Alfred the Great is a rare historical figure from the early Middle Ages, in that he retains a popular image. This image increasingly suffers from the dead white male syndrome, exacerbated by Alfred's association with British imperialism and colonialism, so this book provides an accessible reassessment of the famous ruler of Wessex, informed by current scholarship, both on the king as a man in history, and the king as a subsequent legendary construct.Daniel Anlezark presents Alfred in his historical context, seen through Asser's Life, the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, and other texts associated with the king. The book engages with current discussions about the authenticity of attributions to Alfred of works such as the Old English Boethius and Soliloquies, and explores how this ninth-century king of Wessex came to be considered the Great king of legend.

In all of the literature on Anglo-Saxon England, rarely has the question of social class been confronted head-on. This study draws upon recent research into topics such as religious practice, emotions, daily life, and intellectual culture to investigate how the aristocracy of Northumbria maintained social dominance over wider society. Moreover, this monograph suggests that the crisis that brought an end to Northumbria as an independent kingdom was the product of the social contradictions produced by the ruling class as social domination developed over time. The analysis is divided into three broad parts – production, circulation, and consumption – both as a nod to Marxist historiography and also to signal a commitment to a methodology that situates the subject within a global context.

From the first centuries of Christianity, believers turned to the perfection modeled by saints for inspiration, and a tradition of recounting saints’ Lives flourished. The Latin narratives followed specific forms, dramatizing a virgin’s heroic resolve or a martyr’s unwavering faith under torture.

In early medieval England, saints’ Lives were eagerly received and translated into the vernacular. The stories collected here by unknown authors are preserved in manuscripts dating from the eleventh and twelfth centuries. They include locally venerated saints like the abbess Seaxburh, as well as universally familiar ones like Nicholas and Michael the Archangel, and are set everywhere from Antioch to Rome, from India to Ephesus. These Lives also explore such topics as the obligations of rulers, marriage and gender roles, private and public devotion, the environment, education, and the sweep of human history. This volume presents new Old English editions and modern English translations of twenty-two unattributed saints’ Lives.

An eye-opening, engrossing look at the central role of monsters in the Anglo-Saxon worldview—now in paperback.
 
This book addresses a simple question: why were the Anglo-Saxons obsessed with monsters, many of which did not exist? Drawing on literature and art, theology, and a wealth of firsthand evidence, Basilisks and Beowulf reveals a people huddled at the edge of the known map, using the fantastic and the grotesque as a way of understanding the world around them and their place within it. For the Anglo-Saxons, monsters helped to distinguish the sacred and the profane; they carried God’s message to mankind, exposing His divine hand in creation itself. At the same time, monsters were agents of disorder, seeking to kill people, conquer their lands, and even challenge what it meant to be human. Learning about where monsters lived and how they behaved allowed the Anglo-Saxons to situate themselves in the world, as well as to apprehend something of the divine plan. It is for these reasons that monsters were at the very center of their worldview. From map monsters to demons, dragons to Leviathan, we neglect these beasts at our peril.

An accessible biography of the venerable Bede, regarded as the father of English history.
A 2023 History Today Book of the Year
 
This book investigates the life and world of Bede (c. 673–735), the foremost scholar of the early Middle Ages and the “father of English history.” It examines his notable feats, including calculating the first tide tables, creating the Ceolfrith Bibles and the Lindisfarne Gospels, writing the earliest extant Old English poetry, and composing his famous Ecclesiastical History of the English People. In addition to providing an accessible overview of Bede’s life and work, Michelle P. Brown describes new discoveries regarding Bede’s handwriting, his historical research, and his previously lost Old English translation of St John’s Gospel, dictated on his deathbed.

This newest volume in a long-running work of mapping the sources of Anglo-Saxon literary culture in England from 500 to 1100 CE takes up one of the most important authors of the period, the eighth-century monk-scholar known as the Venerable Bede. Bede is best known as the author of the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, which is one of the key sources for our historical and cultural knowledge of the period; this collection covers that and more, drawing on manuscript evidence, medieval library catalogues, Anglo-Latin and Old English versions, citations, quotations, and more, putting Bede and his work in the context of his period.

