Despite being often criticized, the notion of face has recently begun to be applied in diachronic pragmatic investigations on directives, requests, apologies, and terms of address. The present study also uses the notion of face to investigate the use of Dank ‘thanks’, Dankbarkeit ‘thankfulness’, and danken ‘to thank’ in expressions of gratitude in Old Saxon and Old High German, laying the foundations to a better understanding of the speech act of thanking in the history of German. The data suggest (...) that, although the manifestation of gratitude was common, the expressions containing Dank, Dankbarkeit, and danken could mostly be found when the addresser was in a lower social position than the addressee. The same situation was observed when these nouns and verbs were used with the meaning of “to reward” and “to praise.” These findings provide evidence to the claim that the effects of a speech act on the speaker’s or hearer’s face are mostly situational rather than being an intrinsic property. They also suggest that, in strictly hierarchical societies such as the Old Saxon and Old High German ones, addressers would threaten their own negative face only if they were in a lower social position than the addressees. (shrink)

At the beginning of his essay on the phrases þing gehegan and seonoþ gehegan in Beowulf and Phoenix, Eric Stanley makes the following pessimistic statement about the fundamental uncertainties facing literary critics of Old English verse:After a century and a half of serious and informed Beowulf scholarship we have our orthodoxies of understanding and may even feel safe enough for literary criticism of points of detail requiring a familiarity with the overtones of the original which, I believe, we lack. The (...) study of the other long poems is less well developed, and the notes and commentaries on them are less full. Even so, for them too literary interpretations are advanced with hope of success, which would be courage if the exercise were dangerous. I wish to test the ice at two places; at one of them we have for a long time executed our more daring figurative skating, though I expect to find the ice thin; and the other place is similar to it, but less frequented.Stanley's argument has to do with our inability to perceive the stylistic nuances of such a distant time. The ice appears inviting but may not sustain us. In what follows I want to examine another area of fundamental uncertainty facing the modern critic of Old English verse: scribal performance. (shrink)

This book offers an analysis of the status and function of the Anglo-Saxon prognostics in their manuscript context, a study of their introduction to and transmission in Anglo-Saxon England, and, for the first time, a comprehensive edition of prognostics in Old English and Latin.

La comparaison entre vieux-saxon (vsax), et vieil-anglais (va), deux langues germaniques historiquement et linguistiquement proches, concerne dans cet article le groupe nominal au sens de Jean Fourquet (1966, publié 2000 et 201), avec une détermination ∅ ou autre que ∅, ayant trait à Dieu. Les deux textes comparés datent du IXème siècle, le poème en vieil-anglais étant la traduction de la Genèse en vieux-saxon. De ces poèmes il ne reste que certains fragments, avec une partie commune de 25 (...) vers allitérés. A partir de ces 25 lignes communes, on essaiera de déterminer le système de détermination propre à chaque langue, qui se situe à la croisée entre un système ancien et un système nouveau. Une évolution est ainsi à l’œuvre, qu’il s’agit de reconnaître dans son caractère dynamique, à partir de la façon dont Dieu est désigné en vsax comme en va. Les appellations de Dieu sont comparables sur les plans morphologique, syntaxique, lexical. Des termes du domaine séculier sont utilisés dans le domaine religieux. La différence entre les deux textes renvoie à la façon dont chaque langue tire parti des mêmes procédés. (shrink)

"A consistently informative and often impressively detailed analysis of Anglo-Saxon heroic stories (especially Beowulf, Brunanburh, Maldon), this study pulls them out from under the pall of pseudo-mystical Germani-schism that has shrouded them for generations and returns them to something of their own historical, and especially political, origins."--R. A. Shoaf, University of Florida Anglo-Saxon poems and fragments seem to preserve a long-standing Germanic code of heroic values, but John Hill shows that these values are probably not much older than (...) the poems that record and advance them. In the first book-length application of anthropological research to Old English heroic literature, Hill demonstrates that the loyalties and values celebrated in "The Battle of Brunanburh," "The Battle of Maldon," and numerous other heroic episodes in Old English literature are not aspects of an archaic or ancient ethical life but instead political models serving the interests of West Saxon kingship and hegemony. Using the much more complicated Beowulf as an illuminating counterpoint, Hill works out the development in the heroic literature of these new ideals. Employing anthropological and psychoanalytic perspectives, Hill reopens for study an important subject of Old English literature long thought settled, and he provides a window onto the process of Anglo-Saxon state formation that should appeal to medievalists in both literary studies and history. John M. Hill is professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy and author of several books, including Chaucerian Belief and The Cultural World in Beowulf. (shrink)

