This article takes literary representations of Cnut, the Danish conqueror of England, as a case study of the construction of English identity in the eleventh century. It traces representations of Cnut in four literary texts composed over the course of the century: the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Knútsdrápur, the Encomium Emmae Reginae, and Osbern of Canterbury's Translatio Sancti Ælfegi. Each of these texts constructs a politically useful national—ethnic identity through the figure of Cnut, using the mechanisms of kingship, piety and devotion, language, place and literary tradition to work through the particular exigencies faced by the audiences that they seek to address.

In a ninth-century manuscript now in St Gallen (Stiftsbibliothek, 254) are found three Latin poems in three different metres dedicated by a poet who names himself as Lutting, in memory of his master Bede who, according to the first of the poems, died in AD 681 (and cannot, therefore, have been the much better known Bede of Monkwearmouth–Jarrow). In the St Gallen manuscript the poems are transmitted alongside Cuthbert's Epistola de obitu Bedae; judging from the language of Bede's ‘Death Song’ which it contains, the Epistola was copied from a Northumbrian exemplar, and the same is apparently true of the three Latin poems. The fact that the names of Lutting and his master Bede are found near to each other in the Durham Liber Vitae raises the possibility that they were together at Lindisfarne; and detailed metrical analysis indicates that two of the poems follow Hiberno-Latin metrical practice in significant ways, which also points to the Irish cultural milieu of Lindisfarne. In an Appendix, the poems are edited for the first time, with translation and commentary.

The scattered nature of references to dance and the ambiguity of its vocabulary have obscured Anglo-Saxon dance practices, but evidence suggests that dance was a significant cultural phenomenon. The earlier centuries of the Anglo-Saxon period saw the depiction of weapon dances, and later sources also allow us a glimpse of lively secular dance. Performance traditions may have included dance combined with satirical songs, as well as possible secular ritual dance. Finally, scripture provided examples of both holy dance and lascivious female dance. Contemporary iconography of these dance practices, combined with continued associations between dance and music, allow us to understand the conventions in the depiction of dance, and in turn these suggest that the figure of ‘Hearing’ on the Fuller Brooch, traditionally regarded as running, is in fact dancing.

Of recent years, the persuasion seems to have been gaining ground that the records of earliest Northumbria are muddled and that the eighth-century sources are more muddled than those of the twelfth and later. If the last part of this proposition were true, it would be a remarkable and unique fact, worthy of much further exploration; if the first part were true in any distinctive sense, that the early Northumbrian material is more confused than the West Saxon or Dalriadan, then we should have to consider how far Bede was contaminated by his native context.

Evidence concerning the position of women in Anglo-Saxon England, particularly during the early period, is sparse and often difficult to assess. Surviving law-codes constitute an important source of information, but due to their cryptic phraseology and sometimes archaic vocabulary they are notoriously open to misinterpretation. Two clauses from the earliest extant code, issued by King Æthelberht of Kent towards the beginning of the seventh century, are commonly treated as evidence of the independent status of divorced women in early Kentish society. So far as I am aware this view has never been challenged, although it remains uncorroborated by other sources and is by no means the only possible interpretation of the text. In this paper I wish to put forward an alternative reading.

A previously unidentified annal-entry in the Welsh chronicles Brut y Tywysogion and Brenhinedd y Saesson records the blinding of the sons of Ealdorman Ælfhelm as part of the ‘palace revolution’ of 1006. This article discusses how the Old English names Wulfheah and Ufegeat were recorded by Welsh scribes in accordance with Welsh phonological and orthographical norms. Possible Anglo-Saxon sources for the annal-entry are briefly considered and the transmission of the annal-entry in the Welsh sources is analysed.

In a famous letter to his missionaries in England, Pope Gregory the Great suggested that the newly converted Anglo-Saxons should be encouraged to build small huts, or ‘tabernacula’, in conjunction with Christian festivals. He seems to have associated these structures with the Jewish festival of Sukkot, reflecting a missionary strategy modelled on both the biblical conversion of the Israelites and on Gregory's own proselytizing approach towards the Jews of Rome. Gregory's instructions are discussed in the light of historical writings and archaeological evidence, which suggest that ‘tabernacula’ were indeed constructed in England during the conversion period, possibly adapted from pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon ritual structures.

