John Blair

First published as part of the best-selling The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, John Blair's Very Short Introduction to the Anglo-Saxon Age covers the emergence of the earliest English settlements to the Norman victory in 1066. This book is a brief introduction to the political, social, religious, and cultural history of Anglo-Saxon England. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

The Anglo-Saxon Age: A Very Short Introduction

Building Anglo-Saxon England

The first study of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman canals and waterways, this book is based on new evidence surrounding the nature of water transport in the period. England is naturally well-endowed with a network of navigable rivers, especially the easterly systems draining into the Thames, Wash and Humber. The central middle ages saw innovative and extensive development of this network, including the digging of canals bypassing difficult stretches of rivers, or linking rivers to important production centres. The eleventh and twelfth centuries seem to have been the high point for this dynamic approach to water-transport: after 1200, the improvement of roads and bridges increasingly diverted resources away from the canals, many of which stagnated with the reassertion of natural drainage patterns. The new perspective presented in this study has an important bearing on the economy, landscape, settlement patterns and inter-regional contacts of medieval England. Essays from economic historians, geographers, geomorphologists, archaeologists, and place-name scholars unearth this neglected but important aspect of medieval engineering and economic growth.

Waterways and Canal-Building in Medieval England

Blair's Chronological and Historical Tables, from the Creation to the present time: with additions and corrections from the most authentic writers; including the computation of St. Paul, as connecting the period from the Exode to the Temple. Edited by John Sharpe

Fellow and Praelector in Modern History John Blair

From the impact of the first monasteries in the seventh century, to the emergence of the local parochial system five hundred years later, the Church was a force for change in Anglo-Saxon society. It shaped culture and ideas, social and economic behaviour, and the organization of landscape and settlement. This book traces how the widespread foundation of monastic sites ('minsters') during c.670-730 gave the recently pagan English new ways of living, of exploiting their resources, andof absorbing European culture, as well as opening new spiritual and intellectual horizons. Through the era of Viking wars, and the tenth-century reconstruction of political and economic life, the minsters gradually lost their wealth, their independence, and their role as sites of high culture, butgrew in stature as foci of local society and eventually towns. After 950, with the increasing prominence of manors, manor-houses, and village communities, a new and much larger category of small churches were founded, endowed, and rebuilt: the parish churches of the emergent eleventh- and twelfth-century local parochial system. In this innovative study, John Blair brings together written, topographical, and archaeological evidence to build a multi-dimensional picture of what local churches andlocal communities meant to each other in early England.

The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society

Shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize A radical rethinking of the Anglo-Saxon world that draws on the latest archaeological discoveries This beautifully illustrated book draws on the latest archaeological discoveries to present a radical reappraisal of the Anglo-Saxon built environment and its inhabitants. John Blair, one of the world's leading experts on this transformative era in England's early history, explains the origins of towns, manor houses, and castles in a completely new way, and sheds new light on the important functions of buildings and settlements in shaping people's lives during the age of the Venerable Bede and King Alfred. Building Anglo-Saxon England demonstrates how hundreds of recent excavations enable us to grasp for the first time how regionally diverse the built environment of the Anglo-Saxons truly was. Blair identifies a zone of eastern England with access to the North Sea whose economy, prosperity, and timber buildings had more in common with the Low Countries and Scandinavia than the rest of England. The origins of villages and their field systems emerge with a new clarity, as does the royal administrative organization of the kingdom of Mercia, which dominated central England for two centuries. Featuring a wealth of color illustrations throughout, Building Anglo-Saxon England explores how the natural landscape was modified to accommodate human activity, and how many settlements--secular and religious—were laid out with geometrical precision by specialist surveyors. The book also shows how the Anglo-Saxon love of elegant and intricate decoration is reflected in the construction of the living environment, which in some ways was more sophisticated than it would become after the Norman Conquest.

Poems ...

