Dying and Death in Later Anglo-Saxon England (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781843837312)

Study of late Anglo-Saxon texts and grave monuments illuminates contemporary attitudes towards dying and the dead.

Pre-Conquest attitudes towards the dying and the dead have major implications for every aspect of culture, society and religion of the Anglo-Saxon period; but death-bed and funerary practices have been comparatively and unjustly neglected by historical scholarship. In her wide-ranging analysis, Dr Thompson examines such practices in the context of confessional and penitential literature, wills, poetry, chronicles and homilies, to show that complex and ambiguous ideas about death were current at all levels of Anglo-Saxon society. Her study also takes in grave monuments, showing in particular how the Anglo-Scandinavian sculpture of the ninth to the eleventh centuries may indicate notonly the status, but also the religious and cultural alignment of those who commissioned and made them.

Victoria Thompson is Lecturer in the Centre for Nordic Studies at the University of the Highlands and Islands.

Author: Victoria Thompson
ISBN-10: 1843837315
ISBN-13: 9781843837312
Publisher: Boydell Press
Language: English
Published: 07/19/2012
Pages: 246
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.95lbs
Size: 9.20h x 6.20w x 0.70d