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. .
- ISBN10 1843830701
- ISBN13 9781843830702
- Publish Date 23 September 2004
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 28 May 2021
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Boydell & Brewer Ltd
- Imprint The Boydell Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 246
- Language English