This volume explores many fundamental questions regarding Anglo-Saxon history and culture.

This volume explores many fundamental questions regarding Anglo-Saxon history. Among those considered is the question of did the earliest English prose really divide into a Mercian tradition and a separate West Saxon one? What is the full roll-call of extant texts containing late Old English 'Winchester' words? How far was Anglo-Saxon medicine hocus-pocus and how far the fruit of deliberate experimentation? How much Greek vocabulary was known in Anglo-Saxon England, and how was it known and how used? How did Anglo-Saxon land law work in practice? Advances in scholarship, application of modern scientific knowledge of a type not normally available, fresh directions of thought, original analysis, stricter criteria and additions to the stock of primary evidence all characterize this book. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year's publications in all branches of Anglo-Saxon studies rounds off the book.

List of illustrations
1. Record of the third conference of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, at Toronto, 20-3 April 1987
2. The Old Frisian component in Holthausen's Altenglisches etymologisches Worterbuch Rolf H. Bremmer Jr
3. The botanical lexicon of the Old English Herbarium Maria Amalia D'Aronco
4. 'lfric's use of etymologies Joyce Hill
5. A Frankish scholar in tenth-century England: Frithegod of Canterbury/Fredegaud of Brioude Michael Lapidge
6. The Yale fragments of the West Saxon gospels Roy Michael Liuzza
7. A fragment of an Anglo-Saxon liturgical manuscript at the University of Missouri Linda Ehrsam Voigts
8. Old English prose before and during the reign of Alfred Janet M. Bately
9. Winchester and the standardization of Old English vocabulary Walter Hofstetter
10. The Latin textual basis of Genesis A Paul G. Remley
11. Anglo-Saxon medicine and magic M. L. Cameron
12. Evidence for knowledge of Greek in Anglo-Saxon England Mary Catherine Bodden
13. A Handlist of Anglo-Saxon lawsuits Patrick Wormald
14. Bibliography for 1987 Carl T. Berkhout, Martin Biddle, Mark Blackburn, C. R. E. Coutts, David N. Dumville, Sarah Foot and Simon Keynes.