Constat Ergo Inter Nos Verba Signa Esse: The Understanding of the Miraculous in Anglo-Saxon Society

2005 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
pp. 56-66
Author(s):  
Anna Maria Luiselli Fadda
Keyword(s):  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Expressive Activity ◽  
Lengthy Process

This paper investigates two important themes which have not hitherto been fully appreciated: how the Anglo-Saxons, during the whole lengthy process of their reception of Christianity, interpreted the meaning of those extraordinary events commonly called miracula, and what reflection on the vernacular was carried forward by the knowledge achieved for purposes of communication. Although the question of the vocabulary of ‘miracle’ in Antiquity and early Christian times has been dealt with elsewhere, any discussion of vernacular terminology is barely discernible and scarcely ever encountered. My intention is, therefore, to consider the intentional expressive activity of the Anglo-Saxons as a reflection of meaning on their language.

The Bishop as Pastor and Solitary: Bede and the Spiritual Authority of the Monk-Bishop

1996 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 601-619 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon J. Coates
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
Fundamental Aspect ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Directed Attention ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Minority Community ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Spiritual Authority ◽  
Clear Link

‘One is always aware of Bede's Church as an institution of men and women, meetings and buildings, and especially as a bishops' Church.’ With this comment, J. M. Wallace-Hadrill directed attention to a fundamental aspect of Bede's world which requires further examination. From early childhood until his death, Bede was and remained a monk. He had entered themonasteriumof Wearmouth and Jarrow at the age of seven and was to remain in it all his life. Although he was ordained to the priesthood by John of Beverley he never advanced to episcopal office. Despite the fact that he was nurtured in a world of reflective scholarship at Wearmouth and Jarrow it is now less common for historians to view Bede as ‘a lonely intellectual locked in an elite minority community’ and a scholar who lived out his life away from the events of the outside world. He perceived that world and the clergy who occupied it, however, through monastic eyes. Since Bede is, and indeed should be, seen as a representative and guardian of a monastic culture heavily influenced by Benedictine spirituality his views concerning the episcopate have not been analysed to the same extent as his views concerning monasticism. This is somewhat surprising since Bede himself perceived a clear link between the episcopal and monastic lives and was deeply concerned with the early Anglo-Saxon Church as an episcopally governed institution. The purpose of this article is to examine Bede's exploration of the manner in which individual bishops came personally to define their prestige, power and authority. This involves an investigation of their continued attachment to ascetic traditions once they had been elevated to the episcopate and an examination of the models applying ascetic sanctity to an episcopal context which Bede inherited from his predecessors in the late antique and early Christian world.

scholarly journals Aldhelm and Old St Peter's, Rome

2010 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
pp. 7-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Story
Keyword(s):  
Ninth Century ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
New Evidence

AbstractAldhelm of Malmesbury was one of the most prolific and influential scholars of early Anglo-Saxon England. His contemporary fame rested partly on the fact that he had been a pilgrim to Rome. This article presents new evidence for Aldhelm's literary debt to the epigraphy of early Christian Rome. Two ninth-century manuscripts from Reims contain an anthology of six epigrams which derive largely from verse inscriptions in Old St Peter's. Aldhelm quoted two of these, de Petro and de Andrea, almost verbatim in his Carmina Ecclesiastica. It is likely that Aldhelm knew these verses from first-hand observation rather than via the pages of a manuscript sylloge.

Toledo, Rome and the legacy of Gaul

1984 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 49-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Levy
Keyword(s):  
Eighth Century ◽  
Northern Italy ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Musical Practice ◽  
Gregory The Great ◽  
Local Material ◽  
Practical Politics ◽  
Lengthy Process

