This collection of articles in honour of Michael Lapidge is divided into two volumes, each comprising twenty articles written by Lapidge's former students, colleagues and collaborators. The year 900 is used as a rough divider between the two volumes. Their contents are as follows:
Volume I: "Anglo-Saxon Glosses to a Theodorean Poem?" by Mechthild Gretsch and Helmut Gneuss; "Between Bede and the Chronicle : London, BL, Cotton Vespasian B.vi, fols. 104-09" by Simon Keynes; "Aldhelm the Theologian" by Michael W. Herren; "Aldhelm as Old English Poet: Exodus , Asser, and the Dicta Ælfredi " by Paul G. Remley; "Faricius of Arezzo's Life of St Aldhelm" by Michael Winterbottom; "Patristic Pomegranates, from Ambrose and Apponius to Bede" by George Hardin Brown; "The Metrical Art(s) of Bede" by Neil Wright; "King Caedwalla's Roman Epitaph" by Richard Sharpe; "A Recension of Boniface's Letter to Eadburg about the Monk of Wenlock's Vision" by Patrick Sims-Williams; "Alcuin as Exile and Educator: 'uir undecumque doctissimus'" by Michael Fox; "'Quid Hinieldus cum Christo?'" by Mary Garrison; "The Sermons Attributed to Candidus Wizo" by Christopher A Jones; "Enigma Variations: The Anglo-Saxon Riddle Tradition" by Andy Orchard; "English Script in the Second Half of the Ninth Century" by David N. Dumville; "Alfred, Asser and Boethius" by Malcolm Godden; "Six Cruces in Beowulf(Lines 31, 83, 404, 445, 1198, and 3074-5)" by R. D. Fulk; "The Role of Grendel's Arm in Feud, Law, and the Narrative Strategy of Beowulf " by Leslie Lockett; "The Merov(ich)ingian Again: damnatio memoriae and the usus scholarum " by Tom Shippey; "Three 'Cups' and a Funeral in Beowulf " by Roberta Frank; "Beowulf in the House of Dickens" by Nicholas Howe.
Volume II: "Alea , Tæfl , and Related Games: Vocabulary and Context" by Martha Bayless; "The Sphere of Life and Death: Time, Medicine, and the Visual Imagination" by Roy Michael Liuzza; "More Diagrams by Byrhtferth of Ramsey" by Peter S. Baker; "The Charter of Lanlawren (Cornwall)" by O. J. Padel; "Anglo-Latin Women Poets" by Jane Stevenson; "Contextualised Lexicography" by Patrizia Lendinara; "Latin in the Ascendant: The Interlinear Gloss of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Misc. 509" by Richard Marsden; "Alfred's Soliloquies in London, BL, Cotton Tiberius A. iii (art. 9g, fols. 50v-51v)" by Paul E. Szarmach; "A Palm Sunday Sermon from Eleventh-Century Salisbury" by Thomas N. Hall; "A Late Old English Harrowing of Hell Homily from Worcester and Blickling Homily VII" by Donald Scragg; "Worcester Sauce: Malchus in Anglo-Saxon England" by Katherine Scarfe Beckett; "'Et quis me tanto oneri parem faciet?': Goscelin of Saint-Bertin and the Life of St Amelberga" by Rosalind Love; "Edith's Choice" by Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe; "Osbert of Clare and the Vision of Leofric : The Transformation of an Old English Narrative" by Peter Jackson; "The Persecuted Church and the Mysterium Lunae : Cynewulf's Ascension , lines 252b-272 (Christ II , lines 691b-711)" by Charles D. Wright; "The Symbolic Use of Job in Ælfric's Homily on Job, Christ II , and the Phoenix " by Robert E. Bjork; "Ælfric's Colloquy : The Antwerp / London Version" by Joyce Hill; "The Relation between Old English Alliterative Verse and Ælfric's Alliterative Prose" by Bruce Mitchell; "Mise en page in Old English Manuscripts and Printed Texts" by Fred C. Robinson; "Ælfric's De auguriis and Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 178" by Mary Clayton; Publications of Michael Lapidge (through 2004); Doctoral Dissertations Directed.
A mere glance at the titles is enough to gather that the articles in the collection deal with a very wide range of areas of research arising from the study of Old English and Anglo-Latin texts: textual criticism, linguistics, (social) history, palaeography, etc. Lapidge's interests and outstanding contributions to all these areas provide the thread which joins this collection.
Various contributions pay tribute to Lapidge's deep interest in Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury, his scholarly legacy and the works of his most outstanding student, Aldhelm. While Gretsch and Gneuss expand our understanding of the impact of the Canterbury school of Theodore and Hadrian and Anglo-Saxon scholarship on German-speaking areas of the Continent, Herren, Remley and Winterbotton focus on Aldhelm's spiritual formation and religious thought, his poetical skills in Old English and the memory of him in eleventh-century Malmesbury.
Besides Theodore and Aldhelm, Beowulf provides the other pillar on which the first volume of the collection stands. The editors explain that the poem is dealt with together with the pre-900 works because of the text's "deeply rooted retrospective sense of history", rather than as a result of a "firm assertion about its date" (I, p. 3). Fulk's and Shippey's articles engage with important debates associated with the editing of the work and its date of composition, a topic which has greatly benefited from Lapidge's scholarship. Shippey, like Lapidge, argues in favour of a date in the early eighth century. Lockett, Frank and Howe explore the Anglo-Saxon and Continental legal context of the poem, its lexical richness and its reception in the nineteenth century.
Other figures such as Bede, Boniface and Alcuin also receive due attention in the first volume, as is fitting in a festschrift in honour of a scholar who has done so much to open up the field of Anglo-Latin literature. His work is the source of inspiration for many articles in the two volumes: Brown's exploration of Bede's style and interests while looking at the symbolism of the pomegranate in biblical texts and exegesis; Wright's analysis of the relationship between the metrical theory outlined in Bede's De arte metrica and the practice in the scholar's works, particularly Vita S. Cuthberti ; Sharpe's study of the information on King Ceadwalla's pilgrimage to Rome, baptism, untimely death in 689 and verse epitaph Aldhelm and Bede can provide us with; Sims-Williams's edition of, and discussion on, the relationship between a letter by Boniface to Eadburg and the vision of Dryhthelm in Bede's Historia ecclesiastica ; Fox's overview of Alcuin's career as an educator; Garrison's exploration of the context behind Alcuin's famous question "Quid Hinieldus cum Christo?" and her explanation that Alcuin would have written the question (at least partially) as a condemnation of the performance of royal genealogical propaganda in a religious context; Jones's edition of four sermons which should be attributed to one of Alcuin's correspondents, Candidus Wizo; and Stevenson's in-depth study of women's learning and literary productions from the eighth till the twelfth century.
Amongst Anglo-Latin and Old English texts, hagiographic and homiletic literature receive particular attention, especially in the second volume of the collection. Hall, Scragg, Scarfe Beckett and Jackson address the connection between homiletic and hagiographic texts and their sources while exploring alterations in content and style within a social, religious, literary and historical context. The works of Goscelin of Saint-Bertin and Ælfric feature in six articles. Both Love and O'Keeffe are interested in contextualising Goscelin's works, the former within the hagiographer's own canon and the latter within contemporary social history, liturgy, and canon law. Ælfric's use of sources, style, and method of composition and revision are scrutinised by Bjork, Mitchell and Clayton, while the transmission of his works is the general topic of Hill's contribution. Mitchell's conclusion that Ælfric's works should be read as good prose, not bad poetry, should be contrasted with those of Thomas Bredehoft in his recent article "Ælfric and Late Old English Verse," Anglo-Saxon England 33 (2004).
The coexistence and relationship between English and Latin, their literary manifestations, and the historical and cultural background of such coexistence and its results are given particular attention in the articles by Keynes, Orchard, Bayless, Liuzza, Baker, Marsden, Szarmach and Lendinara, who defines "contextualised lexicography", as "sequences of words, mainly drawn from glossarial compilations, embedded in both prose and verse" (II, 109). Dumville and Robinson focus on the writing of the texts and what details in the manuscript (letter-forms, spacing and other devices which mark meaningful sections) can tell us about the intended message and the historical context.
As in Lapidge's own work, the articles of the collection focus mainly on Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman England and their cultural links with the Continent, but other geographical areas are also covered in Bayless's and, especially, Padel's and Godden's articles. Padel edits a recently discovered witness of a text which belongs to a unique type of record for Anglo-Saxon England (a Cornishman's grant of land to a minor Cornish church) and which throws further light on the process by which Cornwall became part of the English state during Æthelstan's reign. Godden studies the knowledge of Boethius's De consolatione philosophiae in ninth-century Wales and concludes that Asser may have been a pivotal figure in drawing Alfred's attention to that work.
Latin Learning and English Lore is a very strong collection of groundbreaking essays including new editions of texts and diagrams. The works presented in these two volumes will be of great value for a large number of scholars interested in the language, literature, history and culture of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman England and their connections with the Continent.