Balaam's Ass: Vernacular Theology Before the English Reformation: Volume 1: Frameworks, Arguments, English to 1250 9780812298345

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Balaam’s Ass

This is the first of three projected volumes of Balaam’s Ass: Vernacular Theology Before the En­glish Reformation. The volumes are as follows: Volume 1: Frameworks, Arguments, En­glish to 1250 Volume 2: French 1100–1400, En­glish 1250–1540 Volume 3: The Mystical Ark: Salvation, Conversion, Community

BALAAM’S ASS Vernacular Theology Before the En­glish Reformation Volume I: Frameworks, Arguments, En­glish to 1250

Nicholas Watson

U n i v e r s i t y o f P e n n s y lva n i a P r e s s Philadelphia

THE ­M IDDLE AGES SERIES Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor Edward Peters, Founding Editor A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

 Copyright © 2022 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www​.­upenn​.­edu​/­pennpress Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca on acid-­free paper 10 ​9 ​8 ​7 ​6 ​5 ​4 ​3 ​2 ​1 Hardcover ISBN 9780812253726 Ebook ISBN 9780812298345 A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

 For Amy and in loving memory of my f­ather, Angus Watson, musician (1932–2019)

 Also, my sistir, I drede sore to write of suche highe matiers. For I have neither felinge ne knowinge opinly to declare hem in En­glish ne in Latin, and namely in En­glish tunge. For it passith fer my wit to shewe you in any maner vulgare the termes of divinite. Also I fele mysilf unworthy to have that gostly science whereby I shuld knowe or have inwarde felinge what doctours wolden mene in her holy writinges. ­These ­causes considred and many othere, skilfully I may drede to write. . . . ​But askinge help of almighty God, by whos might the asse had speche to the profete Balaam, aftir youre desire, as ferforth as I dare or knowe, of temptations I wole shewe you in special and in general, and to hem remedies, with sum other matiers that lightly wol falle to purpos; evermore submittinge me lowely to the correction of wise men and clerkis and men of gostly knowinge. (Also, my ­sister, I am sorely afraid to write about such sublime ­matters. For I have neither the insight nor the knowledge to expound them lucidly in En­glish or Latin, and especially in the En­glish language. For it is far beyond my ability to explain to you in any kind of vernacular the technicalities of theology. Also, I judge myself unworthy to attain that spiritual discernment by means of which I might know or have true insight into what it is that doctors intend in their holy writings. Taking into account t­ hese and many other ­causes, I am suitably cautious about writing. . . . ​But asking help from almighty God, through whose power the ass had speech with the prophet Balaam, according to your desire and to the extent that I dare or know, I ­will teach you about temptations in par­tic­u­lar and general terms and about their remedies, along with certain other ­matters that relate easily to the subject; submitting myself always to the correction of wise ­people and scholars and ­people of spiritual understanding.) (The Chastising of God’s C ­ hildren, ca. 1390)

Contents

General Preface Conventions General Introduction: The Prophesying Ass: Patterns and Premises 1. Patterns: Reversal, Re­sis­tance, Reform 2. Premises: Continuity, Centrality, Distinctiveness

xiii xx 1

PART I. BEFORE AND A ­ FTER THE EN­GLISH REFORMATION: CHURCH HISTORY, NATIONAL HISTORY, SCHOLARLY HISTORY Chapter 1. The Diglossic Contract 1. Before the Vernacular: Cædmon, Bede, Alfred 2. Vernacula Lingua: The Genealogy of a Term

29

Chapter 2. Anglican Historiography 1. The Elizabethans I: Foxe’s Actes and Monuments 2. S  eventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries: James, Smith, Burnet, Froude

46

Chapter 3. Romantic Philology 1. Medievalism and Nationalism 2. The Early En­glish Text Society 3. F  rom Cambridge History of En­glish Lit­er­a­ture to Continuity of En­glish Prose

59

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Contents

Chapter 4. Catholic Apol­o­getics 1. The Elizabethans II: Harpsfield, Sander, Stapleton, Harding 2. F  rom Rheims New Testament to XVI Revelations of Divine Love 3. E  igh­teenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Bossuet, Fénelon, Butler, Gasquet

72

Chapter 5. Medieval Studies and Modernism 1. Three Re­nais­sances and a Revolt 2. N  eo-­Thomism, Nouvelle Théologie, and the Second Vatican Council 3. E  n­glish Studies and Medieval Religious Lit­er­a­ture Since the 1930s

88

PART II. THE MEDIEVAL IDEA OF THE VERNACULAR: MODELS, TERMS, CONCEPTS Chapter 6. Christian Teaching Across the Longue Durée 1. The Evangelical Imperative: Robert of Gretham’s Miroir 2. Cultural Change and Historical Explanation

105

Chapter 7. Theology and the Christian Community 1. Versions of “Vernacular Theology” 2. Genres of Vernacular Theology

122

Chapter 8. The Vernacular as a Clerical Construct 1. Artificial/Natural, Metalinguistic/Sociolinguistic 2. Unmarked/Marked, Esoteric/Exoteric

137

Chapter 9. Institutional Stance and Social Address 1. The Pastoral Model: Vulgar Tongue 2. The Communal Model: Common Tongue 3. The Patronal Model: M ­ other Tongue

151

Chapter 10. The Vernacular Archive 1. Shape, Phases, Rhythm 2. Life Cycles, Mobility, Loss

171



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PART III. EN­GLISH IN THE EARLY M ­ IDDLE AGES: LANGUAGE POLITICS AND MONASTIC REFORM Chapter 11. Old En­glish in the Long Twelfth ­Century 1. Scholarly Translators and Monastic Bishops: “Sanctus Beda was i-­boren” 2. A Call to Revival: The Tremulous Hand 3. Scholarly Rationales for Late Old En­glish 4. Homiliaries and Other Genres

195

Chapter 12. The Benedictine Vernacular Canon I: Tenth ­Century 1. ­Imagined Benedictine Communities 2. Æthelwold: Glosses, Rules, Monastic Pedagogy (950–75)

212

Chapter 13. The Benedictine Vernacular Canon II: Eleventh ­Century 1. Ælfric: Homilies and Pastoral Letters (990–1010) 2. Wulfstan: Homilies, Law Codes, Po­liti­cal Theology (1000–1023) 3. Monastic Pastoralia Across the Eleventh ­Century

223

Chapter 14. En­glish in Monastery, Minster, and Court 1. The Benedictine Dominance of the Textual Rec­ord 2. Prob­lems of Evidence: Innovation or Continuity? 3. Blickling Homilies, Vercelli Homilies, Catholic Homilies 4. Court Writing in the Alfredian Tradition

238

Chapter 15. The Contradictions of Benedictine En­glish 1. The Invention of Language Hierarchy 2. C  arolingian Language Reform: Alcuin’s Attack on Vulgar Latin 3. Eu­ro­pean Language Politics and Old En­glish Textuality

261

PART IV. FROM OLD EN­GLISH TO EARLY ­M IDDLE EN­GLISH: CONTINUITY, ADAPTATION, SECULARIZATION Chapter 16. The Narrowing of Written En­glish 1. En­glish in a Changing Sociolinguistic Environment 2. The Old En­glish Apollonius at the Court of Cnut

285

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3. Late Old En­glish as a Sign of the Past 4. The Corpus of Early ­Middle En­glish Before 1250 Chapter 17. The Transformation of Insular History 1. Reformulations of Kingship in The Proverbs of Alfred 2. The Modernity of Layamon’s Brut Chapter 18. The New Pastoralia I: Secular Priests and Regular Canons 1. Pedagogical Ambition and Public Address 2. Navigating the World in Vices and Virtues 3. Willful Learning and the Orrmulum

301

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Chapter 19. The New Pastoralia II: Diocesan Preaching Books 1. Monastic Pastoral Care in a Reor­ga­nized Church 2. The Lambeth Homilies and Worcester Cathedral Priory 3. The Trinity Homilies and St. Paul’s, London

332

Chapter 20. The New Pastoralia III: Anchoresses and the City 1. The Setting of Ancrene Wisse 2. The Audiences of the Ancrene Wisse Group

346

Coda to Volume 1

361

Appendix: ­Tables of Dates, Texts, and Persons

371

Notes

377

Bibliography

461

Index of Manuscripts

565

General Index

567

Acknowl­edgments

585

General Preface

For well over six hundred years, bodies of writing in vernacular languages served an indispensable role in the religious and intellectual culture of medieval Christian ­England. Yet the character and extent of this role has still not been sufficiently recognized. As a result, our understanding of how Chris­tian­ity ­shaped and informed the lives of individuals, communities, and polities across this long era is thinner than it needs to become, if the relationships between t­ hese bodies of writing, let alone their wider significance for literary and religious history, are to be adequately assessed and appreciated. Scholars of the En­glish ­Middle Ages still lack any overarching analy­sis of how religious teachings and ways of thought and feeling ­were developed, deployed, and argued over at a societal level across the medieval centuries, or of how they ­were adapted across time to new institutional configurations, po­liti­cal situations, sensibilities, and audiences. Outside the field, a long-­standing identification of medieval western Eu­ro­pean Chris­tian­ity with the Latin language, and a lack of awareness about the variety and sheer quantity of vernacular religious writing that survives from the En­glish ­Middle Ages, together mean that damaging misunderstandings about the era that have long been discredited are still in scholarly as well as general circulation. Drawing on the ­labors of generations of editors and engaging synthetically with old and new scholarship in a number of fields, the three volumes of this book make a concerted effort to address this situation, and, if this can in fact be done, to help dislodge it. This proj­ect is carried out in several stages. The pre­sent volume opens in the medieval era, explaining the relationship between its title and its topic, setting out its premises, and offering a brief overview of the early En­glish and broader Eu­ro­pean history of the terminology and idea of the vernacular. However, four of its first five chapters are set in the early modern and modern periods. ­These chapters explore the polemical but also structural role played by the medieval vernacular in the two opposed narratives about the Catholic ­Middle Ages and its Protestant repudiation that grew up out of the sixteenth-­century reformations, and the strangely mutated forms in which

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t­ hese two narratives still survive, both for the few who study the medieval era and for the overwhelming majority who do not. ­Because the staying power of ­these narratives makes a phenomenon that spans centuries, languages, and genres hard to see, let alone discuss as a coherent ­whole, five more chapters are then devoted to building the conceptual framework on which the rest of the book depends. Only then, at the halfway point of the first volume, does the book begin a detailed investigation of the nature and significance of this phenomenon, and of some number of the dozens of genres and thousands of individual writings, addressed to dif­fer­ent audiences, from which it is made. The final two groups of chapters in this volume and all its successor undertake the first and longer phase of this investigation. Working forward in time, although with a good number of backward eddies and crisscrossings of centuries, this part of the book builds a stage-­by-­stage account of how the writings that make up the medieval En­glish vernacular religious archive ­were produced, the roles they played during the periods in which they ­were copied and used, and the pro­cesses by which they ­were displaced by new bodies of texts, in dif­fer­ent genres, languages, or orthographic systems. This account also maps the changing attitudes of t­ hese texts t­ oward Christian belief and teaching, po­ liti­cal theology, Church governance, and the vernacular itself. Paying special attention to the connections between religious history and the history of languages and to the institutional settings in which vernacular texts ­were written and circulated, ­these chapters show that the development of new forms of vernacular textuality in Old En­glish, insular French, and ­Middle En­glish took place as a result not only of language change as such but also of new understandings of the Church, the Christian community, and the relationship of both to secular government. As a result, the history of medieval ­England’s vernacular lit­er­a­tures needs to be understood within as much a theological and ecclesiastical as a linguistic, national, and po­liti­cal framework. The discussion moves freely across dif­fer­ent kinds of texts and genres in verse and prose, taking an unusually broad view of what counts as theology in vernacular settings. In places, however, it puts a certain extra emphasis on a kind of writing whose medieval history has long been controversial and is still subject to misunderstanding, Bible translation. The third and last volume turns to the content and literary qualities of the texts that make up the medieval En­glish vernacular archive. Beginning with the answers dif­fer­ent generations of thinkers gave to the urgent question of how many Christians (as well as ­others) w ­ ill attain heaven, the chapters in this volume reconstruct how ­these texts engaged with two dif­fer­ent models of believing



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identity and spiritual aspiration that medieval Chris­tian­ity inherited from Late Antiquity: one communitarian, penitential, and practical; the other perfectionist, ascetic, and often affective. They trace the difficult dialogues that developed between ­these models as they moved out from their respective bases in the secular and religious wings of the institutional Church into Christian society more broadly by means of vernacular genres aimed at lay readerships. Focusing on instructional and pedagogical writings on the one hand, and works of information, imagination, and contemplation on the other, and shuttling between texts and settings that assume dif­fer­ent accounts of Christian personhood, they also consider how such writings used ­these models, and the tensions between them, to reflect on the self, history, society and government, the natu­ral world, and God, as well as on the literary self-­understanding and roles of the vari­ous kinds of narrative repre­sen­ta­tion we would now be likely to call “fiction.” Even though the part vernacular religious writings played within medieval textual and intellectual culture was often thought of as ancillary, especially by the learned, it ­will become clear that ­these writings did a ­great deal more than to pre­sent normative Christian teachings to the unlearned majority, impor­tant though this function was. Addressed to audiences neither wholly familiar with the Latin writings that ­shaped the thinking of their learned contemporaries nor wholly bound by them, ­these writings extend the range of what could be believed, thought, or felt within the structures of the faith and occasionally set out to modify or challenge them. Vernacular textuality was never separate from its Latin counterpart. But ­until its capacities and roles within the larger textual system have been acknowledged and explored, so the book argues, ­there can be no sufficient account of medieval Christian thought and culture. Nor can ­there be a sufficient account of the medieval centuries within the history of Britain and of Eu­rope. Taken as a ­whole, Balaam’s Ass shows how the study of the En­glish vernacular religious archive, in all its fluidity and complexity, contributes to our understanding of Christian theology, social thought, imagination, and practice across the medieval centuries. In the pro­cess, it develops an account of the archive’s significance for the wider history of western knowledge and belief. On a large scale, the book shows how the vernacular archive complicates our understanding of periodization, in relation not only to the sixteenth-­century divide that is usually understood to exist between the medieval era and the re­nais­ sance or reformation, but also to the twelfth-­century divide between the early and late medieval, acknowledging neither with the clarity we have come to anticipate. It further shows how the archive complicates accounts of the history of secularization, challenging intellectual models that treat the category of the

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secular as a ­simple antonym of the religious, rather as the modern is treated as a ­simple antonym of the medieval. More locally, the book demonstrates the value of treating the vernacular as a category and subject of interest in its own right, this despite the vital presence, throughout the medieval centuries, of the learned language, Latin, and the pervasive influence of text and ideas written in Latin on texts in vernacular languages, through translation, adaptation, and citation. The book joins two related bodies of work in religious studies, one of which explores the crucial roles played by the members of Christian society as a ­whole, not merely the educated and power­f ul, in religious history, while the other reconstructs the history of the Latin pastoral texts, many of them meant for vernacular delivery, that aimed to enable and shape ­these roles. The book also joins two other bodies of work in literary studies, one of which investigates the long ­career of Old En­glish religious writing ­after the Norman Conquest and its close relationship to early ­Middle En­glish, while the other considers the key cultural role, over some three hundred years, of written insular French. At certain moments, the book additionally contributes somewhat vociferously to the still-­vexed scholarly conversations about the nature of En­glish religious and literary culture in the ­century and a half before the Henrician Reformation of the 1530s. Throughout, it argues for the centrality of Christian thought, practice, and affective, imaginative, and institutional engagements to the multilingual entity that is early En­glish literary history. §§§ Although Balaam’s Ass engages with a number of disciplines, including social history, Church history, and the history of ideas, this book is primarily a work of literary history. Its approach to the medieval past is thus or­ga­nized around texts, books, genres, languages, ideas, authors, and real or implied audiences rather than events, institutions, belief systems, and socie­ties, crucial as all ­these are to its interests. While the book’s scope means that it can discuss a single text or writer in detail only occasionally, and while it takes care not to fall into postures imitative of medieval Christian belief, its attitude t­ oward t­ hese diverse witnesses aspires to be that of the sympathetic embedded observer. It takes for granted that even the most derivative of the texts it discusses ­were intelligently attentive to the situations for which they ­were written, and are more than mere adaptations of ­earlier writings that happened to be available at a given time or place, and more than dogged collections of improving commonplaces with no purchase on a­ ctual lives and situations.



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This trusting attitude has its dangers. One of ­these is the danger of lapsing into a merely apol­o­getic or partisan attitude, siding with medieval authors, texts, and readers in their strug­gles, or giving the appearance of ­doing so, especially when their values appear to mirror ­those of the book’s ­imagined readership or ­those of the author. Another is the danger of misjudging the gap between rhe­toric and social real­ity in texts that announce themselves as written for the Christian community at large, but are in practice mainly meant for specific, often privileged constituencies, quietly mirroring their localized concerns and interests. In recent years, scholarship on medieval Christian texts that takes them at their idealizing word, w ­ hether by accepting as true their often fiercely prejudiced analyses of the state of con­temporary society and its institutions, or by downplaying their many contributions to the ongoing Western history of sexual, social, racial, economic, and environmental injustice and vio­lence, has been subject to proper critique. Yet to remain attentive to local detail as well as larger patterns, garnering all that can be learned about dif­fer­ent bodies of writing from close reading, literary historians of ­these distant but still reverberant religious materials have ­little choice but to seek a balance between what cultural and linguistic anthropologists term “etic” (outside in) and “emic” (inside out) methods of analy­sis.1 Offering all the texts, genres, ideas, persons, and cultural situations u ­ nder investigation at least a hy­po­thet­i­cal re­spect, we must make the effort to view ­matters, however temporarily, as ­these diverse witnesses appear once to have viewed them, and invite readers, however warily and with what­ever ­mental reservations, to do the same. Literary and historical study in the humanist mode practiced in this book is ultimately grounded in juridical protocols. Taking testimony from many hundreds of subjects and interested parties, it reaches its conclusions on the basis of a balanced assessment of probabilities that, more often than not, stops well short of certainty, then sets out to build a consensus with readers (the self-­selected group the book sometimes refers to provisionally as “we”) that the evidence itself supports but cannot compel. This is an open-­ended and in many ways an inherently problematic, however necessary, pro­cess. The analyses that follow may still strike some as taking the texts they treat too much on their own idealizing and ideologizing terms. Conversely, the absence of close attention ­here to nontextual media of religious teaching, including images, image-­texts, song, and per­for­mance, and the often spare treatment (over the first two volumes) given narrative and devotional genres, may strike some as producing a thin and overly intellectualized account of vernacular religious culture. Book historians may won­der at the emphasis on the study of texts,

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rather than the books that contain them, and language historians at the lack of sensitivity to issues of dialect. Most recent advances in the field have come from the detailed study of topics such as t­ hese. However, to have thickened the texture of the book further would have risked confusing what is already a multifaceted argument. A history of vernacular religious writing must take into account the entire working ­career of texts and genres, rather than consider them only in relation to the contexts that produced them. It must also try to consider the evidence offered by the full range of writings. But it needs to give first priority to ­those moments when textual production was at its most prolific, and to texts that best help us grasp what was at stake at ­these moments. While ­these texts run the gamut from religious rules to lyr­ics, and from history and hagiography to polemics and imaginative fictions, in practice this priority often requires us to attend most carefully to pastoral and pedagogical texts, including sermons, catecheses, forms of living, and Bible translations, where the stakes of religious writing and teaching tend to be at their clearest. §§§ As Sheldon Pollock stated fifteen years ago in The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sans­krit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India, by far the most significant work on early vernacular languages so far published: “the vernacularization of Eu­rope as a literary-­cultural pro­cess in itself and, even more so, in relation to po­liti­cal pro­cesses” remains “one of the ­great understudied topics of Western history.”2 As yet, Eu­ro­pe­anists cannot be said to have risen to the provocation issued by this sentence. But ­after two centuries of nation-­based academic study, Eu­ro­pean vernacularity is at long last being treated as a comparative topic in books and research proj­ects that range across centuries, polities, and language groups. ­There is a ­great deal to be said for this comparative internationalist approach, both in its own right and ­because it offers an alternative to nation-­based studies of the vernacular at a time when ethnicity-­based nationalisms are making a sinister reappearance in dif­fer­ent parts of the world, along with their crude and in some cases violent co-­optations of the nineteenth-­ century tradition of Romantic philology.3 Yet ­because of the historical depth of the En­glish vernacular rec­ord, the narrower focus ­adopted ­here enables comparative analy­sis of a dif­fer­ent kind: across the languages and cultures of a single, evolving polity. The localization of this study also makes it pos­si­ble to confront an influential example of the ideology that long underlay scholarship both of Eu­ro­pean vernaculars and of



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their South Asian and other counter­parts. This is the nationalist and imperialist ideology that formed around the “story of ­England” across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with its agonistic account of the medieval vernacular as a symbol of national re­sis­tance to ecclesiastical domination in pursuit of an ­imagined “liberty” whose contours in practice almost always mirrored the po­liti­cal and economic interests of the governing classes. At dif­fer­ent times and dif­fer­ent ways, this historical narrative has intersected with both the proj­ ect of British global colonialism and its decolonizing aftermath.4 The book does not give equal space to each phase of its story, which is told in such a way as to give extra weight to three critical periods, the several de­ cades on ­either side of the years 1000, 1200, and 1400, and to devote more concentrated attention to the phases of ­Middle En­glish writing than it does to Old En­glish or insular French, fundamental as both languages are to its concerns. ­There should still be enough ­here to enable comparison across the several generations of texts covered by this study, and to give ­f uture scholars of the medieval Eu­ro­pean vernaculars a firmer basis on which to build the synthetic accounts that are ultimately needed.

Conventions

This book hopes to reach readers who are not medievalists, as well as medievalists who are not students of ­England’s vernacular languages. Despite the case that can be made for preserving the full range of local spelling systems and other features of manuscript pre­sen­ta­tion against the centralizing tendencies of orthographic normalization, the book pre­sents its texts accordingly. Quotations from medieval and early modern works thus expand abbreviations and normalize word division and certain spellings in the direction of standard modern usage. ­Those from insular French (as well as Latin) regularize i/j, u/v and c/t. Less usually, ­those from Old En­glish regularize the runic letters eth (ð) = th, thorn (þ) = th, yogh (ȝ) = y, g, ­etc., and wynn (ƿ) = w, and hyphenate the past participle prefix ge-­. Ash (Æ/æ) = is retained. ­Those from ­Middle En­ glish follow both ­these sets of conventions. They additionally regularize vocalic y to i, and terminal i to y; shorten double letters to single, except when doubled in modern spelling; normalize qu-­to wh-­, sch and, when appropriate, s to sh, v to f, final -­ys to -­es and final -­z and -­tz to -­s. For reasons that ­will become clear, an exception is made for the Orrmulum. Individual spellings may also be adjusted, for example, by doubling single -­e to distinguish the from thee. Punctuation and capitalization are modernized, with exceptions that include quotations from early printed texts. Caesuras in alliterative and septenary verse are marked with a space. Quotations, modified in ­these ways, are from existing editions when pos­ si­ble. ­Those from medieval languages are translated, except in the case of many quotations from ­Middle En­glish, where individual words and phrases are glossed. Translations make grateful use of the published translations cited in the notes as a courtesy to the reader but often differ from them silently in ­matters of detail, especially in the case of older translations, and in some cases are entirely new. Editorial emendations are for the most part accepted silently. Emendations to quotations from manuscripts or early printed sources are noted. Choices of editions may be eclectic, where choices exist. Standard editions of any text dis-



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cussed in detail are consulted (and noted in the Bibliography), but references may be to editions more friendly to readers. For Old En­glish, this now often means the parallel-­text editions in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, which are used where pos­si­ble, along with their excellent translations, most of which are ­here followed faithfully. In quotations from sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­ century texts, an original edition may also be preferred to a modern scholarly edition with modernized spellings. Conventional modern titles for works with no fixed title are often used without comment. Occasional medieval titles not used by modern scholars are restored (such as Hierdeboc, King Alfred’s title for the work always known as his Pastoral Care). Where appropriate, translations of titles are added in brackets; ­these are not intended to reference titles of published translations. Date ranges of composition suggested in the text should be understood as approximate. Biblical allusions are identified in the text in parentheses, references normally following the numbering systems of the Latin Vulgate Bible (Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam). This means that many psalm numberings differ by one from ­those of other versions; for example, Psalm 51 in early modern and modern versions of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (“Miserere me Deus. Have mercy upon me, O God”) is Psalm 50 in the Vulgate. Biblical quotations are sometimes given from one or another medieval Bible translation, especially the Late Version of The ­Middle En­glish Bible. In order to save space, references in the notes are shortened, following dif­ fer­ent conventions for primary and secondary works. Primary and secondary works are then listed separately in the Bibliography. Primary works are initially cited by author (when known), shortened title, and editor, followed by a reference to a modern En­glish translation, if one exists. Subsequent citations are abbreviated. ­Unless other­wise stated, references in the format “II.3” are to book and chapter; in the format “32.15–17” to page and line number; and in the format “323” to page number only. Other kinds of subdivision (by “vol.,” “part,” “col.,” “quaestio,” “distinctio,” “passus,” “sec.,” “line,” ­etc.) are spelled out, rather than following the shorthand systems in use in relevant disciplines. Translations are usually listed in the bibliography immediately ­after the work they translate. Secondary works are cited by author/editor, date, and where relevant, page, except in the case of certain reference books and online sources. ­These are cited in abbreviated forms itemized in the Bibliography. References to existing scholarship are plentiful but necessarily selective. The Appendix includes several time lines and other charts, tagged to sections of text.

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§§§ Writing about Christian history involves severe terminological difficulties. Many terms standard in the field ­either derive directly from Christian history and ecclesiology and so bring judgments of an unavoidably theological character in their wake or, no less problematically, preserve the oppositions that underlie ­those judgments in secular-­sounding forms. Despite the awkwardnesses involved, this book thus takes some pains not to describe texts, authors, persons, communities, or doctrinal positions as “orthodox,” “heterodox,” or “heretical” on the one hand, or “conservative,” “traditional,” “mainstream,” “dissenting,” or “radical” on the other. However carefully used, both sets of terms make it difficult to avoid taking implied de facto positions in theological and ecclesiological debates that ­were still in pro­gress during the era ­under consideration, when discussion of religious truth and authority remained fluid. Their scholarly overuse also gives undue emphasis to the normative as such, as though the key question to be asked of any religious text or idea always involves its conformity or other­wise to what­ever is understood as standard teaching. For reasons that become clear in Volume 2, the book takes par­tic­u­lar care not to refer directly to individuals, texts, or religious stances as ­either “Lollard” or “Wycliffite” except when reporting language used at the time or by other scholars. However, the book does invoke or adapt medieval terms for certain large institutional structures and pro­cesses, even when modern usage differs. Despite subjecting the concept and the ideological work it carries out to scrutiny, it often invokes the term “reform,” even while acknowledging that the specifically ecclesiological meanings of this work developed only during the twelfth ­century. It generally uses the word “secular,” not as an antonym for religious in the general modern sense, but to distinguish the “secular Church” (bishops, priests, laypeople) from the “regular ­orders” (monks, nuns, canons, friars), or to refer to “secular” or “lay” society, which includes the secular clergy (parish priests and ­others with spiritual responsibility ­toward their congregations) among its many members. Although this institutional meaning was not always taken for granted during the medieval era, it often uses the term “religious” to refer to members of the regular ­orders, living ­under a rule. The term “clerisy” sometimes refers to all Latinate persons. “Theology,” used somewhat idiosyncratically, is discussed in Chapter Seven. Depending on context, the capitalized term “Church” may refer ­either to the entire body of baptized Christian believers (or to t­ hose in E ­ ngland, in Christian Eu­rope, or across the known world), grouped into the categories that pertained during the period; to the subsection of ­those believers taken to be predestined to eternal salvation, whose membership is often held to be unknowable; or to



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the idea of the Church, in both its “militant” (earthly) and its “triumphant” (transcendent) forms, on opposite sides of death and Judgment. Except when the confessional Churches of the post-­medieval centuries are in question, this abstract entity (which, for medieval En­glish Christians, included the Greek, Syriac, Coptic, and Ethiopic Churches, among ­others) is also the usual referent of the terms “Catholic” or “Catholic Church” (alluding to the original meaning of Latin catholica, “universal”). Only in the phrases “institutional Church,” “Western Church,” and so on does “Church” refer to an ecclesiastical hierarchy with the pope at its apex, ­either at the local (En­glish) or international (western Eu­ro­pean) levels, and acting in concert with or opposition to other centers of ecclesiastical power, such as monasteries, convents, friaries, or universities. Although the book acknowledges the theological and affective weight of this identification, it is careful not to equate the Church with the (Western) institutional Church, or the institutional Church with the Catholic Church, since the nature of ­these relationships was often in question during the medieval centuries themselves. Like the divide between “orthodox” and “heterodox,” indeed, they are part of our story. ­Because the book discusses a number of movements of “reform” or “reformation” (both of which translate the Latin word reformatio), ­these two words are left uncapitalized except as part of a conventional scholarly name for a relatively localized event or movement: “Benedictine Reform,” “Gregorian Reform,” “Henrician Reformation,” “En­glish Reformation,” or “Protestant Reformation.” No specific term is used for the “Catholic Counter-­Reformation,” arising from the Council of Trent (1545–63), although sixteenth-­century reform movements as a ­whole are referred to as the “sixteenth-­century reformations.” The terms “medieval,” “re­nais­sance,” “humanism,” and “scholasticism” are also left uncapitalized. The period of division between rival popes that lasted from 1378 to circa 1417 is termed the “Papal Schism.” Decisions about other kinds of terminology can also be awkward. The tripartite terms “medieval,” “early modern,” and “modern” are used merely conventionally, although they are also subjected to scrutiny. The period covered by the book has sometimes to be named “the ­Middle Ages,” but is also referred to as “the medieval centuries” or “medieval era,” this last tautologous but necessary, especially in contexts involving “the modern era” or “modernity.” Like much recent writing in the field of medieval studies, this book has a necessarily unresolved relationship with this terminology, which once again is effectively part of its subject-­matter. The tripartite division of En­glish into Old, ­Middle, and Modern is also conventional. It bears stressing both that the divide between Old and “early”

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­ iddle En­glish is partly arbitrary and that “late” M M ­ iddle En­glish derived thousands of words from insular French, bequeathing ­these words to Modern En­ glish. Old En­glish, like its “early” ­Middle En­glish successor, is a Germanic language. “Late” M ­ iddle and Modern En­glish are in many ways hybrids of Germanic and Romance. “Insular French” is the name ­here given the dialect of French traditionally referred to as “Anglo-­Norman,” despite the qualms some have expressed about the word “insular.” It may also refer to French texts in medieval En­glish circulation in other dialects. The newer term of art proposed by Jocelyn Wogan-­Browne (2009b), “French of ­England,” is also used. Although the book’s setting is the island of Britain, the texts on which it focuses for the most part derive from areas of the island where dialects of En­glish, and at some periods French, w ­ ere the main spoken languages, alongside languages not discussed ­here, Norse, Welsh, Cornish, and Hebrew. With some complications, ­especially in relation to Wales, these areas roughly correspond to the two ecclesiastical provinces of Canterbury and York. Although its status as a polity, let alone nation, changed over time, the book calls this region “­England,” bearing in mind that this term already had strong affective resonances by the twelfth ­century, of which it is once again necessary to be properly wary. The ­peoples long referred to as “Anglo-­Saxon” are h ­ ere the “early En­glish.” Fi­nally, the text that has come to be known as the Wycliffite Bible over the past hundred years is ­here called The M ­ iddle En­glish Bible. The word “archive” is used to refer generically to the surviving corpus of insular vernacular religious works, physically spread across hundreds of institutional archives maintained by some tens of thousands of ­actual archivists, pre­sent and past, whose ­labors are quite as impor­tant to this book as the ­labors of editors, translators, and other scholars. The term “sociolinguistic” may be used to refer to the ideological relationships between corpora of written languages, in imitation of Roger Wright’s coinage “sociophilological” (R. Wright 2002). The adjective and noun “vernacular” is discussed in Chapters One and Eight.

 General Introduction

The Prophesying Ass: Patterns and Premises

1. Patterns: Reversal, Re­sis­tance, Reform ‫הַּיֹום ַהּזֶה ַה ַה ְסּכֵן‬-­ ‫ ָר ַכבְּתָ ָעלַי מֵעֹודְ ָך עַד‬-­ ‫ ִּב ְלעָם הֲלֹוא ָאנֹכִי אֲתֹנְָך ֲאׁשֶר‬-­ ‫וַּת ֹאמֶר הָָאתֹון אֶל‬ ‫ִה ְס ַּכנְּתִי ַלעֲׂשֹות לְָך ּכ ֹה וַּי ֹאמֶר ֹלא‬

καὶ λέγει ἡ ὄνος τῷ Βαλααµ Οὐκ ἐγὼ ἡ ὄνος σου, ἐφ’ ἧς ἐπέβαινες ἀπὸ νεότητός σου ἕως τῆς σήµερον ἡµέρας; µὴ ὑπεροράσει ὑπεριδοῦσα ἐποίησά σοι οὕτως; ὁ δὲ εἶπεν Οὐχί. dixit asina nonne animal tuum sum cui semper sedere consuesti usque in præsentem diem dic quid simile umquam fecerim tibi at ille ait numquam The asse said: Am not I thy beast, on which thou hast beene alwayes accustomed to ­ride ­until this pre­sent day? Tell me what like ­thing did I ever to thee. But he said: Never.1 By turns cruel, comic, and gnomic, the story of Balaam’s ass that lends this book its title is a story of confusion, vio­lence, and astonishment, as the categories that structure daily existence, separating self and other, friend and ­enemy, ­human and beast are temporarily shattered by a sudden incursion from the transcendent. 2 Quoted ­here in all three of western Christendom’s linguae sacrae, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, as well as in the Douay translation of 1609–10, the story is also retold in vari­ous forms in all three of medieval ­England’s major vernacular languages. Summoned by a desperate King Balaak to curse the Israelites, as they continue their lethal advance on the Moabites during the campaign to invade Canaan, the prophet Balaam, sitting astride his ass, three times fails to see what the ass

2

General Introduction

herself sees clearly: an angel standing in the way with a sword drawn, ready to strike. “Se assa ge-­seah thone engel standende and Balaam ne ge-­seah” (the ass saw the waiting angel and Balaam did not see it; Num. 22:23). So the Old En­ glish Heptateuch sets the scene, in a translation from the Vulgate made around the year 1000 and illustrated by artists in Canterbury for unknown patrons a de­cade or two ­later, one of the few illuminated Old Testament books to survive from the early medieval centuries.3 The ass swerves aside three times, this way and that, bruising Balaam’s foot, crushing him against a wall, then buckling beneath him, terrified but obstinate, as the angel moves again and again to intercept. Each time, her angry master beats her flanks bloody but cannot make her go forward. “Sovent la fert e bat d’escurgee / . . . ​Tant l’ad batue li veillard qu’il est las” (he struck her often and beat her with a scourge; the old fool hit her so much that he was exhausted), in the words of the decasyllabic Poème Anglo-­Normand sur l’Ancien Testament around the end of the twelfth ­century. This is one of several insular French and ­Middle En­glish accounts of the episode written for members of the literate lay and their ­house­holders (“a lais escrif ”) that find ways to highlight Balaam’s bodily vio­lence ­toward an animal who is also female and a bonded servant.4 Fi­nally the ass, bleeding and still prone, is moved to utter an unpre­ce­dented and divinely inspired verbal complaint. “And God undede (opened) this asses muth! / So soth (true) it is! So it is selcuth!” (wondrous), marvels a verse couplet paraphrase of parts of the Pentateuch called Genesis and Exodus in the ­later thirteenth ­century, drawing on an account of the episode in Peter Comestor’s Historia scholastica written some seventy-­five years ­earlier.5 This is how her exchange with Balaam then proceeds in the Early Version of The ­Middle En­glish Bible, the first translation of the ­whole Bible into En­glish prose, likely from the 1370s: And the Lord openide the mouth of the asse and she spak: “What have I do (done) to thee? Why smitist thou me, lo now, the thridde time?” Balaam answerde: “For (­because) thou hast deservide, and bigilide (tricked) me. Wold God I hadde a swerd, that I mighte smite thee!” And the asse seide: “Whethir I am not (am I not) thy beeste, to the which (on which) evermore thou ­were wont to sitte unto the day that is now? Sey, what ­thing lik ever I dide to thee?” And he seith, “Never.”6 Burnel, the she-­ass in the Chester Play of Balaam, regularly performed in the city streets between at least the early 1500s and the 1570s, voices the injured



General Introduction

3

justice of the second speech still more strongly, again using the intimate “thou” of the servant as she insists that her conduct has, as always, been proper. It is Balaam who has gone violently and shamefully astray: Am not I, maister, thy owne asse to beare thee whither thou w ­ ill passe (wherever you want to go), and many winter readye was? To smite me hit (it) is shame. Thou wottest (know) well, maister, perdee (by God), that thou haddest never non like to me, ne never yet (before) soe served I thee. Now am I not to blame.7 Only when Balaam has conceded the truth of her words does God open his eyes, showing him that, in resisting his urgings, she has saved his life. The angel reveals its presence, repeating the ass’s accusation, and Balaam understands at last that he has sinned. The G ­ reat Bible of 1539, whose production for use in church ser­vices was mandated by Henry VIII in 1538, words their conversation like this: And the aungel of the Lord saide unto him: “Wherfore (why) haste thou smitten thine asse thre times? Beholde, I came oute as an adversary, ­because thou makest thy waye contrary unto me. And the asse sawe me, and went back fro me thre times, or els if she had not turned fro me (geving place to me that stode in the waye), I had suerly slaine the, and saved her alive.” Balaam saide unto the angel of the Lorde: “I have sinned, for I wist (knew) not that thou stodest in the waye against me. Now, therfore, if it displease the I ­will turne home againe.”8 Even before she briefly receives the miraculous gift of ­human speech, before returning to her life of alert, suffering beasthood, the ass proves herself wiser than her learned master. §§§ Not surprisingly, given the twists and turns of the episode in which she plays her role, Balaam’s ass bears the burden of many meanings in Christian patristic and medieval thought. According to the opinions synthesized by the Glossa

4

General Introduction

ordinaria, the large commentary compiled in the early twelfth ­century and laid out in the margins of many Latin Bible books well into the print era, ­there is virtually no hope for Balaam himself.9 This is so despite his reluctant obedience to God, his inability to curse the Israelites on Balaak’s behalf ­after his encounter with the angel, and the prophesy of the incarnation he finds himself uttering instead: “I shal se him, but not now; I shal biholde him, but not nigh (near); a sterre shal be borun of (born from) Jacob, and a yerde (staff ) shal rise of Israel” (Num. 24:17), in the suitably mystifying rendering of the Late Version of The M ­ iddle En­glish Bible. The Late Version was revised from the Early Version, prob­ably during the first half of the 1380s, and was still in circulation in the early sixteenth c­ entury. While the Glossa acknowledges that Balaam remains an ambivalent figure, who appears almost capable of virtue, the general consensus of the work’s patristic sources, drawing on early Jewish exegetical traditions whose influence is also evident in the Christian New Testament, is that his prophetic ability was magical, not holy, involving sacrifice to demons, not worship of the one God (see 2 Pet. 2:15, Jude 11, Rev. 2:14).10 Understanding Balaam’s inability to see the angel as proof of his merely carnal understanding, the linguistically gifted Franciscan exegete Nicholas of Lyra (d. 1349), whose commentary became a free-­standing addition to Bibles containing the Glossa, takes the same view. With his usual concern for the priorities of the literal sense, Lyra declares that “Balaam was a demonic prophet . . . ​seeking revelations from the demons” (“Balaam fuit propheta dæmonum . . . ​quærens revelationes a dæmonibus”).11 For Origen (d. 253), the most influential of the Glossa’s sources for Numbers (in the Latin adaptation of his In Numeros homiliae by the early fifth-­century theologian Rufinus), Balaam foreshadows the scribes and Pharisees who resisted Christ.12 Since Balaam’s name can be taken to mean “vain ­people” (“populus vanus”), this typological equivalence fixes his identity as potentially signifying any cleric who “has the word of God not in his heart but in his mouth” (“verbum Dei non in corde sed in ore”; see Isa. 29:13), an idolator and lover of money.13 As a result, Balaam’s learned perversity casts into bolder relief the virtues of his ass, who absorbs many of her master’s potentially positive features into her own—­and does so despite a general indifference on the part of scholarly theologians to the vio­lence between master and servant that preoccupies vernacular accounts of the scene. For Isidore (d. 636), the ass signifies the brutish gentiles (“bruta gentilitas”) who at last threw off the “seductor idolatriae” of



General Introduction

5

paganism at the coming of Christ, and by extension the Christian Church, which this heroic act was humanly instrumental in bringing into being.14 Anticipating and no doubt informing Isidore’s line of thinking, Origen notices that the Church is figured elsewhere in the Christian Bible by a second ass, who bore Christ into Jerusalem (Matt. 21:1–11). The resonance between ­these asses, one antetype, the other her typological fulfillment, reminds us that, in the supersessionary logic of Christian exegesis Origen helped install—in which Christian meanings of the Hebrew scriptures that ­were known neither to their ­human authors nor to their early reception communities displace their first meanings—­Jesus sits where Balaam once sat: on an ass that is no longer the Jews but the Christian Church.15 Always more naturalistic than Origen, Augustine finds the ass in­ter­est­ing primarily as an example of a virtuous talking animal, and as evidence that the gift of prophesy may be transitory. The implications of his analy­sis for language study are laid out in Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia (on vernacular eloquence) early in the ­fourteenth ­century. Following Augustine (perhaps by way of Aquinas, whose views are ­later echoed by Lyra), Dante disappointingly maintains that the ass herself was not speaking at all, merely an angel through the mouth of the ass.16 The Glossa, still following Origen, largely ignores Augustine’s scientific account but also reads the story as a language miracle.17 ­Here the emphasis lies on the ass as a figure of nonrational innocence, whose preternatural speech reminds us that God makes foolish the wisdom of the wise (as Isaiah and Paul join in affirming: Isa. 29:14; 1 Cor. 1:19–20), and turns the stone the builder has rejected into the head of the corner (as the Psalmist and Peter unite in adding: Ps. 117:22, 1 Pet. 2:7). Even as Origen works the episode into a further proof that God has abandoned the old, “Israel in the flesh” (“in carne Istrahel”) in f­avor of the new “Israel in Christ” (“in Christo Istrahel”),18 reversing its polarities from the perspective of what would become Rabbinic Judaism, he and his successors are thus also identifying what is perhaps the most impor­tant pattern Chris­tian­ity has taken from its Old Testament, and that the forty-­year story of the journey to the Promised Land told in Numbers writes large (Sefer Bamidbar, “the book in the wilderness,” in Hebrew).19 This is the pattern of reversal itself: a recurrent feature of God’s dealings with his ­people and their enemies in Jewish and Christian traditions. God reaches into history “with the strength of his arm” and compels it to serve his purposes, “scattering the proud in the imaginations of their hearts and casting down the mighty from their seats,” even as he “exalts the h ­ umble and meek” (see Luke 1:51–52):

6

General Introduction

He dide mihte on earme his. He tostencte overmode of mode hortan his. Fecit potentiam in bracio suo. Dispersit superbos mente cordis sui. He asette wlance of setle, and he up sette eadmode. Deposuit potentes de sede, et exaltavit humiles. (He performed strong deeds with his arm. He scattered the proud in their hearts’ minds. He deposed the power­f ul from their place and raised up the ­humble.)20 Sung by a pregnant Mary to a pregnant cousin Elizabeth at the turning point of Christian sacred history, and quoted ­here from a tenth-­century glossed Psalm book linked to one of ­England’s oldest female religious ­houses, Wilton Abbey, ­these words from the Magnificat distil a major theme of the tradition of doxology assembled in the Hebrew Psalter (Tehillim).21 As a signature of Christian as well as Jewish exegesis, historiography, and social thought, versions of the pattern of reversal involving the overthrow of the power­ful that c­ auses Mary to magnify her God can be traced with some regularity in the surviving vernacular and Latin Christian writings from medieval ­England. The pattern infuses accounts of sacred history from scripture composed in poetry or prose and read, preached, meditated on, imaged, sung, or acted across the era, as it may do the interpretation of secular history in chronicles, as they seek to account for a world of vio­lence and disruption. Texts composed in dif­fer­ ent centuries, languages, and genres, and from dif­fer­ent institutional positions, also show how the pattern shapes the self-­understanding of the Church, as this ­imagined community negotiates this same world, during the long, perilous interval between Christ’s first coming and his second. Despite the strong concern with recurrence that informs Christian understandings of time in relation to the liturgical year, the conviction that the order of t­ hings must undergo sudden overthrow in the f­ uture, as it already and gloriously has in the past, lends this writing both a distinctive dynamism and an unnerved sense of its own instability. Analyses of the Balaam story proliferate across the centuries. With the psychological acuity that typifies his writings, Gregory the ­Great’s Regula pastoralis (pastoral rule, ca. 590) develops an influential homiletic account of the ass’s speech as signifying how the flesh, in its very obduracy, may sometimes play a constructive role in the lives of fallen ­humans.22 The Old En­glish translation of his treatise entitled simply Hierdeboc (shepherd’s book), issued by King Alfred of Wessex to his bishops around 890 and a foundational work of the early En­glish prose tradition, renders Gregory’s words with all its usual precision and reverent concern for lucidity:



General Introduction

7

Baloham thonne ful georne feran wolde thær hine mon bæd, ac his estfulnesse witteah se esol the he onuppan sæt. Thæt wæs forthæmthe se assa ge-­seah thone engel ongean hine standan, and him thæs færeltes forwiernan, thone the thæt mennisce mod ge-­seon ne meahte. Swa eac, thonne thæt flæsc bith ge-­let mid sumum broce, hit getacnath thæm mode for thære swingan hwæt Godes willa bith. (Balaam would very eagerly have journeyed where it was commanded him, but his enthusiasm was resisted by the ass he was sitting on. That was ­because the ass saw the angel standing against him and forbidding his journey, which the ­human reason could not see. So also, when the flesh is hindered by any kind of pain, it signifies to the reason, by means of that scourging, what is God’s ­will.)23 In his epistle to the Galatians, Paul argues pessimistically that “the fleish coveitith ayens the spirit, and the spirit ayen the fleish,” both each other’s enemies (Gal. 5:17).24 ­Here, the “flæsc,” even if it appears to be acting against the interests and purposes of the “mennisce mode,” remains its loyal servant, communicating with it through physical and spiritual suffering if it should go astray. All devout Christians, in this account, become a composite of Balaam and ass—­a symbolically male rational faculty putatively used to rule, and a symbolically female body putatively used to obey—­when the experience of suffering recalls them to a state of ­humble mindfulness ­toward God. Three hundred years ­after Alfred, the Latin De nugis curialium (on courtiers’ trifles), by the noted courtier, raconteur, and archdeacon of Oxford Walter Map (d. 1209–10), inaugurates what may be a new, self-­referential reading of the episode, ­later taken up by vernacular writers, from the mid-­thirteenth-­ century insular French homilist, Robert of Gretham, to the anonymous author of The Chastising of God’s ­Children, quoted in the epigraph to this book.25 Spurred into writing by his patron, just as Balaam spurred the ass into unwilling speech, Map claims he is unlikely to be able to utter much more than noise. Still, if his book turns out to make “an ass out of a man you wanted to make into a poet” he warns (“de homine asinum, quem debueras facere poetam”), the shame w ­ ill only rebound, as the “hollow-­headedness of my hee haws has you held hilarious” (“me ruditus ruditas ridiculum reddiderit,” mimicking a bray).26 The overblown modesty of this witty passage introduces the ass to the provincial realm of twelfth-­century ecclesiastical politics. In the confessedly nugatory book that preserves his brayings, Map on the one hand satirizes the monastic o­ rders, with their supposedly shameful histories; on the other, the ignorant laity who follow

8

General Introduction

Peter Waldo (“Waldenses”), with their glossed psalters and French Bible books (“lingua conscriptum Gallica, in quo textus et glosa Psalterii plurimorumque legis utriusque librorum continebantur”). In the pro­cess, he advertises the new prestige and pretensions of the educated secular clergy, of whom he was one.27 §§§ Treatments of the Balaam story like Map’s show how its meanings came to serve purposes in which the pattern of reversal has become localized, bearing a load whose weight may seem better suited to the back of a mere ass than the crushing historiographic burden laid on it by Origen. Yet the tenacity of Christian textuality is such that, once set in place, the revolutionary potential of the episode could never be fully contained, ­either at an exegetical level or in relation to real events. Throughout the patristic and medieval centuries, the episode continued to be used to urge action in the moment, as individual and groups inspired by the ideal shape of sacred history disruptively set out to realize that shape within their own socie­ties. ­Here, too, vernacular works played an impor­ tant role. Well before the ­Middle Ages ended, indeed, arguments over what the ass’s speech signified, based on exegetical traditions that now stretched back over a millennium, had become bound up with arguments over the appropriate uses of the religious vernacular itself. Exhorting his readers to embrace martyrdom, perhaps during the Decian persecution in the 250s, the Cartha­ginian bishop Cyprian promises ­those unsure how to confess their faith in public that God ­will give them the words. ­After all, “it is not hard for God to open the mouth of someone devoted to him, who made the ass speak against Balaam the prophet, in the Book of Numbers” (“Nec difficile est deo aperire os hominis devoti sibi, . . . ​qui in Numeris adversus Balaam prophetam etiam asinam fecerit loqui”).28 For Cyprian, as not quite entirely for Origen, Balaam and the ass contend with one another, effectively, as members of opposed belief systems. By the early 700s, however, when the g­ reat Northumbrian theologian Bede wrote his innovative commentary on the Catholic Epistles, Balaam is clearly a Christian, one who loves the “wages of iniquity” (“mercedem iniquitatis,” 2 Pet. 2:15). More specifically, he is a cleric, whose sins may be so severe as to be subject to just discipline even by the laity (“a laicis clerici merito lacerentur”), in the same way that Balaam was disciplined by the words spoken, against the order of nature, by the ass (“qui verbis asinae contra naturam loquentis corripitur”; see 2 Pet. 2:16).29



General Introduction

9

Bede’s insistence that, despite seeming canonical impropriety, laypeople have a duty to correct the clergy if they err perhaps reflects the anx­i­eties of living in the theologically plural environment of early Christian ­England, as well as the idiosyncratic organ­ization of the early En­glish Church, structured at this period around minsters (monasteries) that seem sometimes to have doubled as residences for their lay found­ers. ­These wealthy rulers are perhaps the “laicis” whom he compares ­here to the unnaturally speaking ass.30 But Bede’s foregrounding of the allusion to the Balaam story in 2 Peter had lasting significance. A ­ fter Bede, Balaam and his ass continue to be identified for the most part with figures within the Christian Church.31 The ass, Origen’s figure of divine reversal and Cyprian’s of re­sis­tance, has become a figure of reform. In the mid-­t welfth ­century, not too long before the outset of the ­g reat ­battle between the crown and the episcopate for control of the En­glish Church inaugurated by Henry II (d. 1189) and his onetime chancelor Archbishop Thomas Becket (d. 1170), Bede’s analy­sis is quoted at length in Gratian’s Decretum (ca. 1140). Bede is the work’s sole authority on “­those situations in which the learned may properly be reproved by the unlearned, the clergy by the laity” (“Docti ab indoctis, clerici a laicis quandoque merito reprehenduntur”).32 Since the Decretum was hugely influential, this guaranteed the pertinence of this early En­glish analy­sis in discussions of a particularly sensitive topic. For Gratian, ­there is nothing objectionable in Bede’s account. Gratian cites him as part of a longer discussion of the sacerdotal office, which argues that moral living, not official dignity, makes a bishop a bishop (“dignitas non facit episcopum, sed vita”),33 encouraging a reading of the episode in which subordinates (“subditi”) may properly offer re­sis­tance to their superiors in any situation in which the latter are seen to err (“hoc exemplo possunt resistere suis praelatis si eis perceperint errare”).34 One of Gratian’s earliest En­glish users, John of Salisbury, also agrees with Bede, although his concern is with a subject’s right to criticize a secular ruler. “Balaam ­will not be corrected ­unless the ass can speak” (“Balaam etenim non corripitur, nisi asina loquatur”), he declares in his Polycraticus around 1160, with a forthrightness characteristic of the ­house­hold of Becket’s archiepiscopal pre­de­ces­sor, Theobold, of which he and Becket ­were both members.35 Forty years ­later, however, as the spiritual movements that sprang up across the twelfth ­century came into conflict with the reforms pioneered by Innocent III, the ­great architect of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, serious anxiety has begun to set in. For Innocent, in his letter Cum ex iniuncto, addressed to clergy in the newly republicanized city of Metz, the ass’s speech must not be

10

General Introduction

understood to justify criticism of priests by disciples of the layman Peter Waldo, based on the dubious authority of their French Bible translations. Such criticisms, made by a spiritual subject to a spiritual superior, flout the proper order that needs to pertain in the Church: Cum enim iuxta verbum apostoli servus suo domino stet aut cadat (Rom. 14:4), profecto ab episcopo cuius est correctioni subiectus debet in mansuetudinis spiritu castigari, non autem a populo cuius est correctioni praepositus in spiritu superbiae reprehendi. . . . ​Nec quisquam suae praesumptionis audaciam illo defendat exemplo quod asina legitur reprehendisse prophetam. . . . ​Cum aliud sit fratrem in se peccantem occulte corripere, quod utique quisque tenetur efficere secundum regulam evangelicam (Matt. 18:15–17), in quo casu sane potest intelligi quod Balaam fuit correptus ab asina; et aliud est patrem suum etiam delinquentem reprehendere manifeste. (Since a servant “stands or falls by his own lord,” according to the apostle’s word, a priest may certainly be chastised in a spirit of gentleness by the bishop to whose correction he is subject, but not reprehended in a spirit of pride by the ­people for whose correction he is himself responsible. Nor may anyone justify the boldness of their own presumption by means of the story in which the ass is described as having reproved the prophet. It is one ­thing to correct a sinning ­brother privately, which anyone at all is obliged to do according to the evangelical rule, as was the manner in which it can reasonably be understood that Balaam was corrected by the ass; it is a dif­fer­ent ­matter to reprove one’s ­father openly, even if he is d­ oing wrong.) Even private correction of priests by laypeople, following the pro­cess that Christ lays out in the Gospels, can be carried out only in situations in which a priest, having confessed his innocence, willingly hears the complaints of subordinates (“sponte sua confisus innocentia se subditorum accusationi supponit”). Innocent’s investment in the princi­ple of hierarchy produces a severely restricted interpretation of the ass’s speech and thus of the role of the laity in Church reform.36 Cum ex iniuncto gained the status of general Church law a­ fter the inclusion of a version of the letter in Gregory IX’s Liber extravagantium, compiled from five late twelfth-­ and early thirteenth-­century compilationes antiquae by the Dominican Ramon de Peñafort during the 1230s, as part of this work’s



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groundbreaking discussion of heresy.37 Although the Liber never attained (or expected to attain) the absolute authority it claimed for itself, continuing to circulate alongside the Decretum and to be supplemented by new collections, both papal and other­wise, it became the most impor­tant canon law compilation of the ­later medieval centuries.38 In the sixteenth ­century, the prominence of the letter in this context also made it a target of evangelical reformers, both for the high view it expresses of the re­spect owed prelates and for its (in fact, carefully ­limited) strictures on the unsupervised lay circulation of biblical books in French.39 John Foxe burlesques the letter in his magnificent polemical history of the medieval Church, Actes and Monuments, by way of a pastiche bull, added in the 1570 edition, in parody of papal claims to total temporal as well as spiritual power: “For although you read that Balaam was rebuked of his Asse, by the which Asse our subjectes, by Balaam we Prelates are signified: yet that ­ought to be no example to our subjectes to rebuke,” his imaginary pope fatuously declares.40 Yet direct lay criticism of clerical corruption persisted, along with defenses of the laity’s right to engage in such criticism without any canonical restraints, accruing new meanings for the Balaam’s ass episode as they went, not least in vernacular contexts. In Dialogue Between a Clerk and a Knight (?1380s), an attack on papal claims to temporal authority that anticipates Foxe but is written in a tradition that already reached back a hundred years, the Knight at first pretends ­limited deference to Cum ex iniuncto.41 Soon however, his critique takes a radical turn, as he invokes the ass to claim permission to engage in public disputation with the Clerk as a layperson, precisely as Innocent had forbidden. Within a few lines, Balaam has come to signify not a single sinful priest but the entire Church hierarchy, the ass not the laity but the En­glish polity itself: Sir Clerk, said the Knight, than thou hast wel said. And therfore I praye thee that thou take my wordes patientliche, for I mene with all my hert to saye nothinge againes the bileve of Holy Chirche, ne ageines the pope ne (nor) his skilful power (legitimate authority). . . . ​And therfor in his name that againes kinde (nature) gave might to an asse to speke and reprefe and undernim (criticize) his maister that sat upon him and unrightfullich (unjustly) bett and prickid him with his spores (spurs) . . . ​I ­will speke and answer thee, tristinge (trusting) to God that he ­will als wel (also) geve me might and grace to speke and withstonde the unrightful betinge and prickinge that we suffer of the pope, and of the clergy that sitteth upon us.42

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Reminding his audience, as had Cyprian, of the prophetic character of the ass’s words, the Knight’s version of the episode hardens into a polemical portrait of ecclesiastical oppression and the need for ­wholesale Church reform ­under the oversight of ­England’s secular governors. This is the elite group for whom the dialogue was written and to whose interests, not least its financial interests, the Knight appeals. At a moment of jurisdictional tension at all levels of society, when writers and readers occupying a range of theological positions w ­ ere calling for structural as well as moral and theological reform of the institutional Church, reformist theology is ­here offered in ser­vice of a specifically secularizing po­liti­cal vision. Elsewhere, the identification of Balaam with members of the Church hierarchy takes on overtly eschatological overtones. “Woo to hem that ben shadde out (have sold themselves) for mede in the errour of Balaam!” announces The Lanterne of Light (ca. 1410), identifying Balaam with mendicants and priests of all kinds who participate in ecclesiastical corruption so total that the end times must be near (see Jude 11). So greedy was Balaam that, even though “his owned beest repreved him and hirt his foot ayen a wal,” he “wolde not be war” (take care) and so “was slain among the heethen” (see Josh. 13:22). Balaam’s ignominious death signals the fate that awaits the materialistic churchmen of the work’s own, desperate times, if they fail to heed (as it seems they are certain to fail to heed) the vociferous reproofs issued by the text itself.43 In such ­Middle En­glish works, the pattern of reversal reasserts itself on the largest scale, drawing together the Christian’s duty to correct ­others, the use of the vernacular, and a set of related stances on the ordering of authority within the Church, to advocate proposals that ­were still found relevant in the chaotic first stages of the Henrician Reformation, when some of ­these works ­were printed.44 ­Here they ­were met by a host of new references to the ass, often now explic­itly as a symbol of antipapal reform, on the model of Martin Luther’s An den Christlichen Adel deutscher Nation (letter to the Christian nobility of the German nation) in 1520, where opposition to the restricted interpretation of the story in Cum ex iniuncto is overt. “Hat got da durch ein eselinne redet gegen einem Propheten, warumb solt er nit noch reden kunnen durch ein frum mensch gegen dem Babst?” (if God spoke then by an ass against a prophet, why should he not be able now to speak by a righ­teous man against the pope?) Luther declares unreservedly, the year before his excommunication, seeking support for his reforms from secular governors, in the same way the Dialogue Between a Clerk and a Knight had done over a ­century e­ arlier.45 The ass underwent further transformations as the Protestant Reformation gathered force, especially once the pope himself came to be represented with



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an ass’s head in satirical woodcuts, and other asses, such as Apuleius’s asinus aureus (golden ass), ­rose to prominence. Across the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries, she took on the new burdens of exegetical literalism and disenchanted rationalism, neither of which treated her favorably. She was also set to new uses: as an advocate of compassion ­toward animals; as a prop in the blasphemy trial of the abolitionist and Unitarian preacher Robert Wedderburn; and as one among a multitude of beasts who, along with their ­people, join in Christopher Smart’s ­g reat hymn of reconciliation and praise, Jubilate Agno. The historiographic pattern of providential reversal, appropriated in many dif­fer­ent ways throughout the medieval era, underwent further transformations too, with vari­ ous consequences for the repudiation of the “medieval” in general and its relationship to the concept of the vernacular in par­tic­u­lar, as we see in Part I of this volume. Yet like the story of the ass, which still resurfaces unpredictably, the pattern retains its tenacity even in our notionally secular age.46 §§§ It is crucial to the argument of this book that allusions to the Balaam episode such as Luther’s, in which the ass serves as a figure of re­sis­tance to ecclesiastical abuse, are as deeply grounded in medieval exegesis, and in the medieval Church, as are the more restrictive accounts of the episode that grew out of Cum ex iniuncto. It is also crucial to its argument, however, that at no point was the vernacular ever reduced to this voice of protest, or taken to have any automatic relation to it. Most medieval vernacular religious writings and their authors evidently assumed themselves to be contributing to the same proj­ect of fulfilling God’s redemptive plan as was in theory perpetually underway throughout the length and breadth of the institutional Church, from the papacy down to the parish clergy and their congregations. Yet as ­w ill become gradually clear during the course of the book, ­these fifteenth-­century works are only unusually troubled examples of an association between the vernacular and the need for one or another variety of religious reform that persisted through the medieval centuries. Other works discussed in this book offer a strong counterpoint to the theme of reform, it is true, ­whether ignoring it, arguing against its utility, seeking to temper its earnestness, criticizing the damage it did to cherished institutions, or attempting to harness it to new, perhaps worldly ends. Medieval Christians had many other uses for lit­ er­a­ture than the moral disruption of themselves and their socie­ties or the preservation of their souls in safety as they journeyed through this vale of tears. Nonetheless, the need for transformation onto which the story of Balaam and

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his ass opens out in medieval exegesis, as it ruminates on the pattern of reversal said to be revealed in the scriptures, ­will prove to have been a power­f ul driver of vernacular textual production.

2. Premises: Continuity, Centrality, Distinctiveness Keeping the theme of religious reform and its counterpoints carefully in mind, as well as the larger historiographic patterns to which they point, Balaam’s Ass thus seeks to develop an integrated account of the religious lit­er­a­ture written and read in medieval ­England’s three, successively dominant vernacular languages, Old En­glish, insular French, and ­Middle En­glish. The book’s first chapter opens in the early eighth ­century, with a second work by Bede, his Historia ecclesiastica. However, the era of primary interest ­here, over six hundred years long, begins a hundred and fifty years l­ater, with the unification of E ­ ngland by Alfred of Wessex and his descendants during the late ninth and tenth centuries. This era spans the systems of thought and practice inaugurated by three impor­tant episodes in the history of the Western Church: the papal and monastic reforms of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, the reforms of the secular Church associated with the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, and the Papal Schism of 1378–1417. It concludes near the outset of a fourth: the fracturing of the Western Church in the sixteenth-­century reformations, a vast set of events whose tangled relationship to national and religious history and institutional reconfiguring of the status of the vernacular are not part of its subject proper, but are closely bound up with many aspects of the analy­sis (see Appendix, ­Table 1). Some individual figures discussed in what follows are well known, and a few have been known continuously since their lifetimes, although not necessarily widely, accurately, or for their contributions to vernacular religion: Alfred of Wessex, Ælfric of Eynsham, Robert Grosseteste, Richard Rolle, William Langland, Julian of Norwich, William Caxton, and ­others. However, by contrast with the tradition inaugurated by the publication of the Tyndale New Testament in the 1520s, which has been central to the received history of the En­glish language and nation, the medieval religious vernacular archive has never been given the prominence it deserves. The size of this archive also remains much underappreciated: hundreds of millions of words, thousands of books and texts, mostly anonymous, still amounting to a tiny portion of the number in circulation across the period. Furthermore, most of the works that make up this archive ­were forgotten for so long that, despite sustained scholarly effort,



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the claim that it constitutes a significant body of lit­er­a­ture in its own right still bears the burden of the improbable figured by the prophesying ass herself. Even as expertise has grown, it has hence remained hard to read individual texts and genres as carefully as they merit, or to build a general account of their interest and significance. As ­things stand, indeed, it is not at all obvious that we should refer to a single vernacular archive at all. Vernacular religious texts come in many genres and forms. U ­ ntil recently, Old En­glish, insular French, and M ­ iddle En­glish religious writing ­were generally studied as separate fields, divided by language change (Old En­glish was becoming difficult for some to read as early as the late twelfth ­century), and by two momentous national events, the Norman Conquest (1066) and the opening phase of the Hundred Years’ War (1337–60). The Hundred Years’ War is also frequently used to demarcate another divide, between early ­Middle En­glish, written during the period when French was the most influential written insular vernacular, and the late ­Middle En­glish of the ­century and a half that followed. The traditional centers of gravity of the Old En­glish, insular French, and late ­Middle En­glish periods, roughly the several de­cades on ­either side of the years 1000, 1200, and 1400 respectively, are distant by many generations. The sense of distance is further exacerbated by the fact that most writings produced outside ­these de­cades have been seriously neglected ­until recently, except by a few scholars, and still fit awkwardly within traditional maps of the era. The three fields have in any case developed dif­fer­ent search tools, dictionaries, handbooks, and scholarly histories, whose most obvious common feature may be their awareness of the ubiquitous presence of Latin. Old En­glish and its successor vernaculars also fall on opposite sides of the divide that is taken to separate the ­earlier and ­later centuries of the ­Middle Ages themselves, with the so-­called re­nais­sance or reformation of the twelfth ­century inaugurating what specialists on both sides of this imaginary divide have often represented as essentially a new era. For its part, insular French was ­until recently identified with French literary history more than with En­glish. Anglo-­ Norman ­England itself has played dif­fer­ent parts in dif­fer­ent ­g rand récits. Historians of the twelfth ­century have tended to view it as the source of the so-­called British constitution, modern law, and humanist letters, following a tradition given shape by Frederic William Maitland and ­others at the end of the nineteenth ­century.47 Yet for scholars of En­glish, the term Anglo-­Norman also evokes an influential older imagining, best known through that most readable expression of Romantic nationalism, Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1820), in which the Normans play

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the part, not of civilizers, but of colonizing oppressors. As a result, the rich insular French literary tradition that began to develop roughly fifty years ­a fter the death of the last “Anglo-­Saxon” king at Hastings (the Anglo-­Danish Harold Godwinson) was long regarded as not much more than a foreign incursion, repelled at last by the “triumph of En­glish” during the age of Langland and Chaucer a full three hundred years l­ater.48 Meanwhile, comparative work on the ­whole range of early insular linguistic traditions, Norse, Welsh, Irish, Gaelic, Cornish, Manx, and Hebrew as well as En­glish, French, and Latin, may one day render the merely trilingual analy­sis given ­here obsolete but is presently still in its infancy.49 However, despite the vast changes that took place across the centuries covered by the book, and the efforts of a succession of reformers to impose the pattern of reversal derived from sacred history on the flow of ­actual events, Balaam’s Ass takes it as a governing premise that the history of the En­glish vernacular is best understood as continuous: characterized, that is, by adaptation, recombination, and transition, rather than by the transformations and catastrophes that are often taken to punctuate the era. Read across the span of over half a millennium, the vernacular rec­ord can tell us much about the shape and sociolinguistic logic of early En­glish literary history; about how religious thought circulated through Christian society; and about the beliefs, attitudes, and devout practices of several generations of texts and some thirty generations of readers and audiences. Any analy­sis that understands cultural change within a framework built to emphasize continuity has dangers, especially in relation to an era that has so often been represented as static, not to say stagnant, as the so-­called ­Middle Ages. If the functions of vernacular religious teaching have common features across the era and well beyond, we ­will see that its structures, intellectual content, and institutional and social settings all altered quickly enough that few vernacular texts and textual traditions had an active lifetime much more than two hundred years in length. Since their grammar, syntax, lexis, and orthography ­were all tied to speech sufficiently closely that attempts at standardization ­were more local and temporary than came to be the case ­later, the plethora of written En­glish and French dialects altered too, En­glish more quickly than French and both languages much more quickly than Latin. Even so, it is only when we look at the history of the medieval religious vernacular as a ­whole that we can begin to grasp the full scale of its contribution to medieval religious culture, and the long continuities in the priorities and practices of Christian teaching and belief, from late antiquity to the early modern period, to which it testifies.



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The Bible translations, homilies, psalters, and other works written during the period of the late tenth-­century Benedictine Reform consciously drew not only on ­earlier corpora from Continental Eu­rope but also on insular traditions that already extended back for over three hundred years: through the vernacular revival that took place ­under Alfred of Wessex and his successors, starting in the late 800s, and the intellectual achievements associated with Bede and Boniface a ­century and a half ­earlier, on which it built, all the way to the Christianization of the Germanic newcomers by Celtic, Roman, and Frankish missionaries in the sixth and seventh centuries. The earliest corpus of writings in French, associated with the court of Henry I (d. 1135) and his second wife, Adeliza of Louvain (d. 1151), drew on Old En­glish sources and pre­ce­dents.50 The remarkable body of ­Middle En­glish texts written between 1350 and 1420—­the era of Langland, Chaucer, and Gower, Hilton, Julian, and The ­Middle En­glish Bible—­was knowingly indebted, not only to an array of Latin writings and many vernacular texts from the Continental mainland, but to two centuries of insular French and e­ arlier En­glish writing. Despite their resonant sense of pre-­Conquest ­England as past, foundational but gone, and the linguistic obsolescence intrinsic to most kinds of vernacular writing, all three corpora remained proudly aware of Old En­glish textuality as an authorizing pre­ce­dent. Bede’s famous story of “Cædmon’s Hymn,” and the account of Alfred’s vernacular learning by the Welsh scholar Asser, both of which return ­later, ­were often retold in chronicle histories, from William of Malmesbury in the twelfth ­century to Ranulph Higden in the ­fourteenth, and beyond.51 In the same way, the flood of vernacular texts that heralded or opposed the Henrician Reformation from the late 1520s on was continuous with this ­earlier vernacular tradition, even if reformed Anglican texts, like their antagonists, refer to the vernacular past only selectively. The religious vernacular has long been identified with its official promotion in the Protestant Reformation. Yet the claims made for it in the sixteenth ­century first emerged explic­itly at the end of the ­fourteenth c­ entury and have roots a good deal older. A study of transreformation En­glish vernacularity might take the two hundred years ­after 1370 as a single, turbulent period.52 If this book re­spects the divide between the medieval era and the early modern period, it does so, in part, for heuristic reasons. Even the vernacular retellings of the story of Balaam and his ass described in Section 1—­written across five centuries and all indebted to the most influential of all Bible translations, the Latin Vulgate—­a rgue for the depth of insular pre­ce­dent for the ­great series of early modern En­glish printed Bibles: from the Tyndale New Testament to the ­Great Bible (1526, 1539), and from the Geneva

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Bible and Bishop’s Bible (1560, 1568) all the way to the Douay-Rheims and King James Bibles (1582/1609–10, 1611). As sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century scholars on all sides of the proliferating confessional divides ­were aware, a long chapter of the story of the En­glish Bible is medieval. §§§ By treating the surviving vernacular religious writings from prereformation ­England as a single archive, the relict of an episodic but continuous and self-­ conscious textual tradition that endured for many centuries, Balaam’s Ass also advances its second general premise. ­These writings require us to view them as a central ele­ment of early En­glish religious and literary history. To someone looking at the scene from a sufficient height, this might seem obvious. On the one hand, although the oldest surviving runic writing is from as early as the second ­century c.e., vernacular textuality seems effectively to have emerged in northern Eu­rope as a result of Chris­tian­ity.53 The earliest surviving text in En­glish is prob­ably King Æthelberht of Kent’s Law Code, which dates from circa 600, less than three years a­ fter Augustine of Canterbury’s arrival from Rome to baptize the king and convert his kingdom.54 As with this short document, the vast majority of vernacular texts before the fifteenth ­century ­were written by professional religious or clerics. True, the corpora of Old En­glish, insular French, and ­Middle En­glish differ in crucial re­spects. Parts of ­these corpora, moreover, including a mass of utilitarian writings, cannot be included ­under even a capacious definition of the Christian.55 Yet a very ­great deal can: most major bodies of prose, most drama and lyric, most long-­form poetry. An intimate connection between vernacular textuality and Christian subject ­matter survived well into the modern era. On the other hand, the medieval institutional Church made extensive use of a division of its members into clerici or litterati, the clerical minority with good Latin, and laici or illiterati: the ­great majority of laypeople of all estates whose verbal access to truth was mainly confined to what in the early medieval era was called the lingua rustica (the local speech), and ­later the lingua vulgaris (the vulgar tongue).56 A third group—of par­tic­u­lar importance to this account ­because of their interstitial character—­was religious ­women, including not only nuns and canonesses but members of what have come to be termed the “semireligious” ­orders: recluses, hospitalers, vowesses, and devout ­widows, ­England’s nearest equivalent to the beguines. ­These ­were joined in early periods by the less highly educated monks, and at all periods by the less fluently Latinate secular priests, both situated somewhere between lettered and unlettered.57



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Even in situations where several local languages w ­ ere in play, the relationship between Latin and the written vernacular was diglossic: that is, distinguished symbolically by difference of prestige and pragmatically by difference of function.58 Latin was the language of education, canon law, Church administration, learned rec­ord, learned argument, and public worship. The vernacular was that of catechesis, preaching, confession, instruction, and counsel. Both ­were used for worship, devotion, sacred entertainment, and the circulation of information, ­whether ethical, historical, scientific, ­legal, or utilitarian. Both ­were encountered in some proportion by nearly every­one. ­There ­were continual exceptions to all ­these generalizations. ­There ­were also periods of trilingualism and more, when written French and En­glish shared the duties assigned the vernacular, as in some areas did Norse, Welsh, and Cornish.59 At certain critical periods, the vernacular took on further functions, as a vehicle for scholarship, rumination on social, po­liti­cal, and ecclesiastical m ­ atters, clerical satire or polemic, synodalia, and theological exposition. Construing this general scene, we might situate the religious vernacular in literary and religious history in vari­ous ways, perhaps indeed wondering how far the relationship between vernacular and Latin differed from the relationship between learned and nonlearned registers of con­temporary En­glish. But the importance of the religious vernacular could hardly be in doubt. Remarkably, however, the medieval institutional Church, narrowly identified with the papacy and monastic ­orders, has also historically been identified with its putatively almost exclusive use of Latin, sometimes with appreciation, often not, while the medieval vernacular has been taken as a witness e­ ither to the vigorous secularity of popu­lar and aristocratic culture or to the heroic re­sis­tance of disenfranchised dissidents in the face of a restrictive and censorious Church.60 What is more, while the last de­cades have brought impor­tant changes to the study of the era, most of them for the better, strong traces of ­these distortions remain, not least ­because they are still established in con­temporary culture at large, as they also are, to an extent, in related disciplines. In a ­whole range of contexts, indeed, the old fantasy that the medieval Church was sharply divided between an elitist Latin-­speaking clerisy and a spiritually ignorant and illiterate vernacular populace is still integral to the myth of the Dark Ages, that entertaining but self-­serving and occasionally lethal projection of the post-­ Enlightenment cultural imaginary. A strong impulse literary scholars inherit from their own part of this deep background is the desire to isolate the historical moments at which vernacular lit­er­a­tures may be ­imagined as becoming culturally freestanding: sufficiently in­de­pen­dent from Latin to be worthy of focused attention, e­ ither in their own

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right or as part of an emergent literary canon. The need that this disciplinary impulse engenders, to distinguish what is truly singular from the ­great mass of what is not, helps account for the curious freedom long given scholars of medieval writing to belittle the texts they study. Especially with re­spect to vernacular lit­er­a­tures, it is medievalists above all who have sustained the impression that much of what survives from their era is turgidly dull. Yet if we are to reconstruct the roles played by the ­whole corpus of early En­glish and insular French religious writing, we must learn to suspend our ingrained disciplinary preference for viewing vernacular lit­er­a­tures over against Latin, and look as hard at the works for whom unoriginality is a princi­ple as we do at ­those that set out to be innovative. First and foremost, we must learn to read a significant majority of vernacular writings within the limiting, if also capacious, framework of the pedagogical and pastoral mission of the Latin Church. The medieval Church was an “universal” entity that aspired to be locally ubiquitous, in cathedrals, monasteries, parishes, and ­house­holds, notionally for the sole purpose of leading as many of its baptized members as pos­si­ble to the goal and end of ­human life, eternal happiness. It understood teaching, spiritual encouragement, and moral correction as vital to this mandate, not least ­because knowledge, devotion of heart, and holiness ­were necessary to worship, the activity for which humankind (like their angelic forebears and helpers) had first been created, and which, begun in the world, was to be fi­nally consummated only in eternity. In teaching and worship, it used many media, including ­those books of the unlettered, sacred images, and the fluid mixture of word, voice, and ­music, movement and gesture, light and shadow, garment and implement, incense, bread, wine, oil, ­water, and salt that is ordo, the liturgy.61 It affirmed its divine mandate as the sole earthly mediator of grace, and that of the sacraments as vehicles of that grace. Through much of the era, the vernacular was crucial to this system not ­because it had the high symbolic status it assumed in the Protestant Reformation but for the very reason that it did not. From the vari­ous official perspectives of the institutional Church, its role was for the most part utilitarian. In theory, vernacular religious texts in the pastoral mode exist to urge members of given speech communities, closely bounded in time and space, ­toward eternal felicity. Their awareness of the literary not surprisingly tends to stress the immediacy of voice, occasion, and purpose more than the promise of wide or lasting influence held out by their existence as texts. Despite its symbolically subordinate status, however, the vernacular was in constant use, in a relationship not of dependence on but interdependence with



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Latin. To adapt the terminology of translation theory: in a missionary Church, conscious of its evangelical mandate, Latin was the stable source language, the vernacular the mobile target language of most religious teaching.62 If theology, canon law, and Church administration sought to secure the eternal destiny of the ship of the Church in princi­ple, vernacular texts steered its members ­toward that destiny at the local level, that is, everywhere. Like the “flæsc” and the “mennisce mode” in Alfred’s Hierdeboc, Latin and vernacular existed, both ideologically and often in practice, in a state of mutual need. §§§ However, if we think of the medieval religious vernacular only by way of its declarations of pastoral utility, we not only risk missing a good deal of what makes individual texts and genres par­tic­u­lar, even ­those that insist eloquently that they are not. We risk setting aside much of what the field offers the study of medieval textual culture. For however often vernacular texts pre­sent themselves as vessels of teachings whose authoritative formulation resides elsewhere, usually in Latin, the written vernacular is much too complicated a construct to answer to any single account of its functions. Hence the third general premise that undergirds this study: that the religious vernacular made not only a continuous and central but also a distinctive contribution to the archive of Christian belief in general, and the medieval part of that archive in par­tic­u­lar. This premise is grounded in several overlapping features of vernacular texts. A first is the degree of in­de­pen­dence from Latin maintained by the literary forms and traditions within which ­these texts ­were written, as they negotiated their relationships with learned culture throughout the centuries: the alliterative long line for En­glish, the short, rhymed couplet for French, and so on. A second is the character of the social relationships that lie ­behind ­these texts: including both ­those between clerical writers and privileged secular patrons and ­those ­these same writers enjoyed with the wider lay communities within or adjacent to which they lived, as members of the same polity, subject to the same exigencies, and ­under the rule of the same governors. A third concerns the conceptual and imaginative opportunities offered by vernacular languages whose subordination to the language of learning, Latin, had latent theological resonances. In a series of En­glish and French writings from the eighth ­century down to the fifteenth, many of them poems, theological exploration can take place through linguistic exploration itself, as the proclivities of any written language still in close connection with speech to move associatively more than logically, ­favor parataxis over hypotaxis, and make meaning through juxtaposition and

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figuration, rather than argument and abstraction, yield truths that formal expositions of doctrine seemingly cannot. It is as though the vulgar tongue ­were being made into a vehicle of revelation in its own right.63 To focus on the several ways in which the vernacular is distinctive, a medium of religious discourse whose valences are not wholly subsumed by its relationship with Latin, is to view it not as the target language of a proj­ect of pastoral translation but as a meeting place between Christian thought and the predominantly secular cultures, communities, and individuals with which it engages. If vernacular religious texts speak to the lay majority of medieval Christians, that is, in certain cases they can also stake a claim to speak for them, to varying degrees and in varying ways. If the vernacular is a receptor of teachings whose guarantors are texts written or circulating in Latin, it is also the site of a dialogue in which the demands of the faith are not so much set forth as negotiated, and in which even the most stringent theologies and moral systems may have to do business with real-­world concerns. Many standard pastoral genres are well aware that this is so, especially preaching genres; and it becomes vibrantly clear as soon as one turns to the poetic, historical, encyclopedic, and dramatic texts that constitute a significant portion of the archive, despite the fact that ­these, too, are for the most part clerical productions. Vernacular texts occupy no single subject position in relation to Christian discourse as a ­whole. They no more represent popu­lar religious thought than they embody religious re­sis­tance, though in individual cases they may do ­either or both. But even when they originate in large religious institutions, they do often carry out their work at a certain distance from the settings—­monastery, university, episcopal court—in which Latin textual culture was made and sustained. Their distinctiveness, even in relation to the Latin pastoral texts whose object was also secular society, is a pervasive effect of their embeddedness in a range of other settings—­noble court, city, lay ­house­hold, parish, hospital, anchorhold—­and the roles they perform t­ here. ­England’s vernaculars are also distinctive in relation to one another, not least in the shapes of their interactions with Latin. Throughout the era, texts in En­glish and French found means to acknowledge differences of status as well as function between themselves and their learned colleague. Between the seventh and eleventh centuries, En­glish and Irish scholars devoted substantial resources to sustaining something like equivalence between Latin and vernacular by furnishing canonical Latin writings with glosses: a practice that represents the vernacular as a dependent but crucial learned tool, indispensable to the proj­ ect of scholarly study and literate devotion.64 Most of the En­glish poetry written across this period in an alliterative mode designed to represent itself as



General Introduction

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timeless announces itself as indispensable in a wider, societal sense and implicitly treats Latin as an equal. As we begin to see in Chapter One, only in texts written in the late ninth and tenth centuries do we first find the expressions of diffidence that become a feature of vernacular writings in ­later periods. Even ­these first develop in prose texts that understand themselves as official translations of texts of special importance and authority. By contrast, insular French tended to emphasize its difference from Latin, at least during the first phases of its continuous history as a written language, from the turn of the twelfth ­century to the ­middle of the thirteenth, even as it continued to bank on its prestige as romanz, the language of the Romans. This was for the reason that written French was so closely related to Latin that using it implied a more nuanced decision than was faced by a writer of a Germanic language such as Old En­glish. This indeed seems to have been why written French developed sustained textual traditions so late, centuries ­after En­ glish and German, not to mention Irish. The rationales for writing that accumulate in the prologues to French works very often involve an initial address to a noble patron, through whose offices the work subsequently passes to a wider readership. But even in works written in ­England, where the most widely spoken language continued to be En­glish, the accessibility of French compared to its cousin and neighbor, Latin, allowed writers to represent themselves as reaching out to society as a ­whole. ­Later, as French came to function as a simplified alternative to Latin across much of western Eu­rope, its association with accessibility became more marked. Only in ­Middle En­glish texts of the ­fourteenth ­century does French acquire its narrow reputation as the language of the court. As En­glish came to the fore again in the ­fourteenth ­century, gradually displacing French and even representing itself as in competition with that language, it now tended to be viewed as sharply differentiated from Latin, for two reasons: ­because it was more distant from Latin than French, but also ­because it could lay stronger claim to represent the entire En­glish polity than ­either language. It is in late ­Middle En­glish that we thus find both the most direct expressions of linguistic humility and the development of a degree of linguistic aggression. Although this was partly a result of a new tendency across Eu­rope to view the relationship between vernacular and Latin in competitive terms, it was more immediately born out of a sense of cultural belatedness. Like other con­temporary Eu­ro­pean vernaculars, late ­Middle En­glish aspired to a version of the open relationship with Latin previously enjoyed by Old En­glish. In arguing over the Bible translations that ­were a driver of vernacular textual production at this period, fourteenth-­century scholars indeed sometimes

24

General Introduction

referred to the materials written in that language. But as was seldom the case with its Continental peers, the approach to this relationship taken by ­Middle En­glish became vexed in ways appropriate to a period during which the vernacular became, for the first time, an object of sustained suspicion. The notion widespread since the sixteenth ­century and still alive ­today, that vernacular religious writing was never more than tolerated by the medieval institutional Church, derives from texts written on both sides of the ­great debate over the appropriate role of the religious vernacular that took place during this period. ­After the early fifteenth-­century crisis of the written vernacular that occasioned ­these texts, as ­England’s episcopate made increasingly focused attempts to control the delivery of vernacular preaching and teaching, a less agonistic account of the vernacular and its capacities won out, both in the elaborate neoclassical writings of poets in the tradition of Geoffrey Chaucer, especially John Lydgate, and in the newly developed medium of print. The self-consciously Latinate literary En­g lish of the early modern period, often understood as a humanistic import from Continental Eu­rope, was built on fifteenth-­century insular foundations. Yet the agonistic model was not finished. William Tyndale, Simon Fish, John Frith, and other early sixteenth-­century En­glish evangelicals may have derived many of their most impor­tant theological positions from Martin Luther and his German and Swiss colleagues, competitors, and interpreters. But their attitude to the En­glish language, and the par­tic­u­lar uses to which they put it, emerged from their conscious revival of a ­Middle En­glish tradition that episcopal and governmental action in the early fifteenth ­century had partly forced under­ground. §§§ Despite the title chosen for this book and the resonant biblical story that lies ­behind it, the medieval religious vernacular was in practice a ­great deal more than a linguistic beast of burden in the varied contexts in which it found itself in play across the centuries. An essential medium of communication for the Church, it usually carried its master patiently, rarely planting its feet in the face of an angel or chasing off onto paths unknown. Yet even in its simplest expressions, it also played its own roles, separate from ­those of Latin. This is both ­because vernacular texts speak in voices differently accented from Latin ones and ­because any vernacular statement traveled within a dif­fer­ent community and carried dif­fer­ent valences from even its closest Latin equivalents. Unlike its sometimes loudly triumphant Protestant successor, the medieval vernacular



General Introduction

25

often appears to invite us not to value it. To understand anything about this body of writing, we need to receive such assertions of humility, and its inversions, in the right way: as localized expressions of the paradoxical dynamic of power and authority that Chris­tian­ity made its own. Equivalents of the phrase this book sometimes uses to name the religious vernacular, “vernacular theology,” rarely appear in the works it considers. Even where they do references tend to sound the note of impossibility heard in the prologue to The Chastising of God’s ­Children, as this work sets out on its arduous journey through the more troubling zones of the contemplative life: “it passith fer my wit to shewe you in any maner vulgare (vernacular) the termes of divinite (theology).”65 The only related phrase that makes no such apology and is found often in late ­Middle En­glish texts, “word of God in the ­mother tongue,” denotes the Christian scriptures, or arguments based thereon. Vernacular theology is not a properly medieval phrase. Yet its twinning of words that pull in opposite directions—­downward ­toward the embodied, the local, and the social, upward ­toward the abstract, the universal, and the divine—­captures an impor­tant tension that ­will continue to preoccupy the many discussions that follow. The analy­sis must be scrupulous in the re­spect that it shows for both sides of this dynamic opposition.

Chapter 1

The Diglossic Contract

1. Before the Vernacular: Cædmon, Bede, Alfred Maps of the history of western Christian Eu­rope still score thick boundary lines between the medieval era, in which religious thought is supposed to have been the preserve of learned elites, and the eras that flanked it, in which (at least in Protestant historiography) use of the common tongue in teaching and worship is supposed to have made religious truth accessible to all. While it has been challenged with increasing confidence in recent de­cades, the stolid conviction that the vernacular was peripheral to medieval Catholic Chris­tian­ity was crucial to the nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century formation of the tangled cultural heuristic that is the “medieval” itself. Yet although t­ hese boundary lines by now have histories long enough to have influenced the ­actual course of history, we ­shall see they are merely traces of an el­derly, not to say grumpy, hodgepodge of simplifications and misrepresentations—­the troubled scion of religious and nationalist prejudice—­ that still incites us to approach the medieval centuries with dif­fer­ent expectations from ­those brought to bear on what came ­earlier or ­later. ­After all, the concept of the vernacular is itself medieval in origin, taking self-­conscious shape, almost for the first time, in the learned multilingual environment of eighth-­ and ninth-­century Britain, many hundreds of years before the term itself acquired its specifically linguistic meaning (see Appendix, T ­ able 2). The linguistic situation in which Latin Chris­tian­ity found itself from the late sixth ­century on, as it moved into Germanic-­speaking parts of Eu­rope in which its tres linguae sacrae (Hebrew, Greek, and Latin) ­were largely unknown, was challenging.1 It was suddenly necessary to create a Latinate class capable of learning and teaching the mysteries of theology and worship in communities, some of which may not previously have been exposed in depth e­ ither to Christian mono­the­ism, with its universalizing claims, or to writing. It was thus also

30

Before and ­A fter the En­glish Reformation

necessary to develop the translation protocols required to transmit Christian truths to the non-­Latinate; that is, to almost every­one, from the apex of society on down. Near the end of the fifth ­century, the Frankish king Clovodech or Clovis (466–511) sealed his hold over Gaul by converting, not to Arianism, as the Goths and ­others had done, but to the Catholic faith, and began the pro­cess of rebuilding the former province’s badly damaged network of bishoprics and parishes and its prestigious ties with Rome. 2 Clovis’s Merovingian successors ­adopted Latin for official purposes and slowly shifted to local versions of spoken “Vulgar Latin,” as ­these developed into the cluster of descendants of Latin now known as Old Gallo-­Romance.3 The Germanic infiltration of the frontier province of Britannia during the same ­century was of a dif­fer­ent kind, involving ­little absorption of Celtic languages, spoken Latin, or (at least, initially) Chris­tian­ity.4 Christianization began soon, working outward from British communities living in the new Germanic kingdoms or moving eastward from the territories that would come to be called Wales and from recently converted Ireland, or north from Merovingian Francia. By the time of Augustine of Canterbury’s mission to Kent in 597, apparently precipitated by Bertha (Alderberge), Frankish queen of Kent, it was evidently a good deal further advanced than the somewhat prejudiced textual rec­ord is prepared to admit.5 From the perspective of the patrician Gregory the ­Great and his advisers in Rome—­still unsure quite how to go about the conversion of entire p­ eoples, and only distantly familiar with the islands of Britain—­the conversion of ­England must nonetheless have seemed in ­every way a dauntingly difficult prospect.6 Yet what­ever language prob­lems lay ­behind the questions of law and custom discussed in the ­eager letters Gregory and his missionaries passed between Rome and Canterbury over the next few years, as the newly baptized Æthelberht of Kent was promulgating his Law Code, no such prob­lems are allowed to interrupt the account of a nation’s conversion in that triumph of early insular Latinity, Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (ecclesiastical history of the En­glish ­people), written not much more than a ­century ­later (ca. 731).7 Throughout the Historia ecclesiastica, Bede is acutely aware of language ­matters. His book begins by describing Britain as an island in which, “just as the divine law is written in five books ” (the Pentateuch), “one and the same kind of wisdom, namely the knowledge of sublime truth and of true sublimity” is “studied and set forth” in five “languages, the En­glish, British, Irish, Pictish, as well as the Latin” (“iuxta numerum librorum, quibus lex divina scripta



The Diglossic Contract

31

est, quinque gentium linguis, unam eandemque summae veritatis et verae sublimitatis scientiam scrutatur, et confitetur, Anglorum videlicet, Brettonum, Scottorum, Pictorum et Latinorum”). Only Latin, through shared “study of the scriptures,” is “in general use among them all” (“quae meditatione scripturarum ceteris omnibus est facta communis”).8 In one of the work’s central episodes, he also duly notes the multilingualism of the “Synod of Whitby” in 664, which (­under heavy po­liti­cal pressure) resolved the differences between Celtic and Roman Chris­tian­ity in f­ avor of the Roman, and where the presence of royalty (and perhaps some members of the secular clergy) required use of Northumbrian En­glish. He registers gaps in comprehension between Irish and En­glish, as when King Oswald of Northumbria is pictured translating Áedán of Lindisfarne’s sermon to his thegns and ealdormen, since Áedán’s En­glish was dubious (“Anglorum linguam perfecte non noverat”), “always a most beautiful sight” (“pulcherrimo saepe spectaculo”). He is joyful over the election of the first bishop fluent in Greek as well as Latin and Saxonica lingua, Tobias of Rochester (d. 726).9 But in pursuit of his ­great theme, God’s election of the En­glish, he never shows Latin and En­glish as wholly opaque to each other.10 The Gregorian mission is anticipated by a bout of interlingual punning, as the saint notices two fair “Angli” slave boys from the En­glish kingdom of Deira in the Roman market and resolves to convert their ­people into “angeli” rescued “de ira” (from wrath). Briefly derailed by panic, as Augustine and his companions reflect on their fate among a “barbarous, fierce, and unbelieving nation, whose language they would surely not understand” (“Quam barbaram, feram, incredulamque gentem, cuius ne linguam quidem nossent”), the mission sees all its difficulties melt away, as “the language of Britain, which once only knew how to gnash its barbarous teeth,” learns “to sing the praises of God with a Hebrew Alleluia” (“lingua Brittaniae, quae nil aliud noverat quam barbarum frendere, iam dudum in divinis laudibus Hebreum coepit alleluia resonare”). Bede is h ­ ere quoting a proud passage from Gregory’s Moralia in Job.11 In the work’s central scene of translation, set at Whitby during the tenure of Abbess Hild (d. 680), in the monastery that may previously have hosted the synod, the two languages are then at last explic­itly opened up to one another through the inspiration of heaven itself. ­After retreating from the hall, as he always did to avoid participating in the communal ­music making, the herdsman Cædmon finds himself instructed by a being speaking to him in a dream. Told to “sing the origin of created ­things” (“Canta . . . ​principium creaturarum”), he finds his mouth unlocked to proclaim, in inspired En­glish verse, the mysteries of Christian revelation:

32

Before and ­A fter the En­glish Reformation

Nu scylun hergan hefæn-­ricaes uard, metudæs mæcti end his mod-­gidanc uerc uuldur-­fadur, sue he uundra gihuaes, eci dryctin, or astelidæ. He aerist scop aelda barnum heben til hrofe, haleg scepen; tha middun-­geard mon-­c ynnæs uard, eci dryctin, æfter tiadæ, firum foldu, frea allmectig (Gen 1:1). (Now we must praise the guardian of the heavenly kingdom, the might of the creator, and the purpose of his mind, the works of the ­Father of glory, when he, the eternal Lord, laid the beginnings of ­every wondrous ­thing. A holy creator, he first fashioned heaven as a roof for the ­children of men; then the guardian of humankind, the eternal Lord, almighty ruler, afterward fashioned the habitable world, the earth for men.)12 Having received this gift of singing through direct divine aid (“sed divinitus adiutus gratis canendi donum accepit”), and immediately beginning to add verses of his own to ­those given from heaven, Cædmon reports the situation to his abbess and her clergy. He then continues to make “devout and religious songs” (“carmina religioni et pietati”) of soul-­piercing sweetness (“maxima suavitate et conpunctione”), from any portion of the Bible ­those learned in Latin can translate for him (“quicquid ex divinis litteris per interpretes disceret”).13 The story of “Cædmon’s Hymn” used to be seen as effectively a repetition in the poetic domain of Gregory’s celebrated instruction to his evangelists to carry over certain pagan forms into Christian culture. “The ­temples of the idols among that ­people ­ought not to be destroyed at all, but the idols in them,” Gregory urgently wrote to his emissary Mellitus in 601, canceling an ­earlier instruction to the opposite effect, and perhaps inaugurating a new direction in Christian missionary policy in the pro­cess.14 The song’s opening, “Nu scylun hergan,” which one could render “from now on we must praise,” might indeed suggest the “now” not only of revelation but of transition or displacement, as the poet instals a new Christian subject ­matter into an aesthetic order whose associations w ­ ere formerly pagan, beginning with Genesis. ­W hether or not such a reading of the scene (set in a monastery long a­ fter the conversion) is plausible, however, Bede’s emphasis falls elsewhere: on how Cædmon, now a monk, develops his gift with the assistance of Hild’s Latinate clerics, as they furnish him with the biblical ­matter of his ­later songs, said to



The Diglossic Contract

33

cover the ­whole of sacred history, from Creation to Judgment. ­After ruminating on this material, “like a clean animal chewing the cud” (“quasi mundum animal ruminando”), Cædmon turns his teachers into auditors, as they become the first of many drawn from vice and incited to virtue by his sonorous per­for­ mances.15 For Bede, this is a story about a successful collaboration between Latin and En­glish ­under God and enlightened monastic rule. §§§ In surviving eighth-­century sources, this collaboration is often lived, rather than written. However carefully Hild’s clerics listen to Cædmon, the passage nowhere implies that they rec­ord his words.16 Bede emphasizes his re­spect for En­glish verse by acknowledging that he has been unable to render the verse into Latin “without loss to its beauty and dignity” (“sine detrimento sui decoris ac dignitatis”).17 But he chose to omit the En­glish poem from his written account, perhaps ­because he meant the work to circulate internationally or ­because he assumed the mode of En­glish verse to be oral. In many copies of the Latin Historia ecclesiastica down to the twelfth ­century, the verse has been added in the margins only ­later, and with a degree of variance that has been taken to suggest the per­sis­tence of oral habits of thinking on the part of scribes.18 Other evidence for the early use of freestanding written En­glish can be similarly elusive. Writing to his old pupil Ecgbert, archbishop of York, in 734, and affirming that t­ hose “idiotas” “who are acquainted with no language but their own” (“eos qui propriæ tantum linguæ notitiam habent”) should recite the Lord’s Prayer and Creed in this language, ­whether they be laypeople or even clerics and monks, Bede notes that he has often translated both ­these texts into En­ glish for unlearned priests (“Propter quod et ipse multis sæpe sacerdotibus idiotis hæc utraque, et Symbolum videlicet, et Dominicam orationem in linguam Anglorum translatam obtuli”). But he rec­ords none of ­these translations, leaving it unclear ­whether his teaching was oral or written.19 Some years ­later, in 747, the second En­glish Church council of Clovesho institutionalized a practice indebted to Bede and to his con­temporary Boniface (Winfrid), the En­glish evangelist to the Germans (d. 754), encouraging priests to use “their own language” in teaching “the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer and the sacred words used in celebrating mass and solemnly said in the office of baptism to ­those who do not know them” (“ut Symbolum fidei ac Dominicam orationem, sed et sacrosancta quoque verba quæ in missæ celebratione, et officio baptismi solenniter dicuntur, interpretari atque exponere posse propria lingua qui nesciant, discant”).20 In light of the council’s emphasis on teaching and practice,

34

Before and A ­ fter the En­glish Reformation

this passage could be read as calling for the production of En­glish books similar to the Latin baptismal handbooks ­later produced by the Carolingian Church.21 Yet the decrees of the council are ­silent about ­whether this program took documentary form. Surviving seventh- and eighth-century English works include the Old English glosses in the Épinal-Erfurt Glossary (ca. 700) and the Leiden Glossary (ca. 800), among others. Besides showing that early medieval insular intellectuals ­were far from thinking of En­glish as inherently resistant to textualization, ­these glosses offer crucial evidence of the scholarly use of En­glish in the study of Latin, the care over En­glish orthography this necessitated, and the close relationship between En­glish scholarship and Irish, where interlingual glossing also played a crucial part.22 Although consensus on their dating remains a distant prospect, eighth-­ century works in En­glish also include a number of further poems. Among ­these may be Beowulf, whose single surviving manuscript dates from l­ater in the tenth ­century but whose language could be a good deal older. The poem has been speculatively read in relation to Boniface’s mission to parts of Germany, and to the complex attitudes to German pre-­Christian religion this mission might have evoked.23 Another may be an evocative passage inscribed in runes on the side of the Ruthwell Cross in Dumfries, perhaps taken from a longer poem, the “Dream of the Rood.” Surrounded by reliefs of Christ, “iudex aequitatis” (the judge of righ­teousness), the passage speaks to passersby literate in Latin and runic En­glish of the sufferings of Christ and the cross itself, while reminding all who see it of the po­liti­cal dominance of the En­glish over most of the ­peoples of Britain.24 A third poem survives in the symbolically oral context of a letter. This is the widely circulated letter that Cuthbert, ­f uture abbot of Jarrow, wrote to a certain Cuthwin (perhaps one of Boniface’s companions in Germany) describing the saintly death of Bede in 735. Cuthbert quotes the penitential verses the scholar is said to have sung “in our language” (“nostra . . . ​lingua”), as one “learned in our songs” (“doctis in nostris carminibus”), during the course of his final illness: For tham ned-­fere næni wyrtheth thances snotera, thonne him thearf sy to ge-­hicgenne, ær his heonen-­gange, hwæt his gaste godes oththe yfeles æfter deathe heonon demed weorthe.



The Diglossic Contract

35

(Before the compulsory journey, before his departure from ­here, no one becomes wiser of thought than when it is necessary to consider what of good or evil in their soul ­will be judged henceforth a­ fter death.)25 Of Bede’s famous deathbed translation of John’s Gospel “in nostram linguam” also mentioned by Cuthbert—­which perhaps took the form of an interlinear gloss, made for pupils he could now no longer teach in person, and is said to have ended aptly with the words “sed haec quid sunt inter tantos?” (John 6:9, “but what are ­these among so many”)—no identifiable trace remains.26 A small but impor­tant cluster of Old En­glish texts and inscriptions in prose dates from between the mid-­eighth and the mid-­ninth centuries. At one end of the scale, ­these include the interlinear Psalter gloss in the Vespasian Psalter from Canterbury, the earliest surviving biblical prose in En­glish; a group of vernacular charters, mostly from the early to mid-­ninth ­century, from Canterbury, Worcester, and elsewhere; and the widely circulated collection of more than two hundred brief saints’ lives, perhaps also from the early to mid-­ninth ­century, the Old En­glish Martyrology, from somewhere in Mercia.27 At the other, they include an Old En­glish exhortation to prayer at the beginning of the early ninth-­century Latin private prayer book the Book of Cerne, and the note added to the Stockholm Codex Aureus, an eighth-­century Latin copy of the Gospels. This note describes the book’s expensive redemption from Viking armies by “Ælfred aldorman ond Werburg min gefera” (earl Alfred and my wife Werburg) and subsequent donation to Canterbury for safekeeping.28 As the survival of a ­later ninth-­century Mercian adaptation of the Historia ecclesiastica, The Old En­ glish Bede, also forcibly suggest, t­ hese varied and confident uses of written En­glish prose must be tips of lost icebergs. Whole bodies of vernacular lit­er­a­ture from Mercia during the de­cades ­after its consolidation by King Offa (d. 796), as well as from East Anglia and elsewhere, have no doubt vanished or survive only as unidentifiable fragments.29 The first integrated body of En­glish writing we know of, a set of prose works inaugurated by King Alfred of Wessex, was begun no ­earlier than the last de­cades of this ­century and is once again related to the crises caused by the Viking invasions. ­These invasions are vividly described in the coordinated group of En­glish texts known as the Anglo-­Saxon Chronicle, perhaps begun during his reign. In Alfred’s preface to his prose translation of Gregory’s Regula pastoralis, the Hierdeboc, the period of Bede, Boniface, and Alcuin is re­created as a golden age of Latinity, when the diligent learning of scholars made written translation into En­glish unnecessary.30

36

Before and A ­ fter the En­glish Reformation

Conversely, the in­de­pen­dent use of written En­glish is represented as an innovation, arising out of the need to rebuild Christian culture, a­ fter the mix of catastrophic destructiveness and mere negligence that has characterized En­glish culture during the previous hundred years: Tha ic tha this eall ge-­munde tha ge-­munde ic eac hu ic ge-­seah, ær thæm the hit eall forhergod wære ond forbærned, hu tha ciricean giond eall Angelcynn stodon mathma ond boca ge-­fyldæ, ond eac micel menigeo Godes thiowa. Ond tha swithe lytle fiorme thara boca wiston, for thæm the hie hiora nan wuht ongiotan ne meahton, for thæm the hie næron on hiora agen ge-­thiode awritene. Swelce hie cwæden: “Ure ieldran, tha the thas stowa ær hioldon, hie lufodon wisdom, ond thurh thone hie begeaton welan ond us læfdon. Her mon mæg giet ge-­sion hiora swæth, ac we him ne cunnon æfter spyrigean, ond for thæm we habbath nu ægther forlæten ge thone welan ge thone wisdom, for thæm the we noldon to thæm spore mid ure mode onlutan.” (When I considered all this, I also recalled how I saw, before all had been ravaged and burnt, how the churches across all of ­England stood filled with trea­sures and books, and ­there ­were also large numbers of God’s servants. But they knew very ­little about ­those books, ­because they could not understand any of their contents, since they ­were not written in their own language. It is as though they said: “Our pre­de­ ces­sors, who once held ­these places, loved wisdom, and through it they gathered wealth and passed it on it to us. In this we can still see their tracks, but we cannot follow them, and so we have lost both the wealth and the wisdom, since we would not follow their traces with our minds.”)31 This destruction was itself divine punishment for the failure of the learned to follow their pre­de­ces­sors in teaching wisdom to ­others, as Regula pastoralis, written by ­England’s spiritual patron, commands. Even before the Vikings burnt ­England’s churches, the trea­sures and books that filled them are said to have sat idle, as the En­glish grew “reccelease,” their learning decayed, ­earlier hopes for a truly Latinate En­glish clerisy already dashed. Alfred thus invokes the topos of translatio studii, as he declares the Hierdeboc’s inauguration of a wider program to “translate certain books which are most necessary for all ­people to know into the language that all of us can understand” (“tha the niedbethearfosta sien eallum monnum to wiotonne, thæt we tha on thæt ge-­thiode wenden



The Diglossic Contract

37

the we ealle ge-­cnawan mægen”). On the model of the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, Jerome’s Vulgate translation of the Christian Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin, and unspecified translations into the languages of “other Christian ­peoples” (“othræ Cristnæ thioda”), he thus offers the work for attentive study by any youthful En­glish freemen (“Angelcynne friora monna”) whose position in Church or society requires them.32 As it shoulders the burden of textuality signified by prose—­quietly omitting to mention ­either Bede’s lost translations and investment in En­glish as a language of preaching or written vernacular traditions now lost to us, in a bid to create its own dynasty-­building myth of origins—­this preface invokes the mix of humility and confidence found in many prologues over the following centuries, which affirm participation in universal Latin culture even as they address the par­tic­u­lar local situations that cause them to be. Despite its status as inspired ruminations on sacred stories derived from Latin, Cædmon’s poetry issues from a dif­fer­ent, possibly older, locus of learned authority: that of the generalized snottor (wise man) invoked in Bede’s verses.33 Influenced by the Carolingian ideal of spiritual kingship, Alfred’s preface emphasizes the foresight of his own royal rule, as he announces the dispersal of copies of the Hierdeboc around the kingdom, with further books to follow.34 Alfredian prose is nonetheless ­here characterized by its willingness to represent itself as a medium of prestigious Latin learning, rather than stake any claim to in­de­pen­dent intellectual or cultural authority. For all its regal tone, it remains tinged with the awkwardness of its status as a concession to the failures of the pre­sent: the same failures that En­glish clerics of the past are said to have tried to avoid by writing solely in Latin. Early En­glish texts and assumptions about textuality ­were influential at least down to the twelfth ­century, and in the case of the snottor figure arguably much ­later.35 So far as the l­imited sense in which this book uses the word, however, and so far as the surviving rec­ord is concerned, it is only with the prose tradition announced and inaugurated by Alfred that written En­glish self-­ consciously takes on its distinctive ­later role as what would come to be called “vernacular.”

2. Vernacula Lingua: The Genealogy of a Term The Latin adjective vernaculus/-­aris (from the noun verna, a slave or indigene) is classical in origin and originally designated what­ever pertains ­either to the ­house­hold and its slaves or to the local, intimate, popu­lar, or natu­ral.36 Before

38

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the fifteenth ­century, the term did not directly refer to language. In his monastic Institutiones (ca. 420), John Cassian writes of the spirit of purity as “vernacular” to heaven (“caelique vernaculam”).37 Alcuin, the Northumbrian pupil of Ecgbert of York, who became Charlemagne’s intellectual adviser in the early 780s, call himself modestly “vernaculus sanctae Dei ecclesiae,” a servant of God’s holy Church.38 In ­later centuries, the word came to be used to allude to local customs, to properties that ­were held ­free of any overlord, to vari­ous kinds of ecclesiastical dependencies, and to the serfs working on a specific estate.39 Early medieval Latin references to the linguistic vernacular use a fluid set of terms that perhaps indicate a parallel fluidity of perceptions about linguistic relationships. Many of ­these terms are classical in origin: from the generic lingua propria and lingua sua, to the localizing lingua nativa, lingua paterna, and lingua barbara (each of which has its own resonances), and the more hierarchic lingua rustica and lingua vulgaris. A famous synodal canon from Tours for the year 813 instructs preachers to deliver their sermons, not in Latin, but “in rusticam Romanam linguam aut Thiotiscam” (in the local Romance or German language) where rusticam also means regional and dialectal. From the early twelfth ­century on, ­these terms begin to be augmented by an impor­tant new phrase, materna lingua. This phrase was conceivably first introduced by the classicizing poets of the Loire school as a self-­conscious term of art inspired by a line in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. By this time, lingua vulgaris has also begun to increase in popularity.40 In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, insular French ­adopted several versions of the second of ­these newer terms as langage vulgare, vulgar commun, and commun langage.41 By the late f­ourteenth c­ entury, M ­ iddle En­glish had borrowed all ­these as vulgare tunge, commune tonge, commune langage, and so on. It may have borrowed barbare tunge and modir tunge, not yet attested in insular French, directly from Latin. Insular French also made use of pateis (obscurely derived from patoier, to paw), frequent early use of romain/romanz (from Roman), and growing use of Franceis, the first used to indicate difference from Latin, the second from other Romance vernaculars. Despite using folcisc (popu­lar, of the ­people) to translate vulgo, Old En­glish offers few parallels, generally referring to itself simply as Englisc/Anglicus—­a term for the language that began to solidify in the ninth c­ entury—­even in contexts where the Latin term is vulgaris.42 Although they are sometimes used interchangeably, ­these varied terms connote dif­fer­ent features of non-­Latin languages: their localism, their unlearned character, their identification with par­tic­u­lar nations or ­peoples, and the fact they are spoken from infancy. But their meanings are tight-­k nit enough that



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39

they seemingly crossed over together into the word vernaculus, once its linguistic sense came to the fore during the mid-­fifteenth ­century. Working outward from excited humanist discussion of newly discovered uses of the phrases “sermo vernaculus” and “sapore vernaculo” by Cicero (d. 43 b.c.e.) as well as “vernaculis verbis” by Varro (d. 27 b.c.e.), Lorenzo Valla’s Elegantiae linguae Latinae (polite idioms of the Latin language), offers vernacula lingua as an equivalent to lingua materna, noting the phrase’s links to ­house­hold and homeland. Written in 1449, the Elegantiae was frequently printed from the early 1470s on.43 Over the next fifty years, as self-­consciousness about the status of dif­fer­ent national languages became ever more acute, the stylish new term was taken up by intellectuals throughout western Eu­rope. By the early 1500s, vernaculus was already used in ­England as a synonym for vulgaris, making two sinister early appearances in the rec­ords of the Coventry heresy ­trials as early as 1511.44 Its En­glish equivalent, “vernacular,” is recorded in the 1600s, although its rise to eminence and adoption as a noun took place only in the nineteenth ­century, in association with the philological research engendered by Romantic nationalism and Eu­ro­pean imperialism.45 The humanist researches that led to the adoption of vernacula lingua ­were a product of long engagement with linguistic history and theory on the part of Italian thinkers. A famous early product of this engagement is Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia (on vernacular eloquence), written around 1303, as the poet was contemplating his Commedia, during a time of intensive Florentine interest in the vernacularization (volgarizzamento) of learning, soon a­ fter the Romance languages of the Italian peninsula began their relatively belated literary ­careers.46 In his unfinished treatise, Dante argues for the superiority of what the Inferno calls the “lingua che chiami mamma o babbo” (the tongue that cries “­mummy” or “­daddy”) over Latin, which he terms an artificial language, in­ven­ted by clerics in practical response to the linguistic calamity that took place a­ fter the divine destruction of Nimrod’s Tower of Babel (Gen. 10:8–10, 11:1–9).47 Yet the need for a deliberative attitude to language in general and vernacular textuality in par­tic­u­lar had for centuries been apparent to intellectuals working with a wide range of dif­fer­ent languages further north. ­Here, from as early as the eighth ­century on, Celtic, Germanic, and eventually Romance languages began to enter their versions of what we may term the “diglossic contract” with Latin summarized in Alfred’s prologue to the Hierdeboc. Even as poets and ­others working in all ­these languages took care to preserve their separateness in certain discursive fields, in other areas, one by one, all eventually came to accept a symbolically subordinated status as the necessary price of their full textualization.48

40

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§§§ This implied contract took dif­fer­ent forms as languages and language relations changed across the centuries. Less than a hundred years ­after the De vulgari eloquentia, it was already showing the first slow signs of its eventual breakdown, as Eu­ro­pean languages, beginning with French, started to represent themselves as capable of equivalence with Latin. They also started to engage in literary rivalry with one another, and to argue, as this became controversial more or less for the first time, that they could serve as suitable vehicles of God’s word. Even now the term “vernacular” can have strong emotional resonances, initially indebted to nineteenth-­century Romantic nationalism, but more distantly to the term’s early associations with the intimate and native, and to its En­glish use as a symbol of national and religious identity between the ­fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Like “­mother tongue,” “vulgar tongue,” and “common tongue,” the term “vernacular” in its linguistic and other senses is inherently relational, designating not a language as such but the demotic half of a partnership.49 Yet despite its lingering association with the multiplication of tongues at Babel, the word still carries, coiled inside, the memory and hope of two unities: the vanished unity of the first native land, Eden, where Dante tells us the vernacular was created, as Adam opened his mouth for the first time to name God, El or I;50 and the hoped-­for unity of the last days, when God pours out his spirit on all flesh, shattering the crumbling structures of worldly power and destroying the institutions that hold the diglossic contract in place (Joel 2:28). In some English texts from the late Middle Ages and in postreformation texts where the influence of medieval England still lingers, the neoclassical valences of the term first devised by Italian humanists are darkly overshadowed by prophesy. Although the potency of ­these eschatological echoes call for extreme caution, the imbrication of sacred time in the word “vernacular” is of the deepest interest for a study such as this. Yet the complexity of the language situation around which Christian historiographic thought moves is already in play at the scene of Pentecost, the earliest episode of the sacred narrative through which the Church understands itself, ten days ­after Christ’s Ascension makes room for the coming of the Spirit (Acts 2:1–41; see also John 14:15–19). H ­ ere, as medieval commentators liked to point out, the confusion of tongues imposed at Babel was reversed, allowing the apostles to preach the Gospel to listeners from dif­fer­ent speech communities, each hearing their own birth language.51 The South En­glish Legendary, a composite thirteenth-­century collection of saints’ lives and Bible readings for feast days throughout the year, describes the



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episode vividly, in a passage perhaps partly written for use in church to supplement the prescribed reading of the Latin lesson: At undern (third hour) on Witsonday, as the aposteles stoden and sete (waited and sat) In the ­temple and cried to God, it gan (began) to thundere grete (loudly). In a wind among hem (them) come (came) gret fir withoute hete. The ­temple was ful of fir and wind, that folk drade wol grette (­were greatly afraid). The Holy Gost into the apostelis went in forme of that light. Wol boldeliche (very boldly) they wente forth and prechede of Goddes might. Ful they ­were of the Holy Gost; they spoke eche maner speche (kind of language), And ­every tunge that in erthe was, as the Holy Gost gan hem teche (taught them).52 The list of languages that follows in The South En­glish Legendary’s source, Acts 2, are ­those of the Jewish diaspora: the languages “of Parthi, Medy ande Elamite, and of hem that dwellen in Mesapotonie, in tho Jury ( Judea) ande in Capodoche, Pounty ande Assien (Asia), in Frige (Phrygia) and Pamphile, Egipte, and in tho parties of Libee tho whiche es about Cyrinence” (Cyrene), among ­others.53 Yet as Tertullian (d. 220) noted as early as the turn of the third ­century, the episode also looks forward prophetically to the Church’s hybrid ­f uture, both inside and outside the multilingual patchwork of the Roman Empire.54 As such, it has long been taken to justify the use of more than one language of teaching and worship within the earliest Christian communities—­Greek, Syriac, Latin, Coptic, Ethiopic—­and their supplementation by Gothic, Irish, Slavonic, and more. Augustine, followed by Bede, notices that the episode affirms “the unity of the Church amidst the languages of all ­peoples . . . ​spread throughout the world.”55 For the homilist Ælfric, writing a c­ entury a­ fter Alfred’s death in 899, Pentecost is also a symbol of unity amid diversity, a glorious fulfillment of Christ’s departing promise and an eternal reproof to the hunter Nimrod and his team of ­giant master builders: “Nu eft on thisum dæge thurh thæs Halgan Gastesf tocyme wurdon ealle gereord ge-­anlæhte and ge-­thwære” (now again on this day, through the advent of the Holy Ghost, all languages became united and concordant). “God cwæth thurh thæs witegan muth, thæt he wolde his Gast

42

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asendan ofer menniscum flæsce” (God said, through the prophet’s mouth, that he would pour forth his Spirit upon ­human flesh), he has Peter add, announcing the moment when God opens his covenant with the Jews to all p­ eoples.56 In such accounts, the Pentecost episode may appear to describe the full triumph of the unitary, eschatological resonance carried by the term “vernacular,” as the gift of tongues cancels out not only barriers between speech communities but any possibility of legitimate linguistic division between learned and lay. “For now we moun se Goddis might: / For we that lewde w ­ ere, // The langage we kan of ­every lond, / and yit we come nevere ­there” (for now we can see God’s power: for we who used to be ignorant know the language of ­every country, although we never visited it) states Peter in The South En­glish Legendary, his last clause implicitly holding out the promise that the Holy Spirit ­will one day alight even on the distant En­glish.57 From the fifteenth ­century to the pre­sent, the episode has indeed often been used to argue for the theological necessity of vernacular translation, often with suspicious glances ­toward the intransigence of the medieval Church and of Latin itself: that dead language said to have been obstinately preferred by a millennium of stiff-­necked clerical Balaams. When the Roman Catholic Church embraced the vernacularization of liturgy at the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), more than four hundred years ­later than its Protestant colleagues, St. Peter’s papal successor, John XXIII, described the move as vital to that Church’s quest for a “new Pentecost.”58 But for medieval commentators and their forebears, the full meaning of the episode as it works itself out in the daily life of the Church is more nuanced. In early commentaries, diversity of tongues signifies diversity of charisms, as the Spirit moves through his ­people, alighting in fire not only at the consecration of bishops entrusted with the task of preaching but wherever he ­will (John 3:8).59 In the Glossa ordinaria, especially its expanded versions, diversity of tongues also signifies the dif­fer­ent ways preachers must address religious and secular, rulers, merchants, and peasants, each according to their capacity, as Gregory enjoins in his Regula pastoralis.60 ­These interpretations accommodate the diglossic relationship between vernacular and Latin that both The South En­glish Legendary and Ælfric’s homily in practice assume: the first through its versified interpretation of the episode as an account of the birth of pastoral authority itself; the second through its provision of a range of materials for a range of audiences, despite the ominous truth that “Gif se Halga Gast ne lærth thæs mannes mod withinnan, on idel beoth thæs bydeles word withutan ge-­clypode” (if the Holy Spirit does not instruct the ­human mind within, the preacher’s words ­will be uselessly uttered



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without).61 The role of the vernacular in this configuration of the episode is central. But it is multiple, rather than unitary, pastoral rather than eschatological, mediating salvation in ordinary time to individuals and communities, not announcing itself as a linguistically self-­sufficient vehicle for the transformation of the world. §§§ This was not the only way in which the medieval vernacular understood itself. As we saw in the General Introduction, near the end of the period, moreover, a series of works written during a period of unusual anxiety about vernacular Bible translation in the early 1400s began to assume the mantle of eschatology, identifying the written vernacular with a mode of evangelical proclamation that was no longer easily susceptible to such pastoral nuances. Although it had been a feature of En­glish Chris­tian­ity for centuries, the proper use of the written vernacular in preaching and teaching had become a ­matter for debate, ­under intense pressure from the religious controversies that, in ­England and elsewhere, dominated the period of the Papal Schism. As a result, “in this time of hidouse derknes,” reformers found themselves obliged to exhort “untaught [lay] men, . . . ​pore ­simple and idiotis,” like the apostles, to take up the task of pastoral instruction in the face of a prelacy now viewed as members of the Antichrist, not heirs of the apostles. So, at least, the most categorical of the ­Middle En­glish reformists works of this period, The Lanterne of Light (ca. 1410), as it helps construct the rhetorical platform that enabled ­later Protestant polemic to declare the vernacular not only an essential but a self-­sufficient vehicle for divine truth.62 To argue the importance of the medieval religious vernacular is not to deny the existence of ­these debates over the circulation of specific vernacular texts, nor of occasional suspicion of any unrestricted use of the vernacular in preaching and teaching. The fiercely affirmed view that the medieval institutional Church was straightforwardly opposed to vernacular Bible translations and books of theology has now been wholly discredited by the sheer amount of the Christian biblical writing we know to have been composed, copied, and printed in nearly ­every medieval Eu­ro­pean language.63 Beginning with French, whose earliest Bible versions (based on Old En­glish pre­ce­dent) date from as early as the mid-­t welfth ­century, more or less complete Bible translations ­were in Europe-­wide circulation from the second half of the thirteenth ­century, in a tradition that continued uninterrupted by the religious crises of the late ­fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The first printed Bibles in French and

44

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German date from the first de­cades of the new technology, the 1460s, long before Luther’s Deutschen Bibel of 1522 and 1534.64 In rare instances, always connected to the fear of heresy, bishops or regional synods did attempt to curtail the circulation of such materials, especially among the laity. Although Innocent III’s letter Cum ex iniuncto has been cited in this connection since the fifteenth ­century, much the best-­k nown of ­these instances is the one that motivated the writing of The Lanterne of Light, Archbishop Thomas Arundel’s legislative attempt to prevent the unlicensed circulation of The M ­ iddle En­glish Bible and other Bible translations in his Oxford Constitutions of 1407–9.65 The Constitutions represent a major departure from ­earlier ecclesiastical attitudes to the written vernacular. But although The M ­ iddle En­glish Bible was in fact widely copied and used in fifteenth-­century ­England, it was also a consequential departure, both for literary and religious history and for the historiography of the medieval era itself. Still in effect into the sixteenth ­century—­and sufficiently well known to deter En­glish printers from following their Continental colleagues by including Bible translations among their wares—­the Constitutions has helped keep alive the reputation of the medieval episcopate as antagonistic to the Gospel down to this day. Nor is this argument to minimize the importance of the official shift to the vernacular as the language of scripture and public worship that took place, vehemently if queasily, in the Church of ­England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: from the ­Great Bible of 1539, much of it based on William Tyndale’s translations of 1526–36, to its famous descendant, the 1611 King James Bible; and from the 1549, 1552, 1559, and 1604 versions of the Book of Common Prayer to their long-­lived successor of 1662.66 Given the scale of upheavals in theology, ecclesiology, and their ritual expression represented by ­these books, and the permeation of late medieval religion by vernacular sermons, readings, liturgical aids, and primers, one should not exaggerate the social impact of official vernacularity in itself. Some of the scholarly claims made even recently for the revolutionary effects of early modern vernacular Bible reading and worship are ­little more than modern versions of the polemical claims made during the period itself.67 But the Anglican Church’s decision not only to tolerate but to compel such reading and worship still represents the inauguration of a power­ ful new sociolinguistic formation, the culmination of a pro­cess that began some two hundred years e­ arlier, the seriousness of whose consequences is clear.68 Nonetheless the approach to the medieval history of the religious vernacular taken in what follows still highlights continuity more than change across the divide of the sixteenth-­century reformations. This is not least the case in



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45

relation to the diglossic contract itself, which long survived the official Anglican move to vernacular worship and Bible reading, entering the period of its northern Eu­ro­pean breakdown only during the course of the eigh­teenth ­century. In light of the quantities of Latin writing that poured from its presses, much of it closer in style to the pragmatic Latin of the late ­Middle Ages than the careful elegances of humanist Latin, the Protestant Reformation can even be said to have helped to sustain a key role of medieval Latin by encouraging its use as a medium of scholarship and controversy. The legitimacy of the Church of ­England and its clergy, the higher education provided by universities, the ability to write formal vernacular style: all ­these remained dependent on mastery of Latin. For En­glish and American Christians who repudiated Anglicanism, indeed, the per­sis­tence of Latin in learned and official contexts may have done as much to keep the revolutionary rhe­toric surrounding the vernacular current as its liturgical use by the Roman Catholic Church or association with the imaginary spiritual darkness of the ­Middle Ages. Despite the new scholarly role played from the early modern period on by Hebrew and Greek and the neoclassical anti-­scholasticism of Latin humanism—­ despite even the changes wrought incrementally by the printing press—­the relationship between Latin and the En­glish religious vernacular in 1600 in many ways had more in common with ­those that had pertained in 1400, 1200, or 1000 than it did with the one that had grown up in most of Eu­rope by the early 1800s.69

Chapter 2

Anglican Historiography

1. The Elizabethans I: Foxe’s Actes and Monuments The medieval religious vernacular, so this book argues, has not yet been given its proper place in literary or religious history. Despite the continued reading of a small number of texts across the intervening half millennium, and the recovery, over the past two centuries, of very many o­ thers, our understanding of that place and its significance remains seriously insufficient. Yet in itself the disappearance from memory and use of the vast majority of individual vernacular works written across the medieval centuries was inevitable, a natu­ral function of the pro­cesses of change governing all ­human language. So much is made clear in the Paradiso by none other than Adam, as the poet revisits his ­earlier comments on the origins of the vernacular in De vulgari eloquentia (on vernacular eloquence) from the exalted standpoint of the sphere of the fixed stars: La lingua ch’io parlai fu tutta spenta innanzi che a l’ovra inconsummabile fosse la gente di Nembròt attenta: ché nullo effetto mai razïonabile, per lo piacere uman che rinovella seguendo il cielo, sempre fu durabile. Opera naturale è ch’uom favella; ma così o così, natura lascia poi fare a voi secondo che v’abbella. (The language I spoke was entirely dissipated before the time that unfinishable ­labor was attempted by the ­people of Nimrod:



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for never does any product of the reason— thanks to the ­human inclination, which changes following the changing heavens—­last for ever. It is a natu­ral fact that the ­human species speaks; but as to the this or that of it, nature has left how to do it to you, according to what appeals to you.) De vulgari eloquentia identifies Adamic language with Hebrew, a language so sacred it perdures across time. Now we see why this was wrong. Adam’s speech itself became “spenta,” not as a result of the Fall or even ­because of Babel, but ­because it has always been natu­ral to language to be as mutable as the planetary heavens, as leaves on a tree that come and go (“fronda / in ramo, che sen va e altra vene”), or indeed as ­human inclination itself.1 In the same way, texts become exhausted ­unless they prove to have canonical value within a cultural system broader than the one that produced them. Vernacular texts, particularly, even the Paradiso, are local by definition. Despite the preservative effects of literary standardization, the durable medium of parchment, or the less durable but rapidly reproducible medium of printed paper, their intended audience and influence are bounded by ties to a certain place and moment in history. With rare exceptions, the claims they make on posterity are knowingly ­limited. We should not expect to find many vernacular works in use too far beyond their own era. However, an argument for the importance of the medieval religious vernacular is obliged to confront forces more elusive than the purportedly natu­ral ones that Dante’s Adam suggests are the crucial ­factors in the life cycles of individual texts, genres, or textual and religious traditions. Still more than usual when the medieval is invoked, the topic is haunted by the ghosts of early modern and modern history, whose stubborn influence even on con­temporary scholarly disciplines it is a ­matter of elaborate difficulty to exorcize. While the lives that many of ­these ghosts distortedly remember ­will prove to have begun in the last medieval centuries, competing postreformation confessional historiographies and their secular successors in par­tic­u­lar played power­f ul roles in constructing the frames of reference within which many writings in medieval vernacular languages have continued to be viewed. The proj­ect of preserving the textual remains of the prereformation past and recording its history was already in pro­gress before the destructions of the sixteenth ­century ­were well underway, as John Leland, John Bale, and ­others itemized, described, and sometimes sal­vaged books taken in the tens of thousands from monastic libraries, as ­these institutions ­were disbanded in the late

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1530s.2 Like their monastic pre­de­ces­sors who carefully preserved many books long ­after their active life was over, the antiquarii of the early modern period found value in materials for which they had no necessary use, including ­those written in archaic vernacular languages. The cultural debt we owe to t­ hese early modern scholars, and to ­those who took up their work once early En­glish literary and linguistic history became subjects of interest in their own right during the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries, is absolute. But the debt is also profoundly vexed. As we ­shall see in this chapter and the three that follow, all set in the period between the sixteenth ­century and the pre­sent, the story of the transmission of medieval vernacular writing is one not only of preservation but of se­lection, misprision and forgetting, inherited prejudice and occasional suppression, some of whose effects continue down to this day. The story ­matters for the wider proj­ect of this book both ­because it explains a good deal about the specific shape of the surviving vernacular archive and ­because it helps alert us to what is still at stake in its study. §§§ Many of the most influential early modern repre­sen­ta­tions of medieval vernacular religion, so far as northern Eu­rope is concerned, came into being as a result of the absorption of the practical and polemical attention paid the vernacular by evangelical reformers in the early sixteenth ­century, as the idea of the vernacular Bible became conflated with the truths of the Gospel on the one hand, and their dissemination through preaching, Bible study, and communal worship on the other. Nowhere did this conflation take place more powerfully than in ­England. As we saw, ­England was unique among Eu­ro­pean nations in having had formal ­legal restrictions on the circulation of vernacular Bible versions in place since Arundel’s Oxford Constitutions, as well as a rich tradition of defenses of Bible translation dating from the period when this legislation was first enacted.3 In certain of ­these defenses, the vernacular Bible already plays a role as the repository of “Goddis lawe,” which both the tenor of the divine text and the long history of translation from the Septuagint onward show it is the duty of all Christians to study and to teach. “The kinge of hevene wolde that his lawe and his wille ­were cried (publicized) and taught openly to the pepel, and but it ­were taught hem (­unless it be taught to them) opunly on Englische, that they mowen (may) knowen it, ellis it is agens the worship of God,” writes one consciously moderate apologist from the early 1400s in Cambridge Tract 1, perhaps



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the Franciscan friar who also wrote Dives and Pauper, a dialogue on the Ten Commandments widely read in manuscript and print down to the sixteenth ­century.4 “Seint Jerom translatide [the scriptures] out of Ebrew into Latine. . . . ​ And so it was translatid into Spaineshe tunge, Frenche tunge, and Almaine (German). . . . ​Worshipful Bede in his first boke De Gestis Angulorum tellith that Seint Oswold, king of Northehumberlond, axide (asked) of the Scottis an holy bishop, Aidan, to preche to his puple and the kinge of himself interpreted it on Engliche to the puple,” adds another, calling on pre­ce­dents ancient and modern. This is First Seith Bois, written at the same time, alluding to Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica and paraphrasing a Latin treatise De translatione by a Salisbury canon and chancellor of Oxford, Richard Ullerston.5 When William Tyndale’s The Obedience of a Christen Man (1528) set out to justify his own translation of the New Testament, copies of which had been gathered and publicly burned two years ­earlier by Cuthbert Tunstall, bishop of London—­the first clearly verified burning of a vernacular Bible version to have taken place in E ­ ngland—­the work was thus in a position to draw on an established insular tradition of vernacular defenses of Bible translation.6 Moreover, Tyndale could also draw on the rhe­toric of some of ­these defenses in representing the supposed opponents of translation as enemies, not only of En­glish Bibles, but of the Gospel itself: “The sermons which thou readist in the Actes of the Apostles and all that the apostles preached ­were no doute preached in the ­mother tonge. Why then mighte they not be written in the ­mother tonge? As if one of us preach a good sermon, why may it not be written? Sainte Hierom (Jerome) also translated the Bible into his m ­ other tonge. Why maye not we also? They ­will saye it can not be translated into our tonge it is so rude. It is not so rude as they are false liers.”7 Published eight years before Tyndale himself was arrested and strangled, and his body burned at the stake, this protest against episcopal intransigence has been taken as an impor­tant harbinger of the ecclesiastical transformations of the de­cades that followed. Yet Tyndale’s words could equally have been penned in reformist defense of The Middle En­glish Bible in the early 1400s. Tyndale’s execution in 1536, two years before Henry VIII ordered the production of The G ­ reat Bible, partly based on Tyndale’s translations, was described a generation ­later in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments as the most momentous of a series of martyrdoms in defense of the vernacular Bible, from the Waldensians in the twelfth c­ entury, to the Lollards and Hussites in the fifteenth c­ entury, to their many successors from the 1520s onward. For Foxe (1516/17–87), whose first, Latin sketch for his ­great book was written during the reign of Mary, when

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it seemed he might face his own violent death, the seed of the evangelical Church of ­England was thus sown, not by the Ecclesia anglicana itself, its ­actual institutional pre­de­ces­sor, but by the heroes of a venerable, if shadowy, theological countertradition that it was his ­great achievement to bring into permanent British prominence.8 As much a work of devotion as of history, creating for the Protestant ­f uture a new canon of venerated martyr-­saints to replace the discarded Catholic canon, Actes and Monuments is perhaps the single work of British Church history that has been as influential as Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica itself. Indeed, Foxe’s account of the medieval Church’s hostility to the Gospel, especially from his vastly extended second edition of 1570 onward, has had a shaping influence on many areas of En­glish historiography almost down to the pre­sent.9 Like other evangelical Church historians, Foxe accepted both Tertullian’s axiom that, in ­matters of doctrine, “the thinges which be first . . . ​are to be preferred before t­ hose that be latter,” and the belief that the Church has nonetheless coexisted with its fraudulent antagonist since the time of the Pharisees onward: “The true Church of God goeth not lightly alone, but is accompanied with some other Church or Chapel of the devil to deface and maligne the same,” as the preface to the 1570 edition has it.10 Foxe derived this fundamental eschatological princi­ple of Protestant historiography from John Bale’s Image of Both Churches (?1545), as well as from a work whose framing arguments w ­ ere significantly influenced by Bale. This was the Historia ecclesiastica or Magdeburg Centuries, a history of the Church down to 1298, written by Matthias Flacius (Matija Vlačić) and his fellow “Centuriators” between 1559 and 1574, the first work to subdivide history by centuries, one for each of the book’s thirteen weighty tomes.11 Foxe could also have encountered a less absolute version of the same princi­ple in The Lanterne of Lyght, printed in London by Robert Redman in the 1530s, when Foxe was at Oxford.12 The godly historian’s work is thus not merely to lay out the history of the Church as a public institution. It is to discern the true Church as it lies, hidden to every­one but its members, within the false. For “they which require that Gods holy Church should be evident and vis­i­ble to the ­whole world, seeme to define the ­great Synagoge of the world, rather then the true spiritual Church of God,” argued Foxe, echoing a common evangelical conflation of the Catholic Church, and potentially all institutional religions, with Judaism.13 Actes and Monuments hence sets out to depict the pro­g ress of Chris­tian­ity, “from the Aposteles times,” as a slow deterioration from its primitive purity, interrupted at last by the eschatological event of the Protestant Reformation itself, while carefully identifying “the descent (lineage) of the right Church” as it goes.14



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According to Foxe’s schema, the early medieval era represents a time of relatively pure faith and vernacular biblicism, situated between the mythical foundation of the national Church in the first ­century by Joseph of Arimathea and the Romanist seizure of power ­under the despotic Pope Gregory VII a millennium ­later.15 The preface includes “Aelfricus” as the one vernacular writer in its brief list of “godly teachers” whose “diligent industry” was just sufficient to preserve early British Chris­tian­ity “somewhat more tolerably” than Ælfric’s status as a monk might suggest, despite the already “Romish” faith preached by Augustine of Canterbury.16 ­Later, the work makes use Ælfric’s ­actual writings in an account of the history of eucharistic doctrine, drawing on the scholarship of Archbishop Matthew Parker and ­others and alluding directly to both Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies and his pastoral letters.17 Mindful of his royal dedicatee Elizabeth I, however, Foxe reserves his chief interest in the early En­glish vernacular for King Alfred’s supposed translation of “a ­great part of the Latine library,” among them Pope Gregory’s Regula pastoralis, “into En­glish.”18 Even The Old English Gospels, which Foxe and Parker ­were to publish only a year ­later, as The Gospels of the Fower Evangelistes translated in the olde Saxons tyme out of Latin into the vulgare toung of the Saxons (1571), are never ­here mentioned.19 Despite its obligatory criticism of the undue prominence given to Benedictine monasticism in King Edgar’s tenth-­century reform of the En­glish Church, Actes and Monuments by and large continues a tradition of glamorizing early En­glish religion and its emphasis on the vernacular dating back almost to the time of the Conquest itself. From this time of imperfect but sufficiently true belief and practice, the last four centuries of the ­Middle Ages are rudely cut off by the ugly coincidence of the Norman Conquest and the ecclesiastical reforms carried out by Gregory VII in the late eleventh ­century. In the first edition of Actes and Monuments from 1563, t­ hese earthly events are treated as the local consequences of an even more sinister event in the spiritual realm. This is Satan’s unleashing at the turn of the millennium, exactly a thousand years ­after Christ’s death binds him in chains (Rev. 20:1–3): ­ ere nowe beginneth the fresh flouring blud of the Churche to fainte H and strength to defaile. . . . ​­Here nowe cometh in blinde superstition with cloked hypocrisye, armed with rigorous lawes, and cruel murderinge of sainctes. . . . ​­Here the supremacy of Rome raged in his ruffe, which being once established in consciences of men, the power of all other princes Christian did quake and decay. . . . ​Then quenched the clear light of the gospel, the boke of Gods worde obscured in a

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darke tonge, which boke before King Ethelstane caused to be translated from Ebrue into En­glish. Anno. 930. Then shepheardes and watchmen became wicked Wolves, Cristes frendes chaunged into enemies. To be shorte ­here came in the time, that the Revelation speaketh of, whan Sathanas, the old serpent, being tied up for a thousand yere, was losed for a certaine space (Rev. 20:3).20 Both ­here and in ­later editions, from which this passage and its pos­si­ble allusion to the Old En­glish Heptateuch has been removed, the rigors of the era that follow are said to include clerical celibacy, sacramental confession, transubstantiation, and other perversions, besides the reimposition of the “darke tonge,” Latin, and the persecutions of ­those who read the Bible in the vernacular.21 As the preface to the 1570 edition has it, conflating the darkness of Latin with the darkness of error in a manner common in sixteenth-­century evangelical rhe­toric: “Then was the clere sunne shine of Gods word overshadowed with mistes and darknes, appearing like sackcloth to the ­people (Rev. 6:12), which neither could understand that (what) they read, nor yet permitted (­were allowed) to read that (so that) they could understand.”22 A mere remnant of the faithful preserve the truth declared by the Waldensians that “onely the Holy Scripture is to be beleved in ­matters perteining to salvation,” perpetually hounded by Romanists who soon produce their own, spurious martyr to the dev­il’s cause, that papalist and ­enemy of kings, Thomas Becket.23 ­After the Anglo-­Norman era, which coincides with the heyday of the papacy and whose contributions to the medieval vernacular archive go by wholly unmarked, the Gospel at last revives ­under one of Foxe’s heroes, the Oxford theologian and reformer John Wyclif, in an atmosphere of deep ecclesiastical hostility, punctuated by persecutions and burnings. Between 1380 and 1430, Walter Brut, John Badby, William Taylor, Richard Claydon, Sir John Oldcastle, Margery Baxter, and a number of o­ thers all indeed went down to imprisonment or even death.24 In the 1570 and 1583 editions of Actes and Monuments, the new era is introduced with a copy of what is said to be a con­temporary lament at the abuses of the times, The Praier and Complaynte of the Ploughman, printed in 1531 with ancillary materials perhaps by Tyndale, one of several works Foxe uses to stand in for early reformist commitments to the vernacular.25 We also encounter a copy of “the Gospels of Christ in En­glish, with the foure doctours upon the same,” mentioned in Thomas Arundel’s funeral sermon for Richard II’s wife, Anne of Bohemia, as proof of her devotion, with a reflection on “the laudable use of ­those old times receaved to have the scripture and doctours in our vulgare En­glishe



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toung.” Foxe draws ­here on First Seith Bois, printed as early as 1530 and included in its entirety in Foxe’s edition of 1563, where it is interestingly presented as an answer to Tunstall’s charges against Tyndale’s New Testament.26 Foxe’s belief in the official antagonism to “vulgare” En­glish associated with the age of Wyclif emerges both in the comment he adds ­here that “the same Thomas Arundel . . . ​became the most cruel ­enemy that might be againste En­ glishe bookes, and the authors thereof ” and in a subsequent description of Chaucer as “a right Wyclevian . . . ​a lbeit it be done in mirth, and covertly.” Building on a depiction of Chaucer as a Protestant avant la lettre developed by the poet’s sixteenth-­century editors, among ­others, Foxe movingly won­ders how “the Bishops, condemning and abolishing all maner of En­glish bookes and treatises which might bring the ­people to any light of knowledge, did yet authorise the workes of Chaucer to remaine still and to be occupied—­who (no doubt) saw in religion as much, almost, as even we do now, and uttereth in his works no lesse.”27 In all editions from the second of 1570 onward, the age of Wyclif is also associated with the loosing of Satan, which has now been redated to 1327, a millennium ­after Constantine, who was supposedly British and thus an ancestor of the Welsh Tudors, bound him in chains by at last establishing Chris­tian­ity as the official religion of the Roman Empire.28 Drawing on the same body of antifraternal polemic that animates The Canterbury Tales, Foxe links the persecution of Wycliffites with that of the early Church and the errors of ­those hypocrites, the Franciscans and Dominicans, while making an implied case for royal supremacy over the Church. The account of this key period culminates in a full translation of Arundel’s Oxford Constitutions, with its decree “that no man hereafter by his owne authoritye, translate any text of the Scripture into En­glish, or any other tongue by way of a boke, libel, or treatise: and that no man read any such boke, libel, or treatise, now lately set forth in the time of John Wyckleffe, or sithens, or hereafter to be set forth, in parte or in ­whole, privily or appertly (openly) . . . ​ ­until the said translation be allowed by the Ordinary of the place, or (if the case so require) by the Councel provincial.”29 ­Later, t­ here follows Foxe’s celebrated encomium to the Pentecostal power of the printing press, with its brilliantly prejudicial implied identification of manuscript culture itself with the suppression of truth: “Well may this gifte of printing bee resembled to the gifte of tongues . . . ​for that hereby . . . ​k nowledge groweth, judgement increaseth, bookes are dispersed, the Scripture is sene, the doctours be red, stories be opened, times compared, truth decerned, falsehode detected, and with fin­ger pointed.”30 Although the translation’s existence and use is implied, ­there is nowhere any direct reference to The M ­ iddle En­glish Bible itself.31

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As attacks on true believers continue into the sixteenth ­century, and one g­ reat Continental reformer ­after another arises to face persecution and death, the turning point for ­England comes with Tyndale and his marvelous decision, ­under God, to En­glish the Christian scriptures, starting with the New Testament. ­Here we see why Foxe, despite his knowledge of the ­Middle En­glish religious prose tradition, has been so reticent in discussing ­earlier Bible translations directly. For now the idea of a “plaien” Bible in the “­mother tongue” can be represented as something almost new. In what is perhaps the most significant passage in Foxe’s long work, Tyndale is made to muse that: If the Scripture ­were turned into the vulgar speache . . . ​the poore ­people might also reade and see the ­simple plaien worde of God. For first he, wisely casting in his minde, perceived by experience how that it was not pos­si­ble to stablishe the lay ­people in any truth, except the Scripture w ­ ere so plainly layed before their eyes in their ­mother tongue that they might see the pro­cesse, order, and meaning of the texte. . . . ​ Againe, right wel he perceived and considered this onely . . . ​to be the cause of all mischiefe in the Church, that the Scriptures of God ­were hidden from the ­peoples eyes. For so long the abominable doinges and Idolatries mainteined by the Pharisaical Clergye could not be espied. And therfore all their ­labour was . . . ​to kepe it downe so that ­either it shoulde not be read at all, or, if it ­were, they would darken the right sense . . . ​with wresting the Scripture unto their owne purpose.32 Humbly standing firm, like Christ, against a “Pharisaical Clergye” who for four centuries have sought to “darken” the “right sense” of scripture, and with whom he might have understood his personal interests to coincide, Tyndale renews the Gospel itself. The won­der of this transforming moment—­whose embrace of the “plaien” ­mother tongue in the ser­vice of the “poore ­people” unleashes an evangelical power that is strong enough to survive both the vacillations of Henry VIII and the dark machinations of Mary—­obliterates the memories of its pre­ de­ces­sors, including both The Middle English Bible and Tyndale’s key vernacular source, Luther’s Deutschen Bibel.33 ­After spending justly celebrated pages with the Marian martyrs—­including the divines Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley, Thomas Cranmer, and o­ thers, some of them personally known to Foxe—­the last books of Actes and Monuments thus orient themselves firmly ­toward the pre­sent, as Foxe’s dedicatee, Elizabeth, defeats Satan’s most recent attempt to drag the En­glish Church back to the vitiated



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past. Imposing an Anglican reformed theology that represents the victory of truth over error at a national level, Elizabeth also promotes an improved successor to the ­Great Bible, the Bishop’s Bible, acting as a con­temporary Protestant monarch ­ought to do. Bestowing reciprocal honors on Actes and Monuments, Elizabeth ordered copies of the mighty edition of 1570, whose publication her government had heavi­ly subsidized, to be chained beside the Bishop’s Bible in impor­tant places of worship, like a national third testament.34

2. Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries: James, Smith, Burnet, Froude In this way, Foxe became the En­glish Church’s new Eusebius, whose Historia ecclesiastica, written for Elizabeth’s imperial pre­de­ces­sor Constantine, also tells the Church’s story around its martyrs.35 In this way, too, was a richly interested account of early ­England and its Church, in which the long-­oppressed En­glish vernacular plays a fi­nally triumphant role as a signifier of religious orthodoxy and national identity, woven so tightly into a new national history that it survived for centuries in a myriad of forms, religious and secular, among writers and preachers of e­ very shade of reformed churchmanship. Complete and abridged versions of Actes and Monuments itself, aimed at a wide range of readers, ­were energetically reprinted in a variety of formats some sixty times before the end of the nineteenth ­century. The work’s more diffuse influence over the popu­lar and scholarly historical imagination continues to this day.36 Scholars and divines on the Anglican side of the early modern religious divide did not always work within Foxe’s narrative. Even in the sixteenth century, and more clearly in the seventeenth, historians and philologists interested in early medieval ­England studied surviving books and the linguistic and historical information they contained as topics in their own right, not only as evidences of the state of the Ecclesia anglicana before the Gregorian Reform.37 Early book historians such as Thomas James, first curator of the Bodleian Library, went ­behind Foxe’s account of the late medieval centuries to the primary sources, using copies of The ­Middle En­glish Bible in his care to argue that Wyclif was a precursor of Anglican theology, and that the Early Version of the translation might date from the thirteenth ­century.38 The author of the preface to the King James Bible, Miles Smith, also included The ­Middle En­glish Bible (not ­here identified with Wyclif) among his evidences that “to have the Scriptures in the mother-­tongue is not a quaint conceit lately taken up . . . ​but hath

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bene thought upon, and put in practise of old, even from the first times of the conversion of any Nation.”39 Both scholars had read Thomas Cranmer’s preface to the second, 1540 edition of Miles Coverdale’s ­Great Bible, which similarly argues that vernacular Bible reading was an established practice in ­England ­until “not much above one hundreth year ago,” minimizing the gap between the pre­sent and all but the final ­century of the medieval era that Foxe wished to emphasize.40 Less comfortably, they may also have known that the same argument was made a de­cade before Cranmer’s preface by Thomas More, in an attack on the Tyndale New Testament.41 Yet despite a certain tendency to emphasize institutional continuity with the medieval past, influential historians of the Anglican Church continued to retrace the contours of Foxe’s account of the long medieval repression of vernacular Bibles, its heroic translation in the early sixteenth ­century, and the regeneration of a nation that followed. The most impor­tant Church history of the Restoration period, Gilbert Burnet’s History of the Reformation of the Church of E ­ ngland (1679–1714), distances itself from Foxe’s heroizing of Tyndale as it does from Foxe, presumably fearing the association of ­these figures with puritan theology, and almost as anxious about the threat this theology still presented as it is as about the resurgence of Catholicism in Charles II’s court. As the delicate state of the Anglican Church at that time demanded, it also adopts a strikingly positive tone in describing the initial efforts of the episcopate to suppress the translation, presenting the decisive actions taken against Tyndale by Cuthbert Tunstall of London in a sympathetic light, and when pos­si­ble blaming the unkingly dithering of Charles’s II’s ancestor Henry VIII rather than his bishops and ministers.42 Nonetheless the work’s account of the publication of the ­Great Bible ­under Archbishop Cranmer takes as mere common sense Foxe’s theological claim that the Bible in En­glish has an inbuilt capacity to dispel false doctrine and install the truth. It also quietly assumes his claim that it was for this reason that the medieval Church, lost in error, had forbidden its publication: “The Scriptures ­were Translated into the En­glish tongue, and set up in all Churches, and ­every one was admitted to read them, and they alone ­were declared the Rule of Faith. This could not but open the eyes of the Nation, who finding a profound silence in ­these writings about many ­things, and a direct opposition to other ­things that ­were still retained, must needs conclude, even without deep Speculations or nice Disputing, that many ­things that ­were still in the Church had no ground in Scripture, and some of the rest ­were directly contrary to it.”43 Far from causing “deep Speculations or nice Disputing” in the nation, plain Bible translation



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puts an end to such scholastic irritants. Commended by a grateful Parliament, which rewarded Burnet with a bishopric, and reprinted some twenty times before the 1860s, the History of the Reformation offered a trove of original documents and analyses to readers for whom Actes and Monuments had come to seem crude, theologically dubious, or fantastical. But the work’s account of the passing of a perverse old order in which “if any taught their ­Children the Lords Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Apostles Creed in the Vulgar Tongue, that was crime enough to bring them to the Stake,” leaves Foxe’s account of the medieval vernacular securely in place.44 As late as the mid-­nineteenth ­century, even historians who affected indifference to the theological questions at issue in the Protestant Reformation preserved the shape of this account intact. Completed a ­century and a half ­after Burnet, although still dependent on his archival research, J. A. Froude’s influential History of ­England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth (1856– 70) views this event as what he called “the hinge on which all modern history turns,” but now for reasons putatively detached from Christian belief or doctrine.45 Writing ­under the shadow of Edmund Gibbon’s portrayal of the “dark ages” in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and synthesizing Carlyle’s view of history as a rec­ord of heroic individuals and Hegel’s theory of the spirit of the age (Zeitgeist), Froude treats opposition to the ritualism of the ­Middle Ages as an end in itself for sixteenth-­century evangelical reformers.46 In Froude’s essentially agnostic account, the ­battle over Bible translation hence becomes a symptom of the ­great cultural psychomachia that flared up as ­England and much of northern Eu­rope awoke from the Catholic ­Middle Ages. Advocates of the vernacular Bible in turn become embodiments of the spirit of modernity, sloughing off the dead skin of Latinity and rising up to destroy a millennium of cultural stagnation. As the new era began: Then ­rose a common cry for guidance. Books ­were called for—­above all ­things, the ­great book of all, the Bible. . . . ​On one side was wealth, rank, dignity, the weight of authority, the majority of numbers, the prestige of centuries; ­here too ­were the phantom legions of superstition and cowardice; and ­here ­were all the worthier influences so pre-­ eminently En­glish, which lead wise men to shrink from change, and to cling to ­things established, so long as one stone of them remains upon another. This was the army of conservatism. Opposed to it w ­ ere a ­little band of enthusiasts, armed only with truth and fearlessness; “weak t­ hings of the world” (1 Cor. 1:27) about to do b­ attle in God’s name; and it was to be seen ­whether God or the world was the stronger.

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They w ­ ere armed, I say, with the truth. It was that alone which could have given them victory in so unequal a strug­gle. They had returned to the essential fountain of life; they re-­asserted the princi­ple which has lain at the root of all religions, what­ever their name or outward form, which once burnt with divine lustre in that Catholicism which was now to pass away; the fundamental axiom of all real life, that the ser­vice which man owes to God is not the ser­vice of words or magic forms, or ceremonies or opinions; but the ser­vice of holiness, of purity, of obedience to the everlasting laws of duty.47 Redrawing Foxe’s account of the deterioration of the Catholic Church from its primitive greatness, and sublimating his opposition between the medieval Church and the “­simple plaien worde of God” into culturally usable form, Froude recasts evangelical doctrine, meta­phorized out of all specificity, in the guise of a specifically Victorian urgency: “obedience to the everlasting laws of duty.” In this way, Froude did his part to ensure the survival of early modern Protestant national mythography into an increasingly secular age.