Between the late sixth and mid-ninth centuries the lengthy process unfolded that brought substantial unity to the liturgical-musical practice of the Western Church. The Roman-Benedictine liturgy of Gregory the Great was taken to England in 596–7 by the Italianborn Augustine, prior of the Monastery of St Andrew on the Caelian hill. His purpose was to substitute Roman observance for entrenched Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Gallican rites as well as pagan customs. Yet when Augustine questioned Gregory about the variety of Christian usages he found, the pope was unwilling to offend local sensibilities and impede the Anglo-Saxons' conversion. Augustine was told to leave in place whatever of the local rites seemed desirable. During the seventh and early eighth centuries an accelerating missionary activity spread the Roman liturgy through France, Germany and northern Italy. Yet wherever it arrived it became similarly intermixed with local material, and it was not until the mid-eighth century that vigorous measures were taken to impose a purer Roman usage. The change came about not through ecclesiastical initiative but through the practical politics of a pious Frankish monarch. Pepin the Short (714–68) sought to increase unity throughout his domain by imposing the Roman rite. He asked Stephen iii (752–7) for clerics to teach the musical rite, and Stephen's successor Paul i (757–67) sent Roman chant books, an ‘antiphonale et responsale’, presumably without notation.

John the Baptist and the Agnus Dei: Ruthwell (and Bewcastle) Revisited

2001 ◽  
Vol 81 ◽  
pp. 131-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Hawkes ◽  
Éamonn Ó Carragéain ◽  
Ross Trench-Jellicoe
Keyword(s):  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Close Inspection ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
John The Baptist ◽  
Biblical Commentary

The identity of the figure with a lamb carved on the upper stone of the Anglo-Saxon cross at Ruthwell, Dumfriesshire, was interpreted by Paul Meyvaert (in 1982 and 1992), as an apocalyptic image of the Deity instead of John the Baptist. Close inspection of the panel, however, makes it difficult to accept such an explanation. Instead, an adaptation of the early Christian images of the Baptist is proposed, and it is argued that the details of the panel are best understood in the light of the introduction of the Agnus Dei chant into the Mass by Pope Sergius I (687–701), and of biblical commentary which saw the Baptist himself as an apocalyptic figure associated with the Lamb, the paschal sacrifice, commemorated each day in the Mass.

Validating the English Church

2020 ◽  
pp. 52-68
Author(s):  
Graham Parry
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Church History ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Medieval Studies ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
The Church

At the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, leaders of the Church of England recognized the need to provide a history for the national church that would identify its origins in the early Christian era, and demonstrate its initial independence from Rome. Matthew Parker, Elizabeth’s first Archbishop of Canterbury, inaugurated an intense period of research into the Anglo-Saxon Church. Parker and his circle managed to retrieve the Anglo-Saxon language from oblivion, and laid sound foundations for the study of Saxon England and its institutions. This endeavour was further developed by a succession of antiquaries inspired by William Camden’s investigations into the different pasts of Britain. Richard Verstegan, Henry Spelman, James Ussher, and William Somner all made significant contributions to this research. Church history remained a powerful force for advancing Saxon and medieval studies throughout the seventeenth century.

‘Id est, crux Christi’: tracing the Old English Motif of the Celestial Rood

2011 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 43-73
Author(s):  
Brandon W. Hawk
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Complex Matrix ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Literary Images ◽  
Specific Source ◽  
Christian Origins

AbstractThe celestial cross is a prominent motif in Old English texts, and, rather than deriving from a single specific source, the figure provides a case study with implications for understanding the variety of backgrounds that often contribute to Anglo-Saxon conceptions of specific literary images. Tracing the development of the motif from its early Christian origins to its role in Anglo-Saxon England reveals a persistent correlation to eschatology, the importance of the liturgy in its dissemination, and a complex matrix of associations that must be accounted for in considering the Old English settings in which the image exists. An examination of these literary settings further helps to interpret the ways in which Anglo-Saxon authors used this matrix of associations for the celestial cross in their conceptions of the Judgement Day.

Animal Iconography

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Gannon
Keyword(s):  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Introduced Birds ◽  
Contemporary Sculpture ◽  
Symbolic Image ◽  
Secondary Series

