ENGLISH

Dying and Death in Later Anglo-Saxon England (Anglo-Saxon Studies)

By Victoria Thompson

Book information

Publisher
Boydell Press
Year
2004
ISBN
9781843830702, 1843830701
Open Library ID
OL22600712M
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
2 MB (1884481 bytes)
Series
Anglo-Saxon Studies
Pages
240\240
Topic
History
Time added
2010-08-30 15:18:36

Description

This wide-ranging analysis of later Anglo-Saxon culture and society will be indispensable to students of history, literature and archaeology. The death-bed and funerary practices of this period have been comparatively and unjustly neglected by historical scholarship; Victoria Thompson examines them in the context of confessional and penitential literature, wills, poetry, chronicles and homilies, to show that complex and ambiguous ideas about death were current at all levels of Anglo-Saxon society. An important pastoral handbook for the confessor (Bodley MS. Laud Misc. 482) is here given its first extended analysis. As well as these diverse textual sources, her study also takes in grave monuments, showing in particular how the Anglo-Scandinavian sculpture of the ninth to eleventh centuries may indicate not only the status, but also the religious and cultural alignment of those who commissioned and made them. What this study tells us about pre-Conquest attitudes towards the dying and the dead has implications for every aspect of culture, religion and society.

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