Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination, edited by David Clark and Nicholas Perkins (B. S. Brewer, Cambridge, Boydell and Brewer, Woodbridge and New York, 2010) xiv, 283pp., hardback, £55, US $105, ISBN 978 I 84384 2514.

This is a volume in the series Medievalism, which claims to cater for monographs and collections which in the multi-disciplinary field of medievalism studies, like work investigating the influence of the medievalism in the culture of later ages.  The book under review is a collection edited by lecturers from Cambridge and Leicester with 16 contributors from the U.K. and North America.  Interest in Anglo-Saxon culture has grown steadily since the late eighteenth century, culminating in the extraordinary popularity of Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf in 1999.

This volume arises from a conference in April 2008 at Oxford which was entitled ‘Bone Dreams' after a poem by Heaney in his ‘North'.  The contents demonstrate how wide ranging the influence of Old English has been of the poetry of such people as W. H. Auden, P. D. James and Heaney himself.  They explore the interaction between text, image and landscapes, the recasting of mythical figures like Wayland Smith, and the metamorphosis of Beowulf in a novel and in grand opera.  The early medieval emerges as a vital arena for creativity and artistic experiment.

There is an interesting foreword by Bernard O'Donoghue, foot-notes are supplied throughout and there is a useful index.

The book is clearly of special interest for scholars of Old English.