The following article explores one way of using Latin sources to increase our understanding and appreciation of the surviving corpus of vernacular prose hagiography in Anglo-Saxon England. Although the saints' legends in prose make up a significant portion of the Old English literary remains, they have been relatively neglected in comparison with the saints' legends in Old English verse, such as Andreas, Guthlac A and Guthlac B, and Cynewulf's Elene. As the standard bibliographies reveal well enough, the prose texts have been studied mainly from the perspectives of language, stylistics, codicology and basic Quellenforschung, and much less than the verse texts for their literary, historical or broadly cultural interest. This is particularly true of the twenty-nine anonymous legends, some of which are not readily accessible in printed versions, and most of which need re-editing. But even the hagiographic writings of Ælfric, which are better known, have been read only occasionally for their narrative content perse. Primary emphasis has fallen instead on Ælfric's considerable stylistic and prosodic achievements. Moreover, the two most recent monographs on Ælfric's intellectual and doctrinal concerns hardly touch on his saints' legends.

The study of the sources of the Anglo-Saxon medical texts began more than a hundred years ago with T.O. Cockayne's monumental edition of most of the medical, magical and herbal material extant in Old English. Cockayne demonstrated that the most significant text in this corpus, the late ninth-century compilation known as Bald's Leechbook, drew on an impressive range of Latin source materials. Recent work by C.H. Talbot and M.L. Cameron has further extended our knowledge of the classical texts which underlie the Leechbook. Among the significant sources is the text known as the Physica Plinii. Although the Physica survives in several recensions, there has as yet been no systematic study of the relationship between these recensions and the version of the Latin text used by the Old English compiler. The present article investigates Bald's Leechbook as a witness to the history of the Physica Plinii, and demonstrates the complexity of the transmission of the latter work.

The fourteenth-century compiler of the saga of Edward the Confessor, Saga Játvarðar konungs hins helga, supplemented his material on the king with history, anecdote and legend on various topics. His final chapter contains an account of the Anglo-Saxon emigration to Byzantium after the Norman Conquest. No historian doubts that this event took place. There is fairly full documentation from Byzantium itself and the accounts of the Anglo-Norman chronicler Orderic and the hagiographer Goscelin are not unknown. But in general the medieval chroniclers in England make no reference to it and the scholars who have worked on Játvarðar saga, perhaps insufficiently aware of supporting Byzantine evidence, have tended to dismiss the account as a fabrication. Gudbrand Vigfusson calls it ‘an extraordinary story’. Professor Jón Helgason writes, with a characteristic touch of fine disdain, that ‘the saga concludes with the episode of Earl Sigurðr of Gloucester, who after the Conquest left England, together with other English malcontents, and with the Greek emperor's consent settled in a country six days' journey north-east of Constantinople. Here they gave the towns such English names as London and York. The source of this far-fetched story is unknown.’ H. L. Rogers says no more than ‘evidently a similar tradition was known to the Anglo-Norman Ordericus Vitalis’.

Of all the many Anglo-Saxons who travelled to the Continent, some never to return, Boniface, apostle to the Germans, arguably had the deepest and most enduring inuence; for some, he is simply ‘the greatest Englishman’. But aside from Boniface's historical importance there is much of related interest for scholars of Anglo-Saxon literary culture too: not only does a wealth of hagiographical material survive relating to Boniface and his mission, but there remain a number of letters, poems, and other works written by Boniface himself, alongside a wide range of associated texts. Yet while the literary contexts and merits of (for example) Boniface's poetry have been discussed a number of times in recent years, the primary academic focus on the so-called ‘Bonifatian correspondence’ has tended to be historical, rather than literary. Such a focus has tended to privilege those letters with political or administrative implications above those that deal with more domestic or personal issues, yet it is precisely the latter category which shows the less formal aspects of Anglo-Saxon literary culture, and seems to invite closer comparison with a range of other texts. In particular, the innately repetitious and formulaic quality of much of the correspondence has much in common with that of several other areas of Anglo-Saxon literature in both Latin and Old English, whether in prose or verse, and this article seeks to explore those links in detail, in order to offer a broader literary context for the composition of the correspondence as a whole.

