"John Niles''s book is groundbreaking and reveals outstanding literary-critical acumen developed over a long and distinguished career. It will be essential reading for those seeking explication of individual Exeter Book poems or groups of poems." Greg Waite, Parergon "Consistently insightful Niles writes with authority and elegance." Hugh Magennis, English Studies "God''s Exiles and English Verse is a volume that serious students of early medieval English poetry will want to have on their shelves. It treats anew the intellectual acumen and artistry of poets and all those who preserved the poetry in this marvelous book. For that, we are in Professor Niles''s debt." Patrick W. Conner, Speculum "Niles''s call for a more contextualized reading of the Exeter Book poems is a much-needed corrective to current literary critical methods, which too often ignore the religious and manuscript context of the Exeter Book poems.

Niles''s attentiveness to the whole of the collection enriches his approach to individual poems." Peter Ramey, Journal of English and Germanic Philology "Often reading individual poems within such a rigid frame work will lead to flat analyses. Niles carefully and successfully avoids this problem. His readings of the Exeter Anthology poems feel fresh, even when they adhere to traditional frameworks of analysis. It is likely that future work on Exeter Anthology poems will have to contend with Niles''s thesis." Michael Matto, Anglia "Readers of this volume will come away from it with a much better understanding of this fascinating Anthology and the place it occupies in the history of English literature. Emulating the dedicated compilers'' tour de force and Bishop Leofric''s donation of the volume to Exeter Cathedral, Niles has provided us with a generous scholarly legacy that will no doubt be regarded as a landmark in the field of Anglo-Saxon studies." Mercedes Salvador-Bello, Universidad de Sevilla, Review of English Studies ".

an extremely useful resource for any investigation into the Exeter Book of Old English poetry." Tiffany Beechy, Modern Philology "An excellent work by a very good scholar and should be well received." Prof Bernard J Muir, University of Melbourne "His book is premised on one of those simple, but foundational ideas that one can hardly believe has not been attempted before, so fundamentally important is the Exeter Book to our understanding of pre-Conquest English poetry. What has been previously lacking for many of its poems is intelligent, sensitive literary criticism: profound readings of the poems as poems. Niles''s book (which itself rests on deep philological understanding) will fill this void more than admirably; it is a carefully thought-out, elegantly written and critically incisive book that will be a landmark study for at least a generation of scholars and students of early English poetry (and probably for more than one generation). Finally, I would like to say that while one hopes to read learned monographs from scholars of Anglo-Saxon, this reader has learned not necessarily to expect prose that is also pleasurable to read. Niles''s is exactly that. I enjoyed this typescript so much, and was sent back to the poems themselves so often, that even where I found myself disagreeing over minor points of interpretation I took pleasure in that disputatio also.

" Chris Jones, Senior Lecturer in English, University of St Andrews "It is high time that the Exeter Book received a sustained study. John Niles is the scholar to do this, principally because of his track-record of quality scholarship and because of his remarkable poetic sensitivity. This book, God''s Exiles and English Verse, contains much that is of great value. It''s an enjoyable, well-written account of the manuscript and its many contents, containing as it does detailed, insightful, and occasionally beautiful readings of the poems themselves. It would be useful in teaching, and for scholars at all levels." Elaine Treharne, Roberta Bowman Denning Professor of Humanities, Stanford University.