Insular Latin literature
More general subjects:
A New Commentary on the Old English ‘Prose Solomon and Saturn’ and ‘Adrian and Ritheus’ Dialogues
Who was not born was buried in his mother’s womb and was baptized after death? Who first spoke with a dog? Why don’t stones bear fruit? Who first said the word ‘God’? Why is the sea salty? Who built the first monastery? Who was the first doctor? How many species of fish are there? What is the heaviest thing to bear on earth? What creatures are sometimes male and sometimes female? The Old English dialogues The Prose Solomon and Saturn and Adrian and Ritheus critically edited in 1982 by J. E. Cross and Thomas D. Hill provide the answers to a trove of curious medieval ‘wisdom questions’ such as these drawing on a remarkable range of biblical apocryphal patristic and encyclopaedic lore.
This volume (which reprints the texts and translations of the two dialogues from Cross and Hill’s edition) both updates and massively supplements the commentary by Cross and Hill contributing extensive new sources and analogues (many from unpublished medieval Latin question-and-answer texts) and comprehensively reviews the secondary scholarship on the ancient and medieval texts and traditions that inform these Old English sapiential dialogues. It also provides an extended survey of the late antique and early medieval genres of ‘curiosity’ and ‘wisdom’ dialogues and florilegia including their dissemination and influence as well as their social and educational functions.
The Age of Alfred
Rethinking English Literary Culture c. 850–950
King Alfred the Great (r. 871–899) remains a key figure in English literary history. Although his reputation as a scholar who was personally responsible for the translation of a number of Latin works is no longer secure the figure of the wise king nevertheless casts a long shadow over vernacular writing from the late ninth century through to the twelfth. This volume takes stock of recent developments and debates in the field of Alfredian scholarship and showcases new directions in research. Individual chapters consider how English authors before during and after Alfred’s reign translated and adapted Latin works often in innovative and imaginative ways. Other contributions provide new contexts and connections for Alfredian writing highlighting the work of Mercian scholars and expanding the corpus beyond the works traditionally attributed to the king himself. Together these essays force us to rethink what we mean by ‘Alfredian’ and to revise the literary history of the ‘long ninth century’.
Plato in Medieval England
Pagan, Scientist, Alchemist, Theologian
From the time of the Roman Republic continental Europeans traveling to England brought knowledge of Greek and Roman intellectual culture in the form of books of every genre. But until 1111 CE the island contained not a single Platonic dialogue. And for the next two centuries it had only a partial Latin translation of the Timaeus. A Latin Phaedo eventually appeared in 1340 and the Meno in 1423. But this hardly limited the number of ideas people had about Plato. He was a proto-Christian a sage a scholar of the cosmos and a healer. And he had an elaborate oeuvre that did exist in England works of astrology numerology medicine and science including Cado Calf Circle Herbal Question Alchemy and Book of Prophecies of a Greek King. This book tells the story of Plato in Medieval England from a name with too few works to a sage with too many. Based on a complete survey of all extant manuscripts publications and library records until the fifteenth century it traces with extraordinary precision the movement of opinions and information about Plato from Europe to England and then into its various monasteries schools and universities. This erudite and illuminating sociology of knowledge provides novel insight into the dubious English career of our best-known philosopher. This is intellectual history and reception studies at its most surprising.
The Liber de ordine creaturarum
The Liber de ordine creaturarum is an anonymous Latin work with an Irish provenance that dates back to the seventh century. It presents the creation as the divine handiwork and is notable for serving as both a commentary on the Hexaemeron (Six-day Work) in Genesis and as one of the earliest works of systematic theology. Although previously attributed to Isidore of Seville the Liber de ordine creaturarum is far more than a mere compilation of 'authorities.' Instead it emphasizes the inherent order that exists within the creation itself.
