Napier's ‘Wulfstan’ homily xxx: its sources, its relationship to the Vercelli Book and its style

1977 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 197-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. G. Scragg
Keyword(s):  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
British Library ◽  
Bodleian Library ◽  
Middle Section ◽  
The Third ◽  
Vercelli Book

The item which Napier printed as no. xxx in his collected edition of the homilies of Archbishop Wulfstan and which is extant complete only in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 113, written at Worcester in the third quarter of the eleventh century, has long been recognized as a compilation in which a few sentences of undoubted Wulfstan authorship are fitted into a remarkable patchwork of extracts from pseudo-Wulfstan and tenth-century anonymous writings. Karl Jost has stated that the opening and concluding sections consist of extracts from the Institutes of Polity and from Napier's homilies xxiv, xlvi and ii, while in the middle section he has identified parallels to two Vercelli homilies, nos. iv and ix, and to Napier xlix, which also occurs in the Vercelli Book as homily x. He has speculated that for another passage the compiler may have drawn upon an earlier version of a text now surviving in London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iii, but he missed a parallel with Vercelli xxi which had been noted by McIntosh. What in effect Jost and others have shown is that in a ‘scissors and paste’ homily in which no more than a few sentences can be ascribed to the compiler (and these perhaps only because he took them from books since lost) we find extracts from a considerable number of works. The purpose of this article is to examine again the sources of the compilation, to show that very probably more than half of it was drawn from a single codex similar to the Vercelli Book, and to illustrate the influence Wulfstan's writings and style had on its author.

scholarly journals The northern world of the Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 ◽  
pp. 275-305
Author(s):  
Helen Appleton
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
British Library ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
The Mediterranean

AbstractThe Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi, sometimes known as the Cotton map or Cottoniana, is found on folio 56v of London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. v, which dates from the first half of the eleventh century. This unique survivor from the period presents a detailed image of the inhabited world, centred on the Mediterranean. The map’s distinctive cartography, with its emphasis on islands, seas and urban spaces, reflects an Insular, West Saxon geographic imagination. As Evelyn Edson has observed, the mappa mundi appears to be copy of an earlier, larger map. This article argues that the mappa mundi’s focus on urban space, translatio imperii and Scandinavia is reminiscent of the Old English Orosius, and that it originates from a similar milieu. The mappa mundi’s northern perspective, together with its obvious dependence on and emulation of Carolingian cartography, suggest that its lost exemplar originated in the assertive England of the earlier tenth century.

Occasionalism

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulrich Rudolph
Keyword(s):  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Causal Effect ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Islamic Philosophy ◽  
Absolute Power ◽  
The Third ◽  
Islamic Tradition ◽  
The World

This chapter charts the development of the theory of occasionalism within the Islamic tradition until the fifth/eleventh century. Occasionalism emphasizes God’s absolute power by negating natural causality and attributing every causal effect in the world immediately to Him. It is often assumed to be a distinctive, if not exclusive, feature of Sunnīkalāmas opposed to Muʿtazilism, Shīʿism, and Islamic philosophy. The chapter begins with the question of how the foundations of the occasionalist theory were prepared in the evolving Muʿtazilī discussions of the third/ninth and early fourth/tenth century. It then considers the role of Abū l-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī in the completion and final formulation of the theory before turning to later developments originating with some Ashʿarī theologians of the late fourth/tenth and the fifth/eleventh century. It also looks at the seventeenth chapter ofTahāfut al-falāsifa, in which Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111) discusses occasionalism and the problematic of causality.

The ‘old books of Glastonbury’ and the Muchelney breviary fragment: London, British Library, Additional 56488, fols. i, 1–5

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 ◽  
pp. 307-350
Author(s):  
Jesse D. Billett
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
British Library ◽  
Benedictine Reform