The translator of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica faced a daunting task. His source text had behind it the authority of a well-known, learned English saint, and a translation of the work would inevitably be a step removed from that saint. How could the translator convince the audience that his translation possessed authority? Alfred's prefaces to his translations and Wærferth's preface to the Dialogues gain the confidence of the readers or hearers through their explicit discussion of motives and methods of translation. By contrast, the Old English Bede authorizes itself not through any overt claims in an original preface but through strategic translations of the Latin preface and of the text itself. The Alfredian prefaces thus provide valuable points of comparison and contrast for the Old English Bede. All the translations assert continuity between source text and translation while replacing the source text in different ways. Alfred and Wærferth reveal their identities as translators and make claims for their own authority while the translator of the Old English Bede relies on the authority of Bede himself; Alfred and Wærferth argue for the ability of Old English to render Latin, while the translator of the Old English Bede simply provides a text in Old English.

The principles of Old English prose syntax are on the whole well understood, but there is no general agreement about verse syntax. There are many reasons why verse syntax should differ, at least in some respects, from the syntax of prose. The Old English poetic tradition is known to have been conservative, and it is therefore possible that certain ancient syntactic patterns, obsolete in prose, might have survived in verse. The more ‘rhetorical’ purposes of verse might have made it necessary to call extensively on usages either rare or unknown in prose. Above all, the metre might have exercised such a constraint on the syntax that certain syntactic patterns could not be used at all, or could be used only in favourable circumstances. Such general considerations would no doubt be accepted as plausible by all students of Old English poetry, but there is still no agreement about how they may have operated in detail: the result is that any attempt to judge the style of an Anglo-Saxon poet is frustrated at every turn. It is impossible to tell how far his usage is the result of choice, how far the result of constraint; there is no way of judging how skilful he is in avoiding such constraint, or of assessing the ingenuity he exercises in saying what he wants to say in spite of the difficulties imposed by the metrical form; there is no way to tell how far his variations from prose usage are dictated by ‘rhetorical’ motives. Judgement is necessarily limited in this way until there is an agreed analysis of verse syntax.

In May 1909 a medieval wall-painting was discovered behind the fitted bookshelves of the Morley Library at Winchester Cathedral. A brief description was published locally at the time of the discovery, but neither the precise subject matter nor the date of the painting were established. Thereafter the wall-painting lay virtually forgotten until it was re-examined early in 1990 by the present writer. It now seems possible that the painting includes the earliest known representation of Winchester Cathedral in its original, Romanesque form, and that it also portrays an important artifact within that church: the reliquary of St Swithun. This identification is supported by the other scene in the wall-painting, which, it is argued, represents either the saint's burial in 862 or (more probably) his translation in 971. In the second part of this paper the history of the reliquary of Swithun is traced. This important and welldocumented artifact had been presented by King Edgar to the Old Minster in 971–4 and was transferred to the Romanesque cathedral in 1093. It is suggested that this major piece of Anglo-Saxon metalwork may have survived until c. 1450.

The earlier editors of the Old English Martyrology (OEM), T. O. Cockayne and George Herzfeld, recognized that some notices, or phrases within notices, drew on homilies by named patristic writers. Cockayne identified two entries which closely echoed sentences from two of Gregory's Homiliae in Evangelia, for Emiliana (5 January) from Homilia xxxviii.15 and for Cassius (29 June) from Homilia xxxvii.9. Herzfeld added two more, for Processus and Martinianus (2 July) from Homilia xxxii.7 and for Felicitas (23 November) from Homilia iii.3. Also, guided by Ruinart, Herzfeld identified a passage from Augustine's Sermo cccix.4 within the entry for Cyprian of Carthage (14 September). Herzfeld, by oversight, had actually ascribed his Latin quotation (cited in the Addenda) to Fulgentius of Ruspe's Sermo vi, although Fulgentius's sermon probably did influence one other phrase in the notice.

The publication of the first fascicule of the Toronto Dictionary of Old English bears witness to the fulfilment of many vows made at symposia in the past. One of these was to abandon the practice of Bosworth—Toller of providing entries with etymological information. To meet trie objections raised against this policy at the second DOE conference in 1970, Christopher Ball assured the audience that entries would contain etymological information only if it would be impossible to establish the meaning of a word otherwise. ‘Frivolous’ etymology, as Ball termed it, such as linking OE fōt to Latin pedem, would be omitted. The editors of DOE will have been confirmed in their attitude by the fact that in those years Dr Alfred Bammesberger announced a plan for a new etymological dictionary for Old English. Since then, besides numerous articles, he has published a volume of Beiträge Zu einem etymologischen Wörterbuch des Altenglischen. In the preface to this book, Bammesberger stresses that the preparation of such a new dictionary is a project which will not be completed in the immediate future. So, for the time being, the comparist will have to make do with BT and Ferdinand Holthausen's etymological dictionary of Old English. This seems an appropriate time, therefore, to focus our attention on that component of Holthausen's dictionary which concerns the closest relative of English, (Old) Frisian: not least because Holthausen himself devoted so much attention to it.