Peter Blickle, the great scholar of the German Peasants' War of 1525, has asserted that “in the late Middle Ages Europe saw itself confronted with a phenomenon which had been unknown in the previous history of the west—the peasant rebellion.” Is it indeed true that there are no reports of peasant revolts before the fourteenth century and in the early Middle Ages in particular? If one were to answer this question based on the Western scholarship of popular uprisings that has (...) flourished over the last few decades, one might concur with Blickle, since this research has focused almost exclusively on the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. Yet there are a few recorded examples of peasant rebellions from the early Middle Ages, although dramatically fewer than in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. The early-medieval revolt about which we have the most information is the Saxon Stellinga uprising of 841–42. Gerward, the author of the Annals of Xanten, described this revolt with the following words: “That same year throughout all of Saxony the power of the slaves rose up violently against their lords. They usurped for themselves the name Stellinga [apparently Old Saxon for ‘companions’ or ‘comrades’], and they perpetrated much madness. And the nobles of that land were violently persecuted and humiliated by the slaves.” As the only recorded European popular revolt between the sixth and tenth century, the rebellion of the Saxon Stellinga demands an explanation. (shrink)

Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, written in Latin around 525 A.D., was to become one of the most influential literary texts of the Middle Ages. The Old English prose translation and adaptation which was produced around 900 and claims to be by King Alfred was one of the earliest signs of its importance and use, and the subsequent rewriting of parts as verse show an interest in rivalling the literary shape of the Latin original. The many changes and additions have much (...) to tell us about Anglo-Saxon interests and scholarship in the Alfredian period. This new edition is the first to present the second prose-and-verse version of the Old English text, and allows it to be read alongside the original prose version, for which this is the first edition for over a century, and the introduction and commentary reveal much about the history of the text and its composition. The edition contains critical texts of both versions; a translation; a full introduction examining the manuscripts, the composition of the prose text and of the subsequent verse, the language, the authorship and date of the two versions, the relationship to other texts of the period and later uses of it, and the nature and purpose of the work; a detailed commentary exploring the relationship to the Latin text and to the early medieval commentary tradition; textual notes; and a glossary. (shrink)

This book presents the first comprehensive study of Anglo-Saxon manuscript texts containing runic letters. To date there has been no comprehensive study of these works in a single volume, although the need for such an examination has long been recognized. This is in spite of a growing academic interest in the mise-en-page of early medieval manuscripts. The texts discussed in this study include Old English riddles and elegies, the Cynewulfian poems, charms, Solomon and Saturn I, and the Old English (...) Rune Poem. The focus of the discussion is on the literary analysis of these texts in their palaeographic and runological contexts. Anglo-Saxon authors and scribes did not, of course, operate within a vacuum, and so these primary texts are considered alongside relevant epigraphic inscriptions, physical objects, and historical documents. Victoria Symons argues that all of these runic works are in various ways thematically focused on acts of writing, visual communication, and the nature of the written word. The conclusion that emerges over the course of the book is that, when encountered in the context of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, runic letters consistently represent the written word in a way that Roman letters do not. (shrink)

In 1962 appeared one of the classic articles in Anglo-Saxon manuscript studies, the publication of two eleventh-century fragments of leaves of Old English found in the binding of a seventeenth-century printed book in the library of the University of Kansas, Lawrence. The fragment that more nearly concerns the present article now carries the shelf mark Pryce MS C2:1 in the Kenneth Spencer Research Library . It is a large part of a single leaf from The Legend of the Holy (...) Cross before Christ, an edifying work known in full only in a twelfth-century copy, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 343, fols. 14v–20v . Working from a photograph the great paleographer and codicologist N. R. Ker attributed the hand of the Kansas fragment to the scribe who also wrote the texts of two bits of the same work found in the library of Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury , at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, now MS 557 . He concluded, no doubt rightly, that all three are part of one manuscript. (shrink)

The changes known as the loss of inflexions in English (11th- 15th centuries, included) were prompted with the introduction of a new mode of thinking. The mode of thinking, for the Anglo-Saxons, was a dynamic way of conceiving of things. Things were considered events happening. With the contacts of Anglo-Saxons with, first, the Romano-British; second, the introduction of Christianity; and finally with the Norman invasion, their dynamic way of thinking was confronted with the static conception of things coming from the (...) Mediterranean. The history of English from the 11th to the 15th century meant the introduction, confrontation and adoption of a new mental conception of things, the static way of conceiving of things, both modes of thinking defining the language today. (shrink)

The two extant Old English lives of the virgin-martyr St. Margaret of Antioch, in London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iii, and Cambridge, Corpus Christi College Library 303, reflect the specific interest in this saint that appears to have developed in England in the late Anglo-Saxon period. More broadly, they are representative of the widely evident interest in this period in making hagiographical material available, in prose, to vernacular audiences. Although Ælfric played the leading part in that enterprise, numerous (...) translations and adaptations not by him also survive from late Anglo-Saxon England, presenting a wide range of approaches to inherited material. In that connection it should be noted that there is no mention of St. Margaret in the writings of Ælfric, nor does the passio of St. Margaret appear in the Latin legendary believed to have served as Ælfric's principal source for his saints' lives. (shrink)

A series of structural constitutional arguments lodged in multiple cases against Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) authorities to negotiate prescription drug prices via the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act threaten the legitimacy of CMS program and federal agency powers.

