Products

First edition of important but problematic Anglo-Saxon text, with much to say about how later Anglo-Saxon writers used earlier materials.

This volume presents the first edited version of the canon collection associated with two of the key literary figures of the late Anglo-Saxon period: Ælfric, abbot of Eynsham [d. after 1006], and Wulfstan, bishop ofWorcester and archbishop of York [d. 1023]. Although of considerable importance, its textual problems (how many items comprise the collection? When, and by whom, was it composed?) have made proper critical study difficult. This edition aims to answer the need; the texts of the two recensions are edited with full critical apparatus of the five known manuscripts, a detailed study of sources, facing English translation, and an introductory essay on the text and its background.

Dr ANDREW HAMER teaches at the University of Liverpool.

An examination of Wyatt's translations and adaptions of European poetry yields fresh insights into his work and poetic practice.

During the 1520s and 1530s Sir Thomas Wyatt, the poet and diplomat, composed a number of translations and adaptations of European poetry (including the Penitential Psalms and works by Petrarch) when he was in embassy, or when he was engaged in other forms of international negotiations.This volume presents a comparative analysis of those poems which were directly or indirectly shaped by his ambassadorial experience. By examining the key points of divergencefrom and adaptation of his Italian, Latin and French sources and analogues, the author identifes the specific ways in which Wyatt reformed those sources in order to comment upon the lability of Tudor diplomacy and the political machinations at home and abroad which informed it - as well as the personal cost to Wyatt himself. The volume also identifies Wyatt's innovations and his debts, so redressing earlier interpretations of Wyatt's work which ignored its translative ontology. Through noting Wyatt's specific alterations and ameliorations, it allows a clearer image of his poetics to develop.

Dr William T. Rossiter is Senior Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern EnglishLiterature at the University of East Anglia.

First modern edition and translation of the homilies of one of the most important religious figures of his time.

Ælfric of Eynsham stands supreme as a distinguished homilist, translator, and moralist - one whose writings were sought by the most powerful churchmen and landed warlords of his day. In his sermons, the dead are raised to life, innocents are betrayed, civilizations come to ruin, prophecies are finally fulfilled, and sorrow is swallowed up in salvation. He offers guidance regarding sex, financial counsel, botanical excursuses, etymological asides, lions cowed by roosters, arch-heretics disemboweled, and seemingly inconsequential figures receiving everlasting crowns. He also considers the origin of Antichrist, recounts supernatural visions of damnation and deliverance, teases out the tension between predestination and free will, explores the multifarious nature of the soul, seeks to categorize creation, and presses the boundaries of conceptual capacity in describing the divine nature. Treatises take up such subjects as the Holy Spirit, cognition, penitence, and proper comportment. Private prayers appear alongside public declarations of the Christian faith found in the Paternoster and the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds.

The thirty-one texts presented here, with facing translations, span the course of his career: Old English and Latin, ordinary and alliterative prose, pithy prayers and exhaustive exegesis. Nine appear in print for the first time; others for the first time in well over 100 years. Introductions to the texts offer overviews of the content, composition, and circulation of each work, using the fruits of the latest research to envision real-world contexts for their use in specific places, among particular groups, and by certain individuals. Meanwhile, the commentary traces Ælfric's role in the history of ideas, examining his relationship to over 100 sources, 200 other Ælfrician works, and over 1,000 biblical passages; it seeks to clarify Ælfric's compositional aims and further to establish the authorship and date of these remarkable writings from early England.