Following hints provided by Bede and other early eighth-century sources, we can trace likely avenues for the transmission of the story of Caedmon from Whitby to Bede. The omission of the subject we in line 1a is best explained by the physical presence of both the poet and his audience, since subject pronouns are most likely to be omitted by speakers addressing their audience, and provides further confirmation of the authenticity of the Hymn. The emphasis on issues of competence and performance at the core of the story of Caedmon closely resembles the concerns of modern ethnopoetics and confirms that Bede is indeed presenting a historical account of the reception of a new poet by his local community. Focusing on Caedmon's successive audiences as well as the Hymn provides us with new perspectives on both the Hymn and its reception. This second edition is an accessible and scholarly introduction to Old English.īede's story of Caedmon focuses on the reception of Caedmon and his Hymn as much as it does on the poet's inspiration and compositions. Headnotes to each of the six text sections, and to every individual text, establish their literary and historical contexts, and illustrate the rich cultural variety of Anglo-Saxon England. A comprehensive glossary lists and analyses all the Old English words that occur in the book. A succinct reference grammar is appended, along with guides to pronunciation and to grammatical terminology. Modern English glosses for every prose-passage and poem are provided on the same page as the text, along with extensive notes. The fifty-seven individual texts include established favourites such as The Battle of Maldon and Wulfstan's Sermon of the Wolf, as well as others not otherwise readily available, such as an extract from Apollonius of Tyre. The second edition is extensively revised throughout, with the addition of a new 'Beginning Old English' section for newcomers to the Old English language, along with a new extract from Beowulf. This reader remains the only major new reader of Old English prose and verse in the past forty years. Richardson, promoting the idea of smaller teams, invoked documentary evi. Even before Cawley published his edition of the play, the reality of the eight-animal team as the indisputable standard in medieval English farming was under question. There has long been a challenge to the concept of the universal use of an eightanimal team in real-life English farming, and it is the purpose of the present essay to challenge Cawley 's stage plough team by reassessing the Mactacio Abel If we place the Wakefield Master's use of wordplay against a backdrop of recent historical research and representations of plough teams in the art of the period, we can see that the team which the dramatist envisaged for the stage did not consist of eight beasts but was a more manageable twoanimal team, a horse called Don and a mare called Molly. ![]() Agricultural historians seem to have overlooked this reading of Cain's ploughing practice and, in so doing, have missed a clear endorsement in late medieval literature of the tradition of the Domesday eightanimal standard team.2 But traditions are not immune to challenge. ![]() Cawley published his authoritative edition of the Wakefield Master's plays, he established what has become the traditional reading of the medieval English plough team for the fictional world of the stage.1 His interpretation of Mactacio Abel presents Cain, the niggardly ploughman who commits the first murder, ostentatiously driving a mixed team consisting of four oxen and four horses. This tradition has behind it the formidable weight of the Domesday survey, which used the eight-ox team as its standard in assessing demesne livestock. Tradition has it that in England the medieval plough was powered by an eight-animal team, sometimes comprised wholly of oxen and sometimes a mixture of oxen and horses.
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