I The following papers were presented, many of which pertained to the general theme of the conference, word studies and lexicography

The publication of the first fascicule of the Toronto Dictionary of Old English bears witness to the fulfilment of many vows made at symposia in the past. One of these was to abandon the practice of Bosworth—Toller of providing entries with etymological information. To meet trie objections raised against this policy at the second DOE conference in 1970, Christopher Ball assured the audience that entries would contain etymological information only if it would be impossible to establish the meaning of a word otherwise. ‘Frivolous’ etymology, as Ball termed it, such as linking OE fōt to Latin pedem, would be omitted. The editors of DOE will have been confirmed in their attitude by the fact that in those years Dr Alfred Bammesberger announced a plan for a new etymological dictionary for Old English. Since then, besides numerous articles, he has published a volume of Beiträge Zu einem etymologischen Wörterbuch des Altenglischen. In the preface to this book, Bammesberger stresses that the preparation of such a new dictionary is a project which will not be completed in the immediate future. So, for the time being, the comparist will have to make do with BT and Ferdinand Holthausen's etymological dictionary of Old English. This seems an appropriate time, therefore, to focus our attention on that component of Holthausen's dictionary which concerns the closest relative of English, (Old) Frisian: not least because Holthausen himself devoted so much attention to it.

Recent research has established beyond question that, in the study of medicine at least, Anglo-Saxon England was far from being ‘a backwater in which superstition flourished until the mainstream of more rational and advanced Salernitan practices flowed into the country in late medieval times’. On the contrary, Anglo-Saxon medicine was at least at the same level as that of contemporary European schools. In ninth-century England the medical works inherited by ‘post-classical Latin medical literature (which included translations and epitomes of Greek and Byzantine medical authorities)’ were not only well known, but served as the basis for original reworking and compilation, as the example of the Læceboc shows. More important, it was in pre-Conquest England that, for the first time in Europe, medical treatises were either compiled in or translated into a vernacular language rather than being composed in Latin or Greek. Ancient medicine made substantial use of drugs obtained from plants; and therefore, since the sources of Anglo-Saxon medical lore were in Latin (or in Greek: but invariably known through the medium of Latin), it is not surprising that most medicinal herbs used in the preparation of Old English prescriptions were not indigenous to England or even to continental Germany. And since such medicinal herbs were not indigenous to northern Europe, it is evident that, in using them, speakers of vernacular languages were obliged to create a vocabulary appropriate to denote them.

Augustine, Jerome, Bede, Gregory, Smaragdus and Haymo, the exegetical authorities acknowledged by Ælfric in the Latin preface to the Catholic Homilies, frequently used etymologies as one of their techniques for penetrating the words of the biblical text in order to arrive at their spiritual essence. To the modern student of language their interpretations often seem arbitrary, even bizarre, but the idea that there was an intimate connection between the signifying name and the person, place or thing signified was well established within the scriptural canon and was extended and confirmed by the cumulative authority of the exegetes themselves. It was Isidore of Seville, in his Etymologies, who provided the most systematic definition of this tradition of etymologizing. As he explained it, it was a method for determining the true essence of the thing designated by the process of penetrating its appellation, since all things and all activities which were named ‘secundum naturam’ (as opposed to those arbitrarily named ‘secundum placitum’) were designated by those words which had etymologies enshrining the very quality or idea so designated. Given this definition, with its underlying philosophical and linguistic assumptions, it is easy to understand why etymologies were exploited in Christian exegesis and teaching. It was accepted that biblical names were in the category ‘secundum naturam’ since they were God-given or at least divinely sanctioned, and the rationale and method of their penetration had the advantage of harmonizing closely with the general interpretative process that was employed.

