First published in 2001. With the decline of formalism and its predilection for Old English poetry, Old English prose is leaving the periphery and moving into the center of literary and cultural discussion. The extensive corpus of Old English prose lends many texts of various kinds to the current debates over literary theory and its multiple manifestations. The purpose of this collection is to assist the growing interest in Old English prose by providing essays that help establish the foundations for considered study and offer models and examples of special studies. Both retrospective and current in its examples, this collection can serve as a "first book" for an introduction to study, particularly suitable for courses that seek to entertain such issues as authorship, texts and textuality, source criticism, genre, and forms of historical criticism as a significant part of a broad, cultural teaching (and research) plan.

In this major study of Angle-Saxon religious tests sermons, homilies, and saints' lives written in Old English -- Clare A. Lees reveals how the invention of preaching transformed the early medieval church, and thus the culture of medieval England in placing Anglo-Saxon prose within a social matrix, her work offers a new way of seeing medieval literature through the lens of cultures. To show how the preaching mission of the later Anglo-Saxon church was constructed and received, Lees explores the emergence of preaching from the traditional structures of the early medieval church -- its institutional knowledge, genres, and beliefs. Understood as a powerful rhetorical, social, and epistemological process, preaching is shown to have helped define the sociocultural concerns specific to late Anglo-Saxon England. The first detailed study of traditionality in medieval culture, Tradition and Belief is also a case study of one cultural phenomenon from the past. As such -- and by concentrating on the theoretically problematic areas of history, religious belief, and aesthetics -- the book contributes to debates about the evolving meaning of culture.

St Dunstan of Canterbury (909-88) was the central figure in the development of English church and society after the death of King Alfred. Douglas Dales traces Dunstan’s life beginning with his education at the great monastery of Glastonbury of which he became abbot. He was a central figure at the court of the kings of Wessex but was banished, partly because of his hostility to the king’s mistresses, and went to exile in Flanders. After his return he was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury. During the twenty-eight years of his primacy he carried out one of the major developments of the century, the reformation of the monasteries. This book aims to examine him not merely as a prelate and royal advisor, but to see other aspects of his life: his skills as a craftsman caused him to be adopted as the patron saint of goldsmiths; some of his work as calligrapher and artist survives to this day; the coronation service which he drew up still lies at the heart of this service for English monarchs today; he was famed for his musical skills; above all, the sanctity of his name and the fame of his miracles kept Dunstan’s memory alive. Douglas Dales’ re-examination of the life and times of Dunstan sets his achievements against the social and religious background of the day, at a time when new forces were emerging that would shape the future of England and the English Church for centuries to come.

Charles Wright identifies the characteristic features of Irish Christian literature which influenced Anglo-Saxon vernacular authors. As a full-length study of Irish influence on Old English religious literature, the book will appeal to scholars in Old English literature, Anglo-Saxon studies, and Old and Middle Irish literature.