The Art of the Anglo-Saxon Goldsmith - Fine Metalwork in Anglo-Saxon England: its Practice and Practitioners
Throughout the Anglo-Saxon period, goldsmiths produced work of a high standard in both design and craftsmanship, both for personal adornment, and to embellish bookbindings, reliquaries, vessels and weapons. Some works are well known, particularly the magnificent gold and garnet regalia from Sutton Hoo, but this represents only a fraction even of the surviving work, and much more has been lost.
This book is the first to look at the goldsmiths' products through the eyes of both a specialist in the period and a practical craftsman, combining close examination of the surface and structure of the objects with analysis of inscriptions and evidence for design.
Tradition and Belief - Religious Writing in Late Anglo-Saxon England
In this major study of Angle-Saxon religious tests sermons, homilies, and saints' lives written in Old English -- Clare A. Lees reveals how the invention of preaching transformed the early medieval church, and thus the culture of medieval England in placing Anglo-Saxon prose within a social matrix, her work offers a new way of seeing medieval literature through the lens of cultures.To show how the preaching mission of the later Anglo-Saxon church was constructed and received, Lees explores the emergence of preaching from the traditional structures of the early medieval church -- its institutional knowledge, genres, and beliefs.
Pre-Conquest attitudes towards the dying and the dead have major implications for every aspect of culture, society and religion of the Anglo-Saxon period; but death-bed and funerary practices have been comparatively and unjustly neglected by historical scholarship. In her wide-ranging analysis, Dr Thompson examines such practices in the context of confessional and penitential literature, wills, poetry, chronicles and homilies, to show that complex and ambiguous ideas about death were current at all levels of Anglo-Saxon society.
An Archaeology of the Early Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms is a volume which offers an unparalleled view of the archaeological remains of the period. Using the development of the kingdoms as a framework, this study closely examines the wealth of material evidence and analyzes its significance to our understanding of the society that created it. From our understanding of the migrations of the Germanic peoples into the British Isles, the subsequent patterns of settlement, land-use, trade, through to social hierarchy and cultural identity within the kingdoms, this fully revised edition illuminates one of the most obscure and misunderstood periods in European history.
Imagining the Anglo-Saxon Past - The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism and Anglo-Saxon Trial
Published together here are two studies, one already a classic and the other based on recent scholarship, by a scholar who has done so much to rectify myths of the Anglo-Saxon religious and literary past. A reprint of his 1975 text on the nature of Anglo-Saxon paganism and later `stock views' of it is neatly juxtaposed with Eric Stanley's recent study on the origins of trial by jury.
