The book spans the entire Anglo-Saxon period from Aldhelm and Bede in the earliest centuries to lfric and the anonymous homilists and hagiographers of the later tenth and eleventh centuries; it draws on Anglo-Saxon vernacular texts as well as Latin ones, and on those works most familiar to literary scholars (such as the Exeter Book Riddles or Caedmon's Hymn, the first so-called poem in English, or the female Lives of Saints) as well as historians (wills, charters, the cult of relics); and it deliberately reconsiders, from the perspective of gender and women's agency, some of the key conceptual issues that studying Anglo-Saxon England presents (the relation of orality to literacy; that of poetry and sanctity to belief; the cultural significance of names, naming, and metaphors in Anglo-Saxon writing).