T H E N E W M I DDL E AG E S

BONNIE WHEELER, Series Editor

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by Tory Vandeventer Pearman Palimpsests and the Literary Imagination of
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Sauer, and Diane Watt Tatjana Silec
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PALIMPSESTS AND THE
LITERARY IMAGINATION
OF MEDIEVAL ENGLAND
COLLECTED ESSAYS

Edited by
Leo Carruthers, Raeleen Chai-Elsholz,
and Tatjana Silec
PALIMPSESTS AND THE LITERARY IMAGINATION OF MEDIEVAL ENGLAND
Copyright © Leo Carruthers, Raeleen Chai-Elsholz, and Tatjana Silec, 2011.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011
All rights reserved.
First published in 2011 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-28644-7 ISBN 978-0-230-11880-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-0-230-11880-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Palimpsests and the literary imagination of medieval England :
collected essays / edited by Leo Carruthers, Raeleen Chai-Elsholz, and
Tatjana Silec.
p. cm.—(The new Middle Ages)
Dedicated to André Crépin on the occasion of his eightieth birthday.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978–0–230–10026–8
1. English literature—History and criticism. 2. English literature—Old
English, ca. 450–1100—Sources. 3. English literature—Middle English,
1100–1500—Sources. 4. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—
Sources. 5. Palimpsests. 6. Transmission of texts—History. I. Carruthers,
Leo M. II. Chai-Elsholz, Raeleen, 1967– III. Silec, Tatjana, 1976–
PR161.P35 2011
820.9⬘39—dc22 2010039074
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: April 2011
CONTENTS

List of Illustrations xiii

Acknowledgments xv
Homage to André Crépin, membre de l’Institut, Honorary OBE xvii
Leo Carruthers
List of Abbreviations xix

Introduction: Palimpsests and “Palimpsestuous” Reinscriptions 1

Raeleen Chai-Elsholz

Part I Permanence and Impermanence of

Writing on the Page
1 An Anglo- Saxon Palimpsest from Fleury:
Orléans, Bibliothèque Municipale MS 342 (290) 21
Adrian Papahagi
2 Recovering Anglo-Saxon Erasures: Some Questions,
Tools, and Techniques 35
Peter A. Stokes
3 Some Psalter Glosses in Their Immediate Context 61
Jane Roberts
4 The Palimpsest and Old English Homiletic Composition 81
Paul E. Szarmach
5 “Ic Beda” . . . “Cwæð Beda”: Reinscribing Bede in the
Old English Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum 95
Sharon M. Rowley
6 Vernacular Engravings in Late Medieval England 115
Florence Bourgne
x CONTENTS

Part II Impermanence and Accumulation in

the Literary Imagination
7 Rewriting Genres: Beowulf as Epic Romance 139
Leo Carruthers
8 Palimpsestic Philomela: Reinscription in Chaucer’s
“Legend of Philomela” 157
Gila Aloni
9 The Middle English Breton Lays and the Mists of Origin 175
Claire Vial
10 Enquiries into the Textual History of the Seventeenth-Century
Sir Lambewell (London, British Library, Additional 27897) 193
Colette Stévanovitch
11 Elucidations: Bringing to Light the Aesthetic Underwriting
of the Matière de Bretagne in John Boorman’s Excalibur 205
Jean-Marc Elsholz

Bibliography 227
Notes on Contributors 251
Index of Manuscripts Cited 255
Index 259
André Crépin in full regalia at the Institut de France. Photo courtesy of Jean-
Claude Martin.
ILLUSTRATIONS

Frontispiece: André Crépin in full regalia at the Institut de France

(photo courtesy of Jean-Claude Martin) xi
1.1 Orléans, Bibliothèque Municipale MS 342 (290),
pp. 68–69, upper script. (Photos in Figures 1.1 to 1.5
courtesy of the Médiathèque d’Orléans.) 25
1.2 Orléans, BM MS 342 (290), p. 35, lower script 26
1.3 Orléans, BM MS 342 (290), p. 34 27
1.4 The same image enhanced by Dr. Peter A. Stokes 27
1.5 Orléans, BM MS 342 (290), p. 35, upper script 28
2.1 Intensity curves 39
2.2 Example of a histogram 41
2.3 Histograms for a yellow square 42
2.4 Histograms for a desert scene, where the sky is blue and the
sand yellow. (Photo by the author) 42
2.5 Model “erasure” and accompanying histogram 43
2.6 Three types of histograms 44
2.7 Results of channel manipulation. The upper one (a) is
original, the lower (b) is enhanced 47
2.8 ImageViewer control panel (software by the author) 52
2.9 An improperly “enhanced” image. The upper one (a) is
original, the lower (b) is altered. Cambridge, Corpus
Christi College MS 111, p. 88 (by permission of the
Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge) 55
3.1 London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 427
(Lambeth Psalter), fol. 17r (courtesy of the trustees of
Lambeth Palace Library) 69
6.1 Amor vincit omnia. Graffito from St. Mary &
St. Clement, Clavering (Essex), after 1360
(drawing by Florence Bourgne) 130
6.2 “Well fare my lady Katherine.” Graffito from
St. Mary, Lydgate (Suffolk), after 1370
(drawing by Florence Bourgne) 131
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T he editors are grateful to their friends inside and outside academia

who have generously offered advice, help, and moral support as this
book made its way from a project in honor of André Crépin to the present
finished volume.
We also wish to thank the Médiathèque d’Orléans; the Master and
Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; and the trustees of
Lambeth Palace Library for their kind permission to publish images of
manuscripts from their collections.

Grateful acknowledgement is made for many years of lively and help-

ful discussions with Marguerite-Marie Dubois, the doyenne of medie-
val English studies in France. Born in 1915, she recently celebrated her
ninety-fifth birthday. In 1940, at the age of twenty-five, she became the
first woman to be employed as a lecturer in the English department at the
Sorbonne. Many years after her retirement from the post to which André
Crépin succeeded in 1983, she continues to make contributions to the
field and to help and mentor younger scholars.
LC

I am indebted, as always, to professors Grace Morgan Armstrong and

Charles M. Brand, my mentors at Bryn Mawr College, for their hard
work and generosity, as well as to André Crépin and Leo Carruthers, at
the Sorbonne and beyond.
The greatest debt of all is owed first and foremost to my mother and
father, who instilled in me a love of learning right from the start and gave
unstintingly to help me pursue it.
RCE

I wish to thank Leo Carruthers and Raeleen Chai-Elsholz for giving me

the opportunity to work with them on this book (and on the conference
that preceded it). It has been a wonderful experience—and something of
an eye-opener for a young doctor like me!
TS
HOMAGE TO ANDRÉ CRÉPIN, MEMBRE DE
L’INSTITUT, HONORARY OBE

T his volume is dedicated to André Crépin on the occasion of his

eightieth birthday as a tribute to his life and work. Born on June 9,
1928, André has had a long, distinguished career in the field of Old and
Middle English language, literature, and history. After many years lec-
turing in the Sorbonne’s English department, in 1970 he was appointed
professor of English in the newly created University of Picardy at Amiens,
the town where he grew up and where he still lives. In 1983 he returned
to the Sorbonne (reconstituted under the new name of Université Paris
4-Sorbonne), succeeding Marguerite-Marie Dubois as professor of
English philology, a post he held until his retirement in 1995. In addition
to his research and teaching, André ably served the university commu-
nity through his involvement in administration, being for many years
chair of the English department and head of the Doctoral School of
Medieval Studies at Paris 4.
André Crépin’s inf luence in those years was immense and has not
abated. It can safely be said that the majority of French scholars working
in the field of Old and Middle English today—certainly those who were
at the university in his teaching days—are his past pupils or graduate
students. Even the younger generation, those who never had the oppor-
tunity to attend André’s lectures, have in many cases been subjected to
his penetrating criticism as an examiner of their doctoral thesis. Since
retiring, André has remained very active in research, publishing books
and articles on Old English linguistics, poetics, and metrics, as well as
editing and translating Beowulf into French (which he has done more than
once, in 1991 and again in 2007). His translation of The Canterbury Tales
appeared in 2000.1 He was also president of the AMAES, the national
association for medieval English studies, from its foundation in 1970
up to 2006. Many have heard André speak at international conferences
in France and abroad. He also takes pains to maintain friendships with
xviii HOM AGE TO A N DR É C R É PI N

medievalists in other countries and to make known the publications of

his younger colleagues working in France.
While André Crépin has been honored in many ways, including an
OBE from the British government, there can be no doubt that a crowning
moment came in 2002 when he entered the Institut de France, elected as
a member of its Académie des Inscriptions et des Belles-Lettres, sister to
the Académie Française. This is not only the highest possible recognition
that France’s senior scholars can grant to one of their number, but it was
also a remarkable first: in the entire history of the Institut, no specialist
in English language and literature, let alone Old and Middle English,
had ever before been elected. French scholars in both modern and medi-
eval studies were rightly filled with gratitude and admiration at André’s
achievement.
“Palimpsests,” the theme of the collection of essays presented here,
seems peculiarly apt to celebrate the rich variety of André Crépin’s many
research interests. The book is offered as a token of respect and affection
by his students, colleagues, and friends.
Leo Carruthers
President, AMAES (Association des
Médiévistes Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur),
Director, Centre d’Études Médiévales Anglaises (CÉMA),
Paris 4-Sorbonne

Note
1. The first forty years (1967 to 2007) of publications by André Crépin
are listed in Danielle Buschinger and Arlette Sancery, eds. Mélanges de
langue, littérature et civilisation offerts à André Crépin à l’occasion de son quatre-
vingtième anniversaire, Médiévales 44 (Amiens: Presses du Centre d’Études
Médiévales, Université de Picardie–Jules Verne, 2008), pp. iii–xvi.
ABBREVIATIONS

ACMRS Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance

Studies
AMAES Association des Médiévistes Anglicistes de
l’Enseignement Supérieur
ASE Anglo-Saxon England, a Cambridge University Press
serial publication
ASMMF Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts in Microfiche Facsimile
ASNC Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic,
University of Cambridge
BAV Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana
BL British Library
BM Bibliothèque Municipale
BnF Bibliothèque nationale de France
CCCC or
Cambridge, CCC Cambridge, Corpus Christi College
CCSL Corpus Christianorum Series Latina
CÉMA Centre d’Études Médiévales Anglaises, Université
Paris-Sorbonne (Paris 4)
CNRS Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France
CLA Lowe, Codices Latini Antiquiores
CSASE Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England
CSML Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature
CUL Cambridge University Library
EEMF Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile
(Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger)
EETS Early English Text Society (o.s. 1–319, e.s. 1–126,
and s.s. 1–19 available from Boydell & Brewer;
subsequent o.s. and s.s. available from Oxford
University Press)
e.s. extra series
IRHT Institut de Recherches et d’Histoire des Textes
xx A BBR E V I AT ION S

MHRA Modern Humanities Research Association

MLN Modern Language Notes
MRTS Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies
N&Q Notes and Queries
o.s. original series
PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association
SPCK Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge
TEAMS Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages
s.s. supplementary series
INTRODUCTION: PALIMPSESTS AND
“PALIMPSESTUOUS” REINSCRIPTIONS

Raeleen Chai-Elsholz

This introduction analyzes the term “palimpsest” in relation to the various types
of artifacts of cultural production discussed in the volume’s essays.

Au Moyen Âge, créer signifiait re- créer, réorganiser une matière reÇue.
[In the Middle Ages, to create meant to re- create, to rearrange existing
material.]
André Crépin, “Introduction,” in Geoffrey Chaucer, Les Contes
de Canterbury et Autres Œuvres, trans. and ed. André Crépin,
Jean-Jacques Blanchot, Florence Bourgne, et al.
(Paris: Laffont, 2010), p. x.

H owever much medieval people valued and depended on the spoken

word, an immaterial legacy handed down with loss or enrichment,
the ancient adage, verba volant scripta manent, was nevertheless true then, as
now. Yet the inscribed record, like the memory of what was said, could
fade over time. Documents could be erased or destroyed. Unlike uttered
words, though, effaced inscriptions from the Middle Ages sometimes can
be recovered. Because of this, medieval manuscripts that have been
palimpsested—their original inscription rubbed or washed away to pro-
vide a fresh writing surface—hold an undeniable attraction for the mod-
ern scholar. Palimpsests fascinate as witnesses to the disappearance of a
text, a scribal hand, or a provenance, and for their potential to yield them
up again. They can shed light on the genesis of the existing text, as well
as on its place within a tradition and within the history of the parchment
on which it was inscribed. The quest for the primary text of a palimpsest
opens more broadly onto the pursuit of the origins of a literary work, of
what came before, of the history that anteceded the memory that has sur-
vived. Erasure is a prerequisite of reinscription, and so it may be said that
2 R A ELEEN CHAI-ELSHOLZ

destruction paves the way for re- creation. Thus the palimpsest is an image
of the process of adaptation, translation, and rewriting that shapes a con-
siderable part of medieval literary productions. This volume situates the
various types of palimpsest within the creative dynamics underlying the
composition of works in and about medieval England.
In this collection, the palimpsest under investigation may be a lit-
eral one—that is, a writing surface “smoothed over/rubbed again”—or
a metonymy for works reinscribed in a more or less clear line of descent
from a so-called original. From as early as classical antiquity, the term
“palimpsest” has been used to represent both kinds of layerings: the tex-
tual strata of the paleographical artifact and the analogous intertextuality
of the literary palimpsest.1 Scholars now have called for an examination
of the material phenomenon alongside the conceptual one; this kind of
“literary paleography” is, in fact, a primary focus of the present volume. 2
Yet how can such diverse concepts and phenomena be grouped under a
single term? What are the intersections between them? Perhaps a typology
in lieu of a justification will suffice. The two types of palimpsest dealt
with in this volume correspond to the definitions of “text” versus “work”
cited by Roger Chartier in his exploration of the particular context of
reinscription. Chartier reminds us that texts have been defined as being
tied to the material circumstances that make it possible to read them,
whereas works transcend their possible material incarnations.3 Thus it is
understood that the material palimpsest concerns texts, while works, by
contrast, may circulate independently of their physical manifestations and
cross-pollinate with their predecessors, contemporaries, and successors.
In distinguishing between literal and metaphorical palimpsests, it may
be useful to consider their respective focuses of study. In the case of the
former, the parchment is mined for the lower writing. Material con-
siderations, encompassing paleographical and codicological aspects, are
of utmost importance. The physical medium is the locus of memory,
for it is by scrutinizing the underwriting in conjunction with the con-
text of its overwriting that information can be gleaned about provenance
and intellectual exchanges, utility and taste, and scriptoria and expertise.
Except in the case of correction or revision, the effaced text hardly ever
bears a relationship to the text written over it. A noteworthy instance
of erasure and overwriting in an otherwise homogeneous text occurs
in the magnificent Codex Amiatinus. An analysis of the underwriting
of its reinscribed dedication caused this pandect to be identified in the
late nineteenth century with the gift that Abbot Ceolfrith († 716) of
Wearmouth-Jarrow had intended for St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. In the
great majority of palimpsests, however, the lower text has only the writ-
ing surface in common with the upper text. The memory that the text
 I N T RO DU C T ION 3

was once something else, that the codex was once elsewhere or once
someone else’s, inhabits the parchment.
Literary palimpsests, on the other hand, are reinscriptions that implic-
itly or explicitly point to their own genealogy, whether in the title, through
reuse of the names of characters in it, resemblance of plot, generic form
or argument, and/or by referring to the (factual or imaginary) original
or its author. Theorists view these and other intertextual effects, which
very aptly have been called “literature’s memory,” more or less broadly as
the literary interplay of cultural references, or, more narrowly, as actual
copresence (a text within another) or identifiable derivation.4 In his book
Palimpsests, Gérard Genette reintroduced the neologism “palimpsestu-
ous” to denote the value added of a literary palimpsest’s layers that lies in
their relationship with each other, whereas “palimpsestic” means “like a
palimpsest” in terms of a layered structure.5
The ancestry of a literary palimpsest may be examined extensively,
but it is the overwriting that is generally subjected to the most intense
analysis. Reinscriptions have been welcomed as evidence of how their
forebears were received—that is, ever since reception theory gained cur-
rency among medievalists. The basic tenet, that the text or work should
be “grasped in its becoming rather than as a fixed entity,”6 brings to the
fore another difference between types of palimpsest. Medieval palimp-
sest manuscripts are “fixed entities.” They have stopped “becoming” if
only because they have, over time, attained the status of museum pieces
on which it is now forbidden to write. In fact, because of the extrinsic
value they have acquired, medieval palimpsests, like manuscripts of all
types from antiquity, the Middle Ages, and later, are in danger of elud-
ing the scholar’s grasp. Having become commodities in an increasingly
limited market, the cycle of buying and selling them for financial gain
keeps them from entering (or may cause their sale from) libraries and
institutions that promote the study of such texts.7 Literary works, by con-
trast, can continue their process of “becoming,” not least because the
possibilities of transtextuality are endless. Likewise, the studies devoted
to them and the number of editions of them are theoretically unlimited.
With this observation, however, we have come full circle. The medieval
palimpsest itself is a paleographical material artifact, yet when housed in
a setting conducive to its study, its text(s) can be recovered, examined,
edited, and published. Thus the medieval text is lifted from the manu-
script page by analysis and expansion through scholarship in ways not
so very different from literary works. Analysis of “works” furthermore
raises questions similar to those complicating the identification of “texts”:
both involve “such virtually unresolvable issues as at what point the pro-
cess of abridgment, alteration, and scribal error creates a ‘new’ text rather
4 R A ELEEN CHAI-ELSHOLZ

than a ‘version’ of a given exemplar.”8 In cases like these, what are the
offspring of a text but newborn works? Given the similar iterative possi-
bilities of material and metaphorical palimpsests, it is not always possible,
or even desirable, to adhere strictly or systematically to the distinction
between text and work as it relates to reinscription.
Fuller attention should now be given to the constituent elements
of the palimpsest, defined as “a work or surface with a second text or
image superimposed over an effaced original.”9 Here, art historian Leslie
Brubaker helpfully enriches the notion of reinscription to include image
as well as text. Neither should be excluded from a study of palimpsests, all
the more so because text can function pictorially and images can present
words. In pointing to unspecified “surfaces” as the foundation for new
material, Brubaker allows for media of all types: papyrus, bark, paper,
slate, wax, plaster, stone, and others. A whole new crop of palimpsest
metaphors, not to mention practices analogous to textual recovery, can be
imagined when the definition is permitted to accommodate such media
as film, for as one critic has boldly stated, “[T]he book has now ceased to
be the root-metaphor of the age; the screen has taken its place.”10
By surveying metaphorical palimpsests side by side with palimpsested
and otherwise modified manuscripts, it is hoped that the ways in which
the imagination of medieval writers and their audiences was shaped by
literary recycling will be elucidated to some small degree. Palimpsesting,
in all its usual senses, is indeed an act of recycling:11 writing surfaces
are washed and reused, just as their content may be digested and then
offered up anew . . . like the cud of a ruminant?12 Even where that famous
monastic analogy is inapplicable, Chartier’s use of the term “incarna-
tions” in reference to reinscriptions underscores the physicality of literary
artifacts.
Writing has been interpreted as a way to control the fear of oblivion
because it preserves traces of the past. Erasure, in this mind-set, was tan-
tamount to forgetting.13 Yet was the dread of disappearing from the writ-
ten record really a constant in European societies from the earliest of
modern times? Or, more to the point, was erasure consistently viewed as
something to be feared? Without going so far as to claim that the specter
of palimpsesting loomed large over authors and scribes, one may certainly
posit an anxiety over the possibility of the destruction of manuscripts or
the disappearance of texts. Even if palimpsesting was hardly ever done for
the sole purpose of consigning a text to oblivion, erasure was a frequent
occurrence. A glimpse at the typical medieval scribe’s equipment shows
that implements for rubbing out featured alongside as many instruments
for page preparation and writing respectively: together with the calamus,
stylus, or quill pen could be found “chalk, two pumice stones, two ink
 I N T RO DU C T ION 5

horns, a sharp knife, two razors for erasing, a ‘punctorium’, an awl, lead,
a straight edge, and a ruling stick”; after the thirteenth century, spectacles
might be added to the list.14
The prospect of erasure went hand in hand with suspicions of faulty
copying or deliberate changes to texts. Not without reason has fixing or
maintaining control over the letter of the text been called a “chimerical
task.”15 It was apparently just such a concern that animated the author of
the New Testament book of the Apocalypse, a work as well known to
the monastic copyist of the Middle Ages as it was to his early Christian
forebears. The warning at the end of the book threatens that “if any man
shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are
written in this book; and if any man shall take away from the words of
the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the Book of
Life” (Rev. 22.18–19).16 This was not the only kind of admonition to find
its way into the margins and colophons of medieval manuscripts. From
anathemas menacing book thieves and incompetent scribes to legends
such as the one in which a precious manuscript falls overboard during a
crossing—to be found washed up on shore three days later, having sus-
tained miraculously little water damage17—the loss of texts or the codex
that contains them appears as a subject of concern within medieval nar-
ratives as well as between the lines and in the margins of the manuscript
page.
It is now time to ref lect on how the essays in this volume enrich our
understanding of the literary imagination of medieval England.
Texts destroyed by erasure, accidents, or recycling are at the core
of Peter A. Stokes’s examination of various aspects of illegibility.
Focusing on loss and recovery, Stokes introduces innovative software
for recovering the lower writing of palimpsest manuscripts. Restitution
of erased writing, however, incidentally opens up a whole new range
of possible textual manipulations of the kind that overzealous medieval
correctors might have indulged in. Echoing a warning found in a ninth-
century Sankt Gallen manuscript, “Don’t go mad with pen and pumice
lest something worse get you,”18 Stokes cautions against similar excesses
on the part of practitioners of digital recovery techniques, for they have
at their fingertips the tools to replace any part of a text by entering new
letters or words directly onto the digitized manuscript page. Is this the
dawning of the age of the “cyber-palimpsest”? If this combination of
Greek roots is an affront to the eye and ear, the practice it represents is
likewise to scholarship. Stokes stresses, therefore, that clear rules must
be established and followed in documenting the recovery of texts with
purpose- designed software to ensure the integrity and reproducibility
of results.
6 R A ELEEN CHAI-ELSHOLZ

Adrian Papahagi’s essay is a prime example of how the trial-and-

error approach that characterizes some aspects of palimpsest recovery
coheres with scholarly transparence. His findings and the methods used
to obtain them form a running dialogue with existing scholarship, test-
ing the limits of what is known about exchanges between English and
Continental scriptoria in the age of monastic reform, and at times chal-
lenging it with hard evidence. In setting up the context for his observa-
tions, Papahagi summarizes the kinds of text that were candidates for
erasure: obsolete books, poor copies, the classics, heretical writings, and
texts in languages no longer understood. At this juncture, the example of
the Blickling Homilies springs to mind. It is fortunate that not all texts
that had outlived their usefulness or comprehensibility were erased and
reused, or else the Blickling Homilies would have been lost (if not forever,
then at least pending their recovery by computer- savvy paleographers).
Luckily, the manuscript escaped palimpsesting and reuse in bindings into
an age when the abundance of paper made such recycling unnecessary.
In the early eighteenth century the manuscript was simply given away, a
worthless artifact “writ in ancient character and of no further use.”19
Papahagi notes that contrary to popular belief, palimpsesting occurred
most often during times of intellectual growth in religious communities.
The last candle was not, in fact, on the point of f lickering out in the grow-
ing gloom of the Dark Ages as emaciated, benighted scribes feverishly
scraped away the scorned texts of antiquity. By way of response to the
rhetorical questions posed above regarding fears of erasure, Bede offers an
example. He practically invites rewriting when, in verses attached to his
commentary on the Apocalypse, he playfully suggests that the reader take
a pumice to his words, represented as literary morsels, if they are found
to be displeasing.20 His implication that differences in taste can motivate
erasure underscores the liveliness of literate communities that did, on
occasion, resort to palimpsesting to make way for new copies or new
works. Erasure, like other kinds of interventions on the manuscript page,
is often representative of vitality rather than a sign of an impoverished
literary imagination.
This view is borne out in the contribution by Paul E. Szarmach.
He investigates physical traces of reconfiguration of manuscript texts and
provides evidence of the editorial process at work in the rewriting of
Old English homilies. When such homilists as Ælfric or Wulfstan don
their reviser’s hats, they are setting out to erase and reinscribe their own
texts as well as those of others. In cases like these, the permanent state of
potential transformation comes to emphasize genesis over fact; homiletic
composition is a process rather than an event, as Szarmach puts it. He
thereby adjusts reception theory’s usual viewpoint and terminology to
 I N T RO DU C T ION 7

take the work of authors as editors into account, such that the chain of
end products (“events”) is reabsorbed into the editorial landscape. We
become observers of works in progress, rather than readers of succes-
sive versions. There is ample and original ref lection on what this process
can yield as Szarmach ponders the use of the term “palimpsest” and its
various meanings in relation to artistic, scribal, editorial, and authorial
practices.
Jane Roberts explores textual accumulations in the form of linguistic
strata, as texts in different idioms existing together on the same manu-
script page. Glossators counted on the continued visibility of the “under-
writing” to support their own inscriptions as they planned their writing
to bring out facets of the original text. In this sense, glosses are literary
palimpsests, but, like material palimpsests, they share their writing sur-
face with the original text. The title of Roberts’s essay is a nod to Fred
C. Robinson’s famous plea to study manuscripts in their most immediate
material contexts; indeed, page layout is essential to her understanding
of how the scribes of psalters from the Anglo-Saxon period viewed the
task of glossing in the vernacular. Their interlinear writing can be seen as
conforming to, or departing from, expectations latent in page design. We
see Old English contorting to fit between the lines of the Latin original,
placing itself in fairly consistent word-to-word parallels with its source.
At the same time, its lexis is stretched to ref lect the Latin. Here, then,
is a textual variety of the interlinguistic gymnastics whose loss André
Crépin deplores.21 Yet the point Roberts is making is much less about
the subservience of the Old English to the Latin on the page than about
how Anglo-Saxon scribes seized the opportunity of interlinear glossing
to reinscribe the biblical text in various ways, sometimes resorting to and
adapting earlier glosses to the purpose at hand. Such Old English rework-
ings do not, as a whole, fall neatly into umbrella categories of instruc-
tional aids, running translations, and so forth; rather, they bear witness
to the creative solutions sought and found by Anglo- Saxon glossators in
response to particular contexts of reading.
The diversity of vernacular glosses is a reminder that “writers of
Old English have left us no extended accounts of appropriate styles
for writing in the vernacular.” 22 It might be said, however, that Alfred
of Wessex laid the premises for a “poetics of reinscription.” His Old
English version of Augustine’s Soliloquies describes the intellectual pro-
cess of building a new literary “house” with spolia from the writings
of predecessors. In a lecture from 2003, Malcolm Godden revisited the
traditional interpretation of Alfred’s words to demonstrate the striking
confidence they bespeak. 23 Alfred is not talking about mere accumula-
tion or borrowing. Prefiguring Bernard of Chartres’s “dwarfs” perched
8 R A ELEEN CHAI-ELSHOLZ

on the shoulders of their larger-than-life predecessors,24 Alfred and his

circle of scholars attested that the ability to invent and adapt was alive
and well among writers of Old English, as was the intellectual aptitude
to assume literary activity on their own terms. Sharon M. Rowley
observes, moreover, that Anglo- Saxons had been pondering the process
of rewriting and what it meant at least as early as Bede’s day. In con-
tradiction to the view of erasure as a kind of oblivion or literary death,
Rowley posits it as a basis for creation. She suggests that by reading his-
tory as a palimpsest, we can recast the dynamics of confrontation and
intrusion as reinscription rather than betrayal. Her analysis of the Old
English adaptation of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica confirms the benefits
of this approach in exploring how modifications to the text and use of
narrative voice redefine the work with respect to the original in terms
of historical vision.
Florence Bourgne shifts the spotlight to inscription surfaces in her
study of engravings, pictorial treatment of writing, and literary references
to textual production. A portion of her study is devoted to that “author’s
companion,” the wax tablet, the most common palimpsest medium on
which texts were composed, rubbed out, and written over. The physical
act of inscribing in wax made an indelible impression on the imagina-
tion of medieval scribes handling ink and parchment. One could cite,
by way of illustration, the remarkable case of two eighth- century scribes
who added/replaced a word in their respective copies in such a way as to
evoke a constellation of associations indicating that the image of making
grooves in wax writing tablets was, to their minds, an integral part of the
interpretation of a passage about the divine record of a dying man’s life.25
Later, wax tablets became the topic of poems by Baudri of Bourgueil,
who traveled to Norman England and back to France in the company,
no doubt, of his prized six-tablet wax “notepad.” In an interesting ref lec-
tion of the tension between permanence and transience that underlies
Bourgne’s essay, Baudri writes of his everlasting friendship for his tablets,
but at the same time points to his own mortality, which the tablets are
supposed to share.26 Wax tablets, however, sometimes did enjoy a second
life, as Bourgne notes; finely tooled specimens from antiquity reappeared
in the Middle Ages as covers of precious books.
This reincarnation of writing surfaces has its counterpart in the rebirth
of texts in new works. While all of the essays in the first part of this vol-
ume acknowledge the material surface on which the text is permanently
or impermanently inscribed, the focus of the second part is on rewrit-
ing and the “simultaneous relationship of intimacy and separation”27
that a work, as a literary palimpsest, can be shown to maintain with
its predecessor(s) and successor(s). These studies address literary activity
 I N T RO DU C T ION 9

in terms of textual impermanence and intertextual accumulation. It has

been said that

Old English literature is a palimpsest, and few periods in the history of

English literature offer the literary historian a greater challenge—to com-
prehend and appreciate the layers as they accumulated over many centu-
ries, understanding its historical context and yet using modern critical
techniques.28

Leo Carruthers rises to just such a challenge; his essay on the relationship
between the historical elements in Beowulf and the poem’s genre takes a
significant step toward understanding “the poem’s changing reception in
critical discourse.”29 As such, it illustrates the work of rereading as much
as that of rewriting. Looking back over the road the poem has traveled to
the present day, parallel tracks appear: the historical track, fairly straight,
if not perfectly regular; the other, a series of skid marks over a succession
of genres.
André Crépin has noted that Beowulf contains instructions, so to speak,
for its own retelling/reinscription in its internal references to verse-craft
and especially in its intertextual recycling of historical and story matter.30
In one theorist’s view,

It is exactly in the intertext, which we can now see as akin to the palimp-
sest, that historically conditioned tensions come to the fore: tensions not
only between calendar time and intraliterary time, but also between the
author’s intention and the relative autonomy of a text, or between the old
and the new in general. 31

Carruthers argues that a similar dynamics of palimpsestuous intertextual-

ity informs modern historical fiction genres, and beckons for Beowulf to
be read in those terms, as epic romance.
Carruthers’s essay is a fascinating counterpoint to the study by Claire
Vial, who concentrates on the appropriation of generic markers in
Middle English treatments of Breton lays. Claims of filiation, partic-
ularly unsubstantiated ones, raise awareness that a work’s finiteness or
completeness is a relative concept. Open-endedness applies to both ends
of a tradition, to ancestry and descent alike. It is here that the essays by
Vial and Carruthers implicitly engage a Derridean analysis of genres.
The works they discuss challenge their generic categories because as soon
as they are labeled in one way, they display features that prevent such a
classification from being satisfactory. Works do not belong to a genre;
they are assigned to genres by their readers or audiences in dialogue with
a set of expectations and inf luences. The question, therefore, is one of
10 R A ELEEN CHAI-ELSHOLZ

identification rather than of actual identity.32 Referring as it does to a

normative “invisible center,” the notion of genre “also has a controlling
inf luence and is binding on that which draws the genre into engendering,
generations, genealogy, and degenerescence.”33 To ref lect on Breton lay,
or, more broadly, the matière de Bretagne, is to ref lect on an “engendering”
literary tradition. The reinscriptions of Marie de France’s Lanval, to con-
sider only one of the palimpsested works discussed by Vial, show how the
theoretical conventions of courtly romance, already f lawed but certainly
present in the earliest version, are still applied in Landevale. In Thomas
Chestre’s Launfal, however, those characteristics have been transformed
almost beyond recognition.34
In her analysis of the seventeenth- century Sir Lambewell, Colette
Stévanovitch draws attention to the parallel between scribal and autho-
rial interventions in the text and in the work, respectively. Both involve
erasure, whether in the literal or figurative sense, as well as a potential
for rewriting. Stévanovitch demonstrates that the work presents a nar-
rative rather different from the earlier Middle English reinscriptions of
Marie de France’s Lanval. The early modern adaptation shows significant
changes to plot and meaning, as if propagating the liberties taken by
the Middle English adapters. Moreover, its language offers an intriguing
mixture of outdated and misunderstood terms alongside simple errors
and modernizations. These linguistic and narrative differences separat-
ing the early modern Sir Lambewell from its medieval vernacular prede-
cessors can be set in counterpoint to early modern Latin reinscriptions
of medieval Latin works. In many cases, Neo-Latin authors set out to
improve on their predecessors’ purportedly barbarous style, smooth-
ing their prose “with the Classical pumice.”35 While the early modern
Latinist cast back to classical antiquity to inspire the language of his or
her reinscription, the author of the English Sir Lambewell attempted to
bring the narrative and its language forward in time. After all, what early
modern English adapter of a Middle English text would have turned to
Old English in search of purer style and more authentic idiom (especially
in this case, where Anglo-Norman was the prototype)?36 These multiple
layers of linguistic and diegetic reinscription bear out the observation
that Middle English literature, too, is a “palimpsest”;37 so much the more
so of the seventeenth-century Sir Lambewell that overwrote its medieval
predecessors.
The question of approaches to reinscription is complicated further still
when sources exist both in Latin and in a vernacular different from the
one in which the new work is composed. However much Chaucer may
have complained that a copyist might “myswrite” and “mysmetre” his
verses, he transformed his own sources as well. The contribution by Gila
 I N T RO DU C T ION 11

Aloni investigates how Chaucer composed his “Legend of Philomela”

to infuse it with significations not found in the legend by Ovid or in the
Ovide Moralisé. Parts of the Latin legend are figuratively erased to form a
Middle English text with an entirely different moral. 38 Aloni also exam-
ines the ways in which “palimpsestic Philomela” meshes with Chaucer’s
reinscriptions of other works within his posthumously titled Legend of
Good Women. In this way, “the value of reading the texts in associa-
tion” that is crucial to the study of the manuscript codex as a “composite
artifact”39 is applied here to analysis of the edited form of legends grouped
together in a collection designed by the author.40
The reappropriations and palimpsestuous transformations analyzed by
Aloni, Vial, and Stévanovitch can be understood in terms akin to those
used to describe the activity of the early writers of Old English prose:

One might argue that writers were engaged in a consciously imagina-

tive or fictionalizing activity, creating works which had their own dra-
matic autonomy; that they were not seriously (or fraudulently) claiming
to represent their progenitors but appropriating them to create a body of
literature which explored ideas in an imagined setting which owed some-
thing to those progenitors and certainly acknowledged them but partly
fictionalized them.41

If this quotation from Godden’s study of Alfredian misappropriations of

the past is germane to a discussion of Middle English literary palimpsests,
it is, of course, because there is no rigid boundary between the periods.
Admittedly it is otiose to belabor the point. Nevertheless, in a volume on
how the practice and memory of palimpsesting operated in the literary
imagination of medieval England, it may not be so very superf luous to
underscore continuities where they exist despite differences in language
and historical settings.
As regards continuity, it goes without saying that the memory of
medieval England lives on in the literary imagination. The last essay in
this volume analyzes the transposition of Arthurian legend and the aes-
thetics of medieval romance onto film. More than an illustration of the
palimpsestic Arthurian tradition, John Boorman’s film Excalibur reveals
its aesthetic underwriting. Jean-Marc Elsholz argues that Excalibur,
ostensibly an adaptation of Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, actually renews a
specific medieval aesthetics on the silver screen (a metonymy for cinema
that, it may be argued, has particular relevance to the visual representa-
tion of legends of Arthur). Film is a medium on which aesthetics, defined
by Elsholz as the human construction of the world through vision, can
be enacted and literally brought to light from below the overwriting of
the textual Arthurian tradition. Thus, a parallel may be drawn between
12 R A ELEEN CHAI-ELSHOLZ

cinema and the technologies discussed by Peter A. Stokes at the begin-

ning of the volume, where the aim is to uncover and elucidate the origi-
nal by means of manipulations of light and color.
The science of cinema and its ability to represent aesthetics recalls the
peculiar combination of science and spirituality that allowed Thomas
De Quincey to write of “our own heaven- created palimpsest, the deep
memorial palimpsest of the brain,” on which “everlasting layers of ideas,
images, feelings” have fallen “softly as light.”42 The very notion that
intellectual, visual, and emotional memories are committed to the mind
as if by light augurs Elsholz’s suggestion that perceptions of the universe
were inextricably linked not to the ability to see, but rather to the human
capacity for (en)vision(ing). Of this, the Grail quest depicted in Boorman’s
film is a most poignant demonstration.
With these reminders of the quest inherent in the investigation of
metaphorical and literal palimpsests alike, I close the introduction to
the present volume on palimpsests and the literary imagination in and
of medieval England. Borrowing the words of Umberto Eco, I could
claim to “demonstrate that it is impossible to write without palimpsest-
ing . . . without ever succeeding in eluding the anxiety of inf luence.”43
One of the inf luences most strongly felt within these pages is that of
André Crépin. Unanxiously do we, his friends, fellow scholars, and for-
mer students, acknowledge it. Our “palimpsest” of his work involves
no erasure; rather, it endeavors to build on his original writing to add
another layer to our heritage of medieval English scholarship.
This book is a tribute to André Crépin, angliciste médiéviste par
excellence.