Chapter 3

Romantic Philology

1. Medievalism and Nationalism “And now it is all gone—­like an unsubstantial pageant faded,” writes Froude, bidding farewell to what was coming to be called the “­Middle Ages,” in a much-­ loved passage early in the History of E ­ ngland. “Between us and the old En­glish ­there lies a gulf of mystery which the prose of the historian ­will never adequately bridge. They cannot come to us, and our imagination can but feebly penetrate to them. Only among the aisles of the cathedral, only as we gaze upon their ­silent figures sleeping on their tombs, some faint conceptions float before us of what ­these men ­were when they w ­ ere alive.”1 Despite Froude’s belief that the sixteenth ­century inaugurated an era whose energies ­were still unfolding in his lifetime, the plangency with which he ­here reduces the medieval past to its memorialized dead—so dif­fer­ent from Foxe’s sense of immediacy and threat—­ also shows his awareness of a second gulf, between Victorian modernity and the Protestant Reformation itself. Yet when Froude began work on the History of E ­ ngland in the early 1850s, the Victorian explosion of scholarly and popu­lar interest in the period and its vernacular writing was already starting to render this evocation of an unbridgeable distance unexpectedly obsolete. In poetry, fiction, theology, painting, architecture, and opera, as well as in the work of scholars, the ­Middle Ages, far from receding into irrelevance, w ­ ere once again coming exuberantly alive.2 One impetus ­here continued to be Anglican historiography, whose generally Whiggish account of early En­glish history as “one . . . ​course of steady strug­gle against the Papacy and its anti-­national pretensions” (as Charles Kingsley put it, in an extravagant review of the first two volumes of Froude’s History) led to renewed focus on many of the same vernacular texts and writers that Foxe had singled out three hundred years ­earlier.3 During the first half of the nineteenth ­century, much of the corpus of Old En­glish prose, including

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both The Old En­glish Gospels and Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, as well many works attributed to King Alfred, ­were edited or translated, as a tradition of Old En­ glish study that began in the Elizabethan period reached its culmination.4 So, too, within a few more de­cades, ­were many En­glish works attributed to Wyclif, including the Wycliffite Sermon Cycle and The ­Middle En­glish Bible.5 The latter work, now firmly associated with the ­great theologian, was published in a superb four-­volume edition of 1850, meant to give due prominence to a translation that, as its editors, Josiah Forshall and Sir Frederic Madden, argue in their preface, “supplied to the opponents of the papal system the most effectual means of exposing its abuses and errors; and thus laid a deep foundation for the reforms of the sixteenth ­century.”6 In their history of En­glish and insular French Bible translation from Bede on, Forshall and Madden partially confirm the optimistic judgment of Sir Francis Palgrave in 1831, that “we, in ­England, can show such a succession of biblical versions, in metre and in prose, as are not to be equalled amongst any other nation of Eu­rope.”7 But they remove one of Palgrave’s key evidences, Thomas James’s early dating of the Early Version, rightly seeing it as late fourteenth-­century work (which they argue was carried out by Wyclif himself), produced not long before the revised Late Version (which they argue was that of a follower, John Purvey).8 As another ­great editorial proj­ect came to fruition, William Langland’s late fourteenth-­century alliterative masterpiece Piers Plowman, last published by Robert Crowley in 1561, ostensibly as a searing critique of the Catholic Church, ­rose to a place of dignity next to a work once viewed in a similar light, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.9 Famously compared to Ovid, Homer, and Virgil themselves by John Dryden in 1700, Chaucer had long been firmly pulled into the ambit of a secular version of national literary history.10 Piers Plowman remained situated uneasily between the literary and the prophetic. Perhaps more surprisingly, beginning with the verse Prick of Conscience, the spurious and real works of the fourteenth-­century hermit Richard Rolle, whose En­glish Psalter is given respectful attention by Forshall and Madden, ­were added to the canon.11 Such works, edited by prominent men of letters, played a role in the complicated wars over churchmanship, denomination, and religious belief that characterized the period, as they did in the solidification of En­glish studies as a discipline. A parallel impetus was Romantic nationalism, the most impor­tant of the conduits that, as the nineteenth ­century wore on, enabled old eschatological myths about the Church to be reborn as new teleological ones about the nation.12 Like Anglican historiography in its valorization of the primitive Church, Romanticism attributed power­ful force to origins and genealogy. Yet in its search



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for a ground of national identity that was neither religious nor ­legal but rather ethnic and linguistic, it turned to a dif­fer­ent source of the primitive: the vernacular languages and cultures of the ­Middle Ages.13 ­These it preferred to consider through lenses tinted to filter out institutional religion, ­whether by focusing on ­earlier (“pagan”) systems of belief and practice that Chris­tian­ity displaced, or by reading medieval love poetry as a relic of a mysterious alternative religion of desire, or by aligning the history of vernacular languages and lit­er­a­tures alongside ­those of government and nation.14 Also not surprisingly, the rise to dominance of the term “vernacular” as a noun dates from this period, the same period that established the word “medieval” itself.15 For Romantic philologists, the medieval vernacular—­rigorously researched using the methods laid out in Jakob Grimm’s Deutsche Grammatik (1819–40), within the broad framework of the study of Indo-­European recently inaugurated by Sir William Jones, among ­others—­was no longer a symbol of re­sis­ tance to religious repression.16 It was a rich, if cryptic rec­ord, encoded in the deep structure of phonology, morphology, lexis, and syntax, of the early history of a ­people, its homeland, and its spirit, the three pillars of the modern secular state.17 The vernacular was acknowledged as one term of a diglossic system. In Germany, the search for the origins of the Volk, by way of research into the vernacular, was paralleled by a search for the origins of the Reich, through the assemblies of Latin chronicles and archives edited from the 1820s on ­under the title Monumenta germaniae historica. The Monumenta remains our most impor­ tant resource for the study of early medieval Eu­rope in par­tic­u­lar to this day.18 Yet since the history of ­peoples is presumed anterior to that of nations, the vernacular could still be treated as an object of desiring enquiry, a guarantee of authenticity whose symbolic functions retain a strong flavor of the sacred. One result was a recreation of the primitive past in the pre­sent. The luxuriant growth that was Victorian literary medievalism arose from the fertile ground of James Macpherson’s Ossian cycle (1760–65), the Rowley poems of the Bristol-­born teen genius and suicide Thomas Chatterton (ca. 1770), and the ballads gathered together in the Reliques of Ancient En­glish Poetry by Bishop Thomas Percy (1765) or written and collected by Sir Walter Scott in the early 1800s, all attempts to create or re­create early Britain’s vernacular lit­er­a­tures.19 For Scott and other learned poets, it was further fed by the scholarly research of Thomas Warton, whose History of En­glish Poetry from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eigh­teenth ­Century (1774–81) remained the standard literary history of early ­England down to the early twentieth c­ entury.20 A second result was a new body of scholarship on national epics: the Nibelungenlied in Germany; the Chanson de Roland (triumphantly, if also embarrassingly,

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from an En­glish manuscript) in France; the Arthurian cycle, as represented by Malory’s Morte Darthure and the Mabinogion, in ­England and Wales; Beowulf, initially, in Denmark.21 Purportedly oral in origin, newly promoted to their high estate, and devoured by Eu­ro­pean, American, and other readers ­eager to hear echoes of the uneasy loyalties and conflicting emotions that swirled around the proj­ect of global imperialism, ­these works ­were treated as distillations of the au­then­tic qualities of a given ­people’s language and mores.22 A third was historical linguistics, which transformed Old En­glish studies as it came ­under the professionalizing influence of Grimm and his successors, and bore varied fruit in other areas. The most lastingly significant of t­ hese fruits was the Oxford En­glish Dictionary, developed “on historical princi­ples,” a vast outgrowth of Victorian philological medievalism and its commitment to an etymological and genealogical approach to language and meaning.23

2. The Early En­glish Text Society It was this complicated cultural configuration that lay ­behind the founding, in 1864, of the Early En­glish Text Society.24 One of many associations that was created to encourage research into medieval vernacular lit­er­a­ture and language across the nineteenth ­century, EETS differed from most of its fellows, not only in the nature of its mandate but in its popularism. “The aim of the Committee is, on the one hand, to print all that is most valuable of the yet unprinted MSS. in En­glish, and, on the other, to re-­edit and reprint all that is most valuable in printed En­glish books, which from their scarcity or price are not within the reach of the student of moderate means,” announces its first manifesto.25 The last two clauses nod at the Roxburghe and Bannatyne Clubs, two groups of wealthy bibliophiles, the second of which had published Madden’s edition of the most famous rediscovery of the period, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.26 The society’s early publications did not always have the erudition of ­those produced by the more exclusive Philological Society, founded twenty-­five years ­earlier, and can look amateurish beside the efforts of mid-­Victorian medieval historians, still more beside ­those of German philologists.27 Yet EETS remains the most significant of the learned socie­ties for scholars of Old and M ­ iddle En­ glish, not least ­because it has also remained inexpensive enough to be collected even by smaller libraries and impecunious readers, in Britain and elsewhere, and ­because it still survives.28 Five hundred volumes l­ater, and by this point including “most of the works attributed to King Alfred or to Ælfric . . . ​some of ­those by bishop Wulfstan . . . ​all of the surviving medieval drama, most of the ­Middle



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En­glish romances, much religious and secular prose and verse including the En­ glish works of John Gower, Thomas Hoccleve and most of Caxton’s prints” on its list, EETS has had a decisive influence on the study of early En­glish literary history.29 In many re­spects, EETS’s interpretation of its mandate during its first half ­century was as eclectic as its first manifesto then moves on to suggest. “­Those relating to KING ARTHUR w ­ ill be the Committee’s first care; t­ hose relating to our Language and its Dialects the second; while in due proportion with ­these, ­will be mixed ­others of general interest, though with no one special common design” except to publish annually “one Text in the Northern dialect.”30 The emphases spelled out ­here, not only on the romance tradition but on the repre­ sen­ta­tion of early En­glish language history through regional lit­er­a­tures and dialects, ensured the emergence into print of a more diverse array of Old and ­Middle En­glish texts than had yet been undertaken. This included works whose almost sole value in their editors’ eyes was philological. An early case in point was the Ayenbyte of Inwyt, by the fourteenth-­ century Canterbury Benedictine Michael of Northgate. This impor­tant translation of the influential lay manual Somme le roi (the king’s summa), written for Philip the Bold of France by the Dominican Laurent d’Orléans during the 1280s, is ­here treated almost exclusively as a rare resource for the study of ­Middle Kentish.31 Yet as early as 1874, Frederick James Furnivall, the society’s energetic and idiosyncratic founder, could boast of EETS’s significant contribution to social and religious as well as linguistic and literary history: “If we turn to the Lives of our Forefathers, the Books they read, the Socie­ties they belonged to, the Ways they had, the Beliefs they cherisht, the Superstitions they clung to, the Evils that beset them, the same fact stares one in the face; the Early En­glish Text Society have produced a set of Texts that can challenge comparison with ­those of any other Society; they know that their own cannot be beaten.”32 Diversity included religious diversity, the more so as the society’s mandate expanded to include “the ­whole of our unprinted MS lit­er­a­ture” ­after the creation of the select Extra Series in 1867.33 From the late 1880s onwards, Furnivall regularly announced the imminent publication of the second volume of Carl Horstmann’s pioneering South En­glish Legendary with a mild joke at the expense of the sameness of medieval hagiography: “The Subscribers to the Original Series must be prepared for the issue of the ­whole of the Early En­glish Lives of Saints. . . . ​The Society cannot leave out any of them, even though some are dull. The Sinners would doubtless be much more in­ter­est­ing.” But by this point, saints’ lives, valued for the “incidental details of our forefathers’ social

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state” they provided as the “religious romances or story-­books of their period,” had become an impor­tant part of the series, which had been welcomed by prominent British Roman Catholics.34 Like Romantic philology itself, however, EETS was a child of its time, and the shape of its early publication program set a direction for vernacular scholarship more firmly than its board may have realized. First, by confining itself to works in En­glish, EETS helped solidify the separation of research into medieval British lit­er­a­ture along linguistic lines: strangely, in light of its early privileging of Arthur, a figure available to En­glish romance and chronicle history entirely by way of intermediaries written in Latin, French, and possibly Welsh. Its reluctance to represent the level of integration between Anglo-­Norman and ­Middle En­glish literary and linguistic history, despite good coverage of Anglo-­ Norman in Warton’s History of En­glish Poetry, arguably helped delay research into insular French in par­tic­u­lar, part of a pattern of re­sis­tance to French in ­favor of German that was structural to British nationalist scholarship in the ­century a­ fter the Napoleonic Wars. Founded only in 1937, as the Eu­ro­pean po­liti­cal order shifted once again, the Anglo-­Norman Text Society was an offshoot, not of EETS but of the multilingual Philological Society, building on ­earlier institutional and intellectual efforts that had begun to or­ga­nize only around thirty years previously. The relatively slow rate at which ANTS, despite heroic efforts, has brought out editions and other basic tools, including a comprehensive dictionary, and the fact that the Oxford En­glish Dictionary began to include Anglo-­Norman etymologies for En­glish words as recently as its third edition of 2000, is suggestive of the long-­ lasting effects of Victorian linguistic prejudice.35 Second, EETS published a good deal of religious poetry, including several works of the scale of The South En­glish Legendary: W. W. Skeat’s extraordinary edition of what he identified as the three main versions of Piers Plowman (A, B, and C), in five volumes; Richard Morris’s edition of the ­great sacred history Cursor Mundi, run in parallel columns to garner four witnesses to dialect, in seven; Furnivall’s own edition of Robert Mannyng of Brunne’s witty manual of confession, Handlyng Synne, from 1303, in two. To honor the el­derly scholar, this last includes much of its influential insular French source, the Manuel des pechiez of circa 1260.36 Yet with the partial exception of Piers Plowman, the society’s editors largely missed the learning and sophistication of M ­ iddle En­glish religious poetry.37 By the late nineteenth ­century, the reputation of didactic verse was at a low ebb across the English-­speaking world, and the prevalence of such verse in the corpus, often in what was felt to be the jejune form of short couplets, struck an



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embarrassed nerve. Furnivall’s jovial marginal comments on ­these poems can carry an edge of worry, while even more sober editions by his colleague, Richard Morris, offer a striking contrast between the intense attention paid to morphology and phonology and the absence of treatment of sources, themes, and social and institutional contexts. ­These early editions, most of which the society has kept in print, are more than academic curiosities, for the unintended air of cultural condescension they convey has remained influential. The En­glish and insular French didactic poetry of the thirteenth and ­fourteenth centuries are still underregarded to this day. Third, EETS shared Romantic and Anglican enthusiasm for all ­things primitive, facing down fears that too ­great a concentration of early homilies, “though of extreme interest in point of language,” might drive away subscribers, being “with rare exceptions, theological and dull.”38 Alfred’s Hierdeboc, The Old En­glish Bede, six volumes of homilies written in “Anglo-­Saxon” (Old En­ glish) or “Semi-­Saxon” (early ­Middle En­glish), and other early prose works ­were all part of the series by 1916.39 By 1910, ­after a slow start, perhaps ­because of the society’s philological emphasis as much as any squeamishness about “playing God,” it had made good pro­gress with another major body of writing, late ­Middle En­glish religious drama, where diligent study was made necessary by the late-­ Victorian elevation of Shakespeare to his place as the summit of Eu­ro­pean, and consequently ­human, culture.40 But it was slow to promote M ­ iddle En­glish religious prose. Even by the time John Wells’s Manual of the Writings in M ­ iddle En­glish, 1050–1400 first appeared in 1916—­a key reference work, indicative of the professionalism that a new generation of American scholars was bringing to the field—­not much more than twenty of the 250 volumes EETS had printed ­were in this area.41 What is more, almost half t­ hese volumes w ­ ere dedicated to writers and texts identified with re­sis­tance to the institutional Church. As well as Chaucer’s Boece and Treatise on the Astrolabe, ­there ­were two volumes of works attributed to Rolle; two of early Bible translation; and one of works taken to be by Wyclif, in his short-­lived capacity as the “­father of En­glish prose.”42 ­There was also Supplicacyon for the Beggers, written by Tyndale’s colleague and intimate Simon Fish in 1529, introduced with extracts from Actes and Monuments as a contribution to the study of “the wonderful change the country then went through, the ­causes which led to it, and the means by which it was brought about.”43 ­There ­were some editions of other kinds of prose work: Michael of Northgate’s Ayenbyte of Inwyt; The Myrour of Oure Ladye, a fifteenth-­century vernacular liturgical guide written for the nuns of Syon, the sumptuous Bridgettine

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abbey founded by Henry V outside London; John Mirk’s cycle of sermons, the Festial (ca. 1390); and a scholarly trio of liturgical and catechetic editions of fourteenth-­century prose and verse works from vari­ous sources, prettily entitled Lay Folks’ Mass-­Book, Lay Folks’ Prayer Book, and Lay Folks’ Catechism. ­These last ­were contributed by an ecumenical group of High Anglican and Roman Catholic liturgists, interested in early uses of the vernacular in worship.44 Other socie­ties also did something to compensate. The mid-­thirteenth-­ century Ancrene Wisse (“Ancren Riwle”), and Reginald Pecock’s mid-­fifteenth-­ century Repressor of Over-­Much Blaming of the Clergy ­were in print ­under the aegis of the Camden Society and the Rolls Series as early as 1853 and 1860 respectively. The first was valued as evidence of the transition between the “Anglo-­ Saxon” and “Semi-­Saxon” forms of En­glish, the second as evidence of the history of heresy in the ­century before the En­glish Reformation.45 Early in the 1920s, the situation in EETS itself began to change rapidly, in step with wider scholarly developments, among them a turn to the study of prose by literary scholars. Notable ­here are Elsie V. Hitchcock’s editions of two other works by Pecock, the Donet and the Folower to the Donet, in 1921 and 1924.46 Yet this fifty-­year delay in taking seriously the medium in which the bulk of surviving Old and ­Middle En­glish texts ­were written involves more than the society’s original declared preferences for romances and works of special philological interest. It also signals the society’s early reluctance to put itself at odds with the assumption that, during the ­later ­Middle Ages, only Wycliffism made any serious attempt to discuss the Christian faith in the vernacular.

3. From Cambridge History of En­glish Lit­er­a­ture to Continuity of En­glish Prose By the early twentieth ­century, the current of Anglican historiography flowing from Foxe was becoming dilute. Editions of Actes and Monuments dropped off sharply ­after the 1860s. The last scholarly rearticulation of Foxe’s case that the medieval Church suppressed the vernacular Bible to be written by a medievalist, Margaret Deanesly’s Lollard Bible and Other Medieval Biblical Versions, was published in 1920. This impor­tant book, which is still cited, distances itself from the confessional history from which its stance and arguments nonetheless continue to derive.47 Taking all medieval Eu­rope as its canvas but focusing most closely on The ­Middle En­glish Bible and the controversies surrounding it, The Lollard Bible opens at the time of Peter Waldo and Innocent III’s Cum ex iniuncto, a letter



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Deanesly understands as concerned above all with the suppression of Bible translation.48 Linking translation to the themes of “the liberty of private judgment, and the unity of Christendom,” she proposes that “had lay ­people in the thirteenth ­century been allowed the right to read the gospels for themselves, or exposed to the temptation to do so, and had they generally been able to read, reinterpretation would inevitably have followed, and Christendom would have been divided in that ­century instead of the sixteenth.”49 While this striking counterfactual conjecture evokes Foxe and Burnet’s account of the transforming power of Bible translation in the sixteenth ­century, Deanesly’s repre­sen­ta­tion of religious division ­here as desirable, a benign product of the private liberty guaranteed by a properly secular social contract, is a product of nineteenth-­rather than sixteenth-­century controversy and tilts the book firmly ­toward modern values.50 Within the field of literary scholarship, the ­silent Victorian alliance between Romantic philology and Anglican historiography that gave the early EETS list its baggy logic was also weakening, as the academic discipline of En­glish studies, offspring of two diligently secular parents, classical studies and Romantic philology, came into its own.51 In the medieval volumes of Adolphus Ward and Rayner Waller’s The Cambridge History of En­glish Lit­er­a­ture (1907–17), by far the most ambitious work of its kind undertaken to date, religious writing serves as not much more than a backdrop to the national story of the development of individual voice, emotional richness, and narrative interest told by the period’s imaginative lit­er­a­ture. This story runs from the alliterative “minstrel” poetry of the Old En­glish period, to its revival a ­century ­after the devastation of the Conquest, then on from the rise of romance in the twelfth ­century, to the resurgence of En­glish poetry out of the new devastation of the Black Death in the c­ entury that followed, the ­century of Chaucer.52 A few flashes of religious polemic survive, as when one essay describes the Corpus Christi pro­cession associated with the miracle plays as “a sort of triumphal pro­gress, by which the church, ­after centuries of strug­gle, solemnised her absolute and full victory over the minds of men.”53 But in the disciplinary environment of this academic mode of national literary history, religious texts are more often ignored than directly slighted. The vernacular homilist and Bible translator Ælfric receives a dozen pages.54 But that intricately wrought spiritual rule Ancrene Wisse is invoked only to provide evidence of a proposition apparently inspired by Magna Carta, that, in the early thirteenth ­century, “the literary temper began to betray signs of a desire for freedom.”55 Apart from a fine republished chapter on law French by the ­legal historian F. W. Maitland, insular French, religious or other­wise, is explic­itly excluded from consideration.56

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Even Wyclif, who shares a well-­balanced chapter with Rolle, participates in the dullness that characterizes the religious in ­these volumes. His influence is attributed not to his ideas but to his promotion of En­glish, at a time when “men ­were almost ceasing to think in Latin.” In an echo of Froude, his writing is impossible to distinguish from “the general ideas and the literary habits” of “an age that has passed away, and we cannot discover the secret of it for ourselves.”57 The one imaginative text admitted to illumine “a dark epoch in the history of ­England” in a declaredly religious mode is Piers Plowman, at that period enjoying a period of well-­merited appreciation on both sides of the Atlantic by secular intellectuals on the po­liti­cal left.58 Yet for John Matthews Manly, the notable American scholar who wrote the Langland chapter, this work, too, needs to be seen as representative, not purposeful. For Manly, Piers Plowman voices the aspirations of a “host of forgotten or nameless men who battled for justice, and kindliness, and intellectual and spiritual light” and “cherished the same enthusiasm for righ­teousness and hate for evil,” in language unfiltered by consistent poetic design or singular authorial consciousness.59 Taken as a sign of the scholarly state of play ­little more than a ­century ago, The Cambridge History makes for fascinating reading, anticipating the sometimes embarrassed relationship that En­glish literary studies has continued to have with Christian topics, while showing how much ground the nascent academic discipline had to make up before it could add much to the historical disciplines generally, beyond its expertise in the history of the En­glish language. Yet one virtue that En­glish studies inherited from Romantic philology was its fierce sense of responsibility ­toward what EETS called “the ­whole of our unprinted MS lit­er­a­ture.” In practice, the period from the 1890s to the 1930s was one of expansion, as scholars made inroads into unexplored parts of the vernacular religious archive, always linking their research to the discipline of national literary history, but in ways that rendered the ­limited account given by Ward and Waller’s contributors hard to sustain. A de­cade before The Cambridge History began publication, Carl Horstmann’s energetic and wholly remarkable Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle, an En­glish ­Father of the Church, and His Followers, introduced scholars to a vast new set of ­Middle En­glish contemplative works of the ­fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, most of them anonymous, many still not other­wise edited. Horstmann’s desire to emphasize the Catholic character of this body of writing in the face of Anglican prejudice is manifest even in his book’s striking title. Yet he pre­sents his work in the style of a scholar of Romantic philology. The introductions to his two crowded volumes thus argue that Rolle’s ecstatic vernacular prose is



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significant ­because it shows the inevitable victory of Saxon over Frankish influences in the En­glish character, “essentially individual, self [sic], self-­asserting, self-­relying, self-­possessed”; and that the hermit Rolle, rather than the reformer Wyclif or the Francophile Chaucer, was in this way the “true f­ather of En­glish lit­er­a­ture.”60 Thirty years ­later, G. R. Owst’s two pioneering books Preaching in Medieval ­England and Lit­er­a­ture and Pulpit in Medieval ­England use long catenas of quotations from dozens of unedited sermons from the same period, as well as many passages of Piers Plowman and the religious drama, to argue a dif­fer­ent case. In Owst’s account, which owes something to Manly, it was the common voice itself—­the vox populi manifested through popu­lar preaching and teaching in the vernacular, not the writings of Wyclif, or Rolle, or even Chaucer—­ that laid the foundation of the “literary Realism” that truly transformed ­England in the sixteenth ­century.61 Hope Emily Allen’s superb Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle, Hermit of Hampole, and Materials for His Biography, published around the same time (1927), eschews ­grand nationalist narratives, intent on bringing specificity to a field still often marked by a lack of basic research. Besides establishing the canon of Rolle’s works, resolving many prob­lems of authorial ascription ignored or created by ­earlier scholars, including Horstmann, in the pro­cess, Allen’s book put the manuscript study of late medieval En­glish spiritual writing on a professional footing. Yet even she represents her book as the “materials” ­toward a ­f uture “biography” of a canonical literary figure, based on a reconstruction in which psychological concerns are paramount.62 However, the period’s most ambitious attempt to make the religious vernacular central to national literary history was R. W. Chambers’s On the Continuity of En­glish Prose from King Alfred to Sir Thomas More. Published in 1932 as an introduction to E. V. Hitchcock’s EETS edition of Nicholas Harpsfield’s Life of Sir Thomas More, this extended essay was reprinted on its own that year, as the only monograph to date printed by the society.63 ­Here, Chambers boldly argues that religious prose style was the ­great hawser that held Old En­glish, ­Middle En­glish, and modern literary culture together, in a single tradition extending from “the noblest of all En­glish kings,” Alfred, in the late ninth ­century, down to the re­nais­sance, and beyond.64 Chambers takes pains to emphasize the key role devotional prose played as the conduit of this tradition. He points in par­tic­u­lar to the “Semi-­Saxon” homilies of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, as well as to Ancrene Wisse and a group of works associated with it, for his early evidence.65 But he also includes a set of ­later contemplative writers, already widely read in religious

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circles in modernized versions, who had hardly featured so far in literary scholarship: the Augustinian canon Walter Hilton; the anchoress Julian of Norwich; the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing; and the Carthusian prior Nicholas Love. Prose, he affirms, is “part of the equipment of a civilization, part of its heritable wealth, like its laws.” To know its history is to move closer to defining that elusive quality sought by the literary historians of his generation, En­glishness. Research into En­glish devotional prose, centered on a full new edition of Ancrene Wisse, is thus “prob­ably the greatest need in the ­whole field of En­glish lit­er­a­ture.”66 Declining from early success into long humiliation before its final victorious reascent, the story of early En­glish prose told by Chambers closely resembles the story of Foxe’s persecuted true Church in its under­lying mythic structure. Like the true Church, the “heritable wealth” that is En­glish prose was long ­under threat, in this case from the Normans, still in the villainous role they play in Scott’s Ivanhoe. Also like the true Church, however, this “wealth” was secretly preserved, in this case, in the “cloister or hermitage” into which it retreated, “in search of a peace” not found “in feudal E ­ ngland.” Kept safe by anchoresses, hermits, and monks, it then resurfaced, ­after the perilous passage of the Protestant Reformation, in the current of prose that flows into the King James Bible, then on through Sir Thomas Browne, John Bunyan, and ­others.67 Even as he recasts the venerable Anglican account of the medieval vernacular in the still vibrant language of Romantic philology, however, Chambers is working vigorously to challenge this account. ­Here, Ancrene Wisse and its contemplative successors take the place of Wyclif and The ­Middle En­glish Bible at the center of the national literary story. Once Chambers reaches the early sixteenth ­century, Tyndale is also displaced by More, inaugurating a controversy among scholars of the history of prose that has rumbled on almost down to the pre­sent day.68 Although On the Continuity of En­glish Prose is a work of literary history, it is also one of confessional scholarship by a devout Anglican with deep Roman Catholic sympathies. EETS’s publication of Harpsfield’s Life of More anticipated what Chambers considered an event of national importance: the long-­awaited canonization of Sir Thomas More in 1935, the fourth centenary of his execution, ­after a formal pro­cess to which the edition itself made an admitted contribution.69 As an obituary of Chambers in the Catholic periodical the Tablet recalled at his death in 1942, Pius XI awarded both Hitchcock and Chambers “a medallion in appreciation of the work they did,” a rare privilege for non-­ Catholics. The declared aim of On the Continuity of En­glish Prose is ecumenical:



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to demonstrate that “in one sense ­there is, and in one sense ­there is not, a Protestant schism in lit­er­a­ture.” But if the study’s royalist account of the Old En­ glish period ­until the eleventh ­century is broadly parallel to the one presented by Foxe, its account of the ­later ­Middle Ages and the Henrician Reformation is unfeignedly, innovatively Catholic. Chambers would surely have appreciated his obituarist’s considered statement that it was his book that had “established the essential Catholic contribution to the life of En­glish prose.”70

Chapter 4

Catholic Apol­o­getics

1. The Elizabethans II: Harpsfield, Sander, Stapleton, Harding How can it still have been necessary as late as the 1930s, a full seventy years into the history of the Early En­glish Text Society, for the “Catholic contribution” to early En­glish prose to be “established,” seemingly for the first time?1 The revelatory effect that Chambers’s essay had on readers at least ­u ntil the 1960s, reconfiguring a field they thought they knew, is suggestive of the residual power of the Anglican historiographic model even as it faded.2 Yet Catholic accounts of En­glish history also extended back to the sixteenth ­century and ­were well known to Anglicans. Moreover, as we ­shall see, En­glish Catholics had long had their own canon of ­Middle En­glish religious writers to ­counter the Anglican appropriation of Chaucer, Langland, and Wyclif. What, then, had been the En­glish Catholic account of the medieval vernacular—or indeed the En­glish Catholic account of the vernacular in religious contexts more generally—­during the long period in which Anglican and nationalist accounts dominated the discussion? How did some medieval religious works appear to be more Catholic than ­others to twentieth-­century Catholics? And why, as recently as the interwar period, ­were ­these works “hardly mentioned in histories of En­glish lit­er­a­ture, or represented in anthologies of En­ glish prose,” as Chambers rightly notes?3 In order to answer ­these questions, this chapter moves sharply back again in time, initially to the ­later sixteenth ­century, to consider how early modern En­glish Catholic intellectuals set out to ­counter hostile or prejudicial Anglican repre­ sen­ta­tions of the medieval Church, and to develop their own position on the legitimate religious uses of the vernacular. The chapter considers the relationship between the work ­these intellectuals carried out as controversialists and historians, and the copying, reading, and printing of a series of M ­ iddle En­glish



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contemplative writings in the ­middle de­cades of the seventeenth ­century, partly in connection with ­houses of En­glish nuns. As it works its way forward again ­toward the twentieth ­century, the chapter also glances at two further topics: the birth of scholarship on medieval Christian lit­er­a­ture in religious ­houses and other intellectual centers on the Eu­ro­pean mainland; and the increasingly confident views articulated by Catholic theologians, also on the Eu­ro­pean mainland, on Bible translation. As a result, the chapter can speak not only to the specific situation that Chambers’s essay illuminates and set out to remedy, but to the broader context within which medieval studies was beginning to develop as an interdisciplinary and international enterprise, for the most part outside the British Isles, at the time he was writing. This pro­cess and its somewhat complicated relationship to the development of En­glish literary studies, as the religious vernacular belatedly emerged as an area of broad interest to medievalists, are then taken up in the final chapter of Part I. §§§ Although its groundwork was laid as early as the late 1520s, in the controversial writings of Thomas More, apol­o­getic En­glish Catholic history came into its own only ­after the accession of Elizabeth in the 1560s, developing in hostile dialogue with Anglicanism in ways that did as much to shape Anglican historiography as the other way around.4 The first En­glish translation of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica since the Old En­glish period, Thomas Stapleton’s History of the Church of En­glande, published in Antwerp in 1565, was partly a riposte to the 1563 Actes and Monuments. It bears its own dedication to Elizabeth and opens by itemizing all the ways in which Protestant doctrine and practice differ from ­those of the primitive En­glish Church.5 Stapleton’s book was one of several that prompted Foxe’s massive second edition of 1570.6 Another was the Dialogi sex contra summi pontificatus, monasticae vitae, sanctorum, sacrarum imaginum oppugnatores, et pseudomartyres (six dialogues against the opponents of the high pontiff, the monastic life, the saints, and sacred images, and about the pseudo-­martyrs), written by one of the heroes of On the Continuity of En­glish Prose, More’s biographer Nicholas Harpsfield (1519–75), published in 1566. This Latin work attacked Foxe’s account of Wyclif at length but was also a response to one of Foxe’s most impor­tant Latin sources, the Magdeburg Centuries.7 Harpsfield’s final work, the Historia anglicana ecclesiastica (history of the church of England), composed in prison in the early 1570s but published only in

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1622, then provided a Latin response to Foxe’s 1570 edition. Part of this work is devoted to a renewed attack on Wycliffism that draws on an early treatment of this topic, Doctrinale antiquitatum fidei ecclesiae catholicae (theological handbook to the ancient faith of the Catholic church), by the Carmelite theologian Thomas Netter (1429).8 A ­later En­glish response was Treatise of Three Conversions (1603– 4), by the prolific Jesuit scholar Robert Persons. This ­counters Foxe’s attempt to minimize Augustine’s Roman mission to the En­glish by arguing that the first conversion of Britain was by St. Peter himself.9 Nearly a ­century l­ater, the appearance of a new French translation of Nicholas Sander’s international bestseller the De origine ac progressu schismatis Anglicani (the rise and growth of the Anglican schism), first published in Latin in 1586, prompted Gilbert Burnet to begin work on his History of the Reformation.10 Burnet’s history was in its turn answered in Jacques-­Bénigne Bossuet’s devastating Histoire des variations des églises protestantes in 1688. This tit-­for-­tat approach to Church history was vigorous at least to the mid-­nineteenth ­century. Froude’s History of ­England (1856–70), begun not many years ­after Pius IX’s reestablishment of the En­glish Catholic hierarchy in 1850, can itself be read as an agnostic restatement of the Anglican side of the exchange.11 Written in a merciless po­liti­cal environment in which doctrinal controversy still retained a certain formal character, En­glish Catholic apol­o­getics focused on a narrow set of topics, ­whether in exposing Anglican weaknesses or in responding to Anglican attacks. Choosing their ground carefully, ­these historical works placed ­little emphasis on the vernacular. Harpsfield accepts the identification of Wycliffism as a precursor of Protestantism. But his rare references to Old En­ glish, or, in one case, to John Lydgate, do not provoke him to further comment on the topic. He gives ­little space to Arundel’s Oxford Constitutions and none to The M ­ iddle En­glish Bible, remarking only in passing that Wyclif ’s “books full of pestiferous doctrines” w ­ ere written “in both Latin and En­glish.”12 Stapleton offers a translation of “Cædmon’s Hymn” from Bede’s Latin prose version: “Nowe must we praise the maker of the heavenly kingdome, the power of the creatour, his counsell and devise, the workes and actes of the ­father of glorie. Howe he being God eternal was the maker and author of all miracles, whiche first unto the ­children of men created heaven for the top of their dwelling place; and a­ fter, the omnipotent keper of mankinde created the earthe for the flowre thereof.” This is the meaning, but not the order of the wordes which he sange in his sleape. For verses be they never so wel made can not be tourned



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out of one tonge into an other, word for worde, without leasing a g­ reat pece of their grace and worthinesse.13 Yet his comments on the chapter are concerned with the rituals said to have been observed at Caedmon’s scrupulously Catholic deathbed, for which he writes careful marginalia. Persons similarly criticizes Foxe’s account of the Second Council of Clovesho but is s­ ilent on the clause that requires priests to “learne and teach the Lords Prayer and the Creed in En­glish.” Like Sander, who reduces the Henrician Reformation to a sordid tale of royal sexual desperation, Persons even has ­little to say about the Tyndale New Testament, merely linking it to the “novelty and forwardnes” typical of any heretical moment throughout Christian history, in which “whosoever shewed himself most rash . . . ​was thought to have most of Gods spirit.”14 This was not, however, ­because the vernacular was a minor ­matter. On the contrary, since Protestantism made it a blazing cause, and since Catholic attitudes ­were long in a state of flux, it was a ­matter of intense sensitivity. Translation of the Bible and the liturgy in par­tic­u­lar ­were topics of charged debates in Catholic Germany, Italy, Spain, and France, as well as in ­England, throughout the m ­ iddle part of the sixteenth c­ entury, the subject of treatises, intense discussion at the Council of Trent (1545–63), and the careful attentions of the new papal Index. Instituted in 1559, the Index briefly attempted to limit the printing and even the possession and reading of vernacular Bibles to ­those who had received written permission from the Vatican.15 ­Whether produced for controversial or pastoral reasons, accounts of the medieval vernacular by En­glish Catholics thus took place in genres that allowed the subject to be handled with proper care. For the liturgy, the most impor­tant of ­these accounts is perhaps the one found in Thomas Harding’s An Ans­were to Maister Juelles Chalenge, printed in 1564, soon ­after Harding’s arrival at that ­great gathering place for exiled En­ glish Catholic intellectuals, the newly founded En­glish College at Douai.16 An Ans­were is the first of several works Harding wrote against John Jewel, now bishop of Salisbury, where Harding had recently held the se­nior office of trea­ surer, one in a long line that included Edmund Rich of Abingdon (d. 1240), author of The Mirror of Holy Church. Jewel’s celebrated “Chalenge,” preached at London’s venerable open-­air pulpit, St. Paul’s Cross, in 1559, challenged Romanists to justify a list of their doctrines and practices, including the practice of celebrating the mass in Latin. The sermon set off a controversy between Jewel and Harding, “two thundring and lightning Oratours in divinity,” as Gabriel Harvey called them in 1593, that brought in other scholars on both sides of the debate and continued for more than ten years.17

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Writing the same year the Book of Common Prayer was reinstated by Elizabeth, a de­cade ­after its first version was published in 1549, Jewel’s claim was that in the primitive Church (up to “sixe hundred yeares ­after Christ”) the “common prayers” of the “­people” w ­ ere in their own tongue, e­ ither Greek or Latin, and that this practice set an authoritative pre­ce­dent.18 Agreeing on the ­matter of pre­ce­dent, Harding set out a counterposition, that in saying private prayers, “the unlearned ­people . . . ​uttered them in that tonge which they understood,” but that in attending public ser­vice, “some understoode the language thereof, and some understoode it not.”19 As the account of Pentecost in Acts 2 shows, Harding argues, many languages other than Greek and Latin ­were spoken in the Roman Empire. Thus in Augustine’s North Africa, the vulgar tongue was Punic, and the status of African Latin was like that of “the Frenche tonge” in ­England ­after the Norman Conquest. Although scarcely known to “the common and uplandish ­people,” French was fluently familiar to “the nobilitye, lawyeres, merchantes, capitaines, souldiers and welthy folke” who administered the “Frenche lawes” and served the king at court.20 Yet African public worship was in Latin, as it was in “barbarouse and vulgare” Gaul and Britain. Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica describes numerous liturgical occasions at which Latin was used. He would in any case have said if “the Ser­vice of the Masse to be in En­glish” had “ben thought necessary,” for he knew of a fitting instrument to write such a ser­vice. This was none other than “Cednom” (Cædmon), whose “singular gifte to make songes and sonets in En­glish meter, to serve religion and devotion” could have made him an “apte” vernacular liturgist had one been called for.21 Harding’s account of a multilingual early Church, which also assumes the omnipresence of vernacular pastoralia from the earliest Christian centuries on, rested on distinctions between liturgical, biblical, and pastoral uses of the vernacular as nuanced as the case he was making. All it failed to provide, as Jewel points out at length in A Replie, is a clinching argument that the liturgy should be in Latin.22 ­Here, An Ans­were seems to be torn between receiving the liturgy as a cele­bration of mystery and understanding it as an opportunity for teaching, sometimes taking it that the laity’s grasp of the proceedings is desirable, at other times appearing to assume almost the opposite.23 Such equivocation is in tune with a certain post-­Tridentine reluctance to absolutize in spiritual ­matters that is also in evidence in An Ans­were’s account of the vernacular Bible. This proceeds from the pointedly balanced premise that, in the primitive Church, the “laye ­people” ­were not forbidden but also not commanded “to reade the word of God in their owne tonge.”24 Yet Harding’s lack of a



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clear stance on vernacular liturgy is also redolent of the uncertain state of the issue between the publication of the Council of Trent’s canons on the mass in 1559, which anathematized any who claimed that “the mass should be celebrated only in the vernacular,” and Pope Pius V’s promulgation of the Missale Romanum in 1570, which resolved the ambiguities in this anathema in f­avor of a mass wholly in Latin.25 Harding’s analy­sis points in more than one direction, in part, ­because it needed to remain open to more than one pos­si­ble liturgical f­ uture. Harding’s account of the vernacular Bible is generally admonitory, dwelling on its many perils and correctly noting that, according to Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica, Christians in early Britain confessed God “with the tonges of five nations, of the En­glishe, the Britons, the Scottes, the Pightes, and the Latines,” but used Latin on its own “for the studie and meditation of the Scriptures.”26 An Ans­were also alludes approvingly to The Apologie by the German theologian Fridericus (Friedrich) Staphylus, which Stapleton published in En­glish in 1565, the year of his translation of Bede.27 In The Apologie, written in 1558 (just before the papal Index was established), Staphylus disputes “that the common p­ eople ­ought of necessite to reade Scripture,” appealing to what the “experience of our time hath taught, howe dangerous it is that ­every laye man . . . ​should reade and examine Scripture at their plea­sure.” Instead, he suggests what he understands to be a return to the medieval past, by promoting the wider private use of official vernacular breviaries, biblical digests, and homily collections, in place of direct Bible reading.28 Yet even ­these more de­cided arguments assume that lay Catholic Bible reading is fast becoming, if it is not already, a standard devotional practice. Staphylus suggests as much by warning readers off Luther’s putatively unsound translations, as indeed did Stapleton by producing his translation of The Apologie itself.

2. From Rheims New Testament to XVI Revelations of Divine Love We should thus not be surprised at the appearance in 1582 of the Rheims New Testament, a carefully collated scholarly translation based on the Latin Vulgate, in an ambitious print run of five thousand copies financed by Douai’s En­glish College, only seventeen years ­after The Apologie was published in En­glish. Nor, however, should we be surprised at the fact that parts of its preface, written by its translator, the Jesuit scholar Gregory Martin (1542–82), take the same admonitory tone as Staphylus. Echoing The Apologie and Harding’s Ans­were, Martin

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takes care to distance his translation at the outset from the “erroneous opinion of necessitye (argument for the necessity) that the holy Scriptures should alwayes be in our m ­ other tonge.”29 Like Harding, however, Martin also goes on to argue that, while the Church has never “by publike authoritie prescribed” a translation “to be indifferently used of all men,” neither has it “wholy condemned all vulgar versions of Scripture.” “In the primitive Church,” the scriptures ­were not accessible even to all who “understoode the learned tonges.” While individuals might study them with guidance, their wide circulation was unnecessary in an era when “holy persons” preferred genres such as saints’ lives, and “the poore ploughman . . . ​labouring the ground” was content to sing “hymnes and psalmes ­either in knowen or unknowen languages.” Martin is h ­ ere reworking a famous sentence from Desiderius Erasmus’s 1516 Exhortation to the Diligent Study of Scripture: “I wold to God the plowman wold singe a texte of the scripture at his plowbeme.”30 If the Goths and the Armenians had translations as long ago as the fifth ­century, this was mainly to combat heresy, as was also true of Charles V’s French Bible nine hundred years ­later, ­here said to have been “put forth” against “false heretical translations of a secte called Waldenses.”31 The Rheims New Testament is thus issued, not as a permanent or official translation, like its Anglican pre­de­ces­sor, Elizabeth I’s Bishop’s Bible (1568), but “upon special consideration of the pre­sent time, state and condition of our countrie,” ­because of which “divers thinges are ­either necessarye, or profitable and medicinable” that would not normally be so. Far from representing the work as continuous with ­earlier practice, Martin’s preface points up a divide between a better past, when even “devout principal Lay men” (reading “with feare and reverence”) took care to avoid “places of greater difficultye,” in order to focus on simpler, more edifying passages, and a dystopic pre­sent when it is a duty to open up the scriptures for the instruction of all.32 Yet despite this delicately conveyed awareness that history no longer offers an adequate roadmap to the pre­sent, Martin also argues that the translation it introduces is not the first En­glish Catholic Bible. Strikingly, it is Arundel’s Oxford Constitutions itself that provides his key evidence: In our owne countrye . . . ​[the scriptures] ­were extant in En­glish even before the trou­bles that Wicleffe and his folowers raised in our Church; as appeareth, as well by some peeces yet remaining, as by a provincial Constitution of Thomas Arundel . . . ​where straite provision (a strict rule) was made that no heretical version set forth by Wicleffe, or his adherentes, should be suffered (allowed). . . .



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So also it is t­ here insinuated (implied), that neither the Translations set forth before that Heretikes time, nor other afterward being approved by the lawful Ordinaries (bishops), ­were ever in our countrye wholy forbidden; though they ­were not (to say the truth) in quiet and better times (much lesse when the ­people ­were prone to alteration, heresye, or noveltye) ­either hastily admitted or ordinarily readde of the vulgar, but used onely, or specially, of some devout religious and contemplatives persons, in reverence, secrecye, and silence, for their spiritual comforte.33 Besides linking the new translation with En­glish pre­de­ces­sors of which certain “peeces” remain, and conceivably affirming a belated compliance with the Oxford Constitutions, this passage also suggests a pos­si­ble motive for Bible translation ­free from entanglement with heresy. This is the “spiritual comforte” of the devout, reading in “secrecye,” seemingly far from the combat zone in which the Rheims New Testament itself goes forth, in Martin’s account, to do spiritual b­ attle. To translate the Bible or read a translation was never “hastily admitted.” But before “the trou­bles . . . ​in our Church” “raised” by Wyclif, such activities ­were often signs of “quiet and better times,” not the opposite. ­These times are now gone. As in the eras of the ancient Goths and the late medieval Waldensians, vernacular Bibles have become vital instruments of the war on heresy. Yet as the preface suggests through its evocations of the halcyon devotional climate of the medieval past, readers can even so strive to model themselves on the “devout religious and contemplatives persons” of former eras, and hope to receive the “comforte” they once did. §§§ In proposing a reading practice for the vernacular New Testament grounded in the reconstructive imitation of medieval contemplatives, Martin’s preface anticipated by two de­cades what became a crucial aspect of the copying and publishing program associated with Douai’s En­glish Catholic communities. By the early 1600s, ­these also included the Benedictine monastery of St. Gregory, founded by John Roberts.34 Four years before gathering the resources to print an entire Douay-­Rheims Bible in 1609–10 (a well-­timed year before the King James Bible), Douai’s En­glish Catholics sponsored the publication of a version of Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Life of Christ, a work finished in the wake of the Oxford Constitutions, around 1410, that circulated widely in manuscript and print across the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. However the language of the

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text itself would have been received by readers, the title page of this edition remembers none of its early history, presenting the Mirror as “newlye set forth in En­glishe for the profitte and consolation of all devoute persons” from a Latin book by Bonaventure, as though it was of recent composition.35 Over the next half ­century and more, two Douai monks, Augustine (David) Baker and Serenus (Hugh Paulinus) Cressy, worked with En­glish nuns at nearby Cambrai and Paris, including Margaret Gascoigne, Barbara Constable, and Clementia (Anne) Cary, to copy, study, and on occasion print several other ­Middle En­glish contemplative texts whose association with the prereformation past was more overt.36 ­These texts, which Baker may have learned about from visits to the ­great manuscript library of Sir Robert Cotton, included The Cloud of Unknowing, on which Baker ­later wrote a fine commentary; a ­Middle En­ glish version of William Flete’s De remediis contra temptaciones (remedies against temptations), ­here ascribed to Rolle; and Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, which Cressy printed in London in 1659. They also included Julian’s Revelation of Love, which was copied and excerpted by Cary, Constable, and ­others a number of times before being printed by Cressy in 1670, again in London, ­under the title XVI Revelations of Divine Love. The status of this small canon of fourteenth-­century En­glish authors, which corresponds closely to the group of neglected works that R. W. Chambers positions between Ancrene Wisse and More in his On the Continuity of En­glish Prose, depended on reissues of ­these editions down to the early twentieth ­century.37 Like the Rheims New Testament, this copying and publishing program had its militant side, intended to further the contemplative regime of the Cambrai and Paris nuns, but also to assist in the reconversion of ­England, an event closely looked for ­after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 and his marriage to the Portuguese Catholic princess Catarina de Bragança, to whom Cressy became a chaplain. In the early years at Cambrai (founded in 1625 by descendants of Thomas More), it also had its controversial side, as it became embroiled in arguments about the proper form of contemplative life that ranged the Cambrai community and Baker as its spiritual director against proponents of Ignatian meditation across the Low Countries. Yet this program, too, was closely invested in maintaining a sense of continuity with the medieval En­glish past.38 Thanks to the ingenuity of Baker, the Benedictines of St. Gregory found a means to affirm a ­legal fiction of institutional continuity with their medieval En­glish pre­de­ces­sors, through the reception of two monks of the new ­house into the defunct Westminster congregation by its last living member, Sigebert Buckley, in 1607.39 Julian’s Revelation served to maintain a form of spiritual continuity. At Cambrai, the nun Margaret Gascoigne wrote a long reflection on



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Christ’s words to Julian, “Intende to me,” and “in her last sicknes” (according to Baker’s notes) “caused ­those words to be placed before her eyes at the crucifixe, which she regarded till her death,” in complex imitation of the scene that opens A Revelation, intending to Christ but also Julian.40 Dedicating his edition of A Revelation to Lady Mary Blount a generation ­later, Cressy wrote of the book in a similar vein, suggesting that attending to the living words of its long dead author would allow Julian to enter into literary but also more direct interaction with the reader: The Author of it, is a Person of your own Sex, who lived about Three Hundred years since, intended it for You, and for such Readers as your self, who ­will not be induced to the perusing of it by Curiosity, or a desire to learn strange ­things, which afterward they ­will at best vainly admire, or perhaps out of incredulity contemn. But your Ladiship ­Will, I assure my self, afford Her a place in your Closet, where at your Devout Retirements, you ­will enjoy her Saint-­like Conversation, attending to her, whilst with Humility and Joy, She recounts to you the Won­ders of our Lords Love to Her, and of his Grace in Her. And being thus employed, I make no doubt but you ­will be sensible of many Beams of her Lights, and much warmth of her Charity, by reflection darted into your own Soul. As she hears A Revelation in the quiet of her “Closet,” in language modernized only slightly to preserve the “agreeable Simplicity” of Julian’s “Style,” Lady Blount ­will receive the precious solace of Julian’s “Lights” and “Charity,” which themselves mediate the presence of the divine.41 ­W hether through the passionate attention practiced by Gascoigne or the closet conversations advocated by Cressy, A Revelation and its colleagues suggested that the reading practices of past “devout religious and contemplatives persons” of “our owne countrye” evoked in Gregory Martin’s preface could still, in mediated form, be experienced by modern En­glish Catholics.42

3. Eigh­teenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Bossuet, Fénelon, Butler, Gasquet Despite exceptions on both sides of the confessional divide and occasional bridges across it, En­glish Catholic accounts of the medieval religious vernacular in the ­century and a quarter between the accession of Elizabeth I in 1559 and the

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Glorious Revolution of 1688 ­were in many ways both more open and more learnedly in touch with the complexities of medieval Catholic Christianity than their Anglican equivalents. Flexible in ways that complicated their relationship to controversy, ­these accounts are evocative of that doubled sense of separation from and identification with the past that characterizes cultural moments when history is an especially absorbing preoccupation. Five of the ­great historical and editorial proj­ects that created the field of medieval studies, all closely focused around texts written in Latin, came into being during t­ hese de­cades. The first large collection of patristic and medieval theology, Marguerin de la Bigne’s Sacra bibliotheca sanctorum patrum, was printed in 1579 and reprinted five times before 1677 ­under related titles, in editions each more massive than its pre­de­ces­sor. Besides eventually folding in several of Rolle’s Latin works, justifying Horstmann’s ­later designation of Rolle as an “En­glish ­Father of the Church,” the Sacra bibliotheca and its sequels provided many texts for J. P. Migne’s Patrologia latina (1841–65).43 The first fully comprehensive Catholic Church history other than Harpsfield’s, Caesarius Baronius’s Annales ecclesiastici, a response to the Magdeburg Centuries, was published between 1588 and 1607, with further volumes by ­later writers. It was Baronius who canonized the twelfth ­century, between the pontificates of Gregory VII and Innocent III, as the high point of Church history ­after the primitive era, and who coined the term “dark age” (saeculum obscurum) of a difficult episode in the eleventh-­century history of the papacy. The scope of this phrase was then considerably extended by Voltaire in his Philosophie de l’histoire (1765), followed by Gibbon in Decline and Fall.44 Much as Actes and Monuments ­shaped the British historiographic tradition, the Annales ecclesiastici helped shape the French one, as late as Jules Michelet’s huge Histoire de la France (1833–67), in which the twelfth ­century now culminates with Philippe Auguste, the conqueror of Normandy from the En­glish, and the first monarch to style himself king of France. Michelet’s history, a learned and brilliant product of Romantic nationalism, has in turn left strong traces on medieval studies nearly down to the pre­sent.45 More briefly, although their heyday was near the end of the seventeenth ­century, the first fruits of the editorial and historical researches into the monastic ­orders, the French Church (via the Gallia Christiana), and other topics undertaken by the Benedictine Maurists of St. Germain des Prés in Paris date from the 1630s. The first two volumes of the Acta sanctorum, a vast series of critical editions of lives of the saints, ­were published in 1643 by the Jesuit Jean Bolland. The first dictionary of medieval Latin, Charles du Fresne du Cange’s Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis, was published in 1678. ­These last three



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proj­ects shared a methodological rigor in their approach to texts and primary sources that set a standard for l­ater scholars in the field.46 Parochial by comparison, as both poverty and the missionary imperative demanded, the slender con­temporary En­glish Catholic output of works in Latin and En­glish in many re­spects shared the openness to history typical of ­these and other proj­ects. Although virulent about the legacy of Wyclif when this topic arose, elsewhere they also shared ­these proj­ects’ tendency to downplay areas of interdenominational tension, even as they tended to treat the historical past instrumentally, as a store­house of arguments and examples to be used in the pre­sent. Nonetheless, ­there was ­little ­here for ­later generations of En­glish Catholic historians to build on. The responses to the strong Anglican account of the vernacular provided by Harding, Martin and ­others ­were too self-­divided to offer a clear alternative narrative. Even the ­Middle En­glish writings studiously copied and studied at Douai, Cambrai, and Paris could not redress the situation, not least ­because they ­were to a real extent valued for their perceived distance from the surrounding polemical rage. Cressy’s horror when Julian’s XVI Revelations was savagely satirized by the controversialist Edward Stillingfleet, bishop of Worcester, expresses more than mere gallantry: “Would not damned soules in Hell, if Spirituall Books ­were sent them, thus read and thus descant upon them?”47 Martin’s imagination of devout early En­glish Bible reading carried a similar hope of contemplative escape from the anguish of religious controversy. The topic of the vernacular thus continued to be excluded from historical accounts such as Charles Dodd’s Church History of ­England, from the Year 1500, to the Year 1688 (1734–37), and, much ­later, John Lingard’s History of ­England, from the First Invasion of the Romans to the Accession of William and Mary (1819–30), both by alumni of Douai’s En­glish College. Like Harpsfield, Dodd and Lingard focused their discussions on the Crown’s relationship with pope and monastery, avoiding the topic of En­glish Bibles even in dealing with the sixteenth-­century reformations.48 By the early eigh­teenth ­century, ­earlier Roman Catholic discussions of Bible translation ­were in any case growing obsolete, as emphasis fell on the positive reception the Church had given vernacular Bibles throughout history. Martin’s preface to the Rheims New Testament was omitted in editions of the Douay-­Rheims Bible ­after 1633, vulnerable as it admittedly was to the gibe that Smith’s preface to the King James Bible directs against its cautionary tone: “Yea, so unwilling they are to communicate the Scriptures to the p­ eoples understanding in any sort, that they are not ashamed to confesse, that we forced them to translate it into En­glish against their w ­ ills.”49

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Writing his Histoires des variations in 1688 as a stranger to the emotions the topic awoke in the British, Bossuet (1627–1704) dismissed Burnet’s claim that the En­glish Protestant Reformation was the result of vernacular Bible translation (“la Bible en language vulgaire”), declaring that “il n’y avoit rien de nouveau dans cette pratique. Nous avons de semblables versions . . . ​dans les siécles qui ont précédé les prétendus Réformateurs, et ce n’est pas là un point de nos controverses” (­there was nothing new in that practice. We have the like [Bible] versions . . . ​in ages preceding the pretended Reformers; nor is that a point of our controversies). If ­there was some popu­lar assent to the break from Rome, this was due to heretical preaching, not the vernacular Word.50 More nuanced ­here than Bossuet, the learned theologian and litterateur François Fénelon (1651–1715) admitted cases of restriction on vernacular Bibles from the early thirteenth ­century on, when the heresies that subsumed late medieval Christendom, it seems, first began to appear. Discussing the attitudes of Innocent III, Jean Gerson and ­others, in 1707, in a pastoral “Lettre sur la lecture de l’écriture sainte en language vulgaire” (on the reading of the holy scripture in the vernacular) that ­later influenced Deanesly’s Lollard Bible, Fénelon suggests that the temporary local restrictions such figures advocated might yet be useful, given the confusion of the times. Fénelon agrees with Harding and Martin that the Church did not view the ability to read the Bible as strictly necessary to Christian life, arguing that preaching and the ministrations of the “unwritten word of God,” the Spirit, might be sufficient. Yet he is clear that early Christians had direct access to the Bible and liturgy and viewed neglect of the scriptures as dangerous: Ainsi, sans entrer dans aucune question de critique, il est plus clair que le jour que tout le peuple avoit dans sa langue naturelle la Bible et la liturgie; qu’on faisoit lire la Bible aux enfants pour les bien élever; que les saints pasteurs leur expliquoient de suite dans leurs sermons les livres entiers de l’Ecriture; que ce texte étois très-­familier aux peuples; qu’on les exhortoit à le lire continuellement; qu’on les blâmoit d’en négliger la lecture; enfin qu’on regardoit cette négligence comme la source des hérésies et du relâchement des moeurs. (Wherefore, without entering into any critical discussions, nothing is more manifest, than the following facts,—­that the Christian public possessed, each, in their own languages, both the Bible, and their Liturgies,—­which, for their pious education, the very ­children ­were made to read;—­that the holy pastors of each church ­were wont, in their



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sermons, to explain regularly, and in order, the entire books of the Scriptures;—­that the sacred text was familiar to the ­people;—­that they ­were continually exhorted to read the holy volume, and blamed,—if negligent,—­for the omission;—in short, that the Church, and its pastors, considered the neglect of the Scriptures, both as a source of heresies, and as a cause of the relaxation of piety and morals.)51 The potential for a causal relationship between Bible translation and heresy that gives Staphylus, Harding, and Martin concern is ­here explic­itly denied, even as restrictions on lay reading of the vernacular Bible are seen as legitimate, and perhaps salutary, at par­tic­u­lar, strategic moments. In his essay “On the Discipline of the Church of Rome respecting the general PERUSAL of the SCRIPTURES in the vulgar tongue, by the Laity,” the early nineteenth-­century Catholic l­egal scholar Charles Butler took up both Fénelon’s and Bossuet’s arguments, with the Douay-­Rheims Bible as his main postmedieval example. Arguing in The Gentleman’s Magazine that the appearance of the Cathars and Waldensians caused the Church to impose restrictions on Bible translation for the first time, and that “the notion, entertained by some protestants, of its being considered by the romanists to be unlawful to print a translation of the scriptures, in the vulgar tongue without notes” was without foundation, Butler, too, concurred that censorship of vernacular Bibles constituted a rare and an always regrettable exception to the rule.52 Most ­later En­glish Roman Catholic responses to Anglican charges focused on the period ­after the Protestant Reformation and ­were occupied with arguments on points of translation, or ­else with answering the denunciations of the dangers represented by papism that poured from Anglican presses and pulpits across much of the nineteenth ­century.53 Even in the early twentieth c­ entury, however, En­glish Catholic claims that the medieval Church had looked favorably on the vernacular Bible, or on vernacular religious instruction more generally, could be harshly rebuffed. During the 1890s, the Benedictine and ­later cardinal Francis Aiden Gasquet—­ former prior of St.  Gregory at Downside in Somerset, where the monks of Douai had removed ­after the French Revolution—­wrote a set of essays in which he argued that the late medieval En­glish Church was serious about pastoral care, required diligence from its priests and laypeople in catechetic instruction, and promoted vernacular preaching through synodalia, pastoral manuals, and written sermon collections. Noticing that many copies of The ­Middle En­glish Bible include calendars to enable them to be used in church ser­vices, and turning to the Oxford Constitutions yet again for evidence, he also suggested that this Bible

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might itself be the orthodox early Bible translation mentioned by Gregory Martin and o­ thers, including Sir Thomas More.54 Although he was not a professional scholar and was unfortunately accident prone in ­matters of detail, Gasquet’s work was ahead of its era, and his revisionist essays bear rereading. His intuition that ­later medieval En­glish religion was not merely de­cadent, as scholars of all denominations widely assumed at the time, but could be energetic and effective appears to be valid. Certain parts of his thesis about The M ­ iddle En­glish Bible have recently been suggestively revived.55 Gasquet’s findings ­were nonetheless subjected to four de­cades of vitriolic attack from the Cambridge historian G. G. Coulton, a mentor of Deanesly and Owst, who argued in a long string of publications that instruction of the medieval laity was vitiated by eight centuries of clerical ignorance. In Medieval Pa­ norama (1938), published three years a­ fter More’s canonization and still in print, he sums up his unremitting version of the medieval Dark Ages one final time: Let us try to fathom this ignorance, bearing in mind that the ­whole ser­vices of the Church, from beginning to end, ­were in Latin; that the only Bible authorized by Rome was in Latin; so also was ­every accessible commentary, and, ­until the last few generations of our period, nearly e­ very religious book. The Venerable Bede (730) speaks of “clerics or monks who are ignorant of the Latin tongue . . . ​on which account I myself have often given to many unlearned priests ­these two ­things, the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, translated into En­ glish.” This may be compared with that which Tyndale asserted and St Thomas More, I believe, never denied: “I dare say that ­there be twenty thousand priests, curates, this day in ­England, and not so few, that cannot give you the right En­glish unto this text in the Paternoster, Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in coelo et in terra, and answer thereto.”56 Such vernacular religious instruction as did exist was full of superstition, ­mistakes, and other symptoms of the prolonged cultural catastrophe that was the millennium following the fall of imperial Rome. Gasquet, whose own ignorance Coulton sought to expose in arduous lists of his errors issued as pamphlets, was thus merely a modern instance of a benighted medieval tradition.57 Given the per­sis­tence of such strident anti-­Catholicism, it is not surprising that when Hilton, the Cloud author, Julian, and Love began to garner widespread attention in the second half of the nineteenth ­century, it was again in part ­because their works could be read within the framework of what was now



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coming to be called spirituality, in a manner isolated from ­these interdenominational conflicts.58 Seen less as theologians or writers than as mystics, of interest mainly for their experiential witness to the real­ity of the divine, they ­were at first read primarily in modernized versions, including reprints of Cressy’s editions, as though unconnected with vernacular literary history as the Early En­ glish Text Society understood it.59 This did not prevent one of them, Julian, from playing an unexpected role in a ­bitter early twentieth-­century controversy within En­glish Catholicism.60 But it did mean that where Rolle is given a third of a chapter in The Cambridge History, Julian and Hilton share a single paragraph while, remarkably, The Cloud of Unknowing, in print since 1871, goes unmentioned.61 Gradually joined by Ancrene Wisse and other devotional works in the sequestered spaces of the Roman Catholic and High Anglican imprint, t­ hese writers and texts began to be known to literary scholars and their students only in the midcentury, and to appear in original-­language editions still l­ater.62 The entire story of their reemergence is more complex than this. It also involves a group of High Anglican intellectuals whose members included Evelyn Underhill, Charles Williams, and T. S. Eliot, as well as Hope Emily Allen’s identification in the late 1930s of a work clearly related to the En­glish Catholic canon but magnificently disruptive of its decorum, The Book of Margery Kempe.63 Nonetheless, as Chambers’s obituary in the Tablet suggests, On the Continuity of En­glish Prose did play an impor­tant role in bringing ­these “Catholic” works into the mainstream of literary historical studies. Even now, however, they retain a special status in the field, partly intrinsic to the material itself, but partly the legacy of reading practices long built into their reception. The desire for the vanished ­Middle Ages they engender in many readers may still reflect the tangled relationship to history expressed three and a half centuries ago by communities of devout exiles, for whom it was the pre­sent, still more than the past, that was, necessarily, a foreign country.64

Chapter 5

Medieval Studies and Modernism

1. Three Re­nais­sances and a Revolt The argument of the previous three chapters can be summarized as follows. The claim that the ­later medieval institutional Church withheld the word of God by forbidding its circulation in the vernacular grew up in the context of the controversy over The M ­ iddle En­glish Bible during the 1400s and was renewed in that of the controversy over the Tyndale New Testament during the 1520s. Broadening its scope to encompass catechesis, preaching, and the liturgy, by 1570 at the latest it had become integral to Anglicanism’s account of Church history and its own, essentially eschatological place within that history. In princi­ple a polemical charge about pastoral practice, largely unconnected to ­matters of doctrine, it was nonetheless crucial to condemnations of the medieval Church and its theology. Naturalized into known fact and made structural to the national history of Britain, the claim represented a consensus view for nearly four hundred years. It thus had ample opportunity to shape the new, ostensibly secularized approaches to the ­Middle Ages that developed during the nineteenth ­century with the nationalist proj­ect of Romantic philology. ­There ­were En­glish Catholic counterpositions, which ­were articulated lucidly and forcefully, but their reach was ­limited. The influence of the claim on medieval scholarship weakened only with the rise of academic literary studies, which had disciplinary reasons to distance itself from religious history, and with steadily increasing knowledge of the vernacular archive itself. Nonetheless, it was not ­until the 1930s that vernacular genres indelibly marked as Catholic, most often through their association with monasticism, ­were admitted into mainstream En­glish literary history. In some quarters, the influence of the starkly negative view of the medieval Church to which Coulton gave prolific vent lasted a further fifty years. It



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was still pre­sent, for example, in the arguments about the ­causes of the Henrician Reformation that took place in the years around the publication of Eamon Duffy’s remarkable The Stripping of the Altars in 1992.1 Echoes of the interdenominational controversies of the past sound even now in certain areas of scholarship, especially (as one might expect) ­those having to do with the study of persecution and heresy.2 Nonetheless, the ­middle de­cades of the twentieth ­century saw the demise of the explic­itly anti-­Catholic approaches to the ­Middle Ages that, at least in Britain, had long been a feature even of serious scholarship. Not coincidentally, it also saw the emergence of the ­great historiographic breach between medievalists and the rest of the humanist acad­emy over the place of the Western ­Middle Ages that has been an equally notable feature of modern historical studies. To overdramatize the situation only somewhat: outside the flickering zones of influence of the medieval disciplines, the Dark Ages still roll on, sometimes as no more than a backdrop to the myth of cultural rebirth first fully laid out in Jacob Burckhardt’s Die Kultur der Re­nais­sance in Italien (translated as The Civilisation of the Period of the Re­nais­sance in Italy), published in 1860, four years ­after the inauguration of Froude’s History of ­England and, like the term “re­nais­ sance” itself, a product of the same, mid-­Victorian cultural moment. In Burckhardt’s vastly influential study, the old Protestant imagining of a divinely ordained break with the Catholic past is refashioned as a secular imagining of the dawn of an epoch. Awakening from a “Mittelalter” during which he had lain “dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil . . . ​woven of faith, childish prejudice, and illusion” (“wie unter einem gemeinsamen Schleier träumend oder halbwach . . . ​gewoben aus Glauben, Kindesbefangenheit und Wahn”), “Man” (“der Mensch”) turned to the all-­but-­forgotten media of painting, sculpture, architecture, and lit­er­a­ture, to reaffirm the individual, embrace the natu­ ral world, and rediscover the glories of the classical past. The providential pattern of reversal that undergirds Christian sacred history and that Origen inscribed onto the story of Balaam’s ass ­here takes on a new guise as an allegory of the birth of Eu­ro­pean humane values and civilizational exceptionalism.3 “The revolt of the medievalists” that has been a distinctive feature of Anglo-­ American historical studies over the past hundred years has been almost as per­sis­tent, often building on the alternative historiographic paradigm that led to the coining of this wry phrase.4 This was Charles Homer Haskins’s imitative riposte to Burckhardt, The Re­nais­sance of the Twelfth ­Century, with its argument against supposing “violent contrasts between successive periods,” at least in relation to the ­later ­Middle Ages and its successors.5 A foundational work of

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American medieval professional scholarship, whose presuppositions about the shape of history are strikingly more redolent of Michelet than they are of Froude, this book was published in 1927, two years ­after the creation of the Medieval Acad­emy of Amer­i­ca by Haskins and ­others set in motion one of the several pro­cesses that brought into being the interdisciplinary field of medieval studies.6 As we ­will have opportunities to see ­later, Haskins’s new use of the re­nais­ sance paradigm suffers from the drawback that it cannot avoid representing the period before the twelfth ­century as something of a “saeculum obscurum” in the tradition of Baronius, solidifying one break (between the early and the late medieval) even as it seeks to repair another (between the late medieval and the early modern). Nonetheless, his thesis that the twelfth ­century was as impor­ tant as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the formation of Eu­ro­pean culture, thought, and institutions, and the disciplinary breadth he brought to that thesis, have been lastingly generative within the field, especially in the United States and Britain.7 The paradigm’s l­imited success in embedding itself in the wider cultural imaginary may merely suggest that re­nais­sances weaken when multiplied. A third, ninth-­century Carolingian re­nais­sance, another early twentieth-­century creation that has similarly had only localized influence, would afford a further case in point.8 But the staying power of the re­nais­sance proposed by Burckhardt is also an object lesson in the fungible resourcefulness of sacred history once its basic shape is established, as it mutates its eschatological account of how the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries gave birth to a new order of time to new uses. Anti-­ Catholicism is no longer a ­viable intellectual proj­ect. Yet traces of its energies linger in the rich brew of forgettings, misrememberings, and reimaginings that keep the medieval era and its justly supplanting successor, modernity, in the places assigned to them. Despite its many drawbacks, the decline in the cultural standing of the ­Middle Ages over the past hundred years, as Romantic nationalism became another unviable intellectual proj­ect in the wake of fascism and global war, has allowed medievalists a certain freedom from successive versions of the Burckhardtian paradigm, as ­these have continued their prominent public ­careers.9 The need for a ­Middle Ages redolent of barbarism and superstition, heroism and magic, is now met mainly by fantasists, working in a tradition that dates back to the Victorian period but came to its flowering with J. R. R. Tolkien’s creation of ­Middle Earth. The work of a scholarly Catholic protégé of Chambers, The Hobbit was published in 1937, a year before Coulton’s Medieval Pa­norama and five years ­after On the Continuity of En­glish Prose, whose argument owes a good



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deal to Tolkien’s early, brilliant, but l­ater largely abandoned medieval philological scholarship.10 The Lord of the Rings, the Narnia series by another medievalist, C. S. Lewis, and a ­great deal ­else followed.11 Thus did genres of storytelling developed a millennium ago, especially romance, resurface in post-­Enlightenment forms, to carry on their old work of mingling plea­sure with instruction, to serve as unpredictable lightning rods for con­temporary prob­lems and prejudices, and to stand in with complex nostalgia for the sophisticated civilizations in which they arose.12

2. Neo-­Thomism, Nouvelle Théologie, and the Second Vatican Council This is not to say that the field as a ­whole, or the parts of it that have to do with the vernacular, have found it easy to ­free themselves from the effects of religious politics, or of the epochal thinking that underlies the Burckhardian paradigm. This would in any case hardly be possible, given the key role that the idea of the medieval played in the early twentieth century in stabilizing the humanist and social science disciplines on which historical scholarship has subsequently relied, serving as a discarded antonym to the “secular” as this became an organizing concept of Western modernity.13 One case in point is Max Weber’s ­great study Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (translated as The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) of 1904–5, which is remarkable for the role it understands religion to have played in the construction of modernity. Weber’s argument for the centrality of Beruf (vocation) to Western modernity rests on a Lutheran account of the rise of rationalism, disenchantment, and laicization in modernity in which medieval superstition and collectivity again serve as a crucial defining backdrop.14 The study of medieval Chris­tian­ity in par­tic­u­lar has continued to have intimate links to Christian religious institutions and their historiography, although usually now less in relation to the interdenominational conflicts of the past than to debates within the Roman Catholic Church. During much of the last fifty years, it is fair to say that at least certain aspects of medieval Chris­ tian­ity have been analyzed with a sympathy unusual in the modern study of Western religions.15 One reason for this has to do with an understandable, if intellectually perilous, need to compensate for a long history of hostile repre­ sen­ta­tions. Yet scholarship on the composite of belief, practice, and affect that is now analyzed ­under the categories of spirituality, mysticism, affectivity, devotion, experience, or emotion also stands in reproof of ­earlier rationalizing

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strands within Roman Catholicism.16 Emphasis on the multiplicity of medieval Chris­tian­ity responds not only to Romantic preoccupation with the unity of origins but to e­ arlier Roman Catholic understandings of tradition, as summed up in the oddly heraldic motto of Baronius’s Annales ecclesiastici: “Semper eadem,” always the same.17 In the forty years leading up to the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), scholarship on medieval religious history was a notably activist enterprise, as the northern Eu­ro­pean Catholic reform movement nicknamed la nouvelle théologie by its opponents sought to engage with the Neo-Thomist (or Neo-Scholastic) orthodoxy that dominated Catholic intellectual life between the 1870s and perhaps the 1940s.18 In its condemnation of the subjectivism of Western philosophy since Descartes, Neo-­Thomism was itself a medievalist construct of a distinctively modern kind, grounding its approach to pedagogy, law, ethics, practice, and theology in the philosophical theology of the doctor angelicus, Thomas Aquinas. This it took to constitute a fully systematic account of the interlocking workings of h ­ uman science and divine revelation, the order of reason and the order of grace.19 Rejoicing in the divide between medieval and modern that Burckhardt and ­others ­were reinventing through the category of the re­nais­sance, Neo-­Thomism represented itself as situated ideologically on the far side of that divide, challenging the forces it classified as modernist with striking institutional success. The new field of spirituality studies—­increasingly identified with secularism, even heterodoxy, by the Vatican, as it was taken up by scholars and intellectuals outside the Roman communion—­was itself an object of antimodernist attack in the early 1900s, targeted in one of the series of encyclicals aimed at reinforcing unity and discipline that followed the declaration of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council in 1870.20 Citing the example of the Benedictine textual critic Jean Mabillon (d. 1707) and other seventeenth-­century Maurists to argue that a rich awareness of history as pro­cess was vital, the scholars of la nouvelle théologie inaugurated a program of what they called ressourcement (return to the sources), beginning in the 1920s.21 This attempt to recover the teachings of the Church ­fathers in the millennium before Aquinas in all their historical complexity involved a renewal of editorial research into patristic and medieval theology, much of it published ­under the imprint of Sources Chrétiennes, founded by the Jesuits Jean Daniélou, Henri de Lubac, and Claude Mondésert in 1942. It also involved a new body of critical work, much of it focused on the twelfth ­century.22 As we have seen, this was where Protestant historiography, as represented by Foxe and the Centuriators of Magdeburg, had located the medieval Church’s ­great betrayal of



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the Gospel; where Catholic historiography, as represented by Baronius and ­others, had located the full realization of the idea of the institutional Church; and where Romantic nationalism, as represented by Michelet, had located the birth of the French nation. It was also where Haskins and other medieval historians w ­ ere now locating the early sources of secular modernity. In the religious movements of the twelfth ­century on which Mabillon and his colleagues had focused, the Dominican Marie-­Dominique Chenu (1895–1990) discerned a ­great awakening, a yearning not only up ­toward God but out ­toward the world he believed it was the con­temporary Catholic Church’s urgent task to rediscover, renouncing the rigidity of system and reentering the flow of history, in part through a return to historical research itself.23 Initially censured and indeed censored, Chenu and the nouvelles théologistes ­were rehabilitated in time to set the agenda for the council, debate over its implementation, deny that they had ever constituted a movement, and in some cases ascend to high ecclesiastical positions.24 The council’s much-­publicized rhetorical embrace of modernity (aggiornamento), the secular, and the vernacular, in pursuit of a renewed vision of the sacramental presence of the Spirit throughout history and the created order, appeared a betrayal of the Church’s past to Neo-­Thomist traditionalists, just as it appeared as an overdue repudiation of the medieval Dark Age to outsiders. In one sense, especially in its ­earlier sittings, the council indeed participated in its own Pentecostal version of the presentism of the era. But it also crystallized modern Catholicism’s revitalized commitment to the flux of Christian history, including the medieval centuries.25 Along with the lay phi­los­o­pher and historian Étienne Gilson, the Benedictine Jean Leclercq, the Jesuit Henri de Lubac, and the many scholars they influenced, Chenu sacralized Haskins’s twelfth-­century re­nais­sance, reimagining it as a reformation in its own right, with the same degree of significance as the sixteenth-­century reformations.26 In books such as Chenu’s La Théologie au douzième siècle (1957)—­its central chapters published in En­glish ­under the more renaissance-­friendly title Nature, Man, and Society (1968)—­the inner life is the ­great historical protagonist. The twelfth-­century Church is hence primarily a sacramental community: diverse, ­eager for new understanding, as porous to the world as many of the declarations of the council sought to be. In this interdisciplinary account, influenced by Haskins’s multiple interests in art, architecture, and lit­er­a­ture, as well as the researches of les nouvelles théologistes, the story of the rise of the papacy from Gregory VII to Innocent III told by Baronius and other Church historians takes second place to developments in

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the charismatic institutions that Chenu understands to have manifested the period’s real energies. ­These ­were the cathedral schools and universities but also the new religious ­orders, Carthusian, Cistercian, Augustinian, Gilbertine, Fontevraultian, Franciscan, Dominican, Carmelite, and more. Between the 1930s and the 1960s, scholars of very dif­fer­ent outlook made arguably more learned contributions to the study of medieval Chris­tian­ity. The work of Herbert Grundmann (1902–70) at Münster on Eu­ro­pean religious movements and of F. M. Powicke (1879–1963) at Oxford on the En­glish Church are two cases in point.27 But the vibrant relationship with history that was cultivated by les nouvelles théologistes, and their explic­itly pastoral awareness of the “constante perméabilité” they discerned between past and pre­sent, has left a long afterglow.28 With a conviction of its own rightness that, as we again see ­later, has been a dubious blessing for study of the En­glish religious vernacular, 29 Haskins’s twelfth-­century re­nais­sance remained a charismatic presence at least down to the 1980s, in books such as Colin Morris’s Discovery of the Individual of 1972 or the first edition of Michael Clanchy’s From Memory to Written Rec­ord of 1979.30 But a good deal of the historical work on the twelfth ­century published in the forty years ­after the Oxford scholar R. W. Southern’s vibrant first book, The Making of the ­Middle Ages, published in 1953, was as indebted to Chenu as to Haskins. This is even true of Robert Benson and Giles Constable’s well-­k nown collection, Re­nais­sance and Renewal in the Twelfth ­Century (1982), produced in cele­bration of Haskins, which features essays by Southern and Leclercq among ­others. It is also true of Southern’s uncompleted final trilogy, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Eu­rope (1996–2003), and of the books he produced across the intervening de­cades.31 Even recent work on the religious thought and institutions of the period, although for the most part less positive in tone, has done less than one might expect to temper the note of historiographic optimism, and the assumption of a divide between “early medieval” and “high” or “­later medieval” on which it depends.32 Nor have the effects on medieval scholarship of the theological movements that ­shaped the council come to an end. Two developments in the study of medieval Chris­tian­ity of the past de­cades suggest the field’s continued relationship with con­temporary religious concerns. First, the research into late medieval pastoralia inaugurated in the 1960s by the Dominican Leonard Boyle at Toronto’s Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (founded by Gilson in 1928) has done a good deal to refocus scholarship on medieval religious institutions away from monasteries ­toward the episcopate, and away from bishops as administrators ­toward bishops and pastoral care.33 This research has increasingly been



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supplemented by work on the pastoralia of other times and places: late antique Gaul, the Carolingian Empire, and early medieval E ­ ngland.34 Second, the diffuse body of research into medieval affective piety, which descends in part from Leclercq’s championing of early Cistercian spirituality, is one of several investigations now being undertaken by medievalists into the history of Christian religious experience. This research is already joining forces with the investigation of early medieval Christian piety, indebted to the revival of late antique studies ­under Peter Brown, himself working outward from the new accounts of the period made pos­si­ble by the found­ers of Sources Chrétiennes, among ­others.35 Other intellectual currents are in play. Among ­these are the study of practice, a term made urgent by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and crucial to recent work on religion;36 the study of embodiment, of special significance in feminist, gay, and queer scholarship, as it is in the impor­tant body of new work on premodern understandings of race; and the study of emotion, a term whose use by medievalists builds bridges between historians and the cognitive sciences.37 But while all ­these terms have links to the medieval, the recent rapprochement between medieval Church history and the secular social sciences is unimaginable without the partial rapprochement between the Roman Catholic Church and the idea of modernity that took place sixty years ago.

3. En­glish Studies and Medieval Religious Lit­er­a­ture Since the 1930s Beginning in the 1970s and picking up speed ­after the 1980s, medieval En­glish literary scholars have accomplished their own partial rapprochement with colleagues in religious history, building a major body of work on vernacular pastoralia to complement that of Boyle and his successors, and developing research proj­ects in other areas in which the vernacular played a significant role, from contemplative theology to religious controversy.38 Although interdisciplinary tensions still surface, scholarship on such topics as early religious prose, preaching, contemplation, heresy, religious ­women, and the laity are increasingly joint enterprises; proof, if proof ­were needed, that medieval studies can be a constructive intellectual as well as institutional configuration. Insular French studies, which has always been underresourced and which did not even have a secure sense of its own corpus ­until 1999, when Ruth Dean’s pioneering Anglo-­Norman Lit­er­a­ture: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts was published, has been slower than Old and ­Middle En­glish studies. This is a local

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version of a wider imbalance between scholarship on Germanic and Romance lit­er­a­tures in the area of religious writing. Yet in recent years, as it has begun to use its awkward institutional situation straddled between French studies and En­glish studies to advantage, this field, too, has made increasingly influential contributions of its own.39 Nor are literary scholars the single group interested in vernacular religious materials. Given the topics and approaches that have come to the fore in recent de­cades, it is not surprising that close attention is now also being paid them by historians, art historians, and theologians.40 Study of the medieval religious vernacular remains a work in pro­gress. A ­great deal of research still needs to be done before parts of the relevant corpora are even available for analy­sis. Despite the development over the past forty years of several new editorial series in addition to EETS and ANTS, this is a slow pro­cess, slower at times when institutional support for editing, never too robust in the Anglophone acad­emy, is at a lower than usual ebb.41 Some of the tools needed for this research still need development. Despite advances in dialectology, paleography, and codicology, the dating and localizing of texts and books often remains more an art than a science.42 Some of the larger questions about the scope and character of this field of study and the working assumptions on which it can best be based, including the assumption that it can be understood as a field of study, have not yet been clearly asked, let alone carefully answered. ­These questions, to which we turn in Part II, are among the par­tic­u­lar concerns of this book. All this is as we would expect, given the ground that has had to be covered between, for example, the implicit personal religiosity of Chambers’s attempt to create a new national story around the history of En­glish prose in 1932 and Milton McC. Gatch’s learned thematic study of some of this prose Preaching and Theology in Anglo-­Saxon ­England in 1977. Not only ­were ­there gaps in theological expertise to overcome for scholars initially trained in philology, before vernacular religious texts could be read knowledgeably and with sensitivity; conditions in the departments of En­glish in which many field scholars are situated have not always been favorable ­either to the study of the religious or, in some cases, to that of the medieval era itself. §§§ First, as to the gaps in expertise: from the ­middle of the last ­century onward, literary scholars in search of their own disciplinary approaches to medieval religion executed a pincer movement on this huge topic. One group sought to



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respond to Chambers’s plea for work on early En­glish prose by broadening the scope of EETS editions beyond linguistic analy­sis to include such ­matters as form, theme, source, and milieu. This was not a ­simple pro­cess. The proj­ect to which the society committed itself in the 1930s, to produce separate transcriptions of all eight copies/versions of Ancrene Wisse, and its Latin and two French translations, intensified the emphasis on philology alone, providing a superb array of materials for the study of dialect and orthography but initially ­doing ­little for literary and historical scholarship.43 Although it represents the culmination of this proj­ect, Bella Millett’s critical edition of 2005–6, whose thematic and linguistic apparatuses are supplemented by a translation, a bibliographic guide, and many contextualizing articles, views the work of the edition in ways that transcend what the society had at first i­magined.44 The groundwork of this editorial model for ­Middle En­glish was laid, rather, by Hope Emily Allen and Sanford B. Meech’s revelatory war­time edition of The Book of Margery Kempe, by some way the most ambitious repre­sen­ta­tion of a text the society had to that point attempted, where linguistic analy­sis takes its place alongside biographical research as well as explorations of pos­si­ble links to continental ­women saints, their cults, and their writings.45 Less idiosyncratic early examples of this model include the editions of the works of the Cloud author by Chambers’s student Phyllis Hodgson. More recent ones, of Old En­ glish prose from the late tenth ­century and ­Middle En­glish prose from the early fifteenth, are numerous, and not confined to EETS.46 The new model, which also requires attention to the evidence of scribal handwriting, manuscript context, and corrections or internal revisions, is exceptionally demanding. More complicated proj­ects may now outlive their first editors.47 Insular French prose and verse and En­glish didactic verse have only begun to be given a comparable level of treatment.48 A critical edition of a medieval vernacular text is a specialist tool that represents only the beginning of its modern c­ areer and may or may not soon lead to further study. But the learned and ambitious approach to vernacular religious texts developed by recent generations of EETS editors is by now working fully as effectively as editions in Sources Chrétiennes and its colleague Corpus christianorum to reveal the learning and ambition that underlie many of the texts themselves. Another group sought to understand the religious aspects of the period’s acknowledged masterpieces, including The Canterbury Tales, Piers Plowman, and John Gower’s Confessio amantis, all of which make sophisticated use of themes, materials, and genres that derive from thirteenth-­century pastoral theology with deeper roots in in the patristic era. Their research thus focused on Latin texts and genres, sometimes seen as a hinterland for vernacular writings, in the vein

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of R. E. Kaske’s Medieval Christian Literary Imagery (1988), sometimes as contiguous to ­these writings, in the vein of Morton W. Bloomfield’s Incipits of Latin Works on the Virtues and Vices, 1100–1500 (1979). Both ­these books ­were the work of several de­cades. Critical analyses followed suit, developing dauntingly learned templates for studying vernacular texts through their Latin sources and analogues, a method always informative and in the case of Piers Plowman transformative, although in retrospect not always sufficiently aware of the distinct conditions ­under which vernacular texts make meaning. The most systematic such template was D. W. Robertson’s “exegetical criticism” as developed in A Preface to Chaucer (1962), which takes a certain mode of Christian allegoresis as a key to understanding medieval imaginative writing, and as a sign of its separation from modern ideas of the literary. Recent scholarship is diverse, focusing now on scholastic literary commentary, now on the history of rhe­toric or on pastoral manuals. But it retains the bifocal approach of ­earlier work, recognizing a double duty to explicate and make available complex bodies of Latin material and explore their relevance for vernacular lit­er­a­ture.49 The result is a patchy but increasingly thick description of the areas of medieval textuality and intellectual life that informed vernacular writings.50 §§§ Second, as to the institutional context within which this work is carried out: modern university disciplines, viewing themselves as organs of secular modernity, have found religion an awkward topic. This is perhaps ­because it is hard to treat the idea of the transcendent as a historical actant, a ­factor among other ­factors; perhaps ­because, in modernity, belief is subjectivized in ways that make its public manifestations hard to grasp, except as a sign of magical thinking or ideological compulsion.51 Hence, perhaps, the emphasis in religious studies, through much of the twentieth ­century, on the privatized topic of religious experience in the tradition of William James.52 Nowhere is such awkwardness more in evidence than in En­glish studies, which at certain moments in its brief history has represented itself as a modern substitute for religion, promoting its “canon” as a “secular scripture”: a source of reflection, delight, even redemption in a world from which the “Sea of Faith” has almost completed “its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,” but which retains its need for a humanistic appreciation of literary language and the fictive.53



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This messianic account of the literary, which for all its didacticism relies on a queasy distinction between the literary and the homiletic, has also complicated the discipline’s attitude to literary history, which can be seen as ancillary, even antagonistic to the contemplative pro­cess that is literary reading.54 Indeed, as the model of En­glish studies that developed out of Romantic nationalism lost prestige ­after the 1930s, the account came to vex its relationship to history itself. At the same time as Les nouvelles théologistes ­were arguing for the need to replace the Neo-­Thomist system with a more historicized conception of theology, New Critics such as John Crowe Ransom and Cleanth Brooks, moving in the opposite direction, ­were arguing for the need to subordinate historical analy­ sis of lit­er­a­ture to the exegetical practice of close reading. Applied to the ­limited number of literary works that alone ­were thought suited to sustained analy­sis, close reading treats single works, or (for some critics) the literary canon as a w ­ hole, as self-­sufficient and self-­enclosed, transcending their historical moment as they await their consummation in the pre­sent, where they remain available to rigorous, appreciative teaching and study.55 Beginning in the Southern United States, although with antecedents in the “Cambridge En­glish” developed by I. A. Richards and ­others in Britain, New Criticism revolutionized the language used to talk about literary texts and the sophistication brought to their study, reinventing a mode of dense reading whose debt to medieval allegoresis has never been fully acknowledged. Despite many challenges to its premises and practices, subsequent methodological movements within Anglo-­American literary studies have mostly built, one way or another, on this foundation.56 Within this critical environment, somewhat unfavorable to medieval literary studies as it was then practiced, a debate grew up among literary medievalists between ­those who emphasized the historical distance of their materials and ­those who opposed the separation of the field from other areas of En­glish studies this entailed. In effect, this debate was about ­whether scholars of Old and ­Middle En­glish should join “the revolt of the medievalists.” Its best-­k nown instantiation was the controversy over Robertson’s “exegetical criticism,” which has continued almost to the pre­sent. Although he played a crucial role in making literary medievalists articulate their own assumptions and methods, Robertson’s insistence on the radical difference of medieval culture reinforced a sense of the field as an oddity within En­glish studies and enveloped research into medieval religious lit­er­a­ture in a self-­consciousness from which it took time to reemerge.57

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What­ever difficulties it has caused on the way, the emphasis of modern literary studies on critical approaches has also created new tools for historical scholarship. It was this emphasis, for example, that led literary medievalists, working in Robertson’s wake across the 1980s and 1990s, to develop their own kinds of literary theory from medieval grammarians, rhetoricians, and exegetes, creating reading models appropriate to dif­fer­ent centuries, genres, and languages.58 ­There have remained the prob­lems faced by users of modern literary reading protocols, designed for a synchronic study of texts, in addressing the diachronic topic of historical process—to adopt the opposition derived by mid-­twentieth-­century structuralism from the ­great opponent of Romantic philology, the Swiss linguistic theorist Ferdinand de Saussure.59 In responding to ­these prob­lems, also across the 1980s and 1990s, New Historicists such as Stephen Greenblatt turned to the discipline of anthropology, where scholars had articulated their own methods of close analy­sis, focused on socie­ties, not texts, and much indebted to structuralism. This style of close reading suggested new ways of viewing texts as gateways to cultural fields, which could themselves be analyzed using the tools of literary analy­sis. Scholars could thus begin to explicate the entangled relationships between texts and the forces that underlie their production.60 The advantages New Historicism and the methods it has influenced brought to the field are clear, at least for ­those concerned with the cultural and po­liti­cal functions of texts and literary forms, or with literary scholarship as an interdisciplinary enterprise. Its disadvantages ­were twofold. First, ­because its approach entailed treating the past and its rec­ords as a cultural field, whose apparent confusion can be resolved by diagnosing the conflicting pressures and energies that or­ga­nize it, New Historicism could capture the movement of time only in the frozen form of snapshots. It could not easily track change through time. Second, ­because it focused on areas of the past considered symptomatic of significant ideological conflicts, especially the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, it thus yet again tended to represent history as a series of epochal breaks or crises. The method of cultural analy­sis developed by the Annales school in France, in some ways New Historicism’s intellectual cousin, focuses on the per­ sis­tence of densely researched cultural configurations across the longue durée (a secular version of Baronius’s “semper eadem”), which it studies using techniques also indebted to anthropology and to structuralism. By contrast, New Historicism has repeatedly returned to the well of Protestant historiography, as it has or­ga­nized itself around the exploration of that theologically most haunted of categories, the modern.61



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§§§ No longer a sign of the integrity of a ­people or nation, as it was for Romantic philology down to the 1930s, the vernacular reemerged into prominence in medieval En­glish literary studies in the 1990s, at a moment when study of late medieval conflict over the legitimate use of the “­mother tongue” for several kinds of religious writing, including Bible translation, was vibrant.62 As a perusal of the second Cambridge History of Medieval Lit­er­a­ture shows, edited by David Wallace in 1999, what we might call the “vernacular turn” in M ­ iddle En­glish literary studies took place as a direct result of the encounter between medieval studies and New Historicism.63 The emergence of the vernacular as a term of art in the study of religious lit­er­a­ture is described in Chapter Seven, part of a group of chapters that introduce the main concepts and terms used in the historical studies that follow. ­These chapters make it clear that tension between diachronic and synchronic is integral to any attempt to map many centuries of literary history as a field. They also make it clear that diachronic analy­sis in the elucidatory mode of New Theology, with attention to relationships between bodies of work produced over long periods of time, not synchronic analy­sis in the symptomatic mode of New History, must win the day. In one sense, this book is an attempt to develop a hybrid approach to the ­Middle Ages, interweaving in the hope of reconciling a tradition of literary scholarship that, as we saw, grew out of Protestant nationalism with a tradition of religious historical scholarship that grew out of Catholic ecclesiology. In another sense, the book proposes a corrective of both traditions: in the first case, by emphasizing that religious thought and institutions ­were among the most impor­tant engines of medieval literary history; in the second case, that vernacular texts, writers, and readers ­were among the most impor­tant engines of medieval religious history; and in both, by refusing the temptations of eschatology in the secularized forms in which it still offers itself, ­whether as the modernist myth of periodization or the modernist myth of secularization itself. This is why one of the book’s main historiographic themes is the continuity of the religious vernacular across episodes of historical rupture, including ­those championed by Burckhardt and Haskins, despite the seemingly sudden changes to vernacular textual production that could be brought about by the self-­ conscious movements of reformatio that coincide with t­ hese episodes. Yet if ­there is an object lesson to be derived from the posthumous history of the medieval religious vernacular given ­here, it is that a genealogical analy­sis that attends to the fluctuations of a given topic across time remains a critical

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tool of historical understanding. Only an approach of this kind has the capacity to build an account of how we stand as moderns in relation to the topic of the medieval vernacular robust enough to make scholarly advance pos­si­ble. A good deal of the work on the religious vernacular carried out during the 1990s on which this book builds was compromised by its ­limited sense of the wider historical stakes of the topic.64 Hence the need for the exercise in scholarly ressourcement carried out across ­these chapters, as well as for the long historical account of the medieval vernacular itself, which is this book’s contribution to its study.

Chapter 6

Christian Teaching Across the Longue Durée

1. The Evangelical Imperative: Robert of Gretham’s Miroir Saint Pol le dist pur verite: “Jammes ne charrat charite” (1 Cor. 13:8). Nun frat ovre vieraiement Dunt charite est fundement. E li escriz ki serra faiz Pur tut tolir de mortels leiz, Quant purement est fait en De Dun est co dreite charite. Pur co ai jo cest ovre empris Kar charite n’ert ja esquis, E tut parfrat charite Quanque ne poet ma fraellete. Bien recunois ma nunsavance, Ma feblesce, ma nunpuissance; Mais cil me poet bien assenser Qui fist la roche l’ewe jetter (Exod. 17:5–6) E ki fit l’asnesse parler (Num. 22:28–30) Pur le prophete chastier. Dunc ne me dei pas emaier De plus sages amonester. Deus al prophete dist par sei: “Ta buche ovre, jo l’emplirai” (Ps. 80:11).

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E Saint Davi dist el sauter, Qui Saint Esperit fist parler: “Deus a celi verbe durrat Qui par grant vertu nuntterat” (Ps. 67:12). Par ices diz sui esmuz Parler de Deu e de ses vertuz, E les autres endoctriner Que me meimes ne sai guier. (St. Paul says it as the truth: “Charity never fails.” Truly, no work grows cold of which charity is the ground. And writing that was made to draw all from deadly sins, when it is made wholly in God, then it is right charity. This is why I have taken on this work: ­because charity is never in vain. And charity ­will complete every­thing that my weakness may not perform. I fully acknowledge my ignorance, my frailty, my impotence. But he can teach me well who made ­water flow from the rock and who made the ass speak in order to chastize the prophet. Thus I should not be frightened to exhort ­those wiser than myself. God said of himself to the prophet, “Open your mouth, I ­will fill it.” And St. David said in the Psalter that the Holy Spirit made him speak: “God ­shall give the word to them that preach with ­great power.” Through ­these declarations I am emboldened to speak of God and of his power, and to teach ­others, even though I scarcely know how to rule myself.)1 Prefacing a collection of nearly sixty homilies on the Gospels about nineteen thousand lines of octosyllabic couplets long, said to have been written at the behest of “sa trechere dame Aline” around the ­m iddle of the thirteenth ­century, an En­glish cleric named Robert muses at some length on the sober urgencies of vernacular instruction in the lives of Christian believers and communities. 2 All that is written is not, ­after all, written for our doctrine (see 2 Tim. 3:16), for not all writing contains truth. Many works, especially the “chancon de . . . ​ geste” Aline herself is said to prefer, be it the “Chancun de Mainet,” the “Geste dan Tristram,” or another work, are full of fables and vanity.3 Only the Gospel is true, and its exposition must be as plain as pos­si­ble. All should be addressed in the language they know, avoiding the folly of using a Latin the laity cannot grasp and as crudely as necessary to get the point across. It is better to sound



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rustic and speak truth than to go wrong out of mere politeness, even at the cost of language and rhyme. Better also to be brief. Truth is endless, attention strays. Often the shortest tale makes the heart dance in joy.4 The French book about the Sunday Gospels that follows (“les ewangelies des domnees . . . ​en Franceis translatees”) thus has the carefully ­simple name “Mirur” (mirror). By contemplating it, Aline may learn to cherish and correct, not her outer bearing, as in a physical mirror, but her soul and heart: knowing her faults of thought, word, and deed; the virtues best suited to righting them; and how she may garb herself in good works so that God desires her for himself.5 Yet instruction in divine ­things is as hard to provide as it is to learn. To ­those who can understand only its “lettre” or literal sense, the Bible with its Old and New Testaments appears “obscure e dure” (hidden and hard), like a nut or apple tree whose fruit is hidden from view by its dense leaves, or a lowering cloud (“nue obscure”) whose darkness trou­bles the hearts of the onlookers. For it is the “custume” (habit) of God’s word to hide its promised sweetness from a casual gaze: Saint Escripture ad la custume Del arbre qui port noyz u pume. Quant est fuillie esspessement Del fruit i pert petit u nient. Mai si l’em escust l’abrecel Li fruit enchet espes e bel. (Sacred Scripture has the same custom as a tree that carries nuts or apples. When it is thickly leaved, ­little or none of the fruit can be seen. But if someone shakes the tree, the fruit rains down thick and fair.) Only when the “expositur” shakes the tree by declaring the spiritual sense does it shower the precious “pumettes” of moral teaching (“sentences de maneres”) on the eater. Only when the “expositur” pierces the cloud by revealing the spirit of the new law lying concealed within the old (“les leis exspunt”) does it yield the rain of divine truth, freshening the ground of the heart and causing the soul to sing like a bird as it flowers (“flurir”) in good works.6 It was to this end that God ordained “conseillurs,” the first of the three estates of “Sainte Iglise” (holy church) and made it their deepest duty to pass their learning eagerly on to fellow Christians, “defendurs” and “guaignurs” (protectors and laborers). Now, however, many of the clergy shirk this duty through

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lack of virtue, ignorance, greed, or fear. Loving the honors of their “ordre” but not the hard work it entails, they hold God in despite, deaf to the cries of the “lai gent” (laity) who, like “petit” (­children), beg them to break the bread of life by expounding the scriptures, resolving their religious questions and feeding their souls in sermons (Lam. 4:4).7 When the clergy are blinded by worldly delights in this way, the ­people are almost sure to follow. “As it is goes with the priest, so it goes with the laity,” declares the prophet (Isa. 24:2). Even so does the ­whole body of Christ lurch, unseeing, ­toward its doom. God withholds the rain of his truth, drying up the vine that is his ­people and withering the fruit of their good works (Isa. 5:6). He even bids true preachers to be still ­because of the sins of the ­people. For God no longer cherishes with his love ­those whom teaching does not recall to virtue, not wishing them to be instructed, nor to be chastised with the preacher’s admonishing flail.8 In light of this perilous situation, this book of Sunday Gospels and their expositions is addressed not only to dame Aline, nor aimed solely at her own improvement. Rather, it is written so that anyone with French who knows letters may read how clerks should preach and keep themselves in God; how the laity should honor and listen to their teachers; and how all must zealously obey God’s commandments, in order to amend themselves and teach one another: Coment li clerc deit sermuner E sei meimes en Deu guarder; Coment li lais deit bien oir E sun doctur en Deu cherir; E cument tuz vivement Ferrunt le Deu comandement. . . . E chascun ki siet lettrure E de franceis la parleure Lire i poet pur sei amender E pur les autres endoctriner.9 The book is merely a gathering of flowers from the meadows of ­others. It brings no more credit to the writer than is owed to Balaam’s ass. The writer is merely a “gutere,” a conduit or irrigation pipe, whose role is to carry ­water to the ground where it is needed.10 What counts is not who he is, a weak sinner, but what he says, “bone . . . ​doctrine.” Nobody may speak all ­things well. The thorn, however rough, should be prized for the ­rose that grows on it. The preacher, however imperfect, should be sustained by ­those who learn from him.11



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On this basis alone, the writer dares to take on this work to help all understand the Gospel, asking any of his colleagues or ­others who find ­mistakes in what they read to offer corrections. For he has not composed the work only for his own benefit (“pur mei”) but for that of “tute gent.”12 Fi­nally, the writer prays heartily to ­those who have copies of this writing (“escrit”) that they share it freely (“delivere”) with anyone who wishes to copy it (“k’il voldrunt escrivre”). For God rewards all who receive his word except ­those who are miserly about passing it on. All must give what­ever trea­sure they have generously, knowing that Jesus considers ­those who seek to amend their sins his “bons amis,” as anyone who reads on ­will find. May God grant us to spend his gifts in such a way that we may be able to take all gifts from his hand!13 §§§ The dynamic account of Christian instruction laid out in the prologue to the Miroir can serve, if only for the pre­sent, as representative of the pastoral and pedagogical imperatives that undergird a substantial class of vernacular works written across the centuries covered by this study.14 The duty to teach is in the first instance professional, laid on the clergy by Christ himself, on pain of severe spiritual punishment (Matt. 18:6). The health of the ­whole Christian Church depends on the per­sis­tence and care with which the clergy share with ­others, by word and example, the divine truths that they know. Yet in another sense the same duty is inherent in membership of the Christian community, starting with ­those such as “dame Aline,” whose position in society makes them responsible for their subordinates, but fi­nally irrespective of education, status, even virtue. Divine truth is personal, moral, and penitential, requiring all the faithful to amend their own lives in right belief. But it is also social, evangelistic, and po­liti­cal, requiring the faithful to instruct and amend one another as best they can. Even though the Church is a body whose dif­fer­ent members have dif­fer­ent primary functions, this is not at all a task to be left solely to the clergy, who may indeed occasionally be in need of prompting from members of the laity if they are to teach with the diligence that they should. ­Here, the Miroir is in accord not only with the real­ity of church organ­ization at the parochial level (where leading laypeople might well exercise moral authority, as well as rights of patronage, over the local priest) but with a long tradition of thinking about fraternal correction, still developing when it was composed. In this tradition, moral teaching and correction ­were understood as among the most impor­tant of the ties that bound together the Christian community, far too urgent to be

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entrusted only to professionals, even (with some caveats) when it came to exposing the moral or doctrinal failings of the clergy.15 Works such as the Miroir, intended for the mixed lay and clerical audience facilitated by their composition in the vernacular, thus represent themselves as central to the life of the Church in two ways at once. First, through ­these works the clergy discharge their responsibilities ­toward the laity, w ­ hether in their capacity as writers or as professional users. The Miroir is a homiliary on the influential model that lies ­behind Gregory the ­Great’s Homiliae in evangelia (homilies on the Gospels), consisting of translations and expositions of the Gospel readings for preaching on Sundays and major feasts of the liturgical year. As such, it belongs in a line of insular vernacular homiliaries we can trace back clearly at least to the Blickling Homilies in the ­later tenth ­century and forward to the Dominical Sermon Cycle in the ­later fifteenth. Several surviving copies of the work can be linked to members of Augustinian and Benedictine h ­ ouses or to secular clerics.16 ­These canons, monks, and priests may have used the Miroir as an aid to preaching and teaching in the same way ­others may have used a con­temporary En­glish work, The South En­glish Legendary, and almost certainly did a ­later one, The Northern Homily Cycle.17 Robert himself was a priest, perhaps onetime chaplain to the patron of the Miroir, and possibly a canon at the strict Arrouasian ­house at Lilleshall in Shropshire, which followed the Augustinian Rule but ­adopted many of the austere customs of the Cistercians.18 In the Miroir, the priest who does not show the laity how to repent their sins and come with contrition to receive the food of life fails in his most basic obligation, to preach the Gospel. Robert and any of his colleagues who use his poem well can be confident that they are ­free of the hard fate that awaits priests such as ­these. Second, by expounding a comprehensive cycle of readings from the Gospels in French verse, the Miroir aims to allow the laity to discharge their own obligation to instruct themselves and ­others by learning from, talking about, and sharing the book. Robert most likely composed his poem at the request of Elena (Helen, Eleanor) de Quincy (d. 1296), countess of Winchester, wife and ­widow of Henry III’s loyal steward, Alan la Zouche (d. 1270), prob­ably within ten to twenty years ­after her marriage to Alan around 1240. Elena may ­later also have commissioned the sumptuous Lambeth Apocalypse (1265–81), which includes depictions of its noble reader in postures of worship or penance, and whose series of images with French captions perform a visual version of vernacular exposition, both of the Apocalypse itself and of the Christian life as a ­whole.19



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In the most diagrammatic of ­these depictions, which makes in­de­pen­dent use of images that feature in Robert’s prologue, a noble ­woman who “signifies repentance” (“par la Dame est signifie repentant,” reads the caption) is seated on a throne beside the river of holy scripture (“escriture”), as displayed to her and us (“demustre”) by a preacher. The preacher is at once a crowing rooster atop the tree of the world ­under which the lady sits, trampling on it to show how to despise it (“par le coc en larbre est signifie le precheur qui defule e le preie a despire”) and, perhaps, the figure dressed as a “guaignurs” (laborer) who chops at the base of this tree with the axe of “prechement del evungele” or “sentence del jugement.” Yet it is the penitent herself, assisted by the ministrations of her guardian angel, brushing away the “flies of vain thoughts” (“musches de veines pensees”) with a flyswatter (“le muscher”), and chastened by the admonitions of the sword-­ carrying angel of the fear of divine judgment (“la destresce del devin jugement”), who fends off the dev­il’s arrows with the Trinitarian shield of her faith (Eph. 6:16). It is also the penitent to whom the Spirit, perched on the back of her throne in the likeness of a dove, expounds (“espunt”) scripture’s meaning directly, both for her personal benefit and for ­others who meditate on the book Elena has caused to be brought into being.20 Robert’s Miroir is one of several thirteenth-­century insular French works for lay readers aimed at enabling such active participation in the proj­ect of salvation, which also include Pierre Fecham d’Avergnan’s verse Lumere as lais (light for the laity). Versions of ­these works ­were in circulation among literate laypeople, at vari­ous social levels, for 150 years.21 Although Robert wrote in a genre anciently associated with bishops and latterly priests, he is careful to imagine its primary reception within the lay space of an aristocratic, gentry, or mercantile h ­ ouse­hold, to be read in the same settings as the secular entertainments he deplores, instilling virtue in the hearers and urging them to do this to ­others. This accounts for the work’s striking conjunction of an ecclesiastical genre with a verse form derived from secular romance, a regular feature of thirteenth-­and fourteenth-­century insular French and En­glish pastoralia. It may also have influenced Robert’s choice of the by now somewhat old-­fashioned homily form, with its allegorized interpretation of the Gospel reading for the day, over the newer thema sermon form preferred by learned preachers, based on the division and exposition of a single verse.22 Most intriguing, the work’s composition for a setting in which laypeople like Elena or a member or her ­house­hold might read it aloud to ­others explains the distance Robert keeps from claiming personal spiritual authority, or from

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overt identification with the “conseillurs” whose duties he describes. Although his voice is that of a preacher, he is never explicit about his clerical status, claiming to belong not with the learned who have a good grounding in the Bible but with the less educated, for whom he writes: “Jo nel di pas as clers lettrez / Qui sunt en sainz escriz fundez, / Mais as altres meins entendanz / Cum jo sui memes e asquanz” (I do not write this for the benefit of learned clerics who are grounded in the scriptures but to ­others who are of less understanding, since I am one of ­these myself). He also compares the vernacular voice with which he reproves the wise to the urgent but lowly braying of Balaam’s ass.23 Insisting at first on maintaining his anonymity, he ­later names himself minimally, as “Robert de Grettam” (perhaps Greetham, just north of Stamford in Rutland), only in order to secure the prayers of his readers.24 Eschewing the obscurities of Latin and the evasions of courtly French for a plain style in which ­simple words carry the entire weight of the argument, he identifies with the supposed crudity and careful plainness of his vernacular verse medium in his declarations of “fraelete . . . ​nunsavance . . . ​feblesce . . . ​nunpuissance” (frailty, ignorance, feebleness, powerlessnes).25 The body of the Miroir consists of scrupulous, though not always equally literal, verse translations of the relevant Gospel passages themselves, followed by the “expusiciuns” through which the divine word is made profitable, the fruit shaken down, the dark cloud made to release its rain. ­These are drawn, without citation, from “sainz escriz,” Gregory’s Homiliae among them, whose own hermeneutic practice is said to have been based on Christ’s exegesis of the parable of the sower as read at Sexagesima, ten days before Ash Wednesday in the Sarum Rite:26 “La semence est la Deu parole, Li semur est Deus e s’escole (Matt. 13:37). “Lung la veie co ke chai Co sunt cil ki unt oi, Dunc vent li diables ki tost vole E de lur quor tolt la parole, Del verbe Deu tolt remenbrance K’il ne guarissent par creance (Luke 8:11–12). . . . “Co que chait en bon terral Co sunt li saint, li bon fedel Ki volenters Deu sermun oient E en bon quor tenent e cloent. E quant unt oi la sentence



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Dunc portent fruit en pacience (Luke 8:15).” Deus deignat mesmes cest espundre, Par co nus volt il sumundre Ke nus nus devum entremetre D’entendre plus ke dist la lettre. E si alcuns poet bien espundre Il ne deit pas sun sens repundre, Ainz deit tut dire humblement Pur sei estruire e altre gent. (“The seed is the word of God; the sower is God and his school. “The seed that falls on the path are ­those who have heard it only for the devil to come, who quickly steals it and removes the word from their hearts. He steals all memory of the word of God from them so that they are not healed by belief. . . . “The seed that falls on good ground are the holy, the good faithful, who willingly hear God’s speech and in good heart retain it and enclose it. And when they have heard its meaning, then they bring forth fruit in patience.” God deigned to expound this himself in order to admonish us that we should take care to understand more than the literal level says. And if anyone can expound it well, that person should not conceal its meaning but should declare all of it in humility, in order to teach both himself and other ­people.)27 But although the work thus involves itself in the complexities of typology and allegory, reading the Gospels now tropologically (as moral exhortation), now allegorically (as uncovered doctrine), now anagogically (as eschatological prophesy), it does all this in language that aspires to be easy to adapt to lay voices and settings. Far from seeking to preserve ­either the mystery of Holy Scripture or the mystique that accrues to the learned who are best qualified to expound it, as Jesus’s reference to “mysterium regni Dei” (mysteries of the kingdom of God) might seem to encourage (Luke 8:10), the Miroir sets out to perform the work of the “expositur” once and for all, laying out its nuts and apples for any who are able read or listen to French. As the close of the quoted passage makes clear, the “fundement” that ensures the success of the Miroir is not, in princi­ple, its efficient disposal of a professional clerical task but its submission to “charite,” that is, to the duties of spiritual aid, instruction, and correction all Christians share with one another.

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As is often the case in vernacular religious texts, what “charite” requires from the author, his work, and even its subject ­matter thus also in practice includes a kind of self-­abasement. In fulfilling his double duty ­toward the Christian community, as priest and believer, Robert must lay aside his educated priestly identity as a master of Latin learning without remaking himself as a clerical poet in the high tradition of aristocratic romance. Although its ethical ambition and moral severity is thoroughly of its time, the Miroir appears to work largely with older religious materials. It gives few hints e­ ither of the author’s level of scholarship, as (perhaps) a canon from a prestigious ­house who could have spent a period studying at Oxford, or (more particularly) of the recent revolution in pastoral thought and writing that animates the Lumere as lais and other works con­temporary with itself. ­These include Corset, an expository poem on the sacraments also by a certain Robert the chaplain, who appears to be our author, perhaps writing for Elena’s husband, Alan la Zouche, in this case explic­itly as a priest.28 Despite its use of the sermo humilis that Augustine argues is proper to the preacher, the work’s prologue is richly meta­phorical, its occasional lushness gesturing ­toward the wealthy environment in which it first circulated. ­Here apples are gathered by ­others, and ­there is leisure to pause in front of ­actual “miroirs” to right the ­little blemishes of look and attire (“chosettes mesassises”) that perturb one’s sense of social ease.29 Yet the work’s colors are more often drawn from the Bible than from the secular poetry the poem sets out to displace. Its depiction of the expositor as a hero on a desperate quest to fulfill the mysterious “custume” of the country by shaking fruit from the Bible tree, as dark clouds race overhead and the parched earth longs for rain, is a rare and still only partial exception to this rule in a prologue seven hundred lines long.30 In modern times, abasement has had unintended effects. The “monument to mediocrity” that is Robert’s plain style according to one distinguished scholar (echoing a judgment that would have seemed unexceptionable when he wrote) has led to the Miroir’s neglect, even by the impressive standards for neglect set by Anglo-­Norman religious poetry.31 Although it exists in more medieval copies than most of the secular romances with which it sets itself in competition, less than half the French work has been published in any form, for the most part as an auxiliary to an ongoing edition of a mid-­fourteenth-­century translation of the work into En­glish prose, the Mirror.32 ­Until recently, this En­glish work was itself neglected, except as a potential precursor of the attitudes of late prose texts written ­under the influence of John Wyclif. Although this has now begun to change, t­ here are few studies of the work in e­ ither language.33 What is more, ­there is reason for this. Brilliant though its prologue is, the care the



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work takes to subordinate art to instruction, and the derivative, all but anonymous, profile it pre­sents—­scrupulously available to a range of occasions and settings—­still makes it hard to read with the attention it requires. Yet as is again often the case in vernacular religious texts, the ­humble attitude Robert adopts for his poem and models for his readers also suggests a power­f ul claim, one bound up with what, from any everyday perspective, is a paradoxical characteristic of Christian truth itself: Kar custume est del Deu sermun: Plus est cher cum plus est commun. Qui Deu sermun en celant nie Semble ki il ait de Deu envie, E as almes fait guere grande Qui lur tout lur jurnel viande. Dunt tantes rendre li estolt Cum il poet aider, e ne volt. De tantes rendra raisun Cum sunt periz sanz sun sermun. (For this is the custom with God’s word: it becomes more precious the more widely it is shared. He who guards God’s word in hiding seems to be jealous of God. He who deprives souls of their daily bread does them no favours! Thus he who could help and ­will not must account for it. He must render account for all ­those who perish without his word.)34 God’s precious word has a “custume” marvelous enough for any romance; unlike material wealth, which needs to be distributed carefully, its worth increases when it is scattered like seed but destroys any who too jealously hoard it, ­whether by failing to speak of God or by refusing to share the writings of ­those best able to do so.35 Moreover, although Latin theologians must begin the work of teaching by revealing the difficult spiritual senses of the Bible, inaugurating the hermeneutic proj­ect that, in one sense, has defined the Church since Pentecost, this work can be brought to fulfillment only if taken up, again and again, by vernacular authors and their readers, who must willingly assume both the evangelical task of proclaiming Christian truths to their neighbors and the fearful responsibilities this task potentially entails (Mark 9:42). Although the exigencies of vernacular composition allow the Miroir to convey only a crude rendering of the “sainz ecriz” on which it draws, in a sense the

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poem thus sees itself as manifesting divine teaching more completely than the holy Latin originals on which it is based, since it moves this teaching closer to its goal, the conversion of the ­people of God. Like the humility of the Word who became flesh to save his ­people, the humility that defines the Miroir brings rain onto dry ground, food to the needy, riches to the poor, salvation, potentially, to all.

2. Cultural Change and Historical Explanation According to a historical tradition given canonical form by John Foxe, it was only at the end of the 1530s that the En­glish Church, belatedly tutored by God’s true servant William Tyndale, at last embraced the translation of the trea­sure of the Gospel from the “darke tonge,” Latin, into the language of the laity. So ended five long centuries during which Bible translation was for the most part suppressed, along with almost all sound vernacular repre­sen­ta­tion of the truth. In Chapters One and Two, we began to see that the polemical structure around which this tradition formed, at its heart the claim that officers of the ­later medieval institutional Church set out to conceal scriptural truth in order to further their own, sinister interests, was not first born in the sixteenth-­ century reformations. Rather, it developed 150 years e­ arlier, in the more localized controversies that arose in ­England during the period of the late medieval Papal Schism (1378–1417), as a result of episcopal alarm at the teachings of Wyclif and the vernacular writings that became associated with ­these teachings, including The M ­ iddle En­glish Bible itself. At least so far as ­England is concerned, ­these controversies inaugurated the one period before the sixteenth ­century when any official attempt to restrict the circulation of vernacular Bibles took place. Now we see that the evangelical rhe­toric used in the Protestant Reformation to stress the essential role of the vernacular in the life of the Christian community was also established by the time of Tyndale. Indeed, it long antedates even the power­f ul defenses of the Bible in the “moder tonge” produced by writers from a range of institutional situations and theological positions in the early 1400s. In the Miroir, written a good ­century before The ­Middle En­glish Bible and at least two and a half centuries before the Tyndale New Testament, the insular French vernacular already enables God’s word to be written “so plainly” that all may see its “pro­cesse, order, and meaning” and so be “stablished” in the truth, as Foxe says of his hero's great translation.36



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The Miroir is severe in its moral stances and critique of nonbiblical writing and makes defensive reference to the “envius” who criticize the “bons escriz” of ­others. Yet the work is far from suggesting that it was written ­under ideological pressure, as accounts of medieval attitudes to vernacular biblicism, influenced by Margaret Deanesly’s Lollard Bible, still lead us to expect. Composed by a member of an elite order for a prominent aristocrat on the basis of the writings of a saintly pope, Gregory, the Miroir treats it as obvious that vernacular instruction, especially biblical exposition, is crucial to the life of the Church, its pastors, and its ­people.37 Nor was the ambitious stance on vernacular religious instruction outlined by the Miroir ­either a recent or a merely aristocratic development, its urgency purely a symptom of the renewed commitment to lay teaching often identified with the period ­a fter the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215; its preference for French over En­glish, conversely, an indication of the social limits of that commitment in practice. On the contrary, despite any number of local variations, Robert’s account of the role of the vernacular in the Church’s saving work ­will prove to have been congruent not only with con­temporary writings in En­glish used in parish teaching, but with how homilists such as Ælfric conceived of the instruction of the laity at another moment of special pastoral energy at the turn of the millennium, still two and a half centuries ­earlier.38 Despite his par­tic­u­lar concern that religious instruction be sound, moreover, even Ælfric was no innovator, understanding his role as the correction of a tradition of vernacular preaching and teaching that reached back into the distant past, well beyond our pre­sent ability to track it. Despite the apocalyptic associations the topic of “Goddes lawe” in En­glish had accrued for a small number of writers and readers by the end of the ­Middle Ages, the view of the vernacular as an evangelical instrument that came loudly to the fore in the first de­cades of the sixteenth ­century was largely conventional, continuous not only with attitudes to the subject associated with Wyclif and his allies but with the long tradition from which t­ hese attitudes in their turn derived. §§§ To look even briefly into Dame Aline’s Miroir is thus to see that we cannot hope to understand the character and intensity of the attention paid the religious vernacular in late fourteenth-­and early fifteenth-­century E ­ ngland, or the conflicts that arose over its use, ­unless we have a grasp of the entire length of this tradition, attending both to long continuities such as ­these and to the many

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innovations, changes, and disruptions that are also vital to the story. Nor, indeed, can we expect to comprehend the attention paid to the vernacular Bible, liturgy, and religious writing in general in Protestant thought itself, u ­ nless we have a grasp of the extent to which ­these conversations, as well as ­actual practice, ­were or w ­ ere not continuous with ­those that grew up during the previous centuries. As ­will become clear during the course of this volume and its first sequel, to arrive at the late medieval crisis of the vernacular by way of its long past is to see it in a dif­fer­ent light from the somewhat garish one cast back at it by its postreformation ­f uture. So, too, ­will the arguments over the proper role of the vernacular in the sixteenth ­century itself appear dif­fer­ent when they are situated it in the context of this still occluded but exceptionally rich ­earlier history. The value of approaching the ­later phases of this history from ­behind in this way is such that the discussions that follow in the main adopt the same broadly chronological arrangement as the chapters in Part I. The final chapter of Part II (Chapter Ten), an overview of the archive of texts on which the book as a ­whole is based, already lays out this archive in historical phases, or­ga­nized around linguistic and religious configurations it loosely terms “textual generations.” The groups of chapters that follow, in this volume and its first sequel, then develop an account of the rise and fall of the vari­ous approaches to religious teaching and understandings of the vernacular specific to each of ­these generations. ­These ­will prove to have been a good deal more closely linked to one another than may at first appear, but also to have been in a degree of tension with one another’s organ­izing assumptions and pedagogical and stylistic protocols. ­After devoting sustained attention to several episodes of rapid change in the vernacular textual landscape, especially ­those that took place in the de­cades around the turn of the eleventh and the turn of the thirteenth centuries, the account moves ­toward a kind of culmination in the controversies of the late 1300s and early 1400s and their enforced (and at best partial) resolution in Thomas Arundel’s Oxford Constitutions before turning at last to the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. It ends with the transformations of the En­glish Church ­under the Tudors that, for our purposes, mark the ­imagined close of the “medieval” era and the beginnings of both the polemical and the antiquarian histories of its repre­sen­ta­tion. The second volume of this book can thus close by reflecting on the dynamics of textual production and displacement, vernacular sponsorship and censorship, during the period of the Henrician Reformation, in what is indeed a dif­fer­ent light, less as the result of a singular and catastrophic episode than as one in an ongoing series of upheavals in ­England’s textual and religious culture.



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This conclusion in turn prepares the way for the conclusion of the book as a ­whole, at the end of the third volume. This points to some of the ways in which con­temporary Western culture continues to owe a debt to its medieval pre­de­ces­sor, with which it remains in a largely unrecognized but more intense and consequential conversation than our collective sense of the religious and cultural transformations of the sixteenth ­century have led us to expect. Necessary as this forward movement is to the argument, however, it is impor­tant that we not concede it too much explanatory weight. Through much of Part I, the medieval religious vernacular plays the role of an absent object, its character and in some cases very existence a ­matter for high-­stakes religious disputes. ­These disputes, carried on across four centuries, have given way only gradually, and still ­under pressure from versions of the polemicized intellectual attitudes of the past, to the con­temporary programs of research that lie ­behind this book. Yet it should go without saying that we cannot bring this complex object back into steady view conceptually or descriptively by considering it only as it pertains to the last two medieval centuries, conflating the chronological with the teleological. As we have seen, the sixteenth-­century reformations powerfully distorted e­ arlier religious history in the ser­vice of opposed theological and po­liti­cal interests, in ways that should make us automatically wary whenever we encounter their traces, ­whether in the study of Old En­glish biblicism or that of vernacular texts identified as Wycliffite. Our analy­sis of the succession of forms taken by the medieval religious vernacular cannot ignore the disruptive final phases of the story. But the value of the analy­sis ­will be severely compromised if it is not built from its own materials and allowed its own themes and emphases. Rather than subordinate the discussion of individual bodies of vernacular writing to a single template, the groups of chapters that make up Parts III and IV of this volume, and the groups that make up its successor, thus each have their own structure. All three of the parts that focus in turn on Old En­glish, the first phase of the history of early ­Middle En­glish (in Volume 1), and insular French (in Volume 2) begin within a few de­cades on ­either side of 1200, a period of special importance for the history of medieval ­England’s written vernaculars. This period sees four especially significant developments: (1) the end of the remarkable six-­hundred-­year period during which texts ­were written, copied, and circulated in Old En­glish, a ­century and a half ­after the Norman Conquest; (2) the consolidation of a major new body of religious writing in insular French, whose earliest texts, some of them grounded in Old En­glish pre­ ce­dent, go back to around 1100 but multiplied rapidly ­after circa 1150; (3) the first phase of writing in early ­Middle En­glish, in tandem with insular French;

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(4) the development of a massive new corpus of Latin pastoralia, designed for the use of professional religious and the secular clergy. But whereas the movement of the several sets of chapters devoted to insular French and early ­Middle En­glish is (with some local exceptions) forward in time, tracking changes in the roles played by verse and prose in ­these languages, an impor­tant movement of the Old En­glish chapters is in the opposite direction. Beginning with a major but ­until recently unregarded body of pastoralia in En­glish copied and used in Benedictine ­houses and their dependencies across the twelfth ­century, ­these chapters first move back to the tenth and eleventh centuries, when most of this material was initially composed; then back again to the turn of the ninth ­century, in order to explore the potential influence of Carolingian thought on the development of Old En­glish prose. Only in closing does the discussion return again to the twelfth ­century, to track the emergence of the new set of conventions for vernacular writing that became early ­Middle En­glish, in close continuity with Old En­glish as this slowly ceased to be used a language of written rec­ord in the de­cades immediately before and a­ fter 1200. Similarly, where chronology is vital to the group of chapters that discuss ­Middle En­glish works written in the period of the late fourteenth-­century Papal Schism, an era of especially rapid religious and ecclesiological change, the chapters that concern the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries move more slowly, in order to dwell on an understudied period of literary and religious history, soon before the Henrician Reformation, as a relatively coherent, if always self-­divided, ­whole. ­These two groups of chapters also work diligently against what has long been a standard way of conceiving of ­Middle En­glish religious writing, as or­ga­nized into radical and reactive tendencies. Resisting what John Lydgate, in the early fifteenth ­century, memorably describes as “the serpent of division,” they emphasize commonalities between texts and genres that tend to be placed on opposite sides of the fierce but multifaceted religious controversies of the period.39 ­There remains the need to develop a terminology that facilitates lucid discussion of the conceptual as well as historical links between the successive phases of the vernacular religious archive, allowing us to approach it as a segmented but single comparative field. This is the task of the rest of Part II, which sets out to develop a series of terms and categories that are at once broad enough to remain ­viable across a range of periods, languages, genres, and situations, and grounded enough in history to have purchase in the analy­sis of individual bodies of writing. The chapter that follows thus lays out the par­ameters of this field through a discussion of the phrase this book uses to name it, “vernacular theology,” and



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introduces the range of genres the term needs to include in order to carry out its task. Chapters Eight, Nine, and Ten then view this field through three dif­ fer­ent lenses: first theoretically, by way of an account of the idea of the vernacular between the tenth and sixteenth centuries; then modally, by way of an account of the stances and forms of address employed by vernacular authors; fi­nally rhythmically, by way of an account of what the shape of the ­careers of the bodies of writing that make up this archive have in common. The longevity of Christian thought and language, and of the institutions, bodies of knowledge, and attitudes that constitute the realm of Latinitas offers underpinning throughout. While emphasis falls on making connections between periods, analy­sis in ­these chapters largely works backward from the turn of the fifteenth ­century, when issues surrounding the vernacular generated intense and heated discussion. Although this procedure enables us to return to texts and topics that have already been mooted, especially in relation to Bible translation, it risks a degree of anachronism in relation to the early medieval centuries, when the association of the written vernacular with the uneducated was only starting to solidify, and the phrase lingua vulgaris was a rarity among the terms used to name Eu­rope’s spoken languages. Yet Old En­glish texts and writers also have much to offer in the chapters that follow, both for their witness to the several forms taken across time by what Chapter One describes as the “diglossic contract” between Latin and vernacular, and ­because the vision of Christian society they articulated ­will prove to have been so durable. So, too, for reasons that become clear in Chapter Nine, do texts in French. The repository of arguments about the role of vernacular writing in the life of Christian communities in the prologue to the Miroir in par­tic­u­lar remains a point of reference. Thoroughly of its moment and written in a language whose status as an insular vernacular is still sometimes called into question, this work continues to show its value as a witness to the coherence of the insular vernacular tradition in the chapters that follow.40

Chapter 7

Theology and the Christian Community

1. Versions of “Vernacular Theology” The term “vernacular theology” entered medieval studies during the 1990s as part of the wider set of developments in the study of literary and religious history described in Chapter Five. The phrase can be found in a scattering of contexts from the mid-1800s on, as the word “vernacular” in its nominal as well as adjectival form began the last stages of its ascent to the position that had long been held by the late medieval word “vulgar,” although this term’s Latin and En­glish forms remained in common use throughout the early modern period and beyond. Writing in 1857, for example, the Oxford religious historian Mark Pattison describes the Protestant German religious lit­er­a­ture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as “the Vernacular Theology,” successor to patristic Greek and scholastic Latin. This usage has subsequently retained a certain currency in studies of the early Protestant Reformation by G. R. Elton and, more recently, Brian Cummings.1 In 1978, still within an overtly Protestant context, the phrase took on a more pastoral and con­temporary set of meanings in an influential book by the American Lutheran theologian Paul Holmer, the Grammar of Faith. ­Here, “vernacular theology” names what the book claims is the vigorous plain style proper in discussing ­matters of Christian theology, stripped of “isms” and as alive to the pre­sent as good preaching, like the supple but commonplace language it attributes to the Danish phi­los­o­pher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55).2 Building on Holmer’s work fifteen years ­later, the evangelical missiologist William Dyrness proposed a dif­fer­ent but related use for the term, as the name for what he called a “cross-­cultural” approach to Christian theologies that could respond sensitively to the local idioms and inflexions that flourish in a global religion, without fatally compromising what he presupposes is the ultimate unity of Christian truth.3



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Fifteen years ­later still, now within the field of cultural studies, the term was recast more drastically as “vernacular po­liti­cal theology,” in a study by George Shulman of the centrality of biblical prophetic rhe­toric to American, especially African American, po­liti­cal discourse. In this new context, the term “vernacular” is used to describe both the demotic power with which the speeches of Martin Luther King and the novels of Toni Morrison deploy the resources of prophecy and the secular character of the American modernity they aspire to transform. While it retains a close literary relationship with Protestant biblicism, “vernacular theology” in this sense aspires to be more radically mobile than in Dyrness’s somewhat contained “cross-­cultural” account, if only ­because it sets aside any formal claim to coincide with transcendent truth.4 Although its unsystematic use in medieval studies goes back to the 1950s in the case of ­Middle En­glish, the 1970s in that of Old En­glish, scholars of the Eu­ro­pean ­Middle Ages may first have encountered “vernacular theology” as a moniker for vernacular mysticism, now in a Catholic scholarly context.5 Introducing the conference volume Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics in 1994, Bernard McGinn noted that the term “monastic theology,” which has been impor­tant to religious scholarship on the twelfth ­century in par­tic­u­lar, was first coined by Jean Leclercq as recently as the 1950s, as a challenge to the Neo-­ Thomist identification of medieval theology with thirteenth-­century scholasticism. (Although Leclercq, as a Benedictine, was not central to the movement, his thought was richly informed by the nouvelle théologie.) Rather than group them ­under the traditional but comparatively nebulous category of “spirituality,” McGinn proposed that the vernacular works of Eckhart, the beguines, and other speculative mystical thinkers, many of them ­women, should be understood to constitute a third strand of theology that developed in tandem with academic scholasticism during the course of the thirteenth ­century.6 McGinn argues that the emergence of this body of “vernacular theology,” a term he defines as meaning simply any “reflective pre­sen­ta­tion of Christian belief . . . ​through teaching and writing” in the vernacular, had a close cultural relationship with the populous, multilingual, and multijurisdictional triangle formed by Antwerp, Paris, and Cologne, home as ­these cities ­were to many of northern Eu­rope’s ­houses of female religious and semireligious beguines. Flourishing in urban contexts like ­these, but outside large ecclesiastical institutions and centers of learning, “vernacular theology” in this sense was designed to be accessible to mixed lay and religious audiences. It also tended to represent itself as the outcome less of formal study than of direct encounters with God or transcendent real­ity, ­whether through inspired scriptural reading, meditation,

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vision, or mystical ­u nion. It thus took the affective forms of first-­person narrative, poem, or letter as often as it did the more public forms of sermon or treatise.7 Used in this distinctive way, the term has done significant work in drawing attention to a large number of once neglected authors and their writings in several vernacular languages, and in enabling comparative study of t­ hese writings ­under a common rubric that recalls both Leclercq’s “monastic theology” and its venerable ancestor “mystical theology.” This latter term derives from the title of the De mystica theologia of the early sixth-­century Syriac theologian pseudo-­Dionysius, a foundational work of Christian mysticism in its Neoplatonic manifestation, and a conduit of both the Greek adjective mystica in its theological sense and the noun theologia into Latin Eu­rope. Three ­later studies by McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany, and Va­ri­e­ties of Vernacular Mysticism (1998, 2005, 2012), offer a power­ ful composite example of the term “vernacular theology” in action within the wider domain of the theological study of Western Christian mysticism. ­These comprehensive books explore how the felt “presence of God” was practiced, made to ground theological reflection, and turned into public instruction by late medieval eremitic, monastic, semireligious, clerical, and laymen and laywomen, writing in Dutch, French, German, Italian, and En­glish.8 The association of vernacular theology with mysticism, visions, and religious ­women was also impor­tant to the term’s emergence in the theoretically secular context of medieval En­glish literary studies, again during the mid1990s. One of the earliest uses to which it was put ­here was in analyses of how the dream poet William Langland and the visionary Julian of Norwich used the medium of ­Middle En­glish in which they wrote and its associations with the lay, the ordinary, the body, and creation, to undertake original imaginative and conceptual explorations of the theology of salvation and incarnation.9 Despite this overlap, however, the discipline brought its own expertise and preoccupations to the phrase and used it for its own purposes. Rather than being used primarily to distinguish a remarkable group of spiritually ambitious texts by seeking to incorporate them into an enlarged Christian mystical canon, “vernacular theology” within this critical configuration serves to draw together the historical study of texts in an open-­ended series of pastoral, devotional, contemplative, imaginative, informational, historical, and even ­legal genres, written across many centuries and from a wide range of subject positions and institutional perspectives. In this usage, primary attention thus falls on the entangled affective, social, institutional, and intellectual implications of the word “vernacular” itself.10



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As we saw, the phrase vernacula lingua (vernacular language) was a creation of the fifteenth ­century, coming into circulation at a period when the status and roles of vernacular languages had for the first time become a subject of general interest among intellectuals and churchmen across Eu­rope. One culmination of this pro­cess was in the sixteenth-­century reformations. But the structure of linguistic relationships this phrase names and presupposes was already many hundreds of years old by the time it arrived on the scene. In Chapter One, we visited an early episode in the development of this structure in King Alfred of Wessex’s preface to the Hierdeboc, a translation of Gregory the ­Great’s Regula pastoralis from around 890. Chapter Fifteen ­will take us back ­earlier still, to what could be seen as the moment of its first emergence, at the end of the eighth ­century, in the remarkable directives on proper language use issued by Charlemagne with the help of his adviser the Northumbrian scholar Alcuin (d. 804)—­student of Ecgbert of York, who was himself a student of Bede—­that ­were circulated to monasteries, episcopal courts, and other centers throughout Charlemagne’s mighty empire. Importantly, ­these directives are concerned not with the vernacular as such but with the need to preserve the grammatical, syntactic, spoken correctness, and linguistic separateness of Latin. The elevation of Latin to the status of a learned language, spoken generally nowhere but authoritative everywhere, created the framework for an idiosyncratic western Eu­ro­pean and Christian politics of language that has remained part of Western intellectual, national, and more recently colonial and postcolonial history, long ­after the effective demise of Latin itself. The linguistic situation in certain states formed in the wake of global colonization, in which Eu­ro­pean languages retain standing and local languages are viewed as vernacular, offers reason to suspect that the ideological divide that sustains this framework may be a specifically Western legacy.11 It bears emphasizing that the structure of linguistic relationships to which the word “vernacular” and its medieval synonyms such as “vulgar” refer was far from static, developing gradually across the centuries and taking dif­fer­ent forms according to textual situation and especially language. Early writers of French and other Romance languages descended from “Vulgar Latin” understood their medium as “vernacular” in markedly dif­fer­ent ways from writers working with Germanic languages such as En­glish. Despite Alfred’s claims to the contrary, use of the vernacular as a written medium of instruction was already ordinary in ­England by the time of the Hierdeboc and, over the next few centuries, was often so ubiquitous it went unremarked. Unsurprisingly, moreover, the fact that a text was composed in a vernacular language was only one ­factor in how it was understood, not least ­because texts and genres constantly crossed the divide

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between Latin and vernacular via translation and adaptation. ­These caveats ­matter, given the focus in much recent literary scholarship about “vernacular theology” on the religious crisis of the En­glish late ­fourteenth ­century, when the stakes involved in writing in the vernacular ­were raised by its hardening association with “the En­glish heresy,” Wycliffism, and the agonistic approach taken by some scholars as they explored this intricate situation.12 The breadth of reference of “vernacular theology” in the literary version of the term reflects the fact that, while the controversies that arose over the use of the vernacular at this period ­were new, the choice of a vernacular language as a medium of religious expression had always been consequential. This is simply ­because, with certain types of exception, texts written in En­glish and French addressed a dif­fer­ent constellation of audiences and readerships from texts in Latin. Many such audiences and readerships ­were “lay,” a broad ecclesiastical term that includes the vast majority of baptized Christians of all social ranks, including ­people of privilege, many of whom would always have been literate, if not deeply Latinate. As we see in Chapter Nine and elsewhere, certain insular vernacular texts ­were from the start written to be read in religious ­houses or by semireligious: anchoresses, hospitallers, and more. Another audience for vernacular texts was the secular clergy, including local and parish priests, who often shared vernacular reading habits and books with literate laypeople throughout the medieval centuries. Occasionally, even se­nior En­glish churchmen and their ­house­holds indulged a taste for godly entertainments in vernacular languages. For the most part, however, vernacular texts w ­ ere intended to circulate outside the ecclesiastical institutions in which Latin was the language of debate and study as well as worship, engaging one way or another with the vagaries and realities, the spiritual urgencies, and the pedagogical and imaginative demands of secular society. To articulate Christian teachings in a vernacular language thus necessarily inflected the social context, the standing, and the effective meanings of ­these teachings in significant if inconsistent and complicated ways. This is obviously the case in the speculative writings of Langland and Julian, who thought theologically with the idea of the vernacular in the abstract, but also with the a­ ctual sounds, grammar, syntax, and poetic idioms of En­glish, using their vernacular in much the same way as had a long series of religious poets in ­earlier centuries, writing in Old En­glish and insular French as well as ­Middle En­glish. But it is also the case in the most ordinary vernacular works of Christian pedagogy, charged with rendering and explaining ethical terms whose Latin meanings had long been comparatively fixed into languages whose ethical lexis was still fluid and to general lay audiences and readers. Even the multitudes of works that



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translate directly from Latin transform the meanings of their sources not only into a dif­fer­ent language but into a dif­fer­ent cultural mode. This is true ­whether they follow some version of Jerome’s broad strategy of pursuing sense-­for-­sense equivalence or instead take the expository approach of Robert of Gretham’s Miroir, in the hope of achieving equivalence of effect.13 Evidence that vernacular authors and other Christian intellectuals recognized and reflected on the distinct character of vernacular language as an oral and written medium appears in Chapter Eight, which discusses how the idea of the vernacular was understood by the learned. The myriad of ways in which this distinctiveness played out in practice emerge over the course of this book. §§§ Identifying large bodies of writing in Old En­glish, insular French, and M ­ iddle En­glish as “vernacular theology” reorganizes the priorities of literary history, at least as this was practiced ­until recently, inviting an approach to this writing that recognizes both its ancillary status within a textual system dominated by Latin and the centrality of religious thought and institutions to its emergence and development. It also reorganizes the priorities of religious history, institutional as well as intellectual, inviting an approach that attends to the circulation of religious ideas between clergy and laity but also within the lay or lay-­dominated communities that are the principal target audiences of most vernacular texts, as well as to the more restricted ways in which such texts ­were used by members of religious ­orders and churchmen of all ranks throughout the period. Most pertinent ­here, and in general harmony with the religious use of the term developed by McGinn, this identification asks us to reconsider what constituted “theology” on the periphery of the institutions of religious learning and governance responsible for studying and sustaining the deposit of Christian faith, and to reimagine what was always as much the institutional as the intellectual proj­ect that came to be called “theology” in the pro­cess. Although the earliest Latin Christian writer to use the word may have been Tertullian, theologia came into wide circulation in Augustine’s De civitate dei (city of God) in an analy­sis of the ­triple division of theologia into fabulare, naturale, and civilis (mythic, philosophical, po­liti­cal) set out by the Stoic phi­los­o­pher Varro (ca. 116– 27 b.c.e.). Augustine defines what was for him evidently an unusual word, not used elsewhere in his writings, in a straightforwardly etymological way, as meaning simply “reasoning about or discussion of divine ­things” (“de divinitate rationem sive sermonem”).14

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The word was then taken up sporadically by Carolingian scholars in the ninth ­century, perhaps as a result of interest in the writings of the pseudo-­ Dionysius, first translated into Latin at this time by John Scotus Eriugena.15 Yet even as theologia came into more regular use in the early 1100s, apparently again ­under pseudo-­Dionysian influence, it could still be regarded by some as a neologism of dubious utility, in no position to displace the terms sacra lectio and divinitas, which had long been preferred to describe the study of the faith and the goal of both faith and study respectively.16 When the term was used, its meaning could still be strikingly flexible. As late as about 1230, the learned Dominican author of Ancrene Wisse describes the subject of this specialist vernacular guide as “de recto theologico” (right theology), dividing the subject into inner and outer branches, one dealing with the rectification of the heart, the other with liturgy and ­matters of daily routine.17 Only during the thirteenth ­century, as Paris ­rose to preeminence as the center of northern Eu­ro­pean intellectual life, did the word at last shoot into prominence as the name for “the queen and leader of all the sciences,” as the Dominican Hugh Ripelin aggressively describes theologia in his Compendium theologicae veritatis (synthesis of theological truth) around 1268. Putatively the sole academic discipline that was fully capable of using materials from all the other sciences in order to “make for herself a mirror in which she may discern the Creator,” theologia in this professionalized sense bestowed significant authority on the few who had the intellectual and financial resources to master it.18 Grounded in the study of invisible realities—­“evidence / Of ­thing which is noght bodely,” as John Gower notes in his Confessio amantis in the 1390s—­theologia in this sense was a decidedly elite and challenging enterprise. “Theologie hath tened me ten score tymes,” confesses Langland’s Dame Study in the A and B texts of Piers Plowman, adding that “it is no science, forsothe, for to sotile inne” (not a discipline, truly, to exercise your wits in) for the humbler clerics she represents, ­those with only an arts education. “The depper I devine (the deeper I try to plumb it), the derker me it thinketh,” she punningly acknowledges.19 To yoke the qualifier “vernacular” to the word “theology” is to imply that the demanding science Dame Study find “mistloker” (more mystifying) the more she “muse[s]” on it and the exegetical practice of sacra lectio out of which it grew ­were neither the only nor in ­every re­spect the most impor­tant manifestations of medieval Christian thought. Medieval Christian beliefs—­the beliefs of ­actual Christians, as well as the belief systems developed by the several branches of the institutional Church—­­were produced and explored within a wide range of social and institutional environments and by means of a wide variety of genres. Many ­were vernacular.



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Thanks to the efforts of several generations of scholars working in the field of Christian spirituality, the theological importance of vernacular visionary writing is now well recognized, aided by both the term “vernacular theology” itself and Barbara Newman’s overlapping term “imaginative theology.”20 Visionary writings by ­women in vernacular and Latin might be in dialogue with the disputative theologia of the schools and w ­ ere among the few texts to travel somewhat regularly both ways across the divide between vernacular and Latin, a fact that, in the fifteenth ­century, made it pos­si­ble for vernacular works by visionaries from Continental Eu­rope to circulate in ­Middle En­glish through Latin intermediaries. Thanks to the efforts of a number of other scholars building on the foundation laid by Leonard Boyle, “pastoral theology” is not only now better researched and respected but acknowledged to include a range of texts in vernacular languages. Supplemented by works in several genres that have usually been treated ­under this rubric, pastoral theology is one of the main categories of works ­under discussion h ­ ere.21 The broadening of “vernacular theology” that comes from treating the vernacular as an organ­izing category in the history of lit­er­a­ture, religious thought, and the Church enables us to extend this recognition to the many va­ri­e­ties of McGinn’s “reasoning about or discussion of divine ­things” carried out in vernacular languages for and by ­those living in the “world.” As we see in the next section, it also enables us to move beyond the genres associated with formal religious enquiry and instruction, and to embrace the full range of genres that sustained the rational, devotional, practical, and imaginative responses to the Christian faith made by lay and other readers.

2. Genres of Vernacular Theology In the sense used h ­ ere, the phrase “vernacular theology” thus treats theology as a commonplace as well as specialist activity, the domain of learned and ignorant alike, with no specific institutional home, authority, or spiritual intention. It does this despite the fact that any “reasoning about or discussion of divine ­things” in a medieval Christian context necessarily puts in play institutions, authority, and the heavenly end ­toward which religious practice is meant to be directed. As a number of scholars have shown, vernacular theology in this extended sense may still be a rigorous intellectual as well as spiritual discipline, often much aware of recent developments in scholarly Latin theology, now reacting against it, now acting as a guide to it, now seeking to supplement it. It can involve a sustained attempt to theorize and achieve unmediated experience of

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God, as it does for the late fourteenth-­century author of The Cloud of Unknowing, whose writings indeed include a remarkable En­glishing of pseudo-­Dionysius’s De mystica theologia called Deonise Hid Divinite, as well as for the authors of other works or­ga­nized around the idea or practice of “contemplacioun,” from religious rules to forms of living. 22 It can require training of the kind that Reginald Pecock (d. 1461) set out to provide for his readership of lay Londoners in the mid-­fifteenth ­century, in a calibrated series of works that begins with the Donet and its sequel, the Folower, whose declared aim is to show “how . . . ​nedeful it is” for “lay persones” to be “directed” in their faith, not by personal Bible study, but by “substantial clerkis . . . ​in scole of logik, philosophye, and divinite” such as Pecock himself.23 It can entail the direct exposition of “hey divinitye” in a language other than Latin, as when Julian of Norwich argues on the basis of her revelation that “our Lorde wille we know it in the faith and the beleve”—­that is, as formal doctrine—­that “in ech a soule that ­shall be safe is a godly wille that never assented to sinne, ne never ­shall.” For all the constant moral failures that earthly existence entails for every­one, ­these souls remain in their “kindely (created) substance,” though not in their “changeable sensualite,” continually “hole and safe in oure lorde Jhesu Crist.”24 Despite Pecock’s idiosyncratic objections to this practice, vernacular theology can also focus on the direct exposition of “Goddes lawe,” as it does in verse and prose genres in all three of medieval E ­ ngland’s main vernacular languages: sacred histories, lives of Christ, Bible translations, biblical commentaries, sermons, and more. The identity between “seinte escripture” and the “reules de theologie” (directives of theology) affirmed in the Compileison, a major insular French prose work from the mid-­thirteenth ­century, is everywhere in evidence in Old En­glish, insular French, and M ­ iddle En­glish alike, generating a significant proportion of the vernacular religious corpus.25 In the early ­Middle Ages, indeed, Old En­glish law codes and charters explic­itly view themselves as textual extensions of God’s law into secular governance and land management.26 Vernacular theology can also take the pointed form of ecclesiastical or po­ liti­cal critique, still for the most part based on the interpretation of the Christian scriptures, but now directed less ­toward personal divinization through study of the Word than ­toward the moral and sometimes the structural reform of Church and Christian society. Controversial dialogues, complaints, polemics, manifestos, and satires in prose and verse accumulate at moments of especially rapid and painful change, around the turn of the eleventh, thirteenth, and fifteenth centuries, as well as the early sixteenth c­ entury, in par­tic­u­lar.



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Yet however aware in theory theology in ­these vernacular instantiations remains of the heavenly goal of earthly life, it is often as preoccupied with engagement in the secular order as with any direct reach ­toward transcendent real­ity. The most obvious form of this engagement is the instructional, a term we can understand as including both the proffering of “Deu sermun” to the Christian community by religious such as Robert of Gretham and its circulation within the community by means that may or may not require formal mediation by the clergy. The first involves preaching and other professional forms of spiritual instruction and counsel, both oral and written, particularly in relation to the sacraments of baptism, penance, and the eucharist, as regulated by En­glish Church councils from the mid eighth ­century on. The second involves the canonically separate but not always distinguishable activity of teaching, ­whether the teaching of catechesis that bishops and priests aspired to make into a formal spiritual duty for parents, godparents, and ­house­holders, or the more ambitious teaching of Christian truth that Robert enjoins on all his readers. Defending herself before the archbishop of York against the serious charge of unlicensed preaching, while insisting on her duty to “speken of God and undirnemen hem (reprove ­those) that sweren gret othes whersoever I go,” Margery Kempe combines an account of this mode of lay theology with a defense of her practice of Christian correction, insisting that she is obliged to continue her teaching ministry “unto the time that the pope and Holy Chirche hath ordeinde that no man shal be so hardy to speken of God.”27 Taken together, preaching and teaching constitute part of the work of theology in the sense in which Dame Study redefines this term in Langland’s final revision of Piers Plowman, the C text (? ca. 1390). ­Here, Langland rewrites the wording of his ­earlier A and B versions, “teologie . . . ​is no science, forsothe, for to sotile in,” as “teologie . . . ​is no science, sothly, bote a sothfaste bileve.”28 “In this revised account, “teologie” is no longer an incomprehensible academic discipline but has fused with the virtus theologica of faith itself.29 Dame Study’s restatement of the category of theology around communities of believers, not scholars, also encourages us to characterize as theology the many kinds of texts developed to shape the social activities of petition, soliloquy, praise, cele­bration, and worship. In some, the communities in question gather in the private or h ­ ouse­hold settings implied by vernacular lyr­ics, meditations, prayers, psalmody, and other devotional or liturgical genres, where God is the direct addressee of ­human speech.30 Vernacular psalters, often in the form of interlinear glosses of Latin ones, but also circulating as in­de­pen­dent translations,

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represent by some way the most durable single genre of insular vernacular theology, written in an unbroken tradition, in Old En­glish, insular French, and ­Middle En­glish, across perhaps eight hundred years.31 Other such activities require the open settings evoked by genres of writing that mingle private devotion with public cele­bration, such as the vitae written for the annual commemorations of the feast days of saints, or the late medieval urban cycle plays, written to commemorate sacred history as a ­whole. Combining the epideictic and the intercessory in a manner suggestive of their grounding in the rhythms of the Latin liturgy, but translated into the languages appropriate to the secular ­house­hold or the city, texts in ­these performative genres proclaim the ­doings of God in his own person or through the lives of the saints, the patriarchs, and the prophets. In so ­doing, they edify the “sothfaste bileve” of the individuals and communities for which they ­were produced.32 Fi­nally, and in some cases less obviously, two kinds of writing that are often described as “secular” ­because of their connection to the liberal arts also invite us to view them through the lens of vernacular theology—­although in ­these cases, more than ever, by no means exclusively through this lens. To read works in the genres in question in this way is partly to take seriously the fact that they are again often composed by secular priests or professional religious, and are in many cases associated by literary form with works such as the Miroir. But it is also to register their special importance as witnesses to the role of vernacular textuality as a place of meeting or negotiation between institutional Chris­tian­ity and Christian society outlined in the Introduction, which makes them of par­tic­u­lar value to a proj­ect such as this one. ­Here is where the composite world of medieval Christian thought and belief opens itself to intellectual curiosity, vari­ous kinds of instrumentalization, reflection on the state of living in the world, and sometimes pushback.33 The first kind of writing, much of it informational in character and designed to reflect on the purposes of God in creation, comprises the genres that treat the natu­ral sciences and history. In medieval classifications of the sciences, ­these subject areas are often assigned to philosophy, the discipline that saw itself as the synthesis and summit of the liberal arts, the mechanical arts, and even the magical arts. Yet as Hugh Ripelin suggests in Compendium theologicae veritatis—­a work written at a time of intense competition between philosophy and theology, which views all disciplines as fodder for theological analy­sis—­ works in both subject areas are in practice directly concerned with “divine ­things” as they pertain ­either to the order of the cosmos or to the role of providence in shaping ­human affairs. Vital as it was to university ­careers, the



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distinction between philosophy and theology is not in any case regularly activated in vernacular contexts.34 The contemplation of God by way of his traces in the world was first formally theorized in the twelfth ­century by Hugh of St. Victor and ­others, ­under the influence of the Aristotelian natu­ral sciences, as part of the pro­cess by which theologia slowly assumed theoretical command over other disciplines, at least in its own eyes.35 But this mode of theological investigation was already an informing presence in ­earlier Latin and vernacular genres such as the bestiary and Physiologus and the riddle, both of which employ versions of the exegetical tools designed for discerning God in the scriptures to the order of creation.36 Its impact was felt not only in works influenced by Victorine theology, such as the French translation of Edmund Rich’s Mirror of Holy Church, the Mirouer de seinte eglise, but in a new informational genre that developed about the same time, the encyclopedia.37 Vernacular encyclopedias can be especially concerned to emphasize the usefulness of theology in worldly affairs. An early case in point, based in part on Honorius Augustodunensis’s best-­selling “summa totius theologiae,” the Elucidarium (ca. 1100), is the prose Livre de Sidrach (1270–1300), rendered into M ­ iddle En­glish verse as Sidrak and Bokkus (? ca. 1400). Composed at nearly the same time as the Compendium theologicae veritatis, the Livre de Sidrach shares this work’s concern for the integration of theology with the knowledge disciplines as a ­whole. ­Here, however, in a work written with a privileged lay readership, not a clerical one, in mind, integration seems to move in the opposite direction. Bokkus learns the truths of theology—­promiscuously mixed with knowledge drawn from other disciplines—­not, initially, in order to save his soul but to conquer a neighboring polity, India. Like most works in the related genre of the mirror for princes or Fürstenspiegel, the Livre de Sidrach accepts the possibility that Christian revelation may be viewed po­liti­cally and instrumentally, as subordinate to the ends of government. ­These are works of po­liti­cal theology, distantly descended from Varro, anathema to Augustine.38 Vernacular historical writing can also be concerned to use theology ­toward secular and po­liti­cal ends, from the late ninth-­ or tenth-­century Anglo-­Saxon Chronicle and Old En­glish Orosius, which set out with varying degrees of confidence to discern the hand of providence in ­human affairs; to Layamon’s Brut (ca. 1200), where the withdrawal of most signs of that hand only serves to increase the ethical pressure that history and living in history places on Christian rulers; to John Trevisa’s extended translation of Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon, written for Thomas, Lord Berkeley at the end of the f­ourteenth c­ entury.39 Often written for the class of privileged laity responsible for national and civic government,

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works such as ­these provided readers with an impor­tant locus of reflection on the conjunctions and disjunctures of po­liti­cal events in the secular realm and the mystery of God’s purposes in the social order. The second kind of “secular” writing included ­here within the broad ambit of vernacular theology is the imaginative genres that Robert and ­others attack as inherently contrary to sound biblical doctrine, even as they use them as generic building blocks for their proj­ects: romances, chansons de geste, and other narrative works. Questions about the edifying potential of narrative fictions are raised constantly from the twelfth c­ entury to the fifteenth. They have an early echo in Alcuin’s celebrated challenge to a community of En­glish monks, “Quid Hinieldus cum Christo?” (what has Ingeld to do with Christ?), with its allusion to the body of Germanic myth that also lies ­behind Beowulf.40 But while such questions are often posed from the perspective of texts such as the Miroir, which dismiss secular romances as “fable,” they are integral to the romance tradition itself. From the origins of the genre in the mid-­t welfth ­century, romances ­were anxious about the utility of their capacity to engage audiences through their vivid accounts of ­human predicaments and passions, generating new narratives such as the Grail quest specifically in order to explore this anxiety, and passing their complex finding on to ­later genres of imaginative writing.41 In the late ­Middle Ages, questions about the spiritual value of imaginative poetry surface not only in the ­great synthesis of the romance tradition that is Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthure but in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which oscillates between stories told in “myrie” idleness and ­those that urge devotion and penance, opting for the latter only with the closing “Parson’s Tale.” Its central figure a blaspheming Host, who instantiates the Church as body of Christ in its most grossly imperfect social form, the poem might be understood ­either as an account of a mode of piety that aspires to have ­things both ways, bridging the gulf that separates religious living from worldly living, or as a critique of this lukewarm mode of religiosity. Both interpretations ­were in circulation in late medieval ­England. In ­either case, the poem acknowledges that the severity t­ oward imaginative fictions urged by Robert is not the only pos­si­ble position, and that even the distinction Margery Kempe makes between speaking of God and swearing “gret othes” may not be discernible in a society saturated at ­every level with both ­these ways of invoking the divine. The cultivated uncertainty shown in imaginative writings of this kind, which constitute a major locus of medieval theological reflection, is constitutive of the genres in which they are written. In a sense, they exist to explore the boundary that joins and divides the sacred and the profane.42



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§§§ Once the work “theology” is released by the adjective “vernacular” from its institutional settings and normative commitments and re­imagined as the sum of the religious ideas circulating in the local languages of the polities that made up medieval Christian society and the genres through which they found expression the reach of the resulting phrase becomes extremely broad. ­Every medieval text and genre mentioned h ­ ere, even ­those that appear least answerable to Dame Study’s account of theology as “sothfaste bileve,” can be described as a “reflective pre­sen­ta­tion of Christian belief.” Indeed, since medieval Christian textual culture was so significantly ­shaped by religious teaching and the institutions that undergirded it, we might conclude that to define vernacular theology in this way is to define it out of existence, since t­ here is not much writing to which it does not apply. However, while this breadth entails risks for the analy­sis that follows, t­ hese are more than outweighed by the benefits. Prob­lems of boundary definition are sure to occur in an enquiry into the dispersal of religious ideas, terms, and affects outside the institutions within which many of them arose. Over the past de­cades, the study of Christian religious practice, as it has moved outward from its interest in professional religious to consider the clergy and laity in parishes, cities, regions, and ­house­holds, has increasingly intertwined with the study of medieval social practice in general.43 So, too, the study of Christian textuality, as it makes its own movement outward by way of the vernacular, has begun to intertwine with that of medieval literary history more broadly. Only to the extent that this book participates in this movement can it develop the enriched account of the interactions between clerical culture and secular society that study of the vernacular enables.44 We consider other approaches to the field described by the phrase “vernacular theology” in Chapters Nine and Ten. While ­these approaches do ­little to confine the field within definite bound­a ries, they do help to show how this very lack of clear definition suggests something about the ubiquity of Christian assumptions and beliefs in the sectors of medieval society to which vernacular texts give access, as well as in vernacular textual culture itself. First, however, we turn to consider in more detail the tradition of diglossic thinking about language that was incorporated into the phrase vernacula lingua when this came into being in the fifteenth ­century, now working outward from a specific episode in the history of the topic. This is the set of debates over vernacular Bible translation that took place in Oxford between the production of The M ­ iddle En­glish Bible in the 1370s and Arundel’s Constitutions of

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1407–9. Very much of their moment, like another text reintroduced ­here, Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia, the views expressed in t­ hese debates are far from paradigmatic. However, ­because they obliged their participants to articulate their assumptions about what made a language vernacular with unusual explicitness, they make a valuable point of entry into our exploration of this question.

