A great weight of authority supports the view that Bede was averse to pagan rhetoric and had never read anything of its formative literature. I have briefly questioned this opinion elsewhere, and should like now to investigate it more fully. The evidence, of Bede's biblical commentaries in particular, suggests first, that his attitude toward Roman rhetoric was ambivalent, as was that of Augustine and Cicero; secondly, that his knowledge of it reached into the theory of invention; and finally, that he had access to Cicero's De inventione.

‘The Anglo-Saxon glosses are part of the Anglo-Saxon literary heritage.’ This oracular pronouncement of Professor Stanley's has been elucidated by Michael Lapidge's recent article on the school of Canterbury, to which mine is in some ways complementary. Lapidge makes a strong case for his view that the ‘original English collection’ of glossae collectae in the Leiden Glossary and other continental glossaries was compiled in Canterbury under Archbishop Theodore (669–90) and Abbot Hadrian (671–709 × 10) and transmitted to continental centres of Anglo-Saxon missionary activity during the eighth century, and he emphasizes its importance as ‘a wonderful treasury of evidence for the books which were known and studied in early England’. One piece of evidence that he adduces for the English origin of this collection is the fact that batches of glosses derived from it are found in the Epinal–Erfurt and Corpus glossaries, which establishes that the collection was already in existence and in England when the Epinal–Erfurt Glossary was compiled between c. 675 and the end of the seventh century, and was still there intact when the compiler of the Corpus Glossary used it a century or more later.

In the process of literary interpretation no critic can afford to overlook the rôle of the poetic narrator. While poetic and narrative statements (as it is commonly argued) designate their meaning largely in accordance with the conventions of language and literary discourse, linguistic criteria alone cannot determine the attitude of the speaker towards what he says; and this attitude constitutes a crucial element in the meaning of the statement as a speech act or utterance. Indeed, as users of language, all of us habitually include considerations of speaker intentions in our standard operations of interpreting as well as producing discourse. Can the speaker be trusted? Does he speak ironically or sincerely? Is he trying to achieve some aim in relation to the hearer other than that which his act of communication ostensibly purports? Entailed in any act of communication, this dimension of interplay between speaker and statement is inevitably involved in literary discourse as well, since obviously we do not always take literary statements at face value. One of the primary tasks confronting the literary critic, then, in Old English poetry or any other body of work, lies in determining the character of the narrator and the parameters of his functioning.

Genesis B has been almost completely ignored in studies of Old English prosody, most notably by the modern ‘schools’ of Alan Bliss and John C. Pope. Bliss regarded the work, a 617-line interpolation in the Old English Genesis, as ‘untrustworthy’ for the purpose of metrical examination, while Pope excluded it from his examination of Old English hypermetric verse ‘because it is translated from Old Saxon, and retains some of the peculiarities of the latter’. E. G. Stanley expressed similar doubts: ‘Old Saxon verse and the verse of Genesis B (which appears to be an Anglo-Saxon offshoot of it) are only with difficulty to be accommodated within any4 set of rules derived from the metrical practice of the vast majority of the Anglo-Saxon poets’. In his edition of the poem Timmer believed that a metrical comparison of lines 790–817a and the corresponding lines of the Old Saxon Genesis corroborated his view that the interpolation was the work of a continental Saxon who had transliterated the original Old English with minor adjustments, a view supported by a more recent syntactic study.

After Janet Bately's several articles and her recent edition of the Old English Orosius there is little need to analyse further what the Anglo-Saxon translator did to his source. The translator made substantial cuts in the Latin text: he deleted much of Orosius's commentary on the events he narrated, made a number of minor, probably accidental, omissions, rather surprisingly left out some details which should have interested the Anglo-Saxon audience, and carried out a wholesale chopping of events and entire sections, reducing his translation to perhaps one-fifth the length of its source. He also made some additions, primarily explanations of institutions and details which would have been obscure to his audience, but also circumstances and rationalizations taken from secondary sources or from his own whimsy. Finally, he made some changes in the organization of his source and altered Orosius's polemical tone to that of a more objective but still Christian world history. Given the large number of changes, it is important now to ask why the translator might have made such a thorough redaction, and to consider how his translation could have been an appropriate vehicle for the transmission of this standard authority to an Anglo-Saxon readership. We are not unfamiliar today with historical revisionism and the motives for it, and the practice reveals the culture of its modern practitioners; the present study seeks similar information about the culture of Alfred's age.

