Thursday 16th March 14:15—15:45, Session 1

◀	|	▲	|	▼	|	▶
Overview of programme

Session:	Hagiography
Place:	Seminarraum 1
Moderator:	Alastair Minnis
Paper 1:	Translating the Fate of the Soul in Late Anglo-Saxon England: Ælfric of Eynsham and Two Post-Mortem Visions Claudia Di Sciacca
Paper 2:	Legends for Laymen: Translation and Compilation in 15th Century Reform Monastery Martin Haltrich
Paper 3:	Translating the Northern English Saints within Late Medieval Vernacular Legendaries Christiania Whitehead

Translating the Fate of the Soul in Late Anglo-Saxon England: Ælfric of Eynsham and Two Post-Mortem Visions

Claudia Di Sciacca

The sayings of the desert Fathers are a key component of a vast hagiographic corpus inspired by the pioneering age of the monasticism of the Eastern deserts. The Verba Seniorum, as the sayings have generally been known in the West, proved amongst the most popular and influential of patristic texts and as such were crucial to sustaining the very growth of the monastic institution and to shaping a common Christian spiritual universe. As S. Rubenson has pointed out, with their almost unlimited adaptability, the sayings made constant re-formations possible. Since late antiquity up to nowadays, over a geographic area stretching from Ethiopia to northern Europe, they have been constantly translated and retranslated, thus transmitting the legacy of early monastic education, with its roots in classical paideia, into a variety of Christian traditions and monastic practices [Rubenson 2013].

This paper will investigate the Old English translation of two visions of departing souls from the Verba Seniorum [PL 73, 1011-12] by the most celebrated prose writer of late Anglo-Saxon England as well as the most scrupulous offspring of the Benedictine Reform, Ælfric of Eynsham (c. 950 – c. 1010). The two exempla in question were adapted into Old English by Ælfric for some unknown occasion and they were subsequently fashioned by an anonymous interpolator into a composite extension to Ælfric’s homily for the sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost [CH II. 31; Godden 1979: 268-71]; in this expanded form the homily [SH II. 27; Pope 1967-8: II, 775-9] is uniquely attested in ms. London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius C.v (s. x/xi, SW England).

Ælfric has often been attributed a cautious, if not frankly mistrustful, attitude to the eremitic and ascetic kind of monasticism championed by the desert Fathers. In fact, as his hagiographic output attests, Ælfric favoured the hagiographic narratives of the desert Fathers as sources for paradigms of clerical celibacy and continence in general, by far one of the values that Ælfric was most anxious to teach and a theme on which he took a strongly reformist stance [Di Sciacca 2012; 2014]. This case study aims to shed new light on the diffusion and appreciation of such narratives in Benedictine Reform England, in that it will show that, like many anonymous homilists, Ælfric too drew on them as eschatological sources. A detailed contrastive reading of the Latin source and the vernacular text will enable to assess Ælfric’s idiosyncratic approach to his source and to appraise the extent to which such a discerning, punctilious author participated in the appropriation of the eschatological narratives of the desert Fathers towards the definition of the highly distinctive and prolific Anglo-Saxon vision and soul-and-body literature.

Legends for Laymen: Translation and Compilation in 15^th Century Reform Monastery

Martin Haltrich

In the middle oft the 15th century Melk was centre of a monastic reform which was dispread among most of the Benedictine monasteries in the Danube-Alps region. Part of the reform was to reorganize the institution of lay-brothers, who mainly were craftsmen and illiterati. For their education and religious improvement (pessrung) German translations of exegeses or sermons were provided in a special library. Lienhard Peuger the most important scribe and translator was a master of the lay-brothers and tried to implement the ideas of laymen education with vernacular texts developed by Heinrich von Langenstein and Nikolaus von Dinkelsbühl. In his translations and compilations of texts and manuscripts Peuger prepared vernacular texts out of consideration for the illiterate and created a kind of model, which was practiced in Melk for a longer period. We are able to retrace this approach at the end of a manuscript from the middle of the 15th century (Cod. Mell. 1102): Besides other appropriate texts a German version of the legend of S. Caecilia is composed and translated from two Latin sources, both Latin copies are still kept in the library of Melk. One of them is an extended version from the so-called Magnum Legendarium Austriacum, the other one belongs to Jacobus de Voragines Legenda Aurea.

Translating the Northern English Saints within Late Medieval Vernacular Legendaries

Christiania Whitehead

This paper will present preliminary findings from the new Swiss National Science Foundation-funded major research project, Region and Nation in Late Medieval Devotion to Northern English Saints, commencing September 2016, and housed at the University of Lausanne. It will examine the vitae of early English northern saints, pre 1200 (Cuthbert, Oswald, Aidan, Hilda, William of York, Godric of Finchale etc.), incorporated into late medieval vernacular legendaries such as the North English Legendary, the Scottish Legendary, and the Gilte Legende, and analyse their representations of northern sanctity.

Two types of translation process may be seen at work here. First, individual Latin vitae of the northern saints are literally translated and significantly abridged in order to fit the linguistic perimeters of the vernacular legendary. What is included, what is suppressed? To what extent is the saint reconfigured in the course of vernacularization? What kinds of simplification can we see at work, and to what end?

Second, each vita, originally designed as a ‘stand-alone’ production, is translated into a group setting, encouraging readers to make connections between different vitae, and to trace patterns of regional and national sanctity, and sanctity according to category: episcopal saints, eremitic saints, martyrs, and so on. This paper will explore both types of translation in relation to a distinct regional body of saints, and will use the results to draw broader conclusions about the representation of the north in the later Middle Ages, and its relation with central and southern secular and ecclesiastical authority.