For the 2nd ASPNS conference the emphasis regarding the topics of the talks was placed on lexicographic and linguistic matters. In this volume the contributors assess the various problems of working with plant names like foxes glofa and geormanleaf, pulege and psyllium, hlenortear or fornetes folm. A special study analyses the semantic aspects of Old English plant names. More generally plant related discussions deal with the mandrake legend in Anglo-Saxon England and continental Europe, the need for a new publication of the Old English Herbarium and of the Medicina de Quadrupedibus, or the tree names in Anglo-Saxon charters. The conference also served as a platform to introduce the Graz-Munich online project Dictionary of Old English Plant Names.

From Earth to Art presents papers from the ‘Early Medieval Plant Studies’ symposium, a meeting designed to explore the various disciplines which could help to elucidate the plant-names of Anglo-Saxon England, many of which are not understood. The range of disciplines represented includes landscape history, place-name studies, botany, archaeology, art history, Old English literature, the history of food and of medicine, and linguistic approaches such as semantics and morphology. This collection represents a first experimental step in the work of the Anglo-Saxon Plant-Name Survey (ASPNS), a multidisciplinary research project based in the University of Glasgow. ASPNS is dedicated to collecting and reviewing, for the first time, the total multidisciplinary evidence for each plant-name, and establishing new or improved identifications. The results will have implications for various historical studies such as agriculture, pharmacology, nutrition, climate, dialect, and more. Included in the book is the first ASPNS word-study, concerned with the Old English word æspe (the ancestor of ‘aspen’), and it is shown that this tree-name had a broader meaning than has hitherto been suspected. This book will be of interest to historians, botanists, archaeologists, linguists, geographers, gardeners, herbalists, conservationists and anyone interested in the crucial role of plants in history.

This book presents for the first time an up-to-date and easy-to-read translation of a medical reference work that was used in Western Europe from the fifth century well into the Renaissance. Listing 185 medicinal plants, the uses for each, and remedies that were compounded using them, the translation will fascinate medievalist, medical historians and the layman alike.

The papers in this volume cover a wide range of interrelated syntactic phenomena, from the history of core arguments, to complements and non-finite clauses, elements in the clause periphery, as well as elements with potential scope over complete sentences and even larger discourse chunks. In one way or another, however, they all testify to an increasing awareness that even some of the most central phenomena of syntax – and the way they develop over time – are best understood by taking into account their communicative functions and the way they are processed and represented by speakers’ cognitive apparatus. In doing so, they show that historical syntax, and historical linguistics in general, is witnessing a convergence between formerly distinct linguistic frameworks and traditions. With this fusion of traditions, the trend is undeniably towards a richer and more broadly informed understanding of syntactic change and the history of English. This volume will be of great interest to scholars of (English) historical syntax and historical linguistics within the cognitive-linguistic as well as the generative tradition.

Old English had a large number of plant names: more than a thousand are attested. These are listed here, including parts of plants and products of plants. In the main list the following kinds of information are provided: the spelling (including spelling variants), the literal meaning, the etymology (native word or loan-word) and word-formation, equivalents in Modern English, in the Linnéan terminology, and in German, as well as the older Latin names. Cross-references to etymologically or semantically related names are also given. It is furthermore noted if the etymology or the identification of the plant is unclear. The main list is made more accessible and is supplemented by several indices and supplementary lists; these collect, for example, those Old English plant names that survive in Modern English, Old English names for fruits and products of plants, tree names, the Latin names according to the Linnéan system, the Modern English equivalents, and the Modern German equivalents.

This volume offers an empirical and diachronic investigation of the foundations and nature of metaphor in English. Metaphor is one of the hot topics in present-day linguistics, with a huge range of research focusing on the systematic connections between different concepts such as heat and anger (fuming, inflamed), sight and understanding (clear, see), or bodies and landscape (hill-foot, river-mouth). Until recently, the lack of a comprehensive data source made it difficult to obtain an overview of this phenomenon in any language, but this changed with the completion in 2009 of The Historical Thesaurus of English, the only historical thesaurus ever produced for any language. Chapters in this volume use this unique resource as a basis for case studies of semantic domains including Animals, Colour, Death, Fear, Food, Reading, and Theft, providing a significant step forward in the data-driven understanding of metaphor.

Throughout the centuries of its existence, Anglo-Saxon society was highly, if not widely, literate: it was a society the functioning of which depended very largely on the written word. All the essays in this volume throw light on the literacy of Anglo-Saxon England, from the writs which were used as the instruments of government from the eleventh century onwards, to the normative texts which regulated the lives of Benedictine monks and nuns, to the runes stamped on an Anglo-Saxon coin, to the pseudorunes which deliver the coded message of a man to his lover in a well-known Old English poem, to the mysterious writing on an amulet which was apparently worn by a religious for a personal protection from the devil. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year's publications in all branches of Anglo-Saxon studies rounds off the book.

The book examines the lived experience of worship in early medieval England and Ireland, ranging from public experience of church and stone sculptures, to monastic life, to personal contemplation of, and meditation on, manuscript illuminations and other devotional objects.