A HISTORY OF OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE A History of Old English Literature has been significantly revised to provide an unequivocal response to the renewed historicism in medieval studies. Focusing on the production and reception of Old English texts and on their relation to Anglo-Saxon history and culture, this new edition covers an exceptionally broad array of genres. These range from riddles and cryptograms to allegory, liturgical texts, and romance, as well as lyric poetry and heroic legend. The authors also integrate discussions of Anglo-Latin texts, crucial to understanding the development of Old English literature. This second edition incorporates extensive reference to scholarship that has evolved over the past decade, with new chapters on both Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and on incidental and marginal texts. There is expanded treatment throughout, including increased coverage of legal texts and scientific and scholastic texts. The book concludes with a retrospective outline of the reception of Anglo-Saxon literature and culture in subsequent periods.

Anglo-Saxon prose and poetry is, without question, the major literary achievement of the early Middle Ages (c. 700-1100). In no other vernacular language does such a vast store of verbal treasures exist for so extended a period of time. For twenty years the definitive guide to that literature has been Stanley B. Greenfield's 1965 Critical History of Old English Literature. Now this classic has been extensively revised and updated to make it more valuable than ever to both the student and scholar.

This innovative and intriguing introduction to Old English literature is structured around what the author calls ‘figures’ from Anglo-Saxon culture: the Vow, the Hall, the Miracle, the Pulpit, and the Scholar. An innovative and intriguing introduction to Old English literature. Structured around ‘figures’ from Anglo-Saxon culture: the Vow, the Hall, the Miracle, the Pulpit, and the Scholar. Situates Old English literary texts within a cultural framework. Creates new connections between different genres, periods and authors. Combines close textual analysis with historical context. Based on the author’s many years experience of teaching Old English literature. The author is co-editor with Seamus Heaney of Beowulf: A Verse Translation (2001) and recently published with Blackwell Lady Godiva: A Literary History of the Legend (2003).

Informed by multicultural, multidisciplinary perspectives, The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature offers a new exploration of the earliest writing in Britain and Ireland, from the end of the Roman Empire to the mid-twelfth century. Beginning with an account of writing itself, as well as of scripts and manuscript art, subsequent chapters examine the earliest texts from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and the tremendous breadth of Anglo-Latin literature. Chapters on English learning and literature in the ninth century and the later formation of English poetry and prose also convey the profound cultural confidence of the period. Providing a discussion of essential texts, including Beowulf and the writings of Bede, this History captures the sheer inventiveness and vitality of early medieval literary culture through topics as diverse as the literature of English law, liturgical and devotional writing, the workings of science and the history of women's writing.

This updated edition has been thoroughly revised to take account of recent scholarship and includes five new chapters.

Recognizing the dramatic changes in Old English studies over the past generation, this up-to-date anthology gathers twenty-one outstanding contemporary critical writings on the prose and poetry of Anglo-Saxon England, from approximately the seventh through eleventh centuries. The contributors focus on texts most commonly read in introductory Old English courses while also engaging with larger issues of Anglo-Saxon history, culture, and scholarship. Their approaches vary widely, encompassing disciplines from linguistics to psychoanalysis. In an appealing introduction to the book, R. M. Liuzza presents an overview of Old English studies, the history of the scholarship, and major critical themes in the field. For both newcomers and more advanced scholars of Old English, these essays will provoke discussion, answer questions, provide background, and inspire an appreciation for the complexity and energy of Anglo-Saxon studies.

Alexander’s A History of Old English Literature is an outstanding introduction to a difficult period of literary history. It provides a simple historical and cultural context for the study of the Anglo-Saxons, and offers a history, illustrated by many passages in translation, of the whole of the literature that survives. While it contains solid, insightful and sensible criticism of individual literary works, its overall historical organization suggests that Old English literature was created in a cultural context that changed from one century to another. Although its intentions are scholarly, this history of Old English literature is also an introduction, assuming little knowledge of this period or its surviving products, and none of its language. This edition has been revised and rewritten throughout, and offers a new preface as well as an updated bibliography.