Notes
1. Claus Uhlig, “Literature as Textual Palingenesis: On Some Principles of
Literary History,” New Literary History 16.3 (Spring 1985): 496 [481–513],
referring to Plutarch.
2. Willie van Peer, “Mutilated Signs: Notes Toward a Literary Palæography,”
Poetics Today 18.1 (Spring 1997): 34 and 47 [33–57].
3. Roger Chartier, Inscrire et effacer: culture écrite et littérature (XIe–XVIIIe
siècle) (Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 2005), p. 10; his definitions are inspired
by David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), pp. 117–8. The English version of Chartier’s book
is Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the
Eighteenth Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
4. Tiphaine Samoyault, L’intertextualité: mémoire de la littérature (2001;
Paris: Armand Colin, 2008). See also the discussion of palimspest and
 I N T RO DU C T ION 13

weaving metaphors as images of intertextuality by Carmen Lara-Rallo,

“Pictures Worth a Thousand Words: Metaphorical Images of Textual
Interdependence,” Nordic Journal of English Studies 8.2 (2009): 91–110.
5. Gérard Genette, Palimpsests, trans. Channa Newman and Claude
Doubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), pp. 398–99.
The French original is Palimpsestes: la littérature au second degré (Paris: Seuil,
1982). See also Sarah Dillon, The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory
(London: Continuum, 2007), pp. 4–5 and 254.
In Palimpsests, Genette discusses mainly the “hypertext” resulting
from a process of transformation of another text or derivation from it.
He reserves “intertextuality” for the practice of citation, allusion, and
plagiarism. The present volume is not as restrictive in its definition of
literary palimpsests, and encompasses a variety of what Genette terms
“transtextual relationships.”
6. Joyce Hill, “The Preservation and Transmission of Aelfric’s Saints’
Lives: Reader-Reception and Reader-Response in the Early Middle
Ages,” in Paul E. Szarmach and Joel T. Rosenthal, eds., The Preservation
and Transmission of Anglo-Saxon Culture, Studies in Medieval Culture
XL (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan
University, 1997), pp. 406 and 423 [405–30] citing Robert C. Holub,
Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction (London: Methuen 1984), p. 149.
7. William P. Stoneman, “ ‘Writ in Ancient Character and of No Further
Use’: Anglo- Saxon Manuscripts in American Collections,” in Szarmach
and Rosenthal, eds., Preservation and Transmission, p. 108 [99–138]. In a
related vein, Thomas De Quincey, in Suspiria de Profundis [1845], assesses
the status palimpsests have acquired in terms of an inversion of value
between the literary work (“jewel” or “freight”) and the vellum (“setting
of the jewel” or “vehicle”). See his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
and Suspiria de Profundis (Boston, 1866), pp. 227–8.
8. Thomas D. Hill, “Introduction,” in Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture,
Vol. 1, ed. Frederick M. Biggs, Thomas D. Hill, Paul E. Szarmach, and E.
Gordon Whatley (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western
Michigan University, 2001), p. xxi [xv–xxxiii].
9. Leslie Brubaker, “Palimpsest,” in Dictionary of the Middle Ages, vol. 9 (New
York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1987), p. 355.
10. Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2000), p. 172, citing intellectual historian and social critic Ivan Illich, In
the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 3. In fact, the screen in question is
the computer monitor in our age of information technology; here I use it
to represent cinema, a topic Jager discusses on the same page.
11. In fact, the term “recycling” has recently been used in precisely this con-
text. See Geert Claassens and Werner Verbeke, eds., Medieval Manuscripts
in Transition: Tradition and Creative Recycling (Leuven University Press,
2006). This fine volume contains essays on an array of Western manu-
scripts, but none from England.
14 R A ELEEN CHAI-ELSHOLZ

12. See André Crépin, “Bede and the Vernacular,” in Famulus Christi: Essays
in Commemoration of the Thirteenth Centenary of the Birth of the Venerable
Bede, ed. Gerald Bonner (London: SPCK, 1976), pp. 172–3 and 187–9
n. 6 [170–92]; also Dom Jean Leclercq, L’amour des lettres et le désir de Dieu:
initiation aux auteurs monastiques du Moyen Age, 3rd ed. (1957; Paris: Cerf,
1990), p. 72, on ruminatio as a method of lectio divina. I apply the analogy to
scriptio. The English version of Leclercq’s classic is The Love of Learning and
the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catharine Misrahi
(London: SPCK, 1978; New York: Fordham University Press, 1982).
13. Chartier, Inscrire et effacer, p. 7.
14. Bernhard Bischoff, Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans.
Dáibhí Ó Cróinín and David Ganz (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990), pp. 18–19.
15. Laura Kendrick, Animating the Letter: The Figurative Embodiment of Writing
from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (Columbus: Ohio State University
Press, 1999), p. 177, in her discussion of loci of authority over the text’s
sense.
16. Quoted by Richard Gameson, The Scribe Speaks? Colophons in Early
English Manuscripts, H.M. Chadwick Memorial Lectures 12 (Cambridge:
University of Cambridge, ASNC, 2001), p. 20.
17. A summary of this miracle is given by Bertram Colgrave, “The Post-
Bedan Miracles and Translations of St Cuthbert,” in The Early Cultures
of North-West Europe, ed. Sir Cyril Fox and Bruce Dickins (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1950), p. 322 [307–322].
18. Gameson, The Scribe Speaks?, p. 2. The manuscript is Sankt Gallen,
Stiftsbibliothek, 261 (pt. III), 276.
19. Stoneman, “Writ in Ancient Character,” pp. 99–100. Even as late as the
twentieth century, an agent who bought it was scolded for acquiring an
item that would, it was thought, be almost impossible to auction off.
20. Bede, Bedae Presbyteri Expositio Apocalypseos, ed. Roger Gryson, CCSL
121A (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), p. 219. “Nostra tuis ergo sapiant
si fercula labris / Regnanti laudes da super astra deo. / Sin alias, ani-
mos tamen amplexatus amicos, / Quae cano corripiens pumice frange,
fero.” (ll. 19–22). [If these my scanty morsels please thy taste, / Give
praise to God, Who reigns above the skies; / Or else, accept a friendly
heart’s intent, / And, armed with pumice, this my verse erase.] Bede,
The Explanation of the Apocalypse, trans. Edward Marshall (Oxford, 1878),
online at The ORB: On-line Reference Book for Medieval Studies, http://
home.mchsi.com/~numenor/medstud/apocalypse/epigram.htm.
21. Regretting that specialization and the requirements of the job market
ultimately steered him away from the study of the classics, Crépin defends
their value “as an initiation to various modes of thought and feeling, as
linguistic gymnastics, and as a common denominator of European cul-
tures.” André Crépin, “Brute Beauty and Valour and Act . . . ,” in Medieval
English Language Scholarship: Autobiographies by Representative Scholars in Our
 I N T RO DU C T ION 15

Discipline, ed. Akio Oizumi and Tadao Kubouchi (Hildesheim: Georg

Olms Verlag, 2005), p. 20 [18–27].
22. Jonathan Wilcox, “Variant Texts of an Old English Homily: Vercelli X
and Stylistic Readers,” in Szarmach and Rosenthal, eds., Preservation and
Transmission, p. 346 [335–51]. On the absence of recommendations on
vernacular usage in metrical treatises, see André Crépin, “Poétique latine
et poétique vieil- anglaise: poèmes mêlant les deux langues,” Médiévales 25
(Autumn 1993): 36–38 [33–44].
23. Malcolm Godden, The Translations of Alfred and His Circle, and the
Misappropriation of the Past, H.M. Chadwick Memorial Lectures 14
(Cambridge: University of Cambridge, ASNC, 2003), pp. 16–28.
24. In the famous “dwarfs on the shoulders of giants” analogy reported by
John of Salisbury, The Metalogicon of John of Salisbury, A Twelfth-Century
Defense of the Verbal and Logical Arts of the Trivium, trans. Daniel D. McGarry
(1955; repr. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), 3.4, p. 167.
25. The reference is to the unfortunate Mercian’s otherworldly “life- ledger”
in Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica (5.13). An addition/replacement of the word
uomeres (“ploughshares,” “pointed objects,” and, by extension, “dagger”
and “stylus”) in two early manuscripts, as well as modifications around the
word in a number of copies, raises a triple image (stabbing with daggers/
inscribing letters/ploughing furrows) in resonance with various texts well
known to the monastic penman. See Sharon M. Rowley, Reading Miracles
in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (PhD dissertation,
University of Chicago, 1996), pp. 140–41; see also Rowley’s essay, “The
Role and Function of Otherworldly Visions in Bede’s Historia ecclesias-
tica gentis anglorum,” in The World of Travellers: Exploration and Imagination,
Mediaevalia Groningana n.s. 15, ed. Kees Dekker, Karen E. Olsen, and
T. Hofstra (Louvain: Peeters, 2009), pp. 163–82.
26. Chartier, Inscrire et effacer, p. 19, citing Baldricus Burgulianus/Baudri de
Bourgueil, Poèmes, vol. 1, ed. Jean-Yves Tilliette (Paris: Belles-Lettres,
1999), p. 37: Sed uester mecum ludus perduret in aeuum, / A tabulis nun-
quam scilicet amouear. / Viuam uobiscum; uos autem uiuite mecum, /
Tandem nos unus suscipiat tumulus. [May the games we share endure
forever / let me never be separated from my tablets. / I will live on with
you; you, then, live together with me, / May a single tomb receive us
both.]
27. Dillon, The Palimpsest, p. 3.
28. Stanley B. Greenfield with Daniel Gillmore Calder and Michael Lapidge,
A New Critical History of Old English Literature (New York: New York
University Press, 1986), pp. 3–4.
29. This is how Jane Roberts describes her own rather different approach
to “Vainglory” in her essay, “A Man ‘boca gleaw’ and His Musings,”
in Virginia Blanton and Helene Scheck, eds., Intertexts: Studies in Anglo-
Saxon Culture Presented to Paul E. Szarmach (Tempe: ACMRS and Brepols,
2008), p. 136 [119–37].
16 R A ELEEN CHAI-ELSHOLZ

30. André Crépin, Old English Poetics: A Technical Handbook (Paris: AMAES,
2005), pp. 156–9, 165, and 48–9.
31. Uhlig, “Literature as Textual Palingenesis,” 502.
32. Frédérique Toudoire- Surlapierre, “Derrida, Blanchot, ‘Peut-être
l’extase,’ ” in Fabula: littérature, histoire, théorie 1 (February 1, 2006),
http://www.fabula.org/lht/1/Toudoire- Surlapierre.html, ¶3 and ¶5;
also Jacques Derrida; trans. Avital Ronell, “The Law of Genre,” Critical
Inquiry 7 (Autumn 1980): 59 and 64–65 [55–81]. See also Stephen G.
Nichols, “Working Late: Marie de France and the Value of Poetry,” in
Women in French Literature, ed. Michel Guggenheim, Stanford French and
Italian Studies 58 (Saratoga, CA: ANMA Libri, 1988), p. 12 [7–16].
33. Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” 74.
34. Peter Noble, “Lanval, Sir Landevale et Sir Launfal: texte, traduction et adap-
tation,” in D’une écriture à l’autre. Les femmes et la traduction sous l’Ancien
Régime, ed. Jean-Philippe Beaulieu (Ottawa: Presses de l’Université
d’Ottawa, 2004), pp. 75 and 78 [73–80].
35. Ælfric’s Life of Saint Basil the Great: Background and Context, ed. Gabriella
Corona (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006), p. 147. Corona provides
interesting examples of hypercorrection and careful elimination of non-
Classical style in Laurentius Surius’s sixteenth- century rewriting of a
Latin source of the life of St. Basil, pp. 142–48.
36. Cf. the “Saxon root” consciousness of nineteenth-century philologist and
poet William Barnes, and of course J.R.R. Tolkien, among others, in the
twentieth century.
37. Christopher Baswell, “Multilingualism on the Page,” in Middle English,
ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 46 [38–50],
referring to the interplay of literary languages on the manuscript page in
Kyng Alisaunder and the Holkham Bible Picture Book.
38. See Rita Copeland’s discussion of the status of the Legend of Good Women
as a “secondary” form of vernacularization in her Rhetoric, Hermeneutics,
and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 94–96. “While
[secondary translations] may acknowledge a source (as in the case of
Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women . . . ) and hence their own status of trans-
lations, they exploit the logic of exegetical supplementation to recontex-
tualize their sources and so to efface them,” p. 95 (also pp. 107–126 on the
Ovide Moralisé as “primary translation”).
39. Fred C. Robinson, “Old English Literature in Its Most Immediate
Context,” in Old English Literature in Context, ed. John D. Niles (Ipswich:
D.S. Brewer, 1980), p. 28 [11–29]. As is well known, Robinson pleads in
favor of taking full account of how/where a manuscript text was placed
on the page and within a codex; here, however, his argument is fruitfully
applied to consideration of a work within an authorially designed collec-
tion, whether in manuscript or edited form.
 I N T RO DU C T ION 17

40. Reading a corpus of generically related texts in association enabled

Florence Bourgne, in her “Le statut générique de la Légende des femmes ver-
tueuses de Chaucer—ou la couleur des pâquerettes,” Bulletin des Anglicistes
Médiévistes 54 (Winter 1998): 47–50 [37–50], to envision the “Legend of
Good Women” as a pastiche of a compendium of saints’ lives.
41. I have “erased” some parts of this passage, which is taken from Godden,
The Translations of Alfred, p. 27.
42. De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis, p. 233. Uhlig, “Literature as Textual
Palingenesis,” 497, continues the passage from De Quincey to empha-
size the “presentness of the past” in the coexistence of strata in a literary
work.
43. Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before, trans. William Weaver (New
York: Harcourt, 1994), pp. 513–14 (translation slightly modified), refer-
ring undoubtedly to Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory
of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). Most of the works
studied in the present volume fall within what Bloom called the pre-
Shakespearean “giant age . . . before the anxiety of inf luence became cen-
tral to poetic consciousness” (pp. 11–12). Medievalists might feel impelled
to challenge or refine his assessment.
PART I

PERMANENCE AND IMPERMANENCE OF

WRITING ON THE PAGE
CHAPTER 1

AN ANGLO-SAXON PALIMPSEST FROM

FLEURY: ORLÉANS, BIBLIOTHÈQUE
MUNICIPALE MS 342 (290)

Adrian Papahagi

This essay examines an Orléans manuscript (s. x/xi) against the background of
exchanges between Fleury and Anglo-Saxon abbeys, and suggests it was palimp-
sested in Fleury.

A mong the many items of prêt-à-penser that the medievalist must con-
stantly fight, one in particular has the endurance of an archetype.
This diehard prejudice is, alas, linked to the very name of the Middle
Ages. Thus we are all obliged, at one stage or another, to patiently explain
that the Middle Ages were not a thousand years of darkness between the
golden age of Rome and the splendor of Florence; that the Renaissance
was not that much of a virgin birth, since its seeds had been sown centu-
ries before; that the humanists’ antiqua was in fact an imitation of Caroline
minuscule; that without the libraries and scriptoria of the Middle Ages
there would have been little for the Renaissance to resuscitate.
And yet, palimpsests represent precisely one of those controver-
sial practices of medieval civilization that can justify some animosity
between classicists and medievalists. For, as L.D. Reynolds and N.G.
Wilson wrote, “[M]any texts that had escaped destruction in the crum-
bling empire of the West perished within the walls of the monastery . . . .”1
However, it is probably preferable to understand the phenomenon in the
manner of Rosamond McKitterick, who points out quite subtly that “the
most striking feature of palimpsests for the historian is the paradox that
they represent evidence preserved by destruction.” 2 It is to the (rather
22 A D R I A N PA PA H AG I

exiguous) evidence preserved in such a manuscript that I would like to

turn here. Although in the case of Orléans, Bibliothèque Municipale MS
342 (290) almost nothing has survived from the erased text, the Fleury
codex under scrutiny can be used as a pretext to address a few general
issues concerning early medieval palimpsests. If the lower script of this
palimpsest can be shown to be Anglo- Saxon, the manuscript is one fur-
ther witness to the intense relationships between Anglo-Saxon England
and France in the tenth century.
Those times are gone when scholars attributed the erasure of Cicero
codices to the hatred of Gregory the Great or of Columbanus for the
Latin classics.3 If it is true that an important number of Arian texts were
palimpsested because of their unorthodox nature,4 in most cases the rea-
sons for rewriting codices were not religious or ideological, but merely
practical. Early medieval abbeys like Bobbio, the most prolific center
of palimpsest production,5 were in the paradoxical situation of possess-
ing important quantities of late antique and early medieval libri inutiles,6
and of lacking the material to produce all the new books they needed.
The reason for erasing old books was thus not a war against the texts
they contained, but the irrelevance of those texts for early medieval
monks. As noted by Lowe in his article on codices rescripti, manuscripts
were palimpsested because they were obsolescent, because they were in
unknown languages, because they were difficult or impossible to read
(e.g., texts written in scriptio continua), or simply because they contained
bad or incomplete texts (codices mutili).7
During the period studied by Lowe in his invaluable “Codices rescripti”
(up to c.800, but sometimes including manuscripts copied s. viii/ix),
most palimpsests were made in the seventh and eighth centuries, and
a sharp decline in this practice can be noticed in the ninth century.8
Unsurprisingly, two-thirds of the almost 150 palimpsests listed by Lowe
were produced in Italy, and forty-seven were rewritten in Bobbio alone!
In the rest of Merovingian and Carolingian Europe, this practice is not
widespread: liturgical palimpsests can be found in centers like Fulda,
Sankt Gallen, and Benediktbeuern, and there is a modest number of
palimpsests of French provenance, especially from Luxeuil, Corbie, and
Fleury. England, with only four manuscripts listed by Lowe, seems to be
practically unaffected, but this is probably due to the more limited avail-
ability of old continental manuscripts in the insular realm.
If one turns to the types of texts that were overwritten, one discovers
that they included biblical, liturgical, and even patristic texts (the latter,
however, appearing more often as the scriptio superior). Still, in most cases
the erased texts are the works of the classics, such as the famous De re publica
by Cicero (Vatican, Vat. Lat. MS 5757),9 texts in languages other than
 A N A N G L O - S A XO N PA L I M P S E S T F RO M F L E U RY 23

Latin (mainly Greek and Gothic10), heretical texts,11 pre-Vulgate biblical

texts,12 but also bad texts of the Vulgate and obsolete liturgical books.13
Outside Italy, the abbey of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire (Fleury) is one of
the important producers of palimpsests. Fleury was founded in the sev-
enth century, but it became one of the most prominent French abbeys
at the beginning of the eighth century, when its monks succeeded—in
a rather unorthodox way—in translating the relics of St. Benedict from
Monte Cassino.14 Italian books copied in the fifth to seventh centuries may
have been brought to Fleury on that occasion, and others may have been
received later in the eighth century, as a result of “papal munificence.”15 In
any case, it is certain that the Library of Orléans, which inherited the main
bulk of Fleury manuscripts, is second only to Paris where the number of
codices latini antiquiores preserved in French libraries is concerned.16 With
its thirty-one surviving manuscripts copied up to the eighth century,17
and three to five palimpsests, Fleury appears to have had one of the ear-
liest and richest libraries in Merovingian and Carolingian France. Apart
from books imported from Italy, Fleury also had a famous scriptorium,
whose origins may go back to the middle of the eighth century.18 The
library, scriptorium, and school of Fleury enjoyed two moments of glory
in the period under consideration. Their first blossoming began some
time in the eighth century, and probably as early as the translation of St.
Benedict’s relics after 703, and it grew ripe under the rule of Theodulf of
Orléans († 821).19 This period of fervent scriptorial activity was brought
to a halt by the repeated raids of the Normans in 865–897, and it may be
assumed that book production at Fleury dwindled to a minimum or even
ceased at this time.20 The abbey’s second period of glory started after it
was reformed by Cluny around 930, and lasted for a full century. It can be
said that under the rules of Abbo (988–1004) and Gauzlin (1004–1030),
Fleury had already reached its zenith.21
During its second great century, Fleury acted as a reformer of other
French abbeys, and exerted an important and widely acknowledged
inf luence on a series of English monastic and ecclesiastical centers. Since
the exchanges between Fleury and Anglo- Saxon England in the tenth
century have been well studied, a brief sketch of these connections is
sufficient for our purposes.22 Anglo-Saxons started visiting Fleury soon
after its Cluniac reform in the 930s: in that decade, Oda, future arch-
bishop of Canterbury, was tonsured at Fleury. In 959, Oswald, Oda’s
nephew, and future bishop of Worcester (961) and York (971), studied in
Fleury; back in England, he founded Ramsey and became its first abbot.
Other English novices and monks are attested in Fleury in the 950s and
in the 960s, including Germanus, the future abbot of Winchcombe, and
Osgar, Æthelwold’s pupil and successor in 963 as abbot of Abingdon. The
24 A D R I A N PA PA H AG I

exchanges went both ways, however, for a group of Fleury monks is also
known to have visited England in the same period. The intensity of these
exchanges gained momentum in the last decades of the century, when a
mission was sent from Ramsey to persuade Abbo to move to England.
Abbo followed them, and was active in England for a couple of years
(985–87).23 Fleury’s most decisive inf luence on Anglo-Saxon England
was its impact on the Regularis concordia, but also its contribution to the
advancement of insular scholarship. England paid homage to Fleury by
sending over precious books, such as the Winchester Benedictional (Paris,
Bibliothèque Nationale lat. MS 987) offered by Ramsey to Gauzlin,24 the
Winchcombe Sacramentary (Orléans, Bibliothèque Municipale MS 127
(105)),25 and the beautiful Boethius manuscript now in Paris, Bibliothèque
Nationale lat. MS 6401.26
Indeed, the exchanges of books and the circulation of scribes and
illuminators between English centers and Fleury were so multifarious
that it is not uncommon to find drawings by English masters in books
copied at Fleury by local monks, as is the case of Orléans, Bibliothèque
Municipale MS 175 (152).27 English scribes are also known to have been
active at Fleury in the tenth century: a certain Leofnoth was discovered
by Jean Vezin 28 and, even more interesting, the Old English “Leiden
riddle” (Leiden, Voss MS Q 106) is thought by Malcolm Parkes to have
been copied at Saint-Benoît.29
This context of fertile exchanges between England and Fleury is the
background against which may have been made our manuscript, Orléans,
Bibliothèque Municipale MS 342 (290), hereafter referred to as O. O is
the most recent, least famous, and also least readable of the three palimp-
sests of certain Fleury provenance.30 The two others are deservedly
famous manuscripts: one, now membra disiecta divided between Orléans,
Bibliothèque Municipale MS 192 (169), Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Lat. MS
4° 364, and Vatican, Reg. Lat. MS 1283B, contains in lower script a fifth-
century Italian copy of Sallust’s Historiae 31; the other, Paris, Bibliothèque
Nationale lat. MS 6400G, fols. 112v–145v, preserves a fifth- century
African version of the New Testament.32 Both manuscripts were rewrit-
ten in the seventh and eighth centuries, but it is unlikely that this should
have happened at Fleury. O differs in all respects from the other two
palimpsests of unquestionable Fleury provenance in that its scriptio infe-
rior is believed by Lowe to be eighth- century Anglo- Saxon minuscule33
rather than late antique Italian; the manuscript was rewritten in the tenth
or early eleventh century, and most likely at Fleury.
The scriptio inferior of O appears on pages 1–68, which constitute
a visibly distinct unit in the codex: between pages 68 and 69 there
is an obvious change in parchment type, which has not been noted
Figure 1.1 Orléans, Bibliothèque Municipale MS 342 (290), pp. 68–69, upper script.
Note: The transition from insular to French parchment is visible. To the hand, the English parchment is thick and feels starched and crisp, whereas the French parchment
is thin, glossy, very well scraped (there is almost no difference between f lesh- side and hair- side), and sometimes translucid. The pale hue of the French parchment stands in
obvious contrast with the dark aspect of the English parchment (in this case, palimpsesting probably adds to the effect). Note also that the text continues from the palimp-
sested section to the new quire.
Source: Photos in Figures 1.1 to 1.5 courtesy of the Médiathèque d’Orléans.
26 A D R I A N PA PA H AG I

so far—an important point, to which I shall return (Figure 1.1). The

upper script transmits the Lives of St. Nicholas (pp. 1–59) and St. Alexis
(pp. 59–69), 34 copied at Fleury in the late tenth or early eleventh cen-
tury. The palimpsested quires (one binio and four quaterniones) were
obtained by folding the seventeen original sheets into bifolia. Since the
current size of these pages is now c.200 x 130 mm, the original size
of the erased leaves must have been at least 260 x 200 mm, and pos-
sibly c.280 x 220 mm. The old ruling, still visible, was prepared to
accommodate 26–28 long lines. 35 Unfortunately, the lower script text
has been so thoroughly washed out that one can hardly read anything
today. The only visible traces are in the margins of pages, especially
the lower ones, which also display some more easily recognizable large
initials (e.g., “N,” Figure 1.2).
Before seeing the manuscript myself, I asked the technical depart-
ment of the Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes (IRHT) in
Orléans for a new set of photographs, for techniques have evolved signifi-
cantly since the palimpsest was last studied by Lowe. Although the IRHT
promptly responded to my request, their photographs did not use any
special light exposure (ultraviolet, infrared, transparency). 36 Nonetheless,
I was offered excellent high-resolution digital pictures, which I edited in

Figure 1.2 Orléans, BM MS 342 (290), p. 35, lower script.

Note: Normal high-resolution photograph of the lower margin of the page, showing a large N-initial
(rotated).
 A N A N G L O - S A XO N PA L I M P S E S T F RO M F L E U RY 27

various ways in an attempt to better read the scriptio inferior. Although I

employed as best I was able the techniques mentioned in contemporary
research,37 the resulting images did not dramatically improve the visibil-
ity of the lower script. Since the manuscripts reading room of the Library
of Orléans does not possess an ultraviolet lamp, all I could rely on during
my visit to Orléans was my reasonably good sight and the poor natural
light of a very rainy day.38 Combined, they yielded less than the digital
photographs of the IRHT.
After the present paper was completed, Dr. Peter Stokes kindly offered
to process a few images himself, using the software and the techniques
that he presents in his contribution to the present volume. 39 Although Dr.
Stokes’s results are better than mine (Figures 1.3–1.4), one is still far from
reading enough text to make its identification possible. It is our purpose,

Figure 1.3 Orléans, BM MS 342 (290), p. 34.

Figure 1.4 The same image enhanced by Dr. Peter A. Stokes.

Note: Normal high-resolution photograph of the lower margin of the page (rotated).
28 A D R I A N PA PA H AG I

however, to study the codex and its scriptio inferior in more detail, using
the best available technology, in an attempt to crack the mystery of the
erased text.
What I can say, in the given circumstances, is therefore not very much.
However, by examining the manuscript, I noticed a few details that had
escaped Lowe. First of all, pages 1–68 actually seem to be made of insu-
lar vellum, which is thicker than continental parchment.40 Thus, one
statement of Lowe, adopted with caution by Helmut Gneuss,41 can now
be disproved. At the end of his entry in Codices Latini Antiquiores (CLA),
Lowe writes that the manuscript was “used in the eleventh century for
rewriting, apparently in England to judge by the script.” However, the
fact that the text continues from the palimpsested page 68 over to page 69
(Figure 1.1), which inaugurates the French parchment section of the vol-
ume, clearly indicates that it was not copied in England, but in Fleury.
Moreover, I can see no insular symptoms in the upper script of pages
1–69: there is nothing of the Anglo- Saxon mannerism or calligraphic
quality in the treatment of the minims, or in the serifs of such letters as e
(see Figure 1.5). As is well known, Anglo-Saxon Caroline minuscule is
often indistinguishable from its continental models, and Fleury script in
particular was certainly one of those models. Nevertheless, if one exam-
ines however cursorily the specimina in T.A.M. Bishop’s English Caroline
Minuscule, one will note that one aspect of this script that is almost never
missing is the presence of feet applied to the minims of such letters as m
and n.42 Of these, there are few in O. However, even if the hand of pages
1–69 may be thought by some to display insular symptoms, this does not
explain the availability of French parchment in England. It is easier to
argue that an Anglo- Saxon scribe active at Fleury is responsible for copy-
ing pages 1–69 on erased English and new French parchment; indeed,
the presence of such scribes at Fleury in the tenth and eleventh centu-
ries is well documented by Vezin and Parkes.43 To conclude, I have no
doubts that the quires making up pages 1–68 were erased and rewritten at
Fleury, where they were used alongside new French parchment.
As far as the lower script is concerned, more image processing is
needed before its nature can be ascertained. Lowe’s identification of the
script as Anglo- Saxon minuscule is hard to confirm, and so is his dating
in the eighth century. Whether the script is indeed from the eighth cen-
tury is for more experienced specialists of Anglo-Saxon minuscule to say.

Figure 1.5 Orléans, BM MS 342 (290), p. 35, upper script.

Note: No insular features are visible in the treatment of the minims.
 A N A N G L O - S A XO N PA L I M P S E S T F RO M F L E U RY 29

In addition to Lowe’s entry in CLA, I would add that the erased text is
in Latin, as is suggested by the few clusters that can still be made out, not
without some difficulty: e.g., caelo (Figure 1.4) or the abbreviation ē (est),
visible on the specimen in Lowe’s CLA.
Finally, one can only attempt to guess at the contents of the erased
text. Since no two or three contiguous words can be read, I attempted to
compare the size of the original leaves (c.260 x 200 mm) to the sizes of
surviving eighth-century manuscripts written in Anglo- Saxon England.
Starting from Lowe’s CLA, I resolved to put to their best use the prin-
ciples of quantitative codicology, and I recorded the sizes of different
types of texts. Here are some results:

Homilies (five): 215–233 x 123–170 (four); 305 x 215 (one)

Glossary (one): 320 x 245
Theology (eight): 247–252 x 160–190 (three); 280–295 x 210–220 (four);
420 x 295 (one)
Gospels, New Testament books (nine): 227 x 170 (one); 285–288 x 215
(two); 295–308 x 223–230 (three); 325–333 x 235–265 (two); 470 x 345
(one)
Old Testament books (two): 310 x 225; 480 x 335
Liturgical books (one): 215 x 145
Cosmography (one): 280 x 190

These figures do not really provide any final answer, but they can
suggest one or two things. Most manuscripts whose size is in the range
of 260–280 x 200–220 mm are works of theology and gospel books. The
layout of the erased leaves, with its stately initials, does not rule out the
possibility that the lower script of O contained some obsolete, corrupt, or
incomplete biblical or theological text.
However, these are mere hypotheses, and the only conclusion that
I would like to draw is that our Orléans manuscript is a book made at
Fleury, partly using five Anglo-Saxon quires of some liber inutilis. The
original manuscript was probably brought to Fleury in the tenth or elev-
enth century by an English monk, and it was erased because its text was
deemed useless, rather than for dearth of parchment in this leading center
of learning.

Notes
The present study was supported by a grant from the Romanian Research
Council (CNCSIS, UEFISCSU PN II-RU-TE 290/2010).
1. L.D. Reynolds and N.G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the
Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1991), p. 85.
30 A D R I A N PA PA H AG I

2. Rosamond McKitterick, “Palimpsests: Concluding Remarks,” in Georges

Declercq, ed. Early Medieval Palimpsests, Bibliologia 26 (Turnhout: Brepols,
2007), p. 145 [145–51].
3. Against this theory, see C.H. Beeson, “The Palimpsests of Bobbio,”
in Miscellanea Giovanni Mercati VI. Paleografia, bibliografia, varia, ed.
A.M. Albareda (Vatican: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1973), pp. 162–4.
4. See R. Gryson, Les palimpsestes ariens latins de Bobbio. Contributions à la
méthodologie de l’étude des palimpsestes (Turnhout: Brepols, 1983).
5. Cf. Beeson, “The Palimpsests of Bobbio.”
6. See G. Powitz, “Libri inutiles in mittelalterlichen Bibliotheken. Bemerkungen
über Alienatio, Palimpsestierung und Makulierung,” Scriptorium 50 (1996):
288–304.
7. E.A. Lowe, “Codices Rescripti: A List of the Oldest Latin Palimpsests with
Stray Observations on Their Origin,” in Palaeographical Papers, vol. 2,
ed. L. Bieler (Oxford, 1972), p. 482 [480–519]. Originally published in
Mélanges Eugène Tisserant V (Vatican: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1964).
See also Bernhard Bischoff, Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and the Middle
Ages, trans. Dáibhí Ó Cróinín and David Ganz (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), p. 11; Georges Declercq, “Introduction: Codices
Rescripti in the Early Medieval West,” in Declercq, ed., Early Medieval
Palimpsests, pp. 20–22 [7–22].
8. According to Lowe, “Codices rescripti,” p. 482, supplemented by Declercq,
“Introduction,” pp. 11–13, the following numbers of palimpsests were pro-
duced in the early Middle Ages: ss. v–vi: six; s. vi/vii: ten; s. vii: twenty-
two; s. vii/viii: thirty-two; s. viii: sixty-three; s. viii/ix: seventeen.
9. Beeson, “The Palimpsests of Bobbio,” pp. 171–3.
10. Michiel van der Hout, “Gothic Palimpsests of Bobbio,” Scriptorium 6
(1952): 91–93; Lowe, “Codices rescripti,” pp. 517–9.
11. Of course, Gothic writings qualify for destruction both as Arian and as
unintelligible vernacular texts.
12. See, for example, S. Berger, Le palimpseste de Fleury. Fragments du Nouveau
Testament en latin (Paris, 1889), and above all the studies of Dold (see note 13).
13. Many of these were studied and edited by Alban Dold, Palimpsest-Studien,
2 vols., Texte und Arbeiten 45, 48 (Beuron: Beuroner Kunstverlag, 1955
and 1957). Cf. Yitzhak Hen, “Liturgical Palimpsests from the Early
Middle Ages,” in Declercq, ed., Early Medieval Palimpsests, pp. 45–47.
14. On the translation of St. Benedict’s relics, recorded by Paul the Deacon
(Historia Langobardorum VI.2) and Adrevald of Fleury (Historia translationis
S. Benedicti, PL 124, col. 901–10), see G. Chenesseau, L’Abbaye de Fleury à
Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire. Son histoire, ses institutions, ses édifices (Paris: G. Van
Oest, 1931), pp. 5–9.
15. Bernhard Bischoff, Manuscripts and Libraries in the Age of Charlemagne,
trans. Michael M. Gorman (Cambridge: Cambridge Univesity Press,
2007), p. 17.
16. Frère Denis, “Les anciens manuscrits de Fleury (1),” [there was never a
sequel] Bulletin trimestriel de la Société archéologique et historique de l’Orléanais,
 A N A N G L O - S A XO N PA L I M P S E S T F RO M F L E U RY 31

n.s. 2 (1962): 271 [266–81]. On the fate of Fleury’s books, see Frère Denis,
“Les anciens manuscrits de Fleury,” 267–70, and Marco Mostert, The Library
of Fleury. A Provisional List of Manuscripts (Hilversum: Verloren Publishers,
1989), pp. 29–33.
17. Denis-Bernard Grémont and Jacques Hourlier, “La plus ancienne biblio-
thèque de Fleury,” Studia monastica 21 (1979): 253–64.
18. Mostert, The Library of Fleury, p. 21.
19. On Theodulf, see Ernst Rzehulka, Theodulf, Bischof von Orléans, Abt der
Klöster St. Benoît zu Fleury und St. Aignan in Orléans, (Dissertation Breslau,
1877); Alejandra de Riquer, Teodulfo de Orleans y la epístola poética en la
literatura carolingia (Barcelona: Real Academia de Buenas Letras, 1994),
chap. “Estudio biográfico de Teodulfo de Orleans,” pp. 13–59.
20. Chenesseau, L’Abbaye de Fleury, p. 85; Émile Lesne, Histoire de la propriété
ecclésiastique en France. T. 4: Les livres, “scriptoria” et bibliothèques du com-
mencement du VIIIe à la fin du XIe siècle (Lille: Facultés catholiques, 1938),
pp. 549–55.
21. Mostert, The Library of Fleury, pp. 19–27.
22. L. Gougaud, “Les relations de l’abbaye de Fleury-sur-Loire avec la Bretagne
Armoricaine et les Îles Britanniques (Xe et XIe siècles),” Mémoires de la Société
d’histoire et d’archéologie de Bretagne 4 (1923): 3–30; D. Grémont, L. Donnat,
“Fleury, Le Mont et l’Angleterre à la fin du Xe siècle et au début du XIe siècle.
À propos du manuscrit d’Orléans n° 127 (105),” in Millénaire monastique du
Mont-Saint-Michel, Vol. 1 (Paris: P. Lethielleux, 1966), pp. 751–93; Dom
L. Donnat, “Recherches sur l’influence de Fleury au Xe siècle,” Études ligériennes
d’histoire et d’archéologie médiévales. Mémoires et exposés présentés à la Semaine
d’études médiévales de Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire du 3 au 10 juillet 1969, ed.
R. Louis (Auxerre: Société des fouilles archéologiques et des monuments
historiques de l’Yonne, 1975), pp. 165–74; J.-M. Berland, “L’influence de
l’abbaye de Fleury-sur-Loire en Bretagne et dans les Îles Britanniques du Xe au XIIe
siècle,” in 107e Congrès national des Sociétés savantes, Brest, 1982, Section de phi-
lologie et d’histoire jusqu’à 1610, t. 2 (Paris: Ministère de l’éducation nationale,
Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 1984), pp. 275–99.
23. M. Mostert, “Le séjour d’Abbon de Fleury à Ramsey,” Bibliothèque de
l’École des Chartes 144 (1986): 199–208.
24. Birgit Ebersperger, Die angelsächsischen Handschriften in den Pariser
Bibliotheken. Mit einer Edition von Ælfrics Kirchenweihhomilie aus der
Handschrift Paris, BN, lat. 943 (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1999), no. 6,
pp. 44–51.
25. Léopold Delisle, “Mémoire sur d’anciens sacramentaires,” Mémoires de l’Institut
National de France. Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 32 (1886):
213–5; Grémont and Donnat, “Fleury, Le Mont et l’Angleterre”; The
Winchcombe Sacramentary: Orléans, Bibliothèque Municipale, 127 (105), ed.
Anselme Davril (London: Henry Bradshaw Society, 1995).
26. Ebersperger, no. 49, pp. 190–91; Francis Wormald, “The ‘Winchester
School’ before St. Ethelwold,” in England before the Conquest: Studies in
Primary Sources Presented to Dorothy Whitelock, ed. Peter Clemoes and
32 A D R I A N PA PA H AG I

Kathleen Hughes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971),

reprinted in Francis Wormald: Collected Writings I. Studies in Medieval Art
from the Sixth to the Twelfth Centuries, ed. J.J.G. Alexander, T.J. Brown,
and J. Gibbs (Oxford: Harvey Miller Publishers/Oxford University Press,
1984), p. 83.
27. Francis Wormald, English Drawings of the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries
(London: Faber & Faber, 1952), pp. 32–3 and plates 13–14.
28. Jean Vezin, “Leofnoth. Un scribe anglais à Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire,” Codices
manuscripti 3 (1977): 109–120.
29. M.B. Parkes, “An Anglo- Saxon Text at Fleury: The Manuscript
of the Leiden Riddle,” in his Scribes, Scripts and Readers. Studies in the
Communication, Presentation, and Dissemination of Medieval Texts (London:
Hambledon Press, 1991), pp. 263–74.
30. Two further palimpsests could be of Fleury provenance: Bern,
Burgerbibliothek MS 611 (s. v and vii, Italy, palimpsested s. viii), and
Vatican, Reg. Lat. MS 74 (s. viii Luxeuil?, palimpsested s. xi–xii). See
Lowe, “Codices rescripti” and Mostert, The Library of Fleury.
31. Cf. Frère Denis, “Les anciens manuscrits de Fleury,” 272 and 266, plate I.
32. Cf. Berger, Le palimpseste de Fleury.
33. E.A. Lowe, Codices Latini Antiquiores. A Palaeographical Guide to Latin
Manuscripts Prior to the Ninth Century, Part VI. France: Abbeville-Valenciennes
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), no. 820.
34. The manuscript contains in this order: pp. 1–59 Vita S. Nicholai;
pp. 59–69 Vita S. Alexii [not 59–68, as in Van der Straeten (references
hereafter)]; pp. 69–153 Vita S. Athanasii [rubric on p. 69, not 70, as in
Van der Straeten; see also fig. 1.8]; pp. 153–182 Sermo S. Augustini de
Natale Domini; pp. 183–202 De S. Cruce; pp. 203–210 Sermones de Natale
Innocentium; pp. 210–21 Miraculum S. Anastasii; pp. 221–22 Epistula
Chromatii et Eliodori ad Ieronimum; pp. 223–30 Sermo S. Optati in natale
SS. innocentium; pp. 233–44 Passio S. Theclae. See now Joseph van der
Straeten, Les manuscrits hagiographiques d’Orléans, Tours et Angers avec
plusieurs textes inédits, Subsidia hagiographica 64 (Brussels: Société des
Bollandistes, 1982), pp. 72–73.
35. Cf. Lowe, CLA VI, no. 820: “26 long lines.”
36. I thank Anne Laurent from the photographic department of the IRHT-
Orléans. In a message to me on December 3, 2007, Madame Laurent
expressed the skepticism of the IRHT specialists about the possibility
of getting better results: “Nous avons essayé de faire ressortir le texte effacé en
éclairant la feuille par en dessous mais cela n’a pas été plus concluant que la prise
de vue traditionnelle. Mon collègue Gilles Kagan, qui a de l’expérience dans ce
domaine, doute qu’il y ait des procédés adaptés à ce manuscrit pour la prise de vue.”
See, however, J.-P. Despré, “Les applications de la photographie à la lecture
des documents effacés (ultra-violet, infra-rouge, transparence),” in L. Fossier and
J. Irigoin, eds., Déchiffrer les écritures effacées (Paris: CNRS éditions, 1990),
pp. 11–17.
 A N A N G L O - S A XO N PA L I M P S E S T F RO M F L E U RY 33

37. See J.F. Benton, “Electronic Subtraction of the Superior Writing of a

Palimpsest,” in Fossier and Irigoin, eds., Déchiffrer les écritures effacées,
pp. 95–104; N. Tchernentska, “Do It Yourself: Digital Image Enhancement
Applied to Greek Palimpsests,” in Declercq, ed. Early Medieval Palimpsests,
pp. 23–7; and Peter A. Stokes’s essay in this volume.
38. I thank Olivier Morand, archiviste-paléographe at the Médiathèque
d’Orléans for answering my preliminary questions on the state of research
on O, and Anne Monginoux, curator of manuscripts at the same library,
who has once again kindly authorized me to take photographs of the
manuscript for private research.
39. See Peter A. Stokes’s essay in this volume.
40. T.J. Brown, “The Distribution and Significance of Membrane Prepared
in the Insular Manner,” in A Palaeographer’s View: The Selected Writings
of Julian Brown, ed. Janet Bately, Michelle P. Brown, and Jane Roberts
(London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 1993), pp. 125–39.
41. Helmut Gneuss, Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts. A List of Manuscripts
and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England up to 1100, MRTS
241 (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2001), p. 134: “s. x/xi, England or Fleury?”
42. T.A.M. Bishop, English Caroline Minuscule (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1971).
43. See notes 28 and 29.
CHAPTER 2

RECOVERING ANGLO-SAXON ERASURES:

SOME QUESTIONS, TOOLS, AND TECHNIQUES

Peter A. Stokes

This essay provides practical instruction in enhancing digital images of damaged or

palimpsested manuscripts, encompassing basic principles, “hands- on” techniques,
and the ethics of enhancement.

