The Latin textual basis of Genesis A

1988 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 163-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul G. Remley
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
English Text ◽  
Latin Text ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Critical Text ◽  
Textual Basis ◽  
Base Text ◽  
Genesis A

Received scholarly opinion regards Genesis A as an Old English versification of the Latin text of Genesis in Jerome's Vulgate revision of the bible. This view has prevailed in modern editions of the poem, which normally print a critical text of the Vulgate Genesis in their apparatus. The textual basis of Genesis A is perhaps ‘vulgate’ in character in so far as the poem renders Genesis readings that were commonly known in Anglo-Saxon England, but the identification of this base text with that of the Hieronymian Vulgate remains an untested hypothesis. Ten years ago A. N. Doane printed a list of readings in the Old English text which show affinity with the ancient versions of Genesis that emerged before the completion of Jerome's translation, readings associted with the Vetus Latina or Old Latin bible. Doane did not, however, challenge the long-standing belief that Genesis A follows a single, lost exemplar that contained in all essentials the text established by Jerome. The present study attempts to survey, without any preconceptions, all the details in the poem that might derive from Latin sources; its intention is to make a first step towards the recovery of the Latin textual basis of Genesis A.

The Junius Psalter gloss: its historical and cultural context

2000 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 85-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mechthild Gretsch
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Bodleian Library ◽  
Latin Text ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
Benedictine Reform ◽  
The Individual

Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 27 (S.C. 5139), the Junius Psalter, was written, Latin text and Old English gloss, probably at Winchester and presumably during the reign of King Edward the Elder. Junius 27 is one of the twenty-nine complete or almost complete psalters written or owned in Anglo-Saxon England which have survived. (In addition to these twenty-nine complete psalters, eight minor fragments of further psalters are still extant.) This substantial number of surviving manuscripts and fragments is explained by the paramount importance of the psalms in the liturgy of the Christian church, both in mass and especially in Office. Junius 27 is also one of the ten psalters from Anglo-Saxon England bearing an interlinear Old English gloss to the entire psalter. (In addition there are two psalters with a substantial amount of glossing in Old English, though not full interlinear versions.) Since our concern in the first part of this article will be with the nature of the Old English glossing in the Junius Psalter, and its relationship to other glossed psalters, it is appropriate at the outset to provide a list of the psalters in question. At the beginning of each of the following items I give the siglum and the name by which the individual psalters are traditionally referred to by psalter scholars. An asterisk indicates that the Latin text is a Psalterium Romanum (the version in almost universal use in England before the Benedictine reform); unmarked manuscripts contain the Psalterium Gallicanum. For full descriptions of the manuscripts, see N. R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon.

WILLIAM CAMDEN, SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ATLASES OF THE BRITISH ISLES AND THE PRINTING OF ANGLO-SAXON

2018 ◽  
Vol 98 ◽  
pp. 219-244
Author(s):  
Peter J Lucas
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Old English ◽  
English Text ◽  
British Isles ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Sixth Edition

The sixth edition of Camden’s Britannia was published in 1607 with over fifty county maps printed from engraved plates. It was a pioneering work. In 1611, John Speed published his Theatre of The Empire of Great Britaine, again with over fifty county maps, many of them engraved by Jodocus Hondius from Amsterdam, and with an abridged version of Camden’s text. These books established a model that was followed later in Amsterdam itself in the great atlases of Blaeu and Janssonius. One of the ways Camden sought to augment the authority of his work was by using Anglo-Saxon types in his text for county names and the occasional passage in Anglo-Saxon (Old English). As the practice persisted, the progress of these type-designs is examined in relation to the development of the atlases. While Hondius’ map-making skills were imported to add to the English text, when the English text was brought to Amsterdam to add to the Dutch maps, the Dutch printers had to use their own skills to reproduce the Anglo-Saxon characters.