An interest in Danish legend first appears at the West Saxon court in the 890s when King Alfred traced his father's lineage to Scyld. Alfred traced his mother's ancestry through the Jutish kings of Wight to Goths and Geats, suggesting a motive for the particular view of the ethnic past we find in Beowulf, especially the friendship the poet constructs between a Geatish ætheling and a Danish monarch. A modification of Michael Lapidge's paleographical dating of the archetype of Beowulf (2000) indicates a West Saxon exemplar before c. 900, confirming the mature king's court as a plausible context for Beowulf's composition.

Latin manuscripts used for preaching the Anglo-Saxon laity in the tenth century survive in relatively rare numbers. This paper contributes a new text to the known preaching resources from that century in identifying the Homiliary of Angers as the text preserved on the flyleaves of London, British Library, MS Sloane 280. While these fragments, made in Kent and edited here for the first time, cast new light on the importance of this plain and unadorned Latin collection for the composition of Old English temporale homilies before Ælfric, they also represent the oldest surviving manuscript evidence of the text.

The Old English Promissio regis is a translation of the threefold promise made at their coronations by Anglo-Saxon kings in the tenth and eleventh centuries followed by two paragraphs on the duties of kingship; it is preserved in one eleventh-century manuscript and we have two copies of a second. This article reviews discussions of the text, looks at the manuscript evidence for what it can tell about its authorship and history, examines its sources and function and suggests a close connection with Wulfstan, archbishop of York. A new edition of the text concludes the piece.

An Anglo-Saxon gold and garnet cloisonné pectoral cross from a seventh-century bed burial at Trumpington, Cambridgeshire is the fifth such example to be found. Details of the contextual associations of the five crosses are used to argue that these artifacts, and other high status cross-shaped pendants, were overt Christian symbols, strongly associated with high status female burials of the later seventh century. That one of the five examples was associated with the burial of St Cuthbert is highlighted as an anomaly, and could indicate that the Cuthbert Cross may have been a gift, rather than a personal possession of the saint.

This article examines Byrhtferth of Ramsey's derogatory comments about the secular clerics in the Enchiridion and suggests that they should not be read at face value as accurate representations of real members of his monastic classroom, but instead should be read as epideictic literature, the literature of praise and blame. Through these portraits of lazy and incompetent secular clerics, Benedictine monks inscribe their own identity by means of a negative example. Particularly important to the monks' self-definition is the skilful deployment of the so-called hermeneutic style, which encodes the values of the Benedictine Reform, especially the reform's emphasis on education.

This paper provides an edition, translation and discussion of four letters written by Flemish abbots to the archbishops of Canterbury between the years 980 and 991 and preserved in two manuscripts drawn on the archiepiscopal archives in the early eleventh century (London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. xv and Cotton Vespasian A. xiv). The letters document the increasing importance of cross-Channel relations in the late tenth century and provide context for a number of hitherto unexplained indications of cultural, religious and financial exchanges between the county of Flanders and England.

An investigation of Ælfric's shame-vocabulary allows us to divide his shame concept into three areas: being (a)shamed, active shaming, and the shameful. The prototypical scenario of shame is humiliation or exposure before others. However, Ælfric asks his audience to imagine this kind of public, worldly shame in relation to failures to live up to Christian ideals; he thus encourages the ethicization and psychologization of shame. In addition, readers are invited to read to find Christian moral symbolism in narratives of shaming, while the emotive label of ‘shameful’ cues rejection and disgust towards what is wrong and pagan. Ælfric's appeals to shame promote self-scrutiny and the performance of a Christian identity. With respect to Anglo-Saxon shame in general, Ælfric offers a case-study in the flexibility of shame and its importance as a mode of knowing and performing the self.

Ne sceamige nanum menn þæt he anum lareowe his gyltas cyðe · forðan þe se þe nele his synna on ðissere worulde andettan mid soðre behreowsunge · him sceal sceamian ætforan gode ælmihtigum · and ætforan his engla weorodum · and ætforan eallum mannum · and ætforan eallum deoflum æt ðam micclan dome · þær we eall gegaderode beoð · Þær beoð cuðe ure ealra dæda eallum þam werodum · and seðe ne mæg for sceame his gyltas anum menn ge-andettan · him sceal þonne sceamian · ætforan heofonwarum · and eorð-warum · and hel-warum · and seo sceamu him bið endeleas.

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.