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Print Price: $255.00

Format:
Hardback
400 pp.
138 mm x 216 mm

ISBN-13:
9780199605040

Publication date:
January 2012

Imprint: OUP UK

The Early Lives of St Dunstan

Edited by Michael Winterbottom and Michael Lapidge

Series : Oxford Medieval Texts

The Early Lives of St Dunstan contains new editions, with translation and extensive commentary, of the two earliest Lives of St Dunstan, archbishop of Canterbury (960-88) and one of the principal figures of the tenth-century English church. The two Lives were composed in the early eleventh century (within a few years of Dunstan's death in 988), and provide eye-witness accounts of some of the most important events in the archbishop's long and troubled life. Neither of them has been translated before; the provision of translations and commentary facilitates a new understanding of this cardinal figure of the pre-Conquest English church. Neither Life has been edited since the nineteenth century; the editions in the present book are based on a wholly new interpretation of the manuscript evidence for the two works, so that the text which is presented here is radically different from the text currently in use (that of William Stubbs, published in 1874); furthermore, the excruciatingly difficult Latin of the author of the earliest Life, who names himself only as B., has hindered historians from acquiring a proper understanding of Dunstan's life and achievements. The new translation, in combination with detailed philological and historical notes, allows scholarly access to the work for the very first time, and allows a fresh assessment of many aspects of tenth-century English history.

Readership : Students and teachers of Anglo-Saxon literature and history, and of Medieval Latin literature, and research libraries.

Preface
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. The Life of st Dunstan
2. B., Vita S. Dvnstani
3. Sdelard of Ghent, Lectiones in Depositione S. Dvnstani
4. Later Hagiography of St Dunstan
5. Editorial Principles
B., VITA DVSTANI
ADELARD OF GHENT, LECTIONES IN DEPOSITIONE S. DVNSTANI
Appendices
1. Passages in Ms. D of B.'s Vita S. Dvnstani in which Rhymed Prose Replaces the Verse or Supplements the Original Prose
2. Letters Illustrating the Career of B.
3. Letter of Abbot Wulfric to Abbo of Fleury Concerning B.'s Vita S. Dunstani
4. Dunstan's Latin Poetry
Bibliography
Index of Quotations and Allusions
General Index

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Michael Lapidge was formerly Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon in the University of Cambridge. He has published widely on the literature of the Anglo-Saxons (written both in English and Latin) and also on Latin authors of the early Middle Ages. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and a Corresponding Fellow of the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Munich) and of the Accademia dei Lincei (Rome). Michael Winterbottom taught for five years at University College London as Lecturer in Latin and Greek (1962-7). He was for twenty five years Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Worcester College, Oxford (1967-1992), before moving to Corpus Christi College as Corpus Professor of Latin. He retired in 2001. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.

Writing History - William Kelleher Storey and Towser Jones

Special Features

Edited by the two leading scholars in the field of Anglo-Latin Literature.
Includes an entirely new Latin text based on fresh analysis of manuscript evidence with detailed historical and philological notes which facilitate access to these difficult works.
Forms the first translation into any language of these two difficult saints' Lives.
Includes an appendix which assembles the Latin writings of St Dunstan for the first time.