Vestigial Signs: Inscription, Performance, and The Dream of the Rood

PMLA ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 125 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seeta Chaganti
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Old English ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
English Text ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Dream Of The Rood ◽  
Media Performance ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
And Performance

Anglo‐Saxonists often explore connections between The Dream of the Rood and two ritual objects, the silver Brussels cross and the sandstone Ruthwell monument, inscribed with verses related to the poem. This essay offers a new perspective on these artifacts, elucidating not a historical narrative linking them but rather an Anglo‐Saxon poetics made visible in their juxtaposition. It argues that these three manifestations reveal a dialectic of inscription and performance in Anglo‐Saxon poetics. Reading the familiar Old English text through J. H. Prynne's “A Note on Metal” (1968), which imagines dialectics both of metal and stone and of inscription and performance, the essay also interrogates certain divisions between premodern and modern aesthetic traditions. Theories of media, performance, and inscriptionality help to stage an interdisciplinary analysis of The Dream of the Rood and to show that its poetics originate in the formal frameworks of Anglo‐Saxon material culture. (SC)

scholarly journals From Venice to Aleppo: Early Printing of Scripture in the Orthodox World

Chronos ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 33-61
Author(s):  
Hilary Kilpatrick
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Old English ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Greek Translation ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Jewish Scriptures

The Bible, as the etymology of the word indicates, refers not to one book but to many. The Christian Bible is made up of the Old Testament, that is, the Jewish Scriptures, and the New Testament; moreover, for some Churches, among them the Orthodox, certain books commonly called the Apocrypha , which were added to the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, also fonn part of the Bible. The Bible is thus a small library, and as is common in libraries, some books are more popular than others. Long before the introduction of printing, the varying degrees of importance accorded to different books of the Bible led to some of them being translated before others. For instance, in Anglo-Saxon England, interlinear glosses (i.e. crude word-by-word translations) were made of the Gospels and Psalms, and separate portions of the Bible, including the Gospels, were rendered into Old English (Anonymous 1997: 200). Likewise, the earliest known written translations of parts of the Bible into Arabic are of the Gospels and Psalms; they can be dated to the 8th century. Oral translations are older, going back to pre-Islamic times (Graf 1944: 114-115, 138; Griffith 2012: 123-126). By contrast, the first attempt to produce a complete Bible in Arabic occurred only in the l 61h century (Graf 1944: 89-90).

Bald's Leechbook and the Physica Plinii

1992 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 87-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. N. Adams ◽  
Marilyn Deegan
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Systematic Study ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Latin Text ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Medical Texts ◽  
Late Ninth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Source Materials

The study of the sources of the Anglo-Saxon medical texts began more than a hundred years ago with T.O. Cockayne's monumental edition of most of the medical, magical and herbal material extant in Old English. Cockayne demonstrated that the most significant text in this corpus, the late ninth-century compilation known as Bald's Leechbook, drew on an impressive range of Latin source materials. Recent work by C.H. Talbot and M.L. Cameron has further extended our knowledge of the classical texts which underlie the Leechbook. Among the significant sources is the text known as the Physica Plinii. Although the Physica survives in several recensions, there has as yet been no systematic study of the relationship between these recensions and the version of the Latin text used by the Old English compiler. The present article investigates Bald's Leechbook as a witness to the history of the Physica Plinii, and demonstrates the complexity of the transmission of the latter work.

The Functions of Anglo-Saxon Poetry: An Old English Text Typology

2019 ◽  
Vol 100 (7) ◽  
pp. 739-766
Author(s):  
J. Rubén Valdés Miyares
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
English Text ◽  
Anglo Saxon

Adaptation and anweald in the Old English Orosius

1987 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 127-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
William A. Kretzschmar
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
World History ◽  
Latin Text ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Historical Revisionism ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
Similar Information ◽  
Recent Edition