In 948 King Eadred of Wessex conducted a military campaign in Northumbria against Eric Blood-Axe. During the course of this campaign the minster church at Ripon – which had been founded by St Wilfrid and which housed his remains – was burnt down. This unfortunate incident was used as the pretext for a notorious furta sacra: the relics of St Wilfrid were seized and were duly conveyed to Archbishop Oda of Canterbury. In order to celebrate the acquisition of these distinguished relics, Oda built a new altar in honour of St Wilfrid and commissioned a member of his Canterbury household, one Frithegod, to compose a poem in honour of St Wilfrid. Frithegod responded by producing the Breuiloquium uitae Wilfridi, a poem of some 1,400 Latin hexameters which is closely based on the early eighth-century prose Vita S. Wilfridi by Stephanus or Stephen of Ripon. Since the poem bears in its closing lines a dedication to Archbishop Oda, it must have been finished before the archbishop's death on 2 June 958; in other words, it was written between 948 and 958.

The manuscripts which contain the Old English translation of the gospels have been little studied since Skeat's compendious editions of the last century, yet the interest and importance of these codices, no less than that of the texts they preserve, should not be underestimated. The vernacular translation of a biblical text stands as a monument to the confidence and competence of Anglo-Saxon monastic culture; the evidence of the surviving manuscripts can offer insights into the development and dissemination of this text. The following study examines two fragments from an otherwise lost manuscript of the West Saxon gospels, which are preserved as an endleaf and parchment reinforcements in the binding of a fourteenth-century Latin psalter now in the Beinecke Library at Yale University, Beinecke 578. I shall first discuss the psalter and its accompanying texts in the attempt to localize the manuscript and its binding. I shall then turn to the West Saxon gospel fragments; after presenting a description and, for the first time, a complete transcription, I shall attempt to locate this text in the context of other Anglo-Saxon gospel manuscripts.

A single leaf may be a valuable witness to an early manuscript that does not otherwise survive, even when it raises as many questions as it answers. Such is the case of the first fragment in a collection of some 217 leaves and fragments of medieval manuscripts owned by the University of Missouri and housed in the Rare Books Department of the Ellis Library on the Columbia, Missouri, campus. This collection, titled Fragmenta Manuscripta, derives largely from that assembled in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century by John Bagford (d. 1716), an eccentric shoemaker-turned-bookseller. Bagford was, however, not responsible for the first two leaves in the collection. They were added to the collection by the trustees of Archbishop Tenison's School in preparation for sale on 3 June 1861. The first fragment and the second, an Insular leaf of not later than tenth-century date containing grammatical excerpts, had both been removed from the binding of another volume owned by the Tenison Library. That manuscript, now London, British Library, Add. 24193, a continental codex containing the poems of Venantius Fortunatus with replacement quires supplied in two tenth-century English Caroline minuscule hands, has attracted the attention of Anglo-Saxon scholarship, but the early Insular binding fragments removed from it have remained largely unknown.

Old English poetry had its origins in the pagan continental past of the Anglo-Saxons. The development of an Old English literary prose is generally supposed to have taken place many centuries later in Christian England. According to a recent work by Michael Alexander, for instance.

Over a century ago Eduard Dietrich noted that Æfric, pupil of Bishop Æthelwold and educated at Winchester, consistently used certain words (e.g. ælfremed, (ge)gearcian, (ge)fredan) in preference to synonyms (e.g. fremde, (ge)gearwian, (ge)felan) commonly found in other writers. The small number of words given by Dietrich as characteristic of Æfric's usage has been increased as a result of some lexical studies of more recent date. Karl Jost, for example, notes, among several other peculiarities of his vocabulary, Æfric's exclusive use of behreowsian and behreowsung instead of their synonyms hreowsian and hreowsung. Hans Schabram's study of the Old English terminology for superbia shows that Ælfric's language displays a remarkable uniformity in the almost exclusive choice of modig and its derivatives. One of the results of Elmar Seebold's work on the Old English equivalents for sapiens and prudens is to show that Ælfric always employed snotor and snotornes to express the concepts ‘prudens’ and ‘prudentia’. Furthermore, in his study of the Old English vocabulary for corona, Josef Kirschner argues that Ælfric's almost exclusive use of wuldorbeag for corona in a figurative-religious sense (e.g. ‘corona vitae aeternae’, ‘corona martyrii’) suggests a deliberate attempt to standardize vocabulary.

