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This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Biblical poetry, written between the fourth and eleventh centuries, is an eclectic body of literature that disseminated popular knowledge of the Bible across Europe. Composed mainly in Latin and subsequently in Old English, biblical versification has much to tell us about the interpretations, genre preferences, reading habits, and pedagogical aims of medieval Christian readers. Biblical Epics in Late Antiquity and Anglo-Saxon England provides an accessible introduction to biblical epic poetry. Patrick McBrine’s erudite analysis of the writings of Juvencus, Cyprianus, Arator, Bede, Alcuin, and more reveals the development of a hybridized genre of writing that informed and delighted its Christian audiences to such an extent it was copied and promoted for the better part of a millennium. The volume contains many first-time readings and discussions of poems and passages which have long lain dormant and offers new evidence for the reception of the Bible in late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

It is apparent that every linguistic and literary tradition will wish to distinguish broad periods in its historical evolution. One way of demarcating such periods is by isolating and identifying dominant repertoires of texts, styles or types, which may be seen as preserving repositories of material, promoting literary models, privileging formal constraints, or inspiring theoretical reflections - or all of these. The present collection of studies represents the results of a colloquium held at the University of Groningen in 2001. The contributions range widely in area, time, and theme: from general theory of acceptation into the canon to particular case studies; from overall descriptions of cultural repertoires to their very manufacture; from Ancient Mesopotamia to the European avant-garde - taking in Homeric Greece, the Arabic world, the Middle Ages, Renaissance Humanism, and modern Dutch literature along the way.