Author: Patrick P. O’Neill Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674504755 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 744
Book Description
The Latin psalms—translated into Old English—figured prominently in the lives of Anglo-Saxons, whether sung by clerics, studied as a textbook for language learning, or recited in private devotion by lay people. The complete text of all 150 prose and verse psalms is available here in contemporary English for the first time.
Author: M. J. Toswell Publisher: Brepols Publishers ISBN: 9782503545486 Category : Anglo-Saxons Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
The psalms are at the heart of Christian devotion, in the Middle Ages and still today. Learned early and sung weekly by every medieval monastic and cleric, the psalms were the language Christ and his ancestor David used to speak to God. Powerful and plaintive, angry and anguished, laudatory and lamenting: the psalms expressed the feelings and thoughts of the individuals who devised them and those who sang them privately or publicly in Anglo-Saxon England many generations later. Psalters from Anglo-Saxon England are the largest surviving single group of manuscripts, and also form a very significant percentage of the fragments of manuscripts extant from the period. Psalters were central to the liturgy, particularly for the daily Office, and were the first schoolbooks for the learning of Latin and Christian doctrine. Moreover, from Anglo-Saxon England comes the earliest complex of vernacular psalter material, including glossed and bilingual psalters, complete psalter translations, and poems based on individual psalms and on psalmic structures. The lament psalms are remarkably similar to the Old English elegies in both form and imagery, and the freedom with which vernacular adaptors of the psalms went about their work in Anglo-Saxon England suggests an appropriation of the psalter not as the sacred and unchanging Word but as words that could be turned to use for meditation, study, reading, and private prayer. Worth investigation are both individual figures who used the psalms such as Bede, Alfred, and Aelfric, and also the unknown compilers and scribes who developed new layouts for psalter manuscripts and repurposed earlier or Continental manuscripts for use in Anglo-Saxon England. In Latin and in the vernacular, these codices were central to Anglo-Saxon spirituality, while some of them also continued to be used well into the later Middle Ages.
Author: Tamara Atkin Publisher: Boydell & Brewer ISBN: 1843844354 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 364
Book Description
An examination of how The Book of Psalms shaped medieval thought and helped develop the medieval English literary canon. The Book of Psalms had a profound impact on English literature from the Anglo-Saxon to the late medieval period. This collection examines the various ways in which they shaped medieval English thought and contributed to the emergence of an English literary canon. It brings into dialogue experts on both Old and Middle English literature, thus breaking down the traditional disciplinary binaries of both pre- and post-Conquest English and late medieval and Early Modern, as well as emphasizing the complex and fascinating relationship between Latin and the vernacular languages of England. Its three main themes, translation, adaptation and voice, enable a rich variety of perspectives on the Psalms and medieval English literature to emerge. TAMARA ATKIN is Senior Lecturer in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Literature at Queen Mary University of London; FRANCIS LENEGHAN is Associate Professor of OldEnglish at The University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford Contributors: Daniel Anlezark, Mark Faulkner, Vincent Gillespie, Michael P. Kuczynski, David Lawton, Francis Leneghan, Jane Roberts, Mike Rodman Jones, Elizabeth Solopova, Lynn Staley, Annie Sutherland, Jane Toswell, Katherine Zieman.
Author: Jane Geddes Publisher: ISBN: Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 144
Book Description
The St Albans Psalter, made in the 1130s, is one of the great monuments of English Romanesque painting and has survived the disasters of religious upheaval and war in pristine condition. The sequence of forty full-page miniatures illustrating the Life of Christ establishes their artist, the so-called Alexis Master, as one of the most influential painters in early twelfth-century England. It includes 215 initials illustrating the psalms in a vigorously literal way. Their inventiveness and charm belie the complex theological and personal messages which they convey. This new book by Dr. Jane Geddes is the first to reproduce so much of the psalter in color, but it also fully integrates the psalter's contents into the historical context of its probable patron, Abbot Geoffrey of St Albans and its recipient, the Anglo-Saxon hermitess Christina of Markyate. Using a record of Christina's life, written by a St Albans monk, the book examines in depth every aspect of the psalter, tying it in closely to the lives of Christina of Markyate and Abbot Geoffrey. Through her close analysis, Geddes provides a profound insight into female literacy, Anglo-Norman relations, the organization of England's premier scriptorium, monk-nun relations and the emerging Anglo-Norman language. This new book demonstrates the significance of the St Albans Psalter, which in social terms is as important as the Bayeux Tapestry, crystallising the artistic, spiritual and emotional integration of Anglo-Saxons and Normans.
Author: Alderik H. Blom Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG ISBN: 3110501864 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 338
Book Description
This study proposes a new view of glossing as a universal phenomenon. Starting from the Psalter, a centrepiece of devotion and education in early medieval Europe, it combines historical sociolinguistics, comparative philology, manuscript studies and cultural history in order to assess and compare the interface of Latin with Old Irish, Old English, Old Frisian, Old Saxon and Old High German within the context of its multilingual and textual culture. The close study of thirteen glossed manuscripts, such as the Anglo-Saxon Vespasian Psalter and the Old Irish Milan Glosses, reveals when and why scribes switched from Latin into the vernacular, how the vernacular was used in studying Latin, how glosses interact with construe marks and punctuation, and how such manuscripts were intended to be read in a period covering the seventh to the twelfth centuries and in an area stretching from Ireland to Central Europe. The book is an essential textbook for specialists in the growing field of glossing, and also reaches out to scholars of early medieval liturgy, education, palaeography and Christian literature.
Author: Patrick P. O’Neill
Author: Sherman McAllister Kuhn
Author: M. J. Toswell
Author: Tamara Atkin
Author: Michael Lapidge
Author: Alfred (King of England)
Author: Jane Geddes
Author: M. J. Toswell
Author: A. P. Campbell
Author: Alderik H. Blom