Canterbury Glosses from the School of Theodore and Hadrian: The Leiden Glossary
The ‘Leiden Glossary’ provides a record of the understanding and interpretation of the patristic and grammatical texts studied at the Canterbury School of Theodore and Hadrian regarded by Bede as the high point of Christian culture in early Anglo-Saxon England. Each entry in the ‘Leiden Glossary’ is provided with detailed commentary on the sources consulted by the two Canterbury masters (earlier glossaries; Isidore; Eucherius) and the later uses of the glossary by compilers of the Epinal-Erfurt and Corpus glossaries. The ‘Leiden Glossary’ is thus a key witness to one of the greatest schools of learning in the early Middle Ages.
Lives and Afterlives
The Hiberno-Latin Patrician Tradition, 650–1100
Saint Patrick is a central figure in the medieval Irish Church. As the converter saint he was a central anchor through which Irish people came to understand their complicated religious past as well as their new place in the wider Christian world. This study considers some of the earliest and most influential writings focused on Saint Patrick and asks how successive generations forged sustained and redirected aspects of the saint’s persona in order to suit their specific religious and political needs.
In this book Elizabeth Dawson for the first time treats the Hiberno-Latin vitae of Patrick as a body of connected texts. Seminal questions about the corpus are addressed such as who wrote the Lives and why? What do the works tell us about the communities that venerated and celebrated the saint? And what impact did these Lives have on the success and endurance of the saint’s cult? Challenging the perception that Patrick’s legend was created and sustained almost exclusively by the monastic community at Armagh she demonstrates that the Patrick who emerges from the Lives is a varied and malleable saint with whom multiple communities engaged.
Ideas of the World in Early Medieval English Literature
Across three thematically-linked sections this volume charts the development of competing geographical national and imperial identities and communities in early medieval England. Literary works in Old English and Latin are considered alongside theological and historical texts from a range of disciplinary perspectives. Accounts of travel foreign contacts conversion migration landscape nation empire and conquest are set within the continual flow of people and ideas from East to West from continent to island and back across the period. The fifteen contributors investigate how the early medieval English positioned themselves spatially and temporally in relation to their insular neighbours and other peoples and cultures. Several chapters explore the impact of Greek and Latin learning on Old English literature while others extend the discussion beyond the parameters of Europe to consider connections with Asia and the Far East. Together these essays reflect ideas of inclusivity and exclusivity connectivity and apartness multiculturalism and insularity that shaped pre-Conquest England.
The Cambridge Gloss on the Apocalypse
Cambridge University Library Dd.X.16
The Glossa in Apocalypsin (Cambridge Gloss on the Apocalypse) is a recently-discovered anonymous Hiberno-Latin (that is authored by an Irish cleric writing in Latin) commentary on the Apocalypse of John found in a tenth-century manuscript at Cambridge University Library. This gloss is written in a similar style to other Irish-authored exegetical texts of the same period. That is the author proceeds verse by verse through the entire Apocalypse citing short phrases or even single words of the biblical text followed by brief explanations that serve to clarify meaning and are often moral or allegorical in nature as well as offering alternative interpretations of a given passage. The text has a marked dependence on the hermeneutical method of the fourth-century Donatist Tyconius as laid out in his Liber Regularum (Book of Rules) and applied in his Exposition on the Apocalypse. The Cambridge Gloss promotes an ecclesiological and spiritual interpretation of the Apocalypse muting speculation about an imminent endtime scenario. The gloss contains numerous references to heretics emphasises the hierarchy and the privileged role of teachers within the church and likely dates from the eighth century the ‘Northumbrian Golden Age’ exemplified by the works of Bede the Venerable and Alcuin of York. This English translation (accompanied by numerous notes) is intended to give readers an insight into understanding the viewpoint that medieval exegetes held in explaining the Apocalypse of John.
The source text of this volume appeared in Corpus Christianorum Series Latina as Glossa in Apocalypsin e codice Bibliothecae Vniuersitatis Cantabrigiensis Dd.X.16 (CCSL 108G). References to the corresponding pages of the Corpus Christianorum edition are provided in the margins of this translation.