In his study of Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England, Nicholas Howe has argued that the Anglo-Saxons regarded the ancestral migration from the Continent as ‘the founding and defining event of their culture’. He suggests that the adventus Saxonum gave the Germanic tribes in England a shared identity, and proved central to their historical, cultural and even theological self-definition. Howe investigates what he calls the Anglo-Saxon ‘migration myth’, which links the Germanic tribal migration to England with the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, both being transmarine journeys from a land of spiritual bondage to one of spiritual salvation. Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England traces the development of this concept from Bede's Historia ecclesiastica to Wulfstan's Sermo Lupi, and discusses its function in the writings of Alcuin and Boniface, as well as in Old English poetry. Howe's elegant analysis succeeds in demonstrating the pervasiveness of migration as a cultural myth, that is, a story that endures in a people's memory because it speaks powerfully to their collective imagination.

When Henry VIII‘s Antiquary, John Leland, died in 1552, he left several volumes of notes and transcripts which have come to be called his Collectanea Volume iii of this collection, now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, contains a long series of extracts from a Latin–Old English glossary entitled ‘Ex antiquissimo Dictionario Latinosaxonico‘. It has not yet been noticed in print that these extracts are a transcript of items from Ælfric‘s Glossary, and it has not been realized that they were copied from a manuscript not otherwise attested. Although (excluding a Latin–Old Cornish version) the Glossary is extant in seven medieval manuscripts (four virtually complete) and in two sets of medieval excerpts – two more manuscripts being known from sixteenth-and seventeenth-century transcripts – this record of a twelfth text is significant for several reasons. It provides valuable textual evidence; it is an additional sign of the medieval popularity of the Glossary; it is an important witness to the beginnings of Anglo-Saxon studies in the years immediately following the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII; its publication in Hearne‘s edition of the Collectanea in 1715 was in fact the first printing of any version of Ælfric's Glossary (although not recognized as such); and it demonstrates the need for more attention to Leland's Collectanea by both medieval and Renaissance scholars.

The Old English æcerbot charm, whichs is preserved in London, British Library, Cotton Caligula A. vii, in a hand of the first half of the eleventh century, has always attracted a good deal of attention, since it is one of the few surviving texts which unquestionably reflect the influence of Anglo-Saxon paganism – pagan religion, not merely pagan magic, if one can make the distinction. Our knowledge of Anglo-Saxon paganism is so limited, particularly in comparison with the rich corpus of myth and heroic legend preserved in Old Norse-Icelandic, that inevitably scholars give close attention to any text which reveals something of it. So far as the æcerbot charm is concerned, this has meant a preoccupation with distinguishing between pagan elements and Christian accretions. For instance, in Stopford Brooke's translation of lines 30–42 quoted by Storms in his edition, ‘old’ pagan parts of the prayer are printed in italics and ‘new’ Christian ones in roman print. Storms doubts the possibility of drawing a hard and fast line in all cases, but his quite lengthy commentary on the charm as a whole shares the same fundamental concern.

The buildings and lands of Abbotsbury abbey in Dorset were acquired by Sir Giles Strangways soon after the dissolution of the abbey in 1539, various records pertaining to the abbey's estates seem to have passed into Sir Giles' possession at about the same time. Among these records was a cartulary, which is known to have belonged to Sir Giles' descendant, Sir John Strangways, in the seventeenth century, but which is said to have been destroyed when parliamentary forces set fire to Sir John's house at Abbotsbury during the Civil War. It is possible, however, to reconstruct something of the nature and contents of the lost cartulary from the writings of certain seventeenth-century antiquaries, and in the process to recover parts of the texts of six Anglo-Saxon charters whose existence has not previously been recorded.

Although it is a commonplace of history that Anglo-Saxon England was receptive to Christianity and to Christian-Latin culture and that English churchmen such as Aldhelm, Bede and Alcuin made an important contribution to that culture, it is only in recent years that scholars have explored and emphasized the importance of Christian tradition to the understanding of Old English poetry, especially those poems without explicit Christian content. Increased investigation of Old English prose, which is largely Christian, and the well-known work on Beowulf by Frederick Klaeber, Marie Padgett Hamilton, Dorothy Whitelock and others, seems to have redirected ‘the search for Anglo-Saxon paganism‘ into a search – sometimes opposed – for reflections of Christianity in Anglo-Saxon poetry. While in some quarters this critical and scholarly attention has been confined to the influence of Christian doctrine, ritual and interpretation of the bible, in others it has taken into account the broader cultural influences of the church, especially its transmission of the literature and learning of pagan antiquity.

