Synopses & Reviews
A History of Old English Literature has been significantly revised to provide an unequivocal response to the renewed historicism in medieval studies. Focusing on the production and reception of Old English texts and on their relation to Anglo-Saxon history and culture, this new edition covers an exceptionally broad array of genres. These range from riddles and cryptograms to allegory, liturgical texts, and romance, as well as lyric poetry and heroic legend. The authors also integrate discussions of Anglo-Latin texts, crucial to understanding the development of Old English literature.
The second edition incorporates extensive reference to scholarship that has evolved over the past decade, with new chapters on both Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and on incidental and marginal texts. There is expanded treatment throughout, including increased coverage of legal texts and scientific and scholastic texts. The book concludes with a retrospective outline of the reception of Anglo-Saxon literature and culture in subsequent periods.
Review
“Revised to incorporate the latest developments, A History of Old English Literature remains as indispensable as ever. Its scholarship is up to date, its range comprehensive, its writing animated by a critical intelligence throughout. A new chapter on manuscripts, for example, responds to the field's recent turn to material contexts, and that attention begets a second new chapter on marginal texts like charms and cryptograms. An expanded discussion of legal texts, an updated bibliography, and many localized revisions will benefit everyone from beginning students to seasoned scholars.”—Daniel Donoghue, Harvard University
Review
“Summing Up: Recommended. All readers.” (Choice, 1 December2013)
Review
"A new generation of students and their professors will undoubtedly apprecite the currency of what has proven to be a widely respected, comprehensive historical treatment of Old English literature." (Choice, 1 December 2013)
Synopsis
This revised edition of
A History of Old English Literature draws extensively on the latest scholarship to have evolved over the last decade. The text incorporates additional material throughout, including two new chapters on Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and incidental and marginal texts.
- This revised edition responds to the renewed historicism in medieval studies
- Provides wide-ranging coverage, including Anglo-Latin literature as well as non-canonical writings
- Includes new chapters on manuscripts and on marginal and incidental texts
- Incorporates expanded coverage of legal texts and scientific and scholastic texts, now treated in separate chapters
- Demonstrates that the field of Anglo-Saxon studies is uniquely placed to contribute to current literary debates
About the Author
R. D. Fulk is Class of 1964 Chancellor’s Professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of, among others,
The Beowulf Manuscript (2010) and
An Introduction to Middle English (2012) and co-author or editor of
Eight Old English Poems (2001),
A Grammar of Old English, Vol. 2: Morphology (2011),
Klaeber’s Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg ( 4
th edition, 2008), and
The Old English Canons of Theodore (2012).
Christopher M. Cain is an associate professor of English at Towson University in Towson, Maryland. He has published on Old English and Anglo-Latin in Studies in Philology, JEGP, Review of English Studies, and Philological Quarterly, among others. He is the co-editor (with Geoffrey Russom) of Studies in the History of the English Language III—Managing Chaos: Strategies for Identifying Change in English (2007) and is a contributor to The Year’s Work in Old English Studies.
Rachel Anderson, is Associate Professor of English at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations vi
Preface to the First Edition (2003) vii
Preface to the Second Edition ix
Abbreviations x
Introduction
Anglo-Saxon England and Its Literature: A Social History 1
1 The Chronology and Varieties of Old English Literature 42
2 Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts 58
3 Literature of the Alfredian Period 83
4 Homilies 112
5 Saints’ Legends (Rachel S. Anderson) 133
6 Biblical Literature 157
7 Liturgical and Devotional Texts 177
8 Legal Texts 211
9 Scientific and Scholastic Texts 227
10 Wisdom Literature and Lyric Poetry 241
11 Germanic Legend and Heroic Lay 278
12 Additions, Annotations, and Marginalia 329
Conclusion
Making Old English New: Anglo-Saxonism and the Cultural Work of Old English Literature 354
Works Cited 367
Index 481