Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts is the first publication to list every surviving manuscript or manuscript fragment written in Anglo-Saxon England between the seventh and the eleventh centuries or imported into the country during that time. Each of the 1,291 entries in Helmut Gneuss and Michael Lapidge's Bibliographical Handlist not only details the origins, contents, current location, script, and decoration of the manuscript, but also provides bibliographic entries that list facsimiles, editions, linguistic analyses, and general studies relevant to that manuscript. A general bibliography, designed to provide full details of author-date references cited in the individual entries, includes more than 4,000 items. Compiled by two of the field's greatest living scholars, the Gneuss-Lapidge Bibliographical Handlist stands to become the most important single-volume research tool to appear in the field since Greenfield and Robinson's Bibliography of Publications on Old English Literature. Their achievement in the present book will endure for many decades and serve as a catalyst for new research across several disciplines.

This book presents the first comprehensive study of Anglo-Saxon manuscript texts containing runic letters. To date there has been no comprehensive study of these works in a single volume, although the need for such an examination has long been recognized. This is in spite of a growing academic interest in the mise-en-page of early medieval manuscripts. The texts discussed in this study include Old English riddles and elegies, the Cynewulfian poems, charms, Solomon and Saturn I, and the Old English Rune Poem. The focus of the discussion is on the literary analysis of these texts in their palaeographic and runological contexts. Anglo-Saxon authors and scribes did not, of course, operate within a vacuum, and so these primary texts are considered alongside relevant epigraphic inscriptions, physical objects, and historical documents. Victoria Symons argues that all of these runic works are in various ways thematically focused on acts of writing, visual communication, and the nature of the written word. The conclusion that emerges over the course of the book is that, when encountered in the context of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, runic letters consistently represent the written word in a way that Roman letters do not.

The Anglo-Saxon period stretches from the arrival of Germanic groups on British shores in the early 5th century to the Norman Conquest of 1066. During these centuries, the English language was used and written down for the first time, pagan populations were converted to Christianity, and the foundations of the kingdom of England were laid. This richly illustrated new book - which accompanies a landmark British Library exhibition - presents Anglo-Saxon England as the home of a highly sophisticated artistic and political culture, deeply connected with its continental neighbours. Leading specialists in early medieval history, literature and culture engage with the unique, original evidence from which we can piece together the story of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, examining outstanding and beautiful objects such as highlights from the Staffordshire hoard and the Sutton Hoo burial. At the heart of the book is the British Library's outstanding collection of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, the richest source of evidence about Old English language and literature, including Beowulf and other poetry; the Lindisfarne Gospels, one of Britain's greatest artistic and religious treasures; the St Cuthbert Gospel, the earliest intact European book; and historical manuscripts such as Bede's Ecclesiastical History and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. These national treasures are discussed alongside other, internationally important literary and historical manuscripts held in major collections in Britain and Europe. This book, and the exhibition it accompanies, chart a fascinating and dynamic period in early medieval history, and will bring to life our understanding of these formative centuries.

Manuscripts that were made and used in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms before the Norman conquest of England are treasure troves of art and text. Many of these books and documents were brought together in the British Library exhibition, 'Anglo-Saxon kingdoms: art, word, war.' Together, these manuscripts illuminate extensive intellectual connections as well as widespread scribal and artistic networks that developed within the islands of Britain and Ireland, and further afield across much of early medieval Europe. Using new scientific methods, as well as textual criticism, art historical analysis, and historical research, the essays in this richly illustrated volume, written by leading scholars, present innovative research that focuses on manuscripts that were copied, decorated, or used in the early English kingdoms and their neighbours across a 500-year period from the advent of Christianity among the English, c.600, to the age of conquest in the eleventh century.

"The Anglo-Saxons first appeared on the historical scene as pagan pirates and mercenaries moving into the declining Roman Empire in the fifth century. By the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066, Anglo-Saxon England was one of the most sophisticated states in the medieval West, renowned for its ecclesiastical and cultural achievements. The written word was of tremendous importance in this transformation. Within a century of the introduction of Christianity and literacy, the book had become a central element of Anglo-Saxon society, and a rich vehicle for cultural and artistic expression. This new edition of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts provides a short introduction to the art of bookmaking in the Anglo-Saxon period and illustrates in colour over 150 examples of the finest Anglo-Saxon books in the British Library and other major collections."--Pub. desc.

First published in 1998, this volume brings together some of the best recent work on the period before and after the Norman Conquest and makes an irresistible case for a number of fundamental revisions in our understanding of the culture of Anglo-Saxon and Norman England. Combining the use of novel techniques such as digital image processing with the best current practice in textual and iconographic study, this volume broadens the scope and applicability of manuscript studies, showing, for example, the falsity of prevailing notions of the vitality and status of the native English tongue after the Conquest. The essays combine to make a coherent and persuasive demonstration of the benefits of not remaining bound to the physical artifact but rather connecting codicology with practical and theoretical applications within manuscript studies and other historical disciplines.

The cardinal role of Anglo-Saxon libraries in the transmission of classical and patristic literature to the later middle ages has long been recognized, for these libraries sustained the researches of those English scholars whose writings determined the curriculum of medieval schools: Aldhelm, Bede, and Alcuin, to name only the best known. Yet this is the first full-length account of the nature and holdings of Anglo-Saxon libraries from the sixth century to the eleventh. The early chapters discuss libraries in antiquity, notably at Alexandria and republican and imperial Rome, and also the Christian libraries of late antiquity which supplied books to Anglo-Saxon England. Because Anglo-Saxon libraries themselves have almost completely vanished, three classes of evidence need to be combined in order to form a detailed impression of their holdings: surviving inventories, surviving manuscripts, and citations of classical and patristic works by Anglo-Saxon authors themselves. After setting out the problems entailed in using such evidence, the book provides appendices containing editions of all surviving Anglo-Saxon inventories, lists of all Anglo-Saxon manuscripts exported to continental libraries during the eighth century and then all manuscripts re-imported into England in the tenth, as well as a catalogue of all citations of classical and patristic literature by Anglo-Saxon authors. A comprehensive index, arranged alphabetically by author, combines these various classes of evidence so that the reader can see at a glance what books were known where and by whom in Anglo-Saxon England. The book thus provides, within a single volume, a vast amount of information on the books and learning of the schools which determined the course of medieval literary culture.

This book examines descriptions of the natural world in a wide range of Old English poetry. Jennifer Neville describes the physical conditions experienced by the Anglo-Saxons - the animals, diseases, landscapes, seas and weather with which they had to contend. She argues that poetic descriptions of these elements were not a reflection of the existing physical conditions but a literary device used by Anglo-Saxons to define more important issues: the state of humanity, the creation and maintenance of society, the power of individuals, the relationship between God and creation and the power of writing to control information. Examples of contemporary literature in other languages are used to provide a sense of Old English poetry's particular approach, which incorporated elements from Germanic, Christian and classical sources. The result of this approach was not a consistent cosmological scheme but a rather contradictory vision which reveals much about how the Anglo-Saxons viewed themselves.