A collection of articles in English and German devoted to the study of books, readers and libraries in medieval England, especially in the Anglo-Saxon period. The first article surveys the history of the English library from its beginnings to the suppression of the monasteries. It is followed by a more detailed examination of the first four centuries of Anglo-Saxon book collections and by studies on book production in 9th-century England, as seen in relation to King Alfred's plans for educational reform and to the intellectual background of library history in the 10th century. Of two articles on liturgical books, one sets out the now standard classified list of liturgical manuscripts written and owned in Anglo-Saxon England; other essays look at individual manuscripts and the earliest modern catalogue of surviving books with Old English texts.

Significant Anglo-Saxon papers, with postscripts, illustrate advances in knowledge of life and culture of pre-Conquest England. Thomas Northcote Toller, of the Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, is one of the most influential but least known Anglo-Saxon scholars of the early twentieth century. The Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies at Manchester, where Toller was the first professor of English Language, has an annual Toller lecture, delivered by an expert in the field of Anglo-Saxon Studies; this volume offers a selection from these lectures, brought together for the firsttime, and with supplementary material added by the authors to bring them up to date. They are complemented by the 2002 Toller Lecture, Peter Baker's study of Toller, commissioned specially for this book; and by new examinations ofToller's life and work, and his influence on the development of Old English lexicography. The volume is therefore both an epitome of the best scholarship in Anglo-Saxon studies of the last decade and a half, and a guide for the modern reader through the major advances in our knowledge of the life and culture of pre-Conquest England. , Contributors: RICHARD BAILEY, PETER BAKER, DABNEY ANDERSON BANKERT, JANET BATELY, GEORGE BROWN, ROBERTA FRANK, HELMUT GNEUSS, JOYCE HILL, DAVID A. HINTON, MICHAEL LAPIDGE, AUDREY MEANEY, KATHERINE O'BRIEN O'KEEFFE, JOANA PROUD, ALEXANDER RUMBLE.

Originally published in 1985, fourteen leading specialists in the field of Anglo-Saxon studies contributed to this substantial collection of essays in honour of Peter Clemoes, founder of Anglo-Saxon England, who had recently retired as Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon in the University of Cambridge. The book is divided into two complementary parts. The first looks at the background to Anglo-Saxon learning, in particular at the composition of monastic and private libraries and the nature of the individual works available in them. The second examines the contents and sources of individual texts and reviews the problems of interpretation and transmission these pose for scholars. Many of these essays deal with complex and difficult materials like manuscripts and liturgical sources that are fundamental to the interpretation of Old English literature and to Anglo-Saxon culture in general.