the name of a large city. Drumble is an artificial name – presumably a portmanteau word containing the words drear and rumble, which antedates Lewis Carroll's first exploitation of this device in a handwritten version of the poem Jabberwocky from 1855. Elizabeth Gaskell is not the only author to have coined a fictional name for Manchester in the course of time. Charles Dickens referred to it as ‘Coketown’ in Hard Times (1854), for example, and Louis Golding as ‘Doomington’ in Magnolia Street (1931).
Oaks, ships, riddles and the Old EnglishRune Poem
Authors: Sorrell Paul
Published: September 2008

The Holme Riddles are a collection of 144 English riddles preserved in London, British Library, Harley 1960. Although the manuscript dates from the mid-seventeenth century, some of these riddles are apparently rooted in ancient Germanic tradition. One of these, an ancient ‘world-riddle’ according to the editor, is a version of the ‘oak-ship’ riddle:

Q. wnj lived j fed the liveing now j am dead j beare the live[in]g & with swift speed j walk ourthe liveing

A. a ship mad[e] of oake groweing feeds hogs with acorns now b[e]ars men & swims ourfishes.
Bones of contention: the context of Ælfric's homily on St Vincent
Authors: Irvine Susan E.
Published: September 2008

The Old English account of the passion of St Vincent of Saragossa survives only in one late manuscript, Cambridge, University Library, Ii. 1. 33, written in the second half of the twelfth century. This manuscript contains a large proportion of saints' lives by Ælfric, belonging mainly to his two series ofCatholic Homiliesand his later collection known as theLives of Saints. The passion of St Vincent, from its alliterative style, reveals itself also to be the work of Ælfric. Since it was appended by W.W. Skeat to his edition of theLives of Saints, it has generally been treated as part of theLives of Saintscollection, although there is no evidence that Ælfric himself ever added it to that set.
The Abbo glossary in London, British Library, Cotton Domitian i
Authors: Lendinara Patrizia
Published: September 2008

The process through which glossaries came into being can sometimes still be seen and studied in surviving manuscripts, and in such cases it provides a valuable index to the way in which Latin texts were studied in medieval schools. This is the case with an unprinted glossary in London, British Library, Cotton Domitian i. The glossary is mainly made up of words taken from bk III of the Bella Parisiacae urbis by Abbo of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, a work which was widely studied in English schools in the tenth and eleventh centuries, above all because of its unusual vocabulary. We know that Abbo drew the unusual vocabulary in his poem from pre-existing glossaries such as the Liber glossarum and the Scholica graecarum glossarum; but he also took from these works the interlinear glosses which he provided for the difficult words in bk III of his poem, and these in turn are found, with little variation, in all of the manuscripts which preserve the poem. Now under the rubric ‘Incipiunt glossae diversae’ in Cotton Domitian i are collected some two hundred lemmata from bk III of the poem, followed in each case by one or more glosses; on examination these glosses are found to be identical with those which accompany the text in other manuscripts. The glossary in Domitian i thus provides a working model of how a glossary was compiled, and is a further witness to the popularity of Abbo's poem in Anglo-Saxon England.
The production ofde luxemanuscripts and the patronage of King Cnut and Queen Emma
Authors: Heslop T. A.
Published: September 2008

The illustrated manuscripts of later Anglo-Saxon England are justly famed for their beauty. The expense lavished on the most elaborate of them is paralleled in Western Europe at the time only in late-tenth- and eleventh-century Germany. Neither France, Spain nor Italy can offer anything that is comparable to this sustained luxury production. Modern art-historical scholarship on the Anglo-Saxon material has not really attempted to explain this phenomenal industry beyond implying that the vast majority of these books were made in monastic scriptoria and for the use of the church. If this implication is correct, it begs the questions, ‘where did the money come from?’ and ‘whence the desire to spend it in this way?’ Perhaps the questions are not asked because the answers in general terms seem rather obvious. Expenditure on any particular luxury item is usually in part a question of fashion, and fashion in certain circumstances becomes a priority which determines that surplus money is directed towards its indulgence. Doubtless a response along these lines could be fleshed out by a discussion of the sources of income of the Anglo-Saxon church and of its aspirations to conspicuous display. But any exploration of monastic wealth and rivalry for prestige which attempts to explain book production at this period would be based on the assumption, and it is no more than an assumption, that the phenomenon is to be accounted for by ecclesiastical patronage. The arguments brought forward in this paper will be directed towards a different end: that many of the most famous English illuminated books of this period owe their creation to royal money, and that they were produced, sometimes without a particular recipient in mind, to be given as presents which would help cement allegiance to the crown and serve as an indication of the donor's piety. But what is the evidence for this upturn in the production ofde luxemanuscripts?
The Werden ‘Heptateuch’
Authors: Barker-Benfield B. C.
Published: September 2008

