Dr%20Helen%20Appleton: List of publications

The Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi, sometimes known as the Cotton map or Cottoniana, is found on folio 56v of London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B.v, which dates from the first half of the eleventh century. This unique survivor from the period presents a detailed image of the inhabited world, centred on the Mediterranean. The map’s distinctive cartography, with its emphasis on islands, seas and urban spaces reflects a particularly Anglo-Saxon geographic imagination. As Evelyn Edson has observed, the mappa mundi appears to be copy of an earlier, larger map. This article argues that the mappa mundi’s focus on urban space, translatio imperii and Scandinavia is reminiscent of the Old English Orosius, and that it originates from a similar milieu. The mappa mundi’s northern perspective, together with its obvious dependence on and emulation of Carolingian cartography, suggest that its lost exemplar originated in the assertive England of the earlier tenth century.

The opening section of the Old English poem The Phoenix derives from a fourth-century Latin poem, Carmen de ave phoenice, which is usually attributed to Lactantius. It is well known that The Phoenix Christianises and substantially enlarges upon descriptive details derived from its Latin source, but little detailed work has been done on how this actually takes place. The poet of The Phoenix’s expansions have been dismissed as prolix, yet when examined in light of similar passages elsewhere in the corpus of Old English literature, these additions can be seen to introduce images of particular resonance. This essay will focus on the landscape of the poem’s opening to argue for the Anglo-Saxon poet’s introduction of a distinctively insular spatial imaginaire to the setting inherited from the Latin source material. This insular imaginaire is in keeping with general trends in Anglo-Saxon literary culture, and ensures the resonance of The Phoenix’s resurrection allegory with its Anglo-Saxon audience.

A late twelfth-century manuscript that once belonged to the Abbey at Sawley in Yorkshire, but was produced in Durham, contains a collection of texts focused on the history of princes, bishops, and abbots. The manuscript is now divided in two as Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS, 66 and Cambridge, University Library MS, Ff.I.27. The manuscript is an important record of Anglo-Saxon verse as it preserves the only surviving copy of the late Old English poem Durham, a short piece in praise of the resting place of Cuthbert. It is also the only manuscript with a northern provenance to contain Æthelwulf’s De abbatibus, a ninth-century Latin poem on a cell of Lindisfarne. The poems are found in the final part of the manuscript, which focuses on northern England, and the city of Durham in particular. De abbatibus and its associated miscellanea precede a section containing Symeon of Durham’s Libellus de exordio atque procursu istius, hoc est dunhelmensis, ecclesie and the Anonymous Historia de sancto Cuthberto; the section concludes with the Old English poem Durham. The two Anglo-Saxon poems, composed more than two centuries apart, share an interest in the saints and holy men of Northumbria. Together with their associated miscellanea they are employed in the manuscript to aid Symeon’s work in demonstrating the pre-eminence of the Durham community and their patron saint, Cuthbert.

The Old English Durham is a short poem in praise of the final resting place of Saint Cuthbert, the great seventh-century Anglo-Saxon hermit saint. The present essay argues that the poem asserts the primacy of Durham as cult centre, over the previous centres of Lindisfarne and Chester-le-Street, by depicting the city as a space exceptionally suited to Cuthbert and blessed by his presence. The Durham poet presents a selective and idealized description of the city of Durham that uses a hybrid of natural and built space to echo the representation of Cuthbert’s homes on Farne and Lindisfarne in the hagiographic tradition. The result is a fusion of the eremitic space of the hermitage and the coenobitic space of the monastery, both types of the City of God, which creates a sense of continuity from the spaces that Cuthbert occupied in life and demonstrates the fitness of Durham Cathedral as a resting place for the saint.