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The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature

The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace, was published in 1991, intentionally excluding the early medieval centuries from its conception of literary history (in contrast to its much earlier predecessor, published in 1907). The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature is designed to rectify this omission of the earliest centuries of literary production in Britain and Ireland before the English Conquest of 1066. As editor of this volume of the New Cambridge History of English Literature, Lees is responsible for its new multi-lingual, multi-disciplinary and post-national mapping of writing in early medieval culture, commissioning twenty-six chapters from twenty-eight contributors, including historians, palaeographers, art historians and literary scholars. The book addresses the fifth century to the mid-twelfth centuries, crossing the conventional divide of medieval literature into two distinct periods, pre- and post-Conquest. It explores literature written in seven different languages (Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Latin, Anglo-Scandinavian, Welsh, Irish, Gaelic and French) in some seven hundred pages. Its subjects include early English science, Welsh poetry, continental Germanic writing, the literature of law and of science, studies of genre, epic, women’s writing and poetic form. Lees is responsible for the conceptualization and structure of the book and the account of early medieval literary history it offers from its section divisions to its chapter titles. She worked with each contributor to revise their chapters for publication and she also wrote the Introduction (pp.1-16). The research conducted for and during the process of completing this book forms part of her broader research interests in contemporary engagements with the earliest English literature, whether she conceives of that engagement in terms of literary history, new theoretical readings of old texts or modern writers reworking early English material.