Books in the Medieval European Studies Series series

The essays in this book use the nine-line poem known as "Caedmon's Hymn" as a lens on the world of Bede's Ecclesiastical History. Relatively little attention has been paid to what the story of Caedmon and his hymn might tell us about the material as well as the textual culture of Bede's world. The essays in this collection seek to connect "Caedmon's Hymn" to Bede s material world.

Asks why Christians in Britain around the year 700 enjoyed Latin poetry. What did they see in it? What did they get from it? This book attempts to reconstruct the horizon of expectation of a highly learned, Latin-speaking nun as she encounters a fifty-line poem by the Venerable Bede, the Hymn to Aethelthryth.

This verse translation of the most popular and enduring fourteenth century romance to survive to the present offers students an accessible way of approaching the literature of medieval England without losing the flavor of the original writing. With a foreword by David Donoghue, the close verse translation includes facing pages of the original fourteenth-century text and its modern translation.

Seasons for Fasting, a late Old English poem probably composed in the early eleventh century, focuses on proper fasting observances in England. This poem, composed in eight-line stanzas, survives only in a sixteenth-century transcript. This is a new text and translation of the poem, accompanied by an extensive introduction, commentary, and glossary.

Presents the reader with explanatory commentary that encompasses both the scientific and the poetic and treats them both with equal felicity. The volume also contains something that is exceptionally valuable and cannot be found in English: a compact and serviceable grammar of Old Saxon and an appended glossary that defines all of the vocabulary found in this edited version of the Heliand.

Ths is the third and final volume of an ambitious research initiative begun in 1999 concerned with the image of the cross, showing how its very material form cuts across both the culture of a society and the boundaries of academic disciplines - history, archaeology, art history, literature, philosophy, and religion - providing vital insights into how symbols function within society.