University of Toronto. Centre for Medieval Studies

Vercelli Book

Vercelli Homilies, IX-XXIII

Arthur Groos

Robert Earl Kaske

Michael W. Twomey

If a reader of Chaucer suspects that an echo of a biblical verse may somehow depend for its meaning on traditional commentary on that verse, how does he or she go about finding the relevant commentaries? If one finds the word 'fire' in a context that suggests resonances beyond the literal, how does that reader go about learning what the traditional figurative meanings of fire were? It was to the solution of such difficulties that R.E. Kaske addressed himself in this volume setting out and analyzing the major repositories of traditional material: biblical exegesis, the liturgy, hymns and sequences, sermons and homilies, the pictorial arts, mythography, commentaries on individual authors, and a number of miscellaneous themes. An appendix deals with medieval encyclopedias. Kaske created a tool that will revolutionize research in its designated field: the discovery and interpretation of the traditional meanings reflected in medieval Christian imagery.

A Guide to Interpretation

Medieval Christian Literary Imagery

The first of three volumes, this book is an edition of forty psalters written or owned in Anglo-Saxon England, half of which are glossed in Old English. The work is an invaluable tool for comparative gloss scholarship, for the study of the influence of vocabulary, the interpretation of glosses, the study of relations among psalters, and the study of the Latin text of the psalms in Anglo-Saxon England. It also presents new insights on the development of centres of learning and the impact of the psalter on literary tradition. Each volume addresses a group of fifty psalms. This landmark in Old English studies is the first attempt at a completely comprehensive edition. As an original and much-needed contribution to early medieval scholarship, it not only provides a standard edition of texts based on all known Anglo-Saxon psalters but also synthesizes many studies of psalter scholarship from the earliest times.

Old English Glossed Psalters Psalms 1-50

A seminal collection of studies on the date of Beowulf, now back in print, that overturned previous scholarship and raised much new information.

University of Toronto. Centre for Medieval Studies

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