Saturday 18th March 9:00—10:30
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| Overview of programme | ||||||
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Keynote lecture |
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Place: |
Seminarraum 1 |
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Introduction: |
David Wallace |
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Title and speaker: |
Reading Roman Antiquity in Old English: What is an Early Medieval Vernacular? |
Reading Roman Antiquity in Old English: What is an Early Medieval Vernacular?
Elizabeth Tyler
This paper will focus on the readers of the Old English translations of three late antique texts, Orosius’s Historiae, Boethius’s Consolatio and the Historia Apollonii regis Tyri, which are widely popular in early medieval western Europe. The translations, made in the ninth and tenth centuries, continued to be copied and circulated into the twelfth century. The paper will have three parts. The first part of the paper will look at the ways these texts transmit knowledge of and attitudes towards pagan Antiquity to lay audiences, including lay readers of Old English. It includes comparison with early medieval continental lay readers of these texts in Latin. The paper then takes up the issue of how the exposure of lay audiences to Antiquity in Old English prepared them for the cutting-edge classicism of eleventh-century Latin history-writing aimed at the Anglo-Saxon court (Encomium Emmae reginae and the Vita Ædwardi regis). The paper concludes by looking directly at an issue which underpins the whole paper. It will argue that these texts illuminate written Old English, a standardized and highly formal language, as more like Latin than like the written vernaculars of high and late medieval Europe and as a phenomenon which needs to be understood in specifically early medieval terms (some contextualization will be made here with Old Irish, Old Saxon, Old High German, Old Dutch and Old French – languages whose use is closely entangled with Old English in the early Middle Ages).