Chapter 8

The Vernacular as a Clerical Construct

1. Artificial/Natural, Metalinguistic/Sociolinguistic When Dante in the De vulgari eloquentia (on vernacular eloquence) characterized Latin as a rule-­bound language, kept in place by a clerical class to ensure clear communication across time and space ­after the fall of Babel, he was mythologizing a situation that went back to the earliest Latin treatises on grammatica at the turn of the fourth ­century.1 Divided by Donatus and his colleagues into sounds, letters, syllables, parts of speech, spelling, syntax, and so on, Latin was distinguished from other western Eu­ro­pean languages by its insistence that all literate users (which increasingly meant all users) be conversant with it theoretically as well as practically.2 Linguistic movements such as the reforms inaugurated by Charlemagne and his counselor Alcuin to combat the vernacularization of Latin in Romance-­ speaking parts of the Carolingian empire had the same objective.3 As the iconic figure of Dame Grammar beating boys with the aid of a twiggy besom suggests, the medieval institutions that upheld Latinity continued to demand that users of the language distinguish articulately between correct usage on the one hand and discordance, solecism, barbarism, and similar errors on the other. Starting with grammar, but also including the other trivial arts, rhe­toric and dialectic, as well as stylistics, knowledge of Latin was by definition linguistically self-­aware or metalinguistic. ­Those who used Latin ­were supposed to be more explic­itly conscious of the lexis, morphology, syntax, style, and genre of what they wrote or spoke than was the case when they ­were using their birth languages.4 However, when Dante defined the lingua vulgaris as the language that “infants absorb” (“assuefiunt”) “from ­those around them when they first begin to distinguish sounds,” learned “without any ordering, by imitating a nurse” (“sine omni regola nutricem imitantes”), his choice of terms serves to suggest that he

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has no such tradition of detailed scholarly analy­sis on which to draw. Since vulgar languages are internalized in nurseries, not learned in classrooms—­imbibed like breastmilk, not inflicted by the educative blows of Dame Grammar—­such languages are in some ideological, or perhaps even ontological, sense resistant to grammatical analy­sis.5 Dante could not have known the mass of Old Irish and Old En­glish scholarly writings of ­earlier centuries, from lexical glosses to grammatical treatises, that subordinate the vernacular to the goals of Dame Grammar in ways that complicate his identification of the vernacular with the informal, the secular, and the feminine. But he was aware of taking a position that was far from inevitable, especially in a work written to praise the literary excellences of the vernacular.6 De vulgari eloquentia was written in response to an impor­tant group of thirteenth-­century grammars of Occitan (Provençal), produced as guides to composing and appreciating troubadour poetry, as this attained canonical status in vari­ous Romance speech communities across southern Eu­rope. With the exception of specialized poetic grammars of Old Irish, ­Middle Welsh, and Old Icelandic from dif­fer­ent periods, ­these works represent almost the only grammatical analyses of western Eu­ro­pean vernacular languages that we know from before the fifteenth ­century. Dante’s evocative Latin account of the vernacular as Edenic and natu­ral (“naturalis est nobis”), rather than post-­Babelian and artefactual (“artificialis”) is meant to distinguish his account of the vernacular from the ones produced for Occitan, which make innovative use of Latin grammatical categories to clarify and elevate a literary vernacular.7 The De vulgari eloquentia has been praised for its quick grasp of the cognitive as well as institutional differences between first and second language acquisition and has even been represented as a foundational text of Western linguistics.8 Yet in renouncing the chance to grammaticalize his own “vulgare illustre” in order to pre­sent a theory of vernacular languages as natu­ral and “sine omni regola,” Dante was ­doing nothing new, except in his striking identification of the vernacular with the unstudied plenitude of Adam and Eve’s knowledge in the state of innocence. On the contrary, he was steering discussion of the vulgar tongue back into the medieval mainstream. The notion that vernacular languages ­were not simply acquired differently from Latin but dif­fer­ ent in kind represented a consensus among most western Eu­ro­pean intellectuals, who had long built their accounts of Eu­rope’s spoken languages in the same way as the De vulgari eloquentia: not around the morphology, phonology, and affiliations of a specific language or even a language group, but around the diglossic axis implied by the generalizing adjective vulgaris itself.9



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A ­century ­after the De vulgari eloquentia, when the status of vernacular languages came ­under scrutiny in northern Eu­rope, in the debates over Bible translation that took place in Oxford and London at the turn of the fifteenth ­century, the theologians who disputed the propriety of translation thus found themselves with ­little by way of analy­sis of the vernacular to work with. In what is e­ ither the earliest or the latest text linked to t­ hese debates, the De translacione scripture sacre in linguam anglicanam (on the translation of Holy Scripture into the En­glish language), the Dominican Thomas Palmer (fl. 1371– 1415) described a series of features of the language in question, En­glish, that made it unsuitable as a vehicle for divine truth.10 The lay poet Dante, affirming that the nobility of the vulgar tongue lies in the fact that “it was the language first used by the ­human race,” which “the ­whole world enjoys” (“totus orbis ipsa perfruitur”), organizes his account of the Italian dialects according to imputed sonority and beauty, castigating all ­those except his own for ugliness, baseness, or crudity.11 Certain of the criticisms of En­glish in the De translacione derive from a parallel tradition of dialect satire and are in the same, heavy comedic style. The En­glish language lisps aspirants and vomits gutturals, like the grunting of pigs or roaring of lions. Even to transcribe such sounds requires the use of weird runic letters: yogh as in “ȝeȝeyth, ȝonge, ȝor,” and thorn as in “þero, þat, þorwe, þenne.” The fact that En­glish is for the most part crudely monosyllabic, full of words like “ston, bon, non, don, gon, man, that, math, rat,” makes Latin rhetorical figures impossible to reproduce without error or incongruity.12 More seriously, the naturalness Dante attributes to the vernacular is ­here a disadvantage. En­glish no more shares Latin’s intellectual capacity than it does its glorious euphony and can represent neither transcendentals (“ens, substantia, accidens”), nor predicates (“relacio, habitus”), nor fallacies (“equivocacione, amphibolia”), nor other conceptual categories essential for serious Bible study or theological analy­sis.13 Like any other “lingua barbarica,” moreover, it lacks the morphological resources required in order to render Latin syntactic structures with adequate precision. Devised with scrupulous linguistic and theological attention by Jerome, in his superlative Latinizing of the Hebrew and Greek scriptures, ­these structures are essential if solecism and doctrinal error are to be kept at bay.14 “In many places, Holy Scripture cannot be rescued from a certain inconsistency or untruth except by recourse to figures of speech and grammatical rules” (“Sacra scriptura in multis locis salvari non potest aliquando incongruitate et falsitate, nisi per figuras et regulas gramaticales”). ­These are found only in learned languages, which alone render the scriptures accurately.15 Religious teaching in En­glish is crucial. ­Every part of the Bible necessary to salvation must be available in “­every dialect and language” (“omni ydiomate

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et lingua”), lest Christians lack knowledge of what they must know and to do ­under pain of eternal damnation (“quod tenetur scire et observare sub pena damnacionis eterne”). But as for Dante, ­there is an unbridgeable gulf between the learned languages, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and their vulgar counter­parts.16 Resourceful as it is, this scholarly attack on the capacities of vernacular languages in general and En­glish in par­tic­u­lar has its limitations. ­These start with its failure to acknowledge the efforts of vernacular writers and scribes con­ temporary with Palmer—­not least ­those at work on the text to which the De translacione is a response, The ­Middle En­glish Bible—to develop practical canons of syntactic, morphological, orthographic, and lexical correctness, as well as the capacity for varied rhetorical expression.17 ­After all, argues the secular theologian, chancellor of Oxford, and ­later canon of Salisbury Richard Ullerston (d. 1423), in his De translatione sacre scripture in vulgare (on translating Holy Scripture into the vernacular), prob­ably in 1401, all languages, including Latin, are capable of remedying deficiencies by neologism.18 Since grammar is integral to linguistic meaning making, adds Ullerston, it is in any case incoherent to describe any language as ungrammatical. According to Quintilian, grammaticality is no more than “the habit of correctly speaking, properly pronouncing, and correctly writing a given language,” including En­ glish or French.19 It is true that En­glish, whose status as a spoken language means it is in constant flux across both time and place, lacks the stability associated with Latin. Yet Greek, a grammatical language spoken since before the time of Christ, has the same mutability as En­glish has shown since the period of Bede.20 Besides, meaning is anterior to language, as Augustine states in the De trinitate; meaning is born in the reasoning mind and apprehending heart and cannot be expressible only in learned tongues. Idiomatic interlingual translation and vernacular articulacy are pos­si­ble as a ­matter of theological princi­ple as well as linguistic fact.21 Whichever of the two scholars delivered their determinations first, Ullerston may not have known of the satirical objections in Palmer’s text to the sounds and spellings of En­glish. His treatise responds to attacks on Bible translation by other scholars whom he does not name and that survive only through his summaries. Yet although Ullerston’s arguments about En­glish are better attuned to con­temporary linguistic real­ity than Palmer’s, his treatise is still strikingly vague about what it means in detail to say that any specific vernacular is grammatical, resting its case on no more than his formulaically inclusive definition of grammatica itself. Given the development of new learned and literary registers of En­glish, French, and other Eu­ro­pean languages at this period, and the ambitious claims



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being made for them, the absence of satisfactorily grammatical accounts of ­these languages is in certain ways surprising, especially if we consider the wealth of En­glish and French terminology employed by grammar teachers since Ælfric’s Grammar at the turn of the eleventh ­century in order to instruct students in Latin.22 Yet however far classroom use of this terminology also encouraged reflection on the grammatical under­pinnings of vernacular languages, no grammar of En­glish that survives to us was produced before near the end of the sixteenth ­century. Serious analy­sis of the ways in which the language’s morphology, phonology, and syntax differ from ­those of Greek and Latin came still ­later. For all his interest in the vernacular as a category, the generality of Ullerston’s linguistic arguments shows that no more than Palmer was he working from any well-­laid foundation of discussion on the topic. For both ­these scholars, indeed, it appears to have been the very absence of analytically available grammatical structures for English—­the very fact that it was understood to be regulated by habit, not rule, known naturally, not artefactually—­that constituted the language vernacular.23 Despite their interest in the history and structure of En­glish, the force of ­these discussions of Bible translation, like that of the pre­sen­ta­tion of the vernacular in the De vulgari eloquentia, is therefore less metalinguistic than sociolinguistic. The objections to the sounds, spellings, lexis, and grammar of En­glish enumerated by Palmer already imply a connection between the putative ungrammaticality of the vulgar tongue and the carnality of the illiterate vulgus. In the arguments against translation listed by Ullerston, the disorder of En­glish and its inability to render Jerome’s own translations accurately become metonymic of the intellectual and social disorder that must follow open publication of En­ glish Bibles. Translation into the ­mother tongue ­w ill allow any old ­woman (“quelibet vetula”) to usurp the office of teacher. It w ­ ill bring about a world in which laypeople prefer to teach than learn; in which wicked wives (“mulierculae”) talk philosophy and dare to instruct men, and a country bumpkin (“rusticus”) presumes to instruct the learned.24 Conversely, in the arguments in ­favor of Bible translation, the competence of the En­glish language, which already in theory contains all it needs to be dignified with the term grammatica, becomes a metonym for the social order that prevails when all have full access to the vernacular scriptures. Since the En­ glish are proclaimed everywhere as a “wise and understanding ­people” (“en populus sapiens et intelligens, gens magna!”), willing to obey all God’s precepts (“audientes universa precepta”; Deut. 4:6), argues Ullerston, ­there is reason to believe that the availability of vernacular Bibles ­will encourage right belief and practice, rather than the opposite. Indeed, not only ­will improved access to divine

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law give ­women and rustics the knowledge that they need to teach and correct one another with charity and fraternal humility, as is their ethical and canonical responsibility. It also ­will introduce them ­gently to the appropriate limitations that the ordered decorum of Christian community has found it necessary to place on ­these same activities.25 Palmer’s reservations about the capacities of En­glish to represent truths formulated in Latin and Ullerston’s minimizing of the differences between the two languages presuppose dif­fer­ent ecclesiological positions. But the improvisational character of their accounts of En­glish are equally suggestive of the gulf between the analytic sophistication late medieval intellectuals brought to Latin and their lack of an educated awareness of their birth language. Even if Palmer and Ullerston argued contrary cases, for both scholars, as for Dante, Latin and vernacular ­were very dif­fer­ent entities, differently learned and known. Written at the moment ­Middle En­glish was transforming itself, with some rapidity, into a Latinate learned vernacular, and in direct response to one of the more impor­ tant engines of that transformation, The ­Middle En­glish Bible, their theoretical reflections remained revealingly in arrears of the situation in practice. §§§ Impor­tant debates are precipitants, hardening views that used to be fluid and forming permanent new configurations in the pro­cess. Despite their conviction that the princi­ples energizing them are ancient, they can also be destructive of the past, forgetting the flexibility available to ­those who upheld ­earlier versions of ­these princi­ples and bequeathing their amnesia to the ­f uture. The linguistic assumptions ­behind the Oxford debates ­were obsolete within a ­century, displaced less by new insights into vernacular languages as such than by a growing body of prose translations that made arguments about the linguistic debility of En­glish ever more difficult to sustain, as well as by a turn ­toward detailed study of Hebrew and Greek. The ecclesiological arguments ­were a dif­fer­ent ­matter, contributing to the standoff between evangelical princi­ple and episcopal authority that developed in the l­ater phases of the Papal Schism in the early fifteenth ­century, with lasting effects on the history of attitudes ­toward the medieval era as a ­whole. Arguably, the Oxford debates thus mark the first beginnings of the transition between the history of the medieval vernacular and the history of its repre­ sen­ta­tion. Yet most ingredients of the positions taken on ­either side ­were far from new. ­Those who remained in ­favor of translation had the weight of pre­ce­dent



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b­ ehind them. As ­these scholars took pains to point out, in both Latin and En­ glish, this is true if one considers the early history of the Bible, from the Greek Septuagint in the third to first ­century b.c.e. to the Latin Vulgate by Jerome and o­ thers, completed at a high point in the Western history of translation as an elite scholarly practice around 400 c.e., which also saw the production of the first Bible translation in a Germanic language, the Gothic Bible, associated with the fourth-­century Arian bishop Ulfilas (d. 383).26 It remains true if one considers the tenth-­and eleventh-­century insular history of translation in Old En­glish to which Ullerston and o­ thers make reference; or the thirteenth-­and fourteenth-­century production of a series of composite prose Bibles in French, including insular French.27 Yet while early debate about w ­ hether the translation of the divine word was legitimate in princi­ple or pos­si­ble in practice was already fading by the fourth ­century, versions of certain of the concerns about its pastoral propriety expressed by Ullerston’s opponents surface ­toward the end of the Old En­glish period, notably in Ælfric’s preface to his partial translation of Genesis, written around 1000. This expresses alarm about the potential for misunderstanding opened up by the ­free availability of biblical materials that appear to condone social practices that are no longer permissible, including bigamy. From the late twelfth ­century on, related concerns are periodically echoed, always during times of crisis, at the highest ecclesiastical levels. Innocent III’s letter to the clergy of Metz, Cum ex iniuncto, occasioned by lay circulation and exposition of translations of biblical books in French, provides an especially high-­profile case in point.28 Ullerston’s and Palmer’s opposing characterizations of the laity are similarly venerable: one grounded in typological accounts of the Christian Church as the new chosen p­ eople, whose early architects included Tertullian and Origen; the other in a broad tradition of disparagement of the uneducated and uninitiated inherited by the Christian ­Middle Ages from ancient pedagogy and philosophy.29 Versions of the first characterization are frequent in Old En­glish poetry; ­those of the second appear in some works of Old En­glish prose, as we see in Part III. Both then traveled together, in vari­ous combinations, through subsequent centuries, with the first dominant in many vernacular contexts, the second coming into play at times of crisis. The unpredictable shimmer between the two is one engine of Langland’s troubled analy­sis of Christian society and its hope of regeneration in Piers Plowman. Although it has been argued that the dichotomies between litteratus and illiteratus and cleric and lay ­were only fully conjoined during the twelfth ­century, in this area, too, much of what is

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said about the vernacular and lay instruction in the Oxford debates would have been familiar to many En­glish intellectuals by the turn of the millennium.30 Palmer’s argument for the inadequacy of the vernacular is more of its moment, although it is anticipated in the thirteenth ­century by an ­earlier Oxford scholar famous for his accounts of languages and their relationships, with whom Ullerston engages in extended critical conversation in his own treatise. This is the ­great Franciscan theologian Roger Bacon (d. 1292), who also argues that, while the mastery of learned languages is crucial, vulgar languages are intrinsically unsuited to scholarly work, essential though they are to pastoral instruction.31 Resting on a judgment not about the abilities of vernacular readers and audiences but about the capacity of vernacular languages themselves, this argument might not have been readily comprehensible to early British intellectuals. Early medieval insular schooling, which presupposed the ability of Celtic and Germanic languages to represent the morphology and syntax of Latin to an advanced level, used vernacular glosses as a fundamental scholarly as well as teaching tool. Indeed, views similar to Bacon’s are vanishingly rare in vernacular texts before Palmer’s time, when the author of the Chastising of God’s ­Children makes his own declaration of anxiety about the prob­lems that are said to be inherent in rendering “in any maner vulgare the termes of divinite,” and compares the linguistic predicament this task ­causes him to the story of Balaam’s speaking ass. The admission of nunsavance, feblesce, and nunpuissance that leads up to Robert of Gretham’s reference to the same language miracle, by contrast, relates to his skills as cleric and poet, not to the romanz language and verse medium in which he wrote.32 Even ­here, however, Palmer and ­those who espoused his position ­were ­doing ­little more than to extrapolate from a long-­standing intellectual absence, making explicit an account of the vernacular as lacking full grammaticality—or, at least, as not requiring systematic grammatical analy­sis—­that was again implicit from the late Old En­glish period on. Although the institutional standing of the written vernacular, and thus its public functions, had under­gone repeated changes across the four hundred years that separated Palmer’s De translacione from Ælfric’s Grammar, not always in a consistent direction, the differences between how Latin and vernacular expertise ­were acquired and exercised remained both a recognizable constant and a fundamental datum, however interpreted, about the relationship between the two modes of language. While neither might have had much truck with Dante’s evaluative framework and understood the early biblical history of languages very differently from the De vulgari eloquentia, both Ælfric in the late tenth ­century and Alcuin in the late eighth would



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have recognized the force of the dichotomy he describes between vernacular and Latin, the one “naturalis,” the other “artificialis.”

2. Unmarked/Marked, Esoteric/Exoteric In seeking out vernacular evidence of continuity between the linguistic assumptions of the tenth and ­fourteenth centuries, one place to look might be early En­glish metrics, specifically, the intricate, flexible, and perhaps no longer wholly recoverable set of conventions and constraints that governed the writing of alliterative verse, the poetic form that remembers most clearly the original Germanic roots of En­glish language and lit­er­a­ture down to the fifteenth ­century. ­After de­cades of scholarly argument, it now seems likely that the corpora of Old and ­Middle En­glish alliterative verse, although historically divided from one another in the surviving rec­ord, have enough in common metrically to allow us to speak of a continuous tradition across the centuries, despite the dif­ fer­ent kinds of uncertainty generated by textual loss on the one hand, linguistic change on the other. The tradition must have been maintained by an unbroken succession of discriminating audiences as much as it was by the skillful poets who wrote for them.33 Although it does not play as prominent role in this book as it might, this tradition remains impor­tant to our conception of the vernacular as a complex cultural phenomenon, both ­because it serves as a reminder that Old and ­Middle En­glish lit­er­a­ture sustained forms that antedated and ­were not subsumed by their relationship with Latin, and ­because the tradition’s lack of formal codification offers a parallel with the absence of grammars of En­glish. Unlike romanz meters, most of which derive from Latin antecedent and received careful analy­sis from the twelfth ­century on, Germanic alliterative verse seems to have persisted across a millennium without the aid of widely circulated manuals of poetics or other written formulation of rules and practices. Just as even literate medieval speakers of En­glish did not know their own language in quite the metalinguistic way that ­those educated in Latin knew their language, so it may have been with alliterative meter, which appears to have led a simultaneous existence as a craft that required training to practice and appreciate and as a techne that Dante might again have called “naturalis,” a complex system nonetheless learned “sine regola,” without separable theoretical apparatus.34 However, the most productive place to look for signs of long continuities in the idea of the vernacular is the literary prologue, a substantial but ­until recently neglected body of writing that spans all three of medieval ­England’s

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main vernacular languages and was produced across the entire period covered by this book. ­These prologues, whose length varies from one-­sentence incipits to substantial, semi-­independent texts, and which may be written in the language of the text they introduce, in Latin, or in both languages, are composed in numerous received genres: the rhetorical exordium, the translation preface, the dedicatory epistle, the scholastic accessus ad auctores, and ­others. While ­these prologues are ubiquitous, they are perhaps too dispersed to be considered a literary tradition in their own right, although groups of them can form localized traditions. A case in point ­here is the series of thirteenth-­century works in French verse couplets that lie ­behind Robert’s Miroir and their fourteenth-­century En­glish successors, which engage in an ongoing discussion of verse religious instruction as profitable, or salvific, entertainment.35 Despite their variety, however, vernacular prologues tend to be distinguished from their Latin counter­parts by their tendency to draw attention to issues arising from language choice. In general, they justify the use of the vernacular on broadly ethical grounds, often inflecting their analy­sis with comments about the community the works in question set out to address, and the author’s sense of spiritual responsibility ­toward that community. Although vernacular prologues may well include discussions of style, word choice, or translation policy, their thrust is therefore sociolinguistic, not metalinguistic, as with Ullerston’s and Palmer’s accounts of ­Middle En­glish. Yet while t­ hese prologues may take pains to emphasize their own simplicity, and while their focus is ostensibly situational and local, they are sophisticated and intellectually ambitious clerical productions. Together, they can be understood as a collective proj­ect, continued across several centuries, to build an aesthetic, sociopo­liti­cal, and theological account of the resources of the vulgar tongue in its myriad forms and workings, through which the vernacular, despite its putatively natu­ral status, could be conceptualized abstractly and theoretically. Indeed, while they are by no means the only venues in which such discussions took place, for much of the period it was in ­these prologues that medieval learned culture articulated most richly its views about the place of the vernacular in the wider world of Christian textuality and teaching. It is ­here that we must therefore resort most frequently in what follows, as we attempt to track the changing roles, functions, and status of successive forms of the vernacular in both theory and practice. Read in one way, as a discussion internal to vernacular textual culture and the parties that contributed to it—­writers, patrons, readers, hearers, scribes—­these prologues sustain several, rather dif­fer­ent accounts of what it means to write in the vernacular, as we see in the following chapter. Read in another way, as a response



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to the paradoxical condition in which the works they introduce find themselves— as written texts that could not be parsed grammatically; as literate compositions ostensibly produced for the use of illiterati—­their message is more unified and self-­conscious. ­These prologues ­were written in part to acknowledge that, as the inferior term in a diglossic pairing, the vernacular was a marked category. However often it was used, it remained an exception to the clerical assumption that textuality was normatively Latin. Latin was unmarked. Except in relation to ­matters of style and grammar, where authors might elaborate accounts of their pretended incompetence in order to emphasize the status of the Latin language and the textual communities formed around it, its use seldom required comment.36 The one situation in which Latin texts often manifest the specifically sociolinguistic self-­consciousness of their vernacular colleagues is in the ambit of peer languages, Greek, Hebrew, or Arabic, where it is Latin that finds itself stripped of authority and sustaining the role of a regional lingua franca usually fulfilled by the vernacular. This is why vernacular texts are often more informative about how medieval clerics viewed even the learned part of the language system they inhabited than are Latin ones. Simply by existing, vernacular texts showed the linguistic self-­sufficiency that Latin texts typically take for granted to be the fiction it always was.37 §§§ The note of defense or apology that sounds so regularly in prologues may appear to justify both the critique of the vernacular in Palmer’s De translacione and Ullerston’s desire to promote it to the status of grammatica in his own De translatione. Yet if we take the joint witness of ­these prologues seriously, the reasons many religious writers working in En­glish, French, and other local languages ­were in no hurry to see ­these languages attain the status of authoritative and learned counter­parts such as Latin are clear. ­These reasons ­were pedagogical and theological. From one point of view, vernacular textuality was an awkward compromise between the fixity of writing and the fluidity of speech, the stability of truth and the flux that characterizes secular society. To a greater or lesser extent, this remained so ­whether a given textual tradition favored close repre­sen­ta­tion of local dialect forms, conformity to an existing written standard, or deliberate archaism, or w ­ hether its language was a version of En­glish or French. From another point of view, however, it was Latin that was the compromise. This was ­because, as the Miroir argues and all agreed, Christian truth is nothing u ­ nless it is shared.

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As a language confined to an educated minority, Latin had a tendency, as Robert of Gretham notes, to hoard knowledge, like the thickly leaved tree of the scriptures. This might be claimed as an advantage. Citing biblical verses that ­were regularly used to affirm the mystery of divine revelation, Palmer’s De translacione affirms that the Bible is a hidden sign (Isa. 45:3), a secret God reveals to friends alone (John 15:15), and a pearl not to be thrown to swine (Matt. 7:6).38 Another contribution to the Oxford debate, by the Franciscan scholar William Butler, develops this theme in detail. Butler argues his case Contra translacionem anglicanam (against En­glish translation), possibly a riposte to Ullerston’s De translatione, by citing Augustine on the pleasing obscurity of scripture, Dionysius on the hierarchic character of divine illumination, Chrysostom on the limits that God sets on communicating his law, Origen on the fundamental importance of sacerdotal privilege, and Paul on the functions assigned dif­fer­ent members of Christ’s mystical body. He also cites Aristotle on the intellectual debility of the masses.39 Medieval exegesis is scarcely lacking in expressions of disdain for the capacities of the unlettered. The topos of the darkness of scripture unexpounded to which both Robert and Butler allude perhaps underlies polemical use of the word in Anglican critiques of the medieval Church such as Foxe’s. ­These critiques typically identify any attempt to expound a biblical text beyond the sensus litteralis with self-­interested sophistry. This is the academic vice that ­Middle En­glish antifraternal satire calls “glosinge,” a derogatory descendant of “glossing,” used to portray the combination of aggressive self-­aggrandizement and intellectual contempt said to characterize the friars’ preaching and exegesis: “Glosinge is a glorious ­thing, certein, / ‘For lettre sleeth’, so as we clerkes sein” (glossing is surely a glorious ­thing, ­because “the literal sense kills,” as we clerks say; 2 Cor. 3:6). So exults the friar in Chaucer’s “Summoner’s Tale,” written at the time of the translation debate, just before the friar’s delicious comeuppance at the hands of a mere yeoman.40 A distinction between the perfect religion of the few and the barely sufficient faith of the many was a feature of one line of justification for the monastic life in par­tic­u­lar. Versions of this distinction are found in all the religious and philosophical systems whose origins ­were in the ancient Mediterranean. Yet it has been argued that, compared to some of their Islamic and Jewish contemporaries, medieval Christian intellectuals w ­ ere idiosyncratic in their reluctance to separate completely the esoteric truths revealed to the learned through allegoresis, dialectic, and experiment from the exoteric ones manifest to the ordinary faithful. As articulated through its three creeds, medieval Chris­tian­ity was proudly built around two incomprehensible mysteries whose ac­cep­tance is said to distinguish



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the Christian believer in an absolute sense from other mono­the­ists: God in Trinity, and the ­union of God and ­human in Christ. While doctrines such as transubstantiation, which made use of formal scholastic categories, might be thought too complex for the laity, it was thus taken for granted that accounts of the eucharist directed at them would offer not a distinct teaching but a simplified account of the same doctrine.41 In his capacity as “expositur” of the Gospels to the laity, Robert also simplifies, omitting extraneous materials such as references to sources and keeping his exposition brief. But despite writing for what Ælfric calls “ungelærede (unlearned) menn,” he takes as much care as Ælfric and other homilists who do acknowledge their sources to communicate the essence of patristic exegesis of the passages in question.42 Indeed, for both writers it is the sensus litteralis, Robert’s “lettre,” or what Ælfric calls the “nacedan ge-­recednisse” (naked narrative), not the inner meaning of the scriptures, that pre­sents dangers to the untrained.43 By contrast, the influential retelling of the Gospel story undertaken by Nicholas Love in his Mirror of the Life of Christ, shortly ­after the publication of Arundel’s Oxford Constitutions, understands the narrative of the Gospels, not their allegorical meaning, as suitable for “­simple creatures the whiche as ­children haven nede to be fedde with milke of lighte doctrine and not with sadde (weighty) mete of grete clargye and of hye contemplation” the work addresses. Yet as the restatement of eucharistic doctrine that Love appended to the Mirror suggests, he, too, is careful to represent the “milke” he offers the laity not as dif­fer­ent in kind from Gospel “mete” but only as easier to digest.44 Perhaps twenty-­five years before Love wrote his Mirror, glossed vernacular versions of the Gospels in the academic manner, with citations and quotations from the ­fathers, had become available, possibly made by some of the same scholars who translated the Early Version of The M ­ iddle En­glish Bible itself. Although the circulation of the Glossed Gospels, which might date from as early as the 1370s, was relatively restricted, such works ­were on one level produced in the idealistic belief that the “shorte expositioun” of the Gospels “to lewid men in En­glishe tunge” would by itself encourage them to “knowe” and “kepe” divine law, perceive its relation to “lawis of the Chirche grounded in Goddis lawe and resoun,” and so cause more souls to be saved. This is an academic version of much the same conviction that animates Robert’s Miroir.45 By 1400 at the latest, expressions of the view that the un-­Latinate needed the intellectual tools to reflect for themselves on the relationship between “lawis of the Church” and “Goddis lawe” ­were becoming polemical, now sometimes including the claim that limiting Bible study to the Latinate not only shut out some it could benefit but also allowed monks, friars, and especially bishops to

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conceal the unscriptural character of certain laws and practices.46 The fuller versions of this conviction given voice in the early fifteenth ­century foreshadowed ­later Anglican charges that the medieval clerisy indeed had a darkly esoteric conception of the faith. The existence of a connection between clerical privilege and learned Latin can be taken for granted, just as that of a connection between clerical privilege and learned En­glish can be taken for granted ­today. But for the very few who seriously advocated limits to lay access to the scriptures, the issue was not one of what truths the uneducated should know but of how they could know them safely. From a perspective still permeated by a language politics that took shape in the sixteenth-­century reformations, in which unlimited access to knowledge is both a good and (in post-­Enlightenment parlance) a right, it can be difficult to contemplate the diglossic language systems of the Latin M ­ iddle Ages without assuming that their aim was to preserve the gap between clerical knowledge and lay ignorance. But while intellectuals across the centuries usually presupposed this gap and sometimes appeared interested in reinforcing it, the task of the vast majority of the vernacular texts written by members of the medieval Christian clerisy was to bridge it. Latin played its role as a language of authority, necessary for many reasons, including the need to maintain a stable rec­ord of the deposit of faith. But as vernacular prologues find ways to imply, Latin was in and of itself nearly useless for numerous purposes, incapable of making lucid contact with the majority of Christian believers. Even when its status was its highest, by contrast, the vernacular was in practice acknowledged to lack the full scope, the stability, and sometimes the sacrality of Latin. Its reach was ­limited, its standing local and situational. Between the twelfth and the ­fourteenth centuries in par­tic­u­ lar, works like the Miroir often represent themselves as products of a merely personal desire on the part of a clerical author to “despend his witte” in divine ser­vice, as a slightly ­later work, The Northern Homily Cycle (ca. 1300), has it.47 But the informality of the vernacular was also an advantage, enabling it to complete the cir­cuit of instruction as Latin by definition could not. How this was to be done was the ­great question, to which texts offer answers that may differ forcefully according to stance, genre, period, and addressee. That it had to be done was clear. As the medium in which the laity had to be taught, vernacular theology was the basic instrument of what in theory was the Church’s sole endeavor: the salvation of the baptized, or the elect, or potentially even the world.

Chapter 9

Institutional Stance and Social Address

1. The Pastoral Model: Vulgar Tongue From their perspective as academics, the scholars who debated Bible translation in late medieval Oxford no doubt viewed the gap between Latin and vernacular as a confirmation of their own prestigious minority status as litterati, one even the most ambitious program of translation of learned texts and ideas was unlikely to threaten. From their professional perspective as priests, however, they also viewed it as an ecclesiological and ethical prob­lem, raising critical questions about Church governance, the role of religious knowledge in the formation of Christian identity, and the nature of religious truth itself, that required practical, not merely theoretical, responses. Like Ælfric writing homilies for “ungelærede menn,” and like Robert of Gretham noting the duty of clerics to care for “lai gent,” that is, ­these scholars thought of the vernacular through the category of the pastoral. For them, the vernacular was a vehicle of instruction, edification, encouragement, exhortation, counsel, and chastisement, all grounded in divine revelation and mediated to members of the Christian community by ordained ministers, using the vernacular to carry out the most solemn of the tasks Christ entrusted to Peter, to “feed my sheep” (John 21:17). This is why Palmer’s and Ullerston’s determinationes on Bible translation are at once so utilitarian and so po­liti­cal, quickly turning from abstract linguistic issues to focus on sententiae such as “not ­every truth should be written in En­glish, since many have no practical utility” (“Non omnis veritas est scribenda in Anglico, quia multe sunt inutiles”), or to reflect on the potential social, intellectual, and spiritual effects of Bible translation on the “vulgus” more broadly, in seeming agreement that ­these are the issues at the heart of the ­matter of the vernacular.1 The lofty judgments about the capacities of the “vulgus” made by all participants in the Oxford debates, even the eirenic Ullerston, represent the pastoral

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model of vernacular textuality at its most managerial. Butler’s hard-­line Contra translacionem Anglicam indeed argues that, just as with the angelic ­orders, among whom divine light is mediated by the superior hierarchies to the inferior ones rather than being transmitted directly, so it should also be in the earthly Church. ­Here, too, “the passive illumination that is given to wayfarers of lower order ­ought to be wholly dependent on decisions made by wayfarers of a higher order” (“illuminatio passiva viantium de ordine inferiori dependere debet complete a volitiva viantium in ordine superiori”), a debating position that, taken literally, could render almost any vernacular religious proj­ect vulnerable.2 Less absolute versions of the heavi­ly top-­down account of the pastoral and the vernacular implied by this statement are found in episcopal synodal documents and other official accounts of the cura pastoralis from the eighth ­century to the fifteenth, which understand the relationship between pastor and ­people in essentially pedagogical terms, as akin to the one-­way relationship supposed to pertain between teacher and student. Yet ­these accounts are only part of the story. As we saw in the prologue to Robert’s Miroir, a defining feature of the pastoral model as presented in vernacular texts themselves can be its double movement: downward, from clericus to laici, the direction of spiritual authority and salvific teaching; yet also upward, from hungry and perhaps critical sheep to ministering shepherd, the direction of priestly responsibility and spiritual need. Both ­these movements confirm what is presupposed by the pastoral from an ecclesiastical perspective, an intrinsically hierarchic relationship between cleric and lay, the Latin language and what was ­earlier called the lingua rustica, ­later the lingua vulgaris.3 But this is hierarchy of a highly dynamic kind. As the Oxford debate suggests, dif­fer­ent accounts of the nature of salvific teaching and spiritual need produce very dif­fer­ent accounts of how ­these two movements work, and how they relate and react to each other. Yet even the most straightforward of ­these accounts fi­nally place an equalizing moral burden on all the ­human and linguistic agents in the exchange. If vernacular texts written in the pastoral mode are explicit about the duty of the laity to welcome instruction with glad humility, they are equally explicit about the duty of the clergy to offer instruction in the same spirit, and about the laity’s right to receive it. If they represent the vernacular as ancillary, a vehicle for truths whose fullest and most authoritative formulations are in Latin, they also represent the vernacular as the essential medium for the subset of t­ hose truths, however framed and conceptualized, thought necessary to salvation. For all the assurance with which the Oxford scholars who debated Bible translation lined up their learned auctoritates to support their dif­fer­ent positions, they,



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too, ­were aware that, despite all disparities of learning and status, shepherd and sheep, litterati and illiterati, fi­nally submit to a single Judgment. Although the pastoral mode is grounded in language of radical simplicity, much of it from Christ’s own mouth, and ­shaped by works that reflect the relative institutional simplicity of e­ arlier centuries by Gregory the G ­ reat and o­ thers, the agendas of vernacular texts written in this mode may be highly politicized in practice. When the Glossed Gospels asks its “lewid” readers to assess the extent to which the “lawis of the Chirche” are truly “grounded in Goddis lawe and resoun,” it is arguably more interested in persuading ­these readers to participate in a budding movement of institutional reform than in their personal edification or final salvation, even if its compilers might have challenged this distinction.4 Despite the assumptions made on all sides by participants in the translation debate, The ­Middle En­glish Bible was itself far more than a pastoral proj­ect. It was a work of proud exegetical and philological scholarship, whose aims from the perspective of some advocates included dignifying En­glish intellectual culture in the face of the “familiar ­enemy,” France, at a time of international tension.5 As with the Glossed Gospels, moreover, its producers and copyists ­were presumably dependent financially on power­f ul lay readers, in ways that complicated the hierarchic model presupposed by the cura pastoralis. Yet this same combination of spiritual urgency and social malleability was what made the pastoral model the most power­f ul single engine of vernacular literary production throughout the period covered by this book, generating quantities of writing whose extent reflects both the capaciousness of the model and the need felt by successive generations to revisit it.6 In some ways, indeed, the history of medieval vernacular theology is hard to distinguish from the history of the pastoral, that is, the history of the articulation of truths taken as necessary for salvation or spiritual growth; of the arguments over their nature and application to members of dif­fer­ent professions and social groupings; of the genres devised to transmit them effectively to ­these several constituencies; and of the shaping of truths, arguments, and genres in relation to the institutional Church on the one hand, language use, literacy, and book production on the other. Vernacular versions of the majority of the literary genres or­ga­nized around the pastoral model represent their addressees as a single community, large or small. In homiliaries, sermon cycles, and other texts intended to work as preaching aids, or in the instructional genres written for individual or small-­group clerical teaching, members of this community are often addressed as “beloved,” “­brothers and ­sisters,” “sons and ­daughters,” and so on. Prolegomenal materials not meant for delivery may then also describe them in terms meant to preserve

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clerical esprit de corps, stressing the laity’s ignorance and need of instruction. Variants on Ælfric’s En­glishing of illiterati, “ungelærede menn,” from French “sanz letrure,” “idiote,” and “nient-­appris” to ­Middle En­glish “idiote” and “lewed,” is common in texts written over five centuries and more.7 Complicating the apparently binary character of this model, however, is the fact that, in practice, many of t­ hese texts have a double audience in mind, including both the laity and the clergy immediately responsible for their care, and do not always distinguish fully between ­these two audiences. In the case of texts written for delivery to the laity by a parish curate or visiting preacher, this double address can be structural. This is the case, for example, with The Lay Folks’ Catechism, composed by the York Benedictine John Gaytryge at the urgent behest of Archbishop John Thoresby of York in 1357, and written in an indirect version of the archbishop’s own voice. With exemplary lucidity, this work begins by requiring priests in the York archdiocese to announce from their pulpits that Archbishop Thoresby has “treted and ordained for commune profet, / Thurgh tho consaile of his clergye, / That ilkane that ­under him has kepinge of saules” (every­one who has responsibility for the cure of souls ­under his jurisdiction) must “openly on Inglis opon Sonondayes / Teche and preche” the six truths necessary for salvation that the work contains. It closes by announcing the archbishop’s granting of “forty dayes of ­pardon” to all its auditors who “kunnes” (learn) its contents well. The work thus traces the path that it hopes to track: from the Latin synodal decree in which Thoresby issued this instruction and which much of it translates; out into the dioceses, archdeaconries, and parishes of the archdiocese as an En­glish text; and on, now for the most part in oral form, into the ­house­holds that make up ­these parishes, and the individuals making up ­these ­house­holds. In the pro­ cess, it also gives heads of ­house­holds the information they need to ensure their priest is fulfilling his duties as curate.8 In other genres, however, the clergy who minister to the laity may be viewed as the main objects of a vernacular work’s attentions. To recall the devastating term used of his parish clergy by the Franciscan archbishop of Canterbury John Pecham, in his Lambeth Constitutions of 1281, the putative ignorantia of the priests who ministered to the laity is a pastoral topos from as early as Bede.9 Local priests are often implicitly or explic­itly included among the unlettered by highly educated figures such as Ælfric and Robert of Gretham, many of whom ­were monks or canons whose own participation in pastoral care may mainly have been through vernacular writing. As a quietly elitist defense of Bible translation from the early 1400s known as Cambridge Tract 1 astutely argues, “alle Cristine peple,” who had long been



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conventionally divided into two broad groups, literatus and illiteratus, could more usefully be thought about as including “thre maner of folke,” with less educated clergy (“lewed curatis”) and more educated laity (“lewid pepil that is lettrid”) forming an unnamed group of their own. The tract situates this group between “good clerkis and wel-­letterd men,” who garner their knowledge of divine ­things from “bookis of Ebrewe, of Grue (Greek), and of Latin,” and “idiotis that never wenten to skole” who can learn of God “by heringe, by techinge, and good ensaumple,” ­because they lack more than functional literacy. The literacy of this ­middle group is mainly vernacular. Its members thus require the availability of “bookis of her (books in their) moder-­tonge: to Frenche men bokis of Frenche, to Italiens bokis of Latine corrupte (Italian), to Duche men bokis of Duche, to En­glishe men bokis of En­glishe.”10 It is true that, from no ­later than the tenth ­century, ­those who wrote in the vernacular with ­these “lewid curatis” in mind did so with a certain awkwardness, aware of the need to preserve the dignity of the priestly office and to emphasize that Latin is the official language of the Western Church. Nonetheless, works of pastoral instruction written as guides to the duties of the clergy, or in expectation that they would reach a clerical readership in practice, are a major strand of the vernacular religious tradition from the first surviving En­ glish prose texts onward.11 Other pastoral genres ­were intended to serve more specialized occasions and readerships. Translations of religious rules survive from between the tenth and sixteenth ­century, the earliest of them for monks, nuns, and canons, ­later ones for nuns, who in the late ­Middle Ages tend to be imputed roughly the level of Latin literacy implied by the phrase “lewid curatis.” Æthelwold of Winchester’s The Old En­glish Benedictine Rule, from perhaps the 950s, made available to readers of En­glish a work of pastoral care of a specialized kind that became as influential as the Hierdeboc, Alfred’s translation of Gregory’s Regula pastoralis from some sixty years e­ arlier.12 In the thirteenth ­century, ­there also developed a closely related body of En­glish and French writing, addressed in the first instance to nuns and semireligious ­women but already anticipating a secondary readership by the devout laity and ­others. This represents itself as offering readers the rigorous instruction suited to ­those living as contemplatives. Ancrene Wisse (ca. 1230) is the best known of ­these texts, Adam of Exeter’s Exposiciun sur la Pater nostre (also ca. 1230), the most seriously neglected.13 Although ­these texts, too, ­were first written by the litterati for readers increasingly identified as illiteratae and belong within the category of cura pastoralis, they finds ways to recognize that ­those for whom they ­were composed have chosen a way of life

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that is voluntary, ­going beyond what was understood as strictly needed for salvation. The friars and ­others who produced ­these writings accordingly address their readers in the respectful language of spiritual amicitia developed by the Cistercians, tracing the origins of the contemplative life back to an account of the early Church in which the ideal of Christian perfection is said to have been represented by hermits and anchorites, not bishops.14 The slow absorption of this spiritually demanding material into the tradition of general lay pastoralia, and the acceleration of this pro­cess in the ­fourteenth ­century ­under the pressure of religious reform, is an episode of consequence in the history of the En­ glish religious vernacular, challenging the limits this wider tradition had set itself in ways that w ­ ere at once invigorating and disruptive. At no time, however, ­were ­these limits truly stable. The ordinary pastoral genres and structures the thirteenth ­century bequeathed to the late ­Middle Ages aspired to be more demanding of the laity than is often assumed and ­were never at ease with mere catechesis, impor­tant as that was. The ­earlier medieval genres, texts, and structures on which this ­later material drew ­were quite as demanding, distinguishing in practice but seldom in princi­ple between the laity and their monastic and priestly colleagues. Despite an acute awareness of social roles and positions, many Old En­glish pastoral works are written with mixed readerships in mind, as though differentiating between t­ hese positions for the purposes of spiritual instruction was perilous. For many reasons, some connected to the uncertainties in the theologies of salvation and judgment that framed the pastoral enterprise, ­others to its sheer difficulty, the success of vernacular teaching, ­whether in this world or, more solemnly, the next, was in any case admitted to be uncertain and incomplete. Exercise of the cura pastoralis nonetheless remained an imperative, and the vernacular remained its indispensable implement. Any vernacular text that represented itself in pastoral terms could thus describe its goals not only with the ubiquitous language of utilitas but in the urgent language of spiritual necessity. This could then be used to override any fears that might arise or be raised preemptively about the propriety of producing a given work in the vernacular or the capacity of the vulgar writer to express, or the vulgus to receive, divine mystery.

2. The Communal Model: Common Tongue Despite the ubiquitous presence of pastoral language both in overtly homiletic contexts and in genres as widely separated as saints’ lives, chronicles, narrative



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poetry, and religious drama, its dominance was far from absolute. Pastoral thought tends ­toward an understanding of vernacular textuality that accords the clerical writer a higher formal status than t­ hose who read or hear him and associates the vernacular institutionally with the voice and office of the curate, as it does in Robert of Gretham’s Miroir. But nestled within the prologue to that work, we have already glimpsed traces of two other models of address, both with their own deep roots in Christian history, which offer supplements to the pastoral model. Although neither of ­these two models is noticed in the Oxford debates, both are crucial to our picture of how the religious vernacular was thought about and of the functions it performed in medieval Christian communities. It is partly to ensure their proper repre­sen­ta­tion ­here that the generic reach of our archive needs to be so wide. In many of the genres and texts written ­under the influence of the first, communal model, the writer or speaker again addresses an implied audience about ­matters of faith. But now he or she does so as one of their own number, as a spokesperson or representative. This spokesperson is gifted with the skills and learning to articulate eloquently what needs to be said, read, and heard. But he or she offers this per­for­mance as rehearsal, cele­bration, exploration, or complaint, uttered on behalf of the community, rather than with the ostensible aim of instruction. Closely related to the intimate form of individual speech that is soliloquy or private prayer and the genres associated with it, and often most easily discerned in poetic and narrative texts, the communal model often involves and sometimes requires speakers who are also priests or clerics. But now, ­these figures use one or other set of topoi to represent themselves as craftsmen, poets, critics, or occasionally prophets, claiming no formal institutional authority for themselves or their words.15 Conceptually, the communal model draws its potency from the theological truth that, what­ever differences in status divide writer and reader on a worldly plane, both are equals ­under God: fellow Christians, bound by a duty of mutual encouragement and the knowledge that, as the Miroir notices, “custume est de Deu sermun / Plus est cher cum plus est commun” (this is the custom with God’s word: it becomes more precious the more widely it is shared). Grounded in texts such as Paul’s affirmation in Galatians that “alle ye that ben baptisid ben clothid with Crist: ther is no Jewe, ne Greke, ne bond man, ne fre man, ne male, ne female, for alle ye ben oon in Jesu Crist,” the model affirms the fellowship of all Christians, lay, secular, and religious.16 In the pro­cess, the communal model also reorders the diglossic relationship between Latin and vernacular. Latin is no longer the only supportable linguistic domain for the learned, whose members are now welcomed within the

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vernacular community the model invokes. Indeed, Latin now appears comparatively distant, almost as if serving a merely specialized supporting role in a version of the Church whose vital life is vernacular and often secular. Rather than a “vulgar” tongue, used by the learned in addressing the unlearned, the vernacular is a “common” tongue that binds them together, as members of a single spiritual community or polity.17 As happens in the Miroir, the pastoral and communal models often exist side by side, as ­little more than alternate strategies a preacher or priestly writer may deploy, addressing readers now as subjects (subditi in medieval canon law), now as peers, and once again following Paul, who boasts that “to alle men I am maad (I have become) alle thingis, to make alle men saaf ” (so that all ­people may be saved).18 This alternation is a particularly regular feature of sermons preached to the laity, as well as more specialized texts such as Ancrene Wisse, and reminds us to consider the proximity between the two models as much as the differences. ­After all, preaching itself takes place as part of a liturgical event in which the priest is both a mediator between God and his p­ eople and their representative, offering up prayers with as much as for them. The voice of the mass, in Latin or En­glish, is collective, not individual: Joy be unto God in heven, With alkins (­every kind of ) mirthe that men may neven (name); And pese in erthe alle men untille That rightwis are and of gode wille. We lofe (praise) thee, lord God almighty, And als (also) we blesse thee bisily, We worship thee, als worthy es (as it is worthy to do), And makes joy to thee, more and les (the greater and the lesser of us). We thank thee, God, of al thy grace, For tho gret joy that thou hase, Oure lord, oure God, oure king hevenly, Our God, our Fadir almighty. The repetition of “we” in this opening of the En­glish version of the Gloria in excelsis Deo, from the ser­vice book known as the Lay Folks Mass-­Book, emphasizes this collectivity, despite the fact that ­these vernacular words are meant to be said privately by small groups of worshippers while the priest is reciting the Latin prayer on behalf of the congregation as a ­whole. For all their hortatory intent, many sermons take care to keep the priest within this complex double role.19



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Many texts in the two ­great bodies of communal writing from the first half of our period, one in Old En­glish, the other in insular French, also have suggestive links with the liturgy. A good deal of Old En­glish religious poetry, some of which might date from a ­century or more before the earliest surviving pastoral Old En­glish prose, takes episodes in salvation history as occasions for instructional entertainment, borrowing from liturgical texts and forms and often translating them in ways that have been carefully investigated. Though per­for­mance and reading situations for this poetry are hard to reconstruct, some of ­these ­were presumably liturgical or paraliturgical in character. ­Here, the voice of the poem is again usually plural, not singular.20 Three of the four distinctive types of Old En­glish poetic exordia—­formulaic openings that constitute “the closest ­thing to a vernacular ars poetica that the Anglo-­Saxons have left us”—­bring hearers into scores of poems by summoning listeners to praise, or by promising to rehearse stories that they pre­sent as though ­these stories are already known.21 “Now we must praise the guardian of the heavenly kingdom . . . ​he first fashioned . . . ​heaven as a roof . . . ​then the habitable world” (“Nu scylun hergan hefaen-­ricaes uard . . . ​He aerist scop . . . ​ heben til hrofe . . . ​tha middun-­geard”), urges “Cædmon’s Hymn,” activating the opening words of Genesis in the cause of communal worship. “It was not concealed from the inhabitants of the world that the Creator had power and strength when he firmly established the surfaces of the earth” (“That wearth underne eorth-­buendum, / thæt meotod hæfde miht and strengtho / tha he ge-­festnade foldan sceatas”), declares “Christ and Satan,” vertiginously locating poem, poet, and audience in the same eternal place from which God meditates his mighty action.22 This “we” has no necessary connection with liturgy. The community it constitutes around a given narrative can be sociopo­liti­cal, not spiritual. As the poem Beowulf progresses, it is soon clear that the “we” said to have heard of the exploits of the “Spear-­Danes” in its opening lines is a Christian community, reflecting on a pre-­Christian history from which it is ostensibly severed. But the “we” itself still affirms a link with the communities of non-­Christian Danes and Geats who listen to the other epic per­for­mances that take place within the narrative.23 Nor, crucially, do t­ hose who are included in the many forms of this “we” often acknowledge that what they tell together comes to them from another, more authoritative language. Alfred justifies his prose Hierdeboc by noting that God’s law was first known in Hebrew, then rendered into Greek, then into Latin, then into many other languages, a pro­cess of translatio studii that provides a string of authoritative pre­ce­dents for the new En­glish prose work, whose own translation protocols are both derived from and authorized by

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Jerome.24 In the Old En­glish poetic tradition, by contrast, sacred history, although presumably derived from Latin sources, is typically ­imagined as born directly into the distinctive idioms of Old En­glish poetry, through an act not of translation but of rumination and recall. Even when Latin sources are mentioned, as in the story surrounding “Cædmon’s Hymn” as recounted by Bede, the diglossic relationship between En­glish and Latin emphasized in the Hierdeboc and often crucial to the pastoral model goes unnoticed.25 Lacking any consistent need to situate itself in relation to other textual traditions, Old En­glish religious poetry seldom represents itself as written in any specific language or uses terms for the communities it addresses and proj­ects cognate with the term “common,” other than the first-­person plural pronoun itself. In insular French religious poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, by contrast, the language of the commun is impor­tant enough to become a major topic of interest in Volume 2 of this study, for its crucial role in grounding the new literary language. ­Here, the “we” of the liturgy again often echoes, especially in the hagiographic poems central to the early phases of this tradition. However much they may seem freestanding literary artifacts, hagiographic poems never forget the roots of the genre in the annual feast days whose ostensible purpose is to bring the saints to mind. Although saints’ lives serve many personal, community, regional, and national agendas, in princi­ple the primary role of the hagiographic writer is always to deploy the resources of epideictic rhe­toric in voicing the public praise of the community.26 However, the discourses of community on which this corpus draws most powerfully are now ­those implied by the word commun itself, a key term and category whose social, ethical, and theological meanings are often at issue in religious poems and their prologues.27 Most impor­tant ­here, the corpus is deeply aware of the constitutive link between the idea of the “commun” and the singular feature that defines it as a corpus, the fact that it is written in a language it names romanz, a language closely related to but also deliberately severed from Latin. As is evident in Robert’s Miroir, despite its commitment to the pastoral, in this verse tradition, an account of the vernacular as a vulgar commun is indeed so dominant that other models of audience address are obliged to work within the ideological framework it constructs for poets and readers alike.28 Manifestations of the communal model in ­Middle En­glish are also often aware of the complex valences of “common.” This word can refer to one of the three ­orders of society, by now in theory roughly Robert’s laborers or gaignurs, in practice all laypeople except armigerous knights, or even all laypeople except for the nobles who sit, not in the House of Commons but the House of Lords. “Common” can also refer more narrowly to an array of nonclerical professions,



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especially artisanal and mercantile ones. In its plural form, as “commons,” it can even refer to the material needs that laborers of all kinds are obliged to provide for society as a ­whole: Thenne kam ther a King: Knighthod him ladde (led by the order of knighthood); Might of the Communes (the power of the common voice) made him to regne. And thanne cam Kinde Wit (natu­ral intelligence) and clerkes he made, For to counseillen the King and the Commune save. The King and Knighthod and Clergye bothe Casten that the Commune sholde hem communes (material needs) finde. The Commune contreved of (  fashioned with the help of ) Kinde Wit craftes And for profit of al the peple plowmen ordeined To tilie (plow) and to travaille as trewe lif asketh (loyal be­hav­ior requires). The King and the Commune and Kinde Wit the thridde (third) Shopen (­shaped) lawe and leaute (justice)—­ech lif to knowe his owene.29 ­ ere, William Langland uses an ­imagined and heavi­ly abstracted coronaH tion ceremony to dramatize the origins of the ancient contract that, in theory, binds society in a network of mutual obligation. In this way begins his analy­sis of all that eats away at this contract and its spiritual correlative, the contract that, through Holy Church, binds earth and heaven. Piers Plowman is only one of many ­Middle En­glish religious poems and prose works that activate the reformist, satirical, and prophetic potential of the communal model, using the vernacular as a medium of public discourse.30 If the Oxford debaters are not directly concerned with this body of writing or its account of vernacular textuality, it haunts their depictions of looming social breakdown or societal transformation in ways highly suggestive of its con­temporary excitement and potency. The fifteenth ­century sees new versions of the model, in repre­sen­ta­tions of the or­ga­nized private circulation of vernacular manuscripts, or the commercial production of printed ones, as undertaken for “common profit,” a key phrase of the period, used in this context by John Colop, William Caxton, and o­ thers.31 ­Here the echoes of the liturgy and of the interlocking parish, civic, national, and wider Christian communities it sustains and signifies are equally loud.

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­Middle En­glish religious lyr­ics had always intertwined the “we” of liturgy and that of song, voicing the devotional responses of groups, not individuals.32 With the focus on the local that characterizes the religious culture of the period, two new formations now emerged. The first is anticipated by Julian of Norwich in the mid-1380s, addressing her Vision Showed to a Devout ­Woman to “alle mine evencristene,” and gathering her readers into the unifying category of the neighbor or proximus (Luke 10:29), as we watch her revelations play out in the presence of her physical proximi, gathered around her bedside to participate in the liturgy of the visitation of the sick.33 The second is situated at the meeting place of eucharistic devotion and civic religion and takes spectacular form in the guild or mystery plays, religious dramas often performed on or near the feast of Corpus Christi (May 31), a late thirteenth-­century addition to the annual calendar.34 Although the plays that survive represent the work of the vernacular differently, sometimes pulling it ­toward the pastoral model, their more frequent note is participatory, staging topical, lucid, sometimes quizzical accounts of sacred history. ­Here, it is the civic community in its competitive multiplicity, not the institutional Church even at a local level, that is the unofficial owner of the narrative, just as they are official producers of the occasion. Despite the liturgical setting, and the liturgy-­like character of ­those per­for­ mances that ­were staged pro­cessionally, the plays also reside in, and sustain, the now venerable idea of the vernacular as the commun voice.35 Texts that invoke one of ­these culturally diverse versions of the communal model can be written or voiced by any literate member of Christian society. Most Old En­glish poems are both anonymous and institutionally unplaceable. By contrast, French poets, from Guernes de Pont-­Ste-­Maxence to Guillaume le Clerc de Normandie, call themselves clerici, suggesting they had taken at least minor o­ rders or perhaps ­were secular priests. ­Others, such as Simon of Walsingham, identify themselves as Benedictine monks; and some, most notably Clemence of Barking, as nuns.36 Augustinian canons, Franciscan friars, and ­others also play their part. In the ­Middle En­glish period many power­f ul texts of polemic and complaint, including Piers Plowman, ­were written by secular priests, making good use of their real and symbolic ties with the vernacular and the lewednesse or ignorantia with which it could be associated. In what we might see as a staging of this relationship, a late passus of the poem indeed features a “lewed vicory (vicar) / . . . ​a curatour of Holy Kirke” who, in a remarkable speech made on behalf of the Christian community, begs Conscience to protect the Church from the pope and his cardinals, if he wishes to see the cardinal virtues themselves do their work on earth.37 In the early fifteenth ­century, the priest-­poet John Audelay (d. ca. 1430) sometimes hits a similar satirical note.38



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Like the learned lay poets of the period John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer, who are careful not to represent themselves as possessing the magisterium of a cleric, and like Julian of Norwich, whose status as visionary allows her to lay only indirect claim to the formal office of “techere,” the “lewed vicory” ostensibly belongs in the interstitial third group, midway between litteratus and illiteratus, isolated by the author of Cambridge Tract 1. The “vicory” lacks an advanced university degree. Yet while Gower invokes his own version of Cambridge Tract 1’s distinction by similarly calling himself a “burel (unpolished) clerk,” in practice this phrase no more captures his ambitions for his Confessio amantis, grounded in his ethical updating of his classical sources, than Julian’s demurral captures her ambitions for the two versions of her book, grounded in her belief that the teaching in both derives not from her but from Christ.39 Communal writing may position itself at a certain modest distance from the institutional. It may even represent itself, and by extension the vernacular in its capacity as the “common tongue,” as speaking from the disenchanted margin of the institutional.40 Nonetheless, it often proves to have its own, well-­ rooted sources of learning, prestige, and cultural power.

3. The Patronal Model: M ­ other Tongue The communal model did not provide the only alternative to the pastoral model. In the Miroir, we have also encountered a third model, grounded neither in the ecclesiological divide between priest and lay, nor in the ethics and theology of Christian community, but in the structure of medieval En­glish secular society, both ­actual and ideal. In setting out on his homiliary in verse, Robert addresses Aline not only as a layperson and spiritual equal but as a governor, a member of the aristocracy affiliated with what the poem calls defendurs, two of whose symbols, a throne and a shield, feature in what may be her repre­sen­ta­tion in the Lambeth Apocalypse. 41 Robert thus approaches his task not only as a pastoral writer, rendering Gregory’s Homiliae and similar sources into French, and not only as a vernacular spokesperson for the Christian community as a ­whole, but as a conseillur, writing a work for a lay patron of markedly superior status to himself. This is the patronal model, in which the clergy, working at the behest of members of the nobility or other power­f ul individuals, use the vernacular to inform their social superiors of what they wish or need to know, and on occasion to voice their mandates directly. In the pro­cess, the diglossic contract is reordered again. The vernacular becomes a language of lordship, into which

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texts are written or translated, through the patron’s beneficence, to the increase of knowledge in the nation or community. Now the vernacular is neither a lingua vulgaris nor a lingua communis but what in the early M ­ iddle Ages was known as a lingua paterna and ­later a lingua materna, a term that gathered unmistakable nationalist overtones during the final medieval centuries.42 Throughout the medieval centuries laypeople of privilege played practical roles as found­ers and supporters of the institutions that made up the Church, and as patrons of books and writings, many of them vernacular. Although this was not always the case, through much of the period their families additionally provided the institutional Church with much of its upper personnel. But they also had allotted religious roles. ­These included not only their duty to tend to the poor by performing the works of mercy (Matt. 25:31–46), a responsibility of all secular Christians except the indigent poor themselves, but also the duty to administer Christian justice, maintain social order, assist the clergy in their pastoral mission, and carry out their own version of this mission among their immediate subordinates. The inclusion of numerous discussions of clerical abuses and vices in the Miroir suggests that, for Robert and ­others, a further role—­made necessary, not least, by the fact that many parishes ­were in the gift of the secular aristocracy—­also included a degree of canonically unofficial oversight of the local clergy. ­These roles, which overlapped with ­those of the clergy to provide instruction on the one hand and ­those of the general laity to offer encouragement and fraternal correction on the other, ­were in strong tension with the martial demands on the aristocracy. As Robert’s Corset suggests in adapting Paul’s account of the armor of God (Eph. 6:10–17) so that its dedicatee, Alan la Zouche, can be instructed in the sacraments, applying a Christian template to government and warfare was a compromised pro­cess. Alan was dutifully not wearing his own armor on June 19, 1270, when he was attacked by John de Warrene, during a trial to ­settle a dispute between them at Westminster Hall, ­dying of his wounds at the age of forty-­four in consequence.43 But the public role of nobles and other governors of a Christian polity gave them a standing of their own, almost equal to that of the clergy in some ways, potentially superior in ­others. A major mode of vernacular textuality is thus configured around the relationship between clerical writers, members of this key group, and (by extension) the less exalted readerships that listened in, as it ­were, on their exchange. Prominent among the Latin patristic writings aimed at power­f ul lay individuals charged with the spiritual management of their subordinates is Augustine’s Enchiridion (handbook), written at the request of a layman named Laurentinus, to instruct him in key Christian doctrines and establish basic



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princi­ples for their understanding and elucidation.44 But the elaboration of the religious roles of the nobility was a product of Carolingian po­liti­cal theory, which developed a distinctively sacralized account of rulers and rulership that remained influential for centuries, providing an impetus to the production of a wide range of vernacular texts for the benefit of kings, the nobility, and ­later the gentry and merchant and civil elites. The religious duties of secular governors in a Christian polity are an impor­ tant, if often implied, topic of Carolingian homiletic libri manuales (handbooks) for rulers in the general tradition of the Enchiridion, including Jonas of Orléans’s De institutione laicalis (on the religious practices of the laity) and Alcuin’s De virtutibus et viciis (on the virtues and vices), the second of which was popu­lar in ­England down to the ­fourteenth c­ entury. Although they vary a good deal, ­these books typically seek to persuade the male aristocratic reader to fashion himself into an exemplary lay Christian, justly ruling his territories, his court, and himself, in the expectation that subordinates w ­ ill imitate their lord as well as his idealized textual repre­sen­ta­tion, taking on a similar exemplary function at their own, less exalted social levels.45 Along with works in a closely related Carolingian genre, the mirror for princes, the libri manuales inaugurated a tradition of writing for royal and noble readers whose earliest En­glish analogue is the corpus of texts associated with the Wessex court, including the Hierdeboc, the Old En­glish Boethius, and the Old En­glish Soliloquies, all of which make some claim to be written by King Alfred himself, as well as Bible translations, saints’ lives, and even religious rules, produced by the group of Benedictine intellectuals whose writing is the main topic of Part III of this volume. ­These patronal works are diverse, since they assume that kings and the noble laity require vernacular access to a swathe of Latin texts.46 This might be for devotional reasons, as with Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, written for the nobles Æthelweard and Æthelmær. Or it might be ­because ­these texts speak to the situation of secular rulers, as with the Old En­glish Boethius and The Old En­glish Soliloquies. Or it might be ­because ­there is a wider po­liti­ cal need for them to be added to the canon of such texts generally available across the polity, as we ­shall see that Æthelwold of Winchester unexpectedly claimed for The Old En­glish Benedictine Rule.47 Building on ­these e­ arlier traditions of patronage, which include the commissioning of works in Latin as well as vari­ous vernaculars, noble and royal patrons, many of them ­women, played a key role in the emergence of a new body of writing in insular French during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, commissioning histories, saints’ lives, works of religious and moral education, devotional poetry, and much ­else. The earliest closely datable work of French verse,

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Benedeit’s Voyage de saint Brendan, was likely written at the command of Adeliza, Henry I’s second wife, around 1120. Such works testify to a widespread clerical and aristocratic interest in nurturing religious education and a culture of devotion within noble circles. Such works ­were expected to circulate widely, spreading their benefits to ­others ­under the patronage of their first addressee. Although saints’ lives written for lay patrons often find indirect ways to comment on issues of con­temporary po­liti­cal concern, by the mid-­thirteenth ­century, the En­glish aristocracy had turned to works in a more specialized genre, illuminated apocalypses such as the Lambeth Apocalypse, situating themselves and the times in which they live within the arc of eschatological history.48 A dif­fer­ent approach to the public and po­liti­cal is embodied by a pivotal late thirteenth-­century patronal text from France. Widely circulated across Eu­ rope and surviving in six distinct En­glish translations, this is the Dominican Laurent d’Orléans’s Somme le roi (summa for the king), written for Philip III. The Somme le roi takes the form of an analytic exposition of the articles of the faith and the vices and virtues, written for the king both as an exemplary devout lay person, who needs to know how to save and perfect his soul, and as an exemplary king, who needs to know how his kingdom and its subjects are to be saved and perfected. In pursuit of this double goal, the work lays out a socially articulated vision of the vices afflicting the dif­fer­ent estates and an implicit program of moral reform for France, or any other polity, as a ­whole.49 ­Middle En­glish works commissioned by secular patrons come on the scene late but with a splash, in the form of the translations the Oxford-­educated John Trevisa made for Thomas, Lord Berkeley, in the 1380s and 1390s, including Ranulph Higden’s fourteenth-­century synthesis of En­glish chronicles, the Polychronicon; Bartolomeus Anglicus’s thirteenth-­century scholarly encyclopedia, De proprietatibus rerum (on the properties of ­things); and more. ­These and other translations ­were produced for an ostensibly national readership ­under the sponsorship of an impor­tant aristocrat. So much is made clear in Trevisa’s prologue to the Polychronicon, the Dialogue Between a Lord and a Clerk, in which the Lord, a figure for Berkeley, makes known his desire to have a series of works rendered into En­glish; affirms the coincidence of his desire and the national interest; and makes clear his right to command his translator, although a priest, in this ­matter.50 As we have already had occasion to see, the respectful but unequal relationship the Lord maintains with his Clerk in the Dialogue is an expression of a specific ideological moment, soon ­after the Papal Schism, when members of the En­glish aristocracy ­were urged to take an interest in Church affairs by writers who included the authors of the Glossed Gospels, in the hope that they



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would impose changes in the governance and institutional structure of the En­ glish Church, even at the risk of conflict with the episcopate and papacy.51 While the work gives no overt sign that it would endorse direct po­liti­cal action of this kind, the Dialogue perhaps models a vision of the aristocracy as spiritual leaders of the nation that Trevisa and Berkeley both hoped to see. By and large, the En­glish episcopate managed to fight off proposals for structural change of this kind, which had to wait another 150 years for their fulfillment. Yet just as Trevisa and Berkeley’s literary relationship provided an impor­tant model for the multitude of author-­patron relationships that flourished across the fifteenth ­century, so the focus on the role of the wealthy laity on display in many late fourteenth-­century texts provided a springboard for a major fifteenth-­century generic development.52 This was the large-­scale production of manuals of instructional, devotional, and liturgical materials for secular ­people of privilege, intended to furnish them with the means to see both to their own spiritual health and to that of members of their families and ­house­holds, with a quasipastoral role in administering teaching, correction, and counsel that carried quasisacerdotal responsibilities.53 If ecclesiastical governance on a national scale was no longer in question, shared spiritual governance of ­house­holds, hospitals, colleges, and the other devout lay institutions that proliferated across the period was another ­matter. Although they also have insular French pre­ce­dents, ­these books, now made for members of the gentry or merchants and civic governors, not the nobility, closely resemble the Carolingian libri manuales of six centuries ­earlier. The literary deference clerics once showed kings and the upper aristocracy has come down the social ladder in response both to the needs of the moment and to the diversification of readerships and structures of governance associated with the period. The patronal is the least generically specific of the three models of vernacular address isolated ­here. Since the intellectual curiosity of the nobility and eventually the gentry and other persons of standing is wide, as befits their public role and the re­spect due them, patronal writing can be in any number of genres, blending with pastoral writing and sometimes appropriating the demotic energies of the communal mode. Both the libri manuales and their late ­Middle En­glish descendants are clearly also pastoral books. In the Alfredian corpus, perhaps influenced by the voicing of Old En­glish poetry, the noble narrator is especially likely to understand himself as a representative figure, speaking for, as well as to, his readers, despite his elite status.54 Further, since the differences in attitude and social and symbolic status between writer and reader can vary, patronal writing can also express the deference owed patrons in vari­ous ways. Writers may ­wholeheartedly occupy the

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secular role of conseillur offering wisdom to revered rulers. The ­great early figure ­here is Wulfstan I of York, author of royal law codes and works of po­liti­cal theory that lay out an ideal model of governance for the king, especially in the so-­called Institutes of En­glish Polity.55 Or they may seek to emphasize their identity as priests and their client’s twin identities as ruler and layperson, doubling respectful patronal address and pastoral instruction, as happens in the Miroir and other thirteenth-­century works in par­tic­u­lar.56 Or they may hide their own identities ­behind a fictive repre­sen­ta­tion of the role of the conseillur, as in the remarkable thirteenth-­century vernacular encyclopedia, Livre de Sidrach, whose fictional author, counselor to the warlike ­Middle Eastern king Bokkus is claimed to be an inheritor of Noah’s authority and prophetic knowledge of f­ uture history and the cosmos.57 While we can often identify a patronal work simply ­because it identifies itself, naming the patron, the commission to write, and the nature of the work required of the writer, this is not always the case. Much of the corpus of Old En­glish Alfredian writing may have been produced by churchmen writing from a perspective informed by the priorities of royal and noble readers. In the Old En­glish Boethius and The Old En­glish Soliloquies, the narrator seems to be an avatar of this readership, an inscription of ­those who patronized the works within the texts themselves. By the late thirteenth ­century, noble readers and ­those who identified with their interests ­were a broad enough market that specific patrons might play only an enabling role, or no role at all. Brunetto Latini never names the fellow countryman who financed the Trésor, while the Livre de Sidrach though clearly written for laypersons of means, survives in several books made for specific noble individuals but may not have been written for an individual patron at all.58 Somewhat similarly, few fifteenth-­century ­house­hold manuals specify their readership, while the best-­k nown exception, Richard Whytford’s Werke for House­holders (1530), though perhaps written for a known individual, is carefully generic in its address. For the most part, the question of ­whether works or books in this bourgeois genre ­were commissioned by a par­tic­u­lar lay reader or written for the needs of a class of such readers seems impossible to answer.59 The large body of patronal writing produced across the ­whole of the period covered in this study ­matters for two main reasons. First and most straightforwardly, power­f ul and well-­resourced lay patrons caused many texts and books to be written that other­wise would not have been, adding to the size and generic scope of the vernacular archive. For much of the period, wealthy lay courts and ­house­holds and ­those who led them ­were almost the sole commissioners of



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new texts and books outside religious institutions. They ­were also the initial consumers of ­these texts and books, and the tastemakers for literate laypeople and ­others when it came to their wider dispersal. At moments when owning books or commissioning texts was thought especially culturally necessary by wealthy laypeople, ­t hese same courts or ­house­holds, acting in concert with clerical and monastic writers, helped to generate new texts and sometimes textual traditions. This took place in the twelfth ­century with insular French and again in the fifteenth, as printers looked to secular patrons for cultural as well as financial support.60 The vis­i­ble rhythm of vernacular textual production is often dominated by writing in the pastoral mode, which often took place in concentrated bursts, centered around par­tic­u­lar movements of reform. Although secular patrons also commissioned pastoral works, as in the case the Miroir, their activities counterpoint ­these rhythms in ways that ­will prove variously consequential in what follows. Second and perhaps more pointedly, writing on religious topics for secular patrons gave the monks and clerics who produced much of this writing a rare opportunity to reflect publicly on a number of issues connected to their task. ­These include the meaning and urgencies of the be­hav­ior of ­these patrons as prominent and power­f ul individuals, the role of Christian ethics in secular governance, the role of providence in ­human history, and other ­matters pertaining to po­liti­cal theology more broadly. “­Every soule be suget (subject) to heighere powers; . . . ​he that ayenstondith (resists) power ayenstondith the ordinaunce of God,” writes Paul, affirming the need for Christians to obey ordained secular authorities or “geten to hemsilf dampnatioun.”61 One way or another, writing in the patronal mode often takes place in negotiation with this striking, if ultimately ambiguous, elision of the judgments of rulers and the divine disposition. In a sense, indeed, the deference required by the act of writing for a patron—­especially when, as often, the writer is a well-­born and well-­educated monk or priest—­necessarily made a po­liti­cal statement, or perhaps an ecclesiological statement, in its own right. For the authors of the libri manuales and their early En­glish successors, such a statement amounted to an affirmation of a standard early medieval position, that secular governors, the king in par­tic­u­lar, played a central role in the management of the Church, as spiritual equals and social superiors of their counselors. The right and ability of ­these counselors to offer instruction despite this situation rested on their learning more than their official ecclesiastical role. However, ­after the period of ecclesiastical realignment known as the Gregorian Reform, which attempted to create a jurisdictional separation of the Church from secular rulers, the context within which priestly writers exercised deference to

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lay patrons gradually changed, even as the requirement that secular rulers act as examples and guides to t­ hose around them remained constant. In princi­ple, the new order of t­ hings required a delicate balancing of gestures of social deference and gestures of priestly authority on the part of writers, and a corresponding flexibility on the part of patrons. In practice, the competing demands of ­these two kinds of gesture could be dealt with in a relatively perfunctory manner, especially in texts committed to stylistic plainness, like the Miroir. Or they might be resolved in ­favor of the lay patron, as in the images of Elena in the Lambeth Apocalypse. Or they might be emphasized with po­liti­cal intent, as they are in Trevisa’s carefully agonistic Dialogue. To follow the nuances of the public relationships clerical writers construct with their patrons in ­these ­later medieval texts is thus to learn a good deal, not only about how secular governors ­were encouraged to think of their spiritual responsibilities, but about how the churchmen writing for them conceptualized the nature and extent of secular power within the institutional Church during the 350 years between the murder of Thomas Becket in 1170 and the Henrician Reformation of the 1530s.

Chapter 10

The Vernacular Archive

1. Shape, Phases, Rhythm Building on the survey of scholarly and general attitudes to the medieval religious vernacular since the sixteenth ­century undertaken in the first part of this volume, the previous four chapters have argued that this large corpus, produced across many centuries and several languages, can be treated as a single field of study. They have then set out to define this field and to outline certain of the concepts that ­will enable it to be approached as such. Chapters Seven, Eight, and Nine give overviews, respectively, of the genres of the En­glish and French texts discussed in this book ­under the umbrella term “vernacular theology”; of the category of the vernacular itself, as it was understood by medieval intellectuals; and of three impor­tant writerly stances that arise from dif­fer­ent relationships between author and audience and that broadly correspond to three late medieval terms for the vernacular: “vulgar tongue,” “common tongue,” and “­mother tongue.” Before turning to the discussions of individual bodies of writing that make up the rest of this volume and its first sequel, two tasks remain. The first is to give a further overview, now of the history of En­glish vernacular theology in its several phrases, in an abbreviated version of the shape in which this history is presented in the discussions that follow. The second is to isolate what we may learn by considering this body of writing as a single archive, instead of subdividing it into discrete fields, or­ga­nized around language history, as was standard practice u ­ ntil recently. Since it is not easy to bring a set of texts on this large scale into view, it ­will be briefly ­imagined ­here in a physical form in which it ­will never exist: as a series of large books on the scale of Jacques-­Paul Migne’s huge Patrologiae cursus completus, Series latina (complete collection of the works of the ­fathers, Latin series), issued between 1841 and 1865, as though by way of a vernacular

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En­glish sequel to that iconic series.1 Josiah Forshall and Sir Frederic Madden’s four-­volume edition of The ­Middle En­glish Bible from 1850 may be the only example of a substantial text in a medieval En­glish vernacular language that has actually been enshrined in something like this fashion. The 217 text volumes of the Patrologia latina which extend from the Latin ­fathers to the death of Innocent III in 1216, are of dif­fer­ent lengths but on average run to some half a million text words each. ­There are many variables to take into account in assessing the size and makeup of the vernacular archive, as we ­shall see. Nonetheless, an ­imagined sequel to Migne that aimed to represent the medieval En­glish vernacular theology in the broad sense defined in Chapter Seven might consist of somewhere between eighty and ninety books of very roughly this size.2 §§§ Perhaps ten books in this heuristic series would focus on works written in Old En­glish, a large majority of them originally composed between the late ninth and early eleventh centuries, that is, between the reign of King Alfred of Wessex (871–99) and the period of the Benedictine Reform, ending with the reign of Cnut (1016–35). As we saw, the scattered rec­ord from ­earlier centuries consists mainly of a famous body of poetry, quite likely including that remarkable portrayal of a Germanic society still awaiting the advent of divine grace that is Beowulf. It also includes a body of learned glosses derived from scholarly use of En­glish, including glosses on the Psalter and a few prose works, especially The Old En­glish Bede and the Old En­glish Martyrology.3 Between the late ninth and early eleventh centuries, however, texts grow more numerous and genres more diverse, in parallel with the successful establishment of the ­house of Wessex at the head of a single En­glish polity, capable of building the long-­term institutional structures that allow certain kinds of books to survive in some numbers. A significant proportion of this corpus consists of homilies, public expositions of the Gospel readings for Sundays and feast days central to early medieval pastoral care. Far the most prolific homilist was Ælfric of Eynsham, the figure most responsible for the major turnover in the vernacular corpus that evidently took place in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries during the Benedictine Reform and its aftermath. Counting by words, Ælfric’s works alone account for possibly a third of the surviving Old En­glish corpus.4 Yet the full range of genres and texts is a good deal wider. In prose, ­there are translations of significant parts of the Bible, especially the Heptateuch



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(Genesis to Judges), and Gospels, as well as many texts understood as apocrypha, including The Old En­glish Gospel of Nicodemus, The Old En­glish Vision of St. Paul, and parts of the Marian gospel Pseudo-­Matthew. ­There is a wealth of psalters, in which En­glish glosses or translations are interlineated with the Latin text. ­There are saints’ lives of all types, many in the form of homilies, some in­de­pen­dent compositions, ­others gathered into collections such as Ælfric’s Lives of Saints. ­There are other kinds of devotional, pastoral, and penitential writing, including works in the Carolingian tradition of the aristocratic liber manualis.5 ­There is also the extraordinary series of En­glish translations of canonical works from the patristic period, pastoral, theological, philosophical, and historical, from Alfred’s Hierdeboc to the Old En­glish Boethius and Old En­glish Orosius. Some of ­these ­were certainly, ­others perhaps, associated with the Wessex royal court and reflect a world in which kings and nobles played an impor­tant role in sponsoring new texts. ­There are religious rules and other regulatory monastic texts; pedagogical works such as Byrhtferth of Ramsay’s Enchiridion, including further glosses of Latin texts; the Anglo-­Saxon Chronicle, a rec­ord of God’s dealings with the En­glish; and a crucial series of ­legal writings, including t­ hose by the homilist and jurist Wulfstan I of York. Fi­nally, ­there is a continued tradition of poetic composition and copying, including two tenth-­century works in Old High German, the Heliand and “Genesis B,” which appear to have been more or less fully naturalized into the Old En­glish corpus, as well as a more scattered body of monastic poetry to which new items ­were being added well into the twelfth ­century.6 Although some of the materials they preserve ­were already centuries old, all four of the major codices that contain Old En­glish poetry, the Nowell Codex, the Junius manuscript, the Vercelli Book, and the very substantial Exeter Book, all date from the m ­ iddle or second half of the tenth c­ entury. The ­middle and late de­cades of the eleventh ­century, the period of first the Danish, then the Norman invasions, saw the production of a series of mixed Latin and vernacular pastoral books, based for the most part on e­ arlier materials. From the twelfth ­century, when texts in Old En­glish continued to be written, copied, annotated, and adapted, ­there is a further series of Old En­glish homiliaries that recombine works by Ælfric and ­others in dif­fer­ent ways, ­either for the purposes of public preaching or for smaller-­group teaching, sometimes folding in new texts of vari­ous kinds. The Ælfrician texts in the latest of ­these books are updated linguistically. The new texts are also updated structurally, in response to recent innovations in preaching style. Despite such updates, the early En­glish homiletic tradition came to an end in the early thirteenth ­century.

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By the mid-­t welfth ­century, works in En­glish are being copied and composed alongside increasing numbers of works in French—­occasionally literally alongside, as in the case of the Eadwine Psalter, whose elaborate mise-­en-­page combines French, En­glish, and Latin glosses on three versions of the Psalms. The period between the 1160s and 1240s also saw the emergence of a small but crucial body of historical and pastoral writing in early ­Middle En­glish, providing sufficient material for perhaps two further books in our ­imagined series. Although ­these works are ­here treated as extensions of the Old En­glish textual system, they are products of a religious culture that had changed markedly during the previous 150 years, as well as of a literary culture whose three languages ­were increasingly entwined. One work, Layamon’s Brut, is largely based on a named French source, Wace’s Roman de Brut. Some of the best-­k nown of ­these writings are ­those in the cluster called the Ancrene Wisse Group, where this volume ends.7 §§§ More than twenty hy­po­thet­i­cal books would be given to works ­either written in French from the early twelfth to the late ­fourteenth centuries, or written in ­Middle En­glish ­under the influence of French during the latter part of this period. Written French first took its place alongside En­glish during the reign of Henry I (1100–1135), fifty years ­after the Norman Conquest (1066). French then quickly became the more prolific of the two written vernaculars, at least so far as new texts and genres are concerned. It maintained this position for nearly two hundred years, partly again as the result of the sponsorship of new texts and books by noble patrons, many of whom ­were ­women. Twelfth-­century French is justly famous for literary innovation, multiplying romances, saints’ lives, chansons de geste, histories, biblical books in verse and prose, and works in other genres. Many of the verse works represent themselves as improving entertainments. ­Until the end of the ­century, it seems that a majority of religious works ­were composed in ­England, rather than on the Eu­ro­pean mainland, for publics that included townspeople living in the vicinity of a substantial monastery, members of the royal court, and in some cases a more loosely defined international community of literate readers, lay, clerical, and monastic. But texts, books, writers, and patrons all moved freely across the channel in both directions. Although a number of Old En­glish works ­were in circulation in Scandinavia and Iceland in Old Norse translation, alongside perhaps an equal number of works in insular French, no other body of vernacular lit­er­a­ture from ­England achieved this degree of international circulation before the eigh­teenth ­century.8



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Early continuities with Old En­glish are occasionally striking, especially in the areas of biblical, historical, and pedagogical writing. Despite areas of overlap, however, one of which was the tradition of vernacular glossed psalters, the generic landscape of insular French writing changed rapidly in the first hundred years of the new written vernacular. Difference from Old En­glish is marked in many ways, including a preference for verse over prose, at least in contexts in which it was felt impor­tant to emphasize open, rather than specialized, address. Change was even more marked across the thirteenth ­century, for reasons that initially included the flood of Latin pastoralia and other works written in the several de­cades before and ­after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Although the twelfth-­century tradition of didactic verse narratives continued, the growing influence of Latin pastoral writings was one ­factor spurring the creation of a range of new texts in verse, many of which at first direct themselves at the devout laity, although they may also acknowledge a secondary audience of secular priests, and include works that seem to have been written for per­for­ mance in monasteries and episcopal ­house­holds. Only one set of prose French homilies was in evidently wide circulation.9 The period ­after Lateran IV also saw the development of new genres of more specialized French prose writing for religious or semireligious ­women and men, from large works on the contemplative, penitential life, or vices and virtues, to biblical expositions, meditations, and other devotions. Responding to a growing demand for paraliturgical extensions to the Latin office, ­these ­were supplemented by personal prayers, short and long, written to be said in private or small group settings as well as by texts intended as aids to other aspects of the devout life, such as confession formularies. ­Until the 1260s or so, insular French texts for the laity ­were most often written in verse, which in ­England remained the primary vehicle for French Bible translations and hagiographies, as well as works in other homiletic, instructional, and informational genres. Although it comes t­ oward the end of the period in which verse was often preferred to prose, Robert of Gretham’s verse Miroir is typical ­here. However, following trends in French-­speaking Continental Eu­rope that went back to the early 1200s, prose works at least partly intended for literate laypeople now began to proliferate. Some of ­these, such as the Compileison, a long Franciscan work that maintains a deliberately broad address, ­were modeled on new Latin pastoral genres, such as the summae of the vices and virtues. O ­ thers w ­ ere modeled on older Latin genres, such as the several French versions of Honorius’s Elucidarium, part of a tradition of instructional dialogues in verse and prose that constitute a significant genre in their

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own right. En­glish noblewomen and noblemen also now took the lead in promoting a widely prestigious Latin and vernacular genre whose French components again have both prose and verse versions: illuminated, glossed, and in vari­ous ways supplemented copies of the book of Revelation, such as the Lambeth Apocalypse.10 By the end of the ­century, French prose translation was an industry on both sides of the channel, as doctrinal, instructional, encyclopedic, historical, and imaginative prose texts became available to an expanding international readership. Although textual traffic was still in both directions, increasing numbers of ­these works ­were now composed in France, often in Paris, among them Laurent d’Orléans’s celebrated Somme le roi (summa for the king), and the Abbaye du Saint Esprit (abbey of the Holy Spirit). But lengthy French prose works as well as a number of shorter works in verse continued to be composed in ­England far into the ­fourteenth ­century. The first full prose vernacular Bibles from ­England, a series of Anglo-­Norman Bible versions put together from vari­ous sources, date from circa 1300.11 Despite areas of overlap, the roles played by French religious writing ­were significantly dif­fer­ent from ­those previously played by Old En­glish. This was largely a result of the power­f ul presence of Latin pastoral texts of ­every scale, from lengthy works of academic theory to brief practical ones composed for the parish clergy.12 But it may also have had something to do with the continued tendency to use En­glish for certain texts, such as ­those written for per­for­mance on feast days in the manner of The South En­glish Legendary, as well as with the mobility of certain texts and genres between French, En­glish, and indeed Latin. The Ancrene Wisse tradition is one case in point. Ancrene Wisse was translated into both French and Latin, as well as being substantially incorporated into the Compileison. One section of the Compileison, the Peines du Purgatorie, attained a similar degree of mobility. Translated from French into both Latin and En­ glish, the Peines du Purgatorie served as a key source for l­ater works, including the remarkably popu­lar Prick of Conscience.13 By 1300, the roles played by French ­were in any case starting to be absorbed by En­glish, as this increasingly became the majority written language in dif­ fer­ent dialects and parts of the country, perhaps starting in the West Midlands with the late-­thirteenth-­century South En­glish Legendary but including many texts written elsewhere, especially a new body of long verse works of religious instruction from northern ­England, including The Northern Homily Cycle and The Prick of Conscience itself. Yet as late as the 1370s, the two languages continued to coexist as twin halves of a conjoined vernacular linguistic system. Although



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t­ here are exceptions, especially the En­glish works of the contemplative and exegetical writer Richard Rolle (d. 1349), most ­Middle En­glish works written in the first three-­quarters of the ­century have close ties to French works and genres. Some are based on French pastoral genres, including the northern verse group, all of which are composed in the French verse form of short rhyming couplets and look to French works, cooperatively but also competitively, as an authorizing pre­ce­dent. ­Others are translated or adapted from French. Cases in point are Michael of Northgate’s Kentish version of the Somme le roi, the Ayenbyte of Inwyt; Robert Mannyng of Brunne’s version of the Manuel des Pechiez, Handlyng Synne; and an impor­tant group of ­Middle En­glish prose works from fourteenth-­century London, including the ­Middle En­glish version of Robert of Gretham’s Miroir. As had been true since the mid-­thirteenth c­ entury, French, En­glish, and Latin texts also jostle casually in trilingual books for lay and sometimes clerical readers, such as the early fourteenth-­century ­house­hold book Harley 2253. This book preserves the famous Harley Lyr­ics but also a ­great deal ­else, much of it in French.14 Signs of direct influence of Old En­glish on ­Middle En­glish works from this period have proved elusive, except in the area of metrics, where continuities across the centuries are clearly in evidence, if hard to trace in sufficient detail.15 Signs of French influence on ­these works, by contrast, are clear and omnipresent. Verse dominates much of the corpus, as it does the ­great late fourteenth-­ century Vernon and Simeon manuscripts, which gather together much of the En­glish religious writing of this period.16 But t­ here are also major works of pastoral, affective, contemplative, and biblical prose, including Richard Rolle’s influential En­glish Psalter and other works in En­glish. Although a certain number of French religious works continued to be written in ­England down to the sixteenth ­century, the long period when it formed a prominent part of the vernacular textual landscape came to an end in a blaze of glory between the 1350s and 1380s. ­These ­were the de­cades of Henry of Lancaster’s Livre des seyntz Medicines (book of holy medicines), John Gower’s Miroir de l’Omme (mirror of humanity), and The Travels of Sir John Mandev­ille or Livre des Merveilles du Monde (book of the world’s marvels), ­whether this perennially popu­lar work was first composed in ­England or not. The latest En­glish compositions deeply informed by the insular French literary tradition, the works of the Pearl poet, Langland’s Piers Plowman, and Gower’s Confessio amantis among them, are certainly no less remarkable. Although by the late 1300s, the generic traditions such works represent ­were in rapid transition, many En­glish and some French texts from this period w ­ ere still circulating through much of the fifteenth ­century.17

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§§§ Fi­nally, up to fifty books in our vernacular Migne, divided into groups of dif­ fer­ent sizes, would focus on works composed in late ­Middle En­glish during three roughly half-­century periods: from the 1370s to the 1420s, from 1430 to 1480, and from 1480 to the first phase of the Henrician Reformation in the 1530s. The bulk of new writing throughout this period is now in prose, which reemerged in the ­later ­fourteenth ­century as the dominant medium for most kinds of works in En­glish that aim directly at the instruction of readers and audiences, ­whether produced for the laity or for members of the secular clergy or religious ­orders, especially nuns. This left verse in some re­spects the more specialist of the two formats, at least so far as new composition was concerned, although verse was still understood as a public medium in contexts that ranged from the ethical art poetry of Gower, Chaucer, Hoccleve, and Lydgate to the ­great cycles of urban mystery plays. While older works such as The Prick of Conscience played their part ­here, a permanent new space for public poetry may have been opened up by Piers Plowman, possibly one of the most widely read works in En­glish for a period of three de­cades or so ­after 1380.18 Prominent in the first of ­these three periods is the series of major prose works produced in or near Oxford between the 1370s and perhaps the 1390s. ­These include The M ­ iddle En­glish Bible itself; a set of learned and sometimes po­liti­cally pointed commentaries on the Gospels and Psalms; sermon cycles and guides to theology; and the massive translations of several historical and encyclopedic works by John Trevisa, who may have been a member of the translation team that made The M ­ iddle En­glish Bible. Many of t­ hese works are continuous with ­earlier works in insular French, such as the Anglo-­Norman Bibles. But rather than orient themselves rhetorically ­toward the insular past, their major points of cultural reference now tend to be con­temporary and Continental. Even as En­glish completed its absorption of vast quantities of insular French lexis, French itself for the first time began to be presented as a foreign language. True to their institutional setting, as the first major body of insular vernacular writing written at a university, ­these works ­were also carried out to new scholarly standards and with a conscious urgency of reformist purpose seldom displayed in vernacular contexts since the early eleventh c­ entury.19 A heightened and sometimes explic­itly eschatological sense of the urgencies of the time characterizes much of the vernacular religious writing of the period, as the Papal Schism (1378–1417) roiled Catholic Eu­rope, and ­England itself was further agitated both by the violent po­liti­cal events of the period and by the internal ecclesiastical divisions that led to the heretication of Wyclif and



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t­ hose understood as his followers, ­after the promulgation of Arundel’s Constitutions in 1409. The sense of a society and Church in crisis is most overtly on display in the dialogues, satires, polemics, and other prose and verse ecclesiological writings that ­were produced in quantity in En­glish between the 1380s and 1410s, as clerical intellectuals and ­others turned to the vernacular, initially as a potential instrument of religious reform, ­later as a hotly contested object of reformist energies on the part of the En­glish episcopate and many ­others. Yet works in many less explic­itly po­liti­cal genres during ­these de­cades convey a similar energy and in some cases embattlement, as the ambition under­lying vernacular works of dif­fer­ent kinds began to mount, along with the external and internal pressures ­these ambitions brought in their wake. Some of ­these works are in newly elaborated versions of established instructional genres, from long expositions of the articles of the faith to treatises that give a range of accounts of the contemplative life, some designed for professional religious, ­others for the laity. Like so much ­else written at this period, ­these accounts are often in tension with one another and in some cases seriously divided as to the nature of contemplation itself. A good number of works and books in this vein provide edification to the “lettrid” laity, singled out as a distinct group in Cambridge Tract 1 while also enjoining them to pass instruction on to their less educated subordinates in the manner of the Carolingian libri manuales. Although they draw extensively on a mixed array of Latin didactic and contemplative works, writings in ­these genres often remain related to insular French or early ­Middle En­glish pre­de­ces­sors. While direct links to the twelfth-­century golden age of French hagiography have so far proved elusive, this is also true in a general sense of the series of substantial saints’ lives in verse and prose that are a feature of the fifteenth-­century literary scene and one of the most innovative and prolific religious genres of this period.20 ­There are also many works in more recently configured genres. On the one hand, the urban mystery plays, which owe an impor­tant stylistic debt to ­earlier encyclopedic verse texts such as Cursor Mundi, appear to have consolidated into permanent cycles at this period, although they continued to evolve well into the sixteenth ­century and are by no means the only genre of religious drama serving impor­tant, often civic functions: moralities, mummings, entries, saints’ plays, and more. On the other, this is the era not only of vitae Christi such as Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Life of Christ but also of a significant body of visionary writing, much of it by ­women. While a few of ­these works ­were written in ­England and in En­glish, most derive from elsewhere in Eu­rope and are translated from Latin, or via Latin from Italian, German, Swedish, or Dutch. ­These works in turn influenced writings in other genres, from affective meditations

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in prose to religious lyr­ics. Syon Abbey, the ­g reat Bridgettine convent lavishly founded by Henry V around 1415, was a major force in sponsoring this lit­er­a­ture. The late M ­ iddle En­glish period is also the era of a revival of the early medieval En­glish practice of publishing sermons in the vernacular, beginning with the En­glish Wycliffite Sermons and the Augustinian John Mirk’s Festial, but continuing with a number of other collections down to the sixteenth ­century, some of which include items derived from as far back as the ninth ­century. Although the plain style predominates ­here, a few sermons are works of elaborate artifice. One idiosyncratic Benedictine series, evidently intended as a stylistic as well as theological riposte to the Oxford reformers, was composed for delivery in a macaronic mixture of En­glish and Latin.21 Another set of ­Middle En­glish genres that come to the fore during the fifteenth ­century in par­tic­u­lar are ­those aimed at educating the lay reading or viewing public in general terms, be it in the realm of secular ethics; in the nature of the physical or spiritual creation; or in the workings of sacred history, from Creation to Judgment. The miracle plays are the most impor­tant example of writings in this last category. As the range of all kinds of translated material increased across the ­century, versions of pastoral manuals for the clergy initially written in Latin also found their way into En­glish. ­These include another linguistically mixed work, Speculum Christiani.22 Although many works, old and new, circulated only in manuscript well into the sixteenth ­century, a high proportion of the works included in our third group of ­Middle En­glish volumes circulated in print. Printing did not suddenly transform the production of vernacular religious texts or the purposes they ­were asked to serve, as is sometimes assumed. But it began to speed up developments that ­were already in pro­gress, as entrepreneurs such as William Caxton, Wynkyn de Worde, and Richard Pynson worked to keep their presses busy and to compete with En­glish books produced on the Continent. Early En­glish printers published a partly happenstance range of works of general religious interest, many of them encyclopedic in scope, as well as shorter works of utility to the literate lay public, including primers, catechisms, and arts of d­ ying. By the early sixteenth ­century, printing had also become both a national and an international medium of religious controversy, eagerly used by early evangelical reformers of all stripes as well as their opponents. The result was a new flood of theological, pastoral, and controversial writings in En­glish, some new, ­others reworkings of ­earlier texts, some published in ­England, ­others written in En­glish but printed in vari­ous centers on the Continent, as was the case with William Tyndale’s Bible translations and apol­o­getic Obedience of a Christen Man.



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For a de­cade ­after 1525, Syon Abbey was a prolific producer of such writings on the anti-­evangelical side.23 Indeed, so tightly knit are the competing vernacular traditions of the Henrician period with one another and the vernacular past that our heuristic collection must come to a somewhat arbitrary close, much like the “­Middle Ages” themselves. Even with one resonant endpoint in the year 1539, when Henry VIII ordered the dissolution of Syon and the publication of the Great Bible and another in 1549, the year of the publication of the Book of Common Prayer in En­glish, it is not obvious according to what criteria the medieval religious vernacular ceases to be medieval.

2. Life Cycles, Mobility, Loss Considering our archive as it unfolds across time in this summary way of course tells us nothing in detail, at least in the absence of the comprehensive databases now available to scholars of ­later periods of En­glish lit­er­a­ture, as well as of e­ arlier Latin theology, that could allow us to begin to approach it using the techniques applied to Big Data. The summary also raises many questions that cannot be dealt with ­here. Prominent among ­these is the question of how far a proj­ect that focuses on the written religious vernacular needs to take into account the very many Latin texts, especially preaching texts, written to be delivered in the vernacular: from Bede’s Homiliarum in evangelii in the eighth c­ entury, recorded in Latin but perhaps first delivered in En­glish, through the ­great sermons by which Archbishop Stephen Langton consolidated the power of the En­glish Church over the monarchy ­after the papal interdict of the early thirteenth ­century, and on. While not included in our vernacular Migne, such texts cannot be wholly excluded from this book.24 However, even this brief sketch allows us to venture three sets of general observations. The first concerns what we may call the “life spans” of the texts, genres, and traditions that make up this composite archive, and the recurring rhythms of textual obsolescence and renewal that characterize it. The second involves the cultivated unoriginality and textual instability that is a feature of many of the works of which it is composed. The third introduces the thorny prob­lem of textual loss and survival, as it affects our understanding of the archive’s evidentiary value. As to the first: A handful of texts in our archive have been read nearly continuously since they ­were first written, all from the late ­fourteenth or fifteenth centuries. Apart from the works of Chaucer, especially his Canterbury Tales, ­these include the series of contemplative prose works copied and in a number

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of cases printed by exiled seventeenth-­century En­glish nuns and monks, described in Chapter Four.25 The c­ areers of a very few of the earliest En­glish texts ­were of nearly comparable longevity, extending from the eighth ­century down to the twelfth. Parts of the corpus associated with Alfred in the late ninth and tenth centuries also actively circulated for some three hundred years. One composite and collaborative work or perhaps genre of work begun in his reign, the Anglo-­Saxon Chronicle, was updated down to the 1150s, a situation repeated in the ­later ­Middle Ages with the national chronicles known as the Brut, which persisted well into the early modern period. New versions of a few works composed in Latin but whose pastoral content made them well suited to vernacularization also continued to be made across the centuries. Between 1100 and 1500, numerous versions of Honorius’s dialogic theological summa, the Elucidarium, ­were rendered into Old En­glish, insular French, and ­Middle En­glish, as well as Welsh (among many other languages), some of them effectively updates of ­earlier vernacular versions, ­others based on versions in Latin.26 Also notable are the insular French and M ­ iddle En­glish descendants of the Old En­glish Psalter tradition produced between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, whose collective longevity is especially suggestive of the continuities that helped to shape the medieval history of the En­glish religious vernacular.27 Yet ­these long-­lived vernacular texts and traditions are exceptional. From the late tenth ­century to the early sixteenth, the vis­i­ble life spans of most vernacular texts, mea­sured between the date of their first composition and that of their latest recognizable copy, was seldom much longer than two hundred years, around two-­thirds of the total length of what we may loosely call the “textual generation” they helped to constitute. In what follows, a textual generation is a phase of vernacular literary history that overlapped chronologically with its pre­ de­ces­sor and successor but can be distinguished from both by the configuration of genres and languages that dominated it, as well as by the grounding presence of its own series of canonical texts. ­These last can be thought of as “anchor texts,” a term appropriated from the Linguistic Atlas of Late ­Middle En­ glish, where it refers to texts that can be firmly localized and so used as geo­ graph­i­cal anchors for their preferred dialect forms and spellings. ­Here, the term is used in another sense, to refer to widely circulated works that had a major influence in shaping a generation of ­later texts, both in their own right and through their role in authorizing a given genre or tradition.28 The most influential anchor texts w ­ ere not always t­ hose that inaugurated a new textual generation. Once written, however, the life spans of ­these texts tended to correspond to ­those of the larger bodies of texts and books they served to undergird. This is true of Æthelwold’s The Old En­glish Benedictine Rule and



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Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, two of the monastic works that consolidated the l­ater Old En­glish prose tradition in the ­century ­after its inauguration by Alfred’s Hierdeboc. The latest recognizable copies of ­these works are respectively the Wintney Rule (ca. 1200) and (although small groups of Ælfric homilies ­were copied l­ater) the mixed homiliary Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 343 (ca. 1175). Both were produced ­toward the end of the active life of the Old En­glish literary tradition in the decades before the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, late enough to be an informing influence on Ancrene Wisse and the works associated with it. The life spans of two of the key works that anchored the succeeding generation of French and En­glish religious writings, Robert Grosseteste’s Chasteau d’amur and Ancrene Wisse (both perhaps ca. 1230), also ended in their original forms in the late f­ourteenth ­century, with the rise of a major new body of ­Middle En­glish religious prose writing. The latest more or less full copies of ­these texts are in the Vernon manuscript, made in the 1390s, nearly two centuries into their ­careers, where they are found with many ­later texts whose composition they had helped make pos­si­ble. The absence of fifteenth-­century copies of ­these two works is the more striking in light of the fact that, as was not the case with the Old En­glish works of Æthelwold and Ælfric, material from both continued to circulate in new forms and texts. Indeed, Ancrene Wisse seems to have served as a direct pre­ce­dent for many of the prose works that replaced and displaced it.29 The situation with the late ­Middle En­glish generation of texts is more complicated, not least ­because the attempt by Oxford reformist intellectuals to ground this new body of work on The M ­ iddle En­glish Bible and a range of ancillary study tools such as the Glossed Gospels proved so controversial. Yet even at this period, the pro­cess of anchoring, whereby groups of vernacular texts attach themselves to influential forebears, remains relevant. Rolle’s En­glish writings served as a pre­ce­dent for a ­great deal of the religious prose written in the seventy-­five years a­ fter his death in 1349. ­These included not only the group of contemplative writings by Walter Hilton and ­others with which Rolle is often associated, but also the reformist Oxford translation program itself, which may have taken Rolle’s En­glish Psalter as a preliminary model for its protocols and clearly viewed Rolle, who had studied at Oxford, as a supporting pre­ce­dent. Authors writing in other genres affirmed their reliance on certain pre­de­ces­sors more loudly. Fifteenth-­century art poetry took care not only to sound Chaucerian but to allude to Chaucer as “maistre.” As the cultural space for religious and po­liti­cal critique grew narrower, a series of plowman poems and alliterative satires from early in the c­ entury similarly look back anxiously to Piers Plowman.30 The fate of ­these anchor texts is also complicated. The introduction of printing in the 1460s influenced vernacular literary history in unpredictable

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ways, extending or renewing the life cycles of certain texts and cutting short ­others, even before the tidal waves of mandated change brought about by the Henrician Reformation and its successors. Chaucer and Langland ­were beneficiaries of this event, finding urgent new uses as harbingers of evangelical religion. Although a number of his Latin works circulated in the ­great early modern Catholic collections, Rolle had to wait ­until the nineteenth ­century to be read in something like this way. The scale and violence of the national theological and institutional change that took place in the En­glish Church and state between the En­glish 1530s and the 1560s was without pre­ce­dent. In some re­spects, however, the demise of an array of well-­respected vernacular religious texts that was one by-­product of this change, and the production of another generation of replacement texts, was consistent with a pro­cess that had occurred several times across the medieval centuries. Although they need to be treated with appropriate caution, the concepts of the textual generation and the anchor text enable us to compare but also contrast the dif­fer­ent ways in which vernacular textual traditions gave way to one another, causing texts, genres, bodies of material, and indeed ­whole approaches to vernacular composition to dis­appear or to undergo structural change, as ­others ­rose to take their place. They also allow us to re­orient our sense of where the pivotal moments in medieval En­glish literary history fall and what made them pivotal. Despite the significance of King Alfred’s promotion of En­ glish prose, the ideological priorities of much of the surviving Old En­glish prose corpus ­were set more than half a ­century ­later, during the period of the Benedictine Reform. Despite the brilliance of the twelfth-­century corpus of French verse, the priorities of thirteenth-­ and fourteenth-­century insular vernacular verse and prose ­were largely set during the period of the Fourth Lateran Council, the same period that also saw the final end of the Old En­glish prose tradition, a full ­century and a half ­a fter the Norman Conquest. Despite the role played by cultural competition with France in the formation of the late ­Middle En­glish literary canon, the most urgent impetus for vernacular composition in the late ­fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries was provided not by secular nationalism but rather by the conflicting programs of Church reform precipitated by the ecclesiastical disaster of the Papal Schism. §§§ The second set of observations prompted by our sketch of the vernacular archive has to with the derivativeness of many of the texts it contains, but also with the range of versions in which ­these texts may even so come down to us.



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Original texts whose innovative features are symptomatic of their institutional, religious, or literary moment, or that influenced larger bodies of writing, must occupy much of our attention in what follows, since such texts tend to be best qualified to speak powerfully for a par­tic­u­lar phase of the history of the religious vernacular. Yet a ­great many of the works that make up the vernacular archive are emphatically dependent, ­either translated or compiled from one or more named or unnamed sources, and intended to serve a practical and ­limited purpose as merely local mediators of Christian learning or calls to devotion and action. Partly as a result of this pragmatism, one dynamic feature of the archive that stands in the way of defining its size and proportions too closely is the tendency of vernacular texts to mutate, circulating in an array of equally popu­ lar forms in milieux in which recombination, readaptation, retranslation, and other forms of textual mobility appear to be more the rule than the exception. This is one version of the phenomenon that has come to be known as mouvance, once viewed as an endemic feature of medieval manuscript culture as a ­whole, now often understood in more particularized terms, as associated with some genres more than ­others. For reasons that remain unclear, for example, but that surely include the choices of readers and scribes as well as mere exemplar poverty, certain fifteenth-­century didactic prose texts, such as the homiletic Three Arrows of Doomsday, seem to have circulated in almost as many versions as ­there are copies.31 Yet even our anchor texts cannot be relied on to maintain their stability. Ancrene Wisse and its colleague the Mirouer de Seinte Eglise both circulated in many dif­fer­ent versions and adaptations.32 Despite Ælfric’s stern warnings about the need to preserve the work’s integrity, partial copies of his Catholic Homilies greatly outnumber complete ones, while ­later copies in par­tic­u­lar sometimes include homilies he did not write and that propound teachings he took to be false. As the fifteenth-­century afterlives of a number of venerable works suggest, among them the Chasteau d’amur, the most authoritative texts might be especially liable to be used as the basis for new writing during the period when their canonical status was on the wane. Although much of the vernacular corpus makes unoriginality into a cultural princi­ple, the self-­conscious reliance of vernacular texts on Latin originals is often complicated or qualified by the tendency of scribes to rewrite as well as copy. From Alfred’s Hierdeboc to the growing mass of En­glish religious works for sale in early sixteenth-­century London print shops, a historically consistent role of the vernacular was to serve as an accessible medium for materials rendered from other languages, usually Latin or (­later) French. Across

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the centuries, compilations and miscellanies, some of them newly composed but many produced by reworking or combining existing works, make up a significant proportion of the archive, often existing in multiple overlapping forms and versions that can be difficult to distinguish clearly from one another. Careful translations on the model of The M ­ iddle En­glish Bible or the Hierdeboc itself are also an impor­tant part of the corpus, while a number of writers set the same store on textual stability as Ælfric. In the late twelfth ­century, the eponymous Augustinian author of the work known as the Orrmulum requires copyists to preserve not only the words of his homilies but their carefully worked-­out spellings. In the late ­fourteenth, the anonymous Carthusian author of The Cloud of Unknowing, concerned that inadequate readings of his remarkable treatise ­will lead to error, solemnly charges anybody who “shal rede it, write it, or speke it, or elles ­here it be red or spokin,” to “take hem time to rede it, speke it, write it, or ­here it, al over,” an instruction that is also meant to inhibit scribes from making abbreviated or excerpted copies of his book.33 Yet even by the time The Cloud of Unknowing was composed, when the standing of En­glish was by some mea­sures higher than it had been for two hundred years, sophisticated writers not only accepted the mobility of many kinds of vernacular textuality but sometimes seem to have embraced it as part of their composition pro­cess. Piers Plowman, written and rewritten over the course of several de­cades without ever apparently achieving a confidently final form, is only the most intricate and self-­conscious of a number of cases in point ­here. As one of the engines of vernacular textual production, the textual instability that characterizes good portions of our archive needs to be reflected in the approach we take to it in two ways, both of which offer a certain challenge to the idea of a “text,” if we take this word to indicate a stable and easily identifiable entity. First, although this book maintains a distinction that is no longer necessarily accepted by book historians, between a text and a copy, it does not always distinguish closely between a text and a book or collection.34 Early En­glish homiliaries have long been treated as distinct objects of textual analy­ sis and given their own names, despite the fact that their contents often overlap or are also found elsewhere: The Vercelli Homilies, The Blickling Homilies, The Vespasian Homilies, The Trinity Homilies, The Lambeth Homilies. In most fields of medieval literary studies, other kinds of manuscript collection or miscellany are also increasingly now being read in this holistic way, as individualized “­whole books,” whose se­lection of texts need to be read in relation to the entire “manuscript matrix.”35 Such books show how juxtapositions of old and new texts create their own doctrinal and pedagogical profiles, while also focusing attention on the reception



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of the texts they contain: how they ­were read, by whom, in what social settings, and in what groupings. Throughout this study emphasis falls most often on the time and place in which a given work was written, a subject of close interest, for example, in the last two chapters of this volume. Yet as a good deal of recent scholarship has insisted, reception is in princi­ple a topic of equal importance, if we are to attend to all the stages of a given text’s ­career, and to the entire life cycle of a given textual generation. Second, it is sometimes counterproductive to distinguish too closely between a text and a textual tradition, in two senses of this phrase. Certain widely dispersed texts never existed in a single form but ­were treated as open-­ended collections of materials available for customization by copyists and supplementation by new writers. The South En­glish Legendary, a composite and multi-­ authored work that exists in many versions, some of them perhaps tailored to the liturgical requirements of specific parish churches or religious ­houses, ­others copied for the instructive plea­sure of laypeople with their own localized interests, offers a large-­scale example ­here.36 Conversely, some texts ­were translated or adapted so often that the resulting textual tradition, not perhaps recognized as such by the adapters and translators themselves, constitutes an object of study in its own right, rich in interest for what it can tell us about how the source text in question was received in dif­fer­ent milieux. The many versions of the Elucidarium and Somme le roi, both of which span more than one textual generation, are impor­tant examples of this phenomenon. §§§ Fi­nally, as to the ­matter of textual loss and its implications: a recent quantitative analy­sis of medieval book survival rates notes that Andrew Watson and N. R. Ker’s Medieval Libraries of G ­ reat Britain itemizes more than nineteen thousand books listed in medieval British library cata­logs and identifies an impressive seventeen hundred of them (9 ­percent) with books still in existence. This is slightly higher than the 7 ­percent rate for the volumes listed in the Registrum Anglie de libris doctorum et auctorum veterum (En­glish registry of books of doctors and ancient authors), a survey of more than six thousand liturgical, patristic, and other books owned in ninety En­glish monastic and cathedral libraries made by a group of En­glish Franciscans in search of potential ex­em­­plars in 1310.37 It is considerably higher than the likely range of rates we might extrapolate for The Lay Folks’ Catechism, whose mandated distribution to all the parishes in the archdiocese of York should in theory have created some eight hundred one-­quire booklets, only seven of which seem to have left traces among

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twenty-­three surviving copies of this work.38 It is vastly higher than any rate we might estimate for the most prolific and heavi­ly used kind of Latin books, ser­vice books, many of which ­were deliberately destroyed in the Henrician Reformation and of which only a fractional percentage now survives even from the final medieval centuries, a good proportion of them again from large institutions.39 While a few libraries and perhaps a few kinds of texts did better, and while not all the surviving books listed by Watson and Ker and their Franciscan pre­de­ces­sors may yet have been identified, the survival rates extrapolated from them are already likely to be at the high end for books written or already in existence in the ­fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the majority of the surviving library cata­logs used by Watson and Ker ­were produced. They are well above the high end as we go back through the previous few hundred years, given the cumulative losses caused by wear and tear, obsolescence, and the periodic destruction or dissolution of entire libraries and the institutions that sustained them. Large institutional libraries preserved vernacular as well as Latin books, ­either ­because ­these books ­were produced in their scriptoria and kept to be read or used as exemplars for ­f uture copyists, or ­because they ­were donated ­a fter spending time in other settings. Only a minority of books owned by or within institutions, ­whether Latin or vernacular, would have been part of ­these curated collections kept in library chests, chained on library bookshelves, marked with a library’s insignia, or mentioned in library rec­ords. Such informally owned books are less likely to have survived and are much harder to identify. At certain moments, specific kinds of books, including vernacular Bibles, may have had a better chance of survival than ­others. ­There are many signs that survival rates even of vernacular texts and books in use at the same period w ­ ere drastically uneven, perhaps especially in the case of certain types of books in Old En­glish.40 Estimating percentages remains a speculative undertaking, even for books that served a clear institutional purpose such as homiliaries, given all we do not know about the mechanics or frequency of preaching through much of the period, especially at the local level. For less formal kinds of texts, written for nuns, semireligious, laypeople, and local priests, any ideas we might form about rates of survival risk confirming old preconceptions, usually based on literalistic understandings of the complaints of ignorantia leveled at the illiterati across the period, as well as on the common mistranslation of illiteratus as “illiterate,” rather than “non-­Latinate.” The idea that widespread literacy was an early modern phenomenon, attained only ­after the advent of print, still prejudices discussion of medieval literacy rates, just as the assumption that all serious reading is private reading prejudices discussion of medieval access to texts



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and books. Merely to point this out, however, does not make hard evidence on ­either score any easier to find. ­There is nonetheless reason to suppose that certain kinds of vernacular texts and books produced for the readerships just mentioned—­essentially, the interstitial group of ­those who are neither “wel-­letterd men” nor “idiotis” isolated as the target audience for vernacular theology in Cambridge Tract 1—­may have suffered unusually severe losses. Through much of the period, few secular organ­ izations, even royal or aristocratic courts, had the longevity of ­great monastic ­houses and other religious institutions. Although we have a handful of books owned by members of the gentry and ­others at their social level from as early as the thirteenth ­century, such books survived against the odds. The probability of survival for any books produced for ­those lower on the social ladder, where we tend to assume that literacy rates ­were lowest, is vanishingly small, making this assumption hard to challenge. The same is true of vernacular books used by local priests in the course of their duties, most of them privately owned and handed on ­every few de­cades, in the same way as books owned by individual laypeople, in transactions that very often went unrecorded in ­wills, whose survival rates also vary and the vast majority of which in any case date from ­after the ­middle of the ­fourteenth ­century. The cheaply made books, unbound books, booklets, and scrolls that some of ­these priests, along with other less wealthy readers, would have been able to acquire would have been unusually subject to physical deterioration. Our knowledge of the circulation of vernacular books improves ­after 1400, as survivals multiply, a phenomenon often understood as straightforwardly the result of increased demand for books by an increasingly literate populace, rather than as partly a ­matter of bias in the evidence. Even for this period, however, our ability to track vernacular reading below a certain social level tends to depend on problematic evidence such as heresy trial rec­ords, which treat the use of vernacular books by certain groups of devout laypeople as intrinsically abnormal and reflect a low view on the part of inquisitors and scribes of a suspect’s literacy and intellectual capacity.41 Partly ­because the evidence is unavailable, partly ­because forming stable expectations about the circulation of vernacular reading materials whose use was often voluntary is difficult, the uncertainties that surround the relationship of our archive to the texts and books that once existed may well be incapable of resolution. Yet while conjuring lost bodies of writing into hy­po­thet­i­cal existence has its dangers, it is impor­tant to take the force of the fact that very large numbers of vernacular texts, as well as books, have been lost from all parts of the period. It is also impor­tant to recognize that loss has been visited

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disproportionately on certain periods, kinds of texts, and texts for certain readerships in ways that would tend to privilege, for example, the institutional reform movements at the expense of the institutions they displace, large centers at the expense of small ones, professional religious and their libraries at the expense of priests and the laity, and the wealthy and culturally privileged at the expense of their social inferiors. Short of new discoveries, we cannot change the vernacular archive. But we can approach it in the knowledge that in some areas it is likely to be unrepresentative, and adjust our account accordingly. This should involve our willingness to give credence to what texts say about their intended readership, even against the evidence of the books in which they happen to survive. Cases in point from the thirteenth-­century Ancrene Wisse Group concern us in Chapter Twenty. Acknowledging the limitations of the archive should above all involve paying as close attention to rare survivals as to the mainstream traditions represented by our anchor texts. The archive is dotted with what we may call “eccentric texts,” whose protocols and preoccupations appear especially idiosyncratic and whose survival to the pre­sent appears even more than usually accidental. Some of ­these texts survive ­because they traveled with other texts, perhaps even by the same author. Such is the case with Ælfric’s Letter to B ­ rother Edward, a remarkable glimpse into eleventh-­century En­glish manners and ethnic, class, and gender prejudice, apparently written for a readership of one but copied with more wide-­ranging works by the ­great homilist long ­after the situation it addressed was past. ­Others survive ­because they became separated from their original institutional context. Such is the case with the Vercelli Homilies, one of our best witnesses to Old En­glish homiletic writings not closely association with the Benedictine Reform, its one copy left in a cathedral library in northern Italy during the twelfth c­ entury, where it lay untouched for some six hundred years. ­Others still seem to survive for no reason at all, other than that they attracted attention in a par­tic­u­lar time and place. Cases in point ­here include the Orrmulum, its single copy a holograph whose experimental orthography may have confined its circulation to a relatively small set of readers and communities, but which then became an object of philological interest to early modern antiquarians. The also include The Book of Margery Kempe, whose one full copy was rescued from Mount Grace Priory ­a fter its suppression in the 1530s only then to dis­appear for four hundred years, shocking twentieth-­century readers of Julian of Norwich and Walter Hilton once it was rediscovered in the country ­house where it had been kept, again untouched, in a drawer.



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Eccentric texts such as ­these have occasionally received rough treatment by scholars. But they are eccentric only in the sense that they appear so to us, behaving in ways that mainstream textual traditions with which we are more familiar have not led us to expect and challenging the presuppositions and perhaps sense of decorum we bring to the study of the past in the pro­cess. Rather than being treated incuriously, as oddities or failures, ­these texts need to be received as relicts of textual communities and traditions about which we often other­wise know ­little, whose survival offers further evidence of the diversity and reach of medieval vernacular theology. At least to a ­limited extent, they can stand in for the innumerable other texts, written for literate readers and their associates in all walks of life, that are now permanently inaccessible to us.

Chapter 11

Old En­glish in the Long Twelfth ­Century

1. Scholarly Translators and Monastic Bishops: “Sanctus Beda was i-­boren” Sanctus Beda was i-­boren her on Breotene mid us, Ond he wisliche bec awende, Thet theo Englise leoden thurh weren i-­lerde. Ond he theo cnoten unwreih the “Questiuns” hoteth, Tha derne digelnesse the deorwurthe is. Ælfric abbod, the we “Alquin” hoteth, He was bocare ond the fif bec wende, Genesis, Exodus, [De]utronomius, Numerus, Leviticus; Thurh theos weren i-­lærde ure leoden on Englisc. Thet weren theos biscopes theo bodeden Cristendom: Wilfrid of Ripum, Johan of Beoferlay, Cuthbert of Dunholme, Oswald of Wireceastre, Egwin of Heoveshame, Ældhelm of Malmesbury, Swithun, Æthelwold, Aidan, Biern of Wincæstre, Paulin of Rofecæstre, S. Dunston and S. Ælfeih of Cantorebury. Theos lærden ure leodan on Englisc; Næs deorc heore liht, ac hit fæire glod. Nu is theo leore forleten, ond thet folc is forloren. Nu beoth othre leoden theo læreth ure folc, Ond feole of then lor-­theines losiæth ond thet folc forth mid. Nu sæith ure Drihten thus: Sicut aquila provocat pullos suos ad volandum et super eos volitat (Deut. 32:11). This beoth Godes word to worlde asende: Thet we sceolen fæyer feth[ren festen to him].

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(Saint Bede was born ­here among us in Britain, and he wisely translated books through which the En­glish ­people ­were instructed. And he untangled the knots we call “questiones” the obscure mystery that is precious. Abbot Ælfric, whom we call “Alcuin,” he was a scholar and translated the five books: Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Numbers, Leviticus. Through ­these our p­ eople ­were instructed in En­glish. ­These ­were the bishops who preached Chris­tian­ity: Wilfrid of Ripon, John of Beverly, Cuthbert of Durham; Oswald of Worcester, Ecgwine of Evesham, Aldhelm of Malmesbury; Swithun, Æthelwold, Áedán, Birinus of Winchester; Paul of Rochester, St. Dunstan and St. Ælfheah of Canterbury. ­These men instructed our ­people in En­ glish; their light was not dim, but it glowed beautifully. Now this teaching is abandoned and the folk is lost. Now ­there are other p­ eople who instruct our folk, and many of the teachers stray and the folk also. Now our Lord says thus: “As the ea­gle entices her young to fly and hovers over them.” ­These are God’s words sent into the world: that we should beautifully [set our feathers over them].)1 So does a brief poem written by an anonymous Benedictine monk at some time during the twelfth ­century look back with urgent longing to a lost golden age of devout scholars, preaching bishops, and vernacular biblicism and pastoralia. En­glish Chris­tian­ity was founded on the translation, teaching, and deep exegetical wisdom of Bede, whose native birth is pleonastically affirmed in the threefold “her (1) on Breotene (2) mid us (3),” and on obedience to divine law and covenant as represented by the Ælfrician translation of the five books of Moses.2 On this groundwork, it was built up by the ­labors of saintly monastic bishops throughout the country. The poem first lists three early northerners: the ascetic Cuthbert (d. 687), the princely Wilfrid (d. 709/10), and the scholarly John (d. 721).3 Like all the episcopal saints it mentions, each is identified not by his see but by the location of his major shrine.4 Moving southwest to Worcester and Evesham, then southeast to Winchester, and fi­nally east to Rochester and Canterbury, the poem then adds five further found­ers of the En­glish Church: the Irish Áedán (d. 651), the Frankish Birinus (d. 650), and the Roman Paulinus (d. 644)—­longest-­lived survivor of the Gregorian mission to Kent led by Augustine of Canterbury—as well as two En­glishmen, Ecgwine (d. 717) and the brilliant and prolific Latin writer, Aldhelm (d. 709/710). It also lists a single ninth-­century bishop saint, the historically obscure but deeply revered Swithun (d. 863).5



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In among ­these ancients, however, it intersperses a quartet of rather more recent figures: Oswald (d. 992), Æthelwold (d. 984), Dunstan (d. 988), and Ælfheah (d. 1012). The first three of ­these men ­were leaders of the movement of monastic and national religious revival, now known as the Benedictine Reform,6 inaugurated ­under the first ruler of a unified ­England, Alfred’s great-­grandson King Edgar (reigned 959–78): Oswald (of Danish parentage) as bishop of Worcester and archbishop of York; Dunstan as abbot of Glastonbury and archbishop of Canterbury; and Æthelwold as bishop of Winchester, monastic theorist, and celebrated teacher.7 It was Æthelwold who, in 964, forcibly expelled two venerable communities of clerics from the Old and New Minsters at Winchester, with the king’s help, in order to install his own monks, and who apparently took the lead in drawing up the ­great founding document of En­glish Benedictinism, the Regularis concordia, sanctioned by the Council of Winchester in the presence of the king.8 A challenge to the regionalism, diversity, and secularism that typified early En­glish religious communities, the Regularis concordia aimed to harmonize practice in the growing number of reformed Benedictine ­houses across the country, by adopting a version of the observances at two major monasteries from northern Eu­rope, Fleury and Ghent. Both ­houses ­were connected to the network of establishments associated with the ­great monastery of Cluny.9 It was also Æthelwold who taught Ælfric (d. ca. 1010), the figure “Sanctus Beda” identifies most closely with the vernacular, through the version of the Pentateuch to which he contributed and, perhaps, through his widely copied Grammar. A reference to this Grammar, a version of which precedes “Sanctus Beda” in our sole copy of the poem in Worcester Cathedral MS F.174, could lie ­behind the poem’s nickname for Ælfric, “Alcuin,” ­after the impor­tant Northumbrian scholar, pedagogue, and theologian (d. 804).10 Ælfric is ­here said to have played a role second only to Bede in furnishing the materials through which God’s word was transmitted to “ure leoden,” a word that evocatively refers both to a “­people” and, secondarily, to their language.11 As ­these more recent names suggest, the early En­glish Church evoked in “Sanctus Beda” as an object of identification for the poet and his like-­minded readers—­fellow Benedictines, as the repeated use of “we,” “us,” and “ure” suggest—is thus explic­itly monastic and millennial. Reacting against what they took to be the abuses of the recent past, Æthelwold and his close colleagues drew inspiration from the pre­ce­dent they found in the early En­glish Church, built around the scholarship and teaching of bishops and monks living ­under a common rule, which they took to be St. Benedict of Nursia’s rule itself.12 A brief vernacular work now known as King Edgar’s Establishment of Monasteries,

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almost certainly written by Æthelwold, claims that Gregory instructed Augustine of Canterbury to “teach and establish for the servants of God the same mode of life which the apostles maintained within their community in the early days of our Chris­tian­ity” (“thæm Godes theowum thone ylecan theaw tæhte and ge-­sette the tha apostolas mid heora ge-­farrædene on tham anginne ures Cristeondomes heoldon”), creating a monastic En­glish Church in imitation of the Jerusalem Church depicted in Acts 4:32–37. This was the Church, long decayed, that was now to be restored to its primitive state, a pro­cess that needs to be grounded in what the work represents as a return to observance of the Benedictine Rule.13 The source Æthelwold is working somewhat freely ­here, Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica, includes lives of seven of the eight early bishops listed in “Sanctus Beda,” omitting only Ecgwine, whose earliest known full vita is by the scholarly Byrhtferth of Ramsay, a con­temporary of Ælfric. All t­ hese bishops except Ecgwine ­were well known in the tenth ­century.14 Benedictines revived the cults of Aldhelm at Malmesbury and Birinus at Winchester, where they also created what seems to have been effectively a new cult for Swithun, whose spectacular healing miracles brought many pilgrims to the rebuilt cathedral and did much to legitimize the new monastic régime.15 On inspection, what at first appears an idealized portrayal of a timeless ­England, made godly by four centuries of teaching and preaching, thus resolves into an evocation of a specific monastic movement, as it set out energetically to follow what it understood to be the example of the past, by promoting learning and instruction conducted, like the poem, “on Englisc.” §§§ “Nu,” however, the teaching of ­these scholars and bishops has been abandoned (“forleten”), and the “folc”—­the laity, named three times in successive lines as the sudden focus of the poem’s concerns—­a re utterly lost (“forloren”).16 Leadership of the En­glish Church has been taken over by a new “leoden,” many of whose teachers (“lor-­theines”) stray from the right path (“losiæth”). The poem’s lineage of saintly bishops ends with Ælfheah (Alphege), bishop of Winchester and archbishop of Canterbury, a key supporter of the early part of Ælfric’s ­career as a vernacular homilist, whose death at the hands of the Danes, four years before the accession of Cnut (reigned 1016–35), led to his veneration as a martyr.17 However, the “othre leoden” who have flouted insular religious traditions are not Norse-­speaking and partly still-­pagan Scandinavians from across the Baltic, who kept the ecclesiastical structures they found in place largely



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intact. Rather, they are romanz-­speaking Christians from across the channel, the “French” or “Normans.”18 Like the royal court itself, the En­glish Church of the tenth and early eleventh centuries was internationalist in outlook, at least from the perspective of its archbishops, bishops, abbots, and scholars. Yet it had several distinctive features. ­These included not only its local saints and its par­tic­u­lar theological accent, but its use of monks to staff many of its cathedrals—­a uniquely En­glish practice, given renewed impetus by Æthelwold, that survived down to the Henrician Reformation in the 1530s—­and in certain cases to oversee or carry out pastoral duties, especially preaching. They also included the use of the vernacular as the language of rec­ord for homilies, as well as in other pedagogical, pastoral, theological, and ­legal contexts that in much of Continental Eu­rope called for Latin. In the de­cades before the Conquest, certain of ­England’s bishoprics and ­great abbacies had already been taken over by appointees who may not always have had good En­glish, whose attitudes had been nurtured elsewhere, and who assumed responsibility for what “Sanctus Beda” calls “ure folc.” A ­ fter 1066, the pace quickened. As early as 1070, Stigand, who had replaced Robert of Jumièges, abbot of Rouen, as archbishop of Canterbury in 1052, was himself replaced by the Lombard jurist and theologian Lanfranc (d. 1089), founder of an influential school at Bec in Normandy and an impor­tant figure in the ecclesiastical movements of the period.19 Lanfranc’s monastic Constitutiones replaced the Regularis Concordia in ­those ­houses still governed by it, imposing a modern account of the Benedictine Rule based on con­temporary Cluniac practice on his own monks of Christ Church at Canterbury and other En­glish communities that ­adopted it.20 The changes that followed continued to affect the monastic life. Although the wealth and number of Benedictine h ­ ouses was still increasing, their public standing inevitably weakened as new ­orders proliferated around them.21 The refoundation of older clerical communities as ­houses of Augustinian (regular) canons, many of them small but a few prestigious and wealthy, began in the late eleventh c­ entury.22 In the 1130s, two new canonical ­orders, the Gilbertines and the Arrouasians, began to attract significant noble patronage. Bourne Abbey in Lincolnshire, where the remarkable early ­Middle En­glish homiliary known as the Orrmulum was written in the 1160s or 1170s, was founded directly from Arrouaise in 1138.23 The earliest insular Cistercian h ­ ouse, at Waverley in Surrey, dates from 1128, the first of almost sixty to be founded in Britain over the next thirty years.24 In 1177, a year before the foundation of ­England’s first ­house of Carthusian hermits, at Witham in Somerset,25 one of the g­ reat

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Benedictine ­houses for ­women, Amesbury, founded by Edgar’s queen Ælfthryth (d. 999/1001), was declared to be de­cadent and refounded as a ­house of Fontevraudians, an order much favored by Eleanor of Aquitane and her husband, Henry II. 26 Such developments, as well as the ongoing realignments both within the Church and between the Church and secular society traditionally called the Gregorian Reform, changed how the Benedictines thought of themselves, urging them ­toward a more particularized understanding of their identity as a religious order and place in the Church at large. While “Sanctus Beda” imagines a “Breotene” filled end to end with Benedictine saints and their shrines, no memory is thus allowed to intrude of the power­f ul po­liti­cal role once played by the order or its relationship with the royal House of Wessex.27

2. A Call to Revival: The Tremulous Hand From almost the moment it took place, historians have represented the Norman Conquest as a national turning point, following the lead of con­temporary works that celebrated or deplored the event, from the Bayeux Tapestry, produced in its close aftermath, to the Gesta regum Anglorum (deeds of the kings of ­England), written by that second Bede, the Benedictine historian William of Malmesbury (d. ca. 1142), more than fifty years ­later.28 When “Sanctus Beda” was found in 1837 as a minor item in a disheveled Worcester book, copied onto second-­grade vellum possibly as late as the 1230s or 1240s in the shaky script of the glossator known only as the “Tremulous Hand,” only to be reused as binding material in the fifteenth ­century, it was thus read in elegiac terms, as a lament for the catastrophic damage to En­glish life wrought by William I’s invasion.29 Written in a language that feels uneasily situated between Old and early ­Middle En­glish and in a meter long mistaken for prose, the poem was taken as itself constituting “both symptom and witness” of cultural “decline.”30 The congenital tremor that makes the handwriting of the Tremulous Hand pos­si­ble not only to identify but to group into phases, and that gives him his evocative soubriquet, was read as a sign of weary old age. The fifty thousand glosses he added to twenty Old En­glish Worcester books on which he worked for some years, glossing for a brief period in En­glish before switching definitively to Latin, ­were understood as his ­dying effort to preserve the past memorialized in “Sanctus Beda” as it slipped fi­nally away.31 But while the poem testifies to loss, the quotation from Deuteronomy 32:11 that takes up its final lines issues a call to revival: “Sicut aquila provocans ad



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volandum pullos suos et super eos volitans expandit alas suas et assumpsit eum atque portavit in humeris suis” (as the ea­gle enticing her young to fly and hovering over them, he spread his wings, and has taken him and carried him on his shoulders), as the verse reads in full. In the Glossa ordinaria, drawing on Carolingian as well as patristic exegetical traditions, the fatherly ea­gle of the verse is identified with Christ. Christ exhorts us “through word and example to ascend to the heights, that we may follow where he has gone before.” “When he sees them grow feathers,” he also “turns his ea­glets back ­towards the true sun; and he feeds them . . . ​and he lifts them with the wings of grace” (“Christus nos dictis et exemplis exhortans ad alta provehit, ut sequamur quo praecessit . . . ​ cum plumescere pullos suos videt ad solem convertit; et illum nutrit . . . ​et alis gratiae sustentat”).32 Nurturing ­those in their charge by feeding them on the sight of God, the Benedictines must return to their own version of this task, sustaining their weaker lay ­brothers and ­sisters with protecting wings, ­until they can be urged, at last, to fly. Part of the ­great canticle Moses sings as he looks ­toward a Promised Land he ­will never himself enter, sung ­every Saturday at Lauds in the Benedictine office,33 the verse recalls the identification of the En­glish as God’s chosen that many have seen as a key theme of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica, and that is perhaps also implied by the poem’s emphasis on the Pentateuch, the law God gave to his chosen ­people, the Jews.34 Laying solemn spiritual responsibility on Benedictine reader and writer together as it addresses them in the vernacular, the language of religious instruction, “Sanctus Beda” thus declares it their joint task ­under God to supply the deficiencies of the “othre leoden” now in charge of the En­glish Church, affirming that they have the example and aid of the En­glish saints, still sustaining the divine work from their earthly shrines, in this salvific task. The poem’s interest in the past is not passive and elegiac. On the contrary, it is active and reformist. §§§ ­ ecause of its use of some updated early ­Middle rather than Old En­glish spellB ings, as well as one French form in our sole surviving copy (“Questiuns,” for Latin questiones), “Sanctus Beda” is sometimes argued to derive from near the end of the twelfth ­century, perhaps no more than fifty years before our copy was made.35 Although it seems likely the Tremulous Hand understood all the works he was copying to be of some antiquity, it is pos­si­ble that this is so. The interest he showed in the poem is clearly of his moment, the heady period in

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the de­cades immediately ­after the Fourth Lateran Council, when the need to invest resources in pastoral care was a subject of deep interest to churchmen, and when the nature of the contributions the En­glish Benedictines could make to this program was changing rapidly, as we see in Part IV of this volume. Nonetheless the attitudes implied by the poem’s details are more easily continuous with ­those of an ­earlier period, during the reign of Henry I, when a distinction between “othre leoden” and “ure leoden” could apparently still be asserted with a certain clarity.36 The poem’s choice of saints could be topical. Lanfranc’s supposed suspicion of the veneration paid to the only bishops it names as saints, “S. Dunston and S. Ælfeih,” and the cultic humiliation they briefly endured at Canterbury as a result, was a ­bitter subject for the hagiographer and historian Eadmer (d. ca. 1126) as late as the 1120s.37 Norman haste to tear down existing cathedrals and replace them with new ones led to ceremonial translations of relics from old homes to new that affirmed the prestige of certain saints, including Paulinus at Rochester (1080s) and Swithun at Winchester (1093). But it also led to liturgical changes whose effect was to demote ­others.38 The flurry of vitae of insular saints’ lives from across the turn of the twelfth ­century witnesses cultic stress as much as renewal.39 The verbs “forleten” and “forloren” and the equally harsh “feole of then lor-­ theines losiæth and thæt folc forth mid,” may merely reflect in disparaging terms on the priorities of recent bishops in contrast to idealized figures such as Wulfstan II of Worcester (1028–95), last survivor of the pre-­Conquest episcopate. Wulfstan’s dedication to pastoral care was one ground of his canonization in 1203, a generation before “Sanctus Beda” was copied.40 But the word “lor-­ theines” (“teachers,” also “theologians”) might also register anxious awareness of recent theological and pastoral innovation, expressing concern at the spiritual dangers the laity face in the likely event of lapses in doctrine on the part of their new pastors.41 ­Later eleventh-­century ecclesiastical appointees innovated at ­every level, developing new patristic libraries at Salisbury as well as Canterbury, and engaging in exchanges with colleagues at home and abroad that led to developments in thinking about crucial topics, from soteriology to transubstantiation to predestination.42 Although their findings ­were not absorbed into the wider currents of theological thought as quickly as is sometimes supposed, the treatises of Anselm of Bec, Lanfranc’s ­great successor at Canterbury whose reputation for holiness was established during his lifetime, ­were of special importance. ­These works reached a Europe-­wide scholarly readership within months of composition and permanently reshaped the theological landscape of Latin Chris­ tian­ity. Anselm proposed a set of original hypotheses about the incarnation,



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the logic of redemption, and the relationship of divine omnipotence and ­human ­will in par­tic­u­lar.43 Yet although many of Anselm’s teachings ­were worked out in dialogue with members of the monastic community at Canterbury and ­were eagerly studied at Worcester and Rochester, his bold attempt to reexamine the key doctrines of the Christian faith through intellectum, without recourse to ­earlier auctoritates, was controversial. Among other ­things, it was in striking contrast to the practice of Carolingian exegetes and En­glish successors such as Ælfric, for whom careful use of patristic sources was understood to be the only reliable guard against heresy.44 Moreover, like other rigorist churchmen of his day, Anselm in theory disapproved of monastic engagement in pastoral care, believing it was the responsibility of monks to practice the radical detachment from the world that alone gave some surety of salvation. In his view, monks should surrender themselves wholly to the life to come, feasting on the angelic food of contemplation.45

3. Scholarly Rationales for Late Old En­glish Yet however tensely alert “Sanctus Beda” may be to religious change, the very facts both of its composition, and of its subsequent recopying in the early thirteenth ­century, are signs of the continued vitality of the vernacular tradition whose revival it proposes. This vitality has only recently been recognized. Even before the paleographic and codicological work of dating the four hundred or so books that contain literary Old En­glish was completed by N. R. Ker in the late 1950s, scholars ­were aware that a good number of ­these books, most of which are associated with Benedictine ­houses, ­were written ­after the Norman invasion, some postdating it by well over a ­century, while many more show signs of use in the form of marginalia and corrections.46 But ­these books represent a puzzle. Not only did the writing and glossing of Old En­glish slow to a halt in the early thirteenth c­ entury; with the exception of a group of saints’ lives and brief translations of theological writings associated with Anselm, all produced by about 1150, ­little of this material is newly composed.47 Most new En­glish compositions produced in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries are written, not in versions of the standard Old En­glish used in the majority of ­these books, but in the updated mode of representing En­glish philologists call early M ­ iddle En­glish.48 Across this period, moreover, the quantity of newly composed En­glish writing of all kinds is dwarfed by writing in insular French, a good deal of which is also Benedictine in origin. If the

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number of surviving books containing En­glish is roughly similar to the number containing French, all the French texts are new, and many of them are justly celebrated.49 In light of the stark national myth of cultural defeat that surrounds the Norman Conquest and the energy this story draws from basic works of mid-­ twentieth-­century scholarship such as Charles Homer Haskins’s Re­nais­sance of the Twelfth ­Century of 1927 and R. W. Southern’s The Making of the ­Middle Ages of 1953, it is not surprising that scholars ­were long inclined to take the costly scribal activity to which ­these books bear witness as evidence not of practical demand for ­these materials but of the conservatism and cultural nostalgia of the Anglophone monks who produced them, sidelined by the new order. As with the “Sanctus Beda” poet himself, the writers of ­these books appeared ­either to be seeking to preserve a precious legacy for the ­f uture (roughly the view of R. W. Chambers), or, more plangently, to be clinging to “the débris” of the “old lit­er­a­ture” of a dead past by musing on it, with steadily diminishing comprehension, in a spirit of elegiac antiquarianism (roughly the view of Geoffrey Shepherd and, at one point, Michael Clanchy).50 Within the community of specialists able to discriminate in ­these ­matters, the assumption that t­ hese books represent a cultural rearguard action in turn influenced attitudes to language and orthography, which tend to be less regular than is characteristic of ­earlier Benedictine books in standard Old En­glish and ­were taken to be de­cadent. The materials contained in ­these books ­were understood in the same way. ­Either they ­were thought too derivative, mainly comprising copies of texts composed between the late ninth and early eleventh centuries, or the witness they bore to this ­earlier period was understood as merely confused, jumbling together textually corrupt copies of canonical works by Ælfric with anonymous sermons of doubtful provenance, and merely local forms and spellings with ­those derived from the West Saxon literary standard, in ways of which an ­earlier Benedictine generation would (it was supposed) have disapproved.51 Despite what was admitted to be their remarkable value as witnesses to the history of the En­glish language, literary scholars hence treated early ­Middle En­glish writing as an orphan of obscure parentage, and late Old En­glish writing as an anachronistic dead end. Not surprisingly, given every­ thing that was as­suredly new in the twelfth ­century, their analy­sis seemed a lower priority than the exploration of the brilliant Latinities of the era, the development of features of the modern book (­tables of contents, indexes, alphabetization, and other finding aids), the rise of written French in general and the secular romance in par­tic­u­lar, and other signs of a rapidly changing textual order.52



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§§§ A ghost of the antiquarian hypothesis still circulates in an inverted postcolonial form, with the copying of Old En­glish materials now seen as resistant, not nostalgic.53 During the last twenty years, however, our sense of the institutional role of twelfth-­century En­glish has been rapidly transformed, as scholars of early En­glish have undertaken detailed study of the codicology and contents of numbers of books containing written En­glish and begun to contextualize them within a nuanced account of the institutional situations within which they ­were produced.54 From the late eleventh ­century on, the ­g reat Benedictine ­houses and their satellites founded or refounded in the tenth ­century indeed came ­under pressure, as a result both of regime change and of the new religious o­ rders and h ­ ouses with which they had to compete ideologically and financially. The need to preserve lay patronage networks is even a theme of one of the original Old En­glish poems of the period, “Instructions for Christians,” included in a volume of Ælfric’s homilies from the ­later twelfth ­century apparently associated with the Benedictines of Rochester, Cambridge, University Library MS Ii.1.33.55 The advice it offers the wealthy laity ranges freely over “feower ­thing” that save the soul (effort, prayer, instruction, fasting) and includes material on the laity’s duty to engage in mutual instruction of which Robert of Gretham would have firmly approved.56 But as a recent study notes, one of the poem’s main preoccupations is with fund-­raising, including an opening passage on tithing (“Syle ece Gode æhta thinra / thone teothan dæl”; give to eternal God the tenth part of your possessions); incorporating an explicit statement that monks are more worthy recipients than priests, since none may own private property (“Ne mot ænig heora awiht onsundran / habban ænlepig”); and closing with praise of the Bible’s wealthy laymen.57 As was also true elsewhere in Eu­rope, however, the En­glish Benedictines had deep institutional and financial resources to draw on, and an impressive capacity for self-­reinvention. Despite polemical attacks from the new orders—­ which tend to characterize the Benedictines rather as Æthelwold characterizes the expelled Winchester clerics, as perverters of the primitive monastic ideal—­ they retained much of their former status. This was not only ­because of their antiquity and the wealth, institutional solidity, and symbolic standing that came with it, but also ­because of their close engagement with the laity. Across Eu­rope, monks ­were already involved in pastoral care in the time of Benedict of Aniane (d. 821), while “Sanctus Beda” is correct to imply that pastoral concerns profoundly ­shaped the textual culture of tenth-­ and eleventh-­century

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En­glish Benedictinism, in ways that are explored in detail in the following two chapters. By the twelfth ­century, moreover, ­England’s monastic cathedrals had grown in number; Benedictine ­houses had possession of good parts of the network of parishes that by now covered ­England; and many of ­these ­houses had established lay confraternities, following the practice of other religious groups, especially regular and secular canons, and thus implicitly rejecting the Cistercian ideology of total separation from the world. Disputes over the canonical propriety of monks suspending their practice of the opus Dei by leaving their communities to visit the sick, travel for the purposes of preaching, and take on other parochial duties w ­ ere common. But well into the thirteenth c­ entury, and l­ater, monastic engagement in pastoral care continued unabated.58 The unusually close association that existed between En­glish Benedictinism and pastoral care was a by-­product of the distinctive structure of the early En­glish Church, which between the seventh and eleventh centuries appears to have been or­ga­nized around religious communities ­under the nominal supervision of one of ­England’s surprisingly small and widely dispersed cadre of bishops.59 Although the communities ­were described as monasteries (Old En­glish mynster) and their inhabitants as monks (mynstermenn, munecum), they differed greatly from monasteries as they came to be understood in the wake of the succession of monastic movements from the ninth ­century on, whose incremental effect was to make monasticism in the Latin Christian West synonymous with observances based in one way or another on the Benedictine Rule. Initially founded by local rulers and nobles, ­later serving as focal points for new urban communities, t­ hese “minsters” formed a fairly well-­distributed network across ­England, acting as centers of pastoral care, in the absence of the parishes that covered much of western Eu­rope. Although their history and character varied between regions and changed markedly across the centuries, by the tenth ­century only a minority likely ­housed monks or nuns (nunna, mynechena) living in community with the priests who ministered to them (preostas, mæssepreostas) and, except in the case of the minority who took priestly ­orders, still canonically members of the laity. Most minsters seem to have been hereditary communities of priests, perhaps living ­under a common rule as canons, but owning their own property and normally married. A system of local parishes began to develop only during the tenth and eleventh centuries, for the most part forming around a new generation of small churches, once again mainly built by local aristocrats and staffed by married priests, and never fully displaced the minster system. While some have since been recategorized as cathedrals, and while they no may longer retain their colleges, minster churches like ­those at



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Beverley in Yorkshire, the size of cathedrals but with the status of parish churches, still form part of the En­glish ecclesiastical landscape to this day.60 In refounding Winchester and ­later Worcester and Canterbury as monastic cathedrals, ensuring that the En­glish episcopate of the late tenth and early eleventh centuries would for a period consist primarily of monks, Æthelwold and his peers repudiated certain parts of this system, especially ­those having to do with clerical marriage and private property, both of which Benedictine rhe­toric treats with a mixture of condescension and hostility. But despite the strictures on monastic engagement with the world integral to the rhe­toric of the Carolingian and post-­Carolingian sources from which they drew much of their inspiration, they endorsed the traditional pastoral role of the minster, affirming its consistency with Benedictine ideals.61 During a sustained period of national crisis a generation ­later, the im­mense literary ­labors of Ælfric and his power­f ul con­temporary, Wulfstan I, archbishop of York (d. 1023), took ­matters a stage further, furnishing priests and monks with weighty yet flexible bodies of vernacular pastoral materials, for use in preaching to mixed congregations or ­else in the private religious instruction of devout individuals, clerical or lay. The copying and adaptation of vernacular homilies and other pastoralia undertaken by monastic scriptoria during the eleventh ­century, when monastic acquisition of new parishes through purchase or bequest was at its most vigorous, shows that Benedictine commitment to pastoral care remained energetic.62 The continuation of this program during the twelfth and into the thirteenth ­century—in the face of competition from other ­orders, growing control of the parish system by a newly enlarged episcopate, and a newly energized secular clergy—is one of a number of signs that this commitment endured at least down to the period when the Tremulous Hand began his work, as part of the international movement to reconceive pastoral care associated with the Fourth Lateran Council.63

4. Homiliaries and Other Genres Of the more than two hundred books itemized in a recent analy­sis of codices containing En­glish made or modified (and thus evidently in use) between around 1060 and 1220, more than forty contain vernacular homilies, the primary tool of pastoral instruction throughout the Old En­glish period. Some of ­these are large temporale collections, structured around the Gospel readings for the Sundays and the major feasts of the year, and suitable for preaching in large centers, where sermons to lay or mixed congregations ­were at least a weekly liturgical

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event. Many of ­these books also include homilies from the sanctorale, for preaching on saints’ days. Most contain homilies by Ælfric, gathered into single-­author volumes, or mixed with materials by ­others.64 Sometimes this mixing suggests a specific pastoral context. The likelihood that the book containing “Instructions for Christians,” Cambridge Ii.1.33, was produced with the instruction of the privileged laity directly in mind, perhaps in the setting of a confraternity, is supported not only by the poem itself but by the book’s other contents. ­These include a note on how to recite the Seven Penitential Psalms, that crucial intercessory recourse for contrite lay sinners; a copy of the partial Old En­glish translation of Alcuin’s De virtutibus et viciis (on the virtues and vices), a lay manual (liber manualis) written for the Carolingian magnate Count Wido, with its careful emphases on true belief, devout reading, works of charity, and mercy to ­others; and Ælfric’s homilies on Maccabees, the second of which has his fullest account of the roles of laboratores, oratores, and bellatores, urging this last group to take responsibility for national defense and leave monks to their prayers. Opening with a version of Ælfric’s translation of Genesis 1–24, preceded by the famous preface that describes the difficulties that confront the untrained reader of the Bible, the book may have served as a one-­ volume library, including all the teaching and preaching materials needed to sustain a par­tic­u­lar program of lay instruction and worship.65 Other textual mixtures suggest the per­sis­tence of local homiletic traditions and offer evidence of the complex textual histories that lie ­behind a given book. One sizeable ­later twelfth-­century manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 343, in which homilies by Ælfric alternate with o­ thers in Latin and En­ glish, may have been copied in Herefordshire (possibly in Hereford itself) from a succession of exemplars, none of them closely related to one another. The book is an attempt to produce a mixed series of homilies and instructional materials, suitable to an ecclesiastical center that kept a vigorous preaching schedule, while perhaps also providing a resource for copyists. The character of ­these exemplars, so far as they can be reconstructed via close textual analy­sis—­some appear to have been booklets of a single quire, each containing only a few items—­suggests they may have been used in preaching at the parochial level by priests or monastic preachers, journeying from one parish to another. Although the makeup of Bodley 343, with its ninety-­seven homiletic items in En­glish, implies it was produced in a community aware of the need to conserve and select between ­limited textual resources, it also appears to represent the tip both of a local textual iceberg and of a significant pastoral program.66 Yet other books are smaller and at first sight more miscellaneous, suggesting a range of dif­fer­ent uses, including private or community reading or study.