A Vulgate fragment from the Book of Judges was published by Michelle P. Brown in 1989 under the title ‘A New Fragment of a Ninth-Century English Bible’. The depleted bifolium – one trimmed leaf with its ragged, conjoint stub – had been sold at Christie's of London on 2 December 1987 (lot 137) for a hammer-price of £24,000 through Quaritch's to Prof. T. Takamiya of Tokyo. But the manuscript from which it derives is already recorded: the remains of thirty-two further leaves are preserved in Düsseldorf, Universitätsbibliothek, A. 19, and were published in the 1971 Supplement ofCodices Latini Antiquiores. Thirty-one of the leaves are more or less complete (some are conjoint), while the thirty-second consists of a top half only. Like the Tokyo fragment, they show all the signs of having been rescued from bindings; the trimming of many edges has created further minor losses of text throughout. They preserve text from each of the first seven books of the Old Testament.
Poetic language and the Paris Psalter: the decay of the Old English tradition
Authors: Griffith M. S.
Published: September 2008

The metrical version of psalms LI–CL, known as the Paris Psalter, is a pedestrian and unimaginative piece of poetic translation. It is rarely read by students of Old English, and most Anglo-Saxonists make only passing reference to it. There is scarcely any literary criticism written on the text, although some work has been done on its vocabulary and metre. I hope to show in this article, however, that its stylistic peculiarities mark an important stage in the disintegration of the Old English poetic mode, and that analysis of these may go some way towards answering the difficult questions which surround the manner and the cause of the style's disappearance at the end of the Anglo-Saxon period. In particular, I shall examine this poet's selective use of the poetic diction normally associated with the form, and the impact of this selectivity on the systems of rank and formula.
A new Latin source for the Old English ‘Three Utterances’ exemplum
Authors: Wack Mary F. , Wright Charles D.
Published: September 2008

The so-called ‘Three Utterances’ exemplum, which tells of the exclamations of a good and a bad soul to the angels or demons who lead them to heaven or hell at the moment of death, was adapted independently by three Anglo-Saxon homilists. Versions of this legend survive in an Old English Rogationtide homily in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 114, 102v–105v, in a homilyBe heofonwarum and be helwarumin London, British Library, Cotton Faustina A. ix, 21v–23v, and Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 302, pp. 71–3, and in a Lenten homily in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 85/86, fos. 25–40. In 1935 Rudolf Willard published a study of the exemplum, with a detailed comparison between the three Old English versions, an Irish version, and a single Latin version in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 2628 (s. xi). Two years later Willard published a second Latin version from Oxford, University College 61 (s. xiv). Other texts of the Latin sermon have subsequently come to light.
Regula canonicorum or Regula monasterialis uitae? The Rule of Chrodegang and Archbishop Wulfred's reforms at Canterbury
Authors: Langefeld Brigitte
Published: September 2008

Around the years 755–6 Chrodegang, bishop of Metz from 742 to 766 and metropolitan of the Austrasian church since the death of Boniface in 754, compiled a rule for the canons of his own familia in Metz. His paruum decretulum or parua institutio, as he himself called it, contained very few thoughts not already expressed about the spiritual principles and practical organization of those canons who wished to live in a quasi-monastic, celibate community. Indeed, Chrodegang himself made it abundantly clear in the preface to his Regula that he would have had no need to compile his Rule if the writings of the Church Fathers and existing ecclesiastical laws on this subject had been honoured:

Si trecentorum decem et octo reliquorumque sanctorum Patrum canonum auctoritas perduraret, et clerus atque episcopus secundum eorum rectitudinis normam uiuerent, superfluum uideretur a nobis exiguis minimisque, super hac re tarn ordinate disposita aliquid retractari, et quasi quidem noui aliquid dici.
The Limpsfield Grange disc
Authors: Okasha Elisabeth , Youngs Susan
Published: September 2008

In March 1992 a diminutive decorated disc was submitted for comment to the Department of Medieval and Later Antiquities, British Museum. The owner had found it by using a metal detector in an arable field south of the M25 motorway at Limpsfield Grange in the parish of Limpsfield near Oxted, Surrey (NGR TQ 4053). The disc appeared to be an isolated find and a Coroner's Inquest was not held. The piece was subsequendy sent for auction and acquired by the British Museum acting in cooperation with Guildford Museum. There is no Anglo-Saxon material recorded from the immediate area.
Palaces or minsters? Northampton and Cheddar reconsidered
Authors: Blair John
Published: September 2008