AbstractLondon, British Library, Add. 56488, fols. i, 1–5, is a fragment from a monastic breviary of the first half of the eleventh century, probably made at or for Muchelney Abbey (Somerset). It is here argued on palaeographical, musical and liturgical grounds that this breviary represents a liturgical tradition separate from that of Æthelwold’s network of reformed houses, which imitated the northern French monastery of Corbie. The fragment’s liturgy is based instead on a local ‘secular’ (non-monastic) liturgical tradition that has been minimally supplemented and rearranged to agree with the requirements of the Regula S. Benedicti. The scribe apparently compiled the breviary from several separate exemplars (a collectar, a bible, a homiliary, and what seems to have been a ‘secular’ antiphoner), which may indicate that the liturgy at Muchelney was ‘Benedictinized’ much later than might have been assumed. The same secular tradition seems to be preserved, beneath subsequent layers of modification, in a thirteenth-century Muchelney breviary (London, British Library, Add. 43405–6) and a fifteenth-century ordinal of St Mary’s Abbey, York (Cambridge, St John’s College D. 27). These later sources, while not representing the Benedictine liturgy of the lost ‘old books of Glastonbury’ under Dunstan (as suggested by McLachlan and Tolhurst), are valuable potential witnesses to the otherwise largely unattested Office liturgy used in English minsters before the ‘Benedictine Reform’ of the tenth century.

Wynflæd's wardrobe

1979 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 195-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gale R. Owen
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Old English ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
British Library ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
General Terms ◽  
Relative Value

An Old English document, composed probably in the middle of the tenth century and extant in a not very careful, mutilated, eleventh-century copy, London, British Library, Cotton Charter, VIII, 38, lists the bequests of a woman named Wynflæd. The bequests of clothing in this will are particularly interesting. Anglo-Saxon testaments do not itemize elaborate garments as do some English wills of the later Middle Ages; they refer to clothing only rarely, and then sometimes in general terms. Wynflæd's will is unusual in mentioning several different items of clothing and in specifying them more precisely. Descriptive references to non-military clothing are uncommon in Old English texts generally. Although many garment-names are documented, some which occur only in glossaries or translations from Latin may never have been in common use in England and some words are of uncertain meaning. In most cases the sex of the wearer of a named garment and the relative value of the garment are unknown. The garment-names in Wynflæd's will, by contrast, refer to items of clothing which were certainly worn by women at a known date and were valuable enough to be bequeathed.

Medieval Lexicography on Arabic and Persian Terms for City and Countryside

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 465-478
Author(s):  
Roy P. Mottahedeh
Keyword(s):  
Social Structure ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
The Third ◽  
Architectural Features ◽  
Eastern Iran ◽  
The Rich

AbstractMedieval Arabic to Persian dictionaries are a relatively untapped source for the conceptual world in the time of their authors. This essay closely examines four such dictionaries from the late fifth/eleventh century to the seventh/thirteenth century written in eastern Iran. These dictionaries are quite rich in terminology for cities, towns, farmland, pasture and desert. They also describe architectural features of buildings. They offer scant but valuable information on markets and social structure. The information from these dictionaries combined with the rich detail available in the Islamic geographers of the third/ninth and fourth/tenth century allows us to form a more perfect picture of medieval Iranian society.

The Galba Psalter: pictures, texts and context in an early medieval prayerbook

1997 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 109-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Deshman (†)
Keyword(s):  
Ninth Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
British Library ◽  
Bodleian Library ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Ps I ◽  
Full Page ◽  
Terminus Post Quem ◽  
King Alfred ◽  
Made In

The ‘Galba Psalter’ (London, British Library, Cotton Galba A. xviii) is a pocket-sized (128 × 88 mm.), early-ninth-century Carolingian book, perhaps made in the region of Liège, that was originally decorated with only ornamental initials. By the early tenth century the manuscript had reached England, where an Anglo-Saxon scriptorium added two prefatory quires (1r–19v) containing a metrical calendar illuminated with zodiac signs, KL monograms and single figures (pls. IX–X), and five full-page pictures. Two miniatures of Christ and the saints on 2v and 21r (pls. X–XI) preface the calendar and a series of prayers respectively, and three New Testament pictures marked the customary threefold division of the Psalms. Facing Ps. I was a miniature of the Nativity (pl. XII), now detached from the manuscript and inserted into an unrelated book (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson B. 484, 85r). The Ascension on 120v (pl. XIII) prefaces Ps. CI. A third picture before Ps. LI has been lost, but almost certainly it represented the Crucifixion. The placement of an image of this theme between the Nativity and the Ascension would have been appropriate from a narrative standpoint, and some later Anglo-Saxon and Irish psalters preface this psalm with a full-page picture of the Crucifixion. Obits for King Alfred (d. 899) and his consort Ealhswith (d. 902) provide a terminus post quem for the calendar and the coeval illumination. The Insular minuscule script of the calendar indicates a West Saxon origin during the first decade of the tenth century. On the grounds of the Psalter's style and later provenance, the additions were very likely made at Winchester.

