O'keeffe, Katherine O'brien ED. 1997: Reading Old English Texts‪.‬

O'Keeffe, Katherine O'Brien ed. 1997: Reading Old English Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (pp. xi + 231. ISBN Hardback 0-521-46575-3; Paperback 0-521-46970-8). Reading Old English Texts is a collection of essays by renowned Anglo-Saxonists on the diversity of hermeneutic theories and practices that have guided the interpretation of Old English texts, both throughout history and in recent times. I think that a book of these characteristics has come out at the most opportune time. For the last decades, the classical philological approaches to Old English texts, that were the single methods of the past, have coexisted with new critical theories in a mutually illuminating way (Liuzza 1994). Fortunately, some voices which complained about the intrusion of new critical methods are progressively convinced that the multiplicity of current hermeneutic practices is a positive way of keeping this field of studies alive and of enlightening "the ways we read the texts of the past, the way we gain access to them and the uses they may be put to" (1). In this sense, once the debate on the application of "new" and "classical" methods of interpretation to the Old English corpus is seen to be unfruitful and the modern critical perspectives have gained the right to shed light on the philological tradition, I think that we are ready for this type of book.