Preface

Summary

Writing this book has been a fascinating and challenging scholarly experience. Three years ago, I set about what I then thought would be a longish article on the Old English interlinear gloss in the Royal Psalter, its impressive quality and its origin in Bishop Æthelwold's circle, an origin which I had been suspecting for quite a number of years. As my work proceeded, I soon discovered that another important corpus of glosses – those to Aldhelm's prose De uirginitate – showed unmistakable verbal links with the Royal Psalter gloss and with Æthelwold's translation of the Regula Sancti Benedicti, thereby indicating a common origin for all three texts. At that point it became clear that I would have to write a short monograph in order to deal adequately with the three texts and their relationships. I then intended to discuss primarily philological aspects of the three texts and to demonstrate their common origin chiefly by means of philological methods. However, within a few months I had become convinced that such a restricted approach would not be sufficient to draw a comprehensive picture of the three texts and their relevance to Anglo-Saxon literary culture, and that for this I would need to assemble and assess what evidence might be gleaned from neighbouring disciplines. By the same token, I realized that this wider approach would present me with an opportunity to demonstrate the role and importance of philology in our attempts to recreate the Anglo-Saxon past.