Canterbury and Flanders in the late tenth century

2006 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 219-244
Author(s):  
Steven Vanderputten
Keyword(s):  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
British Library

AbstractThis paper provides an edition, translation and discussion of four letters written by Flemish abbots to the archbishops of Canterbury between the years 980 and 991 and preserved in two manuscripts drawn on the archiepiscopal archives in the early eleventh century (London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. xv and Cotton Vespasian A. xiv). The letters document the increasing importance of cross-Channel relations in the late tenth century and provide context for a number of hitherto unexplained indications of cultural, religious and financial exchanges between the county of Flanders and England.

Bald's Leechbook: its sources and their use in its compilation

1983 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 153-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. L. Cameron
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
British Library ◽  
Important Place ◽  
Medieval Latin ◽  
The Third ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Linguistic Evidence ◽  
Distinct Unit ◽  
Medical Writings

Among the surviving medical writings in Old English, Bald's Leechbook holds a deservedly important place. It is preserved uniquely in London, British Library, Royal 12. D. xvii, a manuscript which may be dated on palaeographical grounds to the mid-tenth century (s. xmed), and which may arguably be attributed to a scriptorium at Winchester.1 Linguistic evidence suggests that this manuscript is in turn a copy of a manuscript written perhaps half a century earlier. Although it is written by one scribe throughout, the manuscript contains three distinct books. A metrical colophon at the end of the second book contains the hexameter ‘Bald habet hunc librum Cild quem conscribere iussit’. Neither Bald nor Cild can be identified, and the ambiguity of conscribere in medieval Latin makes it difficult to determine whether Bald ordered Cild to compile the book or simply to transcribe it. (Because of this ambiguity, I shall refer to the person responsible as the ‘compiler’.) In any case, it is clear that the first two books form a distinct unit, and it is these two books that are customarily described as Bald's Leechbook2 (a practice I shall follow in the present essay). The third book is a collection of medical recipes, of lesser scholarly import, entirely separate from and unrelated to Bald's Leechbook; it will not be discussed further here.

The Byzantine Empire in the Eleventh Century: Some Different Interpretations

1950 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 71-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. M. Hussey
Keyword(s):  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Byzantine Empire ◽  
New Era ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of

I was originally provoked into a consideration of this particular problem by reading Ostrogorsky's Geschichte des byzantinischen Staates. A long-needed and courageous attempt to reconstruct the history of the empire and characterized by acute and penetrating analysis, this book is nevertheless marked by a certain unevenness of treatment. Side by side with brilliant sections on the achievements of the tenth century and the complications of the fourteenth (this latter perhaps the finest part of the book) must be set the brief and inadequate account of the years 1025–1081. Ostrogorsky is not alone. Misstatements and omissions continue, and often in unexpected places. Recent much used general histories, as for instance the third volume of the medieval section of the Glotz Histoire générale, still repeat the old emphasis on 1081 as the dividingline between a time of painful disaster and the new era of Comnenian glory.

scholarly journals TWO NEWLY DISCOVERED TENTH-CENTURY ORGANA

2013 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 277-315
Author(s):  
Giovanni Varelli
Keyword(s):  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Music History ◽  
Western Music ◽  
British Library ◽  
Significant Phase ◽  
Carolingian Empire ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Polyphonic Music

In the tenth century, when the earliest chant books were being compiled in the heart of the Carolingian Empire and polyphonic music was entering the realm of theoretical speculation in the anonymous writings of Musica enchiriadis and Scolica enchiriadis, organa were also being notated for performance outside music treatises. We would not know this, were it not for a two-voice organum on an antiphon for Saint Boniface written in the first decades of the tenth century on the last page of a long-neglected manuscript, now in the British Library. A second notated antiphon, Rex caelestium terrestrium, provides elements for a reconstruction of a further, ‘hidden’, organum. These newly identified organa shed light on a significant phase in Western music history, being the sole evidence from the tenth century of a polyphonic practice before the great eleventh-century collection of organa from Winchester.

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