The chapters in Bede's De temporum ratione begin with an etymology for the name of the subject to be examined. Sources and analogues for some have not hitherto been identified. This article shows that some of these etymologies of words for the divisions of time come ultimately, though perhaps not directly, from bk XI of Virgil the Grammarian's Epitomae. These accounts of the origins of calendrical and cosmological terms wound their way through early western computistical works and eventually into Bede's De temporum ratione. The article identifies examples of Virgil's influence on anonymous early medieval biblical commentaries and discusses their significance as pointers towards their place of composition.

This article aims to evaluate the likelihood that whelk dye was known in Anglo-Saxon England, either in the form of imported cloth and textile products, and/or as an activity carried out in England. The nature of whelk dye and the likely processing options available to early societies are considered in the light of extant records and modern experimentation in Israel and Britain. The currently available ‘hard’ evidence is then presented from archaeology, manuscript studies, and the chemical analysis of textiles. Finally, the semantic and literary evidence is considered, including three passages from texts by Bede and Aldhelm, and a new interpretation of OE cornwurma.

The frequent representation of the mind as a potentially secure enclosure in Old English poetry has unrecognized implications for interpretation. The mind as imagined by Anglo-Saxon poets exhibits both capabilities of an enclosure: containment and exclusion; but the most common image is one of containment, specifically of reified thoughts, knowledge or discourse as figurative treasure objects. This model's interaction with traditional value systems invests it with ethical meaning: what is inside or outside of the mind either should or should not be allowed to pass through its boundary. Mental valuables are closely analogous to material wealth and are subject to the same imperatives for their management and use. The poetry also reflects anxiety about the privacy of the individual mind, which allows the accumulation and concealment of a perverse hord of deceit, sin or folly that can cause social harm through a failure of containment.

Most observers now agree that the fitt numbers in Beowulf were not in the scribes' exemplar. A question less frequently addressed is whether the sectional divisions themselves are authorial or whether the poem was divided in the course of manuscript transmission. Several of the divisions in the portion of the poem copied by the second scribe make little narrative sense, while the divisions in the first scribe's work are sufficiently rational. The difference suggests that it is these scribes who are responsible for having introduced the divisions. A consideration of sectional divisions in other poems demonstrates that many of these divisions, too, are unlikely to be authorial.

An interest in Danish legend first appears at the West Saxon court in the 890s when King Alfred traced his father's lineage to Scyld. Alfred traced his mother's ancestry through the Jutish kings of Wight to Goths and Geats, suggesting a motive for the particular view of the ethnic past we find in Beowulf, especially the friendship the poet constructs between a Geatish ætheling and a Danish monarch. A modification of Michael Lapidge's paleographical dating of the archetype of Beowulf (2000) indicates a West Saxon exemplar before c. 900, confirming the mature king's court as a plausible context for Beowulf's composition.

This article sets forth the contrast between the image of the horses in Beowulf and the image of Anglo-Saxon horses that can be derived from archaeology, historical narratives, wills, law codes and glossaries. It focuses particularly on the issue of colour, represented in the poem by the difficult word fealu and its derivative, æppelfealu. It argues that the horses described in Beowulf do not match up closely with Anglo-Saxon horses recorded in any century and that they would have struck the poem's tenth-century audience as very strange. This strangeness has implications for our understanding of Anglo-Saxon reception of the poem.

A fragment of a calendar, written s. viii2/4, either in England or in an Anglo-Saxon centre on the Continent was preserved in Munich until 1939, but was subsequently lost. While still extant, the fragment had been printed, and from this edition it can be seen that, in addition to universally culted saints, the entries included the obits of five Anglo-Saxons, Æthelthryth among them. After a brief review of how the commemorations of the universal saints relate to the earliest manuscripts of the Martyrologium Hieronymianum and to Bede's Martyrology, the article focuses on the English obits, in particular on the question of what light may be shed on the origin and first ambience of the calendar by its commemoration of Æthelthryth and by the form in which her obit there appears.

King Alfred's translations successively develop the metaphors of eagan modes and scip modes to render the implicit and explicit psychological contexts of nautical and ocular images in their Latin source-texts. The increasing complexity and independence of the metaphorical modification evident in the Old English translations suggest the order in which Alfred translated and reveal his maturing conception of epistemology, particularly the theory of illumination. In Pastoral Care, Consolations of Philosophy, Metres of Boethius, and, especially, Soliloquies, the interplay of these psychosomatic metaphors functions not as rhetorical flourish or stylistic ornamentation but as a means for Alfred to model his inferences about epistemological phenomena.

This paper provides an edition, translation and discussion of four letters written by Flemish abbots to the archbishops of Canterbury between the years 980 and 991 and preserved in two manuscripts drawn on the archiepiscopal archives in the early eleventh century (London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. xv and Cotton Vespasian A. xiv). The letters document the increasing importance of cross-Channel relations in the late tenth century and provide context for a number of hitherto unexplained indications of cultural, religious and financial exchanges between the county of Flanders and England.

A previously unidentified annal-entry in the Welsh chronicles Brut y Tywysogion and Brenhinedd y Saesson records the blinding of the sons of Ealdorman Ælfhelm as part of the ‘palace revolution’ of 1006. This article discusses how the Old English names Wulfheah and Ufegeat were recorded by Welsh scribes in accordance with Welsh phonological and orthographical norms. Possible Anglo-Saxon sources for the annal-entry are briefly considered and the transmission of the annal-entry in the Welsh sources is analysed.

This article rethinks the current assessment of the relationship between Goscelin of Saint-Bertin and his one time pupil Eve of Wilton, suggesting that the difference in their ages was less than André Wilmart assumed and that Eve was not an oblate of Wilton but a girl entrusted to the convent for education and safe-keeping. Drawing on the liturgical evidence for consecrations in Anglo-Saxon England and on the rhetoric of Goscelin's Liber confortatorius the article argues that Goscelin describes Eve's consecration (not oblation as Wilmart and others assume) and suggests a date around 1078 for the ritual. An appendix follows detailing surviving manuscript evidence for the consecration of nuns in Anglo-Saxon England.

This article discusses the unfinished mappa mundi found in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 265, dates it to a late-eleventh-century (c. 1065–95) production in Worcester, identifying it as a nearly exact and earlier analogue of two later twelfth-century English maps of the world from the Ramsey area (Oxford, St John's College 17 and London, British Library, Harley 3667). Contained as it is in a collection of Wulfstanian materials, the Worcester map's relationship to these so-called ‘Bryhtferthian’ maps requires a rethinking of how such maps may have circulated and functioned outside of a computisitical context. The close connections between these three maps further point to a unique, late Anglo-Saxon tradition of mappae mundi thus far unrecognized.