First published in 1925, and originally delivered as the Sandars Lectures in Bibliography for 1922--3, this book not only examines the history of the Year Book and its role in English law, but also provides practical suggestions for students of palaeography. Bolland supplies appendices at the end of the book with facsimiles of yearbook entries with a transliteration and translation of each. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in British legal history or palaeography.

This volume offers a new and interdisciplinary treatment of syllabic writing in ancient Cyprus. A team of distinguished scholars tackles epigraphic, palaeographic, linguistic, archaeological, historical and terminological problems relating to the island's writing systems in the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age, from the appearance of writing around the fifteenth century down to the end of the first millennium BC. The result is not intended to be a single, unified view of the scripts and their context, but rather a varied collection that demonstrates a range of interpretations of the evidence and challenges some of the longstanding or traditional views of the population of ancient Cyprus and its epigraphic habits. This is the first comprehensive account of the 'Cypro-Minoan' and 'Cypriot syllabic' scripts to appear in a single volume and forms an invaluable resource for anyone studying Cypriot epigraphy or archaeology.

Learning to read in medieval Germany meant learning to read and understand Latin as well as the pupils' own language. The teaching methods used in the medieval Abbey of St Gall survive in the translations and commentaries of the monk, scholar and teacher Notker Labeo (c.950-1022). Notker's pedagogic method, although deeply rooted in classical and monastic traditions, demonstrates revolutionary innovations that include providing translations in the pupils' native German, supplying structural commentary in the form of simplified word order and punctuation, and furnishing special markers that helped readers to perform texts out loud. Anna Grotans examines this unique interplay between orality and literacy in Latin and Old High German, and illustrates her study with many examples from Notker's manuscripts. This study has much to contribute to our knowledge of medieval reading, and of the relationship between Latin and the vernacular in a variety of formal and informal contexts.

The discovery and decryption of Ugaritic cuneiform tablets in the 1920s has given scholars an insight into the development of alphabetic writing and the origins of biblical poetry. In this book, based on his Schweich Lectures given in 2007, Professor Dennis Pardee describes the origins of the cuneiform alphabetic writing system developed in Ugarit some time before 1250 BC, the use of alphabetic writing at Ugarit, and gives a comparison of Ugaritic and Hebrew literatures

The endangered languages crisis is widely acknowledged among scholars who deal with languages and indigenous peoples as one of the most pressing problems facing humanity, posing moral, practical, and scientific issues of enormous proportions. Simply put, no area of the world is immune from language endangerment. The Oxford Handbook of Endangered Languages, in 39 chapters, provides a comprehensive overview of the efforts that are being undertaken to deal with this crisis. A comprehensive reference reflecting the breadth of the field, the Handbook presents in detail both the range of thinking about language endangerment and the variety of responses to it, and broadens understanding of language endangerment, language documentation, and language revitalization, encouraging further research. The Handbook is organized into five parts. Part 1, Endangered Languages, addresses the fundamental issues that are essential to understanding the nature of the endangered languages crisis. Part 2, Language Documentation, provides an overview of the issues and activities of concern to linguists and others in their efforts to record and document endangered languages. Part 3, Language Revitalization, includes approaches, practices, and strategies for revitalizing endangered and sleeping ("dormant") languages. Part 4, Endangered Languages and Biocultural Diversity, extends the discussion of language endangerment beyond its conventional boundaries to consider the interrelationship of language, culture, and environment, and the common forces that now threaten the sustainability of their diversity. Part 5, Looking to the Future, addresses a variety of topics that are certain to be of consequence in future efforts to document and revitalize endangered languages.

The B-version of 'Piers Plowman', perhaps the only version authorised by Langland, is the one most frequently read today, and the most influential form of the poem. This catalogue of the extant medieval manuscripts, now locaed in Cambridge, London, Oxford, Tokyo, and San Marino, California, offers both individual manuscript descriptions and a record of the annotations. The new and detailed codicological descriptions include information on provenance and ownership, a full list of the contents, and a description of the physical make-up and the presentation of each manuscript. The first published accounts of the various textual annotations on each manuscript (whether produced by the original scribes or later readers) provides the best record available of how 'piers plowman' was understoon by its earliest audience. Professor C. DAVID BENSON teaches in the English Department at the University of Connecticut; Dr LYNNE BLANCHFIELD is an Associate Lecturer at the Open University.

Italy had long experienced literacy under Roman rule, but what happened to literacy in Italy under the rule of a barbarian people? This book examines the evidence for the use of literacy in Lombard Italy c. 568-774, a period usually considered as the darkest of the Dark Ages in Italy due to the poor survival of written evidence and the reputation of the Lombards as the fiercest of barbarian hordes ever to invade Italy. A careful examination of the evidence, however, reveals quite a different story. Originally published in 2003, this study considers the different types of evidence in turn and offers a re-examination of the nature of Lombard settlement in Italy and the question of their cultural identity. Far from constituting a Dark Age in the history of literacy, Lombard Italy possessed a relatively sophisticated written culture prior to the so-called Carolingian Renaissance of the ninth century.

In 1887, when the first volume of this work was published, Greek epigraphy was not systematically studied or taught in English universities, and the book was specifically written to fulfil a need for 'a popular work, giving a classification of Greek inscriptions according to their age, country and subject, and a selection of texts by way of samples, under each class'. At a time when the value of some Greek letters (those peculiar to one city's version of the alphabet and so known rarely in surviving inscriptions) was not universally agreed, and when excavation was regularly providing new materials for study, the book was widely welcomed as a tool for research. The first volume contains a historical sketch of the Greek alphabet and a sequence of inscriptions showing its development across the Mediterranean area and Asia Minor until the end of the fifth century CE.

The second volume of E. S. Robert's Introduction to Greek Epigraphy, written with E. A. Gardner and published in 1905, continued the important and innovative work of the first volume of 1887. The focus is on the inscriptions found in Attica, and especially Athens: they are presented in categories such as decrees of the city-state, foreign affairs, financial, military and naval affairs, administrative regulations, lists of officials, and dedicatory and funerary inscriptions. Each is given in transcription, with suggested restorations and the reproduction of unusual characters where the value is not certain, and with full explanatory notes.

The Bobbio Missal was copied in south-eastern Gaul around the end of the seventh and beginning of the eighth century. It contains a unique combination of a lectionary and a sacramentary, to which a plethora of canonical and non-canonical material was added. The Missal is therefore highly regarded by liturgists; but, additionally, medieval historians welcome the information to be derived from material attached to the codex, which provides valuable data about the role and education of priests in Francia at that time, and indeed on their cultural and ideological background. The breadth of specialist knowledge provided by the team of scholars writing for this book enables the manuscript to be viewed as a whole, not as a narrow liturgical study. Collectively, the essays view the manuscript as physical object: they discuss the contents, they examine the language, and they look at the cultural context in which the codex was written.

Professor Beach's book on female scribes in twelfth-century Bavaria - a full-length study of the role of women copyists in the Middle Ages - is underpinned by the notion that the scriptorium was central to the intellectual revival of the Middle Ages and that women played a role in this renaissance. The author examines the exceptional quantity of evidence of female scribal activity in three different religious communities, pointing out the various ways in which the women worked - alone, with other women, and even alongside men - to produce books for monastic libraries, and discussing why their work should have been made visible, whereas that of other female scribes remains invisible. Beach's focus on manuscript production, and the religious, intellectual, social and economic factors which shaped that production, enables her to draw wide-ranging conclusions of interest not only to palaeographers but also to those interested in reading, literacy, religion and gender history.

From the time of its composition (c.1280) for Philip the Fair of France until the early sixteenth century, Giles of Rome's mirror of princes, the De regimine principum, was read by both lay and clerical readers in the original Latin and in several vernacular translations, and served as model or source for several works of princely advice. This study examines the relationship between this didactic political text and its audience by focusing on the textual and material aspects of the surviving manuscript copies, as well as on the evidence of ownership and use found in them and in documentary and literary sources. Briggs argues that lay readers used De regimine for several purposes, including as an educational treatise and military manual, whereas clerics, who often first came into contact with it at university, glossed, constructed apparatus for, and modified the text to suit their needs in their later professional lives.

The Byzantines used imagery to communicate a wide range of issues. In the context of Iconoclasm - the debate about the legitimacy of religious art conducted between c. AD 730 and 843 - Byzantine authors themselves claimed that visual images could express certain ideas better than words. Vision and Meaning in Ninth-Century Byzantium deals with how such visual communication worked and examines the types of messages that pictures could convey in the aftermath of Iconoclasm. Its focus is on a deluxe manuscript commissioned around 880, a copy of the fourth-century sermons of the Cappadocian church father Gregory of Nazianzus which presented to the Emperor Basil I, founder of the Macedonian dynasty, by one of the greatest scholars Byzantium ever produced, the patriarch Photios. The manuscript was lavishly decorated with gilded initials, elaborate headpieces and a full-page miniature before each of Gregory's sermons. Forty-six of these, including over 200 distinct scenes, survive. Fewer than half however were directly inspired by the homily that they accompany. Instead most function as commentaries on the ninth-century court and carefully deconstructed both provide us with information not available from preserved written sources and perhaps more important show us how visual images communicate differently from words.

This is a fascinating study of the making of the Harley Psalter, an illustrated manuscript which was produced at Christ Church, Canterbury, over a period of about 100 years, from c. 1020 to c. 1130. The Harley Psalter was closely based on the Utrecht Psalter, the most celebrated of all Carolingian illuminated manuscripts. Through meticulous observation of the Harley Psalter, William Noel analyses how the artists and scribes worked with each other and with their manuscript exemplars in making their illustrated text. The author demonstrates that this work is best understood not as a copy of the Utrecht Psalter, but rather as one of a series of Anglo-Saxon manuscript experiments that incorporated its imagery. This is a crucial work for understanding the development of art, script and book making during what has been termed the 'golden age' of Anglo-Saxon art.

A detailed study of the Trier Gospels, an important early medieval manuscript. Through an investigation of its production, Professor Netzer reveals the cross-cultural influences among the Insular, Continental and Mediterranean worlds in the eighth century, demonstrating in particular the complicated process of cultural interplay that took place in the scriptorium at Echternach. She traces the history of the production of the manuscript through a detailed analysis of its components: the individual texts, construction and arrangement of gatherings, scripts, ornamental initials, canon tables and illustrations. She sheds light on the manuscript's sources, on the different backgrounds of the two scribe-artists involved in its production, on the influences which determined the size and layout of the codex, the role of the pictures within the book, and the place of this manuscript in the development of Insular and Continental book production. This study makes a significant contribution to the understanding of early medieval book production and the influence of missionaries from the British Isles on early Continental culture.