The Anglo-Saxon Library

This book is the work of a master who has single-handedly created the field of Anglo-Latin studies and who brings to everything he writes vast erudition and (like his friend the late Bernhard Bischoff) the uncanny ability to make connections between seemingly disparate objects that result in brilliant and (usually) convincing discoveries. Nor does it disappoint. Erudition there is aplenty, and if the views presented are in the main not new—for much of the material has appeared in Lapidge's earlier publications—it is good to have them synthesised. Some things are new, however: the attention given to books from the Anglo-Saxon Continental mission field; the use of Helmut Gneuss's revised Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts, and the judicious conclusion about the modest scope of Anglo-Saxon libraries in relation both to the ancient ones that originally fed them, and to the Frankish ones (which they helped feed) during the Carolingian renaissance. The author might have added a comparison with post-Conquest English libraries as they stood by c.1150. The main text is based upon Lapidge's Lowe Lectures in Palaeography, delivered at Oxford University in 2002. To it he has added five appendices and a ‘Catalogue of Classical and Patristic Authors and Works Composed before AD 700 and Known in Anglo-Saxon England’. This material makes up most of the book, and, such is its substantial and permanent value, I suspect it will be the part most consulted. The ‘Catalogue’, in particular, is essentially a replacement, so far as it goes, for Ogilvy's notoriously inaccurate Books known to the Anglo-Saxons. Its limitation to ‘works composed before 700’ seems both an oddity and a pity, given that writings of much later date are listed in Appendix E, ‘Latin Books Cited by the Principal Anglo-Saxon Authors’. On the other hand the ‘Catalogue’ is swollen with items that, I shall argue below, should not be there at all

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