Since their excavation in the 1950s and early 1960s, the palace buildings at Yeavering (Northumberland) and Cheddar (Somerset) have exemplified the physical impact of kingship on the Anglo-Saxon landscape. When, in 1980–2, massive eighth- and ninth-century halls were found at the heart of Northampton, the temptation to recognize a major residence of the Mercian kings was irresistible. Thanks to archaeology, the image of the king'stūnas the one fixed point in a shifting, uncertain world, encouraged by poetic sources and adopted in the first detailed studies of Anglo-Saxon local organization, was assuming concrete reality.
Rædan, areccan smeagan: how the Anglo-Saxons read
Authors: Parkes M. B.
Published: September 2008

The Middle Ages inherited from antiquity a tradition of reading which embraced the four functions of grammatical studies (grammaticae officia):lectio, emendatio, enarratioandiudicium.Lectiowas the process whereby a reader had to identify elements of the text — letters, syllables, words and sentences (discretio) — in order to read it aloud according to the accentuation required by the sense (pronuntiatio).Emendatio, a process entailed by the realities of manuscript transmission, required a reader (or his teacher) to correct the text in his copy, and sometimes tempted him to ‘improve’ it.Enarratiowas the process of examining features of vocabulary, rhetorical and literary form, and above all of interpreting the subject matter of the text (explanatio).ludiciumwas the process of exercising judgement of the aesthetic qualities or the moral and philosophical value of the text (bene dictorum conprobatio).
The case for a West Saxon minuscule
Authors: Crick Julia
Published: September 2008

Julian Brown's famous analysis of what he termed the Insular system of scripts marked out a number of routes, now well trodden, through the debris of undated and unlocalized manuscript material from the pre-Viking-Age British Isles. Ever since, the best hope for students of palaeography seeking to date and localize examples of early Insular minuscule has been to follow Brown's classification and identify them as Type A or B, Northumbrian or Southumbrian, and Phase I or II. Brown's schema, however, offered orientation rather than a map. As with any typology, it depends on a very few fixed points, themselves unusual because of their lack of anonymity: gospelbooks from Ireland and Northumbria dated by the survival of rare colophons, manuscripts connected with St Boniface which show the operation of a unique editorial mind. Although Brown's system has been successfully applied to the output of scriptoria whose influences, practices, connections, even locations remain mostly unknown, complications inevitably arise. This article concerns one of them, the recycling in Phase II of a type of minuscule displaying the cursiveness and capriciousness characteristic of Phase I: Type B minuscule as illustrated by the script of St Boniface.
Lost in translation: omission of episodes in some Old English prose saints' legends
Authors: Whatley E. Gordon
Published: September 2008

The following article explores one way of using Latin sources to increase our understanding and appreciation of the surviving corpus of vernacular prose hagiography in Anglo-Saxon England. Although the saints' legends in prose make up a significant portion of the Old English literary remains, they have been relatively neglected in comparison with the saints' legends in Old English verse, such asAndreas, Guthlac AandGuthlac B, and Cynewulf'sElene. As the standard bibliographies reveal well enough, the prose texts have been studied mainly from the perspectives of language, stylistics, codicology and basicQuellenforschung, and much less than the verse texts for their literary, historical or broadly cultural interest. This is particularly true of the twenty-nine anonymous legends, some of which are not readily accessible in printed versions, and most of which need re-editing. But even the hagiographic writings of Ælfric, which are better known, have been read only occasionally for their narrative contentperse. Primary emphasis has fallen instead on Ælfric's considerable stylistic and prosodic achievements. Moreover, the two most recent monographs on Ælfric's intellectual and doctrinal concerns hardly touch on his saints' legends.
The seasons of the year in Old English
Authors: Anderson Earl R.
Published: September 2008

‘Feower tida synd getealde on anum geare’, Ælfric writes inDe temporibus anni, translating a portion of Bede'sDe temporum ratione, and he enumerates the seasons together with their Latin counterparts: ‘Veris lenctentid …Aestasis sumer …Autumnusis hærfest …Hiemsis winter.’ Byrhtferth of Ramsey enumerates ‘Þa feower timan … lengten, sumor, hærfest and winter’, allegorizing them as symbols of childhood, adolescence, manhood and old age, of blood, choler, black bile and phlegm, and of air, fire, earth and water, and elsewhere he refers to ‘gewrixlunge Þæsra feower timan, Þæt ys lenctenis and sumoris and hærfestis and wintres’. From these passages, and others like them, it would appear that the Anglo-Saxons observed four seasons: spring, summer, autumn and winter. This conclusion seems obvious enough and represents the conceptual baseline for the Bosworth–Toller dictionary entries forlencten, andlenctentid, sumer, hærfestandwinter, even though it is clear from their own citations thatlenctenandlenctentidoften mean ‘Lent’ andhærfestoften means ‘harvest’.
The iconography of the Utrecht Psalter and the Old EnglishDescent into Hell
Authors: Brantley Jessica
Published: September 2008

