Felix's Life of Saint Guthlac


Book Description

This book has been reissued in a format for students and teachers of history, literature, theology and Anglo-Saxon studies.







Darkness, Depression, and Descent in Anglo-Saxon England


Book Description

This collection of essays examines the motifs of darkness, depression, and descent in both literal and figurative manifestations within a variety of Anglo-Saxon texts, including the Old English Consolation of Philosophy, Beowulf, Guthlac, The Junius Manuscript, The Wonders of the East, and The Battle of Maldon. Essays deal with such topics as cosmic emptiness, descent into the grave, and recurrent grief. In their analyses, the essays reveal the breadth of this imagery in Anglo-Saxon literature as it is used to describe thought and emotion, as well as the limits to knowledge and perception. The volume investigates the intersection between the burgeoning interest in trauma studies and darkness and the representation of the mind or of emotional experience within Anglo-Saxon literature.













Remembering the Medieval Present: Generative Uses of England’s Pre-Conquest Past, 10th to 15th Centuries


Book Description

This volume of essays focuses on how individuals living in the late tenth through fifteenth centuries engaged with the authorizing culture of the Anglo-Saxons. Drawing from a reservoir of undertreated early English documents and texts, each contributor shows how individual poets, ecclesiasts, legists, and institutions claimed Anglo-Saxon predecessors for rhetorical purposes in response to social, cultural, and linguistic change. Contributors trouble simple definitions of identity and period, exploring how medieval authors looked to earlier periods of history to define social identities and make claims for their present moment based on the political fiction of an imagined community of a single, distinct nation unified in identity by descent and religion. Contributors are Cynthia Turner Camp, Irina Dumitrescu, Jay Paul Gates, Erin Michelle Goeres, Mary Kate Hurley, Maren Clegg Hyer, Nicole Marafioti, Brian O’Camb, Kathleen Smith, Carla María Thomas, Larissa Tracy, and Eric Weiskott. See inside the book.




Writing the Welsh borderlands in Anglo-Saxon England


Book Description

This is the first study of the Anglo-Welsh border region in the period before the Norman arrival in England, from the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Its conclusions significantly alter our current picture of Anglo/Welsh relations before the Norman Conquest by overturning the longstanding critical belief that relations between these two peoples during this period were predominately contentious. Writing the Welsh borderlands in Anglo-Saxon England demonstrates that the region which would later become the March of Wales was not a military frontier in Anglo-Saxon England, but a distinctively mixed Anglo-Welsh cultural zone which was depicted as a singular place in contemporary Welsh and Anglo-Saxon texts. This study reveals that the region of the Welsh borderlands was much more culturally coherent, and the impact of the Norman Conquest on it much greater, than has been previously realised.




The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain, 4 Volume Set


Book Description

The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain vereint erstmals wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse zu Multilingualität und Interkulturalität im mittelalterlichen Britannien und bietet mehr als 600 fundierte Einträge zu Schlüsselpersonen, Zusammenhängen und Einflüssen in der Literatur vom fünften bis sechzehnten Jahrhundert. - Einzigartiger multilingualer, interkultureller Ansatz und die neuesten wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnisse. Das gesamte Mittelalter und die Bandbreite literarischer Sprachen werden abgedeckt. - Über 600 fundierte, verständliche Einträge zu Schlüsselpersonen, Texten, kritischen Debatten, Methoden, kulturellen Zusammenhängen sowie verwandte Terminologie. - Repräsentiert die gesamte Literatur der Britischen Inseln, einschließlich Alt- und Mittelenglisch, das frühe Schottland, die Anglonormannen, Nordisch, Latein und Französisch in Britannien, die keltische Literatur in Wales, Irland, Schottland und Cornwall. - Beeindruckende chronologische Darstellung, von der Invasion der Sachsen bis zum 5. Jahrhundert und weiter bis zum Übergang zur frühen Moderne im 16. Jahrhundert. - Beleuchtet die Überbleibsel mittelalterlicher britischer Literatur, darunter auch Manuskripte und frühe Drucke, literarische Stätten und Zusammenhänge in puncto Herstellung, Leistung und Rezeption sowie erzählerische Transformation und intertextuelle Verbindungen in dieser Zeit.




Felix's Life of Saint Guthlac


Book Description

Written around 730-740 the Life of Guthlac by the monk Felix is an important and colourful source for the obscure early history of East Anglia and the Fens. It describes how the youthful Guthlac (674-714) won fame at the head of a Mercian warrior band fighting the British on the borders of Wales before entering the monastery at Repton at the age of twenty-four. Distinguished from the first by his piety and asceticism, Guthlac moved on around 700 to a solitary life on Crowland, an uninhabited island accessible only by boat deep in the wild and desolate marshland separating Mercia and East Anglia. Here he built a shelter cut into the side of a burial-mound in which he lived austerely, skin-clad in the manner of the Desert Fathers, for the rest of his life. Tormented by demons but consoled by visions of angels, Guthlac gained a reputation for sanctity and miraculous healing which spread far afield and continued to grow after his death. This Life vividly reflects the cult of St Guthlac as it existed in East Anglia only a generation later.