The Hjortsping boat, fully excavated in the 1920s, is arguably the most important archaeological find from early Iron Age Scandinavia. This volume forms the first English-language analysis of the find and its context, beginning with the background to the discovery and excavation of the warship and its new display at the centre of a special exhibition at the National Museum in Copenhagen. Illustrated throughout with photographs, many in colour, and drawings of each part of the warship and its associated finds, this is an extremely well-presented study. Specialist contributions examine the warship's construction and components, its geometrical proportions and hydrodynamics, evidence for paddles and its date. Sections also discuss the reconstruction of the ship, and its sailing trials, associated weapons and everyday objects. Emphasis is placed throughout on its context, with sections examining the identity of the shipbuilders, the military organisation of northern Europe in the 4th century BC, ship iconography during the Bronze and early Iron Ages and other examples of ships found across Europe. The enclosed CD-Rom contains images from the sea trials of the reconstruction and scenes from the original excavations. Includes a Danish summary.

A new fourth edition of an invaluable collection of literary sources, all in translation, for Celtic Europe and early Ireland and Wales. The selections are divided into three sections: the first is classical authors on the ancient celts - a huge selection including both the well known Herodotos, Plato, Aristotle, Livy, Diogenes Laertius, and Cicero - and the obscure-Pseudo-Scymnus, Lampridius, Vopsicus, Clement of Alexandria and Ptolemy I. The second is early Irish and Hiberno-Latin sources including early Irish dynastic poetry and numerous tales from the Ulster cycle and the third consists of Brittonic sources, mostly Welsh. This edition includes three new early Irish tales, translated by Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha: The Birth of Aed Sláine; Fingal Rónáin, and the Story of Mis and Dubh Rois.

The twenty-five papers, taken from a Cardiff conference in 1998, are concerned with Insular art in its broadest sense, encompassing studies of metalwork, manuscripts, sculpture and textiles, both recent discoveries and new investigations of well-known objects. They include material associated with Anglo-Saxon England as well as early Medieval Scotland, Wales and Ireland, and discoveries of Insular metalwork in Scandinavia. They are divided into five themes which reflect the many recent advances in the study of Insular art.

Nineteen papers on early medieval Irish and Welsh texts. Contents include: St Patrick in Cornwall? The origin and transmission of Vita Tertia S. Patricii ( David Dumville ); Re-reading Dafydd ap Gwilym ( Patrick Ford ); The spoils of Annwn: Taliesin and material poetry ( Sarah Lynn Higley ); Aldfirth of Northumbria and the learning of a sapiens ( Colin Ireland ); Narrative openers and progress markers in Irish ( Proinsias Mac Cana ); The Hagiographic poetics of Canu Cadfan ( Catherine McKenna ); The introduction of alphabetic writing to Ireland ( Michael Richter ); Daring young men in their chariots ( Joseph Falaky Nagy ); The Celtic bard ( J. E. Caerwyn Bard ).

Ships and shipbuilding were important elements of Viking culture and a precondition for trade, warfare and conquest. The important excavations at the Viking towns of Hedeby and Schleswig-Holstein revealed a rich body of finds of wrecks and parts of ships. This is a report on this material and also examines the role of the towns as ports and the role of trading in their development.

This is the first of a number of volumes describing the 1980-86 excavations at the early medieval Benedictine abbey of San Vincenzo al Volturno in central Italy. This volume gives a general introduction to this important project, a description of the archaeological remains, and then detailed accounts of the excavation of the Carolingian Crypt Church, the `South Church', the Refectory, the Garden Court and the Entrance Hall. Also included is a reappraisal of the cycle of paintings in the crypt in the light of the excavations.

The brief title doesn't really reflect the wealth of information in the three reports in this book. Arising from the British School at Rome's archaeological survey in southern Etruria between 1950 and 1975, they provide important evidence for the transition years between Roman and Medieval. Santa Cornelia, the abandoned site of a medieval monastic seat built from and among the remains of Roman buildings, yielded detailed information about the background, origins and development of the monastery; at Santa Rufina, the traditional site of the burial and centre of the cult of the third century martyr Rufina, excavations revealed a chapel, defensive walls, piazza and timber huts, part of a medieval settlement, overlying a late Roman mausoleum and catacombs, and earlier buildings; at San Liberato the fabric of the surviving church is recorded and analysed to determine its history and development from the early Middle Ages. All reports carry full accounts of the finds, sculptures and inscriptions.

Text in German. Over a 20 year period, the excavations at Illerup in eastern Jutland have brought to light a sacrificial deposit of more than 1500 Iron Age weapons, Roman as well as Germanic. The first two volumes form part of the excavation report, a chronological framework is sketched out and the weapons from Illerup are compared with finds from other Northern European sites. These third and fourth volumes deal with personal ornaments, shields and swords.

Late Latin and Early Romance presents a theory of the relationship between Latin and Romance during the period 400-1250. The central hypothesis is that what we now call 'Medieval Latin' was invented around 800 AD when Carolingian scholars standardised the pronunciation of liturgical texts, and that otherwise what was spoken was simply the local variety of Old French, Old Spanish, etc. Thus, the view generally held before the publication of this work, that 'Latin' and 'Romance' existed alongside each other in earlier centuries, is anachronistic. Before 800, Late Latin was Early Romance. This hypothesis is examined first from the viewpoint of historical linguistics, with particular attention paid to the idea of lexical diffusion (ch. 1), and then (ch. 2) through detailed study of pre-Carolingian texts. Chapter 3 deals with the impact in France of the introduction of standardised Latin by Carolingian scholars, and shows how the earliest texts written in the vernacular resulted from it. The final two chapters turn to the situation in Spain from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries. Ch. 4 suggests, on the evidence of a large variety of texts, that before 1080 the new Latin pronunciation (i.e. Medieval Latin) was not used; Ch. 5 charts the slow spread, as a result of Europeanising reforms, of a distinction between Latin and vernacular Romance between 1080 and 1250. There is an extensive bibliography and full indexes. Wright's controversial book presents a wide range of detailed evidence, with extensive quotation of relevant texts and documents. When it was published in 1982 it challenged established ideas in the fields of Romance linguistics and Medieval Latin. The collectively established facts are however explained better by his theory that Medieval Latin was a revolutionary innovation consequent upon liturgical reform, than by the view that it was a miraculous conservative survival that lasted unchanged for a millennium. Late Latin and Early Romance draws on philological, historical and literary evidence from the medieval period, and on historical linguistics, and is a seminal work in these areas of scholarship.