How the Anglo-Saxons read their poems

Daniel Donoghue’s "How the Anglo-Saxons Read Their Poems" explores how early medieval readers interpreted Anglo-Saxon poetry without modern visual aids like line breaks and punctuation. He explains that readers relied on intuitive skills developed from oral poetic traditions to identify features like alliteration, metrical patterns, and clause boundaries. The book combines paleography, oral poetics, and cognitive psychology to reveal how reading was both a technical proficiency and a social practice.