The Wisdom Of Exeter

This interdisciplinary volume collects original essays in literary criticism and literary theory, philology, codicology, metrics, and art history. Composed by prominent scholars in Anglo-Saxon studies, these essays honor the depth and breadth of Patrick W. Conner’s influence in our discipline. As a scholar, teacher, editor, administrator and innovator, Pat has contributed to Anglo-Saxon studies for four decades. It is hard to say which of his legacies is most profound.

An investigation of the non-human world in the Exeter Book riddles, drawing on the exciting new approaches of eco-criticism and eco-theology.

This book translates and comments on a selection of Old English poems that modern scholars identify as “wisdom” texts. These comprise collections of maxims, philosophical and cosmological speculation, and historical meditation. Composed by monastic authors from the ninth to the eleventh centuries, they mingle orthodox Christian beliefs with pre-Christian sensibilities embedded in the linguistic texture of Anglo-Saxon verse itself. Their preoccupation with how the human psyche responds to the challenges of incarnate life in space and time lends them a wide-ranging interest for students of medieval religion, social history, and psychology. Many are superb poems in their own right, whose quality the translations here serve to communicate to modern readers. The book’s commentaries engage sympathetically with patterns of thought and imagination both remote from us in time and yet strangely familiar.

This book introduces lexomics, the use of computer-aided statistical analysis of vocabulary, to measure influence and integrate research from cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology with traditional, philological approaches to literature. Connecting the theory of tradition with the phenomenon of influence, Drout moves beyond current theories.

1) This is the first monograph systematically to apply modern principles of ecotheology to early medieval literature and religious texts. 2) Whereas Dale (2017) provides ecocritical and ecotheological readings of the Exeter Book riddles alone, this monograph performs ecotheological readings of poems from multiple genres across the manuscript, and of the manuscript itself. 3. This book contributes to the field of pre-modern environmental humanities by considering the impact of medieval theology and environmental apocalypticism on some of the earliest examples of the English literary tradition

A groundbreaking study of pre-Conquest English poets that rethinks the social role of Anglo-Saxon verse.

Bibliography and guide to scholarly literature on the genre of Old English wisdom poetry. Wisdom literature played a crucial role in the evolution of traditional societies, contributing to the structure of society and to the acceptance of new ideas within a culture, a function that has become increasingly understood. Old English wisdom literature is the focus of this volume, which offers an bibliography of the scholarly criticism between 1800 and 1990 of a group of largely secular poems comprising the metrical Charms, The Fortunes of Men, The Gifts of Men, Homiletic Fragments I and II, Maxims I and II, The Order of the World, Precepts, the metrical Proverbs, the Riddles of the Exeter Book, the Rune Poem, Solomon and Saturn, and Vainglory. A General Introduction investigates debates between scholars and establishes overall trends; it is followed by the bibliography proper, divided into chapters, each with its own introduction, focusing on a major text or collection of texts, with entries arranged chronologically. Dr RUSSELL POOLEteaches in the School of English and Media Studies at Massey University, New Zealand.