T he “virtual” restoration of manuscripts by use of computers has

received a good deal of attention in recent years. Perhaps best known
is the so- called Archimedes Palimpsest, but other high-profile cases
include the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Herculaneum papyri, and Codex
Sinaiticus, all of which have been the subject and object of an extraordi-
nary amount of highly specialized and hugely expensive research, as well
as extensive media coverage.1 However, using technology to recover text
from damaged manuscripts need not necessarily require such effort and
money, and much smaller projects are taking place all the time with rel-
atively little financial outlay.2 Such work does require some skill and
practice, and no amount of skill is sufficient to recover material from the
most severely damaged cases, but sufficiently good results can often be
obtained with an average desktop computer and some readily available
software. Given the relative ease with which this can be done, it is worth
attempting such an approach before considering more expensive options
and certainly before giving up entirely. The primary purpose of this
essay, then, is to illustrate how otherwise lost readings can possibly be
recovered by using high-resolution but otherwise unremarkable digital
photographs of the sort that are now readily obtainable from many man-
uscript libraries. Not all possible types of damage can be considered here,
and so the focus is on writing that has faded or been erased, possibly also
36 PETER A. STOK ES

having been overwritten at a later time, but the principles can be applied
to many other situations as well.

Palimpsested, Erased, and Damaged Manuscripts in

Anglo- Saxon England
To begin, it is worth looking brief ly at the surviving material from
Anglo- Saxon England in terms of difficult or illegible readings and to
ask how they differ with an eye to potential recovery. The first thing to
note is that there are very few palimpsests that survive from Anglo-Saxon
England. Neil Ker noted only one fragment containing Old English that
is a “true” example, and observed that this was palimpsested in Trier
rather than England.3 Lowe, with slightly looser criteria, gave three more
entries and noted one more that he rejected from his list.4 Despite this
relative dearth, there are still many examples of erasure and rewriting in
Anglo- Saxon manuscripts.5 Most of these are relatively straightforward
corrections to individual words or letters, and recovering the original
readings may be very useful to anyone trying to understand the process
by which the manuscript was copied or compiled. Rather different in
nature is the much smaller corpus of material that has been erased more
fully, perhaps with a different text written over the top, but without the
entire page being cleaned off as is normally required for a palimpsest.
These include most notably erased inscriptions that can give important
evidence about provenance and also the body of documents, including
those in Old English, which have been erased from gospel books or other
liturgical manuscripts.6 In addition to these cases resulting from deliberate
erasure, we also have cases of apparently accidental wear with the result
much like that of erasure. Examples here include the copy of Solomon and
Saturn that is now on pages 1–26 of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College
422, and the endorsement (perhaps erased or more likely heavily rubbed)
of London, British Library Cotton Augustus ii. 6, a single- sheet charter
from Pershore.7 Similar in the category of accidental loss are some inks
that have faded very badly, to the point of illegibility. Fortunately the
iron-gall inks used by the Anglo-Saxons were normally quite dark and
also quite chemically stable, thus the manuscripts are generally free from
fading or corrosion. However, the red inks used for rubrics were not
always so stable, and in some cases they have faded quite significantly.8
Clean erasures, rubbing, and faded ink are usually relatively easy to
recover. This assumes that the parchment is fairly clean and uniform in
the region of the illegible text, and that at least some of the text remains
and that the difference in color between the illegible writing and the
parchment is still large enough for a digital camera to capture it. Rather
 R E C OV E R I NG A NG L O - S A XON E R A S U R E S 37

more complicated, and also more common in Anglo- Saxon material, is

when the illegible writing is obscured by other ink on top, as is often the
case with corrections or obliterated inscriptions. Similar but complex in
somewhat different ways are those where the damage has resulted not so
much in faded ink as darkened parchment. If the parchment is uniform
in discoloration, then it again can usually be enhanced without too much
difficulty. In practice, however, this is rarely the case. Indeed, perhaps
the largest body of illegible script comes from the library of Sir Robert
Cotton. This now forms the Cotton collection in the British Library
and is the single largest repository of material in Old English and indeed
of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts in general.9 Unfortunately the books were
badly damaged in a fire in 1731, as a result of which many of the pages
are now burnt, shrunken, split, dirty, darkened by fire or water, or any
combination of these.10

A Short Introduction to Computer Imaging

This is the problem, one that has been encountered by almost everyone
who works with medieval (or even modern) manuscripts. But what are
the possible solutions? Fortunately, there is now a lot that can be done
very cheaply and easily in this age of powerful and easily accessible com-
puters and with the relative availability of digital photographs. Most of
the remainder of this essay will therefore consider some of the ways in
which lost and, particularly, erased readings can be restored. The field
of digital image enhancement is very large and very active, and even
a brief survey of the field is far beyond the scope of this essay. Instead
of attempting to do this, therefore, it seems more productive to con-
sider some relatively basic but still proven techniques that were developed
through practical experience, particularly that gained while working for
the British Library on a project to digitally restore its entire collection of
Greek palimpsests.11 None of these techniques require any special pho-
tography, computer hardware, or rare or expensive software. To use them
effectively, however, one must first understand at least a few basics of
computer imaging.
The first step in any enhancement is to obtain a digital photograph of
the manuscript in question. Although often underestimated, this is by no
means trivial and needs to be done with some care. Indeed, it is properly
the subject of an entire essay by itself, and fortunately it has already been
treated very competently elsewhere and so will not be discussed further
here.12
Let us assume that there is available a high-quality digital photograph
taken in natural light in a standard format such as TIFF. This photograph,
38 PETER A. STOK ES

like any digital image, is in essence a grid of colored points. Each element
in the grid is known as a “picture element,” or “pixel,” and each pixel is
assigned a particular color to create an image. The principle is straight-
forward, but the details are rather more complex. Particularly relevant
here is the question of color. In terms of physics, color is simply a way
of sensing different wavelengths of visible light. At the risk of oversim-
plifying both quantum mechanics and human psychology, light can be
thought of as waves in an electromagnetic field, and as the wave oscil-
lates more or less quickly, so we perceive this wave as different colors.
Thus slower waves look red to us, slightly faster ones look orange, and
so on through the entire spectrum, going via yellow, green, and blue, in
that order. These wavelengths are then sensed by the optic nerves and
interpreted by the brain as color, and indeed most people can distinguish
millions of different colors without any effort.
Such is the case for people, but computers work rather differently.
The problem is how to represent color inside a computer in such a way
that the computer can store, manipulate, and ultimately reproduce what
is in essence a physical, if not psychological, phenomenon. Ultimately,
computers are designed in such a way that they can only work with one
type of information—numbers—and therefore every piece of data that
we want to put into a computer must somehow be encoded as a number.
To phrase the problem slightly differently, engineers need a way to take
a specific wavelength of visible light and represent that as a number, and
conversely to take a number and represent that as a specific wavelength
of light. In practice, this is exactly what scanners and digital cameras do
on the one hand, and printers and monitors do on the other. Scanners
and digital cameras contain sensors that measure the wavelengths of light
and represent them as numbers for processing and storing in a computer.
Monitors take those stored numbers and convert them back into visible
light. Printers also convert numbers into colors, but in a different way:
rather than generating light directly, they produce inks that absorb light
that is already there in the room. This difference has some important
implications, but fortunately they are of little immediate consequence for
digital image enhancement and do not need to be considered here.13
How does all of this work in practice? There are many different ways
of storing colors and images.14 When displaying images on a monitor, the
same principle is almost always used: the so-called RGB, or “red-green-
blue” color system. This principle is very simple, namely that every color
that can be displayed on a monitor is represented by three different num-
bers, with these numbers representing the amount of red light, green
light, and blue light, respectively. It may seem rather counterintuitive,
but it is possible to produce almost all visible colors simply by mixing
 R E C OV E R I NG A NG L O - S A XON E R A S U R E S 39

different amounts of red, green, and blue light. If this were not the case,
then it would be almost impossible to build monitors that could display
more than just a few colors, as millions of differently colored lights would
need to be produced in every monitor and television, rather than three
different light sources as are used in practice.
The reason why only three colors are necessary is based on the biol-
ogy of human vision. Specifically, human eyes have three different color
sensors that detect light at different frequencies. One sensor is most sen-
sitive to light at the red end of the spectrum, one is most sensitive to
light toward the blue end, and the third, the most sensitive, is active
around the green region. This principle is shown in Figure 2.1, where
the curves ref lect the relative sensitivities of the three sensors at differ-
ent wavelengths. Yellow light, for example, causes a response of a certain
intensity in the “green” sensor and also a response of another intensity in
the “red” sensor, and our brain mixes these two responses together and
interprets them as yellow. However, the important point here is that the
same two responses can be reproduced by using two different lights of
different color and intensity, neither of which is yellow, and shining these
two lights together onto the same sensors in our eye. These two different
lights, if correctly chosen, will stimulate these two sensors exactly as a
single yellow light would have done, and thus the brain interprets these
two lights as one. This is the secret of color displays, and if one looks

(~445 nm) (~535 nm) (~575 nm)

Relative absorbtion (arbitrary units)

400 450 500 550 600 650 700

Violet Blue Green Yellow Orange Red

Wavelength (nanometres)

Figure 2.1 Intensity curves.

Source: Based on Carl Nave, “The Color- Sensitive Cones,” in Hyperphysics (2005), Georgia State
University, http://hyperphysics.phy- astr.gsu.edu.
40 PETER A. STOK ES

very closely at an older television screen or very old computer monitor,

one will notice that the three differently colored lights are visible to the
naked eye.
How does this relate to the storage of color in a computer? As noted
above, most modern computers represent the color of each pixel with
three numbers; these numbers in turn represent the intensities of the red,
green, and blue lights that are required to produce the color in question.
These intensities are usually encoded using a whole number from zero
to 255 (inclusive), so zero is “off,” or no light at all, and 255 is “on full,”
or maximum brightness. This gives us 256 different intensities for each
of the three lights, and thus 256×256×256=16,777,216 different colors in
total.15 Note that this is a maximum number of colors that can be rep-
resented internally; the number that can be displayed on most monitors
is less and depends on the quality of the monitor and how well it is con-
figured. With this system, the basic colors—red, green, and blue—can
be represented by (255, 0, 0), (0, 255, 0), and (0, 0, 255), respectively.
Mixing two of these colors in each of the three possible combinations
gives cyan, magenta, and yellow, as (0, 255, 255), (255, 0, 255), and (255,
255, 0), respectively.16 Black is produced by showing no light at all, as
one would expect, and so all three values are set to zero. White is some-
what less intuitive: it is the result of all three sensors in the eye receiving
maximum value, and this translates to having all three lights on full, so
(255, 255, 255). Grays are achieved by mixing the three colors in equal
amounts; thus (100, 100, 100) is dark gray, (127, 127, 127) is mid-gray,
and (200, 200, 200) is light gray. Note that two of the three values are
therefore redundant in these cases, and so an entire image that is purely
gray requires only one number for each pixel; this point will become
important shortly.

Image Processing: Techniques

Now that a few basic points have been considered regarding image pro-
cessing; it remains to be seen how these can be used. There are many dif-
ferent techniques and principles, of course, and only a very small selection
can be considered here. Specifically, two important principles of image
manipulation will be examined: adjusting histograms and manipulating
color channels.

Histograms
One of the most important principles in image processing is the histo-
gram. Histograms are widely used in statistics, and in principle simply
 R E C OV E R I NG A NG L O - S A XON E R A S U R E S 41

90
Hands
Codices
80
Charters

70

60

50

40

30

20

10

0
London, British Cambridge, Oxford, Bodleian Other British Continental United States
Library Corpus Christi Library Libraries Europe of America

Figure 2.2 Example of a histogram.

represent counts of items; a trivial example is shown in Figure 2.2. In

image processing, the histogram of an image shows the number of pix-
els in that image that have been set to a particular color. Normally the
histograms are separated into each of the three color channels for ease of
representation. For example, consider a plain yellow square. As discussed
above, yellow is formed by a mixture of red and green light, and thus in
a digital image of this square, most of the pixels are very bright in the red
and green channels and very dark in the blue channel. This is ref lected in
the three histograms for that image, shown in Figure 2.3. Another exam-
ple is shown in Figure 2.4: this time many of the pixels are bright blue
and without much red or green, and this can easily be explained by the
bright blue sky in the photograph. There is also some medium-intensity
yellow in the sand, and some dark colors in the bushes, and these are also
ref lected in the peaks in the middle of the red and green histograms and
at the lower end of all three histograms.
Histograms are useful as a quick statistical summary of an image and
the distribution of colors within it. They can also be used to manipulate
the image by altering those statistics. In particular, the histogram ref lects
the range of different colors in an image, and by manipulating this we
can improve the visibility of that image. For example, consider a very
42 PETER A. STOK ES

Red Green Blue

Figure 2.3 Histograms for a yellow square (histograms generated using GIMP).

Red

Green

Blue

Figure 2.4 Histograms for a desert scene (note very narrow peak at extreme
right of blue histogram), where the sky is blue and the sand yellow. (Photo by
the author.)

faint portion of text on an otherwise white parchment. The question

is how to recover this erasure, and this depends in turn on what “very
faint” means to a computer. “Very faint” really means that the writing
is almost the same color as the parchment and therefore that there is too
little difference between the writing and the parchment for the human
eye to see the letters. We can see this by creating an artificial “erasure”
by writing faint text on top of a colored background and then looking at
the resulting histograms, as shown in Figure 2.5. The narrow peak in the
histogram indicates that there is a very small range of different colors in
the image, and furthermore that all of these colors are very close to each
 R E C OV E R I NG A NG L O - S A XON E R A S U R E S 43

Figure 2.5 Model “erasure” and accompanying histogram (in grayscale)

generated by GIMP.

other. However, as noted above, the average computer display can show
millions of colors, and so one way of improving the image is to spread
out the colors in the image, using more of the available range and thereby
increasing the difference between writing and background. Fortunately,
we can do this very easily with a computer.
This spreading of histograms, like many other techniques of image
enhancement, can be achieved with a variety of different pieces of soft-
ware. I shall confine my discussion to the two that are widely used
and readily accessible: Adobe Photoshop CS and the GNU Image
Manipulation Program, or GIMP.17 Photoshop is commercially available
and must be purchased, but is already present on many computers, par-
ticularly in academic systems. GIMP, in contrast, is published under the
GNU Public Licence, or GPL, and so it can be downloaded from the
Internet for free.18 Both pieces of software are available for Windows and
Mac OS X systems; GIMP is also available for Linux.
The process of spreading out the colors of our faint writing is the same
in both Photoshop and GIMP, and in both cases the command is called
“Level Adjust.” Selecting this command from the relevant menu brings
up a dialog box, which contains a histogram of the image and various
controls to manipulate it. The full details of this are rather complex, but
further information can be found in the user manual for the relevant soft-
ware. The key to understanding what needs to be done is to look at the
histogram. In some cases there will be a single peak that is fairly narrow,
and the rest of the histogram will be low and f lat. This narrow peak con-
firms that most of the pixels in the image are almost the same color and
therefore that it is difficult to distinguish different parts of the image. In
other cases there may be two distinct peaks; for example, in a palimpsest
with dark overwriting and faint underwriting that is approximately the
same color as the parchment. Another possibility is one somewhat wider
44 PETER A. STOK ES

Figure 2.6 Three types of histograms (generated by GIMP).

peak with two sub-peaks; this might be the result of writing that is faint
but still distinguishable from the background. All of these cases are illus-
trated in Figure 2.6.
To enhance the image, the range of colors needs to be increased. In
other words, the lightest colors in the image need to be made very light,
and the darkest colors very dark. For example, all of the pixels in a given
channel in the image might have intensities between 100 and 150. In this
case, pixels in that channel with an intensity of 100 should be reassigned
to an intensity of zero, and those of 150 to an intensity of 255, with every-
thing in between being spread out evenly across the full range of 0–255.
This makes the darkest pixels black and the lightest ones white, and it
increases the difference in color between all of the pixels in the image in
that channel. To do this in Photoshop or GIMP, we need to specify the
range of intensities below which all pixels should be assigned to black,
and similarly the range above which the pixels should become maximum.
This is achieved by two small arrows that are visible at the bottom of the
appropriate histogram. Initially one arrow is pointing to the very bot-
tom of the histogram, and the other is pointing to the very top; thus the
lowest possible value, 0, is black, and the highest, 255, is full intensity. As
we move the lower pointer up, more of the darker colors are assigned to
black, and the intermediate colors are spread out farther and farther across
the resulting range. The equivalent occurs as we move the upper pointer
down. In most cases, the lower pointer should be positioned at the point
where the large peak just begins to grow, and similarly the upper pointer
should be positioned at the other side of the peak. Because this is such
a common requirement, most software packages have an “auto” button
on the level adjust; clicking on this automatically positions the pointers
at the level the computer thinks will be most useful. This is good as a
starting guess, and it can then be adjusted manually. The software also
usually allows adjusting different channels individually, or adjusting the
combined intensity of all channels at once.
This very simple technique can be remarkably effective with faded
writing and is also very quick to do. It does have one significant limita-
tion, namely that it enhances everything together without any easy way
 R E C OV E R I NG A NG L O - S A XON E R A S U R E S 45

of discriminating between what is desired and what is not. It is therefore

most effective when the parchment is very clean and smooth, since oth-
erwise even faint blemishes such as hair follicles will become clear in
exactly the same way that the faint writing does. In practice this means
that it is most useful for clean erasures or ink that has naturally faded
on otherwise good parchment. It is generally much less useful for dirty
parchment, including that which has been blackened by fire, and it nor-
mally works better with the f lesh side of parchment than the hair side.
Even with these limitations, this is still a quick and simple technique that
can be very effective, and so it is usually worth trying as a first step.

Channel Manipulation
The other approach to be considered is somewhat more complex, but it
overcomes some of the difficulties of the simple Level Adjust. This sec-
ond approach uses the computer’s representation of color to our advan-
tage. As has been discussed above, every pixel in a color image can be
represented by three numbers. This raises the possibility of adding, sub-
tracting, or otherwise manipulating these numbers inside a computer. In
particular, we could calculate a “weighted average” of the three values for
every pixel in the entire image. As one example, we could take 30 per-
cent of the red channel, 60 percent of the green channel, and 10 percent
of the blue channel, and add the three values together to produce a single
number. This may seem like a pointless exercise, but it is extremely useful
because, as has been discussed above, if each pixel has a single value, then
the image can still be displayed, but in shades of gray instead of in color.
If the proportions of each channel are chosen correctly, then the results
can be striking.
To illustrate, let us consider an ideal, artificial example. Imagine first
that the parchment is pure white, and that it has some dirt on it that
is gray. Let us also imagine that we have a palimpsest where the over-
writing—that is, the top writing that we want to get rid of—is entirely
black. Finally, let the underwriting that we want to recover be bright
red. In this case, adjusting the levels has little benefit as it would enhance
the overwriting and dirt just as much as it would the underwriting. To
overcome this, the color channels need to be manipulated in such a way
as to remove the noise and overwriting but to leave the underwriting
intact. Specifically, if we subtract the blue channel from the red channel
while ignoring the green channel entirely, we obtain the values shown
in Table 2.1. The numbers in the Red, Green, and Blue columns give
the values in each of those channels for the four different materials in the
image, and the fourth column gives the result of the manipulation. If we
46 PETER A. STOK ES

Table 2.1 Color values of artificial “palimpsest”

Item Red Green Blue Red column minus Blue column

Parchment (white) 255 255 255 0 (black)

Dirt (gray) 122 122 122 0 (black)
Overwriting (black) 0 0 0 0 (black)
Underwriting (red) 255 0 0 255 (white)

Table 2.2 Color values of second artificial “palimpsest”

Red column minus
Item Red Green Blue 84% of Green column

Parchment (white) 255 255 255 41 (dark gray)

Dirt (gray) 238 238 238 38 (dark gray)
Overwriting (faint red) 151 135 135 38 (dark gray)
Underwriting (faint pink) 243 219 219 60 (lighter gray)

display the result as a grayscale image, then all of the noise, overwriting,
and parchment will be black, and the underwriting is left on its own as
entirely white.
The example just given is clearly ideal and it is unreasonable to expect
such results in practice. Nevertheless, the principle still holds with more
complex examples. If the parchment is still white and the dirt still gray,
but the overwriting and underwriting are more similar to each other in
color and the underwriting is quite faint, then the intensities might be
something like those shown in Table 2.2.
In this case, we need to subtract only a portion of the green chan-
nel, 84 percent to be precise, as again shown in Table 2.2. Once again
the resulting image has parchment, dirt, and overwriting all approxi-
mately the same value, and the underwriting significantly different. The
underwriting is still quite dark, however, as is apparent from the figures
in Table 2.2. Fortunately this is again the problem of faint script, and
the solution is simply to adjust the levels, as discussed above. The results
of this are shown in Figure 2.7, with the first image being the original
before any enhancement, and the second the result of manipulation as
just described.
The question that remains is how to perform these manipulations in
practice. The relative weightings of the three channels can be obtained by
a series of mathematical calculations, but fortunately this is not normally
 R E C OV E R I NG A NG L O - S A XON E R A S U R E S 47

(a)

(b)

Figure 2.7 Results of channel manipulation. The upper one (a) is original, the
lower (b) is enhanced.

required.19 Instead, many programs such as Photoshop or GIMP allow

the user to adjust the weightings of the three channels and to see the
results immediately; this allows good results to be obtained relatively
quickly just by trial and error. The menu items to do this vary slightly,
but are the same in principle. With Photoshop, for example, it is per-
formed using the “Calculations . . . ” command in the “Image” menu. In
GIMP it is “Channel Mixer . . . ,” which is found under “Components”
in the “Colors” menu.20 Again, the details vary, but usually a dialog
box is presented with three sliders, one for each channel, and these can
be adjusted to give the different weights. In some cases one can choose
48 PETER A. STOK ES

between color and monochrome output; in this case monochrome is nor-

mally the more useful. It is often also possible to “preserve luminosity,”
but this is rarely useful in practice. It can be helpful to turn this feature
on while the weights of the different channels are still being adjusted, but
it should normally be turned off again before the dialog box is closed and
the settings accepted.

Combining Techniques Using Layers

Two different techniques for enhancing images have been presented so
far. How, then, can they be used in combination for a particular image?
There is no single answer as every case has its own challenges. However,
experience has shown that the following sequence of steps is often
effective:

1. Blur the image.

2. Copy the image.
3. Manipulate the channels of one copy of the image, as described
above.
4. Adjust the levels of this copy of the image, as described above.
5. Invert the adjusted copy of the image if necessary.
6. Paste the adjusted copy of the image back onto the original in a
new layer.
7. Change the form of overlay to that which is most effective (usually
one of “Normal,” “Multiply,” or “Difference”).
8. Try adjusting the levels of the lower (original) image.
9. Flatten the resulting image.
10. Adjust the levels of the f lattened image, as described above.

Steps 2–4, 8, and 10 are either described above or are simple operations
that should be familiar to anyone who uses a computer. The remaining
steps require further explanation.
The first step listed above is to blur the image. This may seem coun-
terintuitive, as the final objective is to obtain a clear image. However,
blurring an image normally reduces the impact of small, sudden changes
of color and increases the impact of larger blocks of color. This is often
precisely what we want in an image, as the small sudden changes are
often hair follicles, bits of dirt, and so on, and the larger blocks of color
are often ink and parchment. This assumes a high-resolution image and
it also depends on the blurring that is used, but often the writing is more
legible after blurring. Blurring is a simple function that is present in pro-
grams like Adobe Photoshop and GIMP, and indeed most such programs
 R E C OV E R I NG A NG L O - S A XON E R A S U R E S 49

offer several forms of blur. In practice it usually makes little difference

which is chosen, and the simple “Blur” is normally sufficient.21 A simi-
lar alternative is the “Despeckle” filter, which is present in both Adobe
Photoshop and GIMP. This is designed to remove small points of dirt
and such without blurring other features, such as the line between ink
and parchment. As always, experimentation is required to see which is
most effective.
Step 5 suggests inversion of the image. This depends on the relative
weightings given to the channels in Step 4; very often the main script is
white and the parchment black, as described in the examples of the pre-
vious section. If this is the case, then the image can be inverted so that
the script is black on a white background. Although this is not neces-
sary simply to read the text, it is required for the following stages to be
successful.
Steps 6–9 specify pasting the enhanced image back onto the original
as a new layer. In software like Photoshop and GIMP, images are treated
as having layers that sit on top of one another. This is most obviously use-
ful for people who are creating original artwork. If one wishes to put text
onto a photograph, for example, then the photograph could be on one
layer and the text on another. This allows the artist to treat the two ele-
ments separately, to make one layer invisible in order to work better with
the other, and so on. This can also be used for enhancing images, but in
a slightly different way. The procedure is to copy the enhanced image,
then select the original image and paste on top of it. The details vary
according to the program, but normally the pasted image will be “f loat-
ing” on top of the original and will obscure it entirely. However, there
will also normally be a “Layers” palette or menu in the software, and
this will have an option to “Create New Layer” from the pasted image.
This allows the user to show the lower, original image, the new image
on top, or both. However, it also allows combining two images in dif-
ferent ways by selecting different “modes.” Again, experimentation will
reveal the most effective combination, but often “Normal,” “Multiply,”
or “Difference” is the most effective.22 It should be noted that the rela-
tive opacity of the layers can also be controlled. Thus, using “Normal”
mode with the default opacity of 100 percent means that the top layer
obscures the lower one entirely. However, as the opacity is reduced, the
lower layer becomes visible. Once again, experimentation can yield very
good results. Finally, when the result is satisfactory, the image can be
“f lattened.” This is a simple operation that combines the different layers
into one so that the result can be saved as a single image in TIFF format
or similar. To aid in this process, a summary of some of the more useful
functions in both Photoshop and GIMP is given in Table 2.3.
50 PETER A. STOK ES

Table 2.3 Summary of relevant functions in Photoshop and GIMP

Function Adobe Photoshop CS GIMP

Blur Filter > Blur > Blur Filters > Blur > Blur
Filter > Noise > Despeckle Filters > Enhance >
Despeckle
Combine Channels Image > Calculations . . . Colors > Channel Mixer . . .
or Colors > Decompose . . .
Level Adjust Image > Adjustments > Levels . . . Colors > Levels . . .
Rotate Image > Rotate Canvas Image > Transform > Rotate
or Select All, then Edit > or “Image Rotate” Tool
Transform > Rotate
Invert Colors Image > Adjustments > Invert Colors > Invert
Show Histogram Window > Histogram Colors > Histogram
Image Overlay Copy & paste image, then Copy & paste image, then
“Layers” Window “Layers” Window
Flatten Image Layer > Flatten Image Image > Flatten Image

Note that in versions of GIMP earlier than 2.4, Colors is a submenu under Layers, and both Decompose
and Channel Mixer are in Filters > Color Filters.

The Image Viewer

The discussion so far has provided a few basic tools that can be used
to good effect when recovering illegible writing from medieval manu-
scripts. There is a series of steps that can be tried, and these are often suf-
ficient. Putting these steps into practice is by no means trivial, however.
In particular, almost all of them allow some degree of freedom and there-
fore require some degree of experimentation in turn. One must decide
whether, how, and by how much to blur the image; what weights to give
the different channels; how much to adjust the levels; what mode of over-
lay to use; and so on. Unfortunately, the implications of each decision
are not clear until the very end of the process. If the blur is not appro-
priate, then one must return to the very beginning and repeat the entire
procedure, particularly since the previously obtained values for channel
weighting, level adjustment, and so on are potentially made invalid by
the altered blur. This is a significant obstacle in practice and is one of the
biggest impediments to the rapid and effective enhancement of images.
To avoid this difficulty I propose a different model for the manipulation
of images. Instead of viewing the entire procedure as a sequence of dis-
crete, one- off steps, with each having to be completed before the next is
begun, it seems more useful to consider the whole process as a continuous
f low. Specifically, it would be very useful for the person trying to recover
 R E C OV E R I NG A NG L O - S A XON E R A S U R E S 51

the reading if the final result of all the stages could be seen even as the
settings for an early stage are being adjusted. There are at least two good
reasons why software such as Photoshop and GIMP do not do this. One is
that it is entirely unnecessary for most people, as in most cases the output
of a given step can immediately be seen to have been successful or oth-
erwise. Furthermore, the alternative view of image processing requires
a great deal of computing power since the entire sequence of operations
must be repeated every time a single value is changed; the only difference
is that the computer does it automatically rather than requiring human
intervention. Nevertheless, computers have become increasingly power-
ful and are capable of carrying out such processing at greater speeds. In
many cases, moreover, the writing that a researcher wishes to recover is
confined to a relatively small part of the page, in which case the image in
question is similarly small and thus relatively fast to process. All of these
factors suggest that a system such as this may be of value.
To test this principle, I have developed prototype software to imple-
ment such a system that incorporates the basic techniques discussed in
this essay, along with one or two others.23 The interface is arranged
rather differently from conventional image-manipulation software:
rather than being commands in menus, the various stages are repre-
sented by a sequential series of panels that runs down one side of the
screen. This is illustrated in Figure 2.8. This may look more imposing
at first, but it allows the researcher to see immediately all of the stages
in the processing, to know what settings have been used for each stage,
and to adjust those settings with immediate effect. Although not yet
possible, in principle the researcher should be able to change the order
of these panels, and to add or delete panels as required. Indeed, almost
all of the functionality in Photoshop or GIMP could theoretically be
implemented in this way, although this would be limited by the time
required for processing. Indeed, to overcome this limitation, two further
options have been added. The first is currently labeled “Live Updates”:
when selected, it updates the image continuously with every adjustment;
thus, if a slider is moved, then the image is processed for each of a series
of intermediate values between the start and end points of the slider.
This means that the image changes before the eyes of the person mov-
ing the slider: a feature that is very useful when trying to establish the
ideal setting but which can make the whole system very slow and unre-
sponsive for large images or complex processes. Similarly, the user can
select “Show Original Image,” in which case the image is shown as it
was before any enhancement. This serves two purposes. One is simply to
compare “before” and “after” images and thereby to establish how much
52 PETER A. STOK ES

Figure 2.8 ImageViewer control panel (on Mac OS X). Software by the author.

a given series of enhancements has improved the legibility of the text.

The other is for reasons of performance. If the researcher has a pretty
good guess of what the best settings might be, then he or she may wish
to refrain from processing the image until the correct settings are all in
place. This avoids the problems of performance, as the image is not actu-
ally processed until the “Show Original Image” option is deselected.
Thus, even a very complex process can be set up without any impact on
performance and then run once when the original image is no longer
shown. In many respects this is like the model provided by Photoshop
or GIMP, in that the whole process is done once and so the user cannot
see the effect of specific changes. The difference with this new system,
however, is that the researcher can still alter values of early stages with-
out repeating the entire process.
 R E C OV E R I NG A NG L O - S A XON E R A S U R E S 53

Reproducibility and the Ethics of Enhancement

One fundamental issue of both practical and theoretical importance
underlies all of this work on image enhancement for scholarly purposes:
that of reproducibility, with the associated issues of documentation and
accountability. Scholars are often suspicious of image enhancement,
and for good reason: all manner of dishonesty can be perpetrated with
a bit of practice. Furthermore, it is not unusual for the script of an
enhanced image to be legible on a computer screen but difficult or
impossible to capture in print. These issues raise the question of how
one can verify claims of a particular reading. The answer, I think, is
readily available in the sciences, where each experimental procedure
must be documented in such a way that it can be reproduced and ver-
ified by independent researchers; only after such verification can the
result then be accepted by the scientific community. Translating this to
the present situation, it follows that a very precise record must be kept
of exactly what was done to any given image so that anyone else can
repeat the steps and independently verify the results. Fortunately, an
international standard already exists for the recording of such informa-
tion about an image—the very existence of such a standard highlights
its importance. 24
Although such a standard exists, it is still very difficult to implement in
practice for three reasons. The first is that the standard itself is very dif-
ficult to set up, and it requires a very high level of technical understand-
ing to make it useable for a given situation. This is not such a problem
in a large-scale project (for which it is designed), as such projects nor-
mally have the required expertise available; it is a substantial difficulty for
scholars working on their own individual research, however. The second
difficulty is that simply recording the relevant data is tedious and very
prone to error. Packages like Photoshop and GIMP offer no easy facility
to record operations in a way that they can be easily transferred to other
systems. It therefore requires a great deal of discipline for anyone enhanc-
ing images to note manually every setting of every stage throughout the
entire process, and the potential to forget this is very high, particularly
when so much experimentation is required. The third difficulty is that
the precise algorithms applied by proprietary software such as Photoshop
are rarely made public. The standard requires noting not only what oper-
ation was carried out, but also what software and what version of the
software was used. This means that the operation can be repeated in
principle, but it depends on the precise version of software still being
available. The problem is somewhat alleviated with open- source projects
like GIMP because one can examine the internals of the software to see
54 PETER A. STOK ES

exactly what process was applied, and these details can then be included in
the record of steps taken. However, examining complex computer code
like this is not something that even the most computer-literate scholars
in the humanities would wish or be able to do. To overcome these three
substantial hurdles, the prototype system described above automatically
logs all of the steps that have been taken, describes those steps in terms
of standard and well- documented algorithms, and includes all the values
of all the settings for each step clearly expressed. This information can
then be displayed for the user’s reference or saved to disk in a format that
conforms to the recognized standard.
This requirement for documentation and reproducibility has one
major disadvantage when applied to image enhancement in that it reduces
the number of tools available for use. For example, Craig-McFeely has
noted that one cannot blindly apply a single process to an entire doc-
ument, but that any successful enhancement requires a great deal of
detailed human interaction.25 Her methods include the painstaking use
of particular tools in Adobe Photoshop to work on one small and very
precise area of the image at a time. Her methods are extremely effective
and should certainly not be dismissed. However, the application of dif-
ferent tools numerous times to small areas of the image means that it is
almost impossible to record her interventions with sufficient detail and
accuracy for them to be reproduced. In contrast, broad techniques that
are applied equally to the whole image (such as “Level Adjust” and chan-
nel manipulation discussed above) can be recorded and reproduced rela-
tively easily. This leads to something of a conundrum about the extent to
which demonstrably valuable techniques should be eschewed in favor of
the more theoretical demand for precise documentation. Granted there
is no theoretical reason why software cannot automatically record the
localized, labor-intensive methods that Craig- McFeely uses. In prac-
tice, this is unlikely to become part of standard software packages like
Photoshop or GIMP in the short or even medium term simply because
such records are of interest to so few people that they would not justify
the effort involved in implementing them. Perhaps more likely is that
improved methods of image processing will require less human inter-
vention of this sort and will therefore allow proper documentation to
accompany good results. Whatever the case, the ideal given current soft-
ware would be to use only techniques that are purely statistical, that is,
where the same sequence of processes is applied equally to the whole
image rather than the closely localized use of different tools and pro-
cesses in different places. These “whole image” techniques may very
well require careful and extensive human intervention, and we may still
be some distance from devising techniques that are sufficiently effective,
 R E C OV E R I NG A NG L O - S A XON E R A S U R E S 55

but the final result, in an ideal world, must surely be one that can be
recorded and reproduced.
This problem of accountability slides into what Julia Craig-McFeely
calls “ethical enhancement.”26 The question is at what point enhancement
becomes active intervention, and how much of the latter should be per-
mitted. This can be illustrated by reference to Figure 2.9, which shows two
small portions of what seems to be perfectly legitimate twelfth-century
script, and it probably comes as no surprise to learn that both derive from
a genuine, original cartulary that was produced at Bath. However, only
one is a photograph of the manuscript; the other is fabricated by using
GIMP to copy letters from the document and piece them together to
form a new word that is almost entirely indistinguishable from the origi-
nal. This is in essence a more sophisticated version of the old ransom notes
featured in movies that were formed by pasting together letters cut from
newspapers. I would not suggest that researchers deliberately manipulate

(a)

(b)

Figure 2.9 An improperly “enhanced” image. The upper one (a) is original,
the lower (b) is altered.
Source: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 111, p. 88 (detail). By permission of the Master and
Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
56 PETER A. STOK ES

photographs to produce entirely new readings such as this. However,

some procedures for image enhancement do use much the same method
to restore readings that the researchers are certain were there before the
manuscript was damaged. This temptation is understandable, particularly
as it is not unusual for an enhanced image to be perfectly legible on a
computer screen but for this legibility to be utterly lost when the image is
printed for publication. Rather than yielding to this temptation, however
helpful it may seem as a means of recording one’s results, it is preferable to
record the exact process of enhancement, as discussed above, and ideally
to provide both original and enhanced images.
If any conclusion can be drawn from this, perhaps it is that the
enhancement of digital images is useful for recovering Anglo- Saxon era-
sures and other forms of lost readings. The tools and techniques outlined
here serve a valid purpose, and they should not be dismissed wholesale
because of the problems they create when misused. It is important for
these problems to be properly understood, both by those carrying out
the enhancement and by those using and judging the results of such
techniques. And with these techniques, tools, and images all readily
available, it is now possible at least in principle for all scholars of manu-
scripts to enhance their own images and recover their own lost readings
in one further step toward greater accessibility to manuscripts and the
evidence they contain.27

Notes
1. For a small sample of the literature on just one of these manuscripts and
its recovery, see Roger L. Easton, Jr., Text Recovery from the Archimedes
Palimpsest: An Exercise in Digital Image Processing, Rochester Institute
of Technology ( July 25, 2001), http://www.cis.rit.edu/people/fac-
ulty/easton/k-12/; Roger L. Easton, Jr., and Keith T. Knox, “Digital
Restoration of Erased and Damaged Manuscripts,” Proceedings of the 39th
Annual Convention of the Association of Jewish Libraries, compiled by Elana
Gensler and Joan Biella (New York: Association of Jewish Libraries, 2004),
http://w w w.jewish librar ies.org/ajlweb/publications/proceedings/
proceedings2004.htm; Roger L. Easton, Jr., Keith T. Knox, and
W.A. Christens-Barry, “Multi- Spectral Imaging of the Archimedes
Palimpsest,” Proceedings of the Applied Imagery Pattern Recognition Workshop
(IEEE-AIPR’03) 32 (2003): 111–16; Emanuele Salerno, Anna Tonazzini,
and Luigi Bedini, “Digital Image Analysis to Enhance Underwritten
Text in the Archimedes Palimpsest,” International Journal on Document
Analysis and Recognition 9 (2007): 79–87; Reviel Netz and William Noel,
The Archimedes Codex: Revealing the Secrets of the World’s Greatest Palimpsest
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007).
 R E C OV E R I NG A NG L O - S A XON E R A S U R E S 57

