An Alfredian Reading Project

2021 ◽  
pp. 89-136
Author(s):  
Francesca Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Pastoral Care ◽  
Old English ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
English Hegemony ◽  
Cultural Project ◽  
Rhetorical Tropes ◽  
King Alfred ◽  
Christian History

Chapter 2 compares the rhetorical tropes employed in the ‘Preface’ to The Anathemata (often overlooked in the scholarship) with those of the preface to King Alfred’s Old English translation of the Pastoral Care. This comparison establishes the idea of Jones’s artful construction of his ‘Preface’ as a manifesto for the cultural project of The Anathemata. Reflecting on the Alfredian rhetorical ideal of an English nation (and more specifically an English nation of Catholics) as both a medieval and a post-medieval construct, this chapter illuminates the direct challenge of Jones’s ‘Preface’ to Alfredian assertions of English hegemony. Key to this effort to disrupt the hegemony of British Christian history, this chapter argues, is Jones’s use of Latin and how this implicates the work of two other ninth-century writers—Asser and Nennius—in Jones’s dialogue with King Alfred.

scholarly journals The Mind in the Old English Prose Psalms

2019 ◽  
Vol 70 (296) ◽  
pp. 597-617
Author(s):  
Amy Faulkner
Keyword(s):  
Pastoral Care ◽  
Old English ◽  
English Translation ◽  
The Other ◽  
English Text ◽  
The West ◽  
Alfred The Great ◽  
English Translations ◽  
Consolation Of Philosophy ◽  
The Mind

Abstract The Prose Psalms, an Old English translation of the first 50 psalms into prose, have often been overshadowed by the other translations attributed to Alfred the Great: the Old English Pastoral Care, with its famous preface, and the intellectually daring Old English translations of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and Augustine’s Soliloquies. However, this article proposes that, regardless of who wrote them, the Prose Psalms should be read alongside the Old English Consolation and the Soliloquies: like the two more well-studied translations, the Prose Psalms are concerned with the mind and its search for true understanding. This psychological interest is indicated by the prevalence of the word mod (‘mind’) in the Old English text, which far exceeds references to the faculty of the intellect in the Romanum source. Through comparison with the Consolation and the Soliloquies, this article demonstrates that all three texts participate in a shared tradition of psychological imagery. The three translations may well, therefore, be the result of a single scholarly environment, perhaps enduring for several decades, in which multiple scholars read the same Latin, patristic writings on psychology, discussed these ideas among themselves, and thereby developed the vernacular discourse observable in these three translations. Whether this environment was identical with the scholarly circle which Alfred gathered at the West Saxon court remains a matter for debate.

scholarly journals Fragments of Boethius: the reconstruction of the Cotton manuscript of the Alfredian text

2005 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 169-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Irvine
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
The Other ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
English Prose ◽  
King Alfred

‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’: T. S. Eliot's metaphor in The Waste Land evokes the evanescent frailty of human existence and worldly endeavour with a poignancy that the Anglo-Saxons would surely have appreciated. Such a concept lies at the heart of Boethius's De consolatione Philosophiae, and perhaps prompted King Alfred to include this work amongst those which he considered most necessary for all men to know. Written in the early sixth century, Boethius's work was translated from Latin into Old English at the end of the ninth century, possibly by Alfred himself. It survives in two versions, one in prose (probably composed first) and the other in prose and verse, containing versifications of Boethius's Latin metres which had originally been rendered as Old English prose. It is the latter of these versions which will be the focus of my discussion here. Damaged beyond repair by fire and water, the set of fragments which contains this copy will be seen to epitomize the ideas imparted by the work in ways that Alfred could never have envisaged.

Francis Junius (1591–1677): copyist or editor?

