It is well known that the extant corpus of Old English literature preserves only a proportion of the vocabulary that once existed. In some instances, terms for concepts that must have been familiar to the Anglo-Saxons have been lost without trace; in others, they may be reconstructed from non-literary forms of evidence such as the place-names coined by early settlers in the areas now known as England and southern Scotland. The main dictionary of place-name terminology, Smith's English Place-Name Elements of 1956, includes many entries for words which are otherwise either unattested, or attested only with other meanings. Animal names in particular constitute an area of vocabulary which is under-represented in literary sources but common in place-names, and for which toponymic evidence often proves crucial. Old English animal names unattested in the extant literature but included in English Place-Name Elements are *bagga ‘badger’, *bula ‘bull’, *ean ‘lamb’, *gæten ‘kid’, *galt ‘pig, boar’, *græg ‘badger’, *hyrse ‘mare’, *padde ‘toad’, *padduc ‘frog’, *pigga ‘young pig’, *stedda ‘horse’, *tacca and *tagga ‘teg, young sheep’, *tige ‘goat’, *todd ‘fox’ and *wiðer ‘ram, wether’. Those identied more recently include *brun ‘pig’ and *wearg ‘wolf ’. As the English Place-Name Survey progresses, providing detailed coverage of the country's toponyms in a series of annual volumes inaugurated in the 1920s, further examples may be expected to come to light. The aim of this article is to offer a new addition to the corpus.

Of all the many Anglo-Saxons who travelled to the Continent, some never to return, Boniface, apostle to the Germans, arguably had the deepest and most enduring inuence; for some, he is simply ‘the greatest Englishman’. But aside from Boniface's historical importance there is much of related interest for scholars of Anglo-Saxon literary culture too: not only does a wealth of hagiographical material survive relating to Boniface and his mission, but there remain a number of letters, poems, and other works written by Boniface himself, alongside a wide range of associated texts. Yet while the literary contexts and merits of (for example) Boniface's poetry have been discussed a number of times in recent years, the primary academic focus on the so-called ‘Bonifatian correspondence’ has tended to be historical, rather than literary. Such a focus has tended to privilege those letters with political or administrative implications above those that deal with more domestic or personal issues, yet it is precisely the latter category which shows the less formal aspects of Anglo-Saxon literary culture, and seems to invite closer comparison with a range of other texts. In particular, the innately repetitious and formulaic quality of much of the correspondence has much in common with that of several other areas of Anglo-Saxon literature in both Latin and Old English, whether in prose or verse, and this article seeks to explore those links in detail, in order to offer a broader literary context for the composition of the correspondence as a whole.

It is an index perhaps of changing historiographical trends that the importance of Alfred's illnesses in the moulding of his outlook, both as a layman and as a king, now hardly needs to be emphasized. In the course of the 1990s, Alfred became gradually better understood as a man of the 890s. Yet Victorian sensibilities have died hard. Both Plummer and Stevenson detected an ‘atmosphere of morbid religiosity’ in Asser's account of Alfred's illnesses in ch. 74, and both refused to associate this atmosphere with the ‘historical Alfred’, in view of his well-attested military successes. The recent resurrection of this approach by Alfred Smyth has only served, however, to emphasize the need for greater sensitivity to the ideals and expectations of the society within which Alfred was operating. Smyth's unsuccessful attempt to expose Asser's Life as a later forgery relies heavily upon his assumption that the text is a work of hagiography, because it supposedly portrays Alfred as ‘a saintly king, wrapt up in prayer [sic], and enduring some form of physical disease’. It should therefore be stressed that royal sanctity was an entirely posthumous phenomenon in Anglo-Saxon England, and, in the case of kings, nearly always acquired through an appropriate manner of death.

David Williams has recently argued that medieval representations of the monster give humans an image of divinity, but one which can never be totally understood or described. Positive theology, the via positiva, attempts to take what is known of divinity and then to derive more precise statements about the nature of God; it attempts to contain God in human thought and language. The via negativa, by contrast, forces humans to discard the idea of any positive knowledge about God, since reason and language are inadequate to the task of containing or describing a being so totally other to humans. Alexander the Great, the narrator of the Old English Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, experiences such a negation in his campaign in India; he attempts to describe the wondrous beings and races which he encounters with his army, and his narrative of conquest functions as a metaphor for containing the encountered world in thought, description and mental order. However, he is resisted at every turn by natives, monsters and classical divinities; he is forced to realize that his reason and his force are incapable of containing divine power as manifested in the natural world of India.