2. For two examples, see William Schipper, “Digitizing (Nearly) Unreadable

Fragments of Cyprian’s ‘Epistolary,’ ” in The Book Unbound: Editing and
Reading Medieval Manuscripts and Texts, ed. Siân Echard and Stephen
Partridge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), pp. 159–68; and
Julia Craig-McFeely, “Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music: The
Evolution of a Digital Resource,” Digital Medievalist 3 (2008): 90 para-
graphs, http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/3/mcfeely/.
3. Neil R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (1957; reis-
sued with suppl. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), p. lxii, referring to Vatican
City, BAV Reg. Lat. 497, fol. 71 (his no. 391). The contribution by Paul E.
Szarmach in this volume brief ly discusses this manuscript.
4. E.A. Lowe, “Codices Rescripti: A List of the Oldest Latin Palimpsests with
Stray Observations on their Origin,” in Mélanges Eugène Tisserant, vol. 5
(Vatican: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1964), pp. 72 and 76, n. 13, and
nos. 10, 23, 35, and 64. The rejection is Durham, Cathedral Library A. ii.
16, fols. 1–23, 34–86 and 102 + Cambridge, Magdalene College, Pepys
2981 (18); part of this manuscript was erased but rewritten by the same
scribe; E.A. Lowe, Codices Latini Antiquiores: A Palaeographical Guide to Latin
Manuscripts Prior to the Ninth Century, vol. 2 (1935; Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1972), no. 148a. For further discussion of Anglo-Saxon palimpsests,
see also Papahagi’s and Szarmach’s contributions to this volume.
5. See especially Szarmach’s contribution to this volume.
6. For some of these, see Ker, Catalogue, nos. 6a; 35, 1–3 + 8; 119b; 126; 147a;
185f; 194 (but see below); 249a, f; 291d (largely illegible but not necessarily
erased); 370b–c. Ker’s no. 194 is BL Cotton Tiberius B. v, vol. 1, fol. 75: this
was described by Ker as containing records added in blank spaces (p. 256),
but was listed as a palimpsest by Lowe, “Codices Rescripti,” no. 35. Lowe
later described the page in more detail, noting that it has documentary
additions both in space originally left blank and also on erased portions of
text: Lowe, CLA 2, no. 190. The page was not described or illustrated in
Patrick McGurk, ed. An Eleventh-Century Anglo-Saxon Illustrated Miscellany:
British Library Cotton Tiberius B. V Part I Together with Leaves from British
Library Cotton Nero D. II. EEMF 21 (1993), because it was added by Sir
Robert Cotton presumably early in the seventeenth century.
7. A complete digital facsimile of CCCC 422 is available at Parker on the Web,
Stanford University, http://parkerweb.stanford.edu, and photographs of
the face and dorse of BL Cotton Augustus ii. 6 as Keynes no. 208. For a
reading of the dorse recovered by the techniques described in this essay
see Peter A. Stokes, “King Edgar’s Charter for Pershore (AD 972)”, Anglo-
Saxon England 37 (2008): 31–78, at pp. 66–67.
8. For example, see many of the rubrics in the so- called Red Book of Darley,
now CCCC 422, pp. 26–586. See Mildred Budny, Insular, Anglo-Saxon,
and Early Anglo-Norman Manuscript Art at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge:
An Illustrated Catalogue, vol. 1 (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute
Publications, 1997), pp. 650–51 (no. 44) and note 7, above.
58 PETER A. STOK ES

9. The Cotton collection now holds 123 distinct items from Anglo- Saxon
England, of which ninety-nine contain material in Old English. The next
largest collection in both regards is that of Corpus Christi, Cambridge,
which holds eighty-four and fifty-three items, respectively. These counts
are based on my own data compiled from Helmut Gneuss, Handlist of
Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: A List of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments
Written or Owned in England up to 1100, Medieval and Renaissance Texts
and Studies 241 (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2001) and Ker’s Catalogue; for a
discussion of the method involved and the assumptions underlying it, see
Peter A. Stokes, English Vernacular Script, c.990–c.1035 (PhD dissertation,
University of Cambridge, 2006), 1:3–4. Compare also Ker, Catalogue,
p. liv for a list of manuscripts and membra disiecta, which Cotton owned
and which contain Old English.
10. Andrew Prescott, “ ‘Their Present Miserable State of Cremation’: The
Restoration of the Cotton Library,” in Sir Robert Cotton as Collector: Essays
on an Early Stuart Courtier and His Legacy, ed. C.J. Wright (London: British
Library, 1997), pp. 391–454.
11. For details of this project see Rinascimento Virtuale – Digitale
Palimpsestforschung – Rediscovering Written Records of a Hidden European
Cultural Heritage, http://www.rinascimentovirtuale.eu/.
12. Craig-McFeely, “Digital Image Archive: Evolution,” §§13–47; Julia
Craig-McFeely and Alan Lock, “Digital Image Archive of Medieval
Music: Digital Restoration Workbook,” Oxford Select Specialist
Catalogue Publications (2006), http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/
redist/pdf/workbook1.pdf, pp. 12–16.
13. The most obvious consequence of this difference is that our perception
of a printed page changes significantly in different light, whereas that of
a computer monitor is much less affected. To take an extreme example, if
a room is completely dark, a computer monitor can still be seen, whereas
a printed page is entirely invisible. For a further consequence, the differ-
ence between additive and subtractive color mixing, see note 16 below.
14. For a brief overview, see Craig-McFeely and Lock, “Digital Image
Archive: Workbook,” pp. 12–15, and, for more detailed discussion,
Melissa Terras, Digital Images for the Information Professional (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2008), pp. 61–98.
15 The system described here is known as “8-bit color” and is the most
common of several possibilities. For others see Terras, Digital Imaging,
pp. 44–49.
16. It should be noted that the type of mixing here, namely mixing light,
is additive, as discussed above in note 13. The results are therefore quite
different from those obtained by mixing paint, which is subtractive, and
where the primary colors are red, yellow, and blue rather than red, green,
and blue.
17. “Adobe” and “Photoshop” are registered trademarks or trademarks of
Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries.
 R E C OV E R I NG A NG L O - S A XON E R A S U R E S 59

Adobe Photoshop CS is hereafter referred to as Photoshop. GIMP is

copyright under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL): see Michael
Natterer, Sven Neumann, et al. GIMP: GNU Image Manipulation Program
(2008), http://www.gimp.org.
18. “GNU General Public Licence,” GNU Operating System, Free
Software Foundation ( June 29, 2007), http://www.gnu.org/licenses/
gpl.html.
19. For one method of performing such calculations, see Easton, slides 32–43,
and for a more complex approach, see Salerno, Tonazzini, and Bedini,
“Digital Image Analysis,” pp. 79–87.
20. “Colors” is a primary menu in the GIMP version 2.4. In earlier versions
it was a submenu under “Layers,” but the “Decompose” function was in
the “Color Filters” submenu of the “Filters” menu.
21. Both “Blur” and “Despeckle” are available under the “Filters” menu in
both Photoshop and the GIMP. “Despeckle” is under the “Noise” sub-
menu in Photoshop and the “Enhance” submenu in GIMP.
22. For further details, see Craig- McFeely and Lock, “Digital Image Archive:
Workbook,” pp. 32–34 and 48–64. This functionality is not unique to
Photoshop, but is also available in GIMP, pace Craig-McFeely and Lock,
“Digital Image Archive: Workbook,” p. 32.
23. At the time of writing, the prototype implements channel manipulation,
“Level Adjust” (both manual and automatic), rotation and ref lection, a
3×3 convolve filter (which includes a “Blur” facility), thresholding (both
manual and various types of automatic), invert, and zoom. All function-
ality was implemented using the Java Advanced Imaging ( JAI) library.
Java is a trademark or registered trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc.,
or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. See Java.com
and “Java Advanced Imaging ( JAI) API,” Sun Development Network
(2008), Sun Microsystems, http://java.sun.com/javase/technologies/
desktop/media/jai/. The software is still in early stages of development
but has been made available online under a Creative Commons license as
part of the “Hand Analyser” Project on SourceForge, http://sourceforge.
net/projects/handanalyser/. Please note that the JAI Library must be
downloaded separately and installed prior to running the Image Viewer
software.
24. The standard is ANSI/NISO Z39.87-2006, for which see National
Standards Organization, Data Dictionary: Technical Metadata for Digital Still
Images, National Standards Organization (2006), http://www.niso.org/
kst/reports/standards/, keyword: Z39.87; §10 applies to image processing.
The standard has been implemented in XML by the Library of Congress
as the MIX schema, which is in turn often used as an extension of the
METS standard for technical and administrative metadata. See MIX:
NISO Metadata for Images in XML Schema, Library of Congress (May
13, 2008), http://www.loc.gov/standards/mix/, and METS: Metadata
Encoding and Transmission Standard Official Website, Library of Congress,
60 PETER A. STOK ES

http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/. I thank Elena Pierazzo for drawing

my attention to these.
25. Craig-McFeely, “Digital Image Archive: Evolution,” §51; compare the
techniques listed by Craig- McFeely and Lock, “Digital Image Archive:
Workbook,” 38–50, almost all of which are labor intensive and apply to
only parts of an image at a time, which must be selected by the user and
which cannot be precisely reproduced without an unreasonable amount
of effort on the part of both the person doing the initial enhancement and
the ones trying to reproduce it.
26. Craig-McFeely, “Digital Image Archive: Evolution,” §62; compare
also Craig-McFeely and Lock, “Digital Image Archive: Workbook,”
pp. 35–36 and 53–54.
27. I wish to thank the Cambridge Newton Trust and the Leverhulme Trust
for their financial support, without which this research would not have
been possible.
CHAPTER 3

SOME PSALTER GLOSSES IN THEIR

IMMEDIATE CONTEXT

Jane Roberts

This essay looks closely at three Anglo- Saxon glossed psalters and how the
palimpsestic layers of gloss and text, language and layout, speak to the meditative
reader.

Introduction: The Psalters Glossed in Old English

Over the past few years I have become obsessed by speculation as to just
what Anglo-Saxons thought they were up to when they added vernac-
ular glosses to some of their finest and oldest manuscripts. From our
perspective, Aldred’s thick encrusting of the Lindisfarne Gospels with
English words and phrases is shocking,1 unless we adopt the point of
view that he has thereby given us the first gospel books in English (the
incidental benefits to language historians were hardly in his mind).2 The
gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels, written in 950–970, is as intrusive as the
Vespasian Psalter gloss written a century or so earlier. In both cases the
glosses were added to great books that had, as far as we can tell, long been
prized among altar furnishings, and the same must have been true of the
Macregol Gospels (alternatively named the Rushworth or Birr Gospels),
however that Irish book got to England. The first glossed psalters extant
from Anglo-Saxon England have ninth- century glossing. Earliest per-
haps is the scattering of glosses in red ink added to the eighth-century
Blickling Psalter.3 The fuller cover given in the ninth- century glossing
of another eighth-century book, the Vespasian Psalter, has led to its being
62 J A N E ROB E RT S

commonly regarded as the first of the psalters substantially glossed in Old

English.4
Preliminary investigation leads me to believe that supplying psal-
ters with vernacular glosses on the page is a practice first seen in ninth-
century manuscripts in areas where Romance languages did not have a
hold. The absence of earlier on-the-page glossing may be seen as sup-
porting Alfred’s lament that back in the good old days the English had
no need for books to be translated “into their own language.” If this
was so in Britain, was it so also elsewhere in western Europe? Ireland
and Germanic-speaking areas on the continent also had psalters glossed
in their vernaculars, and I should like to know from when and to what
degree. In all, some 40 percent of the psalters extant from Anglo- Saxon
England are glossed psalters, a surprisingly high proportion, with the
greatest number surviving from the eleventh century.5 The number over-
all is small, fifteen at a conservative count.6 Of these, the glosses seem for
the most part not to be by the hand of the main text. Sadly, these fifteen
must be a very small fraction of those that once existed,7 and there must,
indeed, have been many more psalters in Anglo- Saxon England than
those of which we now have knowledge.
A significant development in layout is to be seen in the early tenth-
century Junius Psalter, where the handsome pages have widely spaced
lines. Certainly Junius was quick to acquire an interlinear gloss, entered
in a much smaller script on lines sometimes specially ruled. The main
text is described by Ker as “a rather stiff square Anglo- Saxon minus-
cule,” and the smaller script of the gloss as possibly “by the same hand.” 8
A further development is evident in the mid tenth- century Regius
Psalter, a far more scholarly package, and, in Mechthild Gretsch’s words,
“unique among glossed psalters in providing an Old English gloss that
matches the Latin text.” 9 Here the scribe, the writer both of the main
text and of the ancillary materials, provides not just an interlinear gloss
but scholia as well, for which he has made careful provision, all in “f lu-
ent square Anglo- Saxon minuscule” (again, Ker’s description).10 The
scholia, taken mostly from Cassiodorus, were written before the inter-
linear glosses, which have had in some places to work around the signes
de renvoi.11 Yet the Old English glosses are sometimes at odds with the
Latin commentary material, evidence that the Regius Psalter gloss is a
copy very close to an earlier vernacular gloss.12 Whereas the Junius gloss
is closely related to the glosses supplied in the Vespasian Psalter, with
the Regius Psalter a new source gloss is evident. The Regius Psalter
is the earliest of the three glossed psalters from which I shall examine
readings. Where it was written is not known; circumstantial evidence
suggests Winchester, though there are early links with Worcester for
 S O M E P S A LT E R G L O S S E S 63

the second extant manuscript written by its scribe, a commentary on

Psalms 109–49 (London, British Library, Royal 4 A. xiv). By the elev-
enth century the Regius Psalter was at Christ Church, Canterbury.
The psalters I have mentioned so far have Romanum texts, whereas
the Salisbury Psalter, copied in the latter part of the tenth century, is
the earliest of the extant glossed psalters to have a Gallican rather than
Romanum text.13 This psalter was not written with glosses in mind, and
the main-text scribe supplies glosses for one supplementary text only
(fols. 149v–51v, the Athanasian Creed: Quicumque vult). The main-text
hand is a handsome example of Anglo- Saxon square minuscule, differ-
ing markedly therefore from the essentially Caroline letter forms of its
gloss, added sometime in the eleventh or twelfth centuries.14 By contrast,
the late tenth-century Bosworth Psalter,15 a Romanum text with altera-
tions throughout to Gallican readings, could be said to be half-heartedly
glossed, and it should be set aside as a curate’s egg of a glossed psalter,
“continuous” for twenty-five psalms and “good” in parts of four others.
It is a large book, its main text in heavy square minuscule. The vernacu-
lar glosses, dated to the early eleventh century, “perhaps not much later”
(Ker) than the main text, start at Ps 40.5 and are applied intermittently
up to Ps 142.12.
Of the eleventh-century glossed psalters, only the Winchcombe Psalter
(sometimes called the Cambridge Psalter) has a Romanum text.16 The
page is ruled for thirty-two lines, with English in red alternating with
the Latin text in black, so that (in Ker’s words) the gloss is “given parity
with the text and is not properly an interlinear gloss.” The use of alter-
nating lines of similarly sized script for Latin and English, not otherwise
seen in Anglo- Saxon psalters, is a device used also in prose paraphrases
of hymns and canticles, for example, London, British Library, Cotton
Vespasian D. xii, and London, British Library, Cotton Julius A. vi, except
that there the English script tends to be smaller than the Latin. Although
in the Winchcombe Psalter the English interpretation is similar in size
to the Latin (kinder to shortsighted eyes?), the greater importance of the
Latin is signaled by the setting of the initial capital for each verse out into
the marginal space. The signaling of greater importance for the Latin
texts is true also of the hymnals. For a more informal case of seeming
parity, compare the proverbs added into three empty leaves in Durham,
Cathedral Library, B. III. 32, where the English paraphrase follows in the
same ink and sometimes without a line break, but again the initials given
prominence are for the Latin proverbs. In the Winchcombe Psalter a first
scribe wrote the opening page (fol. 5r), making distinctions in the letter
forms according to language, and distinctions are made on the next two
pages, but from fol. 6v such differentiation more or less lapses. From that
64 J A N E ROB E RT S

point the main hand holds for the most part to the letter forms of Anglo-
Saxon minuscule, the clearest difference being the use of the Tironian
sign in English against et or the ampersand in Latin.17
The heyday for supplying Anglo-Saxon psalters with vernacular glosses
was the eleventh century. Apart from the eccentric Winchcombe Psalter,
all are Gallican psalters, the service book of the Carolingian church. Of the
six eleventh-century glossed Gallican psalters, one, the Lambeth Psalter,18
is from early in the century, four are dated to the middle of the century
(Stowe, Vitellius, Tiberius, and a destroyed psalter represented by three
fragments),19 and the Arundel Psalter (Arundel 60) to the latter part of the
century.20 At this point the tradition of psalters with interlinear English
glosses effectively ceases. English plays a minor role within the lavish dis-
play of the Eadwine Psalter,21 relegated to accompanying the Romanum
text alongside the Anglo-Norman gloss supplied above the Hebraicum,22
and the last gasp of the Old English glossed psalter is a splendid manu-
script in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 8846, where a very few scat-
tered glosses above the opening words of Pss 59, 64, 77, and 87 ref lect
the readings of the Eadwine Psalter.23 The other “Paris Psalter” (Paris,
Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 8824),24 also from the middle of the eleventh
century, is a dual-language book, with Latin and English in parallel col-
umns, not a glossed psalter, but I mention it because it too is eccentric for
its century in having the Romanum rather than Gallican text.
The following table summarizes a few details of layout for all but the
last two glossed psalters; R = Romanum, and G = Gallicanum. The dates
indicate the making of the main text, and the psalters are ordered accord-
ing to depth of writing space rather than overall size, which has suffered
greater alteration across time:25

MS Date Name Written Space Page Size Lines

R x 2/x ex. Bosworth 310 x 185 390 x 265 25

R xi med. Winchcombe 250 x 113 c.270 x 113 32
R viii med. Blickling 235 x 160–165 300–305 x 225–230 24
G xi 2 Arundel 60 235 x 120 c.300 x 197 24
G x2 Salisbury 234 x 105 c.287 x 180 24
G xi med. Stowe 227 x 117 278 x 180 20
G xi med. Tiberius 216 x 111 c.250 x 150 25
G xi med. [fragmentary] 210 x c.140 ?c.300 x 180–90 ?
G xi med.26 Vitellius ?c.205 x 120 ?? 26
R x med. Regius 202 x 105 270 x 185 19
R x in. Junius 185 x 110 c.243 x 170 20
R viii1 Vespasian 177 x 138 235 x 180 22
G xi1 Lambeth 166 x 111 212 x 158 16
 S O M E P S A LT E R G L O S S E S 65

The psalters listed above are all written in long lines, not columns. Of
them, the Lambeth Psalter is smallest. At that, it comes as a shock to real-
ize that the next smallest is the Vespasian Psalter, acknowledged as a trea-
sured book displayed on the high altar in St. Augustine’s Canterbury in
the fifteenth century. The Lambeth Psalter, a small book, was not ruled
to receive glosses, but both glosses and construe marks are so carefully
entered so as not to seem out of place. The last two glossed psalters, the
Eadwine Psalter and Paris 8846, both omitted from this table, are very
different: large in format and complex in layout, they belong to a world
in which page design has become “professionalized” and the packaging of
information a far more serious business. By this time, psalters have diver-
sified into many shapes and layouts—whether in the elaborately framed
markup of the glossa ordinaria, or in separate large choir books, or in the
new small “pocket” bibles that swept the field for scholarly consultation.27
In addition, the individual psalter for meditative use faced competition at
one end of the spectrum from the compendious missal,28 at the other from
the Book of Hours. As for interlinear vernacular glossing in English, it
had retreated downmarket (there was now, of course, a rapidly growing
market in bookmaking); there is in the twelfth century little evidence for
English being used to mark other than occasional equivalences in new
teaching materials, where interlinear vernacular glossing was primarily
in French.29

First Sample Verse

I shall now limit myself to two verses in three Anglo- Saxon psalters.
There is an element of randomness in my sample (I am intrigued by
curious forms in two verses in some of these psalters). Three of the pages
chosen have uninterrupted text (Regius, fol. 24v; Vitellius, fol. 29r; and
Lambeth, fol. 24r), and they happen to contain Ps 17.46. Three give a mise-
en-page that shows the beginning of Ps 13.1 (Regius, fol. 18r; Vitellius,
fol. 25r; and Lambeth, fol. 17r). Perhaps it is my good luck rather than
random chance that the samples are from the first fifty psalms, for which
we now have Phillip Pulsiano’s full analysis of glosses.30
The pleasing layout of the Regius Psalter deserves to be better known.
Here there is plenty of space, a larger format indeed than the Vespasian
Psalter. One scribe designed a page meant from the outset to contain
marginal scholia and with plenty of room for interlinear glosses, too. The
otherwise unattested frequentative verb *huncettan was one of the things
that drew my attention to the first sample verse, Ps 17.46. 31 According
to Pulsiano, it is distinctive of psalter glosses in the Regius tradition as
66 J A N E ROB E RT S

opposed to those related to the Vespasian tradition. 32 As an infrequent

word, “huncetton” is certainly distinctive:

bearn fremedu lugun

Filii alieni mentiti s(un)t
me eald[- e\o]don .i. in malitiis suis
mihi filii alieni inueterauerunt
.,

.,
hy healtodon ɫ huncetton fra(m) siðfatu(m) heora
et claudicauer(un)t a semitis suis :·
Regius Psalter, fol. 24v, lines 15–17.

The resemblance of “huncetton” to forms recorded in the same verse in

two later glossed psalters is undeniable. In Ps 17.46, the Lambeth Psalter
reads “luncodon”:

þeoda fram stigum synum ɫ fram heora paðum

gentium ; / a semitis suis ;
folc þ(æt) þe ic ne oncneow ðeowde
Populus quem non cognoui seruiuit
me on gehyrnesse earen hit gehyrsumode me
mihi in auditu auris oboediuit mihi ;
.,

bearn ælfremede ɫ ælðeodisce alugon me bearn

Filii alieni mentiti sunt mihi filii ali
.,

elelendisce forealdodon ahealtedon luncodon

eni inueterati sunt . et claudicauer(unt)
Lambeth Psalter, fol. 24r, lines 7–11.

Here the final phrase “a semitis suis” has been stashed away in handy
space higher up on the page, at the end of verse 44 (line 7). The glossator
may at first have been puzzled, his signe de renvoi in line 11 suggesting that
he thought something like “suis præuitatib|” was missing. Noteworthy
also is the possessive adjective form above “suis,” 33 one of only two
verses in which sin occurs in the glossed psalters.34 Here the fire- damaged
Vitellius Psalter has a different gloss above suis, which is tucked into space
two lines above at the end of a line. The first s is possibly disturbed,
though on balance I think not:

þinum
/ suis .
bearn fremde lugon ∙ ɫ leogende wæron me bearn fremde
Filii alieni mentiti sunt mihi filii alieni
.,

ealdedon synd hi healtodon ∙ ɫ hlyncoton fram siðfatu(m) ∙ɫ st[-|

inueterati sunt & claudicauerunt a semitis
.,

Vitellius Psalter, fol. 29r, lines 12–14

 S O M E P S A LT E R G L O S S E S 67

At first sight, “þinum” looks like a mistranslation, but it is paralleled in

Arundel 60, fol. 23r, where in the phrase “a semitis suis,” the first s of
“suis” is altered from t, a reading that could have led to the gloss “þinu(m)”
if not first in this psalter, in some earlier psalter. 35 Did some scribe some-
where along the long chain of transmission remember the phrase Ps. 16.5
“a semitis tuis” and first write “tuis” here?36 It might almost be argued that
the Lambeth “synum” is a rationalization of thine forms, were it not that
sin occurs in another Lambeth Psalter gloss. As for the glossing of claudi-
care, behind the verb forms linked to healtian in the Lambeth and Vitellius
Psalters we may glimpse a weak verb *hincian, “to limp, be lame,” cognate
with the Regius form “huncetton.”37 The readiness of glossators to pick
among the glosses available to them, to alter, omit, and to supplement, is
well known.38 From the sparse evidence it looks as if the Regius Psalter
form “huncetton” links a more colloquial verb *huncettan to healtian, a
colloquialism leaving its trace in the mangled readings of Vitellius (with
intrusive -l-)39 and Lambeth (with lu- for hi-).

Second Sample Verse

The second sample verse, Ps. 13.1,40 allows us to glimpse the sort of infor-
mation given at the beginning of a psalm. In the Regius Psalter, fol. 18r,
there is no script differentiation for the heading, which, nevertheless,
stands out because it is in red ink:

:∙ minime credider(un)t
Increpat eccl(esi)a iudeos q(u)i uiso cr(ist)o

cwæð se unwisa on heortan his

DIXit insipiens in corde suo
∙i∙ incarnatus ∙i∙ peccatores
hy g(e)wemmede synt on<->
non e(st) d(eu)s . corrupti s(un)t et ab<->
∙i∙ errorib(us) pleni
sceonge\n/lice hy g(e)wordene synt on willu(m)
hominabiles facti s(un)t in uolun<->
heora nis þe dó
tatibus suis ∙ Non est qui fa<->
oð on anne
ciat bonu(m) . non est usq(ue) ad unu(m) :∙
Regius Psalter, fol. 18r, lines 15–19.

Smaller format differentiates the glosses from main text, but the attempt
to position Latin explanations above vernacular forms is not clear- cut, as
68 J A N E ROB E RT S

this transcription suggests. The Vitellius layout pays greater attention to

script hierarchy, and the lesser amount of abbreviation of its text, where
the only abbreviation in these few lines is the “D(EU)S,” a conventional
use of one of the customary nomina sacra forms, indicates greater formality
than in the Regius Psalter. The rubricated display heading in Vitellius is
now hard to read.41 It is followed by a row of narrow capitals:42

·XIII· I N*** D(AUI)D UERBA

CR(IST)I AD DIUITE(M) INTERROGANS SE DE POPULO SUO.
cwæð unwis on heortan his ne is god
DIXIT INSIPIENS IN CORDE SUO NON EST D(EU)S

.,
gewemde syndon onscunigendlic
Corrupti sunt & abhominabiles
gewordene syndon on lustum heora ne is se ðe do
facti sunt in studiis suis non est qui faciat
.,

god ne is oð ænne
bonum non est usque ad unum
.,

Vitellius Psalter, fol. 25r, lines 2–7.

The Lambeth Psalter may be the smallest of all the psalters with Old
English glosses, but it has claims to being the most scholarly text. The
scrupulous marking of words by obelus (÷) and asterisk (*) suggests the
use of a Hebraicum psalter,43 and the glosses often relate to Romanum
readings. With the Lambeth Psalter, firm red display script makes the
move from one psalm to another stand out clearly. Note also in green
ink the typological reminder that the psalm may be read as the words of
Christ, just below a cropped marginal explication of the figural reading.
The spacing available for the glosses is cleverly deployed: note how the
first part of the gloss for “Dixit” is tucked inside the initial and the second
part of the gloss for “insipiens” is added out in the right-hand margin;
again, good use is made of the space below that last line of main text
alongside the gloss for the overrun “d(eu)m.”

XIII IN FINEM PSALMUS D(AUI)D ∙

sæde ɫ cwæð se unsnotera ɫ se unwita on heortan his nys god
Dixit insipiens in corde suo non est d(eu)s
.,

gewemmede hi syndon asceonigendlic ɫ gehyspendlic gewordene

Corrupti sunt & ab[-]ominabiles facti
hy synt on ymbhigdinyssum sinum nys na se þe do ɫ gefremme
sunt in studiis ÷suis : non est qui faciat
.,

god nys na oð to anum

bonu(m) ÷non est: usque ad unum ;
Lambeth Psalter, fol. 17r, lines 10–14. Cf. Figure 3.1.
 S O M E P S A LT E R G L O S S E S 69

Figure 3.1 London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 427 (Lambeth Psalter), fol. 17r.
Source: Courtesy of the trustees of Lambeth Palace Library.

The glossator, an independent and justly praised interpreter of the Latin,

writes “sinum” above “suis,” using the possessive adjective rather than
the pronoun heora. Oddly, sin appears neither in Alfredian prose nor in
the writings of Ælfric,44 although it is recorded twice in the laws from the
early Kentish kingdoms,45 and it occurs frequently in Old English poetry,
being, according to Mitchell, “spasmodic” in poetry of all periods.46 The
latest poem in which it is found is the “Death of Edward” in the Anglo-
70 J A N E ROB E RT S

Saxon Chronicle annal for 1065,47 and sin is found otherwise only in
the tenth-century glosses of Aldred of Chester-le-Street.48 It is worth
note that the accompanying noun, ymbhygdnes, well attested in late West
Saxon,49 also makes its only appearance among the psalter glosses.

Conclusion: Back to the Main Texts

To finish, I should like to return to the question of just what the glossators
thought they were up to. Old English glosses have, in recent years, drawn
the attention of scholars interested in the history of translation. Evert
Wiesenekker, for example, sets up a complex “Lexical Selection Scheme”
by which “to investigate the working methods of some of the best glos-
sators, highlighting the more successful and attractive achievements in
their work,”50 and he argues that that “in terms of modern textbooks
for students, Vespasian, in its habitual use of ‘the same equivalent for the
same lemma’, may claim to be one for ‘beginners’, Regius and Lambeth
definitely for ‘advanced students’.”51 In a later paper he examines the
glossator’s lexis in the Junius Psalter, showing how the choices made often
improve on and “tend towards greater naturalness” than those found in
the Vespasian Psalter.52 Robert Stanton, drawing on Wiesenekker’s work,
also sees in traditions of glossing “a fundamental starting point for the
study of translation theory and practice.”53 Whereas Wiesenekker’s inves-
tigation, focused particularly on lexical choice, is reliant on the standard
editions of the Vespasian, Regius, and Lambeth psalters, Stanton, widen-
ing his approach to include consideration of manuscript layout, seeks to
explain the ways in which the “full interlinear gloss borders most closely
on the domain of continuous prose translation.”54 He makes interest-
ing observations about the mise-en-page of five psalters, Junius, Regius,
Salisbury, Winchcombe, and Arundel 60, for each of which he gives a
full-page illustration. First, he states something so basic that it is too often
taken for granted, that full interlinear glosses have a continuity that occa-
sional glosses lack. Second, he observes that where Old English fills a pre-
set gloss area between the lines, full interpretive coverage is obvious. His
third point, that there is not always a hierarchy of scripts to distinguish
text and gloss, is interrelated to his fourth point, that the vernacular gloss
is not always subservient “in degree of subordination,” where he notes in
particular the unusual layout of the Winchcombe Psalter. Now it seems to
me that the question of hierarchy of scripts is relevant only if the glosses
are part of the makeup of the original psalter. Of the three manuscripts at
which we have been looking, this is most clearly the case with the Regius
Psalter, where a single scribe left adequate room, sometimes ruled, for
 S O M E P S A LT E R G L O S S E S 71

entering glosses after the text itself and its scholia were written. These
interlinear glosses are for the most part English, although they are some-
times accompanied by Latin explanations, which, like the scholia, are
not included in the standard edition.55 There was indeed sufficient room
for these interlinear Latin notes to be entered neatly above the English
glosses, although they are not always so deployed. By contrast, the main
scribe of the Vitellius Psalter, which, before suffering in the 1731 fire at
Ashburnham House, must have been rather a fine volume, observes his
own chosen hierarchies, and these are to a great extent obscured by the
damage imposed both by shrinkage and by the glossator; the gloss is near
in time to, but probably by a hand other than, the main scribe.
We have been looking at sample glosses in three psalter manuscripts,
all of which have fairly uninterrupted interlinear vernacular coverage.
Regius is exceptional for the thoughtfulness with which it was designed.
This scribe was also responsible for a psalter commentary, London, British
Library, Royal 4 A. xiv (at Worcester perhaps as early as the twelfth cen-
tury), so behind these two manuscripts lies a scholarly interest in psalter
studies. At Ps 17.51 this glossator, in response to the phrase “christo suo,”
notes two otherwise unknown lines of Old English poetry: “Wæs mid
Iudeum on geardagum ealra cyninga gehwelc Cristus nemned,” together
with the explanation “omnis rex in antiquis diebus aput iudeos nom-
inabatur christus.” Strikingly, psalter and vernacular poetry are here in
direct collision. The English poetry written down in the tenth century
has its origins in religious centers where the psalter, canticles, and round
of prayer were followed daily. Just as the psalter’s verses help structure
and punctuate the lives of saints—say, Bede’s telling of the stories of
Cuthbert, Chad, Audrey, etc.—so too they lend narrative strategies and
phrases to the vernacular poems, which in their turn respond to medita-
tive reading, just as do the psalms themselves. The origin of the Regius
Psalter is unknown.56 The invocation of Machutus and Eadburga in a
prayer added early in the eleventh century to fol. 1 has prompted circum-
stantial attribution to Winchester,57 and its gloss is thought to have origi-
nated in the 940s “among the new Benedictine élite which had assembled
at Glastonbury,” with Æthelwold playing a part in its production.58 Pen
trials and drafting notes at the end of its final quire show that it was at
Christ Church, Canterbury, already in the early eleventh century.59 We
sometimes forget that books are highly portable objects. The very use-
fulness of this particular psalter led to the updating of some main-text
readings late in the eleventh century, together with the erasure of the Old
English gloss that stood above the Latin. These changes were designed to
bring the Romanum text more in line with Gallicanum readings.60 Does
72 J A N E ROB E RT S

their palimpsestic intrusion indicate that the psalter itself together with its
scholia was already valued more greatly than the interlinear glossing? It is
worth noting that the Salisbury Psalter continued in use probably longer
than its glosses,61 suggesting that well-laid-out manuscripts in Anglo-
Saxon minuscule continued to be read long after the script’s main period
of production.
With the Vitellius Psalter, there seems not to have been sufficient
room left between the lines for a vernacular gloss to be entered comfort-
ably. If we compare just the opening of Ps 13 in these three psalters, we
gain some idea of their glossators’ ambition. The Vitellius gloss makes
do with equivalences: “Cwæð unwis on heortan his ne is god gewemde
syndon onscunigendlic gewordene syndon on lustum heora ne is se
ðe do god ne is oð ænne.” The Regius Psalter scribe, where space was
left for a vernacular gloss, thinks in phrases: “Cwæð se unwisa on heo-
rtan his hy gewemmede synt onsceongenlice hy gewordene synt on
willum heora nis þe do oð on anne.” With the little Lambeth Psalter,
a perfectionist got to work, eager to pack as much information as pos-
sible into a by no means lavish layout. Patrick O’Neill has suggested
that the Lambeth Psalter is remarkable for supplying us with what is in
effect a vernacular prose psalter as well as the psalter glossed,62 and if we
follow the construe marks, we can read the English version here as fol-
lows: “sæde (oððe) cwæð se unsnotera (oððe) se unwita on his heortan;
nys god [.] hi syndon gewemmede hy synt gewordene asceonigendlic
(oððe) gehyspendlic on sinum ymbhigdinyssum nys na se þe do (oððe)
.,

gefremme god nys na oð to anum.”63 The Anglo- Saxon glossed psalters

are often described as “basic educational tools,” but we need to look at
them more carefully and to consider how very different they are from
one another.
The psalms of David permeate the writings the Anglo- Saxons have
left us, an inextricable palimpsestic base, easily identified when a hagio-
graphic episode is punctuated by the chanting of a key verse, less surely
recognized in well-worn phrases, similes, and metaphors that gain
potency from their origins in the services that filled the eight daily hours
of religious life. Too often those of us who specialize in Old English
view the glossed psalters from a limited angle, poking and prodding
English words and structures with scarcely a glance at the actual Latin
context from which they derive.64 Particularly, we compartmentalize the
psalters and their vernacular trappings, giving little attention to manu-
script layout and forms.65 In a scholarly facsimile the “language stint”
may be assigned to someone other than the overall editor, who is gener-
ally a paleographer of note.66 In an edition, the language expert makes
do with a photograph, maybe a couple, referring the reader to a fuller
 S O M E P S A LT E R G L O S S E S 73

paleographic description available elsewhere.67 This standoff is changing

as a result of the research put in hand by Phill Pulsiano and Nick Doane.68
We now have microfiche reproductions of some Anglo-Saxon psalters
accompanied by reliable accounts of the manuscripts. The images, old
stock, may not be up to modern digital standards, but they serve well
alongside the occasional photographs that have been published as a guide
to overall appearance. More and more, I have a sense of unease in rela-
tion to manuscripts glossed in Old English, because for a long time I took
to them my wish to decipher and make some sort of sense of puzzling
out Old English word meanings without giving sufficient time to their
physical context. Then, as a counterbalance to work for the Historical
Thesaurus of English project,69 I gladly seized the opportunity of joining
Julian Brown in Manuscript Studies graduate seminars for students of
Old and Middle English at the University of London, eager to reconnect
with the words in their proper contexts. Reading a single manuscript
page slowly and scrupulously, whether in such seminars or for establish-
ing well-edited texts, has the potential to yield serendipitous discoveries.
A ghost word slain here, a form adjusted there:70 such finds, though for-
tuitous, indicate the need to return to the manuscripts, not just to con-
front the variety of information revealed by the glossed pages, but also to
engage with the many clues the accumulation of additions and changes
left to their meditative readers.

