Reading with David Jones

2021 ◽  
pp. 35-72
Author(s):  
Francesca Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Old English ◽  
Cultural Inheritance ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Imagined Community ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
National Library ◽  
Historical Scholarship ◽  
Original Language

Chapter 1 represents a major archival reassessment of Jones’s knowledge of and interest in early medieval culture and history produced in England, demonstrating that Jones knew many Old English texts in the original language and was engaged with the historiography of the period. The chapter sets out the findings of new archival research with The Library of David Jones, National Library of Wales, and in particular with The Anglo-Saxon Library (Appendix 1). This archival research facilitates a new methodology for reading with Jones and brings evidence from his reading, including previously uncatalogued marginalia, together with the drafts and manuscripts for The Anathemata. This chapter also places Jones’s innovation within the wider context of his reading of historical scholarship on the early Middle Ages, tracing the development of a scholarly poetics with which Jones reshaped a British historical and cultural inheritance for the imagined community of The Anathemata.

Wynflæd's wardrobe

1979 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 195-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gale R. Owen
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Old English ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
British Library ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
General Terms ◽  
Relative Value

An Old English document, composed probably in the middle of the tenth century and extant in a not very careful, mutilated, eleventh-century copy, London, British Library, Cotton Charter, VIII, 38, lists the bequests of a woman named Wynflæd. The bequests of clothing in this will are particularly interesting. Anglo-Saxon testaments do not itemize elaborate garments as do some English wills of the later Middle Ages; they refer to clothing only rarely, and then sometimes in general terms. Wynflæd's will is unusual in mentioning several different items of clothing and in specifying them more precisely. Descriptive references to non-military clothing are uncommon in Old English texts generally. Although many garment-names are documented, some which occur only in glossaries or translations from Latin may never have been in common use in England and some words are of uncertain meaning. In most cases the sex of the wearer of a named garment and the relative value of the garment are unknown. The garment-names in Wynflæd's will, by contrast, refer to items of clothing which were certainly worn by women at a known date and were valuable enough to be bequeathed.

Lapidary traditions in Anglo-Saxon England: part II, Bede's Explanatio Apocalypsis and related works

1983 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 73-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Kitson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Old English ◽  
Critical Edition ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Medical Traditions

Part I of this article1 treated the three main streams of lapidary knowledge current in the early Middle Ages (the classical encyclopaedists, the patristic2 and the medical traditions, with particular attention, in the last-named, to the lapidary of Damigeron and its recensions);3 gloss traditions, terminology and popular beliefs about jewels in Anglo-Saxon England; and the origin and content of the Old English Lapidary, with a new edition of it. This part II treats the lapidary passage in Bede's Explanatio Apocalypsis; a Hiberno-Latin tract De Duodecim Lapidibus (henceforth DDL) used by Bede; and (with a critical edition) a tenth-century Latin hymn Cives celestis patrie, quite likely composed in Anglo-Saxon England, and closely based on Bede's work.4

Two Uses of Apocrypha in Old English Homilies

1964 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 379-391 ◽  
Author(s):  
Milton McCormick Gatch
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Old English ◽  
Important Influence ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Religious Literature ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Restricted Number

It has long been recognized that the homilies preserved in Old English from the early Middle Ages are almost entirely derived from Latin writings. It has also been known that, in selecting sources for adaptation, the Anglo-Saxon writers did not subject Latin materials to rigorous tests of orthodoxy and canonicity. Several important studies have been devoted to analysis of the relation of homilies which derive from apocryphal literature to their sources. They show that a relatively restricted number of apocryphal documents exercised an important influence on the popular religious literature of the late Old English period.

Anglo-Saxon Law

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Rabin
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Old English ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Valuable Insight ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Norman Conquest ◽  
Royal Authority ◽  
Low Profile ◽  
Early English ◽  
Insight Into

A larger body of law survives from Anglo-Saxon England than from any other early medieval community. The standard edition of early English legislation, the Gesetze der Angelsachsen of Felix Liebermann (Liebermann 1903–1916), contains roughly seventy pre-Conquest texts, to which can be added well over a thousand Charters, Writs, and Wills. If one also includes the numerous surviving quasi-legislative texts, legal formularies and rituals, and homilies derived from legal sources, it is possible to gain a sense of both the diversity of Anglo-Saxon legal composition and the centrality of such texts to pre-Conquest culture. Yet the importance of the Anglo-Saxon legal corpus lies in more than just its size. Linguists observe that the legislation of Æthelbert (c. 604) is the earliest substantial text to survive in Old English, while monastic charters of the 11th and early 12th centuries are among the latest. Historians of the English Renaissance point out that the editio princeps of Anglo-Saxon law, William Lambarde’s Archaionomia (1568), was one of the first publications to result from the 16th-century revival of Old English scholarship and that a copy now held by the Folger Shakespeare Library even contains what may be a signature of Shakespeare himself. Americanists note the influence of Old English law on the thought of Thomas Jefferson while scholars of 19th-century literature see its traces in the writings of Henry Adams. Nonetheless, this material has yet to attract the scholarly interest given to either the literature of the period or the legal developments of the later Middle Ages. The centuries before the Norman Conquest rarely feature in courses on legal history and introductory Old English students receive only the most cursory exposure to pre-Conquest laws and charters. Despite its comparatively low profile, however, the study of Anglo-Saxon law offers valuable insight into early English concepts of Royal Authority and political identity. It reveals both the capacities and limits of the king’s regulatory power, and in so doing, provides crucial evidence for the process by which disparate kingdoms gradually merged to become a unified English state. More broadly, pre-Conquest legal texts shed light on the various ways in which cultural norms were established, enforced, and, in many cases, challenged. And perhaps most importantly, they provide unparalleled insight into the experiences of Anglo-Saxon England’s diverse inhabitants, both those who enforced the law and those subject to its sway.