In the long history of the Insular system of scripts, the tenth century marks for England a decisive stage. Within the narrow confines of that eraq we may observe numerous ecclesiastical developments which bear on the history of book production: attempts at a scriptorial reform; the reception of external stimuli of an artistic and technical nature; the creation of a new ‘Square minuscule’ form of Insular script; the deliberate imitation in England (for the first time since its emergence in northwestern Francia in the later eighth century) of the Caroline minuscule, probably not unconnected with an increasing rate of impartation of foreign book; a monastic revolution within the English church (supported by the monarchy but led by Benedictine ideologues drawing inspiration in large part from continental models of reform) some of whose proponents probably favoured Caroline writing as a matter of principle; a growing tendency on the part of scribes to write different scripts for Latin and the vernacular; a considerable growth in the writing of vernacular manuscripts whose output seems to have increased geometrically during the 175 years from King Alfred's literary and educational reform to the Norman Conquest; and finally the abandonment of the Square minuscule as a vehicle for Latin writing, coincident with its transmutation into another variety of Insular script whose use in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was restricted to English-language matter.

In 1910, Samuel Brandt published a description and photograph of a fragment of Justinus's Epitome of the Historiae Philippicae of Pompeius Trogus. The leaf, whose present location is unknown, belonged at that time to the collection of Ernst Fischer at Weinheim. Fischer dated its script, an Anglo-Saxon minuscule, to about AD 800, which, as Brandt observed, would mean that it antedated the earliest known manuscripts of the text, which are ninth-century. Although E. A. Lowe indicated in his Codices Latini Antiquiores that the fragment was lost, it has continued to attract scholarly attention. Professor Bernhard Bischoff suggested that the fragment could be identified with a copy of Justinus listed among the books of Gerward, palace librarian of Louis the Pious. This implied connection with the Carolingian court, taken together with Alcuin's naming of Justinus's work among the books described in the poem on York and his later association with the Carolingian court, has raised the possibility of an English origin for the Weinheim manuscript and therefore also for the earliest known branch of the text. As L.D. Reynolds remarked, ‘This fragment has a significance quite out of keeping with its size.’

The earliest identified surviving manuscripts from Glastonbury Abbey date from the ninth and tenth centuries, but there are reliable post-Conquest traditions claiming that valuable books were found at the monastery as early as the reign of Ine, king of the West Saxons (688–726). By the tenth century at the latest there are reports of an ‘Irish school’ at Glastonbury, famous for its learning and books, and St Dunstan's earliest biographer, the anonymous. B., relates that Dunstan himself studied with the Irish at Glastonbury. During Dunstan's abbacy (940–56) – that is, at the period when most historians would place the beginnings of the English tenth-century reform movement – there was a general revival at Glastonbury which included a concerted policy of book acquisition and the establishment of a productive scriptorium. Not surprisingly, Dunstan's abbacy was viewed by the community ever afterwards as one of the most glorious periods in the early history of the monastery, especially since the later Anglo-Saxon abbots showed a marked falling off in devotion and loyalty to the intellectual inheritance of their monastery. Æthelweard and Æthelnoth, the last two Anglo-Saxon abbots, were especially reprehensible, and confiscated lands and ornaments for the benefit of their own kin. Nor did the situation improve immediately after the Conquest: the first Norman abbot, Thurstan, actually had to call in soldiers to quell his unruly monks. In spite of these disruptions, a fine collection of pre-Conquest books seems to have survived more or less intact into the twelfth century; when the seasoned traveller and connoisseur of books, William of Malmesbury, saw the collection in the late 1120s he was greatly impressed: ‘tanta librorum pulchritudo et antiquitas exuberat’.

According to his own testimony, the fourth-century Spanish poet Prudentius devoted himself to writing only late in life. The Praefatio to his works provides all the biographical details which we have of him: he was born in 348, the year in which Salia was consul (lines 25–6: ‘Sub quo [=Salia] prima dies mihi/ quam multas hiemes uoluerit’), he appears to have studied rhetoric (lines 8–9: ‘mox docuit toga infectum uitiis falsa loqui’), possibly practised law (lines 13–4: ‘Exim iurgia turbidos/ armarunt animos’), became governor of two cities (lines 16–7: ‘Bis legum moderamine/ frenos nobilium reximus urbium’) and finally was taken into the emperor's service (lines 20–1: ‘pietas principis extulit/ adsumptum propius stare iubens ordine proximo’). The exact date of his death is unknown, but it appears to have been before 410 because his writings, especially the Contra Symmachum, still praise a victorious Rome that had not yet been sacked by Alaric.

Some years ago I published a study of the moneyers' names from Edgar's reform of the coinage in the last years of his reign up to the death of Æthelred in 1016. Since then Dr Fran Colman has made a study of the moneyers of Edward the Confessor. The object of this paper is to complete the record of moneyers' names on the late Anglo-Saxon coinage by surveying the period when the Danish dynasty of Cnut and his sons ruled England. Although at this period personal names may no longer be directly indicative of nationality, and the relationship between the named moneyer and his stated mint may be in some cases fluid, nevertheless such a record can still provide a measure of cultural influence and the intensity of settlement.