After Janet Bately's several articles and her recent edition of the Old English Orosius there is little need to analyse further what the Anglo-Saxon translator did to his source. The translator made substantial cuts in the Latin text: he deleted much of Orosius's commentary on the events he narrated, made a number of minor, probably accidental, omissions, rather surprisingly left out some details which should have interested the Anglo-Saxon audience, and carried out a wholesale chopping of events and entire sections, reducing his translation to perhaps one-fifth the length of its source. He also made some additions, primarily explanations of institutions and details which would have been obscure to his audience, but also circumstances and rationalizations taken from secondary sources or from his own whimsy. Finally, he made some changes in the organization of his source and altered Orosius's polemical tone to that of a more objective but still Christian world history. Given the large number of changes, it is important now to ask why the translator might have made such a thorough redaction, and to consider how his translation could have been an appropriate vehicle for the transmission of this standard authority to an Anglo-Saxon readership. We are not unfamiliar today with historical revisionism and the motives for it, and the practice reveals the culture of its modern practitioners; the present study seeks similar information about the culture of Alfred's age.

Genesis A and the Anglo-Saxon ‘migration myth’

2000 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 43-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Battles
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Old English Poetry ◽  
Cultural Myth ◽  
Shared Identity ◽  
Collective Imagination ◽  
Historia Ecclesiastica ◽  
Adventus Saxonum ◽  
Genesis A

In his study of Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England, Nicholas Howe has argued that the Anglo-Saxons regarded the ancestral migration from the Continent as ‘the founding and defining event of their culture’. He suggests that the adventus Saxonum gave the Germanic tribes in England a shared identity, and proved central to their historical, cultural and even theological self-definition. Howe investigates what he calls the Anglo-Saxon ‘migration myth’, which links the Germanic tribal migration to England with the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, both being transmarine journeys from a land of spiritual bondage to one of spiritual salvation. Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England traces the development of this concept from Bede's Historia ecclesiastica to Wulfstan's Sermo Lupi, and discusses its function in the writings of Alcuin and Boniface, as well as in Old English poetry. Howe's elegant analysis succeeds in demonstrating the pervasiveness of migration as a cultural myth, that is, a story that endures in a people's memory because it speaks powerfully to their collective imagination.

A context for the sexualization of monsters in The Wonders of the East

2012 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
pp. 79-99
Author(s):  
Christopher Monk
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Sexual Behaviour ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
English Poem ◽  
Sexual Deviancy ◽  
Poetic Imagination ◽  
A Performance ◽  
Genesis A

AbstractThe belief that monsters had a human genealogy originating at a point of transgressive sexual behaviour is something attested to in early medieval texts that either circulated or were written in Anglo-Saxon England. The Hiberno-Latin Reference Bible, a widely known text of the period, and the Old English poem Genesis A both suggest that the sexual deviancy of the progenitors of monsters is perceivable as reiterated stigmata on the monstrous bodies of their progeny. It is within this context of theological exegesis and poetic imagination that the Anglo-Saxon drawings of monsters in The Wonders of the East were produced. What one sees in the depiction of monsters therein is a performance of sexual monstrosity that links monsters to their human forbears; but also, by means of the illustrated interaction of monster and human, the monster is brought perilously close to the here-and-now of the Anglo-Saxon reader-viewer's imagined world.

The influence of Christian doctrine and exegesis on Old English poetry: an estimate of the current state of scholarship

1973 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 271-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip B. Rollinson
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Cultural Influences ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Old English Poetry ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Current State ◽  
Latin Culture ◽  
The Church

Although it is a commonplace of history that Anglo-Saxon England was receptive to Christianity and to Christian-Latin culture and that English churchmen such as Aldhelm, Bede and Alcuin made an important contribution to that culture, it is only in recent years that scholars have explored and emphasized the importance of Christian tradition to the understanding of Old English poetry, especially those poems without explicit Christian content. Increased investigation of Old English prose, which is largely Christian, and the well-known work onBeowulfby Frederick Klaeber, Marie Padgett Hamilton, Dorothy Whitelock and others, seems to have redirected ‘the search for Anglo-Saxon paganism‘ into a search – sometimes opposed – for reflections of Christianity in Anglo-Saxon poetry. While in some quarters this critical and scholarly attention has been confined to the influence of Christian doctrine, ritual and interpretation of the bible, in others it has taken into account the broader cultural influences of the church, especially its transmission of the literature and learning of pagan antiquity.

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