Notes
1. In Andrew Prescott’s terms, “every manuscript is a palimpsest,” with
all added written materials to be regarded as part of continued use. See
his “What’s in a Number? The Physical Organization of the Manuscript
Collections of the British Library,” in Beatus Vir: Studies in Early English and
Norse Manuscripts In Memory of Phillip Pulsiano, ed. A.N. Doane and Kirsten
Wolf, MRTS 319 (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2006), p. 471 [471–525].
2. See, for example, Michelle P. Brown, The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society,
Spirituality, and the Scribe (London: British Library, 2003), p. 7: “the earliest
surviving translation of the Gospels into the English language.” Aldred
saw himself as the fourth of the makers of the Lindisfarne Gospels; see
Jane Roberts, “Aldred Signs Off from Glossing the Lindisfarne Gospels,”
in Scribes and Texts in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Alexander Rumble
(Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 28–43.
3. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library 776. These glosses are printed,
together with the second later campaign of glossing, by Phillip Pulsiano,
Old English Glossed Psalters: Psalms 1–50, Toronto Old English series 11
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), p. xxxvii, who dates the
older series to the late eighth or early ninth century. But N.R. Ker,
Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (1957; reissued with
74 J A N E ROB E RT S

suppl. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), no. 287, dates the pointed glosses to
the ninth century and the square minuscule glosses to the tenth; compare
E.A. Lowe, Codices Latini Antiquiores, 11 vols. plus supplement (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1934–72), XI, 1661.
4. London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian A. i: Ker, Catalogue, no. 203.
The Blickling and Vespasian psalters are two of the five eighth- century
English psalters whose readings are recorded in Weber, Robert, ed. Le
Psautier romain et les autres anciens psautiers latins (Rome: Abbaye Saint-
Jérôme and Libreria Vaticana, 1953). Of the psalters mentioned later in
this essay, Weber also uses Winchcombe, Bosworth, and the Romanum
text of the Eadwine Psalter in his footnotes.
5. See Mechthild Gretsch, “The Junius Psalter Gloss: Its Historical and
Cultural Context,” ASE 29 (2000): 87 [85–121], for twelve psalters
“glossed continuously or in substantial parts” as “some forty- one per
cent” of extant Anglo- Saxon psalters.
6. The sigla for glossed psalters listed by Phillip Pulsiano, “Psalters,” in
Pfaff, ed., Liturgical Books, p. 70 [61–85], use sixteen letters, but include
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 8824. More recently, Pulsiano, Old
English Glossed Psalters, supplies a fuller listing and labeling of the psalters
of Anglo- Saxon England.
7. For this point, see Celia Sisam and Kenneth Sisam, eds., The Salisbury
Psalter, EETS o.s. 242 (1959), p. 75: “[W]e must reckon the English glossed
psalters of the tenth and eleventh centuries in hundreds.”
8. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 27: see Ker, Catalogue, no. 335.
9. Mechthild Gretsch, The Intellectual Foundations of the English Benedictine
Reform (Cambridge: University Press, 1999), p. 285.
10. London, British Library, Royal 2 B. v: see Ker, Catalogue, no. 249.
11. William Davey, “The Commentary of the Regius Psalter: Its Main
Source and Inf luence on the Old English Gloss,” Mediaeval Studies 49
(1987): 350 [335–51].
12. Sisam and Sisam, eds., Salisbury Psalter, p. 55. See also Mechthild Gretsch,
“The Roman Psalter, Its Old English Gloss and the Benedictine Reform,”
in The Liturgy of the Late Anglo-Saxon Church, ed. Helen Gittos and M.
Bradford Bedingfield. Henry Bradshaw Society Subsidia 5 (London:
Henry Bradshaw Society, 2005), p. 19.
13. Salisbury, Cathedral 150: Ker, Catalogue, no. 379. It should be remem-
bered that the early Irish missionaries used the Gallican text, which was
therefore the version sung in the Northumbrian church.
14. According to Sisam and Sisam in Salisbury Psalter, §33, the use of g forms
is “curious,” and they suggest that the Insular form was in the pattern
gloss taken from a Romanum Psalter: at first the Caroline letter is usual,
but later the Insular form is also pressed into service, apparently with no
discernible rationale for distribution.
15. London, British Library, Add. 37517; main text in a heavy square minus-
cule from late in the tenth century (Ker, Catalogue, no. 129). P.M.
 S O M E P S A LT E R G L O S S E S 75

Korhammer, “The Origin of the Bosworth Psalter,” ASE 2 (1973): 173,

points out that this is “the earliest surviving English manuscript in which
all the important texts of the Benedictine Office—psalter, canticles,
hymns and monastic canticles—have been placed together.”
16. Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Ff. i. 23: Ker, Catalogue, no.
13. Gretsch, Intellectual Foundations, p. 283, reports recent reconsideration
that would date this manuscript to c.1000 rather than c.1050 and place its
origin in Ramsey or St. Augustine’s Canterbury, but Michelle P. Brown,
Manuscripts from the Anglo-Saxon Age (London: British Library, 2007), p. 136,
dates it to c.1030–50, retaining attribution to Winchcombe Abbey.
17. Note variation in a and h, an occasional hook to the back of e, some dot-
ting of y, f sometimes starting a little high, Caroline s only at end of line,
and the calligraphically good distribution of þ and ð.
18. London, Lambeth Palace Library 427: Ker, Catalogue, no. 280.
19. Three are London, British Library manuscripts: Stowe 2: Ker, Catalogue,
no. 271; Cotton Tiberius C. vi: Ker, Catalogue no. 199; and Cotton
Vitellius E. xviii: Ker, Catalogue, no. 224. What was probably a single
manuscript is represented now by Cambridge, Pembroke College 312, C
nos. 1, 2: Ker, Catalogue, no. 79; Haarlem, Stadsbibliothek, 188 F. 53: N.R.
Ker, “A Supplement to ‘Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-
Saxon,’ ” ASE 5 (1976): 122–23; and Sondershausen, Schlossmuseum,
Br. 1: Helmut Gneuss, “A Newly-Found Fragment of an Anglo- Saxon
Psalter,” ASE 27 (1998): 273–87.
20. London, British Library, Arundel 60: Ker, Catalogue, no. 134.
21. Cambridge, Trinity College, R. 17. 1: Ker, Catalogue, no. 91. For a recent
account of this gloss, see Patrick P. O’Neill, “The English Version,” in
Gibson, Heslop and Pfaff, eds., Eadwine Psalter, pp. 123–38. See also
André Crépin, “Le ‘Psautier d’Eadwine’: l’Angleterre pluri- culturelle,”
in Journée d’études anglo-normandes organisée par l’Académie des Inscriptions et
Belles Lettres, Palais de l’Institut, 20 juin 2008, eds. André Crépin and Jean
Leclant (Paris: De Boccard, 2009), pp. 139–70.
22. See the discussion by Dominique Markey, “The Anglo-Norman Version,”
in Gibson, Heslop and Pfaff, eds., Eadwine Psalter, pp. 139–56.
23. Ker, “A Supplement,” no. 419; the glosses are edited by H. Hargreaves
and C. Clark, “An Unpublished Old English Psalter- Gloss Fragment,”
N&Q 210 (1965): 443–46.
24. Ker, Catalogue, no. 367.
25. Dating follows the conventions usual in Ker, Catalogue.
26. Phillip Pulsiano, “The Prefatory Matter of London, British Library,
Cotton Vitellius E. xviii,” in Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts and Their Heritage,
ed. Phillip Pulsiano and Elaine M. Treharne (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998),
p. 104, dates this psalter to 1060x1062.
27. Much useful overall information is to be found scattered throughout
Christopher de Hamel, The Book: A History of the Bible (London and New
York: Phaidon Press Limited, 2001).
76 J A N E ROB E RT S

28. See Pfaff, ed., Liturgical Books, for an excellent overview of the earliest
English service books.
29. There is no evidence for English being used to make other than occasional
glosses in the twelfth century, and the glosses added to the new teach-
ing materials of the twelfth century, where the vernacular glossing was
primarily in French, include only a few English glosses (observation made
on trawling through Margaret Laing, Catalogue of Sources for a Linguistic
Atlas of Early Medieval England (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1993)).
30. Pulsiano, Old English Glossed Psalters.
31. “The children that are strangers have lied to me, strange children have
faded away, and have halted from their paths.”
32. Phillip Pulsiano, “Defining the A-Type (Vespasian) and D-Type (Regius)
Psalter- Gloss Traditions,” English Studies 72 (1991): 317 [308–72].
33. According to Tauno F. Mustanoja, A Middle English Syntax: Part 1, Parts
of Speech (Helsinki: Société Néophilologique, 1960), p. 156, sin is “a lost
ref lexive” that “occurs mostly in poetry, rarely in prose, and it does not
survive into ME.” There is a valuable discussion of forms and usage by
Gero Bauer, “Über Vorkommen und Gebrauch von ae. sin,” Anglia 81
(1963): 323–34.
34. The usual reading in this verse is some form of the genitive plural heora
(in eight of the glossed psalters), though the singular his occurs once
(Salisbury); three psalters have sin in this verse (Vitellius, Arundel 60, and
Lambeth).
35. The alteration in Arundel 60 is noted by Pulsiano, Old English Glossed
Psalters, p. 212.
36. Pulsiano, Old English Glossed Psalters, points out that the first s of “suis”
is on an erasure in the Bosworth Psalter, and that Cambridge, St. John’s
College, MS 59, has the reading “tuis.” Trawling the Vetus Latina (Brepols)
files yielded a further tuis reading, Bildnummer 10/56.
37. See Jane Roberts, “Some Thoughts on the Expression of ‘Crippled’ in
Old English,” Essays for Joyce Hill on Her Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Mary Swan,
Leeds Studies in English n.s. 37 (2006): 372–73 [365–78].
38. “Consistency in anything is rare in the psalter-glosses,” according to
Sisam and Sisam, eds., Salisbury Psalter, p. 45 n. 2. For a more recent
overview of the difficulties presented by interrelationships among the
glossed psalters, see Phillip Pulsiano, “A Proposal for a Collective Edition
of the Old English Glossed Psalters,” in Anglo-Saxon Glossography, ed.
René Derolez (Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 1992), pp. 167–87.
39. James L. Rosier, The Vitellius Psalter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1962), p. xxxii, notes that “hlyncoton may be an error”; he sug-
gests (footnote p. 36) that it “is perhaps a blend of hlinian (‘to lean, bend’)
and hincian (‘to limp’),” comparing the Lambeth reading luncodon, “which
may be for hincodon,” and Andreas 1171 hellehinca.
40. “The fool hath said in his heart: There is no God, They are corrupt, and
are become abominable in their ways: there is none that doth good, no
not one.”
 S O M E P S A LT E R G L O S S E S 77

41. Here I have teased out a little more than reported in Pierre Salmon, Les
“Tituli Psalmorum” des manuscrits latins, Études Liturgiques 3 (Paris: Cerf,
1959), p. 56.
42. Interestingly, the Vitellius side notes are related to the headings of the
dual-language Paris Psalter. See Phillip Pulsiano, “The Old English
Introductions in the Vitellius Psalter,” Studia Neophilologica 63 (1991):
13–35.
43. See further Patrick O’Neill, “Latin Learning at Winchester in the Early
Eleventh Century: The Evidence of the Lambeth Psalter,” ASE 20 (1991):
148–49, who points out that this ref lects the glossator’s own use of the
Hebraicum. Investigation is needed of the occasional use of the obelus in
the Regius Psalter, indeed of these conventional signs in Anglo- Saxon
psalters more generally (for example, the manuscript page reproduced in
Sisam and Sisam, eds. Salisbury Psalter, shows the use of these signs, but
they seem not to be discussed).
44. Bruce Mitchell, Old English Syntax, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1985), §290, explains a homiletic instance as “in a passage of almost
‘poetic’ description.” R. Morris, ed., The Blickling Homilies, EETS o.s. 58,
63, 73 (1874–80), 125.21: “& is sin hwyrfel on wilewisan geworht” / “and
its circuit is wrought basket-wise”; but sinhwyrfel is more plausibly to be
read as an adjective comparable with the gloss form sinhwyrfende “round”
and sharing the first element seen also in the commoner sintre(n)dende
and sinewealt. See Jane Roberts and Christian Kay with Lynne Grundy,
eds., A Thesaurus of Old English, 2 vols., King’s College London Medieval
Studies XI (1995; 2nd impr. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000); online version
by Flora Edmonds, Christian Kay, Jane Roberts, Irené Wotherspoon
(2005): http://libra.englang.arts.gla.ac.uk/oethesaurus/.
45. F.L. Attenborough, ed., The Laws of the Earliest Kings (Cambridge: CUP,
1922), p. 14 (Æthelberht (82) “sinne willan”) and p. 26 (Wihtred (10)
“sine hyd”). The early Kentish laws are preserved in the early twelfth-
century Textus Roffensis.
46. Mitchell, Old English Syntax, 1. §290; at §291 he argues that sin is archaic
and retained for metrical reasons.
47. In C and D texts: see Charles Plummer, ed., Two of the Saxon Chronicles
Parallel, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892–99), pp. 194–5.
48. There is a single Lindisfarne Psalter instance in response to “discipulis” in
the gospel text of John 21.14: discipulis / “sinum ambehtum,” where the
Rushworth Gospels have the reading discipulis suis / “ðegnum his,” but
none in the glosses to the three gospels for which he is thought to have
been copying earlier glosses, an absence that may have constrained him in
his meager use of the form while glossing the fourth gospel. In contrast,
sin is found pervasively in a book Aldred glossed later, the Durham Ritual
manuscript.
49. For example, ÆCHom I, 24 (375.140); ÆCHom I, 40 (526.55); ÆLS
(Agnes) (307)]; Nic (A) (27.4.4); BoGl (Hale) P.3.5.24). These instances,
cited according to the conventions established at the Dictionary of Old
78 J A N E ROB E RT S

English project, may be easily found in the Toronto database: Antonette

diPaolo Healey, John Price-Wilkin, and Takamichi Ariga, Dictionary
of Old English Corpus on the World-Wide Web, rev. ed., Society for Early
English and Norse Electronic Texts (1997; Ann Arbor, MI: University
of Michigan Press, 2000) and online by subscription at http://www.doe.
utoronto.ca/.
50. Evert Wiesenekker, “Word be worde, andgit of andgite”: Translation
Performance in the Old English Interlinear Glosses of the “Vespasian,” “Regius,”
and “Lambeth” Psalters (Huizen: J. Bout, 1991), p. 67.
51. Wiesenekker,”Word be worde,” p. 124.
52. Evert Wiesenekker, “The Vespasian and Junius Psalters Compared:
Glossing or Translation?,” Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 40
(1994): 38.
53. Robert Stanton, The Culture of Translation in Anglo-Saxon England
(Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002), p. 9.
54. Stanton, Culture of Translation, p. 37.
55. Fritz Roeder, Der altenglische Regius-Psalter, Studien zur englische
Philologie 18 (Halle: Niemeyer, 1904).
56. “Almost certainly written at Winchester in 10c,” according to Phillip
Pulsiano, “Psalters,” ASMMF 2 (Binghamton, NY: CEMERS, 1994),
p. 57. It is worth noting that Sisam and Sisam, in The Salisbury Psalter,
§§107–109, leave the question of origin open, despite its use of some
of the vocabulary distinctive of the Benedictine Rule translation
and the “Winchester group.” Walter Hofstetter, “Winchester and
the Standardization of Old English Vocabulary,” ASE 17 (1988): 151
[139–61], does not find the instances sufficient grounds for placing this
psalter among his Group I texts, “whose vocabulary is strongly marked
by Winchester usage,” but instead places it in his Group II, “which favour
vocabulary which does not conform to the Winchester usage.”
57. Ker, Catalogue, no. 249, makes this suggestion, but notes also the evidence
for the manuscript’s presence at Christ Church, Canterbury, in the early
eleventh century.
58. Gretsch, “The Roman Psalter,” p. 19. Catherine Cubitt, “Archbishop
Dunstan: A Prophet in Politics?,” in Myth, Rulership, Church, and Charters:
Essays in Honour of Nicholas Brooks, ed. Julia Barrow and Andrew Wareham
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 158–61, surveys differing opinions on the
origin of 2 B. v and argues for its acquisition “at some point” by New
Minster, Winchester, where its copy of a Marian office was made.
59. These are fully examined by Peter A. Stokes, “The Regius Psalter, Folio
198v: A Reexamination,” N&Q 252 (2007): 208–11.
60. William J. Davey, ed., “An Edition of the Regius Psalter and Its Latin
Commentary” (PhD dissertation, Ottawa, 1979), p. xxxi.
61. Sisam and Sisam, eds., The Salisbury Psalter, §10, argue for long use of
the codex, at least to the late thirteenth century, noting that “at least
throughout the twelfth century, readers of English would be familiar
 S O M E P S A LT E R G L O S S E S 79

with the characteristic Insular letter forms”; at §37 they also point out
that “the various twelfth- century readers who worked over the Latin text
appear to have ignored the gloss.”
62. Patrick P. O’Neill, “Syntactical Glosses in the Lambeth Psalter and
the Reading of the Old English Interlinear Translation as Sentences,”
Scriptorium 46 (1992): 256 [250–56]; the construe marks, written later
than the gloss, are in brown ink, not the black of the main text.
63. For expansion of the abbreviation ɫ by oððe in the English context, see
Sisam and Sisam, eds., Salisbury Psalter, §56; also Fred C. Robinson, “Latin
for Old English in Anglo- Saxon Manuscripts,” in his The Editing of Old
English (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 163 [159–63], repr. from Language
Form and Linguistic Variation, ed. John Anderson (Amsterdam: Benjamins,
1982), pp. 395–400.
64. Patrizia Lendinara, “Instructional Manuscripts in England: The Tenth-
and Eleventh- Century Codices and the Early Norman Ones,” in Form
and Content of Instruction in Anglo-Saxon England in the Light of Contemporary
Manuscript Evidence, ed. Patrizia Lendinara, Loredana Lazzari and Maria
Amalia D’Aronco (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), p. 68 [59–113], reminds
us: “Some psalters were designed for display, others for training in or
performance of the liturgy, and others for private study and devotion.”
See also George H. Brown, “The Psalms as the Foundation of Anglo-
Saxon Learning,” in The Place of the Psalms in the Intellectual Culture of the
Middle Ages, ed. Nancy Van Deusen (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1999), pp. 1–24.
65. But see M.J. Toswell, “The late Anglo- Saxon Psalter: Ancestor of the
Book of Hours?,” Florilegium 14 (1995–96): 1–24, for rewarding consid-
eration of the layout of a group of Anglo- Saxon psalters; see also her
“Anglo- Saxon Psalter Manuscripts,” Old English Newsletter 28.1 (1994):
A-23–A-31.
66. For example, in The Vespasian Psalter (B.M. Cotton Vespasian A.I), EEMF
14 (1967), D.H. Wright describes the manuscript and calls on A. Campbell
for the discussion of language.
67. Sisam and Sisam’s edition of The Salisbury Psalter is exemplary in the
attention given to the whole manuscript and its vernacular glosses.
68. For the Anglo- Saxon Manuscripts in Microfiche Facsimile series, see
http://mendota.english.wisc.edu/~ASMMF/index.htm.
69. See http://www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/SESLL/EngLang/thesaur/homepage.htm.
70. As argued above, Ps 17.46 had given rise to the ghost-word *luncian
(Lambeth), and adjustment resolves the parallel readings to yield the *hin-
cian (Vitellius and Lambeth) and *huncettan (Regius).
CHAPTER 4

THE PALIMPSEST AND OLD ENGLISH

HOMILETIC COMPOSITION

Paul E. Szarmach

This essay proposes that the palimpsest offers a way to understand the composition
techniques of Old English homilists, notably Ælfric, Wulfstan, and the anony-
mous tradition.

T he invocation or citation of a metaphor or analogue in any explana-

tion of a literary feature runs a set of risks. Arguably the most famous
such analogue in the study of Old English literature, viz. John Leyerle’s
interlace theory for the composition of Beowulf, gives a perfect example.1
Leyerle sought to explain narrative features of Beowulf, particularly nar-
rative time and the unfolding of incident, by comparing those features to
the interlace pattern of Insular art in manuscripts and metalwork.
However effective Leyerle’s comparison might be in the classroom, schol-
ars reacted variously at best and sharply at worst in subsequent studies.
Morton W. Bloomfield pronounced, “[T]he ‘interlace’ image is not use-
ful when applied to verbal art.”2 Recognizing the risk of such compari-
sons and nevertheless moving forward, in part at least in ref lective homage
to Leyerle and his suggestion, I would like to propose here that the
palimpsest offers a way to understand the composition techniques of Old
English homilists. Some consideration of what a palimpsest is seems
obligatory before the word can have application to the prose. As we shall
see, a palimpsest is a rewriting and a reuse of both parchment and an idea,
for all writing is a rewriting. Crucial to the analogy is the practice of
writers and their scribes. Ælfric, Wulfstan, and the anonymous homiletic
tradition furnish examples of how the idea of the palimpsest might be
operating in their respective works. The analogy can not only help
82 PAU L E . S Z A R M AC H

explain how the writers compose, but also provide a new basis for judg-
ing how they succeed in their works. Certain features of composition,
e.g., the problematical paragraph or sentence, may derive from a “loca-
tional” view of its function. This locational view, one may further argue,
is a form of text processing. Rather than “scissors and paste” composi-
tions as L.G. Whitbread would have it, these works can thus be seen to
have another order of complexity altogether.3 The palimpsest may also
suggest links between authors and literary features that may impinge on
literary history. “What is a palimpsest?” is the first of many questions to
be asked.
In his classic essay “Codices Rescripti,” E.A. Lowe offers the defi-
nition, “scraped” or “rubbed again,” indicating the Greek origin of the
word, but yet stressing that the word can be misleading.4 Lowe is quick to
observe that skins were more likely exposed to the gentle process of wash-
ing, and not to a second scraping, and that, significantly, not all erased
membranes show rewriting. The palimpsest offers economic and cultural
evidence, for supply and demand for vellum correlate with intellectual
activity. Lower texts were often obsolescent as law and liturgy developed
in different, respective directions from the originating texts. Augustine’s
treatise on the psalms may ride over an erased Cicero De re publica, but
Christian texts were also palimpsested. Pre-Jerome translations of the
Bible yielded to the Vulgate and difficult scripts (e.g., scriptura continua)
were erased, but even the Vulgate is found as the lower text much more
often than the upper. Lowe’s chronological limits, ref lecting the Codices
Latini Antiquiores program, keep him away from much of Anglo-Saxon
England, with the exception of three copies of Bede.5
There are manuscripts containing Old English that have been sub-
jected to palimpsesting. Vatican City, Reg. Lat. 497, fol. 71 [Ker, 391;
Gneuss, 916], is a remnant of the Alfredian Orosius.6 Erased in the elev-
enth century to accommodate a Life of St. Gertrude, the manuscript
was at Trier at that time. All of fol. 71 is erased except the greater part
of some thirteen lines on fol. 71v. It is reasonable to assume an Old
English text was of minimal interest to its continental environment.
Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 422 [Ker 70; Gneuss 110], the Red
Book of Darley, is busy with rubbing, the application of reagents, and
general illegibility. On page 14, the text of Solomon and Saturn has been
erased and a Latin form of excommunication has been written over.7
The most controversial Old English palimpsest possibility is Kevin
Kiernan’s argument that fol. 179 recto and verso of Cotton Vitellius A.xv
is a palimpsest.8 Subjecting these pages to a meticulous investigation
of the apparent rubbing, washing, and retouching, Kiernan concludes
that on fol. 179r, the second scribe removed the former ending of the
 OLD ENGLISH HOMILETIC COMPOSITION 83

poem and connected a text that continued the story of Beowulf. Such
“hard” evidence for the narrative structure undermined generations of
interpretations and interpreters to no little consternation.9 The Kiernan
theses and the resultant discussion have placed the word “palimpsest”
at the center of the subject and Beowulf studies for nearly the past three
decades.
These preliminaries about “palimpsest” need a little more elaboration.
One feature of a palimpsest can be the repositioning of the upper layer
at a ninety- degree angle to the lower text. It is this feature that mitigates
against Kiernan’s use of “palimpsest” to describe what he sees, but one
must note immediately that Lowe does not mention this feature at all in
his discussion. The famous example is the Archimedes palimpsest, where
a thirteenth-century scribe replaced by erasure a tenth-century Greek
text, which is the oldest surviving copy of works by Archimedes (died
212 BC).10 One page of Archimedes thus becomes two pages of prayers
much as one can turn a sheet of letter- size paper, front and back, into four
pages. New Haven, Beinecke Library MS 262, for example, which con-
sists almost exclusively of palimpsest prayers, shows a fifteenth- century
liturgy in Greek over a tenth- century saint’s life.11 Lowe does not remark
on this ninety- degree turn in his general discussion, and the matter of
positioning does not surface in Old English texts where the passages are
too brief. The Beowulf text could not be rewritten at ninety degrees to its
present axis without causing a jumble.
In art the idea of the palimpsest moves on in another direction, which
may cast some light on textual practice. Thus, Leslie Brubaker defines
the word as “a work or surface with a second text or image superim-
posed over an effaced original,” and then applies the word to painting:
“[P]alimpsests indicate either reworking of the image by the original
artist or more often the repainting of the image at a later date.”12 Strictly
speaking, there would be no new text superimposed. Embedded here is
the idea of “reworking,” which strikes a textual note. Richard Galpin
gives “erasure in art” a postmodern spin in his online article.13 In Galpin’s
conception erasure takes on not a destructive meaning, but rather a cre-
ative reaction to the “lower” painting. Since a deep analysis of this strik-
ing intellectual position is beyond the scope of this essay, a brief citation
of Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing must stand as an
example: Rauschenburg used forty erasers to rub out a drawing that
de Kooning had given him for the purpose. Rauschenberg wanted to
find out “whether a drawing could be made out of erasing.”14 These few
examples from art join with textual examples to ask whether any defi-
nition of palimpsest should include the idea of layering, i.e., adding to a
composition rather than merely subtracting.
84 PAU L E . S Z A R M AC H

Let us see how this complex of denotations and connotations in the

word might operate in Old English homiletic composition.
It is appropriate to begin with Ælfric of Eynsham, the acknowledged
master of Old English homilies, if not late Old English prose, who shows
his personal hand in the content, layout, and design of the key manu-
script that contains his work, British Library, Royal 7 C xii, fols. 4–218.
[= A].15 Eliason and Clemoes discern two main scribes, a third scribe,
and four other hands responsible for contemporary alterations and addi-
tions, one of which was surely Ælfric himself.16 There are later correc-
tors than Ælfric and his contemporaries, which complicates analysis, but
the nature of many alterations and similar handwriting—with all the
hazards of impressionism in considering hands—point toward Ælfric’s
active engagement in a manuscript that is early on in the genesis of the
tradition of the text of the Catholic Homilies.17 As Eliason and Clemoes
document the confirmed and possible Ælfrician changes, it is clear that
for Ælfric the composition of the Catholic Homilies was a process, not
an event.18 Within this authorial dynamic, the cancellation on fol. 64r4
through 64v4 takes on a special importance. This passage occurs in art.
12, the Dominica in Media Quadragesima (fols. 62–66), in the midst of the
exegesis of the five loaves. There is a line drawn around the passage on
fol. 64r, which forms an open rectangle that is concluded on the top of
fol. 64v4, where the line continues, ultimately creating the fourth side. In
the margin at the beginning of the passage is a seven-line note, somewhat
trimmed, whose author could only be Ælfric:

ðeos racu [bið] fullicor on ð[ære] oðre bec. 7 w[e hi] forbudon on ð[is]sere
þylæs þe h[it æ]ðryt þince gyf [heo] on ægðre bec b[eo]19
[This account is more thorough in the second book, and we forbade it in
this book lest it seem tedious, given that it is in the second book.]

The passage marked for excision is an aside, or so Ælfric must have seen
it to be in this place, about Moses, the wandering in the desert, and his
writing under God’s dictation the Pentateuch and the commandments,
where the mainline exposition is on John 6.1–14 and the miracle of the
loaves and fishes. True enough, Ælfric cancels, and not strictly speaking
erases, and yet he achieves the partial effects of a palimpsest. He rewrites
and records the rewriting. Ælfric really had no choice. The Royal manu-
script is Ælfric’s personal copy text, if not something akin to “scribal gal-
leys.” The original text must remain on the page so that the next copyist
can understand what passage Ælfric’s marginal note cites and what text
to look for elsewhere. Had the passage been totally erased, there would
have been no point of reference. Further, the text to be excised and its
 OLD ENGLISH HOMILETIC COMPOSITION 85

directive authorial note suggest that this passage on Moses is a compo-

sitional unit. To our contemporary eye the passage is very much like a
paragraph, coherent here as a kind of curriculum vitae for a patriarch. Such
paragraph-style compositional units are a feature of Ælfric’s composition,
which deserve study in their own right. Here the treatment of Moses
becomes a movable text as if in a “cut and paste” operation, or, to offer
another analogy, an implied palimpsest.
There is one more large-scale cancellation that requires discussion.
Fol. 211r, lines 3–12 contains a second ending to art. XXXVIII, IIa kalen-
das decembris natale sancti andreae apostoli. Clemoes infers that Ælfric wrote
a homily on the gospel passage for the feast of Andrew and then added
a passio.20 The scribe, perhaps confused by what Ælfric had done, allows
two closing formulas with “amen” within ten lines. The scribe might
have been waiting for Ælfric to tell him what to do. It was presumably
Ælfric who caught or saw the double ending and drew three boxlike
drawings over the passage to indicate cancellation. It requires some tex-
tual imagination to understand exactly what the scribe had done and
why the second, yet ur-ending is quite where it is. Clemoes describes the
textual situation as a result of “scribal inadvertence.” 21 Erasure of the ten
lines would have been unsightly, as on fols. 64rv, and there might not
have been a clear record of the action taken to remove the second ending.
If the Royal manuscript functions as an author’s working copy, Ælfric
would want to keep a record of major changes. Folio 211r supports the
overall theory that Ælfric originally delivered sermons and then prepared
a version, with prefaces and all, to send to Archbishop Sigeric. This can-
cellation and the one on fol. 64rv offer the oxymoron: a present absence.
In this sense the cancellations are very much like a palimpsest, erased but
still there to describe and exemplify the methods of composition Ælfric
follows in his Catholic Homilies.
Like Ælfric, and indeed arguably more so, Wulfstan of York shows
every interest in the development of his texts. N.R. Ker lists with com-
mentary some ten manuscripts that contain Wulfstan’s handwriting,
which alters, revises, and corrects the text in vernacular or in Latin.22
Ker sees “a man of letters” who seeks to improve what was written, even
taking a pen in hand or perhaps looking over what a scribe has written;
Wulfstan is both reviser and corrector.23 The extent and nature of the
interventions mean that here only a few examples can be adduced to the
topic at hand. The manuscript of major interest is BL Cotton Nero A.i,
which is very busy with later alterations and additions that quite natu-
rally complicate discussion at the empirical level. There seem to be no
major excisions as in the Ælfrician Royal manuscript, though there are
erasures of words or phrases that would be difficult to attribute without
86 PAU L E . S Z A R M AC H

the establishment of a convincing pattern. Ker finds that Wulfstan wrote

some words or lines of the text, but never states that these words are
palimpsested.24 Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile 17, published to a
high standard, as is to be expected from the series, does not suggest that
these passages are palimpsested.25 On fol. 120r, Wulfstan writes fifty- one
consecutive words in the text as if he were coeval with the scribe. On fol.
125v, Wulfstan completes a text in Latin by writing the last thirty-nine
words. Perhaps personal inspection and the human eye will see the marks
of erasure and layering.
Here and there Wulfstan shows a fondness for the tops and bottoms
of pages, where he might add or erase, as in fols. 105r, 107v, and 115v.
This last features a heading, whose original was erased and a new heading
overlaid. There are some long marginal erasures as on fols. 88v and 96v,
whose wording is not legible, and whose responsibility is undetermin-
able. Of special interest is BL Cotton Vespasian A.xiv, fol. 148v, which
contains an “enigmatic” Latin poem in praise of Wulfstan.26 Set down
on a previously empty page evidently by Wulfstan himself, the five cou-
plets and a triplet would appear to be an example of the “talking text,”
whereby the voice, directed to the reader, celebrates Wulfstan as scribe,
object of admiration, and author. For some critics the distance connect-
ing author and persona is too close for comfort and decorum, a manifes-
tation of authorial chutzpah, but it does make sense to hold that Wulfstan
wrote—in both senses—the poem, adopting the fiction of the talking
text.27 The insertion of the poem is no palimpsest strictly speaking, as
all agree, though it shows Wulfstan, once again, ready to intervene in
manuscripts on a consistent basis.
Wulfstan’s busy authorial and scribal interactions with texts and man-
uscripts are evident in magno as well as in parvo. His masterpiece, the Sermo
Lupi, exists in three versions with five manuscripts. In her still standard
edition, Dorothy Bethurum constructs a stemma to sort out the rela-
tionships.28 The five manuscripts are: CCCC 419 (B); Bodley 343 (H);
CCCC 201 (C); Hatton 113 (E); Cotton Nero A.i (I). Bethurum believes
that B and H, which are the shortest witnesses, are likely the earliest.
C is the revised version, and E and I are revisions of the revision. It is
theoretically possible for a short version to come later in the tradition and
receive additions, or for a long version to come earlier, but Bethurum
views the tradition as growing rather than suffering abbreviation. While,
as we have seen, Cotton Nero A.i shows Wulfstan’s own hand in action,
it is not at all certain who bears the responsibility for the interventions.
Bethurum notes the general problems of style and content or other issues,
such as an apparent scribal importation, as in C E I, where a scribal note
has become part of the main text.29 C E I have a lengthy passage on the
 OLD ENGLISH HOMILETIC COMPOSITION 87

humiliations the English have suffered, presented in Wulfstan’s style. 30

Within this thicket of variations and possibilities, one can postulate that
the layering of text onto another text is a palimpsest technique taken
to a compositional level. The authorial “O” in Bethurum’s stemma is a
base text that changes, here mainly in additions and expansions. Given
Wulfstan’s contemporaneity and his engagement with the events of
1014 and thereabouts, this f luid attitude toward the text in hand gives
Wulfstan the proper orientation to the needs of the moment. Unlike
Ælfric, who had his worries about scribes and their accuracy, Wulfstan
never asked—or apparently expected—scribes to be all that accurate. His
busy corrections and interventions suggest very much a kind of practical
or utilitarian energy behind his production.
But Wulfstan’s continual altering and adding suggests a wider view
of his corpus and its importance to prose composition. His work is a
model for a school of prose composition, which we can call the “Wulfstan
School.” As the history of Old English literature indicates, the first step
in the study of Wulfstan is the attempt to determine his body of work.
Napier, Jost, and Bethurum did remarkable literary excavation in trying
to sort out Wulfstan proper from imitators and compilers whose meth-
ods of structuring prose pieces did as Wulfstan did, and who, in fact,
took Wulfstan’s various words and passages and interwove them into a
whole of their own making.31 The scholars who defined Wulfstan have
not agreed on all particulars to be sure. There is the problem of dating
one piece or another as well. If Wulfstan is the real benchmark, then the
date of 1023—the year of his death—is something to hold on to. Behind
any given text of uncertain date might be nonextant earlier texts. One
can further observe that Augustine of Hippo, when he authorized holy
plagiarism in De Doctrina Christiana IV.29, could not have envisioned the
borrowing and taking, the mixing and matching, that this school pur-
sued.32 No doubt unwittingly, Augustine was authorizing the palimpsest,
taking a presumptive author’s point of view.
Napier XXX is a classic example illustrating the methods of this
Wulfstanian school. Found only in Bodleian Library Hatton 113, this
Worcester text is, as Scragg describes it, “a compilation in which a few
sentences of undoubted Wulfstan authorship are fitted into a remark-
able patchwork of extracts from pseudo-Wulfstan and tenth-century
anonymous writings.”33 Scragg offers a chart that lists some seventeen
passages that make up the whole of this sermon.34 In thirteen of the pas-
sages there are sources or parallels to Wulfstan’s Institutes of Polity, Vercelli
Homilies IV, IX, X, XXXI, Napier II, XXIV, XLVI, XLIX, and the
poem An Exhortation to Christian Living.35 There are cross-affiliations as
well: Vercelli XXI and An Exhortation, Napier XLIX and Vercelli X.36
88 PAU L E . S Z A R M AC H

The multiplicity of sources and the proper identification of them as well

as authorship issues have proven to comprise one of the hard-won battles
of traditional scholarship. Yet the emphasis on sources and authorship
stays on the surface of the text that produced those bewildered initial,
scholarly reactions. There is a whole behind that surface. It is first a tem-
plate, effectively the blank page of a manuscript, upon which the sermon
writer layers the seventeen passages. The layering follows the order of
elements preconceived, filling up the page and presenting the topics and
themes of the whole. For Whitbread (as cited in note 3), the technique is
“scissors and paste,” which makes for a pejorative view of the method of
composition. Reading the sermon as palimpsest allows a more positive
view of the composition. The assembly of sources and parallels can more
easily be seen as a testimony to the composer’s range and knowledge, for
the number and nature of sources and parallels suggests a writer who has
command of the subject area. Crossing the prose-poetry “line” by using
extant homilies and a poem is another indication of an accomplished and
confident writer who is working, so to speak, from his angle to the base
text.
Wulfstan presents yet one more pertinent example in his literary rela-
tions. As is well known, Wulfstan receives and rewrites Ælfric’s various
writings and, so to speak, chooses not to receive and rewrite his Anglo-
Saxon source in other matters. Malcolm Godden has recently offered
an authoritative reassessment of the relations between Wulfstan and
Ælfric.37 Considering as well the possibilities of any direct personal con-
tact between the two writers and the apparent coolness of Ælfric toward
Wulfstan, Godden describes the textual relations visible in the corre-
spondence between the two, particularly the “pastoral letters,” as well as
tracts and homilies. Godden’s tally is a cautious count of eighteen texts,
twelve of which are homilies. Questions remain, of course: are there
other texts that might be brought forward that scholars have not rec-
ognized, and did Wulfstan always know that it was a text of Ælfric that
he was working up? Godden has effectively opened up a field of study
where the idea of authorship offers a new avenue for the literary study of
Anglo- Saxon England.
While imponderables will remain, one can take something of a post-
modern step and observe that we do have texts at hand, wherever the
authors might be. Among the texts Godden cites, two of these present
an excellent example of a palimpsest relation: they are Ælfric, De Falsis
Diis (Pope 21), and Wulfstan, De Falsis Dies (Bethurum XII).38 Ælfric
produces a lengthy text of some 676 lines (as per Pope), nearly all of it
in Ælfric’s distinctive rhythmical prose, with lines 72–161 serving as the
equivalent of Bethurum XII. Pope distinguishes two parts of the homily
 OLD ENGLISH HOMILETIC COMPOSITION 89

on the basis of source work, viz., 1–209, which develop the themes, and
210–676, which offer exemplary stories from the Bible or from Christian
literature.39 When Wulfstan saw Ælfric’s work before him, he saw
a text well beyond his apparently preferred brief length. Only four of
Bethurum’s homilies meet or exceed two hundred lines (Bethurum, VI,
Xc, XI, XX (E I)). If not in actuality, then in analogy, Wulfstan must
have drawn lines around his copy to excise segments of the text (or alter-
natively, perhaps, to retain them). Ælfric offers to Wulfstan something of
a treasure house of sources for the archbishop’s selection. But Wulfstan
does more, as Bethurum describes it. He rewrites the section he does take
from Ælfric in his own style, changing the rhythms, adding intensitives
and tautological compounds.40 Bethurum observes that both works seem
“rather more a piece of learning than a tract addressed to a current evil. It
is cool and unimpassioned compared with Wulfstan’s frequent denuncia-
tions of Germanic pagan practices . . . .”41 In this respect Wulfstan mirrors
the tone of Ælfric’s work and its dispassionate treatment of any pagan
threat to belief, which Pope describes as an “academic distance” from a
paganism treated with “contemptuous dismissal.”42 Ælfric is the lower
text from which Wulfstan fashions his upper layer. The palimpsest pro-
cess exists not so much on the erased or washed pages, but rather in the
abstract reaches of Wulfstan’s principles of composition.
This abbreviated overview of the palimpsestical relations of Wulfstan
and Ælfric brings this essay to the doorstep of contemporary theory,
and specifically the work of Gérard Genette’s rich and speculative
treatment of the possibilities of palimpsest.43 Genette seeks to describe
transtextual relationships and how a later text recalls an earlier text. As
Gerald Prince says in the foreword to Palimpsests, “[A]ny writing is a
rewriting.”44 The archetypal trinity of texts is the Iliad, the Aeneid, and
Joyce’s Ulysses: Homer is the hypotext and Vergil and Joyce two different
hypertexts. This fundamental relation plays itself out in several different
forms over the body of literature: e.g., parody, travesty, caricature, forg-
ery, pastiche. Genette includes various sorts of word games in his rather
breathless sweep. Perhaps parody might find its way into Old English (cf.
Genette’s remarks on formulaic poetry) and the play of the Riddles, but
the broad distinction of hypotext and hypertext functions in Old English
prose where Napier XXX is a pastiche—as Genette would have it—and
the forms of rewriting in Ælfric and Wulfstan combine as well with
Wulfstan’s rewriting of Ælfric to mirror many aspects of Genette’s over-
all argument. At least for now, the more playful elements that fascinate
Genette—e.g., parody, caricature, mock epic, among many others—do
not come into play in the prose literature under consideration here, but
ideas such as translation, excision, concision, and condensation do. By
90 PAU L E . S Z A R M AC H

beginning with a close look at writers and their practices, I have sought to
ground my argument in hard, empirical evidence to give the theoretical
possibilities substance and potential. Denholm-Young says that the lack of
palimpsests in England is a function of the abundance of sheep-breeding,
which meant no shortage of writing material.45 The suggestion here is
that palimpsests are as abundant as sheep: one must know where to look
for them and how.