2000 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 279-296 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kees Dekker
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Pastoral Care ◽  
Old English ◽  
English Translation ◽  
British Library ◽  
Bodleian Library ◽  
Scholarly Edition ◽  
The University ◽  
Made In

In September 1890, Hendrik Logeman, professor of English and Germanic philology at the University of Ghent in Belgium, had the audacity to accuse no less a scholar than Henry Sweet of misleading his readers. Logeman based his accusation on an unfortunate remark Sweet had made in his edition of the Old English translation of Pope Gregory'sPastoral Care. For this scholarly edition, Sweet had wished to include the text of London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. xi. However, having barely survived the Ashburnham House blaze of 1731, this manuscript had been almost entirely consumed by fire at a bookbinder's in 1865. As a replacement, Sweet had used Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 53, a transcript made by the seventeenth-century philologist Francis Junius (1591–1677) when the Cotton manuscript was still unscathed. Sweet praised Junius and emphasized the accuracy of the transcript by stating that Junius only ‘swerved from the path of literal accuracy in a few unimportant particulars’. Hendrik Logeman had collated the Old English glosses to the Benedictine Rule from Cotton Tiberius A. iii with a Junius transcript, Junius 52, for his 1888 edition, but he found, instead, that Junius failed to distinguish between 〈ð〉 and 〈þ〉 that he corrected his text without giving the reading of the manuscript, and that he added, omitted or transposed entire words.

The text of Aldhelm's Enigma no. c in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson C. 697 and Exeter Riddle 40

1985 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 61-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Old English ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Bodleian Library ◽  
Latin Text

Exeter Riddle 40 presents two related problems as a translation of one of Aldhelm's Enigmata (no. c: ‘Creatura’): its dislocation, in an otherwise accurate translation, of six lines from their position in the Latin text; and its connection with the so-called ‘Lorica’ of Leiden, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, Voss. lat. Q. 106, the only other surviving Old English translation of an Aldhelmian enigma. In his edition of the Exeter Riddles, Tupper addressed these problems by postulating that both Old English riddles were the work of one translator and that Exeter Riddle 40 was revised from an earlier version of Aldhelm's enigma now lost to us. Although Tupper's view has been widely accepted, it presents a number of difficulties. It is the purpose of the present article to suggest an alternate interpretation of the evidence: that Exeter Riddle 40 – a much later poem than the ‘Leiden Riddle’, a Northumbrian poem perhaps of the eighth century – was translated from a ninth-century continental manuscript with tenth-century English corrections: Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson C. 697.

scholarly journals „Þæt is mid Estum þeaw þæt þærsceal ælces geðeodes man beon forbærned”. What exactly Wulfstan said about the burning of the dead by Ester in the fragment of his report on the trip to Truso? .

2015 ◽  
Vol 290 (4) ◽  
pp. 557-578
Author(s):  
Rafał Panfil
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
Old English ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
English Text ◽  
Dead Body ◽  
Funeral Rites ◽  
Grammatical Analysis ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Dead

In 1961 a part of Old English Orosius, the description of northernmost and central Europe, was translated into Polish and edited by Gerard Labuda. The source contains two short travel accounts by Othere and Wulfstan in the end of ninth century. The Polish editor did not avoid a number of linguistic mistakes made during the translation. Moreover, this was issued without any syntactic and grammatical analysis of the original Old English text. The Labuda’s edition only provides the Polish translation of the modern English translation by the mid-nineteenth century English scholar Joseph Bosworth. This resulted in the wrong inter�pretation of some important information contained in it. The subject of this paper is a one of the sentences included in the final fragment of the description of the funeral rites among the Ests/the Old Prussians – „Þæt is mid Estum þeaw þæt þær sceal ælces geðeodes man beon forbærned”. My aim is to understand this passage of the OE text correctly by providing it’s linguistic and grammati�cal examination to see how it corresponds with the known or presumed historical circumstances of the time and place. The interpretation of the old written source cannot be separated from its context, it this particular case especially from the local archaeological context. This will be arguing in my paper. At last,the above mentioned passage should be translated as:„And that is a custom among the Ests that people of every nationality must be cremated there”. According to this custom, the dead body of every man, that has passed away in the Witland, must be burned on the funeral pile. This Wulfstan’s description seems to be strongly supported by the number of rich equipped graves of the foreigners discovered and archaeologi�cally investigated at the number of early medieval cemeteries located in modern day city of Elbląg area and dated to the VIII/IX/X/XI century.

