The Bishops, Kings, and Saints of York

The Bishops, Kings, and Saints of York

First published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This represents the first study devoted to the life and after-life of St John of Beverley. John was bishop of Hexham and then York, after which he retired to his own monastery in Beverley and was buried there in 721. His cult was quickly established and spread to attract pilgrims from all over the British Isles, and even Europe. It was also established in Brittany by the tenth century, especially in the town of Saint-Jean-Brévelay, which is named after him. The great economic wealth of Beverley in the Middle Ages was largely due to it being a major ecclesiastical centre focused around John's relics. His reputation as a powerful saint was harnessed not only to protect Beverley and the surrounding areas and to give succour to pilgrims to his shrine, but also to further the ambitions of successive kings of England to the extent that Henry V raised him to the status of a patron saint of England following the battle of Agincourt, which was fought on the feast day of St John's translation. The hagiographic works on John extend over nearly six hundred years from that written by Bede c. 731, the Vita Sancti Johannis composed by a monk called Folcard c. 1066, then four separate collections of post-mortem miracle stories of the eleventh-thirteenth centuries, and a number of miracles recorded in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This span is greater even than the hagiography relating to St Benedict, which had been believed to cover more years than any other collection in Europe. Dr Wilson uses these sources as a unique opportunity to examine the ways in which an Anglo-Saxon saint was promoted over a long period of time by different hagiographers, and how the saint was continually re-created in the image which the hagiographers or his community required, depending on their current needs and perceptions. The volume also includes the first English translations of the Life and the miracle stories.

First printed in 2001 by the University of Pennsylvania Press, this book has been out of print for several years and is highly sought after by researchers in the field of Medieval cultural studies. "Double Agents" was the first book length study of women in Anglo-Saxon written culture that took on board the insights of contemporary critical theory, especially feminist theory, in order to elucidate the complex challenges of both the absence and presence of women in the historical record. That is to say, unlike the two earlier books on women in this period (by Fell, 1984, and by Chance, 1986), this is not a book about only those women in the written record (whether we think of it as historical or literary) of Anglo-Saxon England, it also tackles the question of how the feminine is modelled, used, and metaphorised in Anglo-Saxon texts, even when women themselves are absent.This book spans the entire Anglo-Saxon period from Aldhelm and Bede in the earliest centuries to Alfric and the anonymous homilists and hagiographers of the later tenth and eleventh centuries; it draws on Anglo-Saxon vernacular texts as well as Latin ones, and on those works most familiar to literary scholars (such as the "Exeter Book Riddles" or "Cadmon's Hymn", the first so-called poem in English, or the female "Lives of Saints") as well as historians (wills, charters, the cult of relics); it deliberately reconsiders, from the perspective of gender and women's agency, some of the key conceptual issues that studying Anglo-Saxon England presents (the relation of orality to literacy; that of poetry and sanctity to belief; and, the cultural significance of names, naming, and metaphors in Anglo-Saxon writing).

This volume offers for the first time in any language a translation of the poetic corpus of Alcuin of York (c. 735–804), numbering some 339 individual pieces and nearly 7,000 lines. An introduction touches on Alcuin’s life, his writings (including doubtful works and pseudepigrapha), his Latinity, his place in the Latin literary tradition, and the manuscripts, textual history, and editions of his poetry. The translations follow Dümmler’s Latin text, with each poem controlled by a headnote that places the piece in its historical and literary contexts. A series of appendices offers translations of selected letters, a register of the poems by meter, a census of nearly 200 manuscripts with digital links, and a prolegomenon to a new edition. The Poetry of Alcuin of York is a stimulating resource for anyone working on later Latin poetry, and late ancient literature more broadly. The poems also offer fascinating insights into life and scholarship in Anglo-Saxon England and in the Carolingian empire in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, and so will also be of interest to students of medieval history.

The study of manuscripts is fundamental to the appreciation of Anglo-Saxon texts and culture. Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: Basic Readings provides an introductory collection of materials covering basic terms, techniques, resources, issues, and applications. Focusing on manuscripts copied before 1100 in England, the selections gathered here consider their history, production, analysis, and significance. Drawn from a variety of published sources and new writings commissioned for this collection, these essays offer a thorough background in principles and practices, along with up-to-date coverage of new developments in paleography. This interdisciplinary collection introduces key subjects of research for Anglo-Saxon studies while suggesting potential developments and new directions within the field.

Publisher Description

A reference work which presents the history of Britain in biographical form. The two volumes contain over 1500 short biographies of men and women who played an important part in their time.