If poststructuralist literary and cultural theory does not pervade Anglo-Saxon literary studies as thoroughly as it does scholarship in later periods, as it has sometimes been said, to a considerable extent the cause is surely the field's dependence on philology. Some see this as cause for regret. It may be, however, that philology is the field's greatest asset. Given the high value that recent literary studies accord textual alterity, Old English texts are of unparalleled worth in the English canon, since they are culturally the most removed. Philology is the set of protocols designed to mediate the cultural difference, making the language accessible and putting texts into a form that modern readers can comprehend. In making Old English studies resistant to the homogenization of critical methods apparent in later periods, philology perhaps represents the respect in which this field has most to offer literary studies at large, embodying a methodology for dealing with texts of a high degree of alterity.

The writings of John Cassian (c. 370–c. 435) circulated widely through the Middle Ages, not least in Anglo-Saxon England. They are commonly assumed by scholars to have been fundamental to the formation of western monasticism, yet it is worth examining the nature and extent of their usage a little more closely. The following discussion considers this usage in Anglo-Latin sources between the later seventh century and the mid-eighth.

In the years immediately preceding the Second World War, the Latin manuscripts of the National Széchényi Museum in Budapest were in the process of being catalogued by Dr Emma Bartoniek. The collection includes a large number of fragments taken from bindings of printed books, and among these fragments is a single bifolium, written in Anglo-Saxon minuscule script of apparent eighth-century date, containing part of Bede's metrical Vita S. Cudbercti (lines 95–128 and 340–75).

Having just killed the dragon, and with death ‘ungemete neah’ (2728b; ‘exceedingly near’), Beowulf begins to speak, remarking first on his lack of a son:

Nu ic suna minum syllan wolde

guðgewædu, þær me gifeðe swa

ænig yrfeweard æfter wurde

lice gelenge. (2729–2732a)

The language here seems almost neutral, but at least two of the terms are suggestive. The ‘guðgewædu’ (‘war-garments’) that he wishes to leave to his son recall most notably the elaborate gifts of weapons and horses – including the saddle that the king used in battle (1037b–1043) – that Hrothgar had given him following the fight with Grendel, implicating him, as John M. Hill and Stephanie Hollis have argued, in the Danish succession. Similarly, in using ‘yrfeweard’ (‘guardian of an inheritance’), he calls attention to the king's role in protecting the tribe's wealth, although the poet may expect the audience to hear more in the compound since ‘weard’ appears often in the final part of the poem in descriptions of the dragon. Thus, even though Beowulf does not mention this failing again, his remark draws together a theme not only signficant in the Geatish section of the poem, but also present from the opening descriptions of Scyld's reign: part of a king's responsibility is to see that the succession is secure in a son.

In the years 1741–3, two scholars of Anglo-Saxon and Gothic, one an Englishman and the other a Swede, were engaged in correspondence. The Englishman was the Reverend Edward Lye (1694–1767), then rector of Yardley Hastings in Northamptonshire, and the Swede was Eric Benzelius the Younger (1675–1743), bishop of Linköping and, in the last year of his life, archbishop-elect of Uppsala. For many years Benzelius had been preparing an edition of the ‘Codex Argenteus’ of the Gothic gospels, which had been in Uppsala University Library since 1669, but he had been unable to complete the work on account of his many other commitments and also through the lack of suitable publishers for such a volume in Sweden. In his frustration, he sought the help of his many highly-placed friends in England, who included Sir Hans Sloane and John Carteret, first Earl Granville, a former Ambassador to Sweden. They directed him to Edward Lye as the only man in England competent to complete the edition, and the University Press at Oxford, as the only publisher able to handle the diffcult commission, as it still possessed Junius's type fonts for printing Gothic, Old English and runic characters.

For much of the ninth century, Anglo-Saxon interest in literary culture was apparently not as great as it could have been. Medieval and modern commentators have spoken of a pronounced early-ninth-century neglect of English libraries, which seems to have affected contemporary literature as well as the literary legacy which had been inherited from the seventh and eighth centuries. It appears that fewer books and texts were produced; the Latin texts produced may to some extent have been of inferior linguistic quality, and were, so it would seem, used with greater difficulties by a smaller and less educated readership. Comparatively fewer books seem to have survived the ninth century than any other period of Anglo-Saxon history.

Manuscripts can be studied, first, and most obviously, as objects of material culture. Such study may provide valuable information concerning the parchment, the arrangement of quires, the type of script, the letter forms, the decoration, and so on. Manuscripts can also be studied as witnesses to the intellectual preoccupations of the scholars who compiled and copied them: such preoccupations are most apparent in the selection and glossing of the texts which manuscripts from various periods transmit. There is yet a third class of information to be gleaned, from some manuscripts at least, by a combined study of both their physical appearance and of the texts they contain: this information pertains to the time when, the place where, and the reasons why a collection of texts (which is preserved only in a later book) was first put together. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 57 is a manuscript which invites such an approach. The book, its physical appearance (including its numerous later additions), the texts it presents, and the way it was used in late Anglo-Saxon England have been thoroughly and competently studied, and such studies are invaluable for what I shall attempt to do here: to uncover the ambience in which the ultimate exemplar of Corpus 57 was compiled and used, and to uncover the reason why this exemplar was copied into Corpus 57 and why it was copied in the fashion in which it appears there.

