Wednesday 15th March 13:30—14:45, Keynote lecture
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Keynote lecture |
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Place: |
Seminarraum 1 |
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Introduction: |
Walter Pohl |
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Title and speaker: |
Translators, Scribes, Named and Unnamed Readers and Hearers: the Three Versions of the late-Middle English Northern Homily Cycle. |
Translators, Scribes, Named and Unnamed Readers and Hearers: the Three Versions of the late-Middle English Northern Homily Cycle.
Roger Ellis
The lecture concerns the question how the translations for named individuals also often envisage a wider audience. Strikingly, one text, the anonymous later-fourteenth-century Epistle of Discretion of Stirrings, doesn't have an actual named reader, but, as a reply to a letter sent to the translator by this reader, doesn't consider the possibility of other readers engaging with the material, and gives a tantalisingly suggestive picture of this first reader. Other texts, like Chaucer's Treatise on the Astrolabe (1391), addressed in the first instance to the translator's young son Lewis, adapt their writing to the presumed intellectual capacities of their first reader. But regularly such texts envisage a wider audience too (and, to judge by the surviving number of manuscripts of the Astrolabe, reached it).
My principal text is the Ormulum, a late-twelfth-century translation, with accompanying homilies, also including much translated material, by the Augustinian canon Orm, of various Gospel stories. I will be comparing this with an anonymous translation from the fourteenth century of similar Gospel texts, the so-called Northern Homily Cycle (3 versions survive). Orm produced his translation at the request of his brother Walter, like him an Augustinian canon, who wanted to provide religious instruction for those unable to read a vernacular text and who had to listen to it being read aloud. But Orm also envisaged an audience able to read his text for themselves, some of whom at least could read the original Latin of the Vulgate. So Orm found himself having to meet the expectations of three different sets of readers. The different strategies he takes to do so - pretty familiar to readers of vernacular religious translations - are a striking anticipation of the pedagogical programme instituted by the Fourth Lateran council, and realised in the work of the greatest English translator of the Middle Ages, Robert Grosseteste.