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Taking as its chronological and geographical limits the period and area of Anglo-Saxon domination, this study provides a guide to the Latin literature that existed alongside the vernacular. It does so through a chronological survey of known works, based on a thorough examination of documents and of modern scholarship. It includes ample illustrative quotations, with accompanying English translations, and the forms associated with individual (although sometimes anonymous) writers, the histories, biographies, letters, poetry, treatises, and some liturgies. An important feature of the book is the very full bibliography, which is keyed to the text discussions.
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A history of AngLo-LAtin Literature $97-1066
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A n g L o - L A t i n
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597-1066 v o l u m e 1: $97-740
By W. F. Bolton
Princeton, New Jersey Princeton University Press 1967
Copyright © 1967 by Princeton University Press ALL R I G H T S
RESERVED
Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 65-17132
Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey
pnefAce THIS BOOK is intended to provide students of Old English with a guide to the Latin literature which existed along side the vernacular, and I hope it will be of use to others as well. It takes the period and area of Anglo-Saxon domination as its chronological and geographical limits. It includes the forms associated with individual (although sometimes anonymous) writers, the histories, biographies, letters, poetry, treatises, and some liturgy, but not the institutional or official forms, the laws, charters, glos saries, concilia, or penitentials. Its models were the already available histories of Old English literature, particularly Kemp Malone's contribu tion to A Literary History of England (ed. A. C. Baugh, N. Y. 1947), and the standard surveys of patristic and medieval Latin writings, especially Max Manitius' Geschichte der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters (3 vols., Munich 1911-1931). But Malone's chapter on AngloLatin is brief, and Manitius' second volume, which in cludes the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, is now forty years old. Besides, it is in German, lacks a national focus, and overlooks some Anglo-Latin. As a literary history, the book describes the primary materials and brings together a listing of the secondary. Apart from the distinction between the "individual" and "official" genres, I have exercised no selection in the pri mary materials: I hope to have included them all, empha sizing the most important ones, but not suppressing the less important. The reader who approaches the book as a continuous account of pre-Conquest English latinity may find irksome the inclusion of a fragmentary letter by an anonymous celibate, but the reader who requires a work of reference may not be entirely disappointed. Both will find a book which seeks chiefly to assemble, rather than to advance, information and opinion about its subject.
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PREFACE
The bibliographies, the listing of the secondary materials, have occupied a large part of my attention in writing the book. To make them available without further delay, the work has been divided so that the first part could be published while the second was in progress. They are full—more so than any others I know—but not complete. No enumerative bibliographer ever had enough wisdom or industry to be sure he had missed nothing. I have made limitations in addition to the ones I could not avoid. Where there is a sound modern edition, I have not always attempted to list all the earlier ones. I have included little published before the nineteenth century. I have tried to find all the informative books and articles, leaving the reader to estimate the ac