The Regula S. Benedicti was known and used in early Anglo-Saxon England, but it was not until the mid-tenth-century Benedictine reform that the RSB became established as the supreme and exclusive rule governing the monasteries of England. The tenth-century monastic reform movement, undertaken by Dunstan, Æthelwold and Oswald during the reign of Edgar (959–75), sought to revitalize monasticism in England which, according to the standards of these reformers, had ceased to exist during the ninth century. They took as a basis for restoring monastic life the RSB, which was regarded by them as the main embodiment of the essential principles of western monasticism, and in this capacity it was established as the primary document governing English monastic life. By elevating the status of the RSB as the central text of monastic practice in England and the basis of a uniform way of life the reformers raised for themselves the problem of ensuring that the RSB would be understood in detail by all monks, nuns and novices, whatever their background. Evidence of various attempts to make the text accessible, both at the linguistic level and at the level of substance, survives in manuscripts dating from the mid-tenth and eleventh centuries; the most important of these attempts is a vernacular translation of the RSB.

The Old English poem known as The Husband's Message begins in the same minimalist style as is typical of a number of poems of the Exeter Book (Exeter, Cathedral Library, 3501). A first-person speaker, an ‘I’, begins speaking without any context for speech yet being established, without any self-introduction, and without as yet any known purpose: Nu ic onsundran þe secgan wille … As with the Exeter Book elegies known as The Seafarer, The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer, just as with all fifty Exeter Book riddles that are put into the first person singular voice, there is an implied challenge for the reader to discover who the speaker is and to fill out his or her full story. The poem thus begins with a small enigma. It is easy to tell that we are in the midst of that part of the Exeter Book that consists of close to one hundred riddles interspersed by a small miscellany of other poems, several of which are riddle-like in their resistance to easy interpretation.

The inscribed lead piece illustrated in pl. V was an isolated metal-detector find from near Weasenham All Saints, a village in north Norfolk (NGR: TF 848221; Sites and Monuments no. 34651). It was brought to our attention in April 1998 by staff at the Castle Museum, Norwich, and obligingly left by the owner in the British Museum for a considerable time to facilitate its study. It was subsequently acquired by the Castle Museum (acquisition number NWHCM: 2000.3) where Alan West, Curator, arranged for investigation by radiography. All this reflects the considerable difficulties in reading the lettering and interpreting the ornament on this small piece.

‘Many tribulations and hardships shall arise in this world before its end, and they are heralds of the eternal perdition to evil men, who shall afterwards suffer eternally in the black hell for their sins.’ These words, composed by Ælfric in the last decade of the tenth century, reflect a preoccupation in the late Anglo-Saxon Church with perdition and the infernal punishments that awaited sinners and heathens. Perhaps stimulated in part by anxiety at the approach of the millennium, both Ælfric and Wulfstan (archbishop of York, 1002–23) show an overt concern with the continuation of paganism and the evil deeds of mankind in their sermons and homilies. Their works stress the terrible judgement that awaited sinners and heathens and the infernal torment to follow. The Viking raids and incursions, during the late eighth to ninth and late tenth centuries, partially inspired the great anxiety apparent in the late Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical leadership. Not only were these events perceived as divine punishment for a lack of religious devotion and fervour in the English people, but the arrival of Scandinavian settlers in the late ninth century may have reintroduced pagan practice and belief into England.

The central subject of this discussion is a particular diplomatic form that lasted in England for at most some two hundred years, the writ-charter. When it first appeared is obscure for want of surviving examples, but the reign of King Edgar would be a plausible guess. Its extinction in the 1160s is less obscure, and we may even hazard why it came about at that time, when Henry II's government was changing both the role of local courts and the use of documents in the legal process. What is harder to explain is how the writ-charter came to survive so late, for it served as a vehicle of transition.

The ‘Preliminary List of Manuscripts Written or Owned in England up to 1100’, which appeared twenty years ago in vol. 9 of this periodical, was a first attempt to bring together, in a concise inventory, what was then known about surviving manuscripts and manuscript fragments written in, or imported into, England from the end of the sixth to the end of the eleventh century. This has now been superseded by the Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts, published as vol. 241 in the Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies series in 2001. Like the ‘Preliminary List’, the Handlist cannot possibly claim to be perfect or complete, but it is hoped that it may serve some useful purposes as a reference work and, once again, as a searchlist.