Helmut Gneuss

Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts is the first publication to list every surviving manuscript or manuscript fragment written in Anglo-Saxon England between the seventh and the eleventh centuries or imported into the country during that time. Each of the 1,291 entries in Helmut Gneuss and Michael Lapidge’s Bibliographical Handlist not only details the origins, contents, current location, script, and decoration of the manuscript, but also provides bibliographic entries that list facsimiles, editions, linguistic analyses, and general studies relevant to that manuscript. A general bibliography, designed to provide full details of author-date references cited in the individual entries, includes more than 4,000 items. Compiled by two of the field’s greatest living scholars, the Gneuss-Lapidge Bibliographical Handlist stands to become the most important single-volume research tool to appear in the field since Greenfield and Robinson’s Bibliography of Publications on Old English Literature. Their achievement in the present book will endure for many decades and serve as a catalyst for new research across several disciplines.

Originally delivered as a lecture at the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, this volume was published in 2002 as "AElfric von Eynsham und seine Zeit," introducing, as Gneuss says, "an Anglo-Saxon author . . . who was the first, and for a long time the only, master of prose written in English."

The essays in this second volume from Helmut Gneuss are devoted to the study of books, their readers, and libraries in medieval England, especially in the Anglo-Saxon period. The selection opens with a survey of the history of the medieval English library, followed by detailed studies of Anglo-Saxon book production. These also examine its relation in the 9th century to King Alfred's plan for educational reform, and to the intellectual history of the 10th century. Two articles deal with liturgical books, and include the standard classified list of liturgical manuscripts. To end, there is an analysis of the earliest modern catalogue of books with Old English texts, that by George Hickes, and an investigation of the history of the Latin hymnal in Britain.