Anglo-Saxon England

by Edited by Michael Lapidge , Malcolm Godden , Simon Keynes

• ISBN13: 9780521038584
• ISBN10: 0521038588
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-01-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Throughout the centuries of its existence, Anglo-Saxon society was highly, if not widely, literate: it was a society the functioning of which depended very largely on the written word. All the essays in this volume throw light on the literacy of Anglo-Saxon England, from the writs which were used as the instruments of government from the eleventh century onwards, to the normative texts which regulated the lives of Benedictine monks and nuns, to the runes stamped on an Anglo-Saxon coin, to the pseudorunes which deliver the coded message of a man to his lover in a well-known Old English poem, to the mysterious writing on an amulet which was apparently worn by a religious for a personal protection from the devil. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year's publications in all branches of Anglo-Saxon studies rounds off the book.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations

On argumentation in Old English philology, with particular reference to the editing and dating of

Knowledge of the writings of John Cassian in early Anglo-Saxon England

The earliest manuscript of Bede's metrical

Beowulf and some fictions of the Geatish succession

An Anglo-Saxon runic coin and its adventures in Sweden Margaret

The sources of the Old English Martyrology

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 57: a witness to the early stages of the Benedictine reform in England?

The Old English Benedictine Rule: Writing for women and men

The trick of the runes in The Husband's Message

A late Saxon inscribed pendant from

Illustrations of damnation in late Anglo-Saxon manuscripts

The use of writs in the eleventh century

Addenda and corrigenda to the Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts Helmut Gneuss

Bibliography for 2002

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