The Middle Ages inherited from antiquity a tradition of reading which embraced the four functions of grammatical studies (grammaticae officia): lectio, emendatio, enarratio and iudicium. Lectio was the process whereby a reader had to identify elements of the text — letters, syllables, words and sentences (discretio) — in order to read it aloud according to the accentuation required by the sense (pronuntiatio). Emendatio, a process entailed by the realities of manuscript transmission, required a reader (or his teacher) to correct the text in his copy, and sometimes tempted him to ‘improve’ it. Enarratio was the process of examining features of vocabulary, rhetorical and literary form, and above all of interpreting the subject matter of the text (explanatio). ludicium was the process of exercising judgement of the aesthetic qualities or the moral and philosophical value of the text (bene dictorum conprobatio).

In a recent study of the iconographic character of the cross-carpet page (lv) opening the Book of Durrow (Dublin, Trinity College A. 4. 5 (57)), I suggested that the miniature and its facing evangelist symbols page (2r) were intended to call to mind images of adjacent loca sancta of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem – the relic of the True Cross exhibited on the altar of Golgotha church for the sombre Good Friday Adoratio crucis and the monumental cross on Golgotha Hill, the site of the Crucifixion. These and other references I claimed for Adomnán, the scholarly abbot of the Columban foundation of Iona, who, very likely, sponsored the creation of the gospelbook between 682 and 686. Besides the opening miniatures just cited, the codex contains separate evangelist symbol pages, elaborately decorated incipits, small ornamental initials and five carpet pages. Given the great and unusual weight which the Durrow introductory sequence places on the iconographic explication of the Easter theme, an examination of the possibility that other of the decorated pages in the manuscript develop or reiterate Easter associations seems warranted.

What type of liturgy did St Willibrord, the Anglo-Saxon apostle of Frisia (d. 739), use? This is one of the most intriguing questions which a liturgist or historian of this period can ask. In order to answer such a question one has to consider a series of problems concerning the liturgical background of Willibrord himself and, by implication, of his period. With what form of liturgy was Willibrord familiar before he embarked on his mission to Frisia? What liturgy did he find on the Continent when he arrived, and did he attempt to borrow anything from what he found? These and similar questions need to be asked before any clear and coherent picture of the type of liturgy used by Willibrord can be drawn, and since, unfortunately, they cannot be answered with utter certainty, this article will offer some thoughts on the matter, without attempting to provide a solution or a clear-cut answer.

Julian Brown's famous analysis of what he termed the Insular system of scripts marked out a number of routes, now well trodden, through the debris of undated and unlocalized manuscript material from the pre-Viking-Age British Isles. Ever since, the best hope for students of palaeography seeking to date and localize examples of early Insular minuscule has been to follow Brown's classification and identify them as Type A or B, Northumbrian or Southumbrian, and Phase I or II. Brown's schema, however, offered orientation rather than a map. As with any typology, it depends on a very few fixed points, themselves unusual because of their lack of anonymity: gospelbooks from Ireland and Northumbria dated by the survival of rare colophons, manuscripts connected with St Boniface which show the operation of a unique editorial mind. Although Brown's system has been successfully applied to the output of scriptoria whose influences, practices, connections, even locations remain mostly unknown, complications inevitably arise. This article concerns one of them, the recycling in Phase II of a type of minuscule displaying the cursiveness and capriciousness characteristic of Phase I: Type B minuscule as illustrated by the script of St Boniface.

In Alfred's famous Preface to his translation of the Regula pastoralis, the king writes that he translated ‘hwilum word be worde, hwilum andgit of andgiete’ (7.19–20); a similar phrase occurs in the proem to the Boethius (1.2–3). Yet words in different languages are rarely exact equivalents. Translators select words which they feel capture the primary sense of source words and match secondary meanings and connotations only if they can. Similarities between two terms in different languages can reveal where the conceptual systems of the source and target cultures overlap and which denotations and connotations of a complex word were most important to the translator. Differences can indicate how cultures differ and what other conceptual systems might have influenced the translator. In a well-established system of translation, certain terms become accepted as standard equivalents to particular terms in other languages. Alfred, however, was in the position not of employing accepted equivalidents but of trying to create them. By the time he worked on the Boethius, Wærferth had probably translated Gregory's Dialogi, and Alfred's own Regula pastoralis was most likely complete, but no other models were availabel. As one of the earliest Anglo-Saxon translators, producing translations of the De consolatione, Gregory's Regula pastoralis, Augustine's Soliloquia and the first fifty psalms, Alfred had to solve translation problems himself.

The ‘Galba Psalter’ (London, British Library, Cotton Galba A. xviii) is a pocket-sized (128 × 88 mm.), early-ninth-century Carolingian book, perhaps made in the region of Liège, that was originally decorated with only ornamental initials. By the early tenth century the manuscript had reached England, where an Anglo-Saxon scriptorium added two prefatory quires (1r–19v) containing a metrical calendar illuminated with zodiac signs, KL monograms and single figures (pls. IX–X), and five full-page pictures. Two miniatures of Christ and the saints on 2v and 21r (pls. X–XI) preface the calendar and a series of prayers respectively, and three New Testament pictures marked the customary threefold division of the Psalms. Facing Ps. I was a miniature of the Nativity (pl. XII), now detached from the manuscript and inserted into an unrelated book (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson B. 484, 85r). The Ascension on 120v (pl. XIII) prefaces Ps. CI. A third picture before Ps. LI has been lost, but almost certainly it represented the Crucifixion. The placement of an image of this theme between the Nativity and the Ascension would have been appropriate from a narrative standpoint, and some later Anglo-Saxon and Irish psalters preface this psalm with a full-page picture of the Crucifixion. Obits for King Alfred (d. 899) and his consort Ealhswith (d. 902) provide a terminus post quem for the calendar and the coeval illumination. The Insular minuscule script of the calendar indicates a West Saxon origin during the first decade of the tenth century. On the grounds of the Psalter's style and later provenance, the additions were very likely made at Winchester.

