Rewriting Old English in the Twelfth Century

This collection of essays, first published in 2000, aims to redefine the limits of Old English scholarship by studying some of the recent reworkings of texts composed earlier in the Anglo-Saxon period and their implications for the development of literary production across time. The essays in the volume constitute recent work on a wide range of texts, including homilies, saints’ lives, psalters and biblical material; some focus on individual manuscripts incorporating palaeographic and orthographic studies; others use modern critical theory to examine later Old English texts; and all highlight the need to redefine our attitude to late recopying. The volume engages with important issues, including the nature of textual transmission and recomposition and its relationship to late Old English reader-response; attitudes to earlier material as evidenced in its recopying and adaptation; and the character of surviving manuscripts and what these tell us about the twelfth-century scribes and scriptoria, reading and readers.