Reading Old English Wisdom

✍ Scribed by Robert DiNapoli

• Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
• Year: 2021
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 323
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book translates and comments on a selection of Old English poems that modern scholars identify as wisdom texts. These comprise collections of maxims, philosophical and cosmological speculation, and historical meditation. Composed by monastic authors from the ninth to the eleventh centuries, they mingle orthodox Christian beliefs with pre-Christian sensibilities embedded in the linguistic texture of Anglo-Saxon verse itself. Their preoccupation with how the human psyche responds to the challenges of incarnate life in space and time lends them a wide-ranging interest for students of medieval religion, social history, and psychology. Many are superb poems in their own right, whose quality the translations here serve to communicate to modern readers. The books commentaries engage sympathetically with patterns of thought and imagination both remote from us in time and yet strangely familiar.

✦ Table of Contents

Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index