This passage from The Wanderer demonstrates some of the rhetorical techniques which have been noted in Old English texts. Its most striking features are the rhetorical questions and the figure of anaphora which is produced by the repetition of ‘Hwær’. Another rhetorical element is the use of the theme (topos) of ubi sunt (‘where are…?’) to lament the loss of past joys. In classical antiquity, features such as these, which served to create effective discourse, were the products of ars rhetorica. This art was distinguished from the more basic subject of ars grammatica in that rhetoric, the ‘ars … bene dicendi’ (Quintilian, Institutio oratoria II.xvii.37), aimed at the good production of text (for oral delivery) with the aim of persuading the listeners to take or adopt some form of action or belief, whereas grammar, the ‘recte loquendi scientia’, was responsible for correct speech and also for the interpretation of poetical texts (‘poetarum enarratio’: Quintilian, Institutio oratoria I.iv.2). In terms of classical rhetoric, the above passage from The Wanderer could be analysed according to the three phases of the production of a text (partes artis) which pertain to both written and oral discourse: inventio (finding topics such as the ubi sunt), dispositio (arranging the parts of the text) and elocutio (embellishing the text stylistically, for example with rhetorical questions and other figures and tropes).

How and under what circumstances did the Anglo-Saxons acquire their knowledge of how to compose a text effectively?

The twelfth-century Textus Roffensis contains a collection of early English laws, of which the first is attributed to Æthelberht of Kent, who reigned c. 580–616. Although these laws remain to us only in a copy made some six centuries later, there are strong linguistic grounds, first proposed by Sievers and Liebermann, and recently elaborated on and expanded by myself, to assume that the text as we have it genuinely reflects a copy of an early original, albeit much changed by generations of scribal modernization. Yet problems of interpretation often arise, among them the difficulty in the definition of hapax legomena: words which occur in the corpus of Old English only in this text. One such term is contained in Æthelberht, ch. 12, which states: ‘Cyninges fedesl XX scillinga forgelde.’ This is presumably formulated along the lines of Æthelberht, ch. 8, which reads: ‘Cyninges mundbyrd L scillinga.’

There is basic agreement among scholars as to the meaning, if not the precise interpretation, of mundbyrd: most would agree with Bosworth's definition of ‘protection, patronage’. Along these lines, the clause can be interpreted as: ‘[For violating] the king's protection: 50 (of) shillings.’ Using this as a template, one might translate iEthelberht, ch. 12, as: ‘[For violating] the king's fedesl: let [the perpetrator pay] 20 (of) shillings.’

The story of how Domne Eafe acquired the land for her monastery at Thanet when her brothers were murdered by a councillor of her cousin, Ecgberht of Kent (664–73), is variously related in a number of Latin and Old English works. The full version (involving Domne Eafe's tame hind and the death of the councillor) is found in three Latin Lives. These are: a passio of the murdered princes attributed to Byrhtferth, which is the earliest recorded account of the foundation of Thanet, dated c. 1000, and written for the monks at Ramsey, who believed the relics translated to their monastery in 978 × 992 to be those of Domne Eafe's brothers; Goscelin's Vita S. Mildrethae, dated 1089 × 1099, and written for the monks at St Augustine's, Canterbury, who acquired the relics of Mildrith from Thanet in 1030; a passio of the murdered princes found in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 285, also from Ramsey, which was composed sometime between the mid-eleventh century and the early thirteenth.

Bede entered Wearmouth–Jarrow at the age of seven and thereafter, he tells us at the conclusion of his Historia ecclesiastica, spent all his life ‘applying myself entirely to the study of the Scriptures’. He goes on, ‘From the time I became a priest until the fifty-ninth year of my life I have made it my business, for my own benefit and that of my brothers, to make brief extracts from the works of the venerable fathers on the holy scriptures, or to add notes of my own to clarify their sense and interpretation.’ Bede's modest remarks preface an impressive list of his own works, which includes commentaries on Genesis, I Samuel, Kings, Proverbs, the Prophets, Mark, Luke, Acts and Revelation, and many other exegetical, didactic and historical volumes. Installed at Jarrow from about 679 until his death in 735, he contributed more than anyone to the intellectual distinction of early-eighth-century Northumbria. At the same time, the twin house of Wearmouth–Jarrow was winning lasting renown for the products of its scriptorium (or scriptoria). Not least among these were the three great Vulgate bible pandects which Abbot Ceolfrith caused to be made, an achievement celebrated by the chroniclers of the house, who included Bede himself. One of these pandects, which we know today as the Codex Amiatinus, was dispatched to St Peter's in Rome in 716, then spent more than 900 years at Monte Amiata in the Appenines, and is now in Florence (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Amiatino 1). The other two were for use in the Wearmouth and Jarrow churches. One of these has been lost without trace, but the second survived in the cathedral priory of Worcester until the sixteenth century, when an entrepreneurial Nottinghamshire family made use of some of its torn-out leaves as document wrappers. Twelve of these, with some fragments of a thirteenth, are now in the British Library under three different shelfmarks (Loan 81, Add. 37777 and Add. 45025).

