A New Critical History of Old English Literature

With a survey of the Anglo-Latin background by Michael Lapidge. Anglo-Saxon prose and poetry is, without question, the major literary achievement of the early Middle Ages (c. 700-1100). In no other vernacular language does such a vast store of verbal treasures exist for so extended a period of time. For twenty years the definitive guide to that literature has been Stanley B. Greenfield's 1965 "Critical History of Old English Literature". Now this classic has been extensively revised and updated to make it more valuable than ever to both the student and scholar. "A New Critical History of Old English Literature" tries to account for some of the renewed interest in the history of the discipline, seen as a history of tastes, styles, and attitudes. Above all it strives, through an understanding of historical context (while using modern critical techniques) to comprehend and appreciate that extraordinary corpus which came out of the encounter between an unlettered Germanic tribal aesthetic and the remnants of the classical tradition, itself transformed by the Christian religion.