This first volume of essays in honour of Michael Lapidge focuses on Anglo-Saxon literature in both Latin and Old English from its earliest period at the end of the seventh century to the beginning of the Alfredian era at the end of the ninth. The volume also includes no fewer than five contributions on the mighty Old English poemBeowulf, the precise date of which remains a mystery: its inclusion here among the earliest relics of Anglo-Saxon literature simply reflects its own deeply rooted retrospective sense of history, rather than any firm assertion about its date, which would certainly promote...

The rhyming prayerSancte sator, long thought to have been composed in Anglo-Saxon England or Ireland, and recently ascribed, with convincing arguments, to Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury (668–90) by Michael Lapidge,¹ is preserved in eight manuscripts, of which six can be dated to the ninth century. The following descriptions are kept as brief as possible, and the bibliographical references are strictly selective. We use the sigla introduced by Clemens Blume in his edition inAnalecta Hymnica51 and, with Baesecke, employ ‘H’ for the Vienna manuscript.²

The ‘Book of Cerne,’ an Anglo-Saxon prayerbook for private devotion, containing Gospel extracts,...

London, BL, Cotton Vespasian B. vi, fols. 104–9, comprises three bifolia (six leaves, or twelve pages), written somewhere in southern England in the early ninth century.¹ It is not the surviving portion of what was necessarily once a much larger whole. Rather, it appears to represent the greater part of quite a small collection of material, put together for a particular reason and perhaps circulated in booklet form or kept at the back of some other book. Two of the texts which it contains are well known to historians of Anglo-Saxon England: the earliest surviving set of episcopal lists...

No scholar has done more to promote the study of Aldhelm – ‘England’s first man of letters’ – than Michael Lapidge. Decisively his most important contribution was the publication of a complete English translation of Aldhelm’s works in collaboration with several other scholars.¹ Aldhelm has been known for centuries, and virtually every student of early English history or literature mentions him, but few of these have taken the pains to examine him closely.² The reasons are well known. Aldhelm is a hard author. His ‘densa silva latinitatis’ [dense forest of Latinity] is close to impenetrable, and his proverbial verbosity doubtless has led...

Charles Plummer, writing at the close of the nineteenth century, registered an uncharacteristically harsh judgment, a declaration which – while ultimately indefensible – was heartfelt in its exasperation: ‘How willingly we would surrender the whole of Aldhelm’s stilted Latin to recover one of his native poems!’¹ Plummer’s opinion reflects the faith he placed in an anecdote recounting Aldhelm’s recitation of Old English verse on a bridge near a church, an anecdote which William of Malmesbury attributed to King Alfred’s handbook (orenchiridion).² Michael Lapidge, in articles published in 1979 and in 1982, strengthened the case for Aldhelm’s vernacular artistry through...

Faricius’s Life of St Aldhelm¹ has hitherto been known from a single witness. A second manuscript has now emerged,² one indeed of great value, for it gives a fuller text of theVita, as well as fresh evidence for the parts already known. A new edition is clearly called for; meanwhile, this contribution aims to exploit some of the new material in the course of preliminary remarks on the content and expression of a neglectedlibellus.

Previous editions have drawn upon a manuscript written c. 1200,³ from the Cistercian house of Holme Cultram⁴ in Cumbria. The work is unattributed, and...

Fruits and flowers have always served as symbols.¹ Throughout western culture from classical and biblical times to the present, flowers such as the rose and lily have been used to emblematize beauty, love, and devotion. Particular fruits, however, as symbols of fertility, pleasure, and plenitude have maintained less continuity. For instance, the apple, ubiquitous in its many varieties in contemporary culture, scarcely appears in the Bible;² but the pomegranate, considered now of little symbolic significance, features prominently as a fruit, ornament, and symbol of abundance and fertility.³

Historical and agricultural factors contributed to the change. Although the apple tree (Heb....

Until recently Bede’sDe arte metricahas been regarded as a work compiled relatively early in the saint’s career. The fact that Bede addressed his metrical handbook to aconleuita, or ‘fellow deacon,’ was conventionally interpreted as meaning that it must have been composed between 691/2 and 702/3, when Bede was himself a deacon, with a preference for a date of 701–2. However, in a recent paper Arthur Holder argued persuasively that Bede’s use ofconleuitaneed not imply that he also held that office, but merely denotes fellowship within the church hierarchy more generally.¹ Holder has, to paraphrase...

