Anglo-Saxon England

by Edited by Michael Lapidge , Malcolm Godden , Simon Keynes

• ISBN13: 9780521038591
• ISBN10: 0521038596
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-10-15
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

It is red-letter day in Anglo-Saxon studies when a previously unknown Old English text comes to light. In 2002, as the result of some outstanding scholarly detective work, a fragmentary homiliary, containing exegetical homilies for the Sundays after Pentecost, came to light in the Somerset County Records Office in Taunton. The manuscript apparently dates from the middle years of the eleventh century; but questions of when and where and by whom the homiliary was composed can only be answered by close philological study of the Old English text itself. The present volume of Anglo-Saxon England contains a printed edition of this interesting text, and detailed philological analysis leads to the extraordinary hypothesis that the text may have been composed by someone whose native language was not English, and who was apparently unfamiliar with the mainstream of English homiletic composition, best illustrated in the work of 'lfric. 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

St Aldhelm's bees (De uirginitate prosa, cc. iv-vi): some observations on a literary tradition

Poetic words, conservatism and the dating of Old English poetry

The several compilers of Bald's

'lfric and late Old English verse

Abbot Leofsige of Mettlach: an English monk in Flanders and Upper Lotharingia in the late tenth century

The Taunton Fragment: a new text from Anglo-Saxon England

Pre-Conquest manuscripts from Malmesbury Abbey and John Leland's letter to Beatus Rhenanus concerning a lost copy of Tertullian's works

A third supplement to Hand-List of Anglo-Saxon Non-Runic Inscriptions

Bibliography for 2003

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