Received scholarly opinion regards Genesis A as an Old English versification of the Latin text of Genesis in Jerome's Vulgate revision of the bible. This view has prevailed in modern editions of the poem, which normally print a critical text of the Vulgate Genesis in their apparatus. The textual basis of Genesis A is perhaps ‘vulgate’ in character in so far as the poem renders Genesis readings that were commonly known in Anglo-Saxon England, but the identification of this base text with that of the Hieronymian Vulgate remains an untested hypothesis. Ten years ago A. N. Doane printed a list of readings in the Old English text which show affinity with the ancient versions of Genesis that emerged before the completion of Jerome's translation, readings associted with the Vetus Latina or Old Latin bible. Doane did not, however, challenge the long-standing belief that Genesis A follows a single, lost exemplar that contained in all essentials the text established by Jerome. The present study attempts to survey, without any preconceptions, all the details in the poem that might derive from Latin sources; its intention is to make a first step towards the recovery of the Latin textual basis of Genesis A.

When J. R. R. Tolkein criticized the critics of Beowulf, it was because ‘Beowulf has been used as a quarry of fact and fancy far more assiduously than it has been studied as a work of art.’ The Old English medical documents have suffered from a similar treament in that critics have rarely dealt with them primarily as medical documents. So far as I know, none of them has been criticized primarily as a medical work, to the extent that its recipes and remedies have been evaluated for their usefulness as medical treatments. But they have been searched, discussed, emended and evaluated as sources for the study of paganism, magic, superstitions, Christianity and the influence of Christian and Latin culture on the primitive beliefs of the Teutonic peoples, and as indicators of the spread of Greek and Latin science among the Northern peoples. Yet they were all originally conceived, used and finally preserved in writing as medical documents. They deserve consideration for what they were intended to be.

More than half of the extant manuscripts from Anglo-Saxon England, both vernacular and Latin, contain Greek. How much Greek did the early English know? M. L. W. Laistner accepted only a handful of early authors, Bede among them, as ‘competent Hellenists’. Bernhard Bischoff, too, noted that among the numerous witnesses to Greek writing in the medieval West, only a few show knowledge of the language itself, and the majority in their corrupt state suggest just the opposite; moreover, he points out, their function is very often liturgical. By the same token, a recent survey of the rich Greek materials from Sankt Gallen makes the general observation that ‘few medievals possessed an ability to read Greek prose, an ability based on, at least, an acquaintance with the elementary principles of grammar’. For a number of years, I have been compiling a catalogue of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts containing Greek, and on the basis of what I have seen, these various assumptions – that much of the Greek was badly copied, that its vocabulary was largely ecclesiastical or liturgical, that such a vocabulary would necessarily repeat itself, yielding therefore perhaps no more than some 500 to 800 Greek words, and that knowledge of Greek grammer (declensions, inflexions and so forth) was minimal – need major modification. In what follows, I shall examine these various assumptions in turn.

There is no acknowledged corpus of Anglo-Saxon lawsuits. Scholars have had the benefit of Bigelow's Placita Anglo-Normannica for over a century, and this will soon be superseded by the definitive edition which has occupied Professor van Caenegem since 1952. But the nearest that Anglo-Saxonists have come to a counterpart is the set of thirty-five ‘Select Cases in Anglo-Saxon Law’ appended to the Essays in Anglo-Saxon Law, which four of Bigelow's fellow Bostonians published as a symbolic, if apparently unintended, celebration of America's origins in centennial 1876. The limitations of this admittedly useful exercise extend beyond the facts that three of its cases are not Anglo-Saxon at all, and that its editors were unable to distinguish between the Latin names for Dover and Canterbury. Since then, the selections of Harmer, Robertson and Whitelock have made many more texts generally available, but without isolating the procedural records from other ‘historical documents’. Mean-while, the English evidence was ignored in the impressive list which Hübner intended as the basis of Placita section in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica: that august institution has tracked Germanic footsteps across the Alps, the Rhine, the Pyrenees and even the Straits of Gibraltar, but it as seldom followed. the Anglo-Saxons across the North Sea.