ABSTRACT
The great bulk of Anglo-Saxon poetry is explicitly religious and didactic in character, its purpose being to glorify God and draw man to praise him. Judith draws close at times, in its simple placings of emphasis, to saint’s life, a genre of writing widespread in England during the Anglo-Saxon period, in Latin and the vernacular, in both verse and prose. Two poems which embody more of its richness are Christ I and The Dream of the Rood: ‘devotional’ is only a label for these poems, and would be clearly misleading if it implied anything of the affective spirit of post-Bernardine devotional writing. The much larger body of straightforward homiletic poetry has a more routine quality, as one might expect. These are craftsmanlike, unspectacular productions within a well-established monastic tradition, and they probably played a fairly small part in that tradition.