The relationship between the book and the body in the Middle Ages is complex and has been the focus of much recent attention. At a most basic level the dead, dismembered, yet living body of the book was united with the bodies of author, scribe, artist and reader in the act of reading. Medieval readers from the age of Augustine on left their marks in books in the form of glosses, personal comments, sketches, signatures, and the traces of kisses, caresses, or of simple repeated readings that have worn away parts of numerous illustrations. Michael Camille, in particular, has explored the sensual nature of the relationship between book and reader in the act of reading. Perhaps nowhere is this union of bodies so vividly enacted as in the works of the fourth-century Spanish poet Prudentius, whose poems remained extremely popular for centuries. They were copied, translated, rearranged and illustrated to suit the needs of a variety of patrons and readers across medieval Europe.

Two fragments of an important eleventh-century manuscript, missing for some years, were recently rediscovered by the staof Gonville and Caius College library. The manuscript is signicant both because of its attribution to the hand of ‘Eadwig Basan’, a major figure in the history of eleventh-century English script, and because it constitutes evidence for the use in late Anglo-Saxon England of a mass lectionary, a rare type of liturgical book. The fragments have now been assigned the class-mark 734/782a, in order both to associate them with and distinguish them from manuscript 734/782, a seventeenth-century paper catalogue of a bequest of books to the college, in whose binding they were originally preserved.

It is generally recognized that during the reign of Cnut the Danish king's court came to represent the focal point for skaldic composition and patronage in the Norse-speaking world. According to the later Icelandic Skáldatal or ‘List of Poets’, no fewer than eight skalds were remembered as having composed for Cnut: Sigvatr Þórðarson, Óttarr svarti, Þórarinn loftunga, Hallvarðr háreksblesi, Bersi Torfuson, Steinn Skaptason, Arnórr Þórðarson jarlaskáld, and Óðarkeptr. Comparing this list with the extant poetic remains, one arrives at the following collection of skaldic praise-poems (some fragmentary) in honour of Cnut: Sigvatr Þórðarson's Knútsdrápa; Óttarr svarti's Knútsdrápa; Hallvarðr háreksblesi's Knútsdrápa; Þórarinn loftunga's Ho˛fuðlausn and Tøgdrápa; and (probably) a fragment by Arnórr jarlaskáld. Of the other poets cited in Skáldatal, no verse in honour of Cnut is extant by Bersi Torfuson, and none at all by Steinn Skaptason and Óðarkeptr.

The various Latin and Old English texts which have come to be called ‘prognostics’ have not, in general, been well served by scholars. For some texts the only available edition is Oswald Cockayne's Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England from 1864-6; most others are available only in the broad but somewhat unsystematic series of articles published by Max Förster in Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen in the 1910s and 1920s. Anselm Hughes does not include the eight prognostic texts in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 391 in his otherwise fairly thorough edition of much of that manuscript; Peter Baker and Michael Lapidge omit any discussion of such texts from their excellent survey of the history of the computus in the preface to their edition of Byrhtferth's Enchiridion. The mid-eleventh-century Christ Church manuscript now known as London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iii has attracted the notice of many fine scholars, including liturgists, linguists and monastic and art historians, who have been drawn to the series of texts at the beginning of the manuscript (fols. 117-73 and 2-27), including two magnicent full-page drawings (117v and 2v) and glossed copies of the Benedictine Rule and the Regularis Concordia. Helmut Gneuss describes this carefully presented series of interrelated texts as ‘a compendium of the Benedictine Reform movements in Carolingian Francia and in tenth-century England’; Robert Deshman has argued that the very sequence of texts is ‘laden with meaning’. Despite their appreciation of these manuscript sequences, however, few scholars have included in their study of this material the eighteen prognostic texts which follow the Regularis Concordia in the manuscript (27v-47), though most of these are in the same hand and are arranged, it may be argued, with equal care.

Until recently, the late Old English poem Durham was known to have been copied in two manuscripts of the twelfth century: Cambridge, University Library, Ff. 1. 27 (C) and London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius D. xx (V). C has been transcribed frequently and serves as the basis for Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie's standard edition of the poem in the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records. V was almost completely destroyed in the Cottonian fire of 1731. Its version is known to us solely from George Hickes's 1705 edition (H).

In a recent article, however, Donald K. Fry announced the discovery of a third medieval text of the poem. Like V, the original manuscript of this ‘third’ version is now lost and can be reconstructed only from an early modern transcription - in this case a copy by Francis Junius no win the Stanford University Library (Stanford University Libraries, Department of Special Collections, Misc. 010 [J1]). Unlike V, however, Junius's copy is our only record of this manuscript's existence. No other transcripts are known from medieval or early modern manuscript catalogues.