Rivers of tears, softening stone

“Jesus wept.”  Famously the shortest verse in the Authorised English version of the Bible (John 11:35), when Jesus weeps at the death of his friend Lazarus, this is actually slightly longer in Latin, usually a more succinct language than English: Et lacrimatus est Iesus. A major focus of my work is on the circumstances surrounding…

Faithful cross, gate of heaven

Today is Good Friday, the day which commemorates the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.  For today’s blogpost, I’ve decided simply to post and translate some Anglo-Saxon texts dedicated to the Holy Cross: a hymn, a poem, and two prayers.  As my research is all about how texts were adapted and reused in different contexts, in each…

The scribe, the editors, and the well-dressed Elizabethan: a day with an 11th-century psalter

As I mentioned in my post on an Old English confessional prayer, I recently visited the British Library to visit the manuscript known as Cotton Tiberius A. iii, which was a sort of ‘supporting actor’ in my thesis.  A similar role was played by an eleventh-century psalter, known as the Eadui Psalter and with the…