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Klein explores how queens functioned as imaginative figures in Anglo-Saxon texts as mediatory figures for negotiating sustained tensions and antagonisms among different peoples, institutions, and systems of belief.
R.M. Liuzza’s translation of Beowulf, first published by Broadview in 1999, has been widely praised for its accuracy and beauty. The translation is accompanied in this edition by genealogical charts, historical summaries, and a glossary of proper names. Historical appendices include related legends, stories, and religious writings from both Christian and Anglo-Saxon traditions. These texts help readers to see Beowulf as an exploration of the politics of kingship and the psychology of heroism, and as an early English meditation on the bridges and chasms between the pagan past and the Christian present. Appendices also include a generous sample of other modern translations of Beowulf, shedding light on the process of translating the poem. This new edition features an updated introduction and an expanded section of material on Christianity and paganism.
Childhood & Adolescence in Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture counters the generally received wisdom that early medieval childhood and adolescence were an unremittingly bleak experience. The contributors analyse representations of children and their education in Old English, Old Norse and Anglo-Latin writings, including hagiography, heroic poetry, riddles, legal documents, philosophical prose and elegies. Within and across these linguistic and generic boundaries some key themes emerge: the habits and expectations of name-giving, expressions of childhood nostalgia, the role of uneducated parents, and the religious zeal and rebelliousness of youth. After decades of study dominated by adult gender studies, Childhood & Adolescence in Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture rebalances our understanding of family life in the Anglo-Saxon era by reconstructing the lives of medieval children and adolescents through their literary representation.
Humour in Old English Literature deploys modern theories of humour to explore the style and content of surviving writing from early medieval England. The book analyses Old English riddles, wisdom literature, runic writing, the deployment of rhymes, and humour in heroic poetry, hagiography, and romance. Drawing on a fine-tuned understanding of literary technique, the book presents a revisionist view of Old English literature, partly by reclaiming often-neglected texts and partly by uncovering ironies and embarrassments within well-established works, including Beowulf. Most surprisingly, Jonathan Wilcox engages the large body of didactic literature, pinpointing humour in two anonymous homilies along with extensive use in saints’ lives. Each chapter ends by revealing a different audience that would have shared in the laughter. Wilcox suggests that the humour of Old English literature has been scantily covered in past scholarship because modern readers expect a dour and serious corpus. Humour in Old English Literature aims to break that cycle by highlighting works and moments that are as entertaining now as they were then.
Works on Anglo-Saxon kingship often take as their starting point the line from Beowulf: ‘that was a good king’. This monograph, however, explores what it means to be a king, and how kings defined their own kingship in opposition to other powers. Kings derived their royal power from a divine source, which led to conflicts between the interpreters of the divine will (the episcopate) and the individual wielding power (the king). Demonstrating how Anglo-Saxon kings were able to manipulate political ideologies to increase their own authority, this book explores the unique way in which Anglo-Saxon kings understood the source and nature of their power, and of their own authority.
A consideration of the ways in which the past was framed and remembered in the pre-modern world. The training and use of memory was crucial in medieval culture, given the limited literacy at the time, but to date, very little thought has been given to the complex and disparate ways in which the theory and practices of memoryinteracted with the inherently unstable concepts of time and gender at the time. The essays in this volume, drawing on approaches from applied poststructural and queer theory among others, reassess those ideologies, meanings and responses generated by the workings of memory within and over "time". Ultimately, they argue for the inherent instability of the traditional gend...
Medievalists have much to gain from a thoroughgoing contemplation of place. If landscapes are windows onto human activity, they connect us with medieval people, enabling us to ask questions about their senses of space and place. In A Place to Believe In Clare Lees and Gillian Overing bring together scholars of medieval literature, archaeology, history, religion, art history, and environmental studies to explore the idea of place in medieval religious culture. The essays in A Place to Believe In reveal places real and imagined, ancient and modern: Anglo-Saxon Northumbria (home of Whitby and Bede&’s monastery of Jarrow), Cistercian monasteries of late medieval Britain, pilgrimages of mind an...
New approaches to a range of Old English texts. Throughout her career, Professor Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe has focused on the often-overlooked details of early medieval textual life, moving from the smallest punctum to a complete reframing of the humanities' biggest questions. In her hands, the traditional tools of medieval studies -- philology, paleography, and close reading - become a fulcrum to reveal the unspoken worldviews animating early medieval textual production. The essays collected here both honour and reflect her influence as a scholar and teacher. They cover Latin works, such as the writings of Prudentius and Bede, along with vernacular prose texts: the Pastoral Care, the OE Bo...
Æthelflæd (c. 870–918), political leader, military strategist, and administrator of law, is one of the most important ruling women in English history. Despite her multifaceted roles and family legacy, however, her reign and relationship with other women in tenth-century England have never been the subject of a book-length study. This interdisciplinary collection of essays redresses a notable hiatus in scholarship of early medieval England. Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, and Women in Tenth-Century England argues for a reassessment of women’s political, military, literary, and domestic agency. It invites deeper reflection on the female kinships, networks, and communities that give meaning to Æthelflæd’s life, and through this shows how medieval history can invite new engagements with the past.
This is the first comprehensive study of the role of women in the Polish Piast dynasty from 965 until c.1144, comparing them with female members of other contemporary medieval dynasties.