Author: Catherine E. Karkov
Publisher: Boydell Press
ISBN: 9781843831945
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 198
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Book Description
The cross pervaded the whole of Anglo-Saxon culture, in art, in sculpture, in religion, in medicine. These new essays explore its importance and significance.
Author: Éamonn Ó Carragáin
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802090089
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 492
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Book Description
In bringing together these scattered witnesses to the sustained brilliance of Anglo-Saxon artistic achievement across several centuries, ?amonn ? Carrag?in has produced a study of great significance to Anglo-Saxon history.
Author: Kerstin Majewski
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110785447
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 424
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Book Description
The Ruthwell Cross is one of the finest Anglo-Saxon high crosses that have come down to us. The longest epigraphic text in the Old English Runes Corpus is inscribed on two sides of the monument: it forms an alliterative poem, in which the Cross itself narrates the crucifixion episode. Parts of the inscription are irrevocably lost. This study establishes a historico-cultural context for the Ruthwell Cross’s texts and sculptures. It shows that The Ruthwell Crucifixion Poem is an integral part of a Christian artefact but also an independent text. Although its verses match closely with lines of The Dream of the Rood in the Vercelli Book, a comparative analysis gives new insight into their complex relationship. An annotated transliteration of the runes offers intriguing information for runologists. Detailed linguistic and metrical analyses finally yield a new reconstruction of the lost runes. All in all, this study takes a fresh look at the Ruthwell Cross and provides the first scholarly edition of the reconstructed Ruthwell Crucifixion Poem—one of the earliest religious poems of Anglo-Saxon England. It will be of interest to scholars and students of historical linguistics, medieval English literature and culture, art history, and archaeology.
Author: Helen Foxhall Forbes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317123069
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 462
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Book Description
Christian theology and religious belief were crucially important to Anglo-Saxon society, and are manifest in the surviving textual, visual and material evidence. This is the first full-length study investigating how Christian theology and religious beliefs permeated society and underpinned social values in early medieval England. The influence of the early medieval Church as an institution is widely acknowledged, but Christian theology itself is generally considered to have been accessible only to a small educated elite. This book shows that theology had a much greater and more significant impact than has been recognised. An examination of theology in its social context, and how it was bound up with local authorities and powers, reveals a much more subtle interpretation of secular processes, and shows how theological debate affected the ways that religious and lay individuals lived and died. This was not a one-way flow, however: this book also examines how social and cultural practices and interests affected the development of theology in Anglo-Saxon England, and how ’popular’ belief interacted with literary and academic traditions. Through case-studies, this book explores how theological debate and discussion affected the personal perspectives of Christian Anglo-Saxons, including where possible those who could not read. In all of these, it is clear that theology was not detached from society or from the experiences of lay people, but formed an essential constituent part.
Author: Sarah Semple
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199683107
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
Represents an unparalleled exploration of the place of prehistoric monuments in the Anglo-Saxon psyche, and examines how Anglo-Saxon communities perceived and used these monuments during the period AD 400-1100.
Author: Martin Carver
Publisher: Boydell Press
ISBN: 9781843831259
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 612
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Book Description
37 studies of the adoption of Christianity across northern Europe over1000 years, and the diverse reasons that drove the process. In Europe, the cross went north and east as the centuries unrolled: from the Dingle Peninsula to Estonia, and from the Alps to Lapland, ranging in time from Roman Britain and Gaul in the third and fourth centuries to the conversion of peoples in the Baltic area a thousand years later. These episodes of conversion form the basic narrative here. History encourages the belief that the adoption of Christianity was somehow irresistible, but specialists show theunderside of the process by turning the spotlight from the missionaries, who recorded their triumphs, to the converted, exploring their local situations and motives. What were the reactions of the northern peoples to the Christian message? Why would they wish to adopt it for the sake of its alliances? In what way did they adapt the Christian ethos and infrastructure to suit their own community? How did conversion affect the status of farmers, of smiths, of princes and of women? Was society wholly changed, or only in marginal matters of devotion and superstition? These are the issues discussed here by thirty-eight experts from across northern Europe; some answers come from astute re-readings of the texts alone, but most are owed to a combination of history, art history and archaeology working together. MARTIN CARVER is Professor of Archaeology, University of York.
Author: William A. Chaney
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520014015
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 284
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Book Description
Author: Michael D. J. Bintley
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191502170
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269
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Book Description
Trees were of fundamental importance in Anglo-Saxon society. Anglo-Saxons dwelt in timber houses, relied on woodland as an economic resource, and created a material culture of wood which was at least as meaningfully-imbued, and vastly more prevalent, than the sculpture and metalwork with which we associate them today. Trees held a central place in Anglo-Saxon belief systems, which carried into the Christian period, not least in the figure of the cross itself. Despite this, the transience of trees and timber in comparison to metal and stone has meant that the subject has received comparatively little attention from scholars. Trees and Timber in the Anglo-Saxon World constitutes the very first collection of essays written about the role of trees in early medieval England, bringing together established specialists and new voices to present an interdisciplinary insight into the complex relationship between the early English and their woodlands. The woodlands of England were not only deeply rooted in every aspect of Anglo-Saxon material culture, as a source of heat and light, food and drink, wood and timber for the construction of tools, weapons, and materials, but also in their spiritual life, symbolic vocabulary, and sense of connection to their beliefs and heritage. These essays do not merely focus on practicalities, such as carpentry techniques and the extent of woodland coverage, but rather explore the place of trees and timber in the intellectual lives of the early medieval inhabitants of England, using evidence from archaeology, place-names, landscapes, and written sources.
Author: G. Ronald Murphy S.J.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019937130X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
Winner of the 2014 Mythopoeic Myth & Fantasy Studies Award At the heart of the mythology of the Anglo-Scandinavian-Germanic North is the evergreen Yggdrasil, the tree of life believed to hold up the skies and unite and separate three worlds: Asgard, high in the tree, where the gods dwelled in their great halls; Middlegard, where human beings lived; and the dark underground world of Hel, home to the monstrous goddess of death. With the advent of Christianity in the North around the year 1000, Yggdrasil was recast as the cross on which Christ sacrificed himself. G. Ronald Murphy offers an insightful examination of the lasting significance of Yggdrasil in northern Europe, showing that the tree's image persisted not simply through its absorption into descriptions of Christ's crucifix, but through recognition by the newly converted Christians of the truth of their new religion in the images and narratives of their older faith. Rather than dwelling on theological and cultural differences between Christianity and older Anglo-Scandinavian beliefs, Murphy makes an argument internal to the culture, showing how the new dispensation was a realization of the old. He shows how architectural and literary works, including the Jelling stone in Denmark, the stave churches in Norway, The Dream of the Rood, the runes of the futhark, the round churches on Bornholm, the Viking crosses at Middleton in Yorkshire and even the Christmas tree, are all indebted to the cultural interweaving of cross and tree in the North. Tree of Salvation demonstrates that both Christian and older Northern symbols can be read as a single story of salvation.
Author: Pam J. Crabtree
Publisher:
ISBN: 0521885949
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 247
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Book Description
Traces the development of towns in Britain from late Roman times to the end of the Anglo-Saxon period using archaeological data.
