An unfinished mappa mundi from late-eleventh-century Worcester

2006 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 271-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin K. Foys
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
British Library ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Corpus Christi ◽  
The World

AbstractThis article discusses the unfinished mappa mundi found in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 265, dates it to a late-eleventh-century (c. 1065–95) production in Worcester, identifying it as a nearly exact and earlier analogue of two later twelfth-century English maps of the world from the Ramsey area (Oxford, St John's College 17 and London, British Library, Harley 3667). Contained as it is in a collection of Wulfstanian materials, the Worcester map's relationship to these so-called ‘Bryhtferthian’ maps requires a rethinking of how such maps may have circulated and functioned outside of a computisitical context. The close connections between these three maps further point to a unique, late Anglo-Saxon tradition of mappae mundi thus far unrecognized.

Reddatur Parentibus: The Vengeance of the Family in Cnut's Homicide Legislation

2002 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Jurasinski
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
British Library ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Corpus Christi ◽  
The Family ◽  
Ultimate Outcome ◽  
English Law ◽  
One Year

TheAnglo-Saxon Chroniclestates that during his 1018 meeting in Oxford with the leading English ecclesiastical and lay authorities, roughly one year after his accession to the throne in England, Cnut agreed to uphold “the laws of Edgar” during his reign. The ultimate outcome of this and subsequent meetings is the code issued at Winchester in 1020, referred to by editorial convention as I and II Cnut. This code contains, respectively, the religious and secular laws of England promulgated under Cnut. The code is contained in four manuscripts in Old English. The earliest are British Library, Cotton Nero A.i and Cambridge, Corpus Christi College (CCCC) 201, both dated to the mid-eleventh century; the latest, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College (CCCC) 383 and British Library, Harley 55, belong to the early twelfth century. Cnut's code reappears in three twelfth-century Norman Latin tracts intended to acquaint French authorities with English law, theInstituta Cnuti, Consiliatio Cnuti, andQuadripartitus. TheLeges Henrici Primi, prepared by the same author as theQuadripartitus, also draws heavily on Cnut's legislation.

Lists of saints' resting-places in Anglo-Saxon England

1978 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 61-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. W. Rollason
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
British Library ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Scholarly Edition ◽  
Corpus Christi ◽  
Topographical Feature ◽  
Usual Formula

Secgan be þam Godes sanctum þe on Engla lande ærost reston is the title of a short document in Old English which is extant in two manuscripts, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 201, pp. 149–51, and London, British Library, Stowe 944, 34v–39r. These manuscripts are dated to the middle and the first half of the eleventh century respectively on the evidence of their script. A third copy was once in London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius D. xvii but was destroyed in the fire of 1731. The only scholarly edition is that of Felix Liebermann. The document mentions the resting-places of eighty-nine saints: all but one of these places are in England and all but ten of the saints were active in England. The usual formula is of the type, ‘Ðonne resteð sanctus Congarus confessor on Cungresbirig’ (37b), but in many cases the place is further defined by reference to some topographical feature, most often a river, as, for example, ‘Ðonne resteð sanctus Iohannes biscop on þare stowe Beferlic, neah þare ea Hul’ (5a).

Ant-lore in Anglo-Saxon England

2011 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 273-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marilina Cesario
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Bodleian Library ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Corpus Christi ◽  
Gold Digging

AbstractTwo Old English versions of a sunshine prognostication survive in the mid-eleventh century Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 391, p. 713, and in a twelfth-century addition to Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 115, 149v–150r. Among standard predictions promising joy, peace, blossom, abundance of milk and fruit, and a great baptism sent by God, one encounters an enigmatic prophecy which involves camels stealing gold from the ants. These gold-digging ants have a long pedigree, one which links Old English with much earlier literature and indicates the extent to which Anglo-Saxon culture had assimilated traditions of European learning. It remains difficult to say what is being prophesied, however, or to explain the presence of the passage among conventional predictions. Whether the prediction was merely a literary exercise or carried a symbolic implication, it must have originated in an ecclesiastical context. Its mixture of classical learning and vernacular tradition, Greek and Latin, folklore and Christian, implies an author with some knowledge of literary and scholarly traditions.

Anglo-Saxon prognostics in context: a survey and handlist of manuscripts

2001 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 181-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy Michael Liuzza
Keyword(s):  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
British Library ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Reform Movements ◽  
Corpus Christi ◽  
Full Page ◽  
Benedictine Reform ◽  
Christ Church ◽  
History Of