The Old English medical records are rich in materials which contain evidence for contacts between the Anglo-Saxons and other cultures. For example, in 1945 Howard Meroney collected the various loan translations of Irish words found in the medical charms in the Leechbook, Lacnunga and other Old English texts. It is an interesting exercise to speculate on how Irish charms such as these, in Old Irish, got into the Old English medical repertory in their pristine form, whereas most of the Latin medical charms were translated straightway into English. It is customary to suppose that the Anglo-Saxons picked them up from Irish teachers in their monasteries, but there may be other explanations. Recently, while I was reading the Hisperica famina (in Michael Herren's translation), I came across references to young ‘visitors’, students who wandered about the Irish countryside begging for food and shelter among the country people, with whom they had difficulty communicating; as one of them is made to say:

Who will ask these possessors

to grant us their sweet abundance?

For an Ausonian chain binds me;

hence I do not utter good Irish speech.

It is a well-known fact that Old English is rich in Latin loan-words. Although the precise number is not yet known, it is a fairly safe assumption that there are at least 600 to 700 loan-words in Old English. This compares with 800 Latin loan-words borrowed in different periods in the Brittonic languages (Welsh, Cornish, Breton), and at least 500 early Latin loan-words common to the West Germanic languages. These rather vague overall numbers do not lend themselves, however, to a serious analysis of Latin influence on the Germanic and Celtic languages, because they include different periods of borrowing which are not really comparable to each other. The basis of these estimates, moreover, is often not stated very clearly. Although the establishment of a complete list of Latin loan-words in the various Germanic languages is a desideratum, it can only be achieved in a later stage of our studies.

The landscape of the epic poem Beowulf is a fantasy construct in which incompatible features coexist, but while it is an unprofitable exercise to attempt a reconstruction of a coherent topography in which Beowulf's exploits took place, the poet's choice of individual landscape terms is not likely to be random. Where this choice is not influenced by alliteration, each term may have been intended to convey a specific image appropriate to its immediate context. Several of the landscape terms used in the poem are otherwise unrecorded or only found rarely in other literary sources. This applies to hlið, hop and gelad; but by contrast with their rarity in literature these words are well evidenced in place-names, and an understanding of the place-name usage may have some relevance to the interpretation of their occurrences in the poem.

Sermo Lupi ad Anglos has attracted far more attention by its subject matter than have other Wulfstan sermons, because its apparent topicality is of interest to students of the Old English period. Like all Wulfstan's sermons, though, it has been chiefly esteemed for its forceful oratory – it is this sermon, indeed, which is responsible for his reputation as a fiery orator in the Old Testament vein. Most readers have praised it more enthusiastically than Sir Frank Stenton did, when he stated that it ‘makes its effect by sheer monotony of commination’. But even its admirers have regarded it as little more than a stringing together of the nation's sins and tribulations which impresses by the horrific accumulation of detail. Such a view, it will be argued, is a drastic oversimplification. The Sermo Lupi presents a number of closely related themes, and the catalogues are but one aspect of the development of these themes. Certainly the seemingly inexhaustible fashion in which Wulfstan heaps up specific instances of the nation's iniquities and misfortunes contributes much to the force of his indictment, but the sermon is neither formless nor repetitive. On the contrary, it is the most skilfully and tightly constructed of all his sermons.

A wall-painting at Nether Wallop church, Hampshire (SU303365), recently conserved, is here discussed and related to its architectural context. Previously thought to be of the thirteenth century, it is for the first time attributed to the ‘Winchester School’ of late Anglo-Saxon art, and a late-tenth-to-early-eleventh-century date is suggested for it.

According to Aediluulf's poem De abbatibus, written in the early ninth century, the Irish priest Ultán was ‘a man called by a famous name’ (preclaro nomine dictus), who ‘could ornament books with fair marking’ (comptis qui potuit notis ornare libellos). Active during the first half of the eighth century in Aediluulf's otherwise unknown monastery located most probably in the area of what is today southern Scotland or northern England, Ultán has also won growing renown in modern art-historical writing, on the basis of Aediluulf's text, our only source for his life and work. Several of the older general reference works for artists include his name, Thieme-Becker terming him ‘Kalligraph und Miniator’, Bénézit ‘enlumineur et calligraphe’ and Bradley more cautiously ‘calligrapher’ while repeating the statement of the sixteenth-century antiquary John Leland, that Ultán was scriptor et pictor librorum optimus. In other words, these early sources agree in making Ultán not only a scribe but also a painter or illuminator.

