Descriptions of manuscripts held in various libraries, including the manuscript's history, codicological features, collation, list of contents, notes on special features and problems, and selected bibliography.

While quill and ink were the writing implements of choice in the Anglo-Saxon scriptorium, other colouring and non-colouring writing implements were in active use, too. The stylus, among them, was used on an everyday basis both for taking notes in wax tablets and for several vital steps in the creation of manuscripts. Occasionally, the stylus or perhaps even small knives were used for writing short notes that were scratched in the parchment surface without ink. One particular type of such notes encountered in manuscripts are dry-point glosses, i.e. short explanatory remarks that provide a translation or a clue for a lexical or syntactic difficulty of the Latin text. The present study provides a comprehensive overview of the known corpus of dry-point glosses in Old English by cataloguing the 34 manuscripts that are currently known to contain such glosses. A first general descriptive analysis of the corpus of Old English dry-point glosses is provided and their difficult visual appearance is discussed with respect to the theoretical and practical implications for their future study.

New edition with facing-page translation of a highly significant and influential Old English text.

In her ground-breaking new study, Katie Bugyis offers a new history of communities of Benedictine nuns in England from 900 to 1225. By applying innovative paleographical, codicological, and textual analyses to their surviving liturgical books, Bugyis recovers a treasure trove of unexamined evidence for understanding these women's lives and the liturgical and pastoral ministries they performed. She examines the duties and responsibilities of their chief monastic officers--abbesses, prioresses, cantors, and sacristans--highlighting three of the ministries vital to their practice-liturgically reading the gospel, hearing confessions, and offering intercessory prayers for others. Where previous scholarship has argued that the various reforms of the central Middle Ages effectively relegated nuns to complete dependency on the sacramental ministrations of priests, Bugyis shows that, in fact, these women continued to exercise primary control over their spiritual care. Essential to this argument is the discovery that the production of the liturgical books used in these communities was carried out by female scribes, copyists, correctors, and creators of texts, attesting to the agency and creativity that nuns exercised in the care they extended to themselves and those who sought their hospitality, counsel, instruction, healing, forgiveness, and intercession.

Anglo-Saxon lexicography studies Latin texts and words. The earliest English lexicographers are largely unidentifiable students, teachers, scholars and missionaries. Materials brought from abroad by early teachers were augmented by their teachings and passed on by their students. Lexicographical material deriving from the early Canterbury school remains traceable in glossaries throughout this period, but new material was constantly added. Aldhelm and Ælfric Bata, among others, wrote popular, much studied hermeneutic texts using rare, exotic words, often derived from glossaries, which then contributed to other glossaries. Ælfric of Eynsham is a rare identifiable early English lexicographer, unusual in his lack of interest in hermeneutic vocabulary. The focus is largely on context and the process of creation and intended use of glosses and glossaries. Several articles examine intellectual centres where scholars and texts came together, for example, Theodore and Hadrian in Canterbury; Aldhelm in Malmesbury; Dunstan at Christ Church, Canterbury; Æthelwold in Winchester; King Æthelstan's court; Abingdon; Glastonbury; and Worcester.

While quill and ink were the writing implements of choice in the Anglo-Saxon scriptorium, other colouring and non-colouring writing implements were in active use, too. The stylus, among them, was used on an everyday basis both for taking notes in wax tablets and for several vital steps in the creation of manuscripts. Occasionally, the stylus or perhaps even small knives were used for writing short notes that were scratched in the parchment surface without ink. One particular type of such notes encountered in manuscripts are dry-point glosses, i.e. short explanatory remarks that provide a translation or a clue for a lexical or syntactic difficulty of the Latin text. The present study provides a comprehensive overview of the known corpus of dry-point glosses in Old English by cataloguing the 34 manuscripts that are currently known to contain such glosses. A first general descriptive analysis of the corpus of Old English dry-point glosses is provided and their difficult visual appearance is discussed with respect to the theoretical and practical implications for their future study.

Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History, volume 7 (CMR 7), covering Central and Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and South America in the period 1500-1600, is a continuing volume in a general history of relations between the two faiths from the seventh century to the early 20th century. It comprises introductory essays and the main body of detailed entries which treat all the works, surviving or lost, that have been recorded. These entries provide biographical details of the authors, descriptions and assessments of the works themselves, and complete accounts of manuscripts, editions, translations and studies. The result of collaboration between numerous leading scholars, CMR 7, along with the other volumes in this series, is intended as a basic tool for research in Christian-Muslim relations. Section editors: Clinton Bennett, Luis F. Bernabe Pons, Lejla Demiri, Martha Frederiks, John-Paul Ghobrial, David Grafton, Alan Guenther, Abdulkadir Hashim, Şevket Küçükhüseyin, Emma Loghin, Gordon Nickel, Claire Norton, Peter Riddell, Umar Ryad, Davide Tacchini, Moussa Serge Hyacinthe Traore, Carsten Walbiner

In this overview of secularism and its history, Kennedy traces, through a series of intellectual biographies of leading European thinkers such as Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Dostoyevsky, and Solzhenitsyn, just how the Western world changed from religious to secular.