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The Tower of Babel narrative is one of the most memorable accounts of the Bible, and its interpretative potential has produced a vast array of literary adaptations.
Undoing Babel is the first extensive examination of the development of the Babel narrative amongst Anglo-Saxon authors from late antiquity to the eleventh century. Tristan Major’s illuminating and original insight into Anglo-Latin and Old English works, including the writings of Aldhelm, Bede, Alcuin, ¿fric, and Wulfstan, reveals the cultural ideologies and anxieties that transformed the Babel narrative. In doing so, Major argues that these Babel narratives provide a basis for understanding the world’s ethnic and linguistic diversity as well as a theological stimulus to evangelize non-Christian and non-European people.
Undoing Babel highlights
the depth of literary innovation in this period and disproves any notion of a single Anglo-Saxon reception of biblical sources.
List of contents
Acknowledgements Genesis 10-11 Introduction 1 Early Jewish and Christian Antiquity
2 Latin Christian Antiquity
3 The Early Anglo-Saxon School at Canterbury
4 Bede and Alcuin
5 Alfred the Great and the Literature of his Reign
6 The Tenth and Early Eleventh Centuries
7 The Biblical Poems of Junius
8 Conclusion
Bibliography
About the author
By Tristan Major
Summary
Undoing Babel is the first extensive examination of the development of the Babel narrative amongst Anglo-Saxon authors from late antiquity to the eleventh century.
