Rewriting Old English in the Twelfth Century

by Edited by Mary Swan , Elaine M. Treharne

• ISBN13: 9780521623728
• ISBN10: 0521623723
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-08-15
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This collection of essays aims to redefine the limits of Old English scholarship by studying some of the recent reworkings of texts composed earlier in the Anglo-Saxon period and their implications for the development of literary production across time. The essays in the volume constitute recent work on a wide range of texts, including homilies, saints' lives, psalters and biblical material; some focus on individual manuscripts incorporating palaeographic and orthographic studies; others use modern critical theory to examine later Old English texts; and all highlight the need to redefine our attitude to late recopying. The volume engages with important issues, including the nature of textual transmission and recomposition and its relationship to late Old English reader-response; attitudes to earlier material as evidenced in its recopying and adaptation; and the character of surviving manuscripts and what these tell us about the twelfth-century scribes and scriptoria, reading and readers.

Table of Contents

List of plates	vi
Acknowledgements	vii
List of abbreviations	ix
Introduction	1	(10)
Elaine M. Treharne
Mary Swan
The production and script of manuscripts containing English religious texts in the first half of the twelfth century	11	(30)
Elaine M. Treharne
The compilation and use of manuscripts containing Old English in the twelfth century	41	(21)
Susan Irvine
&Aelig;Aelfric's Catholic Homilies in the twelfth century	62	(21)
Mary Swan
Wulfstan and the twelfth century	83	(15)
Jonathan Wilcox
Menemonic transmission of Old English texts in the post-Conquest period	98	(19)
Loredana Teresi
Old English prose saints' lives in the twelfth century: the evidence of the extant manuscripts	117	(15)
Joana Proud
Old English prose saints' lives in the twelfth century: the Life of Martin in Bodely 343	132	(11)
Susan Rosser
Scribal habit: the evidence of the Old English Gospels	143	(23)
Roy Michael Liuzza
The Old English gloss of the Eadwine Psalter	166	(29)
Phillip Pulsiano
The Tremulous Worcester Hand and Gregory's Pastoral Care	195	(14)
Wendy Collier
Index of manuscripts	209	(2)
General index	211