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Weaving Words and Binding Bodiespresents the first comprehensive study of weaving and binding imagery through intertextual analysis and close readings ofBeowulf, riddles, the poetry of Cynewulf, and other key texts.

The Tower of Babel narrative is one of the most memorable accounts of the Bible, and its interpretative potential has produced a vast array of literary adaptations. Undoing Babel is the first extensive examination of the development of the Babel narrative amongst Anglo-Saxon authors from late antiquity to the eleventh century. Tristan Major’s illuminating and original insight into Anglo-Latin and Old English works, including the writings of Aldhelm, Bede, Alcuin, Ælfric, and Wulfstan, reveals the cultural ideologies and anxieties that transformed the Babel narrative. In doing so, Major argues that these Babel narratives provide a basis for understanding the world’s ethnic and linguistic diversity as well as a theological stimulus to evangelize non-Christian and non-European people. Undoing Babel highlights the depth of literary innovation in this period and disproves any notion of a single Anglo-Saxon reception of biblical sources.

As one of the most prolific and influential scholars in the field, Thomas D. Hill has made an indelible mark on the study of Old English literature. In celebration of his distinguished career, the editors of Source of Wisdom have assembled a wide-ranging collection of nineteen original essays on Old English poetry and prose as well as early medieval Latin, touching upon many of Hill’s specific research interests. Among the topics examined in this volume are the Christian-Latin sources of Old English texts, including religious and ‘sapiential’ poetry, and prose translations of Latin writings. Old English poems such as Beowulf , The Dream of the Rood , and The Wife’s Lament are treated, throughout, to thematic, textual, stylistic, lexical, and source analysis. Prose writers of the period such as King Alfred and Wærferth, as well as medieval Latin writers such as Bede and Pseudo-Methodius are also discussed. As an added feature, the volume includes a bibliography of publications by Thomas D. Hill. Source of Wisdom is, ultimately, a contribution to the understanding of medieval English literature and the textual traditions that contributed to its development.

Reviews This work fills a gap in existing literature by providing a resource that categorizes primary texts in old and middle English literature into sepcific genres...Recommended for academic libraries. Reference & User Services Quarterly This is a knowledgeable and lively companion for students encountering Anglo-Saxon or Middle English literature for the first time in a survey course or even for specialists in a particular medieval area who wish to pursue other genres...Students of medieval literature will want to own and reread this volume; all academic libraries serving upper-division undergraduates and above should purchase it. Choice

Land and Bookplaces a variety of texts in a dynamic conversation with the procedures and documents of land tenure, showing how its social practice led to innovation across written genres in both Latin and Old English.

How did the Anglo-Saxons conceptualize the interim between death and Doomsday? In this 2001 book, Ananya Jahanara Kabir presents an investigation into the Anglo-Saxon belief in the 'interim paradise': paradise as a temporary abode for good souls following death and pending the final decisions of Doomsday. She locates the origins of this distinctive sense of paradise within early Christian polemics, establishes its Anglo-Saxon development as a site of contestation and compromise, and argues for its post-Conquest transformation into the doctrine of purgatory. In ranging across Old English prose and poetry as well as Latin apocrypha, exegesis, liturgy, prayers and visions of the otherworld, and combining literary criticism with recent scholarship in early medieval history, early Christian theology and history of ideas, this book is essential reading for scholars of Anglo-Saxon England, historians of Christianity, and all those interested in the impact of the Anglo-Saxon period on the later Middle Ages.

This review of the critical reception of Old English literature from 1900 to the present moves beyond a focus on individual literary texts so as to survey the different schools, methods, and assumptions that have shaped the discipline. * Examines the notable works and authors from the period, including Beowulf, the Venerable Bede, heroic poems, and devotional literature * Reinforces key perspectives with excerpts from ten critical studies * Addresses questions of medieval literacy, textuality, and orality, as well as style, gender, genre, and theme * Embraces the interdisciplinary nature of the field with reference to historical studies, religious studies, anthropology, art history, and more

A Handbook of Animals in Old English Texts is the definitive handbook for students, scholars, and observers of the non-human in early medieval England. In this interdisciplinary compendium to the animal inhabitants of medieval Britain, Preston documents each creature mentioned in the Old English literary textual canon and correlates its standard literary interpretation with relevant historical, archaeological, and ecological studies. Beyond its usefulness as a reference work, Preston’s text challenges the reader to move beyond a literary analysis of the figural beast to one that leaves space for the actual animal.

The Anglo-Saxon Literature Handbook  presents an accessible introduction to the surviving works of prose and poetry produced in Anglo-Saxon England, from AD 410-1066. * Makes Anglo-Saxon literature accessible to modern readers * Helps readers to overcome the linguistic, aesthetic and cultural barriers to understanding and appreciating Anglo-Saxon verse and prose * Introduces readers to the language, politics, and religion of the Anglo-Saxon literary world * Presents original readings of such works as Beowulf, The Battle of Maldon, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

From the eighth century to the turn of the millennium, East Anglia had a variety of identities thrust upon it by authors of the period who envisioned a unified England. Although they were not regional writers in the modern sense, Bede, Felix, the annalists of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, King Alfred of Wessex, Abbo of Fleury, and Ælfric of Eynsham took a keen interest in East Anglia, especially in its potential to undo English cultural cohesiveness as they imagined it. Angles on a Kingdom argues that those authors treated East Anglia as both a hindrance and a stimulus to the development of early English national consciousness. Combining close textual reading with consideration of early medieval barrow burials, coinage, border delineation, and rivalries between monastic houses, Joseph Grossi examines various forms of cultural affirmation and manipulation. Angles on a Kingdom shows that, over the course of roughly two and a half centuries, the literary metamorphoses of East Anglia hint at the region’s recurring tensions with its neighbours – tensions which suggest that writers who sought to depict a coherent England downplayed what they deemed to be dangerous impulses emanating from the island’s easternmost corner.