Pagan Germanic art had favoured the representation of animals and invested it with apotropaic qualities. The new Christian animal iconography (Evangelists’ symbols, doves, peacock, the fauna in the vine-scrolls, etc.) was accepted and integrated into a tradition which saw it not as purely decorative, but as a potent symbolic image. It is not surprising that, just as in contemporary sculpture, manuscripts, metalwork, and embroidery, many of the reverses of the Secondary series show animals, real or fantastic. These representations must be analysed in the context of the culture of the time, and therefore as potential for metaphors. Whilst the gold coinage, following Merovingian numismatic prototypes, had crosses as reverses, the Primary coins of Series B introduced birds to this iconography. Birds will indeed dominate amongst the reverses of the whole of the early Anglo-Saxon coinage, and their importance can be understood in a Christian context. Several groups of coins sharing the iconography of a bust or head with diadem and spiky hair on the obverse, and of a bird surmounting a cross on the reverse, are gathered under the classification of Series B. Some issues have unintelligible legends on both sides, cordoned by a torque of pellets, sometimes snake-headed, and though they differ in details, their iconography is consistent (Fig. 4.1). Rigold regarded the coin iconography of the bird on a cross as original Anglo-Saxon, rejecting any Merovingian numismatic precedent. Conceptually close models may have developed in imitation of Roman and Christian standards or sceptres. Coptic bronze lamps present us with several examples where the reflector above the handle is in the shape of a cross topped with a bird (Fig. 4.1c), and there is also an interesting bronze lamp in the shape of a ram with a cross and bird on its head. Following Early Christian precedents, the bird on the coins can be identified as a dove, in a Christian context a symbol of the Holy Spirit, appropriately set on a cross. In Insular metalwork there are two three-dimensional dove-shaped mounts that may perhaps have similarly topped crosses.

scholarly journals The Tension between Heroic Masculinity and the Christian Self in the Old English Andreas

2018 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 87-107
Author(s):  
Jacek Olesiejko
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Christian Literature ◽  
The Military ◽  
Military Masculinity ◽  
The Devil

The article’s aim is to elucidate the religious transformations of the secular notions of identity and masculinity in Andreas. Andreas is a religious poem composed in Anglo-Saxon England around the ninth century. It is an adaptation of the Latin recension of the Acts of the Apostle Andrew, but the poet uses heroic diction borrowed from Old English secular poetry to rework the metaphor of miles Christi that is ubiquitous in Christian literature. The poet uses the military metaphor to inculcate the Christian notion of masculinity as the inversion of the secular perception of manliness. He draws upon a paradox, attested in the early Christian writings, that spiritual masculinity is true manliness, superior to military masculinity, and that it is expressed through patient suffering and the acknowledgment of defeat. The poem inverts the notions of war and victory to depict the physical defeat of the martyr as a spiritual victory over sin and the devil.

scholarly journals Aldhelm’s De Virginitate and Anglo-Saxon Nuns at the Turn of the 7th – 8th Centuries

2021 ◽  
pp. 28-40
Author(s):  
Irina Boldyreva ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Original Writing ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Intellectual Activity ◽  
High Position ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Cultural Methods ◽  
Structural Peculiarities ◽  
High Level ◽  
Christian Saints

Introduction. The publication focuses on the prose treatise De virginitate, composed by Anglo-Saxon Church author Aldhelm at the turn of the 7th – 8th centuries. The work was written for the nuns of the double monastery of Barking and its abbess Hildelith. The treatise has not received proper attention in domestic historiography. The purpose of this article is to study De virginitate in the context of associated with double monasteries social, cultural, and historical realities of Aldhelm’s day Britain. Methods and materials. The study is based on textual, historical, and cultural methods. The treatises of individual Church Fathers and a wide corpus of narrative testimonies, provided by Anglo-Saxon Church writers, have been used. Analysis. It is shown that in his epistle to the nuns of Barking Aldhelm not only derived from the previous tradition of praising virginity, but produced original writing that has preserved unique features of the environment in which he and his dedicatees moved. Among these features the following are emphasized: the presence of a large number of formerly married noblewomen in Anglo-Saxon double monasteries, the use of luxury, the wide spread of epistolary contacts in the clerical circles, the high level of aristocratic nuns’ education, and a large share of intellectual activity in their daily life. Results. Rhetorical, conceptual, and structural peculiarities of Aldhelm’s treatise prove that he belonged to the part of Anglo-Saxon clergy that did not debate the high position of noble women in the Church. Aldhelm’s praise of the Barking nuns’ virginity and learning, as well as the examples of cooperation and spiritual amity between the sexes among early Christian saints, can be considered manifestations of support for double monasteries as Church institution, spread in his days.

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