This new edition of an important early English poem includes a history of the text and an updated bibliography.

The Cynewulf Reader is a collection of classic and original essays presenting a comprehensive view of the elusive Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf, his language, and his work.

Two original essays and 16 published since 1950 offer a comprehensive view of Cynewulf, his language, and his poetry. The collection contains important new statements on dates, provenance, and canon by R.D. Fulk and Patrick W. Conner, four influential essays that thoroughly explore Cynewulf's runic signature and poetic style, and major contributions to our understanding of the four signed poems of Cynewulf, Fates of the Apostles, Christ II, Juliana, and Elene. Three essays are devoted to each of these poems, and the essays themselves exemplify a broad range of approaches to this highly elusive Anglo-Saxon poet. The volume complements existing book-length treatments of the subject and will be welcome to scholars and students who need the foundations of Cynewulf scholarship at their fingertips.

St Helena, mother of Constantine the Great and legendary finder of the True Cross, was appropriated in the middle ages as a British saint. The rise and persistence of this legend harnessed Helena's imperial and sacred status to portray her as a romance heroine, source of national pride, and a legitimising link to imperial Rome. This study is the first to examine the origins, development, political exploitation and decline of this legend, tracing its momentum and adaptive power from Anglo-Saxon England to the twentieth century. Using Latin, English, and Welsh texts, as well as church dedications and visual arts, the author examines the positive effect of the British legend on the cult of St Helena and the reasons for its wide appeal and durability in both secular and religious contexts. Two previously unpublished vitae of St Helena are included in the volume: a Middle English verse vita from the South English Legendary, and a Latin prose vita by the twelfth-century hagiographer, Jocelin of Furness. Antonina Harbus is Professor in the Department of English at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.

The late tenth-century Vercelli Book (Vercelli, Biblioteca Capitolare CXVII) contains one of the earliest surviving collections of homilies and poetry in the English language. The manuscript's combination of poetry and homiletic prose has generated intense scholarly debate, and there is no consensus concerning the original purpose of the compiler. New Readings in the Vercelli Book addresses central questions concerning the manuscript's intended use, mode of compilation, and purpose, and offers a variety of approaches on such topics as orthography, style, genre, theme, and source-study. The contributors include some of the foremost Vercelli experts, as well as the two most recent editors of the homilies. The remarkable essays in this volume offer the first sustained literary analysis of both the poetry and prose texts of the Vercelli Book, providing important new perspectives on a dynamic and valuable historical document.

Medieval writers who 'translated' Latin texts into Germanic vernaculars not only transmitted their originals, but, driven by individualistic impulses and cultural conventions, also transformed them. This process of domesticating texts was fundamentally creative and might more accurately be described as 'reconstruction'. The essays in Germanic Texts and Latin Models: Medieval Reconstructions explore the ways in which Latin texts and traditions were reconstructed in Old English, Old Icelandic and Old High German and cover a range of genres: legal texts, genealogies, histories, and poetry. They examine how medieval Germanic authors negotiated the need to transmit their models while at the same time fulfilling their own political, artistic and didactic objectives in the creation of vernacular texts. These new studies demonstrate the variety of ways in which medieval Germanic texts were indebted to their Latin exemplars, while reflecting their new culturally specific circumstances in the complex nexus of Latin learning and Germanic lore.

Anglo-Saxons valued education yet understood how precarious it could be, alternately bolstered and undermined by fear, desire, and memory. They praised their teachers in official writing, but composed and translated scenes of instruction that revealed the emotional and cognitive complexity of learning. Irina Dumitrescu explores how early medieval writers used fictional representations of education to explore the relationship between teacher and student. These texts hint at the challenges of teaching and learning: curiosity, pride, forgetfulness, inattention, and despair. Still, these difficulties are understood to be part of the dynamic process of pedagogy, not simply a sign of its failure. The book demonstrates the enduring concern of Anglo-Saxon authors with learning throughout Old English and Latin poems, hagiographies, histories, and schoolbooks.