First printed edition, with facsimile and studies, of a significant manuscript from medieval England.

The Thorney liber vitae (BL, MS Add. 40,000, fols 1-12v) consists of many hundreds of names written in the front of a tenth-century gospel book. This liber vitae is one of only three such compilations surviving from medieval England, the others being the Durham liber vitae (BL, MS Cotton Domitian A vii) and the New Minster liber vitae (BL, MS Stowe 944). Begun at Thorney abbey (Cambridgeshire) in the late eleventh century and continued into the late twelfth, it purports to be a record of the names of confraters of the abbey, that is of those people who, through their friendship and gifts to the abbey, were included in the daily prayers of the monks of the community. The present volume is the first complete edition of this important text, and includes a complete facsimile of the pages. It also contains studies of the manuscript context, of the names included and, where possible, the identities and relationship to the abbey of those named, many of whom are also entered in the priory cartulary known as the Red Book of Thorney. The introduction provides a wide-ranging historical context for the production of the liber vitae. Lynda Rollason is Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Archaeology at Durham University. With contributions from Richard Gameson, John Insley and Katharine Keats-Rohan.

A seminal biography of the underappreciated eleventh-century Scandinavian warlord-turned-Anglo-Saxon monarch who united the English and Danish crowns to forge a North Sea empire Historian Timothy Bolton offers a fascinating reappraisal of one of the most misunderstood of the Anglo-Saxon kings: Cnut, the powerful Danish warlord who conquered England and created a North Sea empire in the eleventh century. This seminal biography draws from a wealth of written and archaeological sources to provide the most detailed accounting to date of the life and accomplishments of a remarkable figure in European history, a forward-thinking warrior-turned-statesman who created a new Anglo-Danish regime through designed internationalism.

The Encomium Emmae Reginae is a political tract in praise, as its title suggests, of Queen Emma, daughter of Duke Richard I of Normandy, wife of King Ethelred the Unready from 1002 to 1016, and wife of the Danish conqueror King Cnut from 1017 to 1035. It is a primary source of the utmost importance for our understanding of the Danish conquest of England in the early eleventh century, and for the political intrigue in the years which followed the death of King Cnut in 1035. It offers a remarkable account of a woman who was twice a queen, and of her determination to retain her power as queen-mother. This reprint, which contains the definitive text and translation of the Encomium Emmae Reginae first published in 1949, traces the basic outline of Queen Emma's career and transports us to the heart of eleventh-century politics by defining as clearly as possible the historical context in which the Encomium was written.

Drawing on a wide range of types of evidence this book offers a fresh impression of the a ~empirea (TM) built by King Cnut (1016a "1035) in England and Scandinavia, and offers insights into contemporary developments in the conceptions of this new dominion.