In the study of historical Mariology, the monastic communities of England before and after the Norman conquest receive too little attention. Classic surveys, such as Hilda Graef’s, Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion (2 vols, orig. 1963, 1965), highlight key figures and developments; and a fine book by Mary Clayton, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Anglo-Saxon England (1990), takes scholarship as far as the early-eleventh century. The present volume, building upon such works, delves more deeply into the prayerful, intellectual and artistic contemplation of Mary during the age of monasticism, roughly the two hundred years prior to the advent of the mendicant orders in the thirteenth century. In the history of England, this was a time of high drama: conquest, power struggle, martyrdom; for English monasticism, it was marked by suppression, reform and renewal, patronage, and new currents of prayer and thought. Against this backdrop, Matthew Mills uncovers many vibrant contributions to Marian doctrine and devotion by theologians and communities living according to the sixth-century Rule of St Benedict: the Benedictines and their successors, the Cistercians, who arrived in England in 1128. In a thematic unfolding of Mary’s life and identity, from conception to assumption and intercession, a picture emerges of a Mariology shaped by the constant of monastic liturgy, anchored in deep biblical and patristic wisdom, cherished and transmitted by the Englishman, St Bede (d. 735), and animated by profound love. Towering figures, St Anselm (d. 1109) and St Ælred (d. 1167), are placed within a wider landscape, alongside lesser-known but still significant individuals, including the Cistercian abbot, John of Forde (d. 1214), royal confessor and pioneer of Marian exegesis of the Song of Songs. England’s monastic Mariology was colored by Greek as well as Latin influences and touched by key experiences of the contemporary church at large: apocalyptic disappointment, eleventh-century reform (sometimes called, ‘Gregorian’), sacramentalism, intense yearning for salvation. This book also sheds light upon the significance of Mary for medieval monks’ understanding of their own profession; their mother and their lady, she was, in addition, their icon and exemplar of life in St Benedict’s ‘school for the Lord’s service’ (Rule, Prol. 45).

Abbatial annals of medieval England.

Bede “the Venerable,” English theologian and historian, was born in AD 672 or 673 in the territory of the single monastery at Wearmouth and Jarrow. He was ordained deacon (691–2) and priest (702–3) of the monastery, where his whole life was spent in devotion, choral singing, study, teaching, discussion, and writing. Besides Latin he knew Greek and possibly Hebrew.

Bede’s theological works were chiefly commentaries, mostly allegorical in method, based with acknowledgment on Jerome, Augustine, Ambrose, Gregory, and others, but bearing his own personality. In another class were works on grammar and one on natural phenomena; special interest in the vexed question of Easter led him to write about the calendar and chronology. But his most admired production is his Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation. Here a clear and simple style united with descriptive powers to produce an elegant work, and the facts diligently collected from good sources make it a valuable account. Historical also are his Lives of the Abbots of his monastery, the less successful accounts (in verse and prose) of Cuthbert, and the Letter (November 734) to Egbert his pupil, so important for our knowledge about the Church in Northumbria.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Bede’s historical works is in two volumes.

Abbatial annals of medieval England.

Bede “the Venerable,” English theologian and historian, was born in AD 672 or 673 in the territory of the single monastery at Wearmouth and Jarrow. He was ordained deacon (691–2) and priest (702–3) of the monastery, where his whole life was spent in devotion, choral singing, study, teaching, discussion, and writing. Besides Latin he knew Greek and possibly Hebrew.

Bede’s theological works were chiefly commentaries, mostly allegorical in method, based with acknowledgment on Jerome, Augustine, Ambrose, Gregory, and others, but bearing his own personality. In another class were works on grammar and one on natural phenomena; special interest in the vexed question of Easter led him to write about the calendar and chronology. But his most admired production is his Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation. Here a clear and simple style united with descriptive powers to produce an elegant work, and the facts diligently collected from good sources make it a valuable account. Historical also are his Lives of the Abbots of his monastery, the less successful accounts (in verse and prose) of Cuthbert, and the Letter (November 734) to Egbert his pupil, so important for our knowledge about the Church in Northumbria.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Bede’s historical works is in two volumes.

