Priests And Their Books In Late Anglo Saxon England

Fresh perspectives on the English clergy, their books, and the wider Anglo-Saxon church.

In tenth- and eleventh-century England, Anglo-Saxon Christians retained an old folk belief in elves as extremely dangerous creatures capable of harming unwary humans. To ward off the afflictions caused by these invisible beings, Christian priests modified traditional elf charms by adding liturgical chants to herbal remedies. In Popular Religion in Late Saxon England, Karen Jolly traces this cultural intermingling of Christian liturgy and indigenous Germanic customs and argues that elf charms and similar practices represent the successful Christianization of native folklore. Jolly describes a dual process of conversion in which Anglo-Saxon culture became Christianized but at the same time left its own distinct imprint on Christianity. Illuminating the creative aspects of this dynamic relationship, she identifies liturgical folk medicine as a middle ground between popular and elite, pagan and Christian, magic and miracle. Her analysis, drawing on the model of popular religion to redefine folklore and magic, reveals the richness and diversity of late Saxon Christianity.

The role of pastoral care reconsidered in the context of major changes within the Anglo-Saxon church. The tenth and eleventh centuries saw a number of very significant developments in the history of the English Church, perhaps the most important being the proliferation of local churches, which were to be the basis of the modern parochial system. Using evidence from homilies, canon law, saints' lives, and liturgical and penitential sources, the articles collected in this volume focus on the ways in which such developments were reflected in pastoral care, considering what it consisted of at this time, how it was provided and by whom. Starting with an investigation of the secular clergy, their recruitment and patronage, the papers move on to examine a variety of aspects of late Anglo-Saxon pastoral care, including church due payments, preaching, baptism, penance, confession, visitation of the sick and archaeological evidence of burial practice. Special attention is paid to the few surviving manuscripts which are likely to have been used in the field and the evidence they provide for the context, the actions and the verbal exchanges which characterised pastoral provisions.

New edition with facing-page translation of a highly significant and influential Old English text.

"The Blickling Homilies, which date from the end of the tenth century, are one of the earliest extant collections of English vernacular homiletic writings. The homiletic texts survive in a composite codex consisting of Municipal Entries for the Council of Lincoln (fourteenth to seventeenth century), a Calendar (mid-fifteenth century), Gospel Oaths (early fourteenth century) and the eighteen homiletic texts that are based on the annual liturgical cycle. The Blickling Homilies are an important literary milestone in the early evolution of English prose." "The manuscript, in the William H. Scheide collection which is housed in Princeton University Library (MS. 71, s.x/xi), was edited in facsimile by Rudolph Willard and published as Volume 10 of Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile (Copenhagen, 1960). The previous edition of The Blickling Homilies is by Richard Morris, published as three volumes in 1874, 1876 and 1880 (reprinted as one volume in 1967) by the Early English Texts Society (London), though individual items from the collection have also been published in readers and anthologies." "This new edition makes certain corrections to Morris's editing of the manuscript and the translations are modernized and made more exact. It also formats both the original text and facing-page translation into paragraphs based on the considered opinion of the editor, which makes it easier to comprehend the flow of the prose. Finally, the text and translation are accompanied with a general introduction, textual notes, tables and charts, select bibliography and index."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Anglo-Saxon authorities often punished lawbreakers with harsh corporal penalties, such as execution, mutilation and imprisonment. Despite their severity, however, these penalties were not arbitrary exercises of power. Rather, they were informed by nuanced philosophies of punishment which sought to resolve conflict, keep the peace and enforce Christian morality. The ten essays in this volume engage legal, literary, historical, and archaeological evidence to investigate the role of punishment in Anglo-Saxon society. Three dominant themes emerge in the collection. First is the shift from a culture of retributive feud to a system of top-down punishment, in which penalties were imposed by an authority figure responsible for keeping the peace. Second is the use of spectacular punishment to enhance royal standing, as Anglo-Saxon kings sought to centralize and legitimize their power. Third is the intersection of secular punishment and penitential practice, as Christian authorities tempered penalties for material crime with concern for the souls of the condemned. Together, these studies demonstrate that in Anglo-Saxon England, capital and corporal punishments were considered necessary, legitimate, and righteous methods of social control. Jay Paul Gates is Assistant Professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in The City University of New York; Nicole Marafioti is Assistant Professor of History and co-director of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Contributors: Valerie Allen, Jo Buckberry, Daniela Fruscione, Jay Paul Gates, Stefan Jurasinski, Nicole Marafioti, Daniel O'Gorman, Lisi Oliver, Andrew Rabin, Daniel Thomas.

Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon England explores English legal culture and practice across the Anglo-Saxon period, beginning with the essentially pre-Christian laws enshrined in writing by King AEthelberht of Kent in c. 600 and working forward to the Norman Conquest of 1066. It attempts to escape the traditional retrospective assumptions of legal history, focused on the late twelfth-century Common Law, and to establish a new interpretative framework for the subject, more sensitive to contemporary cultural assumptions and practical realities. The focus of the volume is on the maintenance of order: what constituted good order; what forms of wrongdoing were threatening to it; what roles kings, lords, communities, and individuals were expected to play in maintaining it; and how that worked in practice. Its core argument is that the Anglo-Saxons had a coherent, stable, and enduring legal order that lacks modern analogies: it was neither state-like nor stateless, and needs to be understood on its own terms rather than as a variant or hybrid of these models. Tom Lambert elucidates a distinctively early medieval understanding of the tension between the interests of individuals and communities, and a vision of how that tension ought to be managed that, strikingly, treats strongly libertarian and communitarian features as complementary. Potentially violent, honour-focused feuding was an integral aspect of legitimate legal practice throughout the period, but so too was fearsome punishment for forms of wrongdoing judged socially threatening. Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon England charts the development of kings' involvement in law, in terms both of their authority to legislate and their ability to influence local practice, presenting a picture of increasingly ambitious and effective royal legal innovation that relied more on the cooperation of local communal assemblies than kings' sparse and patchy network of administrative officials.

Winner of the Best First Monograph from the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England (ISSEME) 2021. An examination of the Old English medical collections, arguing that these texts are products of a learned intellectual culture.

Pastoral Care, or The Book of the Pastoral Rule, is a treatise on the responsibilities of the clergy written by Pope Gregory I in which he contrasted the role of bishops as pastors of their flock with their position as nobles of the church: the definitive statement of the nature of the episcopal office. Gregory enjoined parish priests to possess strict personal, intellectual and moral standards which were considered, in certain quarters, to be unrealistic and beyond ordinary capacities. The influence of the book, however, was vast and became one of the most influential works on the topic ever written. It was translated and distributed to every bishop within the Byzantine Empire.