Karen Louise Jolly

In tenth- and eleventh-century England, Anglo-Saxon Christians retained an old folk belief in elves as extremely dangerous creatures capable of harming unwary humans. To ward off the afflictions caused by these invisible beings, Christian priests modified traditional elf charms by adding liturgical chants to herbal remedies. In Popular Religion in Late Saxon England, Karen Jolly traces this cultural intermingling of Christian liturgy and indigenous Germanic customs and argues that elf charms and similar practices represent the successful Christianization of native folklore. Jolly describes a dual process of conversion in which Anglo-Saxon culture became Christianized but at the same time left its own distinct imprint on Christianity. Illuminating the creative aspects of this dynamic relationship, she identifies liturgical folk medicine as a middle ground between popular and elite, pagan and Christian, magic and miracle. Her analysis, drawing on the model of popular religion to redefine folklore and magic, reveals the richness and diversity of late Saxon Christianity.

Elf Charms in Context

Popular Religion in Late Saxon England

Catherine E. Karkov

Sarah Larratt Keefer

The cross pervaded the whole of Anglo-Saxon culture, in art, in sculpture, in religion, in medicine. These new essays explore its importance and significance.

The Place of the Cross in Anglo-Saxon England

This text is designed to serve as a primary source reader. It addresses medieval Christendom in the context of world history. It combines the traditional approach (the medieval Christian tradition found in the church hierarchy and theological development) with the newer approach to cultural diversity - diversity within European Christianity (women mystics, heretics, and popular religion), and diversity without, in a world context (non-European Christianity and relations with Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism).

Christianity in a World Context to 1500

Tradition and Diversity

Cross and Cruciform in the Anglo-Saxon World: Studies to Honor the Memory of Timothy Reuter is edited by Sarah Larratt Keefer, Karen Louise Jolly, and Catherine E. Karkov. This third and final volume of an ambitious research initiative begun in 1999 concerned with the image of the cross, shows how its very material form cuts across both the culture of a society and the boundaries of academic disciplines---history, archaeology, art history, literature, philosophy, and religion---providing vital insights into how symbols function within society. The flexibility, portability, and adaptability of the Anglo-Saxon understanding of the cross suggest that, in pre-Conquest England at least, the linking of word, image, and performance joined the physical and spiritual, the temporal and eternal, and the earthly and heavenly in the Anglo-Saxon imaginative landscape. The book is divided into three sections. The first focuses on representations of "The Cross: Image and Emblem," with contributions by Michelle P. Brown, David A. E. Pelteret, and Catherine E. Karkov. The second section, "The Cross: Meaning and Word," deals in semantics and semiology with essays by Eamonn O Carragain, Helen Damico, Rolf Bremmer, and Ursula Lenker. The third section of the book, "The Cross: Gesture and Structure," employs methodologies drawn from archaeology, new media, and theories of rulership to develop new insights into subjects as varied as cereal production, the little-known Nunburnholme Cross, and early medieval concepts of political power. "This volume makes valuable contributions and should appeal not only to Anglo-Saxonists but also to those with interests in early medieval intellectual and cultural history, liturgy, and iconography."---Nicole Guenther Discenza, University of South Florida Cross and Cruciform in the Anglo-Saxon World: Studies to Honor the Memory of Timothy Reuter is a major collection of new research, completing the publication series of the Sancta Crux/Halig Rod project. Cross and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies in Honor of George Hardin Brown, Volume 2 in this series, remains available from the West Virginia University Press.

Karen Louise Jolly

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