The Old English Canons of Theodore

The Canons are one of the earliest handbooks of penance to appear in any West European vernacular. The material shows the Anglo-Saxons addressing matters ranging from baptism and the ordination of priests to the conduct of the married and sexual norms. Less a translation of the judgements attributed to Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury (d. 690), than an adaptation of these materials, the work is of major importance for specialists in Old English and historians of medieval Europe generally, affording an early view of what pastoral care in early England may have looked like which is more authentic than the Latin texts on which they are based.

Stefan Jurasinski is Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York at Brockport. His published work has focused on aspects of Anglo-Saxon legal history and on the literature of the early and late Middle Ages. He is at work currently on a book-length study of the Old English penitentials and a collaborative edition (with Lisi Oliver) of the laws of Alfred and Ine for the Early English Laws Project.

R.D. Fulk is Class of 1964 Chancellor's Professor of English at Indiana University. His research centres on Germanic and Celtic languages and literatures of the Middle Ages (with special emphasis on Old English and Old Norse studies), and on comparative Indo-European linguistics, with particular attention to the history of the English language.