The Old EnglishDescent into Hellfits uneasily into the poetic corpus remaining to us from Anglo-Saxon England. The poem is an oddity both thematically and genetically, and (insofar as it has attracted any attention at all) the history of its criticism has been an unrewarding search for sources. TheDescentpresents a sourcing problem at its most basic, for its parts are so disparate that it is difficult even to construct a horizon of expectations from which to read the work. I hope to suggest here a new analogue, as well as a new way of thinking about sources and analogues in Old English literary studies, that may prove fruitful. The more rewarding context for comparative study of theDescent into Hellis not textual, but pictorial; I argue that visual exegesis of the psalms reveals both the source and the nature of the connection between the poem's two primary topics. In particular, iconography derived from the enormously influential Utrecht Psalter (Utrecht, Universiteitsbibliotheek, 32) provides a structural model, if not for the composition of the text in the most direct sense, then certainly for both medieval and modern understanding of it.
Anti-Judaism in Ælfric'sLives of Saints
Authors: Scheil Andrew P.
Published: September 2008

Anti-Judaism existed in Anglo-Saxon England without the presence of actual Jewish communities. The understanding of Jews and Judaism in Anglo-Saxon England is therefore solely a textual phenomenon, a matter of stereotypes embedded in longstanding Christian cultural traditions. For instance, consider the homilyDe populo Israhel(written between 1002 and 1005), a condensation and translation of selections from Exodus and Numbers by the prolific monk Ælfric of Eynsham (c. 955–c. 1020). The text narrates the tribulations of the Israelites in the desert: Ælfric explains that although God ‘worhte feala wundra on ðam westene’, the Israelites were ‘wiðerræde witodlice to oft’ and angered him. The intractable attitude of God's chosen people in the desert demands an explanation; why did the Israelites spurn the heaven-sent manna and long for the repasts of their Egyptian captivity? Ælfric clarifies their behaviour through a string of typological associations. He explains that the manna ‘hæfde Þa getacnunge ures Hælendes Cristes’.
The earliest texts with English and French
Authors: Porter David W.
Published: September 2008

Modern scholars can sometimes reconstruct the methods of medieval glossary-makers by tracking individual glosses along the path from the textual source to the final destination in the glossarial list. Here I wish to pursue a trail of clues through two early-eleventh-century manuscripts of the Excerptiones de Prisciano (‘Excerpts of Priscian’), a Latin grammatical treatise which has been identified as the source for Ælfric's bilingual Grammar. Viewed singly, the manuscripts of this work offer partial views of glossatorial activity; viewed together, these fragmentary glimpses snap into perspective, rendering a dynamic picture of glossary-making as a corporate enterprise undertaken by a group of Anglo-Saxon schoolmen working in several manuscripts simultaneously.
TheWest Saxon Gospelsand the gospel-lectionary in Anglo-Saxon England: manuscript evidence and liturgical practice
Authors: Lenker Ursula
Published: September 2008

Farað witodlice and Iærað ealle þeoda and fulligeaþ hig on naman fæder and suna and þæs halgan gastes, and lærað þæt hig healdon ealle þa ðing þe ic eow behead (Matt. XXVIII.19–20).

With these words at the end of the gospel according to Matthew, Jesus sends out his disciples to spread the words and deeds of the Lord to all peoples. With respect to the Anglo-Saxons, this order was impressively executed by the earliest translation of the Vulgate gospels into a vernacular, theWest Saxon Gospels (WSG). This text, from the late tenth or early eleventh century, survives in four complete manuscripts (A, B, C, Cp) and two fragments (F, L) from the Old English period and two complete manuscripts from the late twelfth century (R and its copy H).
The scribe of the Paris Psalter
Authors: Emms Richard
Published: September 2008

