Most Old English literature was translated or adapted from Latin: what was translated, and when, reflects cultural development and the increasing respectability of English. Translation was central to Old English literature as we know it. Most Old English literature, in fact, was either translated or adapted from Latin sources, and this is the first full-length study of Anglo-Saxon translation as a cultural practice. This 'culture of translation' was characterised by changing attitudes towards English: at first a necessary evil, it can be seen developing increasing authority and sophistication. Translation's pedagogical function (already visible in Latin and Old English glosses) flourished in the centralizing translation programme of the ninth-century translator-king Alfred, and English translations of the Bible further confirmed the respectability ofEnglish, while Ælfric's late tenth-century translation theory transformed principles of Latin composition into a new and vigorous language for English preaching and teaching texts. The book will integrate the Anglo-Saxon period more fully into the longer history of English translation.ROBERT STANTON is Assistant Professor of English, Boston College, Massachusetts.

Significant Anglo-Saxon papers, with postscripts, illustrate advances in knowledge of life and culture of pre-Conquest England. Thomas Northcote Toller, of the Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, is one of the most influential but least known Anglo-Saxon scholars of the early twentieth century. The Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies at Manchester, where Toller was the first professor of English Language, has an annual Toller lecture, delivered by an expert in the field of Anglo-Saxon Studies; this volume offers a selection from these lectures, brought together for the firsttime, and with supplementary material added by the authors to bring them up to date. They are complemented by the 2002 Toller Lecture, Peter Baker's study of Toller, commissioned specially for this book; and by new examinations ofToller's life and work, and his influence on the development of Old English lexicography. The volume is therefore both an epitome of the best scholarship in Anglo-Saxon studies of the last decade and a half, and a guide for the modern reader through the major advances in our knowledge of the life and culture of pre-Conquest England. , Contributors: RICHARD BAILEY, PETER BAKER, DABNEY ANDERSON BANKERT, JANET BATELY, GEORGE BROWN, ROBERTA FRANK, HELMUT GNEUSS, JOYCE HILL, DAVID A. HINTON, MICHAEL LAPIDGE, AUDREY MEANEY, KATHERINE O'BRIEN O'KEEFFE, JOANA PROUD, ALEXANDER RUMBLE.

The twelve articles in this volume promote the growing contacts between historical linguistics and medieval cultural studies. They fall into two groups. One examines the interrelation in Anglo-Saxon England between Latin and vernacular language and culture, investigating language-contact between Old English and Latin, the extent of Latinity in early medieval Britain, Anglo-Saxons’ attitudes to Classical culture, and relationships between Anglo-Saxon and Continental Christian thought. Another group uses historical linguistics as a method in the wider cultural study of medieval England, examining syntactic change, dialect, translation and semantics to give us access to politeness, demography, and cultural constructions of colour, thought and time. The volume will be of particular interest to scholars of Anglo-Saxon culture and Middle English language. Contributors are Olga Timofeeva, Alaric Hall, Seppo Heikkinen, Jesse Keskiaho, John Blair, Kathryn A. Lowe, Antonette DiPaolo Healey, Lilla Kopár, C. P. Biggam, Ágnes Kiricsi, Alexandra Fodor and Mari Pakkala-Weckström.

Preaching Apocrypha in Anglo-Saxon England is the first in-depth study of Christian apocrypha focusing specifically on the use of extra-biblical narratives in Old English sermons. The work contributes to our understanding of both the prevalence and importance of apocrypha in vernacular preaching, by assessing various preaching texts from Continental and Anglo-Saxon Latin homiliaries, as well as vernacular collections like the Vercelli Book, the Blickling Book, Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, and other manuscripts from the tenth through twelfth centuries. Vernacular sermons were part of a media ecology that included Old English poetry, legal documents, liturgical materials, and visual arts. Situating Old English preaching within this network establishes the range of contexts, purposes, and uses of apocrypha for diverse groups in Anglo-Saxon society: cloistered religious, secular clergy, and laity, including both men and women. Apocryphal narratives did not merely survive on the margins of culture, but thrived at the heart of mainstream Anglo-Saxon Christianity.

In Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England, Mary Kate Hurley reinterprets a well-recognized and central feature of medieval textual production: translation. Medieval texts often leave conspicuous evidence of the translation process. These translation effects are observable traces that show how medieval writers reimagined the nature of the political, cultural, and linguistic communities within which their texts were consumed. Examining translation effects closely, Hurley argues, provides a means of better understanding not only how medieval translations imagine community but also how they help create communities. Through fresh readings of texts such as the Old English Orosius, Ælfric's Lives of the Saints, Ælfric's Homilies, Chaucer, Trevet, Gower, and Beowulf, Translation Effects adds a new dimension to medieval literary history, connecting translation to community in a careful and rigorous way and tracing the lingering outcomes of translation effects through the whole of the medieval period.