King Ceadwalla’s giving up his crown and going to Rome represented a dramatic conversion after a short and turbulent career, and his baptism by the pope in 689 was a strong symbol of the bond between the English church and Rome. His death only days later set a seal on this significant conversion. ‘It was an impressive act’ (in the words of Wilhelm Levison) ‘that a prince should relinquish his power to comea finibus terraeto the prince of the apostles; the Pope gave him the distinctive baptismal name of Petrus and a tomb in St Peter’s.’¹ Aldhelm is...

The content and inspiration of the otherworld vision of a brother ‘in the monastery of Abbess Milburg’ (that is, Much Wenlock, Shropshire), as recounted in St Boniface’s letter to a certain Eadburg, have been discussed in detail elsewhere.¹ The transmission of the letter also deserves attention for the light it sheds on the evolution of the medieval otherworld vision genre.

Boniface’s letter to Eadburg must have been written between 716 and 719, later than King Ceolred’s death in 716, which is mentioned, and earlier than Boniface’s change of name from Wynfrith to Boniface on the occasion of his visit to...

Scholarly appraisals of Alcuin’s career have varied widely, especially in different aspects of his work. Even the generally favourable study of C.J.B. Gaskoin describes Alcuin’s intellectual activity as a ‘hoarding up’ of past wisdom, rather than any creative or original work,¹ and Beryl Smalley famously sweeps aside the accomplishments of several generations of Carolingian exegetes with the comment that to study Carolingian exegetes is simply to study their sources.² Others, impressed with the role of Alcuin at court, have noted Alcuin’s central position in an ambitious programme of educational and religious reform;³ Luitpold Wallach thus suggests that ‘the unusual versatility...

Alcuin’s extensive writings seem to offer access to a knowable individual in the distant past. While many facts about the external details of his life cannot be ascertained with certainty (for example, the date of his move from York to the court of Charlemagne), his letters and poems make it possible to explore his inner world to a remarkable degree – his experiences of grief, friendship, his views of momentous current events, such as the Viking attack on Lindisfarne, Charlemagne’s unprecedented successes, and the simultaneous chaos and violence of Northumbria and Mercia at the end of the eighth century. Accordingly, one...

Alcuin’s writings often refer to ‘Wizo’ – usually by the Latin nickname ‘Candidus’ – as a protegé, emissary, and confidant, though such mentions reveal few facts about the younger man.¹ Since the seventeenth century, historians have tried hard to fill out Candidus’s biography and assign him a corpus of writings.² Students of medieval philosophy, above all, have held Candidus to be the author or editor of texts bearing witness to a Carolingian revival of dialectic. About twenty years ago, renewed interest in these school texts led to unprecedented claims about the scope of Candidus’s achievement.³ Some of those claims have since required...

That Anglo-Saxons considered riddles generically distinct is selfevident from the fact that they appear in batches in both Latin and the vernacular in extant manuscripts: a dozen manuscripts written or owned in England up to 1100 containing riddles survive, and only one of these contains a single riddle.¹ Certainly the many influential Anglo-Saxons who chose to composeenigmatain Latin, including Aldhelm, Boniface, Tatwine, Eusebius, and Alcuin, seem aware that they are following in a literary tradition the roots of which in England can be traced to the late seventh century, when Aldhelm adapted the form from the Late Latin...

When, in the years around 800, scribes working in the English tradition abandoned majuscule scripts in favour of a wholly minuscule repertoire,¹ Insular hybrid minuscule assumed the status and the role previously occupied by Uncial and by Insular Half-uncial.² The complex Insular system of scripts lost its straight-pen grade, just as (by the very nature – regular and highly disciplined – of Phase II) it seems also to have lost or abandoned its current (cursiua currens) grade, the lowest in its hierarchy.³

It may be argued, however, that some consequent or compensatory reconfiguration of the ever-flexible Insular system followed or...

Although King Alfred’s preface acknowledges the help of various learned advisers in his translation of Gregory the Great’sRegula pastoralis,¹ the preface to his version of Boethius’sDe consolatione Philosophiaegives no hint that anyone had assisted him with that text. William of Malmesbury, however, reported that the meaning of the text had been explained to the king by his Welsh adviser Asser.² In recent years that possibility has been particularly associated with the tantalizing evidence of Vatican City, BAV, lat. 3363, and it is that manuscript which I wish to discuss in this article, in recognition of Michael Lapidge’s...

Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson, in their excellent edition ofBeowulf, include a section ‘How We Arrived at Our Text,’ concerning editorial problems they encountered.¹ The inclusion seems in keeping with the tenor of recentBeowulfscholarship, in which textual methods, which have been a matter of intense controversy almost since the moment Thorkelín’s edition of 1815 appeared, are the battleground in a debate that has grown livelier than ever – a debate, I should say, to which the scholar honoured by this volume has contributed significantly.² It is also an apt appendix to an edition that will be used...

