How Tradition Works: a MemeBased Cultural Poetics of the AngloSaxon Tenth Century

Drout, Michael D. C.

ISBN 10: 0866983503 / ISBN 13: 9780866983501

Published by ACMRS Press, 2006

About this Item

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: How Tradition Works: a MemeBased Cultural Poetics of the AngloSaxon Tenth Century
• Publisher: ACMRS Press
• Publication Date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0866983503
• ISBN 13: 9780866983501
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Fine
• Weight: 0.5 pounds

About this title

Synopsis

How Tradition Works examines the ways traditions are created, constituted, modified, and recognized. Expanding and revising "memetic" theory, the book analyzes the culture of the tenth-century English Benedictine Reform. How Tradition Works shows how this flowering of culture can be traced to the reliance by Anglo-Saxon monks upon unchanging written rules, the Rule of St. Benedict and the Regularis Concordia. The book also examines the corpus of Old English wills, the Old English Rule of Chrodegang, and the "wisdom poems" of the Exeter Book. This interdisciplinary study is valuable for specialists in evolutionary theory and memetics, Anglo-Saxon studies, and scholars interested in Oral Traditional Theory. How Tradition Works provides researchers with new methodological tools as well as showing how these tools can work to untangle the intricacies of cultural change and stasis.

About the Author

Michael D. C. Drout is William and Elsie Prentice Associate Professor of English at Wheaton College, Norton, MA, where he teaches Old and Middle English, fantasy and science fiction. He received his Ph.D. from Loyola University, Chicago in 1997. Drout edited J. R. R. Tolkien’s Beowulf and the Critics (ACMRS, 2002), winner of the Mythopoeic Society’s 2003 Scholarship award. He has published on Beowulf, the poems of the Exeter Book, the Old English Rule of Chrodegang, Anglo-Saxon medicine, and Anglo-Saxon wills. Drout is the editor of The J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia and the co-editor of the journal Tolkien Studies (WVU Press). He is also the author of an old English grammar book, King Alfred’s Grammar.