The Paris Psalter (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, lat. 8824) has attracted much interest because of its long, thin format, its illustrations in the Utrecht Psalter tradition and its Old English prose translation of the first fifty psalms, which has been convincingly attributed to King Alfred himself. It is a bilingual psalter, with Latin (Roman version) on the left and Old English on the right. The first fifty psalms are in the prose translation connected with King Alfred, the remainder in a metrical version made by an author whose work has not been identified elsewhere. The leaves are approximately 526 × 186 mm, with a writing space of about 420 × 95 mm. It has been estimated that there were originally 200 leaves in twenty-five quires, but fourteen leaves, including those carrying all the major decoration, have been removed. There remain thirteen outline drawings integrated into the text on the first six folios. Some drawings may have functioned as ‘fillers’ where the Latin text was shorter than the Old English. Further on in the manuscript, in order to solve this problem, the scribe either left gaps or made the columns of Latin thinner than the corresponding Old English ones. The Old English introductions were set out across both columns, suggesting that the book was made for someone who read English more easily than Latin. The manuscript was written around the middle of the eleventh century, and it is clearly the work of a single skilled scribe who used a neat Anglo-Caroline minuscule for the Latin texts, and matching English vernacular minuscule with many Caroline letter forms for the Old English. Unfortunately, his hand has not been identified in any other books or charters; however, he did record in a colophon (186r; see pl.V) that he was calledWulfwinus cognomento Cada.
Hereward and Flanders
Authors: Van Houts Elisabeth
Published: September 2008

Hereward ‘the Wake’ is renowned as one of the leaders of the English resistance to the Normans in the late 1060s and early 1070s. His involvement in the resistance is noted by all main sources, even though the extent to which he was responsible for actions in Ely and Peterborough remains to be elucidated. He is listed as a pre-Conquest Lincolnshire landholder and tenant in Domesday Book, which is the only contemporary source to mention, but not date, his outlawry. Hereward's career as an outlaw is shrouded in mystery, due to the lack of detail in contemporary sources and also to the rise of stories incorporated in theGesta Herewardi (The Deeds of Hereward), written in the twelfth century, which claim that he went as a mercenary to Cornwall, Ireland and Flanders. Two sections of theGesta Herewardiare devoted to his exploits in the county of Flanders, and there is a curious third passage describing his relationship to Gilbert of Gent, the richest post-Conquest Flemish settler in England, who is said to have been Hereward's godfather. The purpose of this article is to take a fresh look at these passages and to assess them in the light of sources written on the Continent which seemingly confirm theGestasections on Flanders.
The archetype ofBeowulf
Authors: Lapidge Michael
Published: September 2008

It is a cardinal tenet of classical textual criticism that medieval scribes were most prone to error when copying from an unfamiliar system of script. Accordingly a good deal of attention has been given by classical scholars to what happens to a text when it is copied from one system of script to another, and to the characteristic sorts of error which such copying involves. The great French textual critic, Alphonse Dain, even coined a Greek term,metacharakterismos(μεταχαρακτηρισμός), to describe the scribal process of copying, character by character, from one script to anodier. (The Latin equivalent would betranslitteratio, which might be rendered ‘transliteration’ in English.) Dain was thinking principally of the transliteration of Greek uncial manuscripts into minuscule script; but the process is also known to have taken place in the transmissional histories of Latin texts, when works of classical literature in (say) rustic capital script were transliterated into the various regional minuscules. By observing patterns of repeated error, Latin textual critics have often been able to demonstrate that the archetype of such-and-such a text must have been written in a particular system of script. The first attempt at such a demonstration was apparently that by the humanist scholar Joseph Scaliger (1540–1609), who in hisCastigationes in Catullum(1577) showed that the archetype of all surviving manuscripts of Catullus was written in what he calledLangobardicae litterae, what we should describe as a form of pre-Caroline minuscule.
Anglicized word order in Old English continuous interlinear glosses in British Library, Royal 2. A. XX
Authors: Crowley Joseph
Published: September 2008

The Old English interlinear glosses in the prayerbook London, British Library, Royal 2. A. XX frequently render certain Latin verb phrases and noun phrases into Old English with English word order rather than Latin, in contrast to almost all other surviving Old English interlinear glosses of the same prayers. Investigation of the occurrences of similar syntactic tendencies in all other Old English continuous interlinear glosses (the thirteen Old English interlinear glosses to the psalms, the eleven glosses to canticles of the psalter, the two interlinear glosses to the gospels and the thirty other numbered entries under ‘continuous interlinear glosses’ in Angus Cameron's ‘A List of Old English Texts’) reveals that such anglicization is restricted to relatively few texts from various centuries and places. Analysis of the features and conditions of these few witnesses reveals that neither scribal education, region, century nor other particular of situation is a factor common to all witnesses. The scribe of the Old English glosses in Royal 2. A. XX appears to have had deficiencies in Old English grammar, yet confidence in Old English phrasings of the prayers. His gloss was probably not made for students learning Latin grammar; it was more likely intended simply to help laypeople or less-than-well-educated religious persons to understand the Latin prayers. The context is clearer when we consider the Latin prayers in the margins (and a few interlinear glosses in Greek) that were added by the same hand.
Ælfric's Preface to Genesis: genre, rhetoric and the origins of thears dictaminis
Authors: Griffith Mark
Published: September 2008

