This is our backup site. Click here to visit our main site at MellenPress.com

Hart, Cyril

Dr. Cyril Hart is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS). Recently he was awarded an Hon DLitt by the University of Kent for his contributions to history and medicine. His books include The Early Charters of Eastern England, The Early Charters of Northern England, and The Danelaw. The Edwin Mellen Press published his edition of The Thorney Annals in 1997.

Autobiography and Personal Philosophy of a Retired Physician, by Cyril Hart
1997 0-7734-8470-1
Born a Cockney, Cyril Hart spent his childhood on a large housing estate at Dagenham, just outside London's East End. He was raised in an evangelical Christian family, but by the age of 18 he was a card-holding Communist. He passed this phase and during the war served in the ranks in the army, and with a commission in the RNVR, where he was an air engineer. Subsequently he entered Barts and graduated in medicine. He married, and for over 30 years was the senior partner in a large country practice in Huntingdonshire. He studied local history at Leicester, where he became the university's first MA and was awarded its first DLitt. He has written extensively in medicine and in English history, and is currently completing a book on England in the Tenth Century. In retirement he also turned to philosophy and water colours. This unusual range of interests is the range of his autobiography, and the book also presents a fascinating social history of one English family during the whole of the present century.

Byrhtferth's East Anglian Chronicle
2006 0-7734-5545-0
This is the third volume in a collection in which the pre-Conquest chronicles of England will be presented in a comparative format. Edited texts of the chronicles, and modern English translations, are placed on facing pages. Opposite them appear the translations, with explanatory comments as footnotes. Each volume will conclude with a full bibliography, followed by detailed indexes of personal and place names.

Byrhtferth’s Northumbrian Chronicle: An Edition and Translation of the Old English and Latin Annals: The Early Chronicles of England Volume II
2006 0-7734-5751-8
This volume is the second in a series in which the pre-Conquest chronicles of England will be presented in a comparative format. Edited texts of the chronicles, and modern English translations, are placed on facing pages. The major Old English and Latin texts are given side by side, annal by annal, on even-numbered pages, with significant variants as footnotes. Opposite them appear the translations, with explanatory comments as footnotes.

Chronicles of the Reign of Alfred the Great Part I: Introduction and Commentary. The Early Chronicles of England, Volume IV
2010 0-7734-3729-0
This medieval history captures the narrative of England's formation from an Anglo-Saxon settlement into a kingdom. At the center of this is the life of Alfred the Great.

Chronicles of the Reign of Alfred the Great Part Two. The Texts and early chronicles of England, Volume IV
2010 0-7734-3731-2
This medieval history captures the narrative of England's formation from an Anglo-Saxon settlement into a kingdom. At the center of this is the life of Alfred the Great.

Chronicles of the Reign of Æthelred the Unready
2006 0-7734-5750-X
This volume is the first in a series in which the pre-Conquest chronicles of England will be presented in a comparative format. Edited texts of the chronicles, and modern English translations, are placed on facing pages. The major Old English and Latin texts are given side by side, annal by annal, on even-numbered pages, with significant variants as footnotes. Opposite them appear the translations, with explanatory comments as footnotes.

LEARNING AND CULTURE IN LATE ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND AND THE INFLUENCE OF RAMSEY ABBEY ON THE MAJOR ENGLISH MONASTIC SCHOOLS
Vol. 1
2002 0-7734-6886-2
This massive 3-volume work describes the origin, flowering and decline of one particular monastic school during the fifty years which followed the reception into England of the Benedictine reformation which had swept Northern Europe during the middle years of the tenth century. Ramsey was endowed and established in 964, with a magnificent library, school and scriptorium. It was backed by powerful patrons, and Byrhtferth, its schoolmaster, was entrusted to cultivate in England the new learning that had become the driving force of the Continental reform. Starting with Bede’s historical and scientific works, he resuscitated the national vernacular chronicles and assembled for the first time materials for both regional and national chronicles in Latin. He also produced a number of saints’ lives. Abbo of Fleury, the most renowned Continental scholar of his day, visited Ramsey from 985 to 987, bringing with him many computistical and scientific tracts and teaching in its school. Ramsey was also at the forefront of an artistic revival, introducing important new features into book illumination. This radical and intensive study of the School of Ramsey brings all this together for the first time, shedding fresh light on the intellectual climate in late Anglo-Saxon England, with special attention to its indebtedness to Continental scholarship. The first volume is concerned mainly with the new curriculum in monastic schools and Byrhtferth’s important historical works. The second volume (divided into two books) includes a wide-ranging survey of the development of mathematical, medical and scientific studies in England before the Norman Conquest. Many basic texts are edited and translated in a series of appendices, and illustrated by 100 line drawings. Each volume has its own introduction and extensive bibliography and is fully indexed.

