The Old English literary works traditionally associated with King Alfred are furnished with an array of prologues, epilogues, and other frame texts. These texts give fascinating glimpses into the ideas and contexts underlying the composition and reception of the Alfredian corpus. They draw attention to the ways in which authority and authorship interacted in the period and to contemporary perceptions of poetry and prose. This new edition addresses the contextual, critical, and theoretical issues raised by the frame texts, including their relationship to earlier traditions of prologue and epilogue, their engagement with English as a literary language, and their implications for the authorship debate. The texts are edited here for the first time in a single volume, with a facing-page modern English translation and a wide range of explanatory material.

Susan Irvine is Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London. She studied for her BA (Hons) at Otago, New Zealand, and her DPhil at Oxford. She was Darby Fellow in English Literature at Lincoln College, Oxford, before moving to UCL in 1992. She is the author of Old English Homilies from MS Bodley 343 (1993) and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle MS E (2004), and co-author (with Malcolm Godden) of The Old English Boethius (2009), which was awarded the ISAS 2011 Best Edition Prize. In 2015 she was awarded an Anneliese Maier Research Award by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.