Anglo-Saxon England

This volume mostly deals with manuscripts, directly or indirectly. Of outstanding importance is the first ever attempt to list all the surviving manuscripts that were written or owned in Anglo-Saxon England. There are studies of particular manuscripts: three Latin poems are added to the very few known to have been composed in the time of Athelstan the first; the damaged page in the Exeter Book of Old English poetry is made to yield a better text than before; the distinctive sense of scholarship and literary style that went into a late Old English editing of one of King Alfred\'s prose works is revealed. Another study assembles the widely scattered evidence for slave raiding and slave trading in England from the Anglo-Saxon settlement to the advent of the Normans. Other interpretative contributions examine word order in Beowulf and make further advances in the critical appreciation of The Seafarer.

List of illustrations; 1. A preliminary list of manuscripts written or owned in England up to 1100 Helmut Gneuss; 2. Some Latin poems as evidence for the reign of Athelstan Michael Lapidge; 3. Slave raiding and slave trading in early England David Pelteret; 4. A ‘Winchester School’ wall-painting at Nether Wallop, Hampshire Richard Gem and Pamela Tudor-Craig; 5. The text of a damaged passage in the Exeter Book: Advent (Christ I) 18–32 John C. Pope; 6. Auxiliary and verbal in Beowulf Alan Bliss; 7. Cain’s monstrous progeny in Beowulf: part II, post-diluvian survival Ruth Mellinkoff; 8. Sylf, seasons, structure and genre in The Seafarer Stanley B. Greenfield; 9. The lexical and syntactic variants shared by two of the later manuscripts of King Alfred’s translation of Gregory’s Cura Pastoralis Dorothy M. Horgan; 10. The scholarly recovery of the significance of Anglo-Saxon records in prose and verse: a new bibliography E. G. Stanley; 11. Farming in the Anglo-Saxon landscape: an archaeologist’s review P. J. Fowler; 12. Bibliography for 1979 Carl T. Berkhout, Martin Biddle, T. J. Brown, Peter A. Clayton and Simon Keynes.