Anglo-Saxon England is the only publication which consistently embraces all the main aspects of study of Anglo-Saxon history and culture - linguistic, literary, textual, palaeographic, religious, intellectual, historical, archaeological and artistic - and which promotes the more unusual interests - in music or medicine or education, for example. Articles in volume 36 include: The tabernacula of Gregory the Great and the conversion of Anglo-Saxon England by Flora Spiegel; The career of Aldhelm by Michael Lapidge; The name 'Merovingian' and the dating of Beowulf by Walter Goffart; An abbot, an archbishop and the Viking raids of 1006-7 and 1009-12 by Simon Keynes; and Demonstrative behaviour and political communication in later Anglo-Saxon England by Julia Barrow.

The pre-eminence of Anglo-Saxon England in its field can be seen as a result of its encouragement of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of all aspects of Anglo-Saxon culture. Thus this volume includes an important assessment of the correspondence of St Boniface, in which it is shown that the unusually formulaic nature of Boniface's letters is best understood as a reflex of the saint's familiarity with vernacular composition. A wide-ranging historical contextualization of The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle illuminates the way English readers of the later tenth century may have defined themselves in contradistinction to the monstrous unknown, and a fresh reading of the gendering of female portraiture in a famous illustrated manuscript of the Psychomachia of Prudentius (CCCC 23) shows the independent ways in which Anglo-Saxon illustrators were able to respond to their models. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year's publications rounds off the book; and a full index of the contents of volumes 26-30 is provided. (Previous indexes have appeared in volumes 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25.)

This volume brings to light material evidence to further our knowledge of Anglo-Saxon England.

A consideration of the theme of demons as teachers in early English literature.

The little-known lives of women who ruled, schemed, and made peace and war, between the seventh and eleventh centuries: “Meticulously researched.” —Catherine Hanley, author of Matilda: Empress, Queen, Warrior Many Anglo-Saxon kings are familiar. Æthelred the Unready is one—but less is written about his wife, who was consort of two kings and championed one of her sons over the others, or about his mother, who was an anointed queen and powerful regent, but was also accused of witchcraft and regicide. A royal abbess educated five bishops and was instrumental in deciding the date of Easter; another took on the might of Canterbury and Rome and was accused by the monks of fratricide. Royal mothers wielded power: Eadgifu, wife of Edward the Elder, maintained a position of authority during the reigns of both her sons. Æthelflaed, Lady of the Mercians, was a queen in all but name, while few have heard of Queen Seaxburh, who ruled Wessex, or Queen Cynethryth, who issued her own coinage. She, too, was accused of murder, and was also, like many of the royal women, literate and highly educated. Ranging from seventh-century Northumbria to eleventh-century Wessex and making extensive use of primary sources, Women of Power in Anglo-Saxon England examines the lives of individual women in a way that has often been done for the Anglo-Saxon men but not for their wives, sisters, mothers, and daughters.

For more than forty years Nicholas Brooks has been at the forefront of research into early medieval Britain. In order to honour the achievements of one of the leading figures in Anglo-Saxon studies, this volume brings together essays by an internationally renowned group of scholars on four themes that the honorand has made his own: myths, rulership, church and charters. Myth and rulership are addressed in articles on the early history of Wessex, Æthelflæd of Mercia and the battle of Brunanburh; contributions concerned with charters explore the means for locating those hitherto lost, the use of charters in the study of place-names, their role as instruments of agricultural improvement, and the reasons for the decline in their output immediately after the Norman Conquest. Nicholas Brooks's long-standing interest in the church of Canterbury is reflected in articles on the Kentish minster of Reculver, which became a dependency of the church of Canterbury, on the role of early tenth-century archbishops in developing coronation ritual, and on the presentation of Archbishop Dunstan as a prophet. Other contributions provide case studies of saints' cults with regional and international dimensions, examining a mass for St Birinus and dedications to St Clement, while several contributions take a wider perspective, looking at later interpretations of the Anglo-Saxon past, both in the Anglo-Norman and more modern periods. This stimulating and wide-ranging collection will be welcomed by the many readers who have benefited from Nicholas Brooks's own work, or who have an interest in the Anglo-Saxon past more generally. It is an outstanding contribution to early medieval studies.

Anglo-Saxon England consistently embraces all the main aspects of study of Anglo-Saxon history and culture.

The discovery in Sonderhausen of a fragmentary psalter glossed in Latin and Old English allows fresh inferences to be drawn regarding the study of the psalter in Anglo-Saxon England, and of the transmission of the corpus of vernacular psalter glosses. A detailed textual and palaeographical study of the Wearmouth-Jarrow bibles leads to the exciting possibility that the hand of Bede can be identified, annotating the text of the Bible which he no doubt played an instrumental role in establishing. Two Latin texts from the circle of Archbishop Wulfstan are published here in full, whilst disciplined philological and historical analysis helps to clarify a puzzling reference in 'thelbert's law-code to the early medieval practice of providing food render for the king. Finally, the volume contains two pioneering essays in the histoire des mentalités. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year's publications in all branches of Anglo-Saxon studies rounds off the book.

Throughout the centuries of its existence, Anglo-Saxon society was highly, if not widely, literate: it was a society the functioning of which depended very largely on the written word. All the essays in this volume throw light on the literacy of Anglo-Saxon England, from the writs which were used as the instruments of government from the eleventh century onwards, to the normative texts which regulated the lives of Benedictine monks and nuns, to the runes stamped on an Anglo-Saxon coin, to the pseudorunes which deliver the coded message of a man to his lover in a well-known Old English poem, to the mysterious writing on an amulet which was apparently worn by a religious for a personal protection from the devil. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year's publications in all branches of Anglo-Saxon studies rounds off the book.

Anglo-Saxon England is the only publication which consistently embraces all the main aspects of study of Anglo-Saxon history and culture - linguistic, literary, textual, palaeographic, religious, intellectual, historical, archaeological and artistic - and which promotes the more unusual interests - in music or medicine or education, for example. Articles in volume 37 include: Record of the thirteenth conference of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, 30 July to 4 August 2007; The virtues of rhetoric: Alcuin's Disputatio de rhetorica et de uirtutibus; King Edgar's charter for Pershore (972); Lost voices from Anglo-Saxon Lichfield; The Old English Promissio Regis; 'lfric, the Vikings, and an anonymous preacher in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College (162); Re-evaluating base-metal artifacts: an inscribed lead strap-end from Crewkerne, Somerset; Anglo-Saxon and related entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004); Bibliography for 2007.