Acknowledgements

Francis Leneghan

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful for the support and encouragement of many colleagues and friends who have read or discussed with me various parts of this book, in particular Daniel Anlezark, Helen Appleton, Mark Atherton, John Barton, Rachel Burns, Ed Clarke, Amy Faulkner, Sarah Foot, Cosima Gillhammer, Niamh Kehoe, Samira Lindstedt, Hugh Magennis, Richard North, Elizabeth Solopova, Rebecca Stephenson and Elaine Treharne. I also warmly thank the anonymous reviewer for Boydell & Brewer for their insightful comments and helpful suggestions. Thanks also to Tamara Atkin, Marilina Cesario, Marina MacKay, Annie Sutherland, Marion Turner, Dan Wakelin and Abigail Williams for being such excellent colleagues. I am thankful to Mikael Males and Alice Jorgensen for facilitating productive and enjoyable visiting fellowships at the University of Oslo and Trinity College Dublin Long Room Hub respectively. For assistance with images, I am grateful to Stewart J. Brookes. I am pleased to acknowledge the generous financial support of the Leverhulme Trust [grant number RF-2023-040\1] and the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/Y003276/1], which allowed me to bring this book to completion. Thanks also to Caroline Palmer at Boydell for her sage counsel.

Details

Old English Biblical Prose

Stable URL:https://openaccess.boydellandbrewercms.com/?id=-307500

Open Access license

Provides the first in-depth study of the earliest attempts to make the sacred words of the Bible available to English readers, clerical and lay, in prose writing.

"This is a hugely valuable study - deeply informative about an important tradition of biblical translation from the early medieval period, bringing together material that has previously been considered in isolation, and drawing out a big-picture account of the ebb and flow of biblical translations into the vernacular. Will be a useful point of reference for any interested reader and includes surprises and delights for even the most specialist readers." Professor Jonathan Wilcox, University of Iowa

The story of the English Bible begins not with the King James Version or Wycliffe but in the Old English period. Between the ninth and eleventh centuries, a remarkably diverse corpus of biblical translations, paraphrases, adaptations and summaries were produced in Old English. Yet while Old English biblical verse has been extensively studied, the much larger corpus of vernacular biblical prose remains neglected by historians of the Bible and medievalists.

This book provides the first in-depth study of the genre. Dispelling the notion that access to the Bible was restricted to the Latinate clergy in the early medieval period, it demonstrates how Old English biblical prose made key elements of Scripture available and meaningful to laypeople. Through case studies of the Prose Psalms, Mosaic Prologue to the Domboc, Wessex Gospels, Heptateuch and Treatise on the Old and New Testaments, as well as many other works, it highlights the crucial contributions of well-known figures such as King Alfred and Ælfric of Eynsham while also showcasing the work of anonymous authors who translated, adapted and interpreted the Bible, sometimes in creative and surprising ways. Cumulatively, these case studies show how vernacular biblical prose played a central role in the emergence of English national identity before the Norman Conquest.

This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC-ND.

Author

Francis Leneghan

PublisherD.S.Brewer

Print publication date Jan, 2026

Print ISBN 9781843847601

EISBN 9781805439271

Base text size -

Acknowledgements

Old English Biblical Prose

Chapter illustrations ()