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The cardinal role of Anglo-Saxon libraries in the transmission of classical and patristic literature to the later middle ages has long been recognized, for these libraries sustained the researches of

The cardinal role of Anglo-Saxon libraries in the transmission of classical and patristic literature to the later middle ages has long been recognized, for these libraries sustained the researches of

Originally published in 1985, fourteen leading specialists in the field of Anglo-Saxon studies contributed to this substantial collection of essays in honour of Peter Clemoes, founder of Anglo-Saxon England, who had recently retired as Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon in the University of Cambridge. The book is divided into two complementary parts. The first looks at the background to Anglo-Saxon learning, in particular at the composition of monastic and private libraries and the nature of the individual works available in them. The second examines the contents and sources of individual texts and reviews the problems of interpretation and transmission these pose for scholars. Many of these essays deal with complex and difficult materials like manuscripts and liturgical sources that are fundamental to the interpretation of Old English literature and to Anglo-Saxon culture in general.

One of the most important manuscripts surviving from pre-Conquest England receives penetrating analysis by several scholars. The 'Junius Manuscript' is evaluated from a number of intersecting perspectives, including codicology, decoration, script and punctuation; the confluence of these permits a fresh and convincing dating of this crucially important witness to Old English poetry. This demonstration is strikingly corroborated by an independent analysis of the textual transmission of one of the poems contained in the manuscript – Daniel – which is analysed in connection with another poetic version of the same biblical text, here entitled Three Youths, preserved in the 'Exeter Book'. Ælfric's conception of the creation and fall of the angels is also studied, and this takes us back to a poem in the 'Junius Manuscript', that known as Genesis A. It is shown that Ælfric's conception of the angels, which has no antecedent in the Bible itself, could possibly have been framed by his reading of

The discovery in Sonderhausen of a fragmentary psalter glossed in Latin and Old English allows fresh inferences to be drawn regarding the study of the psalter in Anglo-Saxon England, and of the transmission of the corpus of vernacular psalter glosses. A detailed textual and palaeographical study of the Wearmouth-Jarrow bibles leads to the exciting possibility that the hand of Bede can be identified, annotating the text of the Bible which he no doubt played an instrumental role in establishing. Two Latin texts from the circle of Archbishop Wulfstan are published here in full, whilst disciplined philological and historical analysis helps to clarify a puzzling reference in Æthelbert's law-code to the early medieval practice of providing food render for the king. Finally, the volume contains two pioneering essays in the histoire des mentalités. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year's publications in all branches of Anglo-Saxon studies rounds off the book.

Our knowledge of Anglo-Saxon England depends wholly on the precise and detailed study of the texts that have come down to us from pre-Conquest times. The present book contains pioneering studies of some of these sources which have been neglected or misunderstood. A comprehensive study of a group of lavish gospelbooks written under the patronage of a late Anglo-Saxon countess, Judith of Flanders (sometime wife of the Earl Tostig who was killed at Stamford Bridge in 1066) shows the importance of these artefacts and provides fresh understanding of the transmission of the gospels in late eleventh-century England. Close analysis of the Libellus Æthelwoldi, a neglected Latin translation of a late tenth-century documentary record of the estates acquired by the redoubtable Bishop Æthelwold for Ely Abbey, throws significant light on the operations of the laws of land tenure in the late tenth century. These and other more traditional lines of enquiry are the focus of this book. The usual compreh