For centuries, archaeologists have excavated the soils of Britain to uncover finds from the early medieval past. These finds have been used to reconstruct the alleged communities, migration patterns, and expressions of identity of coherent groups who can be regarded as ethnic 'Anglo-Saxons'. Even in the modern day, when social constructionism has been largely accepted by scholars, this paradigm still persists. This book challenges the ethnic paradigm. As the first historiographical study of approaches to ethnic identity in modern 'Anglo-Saxon' archaeology, it reveals these approaches to be incompatible with current scholarly understandings of ethnicity. Drawing upon post-structuralist approaches to self and community, it highlights the empirical difficulties the archaeology of ethnicity in early medieval Britain faces, and proposes steps toward an alternative understanding of the role played by the communities of lowland Britain – both migrants from across the North Sea and those already present – in transforming the Roman world.

Scholarship on early medieval England has seen an exponential increase in scholarly work by and about women over the past twenty years, but the field has remained peculiarly resistant to the transformative potential of feminist critique. Since 2016, Medieval Studies has been rocked by conversations about the state of the field, shifting from #MeToo to #WhiteFeminism to the purposeful rethinking of the label “Anglo-Saxonist.” This volume takes a step toward decentering the traditional scholarly conversation with thirteen new essays by American, Canadian, European, and UK professors, along with independent scholars and early career researchers from a range of disciplinary perspectives. Topics range from virginity, women’s literacy, and medical discourse to affect, medievalism, and masculinity. The theoretical and political commitments of this volume comprise one strand of a multivalent effort to rethink the parameters of the discipline and to create a scholarly community that is innovative, inclusive, and diverse.

A Handbook of Animals in Old English Texts is the definitive handbook for students, scholars, and observers of the non-human in early medieval England. In this interdisciplinary compendium to the animal inhabitants of medieval Britain, Preston documents each creature mentioned in the Old English literary textual canon and correlates its standard literary interpretation with relevant historical, archaeological, and ecological studies. Beyond its usefulness as a reference work, Preston’s text challenges the reader to move beyond a literary analysis of the figural beast to one that leaves space for the actual animal.

The Old English History of the World is a translation and adaptation of the Latin history known as the Seven Books of History against the Pagans, written by the Spanish cleric Paulus Orosius at the prompting of Saint Augustine after the sack of Rome in 410. To counter the pagan and republican narratives of Livy and other classical historians, Orosius created an account of the ancient world from a Christian and imperial viewpoint. His work was immensely popular throughout Europe in succeeding centuries, down to the end of the Middle Ages. Around the year 900, an Old English version was produced by an anonymous writer, possibly encouraged or inspired by King Alfred. The translator actively transformed Orosius’s narrative: cutting extraneous detail, adding explanations and dramatic speeches, and supplying a long section on the geography of the Germanic world. This volume offers a new edition and modern translation of an Anglo-Saxon perspective on the ancient world.

Archbishop Wulfstan of York (d. 1023) was a powerful clergyman and the most influential political thinker of pre-Conquest England. An advocate for the rights and privileges of the Church, he authored the laws of King Aethelred and King Cnut in prose that combined the rhetorical flourishes of a master homilist with the language of law. Some works forged a distinctive style by adding rhythm and alliteration drawn from Old English poetry. In the midst of Viking invasions and cultural upheaval, Wulfstan articulated a complementary relationship between secular and ecclesiastical law that shaped the political world of eleventh-century England. He also pushed the clergy to return to the ideals of their profession. Old English Legal Writings is the first publication to bring together Wulfstan’s works on law, church governance, and political reform. When read together, they reveal the scope and originality of his thought as it lays out the mutual obligations of the church, the state, and the common people. This volume presents new editions of the Old English texts alongside new English translations.