Over the past decades, the modernization of agriculture in the Western world has contributed not only to a rapid increase in food production but also to environmental and societal concerns over issues such as greenhouse gas emissions, soil quality and biodiversity loss. Many of these concerns, for example those related to animal welfare or labor conditions, are stuck in controversies and apparently deadlocked debates. As a result we observe a paradox in which a wide range of corporate social responsibility initiatives, (...) originally seeking to reconnect agriculture and society, frequently provoke debate, conflict, and protests. In order to make sense of this pattern, the present paper contends that Western agriculture is marked by moral complexity, i.e., the tendency of multiple legitimate moral standpoints to proliferate without the realistic prospect of a consensus. This contention is buttressed by a conceptual framework that draws inspiration the contemporary business ethics and systems-theoretic scholarship. From the systems-theoretic point of view, the evolution of moral complexity is traced back to the processes of agricultural modernization, specialization, and differentiation, each of which suppresses the responsiveness of the economic and legal institutions to the full range of societal and environmental concerns about agriculture. From the business ethics point of view, moral complexity is shown to prevent the transformation of the ethical responsibilities into the legal and economic responsibilities despite the ongoing institutionalization of CSR. Navigating moral complexity is shown to require moral judgments which are necessarily personal and contestable. These judgments are implicated in those CSR initiatives that require dealing with trade-offs among the different sustainability issues. (shrink)

Two principal sources of imprecision in legal drafting (vagueness and ambiguity) are identified and illustrated. Virtually all of the ambiguity imprecision encountered in legal discourse is ambiguity in the language used to express logical structure, and virtually all of the imprecision resulting is inadvertent. On the other hand, the imprecision encountered in legal writing that results from vagueness is frequently, if not most often, included there deliberately; the drafter has considered it and decided that the vague language best accomplishes the (...) purpose at hand. This paper focuses on the use of some defined terminology for minimizing inadvertent ambiguity in the logical structure of legal discourse, where desired by the drafter. The current set of signaled structural definitions that are included in the A-Hohfeld language are first set forth and their use is illustrated in an extensive example from the treaty establishing the European Economic Community. The use of definitions in legal writing is widespread, butaddressed almost exclusively to controlling the vagueness of substantive legal terms; they are seldom used for structural purposes. Furthermore, their use in American legislative drafting is unsignaled. Here, attention is devoted to the relatively-neglected domain in legal discourse of imprecisely expressed logical structure, and the remedy offered, where desired by the drafter, is a set of signaled structuraldefinitions for use in controlling such imprecision. (shrink)

Talking About Ethics provides the reader with all of the tools necessary to develop a coherent approach to ethical decision making. Using the tools of ethical theory, the authors show how these theories play out in relation to a wide variety of ethical questions using an accessible dialogue format. The chapters follow three college students as they discuss today’s most important ethical issues with their families and friends, including:• Immigration• Capital punishment• Legalization of narcotics• Abortion• Premarital sex• Reproductive technologies• Gender (...) identity• The environment, and many moreThe engaging dialogue format illustrates how these topics often take shape in the real world, and model critical thinking and Christian ethical decision making. Study aids in each chapter include overviews, sidebars, reflection questions, glossaries, and recommended reading. Ideal as a textbook for undergraduate ethics courses, it is also accessible enough for high school classes and personal study. (shrink)

Lifschitz introduced the notion of defining extensions of predicate default theories not as absolute, but relative to a specified domain. We look specifically at default theories over a countable domain and show the set of default theories which possess an ω -extension is Σ 2 1 -complete. That the set is in Σ 2 1 is shown by writing a nearly circumscriptive formula whose ω -models correspond to the ω -extensions of a given default theory; similarly, Σ 2 1 -hardness (...) is established by a method for translating formulas into default theories in such a way that ω -models of the circumscriptive formula correspond to ω -extensions of the default theory. (shrink)

Donald Olding Hebb, referred to by American Psychologist as one of "the 20th century's most eminent and influential theorists in the realm of brain function and behavior," contributes greatly to the understanding of mind and thought in Essays on Mind. His objective was to learn about thought which he considered "the central problem of psychology -- but also, not less important, to learn how to think clearly about thought, which is philosophy." The volume is written for advanced undergraduates, graduates, professionals, (...) and lay people interested in or studying the mind. Hebb offers an increased understanding of the mind from a biological perspective that affects long-standing philosophical and psychological problems. "Psychology and Philosophy were divorced some time ago but, like other divorced couples, they still have problems in common," writes Hebb. The first three chapters establish the methodological and philosophical basis for his biologically centered theory of behavior, including the evolution of the mind, nature versus nurture, the origination and status of cell-assembly theory, and infant thought and language development. He concludes with a discussion of the workings of scientific thought from a practical rather than theoretical perspective. (shrink)

Of all the arguments for the existence of God, the argument from design is in many respects the most impressive, as everyone remarks that Kant remarked. Certainly it is an argument which seems to have appealed to the popular imagination and even today does not lack philosophical proponents. The purpose of the present paper is to examine a recent formulation of the argument. In particular I shall be concerned to bring into the open its dualist assumptions and to show how (...) these militate against its general plausibility. (shrink)