The preface by Ælfric occurs in complete form in two manuscripts and in part in a third. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Miscellany 509 (s. xi2) contains the preface (fols. 1–3, headed with the wordsIncipit prefatio genesis anglice), together with the Old EnglishHexateuch(fols. 3–107) and Ælfric's selections from Judges (fols. 108–15). Cambridge, University Library, Ii. 1. 33 (s. xii2) has the preface, without tide, followed by Ælfric's partial translation of Genesis (fols. 2–24). London, British Library, Cotton Claudius B. iv (St Augustine's, Canterbury, s. xi1), having lost its first leaf, now preserves only the second half of the preface followed by an illustrated text of the Old EnglishHexateuch, but a sixteenth-century transcript by Robert Talbot, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 379, preserves some of its missing text, along with the same tide as Laud 509. Both Laud 509 and Claudius B. iv give slightly different compilations of the translations by Ælfric with the more extensive work of the anonymous scriptural translator (or translators). The differing rubrics and contents of the manuscripts affect the way we read the preface that they share: the Cambridge manuscript presents it as a preface to half of Genesis only, Laud 509 and the transcript label it a preface at least to the whole of Genesis. If, however, theincipitis scribal, it could be taken as a prologue to theHexateuch. Was the preface, then, intended by Ælfric to introduce just the first half of Genesis, or a larger work? Sisam is of the first view: ‘no preface to the Pentateuch (or Hexateuch) survives, and evidendy the compiler of the extant Old English version did not know of one, since he used Ælfric's inappropriate English preface to the first part ofGenesis.’
Francis Junius (1591–1677): copyist or editor?
Authors: Dekker Kees
Published: September 2008

In September 1890, Hendrik Logeman, professor of English and Germanic philology at the University of Ghent in Belgium, had the audacity to accuse no less a scholar than Henry Sweet of misleading his readers. Logeman based his accusation on an unfortunate remark Sweet had made in his edition of the Old English translation of Pope Gregory'sPastoral Care. For this scholarly edition, Sweet had wished to include the text of London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. xi. However, having barely survived the Ashburnham House blaze of 1731, this manuscript had been almost entirely consumed by fire at a bookbinder's in 1865. As a replacement, Sweet had used Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 53, a transcript made by the seventeenth-century philologist Francis Junius (1591–1677) when the Cotton manuscript was still unscathed. Sweet praised Junius and emphasized the accuracy of the transcript by stating that Junius only ‘swerved from the path of literal accuracy in a few unimportant particulars’. Hendrik Logeman had collated the Old English glosses to the Benedictine Rule from Cotton Tiberius A. iii with a Junius transcript, Junius 52, for his 1888 edition, but he found, instead, that Junius failed to distinguish between 〈ð〉 and 〈þ〉 that he corrected his text without giving the reading of the manuscript, and that he added, omitted or transposed entire words.
The cults of murdered royal saints in Anglo-Saxon England
Authors: Rollason D. W.
Published: September 2008

Murder by fellow Christians for secular motives may seem to us an improbable qualification for sanctity. To the Anglo-Saxons, however, the matter evidently appeared differently, for several members of pre-Conquest royal families seem to have been regarded as saints chiefly because of their violent ends at the hands of Christian assassins. The lives and cults of some of these murdered royal saints are well attested in pre-Conquest sources. Others, however, are known chiefly from post-Conquest texts which are mainly hagiographical in character and which were written considerably later than the events which they describe. For these reasons these latter texts have not generally been taken seriously as historical sources and the saints who figure in them have been largely neglected by historians. The hagiographical character of these texts, however, should not exclude them from historical consideration. They may preserve details of the saints’ careers which can be accepted as fact, and the accounts of miracles and wonders which they contain, although not to be treated as factual narratives, provide evidence bearing on the veneration of these saints. As for the date of composition, there is always a possibility that late medieval hagiographical texts represent stylistic and literary modifications of much more ancient versions, the former existence of which may in some cases be revealed by close analysis of the extant texts. The evidence relating to the whole group of murdered royal saints said to have been venerated in pre-Conquest England must therefore be evaluated before conclusions about the significance of this type of sanctity can be drawn. In what follows the saints in question will be considered in order of the apparent validity of the evidence pertaining to them, so that those whose existence and veneration are less certain can be examined in comparison with more firmly documented examples.
King Alfred'sBoethiusand its Latin sources: a reconsideration
Authors: Wittig Joseph S.
Published: September 2008

