James Campbell's work on the Anglo-Saxons is recognised as being some of the most original of recent writing on the period; it is brought together in this collection, which is both an important contribution to Anglo-Saxon studies in itself and also a pointer to the direction of future research.

First published in 2000, Basic Readings in Anglo-Saxon England (BRASE) is a series of volumes that collect classic, exemplary, or ground-breaking essays in the fields of Anglo-Saxon studies generally written in the 1960s or later, or commissioned by a volume editor to fulfill the purpose of the given volume. This, the sixth volume in the series, is the first devoted to history and the first edited by a scholar outside the field of literary study. David Pelteret has collected fifteen previously published essays: the first nine of his essays present a conspectus of Anglo-Saxon history; the other seven are spread among seven "Special Approaches": Anthropology, Archaeology, Art History, Economic and Comparative History, Geography and Geology, Place-Names, and Topography and Archaeology.

A revisionist interpretation of Anglo-Saxon England. Nicholas Howe proposes that the Anglo-Saxons fashioned a myth out of the 5th-century migration of their Germanic ancestors to Britain. Through the retelling of this story, the Anglo-Saxons ordered their complex history and identified their destiny as a people. Howe traces the migration myth throughout the literature of the Anglo-Saxon period, in poems, sermons, letters and histories from the sixth to the eleventh centuries.

The articles collected here (two appearing for the first time in English) cover a number of topics central to naval history and illustrate the author's contention that this is not only, or even chiefly, a distinct area of special study, but rather a central theme running through the history of England, and of the whole British Isles. Though the subjects and the styles vary a good deal, the studies are linked by a common approach and some common ideas. Hence many examine ways in which naval history has formed a key element in such subjects as intellectual, religious, administrative or medical history and explored the nature and meaning of sea power as a theme. At the same time naval history is a technical subject, which demands a willingness to understand warships - the most complex artefacts - and the structure of large and complex organisations. Detailed evidence about ships and weapons can build large conclusions, for example about late Anglo-Saxon government and military organisation, or about the nature of warfare at sea in the Renaissance era. While mostly written from the British point of view, several essays explicitly survey naval developments over a range of countries, and even the most narrowly focused are at least implicitly aware of the wider world of war at sea.

A collection of essays by four distinguished Harvard professors: "The Anglo-Saxon Courts of Law" by Henry Adams; "The Anglo-Saxon Land-Law" by Henry Cabot Lodge; "The Anglo-Saxon Family Law" by Ernest Young and "The Anglo-Saxon Legal Procedure" by J. Laurence Laughlin. Includes an appendix of select cases in Anglo-Saxon law with parallel translations. In The Historians of Anglo-American Law, Holdsworth included this volume in his survey of significant books by American scholars (112). Reprint of the first edition. Originally published: Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1876.

These essays make a case for how unified and well-governed Anglo-Saxon England was, and how numerous and wealthy its inhabitants were.

A wealth of new information about lowland Britain in the Migration Period has been generated during the last 10 years, allowing a new examination to be made of the origins of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. These essays throw new light on why and how Anglo-Saxon kingship originated and discuss processes of state formation. Distributed in the US by Columbia U. Press. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR