This monograph is a critical study of the medieval manuscript held
in Exeter Cathedral Library, popularly known as 'The Exeter Book'.
Recent scholarship, including the standard edition of the text,
published by UEP in 2000 (2 ed'n 2006), has re-named the manuscript
'The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry'. The book gives us
intelligent, sensitive literary criticism, profound readings of all
of the poems of the Anthology. God's Exiles and English Verse is
the first integrative, historically grounded book to be written
about the Exeter Book of Old English poetry. By approaching the
Exeter codex as a whole, the book seeks to establish a sound
footing for the understanding of any and all of its parts, seen as
devout yet cosmopolitan expressions of late Anglo-Saxon literary
culture. The poems of the Exeter Book have not before been
approached primarily from a codicological perspective. They have
not before been read as an integrated expression of a monastic
poetic: that is to say, as a refashioning of the medium of Old
English verse so as to serve as an emotionally powerful,
intellectually challenging vehicle for Christian doctrine and moral
instruction. Part One, consisting of three chapters, introduces
certain of the book's main themes, addresses matters of date,
authorship, audience, and the like, and evaluates hypotheses that
have been put forth concerning the origins of the Exeter Anthology
in the south of England during the period of the Benedictine
Reform. Part Two, the main body of the book, begins with a long
chapter, divided into seven sections, that introduces the contents
of the Exeter Anthology poem by poem in a more systematic fashion
than before, with attention to the overall organization of the
Anthology and certain factors in it that have a unifying function.
The five shorter chapters that follow are devoted to topics of
special interest, including the volume's possible use as a guide to
vernacular poetic techniques, its underlying worldview, its
reliance on certain thematically significant keywords, and its
intertextual versus intratextual relations. The riddles, especially
those of a sexual content, receive attention in a chapter of their
own. In addition, there is a translation of the popular poem The
Wanderer into modern English prose, a folio-by-folio listing of the
contents of the Exeter Anthology, and a listing of a number of the
poems of the Anthology with notes on their genre, according to
Latin generic terms familiar to educated Anglo-Saxons. This book is
the first of its kind - an integrative, book-length critical study
of the Exeter Anthology.
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