The Chronicles of Medieval Wales and the March
New Contexts, Studies and Texts
The chronicles of medieval Wales are a rich body of source material offering an array of perspectives on historical developments in Wales and beyond. Preserving unique records of events from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries these chronicles form the essential narrative backbone of all modern accounts of medieval Welsh history. Most celebrated of all are the chronicles belonging to the Annales Cambriae and Brut y Tywysogyon families which document the tumultuous struggles between the Welsh princes and their Norman and English neighbours for control over Wales.
Building on foundational studies of these chronicles by J. E. Lloyd Thomas Jones Kathleen Hughes and others this book seeks to enhance understanding of the texts by refining and complicating the ways in which they should be read as deliberate literary and historical productions. The studies in this volume make significant advances in this direction through fresh analyses of well-known texts as well as through full studies editions and translations of five chronicles that had hitherto escaped notice.
Hope Allen’s Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle: A Corrected List of Copies
Richard Rolle was perhaps the most influential English spiritual writer of the late Middle Ages. This volume provides references to the more than 600 surviving medieval books that offer the primary evidence for his works and their transmission.
Hope Allen's Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle now nearly a century old is a foundational work of English palaeography. This volume extends Allen's most basic contribution her catalogue of manuscripts conveying Rolle's works.
Teaching and Learning in Medieval Europe
Essays in Honour of Gernot R. Wieland
Over the span of his career Gernot R. Wieland has been actively engaged in the contribution and promotion of the study of medieval literature particularly in Anglo-Latin and Old English. From his early work on glosses in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts to his later editorial work for The Journal of Medieval Latin Wieland has provided the field with diverse diligent and creative scholarship. The contributors of this volume pay tribute to the significance of Wieland’s teaching and learning in the literature of medieval Europe by presenting him with twelve essays on varied aspects of the subject.
The first section of the volume aims to honour Wieland’s contributions to the study of medieval glossing. It deals with the history of glossing from early medieval Latin literature to late Middle English grammatical texts as well as the early interpretative history of Walter of Châtillon’s Alexandreis and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britannie. The following section corresponds with Wieland’s interest in Anglo-Saxon literature with essays on the bilingual letters of Ælfric of Eynsham the poetry of Alcuin of York and the Old English Hexateuch. The second half of the volume which examines elements of Latin literature from the eleventh to the fourteenth century is divided into two sections containing essays that well represent Wieland’s diverse philological and literary interests in medieval Latin. The third section of the volume on the texts and contexts of Latin literature presents essays on the books of Abbot Maiolus of Cluny on scholastic virtues of good teaching and on Walter Map’s Dissuasio Valerii. The final section on the texts and manuscripts of Latin literature provides editions of and commentaries on a Latin-Greek phrase-book a treatise on the firmament of Genesis 1:6.
With these contributions this volume honours the research interests of a great teacher and learner of the Middle Ages: Gernot Weiland.
French in Medieval Ireland, Ireland in Medieval French
The Paradox of Two Worlds
This book is a ground-breaking study of the cultural and linguistic consequences of the English invasion of Ireland in 1169 and examines the ways in which the country is portrayed in French literature of the twelfth thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Works such as La geste des Engleis en Yrlande and The Walling of New Ross written in French in a multilingual Ireland are studied in their literary and historical contexts and the works of the Dominican friar Jofroi de Waterford (c. 1300) are shown to have been written in Ireland rather than Paris as has always been assumed.
After exploring how the dissemination and translation of early Latin texts of Irish origin concerning Ireland led to the country acquiring a reputation as a land of marvels this study argues that increasing knowledge of the real Ireland did little to stymie the mirabilia hibernica in French vernacular literature. On the contrary the image persisted to the extent of retrospectively associating central motifs and figures of Arthurian romance with Ireland. This book incorporates the results of original archival research and is characterized by close attention to linguistic details of expression and communication as well as historical codicological and literary contexts.