Richard Sharpe

"This book examines the pastoral and sacramental work of the early medieval church in the British Isles. It provides a synthesis of recent scholarship which has uncovered new evidence about the organisation and structure of the early church and the close relations between monks and clergy and between the 'Roman' and 'Celtic' churches." "It shows how theological ideals were translated into pastoral work and demonstrates the short comings of the 'national church' approach to the history of early British and Irish Christianity. It will become the foundation for most future work on this central field of early medieval history."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Pastoral Care Before the Parish

Playful Song Called Beautiful ranges far into the intersections of faith and scientific thought, places where “there is no stranger who is / stranger than you, no / familiar who’s more / familiar.” In poems that are either formally rhymed and metered or written in syllabically structured three-line stanzas, Blair wanders among universal orders and failures of desire, where the unlikeliness of any of us being who we are, what we are, where we are forces us to consider—and reconsider—the possibilities of belief and meaning. Blair’s poems are elegant and earthy, sometimes profane, and sometimes lovingly playful. From the invisible landscape of elementary particles to Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe’s love of the smell of rotten apples, Blair’s poems direct us through a “great wide world that is / ours and never ours” and somewhere among the rolling tercets, the transcendent becomes not only possible, but entirely inevitable.

Playful Song Called Beautiful

The life and acts of ... sir William Wallace [tr. from the Lat. of J. Blair by Henry the Minstrel].

Michael Lapidge

Simon Keynes

Donald Scragg

Widely acknowledged as the essential reference work for this period, this volume brings together more than 700 articles written by 150 top scholars that cover the people, places, activities, and creations of the Anglo-Saxons. The only reference work to cover the history, archaeology, arts, architecture, literatures, and languages of England from the Roman withdrawal to the Norman Conquest (c.450 – 1066 AD) Includes over 700 alphabetical entries written by 150 top scholars covering the people, places, activities, and creations of the Anglo-Saxons Updated and expanded with 40 brand-new entries and a new appendix detailing "English Archbishops and Bishops, c.450-1066" Accompanied by maps, line drawings, photos, a table of "English Rulers, c.450-1066," and a headword index to facilitate searching An essential reference tool, both for specialists in the field, and for students looking for a thorough grounding in key topics of the period

The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England

Nigel Ramsay

W. John Blair

English Medieval Industries is an authoritative modern survey of medieval crafts and their products. It is heavily illustrated by pictures of surviving objects and contemporary representations of medieval work. Each industry is approached by material (amongst others stone, tin, lead, copper, iron, brick, glass, leather, bone and wood), discussing its acquisition, working and sale as a finished product. The contributors are the leading experts in their fields. They describe the specialist work that went to make the housing, clothing, tools, vessels and ornaments of medieval people. A general bibliography provides a valuable reference tool.

Craftsmen, Techniques, Products

English Medieval Industries

John Thomas Blair

Fresh critical reading of Goethe's important novel, challenging orthodox scholarship.

Tracing Subversive Currents in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship

A Popular Handbook and Illustrated Guide

Birds of Hill and Forest

This work is intended as a modern successor to L.F. Salzman's "English Industries in the Middle Ages" (1913). The approach to each industry is by material, discussing its acquisition, working and sale as a finished product. Only industries that resulted in the production of consumer goods and where substantial numbers of artefacts survive from the Middle Ages are dealt with (fishing and brewing are therefore omitted); the text is illustrated by pictures of surviving objects and contemporary representations of medieval work.

Green is the color of beginnings, of memory and regeneration, of the "fluid arc of what has been, / forever becoming us." John Blair's debut poetry collection, The Green Girls, takes the reader on a journey through life as it explores such subjects as marriage, family, and sex. Written in several voices, from husband and wife, brother and sister, young and old, the poems remind us that paradise "doesn't invite us back." Although filled with sadness and pain, Blair's elegantly written free years resonates with a quiet optimism even while discussing losses and lapses that give life both its terror and its potential for redemption.

John Blair

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