Peter J. Lucas, Old English Poetry from Manuscript to Message. Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 58. Turnhout: Brepols, 2024, xviii, 398 pp.

These collected papers of Peter Lucas (formerly of UCD, Ireland) shed welcome light on early (and even later) English verse. They comprise 22 items in five sections. Part one is on manuscript issues: the Nowell Codex and Judith; the Vercelli Book; the Junius Manuscript’s structure, chasms, and problems of its Daniel and Christ and Satan. The second part brings us to meter: its relation to “verse grammar”; adverbs and “verse grammar”; the Pastoral Care’s Metrical Epilogue; and what Junius thought of Judith’s versification. Part three’s concern is textual minutiae: Beowulf’s vexing eolet æt ende; 733b in Andreas; 1476b in Christ III; anfloga in The Seafarer; Genesis B 623-5; mod gerymde in Exodus; ægnian in the same; Daniel 276. Then come themes: loyalty in Genesis; individualism in Beowulf, Guthlac, The Dream of the Rood, the elegies; the Cross in Exodus; the Easter liturgy and St Guthlac; Judith and women. Fifth and last is a jeu d’esprit on how Lewis Carroll in Jabberwocky sent up Anglo-Saxon Studies. The analysis is yet completely professional and illuminating, both on English Studies in Victorian Oxford and on Carroll’s other parodies (of Watts, Southey, Thomas Hood). Thereafter is a handy bibliography (pp. 355–68) of the author’s publications. It should be used, especially for work on John Capgrave, fifteenth-century historian and Augustinian friar, or on books and their circulation up to the seventeenth century.