Bücher der Reihe Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England

An extensively introduced and annotated edition of two Old English versions of the colourful legend of the virgin martyr, St Margaret of Antioch, who became one of the most widely celebrated of medieval saints and the patron saint of childbirth.

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

This book, published in 2000, is a substantial publication in the growing field of studies of texts in Old English in the twelfth (and early thirteenth) century. Useful to historians, linguists, English, Anglo-Norman and Latin literature scholars and manuscript specialists, it covers a wide variety of significant issues including production, audience, contents and uses.

This book offers an imaginative way of understanding the relationship between syntax and metre in Old English poetry. It challenges the view that verse was composed in loose syntax to compensate for the strict requirements of prosody. The author proposes a 'prosodical' syntax to replace the famous syntactic laws of Hans Kuhn.

Peter Clemoes brings a lifetime's close study of Anglo-Saxon texts to this fresh appreciation of Old English poetry, with a radically new interpretation which relates the poetry to both the entire Anglo-Saxon way of thinking and the structures of its society.

This 1999 book is concerned with the pictorial language of gesture revealed in Anglo-Saxon art, and its debt to classical Rome. Reginald Dodwell, an eminent art historian, notes a striking similarity of both form and meaning between Anglo-Saxon gestures and those in illustrated manuscripts of the plays of Terence.

This is an edition, with introduction, translation and commentary, of the Laterculus Malalianus, a historical exegesis of the life of Christ, which appears to be the only complete text to survive from the hand of Archbishop Theodore at Canterbury, the first school of Anglo-Saxon England.

This study constructs a reading of Old English poetry which takes up issues in poststructuralist theory, arguing that for this genre of poetry the idea of 'verse sequences' should replace the 'poem' and 'implied tradition' should replace the idea of 'the author'.

Professor Cross, in collaboration with four other scholars, presents the manuscript source for the Old English versions of two biblical apocrypha, The Gospel of Nichodemus and The Avenging of the Saviour. Parallel editions of the relevant Latin and Old English texts are given, together with modern English translations.

The cult of saints was one of the most important aspects of life in the Middle Ages, and it often formed the nucleus of developing group identities in a town, a province or a country. This book examines five of AElfric's saints' Lives in their contemporary political and intellectual setting.

Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury (668-90), shaped the English Church into a structure it has retained for a millennium. In this book, internationally distinguished scholars provide a fresh account of the career and writings of a unique personality who brought to Anglo-Saxon England the cultural heritage of Syria, Byzantium and Rome.

This book identifies key features of the audience or readership of Old English poetry in the late Anglo-Saxon period, and relates the interests of these groups of people to themes reflected in the poetic texts.

How did the Anglo-Saxons conceptualize the interim between death and Doomsday? In Paradise, Death and Doomsday in Anglo-Saxon Literature, first published in 2001, Dr Kabir presents an investigation into the Anglo-Saxon belief in the 'interim paradise': paradise as a temporary abode for good souls following death and pending the final decisions of Doomsday.

The author argues that Old English poetic descriptions of the natural world were not a reflection of physical conditions but a literary device used to define important issues, such as the state of humanity, the power of individuals and the relationship between God and creation.

This book is an illustrated study of the theology of the Trinity as expressed in the literature and art of the late Anglo-Saxon period. It will be of interest to art historians, theologians and literary scholars alike.

Richard North offers an interesting view of Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian paganism and mythology in the pre-Viking and Viking age, with special reference to a pre-Christian god known as Ingui. He reconstructs the slender Old English evidence in an imaginative and original treatment of poems such as Deor and The Dream of the Rood.

This book presents an edition, with facing translations and commentary, of three long-neglected Old English apocryphal gospels dealing with the birth, childhood, death and assumption of Mary, extant in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. An extensive introduction covers the origins and development of the apocrypha and their influence in Anglo-Saxon England.

A study of the relationship between text and picture in the only surviving illustrated Anglo-Saxon poetic manuscript. It locates the manuscript within the cultural contexts in which it was produced, documenting its transformation by poets, artists, scholars and editors from biblical poetry to a national historical narrative.

Charles Wright identifies the characteristic features of Irish Christian literature which influenced Anglo-Saxon vernacular authors. As a full-length study of Irish influence on Old English religious literature, the book will appeal to scholars in Old English literature, Anglo-Saxon studies, and Old and Middle Irish literature.

This 1995 book is a study of the transmission of the Vulgate Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon England. Richard Marsden examines the historical context of the dissemination of the scriptures, and analyses twenty surviving Latin manuscripts and further translations of scripture into Old English.

This book, first published in 2000, discusses the attitudes towards Anglo-Saxons expressed by English poets, playwrights and novelists from the thirteenth century to the present day. The essays are arranged chronologically, tracing literary responses to the Anglo-Saxons in the medieval period, the Renaissance, and also the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This is an extended study of the Old Testament poems of the Junius collection as a group. Remley allows the biblical content of the poems to tell its own story. He compares them with other early medieval texts, and sets out the full range of variants while engaging in hermeneutic and reader-response criticism.

This is the first book to study Old English medical texts, comparing Anglo-Saxon medical practice with that of the Greeks and Romans, and concluding that it was as good as any previously practised in Western Europe.

This substantially introduced and annotated first edition of a previously unknown Latin text, the biblical commentaries of Theodore and Hadrian, throws light on the intellectual history of early medieval Europe.

This 1998 book is a clear and concise account of early Germanic alliterative verse which explains how such verse was treated by the Beowulf poet. It should interest scholars of Old English and related Germanic languages, as well as linguists and those concerned with poetic metre.

This book provides a wide-ranging exploration of the cult in England from c. 700 to the Conquest. Dr Clayton describes and illustrates with a plate section the development of Marian devotion, discussing Anglo-Saxon feasts of the Virgin, liturgical texts, prayers, art, poetry and prose.

This is a book-length study of the poetic style of Aldhelm of Malmesbury, 'the first English man of letters' and one of the earliest Anglo-Saxons whose writings survive. Andy Orchard traces the sources and models for Aldhelm's Latin poetry and the nature and extent of his influence on later Anglo-Latin verse.

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

This book throws light on the debate about the 'orality' or 'literacy' of Old English verse, whether it was transmitted orally or written down.

This book argues that the formal art of the Old English epic Beowulf is shaped and determined by the poetic language which the poet inherited from the oral, traditional culture of Anglo-Saxon England.