Anglo-Saxon England (No. 15)

Areas of study pursued in this book include a revealing grammatical document from eighth-century Northumbria; renewed excavations at Sutton Hoo are reported; the existence of an unnoticed late Old English prose version of parts of Gregory’s Dialogues is pointed out. Fresh thinking is directed to topics as interesting and diverse as a design on the Sutton Hoo purse lid; the origin of a little-considered English decorated manuscript containing lives of saints now in Paris; the enigmatic poem Wulf and Eadwacer; word order as an element on Old English poetic style; surviving traces of the teaching which Theodore and Hadrian delivered in England; the career of a Latin text much studied in English schools for its difficult vocabulary; the political aspects of relic cults during the last century and a half of Anglo-Saxon monarchy; and the organization of the invading armies led by Swein Forkbeard and Cnut. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year’s publications in all branches of Anglo-Saxon studies rounds off the book; there is also a comprehensive index to volumes 11–15.

List of illustrations; 1. Record of the second conference of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, at Cambridge, 19–23 August 1985 Stanley B. Greenfield; 2. Wulf and Eadwacer: all passion pent Stanley B. Greenfield; 3. Bede the grammarian and the scope of grammatical studies in eighth-century Northumbria Martin Irvine; 4. The school of Theodore and Hadrian Michael Lapidge; 5. The third book of the Bella Parisiacae Urbis by Abbo of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and its Old English gloss Patrizia Lendinara; 6. Relic-cults as an instrument of royal policy c. 900–c. 1050 D. W. Rollason; 7. The armies of Swein Forkbeard and Cnut: leding or lið? Niels Lund; 8. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. I086I and the scriptorium of Christ Church, Canterbury Michelle P. Brown; 9. Anglo-Saxon objectives at Sutton Hoo, 1985 M. O. H. Carver; 10. Word order and poetic style: auxiliary and verbal in The Metres of Boethius Daniel Donoghue; 11. A third Old English translation of part of Gregory’s Dialogues, this time embedded in the Rule of Chrodegang Brigitte Langefeld; 12. Bibliography for 1985 Carl T. Berkhout, Martin Biddle, Mark Blackburn, C. R. E. Coutts, David N. Dumville, Sarah Foot and Simon Keynes; Index to volumes 11–15.