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 editorial policy of Anglo-Saxon England has been to encourage an interdisciplinary approach to the study of all aspects of Anglo-Saxon culture. This approach is pursued in exemplary fashion by many of the essays in this volume. Fresh light is thrown on the dating and form of Cynewulf's poem The Fates of the Apostles through a comprehensive study of the historical martyrologies of the Carolingian period on which Cynewulf is presumed to have drawn. The literary form of Ælfric's Preface to his translation of Genesis is illustrated through a wide-ranging study of the rhetorical genre of preface-writing in the early Middle Ages (the genre which subsequently was known as the ars dictaminis), and the problems which Ælfric faced and solved in composing a Life of St Æthelthryth are illustrated through detailed comparison of the sources which he utilized. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year's publications in all branches of Anglo-Saxon studies rounds off the book.

Eminent Anglo-Saxonist Nicholas Howe explores how the English, in the centuries before the Norman Conquest, located themselves both literally and imaginatively in the world. His elegantly written study focuses on Anglo-Saxon representations of place as revealed in a wide variety of texts in Latin and Old English, as well as in diagrams of holy sites and a single map of the known world found in British Library, Cotton Tiberius B v. The scholar's investigations are supplemented and aided by insights gleaned from his many trips to physical sites. The Anglo-Saxons possessed a remarkable body of geographical knowledge in written rather than cartographic form, Howe demonstrates. To understand fully their cultural geography, he considers Anglo-Saxon writings about the places they actually inhabited and those they imagined. He finds in Anglo-Saxon geographic images a persistent sense of being far from the center of the world, and he discusses how these migratory peoples narrowed that distance and developed ways to define themselves.

Providing a fresh appraisal of the art of Anglo-Saxon England, this text looks at its influence upon the creation of an identity as a nation.

Anglo-Saxon England was the first publication to consistently embrace all the main aspects of study of Anglo-Saxon history and culture - linguistic, literary, textual, palaeographic, religious, intellectual, historical, archaeological and artistic - and which promotes the more unusual interests - in music or medicine or education, for example. Articles in volume 38 include: The Passio Andreae and The Dream of the Rood by Thomas D. Hill, Beowulf off the Map by Alfred Hiatt, Numerical Composition and Beowulf: A Re-consideration by Yvette Kisor, 'The Landed Endowment of the Anglo-Saxon Minster at Hanbury (Worcs.) by Steven Bassett, Scapegoating the Secular Clergy: The Hermeneutic Style as a Form of Monastic Self-Definition by Rebecca Stephenson, Understanding Numbers in MS London, British Library Harley by Daniel Anlezark, Tudor Antiquaries and the Vita 'dwardi Regis by Henry Summerso and Earl Godwine's Ship by Simon Keynes and Rosalind Love. A comprehensive bibliography concludes the volume, listing publications on Anglo-Saxon England during 2008.

The Idea of Anglo Saxon England, 1066-1901 presents the first systematic review of the ways in which Anglo-Saxon studies have evolved from their beginnings to the twentieth century Tells the story of how the idea of Anglo-Saxon England evolved from the Anglo-Saxons themselves to the Victorians, serving as a myth of origins for the English people, their language, and some of their most cherished institutions Combines original research with established scholarship to reveal how current conceptions of English identity might be very different if it were not for the discovery – and invention – of the Anglo-Saxon past Reveals how documents dating from the Anglo-Saxon era have greatly influenced modern attitudes toward nationhood, race, religious practice, and constitutional liberties Includes more than fifty images of manuscripts, early printed books, paintings, sculptures, and major historians of the era

This volume is framed by articles that throw interesting light on the achievement and reputation of the greatest of Anglo-Saxon kings - Alfred.

Creation, Migration, and Conquest analyses how the Anglo-Saxons' spatial imaginaire shapes perceptions and representations of geographical space. Exploring spatial representations found in both historical documents and verse, it highlights the links between place, identity, and collective destiny.

Anglo-Saxon England is the only publication which consistently embraces all the main aspects of study of Anglo-Saxon history and culture - linguistic, literary, textual, palaeographic, religious, intellectual, historical, archaeological and artistic - and which promotes the more unusual interests - in music or medicine or education, for example. Articles in volume 35 include: Record of the twelfth conference of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists at Bavarian-American Centre, University of Munich, 1-6 August 2005; Virgil the Grammarian and Bede: a preliminary study; Knowledge of whelk dyes and pigments in Anglo-Saxon England; The representation of the mind as an enclosure in Old English poetry; The origin of the numbered sections in Beowulf and in other Old English poems; An ethnic dating of Beowulf; Hrothgar's horses: feral or thoroughbred?; 'thelthryth of Ely in a lost calendar from Munich; Alfred's epistemological metaphors: eagan modes and scip modes; Bibliography for 2005.

Studies the interrelationship of text and picture in the only surviving illustrated Anglo-Saxon poetic manuscript.