From emperors and queens to artists and world travelers, from popes and scholars to saints and heretics, Key Figures in Medieval Europe brings together in one volume the most important people who lived in medieval Europe between 500 and 1500. Gathered from the biographical entries from the on-going series, the Routledge Encyclopedias of the Middle Ages, these A-Z biographical entries discuss the lives of over 575 individuals who have had a historical impact in such areas as politics, religion, or the arts. Individuals from places such as medieval England, France, Germany, Iberia, Italy, and Scandinavia are included as well as those from the Jewish and Islamic worlds. A thematic outline is included that lists people not only by categories, but also by regions. For a full list of entries, contributors, and more, visit the Routledge Encyclopedias of the Middle Ages website.

Wide-ranging survey of current research in Anglo-Saxon studies - from literature and material culture to religion and politics. Anglo-Saxon literature and culture, and their subsequent appropriations, unite the essays collected here. They offer fresh and exciting perspectives on a variety of issues, from gender to religion and the afterlives of Old Englishtexts, from reconsiderations of neglected works to reflections on the place of Anglo-Saxon in the classroom. As is appropriate, they draw especially on Hugh Magennis' own interests in hagiography and issues of community and reception. Taken together, they provide a "state of the discipline" account of the present, and future, of Anglo-Saxon studies. The volume also includes contributions from the leading Irish poets Ciaran Carson and Medbh McGuckian. Dr Stuart McWilliams is a Newby Trust Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh. Contributors: Ciaran Carson, Marilina Cesario, Mary Clayton, Ivan Herbison, Joyce Hill, Malcolm Godden, Chris Jones, Christina Lee, Medbh McGuckian, Stuart McWilliams, Juliet Mullins, Elisabeth Okasha, Jane Roberts, Donald Scragg, Mary Swan, John Thompson, Elaine Treharne, Robert Upchurch, Gordon Whatley, Jonathan Wilcox

Using a variety of texts, but the Matter of England romances in particular, the author argues that they show a continued interest in the Anglo-Saxon past, from the localised East Sussex legend of King Alfred that underlies the twelfth-century Proverbs of Alfred, to the institutional interest in the Guy of Warwick narrative exhibited by the community of St Swithun's Priory in Winchester during the fifteenth century; they are part of a continued cultural remembrance that encompasses chronicles, folk memories, and literature."--BOOK JACKET.

Old English scholars of the mid-seventeenth century lived through some of the most turbulent times in English history but, this book argues, the upheaval inspired them to produce some of the most famous landmark texts in early Old English studies.England in the 1640s and 1650s experienced civil wars, regicide, and unprecedented debate over religious and social structures, but it also saw several milestones in the field of early medieval English studies. This book argues that the scholars of Old English who produced these works did so not in spite but because of the intense political upheaval surrounding them. The opening chapters examine the book collecting and lexicographic endeavors of the Parliamentarian Simonds D'Ewes, sponsor of the professorship of "Saxon" at Cambridge University, and Abraham Wheelock's pro-Stuart "Old English" poetry and the puritan overtones of his edition of the Old English Historia Ecclesiastica. It then moves on to consider the constitutionalist Roger Twysden's depiction of early English laws as the cornerstone for English identity in his edition of Archaionomia and the Leges Henrici Primi; and the royalist and Laudian bent of both William Somner's chorographic work and his Dictionarium Saxonico-Latino-Anglicum, the first printed dictionary of Old English. It concludes by an exploration of the way in which William Dugdale deployed early medieval events to comment on his present day in his monumental county history, Antiquities of Warwickshire. The volume as a whole suggests that the crises through which these scholars lived and worked spurred their research to engage with both the past and present, using Old English texts as a lens through which to view understand and contribute to contemporary debates about the English church and state.

What makes English literature English ? This question inspires Stephen Harris's wide-ranging study of Old English literature. From Bede in the eighth century to Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth, Harris explores the intersections of race and literature before the rise of imagined communities. Harris examines possible configurations of communities, illustrating dominant literary metaphors of race from Old English to its nineteenth-century critical reception. Literary voices in the England of Bede understood the limits of community primarily as racial or tribal, in keeping with the perceived divine division of peoples after their languages, and the extension of Christianity to Bede's Germanic neighbours was effected in part through metaphors of family and race. Harris demonstrates how King Alfred adapted Bede in the ninth century; how both exerted an effect on Archbishop Wulfstan in the eleventh; and how Old English poetry speaks to images of race.