Cuthbert of Wearmouth-Jarrow wrote the wonderful letter giving a moving eye-witness account of the calm death of Bede in 735. He later became abbot of Wearmouth-Jarrow for many years, during which time he corresponded with Anglo-Saxon missionaries working in Germany. Here are included the complete work on the death of Bede and a letter from Cuthbert to Lul, written some thirty years later, in which he notes that he is sending Lul Bede’s prose and verse works on Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, and he asks for a skilled glassmaker as well as a cithara player to come to Northumbria to teach him to play.

Owain Glyndwr (died c. 1416) was the last Welshman to hold the title of Prince of Wales. In 1400 he led a rebellion against king Henry IV and English rule in Wales. In 1406 he addressed a letter, now known as the Pennal Letter, to king Charles VI of France asking for support in persuading the schismatic pope Benedict XIII to help Wales to exist as an independent state with a Church and universities of its own.

The section on Thomas Becket includes a letter from Becket to the Empress Matilda (daughter of king Henry I) who was based in Rouen at the time, and one from the Empress in response, reprimanding Becket for his behaviour towards her son, Henry II. The second part contains two parallel excerpts from the accounts, by Edward Grim and William Fitzstephen, of the murder of Becket in Canterbury cathedral in 1170.

William de Longchamp was notorious at the end of the twelfth century as a hugely powerful man, chancellor of England, but one who was hated by many for having abused his power. The account of his downfall and ludicrous humiliation on Dover Beach as he tried to escape to France is recorded by a number of contemporaries. Here the version recorded by Hugh Nonant, bishop of Coventry, is given. The writing is of a high quality and the text provides both humour and historical detail.

Bede in his letter to Bishop Ecgberht of York expresses his worries over the greed and lack of Latin learning among the clergy, and over lay control in certain monasteries. He stresses the need for the basic texts of the Christian faith to be translated into English. Here he shows that it was not the case that all the clergy were competent in Latin.

Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury from 1093-1109, formerly of the abbey of Bec in Normandy, is here represented by an example of his more intimate writing, namely an exquisite short letter to his dear friend Gundulf, and by an excerpt from his great work, the Proslogion, an address to God in which Anselm meditates on the existence and nature of God and man’s relation to God in a Latin prose studded with Biblical references particularly from the Psalms.

The letters of Boniface’s circle, as published by M. Tangl, includes both letters to and from Boniface himself during his time as a missionary in Germany, and letters to and from his friends and associates. Here 3 letters from Anglo-Saxon women are included, two of them to their friend Boniface. Also a letter from Boniface to Ecgberht bishop of York in which he complains of the immoral behaviour of king Æthelbald of Mercia, and a letter to Boniface from Æthelbert of Kent, thanking him for his mission work, sending him a raincoat and asking for two falcons to be sent from Germany.

In the section on manorial life and agriculture, the focus is on the responsibilities of reeves and estate managers, as evidenced in handbooks and in letters, but also on the rights and responsibilites of both men and women working as tenants on the land. The Records of Elton provide accounts for a manor, with all the agricultural tools itemised. The final excerpt, from a Jersey document, records the rights and duties of the king with regard to his tenants.

Alcuin’s letter no. 16 is addressed to Æthelred, king of Northumbria in 793, the year in which Lindisfarne was destroyed by the Vikings in their first attack on England. In the letter Alcuin blames the king and the people for their immoral lives, and like Gildas before him, sees the foreign invasion as God’s just punishment for such immorality. The excerpt from Symeon of DUrham’s twelfth-century history shows the portents seen shortly before the Viking attack.

Aldhelm of Malmesbury wrote important works on grammar and metre. Here excerpts are taken from his famous prose work on Virginity, with which one may compare his version in hexameter verse.Also from one of the few remaining letters, this one on the subject of education and the rivalry between the Irish and the English in this field. Aldhelm’s distinctively rheorical and inventive Latin prose was very influential in the following centuries.

Burginda was a woman about whom little is known, apparently writing around 710. She writes a letter to an unknown young man, urging him in rhetorical and learned prose, to lead a spiritual life. The letter includes a few lines where Burginda reworks part of a Christian poem from north Africa from about AD 500. The letter survives in a single manuscript.

Caesar decamped to Gaul to fulfill his high military ambition, but he was far from immune from senatorial interference. A swift series of successes protected his precarious position down to the renewal of his command in 55; thereafter down to his decisive victory at Alesia in 52 he strove despite some memorable disasters to realize his repeated exaggerated claims to have "pacified the whole of Gaul." Final victory at Alesia brought the sustained applause not only of the People but also of the Senate. Caesar had a vital interest in making sure that Roman senators and the Roman People received a flow of positive news about his campaigns in Gaul, but his control over this multifocal network of communication is often greatly overstated. The chief media for this communication were not the Gallic War Commentaries but a dense network of "letters, rumor, reports" bringing a steady flow of news from various sources in the war zone to numerous recipients in Rome. Just as Caesar could not control the flow of information between the Army of Gaul and Italy, he also could not control political events in Rome, as the development of the crisis over his return shows.

Tendencies inherent in language to amalgamation and to anatomization are placed in tension. The Name and the letter can become objects of vision and veneration in their own right in a quasi-cultic worship of writing. But Dante at the same time embraces a rational view of language in which meaning is produced mechanically by systematic differentiation. He lets these perspectives play suggestively with and against one another. He also stages the transition from oral to written culture and, correspondingly, the transfer of the mystique of the word from prophetic utterance or prolusion to artistic representation in visible form.

David M. Bergeron reminds us that, for over 150 years, scholars and critics have known about a performance of Pericles at the Jacobean court in Whitehall on 20 May 1619. For the past fifty years some scholars have claimed that the Duke of Lennox arranged for or sponsored this performance. Bergeron uncovers the basis of this idea. He argues that to understand fully the 1619 event, scholars, editors, and critics need to return to the original source, found in a letter from Gerrard Herbert, dated 24 May, rather than depend, as most have, on a nineteenth-century transcription of the letter. He wants to know how scholars have reached their conclusion about Lennox’s involvement and determine its accuracy. His approach, therefore, underscores the fundamental point that scholars cannot rely on transcriptions or printed summaries of earlier manuscript or archival material without checking the primary material. Bergeron returns to the original Herbert letter and offers a transcription of the feast and performance of Pericles as recorded by Herbert four days after the event. He concludes that Bentley’s assertion, prompted in part by his reliance on Chambers, does not rest on solid evidence.