Eschatology in the Anonymous Old English Homilies

Traditio ◽  
1965 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 117-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Milton McC. Gatch
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Aelfric Of Eynsham ◽  
Benedictine Reform

The vernacular homilies of pre-conquest England fall into two clear groups: homilies whose authorship is unknown and which are generally considered to have been written by the middle of the tenth century and the sermon collections of Abbot Ælfric of Eynsham and Archbishop Wulfstan II of York which were written,ca.990–1020, under the influence of the Benedictine reform.

scholarly journals Translating the Fate of the Soul in Late Anglo-Saxon England

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Di Sciacca
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Old English ◽  
Post Mortem ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
English Version ◽  
Aelfric Of Eynsham ◽  
Desert Fathers ◽  
Benedictine Reform ◽  
Western European

This essay discusses what is possibly the earliest translation from theVitas Patrumcorpus into a Western European vernacular, i.e. the Old English version of two visions of departing souls from theVerba Seniorumby Ælfric of Eynsham. Contrary to received notions, Ælfric favoured the narratives of the Desert Fathers as sources for paradigms of clerical celibacy and continence, two of the values that he was most anxious to teach and on which he took a strongly reformist stance. The two case studies presented aim to shed new light on the diffusion and appreciation of the Desert Fathers tales in Benedictine Reform England, in that they will show that, not unlike many anonymous homilists, Ælfric too drew on them as eschatological sources to conjure up two dramaticpost-mortemscenes.

Æthelwold's translation of theRegula Sancti Benedictiand its Latin exemplar

1974 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 125-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mechthild Gretsch
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
English Language ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
English Word ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Language And Literature ◽  
Benedictine Reform ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

St Benedict wrote his Rule for monastic communities in the first half of the sixth century. It must have reached England in the course of the seventh century and was translated into Old English prose by Æthelwold, bishop of Winchester, in about 970 at the request of King Edgar and Qeen Ælfthryth. Æhelwold was one of the leaders of the tenth-century Benedictine reform in England and his translation of the Rule is among his major contributions to the reform movement. Moreover the Old English Rule holds a key position in the history of the development of Old English language and literature. Manuscripts of the text must have been numerous from the tenth century to the twelfth century and even the thirteenth. Scholars like William of Malmesbury, Lawrence Nowell, John Jocelyn and Francis Junius took an interest in the Old English Rule, but, except for a chapter printed from BM Cotton Faustina A.x by Thomas Wright in 1842, the text was not easily accessible until Arnold Schröer published his edition in 1885, followed in 1888 by his introduction discussing date and authorship, the relationship between the manuscripts and some linguistic points. Comparatively little work seems to have been done on the Old English Rule since then except for Rohr's Bonn Dissertation of 1912 and Professor Gneuss's supplement to the 1964 reprint of Schröer's edition. Rohr, in an investigation of the phonology and the inflexional morphology of the manuscripts of the Old English Rule, was able to show that the language of all of them is basically late West Saxon, while Gneuss gave a survey of what is known about the Old English Rule and the Latin Rule in Anglo-Saxon England; he also pointed out the difficulties involved in an attempt to identify or reconstruct the Latin exemplar which Æthelwold used. In this article I shall consider four topics which seem to me essential for our understanding of the Old English Rule: the question of Æthelwold's exemplar; the relationship between the manuscripts of the Old English Rule; Æthelwold's aims and techniques in his translation; and the vocabulary of the Old English Rule, with special reference to recent research in Old English word geography.

Performing (In)Attention

2020 ◽  
Vol 152 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Erica Weaver
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Regulatory Document ◽  
Aelfric Of Eynsham ◽  
Benedictine Reform

The central regulatory document of the tenth-century English Benedictine Reform, Æthelwold of Winchester’s Regularis concordia, contains an important performance piece: the Visitatio sepulchri, which standard theater histories understand as an anomalous originary text that marks the reemergence of drama in the European Middle Ages. This article resituates it alongside the schoolroom colloquies of Æthelwold’s student Ælfric of Eynsham and his student and editor Ælfric Bata to argue that these texts together cultivated monastic self-possession by means of self-conscious performances of its absence. By staging (in)attention, they thereby modeled extended engagement in moments and spaces that could otherwise seem too quiet or empty to hold concentration for long, from the classroom to the sepulcher to the page, while also exposing the limits of “distraction” and “attention” as analytical terms.

