Böcker i Studies in Early Medieval History-serien

In the history of Christianity, the so-called 'Church Fathers' hold an immensely important place. This title, which we now associate with figures like St Augustine or St Jerome, was used from the fourth century onwards to designate particularly trustworthy authorities, whose opinions became the foundation of Western religious and intellectual culture. But who exactly were these Church Fathers? This examines this fundamental questions and considers which authors constituted the 'Church Fathers', the key religious authorities of the early Middle Ages, and assesses whether the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus formed part of this illustrious category. In the process Richard Matthew Pollard uses a variety of novel techniques: using new quantitative methods, as well as sensitive qualitative analysis, it sketches the shape of this shadowy group, and traces how certain figures join, or leave, this exclusive club. In particular, the book focuses on the place of Flavius Josephus, an ancient Jewish historian (c. 37-100) whom some have suggested became a quasi-Church Father. Only by carefully defining the Church Fathers can we evaluate such claims; in the process, we learn a great deal more about Josephus' understudied medieval legacy. Josephus and the Church Fathers in the Early Middle Ages ultimately enables us to understand and appreciate the foundational authorities of European Christian culture - some of whom were not Christian at all.

Explores the practicalities of the spread of this Irish scholarship to St Gall and the reception it received once there. This book investigates a part of the network of knowledge that fed this important Carolingian centre of learning with scholarship.

For earlier medieval Christians, the Bible was the book of guidance above all others, and the route to religious knowledge, used for all kinds of practical purposes, from divination to models of government in kingdom or household. This book''s focus is on how medieval people accessed Scripture by reading, but also by hearing and memorizing sound-bites from the liturgy, chants and hymns, or sermons explicating Scripture in various vernaculars. Time, place and social class determined access to these varied forms of Scripture. Throughout the earlier medieval period, the Psalms attracted most readers and searchers for meanings.This book''s contributors probe readers'' motivations, intellectual resources and religious concerns. They ask for whom the readers wrote, where they expected their readers to be located and in what institutional, social and political environments they belonged; why writers chose to write about, or draw on, certain parts of the Bible rather than others, and what real-life contexts or conjunctures inspired them; why the Old Testament so often loomed so large, and how its law-books, its histories, its prophetic books and its poetry were made intelligible to readers, hearers and memorizers. This book''s contributors, in raising so many questions, do justice to both uniqueness and diversity.

This book considers evidence for Germanic goddesses in England and on the Continent, and argues on the basis of linguistic and onomastic evidence that modern scholarship has tended to focus too heavily on the notion of divine functions or spheres of activity, rather than considering localities and social structures.