Old English Lives of Saints, a series composed in the 990s by the Benedictine monk Aelfric in his distinctive alliterative prose, portrays an array of saints—including virgin martyrs, married virgins, aristocrats, kings, soldiers, and bishops—for a late Anglo-Saxon audience. At a turbulent time when England was under increasingly severe Viking attack, the examples of these saints modeled courageous faith, self-sacrifice, and individual and collective resistance. The Lives also covers topics as diverse as the four kinds of war, the three orders of society, and whether the unjust can be exempt from eternal punishment. Aelfric intended this series to complement his Catholic Homilies, two important and widely disseminated collections used for preaching to lay people and clergy. The translation is presented alongside a new edition of Lives of Saints, for which all extant manuscripts have been collated afresh.

The Book of Pastoral Rule, or Liber regulae pastoralis, by Pope Gregory the Great—the pontiff responsible for the conversion of the English to Christianity beginning in 597—is a guide for aspiring bishops. Pope Gregory explains who ought and who ought not seek such a position and advises on what sort of spiritual guidance a bishop should provide to those under his direction.

The Old English Pastoral Care, a translation of Gregory’s treatise completed between 890 and 896, is described in a prefatory letter by King Alfred the Great as his own work, composed with the assistance of his bishops and chaplains. It appears to be the first of the Alfredian translations into Old English of Latin texts deemed necessary for the revitalization of the English Church, which had been ravaged by the depredations of Scandinavian invaders during the ninth century and by the decline of clerical competence in Latin.

This new edition and translation into modern English is the first to appear in a century and a half.

Pictish studies is undergoing significant revision and invigoration, with recent archaeological discoveries and new methodologies in archaeology, cultural geography and art history prompting a re-assessment of Pictish cultural and social development. We can now say more about the cultural and political lives of the Picts than ever before, and these new findings are enabling a fresh perspective on the wider development of Early Medieval polities across the Latin west. This short book provides an exciting and informed synthesis of our current understanding of Pictish history and material remains.

Early Medieval Britain is more Roman than we think. The Roman Empire left vast infrastructural resources on the island. These resources lay buried not only in dirt and soil, but also in texts, laws, chronicles - even charters, churches, and landscapes. This book uncovers them and shows how they shaped Early Medieval Britain. Infrastructure, material and symbolic, can work in ways that are not immediately obvious and exert an influence long after the builders have gone. Infrastructure can also rest dormant and be reactivated with a changed function, role and appearance. This is not a simple story of continuity and discontinuity: it is a story of transformation, of how the Roman infrastructural past was used and re-used, and also how it influenced the later societies of Britain.

This study shows the importance of carolling in the celebrations and festivities of medieval Britain and demonstrates its longevity from the eleventh century to the sixteenth. It illustrates the flexibility of the English carole form for adaptation to include content in high and low registers and its suitability for use on all occasions and by different communal peer groups. Although the vast majority of extant texts in carol form from the late medieval period are religious in subject content, secular carolling was far more prevalent than the textual record implies. The dance-song elements of the medieval carole were so strongly woven into the vernacular cultural fabric of the British Isles that their threads can be traced through the folk songs and dances of subsequent centuries. This study contextualizes the written evidence and re-integrates the various components of the activity in order to illuminate our understanding of the universally popular medieval, participatory, pastime of carolling.

This book looks particularly at the shift from manuscripts to the physical book, while taking into account the medieval book as not only as a source of information, but also as an aesthetic experience, a status symbol, and a shrewd investment. Tracing the rise of the book in the ninth and tenth century, this insightful study looks at the way in which the scribes eased the shift from manuscript to book through additions such as running titles and chapter numbers. A rich and intriguing history, Turning over a New Leaf examines how readers and the reading experience shape books, and vice versa.

Interweaving literature, history, and religion, an exquisite meditation on the turning of the seasons in medieval England—now in paperback.
 
Winters in the World is a beautifully observed journey through the cycle of the year in Anglo-Saxon England, exploring the festivals, customs, and traditions linked to the different seasons. Drawing on a wide variety of source material, including poetry, histories, and religious literature, Eleanor Parker investigates how Anglo-Saxons felt about the annual passing of the seasons and the profound relationship they saw between human life and the rhythms of nature. Many of the festivals celebrated in the United Kingdom today have their roots in the Anglo-Saxon period, and this book traces their surprising history while unearthing traditions now long forgotten. It celebrates some of the finest treasures of medieval literature and provides an imaginative connection to the Anglo-Saxon world.