Although writings of Aldhelm (c. 635–c. 709) were widely known in early Spain, in modern Spain they are hardly known at all. An entry on Aldhelm in a recent Spanish book on medieval Latin makes the latter point vividly: ‘Bibliografía: Escasa. Autor casi olvidado. Totalmente ausente en algún catálogo bibliográfico.’ A survey of the transmission of Aldhelm's writings from a Spanish viewpoint, however, is able to alter this perspective and to show new aspects of his influence.

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.

The inscribed lead piece illustrated in pl. V was an isolated metal-detector find from near Weasenham All Saints, a village in north Norfolk (NGR: TF 848221; Sites and Monuments no. 34651). It was brought to our attention in April 1998 by staff at the Castle Museum, Norwich, and obligingly left by the owner in the British Museum for a considerable time to facilitate its study. It was subsequently acquired by the Castle Museum (acquisition number NWHCM: 2000.3) where Alan West, Curator, arranged for investigation by radiography. All this reflects the considerable difficulties in reading the lettering and interpreting the ornament on this small piece.

King Alfred's preface to the Old English Pastoral Care, explaining how and why he made this translation from the original of Gregory the Great, ends thus:

Siððan ic hie geliornod hæfde, swæ swæ ic hie forstod, ond swæ ic hie andgitfullicost areccean meahte, ic hie on Englisc awende; ond to ælcum biscepstole on minum rice wille ane onsendan; ond on ælcre bið an æstel, se bið on fiftegum mancessa.

The so-called ‘Three Utterances’ exemplum, which tells of the exclamations of a good and a bad soul to the angels or demons who lead them to heaven or hell at the moment of death, was adapted independently by three Anglo-Saxon homilists. Versions of this legend survive in an Old English Rogationtide homily in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 114, 102v–105v, in a homily Be heofonwarum and be helwarum in London, British Library, Cotton Faustina A. ix, 21v–23v, and Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 302, pp. 71–3, and in a Lenten homily in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 85/86, fos. 25–40. In 1935 Rudolf Willard published a study of the exemplum, with a detailed comparison between the three Old English versions, an Irish version, and a single Latin version in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 2628 (s. xi). Two years later Willard published a second Latin version from Oxford, University College 61 (s. xiv). Other texts of the Latin sermon have subsequently come to light.

The earliest identified surviving manuscripts from Glastonbury Abbey date from the ninth and tenth centuries, but there are reliable post-Conquest traditions claiming that valuable books were found at the monastery as early as the reign of Ine, king of the West Saxons (688–726). By the tenth century at the latest there are reports of an ‘Irish school’ at Glastonbury, famous for its learning and books, and St Dunstan's earliest biographer, the anonymous. B., relates that Dunstan himself studied with the Irish at Glastonbury. During Dunstan's abbacy (940–56) – that is, at the period when most historians would place the beginnings of the English tenth-century reform movement – there was a general revival at Glastonbury which included a concerted policy of book acquisition and the establishment of a productive scriptorium. Not surprisingly, Dunstan's abbacy was viewed by the community ever afterwards as one of the most glorious periods in the early history of the monastery, especially since the later Anglo-Saxon abbots showed a marked falling off in devotion and loyalty to the intellectual inheritance of their monastery. Æthelweard and Æthelnoth, the last two Anglo-Saxon abbots, were especially reprehensible, and confiscated lands and ornaments for the benefit of their own kin. Nor did the situation improve immediately after the Conquest: the first Norman abbot, Thurstan, actually had to call in soldiers to quell his unruly monks. In spite of these disruptions, a fine collection of pre-Conquest books seems to have survived more or less intact into the twelfth century; when the seasoned traveller and connoisseur of books, William of Malmesbury, saw the collection in the late 1120s he was greatly impressed: ‘tanta librorum pulchritudo et antiquitas exuberat’.

According to his own testimony, the fourth-century Spanish poet Prudentius devoted himself to writing only late in life. The Praefatio to his works provides all the biographical details which we have of him: he was born in 348, the year in which Salia was consul (lines 25–6: ‘Sub quo [=Salia] prima dies mihi/ quam multas hiemes uoluerit’), he appears to have studied rhetoric (lines 8–9: ‘mox docuit toga infectum uitiis falsa loqui’), possibly practised law (lines 13–4: ‘Exim iurgia turbidos/ armarunt animos’), became governor of two cities (lines 16–7: ‘Bis legum moderamine/ frenos nobilium reximus urbium’) and finally was taken into the emperor's service (lines 20–1: ‘pietas principis extulit/ adsumptum propius stare iubens ordine proximo’). The exact date of his death is unknown, but it appears to have been before 410 because his writings, especially the Contra Symmachum, still praise a victorious Rome that had not yet been sacked by Alaric.