This essay uses maps that have illustrated Beowulf since Klaeber's edition as a starting point for an exploration of spatial representation in the poem. It is argued that modern maps do not offer particularly useful tools for understanding the poem, and that ‘chorography’, that is, the description of regional space, may be a more accurate term for analysis of Beowulf than ‘geography’. The poem presents a topography intimately connected to the interrelations of different peoples, and the frequent movement between past, present and future times. The final section of the article considers the postmedieval reception of spatial reference in Beowulf, disputes the presence of an Anglo-Saxon ‘migration myth’ in the poem, and raises some implications for genre that result from spatial analysis.

In a paper in Anglo-Saxon England 3 N. F. Barley has drawn attention to the richness of Anglo-Saxon colour vocabulary, which, he suggests, emphasized the light–dark axis of colour perception to a greater degree than does our own, in which hue is differentiated and then qualified adjectivally, pale, dark, etc. It is interesting to examine actual Anglo-Saxon artifacts with his observations in mind. The main sources for our knowledge of the Anglo-Saxons' use of colour are the illuminated manuscripts of which the earliest surviving are of the seventh century. We have only one small fragment of wall-painting, the recently discovered mural at Winchester datable to c. 900. There is a considerable amount of metal-work and jewellery, of which the Sutton Hoo find, a seventh-century burial hoard, is the most spectacular, and there are some embroideries of the early tenth century found in the tomb of St Cuthbert, now at Durham. There are also literary descriptions of works of art, especially church furnishings. The paucity of surviving material and the lack of descriptions of identifiable objects are obvious disadvantages. In addition there has to be considered the extent to which the use of colour changed and developed over the period c. 650–1050. In this paper some examples of manuscript illumination will be discussed.

The preface by Ælfric occurs in complete form in two manuscripts and in part in a third. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Miscellany 509 (s. xi2) contains the preface (fols. 1–3, headed with the words Incipit prefatio genesis anglice), together with the Old English Hexateuch (fols. 3–107) and Ælfric's selections from Judges (fols. 108–15). Cambridge, University Library, Ii. 1. 33 (s. xii2) has the preface, without tide, followed by Ælfric's partial translation of Genesis (fols. 2–24). London, British Library, Cotton Claudius B. iv (St Augustine's, Canterbury, s. xi1), having lost its first leaf, now preserves only the second half of the preface followed by an illustrated text of the Old English Hexateuch, but a sixteenth-century transcript by Robert Talbot, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 379, preserves some of its missing text, along with the same tide as Laud 509. Both Laud 509 and Claudius B. iv give slightly different compilations of the translations by Ælfric with the more extensive work of the anonymous scriptural translator (or translators). The differing rubrics and contents of the manuscripts affect the way we read the preface that they share: the Cambridge manuscript presents it as a preface to half of Genesis only, Laud 509 and the transcript label it a preface at least to the whole of Genesis. If, however, the incipit is scribal, it could be taken as a prologue to the Hexateuch. Was the preface, then, intended by Ælfric to introduce just the first half of Genesis, or a larger work? Sisam is of the first view: ‘no preface to the Pentateuch (or Hexateuch) survives, and evidendy the compiler of the extant Old English version did not know of one, since he used Ælfric's inappropriate English preface to the first part of Genesis.’

Part I of this article1 treated the three main streams of lapidary knowledge current in the early Middle Ages (the classical encyclopaedists, the patristic2 and the medical traditions, with particular attention, in the last-named, to the lapidary of Damigeron and its recensions);3 gloss traditions, terminology and popular beliefs about jewels in Anglo-Saxon England; and the origin and content of the Old English Lapidary, with a new edition of it. This part II treats the lapidary passage in Bede's Explanatio Apocalypsis; a Hiberno-Latin tract De Duodecim Lapidibus (henceforth DDL) used by Bede; and (with a critical edition) a tenth-century Latin hymn Cives celestis patrie, quite likely composed in Anglo-Saxon England, and closely based on Bede's work.4

The Old English poem known as The Husband's Message begins in the same minimalist style as is typical of a number of poems of the Exeter Book (Exeter, Cathedral Library, 3501). A first-person speaker, an ‘I’, begins speaking without any context for speech yet being established, without any self-introduction, and without as yet any known purpose: Nu ic onsundran þe secgan wille … As with the Exeter Book elegies known as The Seafarer, The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer, just as with all fifty Exeter Book riddles that are put into the first person singular voice, there is an implied challenge for the reader to discover who the speaker is and to fill out his or her full story. The poem thus begins with a small enigma. It is easy to tell that we are in the midst of that part of the Exeter Book that consists of close to one hundred riddles interspersed by a small miscellany of other poems, several of which are riddle-like in their resistance to easy interpretation.