The West Virginia University Press is proud to announce Volumes 11 and 12 in our Medieval European Studies series

The West Virginia University Press is proud to announce Volumes 11 and
12 in our Medieval European Studies series:

MES 11:

Cross and Cruciform in the Anglo-Saxon World: Studies to Honor the
Memory of Timothy Reuter is edited by Sarah Larratt Keefer, Karen Louise
Jolly, and Catherine E. Karkov (PB: 978-1-933202-50-1 | $44.95) and is
the third and final volume of an ambitious research initiative begun in
1999 concerned with the image of the cross, showing how its very
material form cuts across both the culture of a society and the
boundaries of academic disciplines*history, archaeology, art history,
literature, philosophy, and religion*providing vital insights into how
symbols function within society. The flexibility, portability, and
adaptability of the Anglo-Saxon understanding of the cross suggest that,
in pre-Conquest England, at least, the linking of word, image, and
performance joined the physical and spiritual, the temporal and eternal,
and the earthly and heavenly in the Anglo-Saxon imaginative landscape.

This volume is divided into three sections. The first section of the
collection focuses on representations of “The Cross: Image and Emblem,”
with contributions by Michelle P. Brown, David A. E. Pelteret, and
Catherine E. Karkov. The second section, “The Cross: Meaning and Word,”
deals in semantics and semeology with essays by Éamonn Ó Carragáin,
Helen Damico, Rolf Bremmer, and Ursula Lenker. The third section of the
book, “The Cross: Gesture and Structure,” employs methodologies drawn
from archaeology, new media, and theories of rulership to develop new
insights into subjects as varied as cereal production, the little-known
Nunburnholme Cross, and early medieval concepts of political power.

Cross and Cruciform in the Anglo-Saxon World: Studies to Honor the
Memory of Timothy Reuter is a major collection of new research,
completing the publication series of the Sancta Crux/Halig Rod project.
Cross and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies in Honor of George
Hardin Brown, Volume 2 of Sancta Crux/Halig Rod, remains available from
West Virginia University Press.


MES 12:

Perspectives on the Old Saxon Heliand: Introductory and Critical Essays,
with an Edition of the Leipzig Fragment is edited by Valentine A. Pakis
(PB: 978-1-933202-49-5 | $44.95). Heliand, the Old Saxon poem based on
the life of Christ in the Gospels, has become more available to students
of Anglo-Saxon culture as its influence has reached into a wider range
of fields from history to linguistics, literature, and religion. In
Perspectives on the Old Saxon Heliand, Valentine Pakis brings together
recent scholarship that both addresses new turns in the field and
engages with the relevant arguments of the past three decades.
Furthering the ongoing critical discussion of both text and culture,
this volume also reflects on the current state of the field and
demonstrates how it has evolved since the 1970s.

Perspectives on the Old Saxon Heliand is the perfect complement to James
E. Cathey's Hêliand: Text and Commentary (MES 2 | PB:978-0-937058-64-0 |
$44.95) offering for the first time in English a well-edited, fully
annotated text of large segments of the poem. The commentary portion of
the book consists of an interweaving of interpretation and philological
consideration. This work presents the reader with explanatory commentary
that encompasses both the scientific and the poetic and treats them both
with equal felicity. The volume also contains a compact and serviceable
grammar of Old Saxon (with appropriate comparison to Old English
accidence for each paradigm) and an appended glossary defining all of
the vocabulary found in this edition of the Hêliand.

To order or learn more about these or other books in the series, as well
as other Medieval books (Reading Old English and The Post-Modern
Beowulf), see http://wvupressonline.com/series/medieval_european_studies