The Old English Hexateuch is a manuscript of the earliest vernacular translation of the Old Testament books of Genesis through Joshua. The texts belong, in part, to the Anglo-Saxon monk Aelfric (950?-1010?) and to several anonymous translators and at least one artist who compiled these translations and illustrated them with nearly four hundred narrative images, which are carefully integrated into the manuscript. The Hexateuch testifies to the creativity and innovation of Anglo-Saxon bookmakers and stands as an important, if little known, witness to the relationship between early book-making technology and the history of literacy. Benjamin C. Withers examines codicological features of the manuscript, focusing on the working processes of the artist and scribes and seeking to understand how they integrated newly translated text with newly developed imagery so deftly. Grounded in art history and literary theory, this work considers the narrative relationships created by the careful design and seeks to place the Hexateuch within the broader social and cultural development of vernacular literacy in the eleventh century.

In Moses the Egyptian, Herbert Broderick analyzes the iconography of Moses in the famous illuminated eleventh-century manuscript known as the Illustrated Old English Hexateuch. A translation into Old English of the first six books of the Bible, the manuscript contains over 390 images, of which 127 depict Moses with a variety of distinctive visual attributes. Broderick presents a compelling thesis that these motifs, in particular the image of the horned Moses, have a Hellenistic Egyptian origin. He argues that the visual construct of Moses in the Old English Hexateuch may have been based on a Late Antique, no longer extant, prototype influenced by works of Hellenistic Egyptian Jewish exegetes, who ascribed to Moses the characteristics of an Egyptian-Hellenistic king, military commander, priest, prophet, and scribe. These Jewish writings were utilized in turn by early Christian apologists such as Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius of Caesarea. Broderick’s analysis of this Moses imagery ranges widely across religious divides, art-historical religious themes, and classical and early Jewish and Christian sources. Herbert Broderick is one of the foremost historians in the field of Anglo-Saxon art, with a primary focus on Old Testament iconography. Readers with interests in the history of medieval manuscript illustration, art history, and early Jewish and Christian apologetics will find much of interest in this profusely illustrated study.

In Communal Creativity in the Making of the ‘Beowulf’ Manuscript, Simon Thomson analyses details of scribal activity to tell a story about the project that preserved Beowulf as one of a collective, if error-strewn, endeavour and arguing for a date in Cnut’s reign. He presents evidence for the use of more than three exemplars and at least two artists as well as two scribes, making this an intentional and creative re-presentation uniting literature religious and heroic, in poetry and in prose. He goes on to set it in the broader context of manuscript production in late Anglo-Saxon England as one example among many of communities using old literature in new ways, and of scribes working together, making mistakes, and learning.

The essays here take us from the twelfth century, with an exploration of an inventory of Mediterranean textiles from an Ifriqiyan Church, into an examination and reconstruction of an extant thirteenth-century sleeve in France which provides a rare and early example of medieval quilted armour, and finally on to late medieval Sweden and the reconstruction of gilt-leather intarsia coverlets. A study of construction techniques and the evolution of form of gable and French hoods in the late medieval and the early modern periods follows; and the volume alos includes a study of how underwear for depicted in Renaissance paintings and manuscript illuminations serves as a marker of class.