This new critical edition responds to the enormous range of critical views that the poem has excited: the introduction is, accordingly, substantial, and includes sections on language, prosody, style, and narrative, as well as a new and full consideration of the reliability of the sole surviving transcript. There is a detailed liberary commentary and a full glossary.
Ælfric’s Preface to Genesis: commentary, with text, translation, sources and analogues and parallel passages in Ælfric’s works
January 2024
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Journal article
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SELIM. Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature
Ælfric’s <i>Preface to Genesis</i> is the first English preface to the first English translation of Genesis. That alone is sufficient to establish its great literary significance. But, beyond that, it also contains the first attested expression in English of an argument about the vernacular translation of the Bible which was to resonate for hundreds of years to come. It is couched as a letter from the author, a Benedictine monk, replying to his secular aristocratic patron Æthelweard’s request for the translation. Ælfric cogently expresses orthodox Christian opposition to such translation: the Bible’s meaning is too difficult for the laity and the Church must interpret it for them. Æthelweard’s wish for there to be an English translation of Genesis represents the wish of the laity to read for themselves the book which encapsulated their religion. The opposition of Catholic and Protestant views, respectively, in the early modern period is strikingly similar. Paradoxically, then, this first translation is headed by a preface which argues against its existence. Anxiety accordingly saturates its every syllable and the author marshals every authority to defend his case and himself. Its recipient, Æthelweard, is silent, but victorious. The following commentary is an attempt to unravel the twists and turns of the author’s complex arguments.
Old English, Genesis, translation, theology, patristics, sources
Some corrections to Alan Bliss’s indices to the metre of Beowulf, together with his last known views on the metre of the poem
September 2022
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Chapter
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Tradition and Innovation in Old English Metre
SBTMR
The Battle of Maldon and the vengeance of Offa
September 2022
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Chapter
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Tradition and Innovation in Old English Metre
SBTMR
Extra alliteration on stressed syllables in Old English poetry: types, uses and evolution
December 2018
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Journal article
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Anglo-Saxon England
Bigamy and the Bible in Ælfric’s ‘Preface to Genesis’
July 2017
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Journal article
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Notes and Queries
The Battle of Maldon : the Guile of the Vikings explained
March 2016
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Journal article
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Notes and Queries
SBTMR
Alliterating Finite Verbs and the Origin of Rank in Old English Poetry
January 2016
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Chapter
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Old English Philology: Studies in Honour of R.D. Fulk
Reading Chaucer in New College, Oxford, in the 1630s: the commendatory verses to Francis Kynaston's Amorum Troili et Creseidae
January 2016
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Journal article
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Medium Aevum
<p style="text-align:justify;"> The Latin translation of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde by Sir Francis Kynaston or Kinaston, published in part in 1635 as Amorum Troili et Creseidæ libri duo priores Anglico-Latini (‘The two first books of the Loves of Troilus and Criseyde, in English and Latin’), has long been acknowledged as a particularly sensitive and detailed example of the seventeenth century’s scholarly engagement with Middle English poetry. Kynaston’s work was published not in London, as we might expect, but in Oxford, by the printer to the university, John Lichfield, and the fifteen commendatory poems that appear in the volume offer a multitude of perspectives not only on Kynaston’s project, but also on Chaucer and his writings. Among the authors of these prefatory verses there is a peculiar dominance of fellows of New College, and the detailed knowledge of Chaucer’s works that they reveal gives a suggestive insight into how groups of Oxford scholars engaged with Kynaston’s activities as a translator through their own reading of Chaucer. In this article we investigate these commendatory verses, a narrow but rich seam of evidence for a variety of attitudes to Chaucer in the seventeenth century that occupy an unusual position in the history of Chaucer’s reception. Taken as a whole, we argue, the poems suggest a peculiar concentration of Chaucerian enthusiasm in New College, Oxford in the period. </p>
SBTMR
READING CHAUCER IN NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD, IN THE 1630s: THE COMMENDATORY VERSES TO FRANCIS KYNASTON'S "AMORUM TROILI ET CRESEIDÆ"
January 2016
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Journal article
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Medium Ævum
43 History, Heritage and Archaeology, 47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4303 Historical Studies, 4705 Literary Studies, Generic health relevance
Old English poetic diction not in Old English verse or prose – and the curious case of Aldhelm's five athletes
December 2014
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Journal article
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Anglo-Saxon England
47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4705 Literary Studies
On the Lexical Property termed "Rank" in Old English Poetry and its Later Developments
January 2013
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Journal article
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Anglo-Saxon England
The Register of Divine Speech in Genesis A
January 2012
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Journal article
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Anglo-Saxon England
A Possible Use of Pliny's Historia naturalis in the Old English Rune Poem
March 2010
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Journal article
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Notes and Queries
47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4705 Literary Studies
A Possible Use of Pliny’s Historia Naturalis in the Old English Rune Poem
January 2010
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Journal article
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Notes and Queries
From Prose to Verse
January 2009
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Chapter
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The Old English Boethius: An Edition of the Old English Versions of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae , Vol 1
Prosody
January 2009
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Chapter
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The Old English Boethius: An Edition of the Old English Versions of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae , Vol 1
The Composition of the Metres
January 2009
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Chapter
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The Old English Boethius: An Edition of the Old English Versions of Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophiae
This new edition is the first to present the second prose-and-verse version of the Old English text, and allows it to be read alongside the original prose version, for which this is the first edition for over a century, and the introduction ...