The various Latin and Old English texts which have come to be called ‘prognostics’ have not, in general, been well served by scholars. For some texts the only available edition is Oswald Cockayne's Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England from 1864-6; most others are available only in the broad but somewhat unsystematic series of articles published by Max Förster in Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen in the 1910s and 1920s. Anselm Hughes does not include the eight prognostic texts in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 391 in his otherwise fairly thorough edition of much of that manuscript; Peter Baker and Michael Lapidge omit any discussion of such texts from their excellent survey of the history of the computus in the preface to their edition of Byrhtferth's Enchiridion. The mid-eleventh-century Christ Church manuscript now known as London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iii has attracted the notice of many fine scholars, including liturgists, linguists and monastic and art historians, who have been drawn to the series of texts at the beginning of the manuscript (fols. 117-73 and 2-27), including two magnicent full-page drawings (117v and 2v) and glossed copies of the Benedictine Rule and the Regularis Concordia. Helmut Gneuss describes this carefully presented series of interrelated texts as ‘a compendium of the Benedictine Reform movements in Carolingian Francia and in tenth-century England’; Robert Deshman has argued that the very sequence of texts is ‘laden with meaning’. Despite their appreciation of these manuscript sequences, however, few scholars have included in their study of this material the eighteen prognostic texts which follow the Regularis Concordia in the manuscript (27v-47), though most of these are in the same hand and are arranged, it may be argued, with equal care.

scholarly journals The northern world of the Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 ◽  
pp. 275-305
Author(s):  
Helen Appleton
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
British Library ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
The Mediterranean

AbstractThe Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi, sometimes known as the Cotton map or Cottoniana, is found on folio 56v of London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. v, which dates from the first half of the eleventh century. This unique survivor from the period presents a detailed image of the inhabited world, centred on the Mediterranean. The map’s distinctive cartography, with its emphasis on islands, seas and urban spaces, reflects an Insular, West Saxon geographic imagination. As Evelyn Edson has observed, the mappa mundi appears to be copy of an earlier, larger map. This article argues that the mappa mundi’s focus on urban space, translatio imperii and Scandinavia is reminiscent of the Old English Orosius, and that it originates from a similar milieu. The mappa mundi’s northern perspective, together with its obvious dependence on and emulation of Carolingian cartography, suggest that its lost exemplar originated in the assertive England of the earlier tenth century.

The Anglian collection of royal genealogies and regnal lists

1976 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 23-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
David N. Dumville
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
British Library ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Corpus Christi ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

This collection of Old English royal records is found in four manuscripts: London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian B. vi; London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. v, vol. 1; Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 183; and Rochester, Cathedral Library, A. 3. 5. The present paper aims both to provide an accurate, accessible edition of the texts in the first three of these manuscripts and to discuss the development of the collection from its origin to the stages represented by the extant versions. We owe to Kenneth Sisam most of our knowledge of the history of the Anglo-Saxon genealogies. Although his closely argued discussion remains the basis for any approach to these sources, it lacks the essential aid to comprehension, the texts themselves. It is perhaps this omission, as much as the difficulty of the subject and the undoubted accuracy of many of his conclusions, that has occasioned the neglect from which the texts have suffered in recent years.

OLD-ROMAN CHANT AND THE RESPONSORIES OF NOAH: NEW EVIDENCE FROM SUTRI

2007 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 91-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Forrest Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
British Library ◽  
New Information ◽  
Vatican City ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
Old Roman

Among the manuscript fragments in the Archivio comunale of Sutri (Province of Viterbo), Italy, are four consecutive folios of an Old-Roman antiphoner of the later eleventh century. The two bifolios are now identified as fragments 141 (Frammenti teologici 40) and 141bis (Frammenti teologici 41). These fragments, which preserve music for the feasts of Sexagesima, Quinquagesima and Ash Wednesday, are remnants of what appears to be the oldest witness of Old-Roman music for the office. When added to the two surviving antiphoners (London, British Library, Add. MS 29988, of the twelfth century, and Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS San Pietro B 79, of the end of the twelfth century) and two recently discovered fragments (in Frosinone and Bologna), the Sutri fragments bring to five the number of Old-Roman antiphoners of which at least some evidence survives. It begins to appear that manuscripts of this music were once not so rare. The Sutri fragments show some unusual liturgical characteristics that provide new information on the Roman liturgy; I will discuss these aspects shortly.

scholarly journals “Health of the World”: The Symbolic Associations of Trees in Eleventh-Century England, in the Context of Landscape

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Ruten
Keyword(s):  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Belief System ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Christian Conversion ◽  
Conversion Period ◽  
The World ◽  
Symbolic Meanings ◽  
Demand For Health

The Christianization of Anglo-­Saxon England in the seventh century CE was a momentous period of religious change which had many far­‐reaching effects. Anglo-­Saxon paganism had attached a set of sacred and symbolic meanings to various natural features in the English landscape. In this belief system, trees and groves were strongly associated with healing and defensive powers. This paper will argue that due to the persistent presence of once-­sacred trees and groves in the English landscape, combined with a continually widespread demand for health remedies, the pre-Christian associations of trees with healing and defense in England were not easily forgotten after the conversion period and in fact continued throughout the eleventh century. However, these pre-­Christian symbolic associations were effectively subsumed within the hegemony of a Christian ideological framework. A continual, bidirectional alignment of these symbolic associations of trees with elements of Christian symbolism, namely that of Paradise and that of the Cross, served to explain and legitimize their syncretic continuation within this Christian framework. These insights invite us to appreciate some of the complexity of the syncretism that occurred during the period of Christian conversion in Anglo-­‐Saxon England. They also invite us to further contemplate some of the lasting effects of this gradual syncretic process.

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