Work for the series Placenames of the Isle of Man is undertaken under the auspices of the Manx Place-Name Survey, set up at the University of Mannheim in 1988. The survey falls into two parts: material collected from a) oral, and b) documentary sources. Placename material, mostly Manx Gaelic, for the first part, was collected on sound-recordings or in phonetic script 1989-1992 from some 200 informants, almost exclusively from the farming community. The second part contains material drawn from documentary sources of 13th-20th century date, but mostly from 17th-19th centuries. The whole is to appear in seven volumes, the first six based on each of the six Sheadings (districts) as follows: Vol. 1 - Sheading of Glenfaba, Vol. 2 - Sheading of Michael, Vol. 3 - Sheading of Ayre, Vol. 4 - Sheading of Garff, Vol. 5 - Sheading of Middle, Vol. 6 - Sheading of Rushen, Vol. 7 - Douglas. The last volume also contains a detailed linguistic discussion of the corpus, a full and comprehensive index, as well as a series of element distribution maps and maps of the 17 parishes showing the traditional land divisions upon which the names are based.

This volume contains a selection of papers which have been revised and extended for publication from two working groups held at conferences at Galway (1992) and Göteborg (1993) which celebrated the quincentenary of Columbus' discovery of America in 1492. The pre-Columbian period of language contact is covered by articles on Old Norse in the Faroes, Scotland and Ireland, the Shetland dialect and Norn, and placenames in Iceland and Greenland. The articles on the post-Columbian period are wide-ranging and cover, in the Scandinavian context, the Scandinavian emigration, American Swedish, American Finnish, Swedish-Spanish and various aspects of Norwegian in America and also in Spitzbergen; in the British colonial context, English dialects in New England, Scottish Gaelic in Nova Scotia and Scots in North America (Maryland, the Appalachians and Virginia); in the context of the later continental mass emigration, American Dutch, Texas German, Croatian and Italian. Two papers deal with reverse emigration, that of Sicilian and Calabrian dialects, and the special case of Krio in Sierra Leone.

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 'thelbert'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.

Summaries of theses and monographs.