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One example of such a book is London, British Library MS Cotton Vespasian D. xiv, which organizes into a coherent reading program a group of works by Ælfric and Wulfstan of York alongside a cluster of recent texts, including parts of Honorius’s theological summa, the Elucidarium, and a homily on the Virgin by Ralph d’Escures (d. 1122), Anselm’s successor as archbishop of Canterbury. Although certain of the texts included ­here, including expositions of the creed and the Ten Commandments, suggest that the book was partly intended as a guide to the instruction of laypeople, Vespasian D.xiv, a slightly ­earlier book than ­either Cambridge Ii.1.33 or Bodley 343, could have been made for the use of adult conversi within the monastic community at St. Augustine’s Canterbury, as well as for interactions between the monastery and the local clerisy and laity. ­Later, Vespasian D.xiv seems to have passed into the hands of a ­house of Benedictine nuns at St. Sepulchre, Canterbury, which Anselm founded. Near the end of the ­century, a nun (“ancilla”) of this community added to the book a Latin prayer addressed to Thomas Becket (d. 1170), who had been murdered by Henry II’s knights in the ­great Benedictine cathedral at Christ Church, to the lasting scandal of all Latin Christendom, less than a mile from where she lived and wrote.67 §§§ A few of t­ hese homiliaries belonged to secular canons. Homiliaries are among the impor­tant group of vernacular books that survive from Exeter Cathedral, where (in a reversal of the ­earlier trend) the Cornish-­born but Continentally educated Bishop Leofric (d. 1072) installed canons in place of an existing community of monks, bequeathing them a library tailored to their needs, much of it produced by the canons themselves.68 This library included recent copies of the Old En­glish Martyrology, an early ninth-­century guide to the lives of the saints, the first vernacular work of its kind known to survive from anywhere in Eu­rope; Alfred’s late ninth-­century translation of Gregory’s Regula Pastoralis, the Hierdeboc, evidently already understood as the symbolic foundation of Old En­glish prose; the tenth-­century Old En­glish Rule of Chrodegang, with the Latin and En­glish interleaved in the manuscript; and a set of homilies and l­egal writings by Wulfstan, Ælfric, and ­others. The eighth-­century rule of Chrodegang of Metz (d. 766) was followed by the Exeter canons. The library also included the famous Exeter Book of Old En­glish poetry, originally copied in the late tenth ­century.69 One late twelfth-­century early ­Middle En­glish homiliary in verse of startling orthographic as well as intellectual originality, the Orrmulum, was written

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in a ­house of regular canons, Bourne Abbey.70 The pos­si­ble association of a second such homiliary with the community of secular canons at St.  Paul’s, London Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.14.52, is discussed in Chapter Nineteen, below. But most of t­ hese homiliaries are monastic. Between 1060 and about 1200 some twenty books containing substantial numbers of homilies that come down to us ­were made, most of them in monastic ­houses or with monastic involvement.71 A number of ­others ­were modified. This is by far the largest collection of vernacular sermons—­indeed, the only large collection of such sermons—to survive from twelfth-­century Eu­rope.72 Around sixty of the itemized books also contain religious writings of other kinds. We cannot be sure of the origins of a few of ­these books. But most ­were again part of the corpora of books from the libraries at Worcester, Canterbury, or Winchester, or derive from other major Benedictine ­houses. ­There are old classics, such as the Old En­glish Gregory’s Dialogues, Bishop Wærferth of Worcester’s ninth-­century translation of Gregory the ­Great’s Dialogues, widely consulted in several copies throughout the ­century.73 From Canterbury’s two monasteries, the cathedral priory of Christ Church and St. Augustine’s, come a number of Bible translations and glosses, including two copies of The Old En­glish Gospels, two glossed psalters, and a long series of annotations in En­glish and Latin written into the Old English Illustrated Hexateuch many of them taken from Peter Comestor’s Historia Scholastica.74 ­There is the Textus Roffensis, likely compiled for Ernulf, bishop of Rochester from 1115 to 1124, our sole source for a number of early En­glish law codes, including that of Æthelberht of Kent, produced in the immediate aftermath of the king’s conversion in 597.75 ­There is Æthelwold’s King Edgar’s Establishment of Monasteries itself, whose sole surviving copy dates from around 1150.76 Like the copy of Æthelwold’s The Old En­glish Benedictine Rule in London, British Library MS Cotton Faustina A.x, not to mention the herbiaries, ecclesiastical institutes, manumissions, writs, charters, land grants, and law codes, besides many copies of Ælfric’s Grammar, some of ­these works testify to continued use of En­glish within male and female religious ­houses.77 The final entry in The Peterborough Chronicle, a continuation of the Anglo-­Saxon Chronicle, perhaps inaugurated in the vicinity of Alfred’s court in the late ninth ­century, was added to Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 636, by a monk of Peterborough Abbey in 1154.78 Yet ­whether designed for intramural or extramural use, this dynamic and unpredictable collection of writings witnesses an impulse less ­toward the conservation of ­earlier texts than ­toward their purposeful adaptation, in a manner



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that bespeaks neither elegiac detachment nor (in any straightforward sense) cultural re­sis­tance but active engagement with religious teaching on the part of their makers, annotators, and users. In summoning their colleagues in En­glish to renew the long-­standing monastic commitment to lay pastoral care, the “Sanctus Beda” poet and his Tremulous copyist, ­whether they ­were working fifty years apart or a hundred, ­were no mere voices crying in the wilderness. Through all the changes that monasticism and the institutional Church more broadly underwent across the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, their views continued to be representatives of the mainstream En­glish Benedictine position of their day.

Chapter 12

The Benedictine Vernacular Canon I Tenth ­Century

1. I­ magined Benedictine Communities We return to the twelfth and early thirteenth ­century in Part IV of this volume, which considers the significance of En­glish texts and books produced between the eleventh and early thirteenth centuries for the longer history of insular literary history and vernacular religious teaching, this time with a focus on the small but innovative group of works and books written in early ­Middle En­glish. First, however, it is necessary to move backward in time, initially to the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, to consider the impor­tant and substantial corpus of En­glish texts that emerged from the Benedictine movement whose cultural power and pastoral idealism “Sanctus Beda” seeks to revive. The work of abbots, bishops, and archbishops, this corpus is the largest body of officially sanctioned vernacular theology produced in Britain before the Reformation. The next two chapters consider the roles played in shaping this corpus by three celebrated monastic intellectuals, two of whom figure in “Sanctus Beda,” Æthelwold of Winchester, Ælfric of Eynsham, and Wulfstan of York, with more ­limited reference to several colleagues, especially Dunstan of Glastonbury and Byrhtferth of Ramsay. In so ­doing, they trace the development of a self-­ consciously Benedictine tradition of vernacular prose writing, in an array of genres, with as much confidence as the patchy evidence presently allows. Chapters Fourteen and Fifteen then reflect on what might be learned by placing the activities of ­these writers in their sociolinguistic and literary contexts. ­These reflections take the form of a pair of somewhat more speculative investigations, which first move sideways in time, to the vernacular books and texts produced by other tenth-­century En­glish religious institutions; then back again, to the court of Wessex in the late ninth and early tenth centuries; then still further



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back, to the Carolingian court and church of the late eighth and early ninth centuries. The first of ­these investigations involves the complex relationship between the En­glish writings produced by the Benedictines and existing vernacular traditions, in so far as ­these can be recovered, both the pastoral homiletic traditions on which the Benedictines built but sought to displace, and the Alfredian courtly tradition on which they also built but in this case sought to appropriate. The second concerns the international setting and antecedents of what it ­will become clear was the distinctive, and in certain re­spects notably self-­contradictory, early En­glish Benedictine understanding of the vernacular itself (see Appendix, ­Table 3).1 §§§ The ecclesiological and sociolinguistic structure “Sanctus Beda” takes as its ideal is diglossic in an unusually harmonious sense of this word.2 In the poem, Bible study in the shape of Bede’s exegetical writings and real or ­imagined translations, Bible translation in the shape of the Old En­glish Pentateuch, lay preaching as carried out by saintly bishops across the wide expanses of ­England, and Benedictine monasticism, all merge into a seamless w ­ hole. All forms of Christian textuality and identity are integrated into a single ­imagined national community, with the ­great monastery at its heart, and the shrine of the episcopal saint at the heart of the ­great monastery. Like the theologians and bishops it enumerates, the poem’s monastic writer and readers participate joyously in the contemplative life represented by the ea­ gle of Deuteronomy 32:11, reveling in what the Glossa ordinaria describes as God’s invitation to ascend to the true sun that is Christ (“Deus ad verum solem nos invitat”). Also like their pre­de­ces­sors, however, indeed like Christ himself, they nonetheless “watch with eyes of mercy” as the laity “swim through the sea of this world,” seeking to “draw them, upon wings of love, ­towards the shore of eternal freedom” (“in mari huius mundi natantes oculis misericordiae videt, et pennis amoris pertrahis ad littus aeternae securitatis”).3 The “deorwurthe” journeys into God’s “derne digelnesse” made by ­these learned monks in the quiet of their cloisters, diligently untying exegetical “cnoten” with the help of Bede’s scriptural commentaries (“Questiuns”), are thus continuous with the exposition of God’s law around which their studies move, on behalf of the needy laity and in the vernacular.4 Indeed, as the analogy the poem proposes between the lay “folc” and the ­little ea­glets of Deuteronomy suggests, in this monastic pastoral system, laypeople also practice a version of this mixture of action and contemplation. In

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Ralph d’Escures’s homily on Luke 10:38–42, translated in Vespasian D.xiv, the Virgin is figured by the “cæstele” at Bethany where Christ visits Martha and Mary as containing in herself the perfection of the active life of Martha (“Marthen weorc”), centered on per­for­mance of the deeds of mercy Christ describes in the parable of the sheep and the goats (Matt. 25:31–46). But since the w ­ hole of “Godes mihten (powers) and his wisedom” was “beclysede” (enclosed) in Mary at the Annunciation, she additionally contains the perfection of the contemplative life of Martha’s ­sister, Mary (“Marien sceawunge”). Following the example of the Virgin, whose noble lineage the homily details, the wealthy laypeople whose instruction was evidently one of this book’s functions should thus also aspire to the “seleste dæl” (the best part) that belongs to Mary (Luke 10:42), the worship of God in eternity, an activity that begins in this life. Like the ­little ea­glets, they are urged to fly to God in contemplation on wings of their own.5 If we consider “Sanctus Beda” as a reconstruction of the early En­glish Church and its use of the vernacular, the poem testifies to Benedictine fantasy better than to historical fact. While the early En­glish Church seems indeed to have been primarily monastic in character, at least in a historically specific meaning of that term, it was by no means straightforwardly Benedictine, as the “Sanctus Beda” poet, following the historical argument apparently laid out in Æthelwold’s King Edgar’s Establishment of Monasteries in the mid-­tenth ­century, seems to have assumed.6 The Benedictine Rule was known in early ­England and was well known to Bede himself. The earliest copy of the work from anywhere in Eu­rope, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Hatton 48, was written in ­England around 700, during Bede’s lifetime.7 Yet we have no evidence that religious h ­ ouses before the tenth ­century used the Benedictine Rule as an exclusive guide to the monastic round.8 When Æthelwold and his colleagues drew up the Regularis concordia, their sources ­were not En­glish but Continental and Carolingian.9 Bede was deeply concerned with pastoral care and is said to have translated versions of the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed, as well as portions of John’s Gospel. The En­glish poem he uttered on his deathbed, “Bede’s Death Song,” was still in wide circulation in twelfth-­century ­England.10 But t­ here w ­ ere impor­tant discontinuities between the language politics of the eighth c­ entury and t­ hose that came to the fore l­ater. As we can deduce, for example, from Bede’s choice of Latin for his Homiliarum evangelii, neither he nor Alcuin anticipated the extended uses of the vernacular that came to characterize En­glish textuality during the period of the Scandinavian incursions, one of whose ­earlier surviving products is an Old En­glish version of the Historia ecclesiastica itself.11



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But if we consider “Sanctus Beda” as a depiction of a distinctive En­glish Benedictine model of vernacular religious teaching, rooted in the tenth ­century yet still active at the time the poem was written, its account of the pedagogical and pastoral assumptions that underlay this model, even if idealizing, can lay claim to respectful attention. For Æthelwold of Winchester, who over the past several de­cades has emerged as the most significant of the three episcopal architects of early En­glish Benedictine monasticism, and still more clearly for his successors, it appears that the En­glish Church indeed needed to be refashioned along the lines “Sanctus Beda” seems to envisage, led by educated monks following a single, self-­consciously rigorous rule, while si­mul­ta­neously engaging in the edification of Christian society as a ­whole.12 Partly by design, the tenth-­century Benedictines ­were always a privileged minority movement within the En­glish Church, confined to a relatively small number of religious h ­ ouses, at first mainly in Wessex and south Mercia, although ­later spreading east and north to encompass most of the major religious centers across the country listed by “Sanctus Beda,” as well as some ­others, including a number of long-­lived female ­houses. According to one recent estimate, no more than thirty male ­houses and eight female ­houses had been refounded by 975, in a polity that contained several hundred religious communities in all.13 Even in the heyday of the movement, no more than one-­tenth of ­these communities may have exclusively followed the Benedictine Rule, in the manner laid out in the Regularis concordia.14 But the movement’s found­ers ­were influential aristocrats, larger ­houses w ­ ere wealthy and in some cases doubled as episcopal seats, and in its early years in par­tic­u­lar the movement was closely identified with the Crown. Moreover, partly ­because of its roots in the Continental Cluniac movement, which viewed uniformity of practice across religious ­houses as a core Benedictine value and developed in parts of Eu­rope that had been suffused with a rhe­ toric of uniformity since the reign of Charlemagne (d. 814), early En­glish Benedictinism was much concerned with consistency at an ideological level, anxious both to proj­ect a monastic golden age onto the past and to re­create one imaginatively in the pre­sent.15 Æthelwold’s aggressive monasticization of Winchester Cathedral not only did return it to the state that his own King Edgar’s Establishment of Monasteries claims Gregory the G ­ reat had intended for it when he sent Augustine of Canterbury on his mission. As the sumptuous artistic, architectural, and liturgical programs that followed Æthelwold’s audacious action ­were also meant to suggest, it began a pro­cess of hierarchization whose goal was to set Benedictine ­houses aesthetically and spiritually above other communities,

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besides giving them a new degree of authority over diocesan business and a power­f ul institutional grip on the episcopate itself.16 Edgar’s death in 978 was a serious setback, as ­were the renewed Scandinavian attacks from the 980s onward, which some interpreted in eschatological terms.17 As the long reign of Æthelred drew to a close (978–1013, 1014–16), ­these led to the long-­term loss of the Crown by the ­house of Wessex, first to Sweyn Forkbeard (1013–14), then to his son, Cnut (1016–35), power­f ul disruptions for noble families and churchmen, and a permanently altered ecclesiastical and po­liti­cal landscape. Although Sweyn and Cnut ­were Christians, who cultivated careful relationships with the En­glish Church (and in Cnut’s case, with Rome), many of their followers, including members of their ­house­holds, ­were not.18 Yet the crises that accompanied the new millennium may only have made certain of the monastic intellectuals of the generations following Æthelwold more determined than ever to view the nation as an extension of the monastery, not subject to the strictures of the Benedictine Rule but answering to the same ideals and called to respond with the same fierce submission to the divine law. Monastery, nation, and Church bound together, ­England was prospectively, if by no means actually, a single “holy society,” as one scholar has described the embattled religious ideal promoted by Wulfstan of York and some of his contemporaries in the early de­cades of the eleventh ­century. Determined to remain the spiritual arm of the monarchy for as long as pos­si­ble, Benedictines ­were this society’s religious governors.19 The installation of this daunting and complex self-­conception, still connected in impor­tant ways to Æthelwold’s Winchester, if also distant from anything Æthelwold himself seems to have envisaged, required the production of substantial quantities of new writing in Latin and En­glish. It accounts for much of what is idiosyncratic about the vernacular textual culture associated with the new monasticism.

2. Æthelwold: Glosses, Rules, Monastic Pedagogy (950–75) From a wider Eu­ro­pean perspective, the most singular feature of the body of monastic writing that dominates the En­glish textual rec­ord across the ­century from 950 to 1050 was simply its profuse use of the vernacular itself. This went well beyond the pastoral functions with which it is primarily associated in “Sanctus Beda,” assuming a degree of importance unparalleled e­ ither in other Germanic languages or in Celtic ones (so far as we can tell from the surviving



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rec­ord), impor­tant though both ­were, at vari­ous moments, in the development of Old En­glish textuality.20 The earliest uses to which the Benedictines put the vernacular ­were not in the extramural activities of preaching and teaching but in the intramural ones of schooling, study, and religious devotion. ­Here, they built on the work of their En­glish and Irish scholarly pre­de­ces­sors as far back as the seventh ­century, making use of several types of vernacular gloss, written as lists, as marginalia, or between the lines of a Latin text as aids to lexis, grammar, and sometimes syntax, in the case of continuous interlinear glosses (glossae continuae) amounting to full translations.21 Besides numerous anonymous glosses of texts that range from the patristic florilegium known as Liber scintillarum (book of sparks) by the eighth-­century monk Defensor, to works on ecclesiastical governance by Carolingian monks and bishops, 22 we seem to have the sets of glosses made by Æthelwold himself to two key monastic texts, perhaps during the early 950s, as one of a number of vernacular proj­ects in which he may have participated when studying with Dunstan at Glastonbury. One, which has been assigned to him on circumstantial grounds, is a glossa continua on the Psalter, written in a mid-­tenth-­century book, London, British Library, MS Royal 2.B.v. This was the most influential of the Psalter glosses to survive from early medieval ­England. The other, perhaps the joint work of Æthelwold and Dunstan, is a late layer of the thousands of glosses of Aldhelm’s prose work in praise of virginity, the De virginitate (ca. 700), in Brussels, Bibliothèque royale MS 1650. ­These may also have been produced in Glastonbury but ­were written into the book in the early eleventh ­century, at Abingdon (which Æthelwold refounded) or at Canterbury (where Dunstan became archbishop). Along with Aldhelm’s other works, the De virginitate became central to the higher levels of the educational program that Æthelwold developed for the refounded cathedral monastery at Winchester, both for its stylistic richness and for its praise of the virtue that clearly differentiated the monastic life from o­ thers.23 The intensive study of Aldhelm’s Latin writings that lie ­behind ­these glosses, which show En­glish in use as a means of wide-­ranging lexical and intellectual experimentation and enquiry, also played a major role in Æthelwold’s revival of Alhelm’s distinctive mode of what has been termed “hermeneutic” Latin, which for perhaps fifty years ­a fter the 960s was identified with Winchester in par­tic­u­lar and the En­glish Benedictine movement in general.24 Both the Regularis concordia and the other Latin work closely associated with Æthelwold, Edgar’s elaborately written and sumptuously illuminated foundation charter for the New Minster at Winchester, have passages in this mannerist Latin

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style, as do vari­ous Benedictine hagiographies, from Lantfred’s Translatio et miraculi S. Swithuni from the 970s to the vitae of the three ­great episcopal found­ ers of the movement, written in the years immediately ­after their deaths during the 980s and 990s.25 As Wulfstan Cantor notes in his vita of Æthelwold, reminiscing with the warmth of a favored alumnus on the success stories he has witnessed, rigorous training in Latin through the constructive use of the vernacular also built a string of high-­flying ecclesiastical c­ areers: Dulce namque erat ei adolescentes et juvenes semper docere, et Latinos libros Anglice eis solvere, et regulas grammaticae artis ac metricae rationis tradere, et jocundis alloquiis ad meliora hortari. Unde factum est ut perplures ex discipulis eius fierent sacerdotes atque abbates et honorabiles episcopi, quidam etiam archiepiscopi, in gente Anglorum. (It was always agreeable to him to teach young men and the more mature students, translating Latin texts into En­glish for them, passing on the rules of grammar and metric, and encouraging them to do better by cheerful words. Many of his pupils accordingly became priests, abbots, and notable bishops, some even archbishops, among the En­ glish ­people.)26 According to Wulfstan Cantor, whose own ­career at Winchester and possibly Canterbury was proof of his pudding, an intensive education in the liberal arts, centered on excellent Latin but assisted by a regime of vernacular glossing and translation at both introductory and intermediate levels, indeed laid the groundwork for the ascendency of the Benedictines in the En­glish Church. Although “Sanctus Beda” focuses on theological, not lexical, mysteries, the poem is thus correct to represent Benedictine education as involving untying of “cnoten,” one of the purposes of the ancillary genre of the gloss. Yet it is also correct to represent the monastic delight in the elucidation of mysteries as more than an end unto itself. For it has been argued that Æthelwold and (even more clearly) certain of his students used the study of glosses to develop not only their Latin scholarship but their fluency and consistency as writers and copyists of works in En­glish. The potential and often ­actual audiences of ­these works ­were not confined to male monastics but included nuns, canons, secular priests, and members of the laity, courtly and other­wise. Indeed, intensive use of the vernacular gloss may have been an impor­tant point of origin for the regularized “Winchester



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vocabulary” found in varying degrees in a number of Old En­glish texts, including ­those associated with Æthelwold, and much of Ælfric’s oeuvre, as well as for the West Saxon En­glish that developed into the literary standard used in a majority of Old En­glish books of all types copied between the late tenth and the mid-­t welfth centuries.27 Like the traditions of interlingual glossing on which they drew, which already stretched back over two hundred years, Benedictine Old En­glish glosses helped establish equivalence of meaning across languages with very dif­fer­ent histories and cultural functions. In ­doing so, they also stabilized vernacular lexis around certain favored equivalences, thus drawing the glossing language (En­ glish) and the glossed language (Latin) more closely together, if necessary through calque or neologism. Inscribed on the pages of texts in Latin and studied in classroom, cloister, or church, ­these glosses also did much to stabilize En­glish orthography and dialect, encouraging the En­glish vernacular to imitate the artificial stability of Latin. Although a specialized practice confined to studia, the tradition of vernacular glossing associated with Winchester thus provided linguistic and theological underpinning for Benedictine vernacular textuality as a ­whole. §§§ While dates and even attributions can be impossible to ascertain with certainty, Æthelwold’s own ­career as a vernacular writer admittedly seems to have confined itself closely to the pedagogical, spiritual, and public needs of the new Benedictinism. His major known work in En­glish is The Old En­glish Benedictine Rule, a product of the period ­either of his glosses in the 950s or slightly ­later. This work is a close translation of the Benedictine Rule, with certain clarifications from the Carolingian scholar Smaragdus, produced not as an interlinear glossa continua but rather in the interleaved format in which it mainly circulates, each chapter of the translation following the corresponding chapter of the Latin.28 It has been argued that Æthelwold intended this translation for nuns, since most of the nine surviving copies—­almost all of which use some feminine forms of address—­are adaptations for monks of ­earlier copies addressed to a conventual readership.29 From the start, convents evidently played a significant role in its transmission. However, recent analy­sis of the several recensions of the work implied by the copies suggests that the translation is more likely to have used the same masculine forms as does the Latin Regula itself.30 The apparent implication is that the work was produced for Æthelwold’s communities of monks, initially at Abingdon, which he expensively refounded

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as a Benedictine ­house during the 950s, and subsequently at Winchester, where he became bishop in 963. Except in the case of the latest copy, the early thirteenth-­century London, British Library MS Cotton Claudius D.iii, in which the text has been systematically addressed to a community of nuns, feminine forms in the manuscripts appear to be relicts of three or more e­ arlier and “interrelated attempts made to adapt and revise a male version for use in female communities.”31 The Old En­glish Benedictine Rule is thus likely to be one of the works that Wulfstan Cantor had in mind in describing the cheerful En­glishing of “Latinos libros” that Æthelwold was wont to undertake for his monastic pupils. The early spread of several slightly dif­fer­ent versions of Æthelwold’s translation suggests something both of the urgency of reformist thought in the late tenth c­ entury and of its mobility. Indeed, ­there is evidence that Æthelwold himself participated in disseminating the translation beyond its first, male monastic readership. A memorial collected in the twelfth-­century Liber Eliensis rec­ords a transaction from around 970, in which Æthelwold transferred to the refounded ­house at Ely an estate in Suffolk that Edgar and his wife, Ælfthryth, had ­earlier granted him, on the condition that he translate “the Rule of St Benedict from Latin into the En­glish language” (“ut ille regulam sancti Benedicti in Anglicum idioma de Latino transferret”).32 This rec­ord of what was evidently a royal commission, prob­ably not of the translation in its original form but of a ­later copy or adaptation, clearly confirms Æthelwold’s authorship of the translation. It also does much to illuminate a second, fuller description of the translation found in King Edgar’s Establishment of Monasteries, whose unique copy is preceded by The Old En­glish Benedictine Rule in a book of the first half of the twelfth c­ entury, Cotton Faustina A.x.33 This short text, it has been suggested, can best be explained as a prologue to a lost pre­sen­ta­tion copy of the rule, one of the several we know was adapted for nuns. Such a copy could well have been commissioned from Æthelwold by Edgar in connection with his marriage to Ælfthryth around 964. King Edgar’s Establishment of Monasteries contains the first datable use of myncenu (nun) in En­glish and a hortatory address to abbesses, exhorting them not to alienate convent properties by gifting them to lay relatives. Ælfthryth played a prominent role in the Benedictine movement, promoting the refounding of female ­houses at Nunnaminster in Winchester and elsewhere. A partial copy of the Regularis concordia in En­glish, similarly, adapted for nuns, survives from a ­little ­later. If this argument is right, the copy of The Old En­glish Benedictine Rule for which King Edgar’s Establishment of Monasteries was written was therefore



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the same copy referred to in Liber Eliensis and its sources, valued somewhat extravagantly at the price of a royal estate.34 A famous image that serves as a frontispiece to London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius A.iii, a prestige early eleventh-­century book whose contents include glossed copies of both the Regularis concordia and the Benedictine Rule, depicts Edgar flanked by Dunstan and Æthelwold, holding a scroll that represents the rule and its unifying of ­England’s monasteries and the polity as a ­whole.35 To somewhat similar symbolic effect, King Edgar’s Establishment of Monasteries repeats a version of the claim made in Liber Eliensis, that Edgar commanded the rule to be translated, stating that he did so only ­after he had made a preliminary enquiry into its teachings, realizing that he truly “wished also to know from the Rule the wise disposition which is prudently appointed concerning the ordering of unfamiliar ­matters” (“He wolde eacswylce thurh thone regul oncnawen tha wislican gefadunge the snotorlice ge-­set is be incuthra thinga endebyrdnesse”).36 Already wise in the many earthly “thinga” that are quite properly his primary concern as a ruler, Edgar now aspires to raise his royal eyes, for reasons apparently both po­liti­cal and personal, to the spiritual ­matters disposed in the rule. Edgar is thus named not only as the commissioner of the translation but as its pioneering first lay reader. Remarkably, however, the text then goes further, stating that the translation has also been made for the unlearned laity in general (“ungelæredum woroldmonnum”), ­those for whom the use of En­glish is needful (“niedbehefe”) and who, “for fear of hell-­torment and love of Christ, abandon this wretched life and turn to their Lord and choose the holy ser­vice of this rule” (“for helle wites ogan ond for Cristes lufan this earmfulle lif forlætath, ond to hyra Drihtne gecyrrath ond thone halgan theowdom thises regules geceosath”).37 ­W hether they undertake conversion to the monastic ideal directly, entering a monastery as conversi or striving to follow its precepts in the world (as members of what would come to be called a confraternity), or do so indirectly by joining Ælfthryth and Edgar as patrons of the new monastic movement, they must protect the rule by preserving the patrimony of Benedictine ­houses, both during Edgar’s reign and in the ­f uture.38 In this account, The Old En­glish Benedictine Rule is thus no longer wholly aimed ­either at monks, as an aid to study of the Latin original, or at the nuns for whom the text was evidently adapted within a few years of its first composition. Rather, it functions as an instrument both of evangelism and of a kind of public relations, converting laypeople into religious, ministering to them as novices a­ fter their conversion, guiding the lives of ­others who are converted inwardly

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but decide or are required to remain in the world, and acting to remind every­ one who reads the work of the privileged place of the Benedictine Order in the life of the En­glish polity. Far from being produced merely for intramural consumption, as a guide for ­those confined by lack of skill or opportunity to the lower slopes of Latinity, Æthelwold’s most impor­t ant En­g lish work takes its part on the public stage, seeing to the welfare of all by showing how the spiritual health of the nation depends on that of the Benedictine communities positioned at its heart.

Chapter 13

The Benedictine Vernacular Canon II Eleventh ­Century

1. Ælfric: Homilies and Pastoral Letters (990–1010) The composition of works in hermeneutic Latin continued into the early eleventh ­century: at Winchester, in the writings of Wulfstan Cantor; Canterbury, where the cleric who signs his name with the initial “B” dedicated his Vita S. Dunstani to Archbishop Ælfric (d. 1005); and Ramsay, where the brilliant Byrhtferth, a student of Abbo of Fleury, wrote a stream of works in this mode. ­These include not only his Vita S. Oswaldi and other vitae but the bilingual Enchiridion, in which passages in En­glish serve to elucidate a difficult Latin text, at the same time as the need to render technical Latin lexis into En­glish introduces neologisms and “hermeneutic” stylistic effects into the vernacular.1 However, as the po­liti­cal situation deteriorated through the long and difficult reign of Æthelred II (978–1013, 1014–16), and se­nior churchmen responded by interpreting an increasingly catastrophic pre­sent as a eschatological call to national moral rearmament, public texts written in En­glish came to the fore, a good number of them written with the support of devout members of the secular aristocracy and not always directly linked to the monastic life.2 Through figures such as Wulfstan Cantor, Winchester itself appears to have remained associated with the overwhelming aesthetic and devotional richness exemplified by the ­great Benedictional of St. Æthelwold (London, British Library Additional MS 49598), whose narrative cycle of illuminated images of the life of Christ make it one of the most impressive books to survive from early medieval ­England.3 By contrast, the vernacular and Latin writing of other members of the new generation—­particularly Ælfric of Eynsham (d. ca. 1010) and Wulfstan I of Worcester and York (d. 1023)—­sought ways to balance the rhetorical and lexical care and inventiveness for which their education had prepared them, with the urgent lucidity suited both to the times and to the

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intellectual and cultural wasteland that imaginatively surrounded the monastic community.4 Ælfric’s substantial output in his capacity as de facto vernacular spokesman for the doctrines of the En­glish Church ­under its new, primarily Benedictine leadership includes not only his many contributions to the homiletic tradition, but works commissioned by aristocratic laymen that can be understood as continuous with Æthelwold’s The Old En­glish Benedictine Rule in its guise as a royal commission. The many items in the Lives of Saints, a lengthy series of hagiographic homilies equally suited to preaching and to public or private reading, are among the works produced at the request of Ælfric’s aristocratic patrons, the learned Æthelweard and his son Æthelmær, who also commissioned the Old En­glish Heptateuch, several portions of which are by Ælfric.5 The Libellus de veteri testamenti et novo (also Letter to Sigeweard), which outlines the books of the Bible within the frame of the six ages of the world, was produced for the aristocratic layman Sigeweard of Eastheolon.6 Two other letters to aristocrats, Sigefurth and Wulfgeat of Ylmandum, are less commissions than fragments of pastoral conversations with influential lay neighbors. The second of ­these recalls Ælfric’s ­earlier loan of En­g lish books (“Engliscum gewritum the ic the alænde”) and opens by stating that “this work is not writen for only one person but is meant for all” (“Nis this gewrit be anum men awriten, ac is be eallum”).7 Ælfric and his con­temporary Wulfstan of York also wrote extensively and in some cases collaboratively for the secular clergy and, through them, for the laity. Besides the homilies for mixed monastic, clerical, and lay use that he worked and reworked across much of his lifetime, exegetical texts such as his reduction of Alcuin’s Latin dialogue on Genesis, the Interrogationes Sigewulfi, and calendrical texts such as the De Temporibus Anni, a guide to the liturgical year, Ælfric drafted and translated pastoral letters for Wulfstan as archbishop of York, as he did for Wulfsige III as bishop of Sherborne.8 Wulfstan, an impor­ tant po­liti­cal as well as ecclesiastical statesman for three de­cades, also wrote homilies in his own oratorical style and numerous works of ecclesiastical law and governance, as well as compiling and writing an open-­ended series of bilingual collections of catechetic, homiletic, penitential, and liturgical pieces for his own use and that of other churchmen. In his capacity as adviser to Æthelred II and Cnut, he also produced law codes and works of po­liti­cal theory, ­under their names, or t­ hose of other, e­ arlier monarchs.9 Ælfric and Wulfstan’s concern to address a national audience is especially suggestive of the urgent ambition with which at least certain monastics of the early eleventh ­century set out to reimagine the En­glish Church as a single



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community. To be sure, members of this community had dif­fer­ent duties and to some extent answered to dif­fer­ent imperatives. But all alike ­were called to right belief and good living u ­ nder the governance of the Benedictine monks and bishops it was imperative be held in due honor if the nation was to retain God’s ­favor.10 The scope of this ambition is already in evidence in Ælfric’s early and most widely circulated work, the Catholic Homilies, whose two series—­each consisting of forty homilies, meant to be preached in alternate years, preceded by prefaces in Latin and English—­were first written soon ­after 990. This was less than a de­cade ­after Æthelwold’s death in 984 and within perhaps five years of Ælfric’s departure from Winchester around 987 to Cerne Abbey in Dorset, at the request of its founding patron, Æthelmær, apparently to take charge of its school.11 Even in their earliest copies and versions, both series are dedicated to Sigeric, Benedictine archbishop of Canterbury (d. 994), clearly with his prior permission, and very possibly in response to an informal commission.12 In the Latin and En­glish prefaces to the First Series, the homilies offer themselves as expositions of the Gospel readings for most Sundays and major feast days, based on authoritative patristic, insular and Carolingian sources (“Augustinum Ypponiensem [of Hippo], Hieronimum, Bedam, Gregorium, Smaragdum, et aliquando Hægmonem [Haymo]”), which aim both to edify the hearers and to combat the ­great errors (“mycel gedwyld”) their author discerns in multitudes of En­glish books (“manegum Engliscum bocum”) in pre­sent circulation.13 Shunning “obscura . . . ​verba” and translating “sensum ex sensu” not “verbum ex verbo” to avoid implanting new “errores” as they root out old ones, the homilies are further said to be especially suited to all for whom “­simple En­glish can more easily enter the heart to the benefit of their souls, as readers or listeners, since they are do not know how to be taught in any other than their birth language” (“simplicem Anglicam quo facilius possit ad cor pervenire legentium vel audientium ad utilitatem animarum suarum, quia alia lingua nesciunt erudiri quam in qua nati sunt”).14 At one level, Ælfric is ­here representing the Catholic Homilies as a personal proj­ect, the work of a “munuc and mæssepreost,” carried out in fulfillment of his duties as a preacher but also especially prompted by God to address the serious theological errors of his age in expectation of the coming Judgment: “Then it came to my mind, I trust by God’s grace, that I should translate this book of Latin teaching into En­glish speech” (“Tha bearn me on mode, ic truwige thurh Godes gife, the ic thas boc of Ledenum ge-­reorde to Engliscre spræce awende”), he writes in the first person, adding that his work is most necessary “at this time that is the end of the world and ­there are many wickednesses that must be visited on humankind before the end comes” (“on thisum timan the is

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ge-­endung thyssere worulde and beoth fela frecednyssa on mancynne ær than the se ende becume”).15 Our unusually good access to the early manuscript tradition of the work show that the earliest copy of the first of three authorial recensions in which the First Series comes down to us was already its second version, carefully worked up from the course of vernacular sermons Ælfric de­ cided to preach at Cerne ­after arriving from the learned enclave of Winchester, perhaps a­ fter encountering (or re-­encountering) traditions of vernacular theology he could not endorse.16 Yet by submitting his work to Sigeric for his approval, sending him a copy of the First Series while the Second Series was still in the pro­cess of being corrected, Ælfric was also producing the conditions in which the work would circulate with the approval of the spiritual leader of the En­glish Church as, effectively, an archiepiscopally authorized homiliary. Ælfric emphasizes his relation with the ­great school at Winchester, naming himself “Ælfricus, alumnus Adelwoldi” in the opening words of the Latin preface to the First Series. In practice, however, Canterbury soon became a more impor­tant distribution center for the work, as Winchester lost the central role it had played ­under Æthelwold. In the En­glish preface to the First Series, Ælfric also claims a secular source of authority, naming “Ælfeage biscope,” Æthelwold’s successor (“æftergengan”) at Winchester, but also his lay patron Æthelmær as sponsors of his move to Cerne.17 Grounded in divine truth and presented in “pure and open words from the language of this ­people” (“puris et apertis verbis linguae huius gentis”), as the preface to the Second Series puts it, the Catholic Homilies aspires to edify the entire Christian community, and in the pro­cess to inaugurate a work of moral and doctrinal purification throughout the land.18 In introducing the First Series while anticipating its eventual supplementation by the Second Series, Ælfric notes that even the forty homilies he is initially presenting should “suffice for the annual needs of the faithful so long as they are recited in church by the ministers of God in full” (“hoc sufficere posse per annum fidelibus, si integre eis a ministris Dei recitentur in ecclesia”), adding in En­glish that this must take place using copies from which scribal errors (the word once again is “gedwylde”) have been removed.19 The mix of audiences addressed in the homilies suggests he expected Benedictines to hear and read them but also to preach them, using them for their own edification as well as that of o­ thers, both at monastic cathedrals such as Winchester and in the other reformed ­houses with responsibility for pastoral care, ­whether of the residents of local towns or of members of the ­house­holds of wealthy lay benefactors.20 However, it is clear from the agenda Ælfric sets out in ­these prefaces and their choice of the general terms “ministris Dei” for ­those who preach the



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homilies and “gentis” for ­those who hear them that he also anticipated his work traveling outside the zone of Benedictine influence, both to clerical communities run on versions of the minster model and to individual priests in the nascent network of local churches that would become the parish system.21 Not only did ­these groups provide pastoral care to most of the populace; from Ælfric’s point of view they ­were no doubt more likely than his Benedictine colleagues to be fervent users of the “Engliscum bocum” in which the doctrinal errors against which he wrote w ­ ere expounded as truth. §§§ To imagine the non-­Benedictine clergy engaging responsibly in pastoral care may not have come easily to educated monks such as Ælfric and Archbishop Sigeric. Criticism of minster canons and secular clerics is a regular feature of Benedictine texts, from Æthelwold’s foundation charter for the New Minster during the 960s, which sets the expulsion of the supposedly corrupt canons of Winchester within a cosmic framework of creation, fall, and redemption; down to Byrthferth’s Enchiridion nearly fifty years ­later, which satirically depicts secular priests as hardly worth the instruction offered to them, vital though it is to their duties. Like Æthelwold, Byrhtferth uses negative depictions of what he calls “imperiti (unskilled) clerici,” lazily immersed in society and incapable of appreciating the refinements and complexities of Latin, to burnish his images of the monks who have turned their backs on the world to follow perfection.22 Worse, the account of pastoral care tenth-­century ­England inherited from Gregory, itself developed out of ­earlier patristic accounts of the duties of bishops and abbots, was demanding. According to the Hierdeboc, King Alfred’s late ninth-­century translation of Gregory’s Regula pastoralis, which Ælfric knew well, this ars artium (“cræft ealra cræfta”) was indeed so morally and intellectually difficult that only the well-­educated should have the temerity to undertake it: Forthonthe nan cræft nis to læranne thæm the hine ær geornlice ne leornode, forhwon beoth æfre suæ thriste tha ungelæredan thæt hi underfon tha heorde thæs lariowdomes, thonne se cræft thæs lareowdomes bith cræft ealra cræfta. (­Because no art ­ought to be taught except by someone who has first willingly learned it, the unlearned are exceptionally rash when they take on the authority of a pastoral teacher, ­because this art of teaching is the art of all arts.)23

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Since Benedictine ideology could not allow ­England’s pastors to be capable of this perilous and absorbing practice as Alfred and Gregory go on to define it, the proj­ect of national restoration and edification Ælfric and his sponsors seem to have hoped the Catholic Homilies would help to bring about would on this account of the m ­ atter appear to be doomed from the outset. The difficulty of the situation as Benedictine intellectuals understood it is well laid out in Ælfric’s First Old En­glish Letter for Wulfstan, written for Wulfstan to circulate ­under his own name in his capacity as archbishop of York, a de­cade ­after the Catholic Homilies, which summarizes the duties expected of all priests within the archdiocese and the resources they need to carry them out. In order to conduct ser­vices, confess penitents, calculate the date of Easter and other feasts, and oversee the lives of their flock, a priest requires access to a good number of books: “a missal and a book of epistles, and a hymn-­book and a reading-­book and a psalter and a manual and a penitential and a computus” (“Mæssepreost sceal habban mæsseboc and pistelboc and sangboc and rædingboc and saltere and handboc and penitentialem and gerim”), an ambitious list.24 Byrthferth’s Enchiridion, whose subject is computus (the science of the yearly cycles that underlie the liturgy) and which, despite its anticlerical rhe­toric, assumes a classroom in which monks and priests are studying together, suggests that training in ­these complicated tools was offered in religious h ­ ouses. But Ælfric and Wulfstan go on to note that a priest must also “preach to men the true faith and recite homilies to them” (“mannum bodian thone sothan geleafan and hym larspel secgan”) without becoming a “leader of error” (“ealdor . . . ​gedwyldes”), a task that in princi­ple demands sustained theological study. “Long ­shall he learn who ­shall teach” (“lange sceal leornian se the læran sceal”), they sententiously declare, echoing Gregory’s preface.25 The state of learning among the archdiocesan clergy is nonetheless such that Wulfstan is obliged to issue his letter in both Latin and the vernacular, to ensure it is understood: “It befits us bishops that we reveal to you priests the written instruction which our canon teaches us, and also Christ’s own book, in the En­glish language; for not all of you can understand the Latin” (“Us bisceopum ge-­ dafenath thæt we tha boclican lare the ure canon us tæcth and eac seo Cristes boc, eow preostum ge-­openigan on Engliscum gereorde, forthon the ge ealle ne cunnon thæt Leden understandan”) the letter begins.26 Given that theological study must also be in the vernacular for many, and given Ælfric’s conviction that many existing En­glish books are full of “gedwylde,” the prospect of furnishing the laity with adequate pastoral care seems dim indeed. The solution the Catholic Homilies offers to this supposed predicament is twofold. On the one hand, the work constitutes exactly the vernacular resource



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for clerical study of the faith that is said to be needed, its scrupulous dependence on only the most authoritative patristic and Carolingian sources removing any danger that a priest ­will cause his ­little ones to stumble by teaching “gedwylde,” if he peruse it carefully (Mark 9:42). Offering an education in exegesis, sacred history, dogma, ethics, and catechesis that is remarkably ­free of the anticlerical snobbery that pervades Byrthferth’s Enchiridion, the work is suited to provide a comprehensive training in Christian theology to individuals or communities that can acquire a copy, and do so at a range of levels of difficulty and detail. Indeed the Catholic Homilies offers the most extensive surviving account of the Christian faith in any insular vernacular before the late ­fourteenth ­century. On the other hand, the work partly obviates the need for such perusal, since the homilies it contains are designed to be delivered in ­whole, exactly as written: “integre . . . ​recitentur in ecclesia” as the prologue to the First Series puts it (compare “secgan larspel” [recite homilies], in the First Old En­glish Letter for Wulf­ stan). Indeed, they are carefully tailored to just this mode of per­for­mance, composed in a rhythmic style that attends equally to ease of delivery and clarity of exegesis.27 In this passage from the opening of the g­ reat Nativity homily in the Second Series, the homily’s key word (acenned, born), forms of which appear nine times, is marked in bold, and two words used in a specialist sense to refer to Christ’s h ­ uman and divine natures are italicized: Mine gebrothru tha leofostan on thisum dæge we wurthiath ures Hælendes acennednysse æfter thære menniscnysse; He wæs todæg acenned of tham halgan mædene MARIAN mid lichaman. and mid sawle. se the wæs æfre mid tham Fæder wunigende on thære Godcundnysse; He is tuwa acenned. and ægther acennednys is wundorlic. and unasecgendlic; He wæs æfre of tham Fæder acenned. for than the he is thæs Fæder Wisdom. thurh thone he ge-­worhte. and ge-­ sceop ealle gesceafta; Nu is theos acennednys buton anginne. for than the se Fæder wæs æfre God. and his Wisdom. thæt is his Sunu wæs æfre of him acenned. buton ælcere meder; theos acennednys the we nu todæg wurthiath wæs of eorthlicere meder buton ælcum eorthlicum fæder. (My dearest brethren, on this day we celebrate our Saviour’s birth according to his humanity. He was ­today born of the holy maiden Mary, in body and in soul, he who was eternally existing with the ­Father in the

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Godhead. He is twice born, and each birth is wonderful and ineffable. He was eternally born of the ­Father, for he is the Wisdom of the ­Father, through whom he wrought and created all creatures. Now this birth is without beginning, ­because the ­Father was eternally God, and his Wisdom, that is his Son, was eternally born of him, without any ­mother. This birth, that we now ­today celebrate, was of an earthly ­mother without any earthly ­father.)28 This exposition of the doctrine of the incarnation via the Gospel reading for Christmas (John 1:1–18) gives a theologically precise account of Mary’s virginity, the double character of Christ’s ­human nature (“mid lichaman. and mid sawle”), the eternal nature of his heavenly birth within the order of the Trinity (as eternal Wisdom and divine agent of creation), and the fundamental difference between the two births (one motherless, the other fatherless). All this is delivered in just over a hundred words, which need normally take no more than a minute to recite. Yet the passage is as mellifluous as it is doctrinally rigorous, extrapolating the meanings of Christ’s “acennednysse” using a minimal array of repeating words, sounds, and rhythms that must have rendered it as difficult to skip over or excerpt for the preacher as it was difficult to misunderstand for the congregation, while remaining fully accordant, despite its use of En­glish, with its august intended setting within the Latin liturgy.29 In effect, the passage invites the priest to perform the homily in the same was he does the Latin portions of the opus Dei. Without in any way compromising moral or intellectual rigor, the Catholic Homilies might thus be performed with some success even by ­those canons and secular priests whose level of education most nearly corresponded to the satirical portraits of them produced by their Benedictine colleagues.

2. Wulfstan: Homilies, Law Codes, Po­liti­cal Theology (1000–1023) Wulfstan’s writings for the clergy show a similar interest in developing materials for direct use by priests with dif­fer­ent resources and levels of education, although he is less anxious about precise doctrinal details than Ælfric and more concerned with Christian practice at a personal, communal, and national level. His homilies have their own carefully worked style, meant to be recognized as



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his, their heavy, two-­beat rhythms and lexical and sonic repetitions suited both to the large-­scale occasions that featured preaching by the archbishop and, possibly, to smaller ones where ­others might preach them as though he ­were pre­ sent.30 Often including passages derived from his po­liti­cal and ­legal writings and as liable to authorial revision and tinkering as ­were the homilies of Ælfric, they function as digests of his ecclesiological and social thought, available to be preached to clerical congregations or used for private reading within clerical communities.31 His short pastoral writings, gathered into miscellanies with ­legal and liturgical materials by himself and ­others and often rearranged and rewritten throughout his lengthy ­career, also manifest his abiding interest in furnishing multiple versions of the materials needed for a priest to carry out his duties. His writings on ecclesiastical governance, including not only the pastoral letters ghostwritten for him by Ælfric but the so-­called Canons of Edgar, offer a range of kinds of advice to the clergy, combining instructions on tithing, jurisdiction, attendance at synods, book owner­ship, and other ­matters of governance with passages of exhortation. Both works are written in his homiletic voice, with short clauses bound together by alliteration and stress, and a distinctive preference for continuous tenses to convey the right note of unrelenting urgency: Riht is thæt preostas beon geornlice Gode theowiende and theniende and for eall Cristen folc thingiende; and thæt hig ealle beon a heora ealdre holde and gehyrsume, and ealle anræde to gemænre thearfe; and thæt ælc sy othrum on fultume and on helpe ge for Gode ge for worulde; and thæt heo beon heora woruldhlafordum eac holde and getrywe æfter Godes rihte. (It is right that priests are to be obeying and serving God willingly and praying for all Christian ­people; and that they all be faithful and obedient to their lord always, and wholly single-­minded for the common good; and that each be supportive and helpful to ­others in both spiritual and secular ­matters; and that they also be faithful and true to their secular lords, in keeping with God’s law.)32 Although Wulfstan often seems to have worked up ideas for his En­glish writings in Latin, much of this material likely circulated primarily and in some cases exclusively in the vernacular.33

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However, both as archbishop and as king’s counselor and royal lawmaker, Wulfstan was also concerned to articulate a wider imagining of the sociopo­liti­ cal context in which pastoral care was exercised, developing a model of the En­ glish polity in which ecclesiastical and royal power are so fully intertwined that t­ here is l­ittle vis­i­ble gap between earthly law and divine. In another much rewritten and possibly composite work, the Institutes of Polity, which describes the duties of the ­whole of society from king and counselor to bishops, nobles, priests, abbots, monks, nuns, and the laity, the idea of an En­glish Church with monasticism at its center is subsumed into a wider, Mosaic vision of the elect but sinful nation. This is also the vision articulated in his most famous work, the remarkable Sermo lupi ad anglos (Wulfstan’s sermon to the En­glish), in some sense written in the face of the Danish invasions, but still copied long ­after ­these had triumphed, with its fierce, typically charismatic, and arguably hopeful call to national penitence.34 In the Institutes of Polity, a work of law that doubles as a theoretical statement about the nature of Christian governance, the royal throne stands, not on monasticism alone, but on the three pillars of ­those who pray (oratores), ­those who work (laboratores), and ­those who fight (bellatores), each of whom do their separate part in maintaining a society deserving of God’s ­favor. “On ­these three pillars must each throne rightly stand. If any of them weaken, immediately the throne ­will ­tremble; and if any of them fracture, then the throne ­will crumble to pieces, and that ­will bring the ­people to total ruin” (“On thisum thrim stapelum sceall ælc cynestol standan mid righte. And awacige heora ænig, sona se stol scilfth; and forberste heora ænig, thonne rist se stol nither, and thæt wurth thare theode eal to unthearfe”).35 This social vision, whose active life extends far beyond the early En­glish period, parallels the one articulated in Ælfric’s homilies on Maccabees and has roots in the Alfredian court tradition. But its emphases differ markedly from the vision of a Benedictinized Christian ­England promulgated a generation e­ arlier by Æthelwold.36 The ethos of Wulfstan’s writings is distinctive enough to suggest that he did not share a Winchester education with Ælfric, although this high-­born figure had links to Benedictine ­houses in East Anglia, Ely, and Peterborough, as well as Worcester, where he may have begun his ­career as monk, ­under Oswald, and where ­after a period as bishop of London, he ­later became bishop and titular abbot.37 Yet while the emphasis of the Institutes of Polity falls on the duty of monks to separate themselves from secular affairs, leaving pastoral care to bishops and priests, the work’s depiction of a society whose members are unified by faith but distinguished by function asks to be understood as a radical variant on insular Benedictine ecclesiology, rather than an alternative.



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The work requires of the king the humility and open generosity of an abbot or bishop. It gives a major po­liti­cal role to bishops, many of whom are monks. It specifies that, during periods of fast and holy feast, all Christians must observe the rule of chastity as practiced by monks.38 Indeed, by prescribing the dif­fer­ent duties to be performed by members of the dif­fer­ent estates ­under the king, the work seeks to play a formational part in the governance of the En­glish ­people that we might see as broadly analogous to the role played by the Benedictine Rule in the lives of monks, or at least to the Carolingian lay forms of living or libri manuales by Alcuin and some of his contemporaries.39 Its lucid account of the ideal forms of be­hav­ior to which all social actants, what­ ever their status, should conform themselves establishes an standard to which such be­hav­ior and deviations from it can be measured—­and publicly mea­ sured, since Wulfstan once again writes, in principle to the entire nation, in the En­glish vernacular.

3. Monastic Pastoralia Across the Eleventh C ­ entury Ælfric’s and Wulfstan’s writings circulated widely, both in large-­scale collections and in the form of booklets of the kind that lie ­behind Bodley 343, made for individual priests to include within their small gatherings of professionally necessary texts.40 We cannot tell how far their campaign to regularize En­glish preaching and teaching succeeded at a national level, w ­ hether in their own lifetimes or during the half ­century that followed. It is notable, however, that we know of few further sermons or pastoral works by En­glish Benedictine monks. Copying of vernacular and Latin pastoralia continued throughout the ­century. Latin lit­er­a­ture in hagiographic and other genres, some of it learned and replete with classical allusions, flourished in the multilingual and interlocking milieux of royal courts and royally endowed monasteries and convents from Cnut’s reign onward, as the balance between Latin and vernacular maintained in Benedictine ­houses across the late tenth and early eleventh centuries tilted in ­favor of Latin.41 But the production of new texts in En­glish trailed off in the 1020s, a few years ­after the accession of Cnut, and may not have resumed on any scale ­until the turn of the twelfth ­century, which witnessed the first of several flurries of new composition in En­glish, all with lay audiences in mind.42 The most distinctive products of the third and fourth Benedictine generations, a series of Latin and vernacular pastoral books for priests and bishops, are largely or­g a­nized around existing materials. ­These often feature portions or versions of materials assembled from the composite of texts known

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as “Wulfstan’s Commonplace Book,” a mixed assemblage of Latin homiletic, ­legal, penitential, and other works often used, by Wulfstan and ­others, as the basis for ­later vernacular writing. Versions of this collection survive in eleven manuscripts in relatively full form and lend texts to ­others.43 The substantial body of pastoral writing created over the previous seventy years was apparently widely regarded as at once authoritative and effectively complete. Yet it is in ­these same books, as they recombine fragments of a Benedictine canon that has now entered the second, copying phase of its textual lifespan,44 that we can see the mode of pastoral care cultivated by the En­glish Benedictines most directly in action. A fine Canterbury codex begun in the 1020s, London, British Library MS Cotton Tiberius A.iii, associated with the Benedictine archbishop Æthelnoth (d. 1038), or his Canterbury ­house­hold, offers one kind of case in point.45 Beginning with a glossed Latin Benedictine Rule and other texts dealing with the liturgical and spiritual conduct of the monastic life, including the glossed copy of the Regularis concordia mentioned in the previous chapter, the book goes on to furnish materials suitable for all types of Christian, monastic, priestly, and lay: confessionals, homilies, saints’ lives, dream analyses, occasional offices, prayers and devotions, and instructions. Special attention is given to the moral life and religious obligations of the laity and secular clergy: tithing and penance on the part of the layperson; visiting the sick and conducting confessions on that of the priest. Much of this material was originally written or collected by Wulfstan. Moreover, it is also Wulfstan who provides the book’s with its larger po­liti­cal and ecclesiological perspective, both by way of a truncated version of the Sermo lupi and by the insertion of characteristically energetic passages of exhortation such as this one: A bith Cristenes mannes thærf thæt he meage a ymbe Cristendom iorne smægan, and axie iornliche ge-­hadode menn hwæt him sig to donne and hwæt to forganne, and smeage gelome hu theos woruld ærest ge-­ wyrthe, and swa forth: thæt he wite, hu Crist to mannum become, and eall thæt he on life dreh for urum sinnum, and hu he for us death throwode, and hu he of deathe aras, and hu he on heofonum asta, and hu he to tham miclum dome cymth, thær the ealle to sceolon on domes daga to tham dome. (But it is needful to ­every Christian man that he ever eagerly seek out knowledge about Chris­tian­ity, and eagerly ask ordained men what is to be done and what avoided, and seek earnestly how this world came



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to be, and so on: so that he may learn how Christ became a man, and all that he endured in life for our sins, and how he suffered death, and how he arose from death, and how he ascended into heaven, and how he ­will come in g­ reat judgment of us all on Doomsday.)46 The priest in turn must use ­every opportunity to expound ­these credal doctrines, not only in the public context of preaching but also in the private context of the administration of penance. Another kind of case in point is offered by a more modest volume from several de­cades ­later, one of many Worcester books that was eventually glossed by the Tremulous Hand. This is Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 482, part of a group of seven books produced between circa 1050 and circa 1100 that focus on the duties of the clergy at the local level, with an emphasis on confession and occasional offices such as baptism and visitation of the sick.47 Books in this loose group, which share connections with Worcester and Wulfstan, sometimes use En­glish not only in contexts such as instructions to the lay penitent but in rubrics aimed at the priest. Evidently intended to accompany a priest as he visits the sick and the ­dying—­even the book’s unusual long, thin shape declares its production for use in the field—­Laud Misc. 482 provides a detailed script for him to perform at this most urgent moment, beginning with a speech that establishes the obligations priest and penitent have to themselves and one another: “Ic the halsige and beode and hate thæt thu Gode ælmihtigum hyrsumige, for than me is neod thearf thæt ic the riht lære, and the is neod thearf thæt thu riht do” (I entreat you and bid you and command you that you obey God Almighty, ­because it is necessary for me that I teach you properly and it is necessary for you that you behave properly). The priest is ­here representative both of the Church and of God, required not only to try to save the penitent’s soul by exercising the ars artium that is pastoral care with skill and sensitivity but to exercise the fearful authority involved in giving or, when he truly must, refusing absolution to the sick or the d­ ying.48 Yet the book also takes care to monitor this authority in scrupulous detail. It instructs the priest to be merciful in all but the most obdurate cases and seeks to or­ga­nize his demeanor as well as words, instructing him to enter a sick person’s ­house “with inward humility and without arrogance of spirit” (“mid incundre eadmodnesse, butan æghwylcere modes tothundnesse”), and stressing the need for gentleness (“lithnesse”) and humility (“eadmodnesse”). In a real sense, indeed, the priest, not his penitent, is the object of the book’s solicitude, his correct per­for­mance of his responsibilities a ­matter of such institutional

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anxiety that the book exercises its own kind of “lithnesse” and “eadmodnesse” in addressing its user. Like the Catholic Homilies and many of Wulfstan’s writings, Laud Misc. 482 seeks not only to instruct the clergy in their duties but to determine so far as pos­si­ble what they say and how they say it as they carry ­these duties out.49 §§§ By the time Laud Misc. 482 and its colleagues ­were in circulation, the wider national context for the unusually activist mode of monasticism that developed the textual corpus on which they drew had once again shifted. By as early as the 1040s, some twenty years ­a fter the death of Wulfstan, the po­liti­cal importance of the En­glish Benedictines was diminishing. Cnut and Harthacnut’s successor, Edward the Confessor, preferred churchmen working or educated in Normandy for a number of his episcopal and abbatial appointments, beginning with his chaplain, the Cornish-­born Leofric.50 The integrated “godly society” Wulfstan had envisaged—­which imaginatively subsumed all members of the polity, religious and secular, ecclesiastical and lay, ­under a single moral and spiritual order—­was also coming ­under pressure from new conceptions of the Church and Christian society promoted by churchmen whose intellectual formation was in Normandy or Lotharingia.51 Pressure increased a­ fter the 1070s, with the power­f ul new ecclesiology promoted by Gregory VII (d. 1085) and his theologians, notably Peter Damian (d. 1073), with its rhe­toric of radical separation of the Church from the world, which inaugurated a lastingly controversial attempt to reverse the integrationist model of the Church as coterminous with secular society that had dominated western Eu­rope since before the time of Charlemagne in the late eighth ­century.52 Meanwhile, the emergence of the new ­orders, Cistercian, Carthusian, Fontevraudian, and more, was also getting ­under way, their ideals of worldly separation in a broad sense comparable to ­those of Gregory and Damian. One of the ­great literary monuments of the new monasticism in ­England, the Liber confortatorius (book of encouragement), written by the Flemish Benedictine hagiographer, Goscelin of Saint Bertin, for the nun Eve of Wilton, ­after her abrupt departure from ­England to live as a solitary near Angers, dates from as early as the 1080s.53 While they testify to the longevity of the monastic approach to pastoral care developed by Ælfric and Wulfstan, ­these books thus came into being in a milieu whose religious attitudes ­were coming to resemble ­those of the twelfth ­century more than ­those of the early eleventh. As the interest shown in Laud



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Misc. 482 by the Tremulous Hand suggests, the working lives of books such as ­these, like that of the writings of the two canonical figures on which they drew, Ælfric especially, nonetheless persisted through at least the following hundred years. As we ­shall see in Part IV, it appears that they ­were rendered obsolete only by the new body of pastoralia that grew up in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, as part of the ­great movement of reformatio associated with Innocent III’s Fourth Lateran Council.

Chapter 14

En­glish in Monastery, Minster, and Court

1. The Benedictine Dominance of the Textual Rec­ord The vernacular corpus associated with early En­glish Benedictine writers, especially Ælfric and Wulfstan, is remarkable, not only for the detailed attention it brings to managing pastoral care in all the spaces in which it was practiced, but for the fact that such a mass of material, including books produced u ­ nder the direct supervision of ­these two writers, has survived. It goes without saying that an overwhelming majority of a­ ctual books w ­ ill have vanished, permanently limiting our knowledge in many areas. Losses of the heavi­ly used books and leaflets in direct pastoral use ­will have been particularly ­great. This is one reason that the group of eleventh-­century pastoral manuscripts just discussed, and their twelfth-­century successors, are so precious, bringing us as close as we can get to observing the Benedictine religious vernacular in direct pastoral action. It bears emphasizing, too, that the fact so many of ­these materials ­were still in use during the twelfth ­century means that their survival was seldom merely random. A few shorter texts no doubt went on being copied beyond the term of their use life. But many texts ­will have been selected for inclusion, copying, retention, and study in Benedictine libraries according to criteria that favored certain kinds of written materials over o­ thers, normalizing the monastic vernacular textual rec­ord according to the familiar pro­cess of literary canonization.1 Even with ­these caveats in mind, however, ­because of the relative stability of the ­great Benedictine h ­ ouses and their libraries down to the Henrician Reformation, and the care taken to preserve Old En­glish writings from the Elizabethan period onward, our picture of early En­glish Benedictine textual culture reflects the real­ity on the ground unusually closely. This picture is far from complete, especially when it comes to small or middle-­size ­houses and even the wealthiest ­women’s h ­ ouses, such as Barking and Wilton. So far as ­later books



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and texts are concerned, the archive is also skewed t­ oward books preserved at Exeter, Canterbury, Rochester, and especially Worcester, where the study and copying of Old En­glish was maintained unusually assiduously throughout the twelfth ­century, and (crucially) whose library then survived the Reformation all but intact, as was far from being the case, for example, at nearby Gloucester.2 Allowing for the difficulties caused by glaring divergences such as ­these, as well as ­great unpredictability over rates of loss and survival, nonetheless, it seems likely that we know more about this body of vernacular writing, as written and read in larger male and female religious ­houses, than we do of any comparable corpus before the late ­fourteenth ­century. Yet the very wealth of the Benedictine vernacular materials to which we still have access may mislead us ­unless we recognize that its dominance in the textual rec­ord is also the product of the more randomly destructive pro­cesses of textual se­lection that drastically reduce our access to the vernacular books in circulation in other institutional settings, ­whether monastic, canonical, episcopal, or courtly. By 1200, most early En­glish religious communities that did not participate in the Benedictine movement had been refounded as ­houses of Augustinian canons or reconstituted as parish churches or had simply dis­ appeared, often with a loss of textual and archaeological rec­ords so complete that almost nothing can now be known about them. Sometimes their very existence has to be inferred from the topography and character of the institutions that replaced them.3 Our knowledge of the texts associated with ­these communities, like that of ­those associated with aristocratic and episcopal ­house­holds, is as poor as that of their Benedictine counter­parts is rich. Certain tenth-­and eleventh-­century vernacular books and texts from the 80 ­percent of early En­glish religious ­houses not associated with the Benedictine movement survived all ­these vicissitudes and can be provisionally identified, at least if we use the dubiously reliable negative criterion that they are not ascertainably Benedictine. One case in point might well be the Nowell Codex, made soon ­after the year 1000, which contains our sole copies of Beowulf and Judith, and three prose works, all also sole copies: Won­ders of the East, Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, and parts of a Life of St. Christopher. This book has recently been suggestively sourced, albeit on sixteenth-­century evidence, to the ­great Mercian episcopal (and briefly archiepiscopal) seat at Lichfield, an institution run throughout its thirteen-­hundred-­year history by secular canons.4 Another more questionable case in point might be the twelfth-­century book with which the Nowell Codex is now bound, as part of London, British Library Cotton Vitellius  A.xv, which contains the brilliant rendering of Augustine’s

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Soliloquiae known as The Old En­glish Soliloquies, The Old En­glish Gospel of Nicodemus, and the informational dialogue Solomon and Saturn. This book was owned by the Augustinian canons of Southwick Priory, founded in Hampshire in the early 1130s by Henry I. Its first text has close links to another work that claims Alfred as author, the Old En­glish Boethius, and is often taken to be by the same, early tenth-­century writer but is the only work in the Alfredian canon mentioned by neither Ælfric nor William of Malmesbury. A brief excerpt of the work is found as a prayer in a book of verifiable Benedictine provenance, Tiberius A.iii. While scholars have a tendency to assume such provenance as a ­matter of default in cases of doubt of this kind, ­there is nothing to show that any of the ­earlier copies from which the works in Vitellius  A.xv ­were made ­were of Benedictine origin.5 Analogous speculations could be elaborated in the case of less famous books, such as the fragmentary homiliary, containing items by Ælfric interleaved with other, anonymous homilies, that is now Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Junius 85/86, one of the small number of surviving priests’ books or booklets, designed like Laud Misc. 482 for use in the field.6 Other books that apparently derive from tenth-­century minster communities that had not been Benedictinized, two in par­tic­u­lar, are discussed in more detail ­later in this chapter. But all except a few of the books once owned by ­these vanished institutions have been lost, while some that remain to us are likely now to be unrecognizable, especially if they resemble books known to be Benedictine, contain Benedictine materials, or ­were made by scripts trained in Benedictine scriptoria. If the inventory of his donations to the cathedral library had not survived, such would be case with most of the books owned by the community of canons Leofric founded at Exeter. Even books as intriguing as Vitellius A.xv, which tempts speculation that its exemplars derived from pre-­Æthelwoldian Winchester, preserve scant evidence of their institutional and intellectual habitus. Efforts to characterize the scale of textual loss usually have no more to go on than guesswork. However, to an extent seldom paralleled in ­later periods, the Old En­glish textual rec­ord must be presumed disproportionate, drastically favoring texts and books associated with a group of religious ­houses, almost all Benedictine, at the expense of o­ thers. §§§ ­ nless we take pains to read against its grain, the archival advantage enjoyed U by the early En­glish Benedictines—­what has been called, without too much exaggeration, their “virtual mono­poly of rec­ord” during the tenth and eleventh



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centuries—­hence threatens to undermine our attempts to reconstruct how the vernacular functioned in early medieval ­England more broadly.7 Indeed, by encouraging us to assume that Benedictine En­glish was more dominant than can have been the case, and so encouraging us to view Benedictine vernacularity as more original than it was, t­ hese biases within the archive also threaten to compromise our ability to understand how written En­glish functioned within the Benedictine movement itself. This ­matters both ­because, on inspection, Benedictine vernacularity proves a more complex and inconsistent phenomenon than at first appears, and ­because we need some sense of ­these complexities and inconsistencies if we are to assess the impact of early En­glish thinking about the vernacular on l­ater periods. This chapter thus revisits some of the texts and genres introduced in its two pre­de­ces­sors alongside a range of materials that appear to have been produced outside the immediate ambit of the En­glish Benedictine movement, now with an eye, however, not to the internal development of Benedictine vernacularity but to its relationship with existing traditions, in so far as ­these can be reconstructed. The aim ­here is to develop a hy­po­thet­i­cal picture, both of how far the wide range of uses to which the Benedictines put the written vernacular was similar to, or differed from, ­those that pertained in other institutions, and of how such similarities and differences ­were reflected in Benedictine attitudes to the vernacular and the Benedictines’ explicit statements about this topic. As is often the case with religious reformers, the Benedictines ­were self-­ conscious about their activities and stances, prefacing many of their writings with explanations of purpose and audience that suggest a sense of themselves as innovators—or as emenders or correctors, to use the term preferred at this period—­with all the excitement and anxiety that goes with the role. But how and to what effects did they actually innovate, emend, or correct? To address this question, it is not sufficient to consider only their own accounts of the ­matter. Following the analytic strategy that structures much of this book, we must approach the Benedictines from ­behind, with an eye both to the continuities their rhe­toric may conceal and to the inconsistencies it may reveal.

2. Prob­lems of Evidence: Innovation or Continuity? In a number of areas, our knowledge of the context of the vernacular texts associated with the early Benedictines is so circumscribed that we can do ­little more than take note of the ways in which our ignorance is consequential. For

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example, although a small number of ecclesiastical decrees survive from the eighth to tenth centuries, all of them in Latin, we cannot be certain in what sense and how far Wulfstan’s use of the vernacular in addressing his archdiocesan clergy would have been understood to be innovative.8 In issuing two of his first works ­under the names of kings, so contributing to the elision of what ­until recently had been a clear distinction between secular and ecclesiastical law, Wulfstan was building on a tradition of En­glish vernacular law codes that stretched back to Æthelberht of Kent and had been given power­f ul theological impetus in the late ninth ­century by Alfred of Wessex. Alfred’s remarkable law code (or Domboc) opens with a translation of the Ten Commandments and other Mosaic laws, followed by a series of New Testament passages representing the laws of the apostles and Christ, situating both his own laws and ­those of his pre­de­ces­sors within the immutable framework of divine justice.9 Wulfstan’s Laws of Edward and Guthrum, written circa 1002–4 but representing itself as a work of the early 900s, appears in the early twelfth-­century Textus Roffensis alongside Alfred’s law code, among many o­ thers.10 His Canons of Edgar, which represents itself as written during Edgar’s reign but dates from 1004–6, then extends the secular tradition of vernacular law to the ecclesiastical realm, associating a work of canon law with a king who had come to symbolize not only the En­glish Benedictine movement but the model of a Christian polity that Wulfstan sought to actualize at a national level.11 The fact that Ælfric’s First Old En­glish Letter for Wulfstan uses the familiar topos of clerical ignorance to justify the language in which it is issued shows that he and Wulfstan ­were both using En­glish in ways they thought required comment. This may have been ­because the practice of issuing ecclesiastical legislation in En­glish as well as Latin, formalizing what had no doubt always been its oral exposition in the vernacular in synod, was a departure. But perhaps Ælfric was also looking for a rhetorical device that would stress the urgency of t­ hese par­tic­u­lar archiepiscopal instructions. ­Here as elsewhere, our approach to the evidence depends on inferences about the number and character of texts that do not now exist. ­Because the liturgical and institutional life of all but the very wealthiest non-­Benedictine religious ­houses is impossible to reconstruct, we similarly cannot know how far The Old En­glish Benedictine Rule and its distinctive interleaved format, each chapter of the Latin followed by the corresponding chapter in En­glish, was an innovation, or how far it built on ­earlier insular traditions that failed to survive the institutions that upheld them.12 ­After all, minster communities had long made rich intramural use of written En­glish. A venerable, widely attested tradition of vernacular glossing lies ­behind the glosses associated both with Æthelwold and Dunstan and with one of their contemporaries,



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Aldred, prior of the ­great ­house at Chester-­le-­Street, near Durham, who wrote a set of En­glish glosses into The Lindisfarne Gospels around 970.13 Glosses of this kind may have informed the lexical and stylistic choices made by ­earlier writers of prose, in the manner that has been claimed for “Winchester vocabulary.” This may have been the case, for example, with the ninth-­century Old En­glish Martyrology, a rare survival from the tradition of prose hagiography that must lie ­behind Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, whose lexical artificiality has been persuasively linked to the influence of Latin-­English glosses on its vocabulary.14 Although all known early insular grammars other than the “Old Irish Scholars’ Primer,” Auraicept na n-­éces, ­were written in Latin, the extent of this glossing tradition tends to suggest that Ælfric’s bilingual Grammar, with its accompanying glossary, neither inaugurated a method of teaching Latin nor created most of the vernacular grammatical terminology it rec­ords. While we cannot know this, the work may have been the first to incorporate what had always been the language of oral instruction, En­glish, into a classroom text. But as with Byrhtferth’s classroom use of the vernacular, lovingly re­created in the Enchiridion, the Grammar was likely successful precisely ­because it built on pedagogical practices that ­were already thoroughly established. The earliest Latin-­English glosses, named from their earliest surviving copies as the Épinal-­ Erfurt Glossary, anticipate ­those Ælfric added to his Grammar by more than three centuries.15 As Bede’s story about the cowherd Cædmon and his hymn attests, from no ­later than the early eighth ­century onward, and plausibly ­earlier, religious ­houses ­were also a setting for the production and circulation of vernacular religious poetry, whose roots in learned practice are increasingly vis­i­ble to scholars. Wherever it was made, the tenth-­century Exeter Book, the largest of the four Old En­glish poetic codices, may well have been in monastic circulation ­until Leofric donated it to Exeter and is increasingly now seen as a Benedictine production.16 The playfully donnish Solomon and Saturn poems copied into the margins of two Benedictine books have also been compellingly linked to the Glastonbury circle of Dunstan himself.17 But while the dating of individual Old En­glish poems, written in an idiom perhaps designed to suggest a certain timelessness, has proved difficult, many of the Exeter Book poems are likely to predate the tenth ­century, perhaps by a hundred years or more, forming part of a long-­standing vernacular culture shared between vari­ous kinds of religious communities, royal courts, and noble ­house­holds, in all of which they served what may have been similar pedagogical and devotional purposes.18 The Old En­glish Benedictine Rule may nonetheless represent an innovative extension of ­these intramural uses of the vernacular, a sign of the Benedictine

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movement’s commitment to correct observance and desire to recruit adult members. The one available comparand, the Old En­glish Rule of Chrodegang, which survives in full only in the eleventh-­century Exeter copy mentioned in Chapter Eleven, and interleaves chapters of En­glish and Latin in the same manner as The Old En­glish Benedictine Rule, is thought to be roughly con­temporary with the latter work. It may have originated from the same milieu. But Æthelwold’s translation of the Benedictine Rule could also represent an area in which Benedictine textual practice was continuous with a broader culture from which it emerged and against which it took pains to define itself.19

3. Blickling Homilies, Vercelli Homilies, Catholic Homilies In two areas, however, where the early En­glish Benedictines themselves recognize their use of existing vernacular genres, we can reconstruct relationships in more detail. The first of ­these is preaching. Besides being inheritors of the ecclesiastical movement inaugurated by Dunstan, Æthelwold, and Oswald, Ælfric and Wulfstan ­were heirs to a tradition of homilies recorded in En­glish that long predated them, surviving examples of which go back at least to the late ninth ­century and most likely to the period of the Old En­glish Martyrology early in that ­century.20 The most coherent relicts of this tradition, in the form of two impor­tant homiliaries, are con­temporary with the first phase of the Benedictine movement in the third quarter of the tenth ­century. One is the Blickling Homilies (Prince­ton University Library MS Scheide M71), a collection that in its pre­sent, acephalous state contains eigh­teen sermons for the common feast days of the year between the Annunciation on March 25 and the feast of St. Andrew on November  30. Advent, Epiphany, and Nativity sermons prob­ably also once formed part of the collection, for a total of twenty-­one sermons in all, half the length of each series of Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies.21 The other, to which the term homiliary applies rather less certainly, since it contains works in vari­ous genres, is the Vercelli Book (Vercelli, Biblioteca Capitolare MS CXVII). This book has twenty-­three homiletic texts, including vitae of St. Martin and St. Guthlac, but organizes them with ­little sense of liturgical occasion and intersperses them with six famous religious poems.22 ­These books w ­ ere apparently made during Æthelwold’s lifetime. Blickling XI refers to the pre­sent year as 971 (“efne nigon hund wintra ond lxxi on this geare” / “exactly nine hundred and seventy-­one winters this year”), suggesting that the homily was copied in that year, while the Vercelli Book has been dated



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to the mid-­tenth ­century on paleographic and other grounds.23 But many of the contents of both books had been in circulation, in one form or another, for at least a hundred years, as parts of what must have been a massive body of interrelated homiletic material—­the bulk of it evidently in En­glish, despite Bede’s ­earlier preference for Latin as the language of homiletic rec­ord—­some of which continued in use throughout the twelfth ­century.24 The homilies in ­these books bespeak roughly the same assumptions about audience and address as Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies and sometimes draw on similar patristic and Carolingian sources. Yet while they must derive from reasonably well-­resourced institutions, ­these seem not to be Benedictine books. The Vercelli Book shares materials with books owned by Benedictine h ­ ouses, and a few individual Vercelli homilies are found in books other­w ise largely given over to works by Ælfric. Thus Vercelli V (Feast of the Nativity), is preferred to Ælfric’s First Series Christmas sermon in an early eleventh-­century Kentish copy of the Catholic Homilies.25 But this seems evidence, not of the Benedictine provenance ­either of Vercelli or indeed of the manuscript in question (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 340/342), but of the extent to which Benedictines and neighboring minster communities participated in a single textual and religious culture. Neither Blickling nor Vercelli owes its survival to the Benedictines; indeed, neither spent the ­later medieval centuries in a monastic library belonging to an En­glish religious order. Vercelli, whose mixture of prose and verse suggests that one of its functions was as an aid to private or ­house­hold devotion, was made in Kent. Once thought to be another product of the Canterbury monastic scriptorium, it has recently been plausibly reassigned to St. Andrew’s, Rochester, a relatively small ­house of secular canons ­until its refoundation as a monastic cathedral in 1075.26 The book was at its pre­sent locale in northern Italy by the mid-­t welfth ­century at the latest, and possibly much e­ arlier, perhaps stranded on its way to be delivered to an En­glish community of secular clerics in Rome, where it would have served a mix of devotional and pastoral purposes both within the community and, perhaps, in its ministry to visiting En­g lish pilgrims. Neither the Vercelli Book’s prose nor its poetry (including the “Dream of the Rood,” at least part of which dates from the eighth c­ entury) resonates with themes readily identified with Benedictine monasticism: virginity, poverty, and the obligation to submit to a rule. Indeed, passages of polemic against the Benedictines, their leaders, and their hostility to the clergy have been found in Vercelli XI–­X III and XV, apparent evidence of an ecclesiastical backlash against the movement.27 The contents of another homily, Vercelli VII, can also be taken

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to imply that the book was produced with a mixed-­gender and partly noncelibate readership partly in mind. Much of this homily, which is adapted from a Latin version of a sermon by John Chrysostom (d. 407), addresses itself to an audience of pious ­women.28 The homily exhorts t­ hese w ­ omen to the same austerity with re­spect to clothing, food, and general be­hav­ior eloquently urged in Aldhelm’s De virginitate, written for nuns. But it makes no reference to virginity itself or to ­matters of sexual be­hav­ior more broadly, an absence that suggests that professional celibates are not its main target audience. It seems conceivable Vercelli VII is a rare surviving address to wives of the secular clergy, that shadowy group whose existence was already coming ­under canonical attack, as the institution of clerical marriage began to be rendered first illegitimate, then untenable, and whose existence is already acknowledged only in overtly hostile terms by Ælfric and Wulfstan.29 Blickling, whose contents give us a good sense of the likely annual preaching round in the community that produced it, now forms part of a Lincoln manuscript put together during the f­ourteenth c­ entury and long used as a municipal oath book. That it, too, was a clerical rather than monastic compilation seem likely, in part, from the list of religious estates in Blickling X, which situates “munecum” not at the highest level of the ecclesiastical system, with “biscopas, ond cyningas, ond mæssepreostas, ond heahdiaconas” (bishops and kings and mass-­priests and archdeacons) but near the bottom, with “subdiaconum,” only a step above the ordinary laity who are the sermon’s target audience.30 Although this is canonically correct, since most monks ­were originally lay, monastic texts such as the Enchiridion take care to place monks above clerics and “uplendiscum (rustic) preostum.”31 Sharing items and sources as well as religious attitudes with one of the few surviving eleventh-­century pastoral books that appears not to have a Benedictine provenance, Junius MS 85/86, Blickling seems to be a relict of a prominent minster community, most of whose members ­were not monks but secular priests. The assumption that this community was itself at Lincoln, already in occasional use as a diocesan see in the tenth ­century and the location of a substantial minster, appears reasonable, though it cannot be quite certain.32 Like the homilies in the Vercelli Book, ­those in the Blickling Homilies are stylish and well-­conceived productions. ­Those who heard them attentively and repeatedly over the years would have gained a valuable general grounding in crucial theological doctrines, as t­ hese bear on the spiritual life, as well as a clear sense of the reciprocal duties of the dif­fer­ent ­orders of the Church, including the episcopate, which in one sermon finds itself the object of fierce corrective satire.33



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­These listeners would also have enjoyed a good deal of inventive narration. Although the opening of the Annunciation homily (Blickling I) is lost, the text as we still have it develops its expositions of doctrine and injunctions to a good life through a retelling of the Gospel for the day that culminates by identifying Mary as the Church, dramatically amplifying the Lucan narrative on the way (Luke 1:26–38). “Open now your most fair and pure breast, and let the tabernacle of your womb be enlarged, and let the inspiration of the heavenly embrace be blown into you” (“Openige nu thin se fægresta fæthm ond se clæna, ond sy thæt ge-­teld athened thines innothes, ond seo onblawnes thære heofonlican onfæthmnesse sy ge-­windwod on the”), the angel Gabriel is made to say at the moment Mary conceives, one of several affective inventions that bring the scene and its theology to life, rather in the manner theorized several centuries ­later in Nicholas Love’s devotional Mirror of the Life of Christ.34 The fact that most of the materials in Blickling and Vercelli are unrelated to one another, and the mixture in both books of unique survivals with sermons found in one or more other manuscripts, only heighten their value as witnesses to the scale and variety of the mass of materials Ælfric had in mind when he pointed to the “manegum Engliscum bocum” in current circulation, whose “mycel gedwyld” (­great errors) motivated his own work. §§§ Taken together, the First and Second Series of Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies comprise four times as many homilies as ­either Blickling or Vercelli. However, both share a structure with ­these ­earlier books, combining homilies from the temporale with ­others from the sanctorale as Carolingian homiliaries do not, in ways that suggest their use of a single insular template.35 Like Blicking and Vercelli, the works of the Catholic Homilies also emphasize the pastoral themes of penance and divine Judgment, offering catechetical homilies for Lent and popu­lar homilies for Rogationtide, a three-­day period of penance and prayer just before Ascension Day, the occasion of the annual “recognition pro­cessions between local chapels and their ­mother churches,” when higher-­than-­usual levels of attendance at ser­vices was anticipated.36 Despite Ælfric’s lexical distinctiveness, similarities have been discerned between his style and that of several Vercelli homilies, a sign that Benedictine Winchester was not the sole source of his formation as a homilist.37 Seeking common ground when he could, indeed, Ælfric initially even borrowed from existing materials, using a passage from Vercelli I in what may be an early draft of his homily for Palm Sunday.38

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Yet to read the Catholic Homilies in the light of Vercelli and Blickling is to be reminded both of the scale and sophistication of the vernacular corpus whose putative errors so aroused Ælfric’s anx­i­eties, and of the force of his suspicion ­toward a mass of writing, produced in peer institutions, from which he himself had learned a good deal. For not only do the works in the Catholic Homilies offer themselves as an authoritative body of pastoral materials, whose grounding in Ælfric’s own preaching practice allows even the less educated priests to satisfy the homiletic demands of their office; they actively set out to delegitimize a host of other similar proj­ects. The forty homilies a year the work offers over a two-­year cycle—­later to be augmented by more than twenty supplementary homilies, as well as the Lives of Saints, which focuses on saints’ days specific to the monastic calendar—­seek to cover almost any occasion on which preaching might be required by any constituency.39 This even includes the feast days of local saints, for which Ælfric provides a generic template. To increase their institutional range, the homilies shut­tle as they go between the dif­fer­ent genres developed in the Carolingian Church to address monastic, clerical, lay, and mixed congregations, showing Ælfric’s consciousness of the need for flexibility that is a crucial feature of pastoral care in Gregory’s Regula pastoralis. This work lays out in detail “hu mislice mon scyle menn læran mid thæm cræfte thæs lareowdomes” (how the art of instruction requires dif­fer­ent ­people to be taught differently), according to age, gender, status, and temperament, as Alfred translates Gregory’s words in the Hierdeboc.40 Furnished with prologues in Latin and En­glish that explain how the homilies are to be used and copied, the homilies also show Ælfric’s desire for what might appear the opposite quality of textual fixity. Blickling and Vercelli bespeak an older insular homiletic tradition in which the Gregorian model of pastoral care encouraged textual variance, as preachers adapt existing works to new congregations and urgencies. When other versions of their homilies also occur elsewhere, they often do so in as many forms as ­there are copies. In the imaginary of the Catholic Homilies, such variance is a symptom, not of pastoral flexibility but of lurking error.41 Besides trying to improve on existing sermons in their choice of sources, theological clarity and stylistic consistency, the works of the Catholic Homilies thus also target specific doctrines that ­were established landmarks of the homiletic tradition, as well as the texts on which this tradition drew, some of which belonged to the problematic canonical category of apocrypha. While ­there was a range of views about the status of apocrypha, Ælfric seems to have understood the term in the hard-­line fashion of the so-­called Decretum Gelesianum



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(Gelasian decretals) (ca. 550). This work anathematizes over a hundred works in this category as schismatic, heretical, and thus damnable, urging their repudiation by Catholics, who must preserve no more than their names.42 The bodies of absorbing and ethically demanding materials that Ælfric condemns hence include both the Visio Pauli, drawn on extensively in Blickling XVI (Feast of St. Michael) and other homilies, and the Apocalypse of Thomas and Transitus Mariae, the principal sources of Blickling VII (Easter) and XIII (Assumption) and Vercelli XV (Judgment).43 It is from this last text in par­tic­ u­lar that preacher and ­others learned the comforting ancient teaching that the saints ­will intercede for sinners at the Last Day, saving many who would other­ wise be damned. Ælfric’s denunciation of “certain heretics who claim that Saint Mary, Christ ­mother, and certain other saints ­will deprive the devil of his entire portion of sinners ­after the Judgment” (“Sume gedwolmen cwædon thæt seo halige Maria Cristes modor. and sume othre halgan sceolon hergian æfter tham Dome tha synfullan of tham deofle. ælc his dæl”) directly takes aim at a subgenre of Doomsday homily based on the Transitus Mariae and its comforting message of uncovenanted mercy, denouncing it as doctrinally unsound, spiritually complacent, and ethically damaging.44 ­Here is St. Peter in Vercelli XV, one of a number of surviving versions of this type of homily, pleading before God for mercy as the weeping damned begin to be led t­ oward hell: Min Dryhten, min Drihten ælmihtig, thu me sealdest and me geuthest heofona rices cægan and eac helle wita, thæt ic moste swylcne gebindan on eorthan swylcne ic thonne wolde and swylcne alysan swylcne ic wolde. Ic bidde the, min Dryhten, for thinum cynedome and for thinum thrymme, thæt thu me forgife thysses earman and thysses synfullan heapes thriddan dæl. (My Lord, my Lord almighty, you entrusted and gave me the keys to the kingdom of heaven and the torments of hell, that I might bind on earth ­those whom I would and loose ­those whom I would. I beg you, my Lord, for your kingdom and your glory, that you may forgive me the third share of this poor and sinful multitude.)45 Ælfric’s antagonism to this doctrine and the Visio Pauli puts him in agreement with Augustine, who disputes the first near the end of his De civitate Dei and attacks the second in part of his sermon cycle on John’s Gospel.46 In a local insular context, however, it seems that Ælfric’s was, and remained, a minority

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position. The inclusion of sermons based on apocrypha in ­later copies of the Catholic Homilies suggests his stance was not always popu­lar even with monks.47

4. Court Writing in the Alfredian Tradition The other area in which an admitted Benedictine debt to an existing body of vernacular writing can be charted in detail is courtly religious writing, a corpus that begins with the works issued by, composed by, commissioned by, or attributed to King Alfred, and continues with ­those associated with ­later members of the Wessex royal ­house, especially Æthelstan. Far from seeking to displace this corpus, as Ælfric did the existing corpus of vernacular homilies, the Benedictines played a major part in its preservation, while also contributing a number of texts of their own. The practice of attributing works to the hand of Alfred that is shared by the Old En­glish Boethius and The Old En­glish Soliloquies—if ­these works ­were indeed composed in the de­cades ­after the king’s death, as has been controversially argued, rather than being his own work or products of his immediate circle—­suggests the existence of a sustained tradition of prose, prosimetrical, and verse writing, commissioned by lay persons of privilege, whose cultural antecedents ­were Carolingian, but which took Alfred as a local inspiration.48 Ælfric testifies to the longevity of this tradition, attributing several Wessex prose works to the king, including the Hierdeboc and the Old En­glish Boethius, and describing the Catholic Homilies as a successor to “­those books that King Alfred learnedly translated from Latin into En­glish” (“tham bocum the Ælfred cyning snoterlice awende of Ledene on Englisc”). He also lists the Mercian Old En­glish Bede (“Historia Anglorum that the Ælfred cyning of Ledene on Englisc awende”) as part of this corpus.49 A hundred or so years ­later, William of Malmesbury’s account of Alfred’s writings in his Gesta regum Anglorum ensured the survival of this tradition to modern times, as the source of the account in the Polychronicon of Ranulph Higden (d. 1364), through which, in good part, knowledge of Old En­glish vernacular theology reached the translators of The M ­ iddle En­glish Bible.50 William lists the same works as Ælfric, as well as the Old En­glish Orosius, a lost Manual, an unfinished En­glish Psalter, and Wærfirth’s translation of Gregory’s Dialogues.51 Texts and books of the mid-­tenth ­century that built on this tradition may include The Old En­glish Gospels, a complete prose translation of all four Gospels, likely made before the time of the Benedictine Reform, that has been speculatively linked to Alfred’s grand­son, Æthelstan (d. 939), an avid collector and



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donor of Latin Gospels with many ties to Carolingian royalty.52 This translation may be roughly con­temporary with the production of two other impor­ tant vernacular biblical books with aristocratic connections. One is the delicately illustrated Junius manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library Junius 11), in which four Old En­glish biblical poems of varying date, “Genesis A,” “Exodus,” “Daniel,” and “Christ and Satan,” are joined by an Old En­glish rendering of the ninth-­ century Saxon Genesis ("Genesis B").53 The other is London, British Library MS Cotton Caligula A.vii, an En­glish copy of the remarkable Old Saxon Gospel poem the Heliand, written for Louis the Pious (d. 840) or perhaps for his nephew, Louis the German (d. 876).54 On the basis of a reference to a book of “Saxon poems” (“carmina Saxonica”) in the Latin life of King Alfred written by the ­great Welsh scholar Asser (d. 909), it has been plausibly suggested that both ­these German poems, and perhaps ­others, ­were already known at the court of Wessex in the late ninth ­century.55 Although it is unclear in what sense the Junius manuscript or Caligula A.vii ­were themselves courtly productions, this body of biblical poetry can thus also be tentatively viewed as part of the larger tradition of courtly writing and an authorizing antecedent to The Old En­glish Gospels and the other prose Bible translations that followed it. As the works they wrote for privileged patrons suggests, Benedictines ­were ­eager to add to this broad courtly tradition, and Alfred’s descendants and their aristocratic associates ­were equally so to act as their patrons. Both Æthelwold’s The Old En­glish Benedictine Rule, dedicated post facto to King Edgar, and the works Ælfric wrote for his noble patrons and other aristocrats might be understood within the memorably open-­ended category of the books “most needful for all ­people to know” (“niedbethearfosta sien eallum monnum to wiotonne”) announced by Alfred in the prologue to the Hierdeboc.56 Ælfric’s Lives of Saints and the Old En­glish Heptateuch represent especially substantial additions to the courtly canon of devout writing, the first made for the devout scions of the ­house of Wessex with whom Ælfric was associated through much of his ­career, Æthelweard and his son Æthelmær, the second inaugurated ­u nder their patronage. Vernacular courtly texts aligned with what Chapter Nine terms the patronal model—in which clerical writers act as spiritual or temporal counselors to rulers—­repose significant trust in their privileged lay readers, whose duties as po­liti­cal agents require them to have access to a wide range of intellectual resources. Influenced by Carolingian court culture, which made the education of the nobility a priority, Alfred built a persona as a lay intellectual that was given international exposure through Asser’s biography, a work itself modeled on

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Einhard’s vita of Charlemagne (ca. 830).57 This biography provided William of Malmesbury with materials for his account of the king, which formed the basis of what is still Alfred’s reputation as an exemplary ruler, acting as shepherd and guide to his ­people even as he took counsel from learned experts.58 The close relationship between royal or aristocratic court and wealthy minsters such as Winchester in the ninth and tenth centuries strengthened the association between rulership and education, creating an environment in which vernacular texts for court readers also anticipated a readership of clerics or monks. The preface to Alfred’s Hierdeboc directs that “all the youth of ­free men now in ­England . . . ​be set to learning . . . ​­until they know how to read En­glish writing well” (“eall sio gioguth the nu is on Angelcynne friora monna . . . ​sien to liornunga othfæste . . . ​oth thone first the hie wel cunnen Englisc gewrit arædan”), with the intent that some, intended for higher office (“hieran hade”), ­will then be further instructed in advanced Latin. This seems to imply a mode of schooling in which ­f uture secular rulers and their clerical counter­parts ­were initially educated together, ­whether in ­house­holds or in religious communities. The growing canon of “needful” texts produced to enable this study might ground a learned vernacular culture in which adult ­free laymen and clerics participated more or less as intellectual equals.59 Such may be the situation implied by the prologues and epilogues that accompany the certain copies of several works in the Alfredian tradition. ­These share an ethos of privilege that find its paradoxical expression in images not only of largesse but of openness. In the prologue to one of the three surviving copies of Wærferth of Worcester’s Old En­glish Gregory’s Dialogues, a work commissioned by Alfred before he issued the Hierdeboc, the book speaks about its own identity as the handi­work of Wulfsige, bishop of Sherborne. Wulfsige apparently paid for the book to be made, perhaps in his own scriptorium, but derived its exemplar (“bysene”) from the king, Alfred of the En­glish (“Ælfryd mid Englum”), best of trea­sure givers (“beah-­gifan”). The book represents itself as the product of a collaboration between episcopal and royal h ­ ouse­holds. Once made, however, Gregory’s salvific blend of vision and hagiography is open to any who can read it (“Se the me ræden thencth tyneth mid rihtum gethance”), offering heaven to “any person whose mind is sound, and then through his understanding trusts in the help of ­these saints and carries out their example, as this book says” (“Thæt mæg se mon begytan se the his mod-­ gethanc / æltowe byth ond thonne thurh his in-­gehygd to thissa haligra helpe geliefeth / ond hiora bisene fulgath, swa theos boc sagath”). Despite the book’s institutional origins, the community it forms around itself is ethical, not professional or social in character.60



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In the epilogue to the Hierdeboc, in which we are perhaps supposed to imagine the king himself as the speaker, anyone who can read the book is again welcomed to partake of Gregory’s wisdom, drawing the ­water that its saintly writer has himself drawn from heaven: This is nu se wæterscipe the us wereda God to frofre ge-­het fold-­buendum. . . . . . . ​Is hit lytel tweo thæt thæs wæterscipes wel-­sprynge is on hefon-­rice, thæt is Halig Gæst. Thonan hine hlodan halge and gecorene; siththan hine gierdon tha the Gode herdon thurh halga bec hider on eorthan geond manna mod missenlice. . . . Ac hladath iow nu drincan, nu iow dryhten geaf thæt iow Gregorius ge-­giered hafath to durum iowrum Dryhtnes welle. Fylle nu his fætels se the fæstne hider kylle brohte, cume eft hræthe. (This is now the body of ­water which the God of hosts promised for the comfort of us as earth dwellers. . . . ​­There is ­little doubt that the source of the body of ­water is in the kingdom of heaven, that is, the Holy Ghost. From ­there saints and the elect drew it; then they, being obedient to God, directed it by means of holy books ­here on earth in vari­ous ways through the minds of men. . . . ​But draw yourselves ­water to drink, now that the Lord has granted you that Gregory has directed the Lord’s stream to your doors. He who has brought ­here a watertight pitcher may now fill his vessel, and may come back quickly.) ­ hose with leaky vessels that cannot retain the holy word must repair them, T setting guard over their tongues so that the ­water accumulates within them, rather than run off into the ground. Like the Hierdeboc itself, this is advice suited to the exercise of secular as well as spiritual authority. Secular rulers have the same need to reflect on what they learn as their clerical counter­parts. In practice, the textual community Alfred addresses may be largely confined to the group who live b­ ehind the “doors” t­ oward which Gregory’s stream of vernacular ­water is directed. In princi­ple, though, it is again defined as a community

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defined by the pursuit of virtue, including any among “us earthdwellers” who have access to it, unlimited by age, learning, or professional status.61 The invitation to partake in the prologue to The Old En­glish Soliloquies is more complex. ­Here, the Alfredian compiler, who has just returned from the ­great forest of learning with the materials from which he has built the work, hails any capable reader to visit the forest and do as he has: “Therefore I urge every­one who is strong and has many wagons to turn his intentions ­toward that same forest where I cut the support-­beams,” fetching more wood to build a textual ­house of his own (“Fortham ic lære ælcne thara the maga si and manigne wæn hæbbe, thæt he menige to tham ilcan wuda thar ic thas stuthansceaftas cearf, fetige hym thar ma”). No longer is the translated work ­here an object of interest only in its own right. Indeed, although built from the best trees in the forest, it can offer only a temporary home, suited to sustain ­those who live in it for the length of their earthly pilgrimages while they alternate rest (“gerestan”) and ­labor, described ­here as the food-­g athering activities of “huntigan, and fuglian (birding), and fiscian.” Part of the point of the work is to encourage ­others, ­those with “many wagons,” to produce buildings of their own, an appeal, perhaps, both to well-­ educated clerics to participate in the production of vernacular books and to lay patrons to support their efforts. Even though the speaker is a mere tenant on the land he occupies on his lord’s lease (“his hlafordes laene”) and ­will acquire his own property (“bocland”) only ­after death, this prologue is franker than its pre­de­ces­sors about the structures of privilege that underlie its production. But if the ­imagined textual community of “Angelcynne friora monna” ­here has a better-­realized social dimension than do t­ hose of other works in the Alfredian tradition, the meta­phor of narrator and readers as leaseholders keeps it symbolically open. In princi­ple, the work remains available to t­ hose from any background, even the lowliest. All who are able to write, read, or study are invited to come together to commission, produce, circulate, and enjoy a common body of vernacular material.62 In representing a mixed noble and religious audience in insistently open terms, Alfredian court texts ­were no doubt partly drawing on the varied audience stances of Old En­glish religious poetry. Individual poems evoke the public per­for­mance settings traditional to the early En­glish poetic corpus from Beowulf onward, opening with the plea to attention “Hwæt!,” like the Junius manuscript’s “Exodus.” Or they may imply a more intimate and bookish setting, like Cynewulf ’s “Christ II,” which opens with a singular hortatory address to the cultivated and privileged layman who may have commissioned the work: “Now, excellent man, in spiritual mysteries earnestly seek with strength of mind,



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through wisdom of heart” (“Nu thu geornlice gæst-­gerynum, / mon se mæra, mod-­cræfte sec / thurh sefan snyttro”).63 But in both cases, the poems again juxtapose intellectually demanding materials, now presented in the allusive idiom of learned Germanic verse, with the widest pos­si­ble account of the audiences they are imaginatively addressing. In the case of “Exodus,” this juxtaposition finds direct expression in the play between the poem’s heroic description of the crossing of the Red Sea and the lesson in biblical allegoresis it derives from this narrative. Even as it rejoices in the bloody military episode it recounts, the poem notes the need to interpret the “eternal counsels” (“ece rædas”) God gave Moses from the exegetical perspective of the new law of “longer-­lasting joys in heaven” (“lengran lyft-­ wynna”), as expounded by scholars (“boceras”), that is, to read typologically as well as historically. The poem’s ending account of the Israelites despoiling the Egyptian dead urges readers to take all they can from the poem intellectually, in a passage that perhaps alludes to the famous defense of Christian appropriation of the liberal arts in Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana: “They rightly divided the gold and fine cloth, Joseph’s trea­sure, the glorious possessions of men” (“Heo on riht sceodon / gold and god-­web, Josepes gestreon / wera wuldro-­ gesteald”). But despite its learning, “Exodus” resolutely speaks to a community defined in theory only by its appreciation of the oral poetic tradition on which the poem draws, the new chosen ­people who are the En­glish.64 Based on one of Gregory’s Homiliae in evangelia, “Christ II” also pre­sents itself as a work of homiletic exegesis, a riddling elucidation of divine secrets for the benefit of all Christian ­people: “each of the loved ones” (“leofra gehwone”). But although it begins with an exegetical questio, incorporates a remarkable passage in which Christ is likened typologically to a bird (its flight “hidden and secret,” “dyrne ond degol”), and closes by cryptically enfolding into itself the runic letters of the poet’s name, the poem again takes care to situates itself in the broadest social context, addressing an audience that might include all ­those to whom Christ has given his gifts:65 Sum mæg godcunde reccan ryhte æ. Sum mæg ryne tungla secgan, side gesceaft. Sum mæg searolice word-­cwide writan. Sumum wiges sped giefeth æt guthe, thonne gar-­getrum ofer scild-­hreadan sceotend sendath, flacor flan-­geweorc. . . . ​Sum mæg styled sweord wæpen gewyrcan.

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(One can rightly expound the divine law. One can determine the course of the stars, the broad creation. One can skilfully write discourse. To one he gives success in b­ attle, when archers send a shower of darts over the shields, flights of arrows. One can make a hardened sword, a weapon.)66 While the poet ­here is named and individualized, even he remains professionally indeterminate, representing himself not as learned cleric but as exemplary sinner, whose failure to “hold well what my savior / commanded me in books” (“heold teala thæt me hælend min / on bocum bibead”) obliges him to expect “sterner judgment” (“dom thy rethran”) than ­others.67 As with the Alfredian translations, ­there is a clear reluctance to delimit audience or institutional setting. §§§ In light both of Benedictine interest in maintaining connections with the aristocratic laity and of Benedictine appreciation of religious poetry, it is the more notable, then, that Benedictine works for lay patrons are or­ga­nized around a dif­fer­ent language politics and conceptualization of audience, at least so far their careful prolegomenal statements about language and purpose are concerned. In Æthelwold’s King Edgar’s Establishment of Monasteries, the final part of which has been plausibly argued to represent the king’s own voice, Edgar’s desire for knowledge is once again that of the wise ruler, who is said to have studied the Old English Benedictine Rule with an “­eager scrutiny” (“geornfulre scrudnunge”), closely similar to the attitude of earnest seeking that is enjoined on Cynewulf ’s “excellent man” (“mon se mæra”) in “Christ II.”68 Yet far from offering the riches of the vernacular rule to a mixed, if elite, audience that stands in discursively for every­one, Edgar represents the address of The Old En­glish Benedictine Rule as carefully delimited. Not only does he declare that the work is suitable for “unlearned laypeople” (“ungelæredum woroldmonnum”), who need to study it to attain salvation, as we saw; he at once goes on to exclude “sharp-­witted scholars” (“scearp-­thanclan witan”) from its intended purview. ­After himself garnering a mea­sure of spiritual insight from his personal study of the rule, the king is ready to argue that ­those “who understand with clear minds the twofold wisdom, that of pre­sent ­things and that of spiritual ­things” (“scearpthanclan witan the thone twydæledan wisdom hlutorlice tocnawath, thæt is andweardra thinga and gastlicre wisdom”), “have no need for this En­glish translation” (“thisse Engliscan getheodnesse ne behofien”).



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This formulation identifies Latin learning with the ability to grasp not only secular, vis­i­ble, or literal truths but also transcendent, invisible, and allegorical ones, while implicitly associating the kind of learning suited to, or available through, the vernacular with the former truths, not the latter.69 Having singled out the learned as beyond the reach of the translated work, the voice of the king, as Æthelwold represents it, then goes on to frame the translation proj­ect in ­these terms: Ic thonne getheode to micclan gesceade telede. Wel mæg dugan hit naht mid hwylcan gereorde mon sy ge-­stryned ond to than soþan geleafan ge-­wæmed, butan thæt an sy thæt he Gode gegange. Hæbben forthi tha ungelæreden inlendisce thæs halgan regules cyththe thurh agenes gereordes anwrigenesse, thæt hy the geornlicor Gode theowien and nane tale næbben thæt hy thurh nytennesse misfon thurfen. (I therefore consider translation a very sensible ­thing. It certainly cannot ­matter by what language a man is acquired and drawn to the true faith, as long only as he comes to God. Therefore let unlearned natives have the knowledge of this holy rule by the exposition of their own language, that they may the more zealously serve God and have no excuse that they ­were driven by ignorance to err.)70 Although the speaker ­here is apparently a royal layman, the posture of this passage sets the learned Latinate translator apart from the “unlearned natives” it addresses, before turning to address a second target audience of nuns and abbesses, as we saw e­ arlier. Translation is firmly endorsed but no longer imaginatively creates a textual community of privileged equals, drawing vernacular ­water from one pool or bringing home vernacular sticks from one forest. Rather, u ­ nder the king, it constructs a divide between the uneducated many and the educated few, who have implicitly withdrawn into a sphere of Latinate learning that is theirs to share or to withhold, as best suits what they consider to be the interests of the unlearned. The Benedictine ideal of separation from secular society has created its imaginary analogue in the sociolinguistic realm. Strikingly similar to his teacher ­here, Ælfric’s more widely circulated prefaces formalize this separation, making it the ground of the portrait he draws of himself as a monastic translator. This portrait resembles the Alfredian prolegomenal portrait in vividness but stands firmly against the open attitude to translation it announces.71 In the En­glish prologue to the homiletic collection of monastic hagiographies that is the Lives of Saints, Ælfric addresses his patron

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Æthelweard deferentially, emphasizing the novelty of the work he has written for his lord and his sense of its usefulness. Rather as in the Catholic Homilies, however, he precedes this address with a Latin prologue, ostensibly addressed to monastic colleagues, which declares fierce limits to the proj­ect. ­Here he notes that he has declined to render the advanced vitae of the Desert ­Fathers, “in which many subtlelties are contained that are not appropriate to be revealed to the laity” (“in quo multa subtilia habentur, quae non conveniunt aperiri laicis”). He even applies the “pearls before swine” topos to the vernacular, arguing that “it is not appropriate that more be put into this manner of speaking, for fear that the pearls of Christ perhaps be held in contempt” (“nec convenit huic sermocinationi plura inseri; ne forte despectui habeantur margarite Christi”; Matt. 7:6). The translation of any of t­ hese “sacred scriptures” into “our language” then requires further justification (“Non mihi inputetur quod divinam scripturam nostrae lingue infero”), that makes much of Ælfric’s duty to “our” patrons, “Æthelwerdi ducis et Æthelmeri nostri,” and concludes with one of his several unkept promises to desist from translation soon.72 Although “spiritual mysteries” (Cynewulf ’s “mod-­cræfte”) interest both laity and clergy, in this account they can no longer be understood to offer a mutual point of focus for joint reflection, at least not without hesitations and caveats. As in King Edgar’s Establishment of Monasteries, ­there remain two constituencies among whom learned texts are of legitimate interest, one religious, the other noble. But ­these are now identified with separate languages and partly separate subject ­matters, in a manner that holds the differences between ­these constituencies up to anxious scrutiny. However, Ælfric’s most complex response to the translation ideology of the Alfredian courtly tradition is found in his famous preface to his partial translation of Genesis, the opening of the proj­ect commissioned by Æthelweard that developed into the Old En­glish Heptateuch. Ælfric’s Preface to Genesis introduces a prose translation whose strategies resemble ­those of Alfred’s Hierdeboc, attempting sense-­for-­sense equivalence in the manner of the Septuagint or parts of Jerome’s Vulgate. But it does so with a remarkable display of performative anxiety: Nu thincth me, leof, thæt thæt weorc is swithe pleolic me oththe ænigum men to underbeginnenne. For than the ic ondræde gif sum dysig man thas boc ræt, oththe rædan ge-­hyrth, thæt he wille wenan thæt he mote lybban nu on thære niwan æ swa swa tha ealdan fæderas leofodon. . . . ​ Tha ungelæredan preostas, gif hi hwæt litles understandath of tham



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Lydenbocum, thonne thingth him sona thæt hi magon mære lareowas beon. Ac hi ne cunnon swa theah thæt gastlice andgit thærto, and hu seo ealde æ wæ getacnung toweardra thinga. (Now it seems to me, my beloved, that this task is very dangerous for me or for any person to undertake. For I fear that, if some foolish person reads the book, or hears it being read, he ­will think he may live in the pre­sent ­under the New Law in the same way the ancient ­fathers lived. . . . ​For unlearned priests, if they understand only a small part of the Latin books, then it seems to them that they can immediately be ­great theologians. But they do not know the spiritual meaning of ­these books, and how the Old Law was symbolic of ­things to come.)73 In “Exodus,” a mixed readership is inducted into the mysteries of allegoresis in poetic language that mediates the divine word in sophisticated ways to its audience. ­Here, the divine word, when rendered in the open Alfredian manner, has become quite as dangerous as the putative errors found in apocrypha and the homilies based on them, implying the continued legitimacy of such ancient practices as bigamy and inviting many other misunderstandings for the ignorant who may use the translation to pronounce on doctrinal and ethical truths they have not grasped. No criticism, exactly, attaches to Æthelweard for commissioning the work. At least, this is so once Ælfric’s preface recuperates it by offering a primer in the prob­lems presented by an unglossed vernacular Genesis to ­those who grasp only Æthelwold’s “wisdom of pre­sent ­things” (“andweardra thinga . . . ​wisdom”), not the “wisdom of spiritual ­things” (“gastlicre wisdom”). But whereas the Lives of Saints prologues acknowledge the need to negotiate between the aristocratic desire for religious learning and the need to protect monastic secrets, ­here it seems that even the aristocracy must accept limits to the translation of sacred writings into En­glish. It is to drive this point home that Ælfric focuses on ­those hapless figures, “unlearned priests” (“ungelæredan preostas”) whose foolish desire to be “­great theologians” (“mære lareowas”) points up the painful gap between the ethos of Alfredian court lit­er­a­ture and the managed model of vernacularity developed in the Catholic Homilies. Ælfric even criticizes one of his own ­earlier priestly teachers, for his failure to grasp the difference between the Old Law and the New in expounding the story of Jacob and his wives: “My master . . . ​at that time had the book of Genesis and he could somewhat understand Latin . . . ​but did not know, nor yet did I, how much difference ­there is between the Old Law

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and the New” (“Min magister . . . ​on tham timan, hæde tha boc Genesis and he cuthe be dæle Lydan understandan . . . ​ac he nyste, ne ic tha git, hu micel todal ys betweohx thære Ealdan æ and thære Niwan”).74 The court tradition that evolved from the Hierdeboc admitted of no social or intellectual limits to translation, what­ever the situation in practice. To Æthelweard, an heir to this tradition, a prose En­glish Genesis, perhaps modeled on The Old En­glish Gospels, must seem a self-­evident good. But this was no ­simple ­matter in a textual culture that had now begun to identify spiritual mysteries with Latinity and the monastic and En­glish with the laity, the secular clergy, and the pastoral. As they also did with a number of other genres and modes of writing, the Benedictines continued to develop the Alfredian court tradition. But they required it to undergo correctio at the hands of the bishops and abbots who aggressively assumed responsibility for its f­ uture.75

Chapter 15

The Contradictions of Benedictine En­glish

1. The Invention of Language Hierarchy Although this survey of the insular vernacular traditions from which Benedictine vernacularity emerged might incline us to emphasize continuity or discontinuity, development or rupture, it seems clear that the leaders of the early En­glish Benedictine movement themselves would prefer us to emphasize the latter of each of ­these choices. ­W hether their addressees are priests, nobles, or the general laity, corrective disruptiveness has emerged—­a gainst a background of ­earlier texts and genres that, by and large, take pains to emphasize flexibility, openness, and readerly self-­determination—as a hallmark of the language Benedictine writers use to articulate their relationship to the outside world. Correction in all its forms is a necessary part of any premodern vision of community, its use unavoidable whenever the state of harmonious interdependence that ­ought to characterize society is seen to break down. So much Wulfstan of York makes clear in the strikingly homiletic Cnut’s Proclamation of 1020, which establishes Cnut as the final earthly source of correction, but also aspires to correct the king himself, should he fail to live up to his role as Christian ruler. “I proclaim to you that I ­will be a gracious lord, devoted to the rights of the Church and to just secular law (“And ic cythe eow, thæt ic wylle beon hold hlaford and unswicende to Godes gerihtum and to rihtre worold-­lage”), Cnut declares, promising to “everywhere uphold God’s worship and cast down injustice and establish perfect peace through the power which God has chosen to give me” (“æghwær Godes lof upp aræran and unright alecgan and full frith wyrcean be thære mihte the me God syllan wolde”), as he has begun to do. Cnut goes on to threaten any who oppose God’s law with punishment, death, or exile, as a king ­ought. But he does so only ­after acknowledging that his royal authority justly resides in the justice of his own actions.1

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In the prologues to a group of Benedictine prose texts of the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, however, correction turns inward on the written vernacular itself, disrupting not only the reader’s encounter with the works ­these brief texts introduce but the implicit contract that had long governed the relationship between author, text, and audience in vernacular culture. Rather than unite writers and their audiences, religious, priestly, and lay, in a single devout community of learning and aspiration, the vernacular comes to signify spiritual and intellectual in­equality, serving as a tool for monastic professionals engaged in the corrective instruction of ­others. In some re­spects, this might seem an inevitable development. Obedient submission to chastisement is a key Benedictine ideal, whose operation is described in detail in the Benedictine Rule and whose benefits are a continual theme of Benedictine hagiography, both in ­England and elsewhere.2 Arguably, submission must figure prominently in any attempt to imagine an En­glish Church or textual culture governed by monks and their values. Ælfric’s success in persuading even his noble patrons to undergo literary versions of chastisement indeed suggests that this was understood both by the Benedictines themselves and by their power­f ul aristocratic backers. Æthelweard was evidently content not only to have a set of ambitious vernacular works associated with his name, some of them of an explic­itly monastic character, but to receive quietly deferential public correction at the abbot’s hands for requiring their translation. Sigeweard of Atheleon, the considerably less prominent figure for whom Ælfric wrote the Libellus de veteri testamento et novo, was obliged to submit to a correspondingly less deferential prologue that recounts the abbot’s refusal even to copy him books ­u ntil convinced of his sincerity: Thu bæde me foroft Engliscra gewritena, and ic the ne getithode ealles swa timlice, ær tham the thu mid weorcum thæs gewilnodest æt me, tha tha thu me bæde for Godes lufon georne thæt ic the æt ham æt thinum huse gespræce. And thu tha swithe mændest, tha tha ic mid the wæs, thæt thu mine gewrita begitan ne mihtest. Nu wille ic thæt thu hæbbe huru this litle, nu the wisdom gelicath. (You asked me very often for En­glish writings, and I did not consent to you too hurriedly, ­until you desired this from me through your actions, when you asked me eagerly, for the love of God, that I might speak with you at home, at your own h ­ ouse. Then you mourned greatly, when I was with you, ­because you could not get hold of my writings.



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Now I desire that you should at least have the pre­sent ­little book, now that you are pleased by wisdom.)3 Chapter  58 of the Benedictine Rule, which begins “if someone comes to reform their life, do not let them be permitted easy entry” (“Noviter veniens quis ad conversationem, non ei facilis tribuatur ingressus” / “Yif hwa niwan to mynsteres drohtnunge ge-­c yrran wille, ne sy him no eathelice thæs infæres getithod”), describes the ritual re­sis­tance shown ­those who wish to join the order, who must knock at the gate for days before being allowed into the monastery. Ælfric enacts a reversed version of this pro­cess, “trying the spirits, ­whether they be of God” (“probate spiritus si ex Deo sint”; 1 John 4:1), by refusing to provide Sigeweard with books he has requested ­until welcomed into his home, initially to offer instruction in oral form.4 Ever the disciplinarian, Ælfric makes a professed desire for virtue a precondition not for the useful reading of a work in En­glish, as in the verses that accompany Wærferth Old En­glish Gregory’s Dialogues and Alfred’s Hierdeboc, but for its very composition. Perhaps with Sigeweard’s tacit agreement to be presented as a sinful but ­eager postulant, the prologue that announces this conversion then serves to correct prospective ­later readers, standing guard over the holy text lest it should become a mere prestige object for members of the secular elite, devalued by its pre­sen­ta­tion in En­glish. Yet the Benedictine understanding of the vernacular as a public medium of instruction and correction contains one ele­ment that cannot be fully explained ­either by reference to En­glish pre­ce­dent or by invoking monastic theology or practice. This is the strong tendency to identify the vernacular solely with the unlearned laity (Æthelwold’s “ungelæredum woroldmonnum”), putatively unlearned priests (“ungeleræredan preostas”), or the unlearned En­glish in general (“ungelæreden inlendisce”). Æthelwold, Ælfric, Byrhtferth and to an extent Wulfstan represent this identification as though it ­were natu­ral, and the rich complexity of the insular Latin tradition the Benedictines inherited from Aldhelm and other En­glish and Irish writers makes it hard to see other­wise, as does the pervasiveness of this identification in the ­later medieval period.5 ­Until we recall the prominent role that both En­glish glosses and En­glish poetry evidently played in eighth-­century monastic culture, so also do the two very early comments about translation discussed in Chapter One, in Bede’s Letter to Ecgbert of York and in the decrees of the Second Council of Clovesho, where use of the language in religious instruction again appears to be represented, at least in part, as a necessary concession to unlearned “idioti,” ­whether lay, clerical, or monastic.6

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The explicitness and prominence of restrictive accounts of the vernacular in ­these En­glish Benedictine texts nonetheless appears to be an innovation. In his prefaces, Ælfric articulates the view that to render some texts in En­glish necessarily incurs significant personal and communal spiritual risk, ­whether by giving unlearned priests the illusion they can be “­great theologians” (“mære lareowas”), or by exposing sacred mysteries to profane eyes. Although it follows well enough from the attitude to translation laid out by Æthelwold, and has significant parallels in Byrthferth’s Enchiridion that cannot be discussed ­here, this view other­wise appears to have no surviving antecedent in the homiletic, court, or religious writing of the ninth and tenth centuries.7 The newly narrowed identification of the vernacular with the unlearned and the laity is still the more remarkable ­because it is so seriously inconsistent with the reading practices of the Benedictines themselves. Although the beautiful obscurities of Aldhelmian Latin ­were crucial to the aesthetic and intellectual identity of Æthelwold’s refounded Winchester community, we have seen no evidence that the Benedictines, at any period before the Danish conquest, attempted to restrict their intramural uses of the written vernacular in order to stand out from other religious and secular communities sociolinguistically, as they aspired to in other ways. On the contrary, they systematized ­these uses, annotating existing books with vernacular glosses and writing new ones that alternate Latin text with En­glish translation or are wholly composed in En­glish. Moreover, despite Ælfric’s care to identify the inscribed audiences of his own vernacular writings with nonmonastic groups (priests, nobles, laypeople), his writings remain as well suited to reading within Benedictine ­houses as do Byrthferth’s Enchiridion or Æthelwold’s translation of the Benedictine Rule. Monastic copies of works associated with Ælfric’s name suggest that his writings and translations not only remained in intramural use in practice but ­were proudly identified as ­doing so by Benedictines of the next generation. Prominent among ­these are the brilliant Old En­glish Illustrated Hexateuch from Canterbury, London, British Library Cotton Claudius B.iv.8 Although monastic preaching may occasionally have been delivered in Latin, and although it bears emphasizing that a significant majority of surviving books from early medieval ­England are written in Latin and ­were owned in religious ­houses, vernacular preaching seems to have been the norm in tenth-­and eleventh-­century monastic communities.9 The numerous Latin homilies found in En­glish manuscripts of the period “are for the most part not sermons intended for lay preaching or private devotion but for communal reading in the monastic Night Office.”10



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Ælfric’s vernacular preaching to the monks at Cerne formed the basis of the Catholic Homilies, despite the fact that this work addresses itself to the unlearned, who “do not know how to be taught in any other than their birth language” (“alia lingua nesciunt erudiri quam in qua nati sunt”), a description that might have applied to some in his congregation, but scarcely to all. ­Later in his ­career, he no doubt continued to use ­these homilies, now supplemented by the Lives of Saints among other new texts, in preaching to his community as abbot of Eynsham.11 §§§ A fine recent study suggests that the “convention of presenting vernacular texts as if for an unlatinate, lay audience” found in texts such as Ælfric’s is an extrapolation of the account of religious images as books for “idiotis” influentially laid out by Gregory the ­Great in two widely circulated letters to Serenus, bishop of Marseilles. Citing the disparity between this convention and Benedictine practice, this study goes on to argue that the rhe­toric of ­these prologues is meant to be read as formulaic: a clever mingling of the topos of modesty with the topos of translatio studii deployed in the preface to Alfred’s Hierdeboc, whose ­actual intent was to emphasize the rhetorical and intellectual “confidence” of “­these writers and their commissioners.”12 The existence of gaps between normative ideals and practice can be taken for granted in any institutional setting, especially one with an interventionist understanding of its mission, and En­glish Benedictinism was no exception. Benedictine texts such as Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion exaggerate the differences in education between monks and secular priests, ignoring the range of aptitude and opportunity that pertained in each case. They may also exaggerate the differences between monks and laypeople, as Ælfric does in his Latin prologue to the Lives of Saints. In writing about the perils of throwing monastic pearls before lay swine in this language, Ælfric is ­silent about that fact that his patron Æthelweard was well able to appreciate words ostensibly addressed only to fellow monks. Æthelweard was author of a stylish Latin Chronicle written for his kinswoman, the Benedictine abbess of Essen and grand­daughter of Otto I, Mathilde II.13 On the national scene, Benedictine legislative and pastoral practice similarly often take pains not to notice the lack of realism that surrounds their declared aspirations and ambitions. Given the glow that surrounds the En­glish Benedictines in recent scholarship, it bears stressing that Wulfstan’s supremely

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integrated po­liti­cal theology grew up during a period of upheaval that, for most con­temporary observers, threatened chaos. In practice, it may have failed to do much more than preserve an ­imagined connection between the providential order and the pre­sent times, despite Wulfstan’s efforts to promote good government and national penitence and engage in correction of a society whose attempts at godliness ­were often con­spic­u­ous by their absence.14 Ælfric’s brilliantly performative homilies are usable by almost any priest but remain so attentive to his proj­ect of theological normalization that they take ­limited account of the capacity of the lay auditor, leaving concerns about the ­actual efficacy of preaching where, theologically speaking, they belong, in the hands of a gracious God.15 As is perhaps true of almost any proj­ect of universal education, medieval or modern, religious or secular, in a sense the entire imagining of an En­glish Christian society reconstituted around the values imbued by the Benedictines was pos­si­ble only ­because it was rhetorically robust enough to survive the turbulence of history, even when it was most self-­evidently at odds with national events and daily experience. Yet the fact that the relationship between topos and social real­ity in vernacular prologues is, at best, indirect does not mean that ­these topoi are not carry­ing out active cultural work, nor that the aspirations that lie ­behind them cannot be taken seriously. Ælfric no doubt knew that except in a few privileged settings, most of them Benedictine, the Catholic Homilies would not be used in the ambitious way he lays out for it. Yet by developing his g­ reat homiliary into the exemplary pastoral tool it became, he was serious in his desire to transform the religious vernacular, with re­spect not only to the theological ideas they contained but also to the form of their circulation. So committed was he to this proj­ect that his addresses to prominent laypeople suggest more than a merely gestural unease about works such as the Old En­glish Heptateuch, with their traditionally open understanding of the vernacular, even if he expected ­these works to remain the preserve of the same intelligent­sia addressed in Alfredian court writing in practice. The Alfredian courtly prose tradition on which works like the Old En­glish Heptateuch built represents En­glish as something like a regional equivalent of Latin, apt for a privileged readership but ­free, in princi­ple, to anyone. In ­these works, En­glish is what in the early ­Middle Ages was called a sermo patrius and ­later came to be termed a ­mother tongue, ­here viewed as a basic building block of the polity that was Wessex, as it aggressively pursued the goal of uniting much of Britain ­under one rule, reconquering the lands ceded to the Vikings. The venerable but still active poetic tradition with which ­these materials ­were in dialogue represents En­glish as an intricate and distinctive alternative to Latin,



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capable of reflecting on learned and sacred texts and teachings in its own idiom for the benefit of a similar community. In ­these works, En­glish is common tongue or lingua nativa, specific to the En­glish and related p­ eoples. Even as they made close professional use of written En­glish, Ælfric and his colleagues ­were learning to conceptualize the language in a third way, as a vehicle for materials derived from Latin but defined around its use in the instruction of the unlearned. For them, En­glish was now a sermo rustica, lingua vulgaris, or vulgar tongue, one of whose functions was to mark and maintain difference between categories of believer for the spiritual safety of all. Apparently for the first time in En­glish, the Benedictines ­were articulating an explic­itly vertical view of the relations between languages to correspond to their understanding of the structure of the Church. That they developed this account of the vernacular in defiance of what long continued to be their a­ ctual language practice suggests less that it was formulaic than that it was urgent.16

2. Carolingian Language Reform: Alcuin’s Attack on Vulgar Latin The Benedictines thus appear to have introduced into En­glish both a new set of associations for the vernacular and a new tension between their repre­sen­ta­ tion of the vernacular as essentially a pastoral instrument and their own ­free use of it in a wide range of monastic settings. Perhaps the association between the vernacular and the unlearned (“ungelæredum”) is too obviously part of a culture that makes learned use of Latin to require specific explanation. Indeed, although recent work on the learned use of En­glish and other northern Eu­ro­ pean vernaculars from the seventh c­ entury on suggests other­wise, it is conceivably the suspension of this association in the Alfredian and Old En­glish poetic traditions that ­ought to be seen as the oddity.17 Even so, the fact that the Benedictines ­were able to articulate a series of what appear to be three dif­fer­ent understandings of the vernacular at the same time—as a vehicle for the instruction of the unlearned; as a medium for normalizing theology and practice at a national level; and as an essential ancillary tool of monastic study and learning—is sufficiently striking to ask for further explanation. Given the limits of our evidence and the character of the topic, any such explanation must be both hy­po­thet­i­cal and generalized. However, before returning to the twelfth ­century in Part IV of this volume, it ­will be valuable to reflect on the unexpectedly complex phenomenon that is Benedictine vernacularity in the light of a further body of writing, produced not in ­England but in the

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ninth-­century Eu­ro­pean polity to which early medieval En­glish religious and court culture was an heir, the Carolingian Empire. Specifically, it ­will be valuable to consider it in relation to developments in thinking about language that took place in the de­cades around 800, the year of Pope Leo III’s coronation of Charlemagne as “imperator Romanorum,” a hundred and fifty years before the En­glish Benedictine movement began to gain traction.18 Although we ­shall see that the politics of language across ninth-­century Eu­rope remained strikingly multiple, it was during this period of ferment that the ideas, ideals, and institutional structures that ­shaped the po­liti­cal and religious attitudes of the En­ glish governing classes from the midcentury on, and that continued to be a power­f ul influence on ­later medieval theology and politics, w ­ ere systematized. During ­these de­cades, leading Carolingian rulers and churchmen finished constructing a model of the sacred ruler, appointed by God as a mediator of justice to his ­people, that was ­later reaffirmed in Dunstan’s own imperial coronation of Edgar and his wife, Ælfthryth, in Bath in 973, a ceremony with which the Benedictines ­were closely concerned.19 With the promulgation of the Codex regularum at the Synod of Aachen in 817, on which the promulgation of the Regularis concordia at the Council of Winchester around 970 was also evidently modeled, they began the deep work of reor­ga­niz­ing the monasteries within the empire ­under the Benedictine Rule, setting in motion the pro­cess that ultimately led to Cluniac monasticism.20 In their prolific writings for monks, clerics, and kings, full of statements of princi­ple, Carolingian intellectuals advanced the organic understanding of a Christian polity as effectively coterminous with the Church, governed jointly by secular rulers and bishops, that undergirds Wulfstan’s ­later po­liti­cal theory.21 In the small but influential group of libri manuales, works of instruction for secular aristocrats modeled on Augustine’s Enchiridion, they pioneered a genre whose history extended throughout the medieval era and beyond, and whose early En­glish instantiations include versions of one of the most impor­tant of ­these handbooks, Alcuin’s De virtutibus et viciis.22 In their synodalia and pastoral letters, they systematized the roles of the episcopate and clergy, the homiliaries produced as aids to preaching and teaching, and the books written to instruct priests in the details of sacramental per­for­mance, again offering Ælfric and ­others with a significant proportion of the material they subsequently adapted into En­glish.23 Most pertinent ­here, Carolingians intellectuals sought to systematize the role of written and spoken Latin as a tool of government, both by promoting its use as the vehicle of imperial and ecclesiastical administration across territories from Iberia to Germany and Italy to Brittany, and, it appears, by setting



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in motion a reform of the language itself. ­Here, they drew to a large extent on early En­glish expertise, as represented by one of Charlemagne’s closest counselors, the Northumbrian Alcuin (d. 804), a student of the impor­tant school at York founded by Archbishop Ecgbert (d. 766), whose own teacher was Bede (d. 735). In this multilingual context, it was Alcuin’s grammatical writings that seem to have done the most to solidify an understanding of Latin as an imperial as well as a learned and sacred language, qualitatively dif­fer­ent from any vernacular.24 In the pro­cess, ­these writings also began to form a specific understanding of the place of the vernacular within the Carolingian polity as a ­whole.25 Invited to Aachen in the 780s, Alcuin was intellectual architect of the hortatory account of the roles of rulers, bishops, abbots, monks, and the laity in a Christian polity known as the Admonitio generalis. Promulgated in 789 and widely dispersed in both its original form and ­later iterations, the Admonitio urges bishops and priests to preach vigorously to the laity; urges bishops and abbots to establish schools of grammar, writing, and singing; and urges scholars to correct the many errors in books, starting with the scriptures.26 Alcuin wrote extensively in support of aspects of this ambitious moral and intellectual program, producing a quartet of brief treatises on grammar, dialectic, rhe­toric, and orthography, whose aim was to reverse what he understood as a serious deterioration in the knowledge and proper use of the Latin language.27 In a letter Alcuin also apparently drafted, the Epistola de litteris colendis (letter on promoting learning), Charlemagne again requires bishops and abbots to teach Latin letters and pronunciation, once more with an eye to regularizing liturgical per­for­mance in par­tic­u­lar: Notum igitur sit Deo placitae devotioni vestrae, quia nos una cum fidelibus nostris consideravimus utile esse, ut per episcopia et monasteria nobis Christo propitio ad gubernandum commissa praeter regularis vitae ordinem atque sanctae religionis conversationem, etiam in litterarum meditationibus eos, qui donante Domino discere possunt secundum uniuscuiusque capacitatem discendi studium debeant impendere, qualiter, sicut regularis norma honestatem morum ita quoque docendi et discendi instantia ordinet et ornet seriem verborum, ut, qui Deo placere appetunt recte vivendo, ei etiam placere non neglegant recte loquendo. (In order that your devotion may be pleasing to God, be it known that we, along with our counselors, have considered it useful that the bishoprics and monasteries entrusted to our governance through Christ’s

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f­ avor ­ought to be zealous not only in the ordering of the regular life and the practice of holy religion but also in the cultivation of letters, teaching ­those who by the gift of God can learn, according to each person’s capacity. Just as the observance of the rule imparts order and grace to virtuous behaviour, so also zeal in teaching and learning should do the same for the ordering of words: so that ­those who desire to please God by right living should not neglect to please him also by right speaking.) In support of its claim that right speaking (“recte loquendo”) is inextricable with right living (“recte vivendo”), the Epistola quotes Matthew 12:37: “Aut ex verbis tuis justificaberis, aut ex verbis tuis condemnaberis” (for by your words you ­will be justified and by your words you ­will be condemned). In this way did language study and correction became explic­itly integral to the ever-­expanding Carolingian theological, ethical, and po­liti­cal program.28 Preserved in a copy sent to Abbot Baugaulf of Fulda, a ­house founded fifty years ­earlier by Boniface and his disciple Sturmi, the Epistola used to be read as evidence of the difficulties faced by German speakers (one of whom was Charlemagne himself) in developing skill in Latin. But this analy­sis was always at odds not only with the Epistola’s striking emphasis on speaking (loquendo), rather than writing (scribendo), but also with the excellence of the Latin schooling available at Fulda, soon to be made famous as the home of western Eu­rope’s leading theologian, Hrabanus Maurus (ca. 780–856), who was educated ­there from his childhood.29 What is more, the analy­sis was in tension both with Alcuin’s status as the most famous Latinist of his day and with the assumptions implied by his works on language. In Alcuin’s Ars grammatica, a dialogue between two schoolboys in the presence of a master whose name identifies him as from Albion (“in schola Albini magistri”), the part of the se­nior student is played by Saxo, clearly German, who instructs his ju­nior, Franko, clearly Frankish, in aspects of the discipline he has not learned, not the other way around. In his De orthographia, emphasis again falls as much on pronunciation as spelling, and the errors singled out for attention are not ­those we would expect of a speaker of German.30 A better explanation for the Epistola de litteris colendis and for Alcuin’s two treatises, first put forward in the early 1980s and (despite initial controversy) now broadly accepted, is that their main target was not speakers of German, mostly from the Carolingian territories east of the Rhine and north of the Alps, but speakers of dialects of Vulgar Latin or Romance, mostly from the Carolingian lands west of the Rhine or south of the Alps.31



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For eighth-­century Vulgar Latin speech communities (as for members of the multilingual speech communities across the empire), the Latin learned in schools was not a distinct language but a formal register of their own lingua nativa, pronounced using phonemes and accentuation idiomatic in a given region and always liable to conscious or unconscious vernacularization.32 Even in the ancient world, formal and colloquial Latin differed, and colloquial or Vulgar Latin differed from region to region. Both types of difference increased across time.33 Early in the ­century, the scholarly Boniface himself had trou­ble understanding the spoken Latin of Pope Gregory II in Rome.34 Alcuin perhaps had similar difficulties in Francia, where he encountered several dialects of Vulgar Latin, some already on their way to becoming what we would call Old French, but still in formal as well as informal use, infiltrating even communication between monastic ­houses and the royal court, as the Epistola de littera colendis acerbically points out.35 Alcuin was a careful student of Bede’s grammatical writings, including Bede’s own De orthographia, an arrangement of excerpts from seven ­earlier treatises, whose principal concern is with “preserving a Christian latinity and textual authenticity, the realization of which is achieved only by attention to idiom, semantic distinctions, orthography, and the details of grammar,” but which, in the context of his other works on language, also serves to promote the art of correct pronunciation (the ars recte loquendi).36 Like Bede’s, Alcuin’s understanding of the high place of grammar among the arts and the ground of monastic culture was informed by an understanding of the ars grammatica cultivated by insular scholars of Latin from the seventh ­century onward. “Whoever desires wisdom should not despise the art of grammar, without which no-­one is able to be learned or wise” (“non orreat artem grammaticam sine qua nemo eruditus et sapiens esse potest”), as the commentary on Donatus known as Anonymus ad Cuimnanum succinctly puts it.37 For Alcuin and ­others who shared his broad educational background as participants in a venerable insular grammatical tradition that represented the Latin language as an endlessly rich but immutable language of learning, the idea of a Latin susceptible to variation or change, w ­ hether at the level of grammar, syntax, lexis, or pronunciation, was a contradiction in terms. Both the De orthographia, written in Alcuin’s own name, and the Epistola de litteris colendis, written in that of the king, thus set out to reverse the slide of Latin into vernacularity with the same urgency to instill virtuous discipline that undergirds Alcuin’s theological and po­liti­cal writings. If homiletic, liturgical, and sacramental practice across the empire must be harmonized, the pronunciation of Latin must be harmonized as well, following a “system of letter-­sound correspondences,” laid out in

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the De orthographia, “in which ­every letter had to be given a sound in the liturgy, and in which in theory ­every one of t­ hose sounds was specified,” that is, pronouncing Latin phonetically, very roughly as it is still pronounced to this day.38 This system asked ­little of ­those in Germanic-­speaking parts of the Carolingian world, since it followed existing Germanic and Anglo-­Hibernian practice. But for educated Romance speakers, fragmentary textual rec­ords of whose spoken language survives from the mid-­ninth ­century onward, an effort was required to separate the language written, spoken, and prayed on formal occasions from daily speech.39 This separation deliberately defamiliarized the experience of Latin, by transforming it into the artificial learned language it had long been for Germanic and Celtic speakers. This, it seems, is the proj­ect announced by the Epistola de litteris colendis, laid out in Alcuin’s writings on language, and taken for granted in l­ater royal and synodal legislation. In the Carolingian sociolinguistic system, ­there thus seems to have developed not only an officially promoted divide between Latin and vernacular but an explic­itly hierarchic account of the two categories of language, grounded in a broader vision of the relationship between society, religious belief, and learning more structured than could readily have grown up in the turbulent environment of ninth-­century ­England. This relationship, clearest in Romance-­speaking regions, was expressed through the official use of a version of Latin that cultivated difference from its Vulgar counterpart. Such difference, which had doubtless always existed but was now a ­matter of policy, was exacerbated by the sophistication of the intellectuals of Alcuin’s generation, as they developed new tools of grammatical study and climbed new heights of literary Latinity.40 At an ideological level, the prob­lems in comprehension caused by this system in courts, churches, and monasteries could nonetheless be seen as an advantage, affirming the submission of the regional to the imperial, local to universal truth, even in the linguistic realm.41 Although the scholars of language who uncovered it have sometimes viewed it with a curiously critical eye, as an artificial, doctrinaire, and ultimately doomed attempt to interrupt the normal pro­cesses of language development, this system did not at all mean that the non-­Latinate and nonliterate majority ­were excluded from the communication network.42 On the contrary, the use of standardized Latin made pos­si­ble the production and circulation of the vast quantities of pastoral lit­er­a­t ure aimed at this constituency, new and old, written during the Carolingian period, much of which continued in circulation for centuries. The pastoral works of the Carolingian monastic homilists and exegetes whom Ælfric names in the preface to his Catholic Homilies, Smaragdus (d. 840)



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and Haymo (d. 855), are cases in point. Both traveled far beyond the sphere of influence of the monasteries in which they ­were written.43 But despite the prominence in ­England of two ninth-­century German works with pos­si­ble Fulda connections, the Saxon Genesis (the source of “Genesis B”) and the Heliand, even in the eastern part of the empire this linguistic system markedly slowed the development of an extensive vernacular textual culture. Moreover, significant efforts ­were required to reach across the barrier between Latin and vernacular on the part of bishops and their clergy. Such efforts ­were objects of new concern in ninth-­century synodalia, which continued to emphasize that preaching to the laity was a basic task but now added that preaching must be delivered in a language as close to local speech as pos­si­ble, an instruction, previously otiose in Romance-­speaking areas, that now acquired some urgency. The famous seventeenth canon of the Council of Tours of 813 is explicit that, despite the standardized way in which the liturgy was pronounced, the Latin in which sermons ­were written must be adapted to local conditions in Romance-­speaking as well as German-­speaking regions: Quilibet episcopus habeat omelias continentes necessarias ammonitiones, quibus subjecti erudiantur, id est de fide catholica, prout capere possint, de perpetua retributione bonorum et aeterna damnatione malorum, de resurrectione quoque futura et ultimo judicio et quibus operibus possit promereri beata quibusve excludi, et ut easdem omelias quisque aperte transferre studeat in rusticam Romanam linguam aut Thiotiscam, quo facilius cuncti possint intelligere quae dicuntur. (­Every bishop should have homiliaries containing necessary admonitions through which his subjects may be taught: that is, about the Catholic faith, the eternal reward of the good, and the eternal damnation of the wicked. Also about the ­f uture resurrection and the final judgment, and about the deeds through which blessedness is gained and ­those through which it is lost. So far as he is able, he should take care to render the same homilies openly into the regional Romance or German dialect, so that what is said may be more easily understood by all.)44 The ability to shut­tle between formal and local registers of speech, the Latin of the liturgy and the rustica lingua used in preaching, teaching, and confession, also became an essential skill for parish priests and ­others involved in pastoral care, be it in Romana or Theotisca, as bishops from across the Carolingian

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polity issued a stream of baptismal guides, ordines for celebrating mass, and instructions on penance, burial, and other official rites, invariably in Latin. The long-­term consequences of the confrontation between two culturally pos­si­ble but opposed accounts of Latinity discernible in Alcuin’s treatises on language for the history of written French, as well as other Romance languages, ­will continue to be of concern to us in the sequel to this volume.

3. Eu­ro­pean Language Politics and Old En­glish Textuality Ninth-­and tenth-­century En­glish intellectuals ­were evidently aware of several ways of thinking about the relationship between local and learned languages. When Alfred justified his proj­ect of En­glish translation in the Hierdeboc by stating that, even as the Latin p­ eople (“Lædengethiodes”) have translated the Hebrew and Greek sacred writings into “their own language” (“on hiora agen gethiode”), so “all other Christian ­people” (“eall othræ Cristnæ thioda”) have done the same with a portion (“sumne dæl”) of t­ hose writings, he was on one level alluding to Pentecost.45 As the point of departure for the multiplication of Christian languages and, eventually ­peoples, the story of Pentecost was understood as the ­great sequel to the account of the origin of languages with the progeny of Noah and the fall of Babel in Genesis 10 and 11. It thus constituted a significant potential backdrop for any Christian translation proj­ect, as it does to this day.46 But given the reference to “Lædengethiodes,” the phrase “eall othræ Cristnæ thioda” was likely also intended as an allusion to con­temporary Christian ­peoples whose sermo patrius was not a version of Latin: close linguistic kin, such as the Germans; close neighbors, such as the Welsh and the Irish; and more distant and recent additions to the community of the faithful, such as the western Slavs. By the late ninth ­century, “sumne dæl” of sacred writings had been rendered into literary versions of languages spoken by all ­these ­peoples. As we saw, Alfred may have owned a book of sacred poems in German that would likely have included two works that survive in tenth-­century En­glish copies, the Heliand and the Saxon Genesis. As with the En­glish poems with which they ­were copied, ­these works make no reference to the language of their composition and are written in an idiom in which any such reference would apparently have been felt inappropriate. Of extant German poetry or prose from before the tenth ­century, only Otfried’s Evangelienbuch is an exception ­here, opening with a Latin prologue that castigates his countrymen for their sluggish failure to “translate the glorious splendor of the sacred words into our own language”



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(“divinum verborum splendorem clarissimum proferre propria lingua dicebant pigrescere”).47 At an institutional level, the legitimacy of German as a language of worship had been implicitly affirmed during Alcuin’s lifetime, at the Council of Frankfurt in 794. Perhaps working to answer questions raised by the new insistence on the centrality of Latin, the council enjoined that “nobody should believe that God is to be petitioned only in the three languages,” that is, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, the tres linguae sacrae: “for God can be worshipped and a person heard in all languages, if that person ask justly” (“Ut nullus credat, quod nonnisi in tribus linguis Deus orandus sit; quia in omni lingua Deus adoratur et homo exauditur, si iusta petierit”).48 As well as “many Franks” (“multi Franci”) and Fresians, Alfred’s multingual ­house­hold included both the Welsh bishop Asser and scholars from Wales, Ireland, and Brittany, for all of whom vernacular glosses of the Psalter and other canonical texts w ­ ere as vital a component of learned study as in E ­ ngland.49 Unlike vernacular poetry, ­these glosses assumed the possibility of equivalence of meaning between languages and could in princi­ple be taken as pointing ­toward eventual equivalence of status, albeit in the same ambiguous way as the Hierdeboc prologue. By the end of the eighth ­century at the latest, Irish scholars had followed this path some way beyond its logical conclusion, developing a bold set of claims for the language’s superiority to ­others. According to the Auraicept na n-éces a remarkable adaptation of the insular grammar genre to a local language, Irish was the creation of Fénius Farrsaid, working “at Nimrod’s tower” (“ocin tur Nemruaid”), only ten years ­after its fall. In an effort to ­counter the separation of the first language into seventy-­t wo mutually incomprehensible tongues, the scholar was required by colleagues in Egypt “to extract a language out of the many languages such that they only would speak it or anyone who might learn it from them” (“conid and-­sin con·atgetar cuici in scol bérla do thepiu dóib asna ilbérlaib acht combad leo a n-­óenur no·beth no la nech fo·glennad leo”).50 The result, a blend of the best ele­ments of all seventy-­t wo, was “Góidelc,” Gaelic or Irish. Since Irish was not one of the tres linguae sacrae, its standing was vulnerable, ­because it could be claimed that “he who reads Gaelic is ignorant before God” (“Cid ara n-­eper comad borb fiadh Dia inti legas in Gaedhelg”). In practice, the work’s long copying history, extending to the early modern period, was ­because of its usefulness in preparing students for advanced study in two secular domains, poetry and law.51 Nonetheless, in the tradition of the Auraicept, the Babel story remained a sign both of the special status of Irish and of

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its unique qualities. This assertive account of a local language, which short-­ circuits any need for the apol­o­getic note struck in the Hierdeboc, could also have been in circulation in the vicinity of Alfred’s court. The western Slavs ­were recent beneficiaries of a written version of their language, Old Church Slavonic or Glagolithic, created around 863 by Constantine the Phi­los­o­pher (d. 869) and his ­brother Methodius (d. 885), whose center of operations was in Moravia, three hundred miles east of Fulda.52 Responding to critics of the Slavic scriptures, who again claim that only the tres linguae sacrae are “accepted by God,” repeating the error corrected at the Council of Frankfurt, a treatise On the Letters (O pismenexƄ) by an other­wise unknown monk who calls himself Xrabr ( = brave) argues that the first language was not Hebrew but Syriac. The treatise also argues more particularly for the unique status of the new written language. When God scattered the languages at Babel, each language took over its own share of the “institutions and laws and arts among the ­peoples,” with Greek taking responsibility for the prestigious task of philosophizing. The Glagolithic alphabet is modeled on Greek, but also superior to Greek, since it was the creation of a Christian saint.53 Few in early ­England likely had close contact with Glagolithic and few, if any, knew this text, perhaps written at about the same time as the Hierdeboc. Yet En­glish churchmen might well have had a sense of the authority and confidence of the new vernacular linguistic configuration taking shape in central Eu­rope, rooted in the work of two of the most significant scholars of the period. They might also have known both that Pope Adrian II had approved the alphabet in 868, and that his successor, John VIII, had reaffirmed the propriety of using “the Slavic language” to “sing Mass . . . ​or to read the Holy Gospel or the divine readings of the New and Old Testament, if they have been well translated and interpreted, or to sing all of the other hours of the divine office,” as recently as 880, only a few years before the composition of the Hierdeboc (“Nec sane fidei vel doctrine aliquid obstat sive missas in eadem Sclavinica lingua canere, sive sacrum evangelium vel lectiones divinas Novi et Veteris Testamenti et interpretatas legere, aut alia horarum officia omnia psallere”).54 Even if they had not also had ­earlier En­glish pre­ce­dents on which to draw, especially from Mercia, where The Old En­glish Bede was produced and where Carolingian influence was already strong, it would thus have been clear to Alfred and his advisers that ­there was no direct or indirect ecclesiastical bar to translation, even of texts of much greater sacrality than Regula pastoralis.55 It would also have been clear that ­there was no need to represent translation in the apol­o­getic terms used in the prologue to the Hierdeboc, with its elegiac and lastingly influential account of the collapse of an early phase of brilliant En­glish



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Latinity, implicitly exemplified by Bede and Alcuin, in the face of Viking depredation and clerical complacency.56 It is hence all the more striking that the work takes this defensive historicizing stance, refusing the temptation to make claims for En­glish or to argue for its special character. Instead, at the cost of initially representing the apparently innovative use of En­glish as a cultural last resort, it assumes equivalence between the early phase of Latinization of Hebrew and Greek by Jerome and ­others and the endeavors of all ­later Christian translators, culminating in King Alfred himself. The effect is to preserve the superiority of Latin while tying written En­glish as close to it as pos­si­ble, sociolinguistically speaking. Cultural parity is thus affirmed not between two languages but two ­peoples, the En­ glish and the “Lædengethiodes,” a term that seems to refer to the Romance-­ speaking ­peoples living in the Carolingian polities. From a po­liti­cal perspective, this affirmation might indeed be understood as a major priority of the Hierdeboc prologue. §§§ Alfred ignores the separation between formal Latin and spoken Romance imposed by the Epistola de litteris colendis, as he does the linguistic situation in German-­speaking Carolingian polities, where greater demands ­were made on the Latinity of religious and civil governors than he pre­sents as being workable in an En­glish context. In their revisiting of the situation half a ­century ­later, however, the En­glish Benedictines insistently brought ­these complexities to bear, as they developed their own account of the situation and capacities of the En­glish vernacular. The Benedictines, too, had choices of model when it came to thinking about this topic, including both the open Alfredian model pioneered by the Hierdeboc and perhaps, an Irish model, exemplified in the Solomon and Saturn poems, prob­ably from mid-­tenth-­century Glastonbury, which may have played a part in Æthelwold’s intellectual formation. Marked by Irish influence, the first of ­these poems, which describe the efforts of King Saturn to learn the secrets of the Pater noster from Solomon, evinces deep interest both in the power of the riddle and in that of runic letters, coming as close as any early En­glish work to suggesting the potentially sacred status of the written language, at least in this deliberately cryptic or hermeneutic form.57 Yet what­ever pull this nascent account of a specialized form of En­glish writing might have exercised, for the Benedictines and their royal patrons, the need to promote an insular version of religious reform along lines developed by

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the Carolingian Church and its successors was urgent. As a result, Carolingian linguistic thought and practice, as this was understood in the polities into which the empire was now divided, offered a more attractive starting point for their accounts of the vernacular, and even their language practices, than the Alfredian tradition itself. From an En­glish Benedictine perspective, we may conjecture, the language policies of the Carolingian lands must nonetheless have looked far from straightforward. Crucial to ­these policies was the use of a single language of religious and secular governance over a broad and multilingual territory. But while it appeared from the German-­speaking parts of the Carolingian lands that this language might be not only carefully standardized but quite distinct from local languages, the language situation pertaining in Romance-­speaking regions suggested a dif­fer­ent possibility. ­Here, the relationship between written Latin and Romance dialects was still close enough that the latter could still be understood, in many contexts, as a spoken form of Latin. Latin was also thought about in several ways in tenth-­century ­England: as the liturgical and institutional language of part of the universal Church; as the language of the liberal arts and the literary traditions around which they ­were built; and, more locally, as an insular scholarly language with its own literary canon and styles. Nonetheless, on this reading of the Carolingian language situation, for the En­glish Benedictines and their courtly allies, the regional equivalent of Latin for many ecclesiastical and governmental purposes could suitably be En­glish, especially West Saxon En­glish. En­glish was the language of ­legal codes; of the Anglo-­Saxon Chronicle, kept in the ­great monastic ­houses from the late ninth ­century on; and of scholarly glossing. West Saxon was also the governing language of a polity whose rapid expansion during the tenth ­century came to incorporate speakers of Norse, Welsh, and Cornish, as well as Mercian, Northumbrian, Anglian, and Kentish. Moreover, as we saw, the parallels between the imperial uses of Latin in Carolingian Eu­rope and the roles En­glish played in tenth-­and early eleventh-­ century ­England are significant. Despite a good deal of variation, and despite some Benedictine attempts to represent the situation differently, En­glish was in effect the principal, or at the very least an indispensable, language of homilies, religious rules, synodalia, and pastoral letters, as well as law and state administration. Significant, too, are the parallels between Alcuin’s emphasis on a corrected Latin and the attempts by the En­glish Benedictines to shape a broadly standardized form of En­glish, one of several such attempts we can trace across the Old En­glish period, as we saw. The West Saxon En­glish that grew up in Winchester



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was an artificial medium, tied to the world of Latin learning through glossing and translation, which made a careful attempt at internal consistency through the use of a common lexis, syntax, and orthography and acquired perhaps its most systematic expression in copies of Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies. Like Carolingian Latin, it was an educated common tongue, identified with the po­liti­cal center and its laws and orthodoxies, and no doubt experienced as distant from speech even in Wessex. This was likely true, despite the care Ælfric took in his ­later writings to create an alliterative prose style that must have had some connection for his audience with the sounds and rhythms of alliterative verse.58 Wulfstan’s rather dif­fer­ent lexis, which includes many Old Norse words, is a northern adaptation of this southern language system but is similarly artificial and scrupulous in its concern for consistency.59 ­There are limits to ­these parallels. Latin was in use alongside En­glish in many of ­these genres and remained the language of the liturgy, of institutional rec­ord, and of advanced study in particular: necessarily so, for the En­glish to have any standing on the international scene, or to access the vast forest of texts alluded to in the prologue to the Alfredian Old En­glish Soliloquies. Nonetheless, it seems pos­si­ble that the symbolic and practical equivalence between Latin and En­glish affirmed in the tradition of En­glish prose that extended from Alfred to Wulfstan was partly the result of an effort to imitate this aspect of Carolingian language policy. Also crucial to Carolingian thinking about language, however, was the maintenance of a certain gap between the imperial and ecclesiastical language of the governors, Latin, and the local languages of the governed. In the eastern Carolingian lands, this gap was crossed by the German religious poems associated with members of Charlemagne’s ­family, as we saw. During the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, when the En­glish Benedictines ­were at their most prolific, Notker the German (d. 1022), head of the school at the Benedictine abbey of St. Gall, produced a body of translated vernacular prose that stands sustained comparison with Alfredian court prose, initially for the use of his students. Although Notker described ­these translations as “paene inusitata” (almost unpre­ce­dented), they emerge from a pedagogical milieu reasonably similar to Æthelwold’s Winchester, where study of Latin took place in the vernacular. As Notker candidly notes, “­things are soon understood using one’s native language that can be understood only partially or with difficulty in a language other than one’s own” (“quam cito capiuntur per patriam linguam, quae aut vix aut non integre capienda forent in lingua non propria”).60 Outside ­these prestige proj­ects, however, a small corpus of vernacular pastoralia, and a tiny body of early writing in Romance, the gap between Latin

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and vernacular, governors and governed, was likely seen by Carolingian intellectuals as nearly equivalent to the divide between written and oral or literate and nonliterate. One key consequence was that most Carolingian court writing, including writing produced for and by individual noble laypeople, was in Latin, the language of theological discussion, institutional rec­ord, and communication with the clergy.61 In most contexts, the vernacular or rustica lingua, to the extent it was mentioned, was identified with the group Æthelwold refers to as the “ungelæredum woroldmonnum,” the general laity. Despite many points of contact, ­there is a cultural as well as chronological gap between the Carolingian early ninth ­century and the En­glish late tenth ­century, some of it created by rapid changes within Carolingian thought and practice itself. Again, however, it seems plausible to suggest that the tradition of representing the vernacular that found expression in Carolingian synodalia well into the ninth ­century lies somewhere ­behind the rhe­toric of En­glish Benedictine prologues, with their partly counterfactual identification of the vernacular with the unlearned. In deploying this rhe­toric within a body of texts actually written in the vernacular, the Benedictines nonetheless also exposed the limits of the parallels between the two language situations. For the Carolingians, the unlearned language was officially not part of the textual system. Officially, the vernacular was primarily used in spoken interactions between priests and laity, governors and governed, following normative scripts such as homiliaries and liturgical and pastoral aids for the priesthood, all of which ­were written and circulated in Latin. As the Council of Frankfurt affirmed, it might also be used in praying to God. For the En­glish Benedictines, by contrast, the unlearned language was also a written language, widely used in educated and official contexts, not least for the circulation of ­these same normative scripts. In order to pre­sent the relationship between Latin and vernacular in the hierarchic terms they felt ­were appropriate, Benedictine writers of En­glish ­were thus occasionally obliged to sideline, for strategic purposes, their own intramural use of the vernacular. They did this both by identifying the vernacular with the “unlearned,” and by including among the “unlearned” two groups some of whose members boasted a reasonably advanced degree of Latinity, the secular clergy and the devout aristocracy, belittling the learning of the first and constructing careful rhetorical displays of reluctance over the needs to provide vernacular books to the second. Where the Carolingian language system ranged all the major institutions of Church and government and ­those responsible for maintaining them on the same side of the divide between Latin and vernacular, this identification broke this unity apart.



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Fi­nally, ­these deprecating maneuvers allowed the En­glish Benedictines to lay claim on a certain exclusivity in their possession of advanced Latin, and to distinguish themselves from other religious communities, from the secular clergy in general, and, more cautiously, from the devout lay aristocracy. They did this despite what we have seen continued to be the thoroughly porous nature of the barrier between religious and secular, Benedictines and ­others. Yet the tension between ­these maneuvers and the learned uses of the vernacular concurrently promoted by the Benedictines nonetheless also enabled the most ambitious conception of the religious and institutional roles of the vernacular seen in western Eu­rope before the ­fourteenth ­century. Unlike Carolingian Latin, West Saxon En­glish was asked to play in theory incommensurable roles in the Benedictine language system. In practice, during the late tenth-­ and early eleventh-­century heyday of the Benedictine movement, ­these roles ­were mutually constitutive and supportive.

