Aldhelm of Malmesbury's Prosa de virginitate (hereafter Pdv) can be called one of the most enduring works of Anglo-Saxon scholarship. Immensely influential in Aldhelm's lifetime, the text continued to be popular in England and on the Continent until Viking invasions put an end to native learning in the last half of the ninth century. Yet by the 920s interest in Aldhelm's prose treatise had revived, inaugurating a new movement in ‘hermeneutic’ Latin that lasted, in some centres, beyond the turn of the twelfth century. Fourteen English manuscripts of Pdv document the renewed interest in Aldhelm's work. Most of these manuscripts are heavily glossed, and, indeed, some preserve about 25,000 bilingual annotations ranging from single letters or symbols to entire paragraphs copied verbatim from Isidore's Etymologiae. The density of glossing is astounding, when contrasted with the length of Pdv, about 20,000 words.

Although writings of Aldhelm (c. 635–c. 709) were widely known in early Spain, in modern Spain they are hardly known at all. An entry on Aldhelm in a recent Spanish book on medieval Latin makes the latter point vividly: ‘Bibliografía: Escasa. Autor casi olvidado. Totalmente ausente en algún catálogo bibliográfico.’ A survey of the transmission of Aldhelm's writings from a Spanish viewpoint, however, is able to alter this perspective and to show new aspects of his influence.

Although St Dunstan's earliest biographer gave the impression that there was a major collection of books at Glastonbury Abbey before 956 and although it seems that St Dunstan imported books from abroad while abbot and that he himself was actively involved in correcting and illuminating, there is remarkably little hard evidence concerning surviving pre-Conquest books from the monastery. Indeed, the only book which can be said with certainty to have been produced there — Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 30 (S. C. 4076) — subsequently followed Dunstan to Worcester. Several years ago I was able to show that two pre-Conquest books written elsewhere were later imported to Glastonbury; in this article I shall add two more examples.

King Alfred's preface to the Old English Pastoral Care, explaining how and why he made this translation from the original of Gregory the Great, ends thus:

Siððan ic hie geliornod hæfde, swæ swæ ic hie forstod, ond swæ ic hie andgitfullicost areccean meahte, ic hie on Englisc awende; ond to ælcum biscepstole on minum rice wille ane onsendan; ond on ælcre bið an æstel, se bið on fiftegum mancessa.

In the margins of Ӕlfric's ‘Ash-Wednesday’ homily in Cambridge Corpus Christi College 162, an early-eleventh-century annotator adds a remark specifying ‘invasions’ among various misfortunes afflicting the English on a daily basis. This article argues that this marginal annotation constitutes a contemporary reference to the viking raids of King Ӕthelred the Unready's reign. The article examines this marginal text in the context of Ӕlfric's homily and in relation to other marginalia possibly written by the same scribe, including a second comment on the viking incursions. Based on this evidence, it is suggested that the annotator is revising homilies in this manuscript for preaching, possibly at St Augustine's, Canterbury, in the years 1009–12.

The Old English text by Æthelwold, bishop of Winchester, known as ‘King Edgar's Establishment of Monasteries’ (EEM) is here viewed as an expression of royal ideology. The article argues that the final section of EEM, in the first person, should be interpreted as words attributed to Edgar himself. This re-reading strengthens the case for dating EEM to the period 966 x c. 970, and for suspecting a female audience. It is argued that EEM accompanied an early, feminized version of Æthelwold's translation of the Rule of St Benedict. This model of religious life related to the responsibility of Edgar's queen, Ælfthryth, for female houses, and reflected her alliance with Æthelwold. EEM offered a distinctive view of English ecclesiastical history subtly tailored to these purposes. The final section of EEM presented a sophisticated defence of female monastic endowment. Ælfthryth's role provides an important context for understanding the politics and representation of Æthelred's kingship in the 990s.

This article tries to explore the question of whether the Anglo-Saxons in the tenth and eleventh centuries actually had an interest in elaborate and socially distinctive food preparations – whether, to use words that have been employed and defined by anthropologists and other social scientists, their food practices distinguished ‘cooking’ from ‘cuisine’, or even ‘gastronomy’. Through the study of written sources and archaeological data, we address several issues which can tell us about the Anglo-Saxons’ attitude towards food: the existence of proper kitchens and specialized cooks; the question of ‘privileged foods’ – categories of food widely recognized as suitable for social elites; and the ways by which recipes were transmitted. The answer is that the Anglo-Saxons may have known some forms of elaborate ‘cooking’, that ‘cuisine’ may have existed but cannot be identifi ed as such, and that ‘gastronomy’ was not a part of their thought world.