The practice of the late classical grammarians of providing copious lists of frequently archaic and obscure examples of the parts of speech was subjected to varying treatment at the hands of their medieval adapters. Some omitted these lists altogether; some substituted commoner examples current in ecclesiastical vocabulary; others incorporated the classical material almost unaltered into their own works. The ars grammatica Tatuini, a lengthy treatise by the Mercian scholar Tatwine, archbishop of Canterbury from 731 until his death in 734, contains extensive lists drawn from such authors as Charisius and Phocas. Early in the textual tradition of all the surviving copies of this work several of the examples in the first, de nomine section were supplied with glosses, five in Latin and eighteen in Old English. Although they have been mentioned several times, no commentary on them, nor even an adequate transcription of them, has been published. Yet the glosses – particularly those in Old English – are of considerable interest, not only for their contribution to Old English lexicography, but also for the glimpse they afford of one aspect of the study of Latin in early-eighth-century England.

Although St Dunstan's earliest biographer gave the impression that there was a major collection of books at Glastonbury Abbey before 956 and although it seems that St Dunstan imported books from abroad while abbot and that he himself was actively involved in correcting and illuminating, there is remarkably little hard evidence concerning surviving pre-Conquest books from the monastery. Indeed, the only book which can be said with certainty to have been produced there — Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 30 (S. C. 4076) — subsequently followed Dunstan to Worcester. Several years ago I was able to show that two pre-Conquest books written elsewhere were later imported to Glastonbury; in this article I shall add two more examples.

The verb forgytan is used reflexively six times in the extant Old English corpus, and all six instances are found in King Alfred's translation of Gregory the Great's Regula pastoralis. As the translation adopts from its Latin source the concept of what I call ‘completely reflexive forgetting’ (the forgetting of one's self), it adjusts the concept for an Anglo-Saxon audience by reimagining and reconfiguring the logistics of the mind and its mechanisms of perception. Completely reflexive forgetting is thus imagined as the process by which a ruler ceases to perceive himself from within (as God always does) and begins perceiving himself from without (from the perspective of his subjects), thereby slipping into a perpetually totalizing state of self-concealment.

When we forget, something doesn't just slip away from us. Forgetting itself slips into a concealing, and indeed in such a way that we ourselves, along with our relation to what is forgotten, fall into concealment.

Martin Heidegger, ‘Aletheia (Heraclitus, Fragment B 16)’

It has been customary, since comparative scholarship in the field of Germanic literatures began, to explain perceived similarities between Old English and Old Norse poetry in terms of their derivation from common cultural roots and closely cognate languages. Similarities in the two poetic systems have been regarded as evidence of the conservation of ideas, figures of speech and poetic forms. Such similarities have then been used to reveal what the ‘original’ Germanic customs, ideas and literary expressions might have been before the various tribal groups dispersed to their historical medieval locations. This way of thinking assumes the persistence into early medieval times of archaic modes of thought and expression wherever cultural similarities are perceived. The Old English, Old Norwegian and Icelandic Rune Poems have usually been considered in this light. It is widely accepted that they reflect a shared cultural prototype. Moreover, their texts span a considerable period of time and yet show significant similarities. The Old English Rune Poem has often been compared with its Scandinavian counterparts to reveal older forms of thought. Andreas Heusler offered a fairly typical assessment: ‘Die wenigen Anklänge an die nordischen Reihen … erklären sich unbedenklich aus einer alten Grundform der Wanderungszeit, als Angeln und Nordleute Nachbarn waren.’

