A Poem for All Seasons: Alcuin’s “O vos, est aetas”

There is no complete account of the transmission of Alcuin’s poems, which is apparently quite unpredictable if not random. The circulation of a number of short compositions, which accompany his treatises and his letters, and their circulation together, is so far uncharted. Particularly intriguing is the manuscript tradition of “O vos, est aetas,” a poem in seven distichs, in which young men are encouraged to learn rhetoric and to cultivate virtue. The poem generally occurs in connection with two prose works by Alcuin, the De dialectica (henceforth DD) and the Disputatio de rhetorica et virtutibus (henceforth DR). It may be copied either between the two treatises, before the prologue poem of…

Saggi in onore di Piergiuseppe Scardigli

'Filologia germanica- Germanic Philology' 5 (2013)

Un volume monografico della rivista dedicato alla Prosa anglosassone

Hagiography in Anglo-Saxon England: Adopting and Adapting Saints’ Lives into Old English Prose (Textes et Études du Moyen Âge, 73)

This volume gathers fourteen new essays devoted to Old English prose saints’ lives from the late Anglo-Saxon period. Moving from diverse methodological approaches and building on the most recent developments in primary and secondary scholarship, the contributions comprehensively consider the texts and contexts of the vernacular hagiographic output both by Ælfric, the major hagiographer of his day, and by anonymous authors. Attention is devoted also to the post-Conquest legacy of Anglo-Saxon hagiography, as Ælfric’s Lives of Saints continued to be read, copied, edited, and readapted throughout the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In the new stress on the Latin source-texts, among which the lo…