Notes
I would like to thank Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe for her criticisms of a draft
of this essay and Richard Tarrant for several suggestions.
1. John Leyerle, “The Interlace Structure of Beowulf,” University of Toronto
Quarterly 37 (1967): 1–17.
2. Morton W. Bloomfield, “ ‘Interlace’ as a Medieval Narrative Technique
with Special Reference to ‘Beowulf,’ ” in Magister Regis: Studies in Honor
of Robert Earl Kaske, ed. Arthur Groos with Emerson Brown, Jr., Thomas
D. Hill, Giuseppe Mazzota, and Joseph S. Wittig (New York: Fordham
University Press, 1986), pp. 49–59. But see Peter R. Schroeder, “Stylistic
Analogies Between Old English Art and Poetry,” Viator 5 (1974): 185
[185–97], who observes that “a brief consideration of some stylistic analo-
gies between Old English art and poetry will suggest that the hypothesis
is not wholly scornworthy, and that a certain light can be thrown on the
nature and stylistic premises of Old English poetry by an examination of
the contemporaneous art.”
3. Leslie Whitbread, “Wulfstan Homilies XXIX, XXX, and Some Related
Texts,” Anglia 81 (1963): 359.
4. E.A. Lowe, “Codices Rescripti: A List of the Oldest Latin Palimpsests with
Stray Observations on Their Origin,” Palaeographical Papers 1907–1965,
ed. Ludwig Bieler, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 480–519.
Lowe, p. 480, observes that Émile Chatelain gave the first account of
palimpsests in the Annuaire of the École Pratique (1904; publ. 1903). Lowe’s
list comes off the Codices Latini Antiquissimi program, where the “lower
script” antedates the ninth century. I am following Lowe, pp. 481–84, in
this paragraph. See now Georges Declercq, ed. Early Medieval Palimpsests,
Bibliologia 26 (2007), with special reference to Beneventan script and
research aided by digital technology. The promising collection Signs
on the Edge: Space, Text, and Margin in Medieval Manuscripts, ed. Sarah
Larratt Keefer and Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr. (Paris and Leuven: Peeters,
2007), came into my hands too late for mention in these pages. Andrew
Prescott takes an extended view of what a palimpsest is in “What’s in
a Number? The Physical Organization of the Manuscript Collections
of the British Library,” in Beatus Vir, ed. A.N. Doane and Kirsten Wolf,
MRTS 319 (Tempe: ACMRS, 2006), pp. 471–525. For further discussion
 OLD ENGLISH HOMILETIC COMPOSITION 91

of palimpsests with special reference to the Latin tradition, see the essay
in this volume by Adrian Papahagi.
5. In Lowe’s list, these are:
Karlsruhe, Landesbibliothek Aug. CLXVII (Irish), Bede, De
Temporum Ratione
Milan, Ambrosiana M. 12 sup., Beda, De Temporum Ratione
Oxford, Bodleian, Auctarium F.III.15 [=cat. 3511], Beda,
“Computus”
6. See also André Wilmart, Codices Reginenses Latini, vol. 2 (Vatican Library,
1937), pp. 710–19, for a full description of contents. For a photo of fol.
170v, see my note, “Vatican Library, Ms. Reg. Lat. 497, fol. 71v,” OEN
15.1 (1981): 34–35, and for a sharper photograph and transcript of the text,
see Janet M. Bately, “The Vatican Fragment of the Old English Orosius,”
English Studies 45 (1964): 224–30, where the photograph is between 224
and 225.
7. N. Denholm-Young, Handwriting in England and Wales (Cardiff: University
of Wales Press, 1954), p. 58 n. 4, clearly following O.B. Schlutter, who
edited Faksimile und Transliteration des Épinaler Glossars, Bibliothek der
Angelsäschsichen Prosa 8 (1912), p. iv, says that the Épinal Glossary is
a palimpsest, a claim denied by Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing
Anglo-Saxon (1957; reissued with suppl. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990),
p. 152.
8. Kevin Kiernan, Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript, rev. ed. with foreword
by Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (1981; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1996). The frontispiece is a color facsimile of fol. 179r, while the
cover on the paperback edition offers a color facsimile of fol. 179v.
9. In the 1996 revision of his 1981 book, Kiernan responds to his critics,
pp. xv–xxviii. O’Brien O’Keeffe, p. xiii, concludes her foreword [ix-
xiii]: “[W]hat cannot be doubted is the impact this book has had on
Beowulf studies. Quite simply, it is impossible to engage Beowulf seriously
without engaging the arguments Kiernan sets forth in this book.”
10. The Walters Art Gallery, having accepted the task of restoring the manu-
script, offers a very helpful website at http://www.archimedespalimpsest.
org.
11. See Barbara A. Shailor, The Medieval Book (New Haven: Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, 1988), pp. 9–10, with
photo under ultraviolet at p. 10. The most available edition is now found
in Medieval Academy Reprints in Teaching 28 (1991; repr. Toronto and
Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1994).
12. Leslie Brubaker, “Palimpsest,” in Dictionary of the Middle Ages, vol. 9 (New
York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1987), p. 355.
13. Richard Galpin, “Erasure in Art: Destruction, Deconstruction, and
Palimpsest” [February 1998], now moved to http://www.richardgalpin.
co.uk/archive/erasure.htm.
14. I am summarizing the anecdote from Galpin’s introduction, 1–2.
92 PAU L E . S Z A R M AC H

15. The facsimile edition is Ælfric’s First Series of Catholic Homilies, ed. Norman
Eliason and Peter Clemoes, EEMF 13 (1966). The Catholic Homilies appear
now in three volumes: Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The First Series, ed. Peter
Clemoes, EETS s.s. 17 (1997); Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The Second Series,
Text, ed. Malcolm Godden, EETS s.s. 5 (1979); Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies:
Introduction, Commentary, and Glossary, ed. Malcolm Godden, EETS s.s. 18
(2000).
16. Ælfric’s First Series, ed. Eliason and Clemoes, p. 19.
17. Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, ed. Clemoes, pp. 64–6, concisely provides the
larger picture: some thousand alterations around the composition stage
and another hundred or so produce readings not found in any other copy.
The Royal manuscript, as Clemoes’s stemma on p. 137 suggests, has no
extant descendants. Clemoes, 65v n. 1, indicates that he was responsible
for pp. 28–35 of the introduction to the facsimile.
18. Ælfric’s First Series, ed. Eliason and Clemoes, p. 19 n. 8, gives a list of likely
interventions.
19. The excised passage is available in Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, ed. Clemoes,
in Appendix A.1, p. 531, with discussion of the marginal note at p. 65.
20. Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, ed. Clemoes, p. 65.
21. Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, ed. Clemoes, p. 65.
22. N.R. Ker, “The Handwriting of Archbishop Wulfstan,” in England Before
the Conquest: Studies in Primary Sources Presented to Dorothy Whitelock, ed.
Peter Clemoes and Kathleen Hughes (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1971), pp. 315–31. Wulfstan, The Copenhagen Wulfstan Collection, ed.
James E. Cross and Jennifer Morrish Tunberg, EEMF 25 (Copenhagen:
Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1993), pp. 44–49, where Morrish Tunberg
reviews Ker’s work in the context of subsequent criticism and sides with
him on the major points concerning Wulfstan and his interventions.
23. Ker, “The Handwriting of Archbishop Wulfstan,” p. 319. Ker has no
particular interest in recording simple errors.
24. Ker, “The Handwriting of Archbishop Wulfstan,” pp. 321–22.
25. A Wulfstan Manuscript Containing Institutes, Laws, and Homilies, ed.
H.R. Loyn, EEMF 17 (1971).
26. The word is Morrish Tunberg’s, p. 45. The Latin poem, as printed by Ker,
“The Handwriting of Archbishop Wulfstan,” pp. 326–27, from Cotton
Vespasian A.XIV:
Qui legis hunc titulum domino da uota tonanti.
Archipontifice pro uulfstano uenerando;
Floret in hoc opere pia mentio presulus archi.
Wlfstani cui det dominus pia regna polorum.
‘Et sibi commissos tueatur ab hosti maligno;’
Pontificis bonitas manet hic memoranda ierarchi.
Wlfstani supero qui sit conscriptus in albo;
Est laus uulfstano mea pulchritudo benigno.
Pontifici cui sit dominus sine fine serenus;
 OLD ENGLISH HOMILETIC COMPOSITION 93

Comere me comiter iussit ita presulis archi

Wlfstani pietas data sit cui arce corona.
Presule uulfstano hoc opus est censente paratum.
Pollice quod docto inpressit subtilis aliptes.
Ker notes that the margin is cut and that the fifth line is an addition
perhaps by Wulfstan. Morrish Tunberg, with help from Terence Owen
Tunberg, offers this translation, p. 45:
You who read this text, give prayers to God the Thunderer
On behalf of the revered Archbishop Wulfstan.
In this work there f lourishes a sacred reminder of the Archbishop,
Of Wulfstan, to whom may God grant the holy realms of heaven,
And may He protect those entrusted to Him from the harmful
enemy.
Here there remains to be remembered the goodness of the
Archbishop,
Of Wulfstan; may he be inscribed in Heaven’s Book of Life.
My beauty is praise for kind Wulfstan,
To which Archbishop may God be benevolent forever.
And so, the dutifulness of Archbishop Wulfstan has graciously given
the orders to fashion me;
May he be given a crown in heaven.
At the behest of Wulfstan the Archbishop, this work was prepared,
Which the clever scribe set down with his learned fingers.
27. In Wulfstan, The Copenhagen Wulfstan, ed. Cross and Morrish Tunberg,
Morrish Tunberg summarizes the controversies, pp. 45–47.
28. Wulfstan, The Homilies of Wulfstan, ed. Dorothy Bethurum (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1957), pp. 22–24, for the stemma and discussion;
pp. 255–75 for the edited texts.
29. Wulfstan, The Homilies of Wulfstan, ed. Bethurum, pp. 22–24.
30. Wulfstan, The Homilies of Wulfstan, ed. Bethurum, p. 23.
31. In addition to Bethurum, one may cite Wulfstan: Sammlung der ihm zug-
eschriebenen Homilien nebst Untersuchungen über ihre Echtheit, ed. Arthur S.
Napier (Berlin, 1883); Karl Jost, ed., Wulfstanstudien, Schweizer Anglistische
Arbeiten (Bern: A. Francke, 1950); Wulfstan, Sermo Lupi, ed. Dorothy
Whitelock (London: Methuen, 1939), in many reprints.
32. Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana IV.29 (62), ed. Joseph Martin, CCSL 32
(Turnhout: Brepols, 1962), pp. 165–66: “Sunt sane quidam, qui bene pro-
nuntiare possunt, quid autem pronuntient, excogitare non possunt. Quod
si ab aliis, sumant eloquenter sapienterque conscriptum memoriaeque
commendent atque ad populum proferant, si eam personam gerunt, non
improbe faciunt.” D.W. Robertson, On Christian Doctrine (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1958) offers this translation: “There are
some who can speak well but who cannot think of anything to say. If
they take something eloquently and wisely written by others, memorize
it, and offer it to the people in the person of the author, they do not do
94 PAU L E . S Z A R M AC H

wickedly” (pp. 166–67). R.P.H. Green, On Christian Teaching (Oxford:

OUP, 1999), translates the ending differently: “[A]nd then bring that to
their audience, they are not doing anything wrong, provided that they
adhere to this role” (p. 144).
33. Donald G. Scragg, “Napier’s ‘Wulfstan’ Homily XXX: Its Sources, Its
Relationship to the Vercelli Book, and Its Style,” ASE 6 (1977): 197
[197–211].
34. Scragg, “Napier’s ‘Wulfstan’ Homily,” p. 198.
35. Scragg, “Napier’s ‘Wulfstan’ Homily,” p. 198.
36. For my discussion of Vercelli X, see “Vercelli Homilies: Style and
Structure,” in The Old English Homily and Its Backgrounds, ed. Paul E.
Szarmach and Bernard F. Huppé (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1978), pp. 244–48.
37. Malcolm Godden, “The Relations of Wulfstan and Ælfric: a Reassessment,”
in Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, ed. Matthew Townend, Studies in the Early
Middle Ages 10 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), pp. 353–74. Godden also
detects Wulfstan’s restless habit of composition: “His constant tinkering
with his own work suggests a man obsessive about the best formulation
but incapable of satisfying himself ” (p. 372). In the same collection Eric
Stanley focuses on “Wulfstan and Ælfric: ‘The True Difference between
the Law and the Gospel,’ ” pp. 429–41.
38. Ælfric, Homilies of Ælfric: A Supplementary Collection, ed. John C. Pope,
EETS o.s. 260 (1968), vol. 2, pp. 667–724; Wulfstan, The Homilies of
Wulfstan, ed. Bethurum, pp. 222–24, with notes at pp. 333–39. Pope gives
a detailed discussion of the eight manuscripts (including the Wulfstan
“revision”).
39. Ælfric, Homilies of Ælfric, ed. Pope, pp. 670–71.
40. Wulfstan, The Homilies of Wulfstan, ed. Bethurum, p. 333 with further
details on pp. 32–33.
41. Wulfstan, The Homilies of Wulfstan, ed. Bethurum, p. 334.
42. Ælfric, Homilies of Ælfric, ed. Pope, pp. 668–69.
43. Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa
Newman and Claude Doubinsky; foreword by Gerald Prince (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1997).
44. Prince, “Foreword,” in Genette, Palimpsests, p. x [ix–xi].
45. Denholm-Young, Handwriting in England and Wales, p. 58.
CHAPTER 5

“IC BEDA” . . . “CWÆÐ BEDA”: REINSCRIBING BEDE

IN THE OLD ENGLISH HISTORIA ECCLESIASTICA
GENTIS ANGLORUM

Sharon M. Rowley

This essay examines literal and metaphorical palimpsests in the OEHE, empha-
sizing the strategies through which Bede’s translators represent Bede’s voice in direct
and indirect discourse.1

A ndré Crépin begins his essay “Bede and the Vernacular” by remind-
ing his audience not only that Bede reputedly died while dictating
an English translation, but also that none of Bede’s own translations sur-
vive.2 Crépin ponders whether Bede’s Latin could possibly tell us any-
thing about his English. Playing what he calls a “donnish parlour game,”
Crépin attempts to reconstruct the “lost sagas woven into the Latin text
of the Ecclesiastical History” by framing Bede’s famous account of imperium-
wielding kings from Book 2, chapter 5, in the style of Widsith and
Beowulf.3 Although Crépin makes light of this antiquarian ventriloquism
as he settles down to a serious discussion of Bede’s analyses of Old English
place names and Cædmon’s Hymn, he has made an astonishing sugges-
tion: Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica (HE)4 itself can be read as a palimpsest.
Through these playful reinscriptions, Crépin reminds us that Bede’s own
layers of authoritative Latin prose not only reshape Pliny, Solinus, Gildas,
and Orosius for new audiences, but they also recast the oral accounts that
he had heard, probably in English, from some of his informants.5
Although little of the vernacular finds its way into Bede’s HE, oral
traces, including the ones at play around and behind Cædmon’s Hymn,
96 S H A RON M . ROW L E Y

appear throughout the text, though they often go unnoticed as such.

We can almost hear Bede’s voice or those of his sources, along with the
voices he reconstructs for characters like Wilfrid at the Synod of Whitby.
“I myself knew a brother,” Bede tells us, or “a priest and abbot of the
monastery of Partney, named Deda, a most truthful man, told me this”
(HE 5.14, pp. 502–3, and 2.16, pp. 192–3). These clauses do more than
report sources and form the basis of Bede’s authority; they generate a
sense of immediacy of the narratorial persona that is both inscribed in
and belied by language. Reading these oral traces as palimpsests reveals
the fundamental way in which history always already reinscribes and
translates the past. This, in turn, allows a reconsideration of the layers of
authority involved in the reporting of history in the anonymous tenth-
century English version that adapts and transmits Bede’s great work to
vernacular audiences.
The Old English version of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica (OEHE)6 con-
tains both literal and metaphorical palimpsests: folio 115r of Oxford,
Bodleian Library MS Tanner 10 (T) is a palimpsest,7 and hundreds of
words and phrases in Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS 279, part ii (O)
contain layers of writing over erasures.8 These literal palimpsests ref lect
the eventful material history of the OEHE; they afford us a glimpse of
the processes through which the text survived and was adapted by scribes
and translators.9 They are less easily separated than one might imagine
from the reading of the OEHE as a metaphorical act of reinscription.
After outlining the background of and differences between the OEHE
and its Latin source, this essay looks closely at these literal and metaphori-
cal palimpsests, with an emphasis on the strategies through which Bede’s
Old English translators represent Bede’s own voice in direct and indirect
discourse. Considering the impact of translation on a historical text, the
palimpsest not only presents a tertium quid to the binary of the “word for
word” versus “sense by sense” paradox of translation, but also provides a
new way of thinking about the interface between the oral and the writ-
ten, the author and the translator.
The OEHE was translated anonymously sometime between 883
and 930.10 It survives in five substantial manuscripts and three short
excerpts. In addition to T and O, the two manuscripts referenced above,
these are:

London, British Library, Cotton MS Domitian A.IX (Zu), fol. 11 (three

excerpts),11 c.890 x c.930 / s. ix ex. (after 883) or x in.
London, British Library, Cotton MS Otho B.XI (C),12 s. x med.–s. xi1
Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 41 (B),13 s. xi1
Cambridge, University Library, MS Kk.3.18 (Ca),14 s. xi2
 “ I C B E D A” . . . “ C W Æ Ð B E D A” 97

With two exceptions, the origins of and relationships between the

manuscripts of the OEHE are unknown.15 Manuscript C was copied in
Winchester; Ca is a direct copy of O made by the scribe Hemming in
Worcester (c.1062–95). Otherwise, as J.J. Campbell succinctly puts it, “the
MSS . . . differ greatly among themselves in orthography and vocabulary,
and none of them is a direct copy of the archetype.”16 The manuscript
evidence suggests that the OEHE circulated in several additional manu-
scripts and was widely available in later Anglo- Saxon England.
The differences between the OEHE and its Latin source have been
underestimated by scholars, a point to which I will return. To summarize
the larger differences: the OEHE reduces the overall length of its Latin
source by about a third. It shortens Bede’s descriptions of England and
Ireland, and omits most of the Roman history and selected details of the
Easter controversy. The OEHE entirely eliminates the Pelagian heresy
and Bede’s detailed account of St. Germanus’s battle against it. It also
cuts or summarizes all of the papal correspondence, moves Gregory the
Great’s Libellus Responsionum from Book I to the end of Book 3, rear-
ranges many chapter breaks, and deletes Bede’s excerpts from Adomnán’s
Book of Holy Places.17
The origins of the translation and identity of the translators remain
unknown. Ælfric of Eynsham attributed the Old English translation to
King Alfred; however, no documentary evidence connecting the text
to the king or his program survives.18 Because of the Mercian dialect of
the text, scholars have long agreed the king did not make the translation
himself.19 Whether he commissioned it cannot be proven. While the cir-
cumstances in which the translation was made remain unclear, Thomas
Miller presented clear philological evidence that more than one translator
worked on the OEHE as we have it in his 1890–8 edition. Miller discusses
Book 3, chapters 16–20, of the OEHE in detail because he posits his
stemma on the divergence of this section—and it is here that the evidence
begins to suggest a close material connection between text, translation,
and palimpsest.20 Miller suggests that this section went missing, and was
partially restored by one or two additional “editors.” Miller favored the
notion of two “editors,” one for each of his theoretical branches (T and
B from hypothetical [Y]; C, O, Ca from hypothetical [Z]).21 In 1930,
Simeon Potter argued that one scribe discovered a section was missing,
retranslated it, and inserted the text into his copy.22 Campbell took up
the question again in 1952. He agreed with Potter that there was only one
additional translator, strengthening the case on the basis of developments
in our knowledge of Anglian vocabulary. Whitelock concurred, so the
consensus since 1962 has been that the original translation of this section
survives in the T and B texts, while someone else restored a section (plus
98 S H A RON M . ROW L E Y

an extra passage about Aidan) to the exemplar for the three other surviv-
ing manuscripts.23
Although we have no evidence revealing precisely how this replace-
ment occurred, the process must have been akin to the circumstances
that led to the palimpsest in T, fol. 115r. From fol. 105 to fol. 114, a mid-
tenth- century scribe (Ker’s Scribe iii) replaced a section, presumably to
restore a gap. After copying the section, the scribe erased and rewrote the
text of fol. 115r, as Richard Gameson puts it, “to smooth the transition
between the end of the section which he had added and the pre- existing
beginning of Book V.”24 Although this palimpsest obscures the text
below it, it actually reinscribes that same text. The act of replacing the
missing section in Tanner 10, as well as the section of Book 3 from a now
lost manuscript, demonstrates not only that the OEHE was considered
important enough to repair in two different settings, but also that Scribe
iii of Tanner 10 had access to another copy of the OEHE. In contrast,
the “editor” who restored Book 3, chapters 16–18, to a manuscript that is
now lost had access to a copy of the Latin, and had to translate the miss-
ing passages anew. Fascinatingly, Ca marks this variant section in Book 3
with what appear to be original rubricated annotations. The first, which
is written in the blank space at the end of the preceding chapter (fol.
39v/27), reads: “EFT oðer cw(ide) ·” [then the other passage]. The second is
written in the blank space at the end of the inserted passage (fol. 40v/29)
and reads “7 eft oðer cwide ·” [and afterward the other passage]. These are
significant additions to the exemplar, the O text, which contains no such
annotations. They suggest that Hemming (or his rubricator) had access
to another OEHE manuscript, like T or B. Although Hemming does
not appear to have corrected the rest of his manuscript against the other,
these reinscriptions and annotations provide clues as to the availability
and importance of the OEHE in Anglo- Saxon England.
Although Hemming (or his rubricator) marks out the fact that an
“oðer” passage intrudes in Book 3, he silently incorporates the text of the
many palimpsests in its exemplar. Manuscript O contains an estimated
two thousand five hundred alterations, in three or more hands. Most of
the alterations seem to be contemporary with the copying; some are in the
red ink of the rubricator. Miller concluded that in O, the southern scribes
copying the manuscript were correcting their Anglian exemplar. 25 Many
of the alterations involve words, phrases, or clauses written over erasures,
or inserted between lines and in margins. Others fall on individual let-
ters of all sorts: stressed and unstressed vowels, consonants, consonant
clusters, or combinations of vowels and consonants. Finally, there are
numerous instances where something has simply been erased. Although
Miller’s suggestion is plausible, in many cases of erasure the lower text
 “ I C B E D A” . . . “ C W Æ Ð B E D A” 99

cannot be recovered to ascertain whether the alterations follow a clear

pattern of modernization. A full analysis of these alterations and palimp-
sests is beyond the scope of the present essay. I mention them because they
show how one group of scribes adapted and corrected their text. They
also allow us to see how palimpsests can be entirely absorbed into the
authoritative text in the process of textual transmission. Because O sur-
vived, we can see from whence many of the readings in Ca derive. Why
Hemming (or his rubricator) chose to mark the variant passage in Book 3
but to incorporate the many alterations to his base text silently remains
unknown. The evidence of these interventions, however, reminds us of
the many textual layers contributing to the OEHE.
The OEHE as we have it, then, is the work of several voices and
hands, though the history of each contribution cannot be traced. For
instance, although Miller seems to have been wrong about the number of
translators involved in Book 3, a third translator did work on the OEHE.
Whitelock confirms that someone other than the main translator worked
on the lists of chapter headings. Based on the similar vocabulary, but
inferior handling of the Latin, she suggests that this translator was a stu-
dent or colleague of the main translator, but we cannot be certain.26 So,
while there clearly is one principal translator, any conclusions about the
question of the translation of the OEHE must always involve an aware-
ness that the text as we know it results from the activity of several transla-
tors, as well as multiple scribes and editors.
Despite this multiplicity, however, the editing is accurate and consis-
tent throughout what remains a long text. When the main translator cuts
a reference to a person or an event, there are no straggling references to
that person or event later in the text.27 One possible inconsistency in the
abridgement is in the section of Book 3 where the third translator sup-
plied the missing section. The restoration includes a highly emotional
instance of Bede’s first person singular direct address about Bishop Aidan,
which the main translator had eliminated. This is just a small reminder of
the way in which the question of how many people were working on the
OEHE complicates the larger discussion.
The complicated material history of the OEHE serves as a reminder of
the ways in which time, chance, and human intervention mediate history;
the accidence of survival shapes our understanding of medieval textual-
ity. Erasure and reinscription join the punctus, the space between words,
and marginalia in a visual economy that paleographers are still learning
to interpret.28 Reading the OEHE as palimpsest highlights the problem
of seeing versus “seeing as”—or between reading and “reading as.”29 The
OEHE has historically been read as secondary, inferior to Bede’s Latin
original and treated as a problematically literal translation. In Dorothy
100 S H A RON M . ROW L E Y

Whitelock’s assessment, the translation “supports Alfred’s complaints of

the decline of scholarship.”30 She suggests that the main translator “fails
to appreciate the value of sources,” concluding that Bede’s nearly mod-
ern handling of evidence “lay outside the conception of his translator.”31
Some sections, however, have been lauded as poetic.32 Furthermore,
H.R. Loyn has demonstrated that Bede’s Old English translator supplies
more historically accurate terms where Bede uses dux.33 But the fact that
the OEHE is not the HE continues to assert itself: although Raymond
St. Jacques argues that the translator is a master of prose narrative whose
“fidelity, respect, and love for his Latin source are everywhere apparent,”
he concludes that the translator’s vision of history betrays Bede’s.34
Such varied evaluations hinge on the (not unreasonable) assumption
that a translation should be transparent, that is, “true” to either the word
or spirit of its source. Problematically, the OEHE seems to be both or
neither. Because the abridgement is painstakingly accurate overall, asser-
tions that the main translator may not have understood Bede’s vision of
history are troubling—especially given the clear evidence of his accurate,
culturally specific command of Latin.35 It seems to me, moreover, that it
is precisely his clear understanding of Bede’s historiography that informs
his method of abridgment, especially in Books 1 and 5, where he essen-
tially dismantles the imagery that makes the HE a classic of salvation
history.
I believe that the problem of the truth value of historical writing,
along with the question of the task of the translator, lay at the heart of the
contradictory assessments of the OEHE as a translation.36 The scholars
who have come to mixed conclusions have been working within tradi-
tional linguistic, rhetorical, and formal frameworks. Each provides valu-
able insight into the OEHE, yet each comes to a slightly contradictory
set of assertions about the translator’s skills and knowledge. These con-
tradictions are reminiscent of the charges leveled at Bede himself prior to
the practice of cultural studies: Bede was, at one time, both praised for
his nearly modern sense of historical evidence, and roundly condemned
for his inclusion of miracles in the HE. Scholarly awareness of Bede’s
cultural, historiographical, and ecclesiastical milieu, however, has gone a
long way toward fostering a more nuanced understanding of that text.
Theoretical awareness of the ways in which histories operate as nar-
ratives in language, in conjunction with the consciousness that language
is embedded in and ref lective of culture, has allowed Bede scholarship
to move away from the superficial dichotomy of truth versus fiction. An
analysis of the instances in which the translators render the narrator’s
use of direct address either in the first person singular or as free indirect
discourse lays the groundwork for an exploration of several markedly
 “ I C B E D A” . . . “ C W Æ Ð B E D A” 101

self-conscious instances of translation, those that echo authority and

the oral traces behind the text of Bede’s narratorial voice. Furthermore,
because these assessments also tend to invoke the critical dichotomy of
the “sense for sense” versus “word for word” paradox of translation the-
ory, reading history and translation as palimpsests reframes the question
of the skills and knowledge of the translators of the OEHE productively,
in terms of layers of reinscription that revise and represent Bede’s HE
for tenth-century vernacular audiences, just as Bede himself revised and
represented what Crépin called the “lost sagas” behind his own text for
Latin audiences.
While St. Jacques’s title makes clear reference to the formulation of the
translation paradox, “hwilum word be worde hwilum andgit of andgi-
ete,” in the prose preface to King Alfred’s translation of Gregory’s Pastoral
Care, St. Jacques never directly addresses Alfred’s idiosyncratic phrasing,
nor the paradox itself as such. In fact, none of the critics of the OEHE that
I have mentioned do, though it obviously contributes to the organization
of their assessments. In this context, one of the most striking excisions
from the OEHE is Bede’s own phrasing of the paradox in the Cædmon
episode: “Hic est sensus non autem ordo ipse uerborum, quae dormiens ille cane-
bat; neque enim possunt carmina, quamuis optime conposita, ex alia in aliam
linguam ad uerbum sine detrimento sui decoris ac dignitatis transferri” [“This is
the sense but not the order of the words which he sang as he slept. For it is
not possible to translate verse, however well composed, literally from one
language to another without damage to sound and sense”].37 Bede tailors
his statement of the sense/word dilemma to support his decision to para-
phrase rather than translate Cædmon’s Hymn here. In contrast, Alfred’s
phrasing, which translates roughly to “sometimes word for word, some-
times sense for sense,” is, as Robert Stanton points out, a “waff ling com-
bination of the two terms.”38 Alfred’s use of this phrasing demonstrates
awareness of the formula in a form closer to the classical formulation than
Bede’s in later Anglo-Saxon England.39 Although Alfred claims that he
learned this method from his teachers, Stanton speculates that Alfred’s
usage ultimately derives from Jerome’s preface to the Vulgate or the writ-
ings of Gregory the Great, which suggests multiple possible avenues of
transmission into later Anglo-Saxon England.40
As Rita Copeland has demonstrated, Jerome and the others who
helped transmit this formula into the Middle Ages were actively mis-
quoting and manipulating it, even as they theorized about the act of
translation in relation to sacred texts.41 If the ease with which Bede adapts
the sense/word phrasing to justify his own decisions as a translator is
any indication, and if Alfred’s formulation is what he was taught, then it
seems clear that the question of this paradox and of the task of translation
102 S H A RON M . ROW L E Y

itself was self- consciously in play in Anglo- Saxon England. Given the
transmission of sophisticated thought and learning about grammar and
rhetoric from late antiquity through the early Middle Ages and into
Anglo- Saxon England, as Copeland, Stanton, and Martin Irvine dem-
onstrate, the cultural and intellectual contexts of the OEHE—as difficult
at they are to reconstruct—suggest that there may be more going on in
the gap between the main translator’s acknowledged craft at the level of
the word, and the historical allegations of his incompetence at the level
of historical sense.42
In fact, the OEHE may have helped develop English as a literary lan-
guage. To translate Bede’s words accurately, the translators often had
to stretch the limits of the language and build new words, a habit for
which they have sometimes been criticized. Because the main trans-
lator patterned the words he built on Bede’s Latin vocabulary, Henry
Sweet described the language of the OEHE as unidiomatic, or even
“unnatural.”43 But, as Frederick Klaeber cautioned, “we must beware of
condemning these coinages indiscriminately as illegitimate. The neces-
sity of finding equivalents for certain Latin terms heavily taxed the inven-
tiveness of the Anglo- Saxon scholar.”44
The fact that the translators preferred to build new English words
using methods of compounding, prefixing, and suffixing that are native
to English as a language, rather than simply borrowing the words from
Latin, can be read as an innovative strategy of reinscription that pays
homage to Bede. Some examples drawn from the work of Gregory Waite
demonstrate word formation on a morpheme-morpheme basis. A few
examples of this are the formation of fore-wæs from prae-fuit [was before
or over], ut-amærde from exterminauit [banished], and under-þeodde from
subiugatis [subjugated].45 Sometimes, the OEHE translator even patterns
groups of words in ways parallel to Latin constructions, for example,
arfæst, ar-fæst-nes, ar-fæst-lice for pius, pietas, pie [pious, piety, piously] or
ge-flit, flitan, ge-flit-lice for certamen, certare, certatim [contest, to contend,
in competition]. Such examples show that the translator of the OEHE
was aware of and able to exploit parallelisms in methods of word forma-
tion between Old English and Latin. Such an ability may be construed
as ref lecting expertise in both languages. So, while some of the OEHE
vocabulary is often artificial and Latinate, “it is possible that certain
innovations in the [OEHE] and related works helped to establish norms
of usage subsequently in tenth-century ecclesiastical prose.”46
An examination of how the Old English translators treat Bede’s
narratorial persona reveals a series of strategies, including the use of
grammatically equivalent constructions, as well as a series of shifts,
which seem to depend on context in some cases, and on linguistic
 “ I C B E D A” . . . “ C W Æ Ð B E D A” 103

constraints in others. Their translation ref lects, as Clem Robyns puts

it, translation as a confrontation with “alien discourses,” as well as the
intrusion of alien discourses into the target language.47 Reading his-
tory as a palimpsest recasts the dynamics of confrontation and intru-
sion as reinscription rather than betrayal. Copeland’s emphasis on the
cultural aspects of vernacularity and her demonstration of the inter-
play between the acts of reading, interpretation, and translation in the
Middle Ages make it clear that Paul Ricoeur’s dialogic model of read-
ing can help us move beyond the sense/word dilemma in a way that
dovetails with the concept of the palimpsest as a renewal. According to
Ricoeur, “to read is, on any hypothesis, to conjoin a new discourse to
the discourse of the text. This conjunction of discourses reveals, in the
very constitution of the text, an original capacity for renewal, which
is its open character.”48
Translation is only the most marked example of negotiating cultural
and discursive difference in language—not only between languages, but
within language and over time. The difficult choices involved in translat-
ing Bede’s Latin into Old English manifest not only pressures related to
alien constructions, but also the ways in which language and sense can be
renewed to live beyond and into new contexts.
The choices that the Old English translators make in relation to Bede’s
own voice merit close attention. Bede deploys the first person singular
with great care; in some cases, his translators follow his Latin closely so
as to speak in Bede’s voice in English. As Fred Robinson has pointed out,
one of the scribes of CCCC 41 ventriloquized Bede by adding a verse in
the first person to the metrical envoi at the end of the B text.49 In many
cases, however, the Old English translators introduce phrases and clauses
that emphasize the fact of translation, converting direct discourse into
indirect discourse by adding phrases such as “Bede says.” The immediate
textual contexts for examining direct discourse in the OEHE are thick:
almost all of the papal correspondence that remains involves direct dis-
course. Furthermore, the majority of the miracle stories are narrated in
direct discourse, either by the person who experienced the miracle, or
by someone who knew the person who performed or benefited from the
miracle. The grammatical contexts are also varied and deep. Throughout
the Latin original and OEHE, there are examples of grammatically
equivalent translations: the translators successfully translate first person
singular constructions in Latin to first person singular constructions in
English. They also translate first person plural to first person plural, and
indirect constructions to equivalent indirect constructions. Bede relates
the bulk of his narrative in indirect discourse, using indirect construc-
tions and first person plural much more often than he uses first person
104 S H A RON M . ROW L E Y

singular; instances of the latter begin in Book 2 and increase as Bede

draws closer to his own time and acquaintances.
The translators were able to translate much of their text literally by
using or constructing parallel forms. There are very few instances where
Bede uses ego; nostrum is more common, and of course, the OEHE inserts
pronouns where the Latin shows inf lections. Bede himself often switches
between first person singular and plural. For example,

Quae mihi cuncta sic esse facta reuerentissimus meus conpresbyter Edgisl referebat
qui tunc in illo monasterio degebat. Postea autem, discedentibus inde ob desola-
tionem plurimis incolarum, in nostro monasterio plurimo tempore conuersatus
ibidemque defunctus est. Haec ideo nostrae historiae inserenda credidimus ut
admoneremmus lectorum operum Domini.
[It was my revered fellow priest Eadgisl, who then lived in the monastery,
who told me of these happenings. After most of the inhabitants had left
Coldingham because it was in ruins, he lived a long time in our monastery
and died here. It seemed desirable to include this story in our History so as
to warn the reader as to the workings of the Lord.] (HE 4.25, pp. 426–7)

The OEHE matches these shifts:

All þæs ðing me ðus gewurden se arwyrða min efenmæssepreost Eedgyls

sægde, se ða in ðam mynstre eardade 7 drohtode 7 eft in ussum mynstre
longe tide lifde 7 þær forðferde, æfter ðon monige ðara bigengena ðonon
gewitan for þære burge tolesnesse. Ðis spel we forðon setton in ure
béc þæt we men monede ðæt hio gesege Dryhtnes weorc.
[My venerable fellow priest Eadgyls, who at that time lived and dwelled
in that monastery, told me all these things (which) happened. And then he
lived a long time in our monastery, and there died, after that many of the
inhabitants left there because of the dissolution of the town. Therefore we
wrote this story in our book that we may warn men that it speaks the work
of the Lord.] (OEHE 4.25, pp. 356–7)50

The Old English translators introduce a variety of adaptations. For exam-

ple, they transform some passages in which Bede uses the first person
singular or impersonal constructions into passages with first person plural
constructions. For example, the OEHE reads, “Sculon we áne cyðnesse
his mægenes secgan, þæt we his oðer mægen þy eað ongytan magon”
[we shall give one proof of his miraculous power, that we may the more
readily comprehend his other miracles] (OEHE 2.7, p. 118), for Denique
ut unum uirtutis eius, unde cetera intellegi possint, testimonium referam [I will
relate, for example, one instance of his power from which the rest may
be inferred] (HE 2.7, p. 156). It also renders Bede’s Nec ab re est unum
 “ I C B E D A” . . . “ C W Æ Ð B E D A” 105

e pluribus, quae ad hanc crucem patrata sunt, uirtutis miraculum narrare [It is not
irrelevant to narrate one of the many . . . ] (HE 3.2, p. 216) as “Nis forðon
ungerisne þæt we aan mægen 7 aan wundor of monegum asecgan” [It
is not improper, therefore, that we tell one miracle and one wonder of
many] (OEHE 3.2, p. 156).
The OEHE translates first person singular deponent verbs (Latin reor,
arbitror) using impersonal constructions and first person plural:

Inter quae nequaquam silentio praetereundum reor . . . [Among these stories I

think I ought not to pass over in silence . . . ] (HE 3.11, p. 244)
“Betweoh ðas ðing nis to forswigienne . . . ” [Among these things it is
not to pass over in silence . . . ] (OEHE 3.9, p. 182)
Sane nullatenus praetereundum arbitror miraculum sanitatis . . . [I think, how-
ever, that it would be far from fitting to pass over a miracle of healing . . . ]
(HE 4.10, p. 364)
“Þonne is sum wundor hælo, þe us nis to forlættenne . . . ” [Now there is
a wonder of healing, that is not for us to omit . . . ] (OEHE 4.13, p. 292)
Vbi silentio praetereundum non esse reor . . . [I think that I must not pass over
in silence . . . ] (HE 4.16/14, p. 382)
“Nis þonne no to forswigienne . . . ” [It is not, then, to pass over in
silence . . . ] (OEHE 4.18, pp. 308–9)51

There is also at least one instance where a third person subjunctive

becomes first person. Bede’s Quod utinam exhinc etiam nostrarum lectione lit-
terarum fiat! [And may the reading of this account of ours have the same
effect!] (HE 5.14, pp. 504–5) becomes “ic eac swylce wisce forð swa on
leornunge ura stafa” [I also wish henceforth the same on the reading of
our account] (OEHE 5.15, p. 444).52 (Notice also the switch to the first
person plural possessive in both.)
In several instances where Bede reports that he knew someone, or heard
a story directly, the translators choose to shift first person singular direct
discourse into free indirect discourse; that is, they include Bede’s first sin-
gular constructions, but add a third person phrase or clause to change the
syntax, switching from “he told me” to “Bede said, ‘He told me,’ ” or the
like. Surprisingly, none of these passages have to do with the famously
problematic subjects, such as the Easter Controversy, from which the trans-
lators might like to distance themselves. In fact, these interpolations occur
in stories about King Oswald and St. Fursey. For example, the OEHE
translates Bede’s De huius fide prouinciae narrauit mihi presbyter et abbas quidam
uir ueracissimus de monasterio Peartaneu, uocabulo Deda [a priest and abbot of
the monastery of Partney, named Deda, a most truthful man, told me this
106 S H A RON M . ROW L E Y

regarding the faith of the kingdom] (HE 2.16, pp. 192–3) with “Bi þisse
mægðe geleafan, cwæð he Beda, me sægde sum arwyrðe mæssepreost
7 abbud of Peortanea þæm ham, se wæs Deda haten” [With regard to the
faith of this people, said he, Bede, a venerable priest, abbot of the house of
Parteney, called Deda, spoke to me] (OEHE 2.13, pp. 144–5).
There are several examples of this strategy; two more should suffice
to demonstrate:

