📄 Faulkner, Amy, and Francis Leneghan, eds. 2024. The Age of Alfred: Rethinking English Literary Culture c. 850–950. Studies in Old English Literature 3. Turnhout: Brepols. Pp. 598. ISBN 9782503606651.

Summary

This review by Richard Dance (SELIM 31, 2026) assesses an edited collection on English literary culture between roughly 850 and 950. The volume grew out of online symposia held in 2021. It challenges the habit of reading the period mainly through King Alfred and the texts credited to him. The editors, Amy Faulkner and Francis Leneghan, argue for a broader literary history that also gives attention to neglected works: Mercian writing, Anglo-Latin compositions, the Martyrology, Bald's Leechbook, and possibly Andreas.

The chapters use textual criticism, source study, stylistic analysis, manuscript and scribal evidence, legal and lexical analysis, and cultural theory. Several of them revise long-held assumptions. Some departures from source texts turn out to come from later copyists rather than the translator. Alfred's authorship of the Pastoral Care prefaces is doubted. One translator is argued to be behind both the Boethius and the Soliloquies.

Dance judges the collection ground-breaking and essential reading for anyone studying pre-Conquest English literature.

Key points

• The book is The Age of Alfred, Studies in Old English Literature 3 (Brepols, 2024, 598 pp.). It has four sections:

  • "Context" (4 chapters)
  • "Textual Criticism, Source Study, and Style" (6 chapters)
  • "Vernacular Philosophy and Theology" (5 chapters)
  • "Royal Authority and Legislation" (5 chapters)

  An editors' introduction opens the volume, and Malcolm Godden's Afterword closes it.

• Christine Rauer gives a provisional list of fifty texts that can plausibly be placed in a Mercian setting.

• Nicole Guenther Discenza finds broad geographical knowledge in Alfredian texts. Rome and Jerusalem are the places mentioned most often, but Jerusalem appears with its Jewish inhabitants erased.

• Greg Waite, preparing a new edition of the Old English Bede with Sharon Rowley, makes two findings:

  • The surviving copies reflect fairly late reworking of a Mercian original.
  • Many divergences from the Latin are scribal errors. "Geats" may never have appeared in the original translation.

• Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe reinterprets folcleasung in Alfred 32 as malicious false witness (delation) rather than slander. She draws on a source in the Pseudo-Isidore Decretals. Godden attributes the shift from verse to prose to a new taste for written texts and private reading.

Interesting ideas

• I1. Waite shows that "translator choices" were often errors introduced by later copyists, so each divergence must be traced to the stage that actually produced it.
• I2. Anlezark treats coinciding shifts in spelling, vocabulary, punctuation and citation habits as stronger evidence of a change of scribe than any one signal alone.
• I3. Lockett explains a translator's additions by matching them against side sources (Boethius commentaries), turning unexplained deviation into traceable influence.
• I4. Rauer's list is explicitly provisional and assigns texts only "plausibly", keeping confidence visible in the inventory itself.
• I5. O'Brien O'Keeffe narrows a contested legal term's meaning by examining its contexts and its source tradition, rather than relying on the conventional gloss.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

• I1 (learn): When an answer is wrong, trace the fault back through tokens, tree and frames to the step that introduced it, instead of blaming the final reader by default.
• I2 (learn): Accept silver data or flag a domain or annotator shift only when several independent signals change together, which lowers false alarms.
• I3 (world): When a text asserts something absent from the explicit input, the world builder could look for a supporting background-knowledge entry and record it as the explanation.
• I4 (world): Store compiled knowledge (verb classes, ontology links) with explicit plausibility grades so that later reasoning can show how firm each fact is.
• I5 (frames): Choose a word's sense and frame from its surrounding context and known source patterns, not from a single default dictionary sense.