Although recently the object of renewed scholarly interest, the ‘Solomon and Saturn’ dialogues remain among the most enigmatic of Old English works. To some extent the problem resides in their strange subject-matter and hyperbolic style, exemplified by grotesque personifications of the letters of the Pater noster, endless enumerations of its extraordinary attributes, and the esoteric, Middle-Eastern background attributed to the speakers Solomon and Saturn. But hardly less daunting are the textual difficulties posed by the primary surviving manuscript, and the manner in which modern editors have handled them. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 422 is composite, the first two quires of which (pp. 1–26), dating from the mid-tenth century, contain the Old English. Within these two quires the sequence of texts is as follows: a poetic dialogue of 169 lines on the Pater noster (pp. 1–6); followed without a break by a prose dialogue on the same subject, ending abruptly at the end of p. 12 (coinciding with the loss of a leaf); and another poetic dialogue of 335 lines on various aspects of time, nature, good and evil, also ending abruptly, at the end of p. 26. Yet in the editions of Menner and Dobbie the arrangement of texts is altogether different: the prose section is removed and labelled a separate work; and the verse is divided into two discrete poems. The effect, almost inevitably, has been to create a perception of three independent, even unrelated, works.

The reception in Anglo-Saxon England of Prudentius's Psychomachia has been well studied. In an earlier article I concentrated on the textual tradition and touched only briefly on the important aspect of Psychomachia illustrations in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts; in the present article I treat the illustrations more fully. Psychomachia illustrations have been studied previously, most thoroughly by Stettiner and Woodruff, and they are also referred to by Katzenellenbogen and Norman. None of these examinations is completely satisfactory as far as the Anglo-Saxon illustrations are concerned. Both Stettiner and Woodruff examine all, that is both continental and Anglo-Saxon, illustrated Psychomachia manuscripts, and their primary aim is to establish stemmata and to determine generic relationships between the various manuscripts. Of necessity this procedure leads away from a scrupulous examination of individual manuscripts and their illustrations. In other words, by being concerned more with the generic similarities of the illustrations, Stettiner and Woodruff pay less attention to the differences (though they do not ignore them altogether). Moreover, they concentrate on the illustrated manuscripts and neglected the evidence which non-illustrated manuscripts can provide. Katzenellenbogen and Norman, in turn, are interested in the Psychomachia and its illustrations exerted on the sculpture and painting of later centuries, and only briefly refer to the Anglo-Saxon Psychomachia Illustrations thus still remains a necessity.

The following article explores one way of using Latin sources to increase our understanding and appreciation of the surviving corpus of vernacular prose hagiography in Anglo-Saxon England. Although the saints' legends in prose make up a significant portion of the Old English literary remains, they have been relatively neglected in comparison with the saints' legends in Old English verse, such as Andreas, Guthlac A and Guthlac B, and Cynewulf's Elene. As the standard bibliographies reveal well enough, the prose texts have been studied mainly from the perspectives of language, stylistics, codicology and basic Quellenforschung, and much less than the verse texts for their literary, historical or broadly cultural interest. This is particularly true of the twenty-nine anonymous legends, some of which are not readily accessible in printed versions, and most of which need re-editing. But even the hagiographic writings of Ælfric, which are better known, have been read only occasionally for their narrative content perse. Primary emphasis has fallen instead on Ælfric's considerable stylistic and prosodic achievements. Moreover, the two most recent monographs on Ælfric's intellectual and doctrinal concerns hardly touch on his saints' legends.

In his account of the contents of the second volume of London, British Library, Cotton Otho C. i, Kenneth Sisam drew attention to an unpublished sermon on the sins of the tongue to which he gave the title Evil Tongues. The sermon is written in the same hand as the two texts which precede it in the manuscript – an Old English version of St Jerome's Vita Malchi monachi captivi (henceforth Malchus) and a translation of a letter by Boniface (Wynfrith) on an anonymous priest's vision of the next world (henceforth Wynfrith's Letter) Sisam was unable to identify a source for the Evil Tongues sermon, but close parallels for most of the Old English text are found in anther work by Jerome, the exposition of Ps. CXIX in his Tractatus in Psalmos.

‘Feower tida synd getealde on anum geare’, Ælfric writes in De temporibus anni, translating a portion of Bede's De temporum ratione, and he enumerates the seasons together with their Latin counterparts: ‘Ver is lenctentid … Aestas is sumer … Autumnus is hærfest … Hiems is winter.’ Byrhtferth of Ramsey enumerates ‘Þa feower timan … lengten, sumor, hærfest and winter’, allegorizing them as symbols of childhood, adolescence, manhood and old age, of blood, choler, black bile and phlegm, and of air, fire, earth and water, and elsewhere he refers to ‘gewrixlunge Þæsra feower timan, Þæt ys lenctenis and sumoris and hærfestis and wintres’. From these passages, and others like them, it would appear that the Anglo-Saxons observed four seasons: spring, summer, autumn and winter. This conclusion seems obvious enough and represents the conceptual baseline for the Bosworth–Toller dictionary entries for lencten, and lenctentid, sumer, hærfest and winter, even though it is clear from their own citations that lencten and lenctentid often mean ‘Lent’ and hærfest often means ‘harvest’.