The late thirteenth-century, monolingual Oxford manuscript, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108, bears singular importance to medieval studies, for it preserves and anthologizes unique versions of several seminal Middle English texts, including South English Legendary, Havelok the Dane, and King Horn and Somer Soneday. While critics have traditionally classified these poems by genre, this book returns them to their manuscript context in a comprehensive examination of this vernacular codex. Considering the manuscript as a “whole book” rather than a miscellany of romances, saints' lives, and religious poems, these inter-connected essays focus on the physical, contextual, and critical intersections of Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108. Codicological evidence foregrounds the manuscript’s investment in a particular vision of an English Christian identity. Contributors are A.S.G. Edwards, Thomas R. Liszka, Murray J. Evans, Andrew Taylor, Diane Speed, Susanna Fein, Robert Mills, Andrew Lynch, Daniel Kline, Christina M. Fitzgerald, and J. Justin Brent.

This book is an edition and translation of a Middle English text known as the South English Legendary, which is a collection of hagiographical stories about saints. The manuscript, MS Laud 108, is housed in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, and this book provides important insights into the religious culture of medieval England. 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. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.