The earliest identified surviving manuscripts from Glastonbury Abbey date from the ninth and tenth centuries, but there are reliable post-Conquest traditions claiming that valuable books were found at the monastery as early as the reign of Ine, king of the West Saxons (688–726). By the tenth century at the latest there are reports of an ‘Irish school’ at Glastonbury, famous for its learning and books, and St Dunstan's earliest biographer, the anonymous. B., relates that Dunstan himself studied with the Irish at Glastonbury. During Dunstan's abbacy (940–56) – that is, at the period when most historians would place the beginnings of the English tenth-century reform movement – there was a general revival at Glastonbury which included a concerted policy of book acquisition and the establishment of a productive scriptorium. Not surprisingly, Dunstan's abbacy was viewed by the community ever afterwards as one of the most glorious periods in the early history of the monastery, especially since the later Anglo-Saxon abbots showed a marked falling off in devotion and loyalty to the intellectual inheritance of their monastery. Æthelweard and Æthelnoth, the last two Anglo-Saxon abbots, were especially reprehensible, and confiscated lands and ornaments for the benefit of their own kin. Nor did the situation improve immediately after the Conquest: the first Norman abbot, Thurstan, actually had to call in soldiers to quell his unruly monks. In spite of these disruptions, a fine collection of pre-Conquest books seems to have survived more or less intact into the twelfth century; when the seasoned traveller and connoisseur of books, William of Malmesbury, saw the collection in the late 1120s he was greatly impressed: ‘tanta librorum pulchritudo et antiquitas exuberat’.

When Ælfric wrote that ‘every mass-priest should have a mass-book and epistle-book and song-book and reading-book and psalter and handbook and penitential and kalendar’, there is every possibility that by ‘song-book’ he was thinking of a book containing not just chant texts, but also their melodies. A type of musical notation recognized as Anglo-Saxon appears in more than one hundred manuscript sources of the late tenth and the eleventh centuries, many of which may be linked with major ecclesiastical centres such as Worcester, Exeter, Sherborne, Canterbury, Durham and Winchester. Whilst it is possible that knowledge of musical notation reached England via northern France during the ninth century, it was apparently not until after the mid-tenth century, when the Benedictine revival occasioned numerous contacts between England and the continent, that music-writing became established in Anglo-Saxon England. Several Anglo-Saxon manuscripts of the late tenth century have contemporary notation, and they show the use at this period of two different neumatic systems. One system – closely related to northern French notations, particularly those of Corbie — was to set the pattern for the great majority of eleventh-century English notations; the other type, related to notations of Breton provenance, appears mainly confined to sources originating in south-west England. The breadth of notational detail found in one of the so-called Winchester Tropers (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 473) indicates that the practice of notating music was well established, at least at Winchester, by the year 1000.

Discussions of the structure of Beowulf that consider the sections of the poem disposed according to specific mathematical ratios are among the most frequently contested and least accepted by the larger scholarly community. This article examines several theories advocating numerical composition in light of both scholarship that describes structural patterns in the poem and editorial practice. Much agreement is found among theories from widely differing theoretical camps, clustering particularly around the first sections of the poem; however, such agreement does not consistently extend to specific numerical ratios. Further, the significance of such numerical correspondences as can be shown to exist has not been reliably demonstrated.

The purpose of this article is to analyse the different categories of the lexical and syntactic variation which is common to two unpublished manuscripts of King Alfred's translation of Gregory's Cura Pastoralis, Cambridge, Trinity College R. 5. 22 (717), fols. 72–158, and Cambridge, University Library, Ii. 2. 4, referred to henceforth as T and U respectively. These manuscripts are an obvious choice for the following reasons: the relationship of the tenth- (or early-eleventh-)century T to the eleventh-century U (almost certainly written at Exeter) can be at least tentatively established as far as the history of the transmission of the test is concerned; the work has the status of royal origin and one can therefore expect it to have been treated with due respect by later copyists; and the work is of considerable length. My study is based on a complete collation of both manuscripts, since, in any analysis of this kind, numerical weight of evidence lends conviction to the conclusions, but the material, because of its quantity, cannot be presented here in its entirety. What I have attempted to do is to demonstrate, with selected examples as evidence, the clear pattern of variation that emerges. It is hoped that as a result some light is thrown upon linguistic developments within West Saxon and upon the scribal practices involved in the copying and recopying of earlier texts in late Old English times.

