The twelve essays in this collection advance the contemporary study of the women saints of Anglo-Saxon England by challenging received wisdom and offering alternative methodologies.
This collection of essays written by some of the most prominent scholars in the field honours Paul E. Szarmach by bringing together a range of studies relating to Anglo-Saxon literature and culture. As the title suggests, the main concern of the volume is the interconnectedness of a variety of texts, including literary, cultural, historical, scholarly, and ecclesiastical. Organized into three sections that consider scholarly reception, material texts and contexts, and textual transmission, this volume offers fresh scholarship on topics old and new.
The twelve essays in this collection advance the contemporary study of the women saints of Anglo-Saxon England by challenging received wisdom and offering alternative methodologies. The work embraces a number of different scholarly approaches, from codicological study to feminist theory. While some contributions are dedicated to the description and reconstruction of female lives of saints and their cults, others explore the broader ideological and cultural investments of the literature. The volume concentrates on four major areas: the female saint in the Old English Martyrology, genre including hagiography and homelitic writing, motherhood and chastity, and differing perspectives on lives of virgin martyrs. The essays reveal how saints’ lives that exist on the apparent margins of orthodoxy actually demonstrate a successful literary challenge extending the idea of a holy life.
In this the second part of his four-volume military and political history of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom, Paul Hill follows the careers of Æthelflæd, Alfred the Great’s eldest daughter, and Edward the Elder, Alfred’s eldest son, as they campaigned to expand their rule after Alfred’s death. They faced, as Alfred had done, the full force of Danish hostility during the early years of the tenth century, a period of unrelenting turbulence and open warfare. But through their military strength, in particular their strategy of fortress building, they retained their hold on the kingdom and conquered lands which had been under Danish lords for generations. Æthelflæd’s forces captured Derby and Leicester by both force and diplomacy. Edward’s power was always immense. How each of them used forts (burhs) to hold territory, is explored. Fortifications across central England became key. These included Bridgnorth, Tamworth, Stafford, Warwick, Chirbury and Runcorn (Æthelflæd) and also Hertford, Witham, Buckingham, Bedford and Maldon (Edward), to name a few. Paul Hill’s absorbing narrative incorporates the latest theories and evidence for the military organization and capabilities of the Anglo-Saxons and their Danish adversaries. His book gives the reader a detailed and dramatic insight into a very sophisticated Anglo-Saxon kingdom.
Exploring the 'roads less travelled', MacDonald continues his monumental essay in the history of ideas. The history of heterodox ideas about the concept of mind takes the reader from the earliest records about human nature in Ancient Egypt, the Ancient Near East, and the Zoroastrian religion, through the secret teachings in the Hermetic and Gnostic scriptures, and into the transformation of ideas about the mind, soul and spirit in the late antique and early medieval epochs. These transitions include discussion of the influence of Central Asian shamanism, Manichean ideas about the soul in light and darkness, and Neoplatonic theurgy, 'working-on-god-within'. Sections on the medieval period are concerned with the rediscovery of magical practices and occult doctrines from Roger Bacon to Francis Bacon, the adaptation of Neoplatonic and esoteric ideas in the medieval Christian mystics, and the survival of these ideas mixed with natural science in the works of von Helmont, Leibniz and Goethe. The book concludes with an investigation of the many forms of dualism in accounts of the human mind and soul, and the concept of dual-life which underpins our aspiration to understand how humans could have an immortal nature like the gods.
This book charts how the cartographies of American literature as an institutional category have varied radically across different times and places. Arguing that American literature was consolidated as a distinctively nationalist entity only in the wake of the U.S. Civil War, Paul Giles identifies this formation as extending until the beginning of the Reagan presidency in 1981. He contrasts this with the more amorphous boundaries of American culture in the eighteenth century, and with ways in which conditions of globalization at the turn of the twenty-first century have reconfigured the parameters of the subject. In light of these fluctuating conceptions of space, Giles suggests new ways of understanding the shifting territory of American literary history. ranging from Cotton Mather to David Foster Wallace, and from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Zora Neale Hurston. Giles considers why European medievalism and Native American prehistory were crucial to classic nineteenth-century authors such as Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville. He discusses how twentieth-century technological innovations, such as air travel, affected representations of the national domain in the texts of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. And he analyzes how regional projections of the South and the Pacific Northwest helped to shape the work of writers such as William Gilmore Simms, José Martí, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Gibson. Bringing together literary analysis, political history, and cultural geography, The Global Remapping of American Literature reorients the subject for the transnational era.
