In the last issue of this journal, John Hines reviewed the Lincolnshire volume of the Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture. We are very grateful for his generally fair-minded and positive discussion of the range of material presented in this volume. There is, however, one point on which we would like to take issue. He writes that the discussion of the inscriptions`falls well below the appropriate standards' and is`carelessly done'. His main piece of evidence is what he takes to be a`howler'. On examination the`howler' turns out to be the product of the reviewer's less than careful reading. The offending passage comes in a discussion of the architectural inscriptions at St Mary-le-Wigford in Lincoln and at Stow. In the volume it is stated that:`They share the formula to lofe (to love), a vernacular equivalent to in honore [a common Latin dedicatory formula].' As the reviewer writes, the Old English to lofe means something like`to the praise of, to the glory of'. Unfortunately he takes the`to love' in the round brackets to be a translation of to lofe. If he were right, this would indeed be a howler. The`to love' is of course in italics, a normal convention for words or phrases cited in a language other than modern English, and is an alternative spelling of the Old English formula that is the probable reading of the inscription around the fragmentary sundial from Stow. In the Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, translations of inscription texts are given in roman and in inverted commas within brackets, for example the Stow text: (`_ to the glory of [Christ] and [?St] _ '). We would concede, with hindsight, that, in order to avoid possible confusion, we should have put in a phrase indicating explicitly that`to love' was the Old English spelling found on the Stow inscription, although both the context and the catalogue should have made that clear.Hines accepts that the contribution on the Crowle runic inscription by David Parsons (who, incidentally, was not also responsible for the other epigraphical articles, as the review implies 1 ) is`authoritative'. He is unhappy, however, with its principal observation ± that the one word readily identi®ed in the fragmentary surviving text is Old English bñcun',`beacon, monument'. He objects that two letters have been supplied and that the`ñ' remains a problem. Yet the italics of the 1 The other epigraphic discussions were written by John Higgitt and by the principal authors of the volume, Paul Everson and David Stocker.
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