In the aftermath of Beowulf’s fight with Grendel, the men of Heorot are left with the monster’s arm, severed at the shoulder.¹ Instead of removing the gruesome limb from their sight, they hang it up in plain view:

Þæt wæs tacen sweotol,

syþðan hildedeor hond alegde,

earm ond eaxle – þær wæs eal geador

Grendles grape – under geapne hr[of]. (833b–6)²

[That was a clear sign, after the brave one abandoned his hand, arm and shoulder; there was Grendel’s grip all together, under the broad roof.]

Unlike other ‘signs’ inBeowulf, thistacenhas no stated referent,³ leaving the audience...

In their recentHistory of Old English Literature, R.D. Fulk and Christopher M. Cain remark that in constructing such a history ‘it is Anglo-Latin texts that must provide the framework into which undated vernacular texts may be tentatively inserted.’¹ The point ought not to need repeating, but (like other problems to be discussed later in this essay) it runs counter to modern scholarly usage, and to the way in which university departments are organized, with English in one corner and Latin in another. Few universities have been as fortunate as Cambridge in having their researchers in early history and literature...

The monks of Ramsey threw a great party, Byrhtferth reported, commending both the quality of the wine and its presentation: ‘... not only drinking horns encircled with a diversity of inlays in silver and gold but also other kinds of vessels fit enough for drinking.’¹ English churchmen spoke warmly and often of their cups. Aldhelm praised a gem-studded gold chalice that glittered in Bugga’s church ‘just as the sky inset with blazing stars gleams with a reddish glow.’² Bede recorded both Paulinus’s departure with King Edwin’s magnificent receptacles and ‘the not small number of gold and silver vessels’ presented to...

Among the largely forgotten contributions of the nineteenth century to the study of Old English poetry is a prose summary ofBeowulfthat appeared in the 1 May 1858 issue ofHousehold Words.This version of slightly more than 5000 words ran anonymously, as was the magazine’s custom, but it can be positively identified as the work of a staff writer, Henry Morley.¹ In preparing his ‘A Primitive Old Epic,’ Morley relied heavily on Benjamin Thorpe’s 1855 edition and translation of the poem, as he graciously acknowledged in his headnote: ‘Our version is much indebted for its faithfulness, always indirectly,...

This second volume of essays in honour of Michael Lapidge attends to the Old English and Anglo-Latin writings of Anglo-Saxon England from roughly 900 to the end of the eleventh century. Although we have been accustomed – by no less a figure than King Alfred – to associate the greatest treasures of Anglo-Saxon learning with the earliest Christian centuries of the kingdoms, the two last centuries of Anglo-Saxon England produced their own wealth of writings in both main languages of English culture. The essays in this collection group themselves in several broad areas of study: cultural and scientific interests, learning and writing...

In our growing understanding of the early medieval world, so skilfully illuminated by Michael Lapidge, Israel the Grammarian has emerged as one of the leading scholars of the tenth century.¹ Perhaps the most unusual text associated with Israel is an allegorized board-game, thealea euangelii,preserved in a twelfth-century Irish Gospel manuscript.² The colophon of the piece states:

Incipit alea euangelii quam Dubinsi episcopus Bennchorensis detulit a rege Anglorum, id est a domu Adalstani regis Anglorum, depicta a quodam Francone et a Romano sapiente, id est Israel.³

[Here begins thealeaof the Gospel, which Dub Innse, bishop of Bangor,...

The history of Anglo-Saxon medicine¹ has tended to be written in terms of pharmacology or genealogy – whether available remedies had any therapeutic value, or whether a given practice was a learned classical import or a survival of pre-ChristianGermania– and so scholarly emphasis has rested on the recipes and charms found in collections like theHerbarium of Pseudo-Apuleius,Bald’sLeechbook(London, BL, Royal 12. D. XVII), and theLacnunga(London, BL, Harley 585), and in the margins of various manuscripts.² These criteria – the test of efficacy or the narrative of origins – have been invoked to argue either for...

In our edition of Byrhtferth of Ramsey’sEnchiridion, Michael Lapidge and I attempted to reconstruct the computus – that is, the collection ofopuscularelating to mathematics, the calendar, astronomy, and related subjects – which constituted one of the principal sources for that work.¹ Byrhtferth himself built this collection around a core consisting of materials brought to Ramsey by his mentor, Abbo of Fleury, and some taken from earlier English computistical manuscripts. To this core he added excerpts from Isidore, Bede, Macrobius, and others, an intricate calendar, computistical verses, prognostications, and various items of his own devising. Though he seems...

