Bishop Aethelwold

Æthelwold was a major figure in the ecclesiastical and political life of 10th-century England. This much-need appraisal of his life and work views him as monastic reformer, scholar and teacher.

An exploration of how Æthelwold and those he influenced deployed the promotion of saints to implement religious reform.

Explores in detail one of the great works of medieval art, the sumptuously illustrated Benedictional commissioned by the powerful Anglo-Saxon bishop, AEthelwold of Winchester (936-84)

Valuable new insights into the multi-layered and multi-directional relationship of law, literature, and social regulation in pre-Conquest English society. Pre-Conquest English law was among the most sophisticated in early medieval Europe. Composed largely in the vernacular, it played a crucial role in the evolution of early English identity and exercised a formative influence on the development of the Common Law. However, recent scholarship has also revealed the significant influence of these legal documents and ideas on other cultural domains, both modern and pre-modern. This collection explores the richness of pre-Conquest legal writing by looking beyond its traditional codified form. Drawing on methodologies ranging from traditional philology to legal and literary theory, and from a diverse selection of contributors offering a broad spectrum of disciplines, specialities and perspectives, the essays examine the intersection between traditional juridical texts - from law codes and charters to treatises and religious regulation - and a wide range of literary genres, including hagiography and heroic poetry. In doing so, they demonstrate that the boundary that has traditionally separated "law" from other modes of thought and writing is far more porous than hitherto realized. Overall, the volume yields valuable new insights into the multi-layered and multi-directional relationship of law, literature, and social regulation in pre-Conquest English society.

In the period following the collapse of the Carolingian Empire up to the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), the episcopate everywhere in Europe experienced substantial and important change, brought about by a variety of factors: the pressures of ecclesiastical reform; the devolution and recovery of royal authority; the growth of papal involvement in regional matters and in diocesan administration; the emergence of the "crowd" onto the European stage around 1000 and the proliferation of autonomous municipal governments; the explosion of new devotional and religious energies; the expansion of Christendom's borders; and the proliferation of new monastic orders and new forms of religious life, among other changes. This socio-political, religious, economic, and cultural ferment challenged bishops, often in unaccustomed ways. How did the medieval bishop, unquestionably one of the most powerful figures of the Middle Ages, respond to these and other historical changes? Somewhat surprisingly, this question has seldom been answered from the bishop's perspective. This volume of interdisciplinary studies, drawn from literary scholarship, art history, canon law, and history, seeks to break scholarship of the medieval episcopacy free from the ideological stasis imposed by the study of church reform and episcopal lordship. The editors and contributors propose less a conventional socio-political reading of the episcopate and more of a cultural reading of bishops that is particularly concerned with issues such as episcopal (self-)representation, conceptualization of office and authority, cultural production (images, texts, material objects, space) and ecclesiology/ideology. They contend that ideas about episcopal office and conduct were conditioned by and contingent upon time, place and pastoral constituency. What made a "good" bishop in one time and place may not have sufficed for another time and place and imposing the absolute standards of prescriptive ideologies, medieval and modern, obfuscates rather than clarifies our understanding of the medieval bishop and his world.

This book enables rapid access to the events recorded in any one year in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle which was created in the late ninth century. Multiple copies were made and sent to monasteries in England where they were then independently updated, amended and copied, at times resulting in considerable variation in content. Today some nine manuscripts survive in whole or in part to make up what is known as the “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle”. It covers the period BC 60 to AD 1154 recording events, people and places, the governance of England including taxation, foreign affairs, natural events relating to famines, farming, climate, eclipses of the sun and moon, and the arrival of comets. Some entries include commentaries by the scribe. The author provides a narrative in chronological order of the information provided by the extant manuscripts using as his principal source “The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle”, translated by G N Garmonsway. He further develops and abridges the Garmonsway version to produce one continuous text. Unique to Guy Points’ presentation is the device of using different print font types in the text to identify each of the source manuscripts. The font index is supplied at the foot of every single page of the narrative. Thus, the year, content and origin can be instantly correlated by eye. This eliminates time-consuming and potentially confusing cross-referencing by paragraph, page and year. Only new and additional information provided in the different manuscripts is added. Where manuscripts disagree over date attribution this is indicated. Some entries have additional information inserted by the author to help identify more precisely some of the individuals, events and geographical locations named. Overall, the condensed narrative and unique methodology of presentation make the wealth of material in the several manuscripts more easily accessible to everyone.

First printed edition, with facsimile and studies, of a significant manuscript from medieval England.

Æthelwold of Winchester is among the most famous Anglo-Saxon saints. During his lifetime he was the Bishop of Winchester and stood as one of the leaders of the tenth-century monastic reform movement with the English church, along with his peers, St. Dunstan and St. Oswald of Worcester. He remains as one of the major figure of the Anglo-Catholic Church and Church of England. St. Aethelwold also stands as one of the primary catalyst for the revival of the English intellectual tradition, which had been in a state of perennial disrepair during the chaos of the Viking era, but was fully restored under royal patronage through the assistance of St. Aethelwold.