Old English Riddle No. 39

PMLA ◽  
1946 ◽  
Vol 61 (4-Part1) ◽  
pp. 910-915
Author(s):  
Erika von Erhardt-Siebold
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Old English ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Historical Material ◽  
English Poem

Like the Old English poem 74 on metempsychosis, which will soon be discussed in another article, the present poem 39 has puzzled Anglo-Saxon scholars ever since Dietrich in 1859 suggested the solution Day. Later proposals, Time and Moon, are hardly more convincing than the first. In presenting here the solution Hypostasis Death I wish to say that I consider it to be supported not only by the contents of the poem, but also by historical material, from which it may be concluded that during the early Middle Ages speculative theologians inclined towards the belief in the reality of death.

Winchester in the Early Middle Ages: An Edition and Discussion of The Winton Domesday

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Barlow ◽  
Martin Biddle ◽  
Olaf von Feilitzen ◽  
D.J. Keene
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Old English ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Archaeological Excavation ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Recent Advances ◽  
Domesday Book ◽  
Royal City ◽  
The City

London and Winchester were not described in the Domesday Book, but the royal properties in Winchester were surveyed for Henry I about 1110 and the whole city was surveyed for Bishop Henry of Blois in 1148. These two surveys survive in a single manuscript, known as the Winton Domesday, and constitute the earliest and by far the most detailed description of an English or European town of the early Middle Ages. In the period covered Winchester probably achieved the peak of its medieval prosperity. From the reign of Alfred to that of Henry II it was a town of the first rank, initially centre of Wessex, then the principal royal city of the Old English state, and finally `capital’ in some sense, but not the largest city, of the Norman Kingdom. This volume provides a full edition, translation, and analyses of the surveys and of the city they depict, drawing on the evidence derived from archaeological excavation and historical research in the city since 1961, on personal- and place-name evidence, and on the recent advances in Anglo-Saxon numismatics.

The probable derivation of most of the illustrations in Junius II from an illustrated Old Saxon Genesis

1976 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 133-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Raw
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Old English ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Bodleian Library ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Old Saxon ◽  
Old English Poetry ◽  
History Of

Junius II in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, is the only one of the four principal manuscripts of Old English poetry to be illustrated. The pictures are important not only because they form one of the most extensive sets of Genesis illustrations of the early Middle Ages but also because the text which they illustrate is a composite one, 600 lines of which were translated into Old English from an Old Saxon poem probably of the second quarter of the ninth century. By tracing the sources of these illustrations one can throw light on the history and transmission of the text as well as on the history of manuscript art in the late Anglo-Saxon period.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Jones
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Old English ◽  
English Studies ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Two Phases ◽  
Scholarly Contribution ◽  
Anglophone World ◽  
The Relationship

This introductory chapter contextualizes the philological study of language during the nineteenth century as a branch of the evolutionary sciences. It sketches in outline the two phases of poetic Anglo-Saxonism for which the rest of the book will subsequently argue in more detail. Moreover, the relationship between Anglo-Saxonism and nineteenth-century medievalism more generally is articulated, and historical analogies are drawn between nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism and more recent political events in the Anglophone world. Finally, the scholarly contribution of Fossil Poetry itself is contextualized within English Studies; it is argued that ‘reception’ is one of the primary objects of Anglo-Saxon or Old English studies, and not merely a secondary object of that field’s study.

Anglo-Saxon Glosses and Grammars

2020 ◽  
pp. 942-956
Author(s):  
Patrizia Lendinara
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Anglo Saxon

This chapter surveys Old English glosses of Latin works in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and discusses the format of glosses, the types of texts that were glossed, hermeneutic texts, merographs, dry-point glosses, glossae collectae, class glossaries, and alphabetical glossaries. The author also treats the production and study of grammar in Anglo-Saxon England, touching on the works of Bede, Tatwine, Boniface, Alcuin, Priscian, and Aelfric.

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