LEARNING AND CULTURE IN LATE ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND AND THE INFLUENCE OF RAMSEY ABBEY ON THE MAJOR ENGLISH MONASTIC SCHOOLS
Vol. 2, Book 1
2002 0-7734-6888-9
This massive 3-volume work describes the origin, flowering and decline of one particular monastic school during the fifty years which followed the reception into England of the Benedictine reformation which had swept Northern Europe during the middle years of the tenth century. Ramsey was endowed and established in 964, with a magnificent library, school and scriptorium. It was backed by powerful patrons, and Byrhtferth, its schoolmaster, was entrusted to cultivate in England the new learning that had become the driving force of the Continental reform. Starting with Bede’s historical and scientific works, he resuscitated the national vernacular chronicles and assembled for the first time materials for both regional and national chronicles in Latin. He also produced a number of saints’ lives. Abbo of Fleury, the most renowned Continental scholar of his day, visited Ramsey from 985 to 987, bringing with him many computistical and scientific tracts and teaching in its school. Ramsey was also at the forefront of an artistic revival, introducing important new features into book illumination. This radical and intensive study of the School of Ramsey brings all this together for the first time, shedding fresh light on the intellectual climate in late Anglo-Saxon England, with special attention to its indebtedness to Continental scholarship. The first volume is concerned mainly with the new curriculum in monastic schools and Byrhtferth’s important historical works. The second volume (divided into two books) includes a wide-ranging survey of the development of mathematical, medical and scientific studies in England before the Norman Conquest. Many basic texts are edited and translated in a series of appendices, and illustrated by 100 line drawings. Each volume has its own introduction and extensive bibliography and is fully indexed.

LEARNING AND CULTURE IN LATE ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND AND THE INFLUENCE OF RAMSEY ABBEY ON THE MAJOR ENGLISH MONASTIC SCHOOLS
Vol. 2, Book 2
2002 0-7734-6890-0
This massive 3-volume work describes the origin, flowering and decline of one particular monastic school during the fifty years which followed the reception into England of the Benedictine reformation which had swept Northern Europe during the middle years of the tenth century. Ramsey was endowed and established in 964, with a magnificent library, school and scriptorium. It was backed by powerful patrons, and Byrhtferth, its schoolmaster, was entrusted to cultivate in England the new learning that had become the driving force of the Continental reform. Starting with Bede’s historical and scientific works, he resuscitated the national vernacular chronicles and assembled for the first time materials for both regional and national chronicles in Latin. He also produced a number of saints’ lives. Abbo of Fleury, the most renowned Continental scholar of his day, visited Ramsey from 985 to 987, bringing with him many computistical and scientific tracts and teaching in its school. Ramsey was also at the forefront of an artistic revival, introducing important new features into book illumination. This radical and intensive study of the School of Ramsey brings all this together for the first time, shedding fresh light on the intellectual climate in late Anglo-Saxon England, with special attention to its indebtedness to Continental scholarship. The first volume is concerned mainly with the new curriculum in monastic schools and Byrhtferth’s important historical works. The second volume (divided into two books) includes a wide-ranging survey of the development of mathematical, medical and scientific studies in England before the Norman Conquest. Many basic texts are edited and translated in a series of appendices, and illustrated by 100 line drawings. Each volume has its own introduction and extensive bibliography and is fully indexed.

Thorney Annals 963-1412 A. D. An Edition and Translation
1997 0-7734-8535-X
Thorney Abbey lies in the Cambridgeshire Fenlands. It was founded in 971 and survived until the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1540, and ranked as one of the most important religious houses in the Eastern fenlands. The early annals are all in a hand datable to 1110, and were therefore entered retrospectively, but for the next three centuries the annals appear to have been added contemporaneously year by year. In this first complete edition, Latin text and English translation on opposing pages, and a full introduction, critical notes and indexes are provided. Individual annals recorded events of both local and national importance. Besides the succession of abbots and bishops, they covered such topics as the price of wheat, floods, fires, epidemics, and royal successions. Occasional entries cover a range of unexpected subjects sch as the sinking of the White Ship, the beheading of Piers Gaveston, the suppression of the Templars, the writings and trial of John Wycliffe, and the Black Death.