Chapter 16

The Narrowing of Written En­glish

1. En­glish in a Changing Sociolinguistic Environment Within their sphere of influence, many of the En­glish texts written or copied by the early En­glish Benedictines ­were of remarkable longevity, their active lives outlasting both the Danish and the Norman Conquests. Although the pace of new composition slowed markedly ­after Ælfric and Wulfstan passed from the scene, existing texts ­were copied, extended, annotated, and adapted throughout the eleventh and twelfth centuries. New texts written in the regularized Old En­glish consolidated by ­these writers and their copyists also continued to be produced down to the mid-­t welfth ­century and in a select number of cases a good deal ­later (see Appendix, ­Table 4). ­These works include a number described in Chapter Eleven found in manuscripts written around the ­middle of the twelfth ­century: translations of works from Anselm’s Canterbury circle and teaching texts like The Distichs of Cato in Cotton Vespasian D.xiv, perhaps from the abbey of St. Augustine in Canterbury, and the cluster of new texts such as “Instructions for Christians” in Cambridge Ii.1.33, prob­ably from the now monasticized cathedral priory at Rochester. They also include three new En­glish vitae of Margaret, Giles, and Nicholas, written for delivery to lay audiences, in a homiliary from the same priory, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 303.1 All t­ hese works and books w ­ ere monastic productions. Like the modernized and in some cases rewritten Old En­glish texts included in a substantial and slightly ­later homiliary from the West Midlands that returns in a ­later chapter, Bodley 343, all show Old En­glish embedded in a range of pastoral, devotional, and pedagogical settings. 2 Indeed, while signs that Old En­glish was coming to be experienced as archaic begin to accumulate, texts written in this language could be treated as vital resources well into the thirteenth ­century. The Tremulous Hand of Worcester was only the latest of a number of scholars

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of his generation who continued to update the Old En­glish pastoral tradition, glossing or copying old texts or composing new ones on the model of their pre­ de­ces­sors in ways that suggest their continued relevance. Nor was enthusiasm for En­glish confined to its pastoral utility, despite the diminishing importance of vernacular glossing as an academic practice.3 Continued interest in the Alfredian corpus as well as in two famous monastic teaching texts, Æthelwold’s The Old En­glish Benedictine Rule and Ælfric’s Grammar and Glossary, are especially suggestive of the vitality of the textual culture nurtured by En­glish monks across the nearly three centuries that separated the first phases of the movement in the 950s to the period of the Tremulous Hand, whose work as a glossator of Old En­glish books apparently began a de­cade or two ­after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. The long per­sis­tence of monastic Old En­glish more than deserves the attention that it has received in scholarship over the past twenty years, both for the way in which it obliges us to reconsider the relationship between bodies of writing, not to mention historical periods, once taken to be decisively separated, and for the role that it played in the development of its closest linguistic successor, early ­Middle En­glish, and its closest cultural one, insular French. But it also needs to be emphasized that the larger sociolinguistic story of the period, from a monastic point of view as from ­others, was a story of power­f ul, and often powerfully self-­conscious, change.4 Writing the prologue to Gesta regum Anglorum soon a­ fter 1120 in the ancient monastery founded by Aldhelm, the scholarly William of Malmesbury offered his re­spects to a now venerable work of Alfredian En­glish, the Anglo-­Saxon Chronicle. But he affected disdain for early Benedictine Latin, which had come to seem so alien, and so identified with a superseded phase of insular monasticism, that he and his Canterbury colleague, Eadmer, set out to rewrite the historical and hagiographic works of the previous ­century in an updated and putatively more polished style.5 ­Here they followed the lead of an older writer from the abbey of St. Bertin, across the channel, the prolific and brilliant Goscelin (d. ca. 1107), whose reputation as the foremost insular monastic hagiographer of his day was established as early as the 1060s.6 The vitae of Æthelwold, Dunstan, Oswald, and ­others by Wulfstan Cantor and his colleagues at Canterbury and Ramsey at the turn of the millennium ­were written in a consciously mannerist Latin for an elite readership. So, too, was a work whose style William singles out for criticism, the Latin Chronicle written by the se­nior of Ælfric’s two noble patrons, Æthelweard, based on the Anglo-­Saxon Chronicle. Although William dedicated copies of the Gesta and its sequel, the Historia novella, to several royal persons, including the empress



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Matilda (­daughter and heir of Henry I), Robert of Gloucester (an illegitimate son), and King David of Scotland, he and Eadmer also wrote with fellow monks in mind.7 But they did so in language that, despite having its own tendencies ­toward allusion and circumlocution, now preferred to represent itself as what Eadmer calls a “familiar manner of speaking” (“usitato more loquendi”), accessible to anyone with a good grounding in Latin, not merely ­those with training in a given local usage.8 Moreover, the identification of Latin with the qualities of openness and lucidity promoted by early twelfth-­century intellectuals itself came ­under pressure, both from the emergence of new technical registers of Latinity associated with the schools of Bologna and Paris and from the steady proliferation of texts in a new written vernacular, initially at least partly modeled on Old En­glish and other early Germanic textual traditions, romanz or French. Precociously taken up by En­glish monks and secular clerics during the reign of Henry I (1100–1135), written French could stake out a claim to much ­these same qualities, as a common tongue that bridged dif­fer­ent audiences and readerships, rather as written En­glish had done ­earlier, although possibly across a somewhat narrower social range and certainly across a wider geo­graph­i­cally area.9 We do not yet have a full picture of how En­glish monks from older ­houses across this period thought about the relationships between the three languages in which they wrote, nor of how ­these relationships changed across time, or from ­house to ­house. But despite the per­sis­tence of areas of overlap between works in ­these languages, the enlarged role played by Latin and the increased use of French encouraged written En­glish to become a more specialized medium than during its tenth-­century heyday, suited to a narrower range of uses, genres, and readers. The aftereffects of this narrowing can be seen in the activities of Worcester’s Tremulous Hand, whose ­career was spent at what by the early thirteenth ­century was the country’s most impor­tant center of production for texts in En­ glish, but who worked as a linguistic specialist, trained in parsing an ­earlier form of the language to render it readable to users. The Tremulous Hand’s notae and glosses, the vast majority of them in Latin, offer help to colleagues both in the cathedral priory and, perhaps, in the bishop’s ­house­hold, who had uses for the homiliaries and other pastoralia that w ­ ere his focus but had diffi10 culties with parsing their lexis and orthography. ­These effects can also be seen in the new bodies of writing in what philologists call early ­Middle En­glish that began to multiply in the last de­cades of the twelfth ­century, some fifty or sixty years before the Tremulous Hand copied “Sanctus Beda” and the other works in Worcester MS F.174. Besides updating

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En­glish lexis, ­these writings set aside key features of the orthographic system derived from West Saxon En­glish, even as the spellings of ­those who continued to use this system diversified, and began to represent the morphology and phonology of En­glish in new ways, many of them reflective of regional dialects and localized audiences.11 The dif­fer­ent ways of representing En­glish coexisted for a period, influencing each other. Despite the range of orthographic strategies used by scribes, including the radical experiment in spelling systematization implemented in the Orrmulum, the “proud” traditionalism of even the latest copies of a number of Old En­glish texts “persists in the earliest early M ­ iddle En­glish texts.” Indeed, no doubt influenced by the continued study, copying, and in many cases forging of Old En­glish charters, some of ­these texts not only preserve traditional spellings but introduce new, archaizing ones that seem to correspond to neither e­ arlier practice nor pronunciation.12 Yet the increasingly common decision to use localized and modern forms played its own part in completing the pro­cess by which the corpus of Old En­ glish writing ceased to be thought of as current during the first de­cades of the thirteenth ­century, its texts no longer copied or much annotated and well on the way to becoming “not valued on account of its unknown idioms” (“non appreciatum propter idioma incognita”), as a librarian’s note, perhaps from Rochester, has it. The candor of this judgment, scribbled into a clearly written book of the mid-­t welfth ­century as early as 1300, is only partly qualified by the fact that the book continued to be preserved nonetheless.13

2. The Old En­glish Apollonius at the Court of Cnut However, as we turn to t­ hese early M ­ iddle En­glish texts and books in the last part of this volume, two final observations about the changing shape of late Old En­glish textual production bear noting. The first is that the pro­cess of attenuation just alluded to was not only a twelfth-­century and early thirteenth-­ century phenomenon, a reaction to a sociolinguistic landscape altered by the advent of new understandings of Latinity ­after the Norman Conquest, or even of written French at the court of Henry I fifty years ­later. On the contrary, it was well already underway by the 1040s, when Edward the Confessor came to the throne. A single example serves as illustration. Around the 1020s, a remarkable prose translation, the Old En­glish Apollonius of Tyre, was copied into a Winchester book (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 201), perhaps meant for use by clerical members of Cnut’s court,



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t­ oward the end of a series of homilies, law codes, and other works, many of them by Cnut’s spiritual adviser, Archbishop Wulfstan of York.14 As a recent study argues, the account of sexual sin and fidelity, storm-­tossed disaster, and providential redress that is the Apollonius of Tyre story, with its high Greco-­ Roman pedigree, riddles, lurid sensuality, and grippingly intricate plot, would have been “well suited for use as an exemplary text by Wulfstan or ­those within his orbit” at the Danish royal court. ­Here, it seems, sexual be­hav­ior tended to be ordered around dynastic more than normative Christian considerations, to the point that “issues of divorce, concubinage and polygamy” cried out for moralistic attention.15 ­After all, Wulfstan and ­others had a responsibility to see to the spiritual care of the king and his ­house­hold and followers, lay “­little ones” who, for all their worldly power, should not be allowed to stumble (Mark 9:42). Depicting the rewards that attend royal continence even outside the scheme of Christian salvation and the punishments that attend its opposite, the work might have been used to exert salutary moral pressure on audience members, even to direct implied censure ­toward the king himself, with the delicacy this difficult setting evidently required. On this reading, the Old En­glish Apollonius can be regarded as a further contribution to the Alfredian tradition of court writing, produced for the education and edification of members of the secular aristocracy, among ­others. If so, however, the work’s frankness about sexual ­matters and positive repre­sen­ta­tion of paganism are far from being its only idiosyncratic features. As we have seen, from Alfred to Ælfric, Old En­glish court writing, like much writing for aristocratic lay patrons of any period and in any language, represents itself as providing improving entertainment and spiritual wisdom directly to its readers, acknowledging their competence to receive it as best serves their interests as individuals and governors. The epilogue to Alfred’s Hierdeboc offers this work as a permanent resource for all who desire to drink from Gregory’s words directly (“Ac hladath iow nu drincan”), or to fill their vessels (“fylle nu his fætels”) from its stream of wisdom for ­f uture use, ­whether by study or by commissioning copies or digests of their own.16 By contrast, the Old En­glish Apollonius is addressed in the first instance to a readership of clergy, the translator’s immediate colleagues, whose role is to mediate the work orally to its ­f uture lay audiences. A closing colophon urges ­these same readers “not to blame the translation” (“thas awændednesse ne tæle”) but to “conceal what­ever may be found worthy of blame in it” (“hele swa hwæt swa thar on sy to tale”), omitting materials they suspect is inappropriate or, it may be, that they themselves find objectionable.17 The work was perhaps intended as a

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script for clerical per­for­mance, meant to be read aloud, ­whether in full or in bowdlerized form, in the hope of inspiring improvement in the frequent situations in which the use of the more pointed works in Corpus 201, such as Wulf­ stan’s fire-­breathing Sermo Lupi, was not to be contemplated. In the patronal writings of Ælfric, the courtly ethos of openness is already ­under pressure from the less trusting account of the capacities of the laity associated with Benedictine pastoral writing. In the Old En­glish Apollonius, a work that stretches the flexible awareness of audience enjoined by Gregory in Alfred’s Hierdeboc to its limits, this pro­cess has reached its culmination. The patronal has been fully absorbed into the pastoral. It is not surprising if the work is the latest in Old En­glish that we can identify as belonging, even broadly, within the Alfredian tradition of court writing explic­itly directed at the education and moral improvement of secular rulers. Between the mid-­eleventh and late ­fourteenth centuries, works written for En­glish royalty or the upper aristocracy in this vein ­were composed not in En­ glish but in Latin or French.18 Yet while this remarkable 350-­year hiatus can be explained as the result of the linguistic situation in E ­ ngland between the Norman Conquest and the Hundred Years’ War, this is not the full story. In this case, the withdrawal of En­glish from what had been one of its most notable textual domains, and its increasing identification with the pastoral that is the result, dates back all the way to the period of the early En­glish Benedictines and merely extends its sociolinguistic logic.

3. Late Old En­glish as a Sign of the Past The second observation is that, while this logic points ­toward an increasing public identification of En­glish with pastoral genres across the eleventh and twelfth centuries, this, too, is not the full story. Besides maintaining its standing throughout this period as a pedagogical language within the monastery, En­glish also maintained, and in some ways even strengthened, its identification with a dif­fer­ent set of genres. ­These are the genres that gave access to three impor­tant va­ri­e­ties of insular history: first, narrative history, as represented especially by The Old En­glish Bede and the Anglo-­Saxon Chronicle; second, constitutional history, as found in law codes and other kinds of ­legal writing; third, the history of lands and properties, as preserved in charters.19 In the ­century ­after the Norman Conquest, an urgent need to understand, reinterpret, and build on early insular history, at both a national and a regional level, powered several waves of Old En­glish copying and English-­to-­Latin



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translation. Histories in Latin and French, from William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum Anglorum and Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum to Geffrey Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis, carefully rec­ord their use of the Anglo-­Saxon Chronicle as an authorizing vernacular source. Henry of Huntingdon goes so far as to imitate the style of the work’s most famous poem, The ­Battle of Brunanburh, in his verse Latin account of the ­battle.20 The Anglo-­Saxon Chronicle was itself reissued in abridged Latin-­and-­English format in Canterbury around 1100 and was recopied and updated in Peterborough in the 1120s, with a final, anxiously excited entry during the 1150s, sometimes understood as the earliest piece of writing in a language that is clearly early ­Middle En­glish.21 The compilers of the Liber Eliensis, a documentary history of the monastery of Ely begun in the 1130s but not finished ­until the 1170s, included Latin translations of three Old En­glish cartularies in their compendium as well as other vernacular sources.22 A de­cade or so ­earlier, during the 1120s, the compilers of the Textus Roffensis de­cided to use a set of Old En­glish law codes to introduce the Latin codes that make up most of the book, ending with Henry I’s Charter of Liberties (1100), a key precursor of Magna Carta (1215). Written so as to preserve the archaic language of their exemplars, starting with that of Æthelberht of Kent, who had been dead for a half millennium, t­ hese codes preserved for posterity the only vernacular copies of several sets of early En­ glish laws that survive to us.23 An identification of ­earlier forms of En­glish with the deep past may also be in evidence in the enormous Eadwine Psalter (Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.17.1), written in Christ Church, Canterbury, during the ­middle de­cades of the ­century, as the most elaborate of several proj­ects involving Old En­glish biblical books associated with one or other of Canterbury’s two g­ reat Benedictine ­houses between 1150 and 1200. The producers of this richly illuminated book, in which interlinear glosses in French and En­glish and a commentary in Latin elucidate three Latin versions of the Psalms (“Hebrew,” “Roman,” and “Gallican”) in parallel columns, elected to use a prestigious but linguistically archaic ninth-­century exemplar for the En­glish Psalter gloss. It appears that En­glish functioned ­here in part to emphasize the sacred antiquity of the En­ glish Church over which Christ Church’s abbot, in his capacity as archbishop, was head, even as the French and Latin materials served as markers of modernity.24 By the mid-­t welfth ­century, a certain archaism, and the consciousness of this archaism, appears to have been a shared feature of Old En­glish literary practice, as copyists, annotators, readers, and audiences negotiated the increasing distance between written and spoken forms of the language. Yet as ­these scattered

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examples suggest, the value of Old En­glish considered as a privileged vehicle of the national past was, in princi­ple, of a dif­fer­ent kind from the value of Old En­glish considered as a privileged vehicle of pastoral truth. Often, indeed, this value might be described as symbolic. Only in a minority of ­these cases are Old En­glish texts situated to do the communicative work—­the work of opening—­ typically associated with the vernacular. In most, t­ hese texts are ­either absent in their original language; already translated, or other­wise subsumed into Latin books, in order to retain cultural currency; or included in deliberately archaic form as a way of validating ­these books. The Old En­glish law codes in the Textus Roffensis, which had long been obsolete, in princi­ple serve only to validate the Latin codes, which ­were still in force.25 According to the poem “Sanctus Beda,” En­glish in its character as a pastoral instrument, grounded in a distant and revered yet still living past, must continue to renew itself in its repeated encounter with the pre­sent, through its use as a vehicle of teaching and preaching. Only in this way can the ea­glets be taught to fly, and the Benedictines fulfill their spiritual responsibilities ­toward the lay “folc.” By contrast, En­glish in its character as an instrument and object of historical understanding threatens to vanish into an equally distant and revered but superseded past that it both commemorates and represents.26 This is why the ­earlier scholarly view that twelfth-­century interest in Old En­glish was motivated by nostalgia or antiquarianism, rather than any sense of its continued relevance, has its own plausibility. In ­these historiographic and ­legal contexts, it would seem that centuries before the sixteenth-century reformations, indeed well before 1200, the very obscurity of the earliest forms of Old En­glish was already rendering the language emblematic of the antiquity of ­England’s laws, ­England’s Church, and E ­ ngland’s religious vernacular itself.

4. The Corpus of Early ­Middle En­glish Before 1250 In the ninth, tenth, and early eleventh centuries, written Old En­glish was an indispensable partner in what, through much of the country, was effectively a bilingual textual system, with a broad generic range and an integrated, if complicated, series of functions. By the ­later twelfth ­century, by contrast, it had become an occasional player in a normatively trilingual textual system, with a narrowed generic range and a dispersed and considerably simplified sets of functions.27 Old En­glish texts remained crucial resources in the delivery of pastoral care, perhaps especially for older monastic ­houses with a tradition of preserving and



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copying Old En­glish books. Homiliaries largely consisting of old materials continued to be produced down to about 1200. But En­glish was no longer the preferred language ­either for texts written for the leisure reading of wealthy lay patrons, or for ­those concerned with government, law, and land management. Intramurally, certain male and female Benedictine ­houses still apparently used it to teach novices by way of Ælfric’s Grammar and Glossary or practiced communal reading of Æthelwold’s The Old En­glish Benedictine Rule.28 Existing Old En­glish texts and books ­were also objects of deep interest in their own right, as they ­were for the Tremulous Hand some de­cades ­later, despite his significant preference for pastoral texts and tendency to ignore ­those in other genres, including charters and l­egal texts.29 Although “written [Old] En­glish was still a language used by a select group of ­people for some tasks,” Latin and French ­were other­wise everywhere dominant.30 Even at this late period, Old En­glish performed vital roles in certain institutional contexts and regions of the country. The most impor­tant such context was still monastic, and the most impor­tant regions, so far as we can ascertain, ­were the Southeast and the West Midlands, near enough the border of the indeterminate area of Wales ­under En­glish jurisdiction called the March to be home to many first-­, second-­, and third-­language speakers of Welsh.31 Yet the discursive domains occupied by Old En­glish w ­ ere now separated both by their dif­fer­ent kinds of utility and by the intervening presence of major new corpora of texts in Latin, as well as French, the new written vernacular. It was perhaps more ­because of this separation and its effects on habits of reading and scribal training than ­because of prob­lems of comprehension that the orthographic, syntactic, and lexical features of written Old En­glish that distinguished it from spoken En­glish, and ­were clearly in certain textual contexts still valued for ­doing so, grew gradually vulnerable. Strikingly, moreover, the attenuated generic profile of the Old En­glish texts written and copied across the period continued to shape the body of early ­Middle En­glish texts that arose in the final de­cades of the twelfth ­century, from which ­these features ­were for the most part absent. ­These texts, many of them not written by monks, are urgently alive to po­liti­cal, ecclesiastical, and theological change and share a clear sense of their own contemporaneity. Indeed, although they claim vari­ous kinds and levels of cultural status, they are learned and intellectually up to date in ways that in some cases have only begun to be acknowledged, in a body of recent scholarship that has significant implications for En­glish literary and religious history more broadly. As we see in the last three chapters of this volume, the pastoral works in par­tic­u­lar belie their reputation for conservatism. Most are urban productions, some of them apparently

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written for the use of bishops or at their behest, at a period when the En­glish episcopate was as impor­tant a national force, culturally and po­liti­cally, as at any time since the turn of the millennium. Yet rather than stake out new sociolinguistic territory, the genres of early ­Middle En­glish text built on the same, particularized assumptions about the roles of the written language that had come to define ­those played by Old En­ glish. A rapprochement between the domains of En­glish and insular French developed ­after the 1250s, beyond the scope of this volume. An early sign of this rapprochement is a group of trilingual manuscripts from ­later in the ­century, where poetic works in En­glish, some new, ­others almost a hundred years old, are copied alongside works in French and Latin.32 ­Until this time, however, and in some generic domains l­ater, the development of a corpus of early M ­ iddle En­ glish writing was continuous with, not disruptive of, the trilingual textual system that had grown up during the twelfth ­century (see Appendix, ­Table 4). §§§ As tends to be true of phases of literary history in which languages, genres, and institutional affiliations are shifting, especially when they coincide with modern disciplinary bound­a ries, reaching a consensus over basic facts about early ­Middle En­glish texts and books has offered many difficulties, not all of which have been resolved. New information or improved argument has sometimes required repeated revisiting of received opinion, shifting the presumptive dates of key manuscripts and texts by de­cades, in ways that then re­orient other parts of what ­will always be our sketchy map of the period. Although the work of language historians has been crucial, not least for the rigorous candor it has increasingly brought to questions of evidence and its limits, source study and literary analy­sis have played a major role.33 Yet much depends to this day on the localization of texts and books by dialect or language state, as well as on the unscientific dating of scribal hands, where the findings of acknowledged experts are necessarily treated as evidence in their own right. Findings are thus often more tentative than they appear or than can easily be kept in mind in developing a synthetic account such as this one. This is true even though the chapters that follow move a good deal more slowly than t­ hose in Part III, feeling their way through literary terrain whose coordinates are in some cases still being mapped, building on the findings of very recent scholarship, and occasionally ­doing primary work of their own.34 Over the past fifteen years, for example, the old assumption that the linguistic profile of a book or text, once its layers have been sifted, offers a reliable



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indication of where it was made—­rather than, for example, where its scribe was born or raised—­has come to seem doubtful. This is so despite the singular usefulness of the wide range of ­Middle En­glish spelling systems, both to dialectology and to manuscript studies and literary history more broadly, in localizing texts and books whose early histories may other­wise be very largely a ­matter of conjecture.35 In light of the relatively small size of the surviving corpus of early ­Middle En­glish writings from before 1250, the usual uncertainties surrounding rates of textual loss, especially outside substantial religious institutions, also create more than the usual practical and methodological difficulties. Across the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, ­there developed a small but impor­tant body of texts that explored the association between the En­glish language and the pre-­Conquest past from the perspective of the later period. Albeit indirectly, ­these texts can be read as responding to the changes in thinking about the place of secular government and, by extension, the meaning of secular history taking place in the de­cades surrounding the murder of Thomas Becket in 1170 and the ideological rethinking and realignments associated with this event, which radicalized the po­liti­cal attitudes of more than one generation of churchmen.36 At one end of the spectrum is the enormous verse history of early Britain, over sixteen thousand alliterative long lines in length, now known as the Brut, not to be confused with the genre of insular French and M ­ iddle En­glish prose chronicles that share this name. Unusually forthcoming about its place of origin, the Brut tells us that it was written in the village of Areley Kings (“Erneleye”) on the river Severn, just north of Worcester, by a priest who names himself Layamon or Lawman, son of Leovenath or Levca, certainly ­after 1189 and apparently before 1216. It exists in dif­fer­ent forms in two books apparently from the late thirteenth ­century: London, British Library MS Cotton Caligula A.ix, and London, British Library MS Cotton Otho C.xiii. Although both copies have in­de­pen­dent passages that are likely to have been in the poem as Layamon wrote it, Caligula is evidently closer to this version, while Otho has been abbreviated and reworded with an eye to audiences unfamiliar with its distinctive poetic idiom.37 At the other is the anonymous, much briefer, and in its extended form likely composite Proverbs of Alfred. The provenance of this work remains a mystery, although its four markedly dif­fer­ent thirteenth-­century copies show that it circulated widely across southern and western ­England for perhaps a hundred years. The work, which appears to belong to the l­ater twelfth c­ entury and whose first copies are from the turn of the thirteenth, has always been printed in short couplets but is written in more or less the same alliterative meter as the Brut,

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albeit with frequent rhyme, almost regular in its closing sections. All but ­these closing sections, which may have a separate origin, purport to recount the maxims King Alfred uttered before a distinguished assembly, perhaps at the coastal town of Seaford in East Sussex, not far from the monastic ­houses of Lewes and ­Battle, in ­either of which it could potentially have been composed.38 §§§ During roughly the same period but also extending well into the thirteenth ­century, ­there further developed a larger body of early ­Middle En­glish pastoral writing, whose initial emergence was exactly con­temporary with the final phases of copying and reworking of Old En­glish pastoralia described in Chapter Eleven. Like early ­Middle En­glish historical writing, early ­Middle En­glish pastoralia responds to change, in the organ­ization of the institutional Church; in how the Church fulfilled its perennial responsibility to preach and teach; and in the form, timbre, and to a ­limited extent content of this teaching. In a reciprocal movement typical of the period, religious teaching grew more systematic on the one hand but also more affectively charged on the other. ­These are large topics that ­will continue to be of concern in the sequel to this volume. Of special interest for the pre­sent is the realignment of ecclesiastical priorities at the highest level that found expression in the canons of the Third Lateran Council of 1179. In their emphasis on ordinary clergy and the need to improve their education and discipline, its decrees anticipate ­those of the more famous Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, at which annual confession was declared mandatory for all adult Christians. Although a few pastoral texts to be discussed ­here ­were written ­after Lateran IV and reflect its par­tic­u­lar ethos, many ­were products of the experimentalist de­cades between the two councils, participating in the pastoral turn that was taking place at this period ­under the growing influence of the school of theology at Paris.39 The early M ­ iddle En­glish texts in question include three homiliaries of varying length and a miscellany of works in other genres. One of the e­ arlier of ­these is Poema Morale, a four-­hundred-­line poetic exhortation to works of charity and salvific virtue in the face of eternal punishment and the promise of heaven, composed in rhyming septenary couplets. The work’s dialect profile suggests it was written in southeast ­England. The first of its seven complete copies dates from the late twelfth ­century, so the poem itself may date from around the 1170s. It continued to be popu­lar throughout the thirteenth ­century. Vari­ ous indications suggest this is a monastic work, especially its relationship with a near con­temporary Sermon or Romaunz de Temtacioun de Secle by Guischart,



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a monk prob­ably of Beaulieu (Beadlow) in Bedfordshire, a dependent cell of the ­great abbey of St. Albans.40 Another is the Orrmulum by Orm or Orrm, a homiliary written in unrhymed septenaries, originally consisting of 250 homilies or more, including verse translations and moral and doctrinal commentaries on substantial portions of the Gospels. ­These are written in a complex and remarkably consistent orthography, updated while the work was in pro­g ress, which scribes are instructed to preserve. Orrm distinguishes the length of vowels by doubling the consonant that follows when the vowel is short (as with his own name), or using a system of accents when words end in vowels. He also distinguishes three forms of the letter “g.” His book, whose title we might expand as “Orrm’s libellum,” “Orrm’s speculum,” or possibly “Orrm’s microcosm,” is understood on paleographic grounds to have been finished before 1180. It was almost certainly written at Bourne Abbey, a ­house of Arrouasian canons in south Lincolnshire, a region from which we have ­little previous En­glish writing, except the tenth-­ century Blickling Homilies from Lincoln and the Peterborough Chronicle from nearby Northamptonshire. Ten thousand long lines of the Orrmulum, perhaps one-­sixth of the original poem, survive in a working copy written in Orrm’s own hand, with many paste-­ins and corrections, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Junius 1.41 Perhaps of roughly the same date is the prose dialogue Vices and Virtues, in which the Soul confesses the eight cardinal sins and other faults to an interlocutor who proves to be “Ratio be name, that is, Scadwisnesse” (discernment) and then receives instruction in the virtues in three stages, one of which also involves a passionate speech by the Body. This understudied work is found in an early thirteenth-­century book, London, British Library MS Stowe 34, from southeast ­England, in or near London. Although the text’s opening is lost, a statement that “tha the bieth on religiun, hie bieth avre ­under scrifte, swa bihoveth us alswa” (­those ­people who are in religious ­orders are always in a state of penance, and we should be also) suggests that it was not the work of a monk, hermit, or regular canon and that its author was a secular priest or secular canon.42 Also from around the end of the twelfth ­century are two related prose homiliaries, The Trinity Homilies and Lambeth Homilies. The Trinity Homilies (Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.14.52) is a set of thirty-­five prose sermons, again from southeast ­England, apparently written for use in a large ecclesiastical center where clerics as well as members of the laity would be in somewhat regular attendance. The Lambeth Homilies (London, Lambeth Palace MS 487) is a set of sixteen prose homilies and one in verse copied in the West Midlands

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a l­ittle ­later for use in a similar, apparently cathedral or diocesan setting. Lambeth, which was evidently copied from two or more ­earlier books of dif­fer­ent character, includes what may be the latest known copies of three homilies by Ælfric, in linguistically updated form, and five sermons also found in Trinity, all of which are recent. The complicated institutional associations of ­these homiliaries, which also include the earliest two copies of Poema Morale, are discussed in Chapter Nineteen below.43 Slightly ­later still are the series of works in dif­fer­ent genres that constitute what is now called the Ancrene Wisse Group, named for the most influential English-­language work of the period.44 This guide to the anchoritic life, written and rewritten by a Dominican friar prob­ably between the late 1220s and the 1240s, survives in full in four books, all made close in space and time to the work, as well as in further copies, versions, and translations. One of ­these books, London, British Library MS Cotton Nero A.xiv, preserves the author’s first version in its apparently original form, addressed to three ­sisters who ­were known to the author, at least by reputation. The second and third, London, British Library MS Cotton Titus D.xviii, and London, British Library MS Cotton Cleopatra C.vi, also preserve this version but do not include several personal passages in Nero, presumably in deference to other users. Remarkably, Cleopatra also has extensive, if unsystematic, corrections and additions apparently in the author’s own hand, as he reread his own work in an imperfect copy, redrafting as he went.45 The fourth, Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 402, preserves the ­later version, which accepts some of the changes in Cleopatra but ignores ­others and adds further new material. This is the version on which the critical edition and most scholarship is based (see Appendix, T ­ able 5).46 Ancrene Wisse is intricately associated with the texts that make up the Katherine Group and Wooing Group, the names given the two subsets of the Ancrene Wisse Group. The Katherine Group is named for the first work in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 34, a book intimately associated with the Corpus Ancrene Wisse and often discussed alongside it. It includes prose narratives of the martyrdoms of Katherine of Alexandria, Juliana of Nicomedia, and Margaret of Antioch; a treatise praising virginity, Hali Meithhad (holy virginity); and a narrative meditation on hell and heaven in the form of a psychological allegory, Sawles Warde (the custody of the soul). Copies of all ­these works except for Hali Meithhad are found in London, British Library MS Royal 17 A.xxvii. Copies of three of them, this time including Hali Meithhad, as well as Sawles Warde and Seinte Katerine, are also added to the Titus copy of Ancrene Wisse.47 The more open-­ended Wooing Group is named ­a fter a long soliloquy to Christ based on a passage of Ancrene Wisse that is found only in Titus, the



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Wohunge of Ure Lauerd (wooing of our Lord). It also includes four works that ­were added to the Nero copy of Ancrene Wisse at some point within a de­cade or so ­after this copy was made: Ureisun of Ure Lefdi (prayer to our lady); Ureisun of God Almihti (prayer to God almighty); Oreisun of Seinte Marie (prayer to Saint Mary); and Lofsong of Ure Louerde (song of praise to our Lord). Part of the Oreisun of Seinte Marie is also found in Royal, and Ureisun of God Almihti makes a second appearance in a book not other­wise connected with the group, Lambeth 487, the Lambeth Homilies manuscript.48 §§§ A select group of books and texts listed as late Old En­glish in Chapter Eleven and cited in the Dictionary of Old En­glish are linguistically sufficiently ambiguous that they are also cited in the ­Middle En­glish Dictionary. ­These include the large West Midland homiliary Bodley 343 (ca. 1175), which includes many homilies and saints’ lives by Ælfric and homilies and pastoral letters by Wulfstan among its diverse contents. They also include The Vespasian Homilies (ca. 1200), a set of four homilies in a Rochester book in which materials derived from Ælfric are combined with apparently more recent materials (London, British Library MS Cotton Vespasian A.xxii); a version of Æthelwold’s The Old En­glish Benedictine Rule made for the priory of the Blessed Virgin and Mary Magdalene at Wintney in Hampshire around 1200 (London, British Library MS Cotton Claudius  D.iii); and the works the Tremulous Hand copied into Worcester F.174, including Ælfric’s Grammar and Glossary, “Sanctus Beda,” and “The Soul’s Address to the Body.”49 Although ­these chapters argue for a fully integrated approach to all the En­glish writing produced across this period, most of ­these have featured e­ arlier and are mentioned only in passing h ­ ere. Among the other surviving early ­Middle En­glish texts from this period are a small group of songs, also not discussed ­here. The only two datable examples are embedded in copies of works of Benedictine Latin. Copies of Reginald of Durham’s vita of the Norfolk merchant turned ascetic Godric of Finchale (ca. 1070–1171) include three famous paraliturgical songs that Godric is said to have written by divine inspiration, “Crist and Sainte Marie,” “Sainte Marie Virgine,” and “Sainte Nicolaes Godes Druth,” as well musical notations and per­ for­mance instructions.50 The nearly con­temporary Liber Eliensis includes a quatrain that may have begun life as a refrain, differently connected with liturgical per­for­mance, and also recorded on account of its unusual authorship, in this case not the Holy Spirit but none other, it is said, than King Cnut:

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Merye sungen the munekes binnen Ely Tha Cnut king rew therby: “Roweth, cnihtes, ner the land, And ­here we ­these munekes sang!” (The monks sang merrily within Ely. King Cnut rowed close by: “Row, fellows, near to the land, and let us hear the song of t­ hese monks!”)51 This poem is no doubt a remnant of a larger body of per­for­mances pieces and shares with the Godric poems a connection between short En­glish lyric and the liturgy. Its apparent purpose in its literary context, to claim support for a monastery from a king with whom it had a complex relationship, remains analogous to that of the book’s Latinizings of Old En­glish charters. A number of shorter pieces and several mid-­thirteenth-­century poems whose exact date are uncertain have been omitted h ­ ere. Other­wise, t­ hese texts constitute nearly the entire surviving corpus of writing in forms of early M ­ iddle En­glish that appears to have been written before the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 or during the de­cades that followed it, down to 1250.52

Chapter 17

The Transformation of Insular History

1. Reformulations of Kingship in The Proverbs of Alfred Although early M ­ iddle En­glish historical and pastoral writing have a good deal in common in their desire to build bridges between the receding past and a rapidly changing pre­sent, they differ revealingly in their understanding of the relationship between the two. Late twelfth-­and early thirteenth-­century producers of En­glish pastoralia knew that vernacular genres from previous centuries needed modernization, supplementation, and in certain cases contestation. But the commerce of old and new in the books that they made, not to mention the continued copying and linguistic updating of pastoral works in Old En­ glish, suggest their general confidence that the tradition of pastoral care inherited from ­earlier centuries remained useful, if no longer altogether sufficient, and at least generally compatible in its goals with the new pastoralia that emerged in the period leading up to the Fourth Lateran Council. For reasons that had more to do with how written romanz understood itself in relationship to Latin than with direct competition between the two vernaculars, they also reflect a situation in which areas of significant overlap between En­glish and French in religious genres remained relatively few, as we see in Volume 2. On first inspection, by contrast, early ­Middle En­glish writers of texts whose subject is the historical past appear to show less sureness of purpose, just as they reveal less of their intended audience. ­These works, too, are aware of the need to adapt ­earlier understandings of the past in the light of changed circumstances. Yet while The Proverbs of Alfred and Layamon’s Brut are in a real, if attenuated, sense continuous with the pre-­Conquest textual traditions from which they represent themselves as arising, their relationships with ­these traditions has become vexed. By the mid-­twelfth ­century, the governmental structure of the En­glish polity and how it was understood by ­those in power had altered dramatically from

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a hundred years ­earlier, in ways that became yet more marked during the fifty years that followed, ­under the imperial Henry II (1154–89) and his less successful heirs, Richard I and John.1 Even by the beginning of Henry’s reign, moreover, the absorption and displacement of the Old En­glish historiographic tradition by a remarkable range of historical writings in Latin and French, some of which could claim high-­status connections with royal or noble persons, was virtually complete. Although the first of the two texts discussed in this chapter associates itself with a microgenre that still seems to have had associations with the En­glish language, the proverb, historical writing in En­glish thus had no choice but to find its place in a crowded and prestigious literary and cultural field.2 Set during a period William of Malmesbury acknowledges as one of good government, The Proverbs of Alfred begins with allusions both to the Alfredian vernacular tradition and, more substantially, to the writings of early medieval ­England’s g­ reat po­liti­cal theorist, Wulfstan: At Seforde setin theines manye, fele bishopes and fele boc-­lerede, erles prude and knihtes egleche. Ther was erl Alfrich, of thare lawe swithe wis, and ec Alfred. Engle hurde, Engle durling, on Englelonde he was king. Hem he gan leren swo ye muyen i-­heren hu hi h ­ ere lif leden sholden. (At Seaford sat multitudes of thegns, many bishops, many scholars, proud earls and fierce knights. ­There was earl Ælfric, deeply wise in the law, and also Alfred. Pastor of the En­glish, darling of the En­glish, he was king in ­England. He began to teach them, as you can hear, how they should conduct their lives.)3 The phrase “Engle hurde” seems to recall Alfred’s Hierdeboc, especially in light of the poem’s early comment, in the king’s voice, that “Ne may non riht king / ben ­under Criste selven / bute yif he be boc i-­lered” (No just king can be a ruler u ­ nder Christ himself ­unless he has had a scholarly education).4 Although other identifications have also been suggested, “erl Alfrich” might also just allude to Ælfric of Eynsham, in curious disguise as Alfred’s noble lay counselor.5 ­W hether or not this is so, the scene pointedly evokes accounts of royal assemblies such as the one that opens Wulfstan’s first law code for Cnut, a



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substantial recompilation of ­earlier codes issued on the king’s behalf in 1020– 21, not long ­after he had circulated his homiletic Cnut's Proclamation also ghostwritten by Wulfstan.6 ­After describing how the king took counsel with his advisers (“mid his witena getheaht ge-rædde”) “on Winceastre” at the Christmas season (“halgan midewintres tide”), this code describes how Cnut first urged his subjects “that they always love and honor one God above all ­else and single-­ mindedly uphold the one Christian faith” (“thæt hi ofer ealle othre thingc ænne God æfre woldan lufian and wurthian, and ænne Cristendom anrædlice healdan”).7 Only then does it proceed to the long list of laws that, in princi­ple, set out to show how the members of society should remain true to this fundamental commitment in their lives and social interactions. Alfred’s initial priority in The Proverbs is similarly to enjoin his ­people to love and fear Christ. However, the note Alfred strikes is still more elaborately homiletic, recalling the short alliterative two-­beat phrases that characterize Wulfstan’s distinctive preaching style: Mildeliche ic munye, mine leve frend, arme and edie lede liviyinde, that ye alle a-­dreden ure drihten Crist, luvien hine and likien, for he is louerd of lif. He is one god over alle godnesse. He is one gleaw over all gleawnesse. He is one blisse over alle blithnesse. He is one manne mildest maister. He is one folce fader and frofre. He is one rihtwis, and swo riche king that him ne shal ben wane noht of his wille hwo hine her on werlde wurthien thencheth. (­Gently I admonish you my dear friends, all living ­people, poor and rich, that you all fear our lord Christ, love and enjoy him, for he is Lord of life. He alone is good beyond all goodness. He alone is wise beyond all wisdom. He alone is joy beyond all joys. He alone is the most gracious Lord of humankind. He alone is ­father and comfort of ­peoples. He alone is righ­teous and so mighty a king that whoever determines to worship him h ­ ere in this world ­shall lack nothing of his desire.)8 Echoes of Wulfstan and the tradition on which he drew continue, as the king commands his ­great nobles to govern the “lond . . . ​mid laweliche deden,”

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then declares it “knightes lawe” to protect the “lond” and keep the Church in peace, and the duty of a “cherl” to plough, sow, and harvest. Wulfstan’s account of Christian society in the Institutes of Polity is also interested in presenting the duties of the social ­orders as a variegated but harmonious ­whole, whose members work together to build a just society, ­under the king, and whose final goal is eternal salvation.9 As the poem goes on, however, it becomes clear that the differences between Alfred’s speeches and the laws Wulfstan puts into the mouth of Cnut or issues in his own voice outweigh the similarities. Adapting his account of kinship from Carolingian po­liti­cal theory, Wulfstan understands royal lawgiving to incorporate all the ­orders of society in a manner that makes the king effectively the head of the Church. This model was already ­under serious pressure in the late eleventh ­century, during the papacy of Gregory VII (1073–85).10 By the mid-­twelfth ­century, as the strug­gle over the Church’s rights between Henry II and his archbishop, Thomas Becket, intensified, it had been fully repudiated by churchmen. According to the Policraticus, written by Becket’s secretary, John of Salisbury, during the 1150s, the role of rulers is merely to exercise justice on behalf of the Church, receiving their insignia, the sword, from the Church’s hand (“gladium de ma­nu Ecclesiae accipit princeps”), while endeavoring both to protect it and to mount a jealous guard on its privileges. “The prince is a sort of minister of the priests and one who exercises ­those features of the sacred duties that seem an indignity in the hands of priests” (“Est ergo princeps sacerdotii quidem minister et qui sacrorum officiorum illam partem exercet quae sacerdotii manibus videntur indigna”), John declares with typical audacity.11 Reflecting this new thinking, The Proverbs of Alfred thus gives Alfred no directives on ­either spiritual or po­liti­cal topics to pass on to the “fele” bishops and clerics gathered about him, and does not envisage his ­g reat abbots even in attendance at the assembly. All the king says about “hu ye mihten werldes wurthshipes welden / and ec yure saule samnen to Criste” (how you can garner success in the world but also gather your souls to Christ) is meant for the laity.12 Indeed, while the poem continues to use Alfred to give religious as well as social advice to members of all the estates except the clergy, it also increasingly lessens his moral authority even as a secular ruler. Despite references to lawgiving in the poem’s early stanzas, Alfred’s speeches are merely injunctions—­ surviving copies call them dicta, condiciones, or documenta (sayings, addresses, instructions)—­shot through with the proverbs for which he was known, that any Christian might address to one another, or that any of the male ­house­holders



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to whom the poem is addressed might pass on to their wives, ­children, and servants.13 As they go on, moreover, his remarks become noticeably concerned more with the “worldes wurshipes” of individuals than ­either their eternal salvation or any wider program for a just Christian society. Turning to the Disticha Catonis as a new source, the second part of the poem especially focuses on drawing exemplary portraits of honorable lay masculinity: Ne gabbe thu ne strute ne chid thu with none sotte, ne mid manyes kennes tales ne chid tu with nenne dwales. Ne nevre thu ne biginne to telle thine tithinges At nones fremannes borde, ne have thu to fele worde. The wise man mid fewe worde can fele biluken. . . . For ofte tunge breketh bon theh he self nabbe none! (Never argue nor shout at nor chide with a fool; nor chide any evil person with many speeches. Never start to tell your news at any stranger’s ­table, nor use too many words. A wise person knows well how to enclose much sense into few words. For often the tongue breaks bones even though it contains none!)14 As his speeches descend into antifeminist satire, and as the poem’s scribes respond to its growing informality with additions, omissions, and other changes that create unusually high levels of variance, Alfred’s sphere of legitimate concern as a ruler grows more constrained.15 In what may be a ­later addendum to the poem (although already pre­sent even in its earliest copies), the poem indeed briefly conjures a new narrative situation for Alfred’s sayings, which abruptly become ­those of a ­house­hold governor, speaking in old age to his son, as he prepares to “wenden . . . ​to this othir werlde,” in the hope of passing on his wisdom, as he must soon do his riches.16 The Proverbs of Alfred is clearly invested in keeping some version of the vision of good government and social order it inherits from an ­earlier ­century in play, as is also true of a more famous ­later ­Middle En­glish work, William Langland’s Piers Plowman, whose sudden changes of direction and medley-­like structure the poem might be taken to anticipate. Yet the poet can uphold this vision only by limiting its authority and narrowing its scope, representing it more and more in the form of maxims, not laws, in a pro­cess that unfolds within the poem itself.

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The tense relations between the Crown and the Church in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, culminating in the spiritually perilous years from 1208 to 1214, during which ­England was ­under papal interdict and most religious ser­vices ­were banned, not only helped precipitate new po­liti­cal theories and ecclesiologies; they coincided with an increased conceptual separation between the Church and the secular order. The rapid disappearance of the juridical instrument known as the ordeal ­after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which forbade priests to participate in a pro­cess that invited God to determine the accused’s innocence or guilt, is a case in point, furthering the secularization of a ­legal system that had for centuries affirmed an integral relationship between royal government and divine providence, as in Wulfstan’s law codes. Although all Christians ­were still sternly called to godliness, and although in practice the thirteenth-­century Church was as involved in secular governance as ever, considered as a strictly po­liti­cal entity E ­ ngland was in princi­ple a “godly society” no more.17 The poem’s jarring depiction of Alfred, as his dignity degenerates, allows the poem to gesture back ­toward the Wulfstanian sacralized vision of society with which it associates him initially, but also sideways ­toward the new ethical models that ­were coming into being during the period in which it was written. ­These models understood ­human society as in princi­ple not much more than a scene and proving ground for individuals as they strug­gle to act ethically with vari­ous degrees of success and sincerity, aided by divine grace mediated, especially, through the practice of sacramental confession.18 For all his homiletic and latterly prudential wit, the king’s most impor­tant function in the poem is to serve as an emblem of the perceived rupture in po­liti­cal theory, practice, and theology that is the under­lying subject of The Proverbs of Alfred.

2. The Modernity of Layamon’s Brut In some ways, Layamon’s Brut pre­sents a sharper, as well as vastly larger-­scale, example of how early M ­ iddle En­glish historical poets understood the relationship between the twelfth-­century pre­sent and their Old En­glish pre­de­ces­sors to be ruptured. Admittedly, it has come to seem likely over the past de­cade that the poem’s meter can, ­after all, be understood as continuous with that of Old En­glish poetry, not the idiosyncratic back-­formation it was once thought to be. Recent work on the poem’s metrical princi­ples, and the wider reconsideration of the history of En­glish alliterative poetry to which it is giving rise, is a significant new development in early En­glish literary scholarship.19 Although



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t­ here is a much more work to be done h ­ ere, a power­f ul approach to Layamon’s En­glish as itself an archaizing reconstruction—an attempt to re­create a vanished poetic idiom in order to cover the poem in a patina of antiquity—­also now need to be revisited in the light of this development, and may well no longer to be workable in its original terms.20 Despite the Brut’s newly reaffirmed stylistic links with Old En­glish poetry, however, and more general links with the rhythms of Old En­glish homiletic prose, the work not only represents but aspires to represent a departure from the Old En­glish historiographic tradition, setting a new direction for the ­future. The poem crosses historical terrain that may never have been traversed in a work written in En­glish before, devoting most of its considerable length to the earliest period of insular history, between the mythical foundation of Britain by Brutus ­after the fall of Troy and the slow defeat of the British by the Saxons and ­Angles across the fifth and sixth centuries. Further, this backward move, ­behind even the time of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica, is also a modernizing move, made pos­si­ble by Layamon’s decision to base his work, neither on Bede nor on twelfth-­century historians such as William of Malmesbury who regarded themselves as his successors, but on a fairly recent French source. This was the Roman de Brut (ca. 1155), a poetic history of Britain in octosyllabic couplets written by Wace, a secular cleric from Jersey (d. 1175), whose own source was Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (ca. 1135).21 The Historia, that most controversial challenge to the early En­glish historical tradition and its merely provincial preoccupation with the ­Angles and Saxons, is the work that brought the figure of Arthur into prominence, as a distinctively twelfth-­century response to the Carolingian account of kingship that dominated En­glish public life down to the time of Wulfstan. Although French Arthurian lit­er­a­ture based on the Historia proliferated across the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, Layamon’s Brut is easily the earliest surviving account in En­glish.22 Layamon’s choice of source and subject ­matter does not create the prob­ lems faced by ­later French and En­glish prose Brut chronicles, which must reconcile competing versions of the past as they carry the island story down to the pre­sent.23 Only near its end does the Brut intersect significantly with Bede, as the poem’s depiction of the epochal moment when Britain loses that name and becomes “Ængle-­lond” leads straight into Gregory the ­Great’s conversation with the En­glish slave boys in Rome, and the mission of Augustine of Canterbury it precipitated. Even ­here, moreover, Layamon draws on Wace and Geoffrey in depicting the mission’s bloody and tragic aftermath, with the deliberate slaughter

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of hundreds of British monks and clerics. Shortly before it describes the Britons’ final retreat into Wales, where Layamon notes that they still remain, “i-­w urthe thet i-­w urthe, i-­w urthe Godes ­will” (happen what happen may, just as God ­wills it), the poem also depicts the unification of ­England by a fictional eighth-­century version of King Alfred’s grand­son Æthelstan, and the beginnings of the system of guilds, forests, local churches, hundreds, shires, courts, and Parliament he is said to have introduced.24 Nor does Layamon’s use of En­glish necessarily produce the “confusion of sympathies” that have often been found in the poem, on the assumption that a given set of affinities (pro-­English, anti-­Norman, and fi­nally anti-­British) is hardwired into his choice of language and alliterative verse form.25 On the contrary, perhaps the most cogent conclusion of de­cades of study of the Brut as po­liti­cal argument is that the poem’s deep chronological account of the history of the islands of Britain and their ­peoples is wary of ethnic loyalties or suppositions about the ­favor in which God holds certain ­peoples. Beginning where The Proverbs of Alfred ends, the work indeed appears to resist any implication that the working of providence can securely be traced in the movement of secular history, as it necessarily can in sacred history.26 Like the Arthur story, which even at this stage of its ­career has the rise-­ and-­fall pattern that ­later turned it into an exemplary instance of the workings of Fortune’s wheel, the poem’s narrative of endless vio­lence, warfare, and conquest is much invested in the Christian virtues, especially ­those most necessary for the exercise of Christian kingship. This was a topic of consuming interest when Layamon was writing, as often across the medieval centuries. But the poem avoids correlating virtuous rule with positive outcomes, at least so far as the temporal order of ­things is concerned. Like John of Salisbury in the Policraticus, which emphasizes the fundamentally secular character of kingship by drawing many of its examples of just and unjust rule from pagan antiquity, Layamon affirms the earthly punishment of wicked rulers. But he also implies that the rewards of virtuous rulers are not on earth but in heaven. Despite the deep interest in the Consolation of Philosophy in tenth-­and eleventh-­ century ­England, and the Old En­glish Boethius’s claim to be the work of King Alfred himself, Layamon’s Brut is perhaps the first work of history written in En­glish whose po­liti­cal theology can fairly be described as Boethian.27 §§§ ­ ere it not for the Brut’s startling opening, indeed, the poem’s lack of interest W in Bede and other early En­glish sources might lead us to think that Layamon



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had so fully assimilated the striking new historical materials Geoffrey of Monmouth had put in En­glish circulation fifty years ­earlier that he saw nothing unusual about using them as the basis for a work in En­glish verse. Only as this opening unfolds does it become clear that the poet intends more than to add his own version of ­these materials to what was already available in this language, a proj­ect of doubtful utility, since any literate person could access them in French or Latin. He intends a reexamination of the role he believed his choice of medium could play in the multilingual literary culture of his day. The first lines of the Brut, resonantly written in the past tense, as befits a historian whose goal is to produce a permanent contribution to the historical rec­ord, serve a double purpose: An preost was on leoden, Layamon wes i-­hoten. He was Leovenathes sone, lithe him beo Drihten. He wonede at Ernleye, at æthelen are chirechen upen Sevarne stathe, sel that him thuhte, onfest Radestone, ther he boc radde. Hit com him on mode and on his mern thonke thet he wolde of Engle the æthelæn tellen: wat heo i-­hoten weoren and wonene heo comen that Englene londe ætrest ahten, æfter than flode the from Drihtene com, the al her aquelde quic that he funde, buten Noe and Sem, Japhet and Cham, and heore four wives the mid heom w ­ ere on archen.28 (­There was a secular priest [“priest among the ­people”] named Layamon. He was Leovenath’s son, may the Lord be merciful to him. He lived at Areley Kings, at a noble church on the banks of the Severn, as seemed good to him, near Redstone, where he studied his book. It was borne into his mind and into his pure thoughts that he wished to write of the noble among the En­glish: what they ­were called and where they came from who first possessed the land of E ­ ngland, ­after the flood that came from the Lord, that killed every­thing it found alive, except Noah and Shem, Japhet and Ham, and their four wives who ­were with them on the ark.) At one level, ­these lines assure readers of the poem’s cultural currency. Rather than follow the convention of anonymity usual in En­glish alliterative

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writing and observed in The Proverbs of Alfred, they introduce a clerical author by name, following the protocols of French historical works like the Roman de Brut. Other than the Orrmulum, Brut is the first known poem in En­glish to do so.29 Throughout his prologue, Layamon has a certain preoccupation with social capital, as when he stresses the Angevin connections of his source, the “boc . . . ​/ . . . ​tha makede a Frenchis clerk” (the book composed by a French cleric), which was written for “thare æthelen Ælienor, / the wes Henries quens, thes heyes kinges” (the noble Eleanor, who was the high king Henry’s queen).30 The Brut itself has no such connections and notably broad social sympathies, as would continue to be true of the tradition of alliterative historiography the poem inaugurates.31 Yet it has been cogently argued that the work’s frequent use of a high style derived from Old En­glish war poems such as The ­Battle of Brunanburh or The B ­ attle of Maldon is not backward looking in any straightforward sense, but instead reflects the growing regard for Latin epic in the de­ cades around 1200. This is the period when two significant new Anglo-­Latin works of neoclassical epic, Walter of Châtillon’s Alexandreis and Joseph of Exeter’s Daretis Phrygii Ilias (the Iliad of Dares the Phrygian), ­were coming into general circulation.32 Layamon’s implied contract with his readers is thus partly grounded in the paradoxical modernity he claims for his proj­ect. More specifically, however, ­these lines suggest that the Brut proposes to reflect on the course of early insular history from an expert local perspective. Layamon lived not far east of the border zone between ­England and “Walisce lond.” His name, literally “law man,” might have indicated to early readers not only that he has ­legal training but that he had the more specialist linguistic and ­legal expertise to “mediate in ­legal disputes between the Welsh and the En­glish,” an attested regional use of the word.33 Moreover, his church at “Ernlye” was part of a network of churches whose origins ­were British as well as En­glish, and in some cases bore traces of their origins in their dedications. St. Bartholomew’s, Areley, was not a parish church but a dependent chapel of nearby St. Peter’s, Martley, which had originally itself been a dependent of St. Helen’s, Worcester. St. Helen’s was one of two churches in the city dedicated to British saints, the tiny St. Alban’s being the other. St. Helen’s may have been founded as early as the sixth ­century, part of a network of British ­mother churches up and down the Severn. Martley, a dependent of a major Benedictine monastery in Normandy by Layamon’s time, was originally its ­daughter church.34 The Brut implies local pride in Helen, ­mother of the first Christian emperor and finder of the true cross, expanding Wace’s narrative to emphasize her role in the conversion of Eu­rope and in installing veneration of the cross as a



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key Christian devotional practice.35 In one of a number of moments in the poem where the separations and integrations of ­peoples (“leoden”) initiated by the division of races and languages a­ fter the flood attracts Layamon’s attention, the poem also goes out of its way to state that Constantine’s character and charisma was a consequence of his hybrid ethnic origins and upbringing, Roman on his ­father’s side, British on his ­mother’s.36 If a subsidiary aim of the Brut is to update the canon of historical writings in En­glish, by incorporating into it the rich new body of British narrative Wace takes from Geoffrey’s Historia (and perhaps other sources in Welsh or En­glish), the prologue’s account of how this proj­ect first “com . . . ​on mode” thus has reason to specify where this happened, as well as to whom.37 How, though, to reconcile this localization of the work’s point of origin with the prestige and international standing of Layamon’s major source, which he has no desire to hide? And how to make the case that a proper mode for the unified history he wishes to “tellen” is En­glish verse? The second half of the Brut prologue confronts ­these questions directly, turning to an account of how Layamon first obtained, then confirmed, and at last enhanced the authenticity of this source: Layamon gon lithen wide yond thas leode And bi-­won tha æthela boc tha he to bisne nom. He nom tha Englisca boc tha makede Seint Beda. Another he nom of Latin the makede Seinte Albin and the feire Austin, the fulluht broute hider in. Boc he nom the thridde, leide ther amidden. Tha makede a Frenchis clerk, Wace wes i-­hoten, the wel couthe writen, and he heo yef thare æthelen Ælienor, the wes Henries quene, t­ hese heyes kinges. Layamon leide theos boc and tha leaf wenede. He heom leofliche biheold, lithe him beo Drihten. Fetheren he nom mid fingren, and fiede on boc-­felle, and tha sothere word sette togadere, and tha thre bok thrumde to are.38 (Layamon went journeying far around this nation, and obtained the noble book that he took as his exemplar. He took the En­glish book that St. Bede made. He took another book in Latin that St. Alban made and the fair Augustine, he who brought baptism ­here. He took

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the third book, set it down between them. This book was made by a French scholar who was called Wace, who knew well how to write, and who dedicated it to the noble Eleanor, who was the high king Henry’s queen. Layamon set down ­these books and turned their pages. He contemplated them affectionately, may the Lord be merciful to him. He took quill pens in his fin­gers and wrote on parchment, and set together the truer words and pressed t­ hose three books into one.) The travels Layamon undertakes to find a source for his poem suggests that the two books that ­were already available to him before his journey to find a third did not describe the early history of Britain in sufficient detail for the proj­ect he had in mind. Yet both evidently have authority. Having obtained the “bisne” (exemplar) that is Wace’s Roman de Brut, he thus puts this work to the test, setting it down “amidden” them to collate their contents: a crucial preliminary pro­cess, considering that Wace himself admits that the Arthurian materials he derives from Geoffrey are “neither a complete lie nor full truth; neither all folly nor wisdom” (“Ne tut mençunge ne tut veir / Ne tut folie ne tut saveir”).39 Nonetheless confirming the general veracity of his new source, this laborious undertaking brings Layamon such joy that he must ask God to forgive him for the strength of his feelings at having found the win­dow into history he had sought far and wide. One of ­these two books is The Old En­glish Bede, on which Layamon may in fact have drawn. The other is an implausible Latin book, said to be written by “Seinte Albin / and the feire Austin,” St. Alban, Britain’s protomartyr, and St. Augustine of Canterbury, who lived several centuries ­later. Layamon thus authenticates his twelfth-­century French primary source against secondary sources in ­England’s two other main languages, whose authors represent Britain’s three other major p­ eoples, British, Roman, and En­glish, and who can bear witness to the state of the land during the third, seventh, and eighth centuries respectively. Only once he has completed this collation does he take his pens and parchment and write, a pro­cess that involves discerning which of ­these sources contains the “sothere word” at a given moment, in such a way that the finished poem becomes effectively an amalgam of Wace’s text and its comparands (“thrumde to are”), and in princi­ple thus much superior to the “æthela boc” that is the Roman de Brut.40 All that now seems missing are reasons to accept Layamon’s claim that his poem actually selects the “sothere word,” as well as his decision to write his history in En­glish verse. As to the first, Layamon mainly relies on his self-­ portrait as a passionate scholar with broad learning and special local expertise.



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Yet in the final quoted lines, he also implies a further reason for readers to trust his poem: its meter. By the f­ourteenth c­ entury, an association between alliterative verse in En­glish and the truths of history was sufficiently established that the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight can subject it to mild parody, claiming that his poem retells a real set of events, “As hit is stad and stoken / In story stiffe and stronge, / With lele lettres loken / In londe so has ben longe” (in the form in which it has been fixed and embedded in a firm and solid rec­ ord, soundly enclosed in trustworthy words, and as it has existed in the land from long back). The “lele” truth of the poem’s “lettres” derives from their being “loken” by alliteration in a manner that putatively guarantees their antiquity and authenticity.41 Layamon’s account of how his quill pens “sette togadere” the “sothere word,” applying enough force that his sources are “thrumde to are” on the parchment, may be a dif­fer­ent version of this topos. In this version, the alliterative verse the poet fashions from the pressure he applies as he renders his sources—­ pressure both to the sources and to the En­glish language, as he forces it into meter—is new but remains self-­authenticating. Readers can be confident Layamon has succeeded in his choice of the “sothere word” by dint of the fact that his own words are “sette togedere” in a style that reaches at once back into the past, via the history of the alliterative form, and forward into the ­f uture, via the fixity it seems to impose. Alliterative meter is a superior medium ­because the two modes of truth it unites, historical and formal, are mutually supportive. If this somewhat insiderish reading is plausible, this is both ­because Old En­glish poetry also declares its own truthfulness by appealing to a mix of history and form, and ­because of a certain similarity between the heavi­ly stressed doublets of Layamon’s alliterative verse and Wulfstan and Ælfric’s preaching prose.42 Yet the allusiveness of Layamon’s rationale for his meter, if that is what ­these lines are, and indeed that of the prologue as a ­whole, also suggests the limits of the claims he understands the Brut is capable of making on the wider textual system. Wace’s Roman de Brut survives in thirty copies, written and read across western Eu­rope well into the ­fourteenth ­century. Even ­after its own ­career drew to a close, the work remained a key influence ­behind the French and En­glish prose Brut chronicles that represented a mainstream vernacular tradition of insular historiography well into the early modern period. By comparison, despite the level of ambition on display in the Brut, five times the length of any ­earlier En­glish poem we know, it seems likely that Layamon was aware that his poem would remain relatively circumscribed, traveling too far from the place neither

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of its composition nor of its first social settings, the trilingual reading communities for whom its two surviving copies ­were made.43 For all the work’s brilliance and ambition, the Brut’s ability to communicate historical truths by drawing on the literary resources of the early En­glish past comes at a cost. To a much greater extent than was true for the early M ­ iddle En­glish pastoralia considered in the next three chapters, what was at one time a culturally prestigious literary form with broad social reach has ­here been refashioned as learned, specialist, and provincial. In the pro­cess, however, it has also taken on a sociolinguistic task we ­shall see early ­Middle En­glish religious writing was able to avoid ­until the ­later thirteenth ­century. It has reconceived the contribution that writing in En­glish can make to a culturally central literary genre, in a situation where the two most closely adjacent languages, French and Latin, both had Eu­ro­pean as well as national reach. In staking a claim to the superiority of the alliterative En­glish verse medium for communicating and stabilizing the truths of insular history, it has begun to represent En­glish explic­ itly as part of a trilingual literary culture that was already a ­century old and would persist for another two hundred years. As such, the Brut is an impor­ tant harbinger of many literary and sociolinguistic development to come.

Chapter 18

The New Pastoralia I

Secular Priests and Regular Canons

1. Pedagogical Ambition and Public Address As we saw in Chapter Fifteen, Old En­glish accounts of the religious vernacular ­were powered by a productive internal contradiction, one that allowed monastic writers to develop ambitious literary proj­ects that gave En­glish a status comparable to Latin at a local level, all the while also describing En­glish as a language suited only to the “ungelæredum woroldmonnum,” the general laity.1 As the influence of the Alfredian corpus and the vernacular l­egal tradition suggest, this contradiction was partly sustained by the use of En­glish as a language of government, in a polity in which monastic bishops and abbots played a prominent role. By the mid-­t welfth ­century, this way of thinking about En­glish had been obsolete both po­liti­cally and culturally for a hundred years. To suggest that any Eu­ro­pean vernacular had a status comparable to Latin would not be pos­si­ ble again ­u ntil the late thirteenth ­century. New insular texts in a range of genres, some of which became well known throughout Eu­rope, ­were mainly in Latin or the new vernacular, French. ­Because the connection between En­glish and the laity was still in force, any new writing in Old En­glish had a pastoral orientation. It is notable, then, that writers of early ­Middle En­glish pastoralia appear both very much aware of how Old En­glish writers represented the vernacular and interested in updating it for a new era. Addresses to the broad constituency the Liflade and te Passiun of Seinte Juliene names “alle leawede men the understonden ne mahen Latines ledene” (all uneducated ­people who are unable to understand the Latin language) occur somewhat regularly, and almost all this body of writing is composed for lay or mixed lay and clerical readerships, audiences, or congregations.2 This is true even of the works in the Ancrene Wisse

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Group addressed to lay recluses. Yet while Seinte Juliene itself is evidently written with a genuinely “leawede” audience in mind, intended for hearing by a diverse gathering, not reading, ­others make few concessions to their addressees, developing ambitious pedagogical and theological programs that imply an equally ambitious, if now generically particularized, understanding of the capacities of written En­glish itself. The linguistic hierarchy assumed by Seinte Juliene is in evidence in many early ­Middle En­glish prose works, often through the use of Latin words, phrases, and passages, more or less frequent, sometimes rubricated in manuscripts, and almost always translated. Many of the Trinity Homilies and parts of Ancrene Wisse in par­tic­u­lar include significant amounts of Latin.3 This practice, which can involve a density of Latin seldom found in Old En­glish continuous prose, at one level emphasizes language hierarchy, representing the vernacular as a local, strategic, and normatively lay instantiation of truths that exist in a prior and more permanent sense in the clerical language, Latin. At another level, it does the opposite, providing direct access to the authoritative formulation of ­these permanent truths, and thus opening up the universe of Latin learning in fragmentary forms to the non-­Latinate. In texts of mixed address, which assume that both clerics and laypeople are pre­sent in a congregation, or e­ lse that clerics have a practical or theoretical interest in the topic of lay instruction, Latin is also used in a more allusive way, to remind audiences of the undergirding presence of larger bodies of authoritative thought. ­Because they are few in number, in some cases difficult to situate confidently except in broad geo­graph­i­cal terms, and for the most part survive only in one, or at the most two or three copies, many early ­Middle En­glish pastoral texts have been seen as eccentric singularities, or even as rueful proofs of the difficulties involved in sustaining any tradition of En­glish writing in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries in the face of competition from French and Latin. With ­little more justification, this is how The Proverbs of Alfred and Layamon’s Brut have also been read, as we saw. Yet the synthetic study of early ­Middle En­glish pastoralia complicates any idea that En­glish textuality as a w ­ hole was becoming institutionally attenuated, despite the fact that this is indeed what was happening to Old En­glish texts and books themselves, even in the modernized forms in which they ­were being copied during the last quarter of the twelfth ­century. It is true that, with the key exception of the Lincolnshire Orrmulum, early ­Middle En­glish pastoralia derives from the same dialect regions most strongly represented in monastic late Old En­glish, the Southeast and the West Midlands. Yet far from showing that the institutional and civic settings in which



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pastoral works in En­glish ­were now written and used ­were drying up or becoming isolated, ­these works and books suggest nearly the opposite. Although the Trinity Homilies and the Lambeth Homilies, produced close in time and at opposites ends of the country, share versions of a number of homilies as well as of Poema Morale, textual differences between their copies of ­these works show that the books themselves have no direct connection with one another. Both are relicts of a larger group of books of the same type, fragments of one of which survives (London, British Library MS Cotton Otho A.xiii), the full story of whose institutional and regional affiliations may never be ascertained.4 Similarly, although the seven early manuscripts whose contents make up the Ancrene Wisse Group are all from the West Midlands, their dialect profiles show that works in the group ­were geo­graph­i­cally mobile, rapidly moving up and down the full length of the March, across at least five county and three diocesan bound­aries.5 While our ability to track the extent of such mobility is ­limited by a dearth of surviving books, it is clear that institutional and generic diversity ­were also hallmarks of early ­Middle En­glish pastoralia, despite the focus of this body of writing on lay or semireligious readers, audiences, or congregations. Monks, secular priests or canons, regular canons, Dominicans, and members of the episcopate all participated in sponsoring and writing a wide range of religious works in En­glish, to be preached in cathedrals and other large places of worship, performed in public, and read in private ­house­holds or anchorholds attached to parish churches. This small body of pastoralia appears to include the earliest thema sermon (Trinity Homilies), the earliest treatise on virginity (Hali Meithhad), the earliest confession manual (Ancrene Wisse, part 5), the earliest guide for semireligious ­women (Ancrene Wisse), and the earliest meditations in the Anselmian style (the Wooing Group, Sawles Warde) to be written in any of Latin Eu­rope’s vernacular languages. While the range and quantity of religious works in insular French from the seventy-­five years between 1175 and 1250 is much greater than ­those in early ­Middle En­glish (even taking updated copies of Old En­glish works into account), this is a significant corpus. The sophistication and intellectual ambition of early ­Middle En­glish pastoral writing is exemplified in the two late twelfth-­century works considered in this chapter, Vices and Virtues and the Orrmulum. Neither has enjoyed a reputation for ­these qualities or been much read for its content at all, at least ­until relatively recently. In the terminology introduced in Chapter Ten, both are “eccentric texts” par excellence, whose illegibility to modern scholars points to serious gaps in the surviving rec­ord, to serious deficiencies in our approach not only to a given text but to a surrounding period of literary and religious history, or to some combination of ­these ­factors. Both works address themselves

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to laypeople with restricted Latinity and, in the case of the Orrmulum, literacy. But neither the secular priest or secular canon who wrote Vices and Virtues nor the Arrouasian Augustinian canon Orrm understands this address as limiting in itself.6 Pastoral care was a consuming intellectual preoccupation for many churchmen during the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, as Pa­ri­sian theologians sought to systematize a mass of ­earlier writing on the topic, spurred on by two impor­tant Church councils, Lateran III (1179) and Lateran IV (1215), while maintaining the note of spiritual urgency ubiquitous during this period, especially in works dealing with contrition and confession.7 Both writers share a pastoral preoccupation at a theoretical as well as practical level, taking the opportunity offered by their proj­ects not simply to deliver pastoral instruction but to reflect on its implications, apparently for the benefit of a secondary audience of clerical colleagues. Writing before consensus had been reached about the content and limits of such instruction, both of them are alive to the difficulties of their task, careful in their use of existing genres, yet more than willing to innovate in their mode of pre­sen­ta­tion. Writing in En­glish, never a casual choice at this period, both of them also seem to have found a complex inspiration for their experiments in texts and genres derived from an ­earlier period of literary innovation, when written En­glish was still culturally central.

2. Navigating the World in Vices and Virtues On first reading, Vices and Virtues seems a fairly traditional work that stays closely in touch with its generic models. Part confession formulary, designed to instruct lay users in the examination of their consciences, part a stepped account of the virtues users must cultivate as they renounce their sins, the work is close enough to libri manuales such as Alcuin’s De virtutibus et viciis that it has been mistaken for an updated version of a lost work in Old En­glish. Although most of his few identified sources are from the twelfth c­ entury, including the pseudo-­ Augustinian De vera et falsa poenitentia, Anselm’s De similitudinibus, and Hugh of St. Victor’s De sacramentis, we can prob­ably assume that the author knew works in this venerable genre in En­glish or Latin or both. His choices of topics, especially for the virtues, suggests he may have drawn on several.8 Alcuin’s treatise was in significant demand in twelfth-­century ­England. Substantial Old En­glish se­lections from the De virtutibus are found in two books from the ­middle of the ­century, Vespasian D.xiv and Cambridge Ii.33, while an



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early ­Middle En­glish updating of Ælfric’s De octo vitiis, again based on Alcuin, appears in the Lambeth Homilies. Other ­earlier Latin treatises on the virtues, including the Scala virtutum (ladder of virtues), a version of Defensor’s late seventh-­century Liber scintillarum from post-­Conquest Salisbury, w ­ ere also in 9 circulation. The ready availability of texts such as ­these not only offered the Vices and Virtues author a model to imitate and expand on: adding the sins of the tongue and the senses to the eight cardinal sins; adding a dozen new virtues to Alcuin’s twenty-­five; and reversing his order, so that the vices precede the virtues, rather than follow them. It also allowed the work to use the liber manualis as a point of departure, even, potentially, an object of critique. Vices and Virtues addresses itself to a lay reader who is a­ ssumed to be eager to acquire the ethical knowledge needed in order to answer the call to imitate “thane rightwise and onfald Job” (the righ­teous and single-­hearted Job), a standard biblical figure for the prosperous but faithful lay Christian. Somewhat like the libri manuales, although more explic­itly, the text also assumes a state of justifiable spiritual anxiety in this reader. ­After hearing the verse “qui diligit mundum non est charitas Patris in eo” (whoever loves the world, love for the ­Father is not in them; 1 John 2:15), it is natu­ral for such a reader to ask “hu may ic on thane world wuniyen and naht hes ne luviyen?” (how may I dwell in the world and not love it?), then go on to won­der “hu may ic thær on wuniyen and ec be ye-­boryen?” (how may I dwell in it and also be saved?).10 At one level, the work consists of a sustained answer to ­these questions, laying out ways in which the layperson may practice even the virtues it identifies with the life of religion, while also carefully organ­izing its account into stages that pre­sent the “mihtes” (virtues) necessary to all Christians first. No virtue can enter the soul ­until the vices have been driven out by the comprehensive confession that opens the work, and the long-­exiled faculty of Ratio or “Scadwisnesse” has returned in order to direct this confession and to give the equally comprehensive instruction that is needed to raise and furnish “Godes ­temple” in Soul and Body as a dwelling-­place for the Creator.11 Erected on the firm foundation of faith, framed by charity, and roofed by hope, the building of this ­temple “ararde” by Wisdom as her “huse” (Prov. 9:1) is initially made pos­si­ble by “eadmodnesse” (humility), which any account of the virtues must presuppose and which is “Cristes awene mihte” through which he conquered on the cross, the tree whose fruit is eaten in the Mass, the virtue Mary possessed in full.12 The ­temple, whose master mason (“over wrihte”) is Wisdom herself, is held up by the “postes” of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit (Isa. 11:2–4):

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That bieth tho seven haly mihtes the we hier teforen habbeth ye-­ speken, the anginneth at tare the is i-­cleped Godes dradnesse, the is anginn of ­these wisdome (Prov. 9:10). Hier is i-­gadered swilch timbre the nævre rotien ne may (Matt. 6:19). And this derewurthe might is write therover.13 (­These are the seven virtues that we have spoken of before, which begin with the one that is called fear of God, which is the beginning of wisdom. ­Here is gathered such timber that may never rot. And this precious virtue is mason over it.) Fi­nally, the ­temple is richly “a-­stored” with a strikingly wide range of further spiritual, bodily, and contemplative virtues. Grounded in peace, which must dwell in both body and soul if Christ is to make his dwelling t­ here, ­these “mihtes” include the cardinal virtues;14 the obedience owed both God and “the bishope and his prieste and his louerde”;15 mercy, the subject of a retelling of a well-­k nown exegetical narrative about the four ­daughters of God;16 vari­ous virtues pertaining to penitence, from confession to patience;17 the bodily virtues of virginity, continence, chastity, and innocence (in that order), but also honestas (deportment), self-­discipline, and sobriety, as well as fasting and tears, and purity of conscience.18 The work closes with the “mihtes” of prayer, discretion, and perseverance, where Alcuin and o­ thers also end their itemizations.19 A broad movement ­here, from the general and abstract to the par­tic­u­lar and material and sometimes monastic virtues to secular or lay ones, is balanced by homiletic passages that recur throughout the work, serving to underline the fierce demands individual virtues may make on the daily be­hav­ior of the work’s prosperous lay addressees, and the gulf between the logics of the spiritual life and a life of ordinary worldliness. Thus discussion of the gift of counsel leads to an attack on the use of “chierches” or “chirch-­landes” as collateral by the “riche men” who are their patrons, and on their lending money ­either to “hathene (heathen) men” for gain or to merchants to finance overseas ventures. Like the unlawful bearing of weapons by knights, the fraudulent use of weights and mea­sures by tradespeople, the pursuit of ­either vendettas or prostitutes, or per­ sis­tence in any of the cardinal sins, all such practices are worthy of hellfire, ­unless they are fully repudiated through penance and confession to a priest or, if necessary, to God alone.20 The work also uses its encyclopaedic itemization of the virtues to instruct readers in the art of living virtuously as laypeople and attain the salvation they seek. In a number of cases, this requires taking a slant approach to the virtue



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in question. Thus discussion of the spiritual gift of “pietas, . . . ​that is reuthe on Engelisc,” focuses on the urgency of practicing works of charity, not for the sake of ­others but to safeguard one’s own soul: paying in advance for “masses and bienes (prayers) and ælmesses the me doth for the” (alms given on your behalf), rather than trusting to the fickle generosity of relatives ­after one’s own death. Discussion of “fortitudo, . . . ​that is strengthe of Gode,” focuses on the reader’s spiritual weakness, devolving into a prayer for mercy based on a penitential psalm (Ps. 50, “Miserere mei”), written “forthe te frieurien thanne thu hiede hafste” (in order to comfort you whenever you have need): “Let thane wellstream the nævere ne truketh of thine swete mildce yernen to me, swa that ic muye understanden hwanne he cumen thurh the flowinde teares the he bringth mid him to ­there fordruyede hierte” (let the wellstream of your mercy, which never ceases, run to me in such a way that I may understand when it comes, by the flowing tears which it brings with it to the dried-up heart). So the penitent pleads in the voice of David. Throughout Vices and Virtues, the emotional temperature remains strikingly high.21 Similarly, discussion of the gift of counsel summarizes Christ’s counsel to the rich young ruler to convert to the religious life (Matt. 19:16–30), only to warn against the dangers that lurk for any reader who may be tempted actually to follow it. Quoting Christ’s harsh words to ­those who look back ­after answering the call to “lateth all the woreld and nimeth Cristes mark uppen hem of sothe religiun, hwilche kennes swa hit bie” (forsake the world and take Christ’s make of true religion upon them, of what­ever kind it be; Luke 9:62), Ratio points out the eternal penalties faced by ­those who break their vows, but also adds that some ­people can lead a fully spiritual life even while remaining in the world (“the swithe gastlich lif lædet ­after thare woreld the nu is”).22 Despite the challenges the lay form of living pre­sents ­those determined to cultivate the full range of the virtues, the work persists in its advocacy. While acknowledging the necessity of “withheldnesse” and “fasten” (abstinence and fasting), it even argues against any lay attempts to practice forms of monastic self-­mortification as a way to contain sensual urges. “Lieve saule, ic thee bidde and warni that tu none hope ne have upe thine fastene, ne upe thine wæcche, ne uppe non othre gode” (dear soul, I beg and warn you, have no confidence in your fasting nor in your vigils nor in any other good deeds), urges Ratio. Seeking God’s kingdom and its “rihtwisnesse and sibsumnesse (peace) and blisse in the Haly Gaste” (Rom. 4:17), giving both God and neighbor what is due them, is better for the lay soul than performing ostentatious works of devotion.23 The virtues specific to the religious life continue to surface throughout Vices and Virtues, along with a wide range of allusions to ­those who can practice them

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fully, “munkes, kanunekes (canons), ancres (anchorites), and eremites,” always accompanied by advice on how to customize them for life in the world, to the extent this is pos­si­ble.24 But the work’s center of attention determinedly remains the character and in­de­pen­dent viability of the path to heaven figured by the layman Job, who patiently maintained the saving virtue of charity ­whether tempted by good luck or bad, even in the face of cavils by “his awene (own) wife and ec (also) of his awene frienden.”25 §§§ Like other works of this type, Vices and Virtues is written to be used not only by the literate lay ­house­holders who in theory constitute its target audience, but also by the priests responsible for their spiritual care, so that they may competently fulfill their appointed role as “wis and ec God-­frighty” (wise and also God-­fearing) counselors, “i-­fonded of religiun” (experienced in ­matters of religion).26 Despite this last phrase, which activates a permanent and impor­tant ambiguity in the term “religiun” by defining it as a pious habitus, not an institutional identity, ­these priests appear to be urban secular clerics, plausibly Londoners, given both the work’s dialect and its interest in the mercantile, and perhaps including secular canons, living in community. ­Every reference to the religious o­ rders, including “kanunekes” (regular canons), is manifestly from the outside, while the work takes care to stress the layman's obligation of obedience not only to God, the “bishope,” and his secular lord but also to “his prieste,” twice making use of a generic term for the regular and secular clergy, “hodede” (the hooded), that is seldom found in monastic writing. Although it works very differently as instruction, in this sense Vices and Virtues anticipates a ­later and more influential work that also highlights the role of the secular clergy in urging lay Christians ­toward holiness, Edmund Rich of Abingdon’s Mirror of Holy Church (1220s).27 One way the work notices this priestly readership is by laying out its instruction in three stages, separated by brief narrative interludes in which Ratio pretends to draw the work to an early close, ­because the Soul seems to have become disengaged (“aweiward”) or the Body to be exhausted from acting as Ratio’s scribe. Although both fervently appeal to Ratio to continue his disquisition, which the Body says has made her weep so much “that unneathe (scarcely) ich mighte this writen,” t­ hese interludes could serve as staging posts for priestly users unclear how much of the work’s teaching was appropriate to pass on to a given individual, or perhaps on a given occasion, when consulted by a layperson



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as formal “scrifte” (confessor) or informal “wise manne.” Ratio’s premature attempts to declare the work complete quietly imply that to nurture faith, hope, and charity on their own, or with only the gifts of the spirit in addition, may suffice for salvation, even if the account of lay virtue given by the work needs to be comprehensive.28 But the work also engages priestly readers more directly, offering them not only a series of resources to use in pastoral care but an analy­sis of the place of the pastorate in the increasingly diversified Church of the late twelfth ­century. This topic is raised explic­itly in the discussion of charity, the virtue that pertains to Christian community, early in the treatise. If the ­imagined lay reader of the work is called to be Job, and “­those who have left this fickle world and serve our Lord in religious orders” (“tho the ­these swikele woreld habbeth forlaten and servith ure Drihten on religiun”) are called to be Daniel, then the Church’s shepherds (“gastliche hierdes”) are called to be Noah, “protecting and steering not only ­those who are in the world but also ­those who have forsaken it” (“lokin and stieren tho the bieth in thare woreld and ec tho the bieth ute”).29 All must obey ­these steersmen, who speak in God’s own voice as they go about this task. Now they look up to the stars “mid ­here gastliche thohtes” (in their spiritual thoughts), declaring the joys of heaven that await; forecasting the “evele stormes” that seek to stop the ark reaching its destination; and warning of wear and tear to the ship’s halyards, “the bieth i-­broiden mid thrie strænges: of rihte ileave, and of faste hope te Gode, and of thare sothe luve the is i-­hoten carite” (which are woven of three strong ropes: of true belief, and of firm hope in God, and of the true kind of love that is called charity). Now they peer down into the ocean, to warn against the “stanroches” (stony rocks) of “the harde hierte” (hardened heart), on which the ark wrecks if not steered properly. Helmsmen of the ark of the entire Church, it is their difficult task to bring her safe to land, losing none of ­those entrusted to their care, any more than did Noah himself.30 If Vices and Virtues is at once a textual Noah, a work of spiritual navigation for literate laypeople steering through the world, and a guide to priestly Noahs charged with helping them, this passage suggests that it was also intended to be read in a third and more politicized way, as an argument for the centrality of Noahs, principally the secular clergy, to the Church at large. Hence the dominance of the priestly figure of Ratio, who speaks throughout the long second half of the work, and whose confident allusions to the virtues and vices of monks, canons, hermits, and recluses suggest his mastery over members of t­ hese prestigious religious professions also. Although a ­great deal is still mysterious about

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Vices and Virtues, the work is clearly energized by the growing prominence in the late twelfth ­century not only of pastoral care as such but of the secular clergy in its delivery. The work’s considerable spiritual ambition for its ideal lay readers expresses its equal ambition for t­ hose it seeks to establish as their most appropriate directors. On this reading, then, Vices and Virtues views En­glish prose not only as a medium for the instruction of the laity, but also as a medium of public discourse, at least within a specific textual community and potentially more broadly. At a minimum, the work sets out to develop a proud and demanding professional self-­understanding in the author’s clerical colleagues. Traces of its success can be seen in the fastidious corrections that continued to be made to the surviving copy, itself written de­cades ­later than the work itself.31 Although this goal partly has the effect of instrumentalizing the work’s teachings by representing them as ­there to be passed on to ­others, the work also serves as a guide to life in the world for secular priests themselves, who might also be tempted to convert to a life of religion, a common occurrence at this period, or to engage in dubious dealings with ­others. Although its comes to the surface only occasionally, the author does not forget the fact that his fictional dialogue takes place within the mind of a single individual, not between priest and layperson, recognizing in the form of his work the solidarity that existed between all classes of Christian living in the world, priest and lay. At a maximum, the work may have been meant to contribute to a rather more fractious conversation about the ­orders of the Church and the preeminence of pastoral care as a mea­sure of their relative status. Professional religious come in for criticism on several occasions. The Soul’s account of the sin of pride disparages “sum who forlæteth the world and nimeth the clothes of religiun, and sone hemselvun healdeth for haly, and unwurth healdeth of othre” (certain ­people who abandon the world and put on religious habits, and at once regard themselves as holy and regard ­others as unworthy). ­Later passages castigate ­those who “wandeth ­here clathes and naht ­here theawes” (change their clothes but not their be­hav­ior), refusing to practice humility by accepting correction from ­others, or note that “bathe gode and evele” answer Christ’s “swete clepienge” to quit the world, so that d­ oing so confers no special grace of itself.32 Although their ferocity can be exaggerated, debates about the status of the vari­ous ­orders of the Church, both intrinsically and in relation to their respective functions, w ­ ere a feature of twelfth-­century institutional life. One aim of the work, with its cleverly customized accounts of the vices and virtues, may have been to press the claims of the secular clergy as the Church’s most ­adept shepherds to the laity, and to do so in a vernacular medium where the dominance



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of monastic writers such as Ælfric and Wulfstan had for two centuries remained undisputed.33

3. Willful Learning and the Orrmulum While we no longer have the first sections of Vices and Virtues, which might have included an account of why and for whom it was written, we do have an extended prologue to the Orrmulum, apparently added a­ fter the work was complete.34 Orrm’s opening, which learnedly weaves topoi from the classical (“Ciceronian”) epistolary preface into a framework modeled on an early form of the exegetical (“Type C”) prologue, describes the poem’s beginnings in a commission by his ­brother Walter, a fellow canon of the same ­house. Walter is said to have requested Orrm that he “wennd inntill Ennglissh Goddspelless hallȝe lare” (translate the holy teaching of the Gospel into En­glish), not for Walter’s sake alone, but also for the benefit of “Ennglissh follc” as a ­whole: Þu þohhtesst tatt itt mihhte wel till mikell frame turrnenn, Ʒif Ennglissh follc, forr lufe off Crist, itt wolde ȝerne lernenn, & follȝhenn itt & fillenn itt wiþþ þohht, wiþþ word, wiþþ dede; & forrþi ȝerrndesst tu þatt icc þiss werrc þe shollde wirrkenn. (You thought that it might well redound to ­g reat good, if En­glish ­people would study it with desire for the love of Christ, and follow it and fulfill it with thought, with word, with deed; and for this reason you ­were desirous that I should write this work for you.)35 Orrm’s response to this commission was not to render the Gospels in their entirety but to produce versions of all the Gospel readings in “þe messeboc / In all the ȝer att messe,” followed by suitably pitched homiletic expositions, so that “mann birrþ spellenn to þe follc off þeȝȝre sawle nede” (one may preach to the ­people about the needs of their souls). Orrm goes on to characterize the “follc” who w ­ ill hear this preaching in two dif­fer­ent ways, as the “læwedd (uneducated) follc” (the laity), but also as “all Ennglisshe lede” (­people). However, the contrast between “mann” and “follc” in this passage shows that he presupposes a division between ­those who read from the book, as preachers, and ­those who hear it, as congregations.36 Throughout its opening sequence, the Orrmulum evidently understands itself to be using En­glish as a language of clerical address, as it proclaims the

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signal importance of pastoral care, ­here in the specific form of Gospel preaching, as well as of the professionals who undertake it. Orrm indeed solemnly states that his reason for writing is no less than eternal salvation itself: & ȝiff mann wile witenn whi icc hafe don þiss dede, Whi icc till Ennglish hafe wennd Goddspelless hallȝe lare: Icc hafe itt don forrþi þat all Crisstene follkess berrhless Iss lang uppo þatt an; þatt teȝȝ Goddspelless hallȝhe lare Wiþþ fulle mahhte follȝhe rihht Þurrh þohht, þurrh word, þurrh dede. (If a person wants to know why I have done this work, why I have translated the Gospel’s holy teachings into En­glish: I have done it for the reason that the salvation of all Christian persons rests on this one ­thing: that they follow the Gospel’s holy teachings appropriately with all their power, through thought, through word, through deed.)37 More specifically, Orrm continues, working carefully with excerpts of commentaries by Pascalius Radbertus (d. 865) and Honorius Augustodunensis (d. 1154), salvation depends on the preaching of all four Gospels, each of which is bountifully represented in his long work. Only when they are taken together do the four Gospels lay out in full the seven ­great deeds that Christ performed for humankind and the seven sacraments ­these deeds inaugurated. ­These lie at the heart of the “god word & god tiþennde” (good words and good tidings) signified by the word “goddspell.” The four Gospels are the four wheels of Solomon’s chariot (“currus Salomoniss”). The cart is the Gospel. Solomon, whose name signifies peace, is Christ. By proclaiming the good news from all four Gospels, Christ’s evangelists and preachers (“lerninng-­cnihhtess”) do their part to keep the wheels of Solomon’s “karrte” in motion, bearing “soþ (true) Crist fra land to land” and “fra burrh (town) to burrh” to bring “menn upp inntill heffness blisse.”38 The preaching mission that Orrmulum announces and seeks to enable is thus explic­itly apostolic in character. Conflating the past of sacred history with the pre­sent in which the Church must realize its meaning, the work and ­those who preach from it continue to answer Christ’s call to his apostles to convert the nations. Like the apostles, they draw their strength from the “Haliȝ Gast,” who descended at Pentecost and who bestows on them all they need to carry out their task, including “god witt inoh off all hiss hallȝhe lare” (plentiful understanding of his holy teaching). ­Because much of this “witt” is provided by the Orrmulum itself, we may take it that this work, too, is on one level taken to be written



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­ nder divine inspiration, as mediated to Orrm through the scriptures themu selves and through the authoritative commentaries he uses as his sources.39 Like Vices and Virtues, then, the Orrmulum sets out to build both an exalted sense of professional purpose in the preachers who use it, ­whether canons like Orrm and Walter or local secular priests, and an equally high sense of the importance of this group in the con­temporary Church. A passage in the prologue on Orrm and Walter’s joint need to withstand “Þe dom off all þatt laþe flocc þatt iss þurrh niþ forrblenndedd” (the opinion of that ­whole foul com­pany that is entirely blinded by envy) might be merely formulaic but might also suggest that one motivating ­factor ­behind its composition was once again jostling between the ecclesiastical ­orders.40 ­Here the celibate Arrouaisian canons of Bourne, many of whose customs ­were derived from ­those of the ascetic Cistercians, w ­ ere in a strong position to claim preeminence. ­Later in the work, Orrm argues directly that educated priests—­“ þatt lærede genge” (learned com­pany), whose task is to preach, teach, baptize, shrive, bury, and pray for the laity—­a re of higher spiritual status than celibate monks, using the same image of the pastor as navigator found in Vices and Virtues but without reference to Noah. “Ϸiss lott off all Crisstene follc iss heȝhesst undderr Criste, / Forr itt iss sett her att te ster to sterenn baþe þoþre” (this group is the highest ­under Christ of all Christian ­people, for it is set ­here at the helm to steer both the ­others).41 We last saw this position clearly taken in the tenth-­ century Blickling Homilies, made for use by members of the secular community at Lincoln Cathedral, fifty miles north of Bourne and its diocesan seat. The length and ambition of Orrmulum, written at the same period as the copying of the last ­really substantial Ælfrician homiliary, Bodley 343, implies that the work was consciously intended as a competitive response to the monastic Catholic Homilies, the work that, long ago, had attempted to render secular homiliaries such as Blickling and Vercelli obsolete.42 Like Vices and Virtues too, the Orrmulum takes care to focus on the needs and lives of its lay addressees, evoking ­these with a sense of intimacy perhaps learned from a recent masterpiece in the newer style of preaching ad status (to the social ­orders), Honorius’s Speculum ecclesie (mirror of the Church), a Latin work from the early years of the twelfth ­century dedicated to the monks of Canterbury.43 Orrm gives warm, if quietly patriarchal, accounts of the mutual support and counseling enabled by marriage, mapping the path to lay salvation with an optimism that once again evokes Old En­glish homiliaries such as Vercelli, even if the doctrinal grounds for optimism is no longer the suffrages of the saints who intervene on behalf of sinners at the Last Judgment, but the practice of sacramental confession and the cleansing fires of purgatory.44

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§§§ Where the Orrmulum differs from the parts of Vices and Virtues that survive is in the strength of the work’s commitment to the princi­ple that, despite crucial professional differences between its priestly users and lay addressees, both are fi­nally “versions of the same ideal,” called to follow the one true path to eternal salvation.45 As Orrm states repeatedly throughout the prologue, all Christians, “lærede” and “læwedd” alike, must learn to imitate and worship Christ by practicing the same study of “Goddspelless hallȝhe lare,” whose goal is transformation within and without, as knowledge is itself transformed into saving action. If “all Ennglishhe lede” “lisstenn” “wiþþ ære” (with ear) to his “Ennglisshe spæche,” and then “wiþþ herrte . . . ​it trowwenn,” “wiþþ tunge . . . ​spellenn itt” and fi­nally “wiþþ dede . . . ​it follȝhenn” (believe it with their hearts, speak it with their mouths, and follow it with their works), all alike ­w ill “winnenn unnderr Crisstenndom at Godd soþ sawle berrhless” (win from God within the Christian faith true salvation of the soul).46 One sign of this commitment is generic. The work is written for pulpit delivery, with its Gospel passages divided into lections and marked up by a second scribe in the manuscript with preachers clearly in mind. But it also envisages another kind of use, as private reading material for t­ hose who wish to read large portions of the Gospels, with learned commentary, in the En­glish vernacular. Remarkably, rather than being ordered liturgically, by preaching occasion, the work follows the order of the Gospels, moving between one and another like a Gospel harmony, as it describes Christ’s seven g­ reat deeds in chronological order, before moving on to episodes in the history of the early Church from Acts in its closing homilies (a nearly complete Latin listing of homily topics is found at the end of the prologue). ­There are also bridge passages that are part of no homily but set the scene. One describes Adam’s fall in preparation for a series of homilies on the conception and birth of Christ delivered during Advent and the Christmas season. Although ­these features of the book could be helpful in ­house­hold instruction of laypeople, they suggest it was also intended to be used in vernacular Bible study, perhaps by canons and parish priests.47 Two other features of the work also suggest it had direct designs on the spiritual lives of its professional users to an extent that Vices and Virtues does not. One is its choice of sources, so far as ­these are known. Orrm drew primarily on the Glossa ordinaria but also made use of other commentaries in what was clearly a fine exegetical library. Although our picture of this library is still far from complete, ­these included not only recent commentaries by Honorius and ­others but an older rarity, John Scotus Eriugena’s commentary on John’s Gospel.



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Orrm seems to have read this work in a copy similar to the one Anselm and Ralph of Laon used for the Glossa but takes passages from it the Glossa omits. It has been noted that Bourne perhaps obtained certain of its books directly from the m ­ other ­house at Arrouaise, not far from Laon in northern France.48 While the Glossa draws heavi­ly on Carolingian sources some of which ­were also used by Ælfric, the Orrmulum thus had a level of intellectual currency the Catholic Homilies had lost by the l­ater twelfth c­ entury. In one sense, this would have made more difference to its educated users than to their lay congregations, enhancing the work’s value for their study of the scriptures as well as its prestige. In another sense, the work’s grounding in recent exegesis would have been of equal importance to anyone who encountered it, since it also grounds the work’s carefully articulated spiritual ethos. This seems to derive not only from the secular cathedral school at Laon but from the ­great Augustinian school of St. Victor in Paris, a center of distribution for the Glossa, whose teachings provided a vital intellectual resource for regular canons and ­others seeking to theorize pastoral care in the era of the new monasticism and were one of the great engines of twelfth-­century Latin Christian thought. Although Orrm’s debt to Victorine thought has yet be demonstrated in detail, it may well be that the influential mode of affective intellectualism developed by the theologians of St. Victor, especially Hugh (d. 1141) and Richard (d. 1173), undergirded his entire enterprise.49 Victorine thought insisted on the mutually supportive roles played by the reason and the ­will in sanctification, and on the centrality of study to the ­great task of restoration identified in Hugh’s De sacramentis Christianis fidei (on the sacraments of the Christian faith) as the work of the Church, the meaning of the scriptures in their allegorical sense, and the task of each individual Christian.50 But it represents Christ’s redemption of humankind as an action not motivated so much as compelled by charity, in the same way as the ­human ­will can be compelled by desire. Charity brings God low in order to lift h ­ uman beings up (“Deum humilians, nos sublimans”), as Hugh says in the De laude caritatis (see Phil. 2:8).51 Orrm pre­sents Christ’s saving action in similarly urgent terms. Christ is “Amminadab” (Exod. 6:23), whose name in Latin means “ ‘Spontaneus,’ ” and in En­glish “Þat weppmann þatt summ dede doþ wiþþ all hiss fulle wille” (the person who does a certain deed with his entire ­will), just as Christ did when he “toc dæþ o rodetre all wiþþ hiss fulle wille” (accepted death on the cross with his entire ­will). As Hugh’s sketch of the double movement of charity suggests, salvation for Christ’s ­people lies in the desiring love they feel for him once they realize Christ’s desire for them. This realization comes about through a preaching program undertaken in the same spirit. Christ’s descent enables a reciprocal ascent.52

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“Ʒerrninnge” is thus a key both to Orrmulum itself and to the redemptive workings of God as Orrm pre­sents them. It motivates Walter’s commission of the work and, perhaps, both Orrm’s willing ac­cep­tance of the commission and his decision to cast the work in the affective medium of verse. It motivates preachers as they strive to create communities of yearning in their parishes, and continue their lifelong course of Bible study, united with the “læwedd follc” in a single, desiring pedagogical and spiritual enterprise. The ­great task of the Orrmulum is to induce preachers and ­people to “ȝerne lernenn” (yearn to learn) the Gospel, so that they turn knowledge into imitation grounded in reflection and action, a pro­cess on which their salvation depends. The other feature of the work that perhaps sought to engage priestly readers at more than a merely utilitarian level is its striking and rigorously implemented orthographic system, which scribes are instructed to retain in making copies, doubling “bocstaff” (written letters) when they encounter them doubled, and other­w ise reproducing their copy as they find it.53 Orrm’s spelling system is generally assumed to have served mainly as a guide to pronunciation, intended to aid preachers from other dialect areas or whose first language was French, and to ensure that anyone reading the work aloud preserves its strict syllabic meter.54 Orrm’s concern that his homilies be delivered exactly as written is potentially indebted to the directive approach ­adopted by Ælfric, who wrote the Catholic Homilies with a profusion and artificiality of style that was intended to nurture uniformity of doctrine and delivery in the En­glish Church, wherever they ­were “recited by the ministers of God in full” (“integre . . . ​a ministris Dei recitentur”), as he writes in the First Series. Orrm’s own version of this goal clearly influenced his choice of form and orthography and could have been a determining ­factor in his decision to write as such ambitious length.55 Yet the scrupulous ordinatio that Orrm’s heavi­ly worked holograph trusts ­later scribes to re­create, with spellings, punctuation, capitalization, paragraphs, and fitt divisions all marked up with a similar concern for consistency, suggests that more was in play in the Orrmulum’s self-­presentation than ensuring correct delivery, impor­tant though this was. While Orrm took certain orthographic conventions distinctive to written En­glish for granted, notably the writing of verse in the manner of prose, he was also evidently deeply concerned with how copies made from his holograph would look. Despite the unusual appearance of the holograph that is all that survives to us, the consistency, lucidity, and orthographic novelty of the fair copies made from it ­were clearly meant to be noticed, becoming objects of visual interest in their own right for readers.56 Like Layamon, Orrm is preoccupied with the potential of written En­glish verse to achieve a kind of fixity, and with the relationship between textual fixity



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and fidelity to the truth. Unlike Layamon, he chooses a Latin verse form that, in his rendering of it, requires total syllabic fixity, buttressed with orthographic fixity, rather than write in an En­glish verse form in which words are “thrumde to are” (pressed together) by alliteration, as Layamon puts it. Perhaps he considered alliterative verse to be unsuitable for homilies or for close translation of the scriptures. Although he notes that close translation is also impossible to attain in syllabic verse without adding “maniȝ word / Þe ríme swa to fillenn” (many words to make up the meter), he still understands himself to have rendered the divine word and its meanings adequately to readers and hearers.57 It is also just pos­si­ble that he identified alliteration with Benedictine rhythmic preaching prose and wished to distinguish even the sound of Augustinian preaching from its monastic rival. Also unlike Layamon, the truth that concerns Orrm is not the truth of national history, in which the hand of providence is sporadically discernible at best, but the truth of sacred history, proclaimed to “Ennglissh lede” annually as part of the liturgical round. In a broad sense, any preaching copy of Orrmulum would become a “messeboc,” written to be used alongside standard ser­vice books, which (at least in religious ­houses) increasingly had their own detailed ordinatio to ensure consistent per­for­mance. Backed by a strong sense of the prestige that still resided in written En­glish, Orrm set out to forge a fit medium for “Goddspelless hallȝhe lare” in En­glish that would treat it with proper reverence. For his fellow canons and other priestly users, Orrm’s orthography might be perceived as an act of worship and an invitation to worship.58 For Orrm, Walter, and their colleagues, written En­glish was the language of the laity, in the sense that it was the language of preaching and teaching and of the local part of the Church, considered ­u nder the sign of the Christian “Ennglissh lede.” But while its areas of authority ­were now ­limited to the pastoral, for ­these regular canons, as for the author of Vices and Virtues, this did not limit the intellectual or indeed the sacred power of En­glish within its own sphere, any more than it did for the Benedictine author of “Sanctus Beda.” Questions related to pastoral care ­were, ­after all, increasingly central to the learned religious culture of their day. A ­great deal had changed since the late tenth-­ century monastic reform movement whose revival is called for in “Sanctus Beda” and whose canonical texts provided key points of departure for ­these two clerical writers, as the singularity of the Orrmulum is perhaps designed to express. The ambitious and complex account of written En­glish this reform movement had made explicit still provided them with an essential context and framework in devising their own innovative literary proj­ects.

Chapter 19

The New Pastoralia II Diocesan Preaching Books

1. Monastic Pastoral Care in a Reor­ga­nized Church Judging by Vices and Virtues and the Orrmulum, the two innovative and intense works discussed in the previous chapter, the early ­Middle En­glish corpus that took Old En­glish pastoralia as its point of departure was well adapted to participate in the institutional and intellectual changes happening in the late twelfth-­and early thirteenth-­century Church, and at a sophisticated level. T ­ hese are far more than merely provincial texts, written for local or niche readerships. ­W hether Orrm and the Vices and Virtues author thought of themselves as appropriating a mainly monastic vernacular tradition or as continuing alternative traditions that no longer survive to us, they write with obvious confidence both in the inherited status of their medium and in its f­ uture. Orrm is particularly conscious that he is inaugurating not only a major text for which he anticipates significant demand but a new model of writing En­ glish, with the potential to replace both the traditional En­glish spelling systems still in use at the time and what he evidently saw as the worryingly diverse new ones to which they ­were beginning to give way. If Vices and Virtues assumes that its circulation ­will be driven by demand, as priests and lay ­house­holders discover a need for the work, the Orrmulum has a more active eye ­toward the ­f uture, envisaging not only copyists but scriptoria trained in the peculiarities of its orthography and ordinatio. While we no longer have any of the pos­si­ble fruits of its ­labors, the careful preparations for copying evidenced in Orrm’s holograph suggest that one such scriptorium, at Bourne Abbey itself, indeed existed. Making due allowance for differences in genre, author, and intended audience, we could make similar remarks about any of the other early ­Middle En­ glish pastoral works discussed in the final two chapters of this volume, which



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can best be thought of as a diptych. ­These remarks hold for the two homily collections discussed in this chapter, both likely dated within less than thirty years of the Orrmulum and Vices and Virtues: The Trinity Homilies and The Lambeth Homilies, the first of them entirely made up of new texts, the second a blend of new and linguistically updated older ones. As we see in Chapter Twenty, they also hold for a number of apparently slightly ­later works, including the virtuoso Ancrene Wisse and the ten or so works associated with it. All ­these works are alive to the concerns and exigencies of their moment in a way that takes the presence of a respected tradition of vernacular pastoralia for granted, even if they also set out to challenge this tradition. The consciously disruptive Orr­ mulum is the only religious text in En­glish from this period whose author felt the need to offer a sustained justification of his use of the vernacular of the kind often associated with periods of sociolinguistic change, from the ninth ­century to the sixteenth. All Orrm’s peers built on what they took to be stable ground. By framing their relationship with monasticism in competitive terms, Orrm and the Vices and Virtues author ­were setting out to elevate the status of regular canons and secular priests over that of religious contemplatives, both in an absolute sense and in the more par­tic­u­lar area of pastoral care. Yet they ­were also acknowledging that, when it came to pastoralia in En­glish, texts written by monks and copied in monasteries had been central for so long that new proj­ ects like theirs had no choice but to keep ­these texts firmly in view, as rivals and reference points. As the twelfth ­century gave way to the thirteenth, the claims to pastoral preeminence that monks in certain ­houses had continued to make for themselves nonetheless became impossible to sustain. The claim already makes ­limited sense with re­spect to The Lambeth Homilies, prob­ably copied in the ambit of Worcester Cathedral Priory close in time to a pivotal event in the life of the community, Innocent III’s canonization in 1203 of the ­great late eleventh-­ century preaching bishop Wulfstan II (d. 1095), whose own impor­tant vernacular homiliary, kept at Worcester, may have been rebound at this period. This is the substantial collection of homilies by Wulfstan I and Ælfric that is now Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Hatton 113 and 114.1 By the time Ancrene Wisse was written, likely soon before 1230, some fifty years ­after the Orrmulum and fifteen a­ fter the Fourth Lateran Council declared annual confession obligatory for ­every adult Christian, any claim that monks could be at the forefront of lay pastoral care was officially a ­thing of the past. In response to the same institutional and cultural imperative to differentiate the ­orders of the Church that preoccupies Orrm and the Vices and Virtues author,

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t­ here ­were now canonical restrictions on cloistered religious taking a direct role in pastoral care. At the Council of Oxford in 1222, one of a number called to implement Lateran IV in ­England’s archdioceses, religiosi of all ­orders, and secular canons, ­were officially instructed to appoint vicars to serve in churches ­under their control, rather than act as curates in their own right.2 Yet the intricate ways in which the tenth-­century Benedictine Reform and its aftermath had woven religious ­houses into the fabric of the En­glish Church, with its eight monastic cathedrals, abbeys that dominated urban communities, and significant numbers of parishes ­under monastic patronage, meant that pastoral roles both for individual monks and for their ­houses ­were in practice unavoidable, even if they now involved collaboration with members of the clergy or other religious ­orders. Many bishops of monastic cathedrals ­were not by this point monks, while certain bishops of secular cathedrals ­were. Episcopal ­house­holds, impor­tant institutions in their own right, ­were also a mix, although secular clerics, canons, and friars predominated.3 Monastic libraries ­were second to none and ­were still adding to their store of preaching books throughout the new ­century. Monks ­were also still preaching from ­these books. Worcester Cathedral Priory had a book with sermons by William de Montibus, Paris master and subsequently chancellor of Lincoln (d. 1213), as early as the turn of the ­century, likely copied in the priory scriptorium. The priory added ­others over the next de­cades, often also locally produced and heavi­ly used. The assumption of Church historians that in the ­later ­Middle Ages monks withdrew from involvement in pastoral care ignores many signs that this was far from straightforwardly the case.4 We may never know how far this extension of monastic pastoral care into the thirteenth ­century was an enabling, or even perhaps necessary, condition for the composition of the En­glish prose works discussed in ­these two chapters. As we ­shall see, however, the case for attributing a number of ­these works to monastic authors or monastic influence, though often circumstantial, can be surprisingly strong, despite what was clearly also the involvement of other institutional actants, including secular canons, friars, and especially bishops. Moreover, even works that are not of monastic provenance, such as Ancrene Wisse, retain the same close awareness of monastic En­glish as does the Orrmulum. Despite the radical attitude Ancrene Wisse strikes about the very idea of an anchoritic rule (the topic with which it opens), the author’s choice of En­glish over French may have been significantly influenced by the continued prestige of Æthelwold’s The Old En­glish Benedictine Rule. The latest copy of this



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work, conservatively adapted for a community of nuns in Hampshire, is thought to date from around 1200. As profoundly as early Dominican religious thought and attitudes differ from ­those of Ælfric, Wulfstan, and Æthelwold, and as profoundly as the dominant literary styles of Ancrene Wisse also differ from the styles of ­these writers, the work remains attached to the vernacular textual system they formalized and that was still identified with their monastic descendants.5

2. The Lambeth Homilies and Worcester Cathedral Priory Produced within a de­cade or two of each other on opposite sides of the country, The Lambeth Homilies and The Trinity Homilies are similar enough in design and contents to suggest they have comparable institutional backgrounds, but dif­fer­ent enough to suggest that their relationship was far from straightforward. Although the dialect evidence is characteristically complicated, The Lambeth Homilies ­were clearly written in the West Midlands, prob­ably in Worcester, for use around the diocese and in the cathedral itself by a bishop or by one of his surrogates on major feast days when a sermon from a se­nior cleric was expected, as well as on visitations around the diocese. The Trinity Homilies ­were as clearly written in the Southeast, for the same kind of mixed use by a se­nior ecclesiastic, in a location to be discussed in the following section.6 Consisting of seventeen homilies as well as Poema Morale, compared to the eighty in Wulfstan II’s mighty preaching book, Hatton 113 and 114, the small-­ size format of Lambeth 487 makes it portable enough to be used in dif­fer­ent physical settings. It provides material for major feast days (Christmas, Palm Sunday, Easter, Pentecost); for each Sunday in Lent, with a strong emphasis on sacramental confession; for teaching catechesis (a verse exposition of the Pater noster, a prose one of the Creed); and for guest appearances in a parish church on any Sunday.7 Although some of the homilies are appropriate for parish use and may have served such use by way of other books we no longer have, the confession homilies consistently use the third person in urging hearers to confess to their curate, as though presupposing that the speaker is not this curate but a figure of higher authority. A case in point is the vivid imaginary dialogue in Lambeth III that follows when the priest announces to his penitent parishioner that he cannot absolve anyone who does not give back every­thing wrongfully taken from someone ­else:

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Blutheliche the mon wile gan to scrifte and segge the preoste thet he haveth i-­reaveth and i-­stolen, and blutheliche he wule herkien thet the preost him leith on. Ah thenne the preiost hine hat a-­yefen tha ehte thon monne thet hit er ahte, thet he nulle i-­heren his thonkes! Ah he wile seggen and foxliche smethien mid worde, “Nabbe ic nawiht therof! Ic hit habbe al i-­spened!” Thus seith thenne the preost ther onyein: “God mon, nim thu nuthe of thin ayen ehte and do ­there onyein.” (A person ­will happily go to confession and declare to the priest what he has snatched and stolen, and he ­will happily hear the penance that the priest lays on him. But when the priest commands him to give back the goods to the person who once owned them, then he ­will not hear this with any willingness! But the person ­will declare and smooth ­things over with fox-­like words, “I ­don’t have any of it! I have already spent all of it!” The priest then says back: “Good person, in that case you have to produce some of your own goods and give them back instead.”)8 The care with which the rest of this passage lays out how priest and penitent negotiate the details—if the penitent is too poor to restore more than part of what has been taken; if the wronged person is dead; if the offense took place in another parish—­suggests that this Lenten homily was meant to be preached to a mixed lay and clerical congregation by a bishop, or perhaps by one of his archdeacons, to whom it would fall to resolve the more entangled of such situations.9 A homily ­later in the collection, Lambeth XIII on 2 Corinthians 9:6 (“Qui parce seminat parce et metet,” whoever sow sparingly ­will also reap sparingly) explic­itly addresses the clergy (the “i-­hadede”) as well as the laity (the “i-­ leiawede”), and was prob­ably written for preaching ­either in the cathedral itself or on diocesan visitations. Christ sows his seed through his “ayene muthe” (own mouth), through the mouths of the apostles or ­those of “clerkene . . . ​the cunnen the lare of halye boke” (clerks who understand the learning in holy books), and immediately “with iwilche Cristene monne the he to sendeth his halye i-­ writen” (­every Christian person to whom he sends his holy writings). For the clergy, “Ævriche Sunendeye and othre heye dayen is time to sawene thet halye sed thet is Godes word; and thet in halye chirche, ­there alle Cristene men ayen to beon i-­somned togedere” (­every Sunday and other holy days is time to sow the holy seed that is God’s word, and to do so in holy church, where all Christian ­people should be gathered together). The task of the homilist ­here is to urge ­others to t­ hese activities, not engage in them himself.10



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The reason for the book’s se­lection of specific items is not always obvious. ­ nless one use to which it was put was in small-­group meetings with devout U laypeople of privilege, the episcopal occasions that would feature a reading of Poema Morale or Ælfric’s De duodecim abusiuis huius seculi (on the twelve abuses of this age), for example, are not self-­evident. Yet the book has been carefully put together over time from at least two exemplars: one that had five or more items derived from Old En­glish sources, prob­ably made locally; another that, wherever it was made, included new material that originated elsewhere, including the items Lambeth shares with Trinity. Lambeth may simply testify to the range of settings, private as well as public, in which bishops or members of their ­house­holds ­were expected to engage in spiritual instruction.11 The homily that implies the most public of ­these settings is Lambeth I, for Palm Sunday, which evokes the religious pro­cession that may have provided the context for its delivery in its account of the event memorialized by the feast day, Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem. The homily is a careful expansion of one of the abbreviated homilies that make up the Homiliary of Angers (perhaps tenth ­century), which we know was in local circulation.12 Christ entered the city through the “est gate” called “Speciosa,” we are told, then joined “al that folc” who “eode thar ford (went from ­there) to pro­cessiun to munte Oliveti,” before ­going on to the ­temple, as the “Ebreisce (Hebrew) folc” sang “Hosanna in excelsis” and threw down garments or “twigga” and “blostme” from the trees in his honor. In a departure from the source and from the Gospel, the ­children also “ployeden (played) in ­there strete, heriende ure Drihten” (praising our Lord) in the same words.13 Like all the Lenten homilies, Lambeth I urges any Christian hearer who has not yet done so to make confession to “his prest” before Easter, or face the dire spiritual consequences. Less usually, however, it implicitly acknowledges the presence of the se­nior ecclesiasts participating in the mass for this major feast day and taking part in the pro­cession. It identifies the apostles in the Gospel with virtuous prelates whose task is to rule the Church (“that wise witega [teachers] the beoth nu over the Halye Chirche”), to “unbinden Godes folc” through confession, and to instruct and pray for the souls of the laity. H ­ ere as often, the homily expands on its source.14 Lambeth I also implicitly acknowledges the proximity of a second group, Worcester’s small but impor­tant community of Jews, whose synagogue may have been in Huckster Street, close to the guildhall and bishop’s palace and not far from the cathedral and priory themselves.15 The imminent supersession of the so-­called “old law” by the events of Holy Week is an impor­tant theme of Palm Sunday, brought into play by the allegorical meaning of the ass on which Jesus

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rides and her implied connection with the ass once ridden by Balaam. Both ­here and in the source, the ass figures the “sinagoge,” since she was “i-­bunden (bound) and seodthan (subsequently) unbunden” at Jesus’s command, just as “the sinagoge . . . ​was i-­bunden on than alde lawe,” and unbound by the Passion. As the homily explains in another passage, this one not in the source: Alswa hefden the Giwis heore sinagoge efter Moises lawe, alswa we habbet nu chirche efter Drihtenes lawe. And evere to tham Setteres dey, heo comen tha Judeisce folk to settes tima to than sinagoge, and hereden heore Drihten swa heore lawe wes. That was heore Sunedey. And bet heo heolde heore wurthing dey thene we doth, and yet doth ther ther heo beoth. (Just as the Jews had their synagogue according to the law of Moses, so we now have church according to the Lord’s law. And e­ very Saturday, the Jewish ­people came at a fixed time to that synagogue, and worshiped their Lord as their law was. That was their Sunday. And they observed their holy day better than we do, and still do so in places where they are.)16 Renaming the “Hebraisce folke” described ­earlier as “Giwise,” this passage, which pointedly contrasts Jewish observance with Christian indifference, brings the scene into the pre­sent. Although he was hardly alone in this re­spect among se­nior churchmen of his generation, Jews ­were a preoccupation for at least one late twelfth-­century bishop of Worcester, the secular cleric John de Coutances (d. 1198), who began the initially controversial pro­cess that led to Wulfstan’s canonization, and may have commissioned a guide to disputation with the Jews from the archdeacon of Bath, Peter of Blois (d. ca. 1211), Contra perfidiam Judaeorum (against the perfidy of the Jews).17 This work, which provides a pos­si­ble context for Lambeth I, gives biblical witness ­after witness as proof that the Jews do not understand their own scriptures, including passages said to prophesy “the translation of the law to the gentiles and the reprobation of the Jews” (“De translatione legis ad gentes et reprobatione Judaeorum”), as well as other texts said to prophesy their conversion “ ‘ in the eve­ning’ of the world” (Ps. 58:7; “in vesperam mundi”).18 A Worcester Jew, Richard Judeus, appears in rec­ords from the year 1200 as a Christian convert and became reeve of the city in 1217 ­under difficult circumstances. Lambeth I avoids controversy, perhaps with a worried civic eye to the recent massacres in York. Yet the end of the homily likens Christians who refuse to



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make their confession to Jews living ­under the old law, arguing that such Christians merit neither Pater noster nor mass. A similar contrast between the putative severity of the old law and the mercy putatively available in the new recurs in other homilies.19 Despite its probable link with Worcester Cathedral Priory, ­there is nothing monastic as such about The Lambeth Homilies, whose context is clearly diocesan. Monks are mentioned only once in the homilies themselves in a passage of no par­tic­u­lar note or currency.20 Yet given their expertise in the field of En­ glish pastoralia and continued composition and acquisition of Latin sermon books, it is likely that the book was produced at the priory, with monks providing more than the items by Wulfstan and Ælfric. The fact that one priory preaching book of the late twelfth ­century, Worcester Cathedral MS Q.29, includes a Christmas sermon that derives from the same milieu as The Lambeth Homilies provides suggestive indirect evidence of their involvement.21 With one exception, the bishops of Worcester ­after the 1180s ­were secular clerics with no local experience and in some cases possibly l­imited En­glish. Both John of Coutance and his successor, Mauger of Capévraux (d. 1212), ­were born in northern France and presumably spoke French as their first language.22 ­These bishops ­were also a fervidly conscientious group, like many of ­England’s bishops in the de­cades ­after Becket’s murder. John of Coutance seems to have sponsored a guide to his new episcopal task, the Canon episcopale or De institutione episcopi, sent him by Peter of Blois shortly before his installation in 1196 to urge him to focus on pastoral duties, despite what it acknowledges is his needful involvement in secular ­matters.23 One pos­si­ble explanation for The Lambeth Homilies is that the book was written in order to serve a more utilitarian version of the same purpose, providing a series of pastoral scripts for a busy bishop such as John or Mauger to use, or delegate to ­others to use, on impor­tant occasions. Perhaps ­these homilies, too, should be seen as amounting to a set of institutiones for a bishop, briefing notes for the per­for­mance of this office during a period when pastoral care was ­under new scrutiny and sacramental confession was becoming central to the Latin Church.

3. The Trinity Homilies and St. Paul’s, London Although related, The Trinity Homilies is a more ambitious collection than Lambeth, twice the length and with a wider theological, so­cio­log­i­cal, and formal range. The formal range is perhaps of special note, since the innovative structure of a

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good number of items in Trinity, all of which ­were of fairly recent composition when it was assembled, shows it to be closely connected to an internationally significant intellectual movement in a way that Lambeth was not, despite the two books’ shared content. With their reliance on distinctiones, their citation and translation of proof texts or auctoritates, and their fash­ion­able use of classical sources, many of Trinity’s texts are clearly influenced by Pa­ri­sian pastoral thought and the new genres and methodologies associated with it. Indeed, despite the name traditionally ascribed the collection, many of ­these texts are not homilies at all but rather thema sermons, written in a major new preaching genre whose earliest Pa­ri­sian examples are from the 1160s and which may have reached E ­ ngland by the early 1170s.24 In the thema sermon, which quickly established itself as the preferred vehicle for more extended and ambitious exercises in preaching, the exposition of the entire Gospel reading for the day is replaced by a new structure, “characterized by the use of increasingly schematic division and subdivision, sometimes reinforced by rhyme and other kinds of verbal patterning,” so that focus falls on the theological exposition of one verse.25 Rather than discuss only the liturgical role of “the holye tid that me clepeth Advent” (holy time called Advent) as one of the two ­great fasts of the liturgical year, Trinity I thus begins its exposition of the thema antiphon “Ecce venit rex occurramus” by distinguishing three dif­fer­ent times figured by the term adventus in relation to Christ: the time of the prophets, the incarnation, and the Judgment. It then turns to distinguish two less obvious meanings of the term, in reference to Christ’s less public appearances. Christ appears both to elect individuals, when he “turneth his herte to forleten and hatien his senne and to luvien God and al his emcristen” (converts a person’s heart to forsake and hate their sins and to love God and all their fellow Christians), and to “elch man” (­every person) at the time of death. Only ­those graced with the first of ­these appearances w ­ ill be safe, ends the sermon—­neatly tying its distinctiones together in a fashion typical of the new form—­when they come to the second, or to the Judgment that it prefigures.26 Like a number of its colleagues, including the five sermons it shares with The Lambeth Homilies, Trinity I has only certain features of the fully developed thema sermon, which continued to complicate itself well into the thirteenth ­century. But the compilers of The Trinity Homilies ­were clearly determined that the congregations they had in mind should be exposed to the most recent innovations in preaching and exegesis, as they ­were also determined that ­these congregations should be exposed to demanding doctrines, such as that of election.



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Like The Lambeth Homilies, The Trinity Homilies ­were evidently intended for delivery by a se­nior ecclesiast, prob­ably again a bishop or his representative, who was not the primary curate of most members of his congregation. Two sermons describe the church where they ­were given as a “minstre,” a term that in ­Middle En­glish still indicates a cathedral, large abbey, or collegiate church.27 ­Others evoke the presence of congregation whose members attend only certain ser­vices at a major center, other­wise worshipping in their parishes. ­These occasional worshippers include priests responsible for sowing the seed of the word, but also for looking a­ fter their own church’s linens, vestments, and vessels: “alter cloth,” “mes-­hakele” (mass-­cloth), “corporeals” (corporal cloths), “albe” (aube), “haved line” (head linens), or “calix” (chalice).28 As this presumably urban setting would suggest, they also include wealthy laypeople engaged in “cheping” (commerce), “­there teldeth the werse the grune of hindre, that is, of bipeching” (where the devil sets the trap of treachery, that is, of fraud).29 As in Vices and Virtues, a work often called to mind ­here, ­these addressees are also the recipients of homiletic injunctions against practicing divination and other condemned arts, eating and drinking too much “at alehuse and at fermie (banquets) and at feste,” practicing fornication or the sins of tongue, and failing to go to church.30 All the while, they are also invited to compare their own mixed fortunes with t­ hose of the patient but tribulated Job.31 As to where and by whom the homiliary was written and used, the evidence is less clear than for Lambeth. A cathedral setting seems to make best sense of the book’s contents. ­There ­were large ­houses of monks and regular canons within the right dialect area (mainly the Home Counties in and around London, excluding Kent): St. Albans in the first instance; Waltham, refounded by Henry II as part of his penance for Becket’s murder, in the second. But ­there ­were no monastic cathedrals. The nearest, Rochester, is in Kent, which had a quite distinct dialect.32 The form of the sermons and their distance from Old En­glish homilies in any case makes it hard to believe that they are the product of a traditional Benedictine milieu. Perhaps the most plausible group of churchmen to have sponsored a major series of sermons in the new style at this period is secular clerics. Down to the 1220s, secular clerics made up a majority of En­glish students and teachers in the Paris schools. They also took the lead in importing, adapting, and developing new pastoral materials, as took place at Lincoln ­under William de Montibus (d. 1213) in the late twelfth c­ entury, and somewhat l­ater at Salisbury ­under Thomas of Chobham (d. 1233–36), author of an impor­tant Summa de arte praedicandi among a number of other influential works.33

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Yet with one exception, monks made all the homiliaries in En­glish we know of a­ fter the tenth c­ entury and w ­ ere still copying En­glish homilies as late as 1200, the rough date of both The Lambeth Homilies and The Vespasian Homilies, a group of four En­glish homilies that survive in a composite Rochester book.34 While that exception, the Augustinian Orrmulum, invites us to look carefully at Waltham and other London-­a rea ­houses of regular canons, The Trinity Homilies lacks any Augustinian theological coloring. The only nearly con­temporary vernacular homilies with links to the secular clergy are the French versions of the homilies of the ­great late twelfth-­century bishop of Paris Maurice de Sully (d. 1196), which circulated quite widely in thirteenth-­and fourteenth-­century ­England. ­These ­were made some de­cades ­later than Trinity, although their date and provenance is unknown and controversial. Their earliest surviving copy, apparently from the 1220s, was made for the Benedictines of Durham Cathedral, far to the north.35 We also know that monks took an early interest in the new form, not least through its use in several of The Lambeth Homilies. Further, the first item in Trinity, Poema Morale, is monastic work, related to the Sermon or Romaunz de Temtacioun de Secle by Guischart of Beaulieu, a monk of one of St. Alban’s dependent cells in Bedfordshire, and prob­ably of recent composition. The poem seems to have been added to the front of the book as the book was still being completed, ­after being copied by one of the two main scribes responsible for the homilies. Some level of monastic involvement in Trinity would seem to be probable, although it cannot be certain.36 One pos­si­ble origin for Trinity or for some of its sermons for which t­ here is also other suggestive evidence is the secular cathedral of St. Paul’s, London, during the long episcopate of the Cluniac Gilbert Foliot (d. 1187), abbot of Gloucester and bishop of Hereford before his translation to London in 1163, and the most power­f ul En­glish bishop of his generation other than his ­bitter rival, Thomas Becket.37 It was in fact Foliot who in the early 1170s preached the first thema sermon in ­England we know of, making a deep impression on one of his auditors, Peter of Cornwall, ­later prior of the London ­house of Augustinian canons at Aldgate, who was inspired to assem­ble a collection of sententiae he called Pantheologus as a resource for preachers wishing to adopt the form.38 At the outset of De nugis curialium (courtiers’ trifles), written ten years l­ater, Walter Map praises Foliot as “a man most skilled in three languages, Latin, French, and En­glish, discoursing in each with the greatest clarity” (“vir trium peritissimus linguarum latine gallice anglice, et lucidissime disertus in singulis”), suggesting he used all three in public speaking. Map, who also refers confusedly to Guischart of Beaulieu’s Sermon in this passage, was at this time a canon at



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St. Paul’s, appointed by Foliot.39 The bishop of London preached in the choir at St. Paul’s on high feast days and would have done so in the vernacular if laypeople ­were pre­sent. One of several such sermons in The Trinity Homilies is the Christmas sermon, Trinity VI, on the angels’ heavenly appearance to the shepherds in Luke 2:8–14. Trinity VI reads this episode as a moral allegory pertaining to lay and clerical hearers, while also setting it within the cosmic story of Adam’s fall, the harm it inflicted, Christ’s coming into the world to undo this harm, and the role he still plays as physician of the soul. A true Samaritan, Christ binds the wounds of all baptized sinners who repent, confess, and eat his body at mass. The shepherds’ flocks are four kinds of laypeople, figured on the one hand by sheep and oxen (devout churchgoers and faithful laborers), on the other by goats and pigs (proud fornicators and foul gluttons). ­There are also two kinds of shepherd: the “unwreste” (slothful) and the “gode” (good), who watches over his flocks in purity of life (“on faire liflode”) and teaches them by means of “haly larspelle” (holy teaching) “wat is uvel (evil) and wat is god,” urging them to resist vices (“unthewes to forberen”) and to follow virtues (“gode thewes to folgen”). Good shepherds, “lor-­thewes, alse bishupes and prestes” (teachers of virtue, such as bishops and priests) watch throughout the long night of the lives of their spiritual charges, through childhood, youth, maturity, and old age, taking care lest any be snatched away by that wily and fierce “fox . . . ​ wulfe . . . ​leun,” the devil. Skillfully woven, suitably mixing chastisement and encouragement, and consciously magisterial, Trinity VI is a candidate for an En­glish sermon written for, or perhaps by, a bishop of London such as Foliot himself.40 As in the case of The Lambeth Homilies, the diocesan archdeacons might also have preached from Trinity, ­either in the cathedral or around the diocese. ­These ­were se­nior cathedral canons, trusted members of the bishop’s ­house­hold. Archdeacons ­were responsible for diocesan discipline in a number of ­matters treated in the sermons, including a priest’s care for his parish church and its fittings, clerical celibacy, and maintaining the crucial practice of tithing. ­These topics feature in one of the first surviving sets of En­glish diocesan statutes, perhaps issued in London by one of Foliot’s successors, William of Sainte-­Mère-­ Eglise, a former prebend of the cathedral, and likely the same William to whom Geoffrey of Vinsauf entrusted his ­great rhetorical manual, Poetria Nova. The same statutes enjoin teaching of the Lord’s Prayer, Nicene Creed, and Confiteor “in lingua materna” on priests and ­people. Like The Lambeth Homilies, Trinity contains careful En­glish expositions of the first two of ­these items, as well as a good deal of material on confession.41

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The case that Trinity was written for use at St. Paul’s depends in part on a mere paucity of other candidates, especially if we take the collection’s emphasis on clerical correction and edification to support the hypothesis that their setting is a cathedral, rather than an abbey or regular or secular community. But the sermons do give one pos­si­ble positive sign of a St. Paul’s provenance, in the form of fulsome references to the saint in several Advent and Lent sermons, when church attendance would be high. Introducing themae taken from Paul’s epistles, ­these sermons characterize Paul as “principal teacher of all holy churches,” “highest teacher ­after our lord Jesus Christ,” “highest of all teachers ­after our Savior himself,” and “heavenly doctor,” who urges all to “come hastily to our soul’s physician and reveal to him our soul’s wounds that are our foul sins” (“heued lor-­theau of alle holy chirechen”; “heiest lor-­theu ­after ure louerd Ihesu Crist”; “hegest alre lor-­thew ­a fter ure Helende selven”; “hevenliche leche . . . ​cumen festliche to ure saule leche and unhelen him ure saule wundes tho ben ure fule sinnes”). With the exception of an expanded allusion to “the hevenliche key-­herde (keeper of the keys), Sainte Peter,” this sort of language is not used elsewhere in the homilies with reference to other saints or apostles.42 St. Paul’s was well aware of its importance as a cathedral in ­England’s largest city, which had an ancient claim, ostensibly ­going back to Gregory the ­Great, to be a third archdiocesan seat, a claim Foliot notoriously revived in the course of his strug­gle with Becket, whose election as archbishop in 1162 he as notoriously opposed.43 The cathedral was also proud of its dedication. In a letter circulated around the diocese in 1175, Foliot appealed for funding for the cathedral in the name of “your patron and apostle Paul” (“patronus vester et apostolus Paulus”), whom he describes as “bishop of your souls” (“Paulum apostolum episcopum animarum vestrarum”), claiming that St.  Paul’s, London, is the one episcopal seat in all Christendom dedicated to the apostle.44 Trinity III, based on a Pauline text (Rom. 13:12), ends by praying “may the lord St. Paul who teaches us in this way intercede for us to the holy ­Father of heaven, that he may give us might and strength to forsake darkness and follow light” (“the lauerd Sainte Poul the us lareth thus . . . ​he thingie us to the holye Fader of hevene, that he geve us mihte and strengthe to forletene thesternesse and to folgie brictnesse”). Such a prayer, again paralleled only by one closing prayer to Peter, could be uttered with more confidence if Paul was the “patronus” of the building in which it was made.45 The case for St. Paul’s is not certain, and that for Foliot’s episcopacy less so. However, it does seem likely that The Trinity Homilies can be added to the short list of early vernacular texts from London, perhaps alongside the spiritually more demanding Vices and Virtues and certainly alongside another late



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twelfth-­century work, the collection of miracles of the Virgin called Gracial by the St. Paul’s priest and London curate Adgar or William. It also seems likely that, as with Lambeth 487, Trinity shows the regular use of written En­glish in pastoral contexts at a diocesan level. The involvement of Gilbert Foliot, perhaps assisted by West Midland monks who remained in his ­house­hold to help him maintain his liturgical obligations, could offer an explanation for the collection’s choice of En­glish as a language of rec­ord for a major series of sermons written in the new thema style, written during a period when it was becoming fash­ion­able for clerical intellectuals to publish their collected sermons in Latin.46

Chapter 20

The New Pastoralia III Anchoresses and the City

1. The Setting of Ancrene Wisse Recent scholars of late Old and early ­Middle En­glish have often been reluctant to speculate in detail about the provenance of texts and books, in the manner of this chapter and its pre­de­ces­sor. This is partly b­ ecause of a tendency to prioritize the study of language and dialect and of the physical book, in research programs that demand attention to detail and openness to uncertainty; partly ­because of a suspicion of ­grand narratives, ­whether literary, linguistic, or historiographic in orientation, in a field perhaps more than usually littered, and encumbered, with their detritus. Over the last two de­cades, ­there has also been a more pointed reason for reluctance: the unexpected collapse during the 1990s of the best-­a rgued and most widely accepted attempt to develop an account of a group of early En­glish texts on the basis of a hy­po­thet­i­cal provenance. An outgrowth of the research programs generated by R. W. Chambers’s On the Continuity of En­glish Prose of 1932, this account involved Ancrene Wisse, some or all the texts in the Ancrene Wisse Group, and Wigmore Abbey, a ­house of Victorine canons twenty miles north of Hereford. The Wigmore hypothesis, which was first proposed in the 1950s, made canonical in a book-­length study by E. J. Dobson in the 1970s, and had acquired a status close to fact in some circles by the early 1980s, wove together three distinct bodies of evidence, related to dialect, monastic history, and book history, each of which could be used to reinforce the ­others. The first was extrapolated from what J. R. R. Tolkien in 1929 gnomically called the A/B dialect. This is a spelling system shared by Corpus 402 (A), the copy of Ancrene Wisse that preserves the latest of the author’s versions of the work, and a book that contains the works known as the Katherine Group, Bodley 34 (B). A/B has



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proved to be a formalization of a dialect localizable in northern Herefordshire. ­ able 5). (For Ancrene Wisse Group manuscripts, see Appendix, T The second had vari­ous ele­ments, including what proved a mistaken identification of the cell in which the ­sisters for whom the work was written ­were enclosed, but importantly involved the customary practices enjoined on anchorites in Ancrene Wisse and their resemblances to ­those practiced by the Augustinian canons. Although it, too, had vari­ous ele­ments, the third included the fact that the Corpus Ancrene Wisse was bequeathed by a local gentry ­family to the abbey of St. James, Wigmore, in the late 1200s, the only Augustinian ­house in the region. As local names written into the book suggest, Bodley was also in Hereford itself during the sixteenth c­ entury.1 On this mixed basis, Wigmore acquired a glowing scholarly reputation as a “centre of a literary culture,” in which works in the Ancrene Wisse Group ­were written and then copied by “scribes . . . ​trained to reproduce” A/B dialect with due fidelity.2 The success of the Wigmore scriptorium could even be mea­sured by the failure of other scribes to meet its high standards. Although one other early copy of Ancrene Wisse itself (Cleopatra C.vi) and one other of most of the Katherine Group (Royal 17.A.xxvii) are in a related dialect, they do not have the consistency of Corpus and Bodley. Neither, quite, do their colleagues Nero A. xiv and Titus D.xviii, the first from Worcestershire, somewhat to the east, the second from Cheshire, well to the north, although attention to the orthography of ­these books was ­limited, since both are in dif­fer­ent dialects.3 It is very much to the credit of this hypothesis that, over the past twenty-­ five years, it has been proved wrong largely on its own terms, having pioneered the interdisciplinary approach that has created a corrected account, primarily thanks to the work of Dobson’s former student Bella Millett.4 Dialect evidence still links five of the seven Ancrene Wisse Group books to Herefordshire. But A/B dialect is no longer understood to be a self-­conscious literary standard. Not only is the system less regular than used to be claimed, not at the level achieved in the Orrmulum; since Cleopatra and especially Royal ­were both written ­earlier than Bodley or Corpus, the orthographic consistency of the latter pair may be best explained if we suppose it to derive from the spellings of a single copyist, not a ­whole scriptorium. The assumption that books ­were necessarily written where dialect maps place them has also been repudiated. Dialect maps are spatial summaries of what can be learned from the painstaking comparative analy­ sis of manuscript spelling systems and the habits of their scribes. They provide models, not real-­world localizations. A scribe might grow up and learn to speak in one place, be trained to write in a second, then move to work in yet a third. Tolkien wrote stirringly of A/B dialect arising from “a soil somewhere in

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­ ngland,” but a dialect profile is not a terroir. It can provide only a general reE gional localization.5 More specifically, Wigmore Abbey itself is no longer understood as a plausible location for Ancrene Wisse or its copying. Although it was an impor­tant establishment, whose second prior was the learned biblical exegete Andrew of St. Victor himself (d. 1175), Wigmore is not likely to have sponsored the composition and circulation of a major guide for anchorites that was evidently intended to serve a formal regulatory function over ­those who lived by it. From its first arrival in ­England in the late eleventh ­century, the specialized and always mostly lay form of the eremitic life of reclusi or inclusi was overseen by bishops. Except where professional religious ­were concerned, bishops determined who could become an anchorite and ­were responsible for the solemn rite of anchoritic enclosure and for ensuring anchorites lived up to their profession.6 Still worse for the Wigmore hypothesis and long acknowledged as a potential weakness, the liturgical and customary practices alluded to in Ancrene Wisse are not truly Victorine. They are related to ­those of another branch of the Augustinians, the Premonstratensians, who had no ­houses in the area. But they best match the customs of the Dominicans, which ­were modeled on ­those of the Premonstratensians. The work requires anchorites to say Ave Maria before and ­after each office, a specifically Dominican practice at this period. In discussing when anchoresses may take communion, the list of fifteen annual feasts on which a group the author calls “ure brethren” are said to do so are also distinctive to the Dominicans. The preface to Ancrene Wisse draws on prologue that the Dominican customary itself borrowed from its Premonstatensian antecedent. Other moments in the work in all three authorial versions, and much about its wider ethos, further point to its composition by a Dominican friar, once this possibility is entertained.7 §§§ The careful identification of the Ancrene Wisse author as a Dominican has revolutionized our understanding of the work’s intellectual and institutional affiliations, reor­ga­niz­ing our sense of when, where, and in what relationship to one another the Ancrene Wisse Group works may have been written, in ways not all of whose implications have yet not been thoroughly explored. The Dominicans arrived in ­England in 1221, only a de­cade before the date ascribed the earliest of the Ancrene Wisse manuscripts, Cleopatra, the early 1230s. Their first West Midland h ­ ouses also date from the 1230s but w ­ ere some way north of the region to which the dialect of Cleopatra and its colleagues points. Now that the work’s



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institutional origins are recognized, it becomes clear that ­these ­houses are in fact alluded to in the latest (Corpus) version of Ancrene Wisse, in a new passage that describes the wonderful growth in the number of anchorites living ­under its aegis. Multiplying rapidly since the work was first composed, the author writes, by this point to “twenty nuthe (now) other ma” (more), the cells of ­these “ancren of Englond” “biginneth to spreaden ­toward Englondes ende” (begin to extend ­toward the end of ­England). The unity of ­these anchorites as a group given to a common way of life is “as thah ye weren an cuvent of Lundene ant of Oxnefort, of Shreobsbury other of Chester” (as though you ­were a single religious ­house, in London and in Oxford, in Shrewsbury or in Chester). The first ­houses of En­glish Black Friars ­were founded at Oxford and London in 1221 and 1223. Shrewsbury and Chester, both diocese of Coventry and Litch­field, ­were founded around 1231 and 1236. The Hereford ­house was founded a de­cade ­later, in the mid-1240s. Another new passage ­earlier in the Corpus version also notes that anchoresses and “ure Freres Prechurs ant ure Freres Meonurs” (our Dominicans and our Franciscans) hold each other in such re­spect that they can converse with a freedom the author has forbidden in any interactions between recluses and members of other religious ­orders, as well as with priests.8 Taking paleographic and other evidence into account, a new picture emerges of a book initially likely written at the end of the 1220s and reissued several times over the next two or three de­cades, as the numbers of inclusi in all three dioceses that covered the West Midlands who had submitted to its guidance, most though not all of them w ­ omen, continued to increase.9 A new picture also emerges of the setting in which the author likely wrote, extrapolated both from the institutional relationship between anchorites and bishops and from the presence of a Dominican writer in Herefordshire, years before a ­house of his order was established locally. Literary evidence has accumulated that Ancrene Wisse is an impressively au courant product of the period just ­after the Fourth Lateran Council. At this period, a generation of activist bishops, some of whom had trained and taught at Paris, ­were busy implementing the council’s mandates, in par­tic­u­lar urgently installing the now “universal” practice of annual confession at the center of Church life at the parochial level, using Pa­ri­sian pastoral theology as inspiration and model.10 The Trinity Homilies and The Lambeth Homilies, both of which predate Lateran IV, can issue only fierce exhortations to go to confession, backed by strong arguments. The confession manual that is part 5 of Ancrene Wisse makes it clear that the practice is now so fundamental that it asks for detailed treatment even in the vernacular. Multiplying distinctiones in the newest scholastic style, part 5

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divides the topic into two “limen” (branches). It then subdivides the first branch, on confession’s powers (“hwuch mihte hit beo”), into six “stucchen” (sticks); the second, on the qualities necessary to a true confession (“hwuch hit shule beo”), into a full sixteen.11 So significant is this sacramental practice, indeed, that part 5 suspends the convention, carefully observed in the rest of the work, of presenting the anchoritic life as wholly separated from the outside world. “Mine leove sustren,” writes the author, “this fifte dale . . . ​limpeth to alle men i-­liche” (my beloved ­sisters, this fifth part applies to all ­people alike), requiring him to use language that does not “­toward ow nomeliche . . . ​i-­speken” (address your situation especially). This may indicate that part 5 was meant to circulate as a separate work. But it also suggests a new pastoral function anchorites ­were expected to perform as model penitents, charged with dramatizing the practice of confession in their parishes, an extension of their traditional roles as intercessors and symbols of penance, in some sense enclosed on behalf of their communities.12 The broad pastoral priorities of Ancrene Wisse and its use of distinctiones on this level of sophistication point both to an author prob­ably trained in Paris and to his pos­si­ble status as an employee of a bishop, one of whose roles was the oversight of the anchorites in a diocese. The text refers to its anchoritic readers as having a “meistre” who serves as spiritual director, in some cases in terms that imply this person is the same as the author. ­There is a potential parallel ­here to the succession of friars who served in Robert Grosseteste’s episcopal ­house­hold at Lincoln in the late 1230s and 1240s, accompanying him on diocesan visitations to preach to the laity in En­glish while he preached to the clergy in Latin. Tantalizingly, one of the first of ­these friars, a Dominican Geoffrey of Clive, was from Shropshire, within the relevant dialect area.13 The Cleopatra Ancrene Wisse, which has additions written in a dialect close to A/B, evidently in the author’s own hand, suggests that the author was originally from or had been trained in the region and was living ­there again, or at least visiting regularly. Two of ­these additions show a special interest in the role of the “meistre,” who “bereth theos riwle inwith his breoste” (who carries this rule in his mind), and can thus adapt its instructions to the needs of dif­fer­ent users. The situation implied by Cleopatra is that the composition of Ancrene Wisse and its copying ­were closely connected, as the Wigmore hypothesis had posited, but also that the work was not being copied in a regulated scriptorium. Vari­ous features of Cleopatra, including the style of its errors, suggest that it is likely to be the work of a paid professional.14 Dialect evidence also supports a specific locale for our author, his bishop or bishops, and the production both of the work itself and of all three of ­these



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books, as well as Royal.15 This is Hereford, at once the nearest city to the Wigmore area and the region’s diocesan seat. Hereford was a significant center, with more than one major religious institution and professional scribes in permanent residence. The cathedral of St. Etheldreda’s was staffed by secular canons; had an excellent library, which included a careful collection of glossed biblical books and other tools for clerical training; and understood itself as an intellectual and artistic hub. Its bishops during this period ­were Hugh Foliot (1219– 34), a relation of Gilbert Foliot, and Ralph Maidstone (1234–39), both former canons from the region, followed by the Savoyard Peter of Aigueblanche (1240– 68), former archdeacon of Shropshire. Robert Grosseteste was an employee of an ­earlier bishop, William de Vere (d. 1198) and may have been one of Hugh’s protégés during Hugh’s own years as archdeacon of Shropshire. Recent canons included the pastoral theorist and controversialist Gerald of Wales (d. 1223), who first drew Grosseteste to de Vere’s attention in the mid-1190s, having met him at Lincoln, and the poet Simund de Freine, author of the Roman de philosophie (a verse Boethius) as well as a notably anti-­Islamic Vie de S. George, written in the 1180s to promote the Third Crusade.16 The city also had a significant Benedictine priory, Sts. Peter, Paul, and Guthlac, the result of an amalgamation in 1143 of two venerable but badly situated parochial colleges of secular canons, one (St. Peter) inside the cathedral close, the other (St. Guthlac) inside the ­castle walls. This new but ancient priory took an active role in pastoral care despite its new location outside the city and sustained a vigorous competition with the cathedral. Competition was equalized by the fact that Sts. Peter, Paul, and Guthlac had the backing of the power­f ul Gloucester Abbey, of which it was a ­daughter cell and of which St. Peter’s had been a dependent. The priory’s connection with Gloucester and local status meant that it also had a good library, from which a dozen books survive. Grossesteste’s name appears as a witness in several documents related to the ­house during the late 1190s.17 Although several books of insular French survive from Hereford, including a glossed psalter, no book with more than a smattering of Old En­glish is clearly from the city.18 One book, Bodley 343, can be localized in southern Herefordshire by dialect and might have been from the city, although no serious investigation of this possibility has yet been made. A large En­glish and Latin collection of homilies, saints’ lives, and pastoral letters, much of it by Ælfric and Wulfstan but also including works such as the Old En­glish History of the Holy Rood Tree and the Latin Homiliary of Angers, Bodley 343 was written in a linguistically updated En­glish, perhaps as late as 1175, and was still in use in the early thirteenth c­ entury, as vari­ous late additions to the work attest, including

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an image of Wulfstan of Worcester presumably added ­after his canonization in 1203. Evidently put together from several exemplars, perhaps without a level of consistent access to Old En­glish books that would have allowed it to be planned more systematically, it is conceivable that this book belonged to the priory, or even the cathedral.19 At pre­sent we know of only a single anchoress in Hereford at this period, enclosed at St. Owen’s, a de­pen­dency of Sts. Peter, Paul, and Guthlac, and in annual receipt of alms from the Crown during the 1190s. But recluses had been part of diocesan life since the episcopate of the austere Robert of Bethune, an Augustinian from Llanthony Secunda, in the 1140s. In the 1220s, a set of synodal statutes likely from Hereford requires priests with reclusi in their parishes to take care that they not receive overnight guests, a rule echoed by Ancrene Wisse: “Inwith ower wanes ne leote ye na mon slepen” (let nobody sleep inside your dwelling).20 The still unusual form of “ansæte (solitary) lif the we nu clepeth (that we now call) anker,” as Vices and Virtues calls it in an admiring passage apparently written some decades before Ancrene Wisse, was urban as well as lay, lived not in the eremitic wilderness by onetime monks but “æfter thare woreld the nu is” (in the secular world). Although not every­one approved equally of this revised version of eremitism, its link to the “woreld the nu is” seems to have made it glamorous, a “swithe gastlich life” (highly spiritual life), to many contemporaries.21 The cells in which the three “leove sustren” the work’s earliest version addresses are enclosed are urban, surrounded by noise and incident, subject to casual visitors of both sexes, and in danger from the temptations arising from both. Even without friars, who are mentioned only in the Corpus version, ­these visitors include churchmen of vari­ous kinds, any one of whom may be ­eager to to “i-­seon yunge ancres” (see young anchoresses) and all of whom must be treated with ­great caution: a secular (“worltliche”) priest; a prob­ably secular canon, with “wid hod,” “loke cape” (clasped cope), and “wide sleven”; “religiuse” of any order, “hwit” or “blac,” who can be trusted “yet leas” (still less) than secular priests; and conceivably even a “bishop,” whom it is polite to greet if he “kimeth to seon ow” (comes to see you), but should be offered no privileges with regard to conversation ­unless he insists on them.22 Starting with the cathedral canons themselves, members of all ­these groups ­were richly represented in or around Hereford, ­whether by residents or by the clerical travelers who used Hereford as a stopover on their way to and from locations in Wales. The “leove sustren” of Ancrene Wisse, and other anchorites, could well have lived in cells in or near the city.



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As with the argument that The Trinity Homilies ­were associated with St. Paul’s, London, the twinned argument that Ancrene Wisse is a Hereford text, and that Bodley, Cleopatra, Corpus, and Royal are all Hereford books, is circumstantial and based to a certain extent simply on a lack of alternative candidates. But however well the Hereford hypothesis proves to hold up ­under the examination that can again take place only if it is entertained in detail, the broader argument that Ancrene Wisse was written in the context of a wider diocesan pastoral program and the ambit of a bishop’s ­house­hold appears to be established. Albeit in the specialized generic context of a rule or customary for semireligious, living ­under the guidance of a “meistre,” Ancrene Wisse shows En­glish in use as an official ecclesiastical language well into the thirteenth ­century.

