Religion And Literature In Western England 600 800

Describes the early conversion to Christianity of the pagan peoples of an area stretching from Stratford-upon-Avon to Offa's Dyke.

The Latin literature of Anglo-Saxon England remains poorly understood. No bibliography of the subject exists. No comprehensive and authoritative history of Anglo-Latin literature has ever been written. It is only in recent years, largely through the essays collected in the present volumes, that the outline and intrinsic interest of the field have been clarified. Indeed, until a comprehensive history of the period is written, these collected essays offer the only reliable guide to the subject. The essays in the first volume are concerned with the earliest period of literary activity in England. Following a general essay which surveys the field as a whole, the essays range from the arrival of Theodore and Hadrian, through Aldhelm and Bede, to Aediluulf.

In this book, the author makes use of the methodology he developed in Origins of Arthurian Romances (McFarland 2012) in order to reevaluate the post-Roman history of Britain. He begins by delving into the historical contexts of the key traditional players of the fifth century--Hengest and Gwrtheyrn. A better understanding of these two characters allows for a reexamination of the persons and events of the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries. The text that follows entirely realigns how those centuries can be seen from a chronological as well as a military and political standpoint. The fifth century was not a time of British and Germanic fragmentation as they separated from Rome, but one of slow integration and the formation of kingships that were a result of the economic realities of surviving without the dying giant.

Considers many facets of the medieval church, dealing with institutions, buildings, personalities and literature. The text explores the origins of the diocese and the parish, the history of the See of Hereford and of York Minster. It discusses the arrival of the archdeacon, the Normans as cathedral builders and the kings of England and Scotland as monastic patrons. The studies of monastic life deal with the European question of monastic vocation and with St Bernard's part in the sensational expansion of the early 12th century. An epilogue takes us to the 14th century, contrasting Chaucer's parson with an actual Norfolk rector.

Published in 1994: The period surveyed in this anthology extends from the eve of Christianity's triumph, in the third century, to the new age of expansion in the fifteenth century, an age marked by the advent of printing pressed, the European discovery of the Caribbean islands, which Columbus called the Indies, the relentless stripping of medieval altars by Church reformists, and perhaps a diminution of female autonomy.

In the early Middle Ages, the conversion of the early English kingdoms acted as a catalyst for significant social and cultural change. One of the most visible of these changes was the introduction of a new type of household: the monastic household. These reproduced through education and training, rather than biological means; their inhabitants practised celibacy as a lifelong state, rather than as a stage in the life course. Because monastic households depended on secular households to produce the next generation of recruits, previous studies have tended to view them as more mutable than their secular counterparts, which are implicitly regarded as natural and ahistorical. Katharine Sykes charts some of the significant changes to the structure of households between the seventh to eleventh centuries, as ideas of spiritual, non-biological reproduction first fostered in monastic households were adopted in royal households in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and as ideas about kinship that were generated in secular households, such as the relationship between genealogy and inheritance, were picked up and applied by their monastic counterparts. In place of binary divisions between secular and monastic, biological and spiritual, real and imagined, Sykes demonstrates that different forms of kinship and reproduction in this period were intimately linked.

Winner of the Best First Monograph from the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England (ISSEME) 2021. An examination of the Old English medical collections, arguing that these texts are products of a learned intellectual culture.

The Britain of 600-800 AD was populated by four distinct peoples; the British, Picts, Irish and Anglo-Saxons. They spoke 3 different languages, Gaelic, Brittonic and Old English, and lived in a diverse cultural environment. In 600 the British and the Irish were already Christians. In contrast the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons and Picts occurred somewhat later, at the end of the 6th and during the 7th century. Religion was one of the ways through which cultural difference was expressed, and the rulers of different areas of Britain dictated the nature of the dominant religion in areas under their control. This book uses the Conversion and the Christianisation of the different peoples of Britainas a framework through which to explore the workings of their political systems and the structures of their society. Because Christianity adapted to and affected the existing religious beliefs and social norms wherever it was introduced, it’s the perfect medium through which to study various aspects of society that are difficult to study by any other means.