The Latin and the Old English Versions of St Augustine’s Prayer in his Soliloquia: A Study and a Rhetorical Synopsis

2019 ◽  
Vol 137 (4) ◽  
pp. 561-611
Author(s):  
Hans Sauer
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Old English ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Textual Criticism ◽  
Special Kind ◽  
British Library ◽  
Latin Text ◽  
Short Text ◽  
Entire Text ◽  
King Alfred

Abstract A special kind of a short text that is embedded in a larger text is the prayer near the beginning of St Augustine’s Soliloquia, which serves as a kind of introduction to the ensuing dialogue. The relatively independent nature of this prayer was recognized early on, and in addition to its transmission in the manuscripts of the Soliloquia it has also been transmitted as an independent prayer. Something similar happened to the Old English translation. There is a full translation of the entire text, traditionally ascribed to King Alfred (and his learned helpers), but preserved only in a much later manuscript (London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius A.xv); however, a shortened version of the prayer was included in a collection of brief penitential texts in an earlier manuscript (London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A.iii). In the present article I look at the structure of the Latin prayer and at its Old English translation, especially the relation of the two manuscript versions and their value for textual criticism and the reconstruction of the original version, their relation to the Latin source, and the rhetoric of the Latin prayer and its Old English translation, including a brief discussion of the binomials used. The Appendix provides a synoptic version of the Latin text and the two manuscript versions of the Old English translation, highlighting their rhetorical structure, something that to my knowledge has never been done for the Old English translation.

A third Old English translation of part of Gregory's Dialogues, this time embedded in the Rule of Chrodegang

1986 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 197-204
Author(s):  
Brigitte Langefeld
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Latin Text

Gregory's Dialogues are a hitherto unnoticed source of the final chapter of the enlarged version of the Rule of Chrodegang of Metz. The chapter in question, no. 84 or 86 depending on the recension of the Latin text, is preserved in the following manuscripts (the letters in brackets are the sigla used for these manuscripts throughout this article):Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 1535 (P), 113V–149V. Second quarter of the ninth century, possibly written at Fécamp. Latin text only, 86 chapters.

Lexical evidence for the authorship of the prose psalms in the Paris Psalter

1981 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 69-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet M. Bately
Keyword(s):  
Pastoral Care ◽  
Old English ◽  
English Version ◽  
King Alfred

‘Forðy me ðyncð betre, gif iow swæ ðyncð, ðæt we eac sumæ bec, ða ðe niedbeðearfosta sien eallum monnum to wiotonne, ðætweðaonðæt geðiode wendenðe we ealle gecnawan mægen.’ With these well-known words, King Alfred, in the prefatory letter to his Old English version of Gregory's Pastoral Care, enunciates the policy of translation he wishes to see implemented with a view to restoring wisdom and learning to his war-torn kingdom. In the last twenty years or so modern scholars have made a determined effort to define the contribution the king himself made to his scheme. Traditionally it had been accepted that he translated the Pastoral Care, Boethius, Soliloquies, Bede and Orosius. But it has now been firmly established that, while the first three works are his, both Bede and Or are to be excluded as the work of others.

Alfred’s Chronicle and the First Continuations

After Alfred ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 39-51
Author(s):  
Pauline Stafford
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Alternative Model ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Significant Time ◽  
Late Ninth Century ◽  
Time Of Divergence ◽  
King Alfred ◽  
Christian History

This chapter considers the vernacular chronicle produced at the court of King Alfred, its story, and its late-ninth-century evolution. It argues that this story was both dynastic history and a wider tale of English Christian history. It argues that seeing this chronicle as connected to the court rather than as deliberate royal propaganda solves some long-standing historical debates. Using the evidence of language and a comparative method involving Asser, surviving chronicles, and twelfth-century texts, it suggests that this chronicle was already an evolving text before 900. It questions the idea of deliberate circulation in the early 890s, suggesting an alternative model of copies made at different points. The early 890s were, nonetheless, a significant time of divergence and the beginning of the story of the separate development of vernacular chronicles.

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