2. The Audiences of the Ancrene Wisse Group Hy­po­thet­i­cal though it must likely remain, the Hereford localization of Ancrene Wisse reopens a number of possibilities for studying the text. It encourages us to read the work alongside ­others linked to the city. ­These include a fine Tractatus de virtute confessionis by Guy of Southwick, written at the request of Bishop William de Vere, whose structure parallels that of part 5. They also include any of the cathedral’s proud collection of scientific books. A milieu where medical and scientific topics ­were studied, such as ­those covered by the celebrated Salernitan Questions, perhaps written at the cathedral (ca. 1200), might have informed the work’s meta­phorical interest in topics from epileptic seizures in sparrows to the properties of “Grickish fur” (Greek fire).23 The new localization also situates Ancrene Wisse at a node of an ecclesiastical network that already linked religious ­houses, towns, and cities in the region, long before the arrival of the unpre­ce­dently mobile friars, including Worcester and Chester, where Nero and Titus ­were likely written. Dated to 1240s, around the same time as Bodley and Titus, Nero is especially in­ter­est­ing in this regard, preserving our single copy of the work in the form sent to its first readers, but in a book written at Worcester Cathedral itself, and in a modernized local spelling system, ­free of the traditionalizing archaisms of the A/B dialect. The hand and spellings of the Nero Ancrene Wisse scribe are so close to ­those of the Tremulous Hand to make it likely the two men ­were monastic colleagues. It appears that ­there was early demand for Ancrene Wisse in the Worcester diocese, no doubt generated by increasing local interest in the anchoritic

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life. It also appears that copying of con­temporary En­glish works that reflected distinctively con­temporary concerns and forms of religious identity was still alive and well at the cathedral priory, and that the Tremulous Hand’s copying of “Sanctus Beda” and other works into Worcester F.174 was not an isolated event.24 The likelihood that Ancrene Wisse and several of the Ancrene Wisse Group manuscripts are products of a complex urban environment, rather than a comparatively isolated Augustinian priory, also reopens possibilities for considering the other works in the group: when, where, for whom they ­were written, and how they relate to Ancrene Wisse itself (see Appendix, T ­ able 5). In all but one of the main books in which they survive to us, all ­these works have clearly been selected for their specific pertinence to anchoresses. Four of the five Wooing Group works are appended to the Nero copy of Ancrene Wisse, while three of the five Katherine Group works and the remaining Wooing Group works are appended to the Titus copy of Ancrene Wisse. The other two Katherine Group works are collected with the rest of this group in Bodley, whose anticipated readership is suggested by its inclusion of Hali Meithhad. The hard-­line comedic attacks on marriage and husbands in this work made it suitable only for ­those already committed to the “hehnesse (high status) of meithhad.” It seems likely that Bodley and Corpus, or perhaps their exemplars, ­were produced as companion volumes for the same w ­ oman recluse or recluses.25 While scholarly views differ as to details, it is not surprising that the apparently tight-­k nit character of ­these books have caused the works they contain to be understood in recent de­cades as common expressions of a broadly coherent “anchoritic spirituality.” This is one of the terms that has been given to the complicated, disquieting, but also (for some) enthralling mix of ascetic practice, penitential abjection, and passionate engagement with the divine ­these books set out to sustain, disciplining, instructing, encouraging, imaginatively enriching, and heroizing the ­women on whose behalf and with whose active participation they ­were no doubt produced, and on whom they maintain a searching and ­eager focus.26 Nor is it surprising, in light of the discoveries about the origins of Ancrene Wisse just summarized, that t­ hese works have increasingly been presumed to have been composed over a fairly short period, as products of a sustained pastoral initiative on the part of bishops and other churchmen whose common impetus was the Fourth Lateran Council.27 Yet despite their survival in ­these specialist anthologies, it has long been clear that many of the texts themselves ­were not initially written with recluses primarily in view. Nor should we assume that all of them are products ­either of the de­cades ­after the Fourth Lateran Council or of any single place or pastoral



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proj­ect. Two works seem particularly close in time and character to Ancrene Wisse. Written for a celibate ­woman proud of not having fallen “sa lahe into a monnes theowdom” (so low into servitude to a male) through marriage, Hali Meithhad uses the same mix of ancient and recent sources and En­glishes them in the same style. Also written for a celibate ­woman who describes herself as “sperred querfaste withinne four wahes” (fully shut in within four walls), an anchoress in her cell, The Wohunge of Ure Lauerd is based on a passage in part 7 of Ancrene Wisse and makes similar use of an impor­tant new Pa­ri­sian microgenre, the distinctio. But t­ hese carefully targeted texts are exceptions, both written fairly late in the sequence and both found with Ancrene Wisse in Titus, a book that may have been produced at the new Dominican priory at Chester, where it seems pos­si­ble that The Wohunge of Ure Lauerd was written.28 Only two of the four Wooing Group works in Nero could potentially have been composed in this same, anchoritic and Dominican milieu. Both the Oreisun of Seinte Marie (prayer to St. Mary) and the verse Ureisun of Ure Lefdi (prayer to our lady) could more plausibly have been written in Benedictine Worcester, like Nero itself, at any time ­after 1200. The first is a layperson’s confession in the shape of a prayer to the Virgin that lists a set of sins of the senses, speech, and be­hav­ior whose informality of structure recalls the confession that opens Vices and Virtues. The work was apparently composed before the Seven Deadly Sins became standard as a confessional template in the 1220s, making a first appearance in En­glish in Ancrene Wisse, part 4.29 The second states it is written by a “munuch” (monk) for users said to have been “i-­brought into theoudome” (brought into servitude) by love of the Virgin, so that they “swinketh (work) dey and niht” in her “servise.” This work was presumably intended for members of a religious community, perhaps the cathedral priory of St. Mary’s, Worcester, itself, reconceptualizing the novitiate or the monastic life as a ­whole in the affective terms newly popu­lar at this era.30 The protagonists of the other works, Lofsong of Ure Louerde (song of praise to our Lord) and Ureisun of God Almihti (prayer to God almighty), are celibate and presumptively female. The first asks Christ “hu ich shule leden me (I should conduct myself ) and livien on eorthe with meidhod” (virginity). The second addresses Jesus as “min holy luve . . . ​min heorte . . . ​min huny-­ter” (honey-­drop) and asks “why nam ich (why am I not) i thin armes . . . ​on rode (cross)?” While “meidhod” is occasionally a male attribute in early En­glish, and while this is a period of gender fluidity in devotional contexts, the subject position of both speakers is female.31 Although neither has the sharp focus of Hali Meithhad and the Wohunge, both ­these works could in princi­ple be from the milieu of Ancrene Wisse. Like the other Nero soliloquys, however, they may well be innovative

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relicts of that body of affective prayers in En­glish that Ancrene Wisse notes w ­ ere circulating “overal” (everywhere) in the region during the early 1200s, perhaps written on the “scrowen” (scrolls) the author instructs his readers to use to rec­ ord any they do not know, and usable both by religious ­women (anchoresses, nuns, or vowesses) and by other devout persons.32 §§§ One further indication that at least the Oreisun of Seinte Marie may predate Ancrene Wisse and its close colleagues is its presence in a book that other­wise consists of all the Katherine Group works except Hali Meithhad, Royal 17.A.xxvii. Written in the language of Herefordshire in an orthographic system that differs from that of the A/B manuscripts, Royal seems to be the earliest of the Ancrene Wisse Group books. Although its precise date is unknown, the hand of one of its scribes has been compared to that of The Lambeth Homilies manuscript (perhaps ca. 1200).33 This potential early date is also of interest in relation to the other works in Royal, the saints’ passions and Sawles Warde. With their audaciously virginal female protagonists, tales of suffering imprisonment, and triumphantly self-­orchestrated martyrdoms, the passiones are well suited to anchoresses, as allusions to all three of ­these saints in Hali Meithhad confirms: “Thench o Seinte Katerine, o Seinte Margarete, Seinte Enneis, Seinte Juliene, ant Seinte Cecille, ant o the othre haly meidnes in heovene” (think of St. Katherine, of St.  Margaret, St.  Agnes, St.  Juliana, St.  Lucy, and St.  Cecilia, and of the other holy virgins in heaven). A reference in Ancrene Wisse to “ower (your) En­glishe boc of Seinte Margarete” suggests that the three ­sisters for whom the work was originally written already owned a copy of Seinte Margarete itself.34 Yet despite their survival in books intended for private or small-­group reading, the three lives are written in a public style, influenced by the two-­beat rhythms and parallelisms of Old En­glish homiletic writing, and clearly meant in the first instance to function as addresses to gatherings associated with the feast days of each saint.35 Only Seinte Margarete alludes directly to its per­for­ mance on this day, calling the saint “thet eadie meiden the we munneth todey” (that blessed maiden whom we commemorate ­today). But all three carefully note the day of the saint’s martyrdom, when their feasts ­were celebrated: “the sixtenthe dey of Feoverreres moneth, the fowrtuthe kalende of Mearch thet is seoththen” (Seinte Juliene); “the moneth thet on ure ledene (in our language), the is ald (old) Englis, is Efterlithe inempnet, ant Julius o Latin, o the twentuthe



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dey” (Seinte Margarete); “i Novembres moneth the fif ant twentuthe dey” (Seinte Katerine). They also all invite the saint to pray for the hearers, or instruct the hearers to pray to the saint, or promise the saint’s intercessions on the hearers’ behalf.36 Although the saints ­were of somewhat dif­fer­ent status, with Juliana by this period notably less impor­tant than her colleagues, t­ here w ­ ere churches and chapels dedicated to all of them in or near Hereford. Their days ­were also all celebrated annually in larger churches across the diocese: Margaret’s and Katherine’s as major holidays at which attendance at church was mandatory for some categories of laypeople, and where many of the nine lessons for the day ­were taken from the saints’ Latin vitae; Juliana’s as a minor feast with two lessons, except in institutional contexts in which, perhaps for historical reasons, a more elaborate commemoration might be in order.37 Patron saint of childbirth and a ­humble shepherdess Margaret’s day was one of the four annual holidays from work especially for ­women (“ferienda ab operibus mulierum tantum,” as a Worcester document conventionally describes such feasts).38 Seinte Margarete responds to this feature of the day by addressing itself to an audience of “widewen with tha i-­weddede (as well as wedded) ant te meidnes nomeliche” (especially), all terms usually applied to ­women. It includes a charged description of how mere proximity is a source of sexual temptation between ­women and men and closes with a prayer in which the saint asks Christ to give “hihindenliche (hasty) helpe” to any ­woman who “pineth o childe” (suffers in giving birth) and calls her to mind.39 Seinte Katerine does not hail any specific audience, although the work’s sophistication is appropriate for one of the holidays set aside for every­body except laborers (“ferienda in omnibus preterquam in carucis,” as the Worcester document puts it). Only Seinte Juliene addresses itself to a general lay audience of both sexes: “alle leawede (lay) men the understonden ne mahen Latines ledene” (the Latin language) and so desire to hear her life “of Latin i-­turned (translated) to En­glishe leode.”40 ­W hether they derive from the cathedral, the priory of Sts. Peter, Paul, and Guthlac, or somewhere quite dif­fer­ent, ­these passiones appear to have been written for use in a significant and presumably urban ecclesiastical establishment to supplement the Latin lessons said on the saints’ feast days for the benefit of the dif­fer­ent kinds of laypeople in attendance. As such, they participated in a mode of public religious cele­bration that went back centuries, also under­lying the early twelfth-­century Old En­glish lives of Margaret, Giles, and Nicholas mentioned in Chapter Sixteen, as well as numerous twelfth-­century saints’ lives in insular French.41

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Although it is a less ostentatiously public work than the three passiones, Sawles Warde also represents itself as a homiletic address in the form of a discourse on Matthew 24:43, used as a Gospel reading on several feast days: “Yef the husebonde wiste . . . ​hwenne ant i hwuch time the theof walde cume to his hus to breoken, he walde wakien” (if the head of the ­house knew . . . ​when and at what time the thief would come to break into his ­house, he would keep watch).42 This narrative allegory, based on Anselm’s De custodia interioris hominis, describes how a husband Wit (reason), aided by God’s ­daughters, the cardinal virtues, checks the evil impulses of his wife ­Will (the passions) through meditations on hell and heaven. T ­ hese meditations, which include a version of Anselm’s influential exposition of the bodily and spiritual joys of the blessed, are delivered as orations by messengers who have visited ­these locales, Fearlac (fear) and Lives Luve (love of life). Although unconnected to the passiones by genre, the work appears with one or more of them in all three of the books in which it is found and likely derived from the same institutional milieu.43 Again like the passiones, Sawles Warde appears to have lay hearers and readers in mind, domesticating Anselm’s allegory so that it potentially applies to management of the ­house­hold as much as the soul. In Anselm’s allegory, Ratio is not a husband, and ­there is no character ­Will, the wife. ­Will has been imported from another Anselm work, the De humanis moribus, like the De custodia, a relict of Anselm’s intimate pastoral colloquys with the monks of his Canterbury ­house­hold. In the De moribus, voluntas features as a mulier whose disastrous lack of obedient fidelity to her husband is reflected in the “untohene ant rechelese” (undisciplined and undutiful) ­house­hold that it is Wit’s task to discipline in Sawles Warde. Sawles Warde’s account of the psyche as f­amily unit recalls The Proverbs of Alfred in its use of misogynist ste­reo­t ype to promote good patriarchal values. In order for the ­house­hold servants that are the outer and inner senses to behave with decorum and the “tresor” that is the soul to be safe, Wit must “chasti” (chastise) his wife and “bineome hire ofte muchel of thet ha walde” (often deprive her of much of what she wants). Despite its theological sophistication, members of lay ­house­holds are one target audience for this work.44 §§§ ­ nless evidence accumulates that the Royal manuscript was written too early U for this scenario, the four Katherine Group works in the book could have been composed in the immediate ambit of Ancrene Wisse and at the same period, as seems was prob­ably the case with Hali Meithhad. Although the Ancrene Wisse



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author’s reference to Seinte Margarete is sufficiently imprecise to suggest that he neither wrote this passio nor knew it intimately, this would offer one explanation for the focus on female virginity in all t­ hese works. Even Sawles Warde adds a passage on the special heavenly joys of the order of “meidnes” to its source, to which the peroration of Ancrene Wisse, part 7, may allude. This scenario would encourage continued integrated readings of the group, the books in which they survive to us, and the vigorous pastoral initiatives of the 1220s.45 Yet ­these works could also have been written at any period from the late twelfth ­century on, between the Third and Fourth Lateran Councils. Their composition could belong to an early phase of the West Midlands anchoritic movement to which Ancrene Wisse made its power­f ul contribution. It is likely to have taken place in a monastic setting where the rare Anselm texts that lie ­behind Sawles Warde ­were in regular use, as we happen to know they ­were at the ­mother ­house of Sts. Peter, Paul, and Guthlac, the abbey of St. Peter’s, Gloucester.46 Rather than being informed by the new ethos of Ancrene Wisse and its Dominican companions, ­these Katherine Group works, like their Wooing Group colleagues, could have helped produce the conditions that made Ancrene Wisse pos­si­ble, laying the ground for the work’s distinctive repre­sen­ta­tion of the recluses as carefully secluded, professedly in “religiun,” yet still exemplary members of the laity. ­There ­were, ­after all, good grounds for promoting the ideal of “meidenhood,” female as well as male, at a period of new attacks on clerical marriage by the papacy and the episcopate, as ­there ­were for situating what was becoming the exclusively lay state of marriage clearly within the wider framework of repre­ sen­ta­tions of the ­orders of the Church, secular as well as religious.47 Archbishop Stephen Langton’s statutes from the Canterbury diocese from 1213, two years before Lateran IV, are substantially or­ga­nized around such themes, weaving together issues arising from clerical concubinage (so-­called), the newly solidified status of marriage as a sacrament, the need for priests to exercise care in confessing ­women, and (as in the ­later Hereford statutes) their duty to ensure recluses not take in guests of the opposite sex overnight. The promotion of the cult of virgin martyrs on the one hand and of the anchoritic life on the other, in both cases by way of the ideal of spiritual marriage to Christ and the eroticization of celibacy it furthered, ­were complementary aspects of a single pro­cess of mandated social differentiation ­under way at this period.48 It may be still harder to resolve questions about when and where certain of the Ancrene Wisse Group works ­were composed than it has been for Ancrene Wisse. The hypothesis that the latter was written in Hereford, which was also a center of production for Ancrene Wisse Group books, strongly suggests that

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the three passiones and Sawles Warde ­were in the city by the 1220s or ­earlier, as the early date of Royal might in any case suggest. ­There is something to be said for the conjecture that they ­were written ­there. Although dialect evidence does not appear to point in this direction, other possibilities may include Gloucester Abbey, about whose literary culture ­little is known, since most of its library is lost. By the time Hali Meithhad, Ancrene Wisse, and The Wohunge of Ure Lauerd ­were written, they w ­ ere already part of the Hereford devotional scene, as they may have been in other centers up and down the West Midlands, diocesan and other­wise. As such, all the Ancrene Wisse Group works, both ­those performed in public and ­those read in private, participated in what even at this date remained an institutionally multiple and textually layered pastoral environment. Even monastic Old En­glish still played its part, if we are to believe the evidence of Bodley 343 (­whether or not this book was in fact from Hereford), not to mention the other evidence of the style of the passiones, whose traditional use of alliteration, rhythm, and vocabulary was clearly still familiar and effective for members of West Midlands congregations and audiences. For all its innovativeness, the Ancrene Wisse Group was not a de novo creation of the new pastoral theology of the period. More or less as R. W. Chambers long ago argued, the works of which the group is made up still participated in dif­fer­ent ways in a tradition that extended back to the earliest known works of En­glish prose in the ninth and tenth centuries.

 Coda to Volume 1

The En­glish religious and literary scene in the de­cades around 1200 as sketched in the last four chapters may already seem closer to the scene familiar to students of late medieval vernacular religious lit­er­a­ture than it does to the early medieval one from which it emerged. By the time the final works in the Ancrene Wisse Group ­were in circulation, a major pro­cess of re­distribution and differentiation of the structures of authority within the institutional Church had been completed, both in princi­ple and to a l­imited extent in practice. Two g­ reat councils of this period, Lateran III and Lateran IV, had placed the episcopal hierarchy fully in charge of the Latin Church ­under the papacy, relegating the religious ­orders to ancillary roles, with the power­f ul exception of the new ­orders of friars, while elevating the status of the educated secular clergy. Lateran IV also made confession central to lay religious life and instruction and brought the ideal of clerical celibacy a big step nearer to realization, a development motivated both by a cultivated association between sexual purity and the administration of the sacraments, and by a more general ecclesiological (and financial) need to interrupt the hereditary transfer of churches from ­father to son. Only the doctrine of purgatory, still in a fluid and speculative state at this period, was not yet part of the Church’s official repertoire, and was to become so only at the Second Council of Lyon in 1274. A parallel pro­cess of re­distribution and differentiation had taken place in the relationship between Church and Crown. Church and state remained thoroughly intertwined in practice, with bishops and abbots often effectively appointed by kings and taking on aggressive po­liti­cal roles, particularly during the long and consequential reign of Henry III, as we ­shall see in Volume 2. But as the influence of Carolingian po­liti­cal theology and its elevation of kingship faded, and even as the strug­gle between the papacy and the Hohenstaufen

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emperor, Frederick II, began to heat up during the 1220s and 1230s, they achieved an increased separation at a conceptual level. This pro­cess was aided not only by fallout from Thomas Becket’s murder, in many ways an epochal event, but in a dif­fer­ent way by the prominence of ­England’s Jews. The presence of Jews, ­under always inadequate royal protection from violent harassment ­until their expulsion in 1290, complicated efforts to represent ­England as an entirely Christian polity, as had been just pos­si­ble for Ælfric and Wulfstan and would in theory be pos­si­ble again for Langland and Wyclif. As we saw, this separation had implications for lit­er­a­ture as well as in the realms of ecclesiology and politics, urging a view of national history as a scene of ethical, but not in any easily legible way providential, action that left ­limited space for the admonitory optimism about the En­glish as a divinely chosen ­people that gives Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica its special glow. Vernacular pastoralia was still circulating widely, in its En­glish guise most often among the clergy, but was far from ubiquitous, as it had been two hundred years ­earlier. A vast majority of pastoral texts, even on a broad understanding of the pastoral, ­were now in Latin. Vernacular pastoral writers came from dif­fer­ent institutional backgrounds, secular and religious, monastic, canonical, and fraternal, although the Cistercians, Carthusians, and other ascetic ­orders ­were not yet represented. Unlike their Carthusian colleagues, En­glish Cistercians would never be greatly interested in the vernacular. By contrast, although they no longer played a dominant role, as the initiative passed to regular canons, secular canons, and friars, Benedictine monks would continue to write and copy vernacular texts of many dif­fer­ent kinds u ­ ntil their suppression in the 1530s. The influence of a crucially impor­tant new institution, the university, was also starting to be felt, although the term itself was only just coming into use. The proliferation of vernacular pastoral works or­ga­nized around the mnemonic lists and information trees developed in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries still lay in the ­f uture. But systematization was already well ­under way in vernacular texts constructed around dif­fer­ent kinds of distinctio, as well as in the reduction of the varied lists of vices and virtues of ­earlier period to the stabilized groups of seven that had become ubiquitous by the ­fourteenth ­century. Also underway was a broad absorption of the emotionally charged habits of devotion promoted by a group of twelfth-­century monastic teachers and celebrities, including Anselm, Bernard, Aelred, and both Hugh and Richard of St. Victor. Affectivity already fulfilled a significant range of functions, from sustaining individuals who had chosen any of the vari­ous forms of the contemplative life, to cultivating the contrition necessary for true confession, to instilling salvific urgency into preaching and hearing sermons.



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§§§ The impression of a late medieval world of writing, thought, and practice already beginning to emerge ­will become only the more marked in the first chapters of the sequel to this volume, as discussion turns to religious writing in ­England’s other major written vernacular, French, and the roles it played across the twelfth, thirteenth, and ­fourteenth centuries. French was already a more prolific written language than En­glish by the 1120s, and very much so from the 1170s down to the early 1300s. For reasons that include the par­tic­u­lar relationship written French enjoyed with Latin indicated by its initial naming of itself as romanz (literally “Roman”), this re­orientation also requires paying greater attention than has been necessary ­until now to pastoralia in Latin. This shift and broadening of focus is at one level necessary simply to fill the gaping hole left by this volume in its account of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, and to prepare the way for discussion of the ­later history of religious writing in insular French, from the 1230s on. But sustained attention to the growth of a major new body of writing in the French of ­England is also needed before anything can be said about the ­later history of writing in early ­Middle En­glish to around 1350, or even about the late ­Middle En­glish lit­er­a­ ture of the ­century and a half that followed. This is ­because so many early ­Middle En­glish texts produced ­after 1250 ­either are translations of works in French, more often than not insular French, or make use of distinctively French forms and genres. Among all the other kinds of changes that they bring, including the development of French into an international language, read and written across western Eu­rope, the de­cades around 1200 inaugurate a consequential shift in the functions of ­England’s two main vernacular languages that significantly changes the interrelationships and trajectories of both (see Appendix, ­Table 4). §§§ As should now be evident, ­there was nothing conservative or provincial about the En­glish texts and books written across the twelfth ­century and into the thirteenth. Firmly grounded in the canonical group of vernacular homiliaries, rules, and hagiographies written in ­England’s equivalent of Carolingian Latin, this was an adaptive, innovative, and unpredictable body of writing, whose intellectual and institutional range can only grow more apparent to us as the somewhat artificial divide between Old and early ­Middle En­glish ceases to structure scholarly research agendas.

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The entanglement of Old En­glish pastoral lit­er­a­ture with the early ­Middle En­glish works that use it as a point of generic and thematic departure m ­ atters not only for early En­glish literary history, which has never known what to do with ­either body of writing, but for the wider history of Christian thought, which has long exaggerated the transformative character of this time of unusually rapid cultural change. The episcopally driven reforms precipitated by the Third and Fourth Lateran Councils can be credited neither with the invention of pastoral care nor with that of many of the textual materials used in ­later preaching and teaching, despite the systematization of ­these materials into new constructs that look as dif­fer­ent from the writings on which they draw as the thema sermon looks from the homily. The genius of the Glossa ordinaria, the work of an ­earlier group of intellectuals at Laon, was its collation of excerpts of patristic and Carolingian exegetical writing into a new kind of florilegium, whose subsequent authority and comparative stability was in good part simply a ­matter of format. Somewhat similarly, the genius of the Latin pastoral writers of the interconciliar period at Paris and eventually Oxford was their ability to develop portable ways to store and articulate existing doctrines and practices that could be used in a range of institutional contexts and across a wide geo­g raph­i­cal area. Despite the power­f ul changes to theological scholarship brought about by its assimilation of Aristotelian concepts and texts, as well as by its use of dialectic in the tradition of Anselm and Peter Abelard, the early thirteenth-­century pastoral revolution was one as much of medium as it was of message. The creation of the texts and genres, large and small, that brought about this revolution was nonetheless a huge and conscious effort, as the multiplication of artes praedicandi (arts of preaching) and other writing guides in the de­ cades ­after 1200 shows.1 Much like the Benedictine reform movement discussed in Part III and its Carolingian pre­de­ces­sor, it was also an effort that depended heavi­ly on a rhe­toric of transformation, personal and institutional, and was capable of being dismissive of the ­earlier forms and genres on which it nonetheless continued to rely. An example of reformist writing at its most ner­vously self-­confident, Ancrene Wisse is ostensibly impatient of form itself, drawing sustenance from an antiformalist eremitic tradition that stretched back eight hundred years. To resituate Ancrene Wisse in the context of the only somewhat less venerable vernacular prose tradition from which it drew other kinds of sustenance is to develop a fuller sense of the conflicting stresses and strains on the work, its author, and its early readers, as they underwent their versions of the negotiations between the old and the new, full of backward glances and slippages, demanded



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of all their reform-­minded contemporaries. The continued circulation of The Old En­glish Benedictine Rule into the thirteenth c­ entury might have allowed Æthelwold’s translation to function as an authorizing pre­ce­dent for this new set of En­glish institutiones that is effectively a rule, as was suggested ­earlier. But the radically dif­fer­ent kind of idealism embodied by this text, however well worn by time, would also have been felt as a challenge to the new anchoritic religiosity, as we saw it also was for the author of Vices and Virtues, who is careful to incorporate the monastic virtues of obedience and humility into his lay liber manualis, despite the skepticism he brings to his references to the monastic life itself. §§§ Yet however rich a vista ­these early ­Middle En­glish works open onto their era, they ­were never more than a small part of a larger picture, occupying real but restricted space in a wider textual system many of whose complexities have not so far featured in this discussion. This space also proved to be temporary, more so than writers such as Orrm seem to have anticipated. Compared to the Old En­glish works on which they built, this is a short-­lived body of writing, with only a few exceptions. Ancrene Wisse itself was still only starting its ­career in 1250. In the ­fourteenth ­century it went on to anchor a major body of ­Middle En­glish religious prose, circulating in one form or another down to around 1500. Two Wooing Group works, Ureisun of God Almihti and Wohunge of Ure Lauerd, continued to be part of a local canon, resurfacing for us in an ornate late fourteenth-­century soliloquy from the West Midlands, A Talkyng of Þe Loue of God, in which both are absorbed into a longer work of ­great artistry. Layamon’s Brut, Poema Morale, and The Proverbs of Alfred also retained a localized canonical status for a period. ­These works seem to have been read for a hundred years or so ­after their composition, in books one or two of which ­were copied as late as the last de­cades of the thirteenth ­century, the period the Brut was also being used as a minor source for one version of Robert of Gloucester’s Metrical Chronicle. The septenary meter of Poema Morale and the Orrmulum and the alliterative meter of the Brut ­were also established enough to remain regionally, and to an extent nationally, current, well into the ­fourteenth ­century in the first case, well into the fifteenth in the second.2 But no surviving copy of any of the other works discussed in the last four chapters dates from ­after 1250. Most ­were written soon ­after the works themselves. This is true of all three of the early ­Middle En­glish homiliaries, the Orr­ mulum, Trinity Homilies, and Lambeth Homilies, as well as of Vices and Virtues

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and all five works in the Katherine Group. Most survive in only one copy, and none is in more than three. What is more, despite their consistent quality, utility, and close connections with power­f ul institutions and in some cases the episcopate, they have no known descendants, direct or indirect. The next homiliary written in En­glish ­after 1200 is the verse Northern Homily Cycle a c­ entury ­later. The next homiliary in En­glish prose, with the uncertain exception of the En­glish translation of Robert of Gretham’s Miroir, is the Wycliffite Sermon Cycle almost a ­century ­after that. Hali Meithhad was perhaps too specialized a work to have textual offspring. But neither do the more public works that circulated with it, including the highly respected Sawles Warde; nor do works of private lay counsel such as Vices and Virtues, whose nearest equivalent down to the mid-­fourteenth ­century is the Ayenbyte of Inwyt (remorse of conscience), Michael of Northgate’s rendering of the Dominican Somme le roi into Kentish.3 So far as we can tell from the surviving textual rec­ord, indeed, the composition of works in En­glish prose seems more or less to have ceased ­after the Ancrene Wisse Group took its final form. We know of almost no new works in this medium, and almost no new copies of existing works, from between 1250 and the 1330s, when Richard Rolle came on the scene, and the first of a set of prose translations from London perhaps began to circulate.4 Despite the many capacities of Old En­glish verse, prose had been the dominant medium for writing in En­glish since the ninth ­century, initially crucial to its function as a local equivalent of Carolingian Latin, ­later crucial in most contexts to its function as a medium of pastoral instruction. So far as the composition of new works in early ­Middle En­glish prose is concerned, and in many cases its copying, the second quarter of the thirteenth ­century is thus both a kind of terminus and a kind of watershed. §§§ Can we account for this long hiatus in the writing and even the copying of En­ glish prose, soon ­after the composition of one of the most striking groups of works discussed in this volume, the Ancrene Wisse Group? In light of what we now know about the institutional contexts of the works discussed in the past three chapters, the hiatus can no longer be attributed to the marginal status of early M ­ iddle En­glish, any more than it can to the obsolescence of Old En­glish. Although the briefest summary of the structural changes at issue from the point of view of En­glish is in order, this is not the place to address this question in detail ­here. As we see in the sequel to this volume, any answer must be relational, turning on developments within the wider system of written



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languages, especially with re­spect to the new vernacular, French. While some of the earliest works of insular French are recognizably imitative of Old En­ glish and may draw directly on Old En­glish sources, the new literary language rapidly took on its own character. Occupying one piece of literary terrain En­ glish had abandoned, as a preferred language of works written for noble patrons, it also developed a distinctive self-­presentation as a lingua communis (common tongue), a role still also sometimes played by En­glish. Even in the twelfth ­century, texts in the two languages sometimes shared manuscript space, as in the magnificent Eadwine Psalter, and coexisted more closely, culturally and institutionally, than is often assumed. Writing near 1200, Layamon does not reject the account of British history in his main source, Wace’s Brut; he tries to improve on it. Yet the two languages ­were dissimilar enough in function that the changes both underwent over the next de­cades ­were, with one exception, largely asymmetrical. Indeed, even the several changes internal to En­glish are sufficiently complicated that they are difficult to describe straightforwardly in relation to one another. Most notable, perhaps, is the end of the long early medieval insular tradition of writing preaching books in En­glish, partly as an unintended outcome of the new pastoralia and its emphasis on portability and (comparative) uniformity, but also as a sign that it had come to seem inappropriate to many churchmen, now apparently including monks, to use a written vernacular explic­ itly as a language of professional exchange within the institutional Church. With the exception of Philippe de Thaon’s Comput, written as a guide to the liturgical calendar for fellow priests in 1113, this inhibition had applied to insular French from the start.5 As we see in Volume 2, it would continue to do so, despite the practical difficulties that ­were evidently created, ­until the ­later thirteenth ­century. This deprofessionalization of En­glish did not involve even a temporary end to the use of En­glish by clerics writing primarily for other clerics, as Layamon perhaps did in the Brut. ­There is a small but sharply aware body of thirteenth-­ century ecclesiastical satire in En­glish, as well as a larger one in French, written for the purposes of community-­sustaining clerical entertainment. But it did interrupt the use of pastoral writing in En­glish as a medium for the public discussions of the duties and status of the clergy informally conducted by Orrm and the Vices and Virtues author. More obviously, it meant that writers of En­ glish w ­ ere no longer officially engaged in producing materials meant to be “recited by the ministers of God in full” (“integre . . . ​a ministris Dei recitentur”) in church ser­vices, like Ælfric and Orrm, even if one very widely circulated work of the ­later thirteenth ­century, the South En­glish Legendary, may have functioned

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in this way in practice.6 This tradition is reinvented or revived only by the early fourteenth-­century Augustinian authors of The Northern Homily Cycle, and given public form still ­later, in John Gaytryge’s alliterative Lay Folks’ Catechism of 1357, an official En­glish version of Archbishop John Thoresby of York’s syllabus of items necessary for all Christians in the archdiocese to know, written in the archbishop’s voice to be preached from all its pulpits.7 Institutionally, ­these changes thus amounted to the final demise of the special status that En­glish had ­earlier enjoyed as a de facto official language of the Church, at least at the period of the Benedictine Reform and prob­ably long before that. Formally, they coincided with and could have helped precipitate a dif­fer­ent kind of change, from the use of prose as the dominant medium of lay pastoral instruction to the use of expository verse. A turn to verse is anticipated by Orrm, who may have understood the decorous unrhymed septenaries he uses for his homilies as suited to a liturgical event other­wise conducted in Latin. It is also anticipated by the rhymed exposition of the Pater noster that is Lambeth VI, one of the earliest expository En­glish poems written in short rhyming couplets, the form preferred for most long insular French poems of the twelfth and thirteenth and long En­glish poems of the thirteenth and ­fourteenth centuries: “Ure feder thet in heovene is / Thet is al sothful iwis: / Weo moten to theos wordes i-­seon, / thet to live and to saule gode beon, / thet weo beon swa his sunes i-­borene / thet he beo feder and we him i-­corene” (our f­ather who in heaven is, who is all full of truth, indeed: we ­ought to attend to ­these words, which are good for body and soul, so that we may be like his begotten sons, so that he may be ­father and we his chosen ­children).8 Once the passiones of Margaret, Juliana, and Katherine in the Katherine Group ­stopped being performed on the feast days of each saint, it is more than likely that they ­were replaced by works in verse, possibly from the South En­glish Legendary itself. En­ glish prose works clearly intended for the general laity would not begin to reappear ­until the last de­cades of the ­fourteenth ­century. Fi­nally, vernacular prose works intended for more specialist readers, from the devout laypeople who are the target audience of Vices and Virtues to the semireligious anchoresses of Ancrene Wisse, are another story again. ­Here, a major function of Old and early ­Middle En­glish was taken over by insular French, which was becoming the vernacular language of choice for prose works addressed to ­those in contemplative life during the very period when Ancrene Wisse was being written and revised. The earliest substantial French work in this mode is the brilliant Exposiciun sur la Pater nostre, written to an unknown group of nuns by the new-­minted Oxford Franciscan Adam of Exeter, a protégé of Robert Grosseteste, very soon before or ­after 1230, within a few years of the first version



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of Ancrene Wisse. The best-­k nown is the Mirouer de Seinte Eglise, a translation of the Latin Mirror of Holy Church by Edmund Rich of Abingdon, Salisbury trea­surer and archbishop of Canterbury (d. 1240), apparently made at the time of his canonization in 1246. Not long ­after that date, ­these works ­were joined by two dif­fer­ent French versions of Ancrene Wisse itself, one still addressed to anchoresses, the other as part of a more generalized Franciscan pastoral text, the Compileison (before 1274), which incorporates much of Ancrene Wisse into its mighty length.9 By the second half of the ­century, insular French prose texts ­were starting to diversify in response to the increasing circulation of French prose texts in vari­ous genres from the continent, from short theological summae to encyclopedias to Bible versions. Texts of ­these and other kinds ­were still ubiquitous when deliberate efforts began to be made to revive En­glish prose in the 1370s and 1380s, often initially by translating well-­k nown French works into En­glish. As ­will become amply clear in the sequel to this volume, the continuity of En­ glish prose between the Old En­glish and late ­Middle En­glish periods runs, for the most part, through insular French. Again, reasons for this early thirteenth-­century shift between vernacular languages in the domain of prose must concern us elsewhere. But the decisiveness of the shift can be registered not only in general terms, by its comprehensiveness, but more specifically in relation to Ancrene Wisse, whose importance to the ­later medieval centuries is such that it returns again in the sequel to this volume. According to the recent Translations médiévales, a comprehensive annotated listing of translations into French from all languages before circa 1500, of well over twelve hundred such translations, the only substantial translations from En­glish into French made over the course of a period of nearly five hundred years, remarkably, are both of them versions of Ancrene Wisse. As early as the 1260s, it was in French translation, not in its first En­glish guise, that the work was gaining a national reputation, soon leaving the West Midlands to travel as far east as Norwich. The most complete of three surviving copies of the Compileison, Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.14.7, was donated to the Norwich Cathedral Priory library, potentially as early as the 1280s.10 ­There could be no better testimony ­either to the role of Ancrene Wisse as a formative work of insular French, as well as En­glish, contemplative prose, or to the fundamental role played by French in the history of the medieval En­glish vernacular during the two centuries or so of its dominance.

Appendix: T ­ ables of Dates, Te x t s , a n d P e r s o n s

Table 1. Phases in the Development of the Major Vernacular Lit­er­a­tures of Medieval E ­ ngland (See especially Introduction, Section 2.) Events

Old En­glish

Early 600s Conversion Early 700s Bede (d. 735) 800s: Viking raids/invasion 900s Unification of ­England 950–1020s Benedictine Reform 1010s Danish Conquest 1050–80 Gregorian Reform 1066 Norman Conquest 1215 Fourth Lateran Council and Magna Carta 1290 Expulsion of Jews

600–900 Phase 1

1337–89 Hundred Years’ War A 1348–50 Black Death 1378–1417 Papal Schism 1415–53 Hundred Years’ War B 1530s Henrician Reformation

Insular French

­Middle En­glish

1100–1200 Phase 1 1200–1300 Phase 2

1150–1250 Phase 1

900–1100 Phase 2 1100–1200s Phase 3

1300–1400s Phase 3

1250–1350 Phase 2 1350–1530s Phase 3 (becoming early Modern En­glish)

­ able 2. First Phase of Old T En­glish, 600–900 (See especially Chapter 1, Section 1.)

Date

Events, P ­ eople, Texts

590–670

Election of Gregory I (590). Augustine of Canterbury’s mission (597). Earliest En­glish law codes. Synod of Whitby (664). Aldhelm (d. ca. 709), Bede (d. 735). Earliest En­glish glosses. Earliest recorded Old En­glish poems: “Cædmon’s Hymn,” “Bede’s Death Song” (735), perhaps Ruthwell Cross part of “Dream of the Rood,” possibly Beowulf. Bede: Homilies on the Gospels, Historia ecclesiastica (ca. 731), Letter to Ecgbert (both Latin), partial translation of John’s Gospel (735, lost), and more. Second Council of Clovesho (747). Boniface/Winfrid (d. 754). Vespasian Psalter, Codex Aureus (both Latin). Ecgbert of York (d. 766). Offa of Mercia (d. 796). Alcuin of York (d. 804). Viking raids (790s on). Imperial coronation of Charlemagne (800). Council of Tours (813). Old En­glish glosses to Vespasian Psalter. Earliest known in­de­pen­dent Old En­glish prose texts: charters, perhaps Old En­glish Martyrology, homilies. Viking invasion and establishment of Danelaw (865–96). Reign of Alfred of Wessex (886–99). Mercian Old En­glish Bede. Alfred, Hierdeboc, Laws, ­etc. Inauguration of Anglo-­ Saxon Chronicle.

670–750

750–800 800–850

850–900

­ able 3. Second Phase of Old T En­glish, 900–1100 (See especially Chapter 12, Section 1.)

Date, Events, Rulers, (Arch)Bishops

Writers, Texts, Books

880–950. Consolidation of Wessex, reconquest of Danelaw, unification of ­England. Kings Alfred (d. 899), Edward (d. 924), Æthelstan (d. 939), Edmund (d. 946). Bishops Wærferth, Asser.

Wærferth of Worcester’s OE Gregory’s Dialogues. Alfred: Hierdeboc and Domboc. OE Psalms 1–50, Anglo-­Saxon Chronicle. Asser, Life of Alfred (Latin). OE Boethius, OE Soliloquies, OE Orosius (all attrib. Alfred). OE Gospels, Junius Manuscript, insular copy of Old Saxon Heliand. Æthelwold: OE glosses on Psalms and (? with Dunstan) on Aldelm’s De virginitate; King Edgar’s Establishment of Monasteries, OE Benedictine Rule, Regularis concordia (Latin). Wulfstan Cantor, Lantfred of Winchester: saints’ lives (Latin). Blickling Homilies, Vercelli Homilies, OE Rule of Chrodegang, Exeter Book, Nowell Codex. Solomon and Saturn I and II. Ælfric (d. 1010): Catholic Homilies, Lives of Saints, Grammar, Pastoral Letters, Libellus de veteri testamenti et novo, Preface to Genesis, parts of OE Heptateuch. Wulfstan (d. 1023): Homilies, Pastoral Letters, Institutes of Polity, Canons of Edgar, Law Codes, Handbook for a Confessor. Byrhtferth (d. 1020): Enchiridion (bilingual), saints’ lives (Latin). OE Apollonius of Tyre. (Continued)

950–80. En­glish Benedictine monastic reform movement. King Edgar (d. 975), Queen Ælfryth (d. 1001), joint coronation (973). Bishops Æthelwold (d. 984), Dunstan (d. 988), Oswald (d. 992). Monasticization of Winchester Cathedral (964). Council of Winchester (ca. 970). 980–1040. Scandinavian raids, leading to conquest (1010s). Kings Æthelred II (d. 1016), Cnut (d. 1035), Queen Emma (d. 1052). Bishops Sigeric (d. 994), Ælfheah (d. 1012), Wulfstan (d. 1023), Æthelnoth (d. 1038). Æthelweard (d. 998), Æthelmær (d. 1015), noble patrons of Ælfric.

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Appendix

Date, Events, Rulers, (Arch)Bishops

Writers, Texts, Books

1040–1100. Norman Conquest (1066). Election of Gregory VII (1070). Monastic and ecclesiastical reor­ga­ni­ za­tion. Kings Edward the Confessor (d. 1066), William I (d. 1087), William II (d. 1100). Bishops: Leofric (d. 1070), Stigand (d. 1072), Lanfranc (d. 1089), Wulfstan (d. 1095), Anselm (d. 1109).

OE penitentials. Pastoral books: Cotton Tiberius A.iii. Laud Misc. 482. Junius 10/11. Homiliaries of Leofric and Wulfstan of Worcester. Goscelin, Liber confortatorius, saints’ lives (Latin). Eadmer, saints’ lives (Latin), ­etc. Anselm, Orationes sive Meditationes, Proslogion, Cur Deus homo, De humanis moribus, Similitudines (Latin). Honorius, Elucidarium, Speculum ecclesie, ­etc. (Latin).

­ able 4. Third Phase of T Old En­glish, 1100–1200, First Phase of ­Middle En­glish, 1150–1250 (See especially Chapter 11, Section 3; Chapter 16, Sections 1 and 4; and Coda.)

Date, Rulers, Events, Key Anglo-­Latin and Insular French Writers and Texts

Key Old En­glish and Early M ­ iddle En­glish Texts, Books, and Writers

1100–50. Henry I (d. 1135), Adeliza (d. 1151), Stephen (d. 1154), Mathilda (d. 1152). William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum. Benedeit, Voyage de S. Brendan. Phillipe de Thaon. Geoffrei Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis. Oxford Psalter.

Teaching book: Vespasian D.xiv: OE Distichs of Cato, OE Honorius, OE Ralph d’Escures, OE Alcuin, Life of Neot. Homiliary: Corpus 303, with Lives of Margaret, Giles, Nicholas. Law Code: Textus Roffensis. Chronicle: Peterborough Chronicle (to 1154). Further homiliaries. Vitellius A.xv: Old En­glish Soliloquies, Gospel of Nicodemus, ­etc. Eadwine Psalter (trilingual). Proverbs of Alfred. Poema Morale. Vices and Virtues. Homiliaries: Cambridge Ii.1.33 (includes "Instructions for Christians," OE Alcuin, ­etc.), Orrmulum, Bodley 343 (includes History of Holy Rood Tree, Latin Homiliary of Angers), Vespasian Homilies, Trinity Homilies. Late copies of OE Gospels. Layamon, Brut. Wintney Rule. Homiliaries: Lambeth Homilies, Otho A.xiii. Tremulous Hand: Worcester F.174 (“Sanctus Beda” e­ tc.), and annotations of many e­ arlier books. Ancrene Wisse Group: quasi-­r ule, saints’ lives, instructional treatises, meditations (see ­Table 5 below).

1150–1200. Henry II (d. 1189), Eleanor (d. 1204), Richard I (d. 1199). Murder of Thomas Becket (1170). Third Lateran Council (1179). John of Salisbury, Policraticus. Liber Eliensis. Wace, Roman de Brut. Clemence of Barking, Marie de France, Sanson de Nanteuil, Simund de Freine. 1200–50. John (d. 1216), Henry III (d. 1172). Interdict (1208–13). Fourth Lateran Council (1215). Magna Carta (1215). Edmund Rich, Mirror of Holy Church. Maurice de Sully, Sermons (in French). Lucidaire. Adam of Exeter, Exposiciun. Robert Grosseteste Chasteau d’amur, and other works.

­ able 5. Texts and Manuscripts of the T Ancrene Wisse Group (See Chapter 16, Section 4; and Chapter 20, Section 2.)

Manuscript Royal 17 A.xxvii Cleopatra C.vi Nero A.xiv

Bodley 34 Titus D. xviii Corpus 402 Gonville and Caius 234/120

Ancrene Wisse (C13 copies in En­glish)

Early version, plus author’s annotations Early version, including material addressed to three ­sisters as work’s original dedicatees

Early version Late version Lay adaptation (see Chapter 20, note 12)

Katherine Group

Wooing Group

Sawles Warde, Katerine, Margarete, Juliana

Oreison of Seinte Marie

Katerine, Margarete, Juliana, Hali Meithhad, Sawles Warde Sawles Warde, Hali Meithhad, Katerine

Ureisun of Ure Lefdi, Ureisun of God Almihti, Oreisun of Seinte Marie, Lofsong of Ure Louerde

Wohunge of Ure Lauerd

Notes

general preface 1. The terms, which ­were coined by the anthropologist Kenneth Pike in the 1950s (see Pike 1967) derive from a distinction in linguistics between phonetic (standard pronunciation) and phonemic (­actual pronunciations). On the history of the distinction in social analy­sis, see M. Harris 1976; for a sustained study in the context of the methodology of cultural materialism, see M. Harris 1980. Etic/emic analy­sis has much in common with the premodern method of empathetic analy­sis described by Karl Morrison in his remarkable 1988 study I Am You, with its account of the double movement of identification and disidentification he argues characterized this method. See N. Watson 1999a, which explores the potential of what Morrison calls the “hermeneutics of empathy” for historical enquiries such as this one. 2. S. Pollock 2006, 437. 3. For early medieval vernaculars, see Geary 2009 and 2013. For the ­later centuries, see, e.g., Corbellini et al. 2013 and 2015, on Bible translation and religious reading; Krotz et al. 2018, on vernacular literacies across the medieval era; and, in a dif­fer­ent vein, the magisterial Old Spanish Bible of Moshe Arragel, ed. Andrés Enrique-­A rias, Luis Manuel Girón-­Negrón, Francisco Javier Pueyo-­Mena, and Ángel Sáenz-­Badillos, whose first volumes are due to be published in 2022. Foundational contributions are made in the series of editions and studies of instructional texts published by Reichert since the 1980s in the series Wissenliteratur im Mittelalter. See also Somerset and Watson 2003b, and (in a dif­fer­ent, but broadly comparative mode) Wallace 2016. 4. On nineteenth-­century medievalism and nationalism, see M. Warren 2011 and Utz 2016, among many ­others. See also Chapter Three, Section 1. For the vernacular as a category in postcolonial studies, see Bhabha 1996 and S. Pollock 1998, a meditation on Bhabha’s essay in relation to premodern South Asia. See also, e.g., Ramanathan 2005, on the language politics of modern India; Agyekum 2018, on linguistic imperialism in modern Ghana; and Beecroft 2008, on the term as used in global literary studies more broadly. Readers alert to recent discussion of the “politics of time” in medieval studies and elsewhere ­will recognize the influence of K. Davis 2008, an impor­tant book.

introduction 1. Num. 22:30: respectively Biblia Hebraica, ed. Kittel et al. (Hebrew), Septuaginta, ed. Rahlfs (Greek), and Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam, ed. Fischer and Weber (Latin), En­glish translation from Douay-­Rheims Bible, original version of 1609–10, trans. Gregory Martin (see Chapter Four, Section 2). For the Balaam narrative, from the Deir Alla inscriptions in Jordan (ca. 800 b.c.e.) down

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Notes to Pages 1–4

to the first Christian centuries, see Robker 2019. For a study of Jewish, Christian, and early Islamic responses to Balaam, see Van Kouten 2008. 2. For this account of the episode, from the perspective of posthuman and animal studies, see Stone 2014 and Berkowitz 2018, 2–29, the latter with further bibliography. 3. Old En­glish Heptateuch, ed. Marsden, 150, from London, British Library MS Cotton Claudius B.iv. “And Balaam ne ge-­seah” is a clarifying addition. For the production of this book, which left numerous images incomplete, see Withers 2007, 54–58. Conceivably, an aristocratic commission was interrupted by effects of the Danish conquest. For the book’s unusual cycle of Balaam images and their sources, see Old En­glish Illustrated Hexateuch, ed. Dodwell and Clemoes, 65–73; Withers 2007, 90–105. For early medieval illustrated Old Testament books in general, see Lowden 1999. The book is viewable online at http://­w ww​.­bl​.­uk​/­manuscripts. The Balaam story, drawn and roughly colored but unfinished, begins on fol. 125v. 4. Poème Anglo-­Normand, ed. Nobel, vol. 2, lines 2978–80, also line 31, from London, British Library MS Egerton 2710; ANL, sec. 462. The Ludlow Scribe’s account of the scene in the Estoyres de la Bible, ed. and trans. Fein, lines 903–11, is equally focused on Balaam’s excessive action in disciplining a subordinate member of his own ­house­hold. That work is ANL, sec. 463. 5. ­Middle En­glish Genesis and Exodus, ed. Angart, ed. and trans. Morris, lines 3971–72; GMEBL, sec. GE. This poem again conveys disapproval at Balaam’s vio­lence, lines 3947–78. For the source, see Peter Comestor, Historia scholastica, ed. Migne, cols. 1236–37. For the Historia’s vernacular derivatives, see J. Morey 1993. “Undede” is often used in ­Middle En­glish as a term for translation, exposition, or exegesis. See MED, s.v. undon, sense 7. 6. ­The Middle En­glish Bible, ed. Forshall and Madden, Early Version, Num. 22:28–30. The Late Version differs in certain details, e.g., “sle” for “smite,” and the regular, fussy addition of “femal” to “asse.” 7. Chester Mystery Cycle, ed. Lumiansky and Mills, Play V (Moses and the Law; Balaack and Balaam ), lines 232–39. For copies, down to the early 1600s, see ibid., ix–­x liv. For the cycle in a local context, see Sergi 2020. It is not clear when the play became part of the cycle, which began to be performed in the 1420s. 8. The ­Great Bible, second edition of 1540, Num. 22:32–34. The translation, assembled by Miles Coverdale (1488–1569), draws on the 1530 Tyndale Pentateuch, fol. 44r, and the 1535 Coverdale Bible, fol. 67r-­v, with small differences. The gloss “(geving place to me that stode in the waye)” is an innovation, at first added in smaller type to clarify the worryingly ambiguous phrase “turned fro me.” For ­these Bibles, their production, and their relationships, see Daniell 2003, 133–220. 9. For comments on Numbers 22, see Glossa ordinaria, ed. Rusch, vol. 1, 334–38, the earliest printed edition of the work (Strasbourg, 1480–81). (This edition is unpaginated; pagination ­here follows online version listed in the Bibliography.) On the work’s compilers, including Anselm of Laon (d. 1117) and Gilbert of Auxerre (d. 1134), see L. Smith 2009, drawing especially on Smalley 1941. See L. Smith 2009, 91–139 on the stages by which this layout developed. Hebrew copies of the Pentateuch (Torah) with Aramaic paraphrase for reading (Targum) and the commentaries of Rashi (Solomon ben Isaac, d. 1105), have similarities. See Stern 2017, 63–136. 10. For Balaam in early Jewish and early Christian exegesis, see Braverman 1974. Robker 2019 also traces an early countertradition, in which Balaam is a true prophet. See also Magid 2008, 143–95, which carries the story forward from the Midrash to the sixteenth ­century. 11. Glossa cum additionibus, ed. Dadré and Cuilly, vol. 1, col. 1328. On Lyra’s glosses, see the essays gathered in Krey and Smith 2000. On his debt to Jewish exegesis, see Klepper 2007, 32–60.



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12. On the Glossa’s sources for Numbers, see ­Matter 1997, 86–88; L. Smith 2009, 45–46. Lesley Smith notes that the Glossa derives quotations from many of ­these sources from an impor­ tant Carolingian intermediary, Hrabanus Maurus’s Enarrationes in librum Numerorum, ed. Migne. 13. Origen, In Numeros homiliae, ed. Baehrens, XIV.3–4; trans. Scheck, 83–84. The form of the name Balaam derives from the Septuagint. The Hebrew transliterates as Bilʿm and was likely vocalized Bilʿam, where ʿam means “the ­people” and bl-­is associated with bly, “failure, defect”: hence “vain ­people.” (Thanks to Francis Watson for helpful elucidation ­here.) This reading of Balaam’s name was prob­ably in place by the late first ­century b.c.e., since it is alluded to by Philo (d. ca. 50 c.e.). See Van Kouten 2008, 131–61. For Balaam’s covetousness, see Augustine, Quaestionum in Heptateuchum, ed. Fraipont, IV.48. 14. Isidore, Mysticorum expositiones sacramentorum, ed. Migne, col. 357. 15. “Et forte haec asina, id est ecclesia, prius portabat Balaam, nunc autem Christum”; Origen, In Numeros homiliae, ed. Baehrens, XIII.8; trans. Scheck, 79. On supercession and typology in early Christian exegesis, see O’Keefe and Reno 2005, 69–88. On supersession in twentieth-­ century Christian theology, see Soulen 1996, a theological critique in light of the Holocaust. 16. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram, ed. Zycha, trans. Taylor, XI.28–29. Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, ed. and trans. Botterill, I.2. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, ed. and trans. Gilby et al., Secundus secundae, quaestio 172, art. 6. Lyra comments thus: “Non est intelligendum, quod asina illa verba intelligeret, vel formaret” (it is not to be supposed that this ass ­either understood or formed ­these words): Glossa cum additionibus, vol. 1, col. 1337. See Eco 2014, 171–222. Efforts to make the scene plausible in eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century commentaries generally take this rationalizing line. 17. Glossa cum additionibus, vol. 1, cols. 1337–38. 18. Origen, In Numeros homiliae, ed. Baehrens, XIII.1; trans. Scheck, 72. 19. For this reading of the book of Numbers, and on “bewilderment,” see Zornberg 2015. 20. Salisbury Psalter, ed. Sisam and Sisam, 300; CMCAS, sec. 379, Salisbury Cathedral MS 150. For the probable Wilton connection (although Shrewsbury has also been suggested), see Stroud 1979. For liturgical uses of ­these books in early medieval ­women’s ­houses, see Bugyis 2019. 21. On Wilton, founded 802, suppressed 1539, see Pugh and Crittall 1956. On this theme in the Psalms, see Janowski 2003, 97–162. 22. Gregory, Regula pastoralis, ed. Rommel and Clement, III.12; trans. Davis, 124. 23. Alfred, Hierdeboc, ed. and trans. Sweet, 255–56. See now also Old En­glish Pastoral Care, ed. and trans. Fulk, 270–73. “Mennisce mod” translates “humana mens”; “flæsc” translates “caro”; “broce” translates “molestias”; “swingan” translates “flagello.” 24. ­The Middle En­glish Bible, ed. Forshall and Madden, Late Version, Gal 5:17. 25. For Robert’s use of the ass motif, see Chapter Six, Section 1 below. 26. Map, De nugis curialium, ed. and trans. James et al., I.12. On Walter Map, see C. Brooke ODNBb. For Map’s understanding of authorship in this passage, see R. Edwards 2017, 9–32. 27. Map, De nugis curialium, I.31, a famous passage on a petition delivered to Alexander III by the “Waldenses” at the Third Lateran Council of 1179. On the new importance of the upper secular clergy in the twelfth ­century, see H. Thomas 2014, 227–44, 343–63. 28. Cyprian, Ad Fortunatum, ed. Weber, 200; trans. Deferrari, 330. See also Ps. 80:11. 29. Bede, In Epistulas septem catholicas, ed. Laistner and Hurst, trans. Hurst, III.2. This is one of the earliest full Latin commentaries on this group of texts, a good deal of it original to Bede. On Bede (673/4–735), see J. Campbell ODNB. 30. Bede may specifically have been writing against the interpretation of the passage in the late seventh-­century Hiberno-­Latin Tractatus Hilarii in septem epistolas canonicas ed. McNally.

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(Thanks to Celia Chazelle for her insights into Bede’s concerns ­here.) On En­glish monasticism in Bede’s day, and for the Old En­glish term “minster” and its implications, see, e.g., Blair 2005, 75–180, discussed further in Chapter Eleven below. 31. Balaam is also sometimes made to represent Judaism, e.g., in Hrabanus Maurus’s Enarrationes in librum Numerorum, ed. Migne, III.6, cols. 725–31, at 729D. 32. Gratian, Decretum Gratiani, ed. Friedberg, Pars II, Causa 2, quaestio 7, cap. 31. For what ­little is known of Gratian (d. ca. 1155), a Benedictine who evidently taught at Bologna (twelfth-­ century Western Eu­rope’s center of ­legal studies), ending his life as a bishop, see Pennington 2014. 33. Gratian, Decretum Gratiani, ed. Friedberg, Pars II, Causa 2, quaestio 7, cap. 29. 34. Summa Parisiensis, ed. McLaughlin, Causa 2, quaestio 7, cap. 41, a Pa­ri­sian commentary on the Decretum from the 1160s. 35. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, ed. Webb, VII.19 (quotation at 658d), trans. Dickinson. On John of Salisbury (d. 1180), see Luscombe ODNB. On Theobald (d. 1161), see Truax 2012, 133–80; Barlow ODNBe. 36. Innocent III, Cum ex iniuncto, ed. Hageneder, sec. 132, at 273. On Peter Waldo (d. ca. 1205) and the historiography of the Waldensians, see Biller 2006. On Innocent III (Lotario dei Conti di Segni, d. 1216), see J. Moore 2003. On the canonical protocols for fraternal critique in the ­later medieval centuries, including the restricted but real theoretical scope that laypeople continued to have in criticizing the clergy, see Craun 2010. 37. Gregory IX, Liber extravagantium, ed. Freidberg. For its copy of Innocent’s letter, see Liber V, Titulus 7, cap. 12, ­under the chapter heading: “Laici non praedicent, nec occulta conventicula faciant, nec sacerdotes reprehendant” (the laity may not preach, nor hold secret meetings, nor reprove priests). 38. On the place of the Liber extravagantium in the development of medieval canon law, see Larson 2016. On the l­imited role of the papacy in this pro­cess, see Larson and Sisson 2016b. 39. On this aspect of Cum ex iniuncto, see Boyle 1985, an impor­tant essay. 40. Foxe, Actes and Monuments, ed. Greengrass and Loades, 1570, 952 [786]. 41. For the po­liti­cal theology in question, see Wilks 2000. For the intellectual background, see Po­liti­cal Thought in Early Fourteenth-­Century ­England, trans. Nederman. 42. Dialogue Between a Clerk and a Knight, ed. Somerset, lines 74–85. On the Dialogue’s background, see ibid., lii–lv. Its stance on correction of the clergy by the laity derives, directly or indirectly, from John Wyclif ’s De civili dominio. 43. Lanterne of Light, ed. Swinburn, 16.17–20, from chapter 4, “What is Antichrist in special with his three parties,” and 120.26–29. See also Wimbledon, Wimbledon’s Sermon, ed. Knight, lines 491–97; Dives and Pauper, ed. Barnum, vol. 1, part 2, 262.1–263.26. 44. See, e.g., Robert Redman’s undated edition of The Lanterne of Lyghte of ca. 1535. 45. Luther, An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation, 412, trans. Jacobs, 76. 46. On the woodcuts, in relation to Shakespeare’s ass, Bottom, see Schreyer 2012. On the ass and the movement against animal cruelty, see J. Spencer 2020, 29–73. On Wedderburn’s trial, with an analy­sis of the role the Balaam episode played, see Scrivener 2001, 129–66. On Wedderburn himself (1762–1835/36), whose ­mother was an African-­born Jamaican slave, see Chase ODNB. On Smart (1722–71) and his poem, see K. Williamson ODNB. The ass appears in the opening lines of Fragment A of Jubilate Agno, written in 1763 while Smart was committed to Bedlam: “Let Balaam appear with an Ass, and bless the Lord his ­peoples and his creatures for a reward eternal.” See Cambridge, MA, Harvard Houghton MS Eng 719, 1, viewable online at https://­library​.­harvard​.­edu​/­digital​-­collections. The phrase “secular age” is from C. Taylor 2007, with more than a nod to Max Weber.



Notes to Pages 15–30

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47. See Pollock and Maitland 1895, Maitland 1908. 48. On this version of the Normans, see C. Hill 1958, Georgianna 1998. On the “triumph of En­glish,” see Cottle 1969, who borrowed this phrase from the title of R. Jones 1953. 49. For a call to arms on this front, see Stein 2007. See also the essays gathered in Trotter 2000 and Lees 2012, both exemplary in the breadth of their linguistic coverage. 50. Adeliza was patron of one of the earliest datable works in French, Benedeit’s Voyage de saint Brendan, ed. Short and Merrilees, trans. Barron and Burgess. See T. O’Donnell, Townend, and Tyler 2012. 51. Cædmon’s Hymn, ed. O’Donnell; Asser, Life of Alfred, ed. Stevenson, trans. Keynes and Lapidge; William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum, ed. and trans. Mynors et al.; Higden, Polychronicon, ed. Babington and Lumby. 52. For a collection of essays that does just this, see Cummings and Simpson 2010. 53. See Looijenga 2003, 78–104, which suggests that runes developed in the first ­century from contact with the Roman alphabet along the Rhineland border between Germania and the Roman Empire. See also many essays in Higgitt et al. 2011. 54. Beginnings of En­glish Law, ed. and trans. Oliver, 52–116. See also N. Brooks 2015. 55. See Voigts 1989, Voigts and Kurtz 2000. 56. On litteratus and illiteratus, see Grundmann 2019, 56–125, a classic article originally published in 1958. For the elision of ­these terms with the pair clericus and laicus, see Clanchy 1979 (3rd ed., 2012), 226–54. On terms for the vernacular, see Chapter One, Section 2. 57. See Chapter Nine, Section 1. On semireligious ­women and the vernacular, see especially Millett 1993. 58. Ziolkowski 1996. Recent critiques of the term “diglossic” prefer “multilingual” as less hierarchic: see Garrison et al. 2013, vii–ix and its bibliography. This is the term rightly used in studies that focus on medieval spoken languages such as S. Phillips 2008 and Hsy 2013, as well as through most of the essays in Wogan-­Browne et al. 2009. In the context of the pre­s ent study, however, ideologically driven linguistic hierarchies and their significance are indispensable. 59. For Old Norse, see Townend 2001, J. Frankis 2016. For Welsh, see B. Roberts 1999. For Cornish, see Murdoch 1993. For insular writing in Hebrew, see Nissé 2017. 60. For the vernacular as “liberation from clerical Latin culture,” see Auerbach 1965, 216. For the vernacular as the voice of an underclass, see, e.g., Gramsci 1975, vol. 3, 76, trans. in Gramsci 1991, 167–69. 61. Durantus, Rationale divinum officiorum, ed. Davril and Thibodeau; trans. Thibodeau. 62. Nida 1969, Jakobson 1960. For ­these terms in missiological studies, see Sanneh 1989. 63. On this theme, see N. Watson 1997a and 1997b, Cervone 2012. 64. See Blom 2017; also below, Chapter One, Section 1. 65. Chastising of God’s ­Children, ed. Bazire and Colledge, prologue, 95.16–18. See epigraph to this book, quoting ibid. 95.16–96.2.

chapter 1 1. On the early medieval notion of the tres linguae sacrae, see Richter 2006. 2. Fletcher 1998, 130–59; P. Brown 2003, 133–41. The main source for Clovis’s conversion is book 2 of Gregory of Tours’s Historia Francorum, ed. Krusch and Levison, trans. Thorpe. See also the documents gathered in Chris­tian­ity and Paganism, trans. Hillgarth, 72–83.

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Notes to Pages 30–33

3. For the linguistic situation in Gaul ­under the Franks, see Banniard 1995; R. Wright 2013, 116–21; Herman 1997, 9–16. For the development of the Frankish ideals of sacred kingship that underlie l­ater Carolingian thought, and the role of the episcopate therein, see M. Moore 2011. 4. For the linguistic situation in seventh-­century Britain, including the apparent survival of Latin as a spoken language, see A. Hall 2010, an impor­tant essay. See also Charles-­Edwards 2013, 75–114. For the “infiltration” thesis of the Germanic migration to and eventual conquest of Britain, mainly based on archaeological sources, see Fleming 2011. 5. Yorke 2006, 98–148; Blair 2005, 8–48. On Bertha (d. ?601), see J. Nelson ODNB. For a survey of recent scholarship on the perennially controversial topic of the conversion of the En­ glish, see Pickles 2016. 6. For a reconstruction of Gregory’s strategies and thinking, see I. Wood 1994. 7. Bede, Historia ecclesiastica, ed. and trans. Colgrave and Mynors, with notes in the form of a commentary in Wallace-­Hadrill 1993. A classic modern account is Goffart 1988, 229–327. See also Higham 2006. Bede’s sources include Gildas’s mid-­sixth-­century De excidio et conquestu Britanniae, ed. and trans. Winterbottom, on which, see Miller 1975. For Gregory’s letters, see Epistolae, ed. Norberg, XI.35–39, trans. Martyn. See also the letter Martyn numbers VIII.37, translated from Historia ecclesiastica, I.27, its only extant source. On Æthelberht (d. 616?), see S. Kelly ODNBa. 8. Historia ecclesiastica, I.1. On Bede and language, see Crépin 1976; Stanton 2006, 19–23. 9. Historia ecclesiastica, III.25, III.3, V.8. On Bede’s anti-­British prejudices, see Foley and Higham 2009. On the location of the “Synod of Whitby,” see Barnwell, Butler, and Dunn 2003. 10. A similar point is made by Rowley 2011, 103–9. 11. Historia ecclesiastica, II.1, I.23, II.1. See Gregory, Moralia in Job, ed. Adriaen, trans. Bliss, XXVII.11. For a comparative reading of Bede’s anecdote that comes to somewhat dif­fer­ent conclusions, see now Chazelle 2021. The name “Deira,” which names a kingdom that became part of Northumbria, in fact derives from the Brythonic word “deru” (oak). 12. “Cædmon’s Hymn,” in Old En­glish Shorter Poems 1, ed. and trans. Jones, 100, from the earliest copy of the Historia ecclesiastica, Cambridge University Library MS Kk 5.16 (likely 730s). Viewable online at https://­cudl​.­lib​.­cam​.­ac​.­uk, where the hymn is added by the original scribe at the end of the book, on fol. 128v. 13. Bede, Historia ecclesiastica, IV.24. For surviving versions of the song, found in copies of the Historia down to the twelfth ­century, see Cædmon’s Hymn, ed. O’Donnell. For the poem’s overdetermined scholarly reception, see Frantzen 1990, 130–67; Holsinger 2007. For the social omnipresence of oral poetry in seventh-­century ­England, see Donoghue 2018, 11–12. On Hild, see Thacker ODNBa. 14. “Fana idolorum destrui in eadem gente minime debeant, sed ipsa quae in eis sunt idola destruantur.” Bede, Historia ecclesiastica, I.30; also Gregory, Epistolae, ed. Norberg, trans. Martyn, XI.56, dated 18 July 601. The letter is usually taken to reverse the instructions given King Æthelberht in XI.37, from June 22. However, see Demacopoulos 2008. 15. For this phrase, see Lev. 11:3, Deut. 14:6. Also Leclercq 1957, a classic study. 16. In revealing contrast, the ninth-­century Mercian En­glish version of the Historia ecclesiastica is careful to add that the clerics “wrote down” Cædmon’s poety as they learned it (“æt his muthe wreoton and leornodon”). See The Old En­glish Bede, ed. Miller, 346–47. 17. Bede, Historia ecclesiastica, IV.24. For discussion, see D. O’Donnell 2004. 18. See K. O’Keeffe 1990, 23–46. Contrast Cædmon’s Hymn, ed. O’Donnell, 187–204. 19. Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents, vol. 3, 316; En­glish Historical Documents, 737–38. See McClure 1985. 20. Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents, vol. 3, 362–76, at 366. See Cubitt 1992. The exact location of Clovesho/Clofesho remains uncertain. On Boniface, see I. Wood ODNB.



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21. Carolingian priests’ handbooks are edited and discussed in ­Water and the Word, ed. Keefe. 22. See Chapter Twelve, Section 2 n. 21. 23. On prob­lems of dating Old En­glish poetry, see Fulk and Cain 2013, 42–57. Dating depends significantly on metric analy­sis, as exemplified by Fulk 1992 and 2007. On Beowulf and Boniface, see L. Benson 1967, a classic essay. Among the longer Old En­glish poems often understood as dating from the eighth ­century are “Genesis A” and “Guthlac A/B.” 24. For the Ruthwell Cross and its inscriptions and iconography, see Carragáin 2005. For the Old En­glish passage, see Christ and his Saints, ed. and trans. Clayton, 175–77. For the “Dream of the Rood,” found in the tenth-­century Vercelli Book (Vercelli, Biblioteca Capitolare CXVII), see ibid., 160–73, ­under the title “The Vision of the Cross.” The Ruthwell Cross passage could be a source for this poem, not an excerpt. ­A fter a high-­water mark of scepticism exemplified by Stanley 1987, which argues a date range a full two hundred years long, an early date for the inscription is back in ­favor, thanks to Meyvaert 2012, despite an ­earlier dissenting view in Conner 2008, who argues that the monument is a product of the tenth ­century. For the cross’s po­liti­cal significance, see A. Hall 2010, who assumes the cross is early. 25. Old En­glish Shorter Poems 2, ed. and trans. Bjork, 182. 26. Cuthbert, De transitu venerabilis Bedae, ed. and trans. Colgrave and Mynors, 582. For a history of interpretations, see Bede, On the Nature of T ­ hings, trans. Kendall and Wallace, 16–19. For the poem in relation to other prob­ably early Old En­glish poems, see Bredehoft 2009, 39–64. 27. For the Vespasian Psalter, see Oldest En­glish Texts, ed. Sweet. The book (London, British Library Cotton Vespasian A.i) is viewable online via http://­w ww​.­bl​.­uk​/­manuscripts. For early vernacular charters, see Select En­glish Historical Documents, ed. and trans. Harmer, and, for their importance in the history of vernacular documentary culture in early ­England, R. Gallagher 2018, a significant article. On the ninth-­century situation more broadly, see Bately 1988, N. Brooks 2013. On dating early prose, see Fulk 2010. 28. For the Book of Cerne (Cambridge University Library Ll.1.10), see M. Brown 1996. Viewable online via https://­cudl​.­lib​.­cam​.­ac​.­uk. For the note in Codex Aureus, see Select En­glish Historical Documents, ed. Harmer, 12–13. The Codex Aureus (Stockholm, National Library of Sweden A.135) is viewable online via https://­w ww​.­wdl​.­org (note at fol. 10r.). 29. See Rowley 2011, 40–46, discussing scholarly claims made for Mercia as an alternative point of origin for Old En­glish prose, and the controversy around them. On Offa, who provided an insular prototype for the kings of Wessex who ­later unified ­England, see S. Kelly ODNBb. 30. On Alfred, see Wormald ODNBb. For a recent introduction to the Anglo-­Saxon Chronicle, see S. Irvine 2015b. Alfred’s own authorship of the works attributed to him since the tenth ­century has been challenged by Godden in an impor­tant essay from 2007. Godden argues that Alfred did not translate Hierdeboc himself, and that the Old En­glish Boethius and The Old En­glish Soliloquies, attributed to him in early copies, date from ­a fter his death in 899. He expands ­these arguments in Godden 2009. ­These essays have generated many responses. For an early riposte that takes a thematic approach, see Pratt 2007b. See Bately 2009 and 2015 for restatements of the position that all three works mentioned ­here are by Alfred, along with Psalms 1–50 of The Old En­glish Psalms, ed. and trans. O’Neill. For a survey of the debate to 2014, which is not quite over, see Discenza and Szarmach 2015, 1–9. Although it presumes no stance on the question of authorship, this book treats the Hierdeboc as Alfred’s own work, since it was explic­itly issued ­under his name, as it does his Domboc, or law collection, for the same reason. Other works attributed to him are termed “Alfredian.” 31. Alfred, Hierdeboc, ed. and trans. Sweet, 5.8–18, from Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Hatton 20, the copy Alfred sent to Wærrferth, bishop of Worcester. Also see now Old En­glish Pastoral Care, ed. and trans. Fulk, published too late to be used ­here. For a facsimile, see Alfred,

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Notes to Pages 37–38

Pastoral Care, ed. Ker, discussed by Graham 2004. The manuscript is also viewable online via https://­digital​.­bodleian​.­ox​.­ac​.­uk. On translatio studii, see Curtius 1953, 19–30. On Alfred’s literary models in this preface, see Godden 2011. 32. Alfred, Hierdeboc, 5–7. On Alfredian translation, see Stanton 2002, 55–100. On translatio studii and its origins in Roman appropriations of Greek culture, see Curtius 1953, 28–29. For the “othræ Cristnæ thioda,” see Chapter Fifteen, Section 3, below. 33. For the “snottor” as a figure of wisdom in Old En­glish poetry, invoked repeatedly in Beowulf, “The Wanderer,” “Maxims,” and more, see, e.g., Bloomfield 1968, Shippey 1976. 34. Pratt 2007a, especially 193–213. One such book was Wærferth of Worcester’s Old En­ glish Gregory’s Dialogues, ed. Hecht, commissioned by Alfred just before the Hierdeboc. 35. See Chapter Seventeen, Section 2, below. 36. See Lewis and Short, s.v. vernaculus (adj.), from verna, n., native, homeborn slave, also common, natu­ral. Vernaculus can also mean “Roman.” See Starr 1942. 37. Cassian, Institutiones, ed. Guy, trans. Ramsey, XII.11. 38. Alcuin, Alcuini Epistolae, ed. Dümmler, letter 193, 320. The term often appears in Alcuin’s letters. 39. Niermeyer, s.v. vernaculus. 40. On ­these terms, see Grondeux 2005 and 2008, two impor­tant essays. For the 813 decrees of the Council of Tours, see Concilium Turonense, ed. Werminghoff. The invaluable Brepols Cross Database Searchtool, which collates Patrologia latina, Corpus christianorum continuatio medievalis, Monumenta Germaniae historica, and other databases, notes examples of lingua rustica in texts between the sixth and eleventh centuries. Lingua vulgaris occurs early and grows common ­a fter the millennium. Lingua barbara, used in early Latin to refer to a foreign language, names any local language from the Carolingian period onward. The choice of rustica rather than barbara by the synodalists at Tours suggests the difference between the terms (local dialect versus foreign language). Many of ­these terms can also be applied to Latin. Jerome and Isidore of Seville both self-­consciously call Latin nostri vulgo when translating from Greek. Materna lingua is so far unknown in its linguistic sense before the early twelfth ­century. Grondeux 2008, 345–56, attractively cites Ovid, Metamorphoses, IV, lines 670–71, as a potential source for its use by Baldric of Dol and Guibert of Nogent: “Illic inmeritam maternae pendere linguae, / Andromedan poenas iniustus iusserat Ammon” (­there Jupiter Ammon had unjustly ordered innocent Andromeda to be punished for the words of her ­mother Cassiopeia). However, the earliest En­glish examples are con­temporary with ­those on the Continent and have no obvious Ovidian connection. One such is in Eadmer’s Vita S. Odonis, ed. and trans. Turner and Muir, 36: “Cognomine quoque ‘boni’ in materna lingua illum deinceps vocare solebat, videlicet ‘Odo se gode’, quod interpretatur ‘Odo bonus’ ” (he soon began to be called by the nickname “good” in the ­mother tongue, that is “Odo the Good,” which translates “Odo bonus”). Eadmer’s choice of the new term may have been influenced by the fact that Odo, though En­glish born, was of Danish parentage, while Eadmer himself was writing for fellow monks who spoke more than one lingua paterna. Although it is not known to have had immediate vernacular equivalents, this last term was still active at least down to the early ­fourteenth ­century. 41. “Commun” in commun langage might be understood as a translation of vulgaris, though it is most closely associated with Latin communis, as used in phrases such as lex communis and its vernacular equivalent, commun lei, commune lawe. Lingua communis is prob­ably too rare to be a source, although Augustine uses the phrase in De doctrina Christiana, ed. Martin, trans. Robertson, III.36, on Gen. 11:1: “et erat omnis terra labium unum et vox una omnibus. . . . ​Ita dictum videtur tamquam eo iam tempore, quo dispersi fuerant super terram etiam secundum insulas gentium, una fuerit omnibus lingua communis” (“and the ­whole earth was of one speech and



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one language.” This verse appears to suggest that, at the time at which they ­were scattered over the earth in their separate ­house­holds, every­one had a single language in common). 42. For the French and En­g lish terms, see AND and MED, as well as the glossaries in VLTFE and IOVME. Our knowledge of insular French lexis is still far from complete. For Old En­glish, see DOE, s.v. folcisc, whose citations show the word regularly used to translate Latin vulgo, but never in a clearly linguistic sense. See also DOE, s.v. folcisc, noun and folcisc, adj. 2, the former citing examples from The Old En­glish Bede in the ninth ­century onward. The eleventh-­ century scholar Byrhtferth describes En­glish as “vulgarem nostrum” in Latin but “Englisc” in En­glish. See Byrhtferth, Enchiridion, ed. and trans. Baker and Lapidge, e.g., I.4, line 15, IV.2, line 69. 43. “Vernaculus, vernacula, vernaculum, quod est domi nostrae, vel in nostra patria natum, ut lingua vernacula, quod vulgo dicunt, lingua materna; dictum est a Verna, qui est servus domi nostrae natus, id est, ex nostra ancilla” (vernaculus, vernacula, vernaculum: that is, of our ­house­hold, or born in our own country, as in “vernacular tongue,” or as popularly said, “­mother tongue.” It is derived from verna, which means “servant born in our ­house­hold,” that is “from our female servant”). Valla, De linguae Latinae elegantia, ed. Moreda, I.5. On Cicero’s use of vernaculus to denote a non-­Roman Latin accent, see J. Adams 2007, 133–35. For a study of the emergence of the new sense of the term, only loosely based on any classical antecedent, see Ramminger 2010, an impor­tant essay. For a broader account, see Mazzocco 1993. 44. “Et idem Ricardus habet librum in vernacula sua” (and this Richard owns a book in his vernacular); “audivit matrem suam legere in vernacula lingua evangelium illud” (he heard his ­mother read the Gospel in vernacular speech): Lollards of Coventry, ed. and trans. McSheffrey and Tanner, 128, 205. Accounts of Coventry ­t rials from the 1490s still use vulgaris, e.g., at 71. 45. See OED, s.v. vernacular. With one pos­si­ble exception, the word is first recorded in its nominal form in 1807, becoming common only ­a fter 1840. Vulgar in its linguistic sense was already being used as a noun by the 1670s. 46. Dante, De vulgari eloquentia, ed. and trans. Botterill, especially I.11–16 on the dialects of Italian. For a critical study, see Pagani 1982. For the sociolinguistic context, especially in relation to the voracious translation movement of volgarizzamento, see Cornish 2011. 47. See Dante, Divine Comedy: Inferno, ed. Petrocchi, trans. Singleton, canto 32, line 9; De vulgari eloquentia, ed. and trans. Botterill, I.6–7. 48. See Blom 2017 and the essays in Goyens and Verbeke 2003, especially Edel 2003. 49. For this understanding of “vernacular,” see Somerset and Watson 2003a, ix–­x iii. 50. Dante, De vulgari eloquentia, I.4. 51. See, e.g., Bede’s comment in Expositio actuum apostolorum, ed. Laistern and Hurst, II.4, trans. Martin, drawing on a homily of Gregory Nazianzen: “Unitatem linguarum quam superbia Babylonis disperserat humilitas ecclesiae recolligit” (the unity of languages Babylon’s pride once dispersed is gathered again by the Church’s humility). See Dekker 2005, 352–54; Major 2018, 96–132. 52. South En­glish Ministry and Passion, ed. Pickering, lines 2967–74. See Acts 2:2–4, 15. For recent studies of The South En­glish Legendary, see Blurton and Wogan-­Browne 2011. 53. Acts 2:9–10, from the early fifteenth-­century Paues Version, ed. Paues, 125–26. 54. Tertullian, Adversus Judaeos, ed. Kroymann, trans. Dunn, VII.4, which alludes to Britain among other Roman provinces. Quoted in the Glossa ordinaria, the passage was widely known. 55. Augustine, Sermo 268, ed. Migne, col. 1382: “unitas ecclesiae in linguis omnium gentium . . . ​toto orbe diffusae.” 56. Ælfric, Catholic Homilies: First Series, ed. Clemoes, XXII (“In die Sancto Pentecosten”), lines 119–20 and 59–60, translating Acts 2:17, where Peter is citing Joel 2:28.

386

Notes to Pages 42–48

57. South En­glish Ministry and Passion, lines 2985–86. 58. For analy­sis of this much-­discussed phrase, see Hughson 2008. For the ecclesiology that underlies it, which draws on Augustine and Bede, among others, see De Lubac 1988. 59. On early episcopal claims to be special carriers of the gifts of the spirit bestowed at Pentecost, in competition with other classes of holy person, see Rapp 2005, chapter 3. 60. Glossa cum additionibus, ed. Dadré and Cuilly, vol. 6, cols. 987–98, on Acts 2: “Aliter enim admonendi sunt seculares, aliter religiosi, et inter seculares aliter admonendi sunt clericis, et inter laicos aliter milites, aliter mercatores, aliter rurales.” This is eventually derived from Gregory, Regula pastoralis, ed. Rommel and Clement, trans. Davis, III.1, and the discussion that follows. 61. Ælfric, Catholic Homilies: First Series, XXII, line 360. 62. Lanterne of Light, ed. Swinburn, 4.10–11, 5.15–19, from chapters 1 and 2, quoting and translating Jerome, Commentariorum in Matheum libri IV, ed. Hurst and Adrien, I.4. 63. For a statement of this view from relatively recently, see Steven Ozment’s classic Age of Reform (1980), 202: “The medieval church, fearing the social consequences of religious egalitarianism, had always forbidden the circulation of vernacular Bibles among the laity.” 64. Even omitting work on Old and M ­ iddle En­glish and insular French, the bibliography of work in this area is extensive and rapidly growing. Cited works ­here are chosen for their relative accessibility and relatively up-­to-­date biblio­g raphies. For French, see Sneddon 2011, Hoogvliet 2013a and 2013b, Lobrichon 2013. For Italian, see Corbellini 2013, Leonardi 2012. For Spanish, see Francomano 2011, Avenoza 2012, Fellous 1994. For German, before Luther’s Deutschen Bibel, see Gow 2009 and 2012. For Dutch, see Mertens 2000, Folkerts 2015. For Czech, see H. Cooper 2012. For the rise of biblical censorship in the early modern period, see den Hollander 2017. 65. For Cum ex iniuncto, see Boyle 1985. For the Oxford Constitutions, ed. Bray, see H. Kelly 2016, 71–81, rightly challenging a scholarly tradition of referring to the legislation as “banning” Bible translation. 66. See Book of Common Prayer, ed. Cummings, for editions and discussion. 67. For a power­f ul critique of ­these claims, see James Simpson 2010. 68. On vernacular liturgy, see Targoff 2001; Book of Common Prayer, ed. Cummings. 69. For an overview, see Oz-­Salzberger 2015. For the early modern Respublica litterarum (republic of letters), so-­called, and its Latinities, see Grafton 2009. For a polemical history of Latin into the modern era, see Waquet 2001. For the vernacularization of pedagogy in the En­glish eigh­teenth ­century and its relation to literary canon formation, see Guillory 1993, 85–133.

chapter 2 1. Dante, Divine Comedy: Paradiso, ed. Petrocchi, trans. Singleton, canto 26, lines 124–32, 137–38, revisiting De vulgari eloquentia, ed. and trans. Botterill, I.6. See Eco 1995, especially chapter 3. 2. On destruction and conservation, see Recovery of the Past, ed. Graham and Watson; and C. E. Wright 1958, Carley 2006, Summit 2008. On Leland (1503–52), see James Simpson 2002a, 7–33; Summit 2007; Carley ODNBa. On Bale (1495–1563), again see James Simpson 2002a, 7–33; King ODNB. 3. The influence of the legislation through the fifteenth ­century and its implementation at the diocesan level is traced by H. Kelly 2016, 86–128. Volume 2 of Balaam’s Ass, Parts III and IV, also deal in detail with The ­Middle En­glish Bible, the Oxford Constitutions, and the controversies surrounding both, down to the early sixteenth ­century.



Notes to Pages 49–50

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4. Cambridge Tract 1, ed. Dove, lines 120–24. The ascription to the Dives and Pauper author, on the plausible grounds of material shared between the texts, is by Dove. Dives and Pauper is securely dated to e­ ither 1405 or 1410. 5. First Seiþ Bois, ed. Dove, lines 65–72: see also IOVME, sec. II.4. The title ­here given Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica is influenced by that of William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum Anglorum. On Ullerston (d. 1423), see Harvey ODNB. For his De translatione sacre scripture, prob­ably from 1401, see From the Vulgar to the Vernacular, ed. Solopova et al., 1–113; and Chapter Eight below. 6. On early opposition to Tyndale, see D’Alton 2003. For documents relating to the ceremonial burning of the Tyndale New Testament by Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall of London, see Rec­ords of the En­glish Bible, ed. Pollard, especially 150–55. A copy of The ­Middle En­glish Bible prefaced by its “General Prologue” may well have been burned a de­c ade ­earlier, in 1514–15, at the end of the complicated heresy proceedings against Richard Hunne (d. 1514), as recounted in Thomas More’s Dialogue Concerning Heresies. For an analy­sis, see H. Kelly 2016, 114–24. For a ­Middle En­g lish work that foreshadows Tyndale’s rhe­toric, see Holy Prophete David, ed. Dove. 7. Tyndale, Obedience of a Christen Man, fol. 15r–­v. On Tyndale, see Daniell 1994 and ODNB, both interestingly hagiographic accounts. 8. Actes and Monuments is the work that has traditionally gone by the title Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. The two Latin pre­de­ces­sors of the work are Commentarii in ecclesia gestarum rerum (Strasbourg, 1554) and Commentarii rerum in ecclesia gestarum (Basle, 1559). All four successive En­glish versions (1563, 1570, 1576, and 1583) are edited, with a rich body of commentary and ancillary materials, in TAMO (The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online) by Mark Greengrass and David Loades. Below, references to TAMO online pagination are followed by bracketed references to the original printed pagination. On the versions of the work, with special reference to Foxe’s working relationship with his printer, John Day, see Evenden and Freeman 2011, 69–101. Foxe’s life and writings are outlined in Freeman ODNBa; ­those of Day (1521/2–84), a significant figure in his own right, in Pettegree ODNB. 9. For the influence of Actes and Monuments, see Loades 1999, a collection of essays that consider its reception down to the nineteenth ­century. See also Evenden and Freeman 2011, 320–47. 10. Foxe, Actes and Monuments, ed. Greengrass and Loades, 1570, preface, 2–3 [fol. ii.v–­iii.r]. Tertullian, cited in the margins, sets out the conjoined historiographic doctrines that truth precedes error (“principalitatem veritatis”) and that errors accumulate over time (“posteritatem mendacitatis”) in caps. 28–34 of his De praescriptione haereticorum, ed. Refoulé and De Labriolle, trans. Bindley; quotation at 31.1. Tertullian cites Matthew 13:1–13 to the effect that the “bonum semen” (good seed) God the sower scatters in the parable was sown “in primore” (at the beginning). 11. Bale, Image of Both Churches, ed. Minton; Flacius et al. Ecclesiastica historia. On the Magdeburg Centuries, see Scheible 1966, Lyon 2003. A number of texts that articulate the “two churches” model are gathered in Tudor Apocalpyse, ed. Bauckham. 12. Lanterne of Light, ed. Swinburn, divides the Church into three: the “litil flok” of the saved, the material Church, and the Antichrist’s Church, the first and third of which ­battle for the second. Redman’s edition is undated, but ca. 1535. Redman died in 1540. 13. Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 1570, preface, 3 [fol. iii.r]. The conflation derives, conceptually, from Martin Luther’s fundamental distinction between “law” and “gospel” as “two kingdoms” that have always existed, itself an influence on Bale. See W. Wright 2010. On Foxe and anti-­Semitism, see Achinstein 2001.

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Notes to Pages 50–53

14. Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 1570, preface, 3 [fol. iii.r]. 15. Ibid., 1570, books 1–4. On Foxe’s view of early medieval British Chris­tian­ity, see B. Robinson 2002. On Joseph of Arimathea as mythic founder of the British Church, see Lyons 2014, 72–104. On Gregory VII in sixteenth-­century historiography, see Gianmarco 2019. 16. Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 1570, preface, 3 [fol. iii.r]. 17. Ibid., 1570, book 8, 1340–49 [1301–10], which quotes much of Ælfric’s “Sermo de sacrificio in die Pascae” from Henry Parker and John Joscelyn’s collection A Testimonie of Antiquitie, the first work printed in ­England to reproduce Old En­glish runic letters. See J. Bromwich 1962; M. Murphy 1968; Stanley 1980, 229. The homily is Catholic Homilies: First Series, ed. Clemoes, XXII. For Ælfric’s pastoral letters, see J. Hill 2005. 18. Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 1570, book 3, 203 [190], alluding to Alfred’s Hierdeboc and a series of other Alfredian works, in a passage ultimately derived from William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum Anglorum, ed. and trans. Mynors et al., vol. 1, 192–95, and ­later elaborations on this passage, such as Bale, Illustrium maioris Britanniae scriptorum, fol. 65v–66r. 19. The Old En­glish Gospels, ed. Foxe and Parker. 20. Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 1563, book 1, 26–27 [10–11], on “the third age of the Church.” For Foxe’s allusion to translation from “Ebrue,” see Bale’s Illustrium maioris Britanniae scriptorum, fol. 66v: “Nam scripturas divinas verti fecit in Anglosaxonicum idioma, ex purissimis Hebraeorum fontibus, per quosdam Hebraeos ad Christianismum (ut credere par est) in suo regno conversos” (for he [Æthelstan] had the Holy Scriptures translated, from the purest Hebrew sources, into the Anglo-­Saxon language, with the help, it is believed, of a Jew converted to Chris­tian­ ity living in his kingdom). This “Jew” was perhaps the Breton (?) scholar Israel the Grammarian (on whom, see Lapidge 1992), mentioned in John Leland’s Commentarii de scriptoribus Britannicis, vol. 2, 159–60. Compare Tyndale’s Obedience of a Cristen Man, alluding to an unidentified vernacular chronicle: “Except my memory faile me and that I have forgotten what I redde when I was a childe, thou shalt find in the Englesh Cronicle how that kinge Adelstone caused the Holy Scripture to be translated into the tonge that then was in Englonde and how the prelates exhorted him thereunto” (fol. 15v). 21. Old En­glish Heptateuch, ed. Marsden. London, British Library Cotton Claudius B.iv, the illustrated copy of this translation that contains images of Balaam’s ass, would certainly have been known to Foxe, by way of the antiquary Robert Talbot (d. 1558), a friend of John Leland and notable scholar of books containing Old En­glish. For Talbot, see Carley ODNBb. 22. Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 1570, preface, 4 [iii, v.]. 23. Ibid., 1570, book 4, 310 [295]; book 4, 278–306 [263–91]. 24. Ibid., 1570, books 5 and 6. 25. Ibid., 1570, book 5, 515–22 [494–51]. See Praier and Complaynte, ed. Parker. 26. Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 1570, book 5, 626 [605], claiming to draw on a document that “remaineth in the librarye of Worceter recorded.” For the story, which is not in the work’s Latin source, Ullerston’s De translatione sacre scripture, see First Seiþ Bois, ed. Dove, lines 180–90. Foxe’s edition of First Seith Boece in Actes and Monuments 1563, book 3, 504–7 [452–55], derives from the printed edition, A Compendious Olde Treatyse Shewynge howe that we O ­ ught to Have the Scripture in Englysshe. 27. Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 1570, book 5, 626 [605]; book 7, 1004 [965]. For Foxe on Chaucer, see Cook 2019, 73–99, much the best treatment of Chaucer’s early modern reputation to date. The first full edition of Chaucer was The Workes of Geffray Chaucer, ed. Thynne, in 1532. ­Later editions steadily expanded the canon, adding the polemical Plowman’s Tale and other works not of Chaucer’s composing. See Cook 2019, 17–43. 28. Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 1570, book 5, 514 [493].



Bray.

Notes to Pages 53–57

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29. Ibid., 1570, book 5, 648 [427], translating article 7 of Arundel’s Oxford Constitutions, ed.

30. Ibid., 1570, book 6, 858 [837]. Foxe’s account of the high cost and consequent “raritie” of books, the “darth (dearth) of good bookes,” widespread illiteracy, and omnipresent censorship across the long centuries before Gutenberg still commands broad popu­lar ac­cep­tance to this day. 31. Implicit references are brought together by Royal 2017. 32. Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 1570, book 8, 1265 [1226], also found in the 1576 edition, book 8, 1073 [1049], and the 1583 edition, book 8, 1100 [1076]. The 1563 edition, book 3, 570–71 [514–15], describes more briefly how Tyndale, in exile on the Continent, “put forthe certaine bookes of the Olde Testament and the hole Newe Testament, into the En­glishe tongue, with other diverse bookes of his owne compiling, the whiche he sent from thence into En­glande.” It then adds “wherby sence (thankes be geven to God) the dore of light into the Scriptures hath and dailye is more and more opened unto us, the whiche before was many yeares closed in darkenes.” 33. For the history of the “plain style” as a “spiritual ideal,” see Auksi 1995. 34. On the work’s promotion and early reception, see Parry 1999. 35. On the Eusebian theme in Actes and Monuments, see Minton 2002. 36. Some sixty distinct editions are listed in Harvard’s library cata­log alone. The work’s editorial history is detailed in Loades 2011, Greenberg 2011, Nockles 2011, and Westbrooke 2011. 37. See Brackmann 2012, especially 1–26; Niles 2015, 49–108. On the nature of early modern interest in m ­ atters medieval more broadly, see McMullan and Matthews 2007, 1–15. 38. James, Corruption of Scriptures, II.74. On the influence of this passage on ­later scholars, especially the Church historians James Ussher (1581–1656) and Henry Wharton (1664–95), see Dove 2007, 73. James’s Apologie for John Wicliffe, 13–14, praises Wyclif as Bible translator and vernacular commentator, wrongly identifying him as translator of the Late Version and author of the Glossed Gospels, among other works. On James (1572/3–1629), see Julian Roberts ODNB. 39. King James Bible, preface, fol. A5v. On Smith (d. 1624), see J. Tiller ODNB. 40. The G ­ reat Bible, 2nd ed., Cranmer’s preface, fol. 2r, with what appears to be an allusion to the Oxford Constitutions: “For it is not much above one hundreth year ago sence Scripture hath not been accustomed to be redde in the vulgar tonge within this realm; and many hundred yeares before that, it was translated and read in the Saxones tonge, whiche at the time was our ­mothers tonge, wherof ­there remaine yet diverse copies founde lately in olde abbeys. . . . ​A nd when this langage waxed olde . . . ​it was again translated in the newer langage, whereof yet also many copies remaine and be daily founde.” 41. More, Dialogue Concerning Heresies, III.15–16: “But myself have sene and can shew you Biblis faire and olde writen in En­glishe whiche have ben knowen and sene by the bishop of the diocise and lefte in laye mennis handis and ­womens to suche as he knewe for good and Catholike folk that used it with devocion and sobernes” (fol. 89v); “Other olde [Bibles] that ­were before Wyclyffis days remain lawful and be in some folkis handis had and red” (fol. 94r). 42. On the Anglican Church at this period, see Spurr 1991. On Burnet’s History of the Reformation as history, see Starkie 2005. On Burnet (1643–1715), see Greig ODNB. 43. Burnet, History of the Reformation, The First Part, 2nd ed., preface, fol. c.2r. 44. Ibid., 31. Burnet extrapolates from a doubtful incident described by Foxe in Actes and Monuments, 1563, III.472–73 or 1570, VIII.1146, whose sources have not been identified. For separate edition and discussion, see Lollards of Coventry, ed. and trans. McSheffrey and Tanner, 51–56, 297–314. For Foxe as a historical witness, see Freeman 2000. 45. Froude, Lectures on the Council of Trent, 1, delivered more than thirty years ­a fter the History of E ­ ngland by way of a retrospective. For the History itself, see Brady 2013, 198–232. Also

390

Notes to Pages 57–60

valuable is Willey 1956, 106–36. On Froude (1818–94), see Brady 2013 and Pollard and Thomas ODNB. 46. For Gibbon and the “dark age” theme, see P. Ghosh 1997. For Zeitgeist, see Hegel, Lectures on History of Philosophy, trans. Haldane and Simson, vol. 2, 96. On Froude’s overtly unscientific historiography, see Hesleth 2011, especially the epilogue, “Froude’s Revenge,” 152–64. 47. Froude, History of E ­ ngland, vol. 2, chapter 6, 29–34.

chapter 3 1. Froude, History of E ­ ngland, vol. 1, chapter 1, 62, alluding to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, act 4, scene 1, line 145. OED, s.v. ­middle age, n. and adj., 2β, rec­ords “­middle ages” as an alternative to the more common “­middle age” from the early 1600s. The phrase achieved its application to the millennium 500–1500 c.e. only in the nineteenth ­century, as part of a general system of periodization. For Gibbon in 1776, it refers to “the period between the ninth and the twelfth centuries.” According to OED, s.v. medieval, the adjective “medieval” is first recorded as late as 1817. See F. Robinson 1984. 2. On Victorian medievalism, see, e.g., Matthews 2015, J. Parker and Wagner 2016, both with many references to the significant body of ­earlier scholarship on the topic. 3. Kingsley, “Froude’s History of ­England,” 27, published in 1859. On “Whig” history, see J.  W. Burrow 1981. This account of En­g lish history was shared by Anglicans of dif­fer­ent churchmanships. 4. See The Old En­glish Gospels, ed. Thorpe; Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, ed. and trans. Thorpe; Whole Works of King Alfred the ­Great, trans. Giles. On Benjamin Thorpe (1782–1870), a crucial figure, see Seccombe ODNB. For Victorian Anglo-­Saxon studies and the early modern scholarship from which it grew, see J. Hall 2001 and Sauer 2001. ­These essays also describe the transformation of the field by the new philology that grew out of the work of Jakob Grimm (1785–1863), much of it in Germany, a topic that cannot be discussed ­here. The crucial British figure was John Mitchell Kemble (1807–57), son of the actor Charles Kemble (see J. Haigh ODNB). See also Momma 2013, 60–94; Niles 2015, 220–64. 5. The Wycliffite Sermon Cycle takes up the first two volumes of Select En­glish Works of John Wyclif, edited by Thomas Arnold (1823–1900), son of the educator Thomas Arnold and ­brother of Matthew Arnold, in 1880. See Bergonzi ODNB. Wyclif is now thought to have written only in Latin. 6. ­The Middle En­glish Bible, published as The Holy Bible . . . ​Made from the Latin Vulgate by John Wycliffe and His Followers, ed. Forshall and Madden, quotation from the preface at vol.1, i. On Josiah Forshall (1795–1863) and Sir Frederic Madden (1801–73), two scholars from very dif­fer­ent backgrounds, see P. Harris ODNB, Borrie ODNB respectively. 7. Palgrave, History of E ­ ngland, vol. 1, 175. On Francis Palgrave (1786–1861), born Francis Cohen, see G. Martin ODNB. 8. For Forshall and Madden’s influence on ­later scholarship, partly in relation to their now discarded argument for Purvey’s authorship of the Late Version, see Dove 2007, 68–82. On Purvey, see Hudson ODNBc. 9. Langland, Vision of Pierce Plowman, ed. Crowley (1550/1561); Vision and Creed of Piers Ploughman, ed. Wright (1842); Parallel Extracts from Forty-­Five MSS of Piers Plowman, ed. Skeat (1885, first ed. 1866); Vision of William Concerning Piers Plowman, ed. Skeat (1867–84); Vision of William in Three Parallel Texts, ed. Skeat (1886). For t­ hese editions, see C. Brewer 1996. For Chaucer in Victorian scholarship and popu­lar culture, see Matthews 1999 (a groundbreaking study), Ellis



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2000, and now Matthews and Sanders 2021. For Crowley (d. 1588), whose repre­sen­ta­tion of Piers Plowman is in fact far from straightforward, see Scanlon 2007, M. Jones 2011. 10. Dryden, Fables Ancient and Modern, preface. See Trigg 2002, 144–56. 11. Pricke of Conscience, ed. Morris; En­glish Prose Treatises, ed. Perry; Rolle, En­glish Psalter, ed. Bramley, the first editions of En­glish works attributed to or by Rolle since the 1540s. Forshall and Madden discuss the En­glish Psalter in ­The Middle En­glish Bible, vol. 1, iv–­v. Prick of Conscience is not, in fact, by Rolle, as Hope Emily Allen showed in 1910. On Rolle’s writings, see N. Watson 1991. On his importance in John Wyclif ’s Oxford, see Kraebel 2020, 91–132. 12. For Romantic nationalism as a historical category, see Leerssen 2013. For its signal importance in the wider history of Eu­ro­pean nationalism, see Leerssen 2006, 105–71. 13. See Leerssen 2013, 12–13: by 1830, “nations ­were now defined as groups of ­people identified by a common, separate language. . . . ​Groups which ­until 1800 had primarily identified themselves by means of their ­legal constitution . . . ​religion, or historical inheritance, now re-­defined their identity, indeed their ‘nationality’ by the criterion of language.” For a complex pair of cases from central and southern Eu­rope, see Fairey 2003. See also Dann 2006. 14. For the first two, see the operas of Richard Wagner, Der Ring des Nibelungen (as discussed by Cusack 2013), Tristan und Isolde in the second (as discussed by Scruton 2001); see also Eichner 2020. For the third (the relation between language and nation), a prominent theme in the writings of Johan Gottlieb Fichte and Johann Gottfried von Herder, see Hare and Link 2019, on the term Volk and the nineteenth-­century development of research into the Völkisch. The topic remains difficult to detach (in some ways now more than ever) from the prehistory of Eu­ro­pean fascism and both Eu­ro­pean and North American white supremacy. 15. OED, s.v. vernacular, B noun. 16. For Jakob Grimm’s Deutsche Grammatik, see Antonsen et al. 1990. On Sir William Jones (1746–94), see Momma 2013, 28–59; Franklin ODNB. 17. For the origins of this ­t riple association in the writings of Herder, see Schmidt 1956. The association is critical to Jakob Grimm’s Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (history of the German language, 1848), and hence to the proj­ect of Romantic philology as a ­whole. 18. See Knowles 1960, Gall and Rudolf 1999, Sahle and Vogeler 2013. 19. Macpherson, Works of Ossian, the Son of Fingal (1765); Chatterton, Works, ed. Cottle and Southey (1803), II; Percy, Reliques of Ancient En­glish Poetry (1765); Scott, Poetical Works (1821). On ­these writings and their po­liti­cal and cultural context, see Strabone 2018. 20. Thomas Warton, History of En­glish Poetry. On Warton (1728–90), see Reid ODNB. For a general survey of Romantic medievalism, see Fay 2002. 21. For Romantic investments in ­these works, see Breyer 2001 (Nibelunglied), A. Taylor 2001 (Chanson de Roland), R. Bromwich 1996 (Mabinogion), Shippey 2008 (Beowulf ). For the ­later canonization of Poema de mio Cid as an epic of Spanish reconquest, see Galván 2018. On the Mabinogion and its translator, Lady Charlotte Guest (1912–95), see John ODNB. For an account how ­t hese “linguistic monuments” ­were built by Romantic philologists, see Geary 2013, 11–37. 22. On how “medieval literary history comforted modern colonialism” in the case of the Chanson de Roland, see M. Warren 2011, 164–93 (quotation at 164), an impor­tant study. 23. For histories of the OED, see J. Turner 2014 and especially Gilliver 2016. 24. On the early history of EETS, see Matthews 1999, 138–61, Singleton 2005. A full biography of the society, down to 1984, by Helen Leith Spencer, is in preparation. 25. EETS, Reports of the Committee 1, January 1865, 2, published, e.g., in Hume, Orthographie and Congruitie, ed. Wheatley, EETS 5. Membership of EETS was from the start by subscription, not election, set at one pound, which paid for the year’s volumes.

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Notes to Pages 62–64

26. Membership of the Roxburghe Club (founded 1812) has always been by invitation, with copies of their publications initially restricted to members. The Bannatyne Club (1823–61) was founded by Sir Walter Scott. Membership was five guineas a year. In response to Madden’s 1839 edition of Sir Gawain for the Bannatyne Club 61 (1839), on which see Matthews 1998, EETS published its own edition, by Richard Morris, as EETS 4 (1864). On Morris (1833–94), see Cotton and Haigh ODNB. 27. On the amateurism of early En­glish literary scholarship, see Utz 2001 and Dinshaw 2012, 24–28. See also many excerpts from eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century ­Middle En­glish scholars in Invention of M ­ iddle En­glish, ed. Matthews. 28. On the society’s overseas marketing attempts and the anglophone imperialism with which they sometimes align themselves, see Biddick 1998, 91–96, who quotes a purple passage from EETS, Reports of the Committee 5, January 1869, urging readers to renew subscriptions: “We are banded together to trace out the springs, and note the course, of the language that ­shall one day be the ruling tongue of the world, which is now the speech of most of its ­free men” (2). Blending imperialism abroad with democ­ratization at home, the report then goes on to contrast medieval serfdom with the push ­toward “the wide suffrage of our own day, that so the old life of ­England may be bound to the new, and men may learn from our Texts wherein their ancestors failed in care for the weak, in thought for the poor, and be helped in their own efforts that neither ­shall be wanting now” (3). See also Dinshaw 2001, 31–37, and, on the closely related Chaucer Society, R. Evans 2018. 29. Hudson 2014. 30. EETS, Reports of the Committee 1, January 1865, 2–3. 31. Michael of Northgate, Dan Michel’s Ayenbite of Inwyt, ed. Morris, EETS, os (ordinary series) 23 (1866). As Morris’s preface suggests, a secondary motive may have been competition with the Roxburghe Club, which had already published an edition by Joseph Stephenson (1855). 32. EETS, Reports of the Committee 10, January 1874, 8, published, e.g., in Lovelich, History of the Holy Grail, ed. Furnivall, EETS, es 20. On Furnivall (1825–1910), see Benzie 1983, Pearsall 1998, Peterson ODNB. 33. EETS, Reports of the Committee 10, January 1874, 11. The extra series cost subscribers an additional guinea and doubled the society’s rate of publication. 34. Horstmann’s first volume, The Early South-­English Legendary, was published as EETS, os 87 (1887). Furnivall first issued this notice in 1888 with his own edition of Caxton’s Curial Made by Maystere Alain Charretier, EETS, es 54, on which he worked with the prominent French medievalist, Paul Meyer (1840–1917). Horstmann’s sequel was never published. The notice may have been a riposte to an attack on En­glish frivolity and anti-­Catholicism in Horstmann’s introduction: “I know most En­glishmen consider it not worth while to print all ­these Legends. . . . ​ The En­glish mind is always ­r unning into extremes with full steam” (xi). Liszka 2011, at 33, gives a dif­fer­ent interpretation. On Johann Carl Horstmann (1847–­? ca. 1915), see Haenicke and Finkenstaedt 1992, sec. 118 (142–43). Thanks to Thomas Liszka for this reference. The earliest Catholic to welcome the society in print was the medieval scholar and priest J. B. Dalgairns, in his “Essay on the Spiritual Life of Medieval ­England” in 1870. 35. As of 2020, ANTS has published seventy-six volumes in its regular series, twenty-­t wo “plain text” volumes, and eight occasional volumes, which mix editions, essays, biblio­graphies, and language studies; this is at a rate about half of EETS’s, reflecting both a smaller number of specialists and a smaller subscription list. On the society, which was founded by Mildred K. Pope (1872–1956), see Short 1993, and on Pope herself, Kennedy 2005. For an early pioneering work of Anglo-­Norman scholarship, see de La Rue 1834. For nineteenth-­century French scholarship on Anglo-­Norman, see Russell 2017. For an account of the state of play ­a fter the First World War,



Notes to Pages 64–65

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see Studer 1920. The remarkably belated addition of Anglo-­Norman etymologies to the Oxford En­glish Dictionary is announced in the preface to the third edition of 2000 (John Simpson 2000), made pos­si­ble by the completion of a first edition of the Anglo-­Norman Dictionary, ed. Stone and Rothwell, in 1992. 36. Skeat, Vision of Piers Plowman, EETS, os 28, 38, 54, 67, 81 (1867–84); Cursor Mundi, ed. Morris, EETS, os 57, 59, 62, 66, 68, 99, 101 (1874–93); Mannyng, Robert of Brunne’s “Handlyng Synne,” ed. Furnivall, EETS, os 119, 123 (1901–3). The last was a somewhat simplified revision of an edition of both works that Furnivall had produced for the Roxburghe Club forty years ­earlier, in 1862, which contains what ­until 2020 was the only full edition of the Manuel des pechiez to have been printed. See now Manuel dé pechez, ed. Russell, ANTS 75–76 (2018–20). On Skeat (1835–1912), see K. Sisam and Brewer ODNB. 37. Literary criticism, when pre­sent, takes apol­o­getic form, as in Furnivall’s justification for including Marian poetry in his Hymns to the Virgin and Christ, EETS, os 24 (1867), viii–­ix: “A survey of our early religious poetry ­w ill . . . ​result in a verdict favourable to the plain good sense and practical ­going straight at the main point which En­glishmen pride themselves on.” For an exception, see Georgiana Lea Morrill’s edition of the Speculum Gy de Warewyke, EETS, es 75 (1895), whose extensive critical analyses have still not been completely superseded. Morrill was from Pennsylvania, a gradu­ate of Vassar and Bryn Mawr. Although Furnivall, Skeat, and ­others had from time to time tersely acknowledged the assistance of ­women scholars in their prefaces, this was the first volume of EETS to be edited solely by a ­woman and to appear ­under her name. 38. Furnivall 1877, an unsigned defense of the society’s omnivorous editorial policy. 39. Seinte Marherete, ed. Cockayne, os 13 (1866); Hali Meidenhad, ed. Cockayne and Furnivall, os 18 (1866); Old En­glish Homilies, first and second series, ed. Morris, os 29, 34, 53 (1867–73); Liflade of St. Juliana, ed. Cockayne, os 51 (1872); Blickling Homilies, ed. Morris, os 58, 63, 73 (1874– 80); Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, ed. Skeat, os 76, 82, 94, 114 (1881); Oldest En­glish Texts, ed. Sweet, os 83 (1885); Eadwine’s Canterbury Psalter, ed. Harsley, os 92 (1889); Old En­glish Bede, ed. Miller, os 95–96, 110–11 (1890–98). 40. Sixteenth-­century En­glish legislation against depicting God or Christ on stage was only fi­nally withdrawn in 1912. See J. Elliott 1989. For early EETS editions of medieval drama (all now replaced by more recent editions), see Chester Plays, ed. Deimling, es 62, 115 (1892–1916); Digby Plays, ed. Furnivall, es 70 (1896); Towneley Plays, ed. ­England and Pollard, es 71 (1897); Two Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, ed. Craig, es 87 (1902); Macro Plays, ed. Furnivall and Pollard, es 91 (1904); Non-­Cycle Mystery Plays, ed. Water­house, es 104 (1909). The York Plays ­were published by Oxford’s Clarendon Press in 1885, in a remarkable edition by Lucy Toulmin Smith (1838–1911), on whom see Porter ODNB. The first scholarly study of this body of writing in its larger historical context, E. K. Chambers’s Medieval Stage, was published in 1903. 41. Wells 1916, which includes only works already edited. ­Later Supplements increasingly pay attention to manuscript sources, a pro­cess complete in the current version of MWME. 42. Chaucer, Boece, ed. Morris, es 5 (1868); Chaucer, Treatise on the Astrolabe, ed. Skeat, es 16 (1872); Rolle, En­glish Prose Treatises, ed. Perry, os 20 (1866); Rolle, translated by Richard Misyn, Fire of Love and Mending of Life, ed. Harvey, os 106 (1896); En­glish Works of Wyclif, ed. Matthew, es 74 (188); En­glish Prose Psalter, ed. Bülbring, es 98 (1891); Pauline Epistles, ed. Powell, es 116 (1916). The phrase “­father of En­glish prose” is used of Wyclif from the 1830s to the early 1900s. See, e.g., “Lives of Wycliffe” (1832–33), 239, Fasciculi Zizaniorum, ed. Shirley, xvi. 43. Fish, Supplicacyon, ed. Furnivall, es 13 (1871), xvii. This edition was intended as a companion to ­England in the Reign of King Henry VIII, ed. Cowper and Herrtage, es 12 and 32 (1871–78), the second of which focuses on the Henrician humanist Thomas Starkey (d. 1538). The publication in 1876 of the En­glish Works of the sixteenth-­century bishop of Rochester and Henrician martyr

394

Notes to Pages 66–68

John Fisher (d. 1535), as EETS, es 27, is similarly suggestive of special interest in the lit­er­a­t ure of the Henrician Reformation at this period. 44. Michael of Northgate, Ayenbite of Inwyt, ed. Morris, os 23 (1866); Myrour of Oure Ladye, ed. Blunt, es 18 (1873); Mirk’s Festial, ed. Erbe, es 96 (1905); Lay Folks’ Mass-­Book, ed. Simmons, os 71 (1897); Prymer or Lay Folks’ Prayer Book, ed. Littlehales, os 105 and 109 (1895–97); Lay Folks’ Catechism, ed. Simmons and Nolloth, os 118 (1901). The Lay Folks’ Prayer Book is introduced by the distinguished Catholic liturgist Edmund Bishop. On Bishop, see Schoeck ODNB. See also En­glish Fragments from Latin Ser­vice Books, ed. Littlehales, es 90 (1903). ­Middle En­glish Translations of De Imitatione Christi, ed. Ingram, es 63 (1893) is another Anglo-­Catholic contribution to the series. 45. Ancren Riwle, ed. Morton (1853); Pecock, Repressor, ed. Babington (1860). ­There was also an edition of Love’s Mirrour, ed. Powell, for the Roxburghe Club (1908). 46. Pecock, Donet, ed. Hitchcock, os 156 (1921); Folower to the Donet, ed. Hitchcock, os 164 (1924). The editor, Elsie Vaughan Hitchcock (1886–1942) was a student of W. P. Ker at University College, London, graduating in 1910, and ­later becoming a lecturer in the Department of En­ glish Language and Lit­er­a­t ure. As we see below, she was a collaborator and close friend of R. W. Chambers. Thanks to Susan Irvine and Charlotte Mitchell for help ­here. 47. The early c­ areer of Margaret Deanesly (1885–1944) is appreciatively explored by Hanna 2016. 48. Deanesly 1920, 25–40, also 10n1, an impressively thorough account. 49. Ibid., 1–2. On Peter Waldo and Cum ex iniuncto, see Introduction, Section 1, above. 50. The phrase “liberty of private judgement,” in use since the early eigh­teenth ­century, was made prominent in the 1860s in debates between William Gladstone, John Henry Newman, and ­others. See Fisher 2011, 53–86. For Deanesly, it thus had liberal, broad church associations. Thanks to James Engell for help ­here. 51. On the origins of En­glish as an academic discipline, see Palmer 1965, Graff 2007. 52. A. Ward and Waller 1907–17. Vol. 1 (1907), vol. 2 (1908), and a number of chapters of vol. 5 (1910) on early drama deal with medieval lit­er­a­t ure. 53. Creizenach 1910, 45 (A. Ward and Waller, vol. 5). 54. Westlake 1907, 116–29 (A. Ward and Waller, vol. 1). 55. Atkins 1907, 217, although see also 230–31 (A. Ward and Waller, vol. 1). 56. Maitland 1907 (A. Ward and Waller, vol. 1), reprinted from an ­earlier publication. W. Ker 1907 (ibid.) alludes to French romances in a discussion of ­Middle En­glish ones but does not reference Anglo-­Norman as such. Waller’s introductory chapter for volume 1 states that, as a result of the Norman Conquest, “the works of En­glishmen have to be sought in Latin” across the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as though writers of insular French ­were ipso facto not En­glish (6). Anglo-­Latin historical, scholarly, and literary writings of this period receive two chapters in this volume (chapters 9–10). W. Jones’s chapter, “The Arthurian Legend” (chapter 12) also includes discussion of Welsh, but again largely omits French. 57. Whitney 1908, 51 (A. Ward and Waller, vol. 2). The author, James Pounder Whitney (1857–1939), an Anglican priest, was a professor of ecclesiastical history at London and, ­later, Cambridge. 58. See, e.g., Florence Converse’s Long W ­ ill: A Romance, published in Boston in 1903, which understands Piers Plowman as an early expression of the “social gospel” movement. Quotation from Manly 1908, 41 (A. Ward and Waller, vol. 2). 59. Manly 1908 (A. Ward and Waller, vol. 2), 42. Although Langland does not appear in the work, Manly’s account may have been influenced by William Morris’s Marx-­inspired dream vision The Dream of John Ball (1888), widely influential at this period. On Manly (1865–1940), see



Notes to Pages 69–72

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Hulbert 1940. On the history of Manly’s theory that Piers Plowman was the work of several authors, down to the demise of the theory in the 1960s, see C. Benson 2004, 14–24. 60. Yorkshire Writers, ed. Horstmann, vol. 1, v; vol. 2, xxxv. Despite the racial theories that dominate his introduction to volume 1, strikingly redolent of ­those advanced by Fichte and Herder a ­century ­earlier, Horstmann gives a learned and impassioned account of early En­glish eremitism in the introduction to volume 2. 61. Owst 1933, 23, see also Owst 1926. For an appreciative recent account, see Pearsall 2013. 62. H. Allen 1927. On Hope Emily Allen (1883–1960), see Hirsh 1988, D. Williams 2004, and Doyle and Hanna 2019, this last an account of her achievement from the paleographer’s perspective. For a revision of her chronology of Rolle’s works, see N. Watson 1991, 273–94. 63. Harpsfield, Life and Death of Sir Thomas More, ed. Hitchcock, EETS, os 186 (1932), where Chambers’s introduction runs to 160 pages (xiv–­clxxiv); and R. Chambers 1932 (EETS, os 191a), identical to the e­ arlier publication, down to its use of Roman numerals in pagination. 64. R. Chambers 1932, clxxii. With what follows, compare and contrast Wallace 2020, 24– 28, contextualizing Chambers and EETS within the context of global medieval studies in the 1930s. On Chambers (1865–1942), see Sissons and Husbands 1945. 65. R. Chambers 1932, section VIII, xc–­c. Chambers is indebted to the work of his protégé J. R. R. Tolkien, whose famous 1929 essay on the “AB language” identifies what he claims is a standardized literary language, found in Ancrene Wisse and other works. Comparing it with the Old En­g lish prose tradition, Tolkien suggests that, despite the looming presence of Anglo-­ Norman, this standard has “contrived in troublous times to maintain the air of a gentleman, if a country gentleman” (106). See N. Watson and Wogan-­Browne 2004, 35–40; Dance 2003; Chapter Twenty, Section 1 below. 66. R. Chambers 1932, lviii, cxxxiv, in the first instance quoting Phillimore 1913, 8. The essay also quotes with approval from Sir Arthur Quiller-­Couch’s discussion of the King James Bible in his On the Art of Reading (1920) as “the most majestic ­thing in our lit­er­a­t ure” (135), but is in disputative dialogue with two more technical recent accounts of En­glish prose, Saintsbury 1912 and Krapp 1915. R. W. Chambers sums up his groundbreaking argument thus: “The anonymous author of the Ancren Riwle, Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, and Sir Thomas More are main piers of the bridge which connects Tudor prose with the prose of Ælfric and of Alfred” (cxxxiv). 67. R. Chambers 1932, clxxiii. For discussion, see Millett 1996a, 40–45. 68. R. Chambers 1932, section XIII, cxli–­c xlviii, a comparison of the prose style of More and Tyndale; and section XIV, cxlviii–­clvii. For an astute early critique, see Magoun 1934. For a more recent large-­scale reappraisal of fourteenth-­to sixteenth-­century En­glish prose, critical of Chambers on dif­fer­ent grounds, see J. Mueller 1984. See also Chapter Twenty below. 69. More was canonized by Pius XI on May 19, 1935; R. W. Chambers’s biography of More, Thomas More, was published in the same centenary year, six years ­a fter an anticipatory saint’s life by the noted Roman Catholic man of letters and controversialist, G. K. Chesterton. 70. Quotations are from O’­Sullivan 1942, and R. Chambers 1932, cxlvii. Chambers’s sharply intelligent obituarist, Richard O’­Sullivan (1888–1963), was a scholar of medieval common law. He also wrote on More. His papers are collected in O’­Sullivan 1965.

chapter 4 1. O’­Sullivan 1942, 2. See the end of the previous chapter. 2. On the essay’s importance over forty years, see Blake 1972, 437–38. Compare J. A. Burrow 1990.

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Notes to Pages 72–76

3. R. Chambers 1932, cxxxiv. 4. On this pro­cess, see Heal 2005. For a somewhat more eirenic account, see Backus 2003. The wider literary background is explored by Cummings 2002, an exceptionally rich account. The ­careers of several of the figures mentioned in this section are discussed by Duffy 2017. All scholarship on early modern En­glish Catholicism remains indebted to Bossy 1975. 5. Bede, History of the Church of En­glande, trans. Stapleton, opening folios. Stapleton published a companion, A Fortresse of the Faith (1565), to expound ­these differences more fully. His “Preface to the Reader” stresses Bede’s importance as exegete and preacher, and influence on Alcuin and Hrabanus Maurus (fols. 1r–9v). On Stapleton (1535–98), see O’Connell ODNB. 6. See Evenden and Freeman 2011. 7. Harpsfield, Dialogi, 738–1002, attacks Foxe directly. For the Magdeburg Centuries, see Chapter Two, n. 11 above. On Harpsfield, see Freeman ODNBb. R. Chambers 1932 praises Harpsfield both as a biographer (xlv–­lii) and as a writer of En­glish prose (clvii–­clxvii). 8. Harpsfield, Historia anglicana ecclesiastica, which divides history into centuries, in a further sign of the power­f ul influence of the Magdeburg Centuries. On Netter, see Alban 2010, which includes a scan of Netter, Doctrinale antiquitatum ed. Blanciotti. 9. Robert Persons, Three Conversions, vol. 1, 2–43. On Persons or Parsons (1546–1610), a prolific writer, see Carrafiello 1998, Houliston ODNB. 10. On Sander (ca. 1530–81), see Mayer ODNB. On the De origine, written in the 1550s but published only ­a fter Sander’s death in heavi­ly reworked form, see Higley 2005. See also Duffy 2017, 287–300, who emphasizes the work’s long-­lasting and Europe-­w ide influence. 11. An En­glish translation of Sander’s De origine was published in 1877. Twenty years ­earlier, Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! (1855) features Robert Persons and Edmund Campion as villains: “gentlemen in no sense in which that word is applied in this book” (vol. 1, chapter 3, 103). 12. See Harpsfield, Historia anglicana ecclesiastica, 107–8, on Cædmon (“Cedmono monacho”); 162–63 on the Alfredian corpus (this ultimately from William of Malmesbury); 640 on Lydgate (this from John Leland), ­here presented as one among a series of monastic writers from the Norwich diocese, compared to Dante and Chaucer for his writing “in vernacula lingua”; and 678 on Wycliffe, who “cum multa volumina pestiferis dogmatibus repleta, tam Latine quam Anglice conscripsisset.” This seems to be the only remark about the vernacular in the portion of the Historia entitled “Historia Wicleffiana” (663–732). Harpsfield mentions the Oxford Constitutions at 718. 13. Bede, History of the Church of En­glande, trans. Stapleton, 141. 14. Persons, Of Three Conversions, vol. 1, 359–61; vol. 3, 171. On the Second Council of Clovesho, see Chapter One, Section 1, above. 15. For an account of ­t hese debates and their shifting attitudes to the vernacular, see McNally 1966. For the situation in southern Eu­rope, see López 2003, especially 161–78; Fragnito 1997. For the papal Index and its many paradoxes, see Marcus 2020, especially chapter 1. 16. Thomas Harding, An Ans­were. On the En­glish College and its founder, William Allen, see Duffy 2017, 132–67, with further bibliography. On Harding (1516–72), see Wooding ODNB. 17. Harvey, Pierces Supererogation, 13; Jewel, Copie of a Sermon (1560). Jewel answered Harding’s Ans­were (1564) with A Replie (1565). Harding replied with A Rejoindre (1566). Other responses followed. For the controversy, from vari­ous ­a ngles, see Booty 1953, 58–82; Milward 1977, 1–24; Morrissey 2011, 160–90; Jenkins 2016, 115–54. 18. Harding, An Ans­were, fol. Ar, citing “Julles Challenge.” In order to include the En­glish evidence Stapleton was exploring at Louvain as he worked on his translation of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica, Harding unusually extends the “primitive” period as late as the eighth ­century. 19. Harding, An Ans­were, fol. 50v. 20. Ibid., fols. 54r (Pentecost), 60v–61r (Punic and Anglo-­Norman).



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21. Ibid., fols. 62v, 64r, 65v. 22. Jewel, A Replie, 263–338. 23. Harding, An Ans­were, argues: 1. Lay ignorance of the liturgy is not damaging, since they “geve assent to it, and ratifie it in their hartes . . . ​though not in special, yet in general” (fol. 69v); 2. Lay ignorance is partial, since “the Latine tonge in the Latine Churche is not all together straunge and unknowen” (fol. 70r); 3. The Bible is in any case so obscure that “the vulgare Ser­ vice pulleth” the laity “from private devotion” (fol. 73v); 4. Vernacular liturgies thus tend to induce schism, “as the Christians of Moschovia, of Armenia, of Prester John his land in Ethiopia” (fol. 73v). 24. Harding, An Ans­were, fol. 153v. 25. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 2, 735–36: “Etsi missa magnam contineat populi fidelis eruditionem, non tamen expedire visum est patribus, ut vulgari passim lingua celebraretur. . . . ​Si quis dixerit . . . ​lingua tantum vulgari missam celebrari debere: a[nathema] s[it]” (although the mass is full of instruction for the faithful ­people, the council ­fathers did not think it advantageous that it should everywhere be celebrated in the vernacular. . . . ​If anyone says that mass should only be celebrated in the vernacular . . . ​let him be anathema). For the council and the gradual hardening of its positions, see O’Malley 2013. For the 1570 Missale Romanum, see the edition by Sodi and Triacca. 26. Harding, An Ans­were, fol. 160r. 27. Staphylus, Apologie, trans. Stapleton. 28. Ibid., fols. 64r, 65r, 76v–77r. 29. Rheims New Testament, fol. A.ii.r. On the Rheims New Testament, see Walsham 2014, 285–314, a rich discussion from which this account has learned much. On Gregory Martin, who was professor of Hebrew at the En­glish College, see McCoog ODNB; Duffy 2017, 168–202. The translation’s use of the Latin Vulgate was intended to distinguish it from Protestant translations, based on the Hebrew and Greek originals, emphasizing its status as part of an ancient tradition of translation. However, the title page claims that Martin has also “diligently conferred with the Greeke and other editions in divers languages.” 30. Rheims New Testament, fols Aii.r–­Aii.v. Erasmus, Exhortation, trans. Roy (1529), text fol. 5r: an En­glish translation of Erasmus’s introductory “paraclesis ad lectorem pium” to his 1516 Greek and Latin edition of the New Testament, the Novum Instrumentum (“utinam hinc adstivam aliquid decantet agricola”; fol. aaa4.v). For a discussion of the theory of language and lit­er­ a­t ure that underlies Erasmus’s work, see Cumming 2002, 104–11. The passage was also imitated by Miles Coverdale in his Goostly Psalmes (1535), who similarly wishes that “oure minstrels had none other thinge to play upon, nether oure car­ters and plowmen other thinge to whistle upon, save psalmes, hymnes, and soch godly songes as David is occupied withal” (fol. 2v). 31. Rheims New Testament, fol. A ii.v. 32. Ibid., fol. Aii.r, Aiii.r. On this repre­sen­ta­tion of the translation as a temporary expedient, in part to secure license from the papacy, see Walsham 2014, 299. 33. Rheims New Testament, fol. A ii.v. This passage also owes a debt to More’s Dialogue Concerning Heresies III.15–16, quoted in Chapter Two, n. 41 above. 34. On the establishment of St. Gregory’s, Douai, a complex pro­cess, see Fabre 1932. 35. Love, Miroure (1606), title page. On this edition, as well as an impor­tant amplification of the Mirror by the Douai printer and translator John Heigham, published in 1622, see Doyle 1994–96, I. Johnson 2015. Love’s Mirror is a translation and adaptation of the early fourteenth-­ century Meditationes vitae Christi, which he and o­ thers mistakenly attributed to Bonaventure. 36. On seventeenth-­century En­glish nuns and their communities, see Walker 2003, Lux-­ Sterrit 2017. On the libraries at Cambrai and Paris, see Bowden 2015. On Baker (1575–1641), a

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Notes to Pages 80–83

major figure, see Rees ODNB and essays in Scott 2012, with further bibliography. On Cressy (ca. 1605–74), a neglected one, see Steurt 1948, Tavard 1978, 109–25, Brückmann ODNB. On Cary (ca. 1614–71), founding abbess of Cambrai’s ­sister ­house at Paris, see Wolfe ODNBa. On Constable (1617–84), a prolific writer now beginning to gain recognition, see Gertz 2017, Wolfe ODNBb. 37. On Baker and Sir Robert Cotton’s library, see Summit 2008, 136–42. On ­these works at Douai and Cambrai, see Spearitt 1974; Dutton and van Hyning 2012, which anticipates the discussion ­here; Bowden 2015. Hilton’s On Mixed Life was also printed in London in 1653, confusingly ­under the title The Scale of Perfection. Our knowledge of the full version of Julian’s Revelation of Love rests entirely on copies made and printed at this period. No genuine En­glish work of Rolle’s has so far been linked to Baker, Cressy, or the Cambrai nuns. 38. On the gender politics of Catholic religious ­women engaging in evangelism at this period, see Wallace 2006. On this topic in relation to Cambrai and other ­houses in the Low Countries, and on their conflicting spiritual regimes, see Walker 2003, 130–74. 39. See Knowles 1950, vol. 3, 444–55; also Cramer 2007. 40. Julian of Norwich, Writings, ed. Watson and Jenkins, 444 (with most belated thanks to Julia Bolton Holloway for sharing her ­earlier work on Gascoigne). On Gascoigne (1608–29), see Baker, Five Treatises, ed. Clark; Gascoigne, Works, ed. Clark. On her pre­sen­ta­tion of Julian in her own writings, see Gorman 2008. On Julian and Gascoigne at Cambrai, see J. Goodrich 2017. 41. Julian of Norwich, XVI Revelation, ed. Cressy, A.ii.r–­v. See also Julian of Norwich, Writings, ed. Watson and Jenkins, 449–50. 42. See Summit 2009. 43. Sacra bibliotheca, ed. de la Bigne. By the time the 1677 edition was published, a ­century ­a fter de la Bigne’s death, the collection had swollen from eight volumes to twenty-­seven and become the Maxima bibliotheca, ed. de la Bigne and Despont. Rolle’s Latin Psalter, Emendatio Vitae, and other works, first printed in Cologne in the 1530s, take up part of vol. 26 of ­later editions, se­lections from fourteenth-­century theologians. On de la Bigne, see Petitmengin 1985. On Migne, see many essays in Mandouze and Fouilheron 1985, Bloch 1995. See Yorkshire Writers, ed. Horstmann. 44. On the Annales ecclesiastici, see Pullapilly 1975. On the term “dark ages” and its eighteenth-­century popularization, see Varga 1978 (first published in 1932), a classic study whose argument has outlived determined efforts to view Petrarch as the creator of modern periodization, e.g., by Mommsen 1942. 45. See Burrows 1982, on Michelet’s influence on the postwar French Annales school of historians, many of them medievalists. See also below, Chapter Five. 46. On the Maurists, forcibly suppressed in 1792, see Knowles 1959, Dubois 1992, and essays gathered in Fredouille 2001. On the Bollandists, see Knowles 1958, Godding 2007, and the society’s website: https://­w ww​.­bollandistes​.­org​/­. On Du Fresne’s research into Latin and Greek in its wider lexicographical context, see Considine 2008, 250–87. 47. Stillingfleet, Discourse Concerning the Idolatry Practiced in the Church of Rome (1671); Cressy, FANATICISM Fanatically Imputed (1672). Excerpts edited in Julian, Writings, ed. Watson and Jenkins, 448–55 (quotation at 453). On Stillingfleet (1635–99), see Till ODNB. 48. On Charles Dodd (1672–1743), whose ­actual name was Hugh Tootell, see Thompson Cooper and Du Toit ODNB. On Lingard (1771–1851), see P. Phillips ODNB; Duffy 2017, 287–326. 49. King James Bible, preface (“The Translators to the Reader”), unpaginated. In 1750, Richard Challoner (1691–1781) published the first edition of the complete Douay-­Rheims-­Challoner Bible, a large-­scale overhaul of Martin’s translation, still in use in updated forms. On Challoner, see Gilley ODNB.



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50. Bossuet, Histoire des variations, VII.64, vol. 1, 408; anonymous translation, vol. 1, 288. On Bossuet’s theology of history, informed by Baronius’s Annales but with many internal tensions, see Chadwick 1957, 1–73. 51. Fénelon, “Lettre sur la lecture de l’Écriture Sainte en Langue Vulgaire,” 383, trans. Fletcher, 3, preserving Fletcher’s early nineteenth-­century punctuation. 52. C. Butler 1817, 191–218 (based on two letters to The Gentleman’s Magazine), at 191–92. On Charles Butler (1750–1832), a controversial figure among En­glish Catholics, see Moore ODNB. 53. Anti-­Catholicism in Victorian ­England, ed. Norman. 54. Gasquet 1897, 102–225. On Gasquet (1846–1929), see Knowles 1963 (an embarrassed essay), Bellenger ODNB. 55. H. Kelly 2016, especially 141–46. 56. Coulton 1938, 157–58. For Coulton’s view of the ­Middle Ages in general, see his four-­ volume Five Centuries of Religion (1923–50). On Coulton (1858–1947), who founded the impor­tant series Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, see Bennett 1947, Christianson 1972, Summerson ODNB. Although he is still read (and still highly readable), by the end of his life, Coulton’s stridency had lost him the re­spect of younger professional historians. 57. Coulton 1937 (The Scandal of Cardinal Gasquet). On the controversy, see Corio 2013. 58. On the development of this term, see N. Watson 2011. Key figures based in Britain ­were the Catholic modernist, Friedrich von Hügel (1852–1925), and the Anglicans William Inge (1860– 1954) and Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941). See Webb ODNB, Grimly ODNB, P. Evans ODNB respectively. 59. Modernizations ­were numerous. Julian’s Revelation was reprinted from Cressy’s 1670 edition in 1843 and 1864, then again in 1901 and 1902, now with a preface by George Tyrrell (and still with Cressy’s title (XVI Revelations of Divine Love). Modernizations from single manuscripts by Grace Warrack and Roger Hudleston appeared in 1901 and 1927 (now as Revelations of Divine Love). Dundas Harford’s modernization of the first version of A Revelation, A Vision, appeared in 1911 ­under the title Comfortable Words for Christ’s Lovers. Hilton’s Scale was reprinted from Cressy’s 1659 edition in 1870 and 1908. New modernizations appeared in 1923 and 1927, the first (by Evelyn Underhill) edited from manuscripts, the second (by Maurice Noetinger) from Wynkyn de Worde’s edition of 1494. The Cloud was published in 1871 as The Divine Cloud, with Notes and a Preface by Augustine Baker, revised in 1924 by Justin McCann u ­ nder its a­ ctual title. Evelyn Underhill’s modernization, A Book of Contemplation, from one manuscript appeared in 1912. An edition of Love’s Mirror was published in 1908 by the literary scholar Lawrence F. Powell. Anglican and Catholic presses also issued many modernizations of works attributed to Rolle, based on Horstmann’s editions, of Ancrene Wisse, and much more. Impor­tant figures ­here ­were Frances M. M. Comper, Geraldine Hodgson, and, ­later, the scholarly Clara Kirchberger, whose modernizations of ­Middle En­glish spiritual writings include the first published version of Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of S ­ imple Souls (1927) and the fine anthology The Coasts of the Country (1952). 60. On this controversy, over the doctrine of universal salvation affirmed by the modernist Jesuit theologian George Tyrrell, in his 1901 preface to Julian’s Revelation, see Barratt 1995. Tyrrell reprinted this preface in his Faith of the Millions, 1–39, written in mandated seclusion. On Tyrrell (1861–1909), see Sagovsky ODNB. On Catholic modernism and its discontents, see Chapter Five, Section 2, below. 61. For Rolle, see Whitney 1912 (A. Ward and Waller, vol. 2), an essay that alludes to Gasquet’s arguments about The ­Middle En­glish Bible approvingly, if without citation. For “Hylton” and “Juliana,” see Greenwood 1912, 300 (A. Ward and Waller, vol. 2), on fifteenth-­century prose. Hilton and Julian also feature in Wells’s Manual (1916), the latter very briefly. The Cloud does

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not, although the Manual gives space to numerous other anonymous ­Middle En­glish religious prose works, most of which are categorized as the work of “followers” of ­either Wyclif or Rolle. 62. For the Cloud and its sequel, Book of Privy Counselling, see EETS, os 218 (1944), ed. Hodgson, who edited other works by this author in Deonise Hid Divinite, os 231 (1955). A thesis edition of Julian’s Revelation by Francis S ­ ister Anna Maria Reynolds was completed in 1956. Marion Glasscoe’s edition was printed in 1976, and ­others have followed. The Scale was first published in ­Middle En­glish, in a single-­manuscript edition, by Bestul in 2000. A critical edition of book II, by Hussey and Sargent, has appeared as EETS, os 348 (2017). 63. See Mitchell 2005 (Margery Kempe); Newman 2011 (Julian of Norwich). A modernized and lightly bowdlerized version of The Book, ed. Butler-­Bowdon (1935), carries an introduction by R. W. Chambers. For the EETS edition by Meech and Allen, see Chapter Five, Section 3, below. 64. This phrase serves as a title for David Lowenthal’s ­g reat study of the cultural uses of the past (1985, 2nd ed. 2015), who takes it from the opening sentence of L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-­Between (1953), “The past is a foreign country: they do t­ hings differently ­there.”

chapter 5 1. Duffy 1992 (2nd ed., 2005). For the scholarly setting, see C. Haigh 1987. 2. The key figure ­here, a major influence on Coulton, is Henry Charles Lea, especially his A History of the Inquisition of the ­Middle Ages (1888). 3. Burckhardt 1860, 131 (En­glish translation in Burckhardt 1878, 181; the phrase “period of the” in the book’s En­glish title was ­later dropped). Unfair as this may be to Burckhardt, it remains relevant that his book, with its power­f ul repudiation of the medieval “Dark Age,” was published twenty years before Eu­ro­pean imperialists embarked on the notorious phase of the colonization of the “Dark Continent” known as the “Scramble for Africa,” and forty before ­Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” (1899), published in McCool’s Magazine early in the Filipino-­A merican war (1899–1901), represented the proj­ect of white Eu­ro­pean and American global imperialism as heroic sacrifice. For Burckhardt’s pessimism about modernity, see Hinde 2000. For a critique of the re­nais­sance paradigm he did much to inaugurate, with further bibliography on Burckhardt, see Caferro 2011. For a recent example of its enduring charisma, see Greenblatt 2011. The most impor­tant early twentieth-­century response to Burckhardt was Johan Huizinga’s Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen (1919), translated as The Waning of the ­Middle Ages (1924), which represents the medieval past very differently from Burckhardt but endorses its own version of his epochalizing historiography. 4. For the “revolt of the medievalists,” see Ferguson 1948. 5. Haskins 1927, vii. 6. The special status of Haskins’ book is affirmed by R. Benson and Constable 1982, based on a conference of 1977 that marked the fiftieth anniversary of its publication. On the founding of the Medieval Acad­emy of Amer­i­ca, see Coffman 1926, the first article in issue 1 of the acad­ emy’s journal Speculum. On Haskins (1870–1937), who wrote the second article in this issue, cofounded the American Council of Learned Socie­ties, and advised Woodrow Wilson over the Treaty of Versailles, see Cantor 1991, 245–86; Blurton 2009; Kudrycz 2011, 136–42. On the context, see Spiegel 1998, who rightly underlines the role of Haskins’ mentor, Henry Adams (1838– 1918), in the shift in emphasis in twentieth-­century American medieval studies from “Anglo-­Saxons” to “Anglo-­Normans” and Britain to France. See Henry Adams’s glorious Mont-­ Saint-­Michel and Chartres (1904).



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7. Recent assessments include Melve 2006; Noble and Van Engen 2012, especially 1–16. Unlike some of t­ hose who have built on his work, Haskins himself raises potential prob­lems with the term “re­nais­sance” in justifying his usage (Haskins 1927, 1–6). Although the “re­nais­sance” paradigm in twelfth-­century studies has its own baggage, it bears emphasizing that, as Blurton notes, “Haskins was writing against a romantic historiography invested in a popu­lar medievalism that privileged ideologies of ‘race’ and ‘nation’ ” (Blurton 2009, 269). 8. For the term “Carolingian re­nais­sance,” see G. Brown 1994, McKitterick 2005. 9. The most recent ­g reat attempt to incorporate the medieval within the modern may be Curtius 1948 (En­g lish translation 1953), which understands the medieval literary system to end only with Goethe in the early nineteenth ­century. It can do this ­because it also resolutely subsumes the study of medieval lit­er­a­t ure into the study of rhe­toric, rather than philology or literary history, and within the overarching and transnational Eu­ro­pean category of Latinitas, striking a blow against Romantic nationalism. For a retrospective analy­sis, see C. Burrow 2013. 10. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or ­There and Back Again. On Tolkien and Chambers, see D. Anderson 2006. 11. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings was published in 1957. C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia was published between 1950 and 1956. For a survey of the history of fantasy, see Manlove 1999, J. Williamson 2015. Fantasy novels with medieval settings have increasingly been supplemented or displaced by comics, films, tele­vi­sion series, video games, and reenactments. 12. For this double account of medieval romance, see, respectively, Reeve 2014, Heng 2003. The cultural work of medievalist fantasy in relation to race, gender, sexuality, po­liti­cal systems, class, and belief systems is a vast and preoccupying subject. For The Lord of the Rings as a response to early twentieth-­century Aryan nationalism, see Chism 2003, a notably subtle essay. For broader links between medieval fantasy and issues of race, see H. Young 2015. For ongoing discussion of ­these and related issues, see https://­w ww​.­publicmedievalist​.­com​/­, a forum for peer-­ reviewed essays run by Paul B. Sturtevant and o­ thers since 2014. 13. On medieval/modern/secular, see Cole and Smith 2010, especially 1–36, and the books to which it responds, Löwith 1949 and Blumenberg 1966. For an impor­t ant critique of the secularization thesis, see C. Taylor 2007. For the modernist politics of time, see K. Davis 2008. 14. Weber 1904–5. For Weber’s medievalism, see P. Ghosh 2014, 247–92. 15. This is what Bynum 1991, 11–26, calls “history in the comic mode.” 16. See McGinn 1992, 263–343. The foundational work on the category of experience, which makes extensive use of early modern Catholic mystical theology, is W. James 1902. 17. For this idea of tradition and its gradual breakdown, see Chadwick 1957, a rich study. 18. On Neo-­Thomism, see McGinn 2014, 163–209; McCool 1977; McCool 1995. On La nouvelle théologie, first coined as a term of opprobrium, see Kerr 2007, especially 1–86, Mettepenningen 2010. 19. See McCool 1977, 7–10 (nature and grace), 216–40 (Aquinas). 20. Pius X, Pascendi dominici gregis: De modernistarum doctrinis (feeding the Lord’s flock: on the doctrines of the modernists), September 8, 1907. See O’Connell 1995, Rafferty 2010. 21. The key Maurist text from a theoretical perspective was Mabillon’s Traité des études monastiques (1691), a specifically Benedictine introduction to editorial scholarship. 22. See Fouilloux 1995. On ressourcement, see Flynn and Murray 2011. 23. On Chenu, see Duval and Jolivet 2000, Gray 2011, and Le Père Marie-­Dominique Chenu Médiéviste (1997), with essays by a group of impor­tant medievalists of a ­later generation: Alain Boureau, Henri Donneaud, Jean Jolivet, Jacques Le Goff, and Jean-­Claude Schmitt.

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Notes to Pages 93–95

24. See O’Malley 2008, 37–52, 75–80. Among ­those identified with the movement, Henri de Lubac (1896–1991) and Yves Congar (1904–95) became cardinals. Karol Wojtyla and Joseph Ratzinger, who became Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI respectively, ­were also associated. 25. For the council’s ecclesiology, see De Lubac 1953. O’Malley 2008, 39, notes the influence of Newman’s idea of “development of doctrine” on Congar 1963, a reframing of tradition in which the motto semper eadem plays no clear part. He also stresses the importance of Brian Tierney’s ­g reat study, Foundations of the Conciliar Theory (1955) on the council (77). Tierney, a Catholic, reflects on his own unexpected influence on the council in his revised edition of the book, 1998, ix–­x xix. 26. See, e.g., Gilson 1934, Leclercq 1957, De Lubac 1959–64. The term “reformation of the twelfth ­century” was pop­u­lar­ized by Giles Constable in his 1996 book of that name. 27. See Grundmann 1995 (translating Grundmann 1935), Grundmann 2019 (En­glish translations of essays of vari­ous dates). On Maurice Powicke, general editor of Councils and Synods and coauthor (with Christopher Cheney) of its thirteenth-­century volumes, see Pantin 1965, Southern and Harding ODNB. 28. The phrase is from Schmitt 1997, 399, writing of Chenu in par­tic­u­lar. 29. See especially Chapter Eleven below, and Volume 2, Part I. 30. Clanchy significantly and brilliantly updated his account in ­later editions (1993 and 2012). 31. See, e.g., Bynum 1982, Constable 1996. Chenu’s strong influence on Southern is discussed by Duval and Jolivet 2000. On Southern’s “romantic” historiography in its wider context, see Kudrycz 2011, 191–216. 32. Foundational ­here is R. Moore 1987 (revised edition 2003), whose study of the twelfth-­ century “persecuting society” rejects the approach to the period he sees represented by Southern, with whom he studied in Oxford (1–5). For essays building on and in some cases away from Moore’s approach to high medieval heresy, see Frassetto 2006. For a pertinent recent case study, much of it centered on thirteenth-­century ­England, see Heng 2018. 33. See, e.g., Boyle 1956 and 1981. Leonard Boyle (1923–99) was a student of William Pantin at Oxford, who himself was a student of Powicke. His work on thirteenth-­century En­glish pastoralia has been continued by Joseph Goering and ­others, many of them trained in ­either Toronto or Oxford. For studies and a full bibliography of the body of work associated, one way or another, with Boyle, see Stansbury 2010, especially the essay by Goering. For other aspects of Boyle’s life and ­career, see Duggan et al. 2005. 34. See, respectively, Bailey 2010; ­Water and the Word, ed. Keefe; Foxhall Forbes 2013. 35. P. Brown 1989. In a 1997 article, Peter Brown acknowledges his debt to Sources Chrétiennes. 36. On the medievalism of Bourdieu and other French intellectuals, see Holsinger 2005. 37. On medieval Chris­tian­ity and embodiment in general, the work of Caroline Walker Bynum has been especially influential. For feminist approaches also informed by psychoanalytic theory, see, e.g., Fradenburg and Freccero 1996, Hollywood 2002 and 2016. For gay/queer studies, see, e.g., Boswell 1981, Burger and Kruger 2001, Dinshaw 1999 and 2012. For the most recent work on embodiment and medieval ideas of race, in which the study of Chris­tian­ity is often central, see, e.g., Heng 2018, Kaplan 2019, Whitaker 2019. For the influence of modern affect studies and the study of cognition, see McNamer 2009, Dresvina and Blud 2020. 38. Crucial to ­Middle En­glish studies has been the work of Vincent Gillespie, Ralph Hanna, Anne Hudson, and Bella Millett, all building on that of Ian Doyle. Work on Old En­glish religious prose has developed from several sources: a revival of Ælfric scholarship ­under Peter Clemoes, founder of Anglo-­Saxon ­England (1972–); new work on the homiletic tradition more broadly, initially ­u nder Paul Szarmach; new scholarship on the En­g lish Benedictines, spearheaded by



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Mechthild Gretsch, among ­others (especially Michael Lapidge for Benedictine Latinity); and a reappraisal of early En­glish ­legal texts and traditions, pioneered by Patrick Wormald. 39. See Anglo-­Norman Lit­er­a­ture (ANL), by Ruth Dean with the collaboration of Maureen B. M. Boulton (1999), the work of nearly fifty years. Key studies of insular French religious writing, built on the groundwork laid by the Anglo-­Norman Text Society and its cofounder Dominica Legge (especially Legge 1950), include Wogan-­Browne 2001 and many essays in WoganBrowne et al. 2009. Wogan-Browne has additionally pioneered the comparative study of the French of ­England and early ­Middle En­glish (see, e.g., Blurton and Wogan-­Browne 2011). For an impor­tant collection of essays on continental French religious texts, see Hasenohr 2015. The editorial work of Tony Hunt and Ian Short and linguistic scholarship of William Rothwell and David Trotter through the Anglo-­Norman Dictionary (AND) has also been fundamental. 40. See, e.g, Van Engen 2008, Kumler 2011, D. Turner 2011, respectively. 41. ­Middle En­glish Texts (1975–), Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies (1975–), TEAMS ­Middle En­glish Texts Series (1990–), French of ­England Translation Series/FRETS (2008–). 42. Impor­tant resources for ­Middle En­glish scholars include two linguistic atlases, LAEME and eLALMA. For a report on advances in computational paleography, see Kestemont et al. 2017. 43. On EETS and the Ancrene Riwle editing proj­ect, an international enterprise from the first, see H. Spencer 2014, 25. The series began with Ancrene Riwle: Latin Text, ed. D’Evelyn, EETS, os 216 (1944) and concluded with Ancrene Riwle: Vernon, ed. Zettersten and Diensberg, os 310 (2000) fifty-­six years ­later. The most ambitious volume of the series is Ancrene Riwle: Cotton Cleopatra, ed. Dobson, os 267 (1972), which tracks on-­page authorial revisions of Ancrene Wisse in illuminating detail. See Chapter Twenty, Section 1, below. 44. Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, os 325–26 (2005–6). See also Ancrene Wisse, trans. Millett; Millet 1996a; and many articles by Millett listed in the Bibliography. 45. The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Meech and Allen, os 212 (1940). A promised companion volume was not completed, but rich subsidiary materials are pre­sent. Ever since John Hirsh’s fine biography of Allen (1988), scholars have disparaged Meech, a difficult collaborator. But while Allen wrote the edition’s most thought-­provoking notes, Meech deserves his due. The edition took only five years to complete. Its level of commentary had some pre­ce­dent in editions of The Lay Folks’ Mass-­Book and in Morrill’s edition of the Speculum Gy de Warewyke. 46. Cloud of Unknowing, ed. Hodgson, os 218 (1944). A fine example within EETS is Dives and Pauper, ed. Barnum, os 275, 280, 323 (1976–2004). A superlative example from outside the series is Love, Mirror of the Life of Christ, ed. Sargent. Clemoes and Godden’s joint edition of Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, ss 5, 17, 19, is similarly ambitious and wide ranging. 47. The same is true of Michael Sargent’s edition of Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, completing work begun de­cades ago by A. J. Bliss and S. S. Hussey. See (so far) EETS, os 348 (2017). 48. Recent editions of two verse texts, Speculum Vitae, ed. Hanna, os 331 (2008), and The Prick of Conscience, ed. Hanna and Wood, os 342 (2013) are both more than the stopgaps they modestly claim to be. For French, see, e.g., Catherine Batt’s richly presented En­glish translation of Henry of Lancaster’s Livre de Seyntz Medicines (Book of Holy Medicines), FRETS 8 (2014). 49. See, respectively, e.g., Minnis 1988, Copeland 1991, Craun 1997 and 2010. 50. Bloomfield also inspired a body of scholarship that deals with Latin pastoral texts from a literary point of view. His work has been carried on by Siegfried Wenzel (focusing on sermons) and his student Richard Newhauser (focusing on Christian ethics) in par­tic­u­lar. With István Bejczy, Newhauser has co-­edited a supplement to Bloomfield’s Incipits (2008). 51. For reflections on the relationship between religious studies and the con­temporary acad­ emy, see Masuzawa 2012. 52. W. James 1902.

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53. Allusions are to Northrop Frye’s influential 1976 book The Secular Scripture, and to Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach” (1851). For the tensile relation between fiction and belief, see J. Wood 1999. For religion in con­temporary En­glish studies, see the essays gathered in Knight 2016. 54. On modernist lit­er­a­t ure and didacticism, see Blum 2020. 55. Ransom 1941, C. Brooks 1939. For a reappraisal, see Hickman and McIntyre 2012. 56. Cambridge En­glish, which in its own self-­understanding came into its own during the 1930s, was more unequivocally sympathetic to historicism but shared a concern for the literary work as an aesthetic object, maintaining an impor­tant tension between the two perspectives. See I. A. Richards 1924, Empson 1930, Tillyard 1958. Recent discussion of “distant reading,” “surface reading,” “suspicious reading,” and so on still assumes “close reading” as its backdrop. 57. See Dinshaw 1989, 28–64; Patterson 1991, 3–76; Gaylord 2006; Justice 2009. 58. See, again, Minnis 1988 (2nd ed. 2012) and Copeland 1991. See also IOVME (1999). 59. De Saussure 1916 (En­glish translation 1983). See Lentricchia 1980, 156–210. 60. For a recent introduction, see Brannigan 2016. For a sampler, see the materials gathered in Veesser 1989. For a retrospective, see C. Gallagher and Greenblatt 2000. For a Marxist mode of historicism con­temporary with and alternative to New Historicism, see especially Jameson 1982. 61. For Annalisme and its opponents, see S. Clark 1999, Tendler 2013. 62. This was in large part thanks to Anne Hudson’s Premature Reformation (1988). 63. See Wallace 1999, especially his “General Preface” at xvii–­x xi. 64. This is true, not least, of the essay that was one germ of this book, N. Watson 1995.

chapter 6 1. Robert of Gretham, Miroir, ed. Duncan and Connolly, lines 477–506. 2. For general information, see ANL, sec. 589, VLTFE, sec. 14. The ANL dating, “first quarter of the thirteenth ­century,” is presumably too early. The poem is likely nearly con­temporary with its earliest copy, Nottingham University MS MiLM3, dated to ca. 1250 or a ­little ­later (see, most recently, Hanna and Turville-­Petre 2010, 93). The commissioning of the Miroir by “dame Aline” (line 1) is affirmed in lines 99–100: “E vus altre feiz m’avez dit / Que jo feisse cest escrit” (and you have on many occasions said to me that I should compose this writing). 3. Miroir, lines 27–34. For the identity of ­these and other works mentioned by Robert, see Furrow 2010, 66–68. 4. Miroir, lines 1–36, 63–88, especially 85–86: “Cil s’entremet de fol mester / Ki vers lai volt Latin parler”; 105–14, especially 111–12: “Mielz valt vair dire par rustie / Que mesprendre par curteise”; 135–36: “Kar suvent par petit bon dit / Tressalt li quors en grant delit.” 5. Ibid., lines 423–24 and 151–80, especially 151: “Cist livres ‘Mirur’ ad nun.” 6. Ibid., lines 197–202, 203–34, where the image of the tree refers to the tropological or moral sense of the Bible, that of the cloud to the allegorical or typological sense: “Les dous leis mustre par figure” (line 224). 7. Ibid., lines 255–78, where clergy are also “lettrez” (258), and “ordenez” (262); 279–324, especially 291–92, where the bread referred to in Lam. 4:4 is interpreted as “spiritual teaching” (“La doctrine de l’alme”), and 314–16 on the priest’s duties: “Les Deu paroles bien mustrer, / E bien souldre les questiuns / E almes pestre en bon sermuns.” 8. Ibid., line 328: “Tels est li prestres cum est li lais,” translating Isa. 24:2, “Et erit sicut populus ita sacerdos”; lines 325–62, especially 339–50, on the clergy as the eyes of the body of Christ that is the Church; and lines 363–404, especially 365–66 and 401–4: “Feit Deu les prechurs



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taisir / E de tuz sermuns enviir” (alluding to Ezek. 3:26); “Kar Deus cel home pas nen aime / Qu’il par doctrine ne reclaime, / Ki il ne volt endoctriner / Ne par sun flael chastier.” 9. Ibid., lines 415–20, 435–38. 10. Ibid., lines 541–47: “L’ewe k’est e pure e clere, / Ki suvent curt par la gutere, / E la gutere n’en beit mie / Mais l’ewe a bone terre guie. / Li chanels point de fruit ne fait / Mais la terre ki l’ewe beit. / Tut ausi est del prechur.” (When pure and clean ­water runs through a pipe, the pipe does not drink any of it, but guides the ­water to good earth. The conduit has no part of the benefit, only the earth that drinks the ­water. So it also is with the preacher.) 11. Ibid, lines 449, 563 (“Nul n’est ke partut bien die”), 576 (“La ­rose met / espine en pris”), 579–80 (“L’em deit cherir le prechur / Mult pur li, plus pur Deu amur”). 12. Ibid., lines 601–34, quoted phrases at 610. 13. Ibid., lines 635–94, quoted phrases at 635–38, 687. See also 659–60: “Kar avarice en nule place / Ne poet encuntrer la Deu grace.” 14. For a sustained discussion of Robert’s prologue, see ­Waters 2015, 31–45, part of the only book-­length account of thirteenth-­century insular French religious writing to date. 15. For patronage rights in thirteenth-­century ­England, see Gemmill 2013. For the canonical relationship of preaching and teaching in the ­later medieval centuries, see Gillespie 2011a. For writings on correctio or correptio, see Craun 2010, especially 1–56. Innocent III’s attempt to curtail lay criticism of the clergy of Metz is discussed in the Introduction, Section 1, above. 16. ANL, sec. 589 lists ten insular copies and two of a continental redaction. Insular copies of the Miroir and an En­glish translation (see below), are described in ­Middle En­glish “Mirror,” ed. Duncan and Connolly, xx–­x xviii, xii–xx. The copy of the Miroir in London, British Library Additional MS 26773, was owned by “Syr Thomas chapeleyn”; that in San Marino, Huntington Library MS HM 903, was in the library of St. Mary’s York, a Benedictine ­house. The copy of the ­Middle En­glish Mirror in Manchester, John Rylands Library En­glish MS 109/Norwich Cathedral MS 5), was at Welbeck Abbey, Notts, a ­house of Premonstratensian canons. The extent of wear and tear in other copies suggests they, too, ­were in professional use by secular or regular priests. 17. The Northern Homily Cycle, ed. Thompson. On this work as a preaching book, see Heffernan 1985. 18. On Robert’s identity, see Sinclair 1992, who proposes Lilleshall but also suggests his pos­si­ble connections to ­houses in Northamptonshire. On Lilleshall, a royal foundation with connections to the la Zouche ­family, see Angold et al. 1973. 19. “Dame Aline” is compellingly identified with Elena in Sinclair 1992. On Alan and Elena, see Tout and Davies ODNB, Oram ODNB. The Lambeth Apocalypse is London, Lambeth Palace MS 209. For a study, see N. Morgan 1990. For the identification of this book’s patron on the basis of the heraldic motifs on fol. 48r, ­those ­either of Elena de Quincy or of Margaret de Ferrers, see ibid., 79. 20. Lambeth Palace MS 209, fol. 53r. Currently viewable online via LUNA: search Lambeth Apocalypse at http://­images​.­lambethpalacelibrary​.­org​.­uk​/­luna​/­servlet​/­LPLIBLPL~17~17. For the image in the book’s wider pedagogical program, see Kumler 2011, 76–90, with a full-­page color plate of the image at 77. For a detailed analy­sis and edition of the page, see Wogan-­Browne 2009a, 240–45. The rooster as preacher is a commonplace, featuring, for example, in Chaucer’s “Nun's Priest’s Tale” (see Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, ed. Benson, 253–61). William Langland’s Piers Plowman, ed. Schmidt, identifies Piers, the laborer, as a generalized image for preaching the Gospel in B.16 and 19/C.18 and 21, where Piers, like the “guaignur,” is an eschatological figure, pointing not only ­toward eternity but to the Last Times of the material world.

