This is the first complete English translation of the poetic works of Sedulius, a Christian Latin poet of late antiquity whose biblical epic and hymns were enormously popular during the Middle Ages and the early modern period. The introduction places the poet and his works into his historical and literary contexts, followed by the Latin text of Sedulius’s poetic works with English translation on facing pages. Notes on linguistic and historical matters are designed to help the reader with little or no Latin and only some familiarity with Sedulius’s classical and biblical sources. Appendices supply texts and translations of incidental related materials, including Sedulius’s dedicatory letters; biographical notices, subscriptions, and laudatory poems associated with Sedulius’s works in the manuscript tradition; and representative excerpts from Sedulius’s own prose paraphrase of the Paschale Carmen. The volume includes a bibliography and index.

The Latin literature of Anglo-Saxon England remains poorly understood. No bibliography of the subject exists. No comprehensive and authoritative history of Anglo-Latin literature has ever been written. It is only in recent years, largely through the essays collected in the present volumes, that the outline and intrinsic interest of the field have been clarified. Indeed, until a comprehensive history of the period is written, these collected essays offer the only reliable guide to the subject. The essays in the first volume are concerned with the earliest period of literary activity in England. Following a general essay which surveys the field as a whole, the essays range from the arrival of Theodore and Hadrian, through Aldhelm and Bede, to Aediluulf.

The Latin literature of Anglo-Saxon England remains poorly understood. No bibliography of the subject exists. No comprehensive and authoritative history of Anglo-Latin literature has ever been written. It is only in recent years, largely through the essays collected in the present volumes, that the outline and intrinsic interest of the field have been clarified. Indeed, until a comprehensive history of the period is written, these collected essays offer the only reliable guide to the subject. The essays in the first volume are concerned with the earliest period of literary activity in England. Following a general essay which surveys the field as a whole, the essays range from the arrival of Theodore and Hadrian, through Aldhelm and Bede, to Aediluulf.

While quill and ink were the writing implements of choice in the Anglo-Saxon scriptorium, other colouring and non-colouring writing implements were in active use, too. The stylus, among them, was used on an everyday basis both for taking notes in wax tablets and for several vital steps in the creation of manuscripts. Occasionally, the stylus or perhaps even small knives were used for writing short notes that were scratched in the parchment surface without ink. One particular type of such notes encountered in manuscripts are dry-point glosses, i.e. short explanatory remarks that provide a translation or a clue for a lexical or syntactic difficulty of the Latin text. The present study provides a comprehensive overview of the known corpus of dry-point glosses in Old English by cataloguing the 34 manuscripts that are currently known to contain such glosses. A first general descriptive analysis of the corpus of Old English dry-point glosses is provided and their difficult visual appearance is discussed with respect to the theoretical and practical implications for their future study.