Some twenty-five years ago I printed for the first time the Latin text of a charter which appears to be a historical record of a unique type from Anglo-Saxon England: a Cornishman’s grant of land to a minor Cornish church, dating from the reign of King Athelstan (AD 924–39).¹ The charter appears in the cartulary of Athelney Abbey (Somerset); at the time the only text known of the cartulary was an eighteenth-century transcript made by George Harbin. The original cartulary, dating from the early fifteenth century, has recently come to light, and since it provides some better readings of...

It is assumed by historians that some Anglo-Saxon religious women read and wrote in Latin in 800, while they tend to take for granted that they did not do so in 1100. But there is some evidence to support the idea that learning for women began to revive in and after the tenth century, in parallel with the revival of learning which we see in the monasteries and at the English court: this essay examines the evidence.

The earliest surviving evidence for women writers comes from the convent at Barking, founded by Earconwald, bishop of the East Saxons, for his...

The technique by which words drawn from glossaries or other kinds of lexicographic compilation were used to build a lexical continuum, either in prose or in verse, is characteristic of a number of works composed in the Middle Ages and circulating in the British Isles. A penchant for this technique is evident in different genres of compositions, both literary and utilitarian. These works, though employing the same device, were written with various aims and were destined for different kinds of addressees. What I call contextualized lexicography, that is, sequences of words, mainly drawn from glossarial compilations, embedded in both prose...

The practice of glossing is a visible expression of the negotiation between the Latin and Old English languages which so characterized the intellectual life of Anglo-Saxon England.¹ In the glossing of biblical text – first in psalters, then gospel books – the further issue of the authority of the Vulgate versus the democratic claims of the vernacular came to be involved in the negotiation. By the end of the tenth century Old English had asserted itself to the extent that continuous translations of the four gospels and then the first six or seven books of the Old Testament circulated free from the...

When Henri Logeman first printed the text cited in the title of this paper, his identification of it as one of ’a series of prayers and confessions,’ was only partly correct.¹ It was Karl Jost who in 1950 identified this brief prose piece as a fragment from Alfred’s translation of Augustine’sSoliloquies.² Henry Lee Hargrove and Wilhelm Endter did not have the benefit of Jost’s research when they produced their earlier editions in 1902 and 1922 respectively and so they did not know of this mid-eleventh-century witness to part of Alfred’s translation, which antedates the only other witness, London, BL,...

London, BL, Cotton Tiberius C. i is an eleventh-century augmented version of the Romano-German Pontifical, a vast and comprehensive collection of liturgical materials for the use of a bishop, compiled at Mainz about the middle of the tenth century.¹ Because the Romano-German Pontifical was the first pontifical to bring together in a single volume all theordinesand prayers deemed necessary for the routine duties of a tenth-century bishop, it rapidly became the dominant model for medieval pontificals and remained so for several centuries, and later copies are often worth knowing about because of the additions and changes which they...

Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 121 is, as is well known, one of a set of three Worcester manuscripts of the third quarter of the eleventh century, all written by the same scribe, the others being Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 113 and Hatton 114. Junius as originally conceived contained a large collection of canonical and penitential texts or ecclesiastical institutes, presumably collected and organized in an earlier manuscript, while the Hatton manuscripts were, in Neil Ker’s words, ‘a collection of homilies divided into two volumes and, as the quire signatures suggest, probably intended as a continuation of’ Junius.¹ Both Hatton 114...

Jerome (c. 347–420) related in hisVita Malchi monachihow the unfortunate Malchus, leaving his monastery against his abbot’s will to collect an inheritance, was kidnapped by Saracen brigands as a slave along with a young married woman. After a stint keeping flocks in the desert in which, singing psalms, he reminded himself of the biblical shepherds Jacob and Moses, Malchus was forced at his master’s sword-point to take the young woman to wife. Alone with her, he threatened to kill himself rather than lose his chastity, and was then surprised (and gratified) to learn that she felt the same...

In the revised second edition ofThe Life of King Edward,Frank Barlow gave, in an appendix on Goscelin of Saint-Bertin and his works, a somewhat dispiriting assessment of the state of Goscelin studies as he saw it:

Despite the increased interest in hagiography ... and a recurrent concern with Goscelin’s works, hardly any new basic information about him has emerged since 1961. The hard facts remain the same; a reassessment of the attributed works has not disturbed the canon, and no trawling through the anonymous saints’ lives composed in the eleventh century has produced new verifiable ascriptions.¹

Reading this...