Ever since Georg Schepss wrote ‘Zu König Alfreds “Boethius”’, scholars have thought that Alfred's translation depended to a considerable extent upon an early Latin commentary. Dorothy Whitelock has stated the current position of Old English scholarship succinctly: ‘There is no doubt that Alfred's work did use a Latin commentary on Boethius’ work … which was clearly related to the one now normally ascribed to Remigius of Auxerre.’ It is the purpose of the present article to reconsider that hypothesis and to argue that it should be rejected.
The formative stages of Beowulf textual scholarship: part I
Authors: Kelly Birte
Published: September 2008

Probably it is generally recognized that present-day apprehension of the text of Beowulf owes a great deal to scholars of the first half of the nineteenth century, for most editions carry numerous textual notes attributing readings to authorities such as Grundtvig, Kemble, Thorpe and Grein. But often realization of the debt remains only vague. Much of the achievement of the first editors is, in fact, difficult to define, because it consisted in a gradual development of editorial standards and practices through the solution of many individual problems of word and line division, the establishment of numerous particular sentence structures and the identification of a number of proper names. The readings which editors have felt obliged to supply in order to restore those lost because of damage to the manuscript or to repair scribal errors or omissions can, however, be identified and quantified, and analysis shows that well over half of all such readings adopted by editors from 1950 onwards had been proposed by 1857. It is therefore the nature and significance of the readings supplied by that date which this article aims at demonstrating.
Continental influence at Bath monastery in the seventh century
Authors: Sims-Williams Patrick
Published: September 2008

Referring to the reign of Eorcenberht of Kent, 640–64, Bede writes: At that time, because there were not yet many monasteries founded in England, numbers of people from Britain used to enter the monasteries of the Franks or Gauls to practise the monastic life; they also sent their daughters to be taught in them and to be wedded to the heavenly bridegroom. They mostly went to the monasteries at Brie, Chelles and Andelys-sur-Seine…
Late Anglo-Saxon metal-work: an assessment
Authors: Hinton David A.
Published: September 2008

It is a decade since the British Museum published its catalogue of late Anglo-Saxon metal-work – ‘late’ in this context meaning between the eighth century and the eleventh – and the only museum with a comparable collection has now produced an equivalent volume. Probably there will not be any more such catalogues, for no other museum has enough metal-work to make a separate publication worthwhile, although composite catalogues, like the numismatists' sylloges, could be produced; for example, Cambridge, Ipswich, King's Lynn and Norwich would make a substantial East Anglian contribution. Except for catalogues, it seems unlikely that there will ever be books devoted exclusively to the metal-work of post-pagan England, since this is not a subject that can be isolated from its archaeological and art-historical contexts. If there is a distinction between archaeology and art history, metal-work, since it is relevant to both, provides a bridge between them, although often a minor one.
The Vikings in England: a review
Authors: Jensen Gillian Fellows
Published: September 2008

In the preface to F. M. Stenton's collected papers Lady Stenton notes that the publication ofAnglo-Saxon Englandin 1943 marked the culmination of a life-time spent largely preparing for and writing a book in which ‘place-names, coins and charters, wills and pleas, archaeology and the laws of the Anglo-Saxons were all for the first time adequately used to produce a balanced narrative, supported by Domesday Book and the twelfth-century charters which made it easier to understand the earlier material’. Indeed, with the exception of archaeology, Sir Frank had been actively engaged in all these fields of research, as is revealed by the list of his published works, and it seemed unlikely at the time that it would ever be necessary to make major adjustments to the view of the Scandinavian settlements that he presented. Only twelve years had passed, however, when voices of dissent began to arise and the first of three papers that were to herald two decades of controversy about the Vikings in England was published. The present review examines the most significant contributions to the ensuing debate and considers whether it has, in fact, been necessary to depart substantially from the views held by Stenton.
Short titles of Old English texts
Authors: Mitchell Bruce , Ball Christopher , Cameron Angus
Published: September 2008

This is the list referred to by Helmut Gneuss in his ‘Guide to the Editing and Preparation of Texts for the Dictionary of Old English’, A. Plan for the Dictionary of Old English, ed. R. Frank and A. Cameron (Toronto, 1973), pp. 9–23. The list has been prepared for use in The Dictionary of Old English and in Old English Syntax now in preparation by Bruce Mitchell, and will (the compilers dare to hope) replace previous systems, including F. P. Magoun Jr's ‘Abbreviated Titles for the Poems of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Corpus’. It will be used in Anglo-Saxon England where appropriate.
Lapidary traditions in Anglo-Saxon England: part I, the background; the Old English Lapidary
Authors: Kitson Peter
Published: September 2008