The Old English text by Æthelwold, bishop of Winchester, known as ‘King Edgar's Establishment of Monasteries’ (EEM) is here viewed as an expression of royal ideology. The article argues that the final section of EEM, in the first person, should be interpreted as words attributed to Edgar himself. This re-reading strengthens the case for dating EEM to the period 966 x c. 970, and for suspecting a female audience. It is argued that EEM accompanied an early, feminized version of Æthelwold's translation of the Rule of St Benedict. This model of religious life related to the responsibility of Edgar's queen, Ælfthryth, for female houses, and reflected her alliance with Æthelwold. EEM offered a distinctive view of English ecclesiastical history subtly tailored to these purposes. The final section of EEM presented a sophisticated defence of female monastic endowment. Ælfthryth's role provides an important context for understanding the politics and representation of Æthelred's kingship in the 990s.

In a brief discussion of the Vespasian Psalter in 1898, Albert S. Cook offered a statement that set the tone for subsequent debate about the relationship between the Old English gloss of the Vespasian Psalter (A = London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian A. i) and that of the junius Psalter (B = Oxford, Bodleian Library, junius 27): ‘It seems not improbable that it [i.e. the gloss to the Vespasian Psalter] is the original from which all later Old English glosses on the Psalms have been derived, undergoing in the process such modifications as were due to the language of the particular dialect or epoch.’ With regard to the Junius gloss specifically, Cook printed the text of Psalm XCIX [C] from the Vespasian Psalter, which he collated with the Junius, Cambridge (C = Cambridge, University Library, Ff. 1.23), Regius (D = London, British Library, Royal 2. B.V), and Eadwine (E = Cambridge, Trinity College R. 17.1) psalters; he concluded that ‘B stands nearest to A, but is carelessly written, and changes Anglian peculiarities in the direction of West Saxon (in to on, all to eall, &c.) while retaining, in general, a comparatively early and Anglian cast (weotað, scep, leswe, &c.)’. Although Otto Heinzel, writing in 1926, disagreed with Cook's assertion that the Vespasian gloss was the source from which all other psalters ultimately derived their glosses, he reiterated, after a fashion, the idea that the Junius gloss is related to that of the Vespasian Psalter, although, like Cook, he did not argue for a direct relationship between these two works. In Heinzel's stemma, from the Urtext*0 derive *α, which stands as the model for B, and *β, which in turn stands as the model for both A and C. The stemma, in its full form, taking the Dtype (Regius Psalter) tradition into account, has justly been termed ‘fanciful’ by Kenneth Sisam. The relationship between the glosses in these two psalters formed the subject of an extended study by Uno Lindelöf published in 1901.

The career and cult of St Æthelthryth, the seventh-century Northumbrian queen who retained her virginity throughout two marriages in order to follow her vocation as a nun, has always been known to any reader of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica, but has become an especially popular subject for a remarkable range of research and interpretation in the past ten or fifteen years, among editors, historians of sainthood, historians of marriage, feminist literary critics and even novelists.

The purpose of this article is to analyse the different categories of the lexical and syntactic variation which is common to two unpublished manuscripts of King Alfred's translation of Gregory's Cura Pastoralis, Cambridge, Trinity College R. 5. 22 (717), fols. 72–158, and Cambridge, University Library, Ii. 2. 4, referred to henceforth as T and U respectively. These manuscripts are an obvious choice for the following reasons: the relationship of the tenth- (or early-eleventh-)century T to the eleventh-century U (almost certainly written at Exeter) can be at least tentatively established as far as the history of the transmission of the test is concerned; the work has the status of royal origin and one can therefore expect it to have been treated with due respect by later copyists; and the work is of considerable length. My study is based on a complete collation of both manuscripts, since, in any analysis of this kind, numerical weight of evidence lends conviction to the conclusions, but the material, because of its quantity, cannot be presented here in its entirety. What I have attempted to do is to demonstrate, with selected examples as evidence, the clear pattern of variation that emerges. It is hoped that as a result some light is thrown upon linguistic developments within West Saxon and upon the scribal practices involved in the copying and recopying of earlier texts in late Old English times.

Two masterpieces stand out of the mass of Anglo-Saxon religious poetry: The Dream of the Rood and the sequence of liturgical lyrics in the Exeter Book variously known as Christ I, the Advent Lyrics or simply Advent. The two works are similar in focus and technique as well as in quality. Both express the mystery of Incarnation in terms of a riddle: how can it be that Deus and Homo make their impossible contact? What terms can make this meeting graspable by the imagination? Both give eloquent voice to human suffering and human hope, and seem to recognize that it is only through appealing to these feelings that theology can come to life for us by being experienced.

