There has in recent years been a lively debate among ANglo-Saxonists about the principles on which Old English verse should be edited. The present collection of essays, by the foremost living critic of Old English poetry, will move this debate on to a new plane. Robinson approaches editorial problems from a variety of perspectives: several essays show how insufficient attention to the manuscript context of a poem has led earlier scholars into error; on other occasions, scholars are shown to have resorted too quickly to emendation when a fresh combination of philological skill and intelligence can make a transmitted reading yield good sense; on yet other occasions, Robinson solves intractable textual problems by clean and elegant emendation. THe message of the book is one which no student of Old English literature can ignore: namely that the interpretation of Old English poems requires thorough familiarity with the manuscript context in which the poem is preserved, together with deep philological learning and penetrating common sense. No student of Old English poetry has these qualities in greater abundance than Fred C Robinson.

Seven original essays on the theory, practice and future of editing Old English verse.

A complete, well presented and easy to use Old English language course which contains all the exercises and texts needed to learn Old English. The course has been designed to be of help to a wide range of students, from those who are teaching themselves at home, to undergraduates who are learning Old English as part of their English degree course. The author is aware that some students have difficulty learning languages and that many have trouble with grammar. To help overcome these problems he has adopted a step by step approach that enables students of differing abilities to advance at their own pace. The course contains exercises designed to aid the learning process.

Reading Old English Texts, first published in 1997, focuses on the critical methods being used and developed for reading and analysing writings in Old English. The collection is timely, given the explosion of interest in the theory, method, and practice of critical reading. Each chapter engages with work on Old English texts from a particular methodological stance. The authors are all experts in the field, but are also concerned to explain their method and its application to a broad undergraduate and graduate readership. The chapters include a brief historical background to the approach; a definition of the field or method under consideration; a discussion of some exemplary criticism (with a balance of prose and verse passages); an illustration of the ways in which texts are read through this approach, and some suggestions for future work.

Twenty often controversial essays dealing with different aspects of textual criticism.

For the 2nd ASPNS conference the emphasis regarding the topics of the talks was placed on lexicographic and linguistic matters. In this volume the contributors assess the various problems of working with plant names like foxes glofa and geormanleaf, pulege and psyllium, hlenortear or fornetes folm. A special study analyses the semantic aspects of Old English plant names. More generally plant related discussions deal with the mandrake legend in Anglo-Saxon England and continental Europe, the need for a new publication of the Old English Herbarium and of the Medicina de Quadrupedibus, or the tree names in Anglo-Saxon charters. The conference also served as a platform to introduce the Graz-Munich online project Dictionary of Old English Plant Names.