Essays exploring the literary, material, scholarly and linguistic ties between the Continent and early medieval England.
‘Anglo-Saxons were tied to the Continent in many ways’, Rolf H. Bremmer Jr once observed. Throughout the early Middle Ages, a crucial phase for Anglo-Continental contact, cultural connections between the English and their neighbours across the North Sea developed in a number of forms, from missionary activities to political contacts, intellectual exchanges and military confrontations, with people, books, texts, artefacts and ideas travelling back and forth. The language and culture of the Anglo-Saxons became once again part of the scholarly exchange between England and the Continent during the early modern period, when philologists from either side of the North Sea laboured on the recovery of Old English and made new connections between Old English, the other Old Germanic languages, and more distant tongues.
This volume investigates these dynamic interactions between Anglo-Saxons and the Continent. Contributors break new ground in shared traditions in runic writing, legal ideas in England and Frisia, moments of transcultural and translingual contact, the influence of continental texts in early medieval England, the manuscripts which provide unique glimpses of the dissemination of texts and ideas, and early modern attempts to apply Old English to novel purposes. They thus form an appropriate tribute to the inspirational scholarship of Rolf H. Bremmer Jr in the field of Old English philology.
Table of Content
List of Figures and Tables
List of Contributors
List of Abbreviations
Old English Philology across the North Sea: Origins, Innovations and Connections –
Thijs Porck, Kees Dekker and László Sándor Chardonnens
I Parallels and Differences
1. The ‘Anglo-Frisian’ Runic Zone: From Context to Concept –
John Hines
2. The Evolution of Legal Reasoning in England and Frisia, 900-1300 –
Andrew Rabin
II Interactions
3. International Conversations: Multilingualism among Elite Anglo-Saxons and Normans –
Gale R. Owen-Crocker
4. Two Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Saxony: Ewald the Black and Ewald the White –
Concetta Giliberto
5. ‘Worse than Heathens!’: English Kings and Charlemagne in 786-96 –
Richard North
III Intellectual Influences
6. The Iconography of the
oculi mentis on the Fuller Brooch as a Visual Kenning –
Loredana Teresi
7. Consuming (in) the
Dialogi: Food and Gardens in Werferth’s Old English
Dialogues –
David F. Johnson
8. The Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts of Caesarius of Arles –
Thomas N. Hall
9. Criss-Crossing the Channel: Isidore, Aldhelm, Thomas and All That (Monstrous) Jazz –
Claudia Di Sciacca
IV Manuscript Connections
10.
Mæw or
Meg (‘Seagull’)? Mercian Dialect Features in an Early Old English Glossary from the Continent –
Annina Seiler
11. Riddling across the Channel: The Poems on Fols 1r and 35r-v of Brussels, KBR, ms. 1828-30 –
Patrizia Lendinara
12.
Quid Saxonica cum magia? Old English in an Early Modern Magic Manuscript –
László Sándor Chardonnens and Kees Dekker
Selected Publications on Old English Philology by Rolf H. Bremmer Jr
Tabula gratulatoria
Index
About the author
THIJS PORCK is senior lecturer of Medieval English at Leiden University.
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