Summary

This book originated as a series of papers delivered at a Symposium on Irish and Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture in Honor of J. E. Cross, held in conjunction with the 30th International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo in May 1996. The purpose of that symposium was to bring together a number of friends and admirers of Professor Cross to celebrate his remarkably rich career as a scholar of Old English and Insular Latin literature; Anglo-Saxon manuscripts; and medieval sermons, saints’ lives, and apocrypha.

Just over a decade earlier, a group of colleagues had honored Professor Cross with a Festschrift published as a special volume of Leeds Studies in English, but in the years since that collection appeared, Professor Cross had managed to launch into the most productive period of his entire career, producing over thirty new articles and books since 1984, including his ground-breaking monograph on the Pembroke 25 homiliary, a facsimile edition of the Copenhagen Wulfstan manuscript for the series Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile, a book on the Gospel of Nicodemus and Vindicta Salvatoris apocrypha from the St Omer 202 homiliary, and an edition and translation of Archbishop Wulfstan’s canon laws.

Surely these achievements were worthy of fresh recognition, we reasoned, and a small cohort of Professor Cross’s friends accordingly began conspiring to host a symposium in his honor with an eye toward producing a second Festschrift. Kalamazoo was the logical site for this event. Professor Cross had frequented the Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo for as long as any of us could remember, had chaired and presented in numerous sessions, and was a plenary speaker in 1990. It was also at Kalamazoo that Professor Cross initiated discussions of a plan to revise and update J. D. A. Ogilvy’s Books Known to the English, 597-1066, an ambitious project that has since given rise to two large collaborative ventures to which many Anglo-Saxonists around the world now contribute: Fontes Anglo-Saxonici and Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture.

Kalamazoo was thus a perfect match for Professor Cross, and with the kind indulgence of the Medieval Congress program committee, we proceeded to organize five sessions for the 1996 meeting on Irish and Anglo-Saxon studies as a tribute to Professor Cross’s work in these areas. The timing, as it turned out, proved meaningful: Professor Cross died unexpectedly the following December, just seven months after the symposium, and the Kalamazoo conference was consequently the last opportunity most of us had to see him.

Contents

-2. Abbreviations
-1. Illustrations
0. Preface
1. Re-Reading The Wanderer: The Value of Cross-References
     Andy Orchard, University of Toronto
2. Visualizing Judgement: Illumination in the Old English Christ III
     Sachi Shimomura, Virginia Commonwealth University
3. The Old English Dough Riddle and the Power of Women's Magic: The Traditional Context of Exeter Book Riddle 45
     Thomas D. Hill, Cornell University
4. The Old English Life of St. Pantaleon
     Phillip Pulsiano, Villanova University
5. The Earliest Anglo-Latin Text of the Trinubium Annae (BHL 505zl)
     Thomas N. Hall, University of Illinois at Chicago
6. Reconciling Family and Faith: Ælfric's Lives of Saints and Domestic Dramas of Conversion
     Dabney Anderson Bankert, James Madison University
7. Pearls before Swine: Ælfric, Vernacular Hagiography, and the Lay Reader
     E. Gordon Whatley, Queens College
8. Sanctifying Anglo-Saxon Ealdormen: Lay Sainthood and the Rise of the Crusadion Ideal
     John Damon, University of Nebraska at Kearney
9. The Old English "Macarius" Homily, Vercelli Homily IV, and Ephrem Lantinus, De paenitentia
     Charles d. Wright, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
10. Irish Homilies A.D. 600-1100
      Martin McNamara, M.S.C., Dublin
11. An Unpublished Homily on the Transfiguration
      Raymond Étaix, Lyon
12. Pembroke College 25, Arts. 93-95
      Paul E. Szarmach, Western Michigan University
13. Comments on the Codicology of Two Paris Manuscripts (BN lat. 13,408 and 5574)
      Frederick M. Biggs, University of Connecticut at Storrs
14. Links between a Twelfth-Century Worcester (F. 94) Homily and the Eighth-Century Hiberno-Latin Commentary Liber questionum in evangliis
      Jean Rittmueller, Memphis
15. An Eighth-Century Text of the Lectiones in virgiliis defuntorum: The Earliest Manuscript Witness of the biblical Readings for the Vigil of the Dead
      Denis Brearley, University of Ottawa
16. Liturgical Echoes in Laxdæla saga
      Andrew Hamer, University of Liverpool
17. Noble Counsel, no Counsel: Advising Ethelred the Unready
      Alice Sheppard, Pennsylvania State University
18. Gildas and Glastonbury: Revisiting the Origins of Glastonbury Abbry
      Alf Siewers, Buckness University
19. A Bibliography of the Writings of J.E. Cross 1985-2000
20. Index

Reviews

"Scholars in the field of medieval studies will fund much to admire in Via Crucis, and some of the chapters... are extraordinarily solid, incisive, and memorable and will no doubt be much cited. In all, the book is a fine and fitting tribute to the memory of a distinguished scholar."
Kirsten Wolf, Journal of English and Germanic Philology