The Old English verse Menologium is a lively poem which takes the reader through the cycle of the year: the changing months and seasons of the natural year and the feasts and commemorations of the liturgical year, from Christmas and back to Christmas. Written in the characteristic heroic diction and traditional metre of Old English poetry, it opens with a eulogy to the birth of Christ as Heavenly Ruler, ‘glory of kings’ and ‘guardian of the kingdom of heaven’, in a passage reminiscent of the well known Cædmon's Hymn. The months and seasons are personified as they leave the ‘dwelling places’ or ‘come to town’ and there follow short cameo narratives akin to the poem Fates of the Apostles commemorating the apostles, martyrs and confessors of the Church. At one point the poem even quotes directly from the Old English Metrical Psalms. As a summary of the basics of the Christian, as well as the natural, year current in late Anglo-Saxon England, the Menologium is a unique and important piece of Old English poetry. Like Chronicle poems such as The Coronation of Edgar, and like the computistical treatises of Ælfric and Byrhtferth, the poem is didactic and informative on the regular feasts of the year, and it could well have been used as a practical timepiece for reading the dates of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, for which it serves as a kind of Prologue in the manuscript.

In the last 300 years, the fact that at least seventeen different edited texts of the Menologium, published or unpublished, have been available demonstrates the high level of interest among Anglo-Saxonists. It is, however, also true that the interest has not necessarily led to serious critical analysis; the Menologium scholarship which began with George Hickes in the early eighteenth century has become inactive, and there remains ample room for debate, even of such fundamental issues as its overall nature and purpose, structure and content, and sources and analogues. With this situation in mind, the present critical edition is offered, along with a full introduction covering these fundamentals of the poem.

The Menologium in fact exhibits several notable features. Together with Maxims II, it occurs in its unique manuscript (London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B.i) just before the C-text of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.