Rhetoricians, orators, and public speakers of all stripes, if asked the question, which Greek or Roman deity they should invoke in case of need, would surely answer ‘Hermes’ or ‘Mercury’. Members of this profession who also read early Latin-Old English glossaries might therefore be surprised to learn that the deus oratorum was none other than Priapus! This came as good news to me as one who occasionally looks for novel ways to arouse an audience. However, as I reflected further on the meaning of Épinal Glossary 10v32, my expectations wilted. Oratorum must be a simple error for hortorum, ‘of gardens’. Priapus may be fecundus, but he is not facundus.

Without the anonymous Lindisfarne Vita S. Cuthberti, written less than two decades after the saint's death in 687, our knowledge of aspects of the Iona-Lindisfarne tradition in the early Northumbrian church and of Cuthbert's life and death would be even more limited than it is. Its medieval tradition is, however, very different from that of Bede's (prose) version of the Life, which, with its greater sense of literary form, composed in superior Latin, and with some additional or better evidence about its hero (although often omitting telling details), effectively drove the earlier work from its land of origin. The Lindisfarne vita's later, post-1100, manuscript testimonies are exclusively in a closely-related group of continental legendaries (passionals); and the one extant pre-1066 English copy was among the books gifted to Saint-Vaast, Arras, c. 1070, by the former abbot of Bath, Sæwold.

Aldhelm of Malmesbury's Prosa de virginitate (hereafter Pdv) can be called one of the most enduring works of Anglo-Saxon scholarship. Immensely influential in Aldhelm's lifetime, the text continued to be popular in England and on the Continent until Viking invasions put an end to native learning in the last half of the ninth century. Yet by the 920s interest in Aldhelm's prose treatise had revived, inaugurating a new movement in ‘hermeneutic’ Latin that lasted, in some centres, beyond the turn of the twelfth century. Fourteen English manuscripts of Pdv document the renewed interest in Aldhelm's work. Most of these manuscripts are heavily glossed, and, indeed, some preserve about 25,000 bilingual annotations ranging from single letters or symbols to entire paragraphs copied verbatim from Isidore's Etymologiae. The density of glossing is astounding, when contrasted with the length of Pdv, about 20,000 words.

Riddle 74 is one of a handful of Old English riddles of the Exeter Book that have stubbornly resisted a solution. As Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson remark, ‘scholars have suggested answers…but none satisfies all the conditions set forth in the poem’. Peter Clemoes finds the attributes that are ascribed to this particular riddle-subject to be ‘so paradoxical that it seems impossible to name their possessor at all’. Riddles normally do have answers, however, and this one is no exception. My first aim in this article is to offer an answer to Riddle 74 that will put debate to rest as to its intended solution.

This article explores some textual dimensions of what I argue is a crucial moment in the history of the Anglo-Saxon subject. For purposes of temporal triangulation, I would locate this moment between roughly 970 and 1035, though these dates function merely as crude, if potent, signposts: the years 970×973 mark the adoption of the Regularis concordia, the ecclesiastical agreement on the practice of a reformed (and markedly continental) monasticism, and 1035 marks the death of Cnut, the Danish king of England, whose laws encode a change in the understanding of the individual before the law. These dates bracket a rich and chaotic time in England: the apex of the project of reform, a flourishing monastic culture, efflorescence of both Latin and vernacular literatures, remarkable manuscript production, but also the renewal of the Viking wars that seemed at times to be signs of the apocalypse and that ultimately would put a Dane on the throne of England. These dates point to two powerful and continuing sets of interests in late Anglo-Saxon England, ecclesiastical and secular, monastic and royal, whose relationships were never simple. This exploration of the subject in Anglo-Saxon England as it is illuminated by the law draws on texts associated with each of these interests and argues their interconnection. Its point of departure will be the body – the way it is configured, regarded, regulated and read in late Anglo-Saxon England. It focuses in particular on the use to which the body is put in juridical discourse: both the increasing role of the body in schemes of inquiry and of punishment and the ways in which the body comes to be used to know and control the subject.

The great monument of tenth-century Anglo-Saxon monastic liturgy, the Regularis concordia, has been particularly fortunate in its twentieth-century devotees. The most prominent was Dom Thomas Symons, who published numerous learned articles on the text and, in 1953, an edition and translation that are still immensely valuable. More recently, Lucia Kornexl has re-edited the Concordia with its continuous Old English gloss from London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iii, and provided an exhaustive collation against the second Latin copy in London, British Library, Cotton Faustina B. iii. Building on this detailed editorial work, Kornexl's introductory chapters also suggest new and helpful ways of regarding the transmission of this text and the authority of its two extant manuscripts.

A notable addition to our knowledge of Anglo-Saxon manuscript fragments with Old English interlinear glosses has been made in a contribution by Professor Herbert Pilch of Freiburg to the recently-published Festschrift for Anatoly Liberman,1 and I hope to show that the leaf he describes and edits has deserved closer inspection.

A runic text that has, as far as I know, attracted little attention lurks at the bottom right-hand corner of Tabella III of part 3 of Hickes's Thesaurus. It has thirteen graphs, labelled ' e Cod. Cottoniano, Otho C. 5.p. 41‘. The graphs are the Anglo-Saxon runes:

Transliterated: ‗conslruieius‘, followed by what appears to be the bindrune ‘, that is, the late additional rune calc bound with ur. The sigel-Tune ‘s’ is a comparatively rare form found occasionally in manuscripts, on coins and in inscriptions. The other runes are common English types.