Quod ita esse gestum, qui referebat mihi frater inde adueniens adiecit, quod eo adhuc
tempore quo mecum loquebatur, superesset in eo monasterio iam iuuenis ille, in quo
tunc puero factum erat hoc miraculum sanitatis.
[The brother who told me of the incident and had come from the monas-
tery added that, at the time he was speaking to me, the boy to whom the
miracle happened was still at the monastery.] (HE 3.12, pp. 250–1)
Cwom sum broðor þonon, cwæð Beda, þe me sægde þæt hit þus gedon
wære: 7 eac sægde, þe se ilca broðor þa gyt in þæm mynstre lifigende
wære, in þæm cneohtwesendum þis hælo wundor geworden wæs.
[A brother came from that place, said Bede, who told me that it happened
thus, and also said that the same brother was still alive in the monastery,
in which during his boyhood this miracle of healing occurred.] (OEHE
3.10, pp. 186–8)

And:

Superest adhuc frater quidam senior monasterii nostri, qui narrare solet dixisse sibi
quendam multum ueracem ac religiosum hominem, quod ipsum Furseum uiderit in
prouincia Orientalium Anglorum, illasque uisiones ex ipsius ore audierit.
[An aged brother is still living in our monastery who is wont to relate that
a most truthful and pious man told him that he had seen Fursa himself in
the kingdom of the East Angles and had heard these visions from his own
mouth.] (HE 3.19, pp. 274–5)
Is nu gena sum ald broðor lifiende usses mynstres, se me sægde, cwæð se
þe ðas booc wrat, þæt him sægde sum swiðe æfest monn 7 geþungen
þæt he ðone Furseum gesege in Eastengla mægðe, 7 þa his gesihðe æt his
seolfes muðe gehyrde.
[There is now still living in our monastery an old brother who told
me—said he who wrote this book—that a very devout and pious man told
him that he saw Furseus in the province of the East Angles, and heard his
visions from his own mouth.] (OEHE 3.14, pp. 216–7)53

It seems plausible to suggest that the living witness, or the claim that
someone told “me” something, inf luences the translators’ choice to
 “ I C B E D A” . . . “ C W Æ Ð B E D A” 107

convert direct discourse to indirect or free indirect discourse. But the

translators are not entirely consistent. There is at least one instance
where Bede says, Noui autem ipse fratrem, quem utinam non nossem [I myself
knew a brother, and I would that I had not known him] (HE 5.14, pp.
502–3), which is translated literally, “Ic seolfa cuðe sumne broðor ðone
ic wold ðæt ic næfre cuðe” (OEHE, 4.15, pp. 442–3).54 If the trans-
lators’ strategy had been to distance themselves from present- day or
problematic issues, this passage would have been a likely candidate for a
switch to indirect discourse. It is important to note that the translators
do not engage indirect discourse as a distancing strategy in every case
of a living witness.
Phrasings of time, especially concerning places where miracles occur
or witnesses survive “to this day” are translated “nu gen to dæg” through-
out the OEHE. Such statements also often include a change of syntax to
free indirect discourse: Quo defuncto, pontificatum pro eo suscepit Fortheri,
qui usque hodie superest [On his death Forthere, who is still living to this
day, became bishop in his place] (HE 5.18, pp. 514–5) becomes “Þa he
þa forðferde, þa onfeng fore hine þone bysceophad Forðere, se gen oð to
dæge, cwæð se writere, lifigende is” [When he died, then Forthere,
who up until today, said the writer, is living, took from him the bishop-
ric] (OEHE 5.16, p. 448).55 Another example is slightly more difficult:

Erat in eodem monasterio frater quidam, nomine Badudegn, tempore non pauco
hospitum ministerio deseruiens, qui nunc usque superest, testimonium habens ab
uniuersis fratribus, cunctisque superuenientibus hospitibus, quod uir esset mul-
tae pietatis ac religionis, iniunctoque sibi officio supernae tantum mercedis gratia
subditus.
[There was in the same monastery a brother named Baduthegn, who is still
alive and who for a long time had acted as guestmaster. It is the testimony
of all the brothers and the guests who visited there that he was a man of
great piety and devotion, who carried out his duties solely for the sake of
the heavenly reward.] (HE 4.29[31], pp. 444–5)
Wæs in ðæm ilcan mynstre sum broðor, ðæs noma wæs Beadoþegn, se
wæs lange tid cumena arðegen þara ðe þæt mynster sohton 7 cwæð he
ða gena lifgende wære þa he þis gewrit sette. Hæfde he gewitnesse 7
cyðnesse from eallum ðæm broðrum 7 from eallum þam cumendum þe
ðæt mynster sohton.
[There was in the same monastery a brother who was named Beadothegn,
who was for a long time attendant of the guests that sought the monastery.
And (Bede) said he was still living when he composed the account. He had
witness and testimony from all the brothers and from all the guests who
sought the monastery . . . ] (OEHE 4.32, p. 378)56
108 S H A RON M . ROW L E Y

Here we have a surviving witness and a singular nominative present par-

ticiple habens, parallel to deseruiens, which must refer back to Beadoþegn.
Colgrave and Mynors break Bede’s Latin into two Modern English sen-
tences, translating testimonium habens ab uniuersis fratribus . . . as “It is the
testimony of all the brothers . . . .” The Old English also breaks this pas-
sage into two sentences. Miller translates the passage: “And the histo-
rian said that the man was still alive when he composed the account.
He had witness and testimony . . . ” (OEHE 4.31, p. 379). It is quite pos-
sible that any attempt to translate Bede’s Latin here would be awkward,
but the Old English translation includes an ambiguous pronoun. Miller
inserts “the historian,” thereby creating a clear connection between Bede
as writer and as receiver of the testimony. Notably, this passage follows
closely upon a statement by Bede that he was including in the life of
Cuðbert new things he had heard. He made the claim in the first person
singular, which the Old English translates literally, “ac in ðissum stære
we sceoldon an toætecan, þe us gelamp þæt we neowan gehyrdon” [but
we were obliged to add one in this history of ours, which we happened
to hear lately] (OEHE 4.31, pp. 378–9). Consequently, the subsequent
interpolation of “cwæð he . . . þa he þis gewrit sette” into the Beadoþegn
material becomes as striking as it is awkward. If the main translator is
willing to ventriloquize Bede’s discussion of something he heard recently
a few lines above, why mark the transmission of the Beadoþegn story so
emphatically?
It may be that these choices are about marking difference after all, a
calling of attention to the act of reinscription, as such. The main transla-
tor does not switch the narrator’s voice to distance himself from difficult
subjects, nor do any of the translators seem uncomfortable about trans-
lating the voice of Bede’s historical narrator transparently and literally
most of the time. Sometimes grammatical constraints come into play,
and the Old English adapts to translate alien forms into English. The
shift to free indirect discourse is especially marked, and seems to relate to
stories involving surviving witnesses; it therefore also appears to manifest
awareness of both historical truth and historical difference. As Willi Paul
Adams points out, there is a responsibility among translators of history to
“explain change over time.”57 But that very authenticity requires that the
translation never “let readers forget that they are reading a translation.”
Some of the translators’ choices seem to do just that: the palimpsested HE
is visible through the Latinate forms and references to Bede in the Old
English upper text. As reinscription, the OEHE translates Bede’s Latin for
wider vernacular audiences and brings it forward into later Anglo-Saxon
England. It engages multiple strategies for representing Bede and what he
heard from others who were still living during his lifetime. In most cases,
 “ I C B E D A” . . . “ C W Æ Ð B E D A” 109

the OEHE mimics Bede in his use of varied persons and tenses across the
narrative of the HE; however, in some cases it calls attention to the fact
of translation. Doing so, it reiterates the importance of both the witnesses
and the oral stories. If these passages are no longer immediate to readers,
they were immediate to Bede. Because we have Bede’s Latin original
and five substantial manuscripts of the OEHE, we can trace the many
textual and material levels, including the erasures, transformations, and
echoes of voices just as we trace the survival and repair of text and codex.
The OEHE does not restore the lost sagas behind Bede’s HE; rather, it
becomes part of the eventful saga of the HE itself. It provides valuable
glimpses into the reception and interpretation of Bede’s great work in the
tenth century; at the same time it presents clear evidence of the ways in
which the palimpsest, too, can preserve and disappear.

Notes
1. A preliminary version of this essay was presented at the International
Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 2005.
2. André Crépin, “Bede and the Vernacular,” in Famulus Christi: Essays in
Commemoration of the Thirteenth Centenary of the Birth of the Venerable Bede,
ed. Gerald Bonner (London: SPCK, 1976), p. 170 [170–92].
3. Crépin, “Bede and the Vernacular,” pp. 174–75.
4. Bede, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans.
Bertram Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors (1969; repr. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1992). All quotations of the HE hereafter are taken from this
edition.
5. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 14 n.1: “The first
paragraph . . . is a mosaic of quotations from Pliny’s Natural History, Gildas’
Ruin of Britain, Solinus’ Polyhistor, and Orosius.”
6. Thomas Miller, ed. and trans. The Old English Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical
History of the English People, EETS, o.s., 95, 96, 110, 111 (1890–8; repr.
Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2003).
7. s. x1, Ker, Catalogue, no. 351; Gneuss, Handlist, no. 668. N.R. Ker,
Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo- Saxon. (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1957); Helmut Gneuss, Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: A List
of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England up to
1100, MRTS 241 (Tempe: ACMRS, 2001); see also Richard Gameson,
“The Decoration of the Tanner Bede,” ASE 21 (1992): 129 [115–59].
8. s. xi in., Ker, Catalogue, no. 354; Gneuss, Handlist, no. 673.
9. On the “eventful” nature of the HE, see Allen Frantzen, Desire for Origins
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990).
10. These dates ref lect the window determined by the earliest manuscript
evidence. David Dumville argues for the earlier date of London, British
Library Cotton MS Domitian A.ix. See Dumville, “English Square
110 S H A RON M . ROW L E Y

Minuscule Script: The Background and Earliest Phases,” ASE 16 (1985):

147–79.
11. Ker, Catalogue, no. 151; Gneuss, Handlist, no. 330f.
12. Ker, Catalogue, no. 354; Gneuss, Handlist, no. 673.
13. Ker, Catalogue, no. 32; Gneuss, Handlist, no. 39; Mildred Budny, Insular,
Anglo-Saxon and Early Anglo-Norman Manuscript Art at Corpus Christi College,
Cambridge: An Illustrated Catalogue (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1997),
no. 32.
14. Ker, Catalogue, no. 23; Gneuss, Handlist, no. 22.
15. The manuscripts have been described by Ker. Gameson and Bately also
describe manuscript T in detail. I will also provide complete new descrip-
tions in my forthcoming study and new edition. Janet M. Bately, ed. The
Tanner Bede: The Old English Version of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, Oxford
Bodleian Library Tanner 10 Together with the Mediaeval Binding Leaves, Oxford
Bodleian Library Tanner 10* and the Domitian Extracts, London British Library
Cotton Domitian A IX Fol. 11, EEMF 24 (1992). For a fuller discussion of
the problem of the OEHE stemma, see Dorothy Whitelock, “The List
of Chapter-Headings in the Old English Bede,” in Old English Studies in
Honour of John C. Pope, ed. Robert B. Burlin and Edward B. Irving, Jr.
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974) and S.M. Rowley, “Nostalgia
and the Rhetoric of Lack: The Missing Old English Bede Exemplar for
Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 41,” in Old English Literature in
Its Manuscript Contexts, ed. Joyce Tally Lionarons (Morgantown: West
Virginia University Press, 2004), pp. 11–35.
16. J.J. Campbell, “The OE Bede: Book III, Chapters 16–20,” MLN (1953):
381 [381–86].
17. On the replacement of the Libellus Responsionum, see Sharon M. Rowley,
“Shifting Contexts: Reading Gregory’s Letter in Book III of the Tanner
Bede,” in Rome and the North: The Early Reception of Gregory the Great in
Germanic Europe, ed. Rolf Bremmer, Kees Dekker, David F. Johnson,
Mediaevalia Groningana n.s. 4. (Louvain: Peeters, 2001), pp. 83–92.
18. The debate about the relationship of the OEHE to Alfred’s program is
extensive. For a fuller discussion, see Sharon M. Rowley, “Bede in Later
Anglo- Saxon England,” in The Cambridge Companion to Bede, ed. Scott
DiGregorio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 216–28.
See also Whitelock, “The Old English Bede,” Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial
Lecture 1962, in British Academy Papers on Anglo-Saxon England, ed. E.G.
Stanley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 227–61; Malcolm
Godden, “Did King Alfred Write Anything?” Medium Ævum 76.1 (2007):
1–23; Janet Bately, “Old English Prose Before and During the Reign of
Alfred,” ASE 17 (1988): 93–138, and “The Alfredian Canon Revisited,”
in King Alfred The Great, ed. Timothy Reuter (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003),
pp. 107–120; Gregory G. Waite, “The Vocabulary of the Old English
Version of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica,” (PhD dissertation, University of
Toronto, 1985). DAI 46A (1985), pdf version.
 “ I C B E D A” . . . “ C W Æ Ð B E D A” 111

19. See Miller, Whitelock, and Waite. See also Max Deutschbein, “Dialektische
in der ags. Übersetzung von Bedas Kirchengeschichte,” Beiträge zur
Geschichte Deutschen Sprache und Literatur 26 (1901): 169–244; J. Schipper,
ed., König Alfreds Übersetzung von Bedas Kirchengeschichte, Bibliothek der
angelsächsischen Prosa 4 (Leipzig: Wigand, 1897 and 1899); Frederick
Klaeber, “Notes on the Alfredian Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History
of the English People,” PMLA 14 (1899), Appendix I and II: lxxii–lxxiii.
20. These chapters deal with some of Aidan’s miracles, the death of King
Sigebert, Fursey’s visions, and Deusdedit in the Latin. Chapters 19–20
appear only in T and B.
21. Miller, ed. The Old English Version, pp. xxiv–xxv.
22. S. Potter, On the Relation of the Old English Bede to Werferth’s Gregory and to
Alfred’s Translations, Mémoires de la société royale des sciences de Bohême,
Classe des lettres, 1930 (Prague, 1931), p. 33.
23. Both Whitelock and Raymond Grant have demonstrated the unlikelihood
that Miller’s [Y] exemplar existed. See Whitelock, “Chapter Headings,”
and Raymond Grant, The B Text of the Old English Bede, Costerus, n.s. 73
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989).
24. Gameson, “The Decoration of the Tanner Bede,” 129.
25. Miller, ed. The Old English Version, pp. xviii–xix.
26. I refer to the main translator as such, the translator of the lists of chap-
ter headings as the second translator, and the section of Book 2 in Ca
and O as the third translator. Whitelock, “Chapter-Headings,” p. 270.
J.W. Pearce, Francis A. March, and A. Marshall Elliot, “Did King Alfred
Translate the Historia Ecclesiastica?” PMLA 7 (1892): vi–x.
27. Dorothy Whitelock, “The Old English Bede,” pp. 227–61.
28. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, Visible Song, CSASE 4 (Cambridge: CUP,
1990); Paul Saenger, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading,
Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1997).
29. Fred Orton, Ian Wood, and Clare Lees, Fragments of History: Rethinking
the Ruthwell and Bewcastle Monuments (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2007), Chapter 3, “Style, and Seeing . . . As,” pp. 63–80.
30. Whitelock, “The Old English Bede,” p. 245.
31. Whitelock, “The Old English Bede,” p. 245.
32. Donald K. Fry, “Bede Fortunate in His Translators: The Barking Nuns,”
in Studies in Earlier Old English Prose, ed. Paul E. Szarmach (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1986), p. 345 [345–62]; Stanley B.
Greenfield, A Critical History of Old English Literature (New York: New
York University Press, 1965), p. 32.
33. H.R. Loyn, “The Term Ealdorman in Translations Prepared at the Time
of King Alfred,” English Historical Review 68 (1953): 513–25.
34. Raymond C. St. Jacques, “ ‘Hwilum Word Be Worde, Hwilum Andgit of
Andgiete’? Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and Its Old English Translator,”
Florilegium 5 (1983): 93 and 90 [85–104].
112 S H A RON M . ROW L E Y

35. On the accuracy and specificity of the translation, see Whitelock, Waite,
St. Jacques, and Fry.
36. One of the primary claims of a larger project, of which this chapter is a
part, is that the main translator understood Bede’s sense of history well.
See S.M. Rowley, The Old English Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History
(Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, forthcoming); J.M. Wallace-Hadrill,
“Bede and Plummer,” Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People:
A Historical Commentary (1988; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. xx
[xv–xxxv]; Calvin Kendall, “Imitation and the Venerable Bede’s Historia
ecclesiastica,” in Saints, Scholars, and Heroes, vol. 1, eds. M.H. King and
W.M. Stevens (Collegeville: Hill Monastic Library, Saint John’s Abbey
and University, 1979), pp. 145–59; Robert Hanning, The Vision of History
in Early Britain (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), p. 67;
H.E.J. Cowdrey, “Bede and the English People,” Journal of Religious
History 11.4 (1981): 501–523; Patrick Wormald, “The Venerable Bede and
the ‘Church of the English,’ ” in The English Religious Tradition and the
Genius of Anglicanism, ed. G. Rowell (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1992), pp. 13–32; and Nicholas Howe, Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-
Saxon England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
37. HE 4.24, p. 417. Translation as emended by André Crépin in “Bede and
the Vernacular,” p. 183.
38. Robert Stanton, The Culture of Translation in Anglo-Saxon England
(Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002), p. 82.
39. The locus classicus for the phrasing is Cicero’s De optimo genere oratorum: “non
verbum pro verbo necesse habui reddere, sed genus omne verborum vimque servavi”
[I did not hold it necessary to render word for word, but I preserved the gen-
eral style and force of the language]. Quoted by Rita Copeland, Rhetoric,
Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular
Texts, CSML 11 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 33.
40. Stanton, Culture of Translation, p. 82.
41. Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation, pp. 50–55.
42. See Copeland and Stanton. See also Martin Irvine, The Making of Textual
Culture: Grammatica and Literary Theory 350–1100, CSML 19 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994).
43. Henry Sweet, An Anglo-Saxon Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press/
Clarendon, 1896).
44. Klaeber, “Notes on the Alfredian Version,” p. lxxii.
45. Waite, “The Vocabulary of the Old English Version,” p. 134; HE 1.34.
46. Waite, “The Vocabulary of the Old English Version,” p. 133.
47. Clem Robyns, “Translation and Discursive Identity,” Poetics Today 15:3
(1994): 407. Another example of this is the relatively heavy use of the
dative absolute in the OEHE. See Bately, “Alfredian Canon,” p. 114.
48. Paul Ricoeur, “What is a Text?” in A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and
Imagination, ed. Mario J. Valdés (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1991), p. 57 [43–64].
 “ I C B E D A” . . . “ C W Æ Ð B E D A” 113

49. Fred C. Robinson, “Old English Literature in Its Most Immediate

Context,” in Fred C. Robinson, ed., The Editing of Old English (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 3–24.
50. My literal translation.
51. My literal translation for the Old English in all three passages.
52. My literal translation.
53. My literal translation of both Old English passages.
54. T reads “leofa” for “seolfa,” the other manuscripts read “sylfa.” Miller
emends “broðor” to “broðar.”
55. I supply the missing translation for qui usque hodie superest and provide a
literal translation of the Old English.
56. My literal translation. I also removed some of Miller’s editorial
punctuation.
57. Willi Paul Adams, “The Historian as Translator: An Introduction,”
Journal of American History (1999): 1283–88.
CHAPTER 6

VERNACULAR ENGRAVINGS IN
LATE MEDIEVAL ENGLAND

Florence Bourgne

Anxious late-medieval vernacular authors saturated their texts with references to

engraved writings. These often refer to inscriptions on wax tablets, a fragile albeit
professional medium.

alimpsests are a fairly rare phenomenon in late medieval manuscripts,1

P despite the extant evidence of willful defacement. Manuscript
Egerton 3245 at the British Library is an instance of such destructive rub-
bing. The verso of the opening folio still boasts an architectural structure
at the top end of the page, filled with a T-shaped rubbed patch clearly
meant to accommodate a standard representation of the Trinity, such as
those commonly featured in alabaster panels, for example.2 The image of
God the Father holding the crucifix in his lap with the Holy Spirit hov-
ering over it has been carefully erased, leaving the prayer written in the
space below it:

Ffadir sone and holy gost

Allmyhtty god sittend in trone
Here me lord of myhttis most
To the for help I make my mone
Thre personis & oo god alone
I preyende to þyn heyh mageste
Here þat þow graunt me wel to done
And on me haue mercy and pite.
To þe blissful Trinite be don al reuerens
In whos name I begyn þe prik of consciens.
116 F L OR E NC E B OU RG N E

The original eight-line prayer (in red ink) is supplemented by a dedi-

catory couplet in black ink in a later, cramped hand. Egerton 3245 is
the only copy of these introductory stanzas,3 which were meant as an
induction to the Prick of Conscience. If the couplet was indeed added at the
time when the picture was erased—as Lollard iconoclasm was becoming
more and more virulent—this would prove to be one specific instance in
which text proves more durable than image and provides a more accept-
able substitute.
The scarcity of actual fourteenth-century palimpsests—probably
connected to new ways of copying and to more easily available writing
medium—is an invitation to explore instead another case in point: the
literary representation of palimpsests. This, in turn, entails the examina-
tion of two related topics, that of texts described as being written on or as
tables, and that of engraving as a more general metaphor for writing.
In a context in which a relative abundance of parchment meant that it
was somehow easier to preserve and disseminate texts, the phenomenon
that Cerquiglini-Toulet has defined as a general melancholy surrounding
the activity of writing (whether composing or copying) may come as a
surprise.4 Yet, at the close of his Troilus, Chaucer does envisage the risk
of miscopying:

And for ther is so gret diversite

In Englissh and in writyng of oure tonge,
So prey I God that non myswrite the,
Ne the mysmetre for defaute of tonge.5

At the close of the poem, following its resolution as Troilus ascends the
spheres, textual instability is associated with the very common scribal
phenomenon of dialectal rewriting, and finally remains as the only source
of anguish. A similar anxiety can be traced in Chaucer’s address to his
personal scribe, Adam:

“Chaucers Wordes unto Adam, his owne Scriveyn”

Adam scriveyn, if ever it thee bifalle
Boece or Troylus for to wryten newe,
Under thy long lokkes thou most have the scalle,
But after my makyng thow wryte more trewe;
So ofte adaye I mot thy werk renewe,
It to correcte and eke to rubbe and scrape,
And al is thorugh thy negligence and rape.6

Following Linne Mooney’s discoveries, we know now that Chaucer

did indeed employ a London scribe called Adam Pynkhurst.7 We can
 V E R N A C U L A R E N G R AV I N G S 117

discard uneasy metaphorical readings of this stanza, in which Chaucer’s

scribe was the first man on earth. Rubbing and scraping can become
straightforward allusions again to the activity of an actual scribe.
Chaucer’s insistence on the risks and dangers inherent in textual
transmission resonates with most Ricardian literature, in particular the
Gawain corpus. The opening of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight serves as
a reminder that alliteration guarantees the integrity of the text and allows
its oral retelling and preservation:

Forþi an aunter in erde I attle to schawe,

Þat a selly in siзt summe men hit holden
And an outtrage awenture of Arthurez wonderez.
If зe wyl lysten þis laye bot on littel quile,
I schal telle hit astit, as I in toun herde,
With tonge.
As hit is stad and stoken
In stori stif and stronge,
With lele letteres loken,
In londe so hatz ben longe.8

Oral poetry appears miraculously aproblematic; it is felt to be a stable

medium for preserving stories, which circulate freely from teller to teller.
We know that the whole corpus of the Gawain manuscript was compiled
quite carefully despite the rough quality of the script. Somebody took
great pains to commit these poems to writing, and yet the program-
matic opening of Sir Gawain offers a different self- definition of allitera-
tive poetry as a proper oral genre.
Storing narratives in one’s memory, and reciting and retelling them
at will, seems like an ideal situation, in contrast to the potential dangers
facing written texts. The passage on Daniel and the writing on the wall
at the court of Belshazzar is an ideal starting point, with its insistence on
“graven,” “rasped,“ and “scraped” inscriptions.

In þe palays pryncipale, vpon þe playn wowe,

In contrary of þe candelstik, þer clerest hit schyned,
Þer apered a paume, with poyntel in fyngres,
Þat was grysly and gret, and grymly he wrytes;
Non oþer forme bot a fust faylande þe wryste
Pared on þe parget, purtrayed lettres. [ . . . ]
Ay biholdand þe honde til hit hade al graven,
And rasped on þe roз woзe runisch sauez.
When hit þe scrypture hade scraped wyth a scrof penne
As a coltour in clay cerves þe for зes,
118 F L OR E NC E B OU RG N E

Þenne hit vanist verayly and voyded of sy зt,

Bot þe lettres bileued ful large vpon plaster.9

This retelling of the biblical episode in Cleanness insists on the fact that
the inscription on the wall is an engraving, made with a stylus, a “poyn-
tel.” The same word is used by Chaucer in his Boece to render the Latin
stylus: “I merkid my weply compleynte with office of poyntel” (Book I,
prosa 1, §2). Yet the illuminator who created the cycle of illustrations for
the Pearl manuscript chose to ignore these markers.10 Instead, he depicted
a rather enormous hand and what looks clearly like a pen, meant to write
with ink: the inscription is performed on a scroll, signaled by elaborate
convoluted ends. This departure from the text of the poem is in accor-
dance with two separate traditions. One may be ascribed to theological
issues: the word of God is conventionally lent authority by being rep-
resented on a scroll. The other is purely formal: in the late fourteenth
century, inscriptions on walls, whether woven into a tapestry or painted
a fresco, were almost invariably framed and made to look like writing on
a scroll of parchment.
The superior authority of the roll over every other medium is con-
firmed by an occurrence in Lydgate’s Temple of Glas. As Lydgate describes
a worshipper of Venus, he explains that the lady’s garment is covered “in
sondri rolles”:

And so þis ladi, benigne and humble of chere,

Kneling I saugh, al clad in grene and white,
Tofore Venus, goddes of al delite,
Enbrouded al with stones & perre
So richeli, þat ioi it was to se,
Wiþ sondri rolles on hir garnement,
Forto expoune þe trouth of hir entent,
And shew fulli, þat for hir humbilles,
And for hir vertu, and hir stabilnes,
That she was rote of womanli plesaunce.11

The scrolls provide a truthful exegesis of the goddess’s identity: her hid-
den virtues and symbolic significance are thus made manifest.
In Cleanness, having performed this miraculous act of writing/engrav-
ing, the hand disappears and only the mysterious letters remain. The
inscription is begging to be read, deciphered, and commented upon, and
Daniel will duly be summoned. Indeed in the illumination he is already
on hand, receiving orders from the king. A courtly appetite for enigmas
is also rampant in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: the court of King
Arthur revels in the telling of stories around Yuletide, and is presented
 V E R N A C U L A R E N G R AV I N G S 119

with the enigmatic challenge of the Green Knight. The king faces yet
another type of marvel begging to be deciphered and explained away, at
the court’s expense perhaps.
Another corpus of equally mysterious inscriptions, those belonging to a
distant past, is mentioned in later alliterative texts such as St. Erkenwald:

The sperle of þe spelunke þat sparde hit o-lofte

Was metely made of þe marbre and menskefully planede
And þe bordure enbelicit wyt bryзt golde lettres
Bot roynyshe were þe resones þat þer on row stoden
Fulle verray were þe vigures þer auisyde hom mony
Bot alle muset hit to mouthe and quat hit mene shulde
Mony clerkes in þat clos wyt crownes ful brode
Þer besiet hom a-boute noзt to brynge hom in wordes.12

The true (“verray”) letters on the tomb slab are beautiful (“bry зt”)
and all the more fascinating as they cannot be made into intelligible
words, for they prove impossible to pronounce (“to mouthe”). Written
words are “roynyshe,” enigmatic and mysterious like runic inscriptions.
By contrast, orality, or rather live letters, bring on the poem’s resolution;
St. Erkenwald is able to understand the inscription by direct dialogue
with the body of the ancient Saxon who is buried in the tomb; the sal-
vation of the dead man’s soul is brought about by the bishop of London’s
prayers.
Textual, literal survival in Ricardian poetry relied upon two distinct
strategies: passing on a text thanks to an efficient scribe’s pen, or main-
taining the fiction of an oral transmission. None of these texts actually
consider the eventuality of material destruction: the rubbing and scraping
is meant to correct the text, not to erase it. Yet this fear had already been
formulated in various versions of the Life of Adam and Eve.13 The earliest
extant rendition, from the Auchinleck manuscript, dates from 1330–40.14
The second one, entitled the Canticum de Creatione, also survives in only
one manuscript, Trinity College Oxford MS 57, datable to 1375. A much
later prose version also circulated as part of the Gilte Legende.15 In all three
versions, Eve requires Seth to write a life of his parents, a vita whose pur-
pose is mainly to serve as a warning to future generations. In Auchinleck,
this section reads:

& þou, Seþ, for ani þing

Ich comand þe on mi blisceing
Þat þi fader liif be write,
& min also, eueri smite, [ . . . ]
Þat þo þat be now зong childre
120 F L OR E NC E B OU RG N E

Mai it see, & her elder,

& oþer þat here after be bore,
Hou we han wrou зt here bifore,
Þat þai mowe taken ensaumple of ous
& amenden oзain Jhesus.’ [ . . . ]
Þo Seþ hadde writen Adames liif,
& Eues, þat was Adames wiif,
Riзt in þilke selue stede
Þer Adam was won to bide his bede,
In þilke stede þe bok he leyd
As wise men er þis han yseyd
Þer Adam was won to biden his bede,
& leued it in þilke stede.16

In this, the earliest extant version, Seth produces a book and hides it
where his father used to pray. This book happens almost in retrospect to
be in stone; it survives the Flood and is discovered by Solomon:

Long after N[o]es f lod was go,

Salamon þe king com þo,
Þat was air of Dauid lond,
& Adames liif þer he fond,
& al in ston writen it was,
& damaghed non letter þer nas.
For alle þat euer Salamon couþe
Þink in hert or speke wiþ mouþe,
On word he no couþe wite
Of alle þat euer was þer write;
He no couþe o word vnderstond
Þat Seþ hadde writen wiþ his hond.17

The enigmatic engraving is interpreted with the help of an angel:

“Here, þer þis writeing is,

Riзt in þis selue stede
Adam was wont to bid his bede
& here þou schalt a temple wirche,
Þat schal be cleped holi chirche
Þer men schal bid holy bede,
As Adam dede in þis stede.”18

The later versions translate a different Latin branch of the Adamic

legend. Eve requests a specific and mixed medium for the writing of the
text. To survive trial by water and by fire, two types of tablets must be
 V E R N A C U L A R E N G R AV I N G S 121

used: tablets of stone to withstand the water, and clay tablets that can
survive firing.

Eue to Seth þus gan seye:

“Tak & make tables tweye
Of al oure lyf anon,
Tweye of erthe & tweye of ston,
writ þeron oure lyf anon,
For we haue had here;
For longe er domesday falle
Þis worlde shel ben fordon alle
By water or by fere
Зif it be by water fordon,
Þanne shollen þe tables of ston
Lasten wiþouten lye ;
Зif it þorghe fer be broЗt to nou Зt,
Þanne sholle þe tables of erthe wro Зt
Lasten sikerlye.”19

All of the later versions also mention that Seth created his text “with-
out travail,” because an angel guided his hand; his animated finger
inscribed the text:

Þo wroЗte Seth his moderes wil

And þe tables gan fulfil
Wiþ ded and wiþ þou Зt.
Salamon, þe wyse man,
Fond þe tables longe after þan
And he God bisou Зt
To shewen him wiþouten mys
What bytokneþ þe tablys,
Or who þat hem sou Зt.
God þo sent him his angel
And tolde him al fayre and wel
How þat þe З were wroЗt,
And what tokne þat it was;
And þo “archilaykas”
Salamon dede hem calle,
Þat is to sayn : “wiþoute trauaylle,”
And wiþouten wit saunfayle
Seth wrot hem alle,
For an angel held his hond ryЗt.20

In each version the text survives and eventually marks the spot where
Adam used to pray, thus indicating where the Temple must be built. The
122 F L OR E NC E B OU RG N E

late prose version reiterates every stage of the narrative:

Therfore heere, my sonne Seeth : make tables of stoon and tables of shynyng
clay (or) erthe, & write ther-inne the lyf of youre fader and of me, and also
the thynges that ye haue herde and seen of vs. For whenne god shal iugge
alle oure kynde by water, the tables of erthe wil lose and the tables of stoon wil
dwelle ; forsothe, whenne god wil iugge mankyde by fire, thanne wil the
tables of stoon lose and the tables of erthe endure.” [ . . . ] Thanne Seeth made
tables of stoone and tables of shynyng erthe, & thanne he bigan to make
the shappe of the lettres & wrote his fader lyf and his moder, as he had herd
hem tolde, and also þat he had seen with his eyghen, and thanne he putte
thilke tables, when thei were writen, in his fadres hous into his oratorye, where
Adam was wont for to preye to oure lord god. The which tables were founden
aftir Noee flode & seen of many oone, but thei were noght redde. So after wyse
Salamon hadde seen thise tables writen, he prayed to god that he myght
haue witte to vndirstonde the thynges ywriten in thoo tables. Thanne
appered to hym goddes aungel, seyeng : “I am the aungel that helde the honde
of Seeth whenne his fyngre wrothe this with yrne in thise tables. Now herken
knowyng of this writyng, that thow it vnderstonde where thise tables
were. Forsothe, thei were in Adam prayeng-place where he and his wyfe
were wonte to preye to oure lord god ; and therfore it behouith to the
that thow make there prayeng to god.” And Salamon cleped thise lettres
Achiliacos, þat is to seye with- oute techyng of lyppes writen with fynger of Seeth,
the aungel of god holdyng his honde.21

As all three versions engage with their Latin sources, they endeavor to
counter a growing anxiety over the material fragility of the text. Showing
how Seth must carve in stone his newly composed Life of Adam so that
it survives the Flood and reaches Solomon ref lects poorly on the dura-
bility of parchment copies. The very matter of the texts draws attention
to—indeed engineers—the notion that they have entrusted their survival
to a f limsy medium.
The very same idea is put to use in a political song attacking Edward II
and accusing him of having breached the Magna Carta. The song is
extant in several copies, including the Auchinleck manuscript.22 In the
song, the charter is destroyed because it is put too close to the fire after
having been made of wax. This ur- destruction spawns the destruction
and decay of England:

L’en puet fere et defere

Ceo fait il trop souent
It nis nouther wel ne faire
Þerfore Engelond is shent
Nostre prince de Engletere
 V E R N A C U L A R E N G R AV I N G S 123

par le consail de sa gent

At Westminster after the feire
Maden a gret parlement
La chartre fet de cyre
Ieo lenteinte & bien le crey
It was holde to neih the fire
And is molten al awey.
Ore ne say mes que dire,
Tout i va a Tripolay
Hundred chapitle court and shire
al hit goth a deuel way.23

On the contrary, in Reson and Sensuallyte, a text engraved deeply in

stone stands the test of time and remains intelligible; the ekphrastic evo-
cation of the well of Narcissus in the Garden of Pleasure brooks no real
enigma.

