R. D. Fulk

The Canons are one of the earliest handbooks of penance to appear in any West European vernacular. The material shows the Anglo-Saxons addressing matters ranging from baptism and the ordination of priests to the conduct of the married and sexual norms. Less a translation of the judgements attributed to Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury (d. 690), than an adaptation of these materials, the work is of major importance for specialists in Old English and historians of medieval Europe generally, affording an early view of what pastoral care in early England may have looked like which is more authentic than the Latin texts on which they are based.

A Grammar of Old English, Volume II: Morphology completes Richard M. Hogg's two-volume analysis of the sounds and grammatical forms of the Old English language. Incorporates insights derived from the latest theoretical and technological advances, which post-date most Old English grammarsUtilizes the databases of the Toronto Dictionary of Old English project - a digital corpus comprising at least one copy of each text surviving in Old EnglishFeatures separation of diachronic and synchronic considerations in the sometimes complicated analysis of Old English noun morphologyIncludes extensive bibliographical coverage of Old English morphology

In A History of Old English Meter, R. D. Fulk offers a wide-ranging reference on Anglo-Saxon meter. Fulk examines the evidence for chronological and regional variation in the meter of Old English verse, studying such linguistic variables as the treatment of West Germanic parasite vowels, contracted vowels, and short syllables under secondary and tertiary stress, as well as a variety of supposed dialect features. Fulk's study of such variables points the way to a revised understanding of the role of syllable length in the construction of early Germanic meters and furnishes criteria for distinguishing dialectal from poetic features in the language of the major Old English poetic codices. On this basis, it is possible to draw conclusions about the probable dialect origins of much verse, to delineate the characteristics of at least four discrete periods in the development of Old English meter, and with some probability to assign to them many of the longer poems, such as Genesis A, Beowulf, and the works of Cynewulf. A History of Old English Meter will be of interest to scholars of Anglo-Saxon, historians of the English language, Germanic philologists, and historical linguists.