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.

Donations to the Knights Hospitaller in Britain and Ireland, 1291-1400 is the first study of donations to the Knights Hospitaller throughout England and Ireland during the late-thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The book demonstrates that patrons donated to both military and non-military orders for much the same reasons, particularly family connections or the desire for spiritual benefit, rather than an interest in crusading. Such a conclusion has important implications for the treatment of the military orders by scholars of medieval religion, who traditionally have either overlooked these orders entirely or relegated them to a subfield of crusade studies rather than treating them as a full part of mainstream religious life. By reincorporating the military orders into mainstream religious history, discussion will be furthered in a range of fields and debates, such as ecclesiastical landholding, lay-church relations, the role of women in religion, and the processes of the Reformation. By focusing on the period 1291 to 1400, the book considers the impact of the loss of the Holy Land in 1291; the subsequent diffusion in crusade activity to the Baltic and Spain; the intensification of the order’s career as English royal servants in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland; and the Hospitallers’ crusade to Rhodes in 1309-10. This book will appeal to scholars and students of the Hospitallers, as well as those interested in medieval Britain and Ireland.

An authoritative life of Edward the Confessor, the monarch whose death sparked the invasion of 1066 One of the last kings of Anglo-Saxon England, Edward the Confessor regained the throne for the House of Wessex and is the only English monarch to have been canonized. Often cast as a reluctant ruler, easily manipulated by his in-laws, he has been blamed for causing the invasion of 1066—the last successful conquest of England by a foreign power. Tom Licence navigates the contemporary webs of political deceit to present a strikingly different Edward. He was a compassionate man and conscientious ruler, whose reign marked an interval of peace and prosperity between periods of strife. More than any monarch before, he exploited the mystique of royalty to capture the hearts of his subjects. This compelling biography provides a much-needed reassessment of Edward’s reign—calling into doubt the legitimacy of his successors and rewriting the ending of Anglo-Saxon England.

"A series which is a model of its kind" Edmund King This year's volume is made up of articles that were presented at the conference in Bonn, held under the auspices of the University. In this volume, Alheydis Plassmann, the Allen Brown Memorial lecturer, analyses how two contemporary commentators reported the events of their day, the contest between two grandchildren of William the Conqueror as they struggled for supremacy in England and Normandy during the 1140s. The Marjorie Chibnall Essay prize winner, Laura Bailey, examines the geographical spaces occupied by the exile in The Gesta Herewardi and Fouke le Fitz Waryn. Andrea Stieldorf compares the seals and the coins of Germany/Lotharingia in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries with those made in England, exploring the ideas embedded in the iconography of the two connected visual sources. Domesday Book forms the focus of two important new studies, one by Rory Naismith looking at the moneyers to be found in Domesday, adding substantially to the information gained on this important group of artisans, and one by Chelsea Shields-Más on the sheriffs of Edward the Confessor, giving us new insights into the key officials in the royal administration. Elisabeth van Houts examines the life of Empress Matilda before she returned to her father's court in 1125 throwing new light on Matilda's "German" years, while Laura Wangerin looks at how tenth-century Ottonian women used communication to further their political goals. Steven Vanderputten takes the challenge of thinking about religious change at the turn of the Millennium through the lens of the Life of John, Abbot of Gorze Abbey, by John of Saint-Arnoul. Benjamin Pohl looks at the role of the abbot in prompting monk-historians to embark on their historiographical tasks through the work of one individual chronicler, Andreas of Marchiennes, responsible for writing, at his abbot's behest, the Chronicon Marchianense. And Megan Welton explores the implications of honorific titles through an examination of the title dux as it was attached to two tenth-century women rulers. The volume offers a wide range of insightful essays which add considerably to our understanding of the central middle ages.

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 three Garima Gospels are the earliest surviving Ethiopian gospel books. They provide glimpses of lost late antique luxury gospel books and art of the fifth to seventh centuries, in the Aksumite kingdom of Ethiopia as well as in the Christian East. As this work shows, their artwork is closely related to Syriac, Armenian, Greek, and Georgian gospel books and to the art of late antique (Coptic) Egypt, Nubia, and Himyar (Yemen). Like most gospel manuscripts, the Garima Gospels contain ornately decorated canon tables which function as concordances of the different versions of the same material in the gospels. Analysis of these tables of numbered parallel passages, devised by Eusebius of Caesarea, contributes significantly to our understanding of the early development of the canonical four gospel collection. The origins and meanings of the decorated frames, portraits of the evangelists, Alexandrian circular pavilion, and unique image of the Jerusalem Temple are elucidated. The Garima texts and decoration demonstrate how a distinctive Christian culture developed in Aksumite Ethiopia, while also belonging to the mainstream late antique Mediterranean world. Lavishly illustrated in colour, this volume presents all of the Garima illuminated pages for the first time and extensive comparative material. It will be an essential resource for those studying late antique art and history, Ethiopia, eastern Christianity, New Testament textual criticism, and illuminated books.