Author: Amy Faulkner
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1783277599
Category : Bible
Languages : en
Pages : 223
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Book Description
A new, materialistic reading of the Alfredian corpus, drawing on diverse approaches from thing theory to Augustinian principles of use and enjoyment to uncover how these works explore the material world. The Old English prose translations traditionally attributed to Alfred the Great (versions of Gregory's Regula pastoralis, Boethius' De consolatione philosophiae, Augustine's Soliloquia and the first fifty Psalms) urge detachment from the material world; but despite this, its flotsam and jetsam, from costly treasures to everyday objects, abound within them. This book reads these original and inventive translations from a materialist perspective, drawing on approaches as diverse as thing theory and Augustine's principles of use and enjoyment. By focussing on the material, it offers a fresh interpretation of this group of translations, bringing out their complex, often contradictory, relationship with the material world. It demonstrates that, as in the poetic tradition, wealth in Alfredian literature is not simply a tool to be used, or something to be enjoyed in excess; rather, in moving away from these two static binaries, it shows that wealth is a current, flowing both horizontally, as an exchange of gifts between humans, and vertically, as a salvific current between earth and heaven. The prose translations are situated in the context of Old English poetry, including Beowulf, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, the Exeter Book Riddles and The Dream of the Rood.
Author: Jan-Peer Hartmann
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843847361
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 299
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Book Description
Argues for a new understanding of Old English responses to materiality and historical change. Human communities have interacted with the material remains of earlier periods for millennia. Such "archaeological objects" - including bones, coins, weapons, building materials and architectural landmarks - were physically handled, reused, transformed and reinterpreted; they were also depicted in literature. This book examines how Old English texts imagine such human encounters with the remnants of the past. It explores Elene's perspective on the discovery of the True Cross as a narrative of political, spiritual and epistemic translatio and the multiple ways in which The Wanderer and The Ruin use images of ruins and the poetic formula "work of giants'" to construct an unknown and unrecoverable past; it also considers the engagements with 'untimely objects' in Beowulf and the Anonymous Old English Legend of the Seven Sleepers and how the Ruthwell Cross Poem and The Dream of the Rood play off "figural'" against 'literal' history. As this study demonstrates, Old English texts combined and creatively adapted a broad variety of ways of conceptualizing not merely history, but indeed the very processes by which historical thought operates. Its careful readings show that these texts not only display a deep and conflicted understanding of the philosophical implications of viewing history and temporality through the prism of material objects, but also exhibit a powerful capacity for expressing such an understanding through aesthetic strategies.
Author: Alice Jorgensen
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843847051
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
An examination of how emotions were practised and performed through Old English texts.Scholarship is increasingly interested in investigating concepts of emotion found in Old English literature. This study takes the next step, arguing that both heroic and religious texts were vehicles for emotional practice - that is, for doing things with emotion. Using case studies from heroic poetry (Beowulf, The Battle of Brunanburh and The Battle of Maldon), religious poetry (Christ I and Christ III) and homilies (selections from the Vercelli Book, Blickling Homilies and the works of Wulfstan), it shows via detailed close readings that texts could be used to act out emotional styles, manage the emotions arising from specific events, and negotiate relationships both within social groups and with God. Meanwhile, a chapter on the Old English Boethius explores how the control of unruly emotions is theorized as the transfer of attachment from the things of this world to the things of the divine. Overall, the volume offers new angles on the social functions of genres and questions of reception and performance; and it gives insight into how early medieval people used emotions to relate to their world, temporal and eternal. angles on the social functions of genres and questions of reception and performance; and it gives insight into how early medieval people used emotions to relate to their world, temporal and eternal. angles on the social functions of genres and questions of reception and performance; and it gives insight into how early medieval people used emotions to relate to their world, temporal and eternal. angles on the social functions of genres and questions of reception and performance; and it gives insight into how early medieval people used emotions to relate to their world, temporal and eternal.
Author: Mary Elizabeth Blanchard
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1783277645
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 237
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Book Description
Essays highlighting the importance of three kings - Edmund, Eadred and Eadwig - in understanding England in the tenth century. Much scholarly attention has been devoted to both the expanding kingdom of Alfred the Great, Edward the Elder, and Æthelstan, and to the larger and integrated realm of their more distant successors, Edgar and Æthelred II. However, the English kingdom in the 940s and 950s, and its three kings, Edmund (939-946), Eadred (946-955), and Eadwig (955-959), the men who inherited and held together the kingdom created by their immediate predecessors, have been somewhat neglected, with little research being dedicated to these men as kings, or the era in which they ruled. This volume offers a variety of approaches to the period. Its contributors bring to light royal legal innovations to ecclesiastical law, oaths, heriot, complex factional politics, including the crucial role of queens, differing perspectives on the final era of an independent northern kingdom of York, and developments in literary culture outside the domineering trend of the later monastic reformers.
Author: Rebecca Stephenson
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843846241
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 346
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Book Description
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 Boethius, the law codes, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and Ælfric's Lives of Saints. The Old English poetic corpus is also considered, with a focus on less-studied works, including Genesis and Fortunes of Men. This diverse array of texts provides a foundation for the volume's analysis of agency, identity, and subjectivity in early medieval England; united in their methodology, the articles in this collection all question received wisdom and challenge critical consensus on key issues of humanistic inquiry, among them affect and embodied cognition, sovereignty and power, and community formation.
Author: Aaron J. Kleist
Publisher: D. S. Brewer
ISBN: 9781843845331
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
A fresh approach to the works and manuscripts of this influential monk, whose writings synthesised some of the finest minds of the period. A thousand years and more ago, with Vikings ravaging the coastlines and the millennium drawing nigh, a monk named Ælfric embarked on studies that would make him the most erudite, prolific, and influential author writing in English before Chaucer. What drove Ælfric was no desire to leave his mark on history, however, but the belief that he held a treasure on which the temporal and eternal welfare of his contemporaries depended: knowledge of the rich moral teachings of the early Christian church. What he produced was an astonishing synthesis of some of the finest minds in history, conveyed with remarkable authorial transparency and an elegantly simple style. While there is much we know about Ælfric, both from his own self-disclosure and the wealth of surviving manuscripts containing work by him, there is also much that muddies the waters: his feverish pace of simultaneous composition, his habit of reshaping and repurposing his writings, the staggering complexities of textual transmission, and competing scholarly interpretive voices. This volume seeks to take it all into account, setting forth a comprehensive picture of work and the manuscripts in which it may be found. Integrating scholars' best understanding to date and framing new avenues for inquiry, it offers a launching point for new research into this pivotal figure of early England. AARON J KLEIST is Professor of English at Biola University.
Author: Emily Kesling
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843845490
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
Winner of the Best First Monograph from the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England (ISSEME) 2021. An examination of the Old English medical collections, arguing that these texts are products of a learned intellectual culture.
Author: J. Redmond
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780391006485
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 616
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Book Description
Author: Leonard Neidorf
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1843843870
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 266
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Book Description
Examinations of the date of Beowulf have tremendous significance for Anglo-Saxon culture in general.
Author: Leonard Neidorf
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843844389
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 442
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Book Description
Essays bringing out the crucial importance of philology for understanding Old English texts