406

Notes to Pages 111–116

21. Pierre Fecham’s Lumere as lais, ed. Heskith, written in 1267, was copied down to the mid-­fourteenth ­century: see ANL, sec. 630. At least two copies of the Miroir ­were still read in the fifteenth ­century: see VLTFE, sec. 14. One copy of the En­glish version, Glasgow, University Library MS Hunter 250, owned by John Hyll, has notes in a fifteenth-­century hand, updating its spelling and vocabulary: see ­Middle En­glish “Mirror,” ed. Duncan and Connolly, xii–­x iv, lx–­ lxiv. For devout aristocratic commissioning and use of such works, see Wogan-­Browne 2005. 22. On the audiences of the Lumere, the Miroir, and similar insular French works, see Barratt 2008; ­Waters 2015, 1–18. On the relationship of ­these works with secular romance, see Reeve 2014. On the distinctio or thema sermon, see Bériou 2000; Chapter Nineteen, Section 2, below. 23. Robert, Miroir, lines 623–26, as well as 489–95, quoted above. 24. Ibid., line 137: “Mun nun ne voil encore numer”; 634, “Qui pur Robert de Grettam prie.” For the identification, see Sinclair 1992, 203. 25. Ibid., lines 488–90. 26. On Robert’s sources, which also include homily collections by Bede and Haymo of Auxerre, see Robert, Étude sur le “Miroir,” ed. Aitken, 39–46; Miroir, ed. Panunzio, 58–80. 27. Robert, Miroir, lines 3958–65, 3980–93, Sermon 12, expounding Luke 8:4–15, while also drawing on Jesus’s exposition of the parable of the wheat and the tares in Matthew 13 to clarify the allegory. The nonbiblical image of God’s “escole” introduced in line 3959 returns in the exposition as a governing image. God’s “bone parole” is sown throughout the Church and world but does not everywhere fall “en bon escole” (lines 4044–45). 28. Robert le Chapelain, Corset, ed. Sinclair. On the relationship between insular French religious verse and Latin pastoralia, see ­Waters 2015, 19–60, much of which concerns the Miroir and the Lumere. For lexical connections between Corset and the Miroir, see Marshall 1973. 29. Robert, Miroir, line 158. On sermo humilis, see Auerbach 1965, 25–82, commenting on Augustine, De doctrina christiana, ed. Martin, trans. Robertson, IV. 30. Robert, Miroir, lines 197–234. The language even ­here is plausibly biblical (e.g., Song of Sol. 2:3, Ps. 96:12), although narrative and meta­phoric allusions to secular romance seem clear. For the range of pos­si­ble contexts for such imagery, see D. Robertson 1952; Gellrich 1987, 209–14. 31. Ian Short uses this pithy phrase in a 1973 review, reflecting a scholarly tradition that identified literary value with secular romance and ­later court poetry in the style of the Roman de la ­rose. Short’s further claim that “the literary impact of Robert de Gretham’s poetry is minimal” ignores the work’s circulation in En­glish prose translation, reflecting the firm disciplinary divide between French and En­glish studies that pertained at the time. For the Miroir and Langland, see Connolly 2003. 32. For editions of the French work and its En­glish translation, see the Bibliography. Only Robert of Gretham, “Lexicographical Study,” ed. Marshall, and ­Middle En­glish Mirror, ed. Blumreich, are complete. Both are essentially transcriptions from one copy. The first remains unpublished. 33. Besides references already cited, especially ­Waters 2015, see Hanna 2005, especially 177– 202, on the ­Middle En­glish Mirror and its London readership, an impor­tant contribution. 34. Robert, Miroir, lines 639–48. 35. ­Here, as with an ­earlier use of “custume” quoted above, Robert is apparently thinking of the mysterious local customs found in aristocratic romance scenes, such as the “custom of Logres” in Chrétien de Troyes’s Chevalier de la Charrette. See Newman 2013, 59–105, for what she ­here usefully calls the “double coding” of sacred and secular themes often involved in such scenes. 36. Foxe, Actes and Monuments, ed. Greengrass and Loades, 1570, book 8, 1265 [1226].



Notes to Pages 117–124

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37. See Robert, Miroir, lines 137–50: “Mun nun ne voil encore numer / Par les envius deshicer,” e­ tc. Pace Duncan and Connolly, who conclude that “opposition to popu­lar exposition based on scriptural translation was nothing new” (­Middle En­glish “Mirror,” note on 5/28–29), envy of ­others at good writing is a prolegomenal topos, with no necessary connection to any external real­ity and no plausible one to arguments about Bible translation. For similar assumptions about thirteenth-­century Bible translation, see Deanesly 1920, 149–51; Shepherd 1969, which takes Deanesly’s thesis for granted; and GBMEBL, 24–47, an innovative and nuanced account still in difficulty from that thesis. On Deanesly’s Lollard Bible, see Chapter Three, Section 3, above. On references to the “envius” that are a feature of “Ciceronian” prologues, ­here with reference to the late twelfth-­century Orrmulum, an early ­Middle En­glish precursor to the Miroir discussed in Chapter Eigh­teen, Section 3, below, see Johannesson 2007a. 38. For the latter, see Chapter Thirteen, Section 1, below. 39. Lydgate, Serpent of Division, ed. MacCracken. For a study, see Nolan 2005, 33–70. 40. For a recent debate over how to understand insular French among the languages of medieval Britain, see Baswell, Cannon, Wogan-­Browne, and Kerby-­Fulton 2015.

chapter 7 1. Pattison 1857, 333. On Pattison, a contributor to John William Parker’s controversial Essays and Reviews of 1860, see H. Jones ODNB. See also Elton 1990, 219; Cummings 2002, 187–230. See also Bettredge 2010. The first example of the phrase that has been traced is from 1834. 2. Holmer 1978, 14. For a radicalizing analy­sis, see C. West 1988, 226–33. Holmer’s pre­de­ ces­sor in equating theology and preaching is, of course, Augustine, in his De doctrina christiana, ed. Martin, trans. Robertson. 3. Dyrness 1992. For a critique from a conservative evangelical perspective arguing that Dyrness and other missiologists are ­under the secularizing influence of Romantic philology, see Chris Burnett 2017, especially 87. 4. Shulman 2008, 227–54. 5. Doyle 1953 (but see also Doyle 1994, 1, which expresses l­ater doubts); Gatch 1977b. 6. For the rise of “monastic theology” as a term, see Leclercq 1954, 1964. By 1961, the new phrase could already be used as the title of an essay collection issued by the Faculté de théologie S. J. de Lyon-­Fourvière. For nouvelle théologie, see Chapter Five, Section 2, above. 7. See McGinn 1994, 1–14, quotation at 6. See also McGinn 1996. All work in this field builds on Grundmann 1935, a fundamental study. 8. For pseudo-­Dionysius and his influence, see Rorem 1993 and below. McGinn’s books are volumes 3–5 of his magisterial Presence of God: A History of Western Mysticism (1991–2020). In the latest of ­these three volumes, McGinn gives a similar account of vernacular theology, now as “a mode of ‘understanding faith’ (intellectus fidei) that aims for an intellectual and lived appropriation of the tenets of Christian belief open to all believers, and not just one filtered down through an intellectual elite” but ­here associates it more firmly with normative orthodoxies and the late medieval centuries: “The fundamentals of the faith it seeks to understand are not dif­fer­ent from the basis of the traditional . . . ​forms of theology, but the audience and modes of communication express the democ­ratization . . . ​a nd even ‘secularization’ . . . ​that ­were an integral part of the ‘New Mysticism’ of the ­later ­Middle Ages” (McGinn 2012, 334). For uses of the term by other religious historians, see Corbari 2013, Warnar 2014, Rychterová 2015. 9. The term was introduced into literary studies in N. Watson 1995. See also N. Watson, 1997a, 1997b, 1999b. For the term as used by literary scholars, see Gillespie 2007, I. Johnson 2011.

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Notes to Pages 124–128

For a range of responses to Watson, see Rhodes 2001, the essays gathered in E. Robertson 2006 and Gillespie and Ghosh 2011, and Cervone 2012. Not all have welcomed the term. Riehle 2014, 232–33, considers it “highly problematic,” while Van Engen 2017, 34–35, warns that it may only “blur and confuse” the complex multilingual real­ity of the larger textual situation. 10. N. Watson 1995, 823–24n4, proposes that “vernacular theology” be used to refer to “any kind of writing, sermon, or play that communicates theological information to an audience,” in order (1) to enable scholarly work across genres and fields, (2) to foster re­spect for the sophistication of vernacular religious texts, and (3) to focus attention on the cultural and linguistic environment on which they ­were written. Focus on the category of the vernacular itself, not mentioned in this definition, grew out of N. Watson 1997a and 1997b and The Idea of the Vernacular (IOVME), ed. Wogan-­Browne, Watson, Taylor, and Evans, 1999. Use of the term by literary scholars has remained correspondingly flexible. See, e.g., Whitehead and Renevey 2000, 1–17; Blumenfeld-­ Kosinski 2002; James 2002; Poor 2004; Wogan-­Browne 2005; Bettredge 2007; Finan 2007; I. Johnson 2013, 1–30; McDermott 2013, 11–86; E. Johnson 2018; and Love, Mirror of the Life of Christ, ed. Sargent (2005), intro., 75–96. Especially nuanced is Minnis 2009, 90–111. 11. See General Preface, n. 4 above. 12. On the dangers of overemphasizing the radical character of medieval vernacular theology, see especially Gillespie 2007 and I. Johnson 2011. For the “En­glish heresy,” see Hudson 1985c. 13. On Jerome’s understanding of translation in its intellectual context, see Copeland 1991, 8–62, a rich discussion. On translation in the Old En­glish period, much indebted to Jerome, see Stanton 2002. For equivalence of effect as an aspiration of medieval translators, see N. Watson 2008. 14. Augustine, De ciuitate Dei, ed. Dombart and Kalb, trans. Dyson, VIII.1; ibid. VI.5. On Varro’s account of theologia, which we know only through Augustine and which occupies much of books VI–­V III of the De civitate, see Rüpke 2012, 175–80. Varro is the most prominent of the work’s pro­cession of witnesses to the hopelessness of reposing trust in the earthly, rather than heavenly, city. 15. For early En­glish examples, see Alcuin, De dialectica, ed. Migne, col. 952 (ca. 800), where theology is the science “through which, transcending the vis­i­ble, we contemplate only something pertaining to divine and heavenly ­things with our minds” (“Theologica est . . . ​qua supergressi visibilia de divinis et coelestibus aliquid mente solum contemplamur”); and, much ­later, Byrhtferth, Enchiridion, ed. and trans. Baker and Lapidge (ca. 1010), I.i, line 165, perhaps indebted to Alcuin as well as Augustine, where “theologia . . . ​id est, sermo de Deo” is synonymous with computus, the study of the heavens from the perspective of the calendar. 16. On the term in the twelfth ­century, see Gaspar 2017, especially 120–23, on Bernard of Clairvaux’s disdain for the use of the term by Abelard in his Theologia christiana, ed. Buytaert and 128 for a first reference to “masters in theology (in theologia) at Paris” in a letter of Pope Alexander III. For the term as used by Hugh of St. Victor, see Didascalicon, ed. Buttimer, trans. Harkins, II.2 (as “sermo de divinis”); Super Hierarchiam Dionysii, ed. Poirel, III.2, V.4 (as “sacra scriptura”). 17. Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, preface prologue, lines 3–7. 18. Hugh Ripelin, Compendium theologicae veritatis, ed. Peltier, I.1: “Theologia certe scientiarum est princeps omnium et regina, cui artes caeterae tanquam pedissequae famulantur. Nam de naturis rerum illa solum recipit ad usum suum, de quibus sibi speculum fabricare valeat, in quo conspiciat Conditorem.” On Hugh and his book, see Steer 1981. On the high view academic theologians took of their own auctoritas, see Levy 2012, 1–53. 19. Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. Macaulay, book 7, lines 73–75. Gower draws on Brunetto Latini’s Livres dou Tresor, ed. Baldwin and Barrett, I.3, likely the earliest account of “theologia” as an academic discipline in a vernacular language. Langland, Piers Plowman, ed. Schmidt, B



Notes to Pages 129–133

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passus 10, lines 182–85, where “devine” is used as a verb, with allusions to divination and divinity. Although Gower, Langland, and Chaucer all use it, theologie is not a common word in ­Middle En­glish, where divinite and contemplacioun remain the favored terms. See MED. 20. Newman 2003, 294–303, a discussion in dialogue with both versions of “vernacular theology” in question h ­ ere. 21. See Boyle 1981, a collection of essays from the previous two de­cades. 22. Cloud of Unknowing, ed Hodgson; Deonise Hid Divinite, ed. Hodgson. 23. Pecock, Book of Faith, ed. Morison, prologue, 119. 24. Julian, Revelation of Love, ed. Watson and Jenkins, chapter 53, lines 8–14, and chapter 45, lines 1–4. “Hey divinitye” is from the closing rubric in the Sloane manuscript. See ibid., page 415. 25. Edited portions of the Compileison (ANL, sec. 644) are in Ancrene Riwle: French Text II, ed. Trethewey, and Peines du Purgatorie, ed. Relihan. See N. Watson and Wogan-­Browne 2004. 26. For law codes, see, e.g., Alfred, Domboc, ed. Liebermann, and Wulfstan of York’s many ­legal writings, for which see Old En­glish ­Legal Writings, ed. and trans. Rabin. (Thanks to Andrew Rabin for sending me advance proofs of this publication.) For charters, see, e.g., Select En­ glish Historical Documents of the 9th and 10th Centuries, ed. Harmer. 27. Kempe, Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Meech and Allen, 126, lines 18–19, 2–5. On Kempe’s canonical correctness ­here, see Craun 2010, 132–42; Gillespie 2019, drawing on Gillespie 2011a. 28. Langland, Piers Plowman, ed. Schmidt, C passus 11, line 131. 29. The phrase theologicae virtutes comes to name the virtues of faith, hope, and charity (1 Cor. 13:13) during the twelfth ­century. See Aquinas, Summa theologica, ed. and trans. Gilby et al., Prima secundae, quaestio 62, art. 1: “Theological virtues are called this ­because they are like divine virtues . . . ​a nd ­because they direct us ­towards God” (“virtutes theologicae dicuntur quasi virtutes divinae . . . ​quibus ordinamur in Deum”), a definition that aligns theologia with Alcuin’s use of the term. 30. On the importance of affective genres to theological thought in the vernacular, and their relative neglect in discussions of vernacular theology, see McNamer 2009, 147n73. 31. For Old and ­Middle En­g lish psalters, see Toswell 2014, Sutherland 2015, Atkin and Leneghan 2017. For Old En­glish and insular French, see Appleton and Leneghan 2017. 32. On the uses of vernacular hagiography, another genre of ­g reat longevity, though not by way of continuous transmission, see, e.g., Scragg 1979, Rauer 2016 (Old En­glish), Wogan-­Browne 2001 (insular French/early ­Middle En­glish), Sanok 2018 (late ­Middle En­glish). 33. See Introduction, Section 2, above. 34. For the ­later medieval disciplinary system, see Weisheipl 1965. For philosophy and the liberal arts, see Lafleur and Carrier 1997. For magic, philosophy, and the arts, see Charles Burnett 1996. For the distinction between theology and philosophy in vernacular contexts, see, again, Piers Plowman B passus 10, lines 214–15, where Dame Study, ­here speaking as the representative not only of elementary education but of all the artes except theology, declares that she herself “sotilede and ordeynede” astronomy, geomancy, and other doubtful arts, “and founded hem formest folk to deceyve.” See also Gower, Confessio amantis, ed. Macaulay, book 7, a sustained treatment of the academic disciplines. 35. This mode of contemplation is succinctly laid out by Hugh in his Soliloquium de arrha animae, ed. Müller, trans. Feiss. 36. E.g., Old En­glish Riddles of the Exeter Book, ed. Williamson, Old En­glish and Anglo-­Latin Riddle Tradition, ed. and trans. Orchard; ­Middle En­glish “Physiologus,” ed. Wirtjes. 37. See Edmund, Mirour de Seinte Eglyse, ed. Wilshere, chapter 6, rubric: “Coment hom deit contempler Deu en chechune creature” (how one should contemplate God in ­every creature).

410

Notes to Pages 133–138

38. Livre de Sidrach, ed. Ruhe, often entitled Le livre de la fontaine de toutes sciences (book of the fountain of all knowledge); Sidrak and Bokkus, ed. Burton. See also Honorius, Elucidarium, ed. Migne, and its French translation Lucidaire de grant sapientie, ed. Türk. For thirteenth-­century vernacular encyclopedias in the context of their Latin sources and near contemporaries, see Franklin-­Brown 2012. 39. On the providential theme in the Old En­glish Orosius, ed. Godden, see Leneghan 2015. On the same theme in the ­later phases of the Anglo-­Saxon Chronicle, from the early eleventh ­century on, see Winkler 2000, 48–97. On Layamon’s Brut, see Chapter Seventeen, Section 2 below. 40. Alcuin, Alcuini Epistolae, ed. Dümmler, 183. On this theme, see Duncan 2006. 41. See Newman 2013, Reeve 2014. On the Grail quest, see Barber 2004. 42. For this reading of The Canterbury Tales, see N. Watson 2005 and N. Watson 2015, 200–204. 43. See, e.g., Rubin and Simons 2009, the late medieval volume of The Cambridge History of Chris­tian­ity. The introduction to this volume proposes a shift from an ­earlier mode of religious history based “on Latin texts: theological tracts, canon law and its commentaries, and some devotional tracts,” whose “protagonists” are “popes, bishops, reforming abbots and activist preachers,” and whose defining “spaces” are the “monasteries, cathedrals and universities” (1), to the study of religious practice in society more broadly. Although texts, not practice, are the principal subject of this study, ­there are clear parallels to the approach taken h ­ ere. 44. This pro­cess is evident, for example, in both medieval volumes of The Oxford En­ glish Literary History published so far, Ashe 2017 (1000–1350), and James Simpson 2002 (1350– 1547), even if only the second of ­t hese books makes significant use of the category of the vernacular.

chapter 8 1. Dante, De vulgari eloquentia, ed. and trans. Botterill, I.6–7. On early Latin grammars, see M. Irvine 1994 and the essays gathered in Law 1997; also Medieval Grammar and Rhe­toric, ed. and trans. Copeland and Sluiter, 62–310. Grammatica derives from Greek grammatike, “skilled in writing,” suggesting that one impetus for the development of grammars of Latin was the existence of grammars of Greek. 2. Aelius Donatus, Ars maior, ed. Keil; trans. in Medieval Grammar and Rhe­toric, 86–99. On Latin as a spoken language, see Herman 1997; also Banniard 1992, with Roger Wright’s review of this monumental book (R. Wright 1993). 3. On Alcuin’s linguistic reforms, see R. Wright 1981, and Chapter Fifteen, Section 2, below. 4. For this account of Latinity, see Ruff 2012. For the changing idea of Latinity in relation to the vernacular across the medieval centuries, see Van Uytfanghe 2003, N. Watson 2012. 5. De vulgari eloquentia, I.1: “Eam qua infantes assuefiunt ab assistentibus cum primitus distinguere voces incipiunt; vel . . . ​quam sine omni regola nutricem imitantes.” On the figure of Dame Grammar in relation to Dante’s nurse, see Cestaro 2003. 6. For vernacular glossing as an early northern Eu­ro­pean academic practice, see Blom 2017, focused on psalters. For the insular study of grammar, see Hayden and Russell 2016. 7. For Occitan grammars and Dante, see Kay 2013, 27–41, 159–75, 346–49, the last a listing of surviving examples. For the Old Irish grammar Auraicept na n-­éces, ed. Ahlqvist (perhaps eighth ­century but in circulation throughout the ­Middle Ages), see Chapter Fifteen, Section 3, below.



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For Old Icelandic grammars (thirteenth and ­fourteenth centuries), see, e.g., First Grammatical Treatise, ed. Haugen, Fourth Grammatical Treatise, ed. Clunies Ross and Wellendorf, with bibliography. For ­Middle Welsh grammars (­fourteenth and fifteenth ­century), see Matonis 1981, Jacques 2020. Like Occitan grammars, and like the De vulgari eloquentia, all ­these grammars are primarily treatises designed to teach the composition and appreciation of poetry (and, in the case of the Auraicept, law). 8. See Hagman 2007, commenting on Robins 1967 and Peirone 1975. 9. For Dante’s awareness of language groups, Romance and ­others, see Danesi 1996. 10. Palmer, De translacione scripture sacre, ed. and trans. Solopova, Catto, and Hudson, in their impor­tant new edition, translation, and study, From the Vulgate to the Vernacular, replacing an e­ arlier edition in Deanesly 1920. On Palmer, see also Hudson ODNBb. Deanesly 1920, 292– 94, dates his De translacione to 1405, ­later than the other two Latin disputative texts discussed ­here, both of which appear to date from 1401. Linde 2015 argues for its composition in the 1380s or 1390s, but this is disputed by Solopova, Catto, and Hudson, at xlii–iv. For ­earlier discussions of the series of Oxford debates discussed ­here, see Hudson 1985a, N. Watson 1995, 840–46. 11. Dante, De vulgari eloquentia, I.4, 1–15: of thirteen Italian dialects, Roman is not a language but a “tristiloquium,” Aquilian is as crude as the mountainous region itself, ­etc. 12. Palmer, De translacione, 168, quotations at lines 312–13 and 285–86. See also 303–6: “Sic, orationes, dictiones, proposiciones, sillabe multe non possunt plectro lingue formari, nec litteris Latinorum alphabeti sillabicari, sed balbuciendo et de gutture evomendo, quasi granitus porcorum vel rugitus leonum exprimendo.” For satirical comment on En­glish dialects, see John Trevisa’s account of the “apairinge (damaging) of the burth of the tunge” caused by Danish and Norman invasions, as well as by the practice of using French, not En­glish, to teach Latin. As a result, En­glish is now full of “straunge wlafferinge, chiteringe, harringe and garringe grisbaiting” (stammering, swittering, snarling and chattering grinding). See also his comment on the “sharp, slitting (biting) and frotinge (rasping) and unshape” (disfiguring) sounds of northern En­glish. Trevisa, Polychronicon, ed. Babington and Lumby, vol. 2, 159–63. See Lerer 2007, 85–100. 13. Palmer, De translacione, 168–70, lines 314–20. 14. Ibid., 168, 289–302. 15. Ibid., 166, lines 265–67. 16. Ibid., 166, lines 250–62. 17. On the late fourteenth-­century ­Middle En­glish “era of grammaticalization,” see Cannon 2016, especially 13–15, 125–58. On the emergence of a scholastic, “extraclergial” vernacular style, see Somerset 1998, especially 3–21. 18. Ullerston, De translatione sacre scripture, ed. and trans. Solopova, Catto, and Hudson, the first edition of this crucial work. (Thanks to Anne Hudson, who first identified the work, for her long-­ago gift of her initial transcription.) On Ullerston, see Harvey ODNB. On the De translatione, see Somerset 2003; Gillespie 2007, 411–15; H. Kelly 2016, 53–58. For Ullerston on neologism, see 60–62, especially lines 1124–66, which argues (in conversation with the thirteenth-­ century Franciscan theologian Roger Bacon) that it may be necessary “to coin new words in the ­mother tongue” (“in liguam maternam nove vocabula fingere”; lines 1125–26). 19. Ullerston, De translatione sacre scripture, 80, lines 1497–98: “Est enim gramatica habitus recte loquendi, recte pronuncciandi, recteque scribendi.” See Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, ed. and trans. Russell, I.4. 20. Ullerston, De translatione sacre scripture, 80, lines 1490–93: “Nec movet quod Grecum vulgarium modo longe discrepet ab exemplari beatis Johannis apostoli, quoniam sic est in multis vulgaribus linguis, quod pro pro­cessu temporis notabiliter permutantur, sic patet de Anglico nostri temporis et temporis sancti Bede.”

412

Notes to Pages 140–146

21. Augustine, De trinitate, ed. Mountain, trans. Hill, XV.10–11. See Ullerston, De translatione sacre scripture, 18–19, lines 290–317. On this argument, see Panaccio 2017. 22. Ælfric, Grammar, ed. Zupitsa (Old En­glish); Teaching and Learning Latin, ed. Hunt (insular French); Teaching of Grammar, ed. Bland Biggar, and D. Thomson 1979 (­Middle En­glish). 23. Compelling arguments that the production of vernacular grammars of Latin entail some degree of grammaticalization of the relevant vernacular have been made for Old En­glish by Menzer 2004 and Gretsch 2009, for ­Middle En­glish by Cannon 2016, and for early Modern En­glish by Whittington 2017. Menzer’s and Gretsch’s claims that Ælfric’s Grammar was intended to double as a program of grammatical study of En­glish may be overstated. On grammars of En­glish in the early modern period and their slow attunement to the language’s ­actual shape, see Machan 2010. 24. Ullerston, De translatione sacre scripture, 8, lines 119–23: “Item, prebere occasionem mulieribus docendi ubi docere prohibitum est illicitum. Sed hoc fieri evidenter si scriptura sacra in linguam vulgi esset translata, tunc enim quelibet vetula docendi officium usurparet, quoniam inpromptu haberet scripturam sacram in lingua materna.” 25. Ibid., 70, lines 1302–4. 26. On the Septuagint (Septuaginta, ed. Rahlfs), see Jobes and Silva 2000. On the Vulgate (Biblia Sacra, ed. Fischer and Weber), see Berger 1893 and Houghton 2016 (on the New Testament only), an impor­tant update. On the history of translation theory, see L. Kelly 1979. On the Gothic Bible, ed. Streitberg, see Falluomini 2015, with discussion of the role of Ulfilas. 27. For a ­Middle En­glish version of Ullerston’s list of early En­glish pre­ce­dents, in First Seith Bois, see Chapter Two, Section 1, above. For Bibles in insular French, see ANL, secs. 444–76, especially 469); Boulton 2004. For French Bibles more generally, see Berger 1884; and TM, secs. 42–48. 28. Ælfric, Preface to Genesis, ed. Wilcox; Stanton 2002, 101–48. See Chapter Fourteen, Section 4, below. On Cum ex iniuncto, see the Introduction, Section 1, above. 29. On Tertullian’s ecclesiology, see Rankin 1995. On philosophical elitism, see Bobonich 2017. See also Fraenkel 2012, 38–86, on Platonisms in medieval Judaism, Chris­tian­ity, and Islam. 30. For this account of Piers Plowman, see N. Watson 2007. On the crystallization of the literate/illiterate dichotomy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, see Clanchy 2012, 226–54. 31. For a synthetic account of Roger Bacon’s understanding of language, including the relationship between sacred, philosophical, and vernacular languages, see Rosier 2007. For Ullerston’s engagement with Bacon’s theories, see From the Vulgar to the Vernacular, ed. and trans. Solopova, Catto, and Hudson, lxv–­lxix. 32. Chastising of God’s C ­ hildren, ed. Bazire and Colledge, prologue, 95.14–96.2, quoted as the epigraph to this book; Robert of Gretham, Miroir, ed. Duncan and Connolly, lines 489–94. It is clear that the Chastising author knew both of con­temporary debate on Bible translation and of positions about the En­glish language similar to ­those in Palmer’s De translacione. For a witty deprecation of writing in romanz rather than Latin by a twelfth-­century nun, see O’Donnell 2017. 33. See Chapter Seventeen, Section 2 below. 34. Cornelius 2017, 23–44, considers potential exceptions to this rule, poetics treatises in Old Norse by Óláfr Þorðarson and his ­uncle Snorri Sturluson, neither of which in fact offers any clear guide to metrical systems or sets out to do so. Compare Donoghue 2018, on the absence of visual signposts such as punctuation and lineation in early En­glish poetry and its implications for how this poetry was read. Contrast the situation in Wales outlined by Matonis 1981. 35. For prologues in Old En­glish, see Ælfric’s Prefaces, ed. Wilcox; Old En­glish Boethius: With Verse Prologues and Epilogues, ed. and trans. Godden and Irvine; Stanton 2002. For numerous



Notes to Pages 147–152

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examples of insular French and ­Middle En­glish verse prologues, with contextualizing discussion, see VLTFE and its antecedent, IOVME. For translators’ prologues in par­tic­u­lar, see Dearnely 2016. 36. On the dyad marked/unmarked as a key category in linguistics, see Andersen 1989. 37. For Latin linguistic self-­consciousness, especially in the Iberian peninsula and other contact zones between Christian, Jewish, and Islamic intellectual culture, see Szpiech 2012. For vernacular prologues as a source of sociolinguistic information about Latin, see N. Watson 2012. 38. Palmer, De translacione, 160–63, lines 174–79, 172–73, lines 353–57, ­etc. The “pearls before swine” topos had already been applied to vernacular Bible translation in Walter Map’s De nugis curialium, ed. and trans. James et al, I.31. For discussion, see GMEBL, 28–31. 39. Butler, Contra translacionem anglicanam, ed. and trans. Solopova, Catto, and Hudson, 124–25, lines 157–60: “ed ideo [Aristotle] ponit, tertio Rhethorice, quod quanto maior est populus tanto minor vel remocior est intellectus” (and so he argues in the third book of the Rhe­toric that the larger the populace, the lesser and remoter their understanding). On Butler, see also Hudson ODNBa. 40. Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, ed. Benson, Fragment 3, lines 1793–94. See MED, s.v. glosinge, only rarely used in a nonsatirical sense (to mean expositio) in ­Middle En­glish. 41. See Fraenkel 2012, an impor­tant comparative study of Neoplatonism in Judaism, Islam, and Chris­tian­ity. According to Fraenkel, Judaism and Islam accommodated intellectual systems in which the truths discussed by the elite could be virtually separate from ­those held by the body of believers, a situation he understands as a clear good. Chris­tian­ity abandoned this possibility ­a fter Origen. It must be said that Chris­tian­ity’s idiosyncratic tendency to centralize and persecute ­were ­factors ­here, what­ever theological structures ­were also in play. For a dif­fer­ent account of Islamic intellectualism and the role of figurality and allegoresis therein, see Ahmed 2016, 301–402. 42. Ælfric, Catholic Homilies: First Series, ed. Clemoes, 174. 43. Ælfric, Preface to Genesis, ed. Wilcox, 117. 44. Love, Mirror of the Blessed Life, ed. Sargent, 10.14–16, citing 1 Cor. 3:1–3. It should be noted that Love does not equate the biblical narrative with the literal sense as such. See Butler, Contra translacionem anglicanam, citing pseudo-­Chrysostom on Psalm 8:3 and Deut. 14:6, who argues that “if you give a baby a piece of bread whose teeth are weak, it chokes him more than nourishes him (“si infanti dederis fragmentum panis, quia angustos dentes habet, suffocatur amplius quam nutritur”; 144–45, lines 551–53), but again assumes that the nutrition now consumed as milk, now as bread, now as meat, is the same. Love’s work ends with an original “shorte tretes of the hiest and moste worthy sacrament of Cristes blessede body and the merveiles therof ” (223.1– 3; the treatise extends from 223–39). 45. For a study, with extended excerpts, see Hudson 2015, who dates this group of works “certainly before 1400 and prob­ably before 1390 or even 1385” (cliii). Quotations from the prologue to Short Matthew, in Earliest Advocates, ed. Dove, 172, rubric and lines 19–23. 46. See, e.g., Holy Prophete David, in Earliest Advocates, ed. Dove, 150–59. 47. The Northern Homily Cycle, ed. Thompson, line 22.

chapter 9 1. Palmer, De translacione, ed. and trans. Solopova, Catto, and Hudson, 156, lines 103–4. 2. Butler, Contra translacionem Anglicam, ed. and trans. Solopova, Catto, and Hudson, 128, lines 220–21.

414

Notes to Pages 152–157

3. On this terminology, see Chapter One, Section 2 above. 4. Compare Dialogue Between a Clerk and a Knight, ed. Somerset, discussed in the General Introduction, Section 1, above. For arguments over canon law at this period, see Farr 1974; Hudson 1988, 375–82. Both studies focus on John Wyclif, but reform of the canon law was being widely discussed. 5. The phrase is from the title of Butterfield 2009. In First Seith Bois, ed. Dove, Richard II’s ­uncle John of Gaunt himself is (dubiously) claimed to have argued in open Parliament that for the En­glish not to have a version of “Goddis lawe . . . ​in ther owne modur-­langage” would make them “the refuse of alle men” (149, lines 174–78). On the influence of insular French vernacular culture on fourteenth-­century ­Middle En­glish, see Volume 2, Parts II and III. 6. Only in the early fifteenth ­century on does the dominance of vernacular pastoralia begin to be challenged by other utilitarian genres. See Voigts 1995, Voigts and Kurtz 2000. 7. See AND and MED for examples. “Idiote,” relatively common around the turn of the fifteenth ­century in par­tic­u­lar, translates Latin idiota, illiterate or uneducated. 8. Lay Folks’ Catechism, ed. Simmons and Nolloth, 6, lines 46–50, 98, line 567, from the version in Thoresby’s register. For this work’s composition, see Hudson 1985d, Swanson 1991, S. Powell 1994. 9. Councils and Synods II, 900–905, the decree “ignorantia sacerdotum”; Bede, Letter to Ecgbert, in Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents, vol. 3, 316; En­glish Historical Documents, 737–38. See Chapter One, Section 1, above. 10. Cambridge Tract 1, ed. Dove, lines 1–205, quotations from lines 1–2, 56, 184–85, 2–3, 184, 11–13. The Tract uses the key phrase “lewid curatis” unjudgmentally, but in the context of a citation of Isa. 24:2, “as the ­people, so is the prest: lewid peple, lewed prest” (lines 53–54), which is also quoted in Robert’s Miroir, line 328 (see Chapter Six, Section 1). The tract’s chief interest is in the laypeople who fit in its third category, but the utility of vernacular religious materials for “lewid curatis” is also impor­tant. In Earliest Advocates, xxxiii, xxxv–vi, Dove argues that the work may be by the prob­ably Franciscan author of Dives and Pauper as well as of a ­later work, The Longleat Sermons. 11. The Old En­glish Martyrology, ed. Rauer, and Alfred’s Hierdeboc, ed. Sweet, are both cases in point, two among many Old En­g lish works for clerical users discussed in Part III. For an early twelfth-­century French text in the same category, see Philippe de Thaon, Comput, ed. Short. 12. See, Æthelwold, The Old En­glish Benedictine Rule, ed. Schröer, trans. Riyeff, the earliest known vernacular rule. See Chapter Twelve, Section 2, below. For the latest translation of the Benedictine Rule before the Henrician Reformation, published by John Foxe, bishop of Winchester, in 1517, see Collett 2002. Insular French rules are itemized in ANL secs. 710–15. 13. For Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, trans. Millett, see Chapter Twenty, Section 1, below. For Adam’s Exposiciun, ed. Hunt, trans. Bliss, see Volume 2, Chapter Five. 14. The classic Cistercian treatment of amicitia is Aelred, De spirituali amicitia, ed. Hoste and Talbot, trans. Braceland. 15. Not discussed ­here, the soliloquial model can be understood as a specialized version of the communal model, in which the speaker turns his or her back on ­human society in order to engage in direct colloquy with God or a sacred person, often drawing on the language of an authoritative ­earlier speaker. Often, the speaker nonetheless addresses God on behalf of the ­human community as its representative. For an early vernacular work in this vein, see The Old En­glish Soliloquies, ed. and trans. Lockett, whose model and primary source is Augustine’s Soliloquiae. For ­Middle En­g lish soliloquial writing in the voice of two prominent biblical figures, David and Job, both of whom speak representatively as well as personally, see Lawton 2017, especially



Notes to Pages 157–162

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83–102. Lawton additionally draws valuable attention to the uses made of the structurally similar Boethian voice in this mode. 16. Robert of Gretham, Miroir, ed. Duncan and Connolly, lines 639–40; ­The Middle En­glish Bible, ed. Forshall and Madden, Late Version, Gal. 3:27–28. 17. For medieval uses of this terminology, see Chapter One, Section 2, above. 18. ­The Middle En­glish Bible, Late Version, 1 Cor. 9:22. 19. Lay Folks Mass-­Book, ed. Simmons, from London, British Library MS Royal 17.B.xviii, 14, lines 119–30. For a discussion, see Targoff 2001, 20–22, 58–60. The book could be used by a single worshiper, but small group use, in pew or private chapel, would also be likely. 20. For poetry with liturgical ties, see Advent Lyr­ics of the Exeter Book, ed. Campbell; Old En­glish Liturgical Verse, ed. Keefer. For studies, see Gatch 1977a, which summarizes work to date; and Carragáin 2006, focused on “The Dream of the Rood.” On “Cædmon’s Hymn” and its pos­ si­ble relation to early vernacular liturgical practice, see Holsinger 2007. 21. Weiskott 2016, 53–70, quotation on 53. The four exordial types (listed on 54–56 in descending order of frequency) are (1) “we-­have-­heard,” often combined with (3) “days-­of-­yore”; (2) “I-­w ill-­tell”; (4) “let-­us-­praise-­God.” According to Weiskott, versions of one or more of ­these types can be discerned in more than a hundred poems. 22. “Cædmon’s Hymn” in Old En­glish Shorter Poems 1, ed. and trans. Jones, 100; “Christ and Satan,” in Old En­glish Poems of Christ and His Saints, ed. and trans. Clayton, 302. Compare the much less dramatic Psalm 94:5, the likely source of the lines, in The Old En­glish Psalms, ed. and trans. O’Neill: “each he sæs wealdeth and he sette thone; / worhte his folme each foldan drige” (likewise, he governs the sea and put it in place; / his power also created the dry land). 23. Beowulf, ed. and trans. Fulk, 1–3. 24. Alfred, Hierdeboc, ed. and trans. Sweet, 5–7. See Chapter One, Section 1, above. 25. Again, see Chapter One, Section 1, above. 26. For insular French saints’ lives, see Wogan-­Browne 2001. For communal address in the early M ­ iddle En­glish saints’ lives of the Katherine Group, see Chapter Twenty, Section 2, below. 27. See AND, s.v. commun, citing passages in which the word bears meanings such as “general, universal, usual, ordinary, regular, habitual, ­free, unrestricted, public,” and compound phrases with a range of civic, ­legal, and ethical meanings, such as “commun argent” (general purse), “communes lei” (common law), “commun clerk,” “commun profit,” “vulgar commun” (the common vernacular), “metter en commun” (to share all t­ hings in common). 28. For this account of insular French and its religious verse, see Volume 2, Part I. 29. Langland, Piers Plowman, ed. Schmidt, B Prol., lines 112–22; in C Prol., line 140, B’s “might of the Communes” is “might of tho men,” while the last two lines of the passage in B are omitted. See discussion in Galloway 2006, 114–22. See MED, s.v. commun(e), offering a range of meanings and compound phrases similar to ­those in French, including “commune speche.” 30. On the term “public” and ­Middle En­glish writing, see Middleton 1978, a classic essay. 31. For the first, see Scase 1992. For Caxton and other early printers, see Tonry 2016. 32. The classic study ­here is Woolf 1968. For early lyric as song, see also I. Nelson 2017. 33. Julian, Vision Showed to a Devout W ­ oman, ed. Watson and Jenkins, section 6, line 1. On “evencristene” in relation to parish ritual, see Appleford 2008. 34. On the feast of Corpus Christi, see Rubin 1991, 164–210. 35. For this account of the plays, see Kolve 1966, Beckwith 2001. 36. On t­ hese poets, see VLTFE, secs. 11b, 17, 11, 2, respectively. 37. Langland, Piers Plowman, C 21.412–85, quotation from 413–14, returning to a theme first visited more cautiously in the B and C Prologues, lines 100–111 and 128–38, respectively. For the “lewed vicory,” see Barney 2006, 165–85; Aers 2015, 66–75.

416

Notes to Pages 162–166

38. Audelay, Poems and Carols, ed. Fein. On Audelay’s approach to satire, see James Simpson 2005. 39. See Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. Macaulay, prologue, line 52. For a classic account of Gower and Chaucer’s understanding of their own writing in relation to the classical tradition, see Copeland 1991, chapter 7. In A Vision Showed to a Devout ­Woman, section 6, lines 35–38, Julian protests, “Botte God forbede that ye shulde saye . . . ​that I am a techere,” but at once adds, “Botte I wate wele, this that I saye I hafe it of the shewinge of him that es soverayne techare.” 40. For a famous case in point, see the En­glish “John Ball” letters associated with the 1381 rebellion, edited and discussed in Justice 1994, 13–66. 41. See Chapter Six, Section 1, above. 42. On t­ hese terms, see Chapter One, Section 2, above. On “modir tonge” as a nationalist term, increasingly associated with the nobility in late fourteenth-­century ­Middle En­glish texts, see the instances of the phrase listed in IOVME, 439–40. See also the use of the term attributed to John of Gaunt in First Seith Bois, quoted above. Compare Dante’s use of materna lingua in the De vulgari eloquentia, which also assumes the congruity of forms of speech and polities. This sense of the term appears to have been a development of the thirteenth ­century. 43. Tout and Davies ODNB. 44. Augustine, Enchiridion ad Laurentium, ed. Evans, trans. Peebles. 45. Jonas, De institutione laicalis, ed. Dubreucq; Alcuin, De virtutibus et viciis, ed. Migne. For the broad context, see McKitterick 1977. The genre of the liber manualis in its swift evolution is discussed in Romig 2017, with further bibliography. Thanks to Andy Romig for the early gift of a copy of his thesis, on which his book is based. The most famous example of the genre is perhaps Dhuoda’s Liber manualis (843), ed. Riché, trans. Vregille and Mondésert, also ed. and trans. Thibaux, written for her son William, a hostage at the course of Charles the Bald. For a Carolingian mirror for princes, see Sedulius Scottus’s De rectoribus Christianis, ed. and trans. Dyson. For Alcuin’s work in Old En­glish, see Lees 1985; Old En­glish Alcuin, ed. Warner. Alcuin appears in the Speculum Guy de Warwick, ed. Morrill (ca. 1300), a penitential addition to a romance that itself takes a penitential turn, as the “god man . . . ​/ That lived al in Godes lawe; / Alquin was his rihte name” (lines 37–39), who sends a version of the De virtutibus as a missive to the newly contrite knight. On this work, see A. Edwards 2007. 46. For the Alfredian corpus, see Chapter Fourteen, Section 4, below. On its broad interest in philosophical and theological questions surrounding secular governance, see Discenza 2005, Pratt 2007a. On the self-­conscious relationship of works in this corpus to Carolingians writing for secular rulers, see Pratt 2007b. On authorship, see Chapter One, Section 1 above, n. 29. 47. On Æthelwold’s The Old En­glish Benedictine Rule, ed. Schröer, see Chapter Twelve, Section 2, below. 48. Voyage de saint Brendan, ed. and trans. Short and Merrilees; trans. Barron and Burgess. On the role of royal and noble ­women as literary patrons in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, see Tyler 2017. For the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with an emphasis on insular French, see Wogan-­Browne 2001, a crucial study. On the genre of illuminated apocalypses, see S. Lewis 1995. 49. Laurent, Somme le roi, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-­Labie. For discussion of the work and its versions in its late thirteenth-­century Pa­ri­sian context, see Kumler 2011, 164–93. En­glish translations, all produced with lay readers or audiences primarily in mind, include Michael of Northgate’s Ayenbite of Inwyt, ed. Morris; Book of Vices and Virtues, ed. Holthausen; Speculum Vitae, ed. Hanna and Somerset; Two M ­ iddle En­glish Translations, ed. Roux. 50. Trevisa, Polychronicon, ed. Babington; On the Properties of ­Things, ed. Seymour; Dialogue Between a Lord and a Clerk, ed. Waldron. On Trevisa, see Waldron ODNB.



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51. On this theme, see, e.g., Hudson 1988, 314–58, especially 330–34; Wilks 2000. 52. On fifteenth-­century En­glish literary, especially noble, patronage, see R. Green 1980. 53. See Appleford 2015, 18–54; Appleford 2016. The texts in ­these manuals, many of them expositions of the articles of the faith, tend to be written in the pastoral voice, but with the intent of making a lay version of this voice available to the devout lay reader. Texts found in ­t hese manuals include Memoriale credencium, ed. Kengen; and the Schort Reule of Lif, ed. Raschko. 54. On Alfredian court lit­er­a­t ure, see Chapter Fourteen, Section 4, below. 55. Wulfstan, Institutes of Polity (1), ed. and trans. Rabin, 38–59. Most of the works of Wulfstan collected in Rabin’s volume are in versions of this mode. 56. See especially Pierre d’Abergnan’s Lumere as lais, ed. Hesketh, a work that stresses the professional expertise of the clerical author. For the complex rhe­toric governing interchanges between thirteenth-­century clerics and noble ­women readers, see Wogan-­Browne 2005. 57. Sydrac le philosophe, ed. Ruhe, prologue, 1–4. 58. For early copies and their o­ wners, see Sydrac le philosophe, x–xv. 59. Whytford, Werke for House­holders, ed. Hogg. 60. On literary patronage in the twelfth ­century, see R. Kennedy and Meecham-­Jones 2006, Urbanski 2013. On William Caxton and aristocratic patronage, see Rutter 1987, contributing to a long debate about how the workings of literary patronage at this period. See also Tonry 2016. 61. ­The Middle En­glish Bible, Late Version, Rom. 13:1–2.

chapter 10 1. On Migne and the Patrologia latina, see Chapter One, Section  4, above. All 217 text volumes ­were already in print by 1855, the last of four index volumes following ten years ­later. 2. The estimated size of the heuristic series is the result of an informal census based on works consulted for the Dictionary of Old En­glish (DOE); Dean and Boulton’s Anglo-­Norman Lit­ er­a­ture (ANL), to which are added certain Continental French texts in insular circulation; and works consulted for The ­Middle En­glish Dictionary (MED) and the Manual of Writings in M ­ iddle En­glish (MWME). ­A fter some early pen ­t rials (with the help of Erica Weaver), no systematic attempt has been made to itemize or closely enumerate the volumes in the imaginary series, useful as it might be to do so. The numbers gestured at ­here should be treated with skepticism. 3. For Old En­g lish, see Part III of this volume. Notes in this section are kept to a minimum. 4. For an exhaustive and indispensable bibliographic analy­sis, see Kleist 2019. 5. On Old En­g lish biblical apocrypha, see Hawk 2018; on Old En­g lish works related to pseudo-­Matthew, see Clayton 1999. For the genre of the liber manualis, see Chapter Nine, Section 3, above. 6. Heliand und Genesis, ed. Behagel; Heliand, trans. Scott. “Genesis B” survives in the tenth-­century En­glish Junius manuscript. One of the two nearly complete copies of Heliand, London, British Library MS Cotton Caligula A.vii, is also from tenth-­century ­England. 7. For early ­Middle En­glish, see Part IV of this volume. 8. On Ælfric in Old Norse, see J. Frankis 2016. For insular French, see Volume 2, Part I. 9. See Maurice de Sully, French Homilies, ed. Sinclair; ANL, sec. 587. 10. See N. Watson and Wogan-­Browne 2004 (Compileison); Lucidaire de grant sapientie, ed. Türk; ­Waters 2015, 19–60 (Elucidarium and dialogues); S. Lewis 1995 (apocalypses).

418

Notes to Pages 176–187

11. For ­these Pa­ri­sian works, see Kumler 2011. For Anglo-­Norman Bibles, see ANL, secs. 469–71. 12. For the latter, see especially Reeves 2015. 13. Ancrene Riwle: French Text II, ed. Trethewey; Peines du Purgatorie, ed. Relihan; Relihan 1978; ANL, secs. 644, 646; Prick of Conscience, ed. Hanna. 14. See Harley 2253, ed. and trans. Fein, Raybin, and Ziolkowski. For ­Middle En­glish written between ca. 1250 and ca. 1370, see Volume 2, Part II. 15. Weiskott 2016 (alliterative poetry); C. Thomas 2016 (rhymed septenaries). 16. See Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Eng. poet. a.1 (Vernon); London, British Library, MS Add 22283 (Simeon). ed. Scase. 17. See N. Watson 2009a, and for Langland, N. Watson 2017; also Volume 2, Part II. 18. For late M ­ iddle En­glish, see Volume 2, Parts III–­I V. 19. On the ambiguous alienation of French in the late ­fourteenth ­century, see Butterfield 2009. 20. See, e.g., Sanok 2018. 21. Macaronic Sermon Collection, ed. Horner. 22. On this Latin and En­glish work and its full En­glish translation (Speculum Christiani, ed. Holmstedt), see Gillespie 1981, 2019. 23. Da Costa 2012. 24. Bede, Homiliarum in evangelii, ed. Hurst and Fraipoint, trans. Martin and Hurst. On Stephen Langton (ca. 1150–1229), see P. Roberts 1968. 25. See Chapter Four, Section 2, above. 26. For the Welsh version, see Elucidarium and Other Tracts in Welsh, ed. Jones and Rhy. For early En­glish, see Old En­glish Honorius, ed. Warner; for French, Lucidaire de grant sapientie, ed. Türk, among o­ thers. 27. Appleton and Leneghan 2017, Atkin and Leneghan 2017. 28. On the “anchor text” in its original, dialectal sense, see the electronic version of the Linguistic Atlas of Late M ­ iddle En­glish (eLALME) and the essays gathered in Riddy 1991. 29. ­Middle En­glish Translations of Robert Grosseteste’s “Château d’Amour,” ed. Sajavaara; Litch­ field, ­Simple Treatise, ed. Baugh. 30. On Rolle in late fourteenth-­century Oxford, see Kraebel 2020, especially 91–132. For editions of fifteenth-­century works in the tradition of Chaucer and Langland respectively, see, e.g., Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-­Century Continuations and Additions, ed. Bowers; Chaucerian Apocrypha, ed. Forni; Piers Plowman Tradition, ed. Barr. 31. For mouvance, see Zumthor 1972, 65–75. For a critique of the identification of mouvance with manuscript culture as such, see d’Avray 1988. On the Three Arrows, ed. Horstmann, see Hanna 2019. 32. N. Watson 2003a, Innes-­Parker 2003 (Ancrene Wisse), N. Watson 2009b (Mirror of Holy Church). 33. Cloud of Unknowing, ed. Hodgson, 2.10–12. 34. For a methodical elision of the text/copy distinction, see Treharne 2006a. 35. For ­these terms, associated with the “new philology” of the 1990s, and their uses, see Nichols 1990, Nichols and Wenzel 1996, A. Taylor 2002, Edmondson 2011. 36. See the essays in Blurton and Wogan-­Browne 2011. 37. Buringh 2011, 192–202, working outward from A. Watson and Ker 1964 and Registrum Anglie de libris doctorum, ed. Rouse and Rouse. ­There is ­g reat variability from library to library. Buringh’s quantitative account of manuscript survival rates is necessarily speculative but raises impor­tant questions, not least about methodology, that would repay further study.



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38. On the scheme for circulating the work, see S. Powell 1994. On the number of York’s parishes, see W. Campbell 2017, 188–91. On Thoresby, a fine administrator, see J. Hughes ODNB. 39. Pfaff 2009 offers a comprehensive account of the liturgical books surviving in ­England from each period and type of religious institution from the eighth ­century to the fifteenth. 40. See Chapter Fourteen, Section 1, below. 41. On fifteenth-­century book owner­ship, see, e.g., Cavanaugh 1990, Friedman 1995, Erler 2002. On the vernacular books that feature in heresy ­t rials, see Hudson 1988, 390–445. House­hold inventories such as ­t hose produced in southern Eu­rope as part of the pro­cess of debt collection even from citizens of modest means (see Smail 2016) do not exist for medieval ­England.

chapter 11 1. “Sanctus Beda was i-­boren,” in Old En­glish Shorter Poems 1, ed. and trans. Jones, 264–67, ­ nder the title “A Lament for the En­glish Church,” with poem ­here divided into paragraphs, u two letters added in brackets in line 8 (see below), two abbreviations of “Sanctus” (“S.”) that Jones omits included and expanded in line 15, and translation adjusted. The work is also known as the “First Worcester Fragment.” Jones adopts lineation and punctuation from Brehe 1990, 530, and follows a suggestion about the poem’s last legible word made by Donoghue 2006, 81–82. Editors since Joseph Hall, in Se­lections from Early ­Middle En­glish, 1, reconstruct the missing words that follow as “festen to him” and read “feth” as a form of the word “faith,” to make the line read “that we must fasten faith fairly on him.” Donoghue proposes that “feth” is the initial letters of the word “fethren,” a translation of the word “alas” in the last clause of Deut. 32:11 (“expandit suas alas”), implied by the quotation of the rest of the verse in the previous line. Jones combines the two conjectures, by reading “him” as a plural (hem) that refers to the ­little ea­g les, not to God. 2. Part of the Old En­glish Heptateuch, ed. Marsden. Ælfric himself translated only portions of Genesis and Numbers, plus Joshua, but was identified with the proj­ect through his Preface to Genesis, ed. Wilcox, which introduces the collection in its two fullest surviving copies, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 509 (Pentateuch plus Joshua plus Judges), and London, British Library MS Cotton Claudius B.iv (Pentateuch plus Joshua only). 3. For t­ hese saints, see Rollason and Dobson ODNB, Thacker ODNBb, Palliser ODNB. 4. On the organ­ization of the poem’s list of saint-­bishops, see Brehe 1990, 531–35. 5. For ­these saints, see Mayr-­Harting ODNBa, Yorke ODNBb and ODNBc, Costambeys ODNB, and Lapidge ODNBa and ODNBd. On Augustine of Canterbury’s mission to Kent, see Chapter One, Section 1, above. On Augustine himself, see Mayr-­Harting ODNBb. For Old En­ glish cata­logues of the resting places of saints, see Brehe 1990, 532–33, citing Die Heiligen E ­ nglands, ed. Liebermann, especially 147–51, the list in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 201. On this list, see also Treharne PUEMb. The link the poem makes between Áedán and Winchester is puzzling, since the cathedral is not known to have claimed relics of the saint, although by the eleventh ­century he was being venerated at Glastonbury. Áedán’s feast is listed in a calendar in London, British Library MS Cotton Vitellius A.xii, fols. 4–71, which may be from Winchester or derive from a Winchester source. See Dumville 1992, 64–65. The obscurity of the connection points to the possibility that “Sanctus Beda” is a Winchester text. 6. On the anachronistic character of the term “reform,” when applied to early medieval religious change or correctio, see Barrow 2008b, Barrow 2018.

420

Notes to Pages 197–199

7. For Edgar and his trio of Benedictine counsellors, all of whom came to be venerated as saints, see A. Williams ODNB; N. Brooks ODNB; Yorke ODNBa, Lapidge ODNBc. On Edgar, see also Scragg 2008a. 8. The expulsion is described in Wulfstan of Winchester, Life of St Æthelwold, ed. and trans. Lapidge and Winterbottom, 30–32. See Regularis concordia, ed. Kornexl, ed. and trans. Symons. For the work’s two surviving copies, see J. Hill 1991 and Kornexl 1995. Barrow 2008a dates the work to 966 and suggests that the Council of Winchester took place ­earlier than 970–73, the date range usually assigned it. Lapidge 1993, 192–94, collects the evidence for Æthelwold’s composition of the Regularis concordia. On Cluniac influence, a complicated concept, see Bullough 1975. 9. On the Benedictine Reform and its Continental affiliations, see Cubitt 1997, Barrow 2009. For a bracing analy­sis of the origins of En­glish Benedictinism, see Blair 2005, 346–54, who challenges the classic account of Knowles 1966, 31–82. See also J. Clark 2011, 5–59, who works to synthesize ­these contrasting positions. On Cluniac monasticism, see Constable 2010. On the ideology of monastic reform in the tenth and eleventh centuries, see Vanderputten 2013. 10. See “Ælfric’s Grammar and Glossary in Worcester Cathedral MS. F.174,” ed. Butler. For Ælfric and Alcuin, see Godden ODNB, Bullough ODNB. The poet may also have been thinking of Alcuin as exegete. The opening of Ælfric’s Interrogationes Sigewulfi, ed. MacLean, derived from Alcuin’s dialogic commentary of the same name, praises the theologian in language the “Sanctus Beda” poet would have approved, as a theologian who “lærde manega thæs Engliscan mennisces / On boclicum craefte” (instructed many of the En­glish ­people in bookish learning) (2.2–3). On this work, also edited by Stoneman, see Fox 2012. The poem’s reference to “Ælfric abbod” shows knowledge as well as re­spect. Despite the ubiquity of his homilies, he was not well known in the twelfth ­century. 11. See MED, s.v. lede, a ­people, nation, but also leden, Latin, or any language. The ambiguity, potentially operative in lines 3 and 19 especially, is noted by Yeager 2014, 107–9. 12. For the Benedictine view of the insular past, see Barrow 2009. 13. Æthelwold, King Edgar’s Establishment of Monasteries, ed. and trans. Whitelock, 145, where two folios are missing. On the Benedictine Rule (“rihtum regule”), see 149. For the authorship of this work, see Whitelock 1970; Gretsch 1999, 230–33; Pratt 2012. In the Latin West, the widely held belief that the early Church was monastic derives initially from Cassian’s Institutiones, ed. Guy, trans. Ramsay, I.1. For Cassian’s sources, see R. Goodrich 2007, 117–51. 14. Bede, Historia ecclesiastica, ed. and trans. Colgrave and Mynors, III–­V. Bede makes no mention of the Benedictine Rule or Gregory’s commission to Augustine of Canterbury to build a monastic Church. For Byrhtferth, see Lapidge ODNBb. The poet may have known of Ecgwine through Dominic of Evesham’s Vita S. Ecgwini, ed. Lapidge, written ca. 1100. 15. For an introduction, see Riedel 2016. For editions and studies of the texts associated with the cult, see Lapidge 2003, a monumental work. The cult’s origins are discussed at 8–24. 16. The sense “laity,” presumably intended ­here, is given for “folc” in both DOE, s.v., folc, 6, and MED, s.v., folk, 1b, sometimes in the phrase “læwede folc” / “lewed folk,” found in tenth-­ century texts but still in use in the twelfth ­century, e.g., in the Orrmulum. The poet distinguishes “folc” from “leode,” which he uses both for the En­glish ­people as a ­whole and for the foreign newcomers. In premodern En­glish, the prefix “for,” used twice in this line, is a strong intensifier. 17. For Ælfheah, see Leyser ODNBa. 18. Pace both Cannon 2004, 34–40, who argues that “leode” refers primarily to the Danes, and Yeager 2014, 106–13, who suggests they are the sinful En­glish themselves. On the prob­lem terms “French” and “Norman,” see H. Thomas 2003, 1–19 (on historiography and critical issues)



Notes to Pages 199–201

421

and 32–45 (on questions of identity). On the “Normans” as a self-­created myth, see H. Davis 1976. On the twelfth-­century terms used to describe the ­peoples of ­England, see Short 1995. 19. For ­these three archbishops, see Cowdrey ODNBa, ODNBb, ODNBc; also Cowdrey 2003. 20. Lanfranc, Monastic Constitutions, ed. and trans. Knowles. See Cowdrey 2003, 155–60. 21. On Benedictine wealth, see Constable 1964, especially 99–136; Van Engen 1986. For the wider context, see Burton 1994, J. Clark 2011. 22. Fizzard 2008, 1–9, and Burton and Stöber 2011, 1–16, summarize the scholarship on the En­glish Augustinians. See also D. Robinson 1980. Still valuable is Dickinson 1950, chapters 1–2. 23. Golding 1995 (Gilbertines); Milis 1969, especially 1.144–59 (Arrouasians); Parkes 1983 (Bourne). 24. On the En­glish Cistercians, see Coppack 2000, especially 19 on Waverley. 25. On the En­glish Carthusians, see Coppack and Aston 2002. 26. S. Thompson 1991, 167. On Ælfthryth, see Stafford ODNB. Eleanor and Henry ­were both buried at Fontevraud. 27. For the controversial term “Gregorian Reform” in relation to the complex idea of “reform” itself, see Morris 1988, 3, 81–82, 126–33; Tellenbach 1993, 157–84; Howe 2016, 3–5 (with further bibliography). 28. On the tapestry, prob­ably an En­g lish production from the 1070s, see Gameson 1997b. For a digital edition, see Bayeux Tapestry, ed. Foys. William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum Anglorum, ed. and trans. Mynors et al., was completed in 1125. For William’s attitude to Bede, see E. Ward 2017. For Hastings as a national turning point in eleventh-­ and twelfth-­century historical writing, see Otter 1999. For the historiography of the Norman Conquest, see Chibnall 1999. 29. For the discovery of Worcester F.174, see Moffat 1985. For a description, see Traherne PUEMj. Analy­sis of the Tremulous Hand’s handwriting and spellings has pushed the likely date of this book significantly ­later than used to be thought. See Franzen 2003 and Chapter Twenty, Section 2, on links with an early Worcester copy of Ancrene Wisse. For the second alliterative poem in Worcester F.174, see “Soul’s Address to the Body,” ed. and trans. Jones (see also the ­earlier edition by Moffat). The book was roughly produced from sheets of varying size. 30. The language ­here is that of Pearsall in his pioneering Old and ­Middle En­glish Lit­er­a­ ture (1977), 76, reflecting an e­ arlier scholarly consensus. More recent variants on this approach to the poem are by Lerer 1999, 24, and Hahn 1999, 75. For further examples, see Cannon 2004, 36. 31. Crawford 1928, 1–5, argues the already traditional case that the staggered handwriting of the Tremulous Hand declares him an el­derly last survivor. Neil Ker in CMCAS, xlix, also attributes his tremor to old age. The now accepted theory that the tremor was congenital was first offered by Franzen 1991, 198–99. As Franzen brilliantly shows, the glosses can be dated relative to one another by the worsening of the tremor. See also Collier 2000. Although scholars have sometimes assumed that his glossing took de­cades, Franzen 2003, 13 suggests that all his work could have been compressed into a few years. For a diagnosis of the tremor, see Thorpe and Alty 2015. Worcester Cathedral MS F.174 is the only book he is known to have copied, at a fairly early moment in his ­career. 32. Glossa Ordinaria, ed. Rusch, vol. 1, 426. For Worcester Cathedral library and its manuscripts, see R. Thomson and Gullick 2001. For the source of much of the Deuteronomy material in the Glossa, including parts of this passage, a ninth-­century commentary by Haimo of Auxerre, see Van Name Edwards 2003. Van Name Edwards is in the pro­cess of editing this commentary. 33. Benedict, The Rule of St. Benedict, ed. and trans. Frye, chapter 13; Billett 2014, 117.

422

Notes to Pages 201–203

34. See, e.g., Cardwell 2015. For scholarly views on what Bede meant by the phrase “gens Anglorum,” a controversial topic, see Rowley 2011, 59–62. “Sanctus Beda” lists Deuteronomy out of biblical order, giving it a central position. The spelling “utronomius,” other­w ise unattested, is unlikely to be au­then­tic. The Tremulous Hand may have failed to notice a “de” abbreviation or may have being copying from an exemplar in which it was omitted. 35. Thus Treharne 2009, 403. It is also pos­si­ble that the Tremulous Hand was updating his exemplar linguistically or that this exemplar was itself updated. The other, closely linked poem in Worcester F.174, “The Soul’s Address to the Body,” is similarly hard to date but often treated as a linguistically updated work of Old En­glish. See Johansen 1994. On spellings, which mix Old En­glish and ­later forms, and include “back spellings” (forms, perhaps archaizing, that appear Old En­glish but are not), see J. Smith 1991, 57–58. On early Benedictine French, see Legge 1950. 36. See H. Thomas 2003, 77–80, which reconstructs three phases of assimilation between the “En­glish” and the “Normans,” the first ending in the 1130s. Gillingham 2000, 3–18, sets this historical pro­cess in the context of what he describes as the “beginnings of En­glish imperialism.” R. Thomson 2015 notes William of Malmesbury’s overt hostility to the Normans in his writings of the 1130s. Since “Sanctus Beda” claims Cuthbert for the Benedictines, the poem must postdate the translation of Cuthbert’s body to Durham’s new cathedral in 1104. 37. For the modern controversy around Norman demotions of early En­glish saints, see Crook 2011, 107–33, a judicious account; for Eadmer’s sustained outrage on this topic, see 122–33. On Eadmer, see Rubenstein ODNB. 38. Heslop 1995, 60–62. 39. Rubenstein 1999, Hayward 1999. 40. Mason 1990, especially 279–80. 41. MED, s.v., lor-­thein, cites two instances of the word other than this: one from the late twelfth-­century Vespasian Homilies where “larðeign” translates “rabbi,” “teacher”; the other from a gloss by the Tremulous Hand, where it is offered as a synonym for Old En­glish lareowas, teacher. 42. For Salisbury, see Webber 1990. For Canterbury, see N. Brooks 1984, 266–78, and many items listed in Lapidge 2006. For theological innovation at this period, see the classic study by de Ghellinck 1948. For its intellectual and social contexts, see Flint 1988, and, in a dif­fer­ent vein, Southern 1990. 43. For Anselm’s theology, and its sources and influence, see Gaspar 2004. For the long reluctance of vernacular writers to accept his theology of redemption, see Marx 1995. 44. The prologue to Anselm’s Proslogion, ed. Schmitt, 94, famously defines the enterprise of theology as “fides quaerens intellectum,” faith seeking understanding. See also Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm with Proslogion, trans. Ward, 238. For the originality of Anselm’s dialogic and dialectic approach, see Novikoff 2011, 34–61. For Ælfric’s rigorist attitude to heresy and the use of auctoritates, see Chapter Fourteen, Section 3, below. 45. See, e.g., Anselm, Liber Anselmi archiepiscopi, ed. Southern and Schmitt, which collects excerpts of Anselm’s private teaching to the monks of Canterbury or to his intimate familia. As an archibishop and prior of a community that had been heavi­ly invested in pastoral care for centuries, Anselm was sometimes obliged to be more flexible in practice. 46. See Ker’s Cata­logue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-­Saxon (CMCAS) (1957), relied on by all ­later scholarship in the field. 47. For an introductory survey of ­these texts, many discussed below, see Treharne 2001. 48. For a helpful account of the development of early ­Middle En­glish as a writing system, see Blake 1992, 9–15. For a range of approaches to the topic, see also J. Smith 1991, Kitson 1997, Hahn 1999, Cannon 2005.



Notes to Pages 204–206

423

49. PUEM describes over two hundred books containing En­glish copied, modified, or annotated between 1060 and 1220, more than half the total number of “manuscripts containing Anglo-­Saxon” listed in CMCAS. Some seventy are thought to have been written ­a fter 1060, of which some thirty seem to have been written after ca. 1100. Seventy is roughly the number of surviving books from 1100 to 1200 written in ­England that contain French listed by Careri, Ruby, and Short 2011. PUEM does not include charters or other ­legal documents, on which see Pelteret 1990, O’Brien 2015b. For the question of what counts as a “text” or a “new text,” see Chapter Ten, Section 2, above. Major books and texts in En­glish newly written between 1100 and 1250 are itemized in the Appendix, ­Table 3. 50. R. Chambers 1932. See Shepherd 1970, 67–68: “With early ­Middle En­glish we are dealing with an unstable continuum, where the débris of an old lit­er­a­t ure is mixed in with the imperfectly pro­cessed materials of a new.” Compare Clanchy 1979, 166 (see also 2nd. ed., 1993, 211–13), and see Chapter Sixteen, Section 3, below, on a set of texts to which a version of the antiquarian hypothesis might apply. 51. Compare the contrasting accounts of this approach to the En­glish writing of the period by Cannon 2004, 17–49, and Treharne 2006a. The low esteem in which twelfth-­century scribes of Old En­glish ­were long held is of a piece with the low scholarly esteem that used to be accorded scribes in general, especially ­those who lived near the end of a given copying tradition. 52. In contrast to the new vernacular, French, which receives respectful attention, twelfth-­ century En­glish is conspicuously absent from R. Benson and Constable 1982, the volume of essays produced to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Haskins’s Re­nais­sance of the Twelfth C ­ entury. For the modern literary scholarship on the En­glish of this period, with an extensive bibliography, see Faulkner 2012b. For the historiography, see Toswell 2015. 53. Treharne 2006a; Treharne 2012, 122–46. 54. The shift was largely initiated by Swan and Treharne 2000. 55. For a description of Cambridge Ii.1.33, see Da Rold PUEMa. On its provenance, see Treharne 1998. For the book’s production and use, see Da Rold 2011, Swan 2011, Treharne 2011. 56. “Instructions for Christians,” in Old En­glish Shorter Poems 1, ed. and trans. Jones, 138– 55, line 3. On Robert of Gretham, see Chapter Six, Section 1, above. 57. “Instructions for Christians,” lines 1–2 and 114–15, discussed by Younge 2016, 60–64, an article from which this account has learned much. The damned soul who speaks in “The Soul’s Address to the Body,” in Old En­glish Shorter Poems 1, ed. and trans. Jones, 204–49, lines B20– 22, reproves its body to similar effect for its reluctance to “endear yourself to learned men, to give to them of your wealth so that they would pray on your behalf,” adding that “with their psalmody they might have extinguished your sins” (“Noldest thu the makien lufe with i-­lærede men, / Given ham of thine gode, thet heo the fore beden. / Heo mighten mid salm-­songe thine sunne acwenchen”). Compare Poema Morale, ed. Lewin, lines 15–70, especially line 65: “everich man mid thet he haveth mey biggen heoveriche” (­every person may purchase heaven with what he has). Monks w ­ ere hardly the only group who practiced fund-­raising in this way. 58. For this paragraph, see Berlière 1927a and 1927b, Constable 1982, Van Engen 1986, Amos 1987. Another lively question concerned ­whether or not monks required episcopal license in order to preach. For attacks on the Benedictines by members of rival ­orders, and Benedictine counterattacks, see Cantor 1960; Constable 1996, 125–67. Younge 2016, 43–54, offers a summary. Traces of ­these disputes made their way into Gratian’s Decretum, ed. Friedburg, Pars II, Causa XVI, Questio 1, a discussion that gradually became institutionally influential, in part through its incorporation into ­later collections. For the wider context, see J. Clark 2011, 130–88. For the situation in thirteenth-­century ­England, see W. Campbell 2019; also Part IV below. 59. For the episcopate and the episcopal ideal in early medieval ­England, see Coates 1998.

424

Notes to Pages 207–209

60. For ­these two paragraphs, see Blair 2005, magisterially summing up the work carried out by early En­glish Church historians over the previous quarter ­century ­under the aegis of his own so-­called minster hypothesis. Blair first reconstructs the several phases of minster creation and the importance of minsters in the gradual development of towns (79–367), before turning to the much ­later development of parishes (368–504). He posits that religious ­houses, founded by royal and aristocratic laypeople, ­were central to the early En­glish Church, and that ­these ­houses ­were or­g a­nized according to local or regional custom usually impossible to reconstruct. For the origins of the minster hypothesis, see the essays edited by Blair and Sharpe 1992, especially Thacker 1992, on monks and pastoral care. For the fierce controversies the hypothesis at first engendered, particularly over the nature of early En­glish monasticism and pastoral care, see Palliser 1996. For a recent essay on the En­glish Benedictines informed by this work, see Tinti 2015. Drawing again largely on archaeological evidence, Blair 2018 contextualizes his ­earlier findings within a wider study of early medieval En­glish society and its built environments. Outside this scholarly tradition, but in close dialogue with it, is Foot 2006, a rich reflection on the issues to hand focused on the textual sources that Blair for the most part eschews. For clerical marriage, which remained widespread and widely accepted at least to the early thirteenth ­century, see Barrow 2015, especially 115–57; and, for the end of this period, but with numerous glances backward, H. Thomas 2014, 155–89. For the crucial phenomenon of lay investment in, and owner­ship of, local churches, see the vast and wide-­ranging account by S. Wood 2006. 61. On Carolingian Benedictinism, see Choy 2017, especially 1–24. 62. For eleventh-­century pastoral care and the Benedictines, see Tinti 2005. 63. For the secular clergy, see H. Thomas 2014. Of special importance ­were secular canons, at Exeter, Salisbury, Hereford, and London, a group that included a number of prominent writers, including John of Salisbury (d. 1180) and Walter Map (d. 1210). Within the probable lifetime of the Tremulous Hand, the group also included a saint, Edmund Rich, archbishop and author of the Mirror of Holy Church (d. 1240, canonized 1246). 64. The cata­logue in Da Rold, Kato, Swan, and Treharne PUEM offers a con­ve­nient listing of ­these forty books. For historical background, see Treharne 2001, Swan 2005, Swan 2006b. For the homiletic books themselves, see Treharne 2006c. 65. See Da Rold PUEMa. Most of Ii.1.33 consists of a se­lection of homilies by Ælfric. The book has annotations in French and Latin as well as En­glish. Da Rold transcribes the vernacular note on the Penitential Psalms, which is from Alcuin’s De psalmorum usu liber, ed. Migne. See J. Black 2002. For the Alcuin material, see Lindström 1988. For Carolingian lay libri manuales, see Romig 2017, especially 55–66 on Alcuin’s De virtutibus et viciis, ed. Migne. For Ælfric’s homilies on Maccabees, written with devout aristocrats in mind, see Lives of Saints, ed. and trans. Clayton and Mullins, II.66–121, discussed by Wilcox 1993. 66. For Bodley 343, see Conti and Da Rold PUEM, which also notes the Latin items in the book, including an impor­tant copy of the Homiliary of Angers. For the book’s assembly, see Irvine’s introduction to Old En­glish Homilies from MS Bodley 343, and S. Irvine 2000, 55–61. For the book’s pos­si­ble Herefordshire provenance, see Kitson 1990–92 and 1997; Swan 2007a, 33–34; Wilcox in Ælfric, Homilies by Ælfric, 71–101; and Chapter Twenty, Section 1 below. Conti 2007 ­favors a Worcester provenance. The most complete analy­sis of the two scribes’ work is Conti 2011. For the booklet as an early medieval codicological genre, see P. Robinson 1978 and 2010. 67. For Cotton Vespasian D.xiv, see Treharne PUEMh. For an edition, see Early En­glish Homilies, ed. Warner. On Ralph d’Escures, see Brett ODNB. The conversi hypothesis is from Younge 2012. Handley 1974 reconstructs the book’s original order. M. Richards 1979 discusses its pedagogical structure. Treharne 2006b argues that the book was made in Canterbury, taking issue with Handley, who associates it with Rochester. The nun’s prayer is on fol. 4r.



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68. For Leofric, see Barlow ODNBd. For his library, see Conner 1993, with an edition of Leofric’s Inventory, ed. Conner, at 226–35. See also Treharne 2007. Some twenty Exeter books containing Old En­glish survive, several of which correspond to books listed by Leofric. 69. The Exeter books containing ­t hese texts are Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 196 (Treharne PUEMa); Cambridge, University Library MS Ii.2.4 (Kato PUEMa); Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 191 (W. Green and Kato PUEM); Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 201 (Treharne PUEMb); Exeter, Cathedral Library MS 3501 (Exeter Book, ed. Muir). On the Exeter Book see Niles 2018, arguing the book’s monastic stance and provenance. 70. The sole copy of Orrm’s work, discussed in Chapter Eigh­teen, Section 2, is Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Junius 1. On this book, see Faulkner PUEM. 71. Most of the new homiliaries are listed by Younge 2016, 41nn6 and 8. Two ­others are Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.14.52; and London, Lambeth Palace MS 487. 72. The only vernacular homiliary in a language other than En­glish from before the 1230s is a French version of the influential Latin homiliary by Maurice de Sully, archbishop of Paris (d. 1196). See Maurice de Sully, Homilies, ed. Robson; ANL, sec. 587. 73. Wærferth’s Old En­glish Gregory’s Dialogues is found in fragmentary form in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Hatton 76 (Kato and Roberson PUEM), and in complete form in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 322 (Treharne PUEMe), and London, British Library MS Cotton Otho C. i, vol. 2 (Da Rold PUEMc), all late eleventh ­century, all with annotations by the Tremulous Hand. For Gregory’s authorship of the Dialogues, see Meyvaert 2004. 74. See London, British Library, MS Royal 1 A.xiv (Da Rold PUEMd), and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 28 (Kato PUEMc) (both Old En­glish Gospels); Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.17.1 (Treharne PUEMg) (Eadwine Psalter), and Cambridge University Library Ff.1.23 (Kato PUEMb) (Winchcombe Psalter); London, Cotton Claudius  B. iv (Old En­glish Illustrated Heptateuch). For this last, see Doane and Stoneman 2011. 75. Textus Roffensis, ed. Sawyer, i.e., Rochester, Cathedral Library MS A.3.5 (ca. 1122–24). See Treharne PUEMj. See also Chapter Sixteen, Section 3, below. 76. London, British Library MS Cotton Faustina A.x. See Da Rold and Swan PUEM. 77. Faustina A.x is one of five surviving copies of The Old En­glish Benedictine Rule modified or written at this period. The latest of ­these, London, British Library MS Cotton Claudius D. iii, dates from the early thirteenth ­century; see Winteney-­Version der Regula S. Benedicti, ed. Schröer. Books containing works in the other genres mentioned ­here are itemized in the cata­ logue of Da Rold, Kato, Swan, and Treharne PUEM. Nine surviving copies of Ælfric’s Grammar also postdate 1075. Teaching and Learning Latin, ed. Hunt pre­sents rich evidence for the pedagogical uses to which some of ­these copies w ­ ere put, in many cases with significant glossing in French. 78. Peterborough Chronicle, ed. Clark. On Alfred and the Chronicle, see S. Irvine 2015b. For Laud Misc. 636, see Da Rold PUEMh.

chapter 12 1. Although its arguments differ from ­those presented ­here and in Part IV, see O’Brien 2011 for an impor­tant parallel attempt to produce a synthetic account of En­glish vernacular textual culture between the eighth and twelfth centuries, also with attention to the Benedictines. 2. On “diglossic,” see Ziolkowski 1996; Introduction, Section 2, above. 3. Glossa Ordinaria, ed. Rusch, vol. 1, 426.

426

Notes to Pages 213–216

4. MED, s.v., questioun, 2.a, may be incorrect to cite this line as using the word in the sense “philosophical or theological prob­lem or topic.” Their association with “cnotten” and “derne digelnesse” suggests that the term refers to Bede’s exegetical writings. For the former, see DOE, s.v., cnotta, 2.d, “a textual or interpretive prob­lem or puzzle,” citing this passage as well as one from Ælfric’s Interrogationes Sigewulfi, ed. Stoneman, 81.12–15, and another from Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, Second Series, ed. Godden, XXVIII, line 116. In the Orrmulum, ed. Holt, lines 12944– 47, “dærne dighellnesse” alludes to the mysteries of the Old Testament. ­Here, Orrm interprets John 1:38 to argue that Christ “meant to uncover all the secret mysteries written about him through Moses and the prophets” (“wollde unnhilenn all / thatt dærne dighellnesse / thaatt writenn wass thurrh Moysæn / off himm and thurrh prophetess”). The “Sanctus Beda” poet was perhaps thinking of Bede’s commentary on the Books of Kings, In Regum librum XXX quaestiones, ed. Hurst. 5. Early En­glish Homilies, ed. Warner, 134–39 at 136–39. Treharne PUEMh lists this sermon as Vespasian D.xiv, item 45. For the Latin sermon, prob­ably delivered in the vernacular, which survives in over fifty copies, see Ralph d’Escures, Homilia de assumptione Mariae, ed. Migne, who assigns it to Anselm. For its authorship, see Wilmart 1927. For analy­sis, see Treharne 2006b. For a rich history of the allegorization of Luke 10:38–42 around which it is constructed, see Constable 1995, 1–141. 6. “Apparently” b­ ecause the text preserved in Cotton Faustina A.x ­here misses two folios. 7. For Bede’s knowledge of the Benedictine Rule see van der Walt 1986. For Hatton 48, a book perhaps from Worcester or Bath, see the facsimile, Rule of St. Benedict, ed. Farmer. Images of the entire book are available online via https://­digital​.­bodleian​.­ox​.­ac​.­uk​/­. 8. For use of the Benedictine Rule in early ­England, prob­ably as part of a regula mixta created for each ­house, or group of ­houses, see Foot 2006, 48–60. See also J. Clark 2011, 31–33, on Wilfrid of Ripon and his successor, Winfrith (Boniface), founder of the ­g reat monastery of Fulda. Fulda’s own slow adoption of the rule is detailed by Raaijmaker 2012, 157–61. 9. See Regularis concordia, ed. Kornexl; Bullough 1975. 10. See Chapter One, Section 1, above. For “Bede’s Death Song” in post-­Conquest ­England, see the cata­logue in Da Rold, Kato, Swan, and Treharne PUEM, which lists nine copies. 11. The address of Bede’s Homilarum evangelii implies a broad audience. See L. Martin 2006. Differences of language use across the centuries might not have been obvious to twelfth-­century intellectuals, who may have believed the Old En­glish Historia Ecclesiastica was made by Bede himself. See Rowley 2011, 38n5. It is quite pos­si­ble that En­glish was used as a language of rec­ord for homilies as early as the eighth ­century, in books that do not survive. For the earliest Old En­ glish homilies, see Scragg 1979. 12. Æthelwold’s rise to modern prominence can be traced to the mid-1980s, a thousand years ­a fter his death in 984. See Yorke 1988, an impor­tant collection of millennial essays. 13. Blair 2005, 341–54; see also Barrow 2008a. For the nine female religious ­houses that ­were Benedictinized, see Foot 2000, vol. 1, 81–115. Foot’s larger, and fundamental, proj­ect, is to show how unrepresentative ­these ­houses ­were of early En­glish ­women’s monasticism as a ­whole. 14. Only three copies of the Regularis concordia, including a partial one in Old En­glish, survive, although the existence of ­others can be inferred, both from textual analy­sis of ­these copies and from Ælfric’s Letter to the Monks of Eynsham, ed. and trans. Jones. 15. On the rhetorical character of the Carolingian concern for consistency at ­every level of po­liti­cal and religious governance, see, e.g., de Jong 2019, especially 1–16. 16. On the artistic productions associated with tenth-­century Winchester, in vari­ous media, see Berry 1998; Lapidge et al. 2003, 179–89 (on art, by Robert E. Deshmam) and 191–215 (on



Notes to Pages 216–217

427

­ usic, by Susan Rankin); see also 74–138, on the liturgy (by Lapidge). The Benedictional of St. m Æthelwold has been edited by Andrew Prescott. A distinct “monastic poetics” associated with the Benedictines is hypothesized by O’Camb 2016, among ­others. 17. On the millennium as a homiletic theme in the 990s and ­later, see Godden 2003. 18. On Cnut’s Chris­tian­ity in its Scandinavian context, see Bolton 2017, 28–52. 19. Wormald 2000. For an application of Wormald’s idealizing insight to the early En­glish Benedictines as a ­whole, see Tracey-­A nne Cooper 2015, 47–106, which includes a useful overview both of the issues and of the history of scholarship over the past several de­cades. 20. For a general survey of Old High German lit­er­a­t ure, see Murdoch 2004; for Old and ­Middle Irish, see Bhrolcháin 2009. Although in the eighth ­century literary influence runs from ­England to Germany, by the tenth ­century the situation was reversed. Tracking Irish influence is complicated by the late dates of most manuscripts, which often allow only for relative datings of texts, based on linguistic or recension analy­sis. For an exception, the Cambrai Homily (found in a late eighth-­century book, Cambrai, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 679), see Follett 2006, 54–56. A dif­fer­ent situation pertains with Hiberno-­Latin, whose influence on early En­glish intellectual culture, and on individual texts, is easier to gauge. See, e.g., K. Hughes 1970, Charles Wright 1993. 21. On early glosses in Celtic and Germanic languages and their intellectual relationships, see Alderik Blom’s study of Psalter glosses (2017), especially his taxonomy of gloss types (9–35) and discussion of interlinear glosses in En­g lish, German, and Irish (131–243). For a celebrated Old En­g lish glossary in the form of a list, from early eighth-­century Canterbury, see Épinal-­Erfurt Glossary, ed. Pheifer. See also Pheifer 1987. An online critical edition by Michael Herren, David Porter, and Hans Sauer is in pro­g ress. For a late eighth-­century Old En­g lish Latin and En­g lish, see Leiden Glossary, ed. Hessels; for its provenance, again Canterbury, see Lapidge 2015. For early Psalter glosses, see Oldest En­glish Texts, ed. Sweet. On the relationship between Irish and En­g lish scholars at this period, see Herren 1998. For a list of Old Irish glosses, with bibliography via links, see the Codecs website, search string “Irish glosses.” Many are collected in Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus, ed. and trans. Whitley and Strachan. Among the earliest are in the eighth-­century Cadmug Gospels (Landesbibliothek, Bonifatianus MS 3), from Fulda in the generation ­a fter Boniface. The earliest Welsh glosses (ninth ­century) are in the Cambridge Juvencus Manuscript, ed. McKee (Cambridge University Library MS Ff.4.42). For an Irish glossed Psalter con­temporary with the En­g lish Benedictines, although the glosses are copied from an older book, see Psalterium Suthantoniense, ed. Ó Néill (Cambridge St John’s College MS C.9). For the extreme breadth of the term “gloss,” compare Stork 1990 (on one-­word scholarly glosses in a tenth-­century Aldhelm manuscript) and Toswell 2014 (a study of Psalters, focused on glossa continuae or translations, whose purpose was often mainly devotional). 22. The Old En­g lish glossed Liber Scintillarum is edited by Rhodes, the Latin text by Rochais. For Defensor’s compilation in ­England, see Bremmer 2008. For an interlinear En­ glish gloss of a con­temporary Carolingian work, see Old En­glish Epitome of Benedict of Aniane, ed. Napier. For a list and bibliography of Old En­g lish glosses, see Quinn and Quinn 1990, 145–86. 23. For this paragraph, see Gretsch 1999, an impor­tant study of the early lit­er­a­t ure of the Benedictine Reform, especially 42–88 and 132–84. For the Aldhelm glosses, see Old En­glish Glosses of MS. Brussels, Royal Library, 1650, ed. Goossens. Gretsch’s case for the provenance of the Royal Psalter is reviewed by Toswell 2014, 239–41, 260–68, who notes that connections with Æthelwold’s Winchester are unproven, though likely. Toswell suggests the psalter formed part of a

428

Notes to Pages 217–221

“complex of psalter-­study material,” along with a Latin commentary on the Psalter in London, British Library MS Royal 4.A.xiv (268). Gwara 2000 argues (contra Gretsch) that Dunstan was the main producer of the Aldhelm glosses, and that the Brussels manuscript was made in Canterbury, not Abingdon. This echoes his findings in his edition of Aldhelm, Prosa de Virginitate. En­glish glosses to Isidore of Seville’s De fide catholica in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 319, are also associated with the circle of Æthelwold and Dunstan by Hussey 2009. 24. The term was coined by Lapidge 1975, alluding to associations between this style and the Greek-­Latin glossaries known as the Hermeneumata (for which, see Corpus Glossariorum Latinorum, ed. Goetz, vol. 3; Dionisotti 1982). For a recent discussion, see Stephenson 2015, 3–36. 25. London, British Library Cotton MS Vespasian A.viii. See Charters of the New Minster, ed. Miller, 95–104, commentary 104–11, viewable online via https://­w ww​.­bl​.­uk​/­manuscripts​/­. For Lantfred, see Lapidge ODNBe. For vitae of the found­ers, see Wulfstan of Winchester, Life of St Æthelwold, ed. and trans. Lapidge and Winterbottom; Byrhtferth, Vita S. Oswaldi, ed. and trans. Lapidge; Early Lives of St Dunstan, ed. Winterbottom and Lapidge. 26. Life of St Æthelwold, 46–48. The archbishop was presumably Ælfric of Abingdon, archbishop of Canterbury 992–1005; see Mason ODNBa. For Wulfstan Cantor (fl. 996), see Lapidge ODNBf; Thornbury 2014, 209–23. 27. Gretsch 1999, 89–131. On Winchester vocabulary and Standard Old En­glish, see Gneuss 1972, Hofstetter 1988, Gretsch 2009. Gretsch dates the emergence of the first to the mid-­tenth ­century, that of the second to thirty years ­later, defining “Winchester vocabulary” simply as “words which are used in preference to their synonyms in a group of texts which . . . ​can be shown to have some connection with late tenth-­or early eleventh-­century Winchester” (123). For a skeptical account of Ælfric’s long-­term lexical debt to Winchester, see Godden 1980. 28. Æthelwold, The Old En­glish Benedictine Rule, ed. Schröer, trans. Riyeff. For a textual analy­sis, see Gretsch 1974. For date, see Gretsch 1999, 89–131, 226–60. Gretsch argues for the 950s, during or soon a­ fter the Glastonbury period of the Psalter and Aldhelm glosses. 29. Gretsch 1992. 30. Jayatilika 2003, an impor­tant article. 31. Jayatilika 2003, 150. For Claudius D.iii (ca. 1200), see Die Winteney-­Version, ed. Schröer. 32. Liber Eliensis, ed. Blake, 111, trans. Fairweather, 133–34, citing a work known as the Libellus Æthelwoldi episcopi, which is itself based, in part, on lost Old En­glish sources. For this Libellus, which remains unedited, see Clarke 2012, 145–70. 33. For what follows, see Pratt 2012, drawing on Jayatilika 2003. For Cotton Faustina A.x, a composite book, see Da Rold and Swan PUEM. 34. On Ælfryth’s role in the Benedictine movement, see Yorke 2008. J. Hill 2006 discusses the Old En­glish Regularis concordia, which she has also edited. 35. On this book, see Roberson and Da Rold PUEM, Gneuss 1997, and especially Tracey-­ Anne Cooper 2015, where it is discussed as an archiepiscopal book of the late reform period. See also Chapter Thirteen, Section 3 below. The book can be viewed online via https://­w ww​.­bl​.­uk​ /­manuscripts​/­. 36. Æthelwold, King Edgar’s Establishment of Monasteries, ed. and trans. Whitelock, 150–51. “Uncuthra” (strange, unknown, unfamiliar) is perhaps meant to evoke the initial awe with which the king confronts divine law, ­a fter his long exposure to its h ­ uman counterpart. 37. Ibid., 151. Gretsch 1999, 426–27, suggests that this passage has novices in mind, but “woroldmonnum” would be an unusual word to use of conversi. The rest of the work addresses an audience that includes kings, queens, nobles, and other laypeople. See also Pratt 2012, 163. 38. On lay patrons of the En­glish Benedictines, see Rumble 2008.



Notes to Pages 223–225

429

chapter 13 1. Wulfstan of Winchester [Wulfstan Cantor], Life of St Æhelwold, ed. and trans. Lapidge and Winterbottom; “B,” Vita S. Dunstani, ed. and trans. Winterbottom and Lapidge; Byrhtferth, Vita S. Oswaldi, ed. and trans. Lapidge; Enchiridion, ed. and trans. Baker and Lapidge. On the complex interplay of Latin and En­glish in the Enchiridion, see Stephenson 2015, 37–132. On Archbishop Ælfric, not to be confused with the Ælfric discussed ­here, see Mason, ODNBa. 2. On Æthelred, his reputation, and his ­career, see Roach 2016. On the eschatological dimension of religious thought at this period, see, e.g., Godden 1994, MacLean 2007, Cubitt 2015. 3. See Benedictional of St. Æthelwold, ed. Prescott. Deshman 1995 is a book-­length study. The book can be viewed online via https://­w ww​.­bl​.­uk​/­manuscripts​/­. 4. On differences between members of the new Benedictine generation, see C. Jones 2009, who views Ælfric as unusual in his commitment to pastoral care, suggesting that his “younger peers, represented by Wulfstan Cantor of Winchester and Byrhtferth of Ramsey, not only did not need Ælfric’s writings but did not sympathize with their style or populist emphases” (96). For Ælfric’s life, see Godden ODNB; for that of Wulfstan I, see Wormald ODNBc. 5. Ælfric, Lives of Saints, ed. and trans. Clayton and Mullins, cited ­here in preference to an impor­tant ­earlier edition for EETS by W. W. Skeat; Old En­glish Heptateuch, ed. Marsden. On Æthelweard and Æthelmær, see Wormald ODNBa, Cubitt 2009. 6. Ælfric, Libellus de veteri testamenti et novo, ed. Marsden; Letter to Sigeweard, ed. and trans. Swain. 7. Ælfric, Letter to Sigefurth and Letter to Wulfgeat, ed. Assman, quotation at 1. 8. Ælfric, Catholic Homilies, First Series, ed. Clemoes, and Second Series, ed. Godden. For ser­viceable facing-­page translations, see Homilies of the Anglo-­Saxon Church, ed. and trans. Thorpe. Other works include Homilies of Ælfric, ed. Pope; Interrogationes Sigewulfi, ed. Stoneman, one of several works on Genesis written by Ælfric, including his Exameron, ed. Crawford; De Temporibus Anni, ed. and trans. Blake; vernacular and Latin pastoral letters written for bishops, all in Die Hirtenbriefe Ælfrics, ed. Fehr, several also in Councils and Synods I, ed. and trans. Whitelock. For a private letter perhaps composed to a sibling, see Ælfric, Letter to B ­ rother Edward, ed. Clayton. This is far from an exhaustive list, even of works in Old En­glish. Recent scholarship on Ælfric’s ­career builds on Clemoes 1959, who established the chronology of his writings. For editions and studies, see Magennis and Swan 2009, 423–54. For an impor­tant new guide to Ælfric’s writings, see Kleist 2019. 9. On Wulfstan of York, see Wormald ODNBc. For editions, see Wulfstan, Homilies, ed. Bethurum; Homilien, ed. Napier; Old En­glish L ­ egal Writings, ed. and trans. Rabin, cited ­here in preference to ­earlier editions listed in the Bibliography. See also Wulfstan, Po­liti­cal Writings, trans. Rabin, with a wealth of contextualizing discussion. On vernacular liturgical texts associated with Wulfstan, see Old En­glish Benedictine Office, ed. Ure. On Wulfstan’s compilations, including what some scholars term his “Commonplace Book,” see Sauer 2000. For a reconsideration of the canon of his writings, see Lionarons 2010. For essays on aspects of his ­career, see Townend 2004. 10. This general picture comes through regularly in Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, ed. and trans. Clayton and Mullins, as it looks back from the gloomy period of the new Danish raids to the early Benedictine movement, “when this island lived in peace and the life of monks was held in honor” (“tha tha this igland wæs wunigende on sibbe and munuc-­lif wæron mid wurthscipe ge-­ healdene”) ­under King Edgar: Lives of Saints XII (Prayer of Moses for Mid-­Lent Sunday), lines 148–49. In Ælfric’s view, the raids are a result of En­glish indifference to monasticism. 11. Thus Godden in his biographical essay on Ælfric in ODNB. 12. On Sigeric (d. 994), see Mason ODNBb.

430

Notes to Pages 225–231

13. Ælfric, Catholic Homilies, First Series, ed. Clemoes, Praefatio, lines 15–16, 51. For sources, see Ælfric, Catholic Homilies: Introduction, ed. Godden, xxxviii–­lxii. J. Hill 2007 also details Ælfric’s debt to Paul the Deacon, not listed by Ælfric. See Upchurch 2012 for the single copy of the First Series to preserve the Latin preface, Cambridge University Library MS Gg.3.28, an anthology from Cerne Abbey itself, from ca. 995 to ca. 1000, and strongly redolent of its pastoral atmosphere. 14. Ælfric, Catholic Homilies, First Series, Praefatio, lines 8–12. For analy­sis, see Stanton 2002, 144–71; Swan 2009, 251–54. 15. Ælfric, Catholic Homilies, First Series, Praefatio, lines 43, 48–50, 58–60. 16. The three recensions of the First Series ­were noticed by K. Sisam 1932b. Clemoes 1994 (orig. pub. 1966) built on his work. For recensions of the Second Series, see Catholic Homilies, Second Series, ed. Godden, lxxviii–­xciv. 17. First Series, Praefatio, lines 1, 45–46. 18. Second Series, Praefatio, line 10. 19. First Series, Praefatio, lines 20–22. 20. On the mixed audiences Ælfric envisages, see Catholic Homilies: Introduction, xxi–­x xviii. See also Godden 1973. On the audiences of the Lenten homilies in par­tic­u­lar, see Upchurch 2009. For lay attendance at monastic ser­vices, see Riedel 2016. Aristocratic benefactors ­were in close touch with the monasteries they funded and may have taken up residence, as Æthelmær may have done at Cerne and likely did at Evesham, where Ælfric was abbot ­later in his ­career. 21. Blair 2005, 291–367, 368–425, 426–504, reconstructs the stages by which the roles of minsters and local churches developed across the tenth and eleventh centuries. 22. Charters of the New Minster, ed. Miller, 95–104, especially 96–99; Byrhtferth, Enchiridion, ed. and trans. Baker and Lapidge, 46–47, one of many such addresses in this work. See Stephenson 2015, 69–102, who cites examples of this topos by Wulfstan Cantor, at note 1. 23. Alfred, Hierdeboc, ed. Sweet, 25. 24. Ælfric, First Old En­glish Letter for Wulfstan, ed. and trans. Whitelock, 291–92. Compare Ælfric’s Letter for Wulfsige, 206–7, which emphasizes both that all ­these books are necessary and that they must be “well corrected” (“wel ge-rihte,” quotation at 207). 25. Ælfric, First Old En­glish Letter for Wulfstan, 294. Ælfric’s Letter for Wulfsige also states that “the mass-­priest ­shall tell the ­people on Sundays and festivals the meaning of the Gospel in En­glish; and of the Paternoster and of the Creed as well” (“Se mæssepreost sceal secgan Sunnandagum and mæssedagum thæs godspelles angyt on Englisc tham folce; and be tham Paternostre and be tham Credan eac”; 208). On Ælfric and Wulfstan’s sources, see C. Jones 1995. For a comparison of Ælfric’s En­glish with Wulfstan’s Latin, see J. Hill 2005. On the interactions between the two men, see Godden 2004. On the wider context, see J. Hill 1992b. 26. Ælfric, First Old En­glish Letter for Wulfstan, 260–61. 27. On Ælfric’s prose style and its evolution, see Momma 2003, Corona 2009, and the substantial biblio­g raphies in both. The argument by Bredehoft 2004 that Ælfric’s rhythmic prose should be understood as verse has not been widely accepted. 28. Catholic Homilies, Second Series, ed. Godden, I (De natale Domini), lines 1–12. The edition follows manuscript punctuation, which is clearly intended to serve as a guide to delivery. 29. For Ælfric’s homilies within their liturgical context, see Stephen Harris 2007. 30. For the “sententious formalism” that links Wulfstan’s writings, see Yeager 2014, 60–98. 31. See Lionarons 2010, 9–22 and 23–42, on the interrelationships between Wulfstan’s vari­ ous writings. 32. Wulfstan, Canons of Edgar, 124–43, at 124 (canon 1).



Notes to Pages 231–236

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33. M. Elliott 2012 tracks the development of Wulfstanian themes from Latin to vernacular. 34. See Lemke 2014. On the po­liti­cal context, see Wilcox 2004, Keynes 2007. 35. Wulfstan, Institutes of Polity (1), ed. and trans. Rabin, 38–59, at 40–42. 36. For a synthetic account of the topos in early ­England, see T. Powell 1994. For its use in Robert of Gretham’s mid-­thirteenth-­century Miroir, see Chapter Six, Section 1, above. 37. Wormald ODNBc. See also Wulfstan, Po­liti­cal Writings, trans. Rabin, 9–16. 38. Wulfstan, Institutes of Polity, 52. 39. For a ­Middle En­glish “rule” or­g a­nized around the estates, see Schort Reule of Lif, ed. Raschko. 40. See Wilcox 2005a and Wilcox 2009, 352–55, this last a discussion of booklets as a medium for the dissemination of Old En­glish pastoral materials. Wilcox identifies two such booklets that survive, bound into other manuscripts, and infers ­others. The “booklet” format is identified and discussed by P. Robinson 1978. On Bodley 343, see Chapter Eleven, Section 4, above, and Chapter Twenty, Section 1 below. 41. Key texts in question ­here include the remarkable Encomium Emmae Reginae, ed. and trans. Campbell, written for and about Emma of Normandy in 1040–41 by a monk of Saint-­Omer, and the Vita Ædwardi, ed. and trans. Barlow, written in 1067, as well as a major body of work associated with Wilton Abbey, much of it by Goscelin of St. Bertin (d. ca. 1107). ­These works are central to Tyler 2017, an impor­tant study of eleventh-­century literary patronage by En­glish royal ­women that offers a point of entry into the literary culture of the period. 42. Although they, too, may have their origin in Wulfstan’s circle, an exception may be the Old En­glish penitentials, all from eleventh-­century manuscripts and perhaps composed during this period. See Anglo-­Saxon Penitentials, ed. and trans. Frantzen. For a literary and l­egal study, see Jurasinski 2015. For social context, see Foxhall Forbes 2013, 129–264. 43. The classic study is Bethurum 1942; the fullest, Sauer 2000. For a fine discussion of this miscellany as found in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 265, with further bibliography, see Ælfric, Letter to the Monks of Eynsham, ed. Jones, 77–91. 44. On textual lifespans and their phases, see Chapter Ten, Section 2, above. 45. For this paragraph, see Tracey-­A nne Cooper 2015, who analyzes the book’s ordinatio in detail. 46. Tracey-­A nne Cooper 2015, 185–86, transcribed from Tiberius A.iii, fol. 92v, translation modified, and an otiose repetition of the words “and hu he of deathe aras” (­a fter “heofonum astah”) omitted. For an edition of the brief address from which this passage derives, see Wulfstan, Homilien, ed. Napier, 123–24, headed “to folce.” See also Lionarons 2010, 120. 47. For a detailed study, see V. Thompson 2005; for the book in its context, see V. Thompson 2004, 57–91. Besides materials from “Wulfstan’s Commonplace Book,” Laud Misc. 482 contains portions of the Handbook for a Confessor, ed. Fowler. For a description of the book, see Da Rold PUEMg. For the Handbook and its relationship with Wulfstan, see Cubitt 2006, 53–54; Heyworth 2007. For the book’s pos­si­ble connection with a ­later Wulfstan, Wulfstan II of Worcester, see Tinti 2010, 305–10. Foxhall Forbes 2013, 51–62, discusses the Handbook in the context of other pastoral books in which it occurs. See also Foxhall Forbes 2015. 48. Laud Misc. 482, fol. 47r, in V. Thompson 2005, 113. For images of two openings of this highly distinctive book, fols. 36v–37r and 63v–64r, see Digital Bodleian. 49. Laud Misc. 482, fol. 47r, in V. Thompson 2005, 110. 50. On Edward, see Barlow ODNBb and now Licence 2020, which captures the strikingly dif­fer­ent atmosphere of the ­middle de­cades of the eleventh ­century. Thanks to Tom Licence for sending an advance copy. Edward’s first archbishop, Eadsige (1038–50), was a monk at Canterbury,

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Notes to Pages 236–242

having been a secular priest. Eadsige was followed by Robert of Jumièges (1051–52), a Benedictine from Normandy, who was followed in turn by Stigand (1052–70), the first archbishop not to have been a monk for nearly a ­century. On Stigand, see Cowdrey ODNBc. On the ecclesiastical situation more broadly, see Barlow 1963; Loyn 2014, 48–102. On Leofric (d. 1072), see Barlow ODNBd. A second of Edward’s chaplains who became a bishop, Giso of Wells (d. 1088), imposed a rule on the Wells canons as Leofric did at Exeter. See Keynes 1997. 51. On the Lotharingian Church in the eleventh c­ entury, see Vanderputten 2013. 52. For emergent ideas of papal supremacy, see Siecienski 2017, 240–81. On the theology of Peter Damian, with its signal emphasis on moral purity, see Ranft 2012. 53. Constable 1996 emphasizes the integrity of reform at this period. On Goscelin, see Barlow ODNBc. See also Goscelin’s Liber confortatorius, ed. Talbot, trans. Otter, also trans. Hollis et al., with accompanying essays. On Eve, see O’Keeffe 2012, 210–45; Leyser ODNBb.

chapter 14 1. For the normalizing effect of literary canonization, and for ­these paragraphs in general, see Chapter Ten, Section 2, above. 2. On Barking, almost all of whose literary remains date from the ­later twelfth ­century onward, see the essays gathered in J. Brown and Bussell 2012. On Wilton, see the writings of Goscelin and (prob­ably) the tenth-­century Salisbury Psalter. On writings connected to female religious ­houses, see Bugyis 2019, Watt 2020. On medieval En­glish convent libraries, see Bell 1995. On Worcester and Exeter and their libraries, which survived even the Henrician Reformation nearly undamaged, see Treharne 2007. Both Treharne 2007 and Swan 2007a warn of the imbalances in survival rates. 3. On the disappearance of “traditional minsters” and their refounding, often as ­houses of Augustinian canons, see Blair 1985, 1988a, and 2005, 506–22. For Augustinians ­houses and their institutional antecedents, see also D. Robinson 1980, Burton and Stöber 2011. 4. See The Beowulf Manuscript, ed. and trans. Fulk. The Lichfield hypothesis is that of Kiernan 2017 and, more elaborately, S. Thomson 2018. As M. Brown and Farr 2001 note, Lichfield, the religious capital of Mercia, was a major center of cultural production in the eighth and early ninth centuries. Evidence for the community in the eleventh ­century is sparse, although see Charles-­Edwards and McKee 2008. 5. On Cotton Vitellius A.xv, see Treharne PUEMi. Both parts of the book are viewable online via http://­w ww​.­bl​.­u k​/­manuscripts. For the Soliloquies fragment in Tiberius A.iii, see Szarmach 2005; Tracey-­A nne Cooper 2015, 217. The Old En­glish Gospel of Nicodemus is also in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 41, an Exeter book whose provenance is unknown. Compare the poem “Durham,” which survives only in a Benedictine book but which T. O’Donnell 2014 argues was written before Durham was Benedictinized. 6. On Junius 85/86, see Wilcox 2009, a study of this type of typically slim, low-­g rade, and heavy-­use book and the contents thereof. For a description, see Roberson PUEMa and PUEMb. 7. Blair 2005, 353. 8. Cubitt 1995, Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents, vol. 3. 9. Beginnings of En­glish Law, ed. and trans. Oliver; Alfred, Domboc, ed. Liebermann; “Law Code of Alfred the ­Great,” ed. Dammery. For discussion, see Wormald 1999, 264–86; M. Richards 2015. 10. Laws of Edward and Guthrum, in Wulfstan, Old En­glish ­Legal Writings, ed. and trans. Rabin, 2–9. For the authorship of this work, see Whitelock 1941.



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11. Wulfstan, Canons of Edgar, in Wulfstan, Old En­glish ­Legal Writings, ed. and trans. Rabin, 124–43. For the blending of secular and church law at this period, see Wormald 1999, 430–65. 12. The copy of the Benedictine Rule in Hatton 48 is the only surviving rule from ­England before the mid-­tenth ­century. See Gneuss and Lapidge 2014, index, ­under Benedict of Nursia. For early liturgical survivals, which are almost equally exiguous, see Billett 2014, 78–148. 13. On Aldred, see Back­house ODNB. On his glosses and the Lindisfarne Gospels (London, British Library MS Cotton Nero D.iv), see Cuesta et al. 2016. On the intellectual and religious culture of Chester-­le-­Street, see Jolly 2012. Chester-­le-­Street prob­ably followed a regula mixta. 14. On the lexis of the Old En­glish Martyrology, see Rauer 2016. 15. For another Old Irish text that introduces grammatical terminology, the glosses on Priscian’s Institutiones grammaticae in Saint Gall MS 904, see Lambert 2016. On insular Latin grammars, see Law 1997. On the Épinal-­Erfurt Glossary, found in two books from ca. 700, see Old En­glish Glosses, ed. Pheifer, Épinal-­Erfurt Glossary Proj­ect, ed. Herren et al. 16. Exeter Book, ed. Muir. On the book’s contested provenance, see Gameson 1996, arguing for a Benedictine provenance in response to Conner 1993, 95–147, who argues that the book was made in Exeter. Drout 2007 inclines to Conner’s position. R. Butler 2004 and Niles 2018 agree with Gameson. 17. Old En­glish Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn, ed. Anlezark. ­These early tenth-­century works, found in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MSS 422 and 041, are connected only distantly to the Prose Solomon and Saturn of Cotton Vitellius A.xv mentioned above. For their probable Glastonbury provenance, see Anlezark’s introduction, 49–57. 18. On dating Old En­glish poetry, a contentious topic, see Fulk, 2007. For the fiction of timelessness as an integral feature of the Old En­glish poetic idiom, see Tyler 2006, 157–71. For an approach to the Exeter Book as a mixed anthology of poetry from vari­ous periods that may have been modeled on Latin poetry books such as the eleventh-­century Cambridge Songs, ed. Breul (Cambridge University Library MS Gg.5.35), see Tyler 2016. 19. Old En­glish Rule of Chrodegang, ed. and trans. Langefeld. Drout 2004 links this work to The Old En­glish Benedictine Rule on stylistic and lexical grounds and dates it to around the 950s. Further work on the tenth-­century institution or institutions for which this translation was made seems in order. Drout suggests that it was produced to “show Edgar” that the canons at Winchester ­were not “living as they should” in preparation for their expulsion by Æthelwold (346). A tenth-­century copy of the Latin work, Brussels, Bibliothèque royale MS 8558–63, has glosses in En­glish unconnected with the translation. On this book, see Swan and Roberson PUEM. On Chrodegang and his rule, see Claussen 2004, Barrow 2006. 20. Scragg 1979, 2016; more broadly, Ogawa 2010; Old En­glish Martyrology, ed. and trans. Rauer, who argues for this early dating of the work, well before the Alfredian corpus. 21. Blickling Homilies, ed. and trans. Kelly, an attempt to replace a nineteenth-­century edition by Richard Morris with an attractive and useable volume, accessible to nonspecialists. Serious prob­lems with Kelly’s apparatus, discussed in Wilcox 2005b, only partly qualify the book’s value. The manuscript is viewable online via Prince­ton University Digital Archives. Toswell 2007 offers a codicological analy­sis. The book and its contents remain surprisingly underresearched. 22. For the sermons, see Vercelli Homilies, ed. Scragg, trans. Nicholson. The poems alone are edited in Vercelli Book, ed. Krapp. For a codicological analy­sis, see Scragg 1973. For a book-­length study and a rich series of essays, see Zacher 2009, Orchard and Zacher 2011 respectively. 23. Blickling XI (Ascension Thursday), ed. and trans. Kelly, 82. For audience, provenance, and date of this homiliary, see Wilcox 2011, a compelling response to Gatch 1989. For audience, provenance, and date of the Vercelli Book, see Zacher 2009, 3–29.

434

Notes to Pages 245–249

24. The histories of individual homilies in both collections have been explored by Donald Scragg, whose work in this area spans forty years. See Scragg 1973, 1979, 1985, 1998, 2011, 2016. 25. Scragg 1998. 26. Zacher 2009, 10–21, argues compellingly against the long-­standing assumption the book was from Canterbury. She follows Scragg 2008b in identifying the book as Kentish. For Vercelli as a ­house­hold book, see Carragáin 1998. On St. Andrew’s, Rochester, see R. Smith 1945. Note that by the mid-­eleventh ­century or ­earlier, the community at St. Andrew’s was evidently also the owner of Bodley 340/342. See Kato PUEMd. 27. C. Wright 2002, 2011. 28. Zacher 2011, 98–150. 29. Ælfric, First Old En­glish Letter for Wulfstan, in Councils and Synods I, 289–91; see also Ælfric’s Letter for Wulfsige, 198–201. ­Here, radically, any bishop, priest, deacon, or canon who has “in his ­house any ­woman” (“næbbe on his huse nanne wifman”) other than an immediate relative “is to forfeit his ­orders” (“do tholige his hades”; 198). Con­temporary church legislation often presupposes that priests are married. See, for example, the Northumbrian Priests’s Law, in Wulfstan, Old En­glish ­Legal Writings, ed. Rabin, 302–14 at 308–9: “Gif preost cwenan forlæte and othre nime, anathema sit!” (if a priest abandons a ­woman and takes another, let him be accursed), a statement that outlaws adultery and divorce, not marriage. 30. Blickling X (Rogation Wednesday), 76. Part of this homily is found as part of a composite text on penance in an early eleventh-­century Ælfric manuscript, Cambridge, Corpus Christi MS 198. See Swan 2006a. 31. Byrhtferth, Enchiridion, ed. Baker and Lapidge, 120. 32. See Wilcox 2011, 107–8, on Blickling IV. On Junius 85/86, see Wilcox 2009. 33. Blickling IV (Third Sunday in Lent), 28–30, a passage that bears comparison with Wulfstan’s Institutes of Polity (1), ed. and trans. Rabin. 34. Blickling I, 4, a homily headed “In Natali Domini” by Kelly (the opening is lost), but clearly written for the Feast of the Annunciation (March 25). For Love’s discussion of the utility of such “imaginaciouns,” see Love, Mirror of the Life of Christ, ed. Sargent, 10–11. 35. Godden 1978. 36. Gittos 2013, 134–38, quotation at 138. For the range of popu­lar homilies especially preached at this season, see Eleven Old En­glish Rogationtide Homilies, ed. Bazire and Cross. 37. Szarmach 2011. 38. Catholic Homilies, Second Series XIV (Dominica Palmarum), in the version Godden prints in his Appendix (381–90), compared with Vercelli I and IV. See Vercelli Homilies, ed. Scragg, 4–5. 39. Homilies of Ælfric, ed. Pope; Lives of Saints, ed. and trans. Clayton and Mullins. 40. Alfred, Hierdeboc, ed. Sweet, 173 (rubric to chapter 23). Gregory, Regula pastoralis, ed. Rommel and Clement, trans. Davis, prologue to book III. For an analy­sis of Old En­glish homilies that takes Gregory’s injunction seriously as an organ­izing princi­ple, see Clayton 1985, especially 212–26 (Blickling Homilies), 226–30 (Vercelli Homilies), 231–34 (Catholic Homilies). 41. See, e.g., Vercelli I, which may be especially early. According to Scragg in his edition, this homily exists in two interrelated versions and five copies, with “alterations and additions” to the materials “passing freely” between dif­fer­ent copies (3–4). See also Vercelli X, whose nine copies all differ significantly from one another, and whose earliest form, now lost, evidently gave rise to numerous rewritings and derivatives (191–95). Ælfric’s own practice of revising his homilies is related to this culture of textual mouvance but in theory aims to finalize his text. 42. Decretum Gelasiani, ed. Dobschütz, 60. On apocrypha as a category in early En­glish Christian thought, see the essays in Powell and Scragg 2003, especially J. Hill 2003. On the



Notes to Pages 249–252

435

category as it relates to Ælfric, see T. Hall 2003. For apocrypha in early ­England, see Hawk 2018, 3–30. 43. All three are listed in the Decretum Gelasiani, 49–58. The Visio Pauli is arguably as impor­ tant to the Western Christian visionary tradition as Gregory’s Dialogues. See The Old En­glish Vision of St. Paul, ed. Healey. For Ælfric’s condemnation, see Catholic Homilies, Second Series, XX (In Letania Maiore). For the Apocalypse of Thomas, see C. Wright 2011. For Transitus Mariae, see Clayton 1986, T. Hill 1992. For the theological centrality of ­these and other works of apocrypha to many aspects of early En­glish Chris­tian­ity, see Clayton 1999, Kabir 2001. 44. Catholic Homilies, Second Series, XXXIX (In Natale Sanctarum Uirginum), 333. See C. Wright 2011, 180–81. 45. Vercelli XV (Judgment), 260. 46. Augustine, De civitate dei, ed. Dombart and Kalb, trans. Dyson, 21.18; In Iohannis euangelium tractatus, ed. Willems, trans. Rettig, 98.8. 47. See Hawk 2018, 171–200, analyzing the late twelfth-­century homiliary Bodley 343. 48. For the controversy, see Chapter One, n. 29, above. For the intellectual culture of the Carolingian aristocracy, see Wormald and Nelson 2007, building on McKitterick 1989. 49. Catholic Homilies, First Series, Praefatio, lines 54–55; Second Series, IX (Saint Gregory), lines 7–8. On Ælfric’s attribution of The Old En­glish Bede to Alfred, see Rowley 2011, 37–38. 50. William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum, ed. and trans. Mynors et al., 1.192–95. Higden, Polychronicon, ed. Babington and Rawson. 51. Old En­glish Orosius, ed. and trans. Godden; Old En­glish Psalms, ed. and trans. O’Neill, 1–190; Wærferth, Old En­glish Gregory’s Dialogues, ed. Hecht. O’Neill 2015 reaffirms the case for the origins of the Alfredian Prose Psalms (1–50) in the ambit of the late ninth-­century Wessex court. For Alfred’s Manual, apparently a florilegium (set of Latin excerpts) glossed continuously in Old En­glish, see Asser, Life of Alfred, ed. Stevenson, 75; Alfred the ­Great, trans. Keynes and Lapidge, 100. 52. The Old En­glish Gospels are traditionally dated to the 960s and thus brought into the ambit of the Benedictine Reform. This is taken as likely, for example, in Liuzza’s account of the text in his edition. For a potential connection of the work with Æthelstan, see M. Wood 2007, 212–15, a plausible, if uncertain, argument that would date it ­earlier. On Æthelstan’s deep interest in biblical books, see Keynes 1985. On Æthelstan and the Carolingians, see Ortenberg 2010. 53. See Junius Manuscript, ed. Krapp; Old Testament Narratives, ed. and trans. Anlezark, 1–299 (“Genesis A,” “Genesis B,” “Exodus,” “Daniel”); Old En­glish Poems of Christ and His Saints, ed. and trans. Clayton, 301–51 (“Christ and Satan”). See also Saxon Genesis, ed. Doane. On Junius 11, see Karkov 2001, Liuzza 2002. On the influence of vernacular German books, see Lockett 2002. 54. Heliand und Genesis, ed. Behaghel, also ed. Cathey, trans. Scott. On the poem’s connection to one or other Louis, see Hummer 2006, 130–54, arguing the case for Louis the Pious against Haubrichs 1966, who argues that for Louis the German. 55. Bredehoft 2009, 65–103, citing Asser’s Life of Alfred, 59–62. 56. Alfred, Hierdeboc, ed. Sweet, 7, discussed in Chapter One, Section 1, above. 57. Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni, ed. and trans. Firchow and Zeydel. For the cultural influence of the Carolingian court, see Cubitt 2003. For Alfred’s self-­fashioning along Carolingian lines, see Keynes 1999, Pratt 2007b. For Asser and Einhard, see Kalmar 2014. 58. William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum, 1.180–97; Keynes 1999. 59. Alfred, Hierdeboc, 7, often compared with Asser, Life of Alfred, 88–89, 92–6, trans. in Alfred the ­G reat, 107, 109–10. Asser describes the school Alfred founded for his son Æthelweard, other noble boys, and some “of lesser birth.” For the vernacular focus of its pedagogical program,

436

Notes to Pages 252–261

see Godden 2002a. For lay aristocratic education, see Bullough 1991, 297–334; Lapidge 1993, 1–48. 60. Text and translation from Old En­glish Boethius: With Verse Prologues and Epilogues Associated with King Alfred, ed. and trans. Godden and Irvine, 404–7. See also Wærferth, Old En­ glish Gregory’s Dialogues, 2, from London, British Library MS Cotton Otho C.1. For the text, see Yerkes 1980. For the topos of the speaking book, see O’Keeffe 2005. For the Alfredian prefaces, see Godden 2011, S. Irvine 2015a. Godden suggests that an antecedent may be the Latin verse prologues of Alcuin but also cites vernacular prolegomena, such as the Heliand and Otfrid of Weissenberg’s Evangelienbuch, ed. Edmann, from the 860s. 61. Text and translation from Old En­glish Boethius, 410–13. See Alfred, Hierdeboc, 467–68; also now Old En­glish Pastoral Care, ed. Fulk. For sources, including Gregory, Regula pastoralis III.14, see Whobrey 1991. 62. The Old En­glish Soliloquies, ed. Carnicelli, 47–48. Thanks to Leslie Lockett for sharing a draft of her forthcoming edition and translation for the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, from which the translation ­here is taken. On the literary forest (silva), see M. Irvine 1994, 435–37. On the ­legal language involving land and landownership, see S. Smith 2012, 122–35, with bibliography. 63. “Exodus,” in Old Testament Narratives, ed. and trans. Anlezark, line 1; “Christ II” in Cynewulf, Old En­glish Poems of Cynewulf, ed. and trans. Bjork, lines 440–42 (as the poem’s opening lines are ­here conventionally numbered), from the Exeter Book. For the hypothesis that the poem addresses a lay patron, see K. Sisam 1932a. 64. “Exodus,” lines 516, 531–32, 587–89. On the pos­si­ble influence of Augustine, see Walton 2013. For the theme of God’s chosen ­people, see Savage 2001. 65. Cynewulf, “Christ II,” lines 815, 640, 797–807. On the poem’s sources and their deployment, see Grosz 2001. For a general study, see Birkett 2014. 66. Cynewulf, “Christ II,” lines 670–80. 67. Ibid., lines 789–93. 68. For the argument that the final part of King Edgar’s Establishment of the Monasteries, written in the first person, represents the Edgar’s speech and not that of the translator, Æthelwold, see Pratt 2012. 69. Æthelwold, King Edgar’s Establishment of Monasteries, 151. 70. Ibid., 151–52. 71. On Ælfric’s prolegomenal self-­representation, see Swan 2009. For careful editions and contextualizing studies of all his prologues, En­glish and Latin, see Ælfric’s Prefaces, ed. Wilcox. 72. Ælfric, Lives of Saints, ed. and trans. Clayton and Mullins, vol. 1, 2–5. On Ælfric’s disavowals of translation, see Stanton 2002, 155–61. 73. Ælfric, Preface to Genesis, ed. Wilcox, lines 7–10, 23–27. For Ælfric’s anx­i­eties and translation policies, apparently derived from Jerome, see Stanton 2002, 101–43. On codicological contexts, see Griffith 2000, Menzer 2000. On an Isidoran source for the preface, see Hawk 2014. 74. Preface to Genesis, lines 11–16. For analy­sis, see Griffith 1999. 75. Compare Stephenson 2015, 135–57; also O’Keeffe forthcoming.

chapter 15 1. Cnut’s Proclamation, in Wulfstan, Old En­glish L ­ egal Writings, ed. and trans. Rabin, 226– 31 at 226–27, also known as Letter from Cnut to the P ­ eople of E ­ ngland. See Lawson 1992.



Notes to Pages 262–267

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2. See Rule of St. Benedict, ed. and trans. Fry, caps. 23–30. On insular Benedictine hagiography in the tenth and eleventh centuries, see O’Keeffe 2012. 3. Libellus de veteri testamenti et novo, ed. Marsden, 201, lines 14–20. For translation and study, see Letter to Sigewearth, ed. and trans. Swain. On Ælfric’s calibrated approach to making biblical materials available to aristocratic patrons, see O’Keeffe, forthcoming. 4. Rule of St. Benedict, ed. and trans. Fry, cap. 58; Æthelwold, Old En­glish Benedictine Rule, ed. Schröer, 97.3–4, trans. Riyeff, 114. 5. For early En­glish Latinity and the crucial roles it played in sustaining monastic identity, see Townsend 2012 and the essays collected in Stephenson and Thornbury 2016. 6. Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents, vol 3, 316, translated in En­glish Historical Documents, 737–38 (Bede); vol. 3, 366, art. 10 (Clovesho). See Chapter One, Section 1, above. 7. For Byrthferth’s repre­sen­ta­tion of En­glish, see Stephenson 2015, especially 102–32. 8. Edited by Dodwell and Clemoes. On Claudius  B.iv at Canterbury, see Withers 2007, especially 159–82. The manuscript is viewable online via http://­w ww​.­bl​.­uk​/­manuscripts. 9. Gneuss and Lapidge 2014 list 950 surviving books “written or owned in ­England up to 1100.” CMCAS lists nearly four hundred “manuscripts containing Anglo-­Saxon” up to 1200, but the main contents of many of ­these books are in Latin, while in some, the Old En­glish consists of a few glosses or marginalia. As is also the case with texts and books in Old En­glish, many additional insular Latin texts and books can be inferred by vari­ous means and with vari­ous degrees of confidence. Some of ­these are listed in Lapidge 2006. ­Others can be tracked through the Fontes Anglo-­Saxonici database. 10. T. Hall 2007, 227. On readings for the night office, see Gatch 1985. For copies of Latin homiliaries in ­England, especially the Homiliary of Angers (perhaps tenth ­century and of insular composition), see Rudolf 2010. For an edition, see Conti 2004, and on its influence, see Conti 2009, discussing the “Taunton Fragment,” a newly discovered homiletic text announced in Gretsch 2004. 11. On Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, ed. Clayton and Mullins, and liturgy at Eynsham, see Lapidge 1996. The most extensive collection of Ælfric’s ­later homilies is Homilies of Ælfric, ed. Pope. 12. Gittos 2014, an impor­tant study, quotations at 247, 265. Gittos traces the topos of the image as a book for “idiotae” from Gregory’s letters to Serenus of Marseilles, through allusions in Bede, to tenth-­century ­England. She follows the careful analy­sis of the early Latin sources of Ælfric’s prefaces and translation policies in Stanton 2002, 144–71, especially Jerome, emphasizing their essentially rhetorical character. Her doubts about Ælfric’s expressions of anxiety are fueled by Major 2006, an exploration of Ælfric’s ruminations on Pentecost. For the letters to Serenus, see Gregory the ­Great, Epistolae, ed. Norberg, trans. Martyn, IX.209, XI.10, with illuminating discussion in Chazelle 1990. For translatio studii in Alfred’s preface to the Hierdeboc, see Chapter One, Section 1, above. For the concept of the topos, see Curtius 1948, trans. 1953. 13. On the Latinity of Æthelweard and Æthelmær, see Gretsch 2009, 132–37, drawing on Æthelweard, Chronicle, ed. and trans. Campbell, for which see also Gretsch 2012. On this work’s addressee, see van Houts 1992. 14. This despite reappraisals of the religious outlook of Æthelred and Cnut by Roach 2016 and Bolton 2017, and of early En­glish religious culture more broadly by Foxhall Forbes 2013, in which Wulfstan figures prominently. Wulfstan’s special aura in recent years is in considerable part the result of Patrick Wormald’s charismatic scholarship, e.g., Wormald 1999. 15. On divine grace and receptivity to preaching, see, e.g., Ælfric, Catholic Homilies, First Series, ed. Clemoes, XXII (In Die Sancto Pentecosten), quoted in Chapter One, Section 1, above. 16. See Grondeux 2005, discussed in Chapter One, Section 2, n. 40 above.

438

Notes to Pages 267–271

17. For the distinctiveness of early insular attitudes to written vernaculars, see , e.g., Walton 2015, Blom 2017. 18. For Charlemagne’s ­career and system of imperial governance, see especially McKitterick 2008. For the history of scholarly dispute over most ­things Carolingian, see de Jong 2015. 19. J. Nelson 1986a, 1986b, 1994. Still useful is Ullman 1969. 20. On Carolingian Benedictinism, see J. Clark 2011, 5–59; Diem 2016. For its wider place within the Carolingian religious and cultural system, see Choy 2016. 21. On this theme, see especially de Jong 2000 and 2009, Phelan 2014. 22. For a fine study of the genre, see Romig 2017, introduced in Chapter Eight, Section 3, above. On En­glish versions of the De virtutibus, see Lees 1985; Old En­glish Alcuin, ed. Warner. 23. On synodalia, see van Rhijn 2007. On Carolingian preaching, see Diesenberter et al. 2013, especially McCune 2013. On pastoral handbooks for priests, see ­Water and the Word, ed. Keefe, a superlative edition and study of all sixty such handbooks from the Carolingian era. On the modeling of Carolingian imperial religion around aristocratic episcopal values derived from late antiquity, see M. Moore 2011, 243–85. 24. See Bullough 2004 for the chronology of Alcuin’s ­career. For a recent study, see Dales 2013. Witt 2012, 17–35, provocatively suggests that Alcuin’s main influences ­were not insular but Lombard. In relation to the sociolinguistic structures that ­shaped how Eu­ro­pean intellectuals thought about Latin, this argument may m ­ istake the flow of intellectual influence at this period. 25. For what follows, see R. Wright 1981, a fundamental contribution to what Wright himself terms “sociophilological” history; as well as R. Wright 1991 and the essays gathered in R. Wright 2002. See also Banniard 1992, another remarkable study. More recently, see Geary 2009 and 2013, from which this discussion has learned much. 26. Charlemagne, Admonitio generalis, ed. Mordek et al.; Charlemagne: Translated Sources, trans. King, 209–20. On the distribution of the Admonitio generalis, see McKitterick 2008, 263– 66. For the work’s cultural and literary context, see Contreni 1995. 27. Alcuin, Ars grammatica; De dialectica; De orthographia, ed. Migne; Disputatio de rhetorica, ed. and trans. Howell. For a contextual study, see M. Irvine 1994, 313–33. 28. Charlemagne, Epistola de litteris colendis, ed. Martin, 231–32; Translations and Reprints, trans. Munro, 12–14. For Alcuin’s probable authorship of this letter, see Wallach 1951. 29. Raaijmaker 2012, especially 72–98 (Baugaulf ) and 175–264 (Hrabanus Maurus). 30. Alcuin, Ars grammatica, col. 854; R. Wright 1981, 345–51. 31. On the initial controversy over Roger Wright’s thesis, see Versteegh 1992. For a sympathetic early assessment, see McKitterick 1989, 8–16. The essays in R. Wright 2002 restate the thesis in light of subsequent work and situate it an array of scholarly contexts. 32. The divergence between spoken and written forms of Latin would have been similar to ­those experienced by modern speakers of En­glish or French, neither of whose spelling systems is “a reliable guide to the phonetic habits of writers in ­those languages” (R. Wright 1981, 344). 33. For dif­fer­ent approaches to the diversification of “vulgar Latin,” see Herman 1997; J. Adams 2007; Banniard 2013, 57–106. 34. R. Wright 2002, 95–109; Willibald, Vitae Sancti Bonifatii, ed. Levison, 21. 35. Letters to the king from “many” (“nonnullis”) monasteries are said to contain “proper thoughts” (“sensus rectos”) improperly expressed in “rustic language” (“sermones incultos”). It appeared that, for the senders, “the tongue, uneducated by neglect of study, was incapable of expressing externally without solecism ­matters that pious devotion was faithfully speaking to the mind” (“quia quod pia devotio interius fideliter dictabat, hoc exterius propter neglegentiam discendi lingua inerudita exprimere sine reprehensione non valebat”). Charlemagne, Epistola de litteris colendis, 232–33; Translations and Reprints, ed. Munro, 5.12–14.



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36. M. Irvine 1994, 289, part of an analy­sis of Bede’s grammatical thought in its wider En­ glish and Eu­ro­pean context (272–333). See especially Irvine’s figure 7.4 on Bede and the basic divisions of the ars grammatica as it was understood in the eighth c­ entury (288). 37. Anonymus ad Cuimnanum, ed. Bischoff and Löfstedt, lines 551–52. For an analy­sis of the prologue from which this quotation is taken, see Tunbridge 1992, 16–33. On the work’s influence on Bede’s grammatical thought, see M. Irvine 1994, 279–82. On insular grammars more broadly, see Law 1982. 38. R. Wright 1981, 351. 39. On t­ hese texts, see Zink 2001, 25–40. 40. On Carolingian grammars, see Law 1997, 125–64. On Carolingian literary Latinity, see Poetry of the Carolingian Re­nais­sance, ed. Godman; Godman 1986. 41. Banniard 1992, 335–47. 42. R. Wright 1993, 82, complains of “Alcuin’s self-­contradictory determination to achieve both grammatical correctness . . . ​a nd effective widespread preaching, two desiderata hitherto combined by intelligent compromise from native speakers.” 43. On Smaragdus, see Ponesse 2012. On Haymo, see Etaix 1991. On their En­glish circulation, see Smetana 1961, J. Hill 1992a. 44. Concilia Aevi Karolini, ed. Werminghoff, vol. 1, 288. For the manuscript rubric at ibid., 196, “De officio praedicationis, ut iuxta quod intellegere vulgus possit assiduae fiat” (on the office of preaching, that it should be assiduously performed so that the populace can understand it), see R. Wright 1981, 353–59. Wright discusses reissues of this edict, e.g., at the Council of Metz in 847, addressed to a mainly German-­speaking, rather than Gallo-­Latin-­speaking, populace. The small size of dialectal speech communities and proximity of groups that speak dif­fer­ ent languages, sometimes including Celtic languages, is presupposed by all ­these edicts. 45. Alfred, Hierdeboc, ed. and trans. Sweet, 7. See now also Old En­glish Pastoral Care, ed. and trans. Fulk, 8. 46. A recent booklength study of Babel and the ­Table of Nations in early ­England is Major 2018. On the topic of the next few paragraphs, compare Geary 2013, 38–55. 47. Otfrid, Evangelienbuch, ed. Erdmann, 4. Otfried was a student of Hrabanus Maurus at Fulda. No copy of the Evangelienbuch is known from E ­ ngland, but it may have circulated ­there. 48. Concilium Francofurtense, ed. Werminghoff, 171, canon 52. See Richter 2006; Geary 2013, 44. 49. Asser, Life of Alfred, ed. Stevenson, 60, a list of nations from which Alfred made up his ­house­hold. 50. Auraicept na n-­éces, ed. and trans. Ahlqvist 1.1–11, quotations at 1.2, 1.8–9. Alhqvist edits what is understood to be the earliest version of the text, which accrued materials over time. Acken 2008, vii–­x xix, reviews the arguments over dating, discusses the work’s expansion across the ninth and tenth centuries, and situates it within the story of the development of insular Latin grammars. On this last, see Poppe 1995–97 and Hofman 2013, who argues on generic grounds that some levels of commentary may have formed part of the core text. 51. Auraicept na nÉces: The Scholars Primer, ed. and trans. Calder, 4, lines 49–50, perhaps from a layer of the text ­later than Alfred. Thanks to Joseph Nagy and Catherine McKenna ­here. 52. On the Slavic mission, see Tachaios 2001. See also Vita of Constantine and Vita of Methodius, ed. and trans. Kantor and White. On the Glagolithic alphabet, see, e.g., Mathiesen 2014. 53. Xrabr, On the Letters (O pismenexƄ), ed. Džambeluka-­Josova, ed. and trans. Veder, 163– 64. Although copies are late, the work is sometimes dated to the late ninth ­century or the first quarter of the tenth (other scholars date it to the late tenth ­century). Thanks to Michael Flier h ­ ere.

440

Notes to Pages 276–286

54. John VIII, Epistulae 255, ed. Caspar and Laehr, 223–24. Translation largely from Geary 2009, 870. See Geary 2013, 52–55, for Gregory VII’s brief attempt to walk this permission back in a letter written at the end of 1070s. 55. On ninth-­century Old En­glish prose, see R. Gallagher 2018. On Frankish/Carolingian influence on late eighth-­and early ninth-­century ­England, see Story 2003. 56. For this part of the Hierdeboc prologue, see Chapter One, Section 1, above. 57. Old En­glish Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn, ed. and trans. Anlezark, who argues for their Glastonbury provenance and Irish analogues in his introduction. For early En­glish riddling in the tradition of Symphosius’s Aenigmata, in Latin and En­glish, see Niles 2005. For secrecy as a literary and ethical preoccupation in monastic culture, see Saltzmann 2019, 161–240. 58. Godden 2002b, 520, suggests that “­t here is no reason to suppose that they [Ælfric’s homilies] represent a form of language close to speech, or that they are in any way a rec­ord of discourse which originated in oral improvisation.” It bears emphasizing that nothing moderns would consider close to complete orthographic, let alone lexical, standardization in writing West Saxon En­glish, ­free of regional variants, was ever achieved, or, perhaps, seriously attempted. 59. Dance 2004, Pons-­Sanz 2007. 60. Notker the German, Deutschen Brief an Bischof Hugo von Sitten, ed. Hellgardt, 172–73. The letter lists Notker’s surviving translations—­Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae, Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercuriae, Aristotle’s De interpretatione and De categoriis, and the Psalms—­a longside lost translations of the Disticha Catonis and Virgil’s Bucolics. For editions, see Die Werke Notkers, ed. King and Tax. For an introduction in En­glish, see J. West 2004. Copeland 1991, 97–107, offers a compelling account of the sociolinguistic assumptions ­behind Notker’s De nuptiis Philologiae. 61. On Carolingian Latin writing for and by the aristocracy, see McKitterick 1989, 211–70 and Romig 2017. Tyler 2017, 26–7, draws a comparison with Alfredian En­glish prose.

chapter 16 1. Old En­glish Distichs of Cato, ed. Cox, discussion in Treharne 2003. For Vespasian D.xiv, which itself includes a version of the Distichs, see Early En­glish Homilies, ed. Warner. For the vitae, see Old En­glish Lives of St Margaret, ed. and trans. Clayton and Magennis; Old En­glish Life of St Nicholas with Old En­glish Life of St Giles, ed. and trans. Treharne. All are copied from exemplars now lost. Magennis 1996 considers the Corpus 303 St Margaret alongside the other Old En­glish life, also written for a primarily lay audience, in Cotton Tiberius A.iii. On Corpus 303, see Treharne PUEMd, who argues for a relatively late dating. The manuscript can be viewed online via https://­parker​.­stanford​.­edu​/­parker​/­. 2. See Chapter Twenty, Section 1, below. 3. On the “old” and “new” learning, see Jaeger 1994. Further work is needed on the ­later history of vernacular glossing as a specifically academic practice. 4. On consciousness of linguistic change in twelfth-­century Britain, see the major body of sociolinguistic reflection in historical and ­legal writings of the period analyzed by Sara Harris 2017. 5. William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum, ed. and trans. Mynors et al. On William, see R. Thomson ODNB. For the politics of language and style in Anglo-­Latin texts throughout the period, see Townsend 1991 and Townsend 2012. 6. See, e.g., Goscelin, Hagiography of the Female Saints of Ely, ed. and trans. Love. On eleventh-­century Benedictine hagiography in its demanding monastic context, see O’Keeffe 2012,



Notes to Pages 287–290

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a brilliant contextualizing study. On the tradition of hagiographic composition at St. Bertin from which Goscelin’s work emerged, see Defries 2019. 7. On William’s royal addressees, see Weiler 2009. 8. Eadmer, Vita et miracula S. Dunstani, ed. and trans. Turner and Muir, 44. On William’s literary style, see R. Thomson 2005, Winterbottom, 2017. 9. For ­these paragraphs, see Volume 2, Part I. A classic, if controversial, account of Eu­ rope’s changing Latinities at this period is Jaeger 1994. Early twelfth-­century French works by Benedictines include Benedeit’s Voyage de saint Brendan, ed. and trans. Short and Merrilees; Vie de saint Alexis, ed. and French trans. Perugi and Fasseur; and Oxford Psalter, ed. Short. Although we do not know where Vie de saint Alexis was written, both ­these last works are associated with the Benedictine ­house of St. Albans and its satellite, Markyate, and specifically with Markyate’s ­great first abbess, Christina. Philippe de Thaon (also Thaun), author of a verse Comput, ed. Short, and other works, was a secular cleric. On this work, see T. O’Donnell 2017. Like Benedeit, Philippe worked at the court of Henry I. 10. On Old En­glish in post-­Conquest Worcester, see Swan 2007a. Franzen 1991, 29–102, itemizes the books glossed by the Tremulous Hand. ­These include many homiliaries, as well as Æthelwold’s The Old En­glish Benedictine Rule, Alfred’s Hierdeboc (two), Wærferth’s Old En­glish Gregory’s Dialogue (two), and The Old En­glish Bede. 11. For the linguistic differences between Old En­glish and early ­Middle En­glish in general, see Blake 1992, 9–13. For morphology and phonology, see Lass 1992, especially 24–26. Other chapters of Blake 1992 discuss ­Middle En­glish lexis, syntax, and dialect down to the fifteenth ­century. For a case study of word replacement in the twelfth ­century, see Dance 2011. 12. Faulkner 2012a, quotation at 202. On charters, see Pelteret 1990 and (on forged charters) O’Brien 1995, with further bibliography. The classic study of archaizing in early ­Middle En­glish is Stanley 1969. As Faulkner notes, much more work is needed ­here. For Orrm’s spelling system in brief, see Early ­Middle En­glish Verse and Prose, ed. Bennett and Smithers, 174. For its importance to historical linguistics, Lass 1992, 31–32. 13. “Hoc volumen continet multam copiam sermonum in Anglico, non appreciatum propter idioma incognitum.” Cambridge University Library MS Ii.1, 33, fol. 29r, originally its first folio. Noted in CMCAS, xlix. See Da Rold PUEMa. 14. Old En­glish Apollonius, ed. Goolden, trans. Thorpe. For Corpus 201, one of two books that contains most of Wulfstan’s homilies, see Treharne PUEMb. For its Wulfstan materials, see Wormald 1999, 204–10. This discussion of this book is based on that by Tyler 2017, 41–44. By contrast, Anlezark 2006 argues that Corpus 201 was made for ­women religious. The book can be viewed online via https://­parker​.­stanford​.­edu​/­parker​/­. For a study of the Apollonius story, with edition and translation of the Latin text, see Archibald 1991. For the work’s eroticism, unusual in Old En­glish texts, see Townsend 2004. 15. See Tyler 2017, 43, in the second case quoting from Stafford 1997, 229. 16. See Chapter Fourteen, Section 4, above. 17. Old En­glish Apollonius, 42, lines 30–31. Although the language ­here recalls a common topos where the reader is asked to correct any deficiencies in the work, the word “hele” (conceal) suggests we should understand this colophon as a per­for­mance instruction. 18. For discussion of eleventh-­and twelfth-­century Latin and French works for royal and noble readers, especially queens, see Tyler 2017. The next works in En­glish clearly written for a member of the upper aristocracy is the set of translations of chronicles, encyclopedias, and other works made by John Trevisa for Thomas, Lord Berkeley, in the 1380s and 1390s. For Trevisa, see Waldron ODNB. Texts written for gentry ­house­holds are a more complicated story. 19. On the importance of vernacular charters, see Sara Harris 2017, 38–45.

442

Notes to Pages 291–293

20. William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum, I.46; Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, ed. and trans. Greenway, V.19. On the “almost unique hybrid of Latin and vernacular poetic techniques” in Henry’s Latinizing of The ­Battle of Brunanburh, see Rigg 1991, 64–65. For Henry’s metric assumptions and decisions, see the edition in Weiskott 2016, 183–89. Geffrei Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis, ed. and trans. Short, lines 6466–82. 21. Anglo-­Saxon Chronicle: MS F, ed. Baker (London, British Library MS Cotton Domitian A.viii), the revised Old En­glish and Latin Canterbury version (viewable online via https://­ www​.­bl​.­uk​/­manuscripts​/ ­); Peterborough Chronicle, ed. Clark, trans. Rositzke, the Peterborough continuation (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 636, viewable online via Digital Bodleian). Clark provides a full linguistic analy­sis, tracking shifts in language across time. 22. Liber Eliensis, ed. Blake, xlix, trans. Fairweather, xv-­x vi. The Old En­glish cartularies survive only in the Latin versions found in this book. Other vernacular sources include the Anglo-­ Saxon Chronicle and The ­Battle of Maldon, ed. Scragg, whose hero, Byrthnoth, was a patron of the monastery. See T. Hill 1997. On the stages of the composition of Liber Eliensis, see van Houts 1999. 23. Textus Roffensis, ed. Sawyer. See the essays in O’Brien and Bombi 2015, including O’Brien 2015a. On Old En­glish law codes in the twelfth ­century, see Wormald 1999, 162–263. On the archaic language of the codes, see Beginnings of En­glish Law, ed. Oliver, especially 25–34. For Latin versions of many Old En­glish law codes, see O’Brien 2015b. 24. Treharne PUEMg. The Eadwine Psalter is viewable online via the Wren Digital Library. For this argument, see Faulkner 2017, who carefully teases out the apparent stresses and strains within this orthographic proj­ect. Thanks to Mark Faulkner for sharing this essay with me before its publication. For the En­glish text, see Eadwine’s Canterbury Psalter, ed. Harsley; for the French, see Eadwine’s Psalter, ed. Markey. For rich discussions of the book, its layout, and its illustrations, which are closely modeled ­a fter ­those in the ninth-­century Utrecht Psalter (Utrecht, Universiteitsbibliotheek MS Bibl. Rhenotraiectinae I Nr 32; viewable online at http://­p salter​ .­library​.­uu​.­nl​/ ­), see Gibson et al. 1992. On its repre­sen­ta­tion of the past, see Karkov 2015; Sara Harris 2017, 79–89. The three other Canterbury biblical books from this period are (1) two relatively plain copies of The Old En­glish Gospels, London, British Library MS Royal 1.A.xiv (ca. 1150), (viewable online via https://­w ww​.­bl​.­uk​/­manuscripts​/ ­); (2) another copy, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Hatton 38 (ca. 1200); and (3) the elaborate annotation of the Old En­glish Illustrated Hexateuch in Cotton Claudius  B.iv. On this last (viewable online via https://­w ww​.­bl​.­u k​ /­manuscripts​/ ­), see Doane and Stoneman 2011. 25. See Karn 2015, who notes that the Latin part of the book opens with a translation into Latin of Cnut’s laws, the only vernacular code still acknowledged as current. The Latin part of the book was also subject to regular updates and insertions, as the En­glish part was not. 26. See also O’Brien 2015b, analyzing late twelfth-­century Latin copies of ­earlier En­glish law codes that do not form part of the corpus described in PUEM. ­These often quote phrases of Old En­glish, sometimes in a distinctive script, despite the fact that “En­glish as a language for ­legal collections or ­legal compositions faded away (if not dis­appeared) soon ­a fter c. 1150” (245). For post-­Conquest ­legal En­glish, see also Pelteret 1990. 27. Note that ­t hese generalizations are complicated by the continued presence of Norse, Welsh, and Cornish, as well as the relatively recent but widespread presence of Hebrew. 28. On the use of En­glish in teaching Latin, down to ca. 1200, see Kornexl 2003. 29. Franzen 1991, 80. Despite emphasizing his pastoral interests, Franzen also considers the Tremulous Hand as a philologist, interested in Old En­glish in its own right. 30. O’Brien 2015b, 141.



Notes to Pages 293–296

443

31. On the March and its multilingual lit­er­a­t ures, see Henley 2017, Guy et al. 2020. On early use of the term “March” and its shifting definition, see Lieberman 2010, 1–22. 32. Cases in point, discussed in Volume 2, Part II, include London, British Library MS Egerton 613; London, British Library Cotton Caligula A.ix; and Oxford, Jesus College MS 29. For Egerton, see B. Hill 1977. For Caligula and Jesus, see Cartlidge 1997. 33. Laing and Lass 2008, introducing LAEME, is exemplary, as is Laing 2000. 34. For the difficulties both of dating early ­Middle En­glish and of adjusting arguments and scholarly sensibilities to new evidence, ­here with re­spect to Layamon’s Brut, see Jane Roberts 2013. 35. See Millett 2011, drawing on Laing and Lass 2008. Compare Hanna 2005, 1–43. 36. On Becket, see Barlow 1986; and, for the new ecclesiastical and artistic order that his murder ushered in, Binski 2005. On the explosive growth of the Becket cult, see Webster and Gelin 2016. A superbly orchestrated literary response to Becket’s murder is Clemence of Barking’s Life of Saint Catherine, ed. MacBain, trans. Wogan-­Browne and Burgess, written at the abbey in which a penitent Henry II had installed Becket’s ­sister, Mary, as abbess. For the poem’s relation to its po­liti­cal context, see Ni 2019. 37. Layamon, Brut, ed. Brooke and Leslie, trans. Allen. Brooke and Leslie pre­sent Caligula and Otho on facing pages. The earliest modern edition and translation was by Sir Frederic Madden in 1847. Layamon localizes “Ernleye” by also referring to a famous landmark, the “Radestone” rock (lines 3–5). For Layamon himself, see Stanley ODNB. For the internal evidence concerning date, see Le Saux 1989, 1–13. In Caligula, Layamon refers to “the æthelen Ælienor / the wes Henries quene; ­these heyes kinges” (the noble Eleanor who was Henry, the high king’s, queen; lines 22–23). Henry II, Eleanor of Aquitaine’s husband, died in 1189 and Eleanor in 1204, while Henry III came to the throne in 1216 and then reigned ­until 1272. The past tense of “wes” references the first of ­these deaths and may do the second. The absence of any qualifier for the name “Henry” seems to suggest that Henry III was not yet on the throne when Layamon wrote. A date before 1216 is thus ­here taken as probable. On manuscript dates and provenance, see Laing 1993, 69–70. Caligula was at one time thought to be ­earlier than Otho. On their relationship, see Weaver 2019, chapter 3. On Otho, which is not discussed h ­ ere, see Bryan 1999. 38. Proverbs of Alfred: An Emended Text, ed. Arngart, drawing on his ­earlier comparative edition and study, Proverbs of Alfred. Skeat’s revised edition of 1907, which (at xliv–vi) lists ­earlier editions from Reliquiae Antiquae, ed. Wright and Halliwell (1841–43), remains useful. Arngart accepts the identification of what manuscripts call “Seuorde,” “Siforde,” and “Sifforde” with Seaford in East Sussex and argues for the work’s composition nearby. This is generally consistent with the new evidence presented by LAELME. The four copies are London, British Library MS Cotton Galba A.xix (mostly extant only in early transcriptions); Maidstone Museum MS A.13 (se­lections); Cambridge, Trinity College MS, B.14.39 (the fullest version, which Arngart uses as his base); and Oxford, Jesus College MS 29. Laing 1993, 76, 120–21 dates the first two ca. 1200. Trinity B.14.39 was written a­ fter 1253, Jesus 29 a­ fter 1272: see Reichl, Religiöse Dichtung, 46–48; Cartlidge 1996. Arngart dates The Proverbs of Alfred to before 1150, but this has not been accepted by scholars. A date in the last quarter of the twelfth ­century is ­here taken as likely. On the meter, ­here represented in the format that came to be used for alliterative poetry ­a fter the mid-­ thirteenth ­century, see Weiskott 2016, 84–85; Cornelius 2017, 97–98. Thanks to Ian Cornelius and Eric Weiskott for advice ­here. 39. For Lateran III, see Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, volume 1, 211–25. For the pastoral theology of the interconciliar period, see Boyle 1986, Goering 1992. The council’s concern with purity and discipline extended to the inclusion of injunctions against sodomy, as well as canons

444

Notes to Pages 297–298

that seek to limit Christian interactions with Jews and the rights of Jews. For ­these decrees in the wider context of official persecution at this period, see R. Moore 2007, 6–61. 40. Poema Morale, ed. Lewin, ed. and trans. Morris from two early copies, Trinity College MS B.14.52, and London, Lambeth MS 487. Although this poem cannot be discussed ­here, for its inclusion in Trinity B.14.52, see Chapter Nineteen, Section 2. The poem is also in three early thirteenth-­century copies, once in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 4, and twice in dif­fer­ ent parts of Egerton 613, as well as two from ­later in the ­century. ­These are Jesus 29 (as “tractatus quidem in Anglico”) and Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, McClean 123 (the Nuneaton Book). Passages have also been identified in three more books, including Maidstone A.13. For accounts of the poem, see PCMEP; B. Hill 1977; and C. Thomas 2019, who gives an updated list of manuscripts and stemma, based on Zupitza 1878. For parallels with Guischart’s Sermon, ed. Gabrielson, ANL sec. 597, see Gabrielson 1912; Se­lections from Early ­Middle En­glish, ed. Hall, 329– 54; and Younge 2016, 73–76. The standard modern title arguably works as well as Betty Hill’s proposed alternative “The Conduct of Life.” 41. Orrm, Orrmulum, ed. Holt and White; see also N. Ker 1940; GMEBL, sec. Orm, Ormulum. Not in Repertorium, which does not include homilies written in verse. A new edition with extensive commentary by the late Nils-­Lennart Johannesson is forthcoming, both online (see https://­w ww​.­english​.­su​.­se​/­ormulum) and in print. Thanks to Johannesson’s collaborator, Andrew Cooper, who is completing the edition, for updates. The Holt edition counts some nineteen thousand lines, dividing each fifteen-­s yllable septenary line into two (8/7). For an analy­sis of the meter, ­here represented in long lines with a central caesura, see Solopova 1996. For the work’s language and orthography, see Burchfield 1956. For provenance and date, the first based on dialect analy­sis, the second on the dating of the hand of the Latin rubrics added to Orrm’s working copy, see Parkes 1983, an article that grounds all l­ater research. Johannesson’s research into sources confirms Bourne as the institutional home of both the work and its author. For Junius 1, a complex book with idiosyncratic handwriting, irregular quiring, and a range of leaf sizes, see Faulkner PUEM, who rightly calls the book “the first volume of the Orrmulum.” For “Orrm’s microcosm,” see line 17596; and Ashe 2019, 39–40. A digital facsimile of the manuscript is available online through Digital Bodleian. 42. Vices and Virtues, ed. and trans. Holthausen, quotation at 121.26–27. ­There is also a thesis edition by Judith M. Crawford, who assem­bles evidence for authorship at xxxii–iv. On this topic, see also Chapter Eigh­teen, Section 2, below. For the date and provenance of Stowe 34, see Laing 1993, 106. Investigating its twelfth-­century sources, Pelle 2015a provisionally dates the work itself to the period 1170–1200, around the period of Orrmulum and the Trinity Homilies. 43. Trinity Homilies, ed. and trans. Morris. See Treharne PUEMf; Repertorium, volume 1, 139–96. Lambeth Homilies, ed. and trans. Morris. See Swan PUEM; Repertorium, volume 2, 1572– 82; Hanna 2009. For date and provenance, see Millett 2007, 44–45, who discusses the likely setting in which the collections ­were used at 55–56. Hanna dates Lambeth to ca. 1200. On this book’s Old En­glish homilies, see Swan 2007b. On its exemplars, see C. Sisam 1951. 44. For a parallel-­text edition of all the works introduced ­here, see Ancrene Wisse Group Parallel Texts, ed. Kubouchi et al. For a bibliographic introduction, see Millett 1996a. All the works in the group with a brief exception are translated in Anchoritic Spirituality by Savage and Watson. 45. EETS editions of ­these three books are listed in the bibliography ­under Ancrene Riwle. All are viewable online via https://­w ww​.­bl​.­uk​/­manuscripts​/­. A mid-­thirteenth-­century se­lection from the work, in Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College MS 234/120, edited by R. M. Wilson, is not discussed below, though of considerable interest.



