Anglo-Saxon Audiences

Is it possible to enter the minds of medieval people? Anglo-Saxon Audiences explores this question through the use of modern approaches in textual analysis, including techniques of functional grammar, speech act analysis, and semiotics. This book reveals how kings, councillors, and homilists tried to engage and to direct the minds of Anglo-Saxon communicants, and how poets invited their audiences to consider the minds of others as well as their own. This book focuses on legal codes promulgated from the ninth to the eleventh centuries, the homilies of AElfric and Wulfstan, Beowulf, The Battle of Maldon, Deor, and two elegies. Its unifying theme is that Anglo-Saxon audiences welcomed texts focused on future time, a perspective that challenged them to reflect on diverse patterns of thought.