First published in 1998. The following monograph is a revised and updated study which developed as a result of three experiences of the author: an advanced tutorial in Old English, a Fulbright year in Iceland, and a year teaching Old Icelandic. It is intended as a contribution to the ongoing revision of oral theory.
Aquinas at Prayer draws attention to important aspects of Aquinas's life and work which have been all too often overlooked or forgotten. Today Aquinas is almost exclusively regarded as an outstanding scholastic philosopher and theologian. But what is little known is that Aquinas was, first and last, a teacher of the Bible - a Master of the Sacred Page. Moreover there is a distinctly mystical character to his theology. And, as a writer, he was not only a poet but, arguably, the greatest Latin poet of the Middle Ages. The primary focus of this most engaging new book is to explore the question of Aquinas's own practice of prayer and his teaching on prayer in his commentaries on the Psalms and St Paul. The book is strengthened by quotations from Aquinas in fresh translations.
This ninth century history of Alfred the Great’s leadership is “a work of extraordinary scholarship that reads with all the narrative style of a novel” (Midwest Book Review). In this compelling military and political history of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom, Paul Hill explores England’s birth amidst the devastation and fury of the Danish invasions of the ninth century. Alfred the Great, youngest son of King Æthelwulf, took control of the last surviving Anglo-Saxon kingdom, bringing Wessex and the “English” parts of Mercia together into a new “Kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons.” This is a story of betrayal and of vengeance, of turncoat oath-breakers and loyal commanders, of battles fought and won against the odds. But above all, this is the story of how England came into being. Warfare in Alfred’s England changed from attritional set-piece battles to a grander strategic concern. This is explored, demonstrating how defense-in-depth fortification networks were built across the resurgent kingdom in the wake of Alfred’s victory at Edington in 878. The arrival of new Danish armies into England in the 890s would lead to campaigns quite unlike those of the previous generation. This is a human, as well as a military story: how a king demonstrated the importance of his right to rule. Alfred sought to secure the succession on his son Edward, who led his own forces as a young man in the 890s. But not everybody was happy in Alfred’s England. Despite the ever-present threat from the Danes, the greatest challenge facing Alfred arose from his own kin, centered deep in the heart of ancient Wessex. Alfred knew his was not the only branch of the family who claimed a right to rule.
Names and celebrates aspects of the Dominican tradition that are at the very core of its spirituality. One of the things which has characterized the Dominican spirit from the beginning is a sense of openness to the world. This book presents the Dominican vision of life.
Following in the pattern of his earlier works on the origins of Ashkenazic Jewry, Professor Wexler presents a fascinating, but controversial linguistic study on the origins of Sephardic Jewry. Finding that many of the language patterns of Sephardic Jewry have their origins in non-Jewish languages, the author suggests that many Sephardic Jews are actually descendants of the converts who brought with them the language of their birth and integrated it into Sephardic speech patterns and dialects. furthermore, he uses linguistic clues to suggest both migration patterns and the possible isolation of Sephardic Jewry.
Cambridge University Library's collection of illuminated manuscripts is of international significance. It originates in the medieval university and stands alongside the holdings of the colleges and the Fitzwilliam Museum. The University Library contains major European examples of medieval illumination from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries, with acknowledged masterpieces of Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance book art, as well as illuminated literary texts, including the first complete Chaucer manuscript. This catalogue provides scholars and researchers easy access to the University Library's illuminated manuscripts, evaluating the importance of many of them for the very first time. It contains descriptions of famous manuscripts, for example the Life of Edward the Confessor attributed to Matthew Paris, as well as hundreds of lesser-known items. Beautifully illustrated throughout, the catalogue contains descriptions of individual manuscripts with up-to-date assessments of their style, origins and importance, together with bibliographical references.
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