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.

First title in a new series of annotated bibliographies -- includes prose proverbs, romances, computistical texts, Enchiridion, magico- medical literature, etc.

Farming was the basis of the wealth that made England worth invading, twice, in the eleventh century, while trade and manufacturing were insignificant by modern standards. In Anglo-Saxon Farms and Farming, the authors employ a wide range of evidence to investigate how Anglo-Saxon farmers produced the food and other agricultural products that sustained English economy, society, and culture before the Norman Conquest. The first part of the volume draws on written and pictorial sources, archaeology, place-names, and the history of the English language to discover what crops and livestock people raised, and what tools and techniques were used to produce them. In part two, using a series of landscape studies - place-names, maps, and the landscape itself, the authors explore how these techniques might have been combined into working agricultural regimes in different parts of the country. A picture emerges of an agriculture that changed from an essentially prehistoric state in the sub-Roman period to what was recognisably the beginning of a tradition that only ended with the Second World War. Anglo-Saxon farming was not only sustainable, but infinitely adaptable to different soils and geology, and to a climate changing as unpredictably as it is today.

First modern text and English translation of an important Anglo-Saxon poem dealing with the liturgical year.

An collection of essays by specialists in the field examining Anglo-Saxon learning and text interpretation and transmission.

The Old English literary works traditionally associated with King Alfred are furnished with an array of prologues, epilogues, and other frame texts. These texts give fascinating glimpses into the ideas and contexts underlying the composition and reception of the Alfredian corpus. They draw attention to the ways in which authority and authorship interacted in the period and to contemporary perceptions of poetry and prose. This new edition addresses the contextual, critical, and theoretical issues raised by the frame texts, including their relationship to earlier traditions of prologue and epilogue, their engagement with English as a literary language, and their implications for the authorship debate. The texts are edited here for the first time in a single volume, with a facing-page modern English translation and a wide range of explanatory material.

The spectacle of the wounded body figured prominently in the Middle Ages, from images of Christ’s wounds on the cross, to the ripped and torn bodies of tortured saints who miraculously heal through divine intervention, to graphic accounts of battlefield and tournament wounds—evidence of which survives in the archaeological record—and literary episodes of fatal (or not so fatal) wounds. This volume offers a comprehensive look at the complexity of wounding and wound repair in medieval literature and culture, bringing together essays from a wide range of sources and disciplines including arms and armaments, military history, medical history, literature, art history, hagiography, and archaeology across medieval and early modern Europe. Contributors are Stephen Atkinson, Debby Banham, Albrecht Classen, Joshua Easterling, Charlene M. Eska, Carmel Ferragud, M.R. Geldof, Elina Gertsman, Barbara A. Goodman, Máire Johnson, Rachel E. Kellett, Ilana Krug, Virginia Langum, Michael Livingston, Iain A. MacInnes, Timothy May, Vibeke Olson, Salvador Ryan, William Sayers, Patricia Skinner, Alicia Spencer-Hall, Wendy J. Turner, Christine Voth, and Robert C. Woosnam-Savage.

Fresh perspectives on the English clergy, their books, and the wider Anglo-Saxon church.

First published in 1998, this volume brings together some of the best recent work on the period before and after the Norman Conquest and makes an irresistible case for a number of fundamental revisions in our understanding of the culture of Anglo-Saxon and Norman England. Combining the use of novel techniques such as digital image processing with the best current practice in textual and iconographic study, this volume broadens the scope and applicability of manuscript studies, showing, for example, the falsity of prevailing notions of the vitality and status of the native English tongue after the Conquest. The essays combine to make a coherent and persuasive demonstration of the benefits of not remaining bound to the physical artifact but rather connecting codicology with practical and theoretical applications within manuscript studies and other historical disciplines.

In The Third Gender, McDaniel addresses the idea of the "third gender" in early hagiography and Latin treatises on virginity and then examines Aelfric's treatment of gender in his translations of Latin monastic Lives for his non-monastic audiences. She first investigates patristic ideas about a "third gender" by describing this concept within the theoretical frameworks of monasticism and then turns to creating a historical and theological cultural context within which to locate an interpretation of Aelfric's portrayals of male and female saints.