In a brief discussion of the Vespasian Psalter in 1898, Albert S. Cook offered a statement that set the tone for subsequent debate about the relationship between the Old English gloss of the Vespasian Psalter (A = London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian A. i) and that of the junius Psalter (B = Oxford, Bodleian Library, junius 27): ‘It seems not improbable that it [i.e. the gloss to the Vespasian Psalter] is the original from which all later Old English glosses on the Psalms have been derived, undergoing in the process such modifications as were due to the language of the particular dialect or epoch.’ With regard to the Junius gloss specifically, Cook printed the text of Psalm XCIX [C] from the Vespasian Psalter, which he collated with the Junius, Cambridge (C = Cambridge, University Library, Ff. 1.23), Regius (D = London, British Library, Royal 2. B.V), and Eadwine (E = Cambridge, Trinity College R. 17.1) psalters; he concluded that ‘B stands nearest to A, but is carelessly written, and changes Anglian peculiarities in the direction of West Saxon (in to on, all to eall, &c.) while retaining, in general, a comparatively early and Anglian cast (weotað, scep, leswe, &c.)’. Although Otto Heinzel, writing in 1926, disagreed with Cook's assertion that the Vespasian gloss was the source from which all other psalters ultimately derived their glosses, he reiterated, after a fashion, the idea that the Junius gloss is related to that of the Vespasian Psalter, although, like Cook, he did not argue for a direct relationship between these two works. In Heinzel's stemma, from the Urtext*0 derive *α, which stands as the model for B, and *β, which in turn stands as the model for both A and C. The stemma, in its full form, taking the Dtype (Regius Psalter) tradition into account, has justly been termed ‘fanciful’ by Kenneth Sisam. The relationship between the glosses in these two psalters formed the subject of an extended study by Uno Lindelöf published in 1901.

Two masterpieces stand out of the mass of Anglo-Saxon religious poetry: The Dream of the Rood and the sequence of liturgical lyrics in the Exeter Book variously known as Christ I, the Advent Lyrics or simply Advent. The two works are similar in focus and technique as well as in quality. Both express the mystery of Incarnation in terms of a riddle: how can it be that Deus and Homo make their impossible contact? What terms can make this meeting graspable by the imagination? Both give eloquent voice to human suffering and human hope, and seem to recognize that it is only through appealing to these feelings that theology can come to life for us by being experienced.

The career and cult of St Æthelthryth, the seventh-century Northumbrian queen who retained her virginity throughout two marriages in order to follow her vocation as a nun, has always been known to any reader of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica, but has become an especially popular subject for a remarkable range of research and interpretation in the past ten or fifteen years, among editors, historians of sainthood, historians of marriage, feminist literary critics and even novelists.

In the years immediately preceding the Second World War, the Latin manuscripts of the National Széchényi Museum in Budapest were in the process of being catalogued by Dr Emma Bartoniek. The collection includes a large number of fragments taken from bindings of printed books, and among these fragments is a single bifolium, written in Anglo-Saxon minuscule script of apparent eighth-century date, containing part of Bede's metrical Vita S. Cudbercti (lines 95–128 and 340–75).

