Looks at early religious texts and their influence on medieval literature and culture. In this major study of Anglo-Saxon religious texts-sermons, homilies, and saints' lives written in Old English-Clare A. Lees reveals how the invention of preaching transformed the early medieval church, and thus the culture of medieval England. By placing Anglo-Saxon prose within a social matrix, her work offers a new way of seeing medieval literature through the lens of culture. To show how the preaching mission of the later Anglo-Saxon church was constructed and received, Lees explores the emergence of preaching from the traditional structures of the early medieval church-its institutional knowledge, genres, and beliefs. Understood as a powerful rhetorical, social, and epistemological process, preaching is shown to have helped define the sociocultural concerns specific to late Anglo-Saxon England. The first detailed study of traditionality in medieval culture, Tradition and Belief is also a case study of one cultural phenomenon from the past. As such-and by concentrating on the theoretically problematic areas of history, religious belief, and aesthetics-the book contributes to debates about the evolving meaning of culture. ISBN 0-8166-3002-X Cloth £34.50 $49.95xx ISBN 0-8166-3003-8 Paper £14.00 $19.95x 232 Pages 5 7/8 x 9 November Medieval Cultures Series, volume 19 Translation inquiries: University of Minnesota Press