This book offers a new assessment of Early Christianity in South-West Britain from the fourth to the tenth centuries, a rich period which includes the transition from Roman to native British to Saxon models of church.
Oliver Padel\'s meticulous documentation of Cornish place-names has demon.
At Exeter, a Saxon anthology includes numerous riddles, one of which describes in detail the production of an illuminated manuscript in a south-western monastery.
Lundy Island, off the Devon coast, provides evidence of a Celtic monastery, with its inscribed stones that commemorate Early monks.
Early Christian cemeteries have been excavated at Shepton Mallet and elsewhere.
In Street, a large oval enclosure indicates the probable site of a \'Celtic\' monastery.
Wells cathedral grew beside the site of a Roman villa\'s funeral chapel.
Beside the pagan temple at Lamyatt, later female burials suggest, unusually, a small monastic group of women.
In Somerset a number of recently excavated sites demonstrate the transition from a pagan temple to a Christian church.
Wessex was slowly Christianised: in Gloucestershire, the pagan healing sanctuary at Chedworth provides evidence of later use as a Christian baptistery; at Bradford on Avon in Wiltshire, a baptistery was dug into the mosaic floor of an imposing villa, which may by then have been owned by a bishop.
The author uses evidence from St Patrick\'s fifth-century \'Confessions\' to describe how members of a villa house church lived.
The fact that these two Roman villas are only 15 miles apart suggests a network of small Christian communities in this region.
The fifth-century Dorset villas of Frampton and Hinton St Mary, with their complex baptistery mosaics, indicate the presence of sophisticated Christian house churches.
In the south-west, Wessex provides the greatest evidence of Roman Christianity.
The book will be based on evidence from archaeological excavations, Early texts and recent critical scholarship and cover Wessex, Devon and Cornwall.
This book offers a new assessment of Early Christianity in South-West Britain from the fourth to the tenth centuries, a rich period which includes the transition from Roman to native British to Saxon models of church