After almost a century of discussion of the traditions about the apostles in Cynewulf's poem it is somewhat surprising to find that some simple literary contacts have been ignored. This is true of the latest edition of the poem and of the more recent book, Sources and Analogues of Old English Poetry. In an earlier edition G. P. Krapp had chosen Bede's Martyrology as a source for Fates, but, since Dom Quentin's detailed work on historical martyrologies has excised the accretions which that martyrology has accumulated, the authentic Bede can now be left out of the discussion. In modern times it seems that two lists of apostles which preface the Hieronymian Martyrology in eighth-century manuscripts are regarded as analogues or contributory sources. These are the Notitia de locis Apostolorum (Notit.), a list of the apostles’ resting-places, in the Echternach manuscript, and the Breviarium Apostolorum (Brev.), in other manuscripts. The two tracts entitled De Ortu et Obitu Patrum in Migne's Patrologia Latina, the one normally assigned to Isidore of Seville (IO) and the other now regarded as an anonymous Hiberno-Latin tract (HLO) from the eighth century, and both including the apostles, have been considered by previous scholars. All these four works are early enough to have been consulted by Cynewulf, who is thought to have been writing in the ninth century, but none of them individually nor all of them collectively could have provided Cynewulf with all his factual details: none of them reports that James Zebedaei died ‘mid Iudeum’ (35 a) (although this fact could be assumed from Brev., IO and HLO, which state that he was killed by Herod), that Philip preached in Asia (38a), that Thomas raised Gad, the king's brother, from death and that he himself was killed by a sword (54–60), that Matthew preached in Ethiopia (64) and that a named king ‘Irtacus’ (68a) ordered him to be slain ‘wæpnum’ (69b), that Simon and Thaddeus (or Jude) went together to Persia (76b) and that they died on the same day (‘him wearð bam samod / an endedæg‘, 78b–9a). These details are all lacking in HLO, which has the least differences from Cynewulf's poem. Each of the other texts individually has other differences, Notit. having the greatest number. These abbreviated accounts, of course, merely transmit traditions about the apostles, and so it is clear that Cynewulf used different traditions for at least Philip, Thomas, Matthew and the pair Simon and Thaddeus, who are linked by Cynewulf, whereas in the other texts either they are separated or Thaddeus is not mentioned. It is possible that a curious assumption of ‘short poem, short source’ has prevented scholars from being alert to the significance of a clear clue which has long been available. In Brooks's edition we read that ‘the resurrection of Gad… is not mentioned in Bede's Martyrology, nor in the Breviarium; hence neither of these can be the sole source of the poem. A full account is given in the Apocryphal Acts of Thomas’, in other words, in the full story of Thomas's Passio. I hope to demonstrate that almost all the details about the apostles in the poem came immediately from the full stories of the Vitae or Passiones which are still extant. In my opinion it is unnecessary to consider the possibility of an abbreviated intermediary, since, as a religious of his period Cynewulf would have heard stories of the saints, including the apostles, on their feast-days, and, as we know, he had access to written accounts for two pieces for such festivals, a story of the Inventio Crucis for his poem Elene and a Vita S. Julianae for his poem under her name. He would have been remarkably inattentive, not to say undevout, if he had not recalled the few details about individual apostles from such hearing or reading.

From the Norman Conquest onward, the architectural history of England has been put on a firm basis by the work of nineteenth-century writers who were able to associate precise dates, and even named builders, with a considerable number of buildings as a result of the survival of contemporary written records which could be unequivocally linked to the surviving buildings. For the period before 1066 the position is very different: the studies of the last century have indeed established firmly the principal distinctive features of Anglo-Saxon workmanship; but for only a handful of buildings is there any written record that allows a firm assignment of date; and there is consequently a wide divergence of opinion between scholars in the dates which they assign to individual buildings or particular architectural features.

The stylistic disjunctions in The Dream of the Rood are not a new topic. They have been treated explicitly and implicitly for many years from several different points of view. The most frequently noted disjunction occurs at line 78 where the cross, having completed its eye-witness account of the crucifixion, commences a homily explaining the significance of its experience. But there are others as well: at 27 where the poet switches personae from dreamer to cross, at 121 where the dreamer again becomes the speaker to describe his personal reaction to his vision and at 147 where the poet begins an impersonal magnification of Christ which concludes the poem.

When J. R. R. Tolkein criticized the critics of Beowulf, it was because ‘Beowulf has been used as a quarry of fact and fancy far more assiduously than it has been studied as a work of art.’ The Old English medical documents have suffered from a similar treament in that critics have rarely dealt with them primarily as medical documents. So far as I know, none of them has been criticized primarily as a medical work, to the extent that its recipes and remedies have been evaluated for their usefulness as medical treatments. But they have been searched, discussed, emended and evaluated as sources for the study of paganism, magic, superstitions, Christianity and the influence of Christian and Latin culture on the primitive beliefs of the Teutonic peoples, and as indicators of the spread of Greek and Latin science among the Northern peoples. Yet they were all originally conceived, used and finally preserved in writing as medical documents. They deserve consideration for what they were intended to be.

Many of the minsters founded and generously endowed in the first century and a half of Anglo-Saxon christianity were evidently failing as efficient managers of their estates by the late eighth century, if we judge by the actions of the bishops in whose dioceses they sat. In the diocese of Worcester bishops can be seen transferring the administration of the lands of such minsters to the cathedral community, and then seeking ratification from the Mercian kings whose direct ancestors or royal predecessors had often been involved in the original acts of foundation. When ninth-century kings were acutely short of land, they alleviated the problem by engineering forced loans of the lands concerned from the see of Worcester. These processes are well exemplified in the history of the minster at Hanbury (Worcs.) and its landed endowment, for which particularly good contemporary evidence survives.