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46. Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, dates and descriptions at vol. I, xi–xx. Millett’s translation of Ancrene Wisse is a companion volume to her edition. For date and provenance, see Chapter Twenty, Section 1. ­Later versions are listed in Millett 1996a, 51–59, and discussed in the Coda. Viewable online via Parker Library on the Web. 47. See Katherine Group: MS Bodley 34, ed. Huber and Robertson; Medieval En­glish Prose for ­Women, ed. and trans. Millett and Wogan-­Browne. For other editions and translations, see Millett 1996a, 37–39. The date range of ­these works is at issue in Chapter Twenty, Section 2. 48. Wooing of Our Lord and Wooing Group Prayers, ed. and trans. Innes-­Parker. ­These works ­were first edited and translated by Richard Morris in Old En­glish Homilies, First Series in the 1860s. The term “Wooing Group” derives from Wohunge of Ure Lauerd, ed. Thompson. Innes-­ Parker 2013 forcefully argues for the inclusion of the verse Ureisun of Ure Lefdi in the group. 49. Old En­glish Homilies from MS Bodley 343, ed. Irvine; Conti 2011; Conti and Da Rold PUEM. Vespasian Homilies, ed. and trans. Morris; M. Richards 1978; Swan 2007b; H. Morgan PUEM. Winteney-­Version der Regula S. Benedicti, ed. Schröer; Gretsch 1978; Jayatilaka 2003, 158– 66; Artamonova 2009; Da Rold PUEMb. For a comprehensive list of works in early ­Middle En­ glish, see Laing 1993. On Worcester F. 174, see Chapter 11, Section 2, above. 50. Reginald of Durham, Libellus de Vita et Miraculis S. Godrici, ed. Stevenson. A new edition by Margaret Coombe for Oxford Medieval Texts (OMT) is imminent. On Godric, see Tudor ODNB. For early editions of his songs, see Godric, “Cantus beati Godrici,” ed. Zupitza; also Trend 1928. On the songs, their ­music, per­for­mance, and circulation, see Deeming 2005, Coombe 2017. 51. Liber Eliensis, ed. Blake, 154, trans. Fairweather, 181–82. For discussion, see I. Nelson 2017, 1–5; E. Parker 2018. The chronicle is explicit that Cnut himself wrote the song that describes his actions. 52. The Owl and the Nightingale, ed. and trans. Cartlidge, long treated as written ca. 1200 is now often dated nearer the end of the ­century (see xiii–­x vi, drawing on Cartlidge 1996). Its injunction to pray for the soul of “King Henry” (lines 1091–92) is likely to refer to Henry III (d. 1272), rather than his grand­father Henry II (d. 1189). Dates of other thirteenth-­century poems, such as the ­Middle En­glish Physiologus, ed. Wirtjes, are uncertain, and some could perhaps predate 1250. For a listing of early ­Middle En­glish poems, which gives dates that for the most part fall on the early end of currently accepted ranges, see PCMEP. For a study of “lyric” as an emergent form at this period, see Lerer 1997.

chapter 17 1. On Henry II, see W. Warren 1973. On Angevin governance, see Jolliffe 1963. 2. On twelfth-­century historical writing in insular French, see Damian-­Grint 1999 and Urbanski 2013. On Latin historians, see Staunton 2017. Classic accounts are Southern 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973 (which set Anglo-­Latin historical writing in a wider, Eu­ro­pean context), and, in a dif­fer­ent vein, Gransden 1972, 136–403. 3. Proverbs of Alfred: An Emended Text, ed. Arngart, strophe 1, lines 1–16. 4. Ibid., lines 10, 63–66. On other pos­si­ble echoes of the Alfredian corpus, especially the Old En­glish Boethius, see O’Camb 2019. The Tremulous Hand glossed two copies of the Hierdeboc: Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Hatton 20, and Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 12. See Franzen 1991, 59–63, 121–24. 5. As suggested by Crépin 1994, 153. For an alternative identification with a twelfth-­century Alvred, local to Sussex, see Robert Rouse 2005, 33–37. The poem never mentions him again.

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Notes to Pages 303–306

6. See Yeager 2014, 114–20, on which this and the two paragraphs that follow are based. 7. Cnut, I Cnut, ed. and trans. Rabin, 232–33; Cnut’s Proclamation, ed. and trans. Rabin. 8. Proverbs of Alfred, stophe 2, lines 37–60. Compare, for example, the passage from Wulfstan’s Canons of Edgar quoted in Chapter 13, Section 2, above. 9. Proverbs of Alfred, lines 39–43, 76–98. Compare Wulfstan, Institutes of Polity, ed. and trans. Rabin. 10. See Weiler 2013, who argues that re­sis­tance to royal power was consistent episcopal policy throughout the En­glish late eleventh and twelfth centuries. See also Cantor 1958. 11. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, ed. Keats-­Rohan, trans. Nederman, IV.3. See Nederman and Campbell 1991. On Henry, Becket, and John of Salisbury, see respectively Keefe ODNB, Barlow ODNBa, Luscombe ODNB. Henry’s enactment of the Constitutions of Clarendon, ed. Brett and Brooke, in 1154 at an assembly similar to the one ­imagined in The Proverbs of Alfred caused sustained ecclesiastical concern. 12. Proverbs of Alfred, strophe 2, lines 31–34. 13. Terms used in the titles given the poem in Maidstone, Galba, and Trinity. Aelred of Rievaulx’s Genealogia rerum Anglorum, ed. Pezzini, 33, a work of the mid-1150s, describes the king as a purveyor of charming and amusing “parabole.” Wherever Aelred’s information came from, this is too early to be a reference to The Proverbs of Alfred. Not that much ­later, Marie de France claims Alfred as the source of her Fables, ed. and trans. Spiegel. For a study of The Proverbs of Alfred that emphasizes its proverbial, and thus largely otiose, character, see Cannon 2010. 14. Proverbs of Alfred, strophe 23, lines 411–12, modeled on Disticha Catonis, ed. Boas, 1.10 and 3.19: “Contra verbosos noli contendere verbis: / Sermo datur cunctis, animi sapientia paucis” (do not try to match words with the wordy; speech is given to all, wisdom of soul to few); “Inter convivas fac sis sermone modestus, / Ne dicare loquax, cum vis urbanus haberi” (at parties let your speech be sparing, in case you are called talkative when you want to be considered urbane). For t­ hese and other borrowings, see Arngart 1952. 15. “Thus cwath Alfred: ‘Wurth thu nevre swo wod, ne swo windrunken, / that evre segge thu thine wife alle thine wille. . . . ​Wimman is word-­wod and haveth tunge too swifte’ ” (Thus said Alfred: “Never become so mad nor so drunk with wine that you ever tell your wife your ­whole purpose. W ­ omen are word-­mad and have very rapid tongues”). Proverbs of Alfred, lines 268– 72, 282–83, a relatively mild example of misogynist advice whose role, as always, is to sharpen the poem’s account of masculinity. Textual variance can best be tracked by way of Olaf Arngart’s 2-­volume edition of all the poem’s versions (1942–55). 16. Proverbs of Alfred, lines 537–682. Arngart’s edition ends the poem with stophes 28 and 29. The first closes with a standard perorating sentence, “wurthe that i-­w urthe i-­w urthe Godes wille” (lines 504–5), with the second (lines 506–36) acting as a penitential coda. The same words end Layamon’s Brut (see below). As Arngart suggests (23), the last portion of the poem seems most likely to have originated as an in­de­pen­dent work, unconnected with the figure of Alfred. 17. On the theology and practice of interdiction in early thirteenth-­century ­England and elsewhere, see J. Moore 2003. On the transition from ordeals to jury ­t rials, see Kamali 2018, especially 1–29. Clerical participation in ordeals or cases involving a death sentence is forbidden in canon 18 of the Fourth Lateran Council. See Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, volume 1, 244. On the idea of a “godly society” developed by Wulfstan in par­tic­u­lar, see Wormald 2000. On the crucial role played by bishops in secular governance in practice, see, e.g., Jahner 2019, especially 138–74. 18. For transformations of ethical thought at this period, see Bejczy and Newhauser 2005. 19. The most respectful theories of Layamon’s meter ­until recently understood it to be an extrapolation from Old En­glish rhythmic prose. See, e.g., Brehe 1994; Bredehoft 2005, 99–120.



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For recent theories and their implications for the continuity of the alliterative verse tradition in En­glish, see Weiskott 2016, 71–92, anticipating Cornelius 2017, 76–103. Key to both studies is Yakovlev 2008, the first account of alliterative meter sufficiently broadly based to encompass both Old and ­Middle En­glish alliterative poetry at once since Cable 1991. For a dif­fer­ent approach that tends to a similar end, see Russom 2017. On Layamon’s meter in par­tic­u­lar, see Yakovlev 2013. For a critique of the idea of a fourteenth-­century “alliterative revival,” a term coined in the 1890s and given new importance in Turville-­Petre 1977, see Cornelius 2012. None of this new work has gone unchallenged (see, e.g., Griffith 2018, Putter 2018, both reviewing Weiskott 2016), and other approaches, attuned to the specificities of and difference between vari­ous types of ­Middle En­ glish alliterative verse remain vigorous. See, e.g., Putter, Jefferson, and Stokes 2007; and Putter 2013. It remains to be seen ­whether ­these latter approaches can be reconciled with ­those stemming from Yakovlev or indeed Russom. 20. See Stanley 1969, a study of Layamon’s “antiquarian sentiments” on which much ­later work builds. This essay claims that “the question ­whether [Layamon’s] language [as preserved in Caligula] is archaic or archaistic is central to an understanding of the poem,” before arguing for the latter, on a mixture of linguistic, metric, and broader cultural grounds. Literary studies of Layamon are increasingly voluminous, and citations ­here are kept to a minimum. Two essay collections, Le Saux 1994 and R. Allen et al. 2013, provide useful points of entry. 21. Wace, Roman de Brut, ed. and trans. Weiss. On Layamon’s use of this poem, see, e.g., Le Saux 1989, 24–58 and 94–117. 22. Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia regum Britanniae, ed. Reeve, trans. Knight. For contrasting accounts of this work, the topic of a mass of analy­sis, see Echard 1998, 31–67, and Heng 2003, 17–63. Layamon made direct use of a version of the Historia, alongside the Roman de Brut. ­A fter the Brut, the next En­glish work to deal with Arthur at length is Robert of Gloucester’s Metrical Chronicle, ed. Wright, one version of which draws on Layamon (see Coda). 23. See Oldest Anglo-­Norman Prose Brut Chronicle, ed. and trans. Marvin, dated ca. 1300, which draws on Geoffrey’s Historia, Wace’s Roman de Brut, and Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis. 24. Layamon, Brut, ed. Brooke and Leslie, trans. Allen, lines 14668–83 (name change), 14696–720 (Gregory and the En­glish slaves), 14721–823 (Augustine’s mission), 14824–923 (slaughter of fifteen hundred British clerics ­a fter rebellion against Augustine), 14924–16078 (retreats of the British monarchs), 16094 (last line), and 15941–78 (Æthelstan’s establishment of institutions). Æthelstan features in Wace’s Roman de Brut, ed. and trans. Weiss, lines 14757–74, drawing on the “first variant” version of Geoffrey’s Historia, but Layamon builds on Wace’s identification of this figure as “li premiers des Engleis / Ki ot tute Engleterre en baille” (the first of the En­g lish who had all of ­England in his power) by fully eliding him with his tenth-­ century successor. 25. See Pearsall 1977, 110, summarizing a standard view, enriched and complicated by Donoghue 1990, who influentially describes Layamon’s attitude as one of “ambivalence.” 26. See L. Johnson 1994, which painstakingly reads the poem against the tradition of insular providential history inaugurated by Gildas in the sixth ­century, as described by Hanning 1966, a classic study. See also Somerset 2015. For recent readings of the poem as anti-­Norman or anti-­A ngevin, see Tiller 2007, Yeager 2014, 121–49, Davis-­Secord 2017. See also Ashe 2017, 305– 16, which gives a dif­fer­ent account of the poem’s po­liti­cal theology. 27. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, IV.10. For a Boethian reading of the Brut, see Cannon 2007, 77–81, concluding a rich analy­sis that views the “lond” itself and the notionally unchanging laws that bind the land as the poem’s protagonist. For twelfth-­century Boethian readings of Virgil’s Aeneid, see Baswell 1995, 120–35. For the wider, twelfth-­century impulse to understand the secular logic undergirding historical change, see Stein 2006, especially 105–25.

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Notes to Pages 309–312

28. Layamon, Brut, lines 1–13. For “leoden” in the poem’s opening line, see Somerset 2015, one of a number of compelling readings of this prologue. Otho’s version of the prologue, not discussed ­here, pre­sents a significantly dif­fer­ent account. 29. Compare Wace, Roman de Brut, lines 7–8, “Maistre Wace l’ad translaté / Ki en conte la verité” (Master Wace has translated it and tells it truthfully). Authorial self-­identification is standard in twelfth-­century French didactic and historical poetry. Only Cynewulf ’s runic self-­ naming offers a partial Old En­glish pre­ce­dent in poetic contexts. 30. Layamon, Brut, lines 20–23. 31. See A. Mueller 2013, especially 1–18. 32. See Salter 1988, 61–66; Walter of Châtillon, Alexandreis, ed. Colker, trans. Townsend; Joseph of Exeter, De bello Troiano, ed. Gompf, trans. Rigg. Both poems date from the late twelfth ­century (ca. 1180 and ca. 1190 respectively). On Layamon’s b­ attle scenes and other high-­style passages, see Donoghue 1990, 543–54. 33. J. Frankis 2003, 109–10. Frankis finds evidence for this eleventh-­century use of the word in the forest of Dean, roughly thirty miles southwest of Worcester. Stanley ODNB also alludes to this usage. Not only would mediating between En­glish and Welsh require knowledge of Welsh and Welsh law; the term “layamon” (lawman) might locally signify this knowledge. For a study of Layamon’s knowledge of and complex attitude to Wales, the Welsh, and Welsh law, see Meecham-­Jones 2013. 34. Parts of this paragraph are indebted to Weinberg 1995. Relationships between the three churches are tracked by Page and Willis-­Bund 1924b, 1924c, and 1924d, drawing on a range of sources. One source, a charter forged in the mid-­t welfth ­century, purports to detail the pro­cess by which St. Helen’s, asserted to have been Benedictine since the time of Oswald, was assimilated to the priory. For British churches in the seventh-­century West Midlands and their organ­ ization, including their distinctive clusters of “­d aughter churches” associated with “­mother churches,” see Bassett 1989, 1992. For the wider context, see Blair 2005, 8–78. For the ecclesiastical situation in Worcestershire during the twelfth ­century, see Bond 1988, N. Baker and Holt 2004. Tinti 2010, 270–74, is skeptical of the antiquity of St. Helen’s and St. Alban’s. Nothing is known of Areley Kings before the twelfth ­century. Salter 1988, 67, describes what is known of Martley manor. 35. Layamon, Brut, lines 5443–703. Compare Wace, Roman de Brut, lines 5605–730, to which Layamon has substantially added. For the cult of St. Helen (Helena), much of it concentrated in the east, especially Colchester where she grew up as ­daughter of King Coel, see Harbus 2002. Helena is celebrated in The History of the Holy Rood-­Tree, ed. and trans. Napier, item 15 in MS Bodley 343 (ca. 1175), a West Midlands book. See Chapter Twenty, Section  1 for a pos­si­ble provenance. 36. Brut, lines 5514–25. 37. See Le Saux 1989, a patient attempt to identify places in the poem where further source work aimed at tracing Welsh materials ­behind the work could be profitable. For twelfth-­ and thirteenth-­century historiographic writing in Welsh, see McKenna 2019. 38. Brut, lines 14–28. 39. Roman de Brut, lines 9793–94. 40. A nonstandard reading of this passage, which depends on making no attempt to reconcile it with the dif­fer­ent version in Otho. While the identity of “tha Englisca boc” with The Old En­glish Bede is usually assumed, efforts to identify a plausible Latin book by “Seinte Albin / and the feire Austin” sometimes identify “Seinte Albin” as the bishop Albinus whom Bede mentions as a source in the first book of his Historia ecclesiastica, or as Alcuin. See, e.g., L. Johnson 1994, 147–49; Stanley ODNB. But the citation of mysterious sources, classifiable as what Alfred Hiatt



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calls “forgery as historiography” (2019) and possibly exemplified by the notorious references to a “British book” in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia, is hardly unusual in the twelfth ­century. The title “Seinte Albin” makes it more likely that Layamon had in mind the third-­century protomartyr, whose story is told by Gildas and whose earliest known vita dates from the eighth ­century. For “thrumde,” which occurs nowhere ­else in M ­ iddle En­glish, see MED, s.v. thrumen. 41. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. Putter and Stokes, lines 33–36. See also John Clerk of Walys’s Destruction of Troy, ed. Matsumoto, which relates how Dares and Dictys offered eyewitness accounts of the events the poem describes, in order that ­those who come ­a fter may “ken all the crafte how the case felle / By loking of letturs that lefte ­were of olde” (lines 25–26). On Sir Gawain’s allusion to alliterative meter, see P. Frankis 1961, who adds further examples. 42. See Tyler 2006 for the constructed effect of timelessness in Old En­glish verse. For the pos­si­ble parallel with Wulfstan, see Yeager 2014, 121–49. 43. Wace, Roman de Brut, ed. and trans. Weiss, xxviiii–­x xix, lists seventeen full copies and fifteen partial or fragmentary ones. R. Allen 1994 argues for a socially broader readership than is taken as probable ­here. The Otho version of the prologue refers to Layamon as having a lay patron, a “cnithte” (knight). See Salter 1988, 66–67. For the readership of the Caligula manuscript, which includes the works of the impor­tant insular French poet “Chardri,” see Cartlidge 1997, who notes a mid-­thirteenth-­century rec­ord of several of its texts in a manuscript owned by a ­house of Premonstratensian canons in Hampshire. Cartlidge argues that Caligula offers no clear evidence of its original readership. As Cartlidge also notes, however (n. 33), other trilingual literary manuscripts of the period can be associated with laypeople, secular clerics, friars, or all three.

chapter 18 1. Æthelwold, King Edgar’s Establishment of Monasteries, in Councils and Synods I, 151. 2. Liflade and te Passiun of Seinte Juliene, ed. Huber and Robertson, 141, sec. 1. 3. See, e.g., Trinity Homilies IV, XIV, ed. and trans. Morris; Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, trans. Millett, preface, part 1, ­etc. Especially notable is the Latin passage that opens Ancrene Wisse with a distinctio parsing Cant 1:4, “Recti diligunt te” (the righ­teous love you). 4. On Otho A.xiii, destroyed in the Cotton fire, see Pelle 2014a, also Faulkner and Pelle 2013. 5. See Millett 2011, a reflection on the Ancrene Wisse Group in light of LAEME. 6. For the dearth of scholarship on Vices and Virtues, see Gunn 2012. For the vilification of the Orrmulum by literary scholars (not language historians), see Worley 2003, 19–20. 7. For En­g lish reflexes of this pro­cess, see Goering 1992, Morenzoni 1995. The subject of Goering’s study, the chancellor of Lincoln, William of Montibus (d. 1213), casts much of his systematizing teaching in the form of verse, an affective as well as mnemonic strategy. See, e.g., William’s “Peniteas cito peccator” (sinner, repent at once), in Goering 1992, 107–38. All work on late twelfth-­century Pa­r i­sian thought remains indebted to Baldwin 1970, a fundamental study. 8. For Carolingian libri manuales, see Chapters Nine, Section 3, above, and Fifteen, Section 2, above. Joseph Hall suggests a single Old En­glish source for Vices and Virtues in Se­lections from Early ­Middle En­glish, 443–44. For a few early twelfth-­century sources, see Pelle 2015a, who also finds suggestive evidence of ties to more recent Pa­ri­sian texts. For ­others, see Gunn 2012, 65–76. In concluding the work at 151.16–17, the author states that it has been “i-­g adered of his horde and of manies halies mannes ye-­swinkes” (collected from his [God’s] trea­sury [i.e., the

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Notes to Pages 319–321

Bible] and from many holy men’s ­labors). Too ­little has been learned of the work’s sources to develop a picture of how he works with them in detail. 9. For Vespasian D.xiv and Cambridge Ii.1.33, see Chapter Eleven, Sections 4 and 3, above, as well as Lees 1985. Ælfric’s De octo vitiis comprises Lambeth Homilies X, ed. and trans. Morris. For Defensor in early ­England, see Bremmer 2008. For Scala virtutum and Salisbury, see Webber 1992, 171–83 (edition) and 116–23 (discussion), and N. Watson 2019, 39–42. For the intellectual context of schematizations of the vices and virtues and a typology of genres, see Newhauser 1993. All scholarship h ­ ere builds on Bloomfield 1952 and 1979. 10. Vices and Virtues, ed. and trans. Holthausen, 41.6–17. B ­ ecause this work is so l­ittle known, par­tic­u­lar attention is ­here paid to the close tracking of its structure and ethical lexis. 11. Vices and Virtues, 93.23, citing 1 Cor 3:16. For Ratio’s exile and return, see 23.11–15, part of a speech in which he reveals himself to Soul ­a fter she has completed her confession to a figure whose identity she does not initially know. Since the work’s opening is lost, the narrative setup is unclear. It is tempting to suggest a link to the Old En­glish Soliloquies, another dialogue between an individual and his Gesceadwisnes or Ratio, which the speaker also has trou­ble identifying and which uses the same meta­phor of ­house building from Proverbs 9, as well as the conceit that the work is being written, with ­g reat effort, at the same time it is spoken. The sole copy of this work, British Library Cotton Vitellius A.xv, whose explicit calls it “enchiridion” or “liber manualis,” dates from the mid-­t welfth ­century and was owned by the Augustinians of Southwick Priory in Hampshire. See Chapter Fourteen, Section 1, above; and Treharne PUEMi. 12. Vices and Virtues, 91.10–11 (Wisdom); 47.23–30 (humility); 49.2–3 (Christ’s own virtue). Discussions of humility extends from 49.1 to 59.17. For the work’s account of the virtues, see “Vices and Virtues,” ed. Crawford, xlvi–­liv. 13. Vices and Virtues 95.2 (“postes”); 91.25 (“over wrihte”); 91.11–14 (seven “mihtes”). 14. Ibid. 99.1–20 (peace, “pax” or “sibsumnesse”); 99.21–103.7 (prudence, “prudentiam” or “yepnesse”); 103.8–32 (foresight, “providentia” or “forsceawnesse”); 105.1–107.3 (justice, “justitia” or “rihtwisnesse”); 107.4–10 (“fortitudo” or “strengthe”); 107.11–25 (moderation or “temperantia”). 15. Ibid., 107.26–111.22 (“obediencia” or “hersumnesse”), quotation at 109.8–10. 16. Ibid., 111.23–121.3 (“misericordia” or “milce”). On this chapter, a clear sign of the close engagement of the Vices and Virtues author with twelfth-­century Pa­ri­sian theology, see Traver 1907, 18–20. For more on the “­daughters of God” in this milieu, see Volume 2, Chapter One. 17. Ibid., 121.4–27 (“scrifte” or “penitenciam”); 121.28–123.23 (“confession” or “andetnesse”); 123.24–125.25 (“munditia” or “clennesse”); 125.25–127.24 (“disciplina” or “lore”); 127.25–129.10 (“pacientia” or “tholemodnesse”). 18. Ibid., 129.12–25 (“virginitas” or “maidenhad”); 129.26–131.7 (“castitas” or “clannesse”), followed by 131.8–15 (“puditia”); 131.16–133.2 (“continentia” or “withhealdnesse”); 133.3–22 (“innocentia” or “uneilindesse”), followed by 133.23–35.8 (“honestas”); 135.9–30 (“abstinentia” or “withheldnesse”); 137.1–139.12 (“jejunium” or “haly fasten”); 139.13–33 (“sobrietas” or “ye-­methe”); 141.1–15 (“pura conscientia,” “giet,” or “inyehied”). 19. Ibid., 141.16–147.2 (prayer, “oratio sancta,” “haly bede,” or “biene”); 147.3–149.8 (“teares”); 149.9–26 (“discretion” or “skelwisnesse”); 149.26–151.6 (“perseverantia”). 20. Ibid., 77.27–81.10 (lending using collateral or for interest, quoting Psalm 14), 121.17–23 (secular abuses), 121.28–123.23 (confession). 21. Ibid., 63.14–65.8 (pity); 81.12–13, 85.24–25 (purpose of prayer); 81.31–83.1 (prayer based on Psalm 50). 22. Ibid., 71.5–73.34 (counsel), especially 71.33–73.1 and 73.33–34. 23. Ibid., 89.10–11, 7–8, many sections before ­t hose on “withheldnesse” and “fasten” (135.9–139.12).



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24. Ibid., 35.2–3. See also, e.g., 3.7–20 (on “tristicia,” the sin of “thane religiuse man”); 5.33– 7.2 (vanity of ­those in religious ­orders); 109.14–15 (exemplary obedience of monks to their abbots); 137.10–13 (Christ’s example to “ancres and hermites”); 143.14–15 (ditto). 25. Ibid., 41.21–22. 26. Ibid., 71.11. See also especially 75.4–7. 27. On religio, see Millett 2002. Laing 1993, 106, suggests Essex for the provenance of Stow 34, east of London but within the dialect area of other apparently London books, including the Trinity Homilies (see Chapter Nineteen, Section 2, below). Quotation from Vices and Virtues, 109.8– 10. On “hodede” (e.g., 13.9), see MED, s.v. hoden, found in texts written 1150–1200 and one fourteenth-­century Kentish text. The author’s outsidership to the religious life is expressed in distanced phrases like “­these munekes” (109.14) or “tha the bieth on religiun, hie beith avre ­under scrifte, swa bihoveth us alswa” (­those ­people who are in religious ­orders are always in a state of penance, and we should be also) (121.26–27). A reference to the pride of ­those who “bie of heigh menstre” (are attached to an impor­tant minster) might allude to secular canons (7.3). For Edmund’s Mirror as an expression of a specifically secular perfectionist ethos, see N. Watson 2019. 28. Ratio attempts to end the work and is persuaded not to do so at 47 and 91.27–93.19. On both occasions, Soul notes that including more virtues in the book ­w ill “sum other saule hit wele helpen” (47.17–18; compare 91.17–19), suggesting that the new sections to be added may have a specific set of anticipated readers and hearers in mind. The Body weeps at 95.26–28, part of a passage indebted to the tradition of Soul and Body poems, which also give surprising space to the Body’s perspective. For the priest as “wise manne” who also needs experience in “religiun” to be able to counsel well, see 71.10–11; and as “scrifte” (confessor), see 127.2. 29. Vices and Virtues, 41.2–3, 20–21. For this interpretation of Noah, Daniel, and Job, see Kress 2004, a study of an example from late twelfth-­century Canterbury. 30. Vices and Virtues, 45.11–19. On the need to obey priests, see 43.33–45.7. 31. On the book, its scribes, and corrections, see “Vices and Virtues,” ed. Crawford, v–­x. The names of some of the vices and virtues are adjusted, and on fol. 2r (7.9–12) a thirteenth-­ century hand adds a note suggesting that Soul has forgotten to confess to the sin of envy: “Hic deberet poni invidia, quam videtur oblivisci hec anima in sua confessione. Nith nere nohutt te forgeten, quia (Sapientia) ‘et invidia diaboli mors intravit in orbem terre’, et cetera” (here envy should be added, which this Soul seems to have forgotten in her confession. Envy should not be forgotten, ­because [as the book of Wisdom states, 2:24], death enters the world through the dev­ il’s cunning and evil ­w ill, ­etc.). Envy is not a cardinal sin according to the Cassianic list of sins Vices and Virtues follows, so the Soul has not forgotten it, but it had become part of any confession by the 1220s, as one of the seven deadly sins. On this manuscript note, see Bloomfield 1952, 119–20. 32. Vices and Virtues, 5.32–34, 57.31–32, 71.32. 33. On interorder relations in the twelfth ­century, still a controversial topic, see Constable 1996, 129–36. For the development of formal distinctions between ­orders, see Melville 2020. For the twelfth-­century clerical “war against the monks,” most vis­i­ble from the clerical point of view in the writings of Gerald of Wales and Walter Map, see H. Thomas 2014, 343–63. 34. On the prologue and its genres, see Mancho 2004 and especially Johannesson 2007a. 35. Orrm, Orrmulum, ed. Holt and White, dedication, lines 13–24. Quotations from the Orrmulum ­here retain the features of his spelling system represented by Holt and White (only replacing the tironian “and” sign with an ampersand,) but not the full system that ­w ill evidently be reproduced in Johannesson and Cooper’s forthcoming editions. Lineated ­here in septenary long lines. 36. Orrm, Orrmulum, dedication, lines 31–36, 55, 132. On “sawle nede,” see McMullen 2014.

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Notes to Pages 326–330

37. Orrm, Orrmulum, dedication, lines 112–20. 38. Ibid., dedication, lines 157–58; preface, lines 34–46 (“karrte” at 48). On Orrm’s sources ­here, see Johannesson 2008. As Johannesson notes, Pascalius links Christ’s seven ­g reat deeds and the sacraments in the prologue to his Expositio in evangelium Matthaei. Honorius’s Expositio in cantica canticorum, written at Regensburg before 1132, has almost all the ele­ments of the “currus Salomonis” allegory. (See Flint 1974 for this work and its close association with the Glossa ordinaria.) Honorius develops a similar allegory in his ­earlier Speculum ecclesie and Elucidarium from his Canterbury years. The rare phrase “currus Salomonis,” which combines 1 Kings 10:26a (“congregavitque Salomon currus et equites”) and Cant 3:7a (“en lectulum Salomonis!”), is not in Honorius. Johannesson suggests a link with Richard of St. Victor’s Benjamin Major, III.23, which conflates the two verses. Orrm apparently imagines Christ as furnished with the fourteen hundred preacher-­chariots of the 1 Kings passage, which the Glossa ordinaria understands as an account of Christ and his Church. For “lerninng-­cnihhtess,” which goes back at least to the tenth ­century, see MED, s.v. lerning-­knight. 39. Orrm, Orrmulum, dedication, lines 235–44. 40. Ibid., dedication, lines 73–76. For this reading of ­these lines, see Parkes 1983. 41. Orrm, Orrmulum, lines 15247–57, quoted in Ashe 2019, a groundbreaking interpretive essay. 42. See Chapter Fourteen, Section 3, above. 43. For the genre of the sermo ad status and Honorius’s Speculum ecclesie, see Muessig 2002a. On this work in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, see W ­ aters 2015, 27–31. 44. Ashe 2019, 35–37, 41–43. 45. Ibid., 42. 46. Orrm, Orrmulum, dedication, lines 131–38. 47. For the work’s double genre, see Johannesson 2013. For Adam’s fall, see Orrm, Orrmulum, introduction, lines 1–107, a passage evidently not meant to be preached. 48. For Orrm’s sources and his borrowings both from the Glossa ordinaria itself and from related books, see S. Morrison 1983 and 2003; Johannesson 2007b and 2008. S. Morrison 1984a outlines Orrm’s apparent borrowings from Isidore’s Etymologiae and De natura rerum liber. For Orrm’s use of Eriugena and the speculation that the Arrouaisian canons sent books associated with Laon to Bourne when the h ­ ouse was founded in 1138, see Johannesson 2007a, 127–35, drawing on Parkes 1983, 126. Given the complexity of determining Orrm’s sources, some identifications may yet shift in the ­f uture, but the scale of Orrm’s exegetical reading, willingness to work with multiple sources, and in­de­pen­dence of judgment in rearranging source materials and recalibrating their emphases to suit his own homiletic purposes is clear. All work in this area is indebted to Matthes 1933. 49. Ashe 2019, 39–40, also suggests a Victorine connection, as does Johannesson 2008. 50. Hugh, De sacramentis, ed. Migne, trans. Deferrari, I, prologue. 51. On Victorine thought and the distinctive relationship that it posits between study and feeling, see Harkins 2009; Hugh, De laude caritatis, ed. Feiss and Sicard, trans. Harkins, cap 10. 52. Orrm, Orrmulum, preface, lines 7–20, again drawing on Honorius. Orrm extrapolates Honorius’s one-­word Latin rendering of the meaning of the name Amminadab (“Spontaneus”) into a w ­ hole line. 53. Orrm, Orrmulum, dedication, lines 95–110, also asking that scribes retain “all swillc rime (meter) alls her iss sett, wiþþ all se fele (just the same number of ) wordess” (lines 101–2). 54. For the argument that Orrm had speakers of French in mind, see Worley 2003. He may also have feared that French orthographic influences could imperil correct pronunciation. For the work’s orthography and the phonology of Orm’s South Lincolnshire dialect, see J. Anderson



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and Britton 1999. Like other historians of the En­glish language, Anderson and Britton understand Orrm as a spelling reformer, who used a self-­consciously rationalized spelling system that nonetheless retains a number of traditional ele­ments, out of what they argue was his natu­ral desire to follow pre­ce­dent where pos­si­ble. 55. Ælfric, Catholic Homilies: First Series, ed. Clemoes, Praefatio, lines 20–22. On Orrm’s pos­si­ble debts to Ælfric and Wulfstan, see S. Morrison 1984b. Orrm’s specific emphasis on pronunciation has parallels in discussions of liturgical pronunciation of Latin, a key theme of the prologue to Gerald of Wales’s Speculum ecclesie (not to be confused with works of the same title by Honorius or Edmund Rich), written soon ­a fter 1215. On this prologue, see Hunt 1977. 56. For the several ele­ments of the book’s ordinatio, see Johannesson 2008, 227–29. 57. Orrm, Orrmulum, dedication, lines 41–58. 58. Compare Cannon 2007, 82–110, who himself compares Orrm’s efforts at spelling reform with ­those of the sixteenth-­century orthographic theorist, Thomas Smith (d. 1577).

chapter 19 1. On Wulfstan, including his canonization, see the essays gathered in N. Brooks and Barrow 2005. On Hatton 113 and 114, see Swan and Foxhall Forbes PUEMa and PUEMb. 2. “Volumus ut in ecclesiis religiosorum et in prebendatis, secundum formam generalis concilii, vicarie ordinentur” (we desire that vicars be appointed to the churches of religious and of canons, according to the order of the General Council): Canons of the Council of Oxford, sec. 14, in Councils and Synods II, 110. As so often, Lateran IV’s legislation ­here built on, and tightened, canons issued at Lateran III. For analy­sis, see W. Campbell 2019, 30–31. For the messy local implementation of Lateran IV, see Wayno 2018. 3. For episcopal ­house­holds at, respectively, Worcester (Roger of Worcester) and London (Gilbert Foliot), see M. Cheney 1980, 99–112; A. Morey and Brooke 1965, 211–16. 4. For this paragraph, see W. Campbell 2019, who offers evidence that the Worcester prior and chapter continued to preach to the laity at the cathedral and in parishes. Campbell points both to Worcester Cathedral MS  Q.11, with more than twenty sermons (out of nearly two hundred) by William de Montibus, and to Worcester Cathedral MS Q.77, a composite thirteenth-­ century preaching book made by binding over a dozen booklets into one volume. For ­these books, see the relevant entries in R. Thomson and Gullick 2001, who suggest that Q.11’s inclusion of “sermons for ordination and nuns” made it suitable for use by a bishop (126). Campbell 2019, notes 27–28, also lists other sermon books owned by the cathedral priory. On William de Montibus, see Goering 1992, a fundamental study. 5. For this copy of The Old En­glish Benedictine Rule (the Wintney Rule, ed. Schröer ), see Chapter Sixteen, n. 50. On Ancrene Wisse as an eremitic antirule, see Millett 2013. On its style in relation to Old En­glish, see Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, II.xlix–­lvi, building on Millett 1983, 1988. On Nero, Worcester, and the Tremulous Hand, see Franzen 2003, and discussion in Chapter Twenty, Section 2, below. 6. For bibliography, see Chapter Sixteen, n. 44. Crucial is Millett 2007, which establishes that ­these homiliaries ­were written for use in diocesan, not parish, preaching. Thanks to Bella Millett for sharing insights from her extensive work on ­these two books, as she edits them for EETS. Once published, her edition may render some of what is argued in this chapter obsolete. Millett cites Goering 1992, 19–20, on the annual preaching round of William de Montibus, chancellor at Lincoln Cathedral; and rec­ords of Grosseteste’s visitations as bishop of Lincoln in Councils and Synods II, 261–65. Localization of The Lambeth Homilies in Worcester is circumstantial.

454

Notes to Pages 335–339

LAEME locates the dialect of the main Lambeth scribe near the city, within the diocese. Several de­cades ­a fter it was copied, the soliloquy Ureisun of Ure Louerde (prayer to our Lord) was added to the back of the book (see Ureisun of God Almihti¸ ed. and trans. Innes-­Parker). This prayer is other­w ise found only in Nero A.xiv, a copy of Ancrene Wisse. See Franzen 2003 for the Worcester provenance of Nero. 7. For a schematic, homily-­by-­homily analy­sis, see Repertorium, volume 2, 1572–82. Worcester in the late twelfth ­century had an impor­tant penitential theorist, Senatus (d. 1207), prior of the monastery 1189–96. For his writings on penance, see Delhaye 1952; M. Cheney 1980, 58–69. 8. Lambeth Homilies, ed. and trans. Morris, Lambeth III (First Sunday in Lent), 31. Sources of passages of this homily, including a sermon of Caesarius of Arles and Honorius’s Elucidarium, are identified in Pelle 2014b, 49–55. The homily may have been recently composed when the book was put together. 9. Lambeth III, 31. On the duties of archdeacons, including visitation and preaching, see Marritt 2017. 10. Lambeth XIII, 131–37, opening address to “i-­hadede” and “i-­lewede” on 131, 133–35 for other quotations. Trinity XXVI is an ­earlier version of the same sermon. One of Lambeth XIII’s sources, a sixth-­century sermon collected in the Homiliary of Paul the Deacon (ninth ­century), is identified in Pelle 2015b, 37–38. 11. On the production of Lambeth 487 in stages, reconstructed via examination of the quiring, see Hanna 2009. Ælfric’s De duodecim abusiuis, ed. and trans. Clayton, a social satire with a widely circulated seventh-­century Hiberno-­Latin source, is the second part of Lambeth X. 12. The source of Lambeth I (Palm Sunday) is identified in Pelle 2014b, 36–48. The Homiliary of Angers is the most substantial Latin work in the major West Midlands Old En­glish homiliary, Bodley 343. For a study and edition, see Conti 2004. 13. Lambeth I, 3–5, 7. In Matthew 21, on which the homily is based, the ­children praise God in the ­temple, rather than the street. On Palm Sunday pro­cessions, see Trinity XV, ed. and trans. Morris, 89, 91: “It is custume that ech chirchsocne goth this day a pro­cession” (it is the custom that ­every church’s congregation goes in pro­cession on this day); “elch Cristene man maketh this day pro­cession fro chirche to chirche and eft agen” (­every Christian person on this day makes pro­cession from church to church and then back again). 14. Lambeth I, 7. 15. For a reconstruction, see Hillaby 1990, 91–97. 16. Lambeth I, 9. 17. On John de Countances (1296–98), see Hoskin ODNB. For Peter of Blois’s Contra perfidiam Judaeorum, ed. Giles, and John of Coutance, see Jacobs 1893, 179. On anti-­Jewish polemic and disputation texts in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, see Dahan 1998. 18. Peter of Blois, Contra perfidiam Judaeorum, ed. Giles, 114, 120. “Mundi” is a gloss. 19. On Richard Judaeus, see Hillaby 1990, 77–78. On the York massacre and its aftermath, see the essays in Rees-­Jones and Watson 2013. Lambeth II, which borrows material from Wulfstan’s Homily XIX (“Be godcundre warnunge”) in Homilies of Wulfstan, ed. Bethurum, also has extensive material on the “old law.” 20. Monks are listed among ­those destined for salvation in Lambeth XIV, 143, a homily closely based on a Latin sermon of the tenth ­century discussed and edited in Pelle 2014b, 55–71. This sermon was also once in the homiliary Cotton Otho A.xiii, destroyed in the Cotton fire. See Pelle 2014a. 21. For this sermon in Worcester Q.29, see “Inedited Nativity Sermon,” ed. Stanley. See also Faulkner and Pelle 2013, who show that this sermon, too, was in Cotton Otho A.xiii.



Notes to Pages 339–343

455

22. On the prob­lems involved in preaching as a foreign-­born cleric, see Peter of Blois, ­Later Letters, ed. Revell, letter 42, 194–96, to Peter of Cornwall, whose own first language was Cornish: “omnis autem homo expeditius loquitur in lingua consueta quam insolita” (every­one speaks more easily in a familiar language than an unfamiliar one). Cited in Cotts 2009, 235. 23. Peter of Blois, De institutione episcopi, ed. Migne. See Cotts 2009, 205–14, Byrne 2019. 24. See Millett 2005, 131–35, drawing especially on Richard Rouse and Mary Rouse 1974. 25. Millett 2007, 47. For the thema sermon and its contexts, see Zier 2000 and especially Bériou 2000, drawing on her massive 1998 study of preaching in thirteenth-­century Paris. 26. Trinity Homilies I (First Sunday in Advent), ed. and trans. Morris, 2–7, quotation at 5. For a fuller analy­sis, on which this one is partly based, see Millett 2005, 137–39. 27. Trinity XVIII (Fourth Sunday ­a fter Easter), 105; XX (Pentecost), 119. For minsters as cathedrals, see also Trinity XI (Ash Wednesday), 61. See Millett 2007, 55–56. 28. Trinity XXVII (Assumption of Mary), 163. On the double address of a number of sermons to clergy and laity, see Millett 2007, 56. 29. Trinity XXIII (Psalm 119:10), 213. On the rare word “hindre,” see MED, s.v. hinder, n. (2). 30. Trinity III (Third Sunday in Advent), 11. 31. Trinity XXVIII (De defunctis, a funeral sermon), 167. 32. On the dialects of the Trinity scribes in their vari­ous stints in Essex, possibly northern Suffolk, and Berkshire, see LAEME, index of sources, 31–35. For the scribes, see N. Ker 1932. 33. On William, see Goering 1992. On Thomas, see Morenzoni 1995. For the education and intellectual attainments of the secular clergy more broadly, see H. Thomas 2014, 227–44. 34. The Vespasian Homilies, ed. and trans. Morris. See Swan 2007b. 35. Maurice de Sully, French Homilies, ed. Sinclair. ­These homilies are no longer thought to have been written before their longer versions in Latin or to have been written in French by the bishop himself, as Sinclair argues. See Spieralaska 2007. For an early Durham copy, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 270, see Careri, Ruby, and Short 2011, sec. 59. For insular French copies, see ANL, sec. 587, which does not include Douce, since it is not copied in an Anglo-­ Norman dialect. 36. On Guischart’s Sermon and Poema Morale, see Chapter Sixteen, n. 41. 37. On Gilbert Foliot, see Knowles 1951, 115–28; A. Morey and Brooke 1965; Foliot, Letters and Charters, ed. Brooke et al.; C. Brooke ODNBa. Brooke details Foliot’s surviving works, including his commentary on the Pater noster, and his role as dedicatee of Odo’s Ysagogam in theologiam. Foliot was also the dedicatee of Aelred of Rievaulx’s remarkable Homiliae de oneribus propheticis Isaiae, ed. Raciti, trans. White. The scenario conjectured ­here requires Trinity to have been written at the early end of the date range suggested by paleographers, or be an outgrowth of an ­earlier writing proj­ect, dating to the 1170s. 38. On Peter of Cornwall, see Sharpe ODNB, and the rich pre­sen­ta­tion of this figure in Peter of Cornwall, Book of Revelations, ed. Easting and Sharpe. For Peter’s admiration of Gilbert Foliot’s thema sermon, see Millett 2005, 131. For a group of Foliot’s Latin sermons perhaps composed in response to Aelred’s Homiliae, on the subject of St. Paul and St. Peter and found in the same thirteenth-­century manuscript, see Runciman 2019, 48–55. 39. Map, De nugis curialium, ed. and trans. James et al., I.13. On Map, see Brooke ODNBb. 40. Trinity VI (Christmas Day), 31–41, especially 35–41. Some sources identified in Pelle 2015b, 45–47. 41. On Gilbert’s ­house­hold, see A. Morey and Brooke 1965, 188–226, especially 211–16. For the diocesan statutes, see Councils and Synods I, 1070–74, with introductory discussion at 1057– 58. ­These statutes are appended to a copy of the statutes of the Council of Westminster, which met in September 1200, to which they allude several times, suggesting they ­were issued soon

456

Notes to Pages 344–348

a­ fter. As with The Trinity Homilies themselves, a London provenance is plausible, if conjectural. On William and the Poetria nova, see Jahner 2019, 60–98, especially 85. 42. Trinity II (Second Sunday in Advent), 7; Trinity III (Third Sunday in Advent), 9; Trinity XXVI (feast of St. Laurence, also Lambeth XIII), 153; Trinity XIII (Second Sunday in Lent), 77, all Paul; Trinity XXXIII (“Estote prudentes”), 193, on Peter. 43. See D. Johnson 2013; also A. Morey and Brooke 1965, 149–62. 44. Foliot, Letters and Charters, sec. 235. 45. Trinity XV (Third Sunday in Advent), 15; XXXIII (“Estote prudentes”), 201. 46. Adgar, Gracial, ed. Kunstmann; ANL, sec. 558, VLTFE, sec. 11a. For Latin personal sermon collections at this period see, e.g., Peter of Blois’s Sermons, ed. Giles.

chapter 20 1. See Tolkien 1929, R. Chambers 1932, D. Brewer 1956, Dobson 1976. Tolkien’s argument was much enriched by S. R. T. O. d’Ardenne, in her thesis edition of Ϸe Liflade and the Passiun of Seinte Iuliene in 1936. For a detailed history of scholarship to 1995, which involved other major early hypotheses, one of which (by Hope Emily Allen) required dating the work as early as the 1130s and localizing it in London, see Millett 1996a, 6–11. Tolkien’s essay, which successfully argued that A/B was a West Midlands dialect, intervened in a field already crowded with theories. On the mistaken identification of the anchoresses’ cell, which proved to have been inhabited by fratres, not sorores, in the heavi­ly abbreviated relevant document, see S. Thompson 1991, 34n126. Although a number of its conclusions have not stood the test of time, Dobson’s book The Origins of Ancrene Wisse, remains a remarkable, and enviably gripping, achievement. 2. Blake 1996, 129–31, cited in M. Black 1999, 167n9. 3. For studies on the language of Ancrene Wisse and its colleagues ­until the mid-1990s, see Millett 1996a, 17–21 (by George Jack). Of special importance is Zettersten 1965. For new studies and bibliography, see Kano et al. 2019, celebrating the publication of a four-­volume parallel-­text edition of the entire Ancrene Wisse Group, ed. Kubouchi. On the orthography of Cleopatra, see Ancrene Riwle: Cotton Cleopatra, ed. Dobson, lxxiii–­xciii. On the spelling system of Nero, see Franzen 2003. On the dialect of Titus, see Laing and McIntosh 1996. Gonville and Caius 234/120 (see n. 12 below) is also evidently a Herefordshire book. 4. See especially Millett 1992, outlining fatal prob­lems with the Augustinian hypothesis and introducing the Dominican one described below. This latter hypothesis underlies Millett’s subsequent edition of Ancrene Wisse (see vol. II, ix–­x xix) and her “unified theory” of the production of the Ancrene Wisse Group (Millett 2004). It has not been seriously challenged. 5. For arguments against Tolkien’s repre­sen­ta­tion of A/B, with alternative hypotheses, see M. Black 1999, J. Smith 2000, Dance 2003. On the relationship between dialect and book provenance, see Millett 2011, drawing on the indispensable introduction to LAELME by Margaret Laing and Roger Lass. For the “soil” meta­phor, see Tolkien 1929, 106. 6. On Andrew, see Gibson ODNB. On early reclusi, see Licence 2011, 67–89. For synodal statutes forbidding enclosure of recluses without episcopal leave, see Councils and Synods II, 150, note b. For a twelfth-­century enclosure ceremony that presupposes that an episcopus ­w ill in theory (if not always practice) be pre­s ent, see Servicium recludendi, ed. and trans. Ayers and Bahr. On anchoritism and its regulation more broadly, see A. Warren 1985, and the anthology of thirteenth-­ to fifteenth-­century sources Hermits and Anchorites of ­England, ed. Jones.



Notes to Pages 348–351

457

7. Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, vol. II, xvi–­x ix, and Millett’s notes to pref., 63–66, 84–89, 133– 37, 1.134, 8.8, 12. See also note to 8.31–32. (Ancrene Wisse references are to part and line number within part.) All w ­ ere first described in Millett 1992 and are summarized in Millett 2005. 8. Ancrene Wisse, 4.1076–101, 2.311–26. See also 8.77–78. On the early En­glish Dominicans, see Hinnebusch 1951. On the friars and pastoral care, see W. Campbell 2017, 61–80 and bibliography. 9. A date ­later than 1221 is required for the first version of Ancrene Wisse by the Dominican hypothesis. Millett 1999 argues that the character of the work’s discussion of the “conditions of confession” in part 5 points to ca. 1215–30. A date for the work 1225–30 accords well with Malcolm Parkes’s dating of the Cleopatra Ancrene Wisse, a copy of the first version of the work, to the early 1230s (reported in Ancrene Wisse, vol. I, xiii). The date of the latest version, preserved in Corpus, is more problematic. Parkes assigns Nero, Bodley, and Titus to the 1240s, and the annotations in Cleopatra that include passages that look like drafts for this latest version to the 1240s or 1250s. This would place that version it in the same period. The Hereford Blackfriars dates from the mid-1240s. Possibly it is not mentioned in the Corpus passage ­because it had not yet been founded. 10. The classic study remains Gibbs and Lang 1934. See W. Campbell 2017, 25–36, for context; Wayno 2018, especially 625–27, for the immediate En­glish episcopal response to Lateran IV; Hoskin 2019 for the reforms undertaken by Robert Grosseteste as bishop of Lincoln. 11. Ancrene Wisse, 5.1–4. See Millett 1999. 12. Ancrene Wisse, 5.595–98. On the functions of recluses, see Licence 2011, especially 111– 230. The mid-­thirteenth-­century adaptation of Gonville and Caius 234/120, ed. Wilson, pre­sents part 5 of the work near the head of an adaption of portions of Ancrene Wisse meant for the instruction of general lay readers. The adaptation also includes much of part 6 on penance and part 4 on the remedies for sins. Passages directed to anchoresses are omitted, and the work is rewritten with masculine forms (with the intention of addressing it to men and ­women, not men alone). On this version, see Scahill 2009, a linguistic and stemmatic analy­sis that makes a strong case for its importance. 13. On friars and bishops, see Millett 2004, 9–10. On Grosseteste’s ­house­hold, see Hoskin 2019, especially 101–27. For Geoffrey of Clive, see Grosseteste, Letters of Robert Grosseteste, trans. Mantello and Goering, letters 14–15, at 91–93, the only known references to this figure, who was evidently well known to Grosseteste, conceivably from his own time in the West Midlands (see below). Clive is north of Shrewsbury, in the diocese of Litch­field and Coventry. 14. On the anchoresses’ “meistre,” see Ancrene Wisse, 2.119, 4.1109, 8.77, 91, 103. On the dialect of the B scribe in Cleopatra and the probability he is the Ancrene Wisse author, see Ancrene Riwle: Cotton Cleopatra, xciii–­cxl; also LAEME, index of sources 83–85, which heuristically places his dialect north of Hereford, at Ludlow in Shropshire. For the first “meistre” addition, which is found in no other copy, see Ancrene Riwle: Cotton Cleopatra 4, note h (= Ancrene Wisse, pref. 34–37). For the second addition, see ibid., 301, note d (= Ancrene Wisse, 8.25–30): “Thes riwle and alle othre beoth in owres scriftes read and in oweres meistres breoste” (this rule, with all ­others, is according to your confessor’s counsel and is kept in your master’s mind). For “breoste” as (more or less) “mind,” see Lockett 2011, especially 54–109, with relation to Old En­glish poetry; also MED, s.v. “brest,” n. 1, 5 (a). 15. The rest of this section builds on Millett 2011, 191: “Might the ‘AB’ language and the scribal dialects most closely associated with it . . . ​have been ‘varying Hereford language’?” See also Millett 2004, citing Mynors and Thomson 1993, xvii–­x ix, on Hereford’s scribal culture. The single alternative would be Worcester, but this is dialectally more distant. Besides, the Nero Ancrene Wisse, which is indeed from Worcester, has its own, very dif­fer­ent orthographic system.

458

Notes to Pages 351–355

16. On Hereford and its cathedral community, see Barrow 1999, 2000. On the library, see Mynors and Thomson 1993, especially xv–­x vii on its Glossa ordinaria volumes and their acquisition. On William de Vere and his patronage, see Barrow 1987a, Barrow ODNBb. On Simund de Freine, see Oeuvres, ed. Matzke, Wogan-­Browne ODNB. On crusading piety in the Katherine Group, see Kim 2016. On Grosseteste’s time in Hereford and the region, see Southern ODNB, although much about the f­ uture bishop and theologian’s early life remains obscure. 17. On the history of Sts. Guthlac, Peter, and Paul and its library, see Tuckley 2009. For its investment in pastoral care, perhaps partly in the context of hospital care, see Tuckley 2011. St. Guthlac was as ancient a foundation as the cathedral itself. For a list of surviving priory books, see N. Ker 1964, 99–100. The priory’s cartulary, Oxford, Balliol College MS 271, which more than once lists Grosseteste’s name as a witness, has not been edited. See Barrow 1993, e.g., sec. 206. 18. Hereford Cathedral MS O.III.15, ca. 1200, contains a glossed Oxford Psalter, interlinearly copied with the prose commentary attributed to Simon of Tournai down to Ps. 16. See ANL, sec. 445, 451–52. See Mynors and Thompson 1993, 25. Original provenance unknown. 19. On the dialect of Bodley 343, see Kitson 1990–92, 1997, who suggests Hereford as a default candidate for the book’s production, a suggestion subsequently taken up by Swan 2007a and by Wilcox in Homilies by Ælfric, 71. For the book’s assembly, see Susan Irvine’s introduction to her Old En­glish Homilies From Bodley 343. See also Conti 2007 and 2011; Hawk 2018, 171–200; Conti and Da Rold PUEM. Material of special potential relevance to Sts. Peter, Paul, and Guthlac include Items 25 (Chair of St. Peter), 51 (Peter and Paul), 52 (Passion of Peter and Paul), and 21 (Martin), all by Ælfric. Even ­a fter its move, the priory seems to have maintained a chapel of St. Martin in the ­castle. On the vita of St. Martin in its Bodley version, see Rosser 2000. ­Later additions in the manuscript that might be used to localize it include a passage on the angelic hierarchies by Alain of Lille and some liturgical fragments. See J. Frankis 2007, 113, who uses such evidence to develop a dif­fer­ent conjecture. On the use of another work by Alain, the Summa de arte praedicatoria, in both Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meithhad, see Millett 1996b. 20. Ancrene Wisse, 8.111. See Barrow 1999, 13; Licence 2011, 76; also Councils and Synods II, 194, sec. 82, from a set of West Midlands statutes prob­ably from Hereford. See below for what seems to be the source of this statute, Stephen Langton’s statutes for the diocese of Canterbury. 21. Vices and Virtues, ed. and trans. Holthausen, 73.29–34. For more tempered, indeed dismissive remarks about anchorites and their context, some of them by Gerald of Wales, see Easterling 2018. 22. Ancrene Wisse, 2.104–7; pref. 129–33 and 2.299; 2.244–49. As Millett notes, the “loke cape” is mandated for secular clerics in synodal legislation at this period. 23. Guy of Southwick, Tractatus, ed. Wilmart, cited in Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, note to 5.1–4. On the Salernitan Questions and Hereford, see Lawn 1963. On sparrows and Greek fire, see Ancrene Wisse, 3.769–74, 7.257, respectively. 24. On Nero and Worcester, see Franzen 2003, LAEME, index of sources, 90–91. 25. Hali Meithhad, ed. and trans. Millett and Wogan-­Browne, 2.28. See Scahill 2009, 86. 26. The phrase derives from the title of Anchoritic Spirituality, trans. Savage and Watson. For analyses of the Katherine Group around their anchoritic readers, see E. Robertson 1990, Hassel 2002. For the argument that anchoresses should be considered as participants in the production of the Ancrene Wisse Group and its books, see Savage 2003. 27. For the pastoral initiative thesis, which makes Lateran IV the key to the Ancrene Wisse Group as a w ­ hole, see Millett 2004. 28. Hali Meithhad, 4.21–22; Wohunge of Ure Lauerd, ed. and trans. Innes-­Parker, 108, line 399. For the probable sources of Hali Meithhad, see the EETS edition by Bella Millett. For distinctiones in the Wohunge and their implications, see Millett 2009. On Titus and the Chester



Notes to Pages 355–359

459

Dominicans, see Millett 2011, 195. The dialect of Wohunge is from further north than ­those in the other works found in Titus, according to Laing and McIntosh 1996. 29. Oreisun of Seinte Marie, ed. and trans. Innes-­Parker. This reconstruction of the Wooing Group owes much to Innes-­Parker 2013, a brilliant essay. 30. God Ureisun of Ure Lefdi, ed. and trans. Innes-­Parker, 154–60, lines 170, 98, line 50. The speaker adds that “For thine luve ich forsoc al thet me leof was” (I forsook every­thing that was dear to me for your love) (line 99). The original context ­here is clearly coenobitic, not anchoritic. 31. Lofsong of Ure Louerde, ed. and trans. Innes-­Parker, 230, line 89; Ureisun of God Almihti, ed. and trans. Innes-­Parker, 172–76, lines 6–14, 106–107. 32. See Ancrene Wisse, 1.356–58, where the author finds it unnecessary to write ­these devotions out, but suggests his readers may want to do so or have it done. See Innes-­Parker 2013, 138. In Ureisun of God Almihti, note to 21, Innes-­Parker draws attention to the fact that the partial second copy of this prayer added to the back of Lambeth 487 is not based on the same exemplar as the Nero copy, despite both being Worcester productions, a further sign of the ubiquity of ­these prayers. For this copy of the Ureisun, see Chapter Nineteen, n. 6 above. 33. Hanna 2009, 79–80. Hanna adds: “The Royal manuscript is customarily (and unhelpfully) dated ‘s. xiii in.,’ ” i.e., shortly a­ fter 1200. Compare LAELME, index of sources, 111–16. 34. Hali Meithhad, 40.18–20; Ancrene Wisse, 4.930–32. 35. On the stylistic influence of Old En­glish models on the saints’ passiones, see Bethurum 1935, Millett 1983. On their composition for public occasions, see Millett 1988. 36. Seinte Margarete, ed. and trans. Millett and Wogan-­Browne, 44.27–28, 82.33–84.1; Seinte Juliene, ed. and trans. Huber and Robertson, 167, para. 74; Seinte Katerine, ed. and trans. Huber and Robertson, 61, para. 62. The ­dying prayers of all three saints invite the prayers of ­f uture devotees. See especially Seinte Margarete, 78.11–80.12. 37. Juliana was former dedicatee of St. John’s, Shobdon, north of the city, first home of what became Wigmore Abbey. St. Margaret’s, Hereford is west of the city. Both ­were ancient. Katherine’s dedications include a late eleventh-­century double chapel in Hereford Cathedral (see Drinkwater 1954), and the hospital of St. Katherine’s, Ledbury, founded by Bishop Hugh Foliot in the 1220s. For the calendar, see Hereford Breviary, ed. Frere and Brown, I.xiii–­x xiv. Juliana’s feast day is not listed as celebrated in the Worcester diocese in Councils and Synods II, 323–25. The calendar of Sts. Guthlac, Peter, and Paul survives in Oxford, Jesus College MS 10, fols. 1–6. 38. Councils and Synods II, 325. On feast-­day observances, see C. Cheney 1961. 39. Seinte Margarete, 43.24–25, 66.10–70.13, 78.26. 40. Seinte Juliene, ed. and trans. Huber and Robertson, 141, para. 1. 41. Chapter Sixteen, Section 1, above. A parallel and con­temporary case in point from east ­England also involving a virgin martyr could be Simon of Walsingham’s Vie de sainte Fey, perhaps written for feast-­day per­for­mance at Bury St. Edmonds in the early 1200s, near her newly renovated chapel in the monastery. See VLTFE, sec. 12. 42. Sawles Warde, ed. and trans. Millett and Wogan-­Browne, 86.3–5. 43. See Anselm, De custodia interioris hominis, ed. Southern and Schmitt. On this relatively rare work as the source of Sawles Warde, see Becker 1980. 44. For Sawles Warde and Anselm’s De humanis moribus, ed. Southern and Schmitt, see Healy-­Varley 2012. Quotations from Sawles Warde, 86.13, 11. 45. Sawles Warde, 102.8–17; Ancrene Wisse, 7.365–66: “Ye habbeth of theos blissen i-­w riten elleshwer, mine leove sustren” (you have ­matter on ­these joys written elsewhere, my dear ­sisters). Millett suggests a reference ­either to Sawles Warde or to Hali Meithhad. 46. One late twelfth-­century book from St. Peter’s, Gloucester, now Hereford Cathedral MS P.I.1, has both De humanis moribus and De custodia. Hereford Cathedral MS O.I.2, also from

460

Notes to Pages 359–369

Gloucester, has the De moribus. See Mynors and Thompson 1993, 64–65, 3–5. Other copies of ­these works found at Worcester priory date from the ­fourteenth ­century but might have been made from ­earlier copies. 47. On the campaign for clerical celibacy, see H. Thomas 2014, 155–89. On married clergy in the Hereford diocese, at least ­until the early thirteenth c­ entury, see Barrow 1987b. 48. Councils and Synods II, 23–42, especially 35, sec. 57.

coda to volume 1 1. For representatives of this genre and a study, see Art of Preaching, ed. and trans. Wenzel. 2. For the ­career of Ancrene Wisse, see N. Watson 2003a, 2003b. See also A Talkyng of Þe Loue of God, ed. and trans. Westra; Robert of Gloucester, Metrical Chronicle and Anonymous Short Metrical Chronicle, with Pickering 2001. On alliterative meter and its conscious provincialism, see A. Mueller 2013. On the history of En­glish septenary meter, which is also the meter of the South En­glish Legendary, see C. Thomas 2016, presently being revised for publication. 3. The Northern Homily Cycle, ed. Thompson, also Heffernan 1985; ­Middle En­glish Mirror, ed. Duncan and Connolly; Michael of Northgate, Ayenbyte of Inwyt, ed. Morris, also ed. Gradon; Laurent d’Orléans, Somme le roi, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-­Labie. 4. A solitary exception is the Kentish Sermons, ed. Morris, four brief translations of four homilies of Maurice de Sully, in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 471, fol. 128v–33v, dated near the end of the thirteenth ­century. For the dates and milieu of the early fourteenth-­century London prose works, which include The ­Middle En­glish “Mirror,” ed. Duncan and Connolly; The Pepys Rule, ed. Zettersten, among a number of ­others, see Hanna 2005, 1–43. For Rolle, see Prose and Verse, ed. Ogilvie-­Thompson, and for his place in the early En­glish prose tradition, Kubouchi 1999. 5. Philippe de Thaon, Comput, ed. Short. 6. Ælfric, Catholic Homilies: First Series, ed. Clemoes, Praefatio, lines 20–22. For quasiliturgical uses of The South En­glish Legendary, eds. D’Evelyn and Mills, also ed. Horstmann, see Chapter One, Section 2, above, and Volume 2, Part II. 7. The Northern Homily Cycle, ed. Thompson; Lay Folks’ Catechism, ed. Simmons and Nolloth, on which see Chapter Nine, Section 1, above. 8. Lambeth Homilies, ed. and trans. Morris, Lambeth VI, 55.1–6. 9. For ­t hese works, see Adam of Exeter, Exposiciun, ed. Hunt, trans. Bliss; Edmund of Abingdon, Mirour de Seinte Eglyse, ed. Wilshere; Ancrene Riwle: French Text I, ed. Herbert, and Ancrene Riwle: French Text II, ed. Trethewey. See also, respectively, ANL, secs. 846, 629, 643–44. 10. For Ancrene Wisse in French, see TM, sec. 128, which includes both versions as one item. On the Compileisun in Norwich, see N. Watson and Wogan-­Browne 2004, 49–50. TM, sec. 1001, lists a third work, a romance called L’Histoire de la Duchesse de Savoie, but on the evidence of TM itself, this translation dates from well into the sixteenth ­century, as the work of Hugh Paulet, governor of Jersey (d. 1573). The situation was slow to change. According to Lee 1907, only a handful of late sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century En­glish and Scottish works ­were translated into French. English-­French translation became common only in the eigh­teenth ­century. Thanks to Gordon Teskey for helpful discussion on this point.

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Abbreviations are used for impor­tant text and translation series, frequently cited works of reference, and a small number of monograph series. Printed versions of sources are cited and have been used where they exist. References include series information but usually list only the earliest place of publication, publisher, and date. Primary sources are listed by author and cited title, by cited title alone when no author is known, or by cited title and author in the case of edited collections. Translations are listed immediately ­after the work they translate. Manuscripts are itemized in the Index of Manuscripts. Most scholarly works written before 1800 and some from several de­cades ­later are listed as primary sources. Secondary sources are listed by author and date, or author and online source in the case of articles in ODNB and PUEM. Dates of consultation for online sources are not listed. 1. abbreviations Analecta Cartusiana. Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik. AND. The Anglo-­Norman Dictionary Online. Aberystwyth: Universities of Aberystwyth and Swansea, 2001–. Online at http://­w ww​.­a nglo​-­norman​.­net​/­g ate​/­. Based on The Anglo-­ Norman Dictionary, 2nd  ed., A–­E . Edited by Stewart Gregory, William Rothwell, and David Trotter. Publications of the Modern Humanities Research Association 17. London: Maney, 2005. Also based on The Anglo-­Norman Dictionary. Edited by Louise W. Stone, T. W. B. Reid, and William Rothwell. Publications of the Modern Humanities Research Association 8. London: Maney, 1977–92. Anglo-­Saxon Chronicle. The Anglo-­Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition. General editors David Dumville and Simon Keynes. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1983–. Anglo-­Saxon Penitentials. Edited and translated by Allen  J. Frantzen. Online at http://­w ww​ .­a nglo​-­saxon​.­net​/­penance​/­index​.­php. Anglo-­Saxon Poetic Rec­ords. The Anglo-­Saxon Poetic Rec­ords. Edited by George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie. 6 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1931–53. ANL. Anglo-­Norman Lit­er­a­ture: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts. Edited by Ruth J. Dean, with the collaboration of Maureen  B.  M. Boulton. Anglo-­Norman Text Society Occasional Publications 3. London: Anglo-­Norman Text Society from Birkbeck College, London, 1999.

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Index of Manuscripts

Brussels, Bibliothèque royale 1650, 217; Bibliothèque royale 8558-63, 433n19

Cambridge MA, Harvard University Houghton Eng 719, 380n46

Cambrai, Bibliothèque municipale 679, 427n20 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 12, 445n4; Corpus Christi College 41, 432n5, 433n17; Corpus Christi College 191, 425n69; Corpus Christi College 196, 425n69; Corpus Christi College 198, 434n30; Corpus Christi College 201, 288–90, 419n5, 425n69, 441n14; Corpus Christi College 265, 431n43; Corpus Christi College 303, 285, 440n1; Corpus Christi College 322, 425n73; Corpus Christi College 402 (A), 298, 346–47, 349, 353; Corpus Christi College 422, 433n17 Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum McClean 123 (Nuneaton Book), 444n40 Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College 234/120, 444n45 Cambridge, St John’s College C.9 (Psalterium Suthantoniense), 427n21 Cambridge, Trinity College B.14.39, 443n38; Trinity College B.14.52 (Trinity Homilies), 210, 297–98, 425n71, 444n40; Trinity College O.2.1 (Liber Eliensis), 220–21, 291, 299; Trinity College R.14.7, 369; Trinity College R.17.1 (Eadwine Psalter), 174, 291, 367, 425n74 Cambridge, University Library Ff.1.23 (Winchcombe Psalter), 425n74; University Library Ff.4.42 ( Juvencus), 427n21; University Library Gg.3.28, 430n13; University Library Gg.5.35 (Cambridge Songs), 433n18; University Library Ii.1.33, 205, 208, 318–19, 441n13; University Library Ii.2.4, 425n68; University Library Ll.1.10 (Book of Cerne), 35

Exeter, Cathedral Library 3501 (Exeter Book), 173, 243, 425n69 Fulda, Landesbibliothek Bonifatianus 3 (Cadmug Gospels), 427n21 Glasgow, University Library Hunter 250, 406n21 Hereford, Hereford Cathedral O.I.2, 459–60n46; Hereford Cathedral O.III.15, 458n18; Hereford Cathedral P.I.1, 459–60n46 London, British Library Additional 22283 (Simeon), 177; Additional 26773, 405n16; Additional 49598 (Benedictional of St. Æthelwold), 223; Cotton Caligula A.vii (Heliand), 251; Cotton Caligula A.ix, 295, 443n32; Cotton Claudius B.iv (Old En­glish Illustrated Hexateuch), 2, 264, 378n3, 388n22, 419n2, 425n74, 442n24; Cotton Claudius D.iii (Wintney Rule), 183, 220, 299, 425n77; Cotton Cleopatra C.vi, 298, 347, 348, 353; Cotton Domitian A.viii, 442n21; Cotton Faustina A.x, 210, 220, 425n76–77; Cotton Galba A.xix, 443n38; Cotton Nero A.xiv, 298, 347, 354–55; Cotton Nero D.iv (Lindisfarne Gospels), 433n13; Cotton Otho A.xiii, 317, 454n20; Cotton Otho C.i, 425n73, 425n74; Cotton Otho C.xiii, 295; Cotton Tiberius A.iii, 221, 234–35, 240, 440n1; Cotton Titus D. xviii, 298; Cotton Vespasian A.i (Vespasian Psalter), 35; Cotton Vespasian A.viii (Charter of New Minster), 428n25; Cotton Vespasian A.xxii (Vespasian Homilies), 299,

566

Index of Manuscripts

London (continued) 342, 422n41; Cotton Vespasian D.xiv, 209, 214, 285, 318–19; Cotton Vitellius A.xii, 299, 419n5; Cotton Vitellius A.xv (Nowell Codex), 173, 239–40, 450n11; Egerton 613, 443n32, 444n40; Egerton 2710, 378n4; Harley 2253, 177, 378n4; Royal 1.A.xiv, 425n74, 427–28n23, 442n24; Royal 2.B.v, 217; Royal 4.A.xiv, 427–28n23; Royal 17.A.xxvii, 298, 347, 350–51, 353, 356, 358; Royal 17.B.xviii, 415n19; Stowe 34 (Vices and Virtues), 297, 451n27 London, Lambeth Palace 209 (Lambeth Apocalypse), 110–11, 163, 166, 170; Lambeth Palace 487 (Lambeth Homilies), 297–98, 299, 425n71, 444n40 Maidstone, Maidstone Museum A.13, 443n38 Manchester, John Rylands Library En­glish 109, 405n16 Norwich, Norwich Cathedral 5, 405n16 Nottingham University MiLM3, 404n2 Oxford, Balliol College 271, 458n17 Oxford, Bodleian Library Bodley 34 (B), 298, 346–47, 353; Bodley 319, 427–28n23; Bodley 340/342, 434n26; Bodley 343, 183, 208, 233, 285, 299, 327, 351–52, 360; Bodley 471, 460n4; Digby 4, 444n40; Douce 270, 455n35; Eng. poet.a.1 (Vernon), 177, 183; Hatton 20, 383n31, 445n4; Hatton 28, 425n74; Hatton 38, 442n24; Hatton 48 (Benedictine Rule), 214, 433; Hatton 76,

425n73; Hatton 113/114, 333, 335; Junius 1 (Orrmulum), 297, 425n70; Junius 11 (Junius manuscript), 173, 251; Junius 85/86, 240; Laud Misc. 482, 235–36, 240; Laud Misc. 509, 419n2; Laud Misc. 636 (Peterborough Chronicle), 210 Oxford, Jesus College 10, 459n37; Jesus College 29, 443n32, 443n38 Prince­ton, University Library Scheide M 71 (Blickling Homilies), 244 Rochester, Cathedral Library A.3.5 (Textus Roffensis), 210, 242, 291–92, 425n75 Saint Gall, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 904, 433n15 Salisbury, Salisbury Cathedral 150, 379n20 San Marino, Huntington Library HM 903, 405n16 Stockholm, National Library of Sweden A.135 (Codex Aureus), 35 Utrecht, Universiteitsbibliotheek Bibl. Rhenotraiectinae I Nr 32 (Utrecht Psalter), 442n24 Vercelli, Biblioteca Capitolare CXVII (Vercelli Book), 173, 243, 383n24 Worcester, Worcester Cathedral F.174, 197, 200, 299; Worcester Cathedral Q.11, 453n4; Worcester Cathedral Q.29, 339; Worcester Cathedral Q.77, 453n4

General Index

The General Index includes names and texts mentioned more than in passing in the body of this volume, except ­those of manuscripts, as well as ­those discussed separately in the notes; notes that build directly on the text to which they refer are not separately indexed. Certain names are grouped u ­ nder collective headings. Certain entries gather references and cross-­ references to texts and writers especially relevant to major volume topics, such as Bible translation, Bible versions, theology, and the vernacular. Subject-­entries such as t­ hese should not be taken as exhaustive. Aachen, 268–69 Abbaye du Saint Esprit, 176 Abelard, Peter, 364; Theologia christiana, 408n16 Acta sanctorum, 82 Adamic language, 40, 46–47, 138 Adam of Exeter, Exposiciun sur la Pater Nostre, 155, 368 Adams, Henry, Mont St. Michel and Chartres, 400n6 Adgar/William of St. Paul’s, Gracial, 345 Áedán of Lindisfarne, saint, 31, 49, 196 Ælfric of Eynsham, 67, 117, 151, 155, 172, 186, 197, 207, 223–30, 263–64; debt to Alfred, 250; fear of heresy, 203, 225, 248–50; patristic and Carolingian sources, 225; style, 229–30, 313; Catholic Homilies, 41–42, 51, 60, 182–83, 185, 225–27, 228–30, 265–66, 279, 327, 330; De duodecim abusiuis, 337; De octo vitiis, 319; De Temporibus Anni, 224; Grammar and Glossary, 141, 144, 197, 210, 243, 286, 293, 299; homilies on Maccabees, 208; Interrogationes Sigewulfi, 224, 420n10; Letter to B ­ rother Edward, 190, 429n8; Letter to Sigefurth, Letter to Wulfgeat, 224; Libelli de veteri testamenti et novo, 224, 262–63; Lives of Saints, 165, 173, 224, 243, 251, 257–58, 262; pastoral letters for Wulfsige and Wulfstan I, 51, 224, 228–29, 242; Preface to Genesis, 143, 149, 208, 258–59; “Sermo de sacrificio,” 388n17

Aelred, 362; De spirituali amicitia, 414n14; Genealogia rerum Anglorum, 446n13; Homiliae de oneribus propheticis Isaiae, 455n37 Æthelberht of Kent. See King and queens of ­England Æthelmær, 165, 224 Æthelweard, 165, 224, 258, 262; Chronicle, 265, 286–87 Æthelwold of Winchester, bishop, 197, 199, 207, 215–16, 263; glosses to Aldelm’s Prosa de virginitate, 217; glosses on the Psalter, 217; King Edgar’s Establishment of Monasteries, 197–98, 205, 210, 214, 220, 256–57; Old En­glish Benedictine Rule, 155, 165, 182–83, 210, 219–22, 242–44, 251, 286, 293, 334, 365 Alcuin, 38, 125, 134, 137, 144, 269–72, 278, 396n5; De dialectica, 408n15; De grammatica, 269, 270; De orthographia, 270, 271; De psalmorum usu liber, 424n65; De virtutibus et viciis, 165, 208, 268, 318, 320; Interrogationes Sigewulfi, 420n10; as nickname for Ælfric, 197. See also Charlemagne Aldhelm, 196, 198, 263; Prosa de virginitate, 217 Alfredian writing, 60, 165, 167, 182, 184, 250–54, 383n30 Alfred of Wessex, king, 14, 17, 184; authorship controversy, 383n30; court at Winchester, 252; as lay intellectual, 251–52; postmedieval reputation, 51, 69, 252; Domboc, 242,

568

General Index

Alfred of Wessex (continued) 409n26; Hierdeboc, xxi, 6–7, 65, 125, 155, 159, 165, 209, 227, 251, 263; prologue to Hierdeboc, 35–37, 274–77; verse epilogue to Hierdeboc, 253–54, 289, 414n11; and Proverbs of Alfred, 296, 304–6 Allen, Hope Emily, 69, 87, 391n11, 456n1; and Sanford B. Meech, 97 Alliterative verse. See Verse, meters Ancrene Wisse, 128, 155, 183, 185, 298–99, 316–17, 334, 346–60 passim, 364–65; date of, 457n9; versions of, 298; Dominican authorship of, 348; episcopal context for, 348, 349–50; French and Latin versions, 176, 369; ­Middle En­glish descendants, 365; scholarly reception, 66, 67, 69–70, 87, 97, 346–48 Ancrene Wisse Group, 174, 190, 298–99, 346–60, 366–67 Andrew of St. Victor, 348 Anglo-­Norman. See French, insular Anglo-­Norman Text Society, 64 Anglo-­Saxon Chronicle, 35, 133, 173, 182, 278, 286, 290, 291. See also Peterborough Chronicle Anglo-­Saxon Penitentials, 431n42 “Anglo-­Saxons,” xxiv, 16 Annales school, 100 Anonymus ad Cuimnanum, 271 Anselm of Bec, archbishop, 202–3, 285, 362; De custodia interioris hominis, 358; De humanis moribus, 358; De similitudinibus, 318; Liber Anselmi archiepiscopi, 422n45; Prayers and Meditations, 422n44; Proslogion, 422n44 Anselm of Laon, 329 Anti-­Catholicism, 85, 86–87, 89, 90, 392n34 Apocalypse of Thomas, 249 Appleford, Amy, 415n33, 417n53 Aquinas, Thomas, 5, 92, 379n16, 409n29. See also Neo-­Thomism/Neo-­Scholasticism Archbishops of Canterbury, medieval: Augustine (d. 601), 18, 30–31, 51, 74, 196, 307, 312, 420n14; Dunstan (d. 988), 197, 202, 217, 243, 268; Sigeric (d. 994), 225–26; Ælfric of Abingdon (d. 1005), 23, 428n26; Ælfheah/Alphege (d. 1012), 198, 202; Æthelnoth (d. 1038), 234; Eadsige (d. 1050), 431–2n50; Robert of Jumièges (d. 1055), 199, 431–32n50; Stigand (d. 1072), 199; Lanfranc (d. 1089), 199 (Consuetudines), 202; Ralph d’Escures (d. 1122), 209, 214 (Homilia de

assumptione Mariae); Thomas Becket (d. 1070), 9, 52, 170, 209, 295, 304, 342, 362; Stephen Langton (d. 1228), 181, 359; John Pecham (d. 1292), 154 (Lambeth Constitutions). See also Anselm of Bec (d. 1109); Edmund Rich of Abingdon (d. 1240); Arundel, Thomas (d. 1414) Archbishops of York: Ecgbert (d. 766), 33, 38, 125, 269; John Thoresby (d. 1363), 154. See also Wulfstan I of York (d. 1023) Archdeacons, 246, 336, 343 Areley Kings, Worcs, 295, 309. See also Layamon/Lawman, Brut Aristocracy. See Lords, secular Arnold, Matthew, 390n5; “Dover Beach,” 98 Arnold, Thomas, 390n5 Arthur, King, 63, 307 Arundel, Thomas, archbishop, Oxford Constitutions, 44, 48, 42, 53, 74, 78–79, 85–86, 118, 179, 389n40 Ass, Balaam’s, 1–13, 42, 105, 89, 112, 144; and authorship, 7–9, 108; and the body, 5–6; and gendered vio­lence, 2; and Jewish exegesis, 4–5; and lay criticism of the Church, 8–12; and martyrdom, 8; and miraculous speech, 379n16; and the Palm Sunday ass, 5, 337–38; as the synagogue, 338; ­a fter the Protestant Reformation, 12–13, 380n46 Asser, bishop, Life of Alfred, 17, 251, 275, 435–36n59 Audelay, John, 162 Auerbach, Eric, 381n60, 406n29 Augustine, pseudo-­, De vera et falsa poenitentia, 318 Augustine of Hippo, 76, 133; De civitate dei, 127, 249; De doctrina Christiana, 114, 148, 255, 384n41; De Genesi ad litteram, 5; De trinitate, 140; Enchiridion, 164, 165, 173, 268; In Iohannis euangelium tractatus, 249; Sermones, 41; Soliloquiae, 414n15 Auraicept na n-­éces, 138, 243, 274–75 Ave Maria, 348 “B,” Vita S. Dunstani, 223, 286 Babel, tower of, 39, 40, 47, 137, 274–75, 276 Bacon, Roger, 144, 411n18 Baker, Augustine/David, 80, 81; commentary on Cloud of Unknowing, 399n59; Five Treatises, 398n40 Balaam, 1–3; interpretations of, 3–13. See also Ass, Balaam’s



General Index

Bale, John, bishop, 47; Illustrium maioris Britanniae scriptorum, 388n18; Image of Both Churches, 50 Bannatyne Club, 62 Baronius, Caesarius, cardinal, Annales ecclesiastici, 82; “saeculum obscurum,” 82, 90; “semper eadem,” 92 Batt, Catherine, 403n48 ­Battle of Brunanburh, 291, 310 ­Battle of Maldon, 310, 442n22 Bayeux Tapestry, 200 Bede, 125, 140, 269; “Death Song,” 34–35, 214; De orthographia, 271; Expositio actuum apostolorum, 385n51; Historia ecclesiastica, 17, 30–33, 35, 49, 73, 76, 77, 198, 201, 362; Homiliarum evangelii, 181, 214; In Epistulas septem catholicas, 8–9; Letter to Ecgbert of York, 33, 86, 263; translations of Lord’s Prayer and Creed, 33, 86, 214; lost translation of John’s Gospel, 35, 214. See also Old En­glish Bede; “Sanctus Beda was i-­boren” Benedeit, Voyage de saint Brendan, 166, 381n50, 441n9 Benedictine Rule, 197, 198, 199, 216, 263 Benedictines, En­glish: as national reformers, xxiii, 17, 51, 172, 184, 197–98, 205–7, 215–16; Cluniac roots of, 197, 215; backlash against, 245; vernacular writings by, 195–237, 362; attitudes ­towards other vernacular corpora, 241–60; dominance in textual rec­ord, 238–41; and the Carolingian Church, 277–81; and the invention of language hierarchies, 261–67; and pastoral care, 200–203, 205–6, 211, 226, 332–34, 453n4; and insular French, 162. See also Ælfric of Eynsham; Æthelwold of Winchester; Byrhtferth of Ramsay; Reform, Benedictine Benedict of Aniane, 205, 268 (Codex regularum) Benedict of Nursia, 197 Beowulf, 34, 62, 134, 159, 172, 239 Bernard of Clairvaux, 362 Bertha/Aldeberge of Kent. See Kings and queens of ­England Bibles in ancient languages: Hebrew, 1, 5, 6, 37, 139, 155, 159, 274, 277; Septuagint and Greek New Testament, 1, 37, 48, 139, 143, 155, 159, 277; Vulgate, 1, 37, 139, 143, 274, 277 (Jerome); Gothic Bible, 143 (Ulfilas) Bible translation, attitudes and practices, xiv, 23–24; medieval prevalence of, 43–44;

569

continuity with postmedieval translations, 17–18, 116–18; conflicting postmedieval repre­sen­ta­tions of, 51–54, 56–58, 66–67; in early medieval E ­ ngland, 35–37, 250–60, 274–77; in the thirteenth ­century, 39–44, 105–117; in the ­fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, 43–44, 48–49, 135–36, 139–45; in continental Eu­ro­pean languages, 386n64, 377n3; anxiety over, 8–10, 43–44, 258–59; attacks and justifications of, 36–37, 47–49, 135–45; and allegoresis, 107–8, 112–13, 147–49, 258–59; equivalence of effect, 127; ideal of plainness/sermo humilis, 54–55, 56–57, 105–7, 114; sense-­for-­sense, 127, 258; as God’s law, 48, 117, 130, 149, 242. See also Bible versions in ­England Bible versions in ­England, early Modern En­glish prose: ­Great Bible (1538), 3, 17, 44, 49, 56, 181; Geneva Bible (1560), 17–18; Bishop’s Bible (1568), 18, 54, 78; Rheims New Testament (1582), 18, 77–79; Douay-­Rheims Bible (1609–10), 18, 79; King James Bible (1611), 18, 44, 70, 79, 395n66; Douay-­ Rheims-­Challoner Bible (1750), 398n49. See also Martin, Gregory; Tyndale, William, Tyndale New Testament Bible versions in ­England, French prose: Oxford Psalter, 441n9, 458n18; Anglo-­ Norman Bibles, 143, 176, 178; Ludlow Scribe, Estoyres de la Bible, 378n4 Bible versions in ­England, ­Middle En­glish prose: Paues Version, 41. See also Glossed Gospels; Lambeth Homilies; ­Middle En­glish Bible; ­Middle En­glish Mirror; Rolle, Richard, En­glish Psalter; Trinity Homilies Bible versions in ­England, Old En­glish prose. See Ælfric of Eynsham, Catholic Homilies, Preface to Genesis; Bede, lost translation of John’s Gospel; Glosses, vernacular; Blickling Homilies; Old En­glish Heptateuch; Old En­glish Psalms; Old En­glish Gospels; Psalters, vernacular and interlinear; Vercelli Homilies Bible versions in medieval ­England, vernacular verse, early ­Middle En­glish. See Genesis and Exodus; Northern Homily Cycle; Orrm, Orrmulum; South En­glish Legendary Bible versions in medieval ­England, vernacular verse, Insular French. See Poème Anglo-­Normand; Robert of Gretham, Miroir

570

General Index

Bible versions in medieval ­England, vernacular verse, Old En­glish. See “Genesis A”; “Genesis B”; “Exodus”; “Daniel”; Heliand; Junius manuscript (see Index of MSS, London, BL Junius 11) Bishop, Edmund, 394n44 Bishops of Exeter. Leofric (d. 1072) Bishops of Hereford: Robert of Bethune (d. 1148), 352; William de Vere (d. 1198), 351; Mauger of Capévaux (d. 1212); Hugh Foliot (d. 1234), 351; Ralph Maidstone (d. 1239), 351; Peter of Aigueblanche (d. 1268), 351 Bishops of Lincoln. See Grosseteste, Robert (d. 1253) Bishops of London: Mellitus (d. 624), 31; Gilbert Foliot (d. 1187), 342–45, 351, 453n3; William of Sainte-­Mère-­Eglise (d. 1224), 343; Cuthbert Tunstall (d. 1559), 49, 53, 56 Bishops of Rochester: Paulinus (d. 644), 196, 202; Tobias (d. 726), 31; Ernulf (d. 1124), 210. See also Fisher, John (d. 1535) Bishops of Salisbury. See Jewel, John (d. 1571); Burnet, Gilbert (d. 1715) Bishops of Sherborne: Wulfsige I (d. ca. 900?), 252; Wulfsige III (d. 1002), 224. See also Asser (d. 909) Bishops of Wells: Giso (d. 1088), 431–32n50 Bishops of Winchester: Swithun (d. 862), 196, 198, 202. See also Æthelwold of Winchester (d. 984) Bishops of Worcester: Ecgwine (d. 717), 198; Oswald (d. 992), 196–97; Wulfstan II (d. 1095), 202, 333, 335, 338, 351–52; John de Coutance (d. 1198), 338. See also Wærferth (d. 915); Stillingfleet, Edward (d. 1699) Blickling Homilies, 110, 186, 244–47, 297, 327 Bloomfield, Morton W., 98 Blount, Lady Mary, 81 Boethius, Consolation of Philosohy, 306. See also Old En­glish Boethius Bolland, Jean, 82 Boniface/Winfrid, evangelist, 17, 33, 34, 270, 271 Booklets, 189, 208, 233, 240, 453n4 Book of Common Prayer, 44, 76, 181 Book of Margery Kempe, 87, 97, 131, 134, 190 Bossuet, Jacques-­Bénigne, Histoire des variations, 74, 84 Bourdieu, Pierre, 95 Boyle, Leonard, 94, 129 Britain, languages of, xxiv, 16, 30–31, 77, 382n4 British Chris­tian­ity, 30, 31, 448n34

Brooks, Cleanth, 99 Brown, Peter, 95 Brut chronicles, 182 Buckley, Sigebert, 80 Burckhardt, Jacob, Die Kultur der Re­nais­sance in Italien, 89, 90, 92, 101 Burnet, Gilbert, bishop, History of the Reformation, 56–57, 74, 84 Butler, Charles, “On the Discipline of the Church of Rome,” 85 Butler, William, Contra translacionem anglicanam, 148, 152 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 402n37 Byrhtferth of Ramsay, 198; Enchiridion, 223, 227, 229, 243, 264, 265, 408n15; Vita S. Oswaldi, 223, 286 Cædmon and his “Hymn,” 17, 31–33, 74–75, 76, 159, 160, 243 Cambrai. See Religious Foundations, En­glish, nuns Cambridge En­glish, 99 Cambridge Tract 1, 48–49, 154–55, 163, 179, 189. See also Dives and Pauper Camden Society, 66 Canons, regular (Augustinian), 94, 162, 180, 199, 240, 342, 347, 352, 368; Arrouasian, 110, 199, 318, 325–31; Gilbertine, 199, 94; Premonstratensians, 348; Victorines, 329, 346, 348; Augustinian h ­ ouses as descendants of minsters, 199, 239. See also Hugh of St. Victor; Laon, cathedral school of; Orrm, Orrmulum; Richard of St. Victor; Robert of Gretham Canons, secular, 206, 322, 334, 352, 362, 424n63, 451n27; expulsion from Winchester, 197, 205, 227; at St. Peter’s, Exeter, 209, 240; at St. Etheldreda’s, Hereford, 351; at St. Mary’s, Lincoln, 246, 327; at St. Paul’s, London, 342–43; at early St. Andrew’s, Rochester, 245. See also Blickling Homilies; Clergy, secular; Trinity Homilies; Vercelli Homilies; Vices and Virtues; William de Montibus Carolingian Church and State, 128; baptismal handbooks, 34, 438n23; influence on ­England, 251; and language hierarchy, 272–74, 280; po­liti­cal theory, 37, 165, 268–74. See also Reform, Carolingian; Theology, po­liti­cal Carthusian hermits, 70, 94, 186, 199–200, 236, 362



General Index

Cary, Clementia/Anne, 80 Cassian, John, Institutiones, 38, 420n13 Catholicism: En­glish, early modern, 72–81, 84; Roman, nineteenth and twentieth ­century, and medieval scholarship, 91–95. See also Anti-­Catholicism Caxton, William, 161, 180 Chambers, E. K., Medieval Stage, 393n40 Chambers, R. W., 204; On the Continuity of En­glish Prose, 69–71, 72, 73, 80, 87, 90, 346, 360 Chanson de Roland, 61–62 Chansons de geste, 61–62, 134, 174; “Chancun de Mainet,” 106; “Geste dan Tristram,” 106 Chardri, 449n43 Charlemagne, 125, 137, 215, 268, 269; Admonitio generalis, 269; Epistola de litteris colendis, 269–72 Charters, vernacular, 35, 130, 168, 210, 288, 290, 300, 423n39 Chastising of God’s C ­ hildren, vii, 25, 144 Chatterton, Thomas, Rowley poems, 61 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 53, 163, 178, 183, 184; Boece, 65; Canterbury Tales, 53, 60, 97–98, 134, 148, 181, 405n20; Treatise on the Astrolabe, 65; early editions, 388n27 Chenu, Marie-­Dominique, 93–94; La Théologie au douzième siècle, 93 Chester Play of Balaam, 2–3 Chrétien de Troyes, Chevalier de la Charrette, 406n35 “Christ and Satan,” 159, 251 Chrodegang of Metz, bishop, 209 Church, conceptions of, xxii-­x xiii, 20 Cicero, 39 Cistercians, 94, 95, 199, 206, 236, 362, 414n13 Clanchy, Michael, 94, 204, 381n56 Clara Kirchberger, Coasts of the Country, 399n59 Clemence of Barking, 162; Life of Saint Catherine, 443n36 Clemoes, Peter, 402n38 Clergy, secular, 8, 322, 352, 424n63; status of, 8, 323–25, 334, 361; putative ignorance of, 86, 108, 188; monastic views of, 207, 227–29; and Latin pastoralia, 120, 175; and pastoralia in En­glish, 226–39, 328; and the vernacular more broadly, 31, 126, 145–55, 175, 244–47; and clerical marriage, 206, 245–46, 359, 434n29; as figured by Noah, 323, 327. See also Canons, secular; Gerald of Wales; Henry of Huntingdon; Map, Walter; Peter of Blois; John of Salisbury

571

Clericus-­laicus, 18 Cloud of Unknowing, 70, 80, 86–87, 130, 186 Clovedech/Clovis, king, 30, 75 Cluniac monasticism, 197, 342. See also Benedictines, En­glish Cnut, king, 172, 198, 216, 224, 288–90, 437n14; Cnut’s Proclamation, 261, 393; I Cnut, 302–3; “Merye Sungen the munekes binnen Ely,” 299–300. See also Old En­glish Apollonius; Wulfstan I of York Colonialism/imperialism, xix, 62, 377n4, 391n22, 392n28, 400n3; twelfth ­century, 422n36 Commandments, Ten, vernacular, 57, 209; and Alfred’s Domboc, 242. See also Lord’s Prayer and Creed, vernacular Compendious Olde Treatyse. See First Seith Bois Compileison, 130, 175, 176, 369 Conquest, Danish, 264, 285. See also Cnut, king Conquest, Norman, xvi, 15, 51, 76, 174, 184, 200, 204, 285, 394n56 Constable, Barbara, 81 Constable, Giles, 402n26 Constable, Giles, and Robert Benson, Re­nais­sance and Reform, 94, 423n52 Constantine, emperor, 53 Converse, Florence, Long W ­ ill: A Romance, 394n58 Conversion of ­England, 29–30 Coptic, xxiii, 41 Cornish, xxiv, 16, 19, 278, 455n22 Corpus christianorum, 97 Correction: fraternal, 20, 109–10, 113, 131, 141–42, 164, 167; of laity by clergy, 10, 108, 261–63; of clergy by laity, 8–13, 109–10; of supposed error, 247–50; of Latinity, 269–72; as a term for religious reform, 419n6 Cotton, Sir Robert, 80 Coulton, G. C., 86–87; Medieval Pa­norama, 86, 90 Councils and Synods, provincial: Whitby (664); Clovesho II (743), 33, 75, 131, 263; Frankfurt (794), 275, 280; Tours (813), 32, 273; Aachen (817), 268 (Codex regularum); Metz (847), 439n44; Winchester (ca. 970), 197, 268; Clarendon (1154), 446n11; Westminster (1200), 455n41; London (?, ca. 1200), 344; Canterbury (1213), 359, 458n20; Oxford (1222), 334; Hereford (?, 1220s), 352, 359; See also Pecham, John, Lambeth Constitutions; Arundel, Thomas, Oxford Constitutions

572

General Index

Councils, General: Lateran III (1179), 296, 318, 359, 361, 364, 453n2; Lateran IV (1215), 14, 306, 361, 453n2; and pastoralia, Latin and vernacular,117, 175, 184, 202, 296, 318, 359, 364; and sacramental confession, 333–34; Lyon II (1274), 362; Trent (1545–63), 75; Vatican I (1869–70); Vatican II (1962–65), 42, 92; aggiornamento, 93 Coventry heresy t­ rials, 39, 57 Coverdale, Miles, 56; Goostly Psalmes, 397n30. See also Bible versions in ­England, early Modern En­glish prose, ­Great Bible Cranmer, Thomas, preface to ­Great Bible, 56 Cressy, Serenus/Hugh Paulinus, 80, 81, 83 Crowley, Robert, 60 Cummings, Brian, 122 Cursor Mundi, 64, 179 Cuthbert of Jarrow, De transitu venerabilis Bedae, 34–35 Cynewulf, “Christ II,” 254–56 Cyprian, Ad Fortunatum, 8 D’Ardenne, S. R. T. O., 456n1 Dalgairns, J. B., 392n34 Damian, Peter, 236 Danes, 198–99, 429n10. See also Conquest, Danish “Daniel,” 251 Dante Alighieri, 396n12; De vulgari eloquentia, 5, 39, 46–47, 137–38, 139, 416n42; Inferno, 39; Paradiso, 46–47 Dark Ages as historiographic concept, 19, 84, 93, 398n44; as “saeculum obscurum,” 82, 90. See also Historiography; History, sacred; Re­nais­sances Day, John, 387n8 Dean, Ruth, 95 Deanesly, Margaret, Lollard Bible, 66–67, 84, 86, 117 De la Bigne, Marguerin, Sacra bibliotheca, 82 De Lubac, Henri, cardinal, 92, 93 De Saussure, Ferdinand, 100 De Sully, Maurice, bishop, French homilies, 175, 342, 425n72 De Worde, Wynkyn, 180 Decretum Gelesianum, 248–49 Defensor, Liber scintillarum, 319; En­glish glosses to, 217 Deonise Hid Divinite, 130 Dhuoda, Liber manualis, 416n45 Dialogue Between a Clerk and a Knight, 11–12, 414n4

Dictionary of Old En­glish, 299 Diglossia. See Vernacular Dionysius the Areopagite, pseudo-­, 128, 148; De mystica theologia, 124, 130 Distichs of Cato, 285, 305 Distinctiones, 340, 349, 362 Dives and Pauper, 49, 380n43, 403n46, 414n10. See also Cambridge Tract 1 Dobson, E. J., 346, 347 Dodd, Charles/Hugh Tootell, Church History, 83 Dominical Sermon Cycle, 110 Dominicans, 94, 348–49, 350; early h ­ ouses of, 349. See also Ancrene Wisse Donatus, Aelius, 137, 271 Douai, En­glish College of, 75. See also Religious Foundations, En­glish, Monks: St. Gregory Doyle, A. I., 402n38, 407n5 “Dream of the Rood,” 34 Dryden, John, 60 Du Cange, Charles du Fresne, Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis, 82 Duffy, Eamon, Stripping of the Altars, 89 Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, xxi Durantus, Rationale, 381n61 Dyrness, William, 122 Eadmer, 202; Vita S. Odonis, 286–87, 384n40 Eadwine Psalter. See Index of MSS, Cambridge, Trinity R.17.1 Early En­glish Text Society, 62–66, 68, 69–70, 72, 87, 96, 97; and British imperialism, 392n28 Early M ­ iddle En­glish. See En­glish, early ­Middle Eckhart, Meister, 123 Edgar, king. See Kings and queens of ­England; King Edgar’s Establishment of Monasteries Edmund Rich of Abingdon, archbishop, 75; Mirror of Holy Church, 133, 185, 322; Mirouer de Seinte Eglise, 369 Elena/Helen/Eleanor de Quincy, countess of Winchester; as “dame Aline,” 110; and Lambeth Apocalypse, 110–11, 163 Eliot, T. S., 87 Elton, G. R., 122 Empathy, hermeneutics of, 377n1 Encomium Emmae Reginae, 431n41 En­glish studies: as outgrowth of Romantic philology, 67–68; as developing discipline,



General Index

95–100; as substitute for religion, 98. See also Philology, Romantic En­glish Wycliffite Sermons, 180 En­glish, early M ­ iddle, 261–360; texts and genres, 292–300; generic innovation in, 316–18; continuity with Old En­glish, 285–90, 333–35, 363–65; archaizing tendencies of, 288, 291, 307, 422n25, 441n12; concentration of texts in Southeast, Lincolnshire, and West Midlands, 293, 316–17; as a language of clerical professional exchange, 324, 326, 367–68; as “Semi-­Saxon,” 65, 66, 69 En­glish, late ­Middle: corpus of, 178–81; continuity with early En­glish and insular French, xxiii-iv, 23–24; history of scholarship, 59–71, 95–102; and medieval conceptions of the vernacular, 137–45; and the idea of vernacular theology, 124, 129–36 En­glish, Old, 22–23, 195–292; ancient character of, xiii, xviii, 34–36; corpus of, 171–74; and literary standardization, 204, 218–19, 243, 278–79; and stylistic elaboration, 223–24; compared to Carolingian Latin, 277–81; in twelfth c­ entury, xvi, 173–74, 203–11; in relation to early ­Middle En­glish, xxiii-­x iv, 204, 363 Épinal-­Érfurt Glossary, 34, 243, 427n21, 433n15 Erasmus, Desiderius, Exhortation /Novum instrumentum, 78, 397n30 Eriugena, John Scotus, 128, 328, 452n48 Estates of the Church. See Theology, po­liti­cal, and the Estates of the Church Ethiopic, xxiii, 41 Etic/emic, xvii Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica, 55 Eve of Wilton, 236 Exegetical criticism, 99 “Exodus,” 251, 254–55, 259 Fénelon, Francis, “Lettre sur la lecture de l’Écriture,” 84–85 Fichte, Johan Gottlieb, 391n14, 395n60 First Seith Bois, 49, 52–53, 414n5, 416n42 Fish, Simon, 24; Supplycacyon for the Beggers, 65 Fisher, John, bishop, 393–94n43 Flacius, Matthias/Vlačić, Matija. See Magdeburg Centuries Flete, William, De remediis, 80 Forms of living, xviii, 130, 233, 321. See also Libri manuales Forshall, Josiah, 60, 172

573

Foxe, John, 49; Actes and Monuments, 11, 49–55, 66, 73, 92, 116, 148, 389n44 Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. See Foxe, John, Actes and Monuments Franciscans, 94, 162, 187, 349, 350, 369. See also Compileison Franks, 275, 382n3 Frederick II, Hohenstaufen emperor, 361–62 French, insular/French of England/ Anglo-­Norman: nomenclature, xxiv; as insular vernacular, 76, 174–77, 203–4, 286, 287, 293, 363, 366–69; as romanz, 23, 38, 144, 145, 199, 363; in relation to Latin, 23, 363; in relation to Old En­glish, 175; as a field of study, 64, 95–96; long absence from En­glish literary and religious history, 15–16, 52. See also Normans Frith, John, 24 Froude, J. A., History of E ­ ngland, 57–58, 59, 68, 74, 89; Lectures on the Council of Trent, 57 Frye, Northrop, 404n53 Fulda, 270, 273, 426n8 Furnivall, Frederick James, 63–64, 65 Gaimar, Geffrey, Estoire des Engleis, 291 Gallia Christiana, 82 Gascoigne, Margaret, 80–81 Gasquet, Francis Aiden, cardinal, 85–86 Gatch, Milton McC., 96 Gaytryge, John, 154. See also Lay Folks’ Catechism “Genesis A,” 251, 383n23 “Genesis B,” 173, 273, 274 Genesis and Exodus, 2 Geoffrey of Clive, 350, 457n13 Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia regum Brittaniae, 307–8, 311 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria nova, 343 Gerald of Wales, 451n33; Speculum ecclesie, 453n55 German, Old High, 274, 427n20. See also Heliand; Nottker the German; Otfrid of Weissenberg Ghittos, Helen, 265, 267, 437n12 Gibbon, Edmund, Decline and Fall, 57, 82 Gildas, De excidio, 382n7 Gillespie, Vincent, 402n38, 408n12 Gilson, Étienne, 93, 94 Glagolithic/Old Church Slavonic, 276 Glosinge, 148 Glossa ordinaria, 3–4, 42, 201, 213, 328–29, 364

574

General Index

Glossed Gospels, 149, 153, 178, 183, 389n38 Glosses, vernacular, 22, 34, 131, 138, 144, 172–74, 210, 217–19, 242–43, 263, 264, 275; and linguistic equivalence, 218–19, 275. See also Psalters, vernacular and interlinear Godden, Malcolm, 383n30, 403n46 Godric of Finchale, songs, 299 Goering, Joseph, 402n33 Goscelin of Saint Bertin, Liber confortatorius; saints’ lives, 286 Goths, 30, 78, 79. See also Bibles in ancient languages Gower, John, Confessio amantis, 97–98, 128, 177, 178, 409n34; Miroir de l’Omme, 177; as “burel clerk,” 163 Grammars and grammaticality, 137, 140, 141, 268, 271; Dame Grammar, 137, 138. See also Ælfric of Eynsham, Grammar and Glossary; Alcuin, De grammatica; Anonymus ad Cuimnanum; Auraicept na n-­éces Gramsci, Antonio, 381n60 Gratian, Decretum, 9, 423n58 Greek, 31, 37, 41, 45, 76, 120, 139–42, 147, 155, 159, 274. See also Linguae sacrae, tres Greenblatt, Stephen, 100, 400n3 Gregory I/Gregory the ­Great, 30, 153, 307, 342; Dialogues, 210; Epistolae, 32 (to Mellitus), 265 (to Serenus of Marseilles); Homiliae in evangelia, 110, 112, 117, 163; Moralia in Iob, 31; Regula pastoralis, 6–7, 36, 42, 51, 276. See also Alfred of Wessex, king, Hierdeboc; Wærferth of Worcester, Old En­glish Gregory’s Dialogues Gregory Nazianzen, 385n51 Gretsch, Mechthild, 402–3n38 Grimm, Jakob, 62; Deutsche Grammatik, 61; Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, 391n17 Grondeux, Anne, 384n40 Grosseteste, Robert, 350, 351, 368, 453–54n6, 457n10, 457n13; Chasteau d’amur, 183, 185 Grundmann, Herbert, 94, 381n56 Guernes de Pont-­Ste-­Maxence, 162 Guest, Lady Charlotte, 391n21 Guillaume le Clerc, 162 Guischart of Beaulieu, Sermon/Romanz de Temtacioun, 296–97, 342 “Guthlac A/B,” 383n23 Guy of Southwick, Tractatus de virtute confessionis, 353 Hali Meithhad, 299, 317, 354, 355, 356, 358, 360, 366. See also Katherine Group

Handbook for a Confessor, 431n47. See also Wulfstan I of York Hanna, Ralph, 402n38, 403n48 Harding, Thomas, An Ans­were, 75–77, 83, 85 Harpsfield, Nicholas: Dialogi sex, 73; Historia anglicana ecclesiastica, 73–74; Life of Sir Thomas More, 69 Harvey, Gabriel, Pierces Supererogation, 75 Haskins, Charles Homer, Re­nais­sance of the Twelfth C ­ entury, 89–90, 93, 101, 204 Haymo of Auxerre, 225, 273, 406n26 Hebrew, 5, 6, 19, 31, 37, 45, 47, 52, 140, 142, 147, 159, 274; as a language of Britain, xxiv, 16, 381n59. See also Linguae sacrae, tres Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 57 Heigham, John, 397n35 Heliand, 173, 251, 273, 274 Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, 291 Henry of Lancaster, Livre de Seyntz Medicines, 177, 403n48 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 391n14, 395n60 Hereford, 347, 349, 350–53, 357, 359–60. See also Bishops of Hereford; Libraries; Religious foundations, cathedrals Higden, Ranulph, Polychronicon, 17, 133. See also Trevisa, John Hild of Whitby, abbess, 31, 32, 33 Hilton, Walter, 70, 86–87, 183; On Mixed Life, 398n37; Scale of Perfection, 80 Hirsh, John, 403n45 Historiography, 5–6, 16–18, 29, 47–58, 59–60, 67, 70, 72, 88, 92. See also Foxe, Actes and Monuments; Dark Ages as historiographic concept; History, sacred; Medieval/Middle Ages; Re­nais­sances History of the Holy Rood Tree, 351 History, sacred, 5–8, 16, 13, 64, 89, 90, 132, 162, 229, 308, 326, 331. See also Historiography; Reform, ideologies of Hitchcock, Elsie V., 66, 69, 70 Hoccleve, Thomas, 178 Hodgson, Phyllis, 97 Holmer, Paul, Grammar of Faith, 122 Holy Prophete David, 387n6 Homiliaries, vernacular, 207–10. See also Ælfric of Eynsham, Catholic Homilies, Lives of Saints; Blickling Homilies; Lambeth Homilies; Orrmulum; Trinity Homilies; Vercelli Homilies; Vespasian Homilies; De Sully, Maurice, French homilies; Robert of Gretham, Miroir; Index of MSS, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 343



General Index

Homiliary of Angers, 337, 351, 424n66. See also Index of MSS, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 343 Honorius Augustodunensis, 328; Elucidarium, 133, 175, 182, 187, 452n38, 454n8; Expositio in cantica canticorum, 326; Speculum ecclesie, 327, 452n38 Horstmann, Carl: South En­glish Legendary, 63, 392n34; Yorkshire Writers, 68–69, 82 House­hold manuals, M ­ iddle En­glish, 167–68. See also Libri manuales Hrabanus Maurus, 270, 379n12, 380n31, 396n5 Hudson, Anne, 402n38; Premature Reformation, 404n62 Hugh of St. Victor, 362; De laude caritatis, 329; De sacramentis Christianis fidei, 318, 329; Didascalicon, 408n16 Huizinga, Johan, Herfittij der Middeleeuwen, 400n3 Humanism, 39, 45 Hundred Years’ War, 15, 290 Hunne, Richard, 387n6 Hussites, 49 Icelandic, Old, 138, 412n34 Index, papal, 75 Innocent III, pope, 82, 93, 172, 333; Cum ex iniuncto, 9–12, 44, 66, 84, 143 “Instructions for Christians,” 205, 208, 285 Irish, Old and ­Middle, 22, 23, 274, 275; Cambrai Homily, 427n20; Cadmug Gospels, 427n21; Psalterium Suthantoniense, 427n21. See also Auraicept na n-­éces Isidore of Seville: De natura rerum, 452n48; Etymologiae, 452n48; Mysticorum expositione sacramentorum, 4–5 Israel the Grammarian, 388n20 Italian, 139, 155; volgarizzamento, 39. See also Dante, De volgari eloquentia James, Thomas, Corruption of Scriptures, 55, 60; Apologie for John Wicliffe, 389n38 James, William, 98 Jerome, 37, 49, 127 Jewel, John, bishop, Copie of a Sermon (“Chalenge”), 75; A Replie, 76–77 Jews, 337–39; York massacre, 454n19; 1290 expulsion, 362 John of Salisbury, bishop, 424n63; Policraticus, 9, 304 Johnson, Ian, 408n12

575

Jonas of Orléans, De institutione laicalis, 165. See also Libri manuales Jones, Sir William, 61 Joseph of Exeter, Daretis Phrygii Ilias, 310 Julian of Norwich: Revelation of Love, 70, 86–87, 124, 126, 130; XVI Revelations of Divine Love, 80–81, 83, 399n59; Vision Showed to a Devout ­Woman, 162, 163 Kaske, R. E., 98 Katherine Group, 298, 354–55, 356–58, 365–66. See also Ancrene Wisse Group Kemble, John Mitchell, 390n4 Kempe, Margery, Book of Margery Kempe, 87, 97, 131, 134, 190 Ker, N. R., 203 Ker, W. P., 394n46 Kierkegaard, Sören, 122 King, Martin Luther, 122 Kings and queens of En­gland/Britain, or of En­glish kingdoms: Æthelberht of Kent (d. 616), 18, 30, 242, 291, 382n14; Bertha/ Aldeberge of Kent (d. ca. 601), 30; Oswald of Northumbria (d. 642), 31, 49; Offa of Mercia (d. 796), 35; Æthelstan (d. 939, 52, 250–51; Edgar (d. 975), 51, 197, 216, 268; Ælfthryth (d. ca. 1000), 200, 220, 268; Æthelred II (d. 1016), 216, 223, 224, 437n14; Emma of Normandy (d. 1052), 431n31; Edward the Confessor (d. 1066), 236; Harold Godwinson (d. 1066), 16; Henry I (d. 1135), 17, 174, 291 (Charter of Liberties); Adeliza of Louvain (d. 1151), 17, 166; Mathilda (d. 1167), 287; Henry II (d. 1189), 9, 200, 209, 302, 304, 310, 341, 443n36; Eleanor of Aquitaine (d. 1204), 200, 310; Henry III (d. 1272), 110, 361; Henry V (d. 1422), 180; Henry VIII (d. 1547), 3, 54, 56, 181; Mary (d. 1559), 54; Elizabeth I (d. 1601), 51, 54, 76; Charles II (d. 1685), 56. See also Alfred (d. 899); Cnut (d. 1035); King Edgar’s Establishment of Monasteries Kingsley, Charles, “Froude’s History of ­England,” 59–60; Westward Ho!, 396n11 Kipling, Rudyard, “The White Man’s Burden,” 400n3 Laity: characterizations of, 141–44; priestly duties ­towards, 105–16, 110, 117, 148–49, 151–56; reciprocity of ­these duties, 105–16, 152–53; supposed ignorance of, 7–8, 86, 148; “lettrid” members of, 154–55, 163, 179, 189;

576

General Index

Laity (continued) and arguments over the vernacular, 44, 76, 85, 116, 127, 149–50; Job, as figure for, 319, 323. See also Ass, Balaam’s; Cambridge Tract 1; Correction; Homiliaries, vernacular; House­hold books; Libri manuales; Litteratus/illiteratus; Patrons, secular; Theology, po­liti­cal; Vices and Virtues Lambeth Apocalypse. See Index of MSS, London, Lambeth 209 Lambeth Homilies, 186, 298, 333, 335–39, 349, 365–66. See also Index of MSS, London, Lambeth 487 Langland, William, Piers Plowman, 97–98, 124, 126, 143, 177–78, 183–84, 186, 305, 362; history of scholarship, 60, 64, 68–69; coronation scene, 161; Dame Study, 128, 132, 135; “lewed vicory,” 162; Piers as laborer/preacher, 405n20 Lanterne of Light, 12, 43, 44; edition by Robert Redman, 50, 380n44, 387n12 Lantfred, Translatio et miraculi S. Swithuni, 218 Laon, cathedral school of, 329, 364. See also Anselm and Ralph of Laon Lapidge, Michael, 402–3n38 Last Days, prophecy of Joel, 40, 42 Latin and Latinity: early insular conceptions of, 35, 277–78; early insular grammars of, 268, 271; early insular styles of, 217–18; standardization by Carolingians, 268–72; as grammatica, 137–40; accessibility of, 287–88; inaccessibility of, 147–48, 287; status of, 137–50; in relation to Arabic, Greek, and Hebrew, 147, 410n4; sociolinguistic functions of, 19, 260; as symbol of medieval Church, xiv, 19, 57. See also Grammars and grammaticality; Vernacular Latin, Vulgar, 30, 125, 137, 268–72 Latini, Brunetto, Livres dou Tresor, 408–9n19 Laurent d’Orléans, Somme le roi, 63, 166, 176, 187, 366 Law Codes, vernacular, 130, 210, 242, 289, 290, 291–92, 306; of Æthelberht of Kent, 18, 30. See also Alfred, Domboc; Textus Roffensis, Wulfstan I of York Layamon/Lawman, Brut, 133, 174, 295, 306–14, 316, 330–31, 365, 367 Lay Folks’ Catechism, 66, 154, 187–88, 368 Lay Folks’ Mass-­Book, 66, 158 Lay Folks’ Prayer Book, 66 Lea, Henry Charles, 400n2

Leclercq, Jean, 93, 94, 95, 123 Legge, Dominica, 403n39 Leiden Glossary, 34, 427n21 Leland, John, 47, 388n21, 396n12; Commentarii de scriptoribus Britannicis, 388n20 Leofric, bishop, 209, 236, 240, 243 Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, 239 Lewis, C. S., Chronicles of Narnia, 91 Liber Eliensis. See Index of MSS, Cambridge, Trinity O.2.1 Liberty of private judgement, 67 Libraries: cata­logs, registers, chests, 187–88; survival rates, 187–90; Bourne, 328–29; Canterbury, 202, 210; Exeter, 209, 239, 240; Gloucester, 360; Hereford, 351; Norwich, 369; Rochester, 239, 288; Salisbury, 202; Vercelli, 190; Worcester, 239, 288; of Sir Thomas Bodley, 55; of Sir Robert Cotton, 80; books as one-­volume libraries, 208. See also Registrum Anglie de libris doctorum; Tremulous Hand Libri manuales, 165, 167–68, 173, 179, 208, 233, 268, 319, 450n11. See also House­hold Manuals; Forms of Living Life of St. Christopher, 239 Lincoln. See Blickling Homilies; Canons, secular; Grosseteste, Robert; Religious foundations, En­glish, cathedrals; William de Montibus Lindisfarne Gospels, En­glish glosses in, 243 Lingard, John, History of E ­ ngland, 83 Lingua, barbara; materna; nativa; paterna; propria; rustica; sua; vulgaris. See Vernacular, terms for Linguae sacrae, tres, 1, 29, 140, 275. See also Greek; Hebrew; Latin Linguistic Atlas of Early ­Middle En­glish, 294, 347 Linguistic Atlas of Late ­Middle En­glish, 182 Literary history, xvi-­x viii Litteratus-­illiteratus, 18, 143, 151–55, 163, 188; and the “lettrid” laity, 154–55, 163, 179, 189 Liturgy, 20, 42, 75–77, 84, 88, 118, 130, 132, 158, 162, 188. See also Book of Common Prayer; Missale Romanum Livre de Sidrach, 133, 168. See also Sidrak and Bokkus Lofson of Ure Louerde, 299, 355. See also Wooing Group Loire school of poets, 38 Lollards, xxii, 49 Longage/Tonge, barbare; commune; m ­ other. See Vernacular, terms for



General Index

Lord’s Prayer and Creed, vernacular, 33, 57, 75, 86–87, 209, 335, 343, 430n25; with Confiteor, 343; with Ten Commandments, 209 Lords, secular: religious roles of, 11–12, 109, 164; vernacular address to, 163–70. See also Libri manuales; Patrons, secular Love, Nicholas, Mirror of the Life of Christ, 70, 79–80, 149, 179, 399n59, 403n46, 434n29 Lucidaire de grant sapientie, 410n38, 418n26 Luther, Martin, 24; An den Christlichen Adel deutscher Nation, 12; Deutschen Bibel, 44, 54 Lydgate, John, 74, 120, 178 Lyr­ics, ­Middle En­glish, 18, 162, 300 Mabillon, Jean, 92, 93 Mabinogion, 62 MacPherson, James, Ossian cycle, 61 Madden, Sir Frederic, 60, 172 Magdeburg Centuries, 50, 73, 82, 92 Magna Carta, 67, 291 Magnificat, 5–6 Maitland, Sir Frederic William, 15, 67 Malory, Sir Thomas, Morte Darthure, 62, 134 Manley, John Matthews, 68, 69 Mannyng, Robert, of Brunne, Handlyng Synne, 64, 177 Manuel des pechiez, 64, 177 Map, Walter, De nugis curialium, 7–8, 342, 424n63, 451n33 Marie de France, Fables, 446n13 Marked/unmarked, 147 Martin, Gregory, 77–79, 83, 85, 377n1 Mathilde II, abbess of Essen, 265 Maurists, 82, 92 McGinn, Bernard, 123–24, 127, 129 Medieval Acad­emy of Amer­i­ca, 90 Medievalism, 59–62, 90–91. See also Nationalism, Romantic Medieval/Middle Ages as historiographic concept, xxiii, 16, 29, 59, 89. See also Dark Ages as historiographic concept; Historiography Memoriale Credencium, 417n53 Mercia, 35, 215, 276 “Merye sungen the munekes binnen Ely,” 299–300 Meyer, Paul, 392n34 Michael of Northgate, Ayenbyte of Inwyt, 63, 65, 177, 366. See also Laurent d’Orléans, Somme le roi

577

Michelet, Jules, Histoire de la France, 82, 90, 92 ­Middle En­glish. See En­glish, early M ­ iddle; En­glish, late ­Middle ­Middle En­glish Bible, 2, 4, 44, 116, 140–42, 149, 153, 178, 183; early modern discussions of, 49, 53, 55–56; Victorian scholarship on, 60, 85–86, 172 ­Middle En­glish Dictionary, 299 ­Middle En­glish Mirror, 114, 177, 366. See also Robert of Gretham, Miroir ­Middle En­glish Physiologus, 445n52 Migne, J. P., Patrologia latina, 82, 171–72 Millett, Bella, 97, 347, 402n38 Minsters. See Religious Foundations, En­glish, minsters Mirk, John, Festial, 66, 189 Missale Romanum, 77 Modernity, xxiii, 57, 60, 90, 91, 93, 95, 98. See also Politics of time; Secular and secularization Monks. See Benedictines, En­glish; Cistercians. See also Canons, regular; Carthusian hermits; Religious foundations, En­glish, monks Monumenta germaniae historica, 61 Moore, R. I., 402n32 More, Thomas, 73; canonization of, 70–71, 86; Dialogue Concerning Heresies, 41, 56, 387n6 Morrill, Georgiana Lea, 393n37 Morris, Colin, 94 Morris, Richard, 64, 65 Morris, William, Dream of John Ball, 394–95n59 Morrison, Toni, 122 Myrour of oure Ladye, 65 Mysticism, 124, 129–30 Nationalism, Romantic, 40, 59–62, 92. See also Philology, Romantic Neo-­Thomism/Neo-­Scholasticism, 92, 93 Netter, Thomas, Doctrinale, 74 New Criticism, 99 Newhauser, Richard, 403n50 New Historicism, 100, 101 Newman, Barbara, 129 Nibelunglied, 61 Nicholas of Lyra, 4 Normans, 15–16, 70, 198–200, 422n36. See also Conquest, Norman Norse, Old, xxiv, 16, 19, 174, 198, 273, 412n34

578

General Index

Northern Homily Cycle, 110, 150, 176, 366, 368 Northumbrian Priests’ Law, 434n29 Notker the German, 279 Nouvelle théologie, 92–95, 99, 101, 123 O’­Sullivan, Richard, 70–71, 72, 87 Occitan, 138; grammars of, 410n7 Odo, Ysagogum in theologiam Old En­glish. See En­glish, Old Old En­glish Alcuin, 208, 416n45 Old En­glish Apollonius, 288–90 Old En­glish Bede, 35, 65, 172, 214, 250, 276, 290, 312, 382n16 Old En­glish Boethius, 165, 167, 173, 240, 250 Old En­glish Gospel of Nicodemus, 240 Old En­glish Gospels, 51, 60, 210, 250–51, 260 Old En­glish Heptateuch, 2, 52, 172–73, 195–96, 210, 224, 251, 266 Old En­glish Honorius, 209, 418n26 Old En­glish Illustrated Hexateuch. See Index of MSS, London, BL Cotton Claudius B.iv Old En­glish Martyrology, 35, 172, 209, 243, 414n11 Old En­glish Nicodemus, 173 Old En­glish Orosius, 133, 173, 250 Old En­glish Psalms, 250, 415n22 Old En­glish Ralph d’Escures, 209, 214 Old En­glish Rule of Chrodegang, 209, 244 Old En­glish Saint Giles, 286, 357 Old En­glish Saint Margaret, 286, 357 Old En­glish Saint Nicholas, 286, 357 Old En­glish Soliloquies, 165, 167, 239–40, 250, 254, 279, 414n15, 450n11 Old En­glish Vision of St. Paul, 173, 249 Old Gallo-­Romance, 30. See also Latin, Vulgar ­Orders of Society. See Theology, po­liti­cal, and the ­Orders of Society Oreisun of Seint Marie, 299, 355. See also Wooing Group Origen, 143, 148; In Numeros homiliae, trans. Rufinus, 4, 89; and supercession, 4 Orrm, Orrmulum, xx, 186, 190, 199, 209–10, 297, 316, 317, 325–31, 342; meter and orthography, 330; and En­glish textuality, 325–26, 331, 332, 333, 367 Otfrid of Weissenberg, Evangelienbuch, 274–75, 436n60 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 384n40 Owl and the Nightingale, 445n52 Owst, G. R., 69, 86

Oxford debates on Bible translation, 135–36, 139–45. See also Bible translation, attitudes and practices Oxford En­glish Dictionary, 62, 64 Oxford university, 364. See also Oxford debates on Bible translation; Arundel, Thomas, Oxford Constitutions Palgrave, Sir Francis, 60 Palmer, Thomas, De translacione, 139–40, 141–44, 147–48, 151 Pantin, William, 402n33 Papal Schism (1378–1417), xxiii, 14, 43, 178, 184 Paris, 123, 397–98n36; as center for study of theology, 128, 296, 340, 349, 355, 364. See also Distinctiones; Maurice de Sully; Thema sermons Parishes: in early Gaul, 30; as a late En­glish development, 206, 424n60; and monastic patrons, 206–7, 334; and the organ­ization of pastoral care, 20, 154, 187, 330, 341, 350; and secular patrons, 164. See also Clergy, secular; Religious foundations, En­glish, minsters Parker, Henry and John Joscelyn, Testimonie of Antiquitie, 388n17 Pascalius Rabertus, Expositio in evangelium Matthei, 326 Pastoral care, xviii, 20–21, 85–86, 154, 315–18; as a scholarly field, 94–95; and early En­glish homiliaries, 172; and the Third Lateran Council, 296, 318; and the Fourth Lateran Council, 201–2, 318; as a solemn duty, 105–16, 195–203; as a paradigm for vernacular theology, 147–50, 151–56. See also Benedictines, En­glish; Clergy, secular; En­glish, Old; En­glish, early M ­ iddle; Homiliaries, vernacular; Parishes; Penance, penitentials, and confession; Preachers; Preaching; Religious foundations, En­glish, minsters Patrons, royal. See Alfred of Wessex, Cnut; Kings and queens of ­England: Æthelstan; Ælfthryth; Adeliza of Louvain; Edgar Patrons, secular, 163–70. See also Æthelmær; Æthelweard; Elena de Quincy; Sigefurth; Sigeweard of Eastheolon; Thomas, Lord Berkeley; Wulfgeat of Ylmandum; Zouche, Alan la Pattison, Mark, 122 Paul, St., 5, 7, 106, 148, 158, 169; as patron of St. Paul’s, London, 344–45



General Index

Pearl poet, 177. See also Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Pearsall, Derek, 421n30 Pecock, Reginald: Book of Faith, 130; Repressor, 66; Donet, Folower, 66, 130 Peines du Purgatorie, 176. See also Compileison Penance, penitentials, and confession, 173, 175; in Old En­glish, 208, 228, 234, 235–36; in early M ­ iddle En­glish, 318–19, 333–34, 335–36, 349–50; David, as figure of penitent, 321. See also Anglo-­Saxon Penitentials; Psalms, Penitential Pentecost, 40–43, 76, 274 Percy, Thomas, bishop, Reliques, 61 Periodization, xv, 101, 390n1, 398n44 Persons, Robert, Treatise of Three Conversions, 74, 75 Peterborough Chronicle, 210, 297. See also Anglo-­Saxon Chronicle Peter Comestor, Historia Scholastica, 2, 210 Peter of Blois, 455n22, 456n46; Canon episcopale, 339; Contra perfidiam Judaeorum, 338 Peter of Cornwall, 455n22; Pantheologus, 342 Philippe de Thaon, Comput, 367, 414n11 Philological Society, 62. See also Anglo-­ Norman Text Society Philology, Romantic, xviii, 61–62, 64, 67, 68, 70, 88, 101. See also Nationalism, Romantic Philosophy and the natu­ral sciences, 132–33 Physiologus, ­Middle En­glish, 133, 445n52 Pierre Fecham d’Avergnan, Lumere as lais, 111, 114, 417n56 Plays, cycle/miracle/mystery, 65, 67, 132, 162, 178. See also Chester Play of Balaam Plowman’s Tale, attrib. Chaucer, 388n27 Poema de mio Cid, 391n21 Poema Morale, 296, 298, 335, 337, 342, 365, 423n57 Poème Anglo-­Normand sur l’Ancien Testament, 2 Politics of time, 377n4, 401n13. See also Modernity; Secular and secularization Pollock, Sheldon, xviii Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 94 Pope, Mildred K., 392n35 Popes: Gregory II (d. 731), 271; Leo III (d. 816), 268; Adrian II (d. 872), 276; John VIII (d. 882), 276 (Epistulae); Gregory VII (d. 1085), 51, 82, 92, 236, 304; Gregory IX, pope (d. 1241), 10–11 (Liber extravagantium); Pius V (d. 1566), 77; Pius IX (d. 1878), 74;

579

Pius X (d. 1914), 401n20 (Pascendi dominici gregis); Pius XI (d. 1939), 70; John XXIII (d. 1963), 42; John Paul II (d. 2005), 402n24; Benedict XVI (d. 2013), 402n24. See also Gregory I (d. 604), Innocent III (d. 1216) Porete, Marguerite, 399n59 Powicke, F. M., 94 Praier and Complaynte of the Ploughman, 52 Preachers: spiritual responsibilities of, 107–8, 110, 111–12; and pastoralia, 151–56. See also Alfred of Wessex, Hierdeboc; Clergy, secular; Homiliaries, vernacular Preaching: as evangelical imperative, 105–16; and teaching, 131; and vernacular preaching books, 172, 178, 207–11, 223–30, 244–50, 332–45, 325–31; routine use of the vernacular in, 264, 273; Artes praedicandi, 364. See also Homiliaries, vernacular; Thema sermons Prick of Conscience, 60, 176, 178, 403n48 Priests, parish. See Clergy, secular Printing, invention of, 45, 53 Prologues, genres of, 146; vernacular, 145–47; and sociolinguistic self-­awareness, 146–47. See also Ælfric of Eynsham, Lives of Saints, Preface to Genesis; Alfred of Wessex, king, Hierdeboc; Robert of Gretham, Miroir; Orrm, Orrmulum Proverbs of Alfred, 295, 301–6, 316, 358, 365 Psalms, Penitential, 208, 321 Psalters, vernacular and interlinear, 131–32, 173, 182. See also Index of MSS, Eadwine Psalter (Cambridge, Trinity R.17.1); Psalterium Suthantoniense (Cambridge, St John’s C.9); Utrecht Psalter (Utrecht I Nr 32); Winchcombe Psalter (Cambridge, UL Ff.1.23); Vespasian Psalter (London, BL Cotton Vespasian A.i) Pseudo-­Matthew, 173 Punic, 76 Purgatory, 328, 362 Purvey, John, 60 Pynson, Richard, 180 Quiller-­Couch, Sir Arthur, Art of Reading, 395n66 Quintilian, 140 Ralph of Laon, 329 Ramon de Peñafort, 10 Ransom, John Crowe, 99

580

General Index

Reform, Benedictine, 17, 51, 172, 184, 197, 250, 368. See also Benedictines, En­glish Reform, Carolingian, 267–74 Reform, Gregorian, 51, 55, 169, 200 Reform: terminology of, xxii-­x xiii; ideologies of, 8–14; and vernacular textual production, 169, 190. See also Correction, spiritual Reformation, Henrician, xvi, xxiii, 71, 75, 89, 120, 170, 199, 238; and the vernacular, 12, 17, 118, 178, 181, 184, 188 Reformation, Protestant, xiii, xxiii, 12, 20, 45, 50, 57, 59, 122, 150; and the vernacular, 17, 20, 70, 85–85, 116. See also Reformation, Henrician; Reformations, sixteenth-­century Reformations, twelfth ­century, 402n26; sixteenth c­ entury, xxiii, 14, 44, 83, 93, 116, 119, 125. See also Reformation, Henrician; Reformation, Protestant Registrum Anglie de libris doctorum, 187–88 Regularis concordia, 197, 199, 214, 215, 234, 268; in Old En­glish, 220 Religious, extra-­regular, 18, 123, 126; anchorites and recluses, 70, 126, 156, 322, 323, 348–52, 354, 355–56, 359, 456n6; beguines, 123; hermits, 70, 156, 322, 323; hospitalers, 126 Religious foundations, En­glish, canons and friars: Aldgate, 342; Bourne (Arrouasians), 199, 210, 297, 327, 329, 332; Chester (Dominicans); Lilleshall (Arrouasians), 110; Llanthony Secunda, 352; Southwick, 240, 353, 450n11; Waltham, 341; Wigmore (Victorines), 346–48. See also Religious foundations, Minsters Religious foundations, En­glish, cathedrals: Canterbury (monks), 202–3, 207, 210, 239; Durham (monks), 342; Exeter (monks, then secular canons), 209, 239, 243; Hereford (secular canons), 351, 352, 357; Lichfield (secular canons), 239; Lincoln (secular canons), 246, 327, 341, 350, 351, 453n6, 457n10; London (secular canons), 210, 342–45; Norwich (monks), 369; Rochester (canons, then monks), 203, 239, 242, 245, 285, 291–92, 341; Salisbury (secular canons), 202, 319, 341; Winchester (canons, then monks), 197, 207, 210, 215, 217–19, 223–27, 252, 264, 278–79, 419n5; Worcester (monks), 156, 203, 207, 239, 310, 333–39, 353, 355, 441n10, 453n4

Religious foundations, En­glish, minsters, 9, 206–7, 227, 244–47; minster hypothesis, 424n60. See also Parishes Religious foundations, En­glish, monks: Abingdon, 217, 220; Beaulieu, 342; Cerne, 225, 226, 265; Chester-­le-­Street, 243; Glastonbury, 239, 277, 351, 359, 419n5; St. Albans, 341; St. Augustine’s, Canterbury, 209, 210, 285; St. Mary’s, York, 405n16; Sts. Peter, Paul, and Guthlac, Hereford (canons, then monks), 351–52, 357, 359; Mount Grace (Carthusian hermits), 190; Waverley (Cistercian), 199; Witham (Carthusian hermits), 199–200; Westminster (80); St. Gregory, Douai, 79, 80; Downside, 85. See also Religious foundations, minsters Religious foundations, En­glish, nuns: Amesbury (Benedictines, then Fontevraudians), 200; Barking, 328; Syon (Bridgettines), 180, 181; Nunnaminster (Winchester), 220; St. Sepulchre, Canterbury, 209; Wilton, 6, 236, 238, 431n41; Cambrai, 80, 83 Re­nais­sances as historiographic concept, 15, 89–90, 93–94. See also Dark Ages; Historiography; History, sacred Ressourcement, 92. See also Nouvelle théologie Richard Judeus, 338 Richard of St. Victor, 362; Benjamin Major, 452n38 Richards, I. A., 99 Riddles, 133, 277, 289 Ripelin, Hugh, Compendium theologicae veritatis, 128, 132, 133 Robert of Gloucester, Metrical Chronicle, 365, 447n22 Robert of Gretham/the Chaplain, 110, 131, 134; Corset, 114, 164, 175; Miroir/Ewangelies des domnees, 105–16, 116–17, 127, 144, 149, 154, 157, 366. See also ­Middle En­glish Mirror Robertson, D. W., 98, 99, 100 Rochester. See Bishops of Rochester; Libraries; Religious foundations, cathedrals; Textus Roffensis; Vercelli Homilies; Vespasian Homilies Rolle, Richard, 65, 68, 69, 82, 87, 177, 183, 184, 366; En­glish Psalter, 60, 177, 183 Rolls Series, 66 Romanz. See French, Insular Rothwell, William, 403n39 Roxburghe Club, 62, 393n36, 394n45



General Index

Runes, 34, 381n53, 388n17 Ruthwell Cross, 34 Salernitan Questions, 353 “Sanctus Beda was i-­boren,” 195–203, 213–14, 215, 218, 292, 299, 331, 354 Sander, Nicholas, De origine ac progressu schismatis Anglicani, 74 Sargent, Michael, 403n45, 403n47 Sawles Warde, 299, 317, 358, 359, 360, 366. See also Katherine Group Saxon Genesis, 273, 274. See also “Genesis B” Scala virtutum, 319 Schools and schooling, 94; and vernacular glosses, 144; in Ecgbert’s York, 269; in Carolingian and Ottonian Eu­rope, 269–70, 279; in Alfred’s Winchester, 252; in the En­glish Benedictine reform, 199, 217–18, 225–26; in Laon, 112–13, 329; in Bologna and Paris, 129, 287, 296, 329, 341; vernacular instruction as God’s “escole,” 112–13. See also Oxford; Paris Schort Reule of Lif, 417n53, 431n39 Scott, Sir Walter, 61, 392n26; Ivanhoe, 15–16, 70 Scriptoria, monastic, 188, 207, 240, 245, 255, 334; at Bourne, 332; at Worcester, 235, 287, 353–54; hypothesized at Wigmore, 347 Scrolls, 189, 356 Secular, xxii, 91, 93, 95, 123, 131, 133–34, 138, 242, 447n27 Secularization, xv, 101, 306, 401n13, 407n8 Sedulius Scottus, De rectoribus Christianis, 416n45 Seinte Juliene, 299, 315–16, 356–57. See also Katherine Group Seinte Katerine, 299, 356–57. See also Katherine Group Seinte Margarete, 299, 356–57, 359. See also Katherine Group Semi-­religious. See Religious, extra-­regular Semi-­Saxon. See En­glish, early M ­ iddle Senatus of Worcester, 454n7 Seven Deadly Sins, 355, 451n31 Shepherd, Geoffrey, 204 Short, Ian, 403n39, 406n31 Shulman, George, 122 Sidrak and Bokkus, 133. See also Livre de Sidrach Sigefurth, 224. See also Ælfric of Eynsham, Letter to Sigefurth; Patrons, secular

581

Sigeweard of Eastheolon, 224, 262–63. See also Ælfric of Eynsham, Libellus de veteri testamenti et novo Simon of Walsingham, 162 Simund de Freine, Roman de philosophie, Vie de S. George, 351 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 62, 313. See also Pearl poet Skeat, W. W., 64 Smaragdus, 272 Smart, Christopher, Jubilate Agno, 13 Smith, Miles, preface to King James Bible, 55–56, 83 Solomon and Saturn poems, 243, 277 Solomon and Saturn, prose, 240 “Soul’s Address to the Body,” 299, 421n29 Sources Chrétiennes, 92, 95, 97 South En­glish Legendary, 40–41, 63, 110, 176, 187, 367–78 Southern, R. W., Making of the M ­ iddle Ages, 94, 204 Speculum Christiani, 180 Speculum Gy de Warewyke, 393n37, 403n45, 416n45 Staphylus, Fridericus/Friedrich, Apologie, 77, 85 Stapleton, Thomas, Fortress of the Faith, 396n5; History of the Church of En­glande, 73 Starkey, Thomas, 393–94n43 Stillingfleet, Edward, bishop, Discourse Concerning the Idolatry, 83 Summa Parisiensis, 9, 380n34 Syriac, xxiii, 41, 276 Szarmach, Paul, 402n38 Talbot, Robert, 388n21 Talkyng of Þe Loue of God, 365 Tertullian, 127, 143; Adversus Judaeos, 41; De praescriptione hereticorum, 50 Textus Roffensis. See Index of MSS, Rochester A.3.5 Thema sermons, 340, 342, 344, 345, 376. See also Trinity Homilies Theological virtues/virtutes theologicae, 131, 409n29 Theology, po­liti­cal, xiv, 123, 127, 130, 133, 162–63, 169; and kingship, 37, 301, 306; and the Estates of the Church, 107–8, 157, 163; and the ­Orders of Society, 160, 208, 232; and the Carolingians, 165, 268, 361; and Wulfstan I of York, 231–33, 266; and Layamon’s Brut, 308. See also Law codes, vernacular

582

General Index

Theology, vernacular, xv, 25, 120, 122–36; history and uses of term, 122–24, 407n9, 407–8n10; archive of, 171–91; genres of, 129–36, 171–81; generations of, 182–84; derivativeness of, 20, 185; and the arts and sciences, 132–33; and hagiography, 132, 160, 179; and law, 130; as biblical exposition, 130; as godly entertainment, 126, 134, 146; as guide to contemplation, 129–30, 133; as guide to living in the world, 123–33; as addresses to God, 131; and the pastoral, 131, 151–56; and the collective, 156–63; and secular patrons, 163–70; as critique, 130, 162–63, 178–79; caveats about term, 125–26, 407–8n9. See also Reformation, Henrician, and the vernacular; Reformation, Protestant, and the vernacular Theology: developing definitions of, 127–29; imaginative, 129; monastic, 123, 124; mystical, 124; pastoral, 129, 151–53; po­liti­cal, xiv, 123, 133, 169; scholastic, 128, 129; and philosophy, 132, 133. See also Theology, po­liti­cal; Theology, vernacular Thomas of Chobham, Summa de arte praedicandi, 341 Thomas, Lord Berkeley, 133, 166–67, 441n18 Thorpe, Benjamin, 390n4 Three Arrows of Doomsday, 185 Tierney, Brian, 402n25 Tolkien, J. R. R., “AB” language, 346, 347–48, 395n65; The Hobbit, 90; The Lord of the Rings, 91 Toumlin Smith, Lucy, 393n40 Tractatus Hilarii in septem epistolas canonicas, 379–80n30 Transitus Mariae, 249 Translatio studii, 36, 159, 265 Translation, Bible. See Bible translation Translations médiévales, 369 Travels of Sir John Mandev­ille, 177 Tremulous Hand, 200–201, 207, 211, 237, 285, 287–88, 293, 353–54, 441n10, 445n4 Trevisa, John, 178; Dialogue Between a Lord and a Clerk, 166–67, 170; On the Property of ­Things, 416n50; Polychronicon, 133, 166, 411n12, 441n18 Trinity Homilies, 186, 316, 317, 335, 339–45, 349, 365–66, 451n27. See also Index of MSS, Cambridge, Trinity B.14.52 Triumph of En­glish, 16 Trotter, David, 402n39

Tyndale, William, 24, 49, 54, 70, 86, 116; Tyndale New Testament, 14, 17, 44, 54, 56, 75, 116; Obedience of a Christen Man, 49, 180–81, 388n20 Tyrrell, George, Faith of the Millions, 399n60 Ullerston, Richard, De translatione, 49, 140, 141–2, 143, 147, 148, 388n26. See also First Seith Bois Ureisun of God Almihti, 299, 355, 365; as Ureisun of Ure Louerde, 453–54n6. See also Wooing Group Ureisun of Ure Lefdi, 299, 355. See also Wooing Group Ussher, James, 389n38 Valla, Lorenzo, Elegantiae linguage Latinae, 39 Varro, 39, 127, 133 Vercelli Homilies, 186, 190, 244–47, 249–50, 327. See also Index of MSS, Biblioteca Capitolare CXVII Vernacular, terms for, 18, 25, 38, 266–67, 383n40, 383–84n41; verna/vernaculus, 37–38; vernacula lingua, 39, 125, 135; vulgar tongue, 151–56; common tongue, 156–63; ­mother tongue, 163–70 Vernacular: centrality of, xv; diglossic character of, 19, 145–50; emergence of, 29–37; definitions of, 37–38, 137–38; distinctiveness of, 21–24; idea of, 38, 121, 147; fluidity of, 16, 47, 126; interdependence with Latin, xv, 20–21; as natu­ral or non-­g rammatical, 137–42, 147–48; satirical depictions of, 139; suspicion ­towards, 24, 139–40, 141–42, 149, 407n37; symbolic status of, 20–21, 147–48; theological implications of, 21; and eigh­teenth ­century pedagogy, 386n69; and British colonialism, xix, 125; in medieval scholarship, 101–2; volgarizzamento, 39 Vernacular and nationalism, xviii-­x ix. See also Philology, Romantic Vernacular textuality: generations of, 16, 118, 182–84; anchor texts, 182–84; eccentric texts, 190–91; stability and instability, 186–87; survival rates, 187–90, 238–40 Vernacular theology. See Theology, vernacular Verse, meters: alliterative verse, 145; and wisdom, 21, 22–23, 34, 37, 313; exordia to, 159; translation into Latin, 33, 291; continuity of, 306–7; septenary verse, 296, 331; couplets, 21, 64–65, 146



General Index

Vespasian Homilies, 186, 299, 342 Vespasian Psalter. See Index of MSS, London, BL Vespasian A.i Vices and Virtues, 297, 317, 318–25, 333, 341, 344–45, 352, 355, 365, 365–66; and En­glish textuality, 324–25, 332, 367 Vie de saint Alexis, 441n9 Vikings, 35–36, 277 Visionary writing, ­women’s, 124, 129, 163, 179 Volk/Reich, 61 Voltaire, Philosophie de l’histoire, 82 Wace, Roman de Brut, 174, 307–8, 310, 311–12, 313–14, 367 Wærferth of Worcester, Old En­glish Gregory’s Dialogues, 210, 250, 252, 263, 383n31, 384n34 Wagner, Richard, 391n14 Waldensians: and Bible translation, 8, 10; in post-­reformation historiography, 49, 52, 78, 79, 85. See also Innocent III, Cum ex iniuncto; Deanesly, Margaret, Lollard Bible Waldo, Peter, 8, 10, 66 Wales, 30, 62, 275, 293, 308, 352, 412n34, 448n33; the March, 293, 310. See Welsh, Old and ­Middle Wallace, David, Cambridge History of Medieval Lit­er­a­ture, 101 Walter of Châtillon, Alexandreis, 310 Ward, Adolphus and Rayner Waller, Cambridge History of En­glish Lit­er­a­ture, 67–68, 87 Warton, Thomas, History of En­glish Poetry, 61, 64 Watson, Andrew, and N. R. Ker, Medieval Libraries, 187–88 Watson, Nicholas, 407–8n9, 408n10 Weber, Max, Die protestantische Ethik, 91 Wedderburn, Robert, 13 Wells, John, Manual of the Writings in ­Middle En­glish, 65, 399–400n61 Welsh, Old and M ­ iddle, xxiv, 16, 19, 64, 138, 182, 274, 278, 293, 311, 412n34; Cambridge Juvencus Manuscript, 427n21; Grammars, 138; Mabinogion, 62; Welsh Elucidarium, 418n26 Wenzel, Siegfried, 403n50 Wharton, Henry, 389n38 Whytford, Richard, Werke for House­holders, 168 William de Montibus, 334, 341, 449n7, 453–54n6 William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum, 17, 200, 250, 286–87, 291, 387n5, 388n18, 396n12; Historia novella, 286–87 Williams, Charles, 87

583

Wimbledon, Thomas, Wimbledon’s Sermon, 380n43 Winchester. See Bishops of Winchester; Religious foundations, cathedrals; Councils and synods, provincial; Canons, secular; Libraries; Scriptoria; Schools; Æthelwold of Winchester; Lantfred; Wulfstan Cantor; Old En­glish Apollonius; Regularis concordia; En­glish, Old, and literary standardization “Winchester vocabulary.” See En­glish, Old, and literary standardization Wintney Rule, 183, 299, 453n5 Wissenliteratur im Mittelalter, 377n3 Wogan-­Browne, Jocelyn, 403n39 Wohunge of Ure Lauerd, 299, 355, 360, 365. See also Wooing Group Won­ders of the East, 239 Wooing Group, 298–99, 317, 354, 355–56, 365. See also Ancrene Wisse Group Worcester. See Bishops of Worcester; Religious foundations, cathedrals; Libraries; Scriptoria; Senatus; Tremulous Hand; Wærferth of Worcester Wormald, Patrick, 402–3n38 Wormald, Patrick, 427n19, 437n14 Wright, Roger, xxiv, 271–72 Wulfgeat of Ylmandum, 224 Wulfstan Cantor/of Winchester, 223; Life of St. Æthelwold, 218, 286, 420n8 Wulfstan I of York, 173, 207, 224–25, 228–36 passim, 265–66, 268, 289, 304, 333; style, 230–31, 313, 362; Canons of Edgar, 231, 242; Cnut’s Proclamation, 261, “Commonplace Book,” 234; Institutes of En­glish Polity, 168, 232–33, 409n26; Laws of Edward and Guthrum, 242; “Be godcundre warnunge,” 454n19; Sermo lupi ad anglos, 232, 234, 290; and The Proverbs of Alfred, 302–4. See also Old En­glish Apollonius; Theology, po­liti­cal Wyclif, John, 52, 68, 73, 178, 362; De civili dominio, 380n42; as “­father of En­glish,” 60, 65, 69 Wycliffism, xxii, 126 Wycliffite Bible. See ­Middle En­glish Bible Wycliffite Sermon Cycle, 60, 366 Xrabr, On the Letters, 276. See also Glagolithic/Old Church Slavonic Zeitgeist, 57 Zouche, Alan la, 110, 114, 164

A c k n o w l ­e d g m e n t s

One way or another, this book has already been nearly a quarter ­century in the making. Despite diversions into other proj­ects large and small and interruptions in the form of administrative duties and life events, I have spent much of this time researching, meditating, and writing it, incurring so many scholarly debts that only some can be acknowledged h ­ ere. First thanks go to the University of Pennsylvania Press for taking the proj­ect on, for long patience, and for not balking as the book grew. In par­tic­u­lar, I am deeply grateful to Jerry Singerman, medievalist and humanities editor extraordinaire, without whom even this first volume might not have seen the light of day, for his support, advice, kindness, and friendship over two de­cades. Thanks are due to two sets of press readers for their reports: the late Anne Middleton and David Wallace, for seeing the potential of an embarrassingly premature proj­ect proposal in the late 1990s; and Barbara Newman and Fiona Somerset, for their detailed reports on a penultimate draft of the manuscript, and for many thoughtful suggestions, most of which I took. I was lucky to have readers who have been fierce intellectual interlocutors as well as friends for many years. Thanks to Erin Davis and Kathleen Kageff of Westchester Publishing Ser­vices for their careful work preparing the manuscript for publication, and to Mary-­Jo Arn for her helpful and imaginative early work on the index. Thanks also to Helen Cushman, Michelle de Groot, Yun Ni, Erica Weaver, and Sarah Star for their work as research assistants over the years; par­tic­u­lar thanks to Rob Brown, for his heroic checking efforts in the final stages. I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their support for the earliest phases of this proj­ect; to the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies, the American Council of Learned Socie­ties, and the Guggenheim Foundation, for supporting a full sabbatical in 2008–9, during which I began writing; and to the Prince­ton Institute of Advanced Studies, as well as the Mellon Foundation, for supporting a further sabbatical in 2020– 21. I thank the En­glish Faculty at Oxford University for making me a Visiting Scholar in 2016–17, a most productive year. I am grateful to past and pre­sent

586

Acknowl­edgments

employers, the University of Western Ontario and Harvard University, for sustaining my research life through sabbatical leaves, occasional teaching releases, funding to attend and or­ga­nize conferences and visit manuscript libraries, and more. Funds provided by Harvard University’s Department of En­glish have helped defray final production costs of this volume. I ­here acknowledge that Western University is located on the traditional lands of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lūnaapéewak, and Attawandaron ­peoples, on lands connected with the London Township and Sombra Treaties of 1796 and the Dish with One Spoon Covenant Wampum. I also acknowledge that Harvard University is situated on the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Massachusett ­people, and that it seeks to honor the historic Harvard Charter of 1650, which committed it to “the education of En­glish and Indian youth of this country.” Harvard’s librarians and library staff have been resourceful as well as tireless, over two de­cades but especially over this past year, when library books have been inaccessible as a result of the pandemic. I thank the En­glish Department staff for all that they do, in this context most of all for their concern to protect the scant research time of faculty in administrative posts. Working with them closely has been one of the true pleasures and privileges of my ­career. Academic administrators should not be forgotten. My position at Western was created by Provost Thomas J. Collins, who believed in building on a department’s strengths. At Harvard, I owe much to Diana Sorensen and Robin Kelsey, successive deans of arts and humanities, and to Laura Fisher, se­nior associate dean for faculty development, for their friendship and kindnesses, as well as for their public commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship and the study of the ­human past. I also owe much to Lawrence Buell, the chair of En­ glish who brought me to Harvard, and to his successors, James Engell, Robert Kiely, and James Simpson, for their friendship and intellectual engagement, and for uncomplainingly undertaking the many tedious offices on a colleague’s behalf that fall to chairs. The chance to devote half a ­career to a single book is a precious and increasingly rare privilege. Working in a field as serious, as alive to its subject, and as committed to intellectual community as medieval studies is another. I am grateful to all my former teachers and mentors, among them the late George Rigg at Toronto and Vincent Gillespie at Oxford, whose gifts to me include, but are by no means restricted to, the gift of open-­minded disagreement. At Western, I was fortunate to number Richard Green, James Miller, Fiona Somerset, and Jane Toswell among my close field colleagues. At Harvard, I have been as fortunate to participate in meetings of my department’s medieval



Acknowl­edgments

587

colloquium, alongside scholars from the Boston area, among them Amy Appleford, Mary-­Jo Arn, Arthur Bahr, David Benson, Lisa Fagin Davis, Mary Dockray-­Miller, Alex Mueller, and Eric Weiskott; and to be a member of the interdisciplinary Medieval Studies Committee and its seminar series. The opportunity to learn from colleagues, visiting speakers, and students has been still another precious privilege and has immeasurably enriched this book. In par­tic­u­lar, I thank Daniel Donoghue and James Simpson for their astute comments on dif­fer­ent parts of this volume, and for collaborations and conversations over the years. James Simpson’s work, which often dovetails with mine, is a challenge and inspiration. For the gift of shared knowledge, suggestions, and ideas, and for general and specific help, I also owe thanks to other colleagues, past and pre­sent, including the late Shahab Ahmed, Phil Deloria, James Engell, Michael Flier, Sean Gilsdorf, Luis Girón Negron, Virginie Greene, Jeffrey Hamburger, Joe Harris, Amy Hollywood, Mark Jordan, Elizabeth ­Kamali, Racha Kirakosian, Kevin Madigan, Michael McCormick, Catherine McKenna, Josephy Nagy, John Parker, Andrew Romig, Dan Smail, David Stern, Bill Stoneman, Gordon Teskey, the late Judith Vichniac, Leah Whittington, Anna Wilson, and Jan Ziolkowski. One impetus for the book came from working with Ruth Evans, Andrew Taylor, Jocelyn Wogan-­Browne, and ­others on The Idea of the Vernacular (1999), a proj­ect at once arduous and, from my own perspective, intellectually transformative. I remain grateful to all three. I especially thank Jocelyn Wogan-­ Browne, whose work on the French and En­glish of ­England over the past thirty years is fundamental to this book and who has been engaged with this proj­ect throughout its gestation, offering ideas, directing me to texts and scholarship, reading portions of this book in draft, and even (with her spouse, Howard Robinson) loaning her ­house during a sabbatical. I also thank Fiona Somerset for our close collaboration on The Vulgar Tongue (2003); and again Vincent Gillespie and Jocelyn Wogan-­Browne, as well as Kantik Ghosh, for invitations to take part in two collections whose essays and arguments inform this book, ­After Arundel (Gillespie and Ghosh 2011) and Language and Culture in Medieval Britain (Wogan-­Browne et al. 2009). Other editors who have commissioned essays that helped me work out my thinking include David Wallace, Cate Gunn and the late Catherine Innes-­Parker, Roger Ellis, Ralph Hexter and David Townsend, Thelma Fenster and Carolyn Collette, and Laura Ashe and Ralph Hanna. Among the ­others who or­ga­nized conferences that fed my research over nearly twenty years, I owe thanks to Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski; Linda Olson and Kathryn Kerby-­Fulton; Katie Bugyis, Kathryn Kerby-­Fulton, and John van Engen; Barbara Newman; and Brian Cummings and James Simpson.

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Acknowl­edgments

I am also grateful to ­those who have invited me to pre­sent work related to this book at a range of venues. Besides t­ hose already mentioned, t­ hese include Boston University’s Scripture and the Arts program, Manchester University’s G. L. Brook Memorial Lecture Series, the Naseeb Shaheen Memorial Lecture Series at the University of Memphis, and the University of Toronto’s Chaucer Seminar. Thanks to Deanna Klepper, Anke Bernau and David Matthews; Cristina Maria Cervone; and Suzanne Akbari, Alex Gillespie, and ­Will Robins, respectively. I have also given talks related to the proj­ect at conferences or freestanding events at Boston College, Bryn Mawr, Cambridge, Columbia, UC Davis, Fordham, Harvard, University of Iceland, Lausanne, the late Malboro College, Miami, Oxford, Pennsylvania, Prince­ton, Yale, and York, among ­others. Thanks to all t­ hose who or­ga­nized and attended ­these events. I thank Elizabeth Tyler and Claire W ­ aters, who generously read and commented on parts of this volume, making many helpful suggestions and catching many errors. Among ­those who sent me materials in advance of publication or helped with specific points, I thank Suzanne Akbari, Cristina Maria Cervone, Celia Chazelles, Ian Cornelius, Mark Faulkner, Thelma Fenster, Patrick Geary, Ralph Hanna, Julia Bolton Holloway, Anne Hudson, Susan Irvine, Andrew Kraebel, Tom Licence, Thomas Liszka, Leslie Lockett, Alastair Minnis, Charlotte Mitchell, Andrew Morris, Andrew Rabin, Andy Romig, Sita Steckel, Audrey Walton, Francis Watson, and Eric Weiskott. Special thanks go to Bella Millett, a formative influence on the last two chapters of this volume, for sharing the pre­sent state of her thinking on texts discussed t­ here. Although ­those mentioned above have been generous with suggestions and scrupulous in pointing out pitfalls and errors, all remaining errors or incautious claims are, of course, my own. This volume is dedicated to the memory of my ­father, Angus Watson, in sorrow but also in fondness and ­great gratitude for his love, gentleness, and patience, as well as for the gift of ­music, freely shared with me as it was with all. It is also dedicated to my spouse and fellow medievalist, Amy Appleford, who has lived with this volume and its ups and downs throughout its long writing, and whose learning, high standards, challenging readings of ­every chapter, and uncanny ability to separate the wheat of an idea from its chaff has improved it at e­ very turn.