The Alphabet of Words (AW), a Latin alphabet text with an interlinear Old English gloss, occurs among the additions made to the Durham Collectar (D) by the priest Aldred in the tenth century. Previously thought to be extant only in D, and possibly by Aldred himself, AW also survives (without the OE gloss) in a Kassel manuscript (K) from the second half of the eighth century, as well as in a defective twelfth-century copy in Karlsruhe (Kr). Most of AW is also incorporated in a Latin treatise on the alphabet (“Audiuimus multos”: AM) compiled probably in the ninth century. AW belongs to the genre of “parenetic alphabet,” widely attested in Greek but also sporadically in Latin, including in a ninth-century Paris manuscript (P: BNF, lat. 2796) that shares lemmata and glosses with AW for the letters X, Y, and Z. We provide the first critical edition and translation of AW from D, K, and Kr, with variants from AM and P, together with a discussion of AW’s genre and relation to other alphabetical texts as well as a full commentary on the biblical, apocryphal, and patristic lore transmitted by AW’s lemmata and glosses on each letter.

A group of half-lines in Cynewulf's poetry that take the form þurh + demonstrative pronoun + adjective + gesceap/gesceaft constitutes a distinctively Cynewulfian realization of a more widespread formulaic system (x X gesceaft). Only Cynewulf substitutes (in two closely similar contexts) gesceap for gesceaft, and Cynewulf consistently uses both words to refer to a specific ‘created thing’ instead of to ‘creation’. Within the system as a whole, the specific referent of gesceaft in the sense ‘creation’ (heaven, or earth, or all of creation) is often clarified by deixis, specifically in the type of demonstrative pronoun that modifies the word. Cynewulf's choice of the distal pronoun þæt likewise indicates that the apparently ambiguous referents of gesceap/gesceaft in Juliana 273b and 728a and Elene 789a are heavenly or unearthly things, and analysis of context as well as Christian-Latin analogues supports a specific identification of the referent in each case. While availing himself of an existing formulaic system, then, Cynewulf was innovative in its metrical realization as well as in its semantic application.

This manuscript extends our previously published work (based on data from one clinic) on the association between three drinking water-treatment modalities (boiling, filtering, and bottling) and diarrhoeal disease in HIV-positive persons by incorporating data from two additional clinics collected in the following year. We conducted a cross-sectional survey of drinking water patterns, medication usage, and episodes of diarrhoea among HIV-positive persons attending clinics associated with the San Francisco Community Consortium. We present combined results from our previously published work in one clinic (n = 226) with data from these two additional clinics (n = 458). In this combined analysis we employed logistic regression and marginal structural modelling of the data. The relative risk of diarrhoea for ‘always’ vs. ‘never’ drinking boiled water was 0.68 (95% CI 0.45–1.04) and for ‘always’ vs. ‘never’ drinking bottled water was 1.22 (95% CI 0.82–1.82). Drinking filtered water was unrelated to diarrhoea [1.03 (95% CI 0.78, 1.35) for ‘always’ vs. ‘never’ drinking filtered water]. Adjustment for confounding did not have any notable effect on the point estimates (0.61, 1.35 and 0.98 for boiled, bottled, and filtered water respectively, as defined above). The risk of diarrhoea was lower among those consuming boiled water but this finding was not statistically significant. Because of these findings, the importance of diarrhoea in immunocompromised individuals, and the limitations of cross-sectional data further prospective investigations of water consumption and diarrhoea among HIV-positive individuals are needed.