It is well known that the extant corpus of Old English literature preserves only aproportion of the vocabulary that once existed. In some instances, terms forconcepts that must have been familiar to the Anglo-Saxons have been lostwithout trace; in others, they may be reconstructed from non-literary forms ofevidence such as the place-names coined by early settlers in the areas nowknown as England and southern Scotland. The main dictionary of place-nameterminology, Smith's English Place-Name Elements of 1956, includes manyentries for words which are otherwise either unattested, or attested only withother meanings. Animal names in particular constitute an area of vocabularywhich is under-represented in literary sources but common in place-names, andfor which toponymic evidence often proves crucial. Old English animal namesunattested in the extant literature but included in English Place-Name Elementsare *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 detailedcoverage of the country's toponyms in a series of annual volumes inauguratedin the 1920s, further examples may be expected to come to light. The aim of thisarticle is to offer a new addition to the corpus.

Of all the many Anglo-Saxons who travelled to the Continent, some never toreturn, Boniface, apostle to the Germans, arguably had the deepest and mostenduring inuence; for some, he is simply ‘the greatest Englishman’. But asidefrom Boniface's historical importance there is much of related interest forscholars of Anglo-Saxon literary culture too: not only does a wealth of hagiographicalmaterial survive relating to Boniface and his mission, but thereremain a number of letters, poems, and other works written by Bonifacehimself, alongside a wide range of associated texts. Yet while the literary contextsand merits of (for example) Boniface's poetry have been discussed anumber 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 administrativeimplications above those that deal with more domestic or personal issues, yet itis precisely the latter category which shows the less formal aspects of Anglo-Saxonliterary culture, and seems to invite closer comparison with a range of other texts. In particular, the innately repetitious and formulaic quality ofmuch of the correspondence has much in common with that of several otherareas of Anglo-Saxon literature in both Latin and Old English, whether inprose or verse, and this article seeks to explore those links in detail, in order tooffer a broader literary context for the composition of the correspondence as awhole.

It is an index perhaps of changing historiographical trends that the importanceof Alfred's illnesses in the moulding of his outlook, both as a layman and as aking, now hardly needs to be emphasized. In the course of the 1990s, Alfredbecame gradually better understood as a man of the 890s. Yet Victorian sensibilitieshave died hard. Both Plummer and Stevenson detected an ‘atmosphereof morbid religiosity’ in Asser's account of Alfred's illnesses in ch. 74,and both refused to associate this atmosphere with the ‘historical Alfred’, inview of his well-attested military successes. The recent resurrection of thisapproach by Alfred Smyth has only served, however, to emphasize the need for greater sensitivity to the ideals and expectations of the society within whichAlfred was operating. Smyth's unsuccessful attempt to expose Asser's Life as alater 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 inprayer [sic], and enduring some form of physical disease’. It should thereforebe stressed that royal sanctity was an entirely posthumous phenomenon inAnglo-Saxon England, and, in the case of kings, nearly always acquired throughan appropriate manner of death.

David Williams has recently argued that medieval representations of the monstergive humans an image of divinity, but one which can never be totally understoodor described. Positive theology, the via positiva, attempts to take what is known ofdivinity and then to derive more precise statements about the nature of God; itattempts 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 abeing so totally other to humans. Alexander the Great, the narrator of the OldEnglish Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, experiences such a negation in his campaignin India; he attempts to describe the wondrous beings and races which he encounterswith his army, and his narrative of conquest functions as a metaphor for containingthe encountered world in thought, description and mental order. However,he is resisted at every turn by natives, monsters and classical divinities; he is forcedto realize that his reason and his force are incapable of containing divine power asmanifested in the natural world of India.

The relationship between the book and the body in the Middle Ages is complexand 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 ofAugustine on left their marks in books in the form of glosses, personal comments,sketches, signatures, and the traces of kisses, caresses, or of simplerepeated readings that have worn away parts of numerous illustrations. MichaelCamille, in particular, has explored the sensual nature of the relationshipbetween book and reader in the act of reading. Perhaps nowhere is this unionof bodies so vividly enacted as in the works of the fourth-century Spanish poetPrudentius, whose poems remained extremely popular for centuries. They werecopied, translated, rearranged and illustrated to suit the needs of a variety ofpatrons and readers across medieval Europe.

Two fragments of an important eleventh-century manuscript, missing for someyears, were recently rediscovered by the staof Gonville and Caius Collegelibrary. The manuscript is signicant both because of its attribution to the handof ‘Eadwig Basan’, a major figure in the history of eleventh-century Englishscript, and because it constitutes evidence for the use in late Anglo-Saxon Englandof a mass lectionary, a rare type of liturgical book. The fragments have now beenassigned the class-mark 734/782a, in order both to associate them with and distinguishthem from manuscript 734/782, a seventeenth-century paper catalogue of abequest 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 courtcame to represent the focal point for skaldic composition and patronage in theNorse-speaking world. According to the later Icelandic Skáldatal or ‘List ofPoets’, no fewer than eight skalds were remembered as having composed forCnut: 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 followingcollection of skaldic praise-poems (some fragmentary) in honour of Cnut:Sigvatr Þórðarson's Knútsdrápa; Óttarr svarti's Knútsdrápa; Hallvarðr háreksblesi'sKnútsdrápa; Þórarinn loftunga's Ho˛fuðlausn and Tøgdrápa; and (probably)a fragment by Arnórr jarlaskáld. Of the other poets cited in Skáldatal, no verse inhonour of Cnut is extant by Bersi Torfuson, and none at all by Steinn Skaptasonand 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 onlyavailable edition is Oswald Cockayne's Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft ofEarly England from 1864-6; most others are available only in the broad but somewhatunsystematic series of articles published by Max Förster in Archiv für dasStudium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen in the 1910s and 1920s. AnselmHughes does not include the eight prognostic texts in Cambridge, Corpus ChristiCollege 391 in his otherwise fairly thorough edition of much of that manuscript; Peter Baker and Michael Lapidge omit any discussion of such texts fromtheir excellent survey of the history of the computus in the preface to theiredition of Byrhtferth's Enchiridion. The mid-eleventh-century Christ Churchmanuscript now known as London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iii hasattracted the notice of many fine scholars, including liturgists, linguists andmonastic and art historians, who have been drawn to the series of texts at thebeginning of the manuscript (fols. 117-73 and 2-27), including two magnicentfull-page drawings (117v and 2v) and glossed copies of the Benedictine Rule andthe Regularis Concordia. Helmut Gneuss describes this carefully presented series of interrelated texts as ‘a compendium of the Benedictine Reform movementsin Carolingian Francia and in tenth-century England’; Robert Deshman hasargued that the very sequence of texts is ‘laden with meaning’. Despite theirappreciation of these manuscript sequences, however, few scholars haveincluded in their study of this material the eighteen prognostic texts whichfollow the Regularis Concordia in the manuscript (27v-47), though most of theseare 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 beencopied in two manuscripts of the twelfth century: Cambridge, UniversityLibrary, Ff. 1. 27 (C) and London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius D. xx (V). Chas been transcribed frequently and serves as the basis for Elliott Van KirkDobbie's standard edition of the poem in the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records. Vwas almost completely destroyed in the Cottonian fire of 1731. Its version isknown to us solely from George Hickes's 1705 edition (H).

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