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.

The Old English Benedictine Rule: writing for women and men

2003 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 147-187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rohini Jayatilaka
Keyword(s):  
Ninth Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Monastic Reform ◽  
Monastic Life ◽  
Benedictine Reform ◽  
The Status ◽  
Linguistic Level

The Regula S. Benedicti was known and used in early Anglo-Saxon England, but it was not until the mid-tenth-century Benedictine reform that the RSB became established as the supreme and exclusive rule governing the monasteries of England. The tenth-century monastic reform movement, undertaken by Dunstan, Æthelwold and Oswald during the reign of Edgar (959–75), sought to revitalize monasticism in England which, according to the standards of these reformers, had ceased to exist during the ninth century. They took as a basis for restoring monastic life the RSB, which was regarded by them as the main embodiment of the essential principles of western monasticism, and in this capacity it was established as the primary document governing English monastic life. By elevating the status of the RSB as the central text of monastic practice in England and the basis of a uniform way of life the reformers raised for themselves the problem of ensuring that the RSB would be understood in detail by all monks, nuns and novices, whatever their background. Evidence of various attempts to make the text accessible, both at the linguistic level and at the level of substance, survives in manuscripts dating from the mid-tenth and eleventh centuries; the most important of these attempts is a vernacular translation of the RSB.

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.

Two composite texts from Archbishop Wulfstan's ‘commonplace book’: theDe ecclesiastica consuetudineand theInstitutio beati Amalarii de ecclesiasticis officiis

1998 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 233-271
Author(s):  
Christopher A. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Old English ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
British Library ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Editorial Work

The great monument of tenth-century Anglo-Saxon monastic liturgy, theRegularis concordia, has been particularly fortunate in its twentieth-century devotees. The most prominent was Dom Thomas Symons, who published numerous learned articles on the text and, in 1953, an edition and translation that are still immensely valuable. More recently, Lucia Kornexl has re-edited theConcordiawith its continuous Old English gloss from London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iii, and provided an exhaustive collation against the second Latin copy in London, British Library, Cotton Faustina B. iii. Building on this detailed editorial work, Kornexl's introductory chapters also suggest new and helpful ways of regarding the transmission of this text and the authority of its two extant manuscripts.

The compilation of the Vercelli Book

1973 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 189-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. G. Scragg
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Vercelli Book ◽  
And Training ◽  
Selection Of

The Vercelli Book, as is well known, is a codex of the late tenth century containing a selection of religious prose and verse in Old English. Of the manuscript's twenty-nine items (some of which are defective owing to loss of leaves), six are alliterative poems and the rest prose homilies. There seems little doubt that one scribe (henceforth referred to as V) was responsible for writing the whole of the codex, even though the size of the writing changes considerably at various points, particularly towards the end of the volume where the lineation also changes. As the earliest of the four extant poetic codices and the earliest surviving collection of homilies in the vernacular, the book is potentially a most important source of knowledge of tenth-century English; most linguistic studies which range over Old English as a whole have included some reference to it. Yet the language of the manuscript is a relatively neglected subject of study, the place of its composition has not been established and the circumstances of its compilation have not been fully explained. This paper seeks to learn more of the book's origin in two ways: firstly, by examining its make-up in an attempt to determine the number and the nature of the sources that V used, and, secondly, by considering the distribution of distinctive linguistic forms in the manuscript in order to find out more about the nature of V's exemplars and about his background and training as displayed in his attitude to the language of his exemplars.

scholarly journals The Homiliary of Angers in tenth-century England

2010 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
pp. 163-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Winfried Rudolf
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
British Library ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
First Time ◽  
Made In

AbstractLatin manuscripts used for preaching the Anglo-Saxon laity in the tenth century survive in relatively rare numbers. This paper contributes a new text to the known preaching resources from that century in identifying the Homiliary of Angers as the text preserved on the flyleaves of London, British Library, MS Sloane 280. While these fragments, made in Kent and edited here for the first time, cast new light on the importance of this plain and unadorned Latin collection for the composition of Old English temporale homilies before Ælfric, they also represent the oldest surviving manuscript evidence of the text.

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