A History of Old English Literature (2^nd Ed.)
Blackwell History of Literature Series

A History of Old English Literature has been significantly revised to provide an unequivocal response to the renewed historicism in medieval studies. Focusing on the production and reception of Old English texts and on their relation to Anglo-Saxon history and culture, this new edition covers an exceptionally broad array of genres. These range from riddles and cryptograms to allegory, liturgical texts, and romance, as well as lyric poetry and heroic legend. The authors also integrate discussions of Anglo-Latin texts, crucial to understanding the development of Old English literature.

This second edition incorporates extensive reference to scholarship that has evolved over the past decade, with new chapters on both Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and on incidental and marginal texts. There is expanded treatment throughout, including increased coverage of legal texts and scientific and scholastic texts. The book concludes with a retrospective outline of the reception of Anglo-Saxon literature and culture in subsequent periods.

List of IIIustrations vi

Preface to the First Edition (2003) vii

Preface to the Second Edition ix

Abbreviations x

Introduction

Anglo-Saxon England and Its Literature: A Social History 1

1 The Chronology and Varieties of Old English Literature 42

2 Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts 58

3 Literature of the Alfredian Period 83

4 Homilies 112

5 Saints’ Legends (Rachel S. Anderson) 133

6 Biblical Literature 157

7 Liturgical and Devotional Texts 177

8 Legal Texts 211

9 Scientific and Scholastic Texts 227

10 Wisdom Literature and Lyric Poetry 241

11 Germanic Legend and Heroic Lay 278

12 Additions, Annotations, and Marginalia 329

Conclusion Making Old English New: Anglo-Saxonism and the Cultural Work of Old English Literature 354

Works Cited 367

Index 481

The Authors

R. D. Fulk is Class of 1964 Chancellor’s Professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of, among others, The Beowulf Manuscript (2010) and An Introduction to Middle English (2012), and co-author or editor of Eight Old English Poems (2001), A Grammar of Old English, Volume 2: Morphology (2011), Klaeber’s Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg (4th edition, 2008), and The Old English Canons of Theodore (2012).

Christopher M. Cain is an associate professor of English at Towson University in Towson, Maryland. He has published on Old English and Anglo-Latin in Studies in Philology, JEGP, The Review of English Studies, and Philological Quarterly, among others. He is the co-editor (with Geoffrey Russom) of Studies in the History of the English Language III—Managing Chaos: Strategies for Identifying Change in English (2007), and is a contributor to The Year’s Work in Old English Studies.

Rachel S. Anderson is Associate Professor of English at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan.