Aldhelm, Abbot of Malmesbury Abbey, Bishop of Sherborne, and a writer and scholar of Latin poetry, was born before the middle of the 7th century. He is said to have been the son of Kenten, who was of the royal house of Wessex. He was certainly not, as his early biographer Faritius asserts, the brother of King Ine. After his death he was venerated as a saint, his feast day being the day of his death, 25 May.
Kentish was a southern dialect of Old English spoken in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Kent. It was one of four dialect-groups of Old English, the other three being Mercian, Northumbrian, and West Saxon.
The Vespasian Psalter is an Anglo-Saxon illuminated psalter decorated in a partly Insular style produced in the second or third quarter of the 8th century. It contains an interlinear gloss in Old English which is the oldest extant English translation of any portion of the Bible. It was produced in southern England, perhaps in St. Augustine's Abbey or Christ Church, Canterbury or Minster-in-Thanet, and is the earliest illuminated manuscript produced in "Southumbria" to survive.
"Wið færstice" is an Old English medical text surviving in the collection known now as Lacnunga in the British Library. Wið fǣrstiċe[wið ˈfæːrˌsti.t͡ʃe] means 'against a sudden/violent stabbing pain'; and according to Felix Grendon, whose collection of Anglo-Saxon charms appeared in the Journal of American Folklore in 1908, “the charm is intended to cure a sudden twinge or stitch, possibly rheumatism that can be due to being shot by witches, elves, and other spirits that fly through the air.” Scholars have often sought to identify this as rheumatism, but other possibilities should not be excluded. The remedy describes how to make a salve, but its main interest lies in the unique charm which follows. This describes how the færstice has been caused by the projectiles of 'mighty women', whom the healer will combat. The charm also mentions elves, believed responsible for elfshot, and provides the only attestation outside personal names of the Old English form of the name of the old Germanic gods, known as the Æsir in Norse mythology.
Byrhtferth was a priest and monk who lived at Ramsey Abbey in Huntingdonshire in England. He had a deep impact on the intellectual life of later Anglo-Saxon England and wrote many computistic, hagiographic, and historical works. He was a leading man of science and best known as the author of many different works. His Manual (Enchiridion), a scientific textbook, is Byrhtferth's best known work.
The Stowe Psalter is a psalter from the "2nd or 3rd quarter of the 11th century", at the end of Anglo-Saxon art. The text includes the Gallican version of the Psalms, followed by the Canticles with an interlinear Old English gloss.
The Old English Hexateuch is the collaborative project of the late Anglo-Saxon period that translated the six books of the Hexateuch into Old English, presumably under the editorship of Ælfric of Eynsham. It is the first English vernacular translation of the first six books of the Old Testament, i.e. the five books of the Torah and Joshua. It was probably made for use by lay people.
John Joscelyn, also John Jocelyn or John Joscelin, (1529–1603) was an English clergyman and antiquarian as well as secretary to Matthew Parker, an Archbishop of Canterbury during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England. Joscelyn was involved in Parker's attempts to secure and publish medieval manuscripts on church history, and was one of the first scholars of the Old English (Anglo-Saxon) language. He also studied the early law codes of England. His Old English dictionary, although not published during his lifetime, contributed greatly to the study of that language. Many of his manuscripts and papers eventually became part of the collections of Cambridge University, Oxford University, or the British Library.
Michael Lapidge, FBA is a scholar in the field of Medieval Latin literature, particularly that composed in Anglo-Saxon England during the period 600–1100 AD; he is an emeritus Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge and Fellow of the British Academy, and winner of the 2009 Sir Israel Gollancz Prize.
The Leiden Glossary is a glossary contained in a manuscript in Leiden University Library in the Netherlands, Voss. Lat. Q. 69. The lemmata (headwords) come from "a range of biblical, grammatical, and patristic texts". It is based on an Anglo-Saxon exemplar, and was prepared c. 800 in the Abbey of Saint Gall in modern-day Switzerland.
Elaine Treharne was born in Aberystwyth, Wales, in 1964. She is the Roberta Bowman Denning Professor of the Humanities, Professor of English, Courtesy Professor of German Studies, and a Bass Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. She is Visiting Professor of Medieval Literature at the University of Leicester, where she worked for fifteen years as a lecturer, then professor, head of department, and dean, before emigrating to the USA. She is a Welsh medievalist, focusing on Manuscript Studies, Early English literature, and the History of Text Technologies, particularly of the handmade book. She led Stanford University's online courses on manuscript study entitled Digging Deeper. She is a qualified archivist, and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and an Honorary Fellow of the English Association, for whom she was also the first woman Chair and President from 2000-2005. Treharne was made a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales in April 2020.
The hermeneutic style is a style of Latin in the later Roman and early Medieval periods characterised by the extensive use of unusual and arcane words, especially derived from Greek. The style is first found in the work of Apuleius in the second century, and then in several late Roman writers. In the early medieval period, some leading Continental scholars were exponents, including Johannes Scotus Eriugena and Odo of Cluny.
The "Leiden Riddle" is an Old English riddle. It is noteworthy for being one of the earliest attested pieces of English poetry; one of only a small number of representatives of the Northumbrian dialect of Old English; one of only a relatively small number of Old English poems to survive in multiple manuscripts; and evidence for the translation of the Latin poetry of Aldhelm into Old English.
The Tiberius Psalter is one of at least four surviving Gallican psalters produced at New Minster, Winchester in the years around the Norman conquest of England. The manuscript can now be seen fully online at the British Library website.
Blickling Psalter, also known as Lothian Psalter, is an 8th-century Insular illuminated manuscript containing a Roman Psalter with two additional sets of Old English glosses.
The Épinal-Erfurt glossary is a glossary of Old English. It survives in two manuscripts. It has been described as "the earliest body of written English", and is thought to have been compiled at Malmesbury for Aldhelm.
The Corpus Glossary is one of many Anglo-Saxon glossaries. Alongside many entries which gloss Latin words with simpler Latin words or explanations, it also includes numerous Old English glosses on Latin words, making it one of the oldest extant texts in the English language.
The Harley Glossary is an Anglo-Saxon glossary, mostly providing glosses on Latin words. It mostly survives in the fragmentary British Library, MS Harley 3376, but fragments are also found in Lawrence, University of Kansas, Kenneth Spenser Research Library, Pryce P2 A: 1, and Oxford, Bodleian Library, Lat. Misc. a. 3., fol. 49. The manuscript was produced in western England in the eleventh century, and has been argued to have been produced at Worcester Cathedral.
