The Old English manuscript whose charred and burnt remains are now MS BL Cotton Otho B. xi was written at Winchester during the reign of Æthelred, partly in the middle of the tenth century and partly about the middle of the first half of the eleventh. In its pristine state it contained Anglo-Saxon texts of some importance, including a collection of laws. Unfortunately, the manuscript fell victim to the Cottonian fire of 1731 and was largely destroyed. Before the fire, however, in 1562, Otho B. xi was transcribed practically in its entirety by the antiquarian Laurence Nowell, whose work formed the basis for the printed edition of the Anglo-Saxon Laws contained in William Lambarde's Archaionomia of 1568. The present edition offers a brief discussion of the laws of the Anglo-Saxons as they survive in manuscripts and printed editions and then concentrates on the work of Nowell and Lambarde. Two Laurence Nowells and at least three Nowell transcripts of Cotton Otho B. xi are known to modern scholarship and require consideration before proceeding to an edition of what can be reconstructed of MS BL Cotton Otho B. xi. The texts of the law codes known as II Athelstan, V Athelstan, Iudex, and Alfred and Ine found originally in MS BL Cotton Otho B.xi are printed from the Nowell transcript contained in MS BL Additional 43703, while on facing pages the corresponding passages from Lambarde's Archaionomia are reproduced. Variants from the other Nowell transcripts of the same texts are noted, manuscript relations are discussed in an appendix, and a select bibliography is offered. The importance of the present edition is that it makes it easier to compare the Otho B. xi text and Lambarde's printed version than is possible with Felix Liebermann's Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen. Comparison of the Nowell and Lambarde texts with one another shows that there can be little doubt that Lambarde for his Archaionomia used Otho B. xi or a transcript of it made by Nowell Comparison of the Nowell and Lambarde texts with the other extant manuscript and printed versions casts some further light on the relations between the surviving law codes of the Anglo-Saxons.

This volume deals with the comparative study of Old Germanic languages in the Low Countries, in the middle of the seventeenth century; with special attention to the work of the philologist and lawyer Jan van Vliet (1622-1666).

The writings of two influential Elizabethan thinkers testify to the influence of Old English law and literature on Tudor society and self-image. Full of fresh and illuminating insights into a way of looking at the English past in the sixteenth century... a book with the potential to deepen and transform our understanding of Tudor attitudes to ethnic identity and the national past. Philip Schwyzer, University of Exeter. Laurence Nowell (1530-c.1570), author of the first dictionary of Old English, and William Lambarde (1536-1601), Nowell's protégé and eventually the first editor of theOld English Laws, are key figures in Elizabethan historical discourses and in its political and literary society; through their work the period between the Germanic migrations and the Norman Conquest came to be regarded as a foundational time for Elizabethan England, overlapping with and contributing to contemporary debates on the shape of Elizabethan English language. Their studies took different strategies in demonstrating the role of early medieval history in Elizabethan national -- even imperial -- identity, while in Lambarde's legal writings Old English law codes become identical with the "ancient laws" that underpinned contemporary common law. Their efforts contradict the assumption that Anglo-Saxon studies did not effectively participate in Tudor nationalism outside of Protestant polemic; instead, it was a vital part of making history "English". Their work furthers our understanding of both the history of medieval studies and the importance of early Anglo-Saxon studies to Tudor nationalism. Rebecca Brackmann is Assistant Professor of English, Lincoln Memorial University.

This book offers something new, a full-length study of printing Anglo-Saxon (Old English) from 1566 to 1705, combining analysis of content and form of production. It starts from the end-product and addresses the practical issues of providing for printing Anglo-Saxon authentically, and why this was done. The book tells a story that is largely Cambridge-orientated until Oxford made an impact, largely thanks to Franciscus Junius from Leiden. There is a catalogue of all books containing Anglo-Saxon, with full details of their use of manuscript or printed sources. This information allows us to see how knowledge of Anglo-Saxon grew and developed.

Bringing together essays on uses of history as both a practical activity and an approach to thinking about the present, this collection explores ways in which people have reckoned with history in pasts both distant and near. Reckoning with History begins by examining uses of the past in early modern Britain, a period in which print, religious reformation, and political conflict transformed historical culture. Later essays offer insights into personal, popular, professional, and sometimes deeply political uses of the past in other times and places, helping to contextualize our own moments in historical writing and to link the early and post-modern periods. Throughout, contributors respond to the writings of Daniel Woolf, whose scholarship illuminates the history of the historical discipline and the social circulation of the past. Covering subjects such as early archival practices, memories of historic plagues, and the type of commemorations needed to revitalize liberal democracies, Reckoning with History contextualizes the uses of the past today.

During the early Middle Ages, King Alfred (reigned 871-99) gained fame as the ruler who brought learning back to England after decades of Viking invasion. Although analysis of Alfred's canon typically focuses on his religious and philosophical texts, his relatively overlooked law code, or Domboc, reveals much about his rule, and how he was perceived in subsequent centuries. Joining major voices in the fields of early English law and literature, this exploration of King Alfred's influential text traces its evolution from its 9th century origins to reappearances in the 11th, 12th, and 16th centuries. Alfred's use of the vernacular and representation of secular practices, this work contends, made the Domboc an ideal text for establishing a particularly "English" national identity.

The first critical edition of Alfred the Great's domboc ('book of laws') in over a century.

In Printing the Middle Ages Siân Echard looks to the postmedieval, postmanuscript lives of medieval texts, seeking to understand the lasting impact on both the popular and the scholarly imaginations of the physical objects that transmitted the Middle Ages to the English-speaking world. Beneath and behind the foundational works of recovery that established the canon of medieval literature, she argues, was a vast terrain of books, scholarly or popular, grubby or beautiful, widely disseminated or privately printed. By turning to these, we are able to chart the differing reception histories of the literary texts of the British Middle Ages. For Echard, any reading of a medieval text, whether past or present, amateur or academic, floats on the surface of a complex sea of expectations and desires made up of the books that mediate those readings. Each chapter of Printing the Middle Ages focuses on a central textual object and tells its story in order to reveal the history of its reception and transmission. Moving from the first age of print into the early twenty-first century, Echard examines the special fonts created in the Elizabethan period to reproduce Old English, the hand-drawn facsimiles of the nineteenth century, and today's experiments with the digital reproduction of medieval objects; she explores the illustrations in eighteenth-century versions of Guy of Warwick and Bevis of Hampton; she discusses nineteenth-century children's versions of the Canterbury Tales and the aristocratic transmission history of John Gower's Confessio Amantis; and she touches on fine press printings of Dante, Froissart, and Langland.

This volume marks the centenary of Liebermann’s Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen (1903-1916) by bringing together essays by scholars specializing in medieval legal culture. The essays address not only Liebermann’s legacy, but also major issues in the study of early law.

This is the first book-length study of the four penitentials composed in Old English. This book argues that they are also important to our understanding of how written law developed in early England. This book considers their backgrounds and shows how they illuminate obscure passages in better-known Old English texts.