Jewels have always fascinated man. They have been admired simply for their beauty – their depth of colour and their different propensities for catching and reflecting light. The combination of these qualities, rare in nature, has encouraged the attribution to them of many magical and medical powers. The rareness of gems and the distance and inaccessibility of the places from which many are obtained have caused them to figure curiously in legends and travellers' tales. The Anglo-Saxons appreciated the beauty of jewels, as their jewellery shows. Nor were they without interest in precious stones they could not possess; but it has been hard for modern readers to discover what their ideas about them were. The mid-eleventh-century manuscript, London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iii, contains what is by common repute the oldest vernacular lapidary in western Europe. No edition has distinguished its sources accurately or analysed the process of its composition. It has been difficult, more generally, to see how the Anglo-Saxons' ideas fitted into those more widely current. There is no reliable published survey of lapidary writings between late antiquity and the late eleventh century.
Lists of saints' resting-places in Anglo-Saxon England
Authors: Rollason D. W.
Published: September 2008

Secgan be þam Godes sanctum þe on Engla lande ærost reston is the title of a short document in Old English which is extant in two manuscripts, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 201, pp. 149–51, and London, British Library, Stowe 944, 34v–39r. These manuscripts are dated to the middle and the first half of the eleventh century respectively on the evidence of their script. A third copy was once in London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius D. xvii but was destroyed in the fire of 1731. The only scholarly edition is that of Felix Liebermann. The document mentions the resting-places of eighty-nine saints: all but one of these places are in England and all but ten of the saints were active in England. The usual formula is of the type, ‘Ðonne resteð sanctus Congarus confessor on Cungresbirig’ (37b), but in many cases the place is further defined by reference to some topographical feature, most often a river, as, for example, ‘Ðonne resteð sanctus Iohannes biscop on þare stowe Beferlic, neah þare ea Hul’ (5a).
Beowulf, Wiglaf and the Wægmundings
Authors: Eliason Norman E.
Published: September 2008

In the second part of Beowulf (2200–3182) two crucial questions are posed, neither of which has ever been satisfactorily answered: precisely how is Beowulf related to Wiglaf and what is Beowulf's connection with the Wægmunding family? The fact that the poet himself does not provide a clear cut answer to either of the questions or indeed any kind of answer at all is as surprising as it is puzzling. Throughout the poem he takes pains to make family relationship clear, usually specifying it and repeating it when the relationship is particularly significant and sometimes mentioning it even when it is pointless. But in the final and climactic episode of the poem recounting how the aged hero Beowulf fights his last battle and meets his death, accompanied only by one loyal and fearless follower, his young kinsman Wiglaf, the poet is content to leave their relationship obscure.
Cynewulf's devaluation of heroic tradition in Juliana
Authors: Schneider Claude
Published: September 2008

A not infrequent observation in criticism about Old English Christian poems holds that a body of diction which was inherited from a Germanic, military and heroic past forced the poets to describe Christian characters inappropriately in terms belonging to the ideals of a warrior society. In my opinion, this is a simplistic assumption which needs to be challenged, particularly in relation to Cynewulf's Juliana, where, I believe, it has been positively misleading. For instance, in her edition of this poem Rosemary Woolf states that its traditional diction might be explained either as Cynewulf's calculated glorification of Christian story or as his mere deference to convention:
Leland's transcript of Ælfric'sGlossary
Authors: Buckalew Ronald E.
Published: September 2008

When Henry VIII‘s Antiquary, John Leland, died in 1552, he left several volumes of notes and transcripts which have come to be called hisCollectaneaVolume iii of this collection, now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, contains a long series of extracts from a Latin–Old English glossary entitled ‘Ex antiquissimo Dictionario Latinosaxonico‘. It has not yet been noticed in print that these extracts are a transcript of items from Ælfric‘sGlossary, and it has not been realized that they were copied from a manuscript not otherwise attested. Although (excluding a Latin–Old Cornish version) theGlossaryis extant in seven medieval manuscripts (four virtually complete) and in two sets of medieval excerpts – two more manuscripts being known from sixteenth-and seventeenth-century transcripts – this record of a twelfth text is significant for several reasons. It provides valuable textual evidence; it is an additional sign of the medieval popularity of theGlossary;it is an important witness to the beginnings of Anglo-Saxon studies in the years immediately following the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII; its publication in Hearne‘s edition of theCollectaneain 1715 was in fact the first printing of any version of Ælfric'sGlossary(although not recognized as such); and it demonstrates the need for more attention to Leland'sCollectaneaby both medieval and Renaissance scholars.