From the Norman Conquest onward, the architectural history of England has been put on a firm basis by the work of nineteenth-century writers who were able to associate precise dates, and even named builders, with a considerable number of buildings as a result of the survival of contemporary written records which could be unequivocally linked to the surviving buildings. For the period before 1066 the position is very different: the studies of the last century have indeed established firmly the principal distinctive features of Anglo-Saxon workmanship; but for only a handful of buildings is there any written record that allows a firm assignment of date; and there is consequently a wide divergence of opinion between scholars in the dates which they assign to individual buildings or particular architectural features.

After almost a century of discussion of the traditions about the apostles in Cynewulf's poem it is somewhat surprising to find that some simple literary contacts have been ignored. This is true of the latest edition of the poem and of the more recent book, Sources and Analogues of Old English Poetry. In an earlier edition G. P. Krapp had chosen Bede's Martyrology as a source for Fates, but, since Dom Quentin's detailed work on historical martyrologies has excised the accretions which that martyrology has accumulated, the authentic Bede can now be left out of the discussion. In modern times it seems that two lists of apostles which preface the Hieronymian Martyrology in eighth-century manuscripts are regarded as analogues or contributory sources. These are the Notitia de locis Apostolorum (Notit.), a list of the apostles’ resting-places, in the Echternach manuscript, and the Breviarium Apostolorum (Brev.), in other manuscripts. The two tracts entitled De Ortu et Obitu Patrum in Migne's Patrologia Latina, the one normally assigned to Isidore of Seville (IO) and the other now regarded as an anonymous Hiberno-Latin tract (HLO) from the eighth century, and both including the apostles, have been considered by previous scholars. All these four works are early enough to have been consulted by Cynewulf, who is thought to have been writing in the ninth century, but none of them individually nor all of them collectively could have provided Cynewulf with all his factual details: none of them reports that James Zebedaei died ‘mid Iudeum’ (35 a) (although this fact could be assumed from Brev., IO and HLO, which state that he was killed by Herod), that Philip preached in Asia (38a), that Thomas raised Gad, the king's brother, from death and that he himself was killed by a sword (54–60), that Matthew preached in Ethiopia (64) and that a named king ‘Irtacus’ (68a) ordered him to be slain ‘wæpnum’ (69b), that Simon and Thaddeus (or Jude) went together to Persia (76b) and that they died on the same day (‘him wearð bam samod / an endedæg‘, 78b–9a). These details are all lacking in HLO, which has the least differences from Cynewulf's poem. Each of the other texts individually has other differences, Notit. having the greatest number. These abbreviated accounts, of course, merely transmit traditions about the apostles, and so it is clear that Cynewulf used different traditions for at least Philip, Thomas, Matthew and the pair Simon and Thaddeus, who are linked by Cynewulf, whereas in the other texts either they are separated or Thaddeus is not mentioned. It is possible that a curious assumption of ‘short poem, short source’ has prevented scholars from being alert to the significance of a clear clue which has long been available. In Brooks's edition we read that ‘the resurrection of Gad… is not mentioned in Bede's Martyrology, nor in the Breviarium; hence neither of these can be the sole source of the poem. A full account is given in the Apocryphal Acts of Thomas’, in other words, in the full story of Thomas's Passio. I hope to demonstrate that almost all the details about the apostles in the poem came immediately from the full stories of the Vitae or Passiones which are still extant. In my opinion it is unnecessary to consider the possibility of an abbreviated intermediary, since, as a religious of his period Cynewulf would have heard stories of the saints, including the apostles, on their feast-days, and, as we know, he had access to written accounts for two pieces for such festivals, a story of the Inventio Crucis for his poem Elene and a Vita S. Julianae for his poem under her name. He would have been remarkably inattentive, not to say undevout, if he had not recalled the few details about individual apostles from such hearing or reading.

The stylistic disjunctions in The Dream of the Rood are not a new topic. They have been treated explicitly and implicitly for many years from several different points of view. The most frequently noted disjunction occurs at line 78 where the cross, having completed its eye-witness account of the crucifixion, commences a homily explaining the significance of its experience. But there are others as well: at 27 where the poet switches personae from dreamer to cross, at 121 where the dreamer again becomes the speaker to describe his personal reaction to his vision and at 147 where the poet begins an impersonal magnification of Christ which concludes the poem.