Editor: Clare A. Lees
Publisher:  Cambridge University Press – 789 pages
Book Review by: Sonu Chandiram

This book explores the earliest writings in Britain and Ireland from the end of the Roman Empire (around 480 AD) to the mid-twelfth century, spanning 670 years. This work:

  • Begins with an examination of writing itself, as well as the scripts and manuscript art.
  • Continues with scrutinizing the earliest texts found in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, and the depth and breadth of Anglo-Latin literature
  • Goes on with discussing English learning and literature in the ninth century
  • Moves forward with the later formation of English poetry and prose that convey the profound cultural confidence of the period
  • Includes the discussion of essential texts such as Beowulf (written somewhere between 975 and 1025) and the writings of Bede such as Ecclesiastical History of the English People (written around 731 AD)
  • Conveys the vitality of early medieval literary culture with a range of topics as broad as devotional and liturgical writing, history of women’s writing, literature of English law, and workings of science.

Twenty-eight people – most of them professors at universities in Canada, all over in the United Kingdom and around the United States, contributed content mainly by authoring the chapters of this book. To provide you a broad overview of the contents of this book, we list below the titles of its three Parts and the 26 chapters within them:

  1. Part I – Word, Script, Image
  2. Writing in Britain and Ireland, circa 480 to 800
  3. The art of writing scripts and scribal production
  4. Art and writing: voice, image, object
  5. Of Bede’s ‘five languages and four nations’: the earliest writing from Ireland, Scotland, and Wales
  6. Insular Latin literature to 900
  7. Bede and the northern kingdoms
  8. Part II – Early English Literature
  9. Across borders: Anglo-Saxon England and the Germanic world
  10. English literature in the ninth century
  11. The writing of history in the early Middle Ages
  12. The literary languages of Old English: words, styles, voices
  13. Old English poetic form: genre, style, prosody
  14. Beowuf: a poem in our time
  15. Old English lyrics: a poetics of experience
  16. Literature in pieces: female sanctity and the relics of early women’s writing
  17. Saintly lives: friendship, kinship, gender and sexuality
  18. Sacred history and old English religious poetry
  19. Performing Christianity: liturgical and devotional writing
  20. Riddles, wonder and responsiveness in Anglo-Saxon literature
  21. Part III – Latin Learning and the Latin Vernaculars
  22. In measure, and number, and weight: writing science
  23. Legal documentation and the practice of English law
  24. Latinities, 893-1143
  25. The authority of English, 900-1150
  26. Crossing the language divide: Anglo-Scandinavian language and literature
  27. European literature and eleventh-century England
  28. Gaelic literature in Ireland and Scotland, 900-1150
  29. Writing in Welsh to 1150: (re) creating the past, shaping the future

This work examines not only literature, but even writing itself from almost when men (and women) began to write through drawings. In a sense, this volume on the earliest English literature is not just a history, but partly, an archaeological study.

Look at the list of 16 illustrations on page X. For example, if you look at the first of these illustrations on page 32, you will find an image of a drawing on a slate. On one side of this slate is the Latin phrase adeptus sanctum premium – these are words from the seventh-century Hiberno-Latin hymn in the Antiphonary of Bangor.

On page 34 is a shown a copy of a large document (about 22 x 13 inches) from the Vulgate bible found in Wearmouth-Jarrow circa 690-700. This text is none other than GenesisI:I-23

There is much, much more that is of value in this Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature, and I urge readers to get this book for themselves.

 

Editor:

Clare A. Lees is Professor of Medieval Literature and History of Language at Kings College London, where she currently directs the Center for Late Antique and Medieval Studies.

She is known for her work on the earliest English literature, gender and the history of women’s writing, religious writing, and cultural studies, including issues of place and landscape, relations between textual and material culture, and reworking of Anglo-Saxon literature by writers of modern, contemporary literature.

She is the editor of Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages (1994) and co-editor of Gender in Debate from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (with Thelma Fenster, 2002) and A Place to Believe In: Locating Medieval Landscapes (with Gillian R. Overing, 2006). She is the author of Tradition and Belief: Religious Writing in Late Anglo-Saxon England (1999) and co-author of Double Agents: Women and Clerical Culture in Anglo-Saxon England (with Gillian R. Overing (2001, 2009).