A HISTORY OF OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE A History of Old English Literature has been significantly revised to provide an unequivocal response to the renewed historicism in medieval studies. Focusing on the production and reception of Old English texts and on their relation to Anglo-Saxon history and culture, this new edition covers an exceptionally broad array of genres. These range from riddles and cryptograms to allegory, liturgical texts, and romance, as well as lyric poetry and heroic legend. The authors also integrate discussions of Anglo-Latin texts, crucial to understanding the development of Old English literature. This second edition incorporates extensive reference to scholarship that has evolved over the past decade, with new chapters on both Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and on incidental and marginal texts. There is expanded treatment throughout, including increased coverage of legal texts and scientific and scholastic texts. The book concludes with a retrospective outline of the reception of Anglo-Saxon literature and culture in subsequent periods.
The fruits of Anglo-Saxon learning continue to captivate Anglo-Saxonists and scholars of natural science and medicine, witness recent publications such as Martin Blake's edition of Ælfric's De temporibus anni (2009), and the proceedings of the Storehouses of Wholesome Learning and Leornungcræft projects. In 1992, Stephanie Hollis and Michael Wright took stock of secular learning in the vernacular, in their monumental annotated bibliography Old English Prose of Secular Learning. The present volume surveys and evaluates advances in the study of Anglo-Saxon secular learning from the past two decades. It also consolidates an ongoing interest in scholarship by Anglo-Saxons by presenting nine original essays that focus on the disciplines of law, encyclopaedic notes, computus, medicine, charms, and prognostication, with a focus on learning in the vernacular, or the relationship between Latin and the vernacular. This volume is of interest for Anglo-Saxonists who work with vernacular sources of learning, and for historians of law, natural science, medicine, divination and magic.