Goscelin of Saint-Bertin’sVita S. Edithae(c. 1080), though dedicated to Lanfranc, archbishop of Canterbury, addresses as well the aristocratic inmates of the wealthiest convent in England in the wake of the disruption of the Norman Conquest.¹ Wilton had girls and women placed within its walls for various reasons, religious and secular – education, safe-keeping, religious commitment, or control of inheritance.² At the time of Goscelin’s writing, Eve, later to become a recluse at Saint Eutrope in Angers, was a nun at Wilton, having been entrusted to that convent by her parents.³ Gunhild (daughter of Harold Godwinson), whose departure in...

In 1996, Michael Lapidge wrote: ‘During the Middle Ages the saint’s life was perhaps the most common and most characteristic literary genre.’¹ Among the most remarkable of Michael’s many contributions to Anglo-Saxon studies have been his studies on the hagiography of pre-(and post-) Conquest England, of which his massive volume on the cult of St Swithun is only the most recent example.² One saint whom Michael has not (I think) written on at any length is from the very end of the Anglo-Saxon period: Edward the Confessor. It would take a volume of the same length and rigour asSwithun...

InThe Ascension (ChristII), Cynewulf borrows from the Ascension homily of Gregory the Great a standard Christian allegory of the sun and the moon:

Bi þon se witga cwæð

þæt ahæfen wæren halge gimmas,

hædre heofontungol, healice upp,

sunne ond mona. Hwæt sindan þa

gimmas swa scyne buton god sylfa?

He is se soðfæsta sunnan leoma,

englum ond eorðwarum æþele scima.

Ofer middangeard mona lixeð,

gæstlic tungol, swa seo godes circe

þurh gesomninga soðes ond ryhtes

beorhte bliceð.¹

[Of that the prophet said that sacred gems, bright stars of heaven, the sun and moon, should be raised up on high....

Scant attention has been paid to the role Job plays in Old English literature after Lawrence L. Besserman published his wide-ranging, meticulous study of the Job legend in the Middle Ages in 1979.¹ In fact, except for one article, nothing but cursory remarks, if any at all, occur, and that one article concerns a poem in which Job never actually appears.² W.F. Bolton argued convincingly in 1980 that the Book of Job is an analogue for and perhaps the source of some of the concepts and imagery inThe Dream of the Rood.³The general neglect has justification. Job shows...

In recent years Ælfric’s characteristics as a Latin teacher, writer, and stylist have become increasingly sharply defined, both directly and by contrast with rhetorical and lexical traditions which were fashionable at the time, but which Ælfric deliberately tried to avoid. For this, Michael Lapidge’s work on the hermeneutic style in late Anglo-Saxon England has been of paramount importance.¹ We are also better placed than we were to understand the textual traditions on which Ælfric drew in developing his suite of language-learning materials, theGrammar, Glossary,andColloquy,and to see, with respect to theColloquyin particular, how this compares...

In 1966, Peter Clemoes of Cambridge, one of the masters of Ælfrician criticism, wrote: ‘Ælfric’s creative step, I believe, was to divorce the rhythm and alliteration of Old English poetry from its traditional vocabulary and syntax and to associate them with the vocabulary and syntax of prose’¹ He illustrated this remark by a passage from theHexameron,which he quoted as prose² and laid out in the form used by Skeat in hisLives of Saintsto indicate the rhythmical structure:

We waeron unpancwurðe and wendon us fram Criste,

ac he us gesohte, swa pæt he sylf nyðer astah

of...

Editors of Old English texts have usually shown little interest in themise en pageof the manuscripts which they are editing.¹ Anglo-Saxon scribes’ use of spacing and letter-shapes to mark sectional divisions in their manuscripts is quite pervasive, but editors typically ignore these structural signals and, without mentioning that they are suppressing the manuscript’s page format, silently supply paragraphing and sectional divisions of their own devising. My contention in this essay will be that editors should not be so cavalier in dismissing themise en pageof their manuscripts and replacing it (silently) with new page formats of their...

Two versions of Ælfric’sDe auguriishave come down to us: six manuscripts preserve the version of the text edited by Skeat asLives of SaintsXVII,¹ while two, CCCC 178 (R) and Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 116 (S), contain an augmented version in which the last four lines of Skeat’s text are replaced by two stories written by Ælfric, the story of Macarius and a story about Saul and the witch of Endor.² John C. Pope argued that the augmented text was the work of a later editor, who joined the two stories on to the originalDe auguriis....