Critics have traditionally treated the Old English poems about saints as individual, autonomous works, relating but little to one another except in a broadly generic way. Bjork challenges the traditional view with an examination of the major structural feature that all the poems share: direct discourse. Syntactical and rhetorical analyses of the five poems reveal a consistent use of spech in creating stylistic norms or ideals - stylistic icons - in spiritually perfect figures. In all the poems the speech of the saints in formal, rhetorical, and balanced, the stylistic analogue both of their immutable fith and of the Christ-saint figural connection. The speech of all other characters is measured against this standard; their ability or inability to meet the saintly ideal in language reflects their level of spiritual awareness. The consistency with which these patterns appear sheds new light on the conventions of Old English poetic hagiography.

Religious piety has rarely been animated as vigorously as in Old English Poems of Christ and His Saints. Ranging from lyrical to dramatic to narrative and showing great inventiveness, these ten anonymous poems vividly demonstrate the extraordinary hybrid that emerges when traditional Germanic verse adapts itself to Christian themes.

Ideas about the human mind are culturally specific and over time vary in form and prominence. The Life of the Mind in Old English Poetry presents the first extensive exploration of Anglo-Saxon beliefs about the mind and how these views informed Old English poetry. It identifies in this poetry a particular cultural focus on the mental world and formulates a multivalent model of the mind behind it, as the seat of emotions, the site of temptation, the container of knowledge, and a heroic weapon. The Life of the Mind in Old English Poetry treats a wide range of Old English literary genres (in the context of their Latin sources and analogues where applicable) in order to discover how ideas about the mind shape the narrative, didactic, and linguistic design of poetic discourse. Particular attention is paid to the rich and slippery vernacular vocabulary for the mind which suggests a special interest in the subject in Old English poetry. The book argues that Anglo-Saxon poets were acutely conscious of mental functions and perceived the psychological basis not only of the cognitive world, but also of the emotions and of the spiritual life.

Ideal for students, this collection of fifteen specially commissioned essays covers all aspects of Anglo-Saxon literature from 600-1066.

Reading Old English Biblical Poetry considers the Junius 11 manuscript, the only surviving illustrated book of Old English poetry, in terms of its earliest readers and their multiple strategies of reading and making meaning. Junius 11 begins with the creation story and ends with the final vanquishing of Satan by Jesus. The manuscript is both a continuous whole and a collection with discontinuities and functionally independent pieces. The chapters of Reading Old English Biblical Poetry propose multiple models for reader engagement with the texts in this manuscript, including selective and sequential reading, reading in juxtaposition, and reading in contexts within and outside of the pages of Junius 11. The study is framed by particular attention to the materiality of the manuscript and how that might have informed its early reception, and it broadens considerations of reading beyond those of the manuscript's compiler and possible patron. As a book, Junius 11 reflects a rich and varied culture of reading that existed in and beyond houses of God in England in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and it points to readers who had enough experience to select and find wisdom, narrative pleasure, and a diversity of other things within this or any book's contents.

Old English Verse (1972) covers the whole range of Old English poetry: the heroic poems, notably Beowulf and Malden; the ‘elegies’, such as The Wanderer and The Seafarer; the Bible stories and the lives of the saints which mark the end of pagan influence and the beginning of Christian inspiration; the Junius Manuscript; and finally King Alfred. All the many quotations are translated.

Intro -- Titlepage -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of Abbreviations of Authors and Works Cited -- Maps -- Introduction -- The Rule of Saint Benedict as Translated by Saint Æthelwold of Winchester -- Appendix 1: I. Concerning the Kinds of Monks (BL MS. Cotton Faustina A. x) -- Appendix 2: LXII. Concerning the Monastery's Priests and Their Servants (BL MS. Cotton Faustina A. x) -- Appendix 3: "King Edgar's Establishment of Monasteries"--Appendix 4: Ælfric's Homily On Saint Benedict, Abbot -- Bibliography

2001 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Exploring Old English texts ranging from Beowulf to Ælfric's Lives of Saints, this book examines ways that women's monastic, material, and devotional practices in Anglo-Saxon England shaped literary representations of women and femininity. Horner argues that these representations derive from a "discourse" of female monastic enclosure, based on the increasingly strict rules of cloistered confinement that regulated the female religious body in the early Middle Ages. She shows that the female subjects of much Old English literature are enclosed by many layers—literal and figurative, textual, material, discursive, spatial—all of which image and reinforce the powerful institutions imposed by the Church on the female body. Though it has long been recognized that medieval religious women were enclosed, and that virginity was highly valued, this book is the first to consider the interrelationships of these two positions—that is, how the material practices of female monasticism inform the textual operations of Old English literature.

In the first book-length study of the whole lifespan in Old English verse, Harriet Soper reveals how poets depicted varied paths through life, including their staging of entanglements between human life courses and those of the nonhuman or more-than-human. While Old English poetry sometimes suggests that uniform patterns shape each life, paralleling patristic traditions of the ages of man, it also frequently disrupts a sense of steady linearity through the life course in striking ways, foregrounding moments of sudden upheaval over smooth continuity, contingency over predictability, and idiosyncrasy over regularity. Advancing new readings of a diverse range of Old English poems, Soper draws on an array of supporting contexts and theories to illuminate these texts, unearthing their complex and fascinating depictions of ageing through life. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

This study constructs a reading of Old English poetry which takes up issues in poststructuralist theory, including intertextuality, work versus text and the author. The modern reader knows this literature as a discrete number of poems, set up and printed in units punctuated as modern sentences and with titles inserted by modern editors. Carol Braun Pasternack offers an alternative approach which takes into account the format of the verse as it exists in the manuscripts, using the term 'inscribed' to define texts which are situated between oral inheritance and print. In a detailed examination of texts throughout the canon she explores the ways in which readers construct poems in the process of reading and in addition she extends her analysis to the question of authorship, arguing that the texts do not imply an author but rather imply tradition as the source of their authority.