And first I saugh in what wyse—

By lettres graven in the stoon,
Which declarede me anoon
The maner hooly and the cas—
How Narcisus slay[e]n was
And his woful Auenture,
Which no wyght koude tho recure.
And whan I had the lettres rad,
Which in the stonys hard and sad
Wer profoundely and depe y- grave,
The scripture for to save
Wryte of olde antyquyte,
To conserve the beaute,
I wexe astonyed in partye
And abasshed sodenly,
Touchyng the pereyl of the welle
Of which ye han herd me telle.24

Ancient inscriptions are (t)here to be deciphered and parsed without

any difficulty. John Lydgate, in his Troy Book, displays similar confidence
when he states that Priamus, as he rebuilds Troy, makes sure he hires
craftsmen whose works of art will never fade nor decay:

He sent also for euery ymagour,

Boþe in entaille, & euery purtreyour
Þat coude drawe, or with colour peynt
With hewes fresche, þat þe werke nat feynt;
124 F L OR E NC E B OU RG N E

And swiche as coude with countenaunces glade

Make an ymage þat wil neuere fade:
To counterfet in metal, tre, or stoon
Þe sotil werke of Pigmaleoun,
Or of Appollo, þe whiche as bokis telle,
In ymagerye alle oþer dide excelle; [ . . . ]
With square toures set on euery syde.
At whos corners, of verray pompe & pride,
Þe werkmen han, with sterne & fel visages,
Of riche entaille, set vp gret ymages,
Wrou зt out of ston, þat neuer ar like to fayle,
Ful coriously enarmed for batayle.25

This very type of proud image-making comes under Langland’s attack

in Piers Plowman:

“We han a wyndowe a worchynge wol stande vs ful heye

Wolde зe glase þat gable and graue ther зoure name” [ . . . ]
Ac god to alle good folk swich gravynge defendeth,
To writen on wyndowes of eny wel dedes,
An auntur pruyde be paynted there and pomp of the world ; [ . . . ]
Forthy, leue lordes, leueth suche writynges ;
God in the gospel suche grauynge nou зt allueth.26

Lady Mede is quite prepared to have the parishioners pay for van-
ity stained-glass windows in which their acts and their names will be
remembered; a strict Langlandian digression reminds the reader that such
“engraving” is forbidden.
Lydgate also uses a spiritual image similar to that of the tables engraved by
Seth without effort because his finger was guided by God. In The Life of our
Lady (c.1416), God is described as one capable of engraving without a stylus:

And he that graved of his grete myght

Withe outyn poyntell, in the hard stone
And in the tables, with lettres clere and bryght
His ten preceptez and byddynges eueryche one
The same lorde, of his power aloon
Hath made this mayde, here oon erthe lowe
A chylde conceyve, and no man to knawe.27

Needless to say, the divinely scripted text survives clear and bright. And
yet, despite this fifteenth-century show of confidence, the evidence
remains: literary and business texts were far more often written on wax
than deeply engraved in stone.28
 V E R N A C U L A R E N G R AV I N G S 125

Most medieval writers carried around one or several wax tablets: thin
hollowed slabs, made of wood or sometimes ivory, filled with a layer
of beeswax to form a surface for writing. Although many tablets must
have been single sheets of wax-covered wood, it was more convenient to
have multiple leaves (most commonly diptychs, but also triptychs, etc., as
many as eight or more). The writing surface was increased and—with the
hard surfaces outside and wax surfaces inside—the writing was protected
from accidental damage. The wax was dyed, in red, or preferably in green
for ease on the eyes. Styluses were often made of aesthetically pleasing
materials including wood, ivory, bone, and even precious metals, and
carved in all sorts of curious and fancy shapes. The blunt edge was used
for rubbing out any unwanted text.
A number of inscribed wax tablets are extant, mostly used for account-
ing purposes. Wax tablets were favored in some areas of business, for
example in the salt industry and in shipping businesses, because neither
parchment nor medieval paper could stand the damp. These surviving
tablets are almost systematically oblong, and quite often round-topped.
As Richard and Mary Rouse point out, wax is never written on in
the Hebrew Bible. It is always mentioned as something that melts ( Judith
16.18, Psalm 21.15, Psalm 57.9, etc.). So technically, the word tabula in
the Vulgate refers to tablets of boxwood, or bronze; of course the most
famous biblical tablets, the tables of the law, were explicitly made of stone.
However, the Middle Ages was a wax tablet culture, and most medieval
readers of the Bible in the West automatically assumed that tabula meant
wax tablet and interpreted the text accordingly.
This ambiguity is ref lected in the evolution of the representation of the
tables of the law in medieval English art. In the Old English Hexateuch
(c.1025–30),29 on fol. 136v, the tables are represented in the hands of
horned Moses, who is shown writing in a square-topped diptych for the
benefit of the Hebrew people. On fol. 6v, the authoritative nature of the
tables is asserted: God is warning Adam and the newly created Eve by
holding up a similar object. It is square in form, and I do think that we are
here exactly halfway between the representation of a parchment codex
and a pair of magnified wax tablets.
In one of the two-tier, full-page illuminations of the Bury Bible,30
Moses is shown twice: once displaying an open codex, once holding folded
round-topped tablets. On folio 5 of the Winchester Bible (c.1160–75), the
same type of duplication is used: Moses holds or is handed down tablets,
but at the same time the word of God is directed toward him by means
of a descending scroll.31 The same device is used again in yet another
Genesis illumination by the Master of Simon of St. Albans, working in
Normandy c.1175–1200.32 In a slightly later illumination by William of
126 F L OR E NC E B OU RG N E

Brailles,33 Moses is shown half-length in the bottom compartment of a

historiated letter I and is handed down the tables of the law. In all three
illuminations the tables are green—perhaps the most common color used
to dye wax so that it does not spoil too quickly.
In the fourteenth-century Holkham Bible,34 Moses holds a round-
topped green-tinted wax tablet. On fol. 27v, the Jews are literally shown
with the tables of the law on their forehead, i.e. phylacteries traditionally
worn by orthodox Jews. I will not dwell on the anti-Semitic potential of
the round-topped tablet. The topic has been repeatedly rehashed since
Ruth Mellinkoff ’s seminal studies.35 My contention here is that obsessive
reference to round-topped tablets is first and foremost an allusion to a type
of inscribed table everybody was well-acquainted with—wax tablets.
The same obsession with tables and tablets can be sensed in three pas-
sages from the Wycliffite Bible, in which tablets feature prominently:36

Thi twei tetis ben as twey kidis, twynnes of a capret, that ben fed in lilies,
til the dai sprynge, and shadewis ben bowid doun. twey tetis ben twey tablis
of witnessing, of whiche the mylk of kunnyng and deuocioun is sokun out; til the
day, of the newe testament; schadewis, for the figuris of the elde lawe ceessen in the
newe testament, of which thei weren schadewe. (Song of Solomon, 4.5–6)
Al зifte and wickidnesse schal be don awei; and feith schal stonde in to
the world. Al зifte; зouun for distriyng of ri зtfulnesse, and wickidnesse doon for
зifte. schal be doon awey; [ . . . ] so that no thing schal appere of her possessiouns and
boost, as no thing apperith in tablis doon awey. (Ecclesiasticus 40.12)
and Y schal do awei Jerusalem, as tablis ben wont to be doon awei; and Y
schal do awey and turne it, & Y schal lede ful ofte the poyntel on the face
therof. (4 Kings 21.13)

The last quotation provides a literal rendering of Jerome’s own inter-

pretation of the destruction of Jerusalem. Jerome himself added “& Y
schal lede ful ofte the poyntel on the face therof ” to insist that Jerusalem’s
face (or the tablet’s) is to be obliterated by the scraping with the blunt
point of the stylus. In the Song of Solomon and Ecclesiasticus, the gloss
deliberately introduces the image of tables. In the first case, the gloss
alludes to the tables of the law. In the gloss on Ecclesiasticus the image of
erased tablets points us in the direction of wax tablets again.
Before moving on, it is worth revisiting some of the texts mentioned
in the opening section in view of that invasion of tables, and more specif-
ically wax diptychs or polyptychs. Because wax tablets were an ordinary
everyday object, we can see why the illustrator of Cleanness decided to
move away from the notion of engraving and chose instead to portray a
hand writing with pen and ink. Because professionals almost systematically
 V E R N A C U L A R E N G R AV I N G S 127

used wax tablets in pairs, we can understand why Eve in the Canticum de
Creatione suggests that two pairs of tablets are going to be made. I suggest
furthermore that familiar wax diptychs may have prompted the associa-
tion of tables with the two breasts in the Song of Songs.
The fact that the Cleanness illuminator chose to depict a hand writing
in ink rather than engraving with a stylus also suggests the existence of a
strict but unspoken hierarchy between modes of writing. Writing in ink
is meant for important texts, and indeed for important authors. In the
Cuthbercht Gospels, Mark is shown with his ink pen resting on the page,
and lifting a corner of the page, signaling ostentatiously that what he is
writing in is indeed a parchment codex.37
In a tenth-century single leaf kept in the Trier Diocesan Library,
Gregory the Great is shown, in the traditional way for artists depicting
him, as being inspired by the Holy Spirit in the shape of a dove.38 His
authoritative fingering of a codex resting on a pulpit contrasts with the
groveling of his younger scribe, who proffers a square tablet such as those
used by schoolboys throughout the Middle Ages and well into the six-
teenth century. The wax tablet is for schoolboys and ink for the men.
Two competing attitudes are displayed in two illuminations from the
middle of the twelfth century. In an illuminated letter P from the Dover
Bible, Mark is seated with a wax tablet in the right hand.39 In his left
hand, he is holding up his stylus for inspection. Despite his apparent lack
of inscribing activity, this authorial portrait stands at the beginning of
Mark’s Gospels, which are fully written out, effortlessly it seems. In the
frontispiece to the Eadwine Psalter, the scribe Eadwine is pictured lean-
ing over a parchment codex, with pen and knife in hand.40 The sur-
rounding inscription proclaims him the prince of scribes. He uses pen
and ink. Yet Mark’s seated calm contrasts with the crouched position of
the toiling monk whose gaze is fixed on the page.
Later authorial portraits make greater use of the ink and pen as
authorizing features. In a Remède de Fortune illumination,41 Machaut is
shown seated on the ground in a park or meadow planted with a few
trees, writing a lay along a horizontal scroll. The miniature is preceded
by the rubric “Comment lamant fait vn lay de son sentement,” which
announces both the image of the writing author and the following score
and text of the song. In a frontispiece prefacing a copy of her works,42
Christine de Pizan is depicted seated at her desk with a dog at her feet.
She is writing away in a neatly ruled and already bound parchment
codex. Both French authors, whether sitting in a carefully manicured
meadow or in a Gothic loggia, are shown writing on parchment (hence
in ink). These authorizing representations had no room for tentative
and fragile wax tablets.
128 F L OR E NC E B OU RG N E

Another change in writing habits toward the close of the medieval

period may be witnessed in the evolution of the scene in which Zachary,
who has been struck dumb, writes out the name of his newborn, John
the Baptist. The naming takes place a few days after the birth, according
to the Jewish custom; family and friends want to name the child after
his father. In the Latin Vulgate, Zachary writes out the name of his son
on pugillares, i.e., tablets that can be held in hand. In early illuminations,
Zachary invariably writes out the name on a pair of joined tablets, with
a stylus. In the Caligula Troper (c.1050),43 for instance, the square tablets
are brownish and both stylus and writing are in white, perhaps to indi-
cate that the inscription is not a regular ink-on-parchment text. In the
Holkham Bible (c.1327–1340),44 the lady on the right is adamant (she is
holding out a scroll bearing her spoken words) that the little boy will have
Zachary as a name (“Lenfant ara a non Zacharie”). Zachary is represented
twice. On the left he is sitting down and being ordered to speak out by
the crowd (again by a scroll-inscribed utterance). When he stands, he uses
a decorated pair of round-topped tablets on which he writes in black to
insist “nomez lenfant Ihoan.”
Some late representations of the naming of John offer realistic and
unambiguous renderings of the tablets. In the Petites Heures du Duc de Berry
(c.1375),45 the tablets are in red wax. In the same scene painted nearly a
century later by Jean Fouquet for the Heures d’Étienne Chevalier (c.1450),46
the tablets have become elongated and whitish. I doubt whether Fouquet
really intended to depict wax tablets. He seems instead to be aiming at
a ledger-book format, which is a fairly common standard for fifteenth-
century codices.
This move is duplicated in the gradual shift from wax tablet and sty-
lus to pen and ink in three written versions of the naming scene: in
the Cursor Mundi (Southern version), in a retelling of the Gospels in the
Vernon manuscript, and in a late fifteenth-century manuscript of the
vernacular Gilte Legend, respectively. In the early Cursor Mundi, Zachary
takes tables and stylus in hand to write his decision:

Þenne loked aftir sir zakary

Tables & poyntel tyte
He bigon þe name to write
And wroot as þe aungel bad
Ion his name shulde be rad47

In the fourteenth-century Vernon manuscript, the vernacular narrator

clearly hesitates between a single table and a pair of tablets, perhaps a
sign that the latter is a fairly common and familiar object, which comes
 V E R N A C U L A R E N G R AV I N G S 129

naturally to mind and displaces the Latin singular pugillar. Vernacular

tablets come necessarily in a pair: Zachary looks for one “table,” but then
writes on “þe tabletz”:

So Zakarie• þe word heo brouhte

And bad him sigge• what he þouhte•
And he a table• sone souhte
And þeron з þe nome wrouhte
¶ On þe tabletz he wrot anon•
þe childes nome• he wrot Ion•48

All ambiguity disappears in the late fifteenth-century rendering of the

Gilte Legende. The new father reaches very naturally for pen and ink
when it comes to writing:

and then thaye askid the fader zachary and he toke

penne and inke & wrote for he myght not yet speke
but he wrote Iohannes est nomen eius.49

The trouble of course with writing in ink as opposed to engraving is

that one must choose a color to write in. The terms illumyne, colours of rhe-
toric have been abundantly commented upon, particularly in the writings of
the fifteenth-century Chaucerians, Hoccleve and Lydgate.50 I would like
instead to look at an earlier hesitation, namely in the textual tradition of
the Charters of Christ, for which there is an excellent parallel-text edition.51
Here are the relevant sections from versions of the Long Charter A-text:

Here now & yhe sall wyten

How þis charter was wryten
/Opon my neese was made þe ynk
With Iewes spyttyng on me to stynk
Þe pennes þat þe letter was with wryten
Was of skourges þat I was with smyten.52
/Of my bloode made þei ynke.53
/Vpon my face was made þe ynke
With Iewes spotel on me to stynke.54

and of the Long Charter B-text:

Зe þat þis boke wyll rede or se [ . . . ]

For З e shull here a-none ryght
How Зour sauyour speketh to Зou as-ty Зte
Wordus of a charter þat he hath wrowЗth.55
130 F L OR E NC E B OU RG N E

To make a chartour by-houyþ many þyng

As parchement pen and ynke
Wex and seele wytnyssith also
Of my face fill downe the ynke
Whan thornys on my hed gan synke.56

In this corpus of metaphorical charters, the body of Christ is stretched

instead of a parchment on the cross, and written upon using scourges.57
The only problem: what type of ink is being used? The latest versions
(B-text) all agree that Christ’s blood is the proper medium; some even con-
sider that the Charter is now a “boke” in itself. In the early versions of the
A-text, written as early as 1350, the ink was made on the knees of Christ,
probably suggesting that dirt was mixed with spit as a binding medium.
Then gradually, logically, the words turned into a blood-red inscription.
I would like to conclude with a series of cross-pollinations between
competing representations of the written text, starting first with two
instances of fourteenth- century graffiti, both found in churches.58 The
first is from St. Mary & St. Clement in Clavering (Essex), and is a careful
crafting of the phrase Amor vincit omnia, skillfully lettered (Figure 6.1).

Figure 6.1 Amor vincit omnia.

Source: Graffito from St. Mary & St. Clement, Clavering (Essex), after 1360. Drawing by Florence
Bourgne.

The motto, from Virgil’s Eclogues, is now inseparable from Chaucer’s

cruel depiction of Eglentyne the prioress, but when it was painstakingly
engraved in the wall of a church it may have referred either to the sav-
ing powers of caritas . . . or more prosaically to courtly love. The script is
similar to a Roman type and suggests formality and grandeur. Because of
the omnipresence of material wax tablets as inscribing devices, because of
their use in biblical illustrations, engraving could be a glorified, spiritual
medium—yet this is a mere graffito.
Even more ordinary graffiti could also be found, direct messages replete
with allusions to dicing and love songs. In Lydgate (Suffolk), St. Mary’s
church harbors a rebus message to a beloved lady (Figure 6.2):

Well ƈ ƈ ƈ ƈ dy -yne
Well fa-re-mi-la dy cater-yne
Well fare my lady Katherine.
 V E R N A C U L A R E N G R AV I N G S 131

Figure 6.2 “Well fare my lady Katherine.”

Source: Graffito from St. Mary, Lydgate (Suffolk), after 1370. Drawing by Florence Bourgne.

Here is a lowly relative of the inscription, a particularly debased engrav-

ing worthy of a grubby wax tablet.
Yet, because of the repeated use of the term “table,” “tables” in bib-
lical and related texts (particularly to mean the tables of the law), the act
of shaping a text in the form of a table, as in the Vernon Paternoster,59
could signify a superior type of engraving. The text is arranged into a
square that fills almost the whole folio—and the Vernon manuscript is a
massive codex. The Vernon Paternoster is shaped into a grid of connect-
ing squares, rectangles, and roundels. Its purpose is literally to align the
seven petitions comprising the Lord’s Prayer with the seven gifts of the
Holy Spirit, the seven virtues, and the seven deadly sins. By using alter-
nately red and black ink, connecting phrases, as well as different modules
and types of script, the result is a fully bilingual (Latin/English) tabular
rendition of the contents. The square form of what Avril Henry sees as
a “banner” is also quite reminiscent of a schoolboy’s square wax tablet,
which could be divided into neat little compartments to hold various
letters, etc.
It thus seems that the humble wax tablet, with its potential for end-
less rubbing and reinscription, as well as its lofty biblical associations,
accompanied the development of a whole array of inscriptions: graffiti,
captions, tabular writings, and so forth. Its constant presence at the side
of medieval intellectuals made them acutely aware of the scribal danger of
erasure. Literary texts naturally evolved and proffered various strategies
to counter the risk of becoming palimpsest medium, either by stressing
the metaphor of writing as inscription/engraving or by glorifying the
132 F L OR E NC E B OU RG N E

very material act of putting quill to parchment—yet the shadow image of

the f limsiest of all writing media, the wax tablet, remained.

Notes
1. Despite this paucity of material, I have deliberately eschewed a purely
metaphorical treatment of the question of the palimpsest. A good starting
point for such an abstract enquiry could be Willie van Peer’s “Mutilated
Signs: Notes Towards a Literary Palæography,” Poetics Today 18.1 (1997):
33–57, which looks at various modes of deletion and their symbolic and
philosophical interpretations.
2. This page can be viewed in the British Library’s Catalogue of Illuminated
Manuscripts, http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/. For
a recent study on English alabasters, see Francis W. Cheetham, Alabaster
Images of Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003).
3. Cf. Julia Boffey and A.S.G. Edwards, A New Index of Middle English Verse
(London: British Library, 2005), nos. 790.5 & 3769.8. Hereafter abbrevi-
ated NIMEV.
4. See Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, La Couleur de la mélancolie. La fréquen-
tation des livres au XIVe siècle (Paris: Hatier, 1993).
5. Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde: A New Edition of “The Book
of Troilus,” ed. B.A. Windeatt (London: Longman, 1984), Book V, ll.
1793–96.
6. All subsequent quotations from Chaucer are from The Riverside Chaucer,
ed. Larry Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
7. Linne R. Mooney, “Chaucer’s Scribe,” Speculum 81.1 (2006): 97–138.
8. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, lines 27–35 (my italics). This and all sub-
sequent quotations from the Pearl poems are from Malcolm Andrew and
Ronald Waldron, eds., The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: Pearl, Cleanness,
Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Exeter: University of Exeter
Press, 1987).
9. Cleanness, lines 1531–36 and 1544–46 (my italics).
10. British Library, MS Cotton Nero A. x, fol. 60b. This illumination can
be viewed together with the whole iconographical cycle of the codex in
“Images Online” on the British Library’s website (http://www.imageson-
line.bl.uk, image no. 022692).
11. John Lydgate, Temple of Glas, ed. Josef Schick, EETS e.s. 60 (1891), p. 12,
ll. 298–307 (my italics).
12. St. Erkenwald, ll. 49–56 (my italics). Quoted from Malcolm Andrew,
Ronald Waldron, and Clifford Peterson, eds., The Complete Works of
the Pearl Poet, trans. and intro. Casey Finch (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993); in this bilingual edition, St. Erkenwald is repro-
duced from the 1977 edition by Clifford Peterson.
13. A recent edition of the two fourteenth- century versions is Brian Murdoch
and J.A. Tasioulas, eds., The Apocryphal Lives of Adam and Eve. Edited from
 V E R N A C U L A R E N G R AV I N G S 133

the Auchinleck Manuscript and from Trinity College, Oxford, MS 57 (Exeter:

University of Exeter Press, 2002); all following data on the various ver-
sions is taken from the volume’s very thorough introduction.
14. NIMEV no. 43.
15. Cf. R.E. Lewis, N.F. Blake, and A.S.G. Edwards, Index of Printed Middle
English Prose (New York: Garland, 1985), no. 25.
16. Lines 613–16, 627–32, 681–88 (my italics), from David Burnley and
Alison Wiggins, eds., The Auchinleck Manuscript, National Library of
Scotland ( July 5, 2003), www.nls.uk/auchinleck/.
17. Burnley and Wiggins, eds., The Auchinleck Manuscript, ll. 691–702 (my
italics).
18. Burnley and Wiggins, eds., The Auchinleck Manuscript, ll. 714–20.
19. Murdoch and Tasioulas, eds., The Apocryphal Lives, ll. 898–912 (my
italics).
20. Murdoch and Tasioulas, eds., The Apocryphal Lives, ll. 931–49 (my
italics).
21. Carl Horstmann, ed., “The Lyfe of Adam aus MS Bodley 596 (c.1430),”
Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 74 (1885): 53
[345–65].
22. Printed by R.H. Robbins in his Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth
Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), pp. 140–3.
23. Burnley and Wiggins, eds., The Auchinleck Manuscript, ll. 1–16 (my italics).
24. John Lydgate, Reson and Sensuallyte, ed. Ernst Sieper, EETS e.s. 84 (1901),
p. 149, ll. 5683–99 (my italics).
25. John Lydgate, Lydgate’s Troy Book, ed. H. Bergen. EETS e.s. 97 (1906),
Book II, pp. 159, ll. 507–516 and pp. 161–62, ll. 607–612 (my italics).
26. William Langland, Piers Plowman: An Edition of the C-Text, ed. Derek
Pearsall (London: Arnold, 1978), Passus 3, ll. 51–52, 68–70, 73–74 (my
italics).
27. John Lydgate, The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. Henry Noble
MacCracken, EETS e.s. 107 (1911), Book II, p. 367, ll. 792–98.
28. The data in the following paragraphs is derived from:
- Olga Weijers, ed. Vocabulaire du livre et de l’écriture au moyen âge,
CIVICIMA: Études sur le vocabulaire intellectuel du Moyen Âge 2
(Turnhout: Brepols, 1989), in particular the essays by Pierre Gasnault,
“Les supports et les instruments de l’écriture à l’époque médiévale,”
pp. 20–33, and Richard H. and Mary A. Rouse, “The Vocabulary of
Wax Tablets,” pp. 220–32;
- Richard H. and Mary A. Rouse, “Wax Tablets,” Language and
Communication 9 (1989): 175–191;
- Richard H. and Mary A. Rouse, “The Vocabulary of Wax Tablets,”
Harvard Library Bulletin n.s. 1.3 (1990): 12–19;
- Elisabeth Lalou, ed., Les Tablettes à écrire de l’Antiquité à l’époque moderne,
Bibliologia 12 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1992), which is most helpful as it
contains many photographs of extant tablets, many with inscribed
accounts.
134 F L OR E NC E B OU RG N E

29. Cf. The Old English Illustrated Hexateuch, EEMF 18 (Copenhagen:

Rosenkilde & Bagger, 1974). At the time of the conference, I had not been
able to consult Benjamin C. Withers, The Illustrated Old English Hexateuch,
Cotton Claudius B. iv. The Frontier of Seeing and Reading (London: British
Library, 2007).
30. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 2.1, fol. 94. Cf. The Cambridge
Illuminations: Ten Centuries of Book Production in the Medieval West (London:
Harvey Miller, 2005), cat. no. 19; illustration p. 82.
31. Cf. Clare Donovan, The Winchester Bible (London: British Library,
1993).
32. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 74, fol. 2v. The image of this folio can be
viewed in the BnF’s “Mandragore” database at http://mandragore.bnf.fr.
33. Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 350/567. Cf. The Cambridge
Illuminations, cat. no. 30, illustration p. 99.
34. British Library, Additional MS 47682, fol. 10. Cf. The Holkham Bible
Picture-Book: A Facsimile, commentary by Michelle Brown (London:
British Library, 2007).
35. Cf. Ruth Mellinkoff, “The Round-Topped Tablets of the Law: Sacred
Symbol and Emblem of Evil,” Journal of Jewish Art 1 (1974): 28–43.
36. The Wycliffite Bible is quoted from Josiah Forshall and Frederick
Madden, eds., The Holy Bible in the Earliest English Versions, Made from the
Latin by John Wycliffe and His Followers: The Middle English Compendium;
http://name.umdl.umich.edu/AFZ9170.0001.001. Italics are used for the
glosses.
37. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. Lat. 1224, fol. 71. Cf.
Michelle P. Brown, ed., Manuscripts from the Anglo-Saxon Age (London:
British Library, 2007), p. 33.
38. Cf. Otto Pächt, L’Enluminure médiévale (Paris: Macula, 1997), p. 184,
fig. 91.
39. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 4, fol. 221v. Cf. The Cambridge
Illuminations, cat. 21, p. 86.
40. Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.17.1. See Margaret Gibson, T.A.
Heslop, and Richard W. Pfaff, eds., The Eadwine Psalter: Text, Image,
and Monastic Culture in Twelfth-Century Canterbury, Publications of
the MHRA 14 (London: MHRA, 1992). See also André Crépin, “Le
‘Psautier d’Eadwine’: l’Angleterre pluri-culturelle,” in Journée d’études
anglo-normandes organisée par l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, Palais
de l’Institut, 20 juin 2008, eds. André Crépin and Jean Leclant (Paris: De
Boccard, 2009), pp. 139–70.
41. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fr. 1586, fol. 26. A description may be
accessed via the BnF’s “Mandragore” database at http://mandragore.bnf.
fr. Cf. Robert Bartlett, Medieval Panorama (London: Thames and Hudson,
2001), p. 222, fig. 3.
42. London, British Library, MS Harley 4431, fol. 4. This illumination can be
viewed in “Images Online” on the British Library’s website (http://www.
 V E R N A C U L A R E N G R AV I N G S 135

imagesonline.bl.uk, image no. 067363). Cf. Bartlett, Medieval Panorama,

p. 222, fig. 1.
43. London, British Library, MS Cotton Caligula A. xiv, fol. 20v. Cf. Brown,
ed. Manuscripts from the Anglo-Saxon Age, p. 168.
44. British Library, Additional MS 47682, fol. 18v. Cf. Michelle Brown, ed.
The Holkham Bible Picture-Book: A Facsimile (London: British Library,
2007).
45. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat.18014, fol. 207. The image of this folio
can be viewed in the BnF’s “Mandragore” database at http://mandragore.
bnf.fr.
46. Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 71, fol. 28. May be viewed on the website main-
tained by the photographic services of the Réunion des Musées Nationaux
at www.photo.rmn.fr/cf/htm/home.aspx, shelfmark 02-007074.
47. Sarah M. Horrall, general editor, The Southern Version of the Cursor Mundi,
vol. 2, ed. Roger R. Fowler (Ottawa: University of Ontario Press, 1990),
p. 63, ll. 11086–90.
48. Transcribed from the Vernon manuscript, fol. 105, col. a (my italics). Cf.
Ian A. Doyle, ed., The Vernon Manuscript. A Facsimile (Woodbridge: D.S.
Brewer, 1986).
49. London, British Library, Additional MS 35298 (late fifteenth century),
fol. 61v.
50. Particularly following the publication of Lois Ebin, ed., Vernacular Poetics
in the Later Middle Ages, Studies in Medieval Culture 16 (Kalamazoo:
Medieval Institute Publications, 1984).
51. Cf. Mary Caroline Spalding, ed. The Middle English Charters of Christ, Bryn
Mawr College Monographs 15 (1914), in The Middle English Compendium,
http://name.umdl.umich.edu/AFW1075.0001.001.
52. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson Poet. 175, fol. 94v, lines 80–85
(mid-fourteenth century); Spalding, ed., Middle English Charters, p. 27.
53. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 89, fol. 46 (c.1400); Spalding, ed.,
Middle English Charters, p. 26.
54. London, British Library, MS Harley 2346, fol. 52 (1400–1450); Spalding,
ed., Middle English Charters, p. 27.
55. London, British Library, Cotton Caligula A. ii, fol. 77r (1446–1460);
Spalding, ed., Middle English Charters, p. 47.
56. Cambridge University Library, MS. Ii. 3. 26, fol. 235 (1558); Spalding,
ed., Middle English Charters, p. 60.
57. On the medieval notion of the book as metaphorical body, see the seminal
study by Jesse M. Gellrich, The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages: Language
Theory, Mythology, and Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985),
which is now superseded by Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2000).
58. On medieval graffiti in England, no study has yet superseded Violet
Pritchard’s English Medieval Graffiti (1967; repr. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008).
136 F L OR E NC E B OU RG N E

59. Vernon Manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Eng. poet. a 1, fol. 231.
In addition to the complete facsimile, the page is reproduced with great
clarity and abundantly analyzed by Avril Henry, “ ‘The Pater Noster in a
table ypeynted’ and some other Presentations of Doctrine in the Vernon
Manuscript,” in Studies in the Vernon Manuscript, ed. Derek Pearsall
(Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 89–113.
PART II

IMPERMANENCE AND ACCUMULATION IN

THE LITERARY IMAGINATION
CHAPTER 7

REWRITING GENRES:
BEOWULF AS EPIC ROMANCE

Leo Carruthers

Investigation of its historical matter in parallel with its generic classifications shows
Beowulf to be a literary palimpsest anticipating the historical novel.

D efining the genre of the Old English Beowulf is a rather complex

problem that is related to the theme of the present volume through
the question of linguistic, generic, and cultural overlap involving ongo-
ing oral composition and rewriting over several centuries.1 It can be dif-
ficult even to distinguish genres, as Roberta Frank says, in a literature
lacking special terms for “epic,” “elegy,” or “lay.” 2 In many respects
Beowulf must be accepted as a kind of epic, even though Classical purists
like Tolkien objected that this term only applied properly to Greek, not
to Germanic poetry.3 In other respects it recalls the later medieval
romances, which portray contemporary society in an idealized historical
past, often mixed with elements of “faery” and fantasy, and some critics
have indeed interpreted it in this way.4 Tolkien, in his day, solved the
problem by inventing a completely new term, “heroic elegy,” which has
much to recommend it but whose very originality may not do justice to
the poem’s involvement with other genres. Anxious to avoid the danger
(and limits) of overcategorization, others have pointed to the multiplicity
of genres that Beowulf embodies and includes within itself, making it a
veritable “literary summa” as Joseph Harris calls it, even going so far as to
compare it in this respect to the Canterbury Tales.5 In addition to the poet’s
use of “literary history” and “historical depth,” Harris points to “genea-
logical verse, a creation hymn, elegies, a lament, a praise poem, historical
140 L E O C A R RU T H E R S

poems, a f lyting, heroic boasts, gnomic verse, a sermon . . . panegyric,

[and] exempla” among the genres which find their way into Beowulf.
Some of these are formally introduced, others are unmarked, but overall
they contribute to the poem’s “catalogue-like qualities.”6
In view of this, it seems unwise, even arbitrary, to try to force Beowulf
into a single Procrustean mode. It is a genre unto itself, for there is noth-
ing else like it in Old English or in any other Germanic literature; but
that does not preclude its containing elements of both epic and romance,
terms which are not mutually exclusive.7 And while Beowulf may not
meet all the criteria of “romance” found in a later medieval poem like Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight, it does have elements of the kind of histori-
cal romance which became popular in the nineteenth century. In the pre-
sent essay I hope to show how Beowulf can be read as a historical romance
through its combination of history and fiction, i.e. the placing of a fic-
tional hero in a historical setting that is at least partly genuine, recogniz-
able to the audience through references to authentic historical kings but
remaining sufficiently vague to allow for imaginative developments.
The historical novel emerged as a genre only in the nineteenth cen-
tury and is very much associated with the career of Sir Walter Scott
(1771–1832). It is characterized by the combination of history and fiction
in varying degrees, the story taking place at a precise date and in a realis-
tic setting. The degree of historicity will depend on this precision, as well
as the extent to which authentic historical people and events are given
either a central or a peripheral role in the story. Where the central char-
acters are fictional, in a good historical novel they will be brought into
contact with authentic figures from history, or will at least be affected
by true historical events in such a manner that the story could only have
taken place at the time and place described. Lacking such precision, the
novel easily descends to the level of historical romance, especially in the
hands of less competent historians than Scott.8 Such, for example, is the
case with Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1881), where the his-
torical backdrop is hardly more than a colorful stage-set; the action takes
place in the eighteenth century but at no precise date; it does not include
any authentic historical personages, and no allusion is made to any real
historical event that could have affected the fictional characters or the
course of the plot. Treasure Island is therefore the perfect example of a his-
torical romance, unlike Scott’s historical novels where the desired level of
authenticity is much higher.9
Beowulf is not of course a novel, but when viewed as history, it does
have elements which may be compared to both the historical novel and the
historical romance. The poem at least partly evokes a genuine past which
the Anglo-Saxon audience would have seen as belonging to their history,
 R EW RITING GENR ES 141

in which authentic, identifiable kings play a role; and into this setting,
fictional heroes and adventures are inserted. Indeed, one could argue that
what the medieval Anglo-Saxons expected of their semi-historical, semi-
mythological poetry is similar to what readers of the English historical
novel or romance have expected since Scott’s day.10 In addition to melo-
drama and high adventure, the modern “historical romance” normally
includes love, courtship and marriage, themes which clearly must not (and
do not) dominate in a heroic poem like Beowulf. However, while they do
not apply to the eponymous hero, in either of his roles as a young, unmar-
ried warrior or as an old, heirless king, such themes are far from being
absent from the poem, both among the main characters (think of those
happily married royal couples, Hrothgar and Wealtheow in Denmark,
Hygelac and Hygd in Geatland) and in the so-called “digressions” (the
two tragic princesses, Hildeburh and Freawaru, would certainly not be
out of place alongside Scott’s Lucy Ashton in The Bride of Lammermoor).
The choice of “Epic Romance” in my title is therefore something of a
compromise, which recalls both the epics and romances of medieval lit-
erature without being meant to limit the poem to either of those genres.11
Like all great works of literature, Beowulf is multilayered and cannot, in
my opinion, be reduced to a single, overarching genre. However, for the
purposes of the present essay I wish to consider those aspects which can
be assimilated with historical fiction, whether this is expressed through
the medium of the novel or the romance.
We are perhaps inevitably inf luenced by modern expectations of
the historical novel and/or romance, beginning with the word “novel”
itself, leading us to exclude a poem like Beowulf automatically. The poem
may not be a novel, but this difference needs to be seen in perspective,
and in the context of the society which produced it. In the Old English
period, verse occupied the place in society and in literary expression that
prose would come to hold only after the Middle Ages had ended. In Old
English literature only Apollonius of Tyre exists as evidence of the begin-
ning of imaginative, fictional prose writing in the vernacular, and even
then it is a translation from Latin. Apollonius is a historical romance in the
sense that it is a love-story set in the past, but not a historical novel because
of the absence of realism, i.e. of the desire to create the impression of his-
torical authenticity. There are no known historical characters involved.
Unlike the modern historical novel, the characters’ lives are not in any
way affected by the concrete historical situation in which the story is set.
They do not interact with people who really lived, with events that really
took place. Beowulf, on the other hand, does meet these criteria; it is fic-
tion with a historical perspective, beginning with the historical period
in which the story is situated. What Roberta Frank writes of Germanic
142 L E O C A R RU T H E R S

legend in general seems to me to apply perfectly to Beowulf: “Situated

somewhere between history and fairy tale, Germanic legend tells of a
distant and largely imaginary past.”12
Because readers tend, not incorrectly, to think of Beowulf as an English
work which was composed in England and is found only in an English
manuscript, it can be helpful to remind oneself that the poem is not in
any explicit way about the Anglo-Saxons or their island. It is set, rather,
in the ancient Continental homeland of the English—the territories of
Saxons and Danes, Franks and Frisians whose settlement of Britain had
begun in the second half of the fifth century and was still going on in
the sixth century, the time period in which the poem’s narrative unfolds.
That the Anglo-Saxons never lost interest in their origins is well exem-
plified by Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica as well as by the fact that this book
was translated into Old English, probably at the end of the ninth century,
about 160 years after its composition.13 Not only that, but they main-
tained an ongoing relationship with their Germanic kinsmen who con-
tinued to interact with them in the following centuries, for good or ill, in
peace or at war. It is worth exploring how far Beowulf is a ref lection of its
Germanic origin, how this English poem remains attached to Germanic
myth and history, and also how it illustrates the dynamic involvement of
the Anglo-Saxons with other Germanic peoples.14 The poem is eminently
allusive, as the large number of proper names shows; apart from the char-
acters in the story, many of these names refer to tribes and heroes known
from other literary sources to belong to Germanic tradition, the dividing
line between history and myth not always being entirely clear.15 Some of
them are alluded to in another Old English poem, Widsith, further proof
of the survival—or reinvention—of Germanic tradition in England.16
And while Beowulf makes no mention of England or the English, there is
at least one highly significant reference to the ancestors of the Mercian
kings—Offa the Angle, his wife and his son Eomer—and many believe
Hengest of the Finn-episode to be the same as that Hengest named by
Bede as the first Anglo-Saxon king of Kent.17
When and where was Beowulf first composed? While these two ques-
tions are related, one is greatly hampered by the discrepancy between
the original, (probably) oral composition and the (probably) late written
version found in the only extant manuscript. There is still no agreement
among scholars as to when exactly the poem was first recited, nor as to
the number of stages of oral composition and/or copying that may have
been gone through before the surviving text was produced.18 Nor is there
ready agreement as to the date of the manuscript itself. Placed by David
Dumville in the period 997–1016, it is dated slightly later, to the reign of
Cnut (1016–35), by Kevin Kiernan; while Helen Damico, aiming to tie
 R EW RITING GENR ES 143

it in with English politics after Cnut’s death, would even push it beyond
that limit, after 1041.19 But whatever the precise date of the extant manu-
script, there is no way of telling if the now lost exemplar used by the
West Saxon scribes of the late tenth or early eleventh century was a recent
text or not. It might have been written in the previous generation, or it
might have been more than a hundred years old. What we know of the
methods of Germanic metrical composition suggest that the poem would
have had a long oral existence before it found its way into writing. The
story was most likely passed on from one generation to another, no doubt
told and retold many times, thus reshaping the oral form, since each new
telling could produce a new version, embellished with stylistic variants.
Theories about the original date of composition thus range from the sev-
enth to the eleventh century; but on the whole, most critics tend to place
the oral origins in the early to mid-eighth century, the age of Bede or
soon after. The poet may have lived in the kingdom of Mercia, if we seri-
ously consider his reference to the Continental king named Offa (lines
1949, 1957), distant ancestor of Offa of Mercia, the most powerful king
in eighth-century England. Yet it must be stressed that everything basic
to the poem could have come from any of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.
Thus, while the reference to the Continental Offa may suggest a Mercian
origin for the existing version, this could be merely an addition to a more
generally circulating story, added in to f latter a local patron.
The Germanic peoples of most interest to the Anglo-Saxons were
the Franks and the Danes, from the conversion period (beginning with
St. Augustine in 597) down to the Norman Conquest. In between lay
the numerous Viking invasions which deeply affected both Anglo-
Saxons and Franks, leading to multiple alliances and counter-alliances—
including the creation, in 911, of the Danish duchy of Normandy which
would eventually conquer England in 1066. Understanding this long-
term interaction helps us to see why Beowulf, regardless of its exact date
and place of composition, belongs not only to England but to the wider
Germanic world in a dialogue of past and present, looking back as it does
to Continental roots while (indirectly) keeping an eye on contempo-
rary warlike neighbors. It is this relationship between past and present
which leads me to see the poem as both a “historical epic” and a “his-
torical romance” in some ways, terms I have used before in an earlier
study of the historical background.20 In my view the relationship with
the present—regardless of when exactly that “present” occurred—also
gave Beowulf political relevance in its own time, so much so that it could
even have been drawn into the royal power struggles of the mid-eleventh
century. This point is argued strongly by Helen Damico, who makes
an interesting comparison between the fictional Wealhtheow and the
144 L E O C A R RU T H E R S

actual Queen Emma (d. 1052), the subject and heroine of the anonymous
Encomium Emmae Reginae (c. 1041).21 But whereas Damico sees Emma as
the model for Hrothgar’s queen, thus turning the Latin Encomium into a
source of the Anglo-Saxon poem—and thereby requiring an extremely
late date for the Beowulf manuscript (in the 1040s)—she makes no allow-
ance for the possibility of the reverse argument, i.e. that it was the poetic
representation of Wealhtheow which inspired Emma’s panegyrist.
The action of Beowulf covers a large part of the sixth century, from
c.515 (the slaying of Grendel) to c.583 (Beowulf ’s death). This chronol-
ogy is based on internal references to real kings, especially those of the
Franks, Danes and Swedes, who are known from historical sources. As
Klaeber reminds us, Beowulf ’s uncle, Hygelac of the Geats, actually died
in AD 521, in a raid on the Frisian territory of the Franks, he being iden-
tical with the king who appears in Gregory of Tours’ Historia Francorum
under the Latin form “Chlochilaicus.”22 The Frankish king at the time
of Hygelac’s death was Theuderic I (511–33), son of the famous Clovis
(481–511). With Beowulf ’s support, Hygelac is succeeded by his young
son Heardred, who reigns as king of the Geats until killed in battle dur-
ing the Swedish wars; this can be placed, from other historical sources,
in 533, the year of the death of the Swedish king Ottar Vendel-Crow,
named Ohþere in the poem. The fictional Beowulf then rules the Geats
for fifty years, thus placing the dragon episode in c.583. Near the end
of the poem, after the hero’s death, the atmosphere is one of fear, fore-
boding the renewal of warfare between the Geats and the Franks; the
messenger recalls that Ūs wæs ā syððan Merewīoingas milts ungyfeðe [“Even
since that, the favor of the Merovingian king has been denied to us”]
(lines 2920–1). The ruler referred to here must be Childebert II (575–95),
king of Austrasia which was the north-eastern part of the Frankish ter-
ritories. Since Frisia lay within the Austrasian sphere of control, it was
Childebert II whom the Danes and the Geats feared in the 580s, rather
than Chilperic I (561–84) who ruled Neustria in the south-west. Gregory
of Tours had a lot of personal dealings with Childebert II; and it is inter-
esting to note that the fictional Beowulf ’s death falls precisely in the
middle of Gregory’s episcopacy (573–94), at a time when the Franks were
expanding their power in all directions.
The historian J.M. Wallace-Hadrill emphasizes how very like other
Germanic peoples the Anglo-Saxons remained, even after their con-
version, and how they kept up political contact with some of their
Continental cousins.23 The reference in Beowulf to the Merovingian threat
did not escape him.24 This argues for the continuity of heroic traditions
among all the Germanic peoples, whether or not they were Christian—
and unlike the Franks and the Anglo-Saxons, many Germanic peoples
 R EW RITING GENR ES 145

such as the Saxons were still pagans in the eighth century. Significantly,
Wallace-Hadrill compares the Frankish Mayor of the Palace, Charles
Martel (c.688–741) to the hero Beowulf.25 And under his son, Pepin the
Short, the Frankish kingdom was about to experience a political upheaval
which the Anglo-Saxons cannot have ignored. For in 751 Pepin deposed
the last of the Merovingians, Childeric III, becoming instead the first
king of the Arnulfing or Carolingian line; and his own son, Charles
the Great (Charlemagne), who ruled as king of the Franks from 768 and
Holy Roman emperor from 800, was to be the most famous member of
that family. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which concentrates almost exclu-
sively on English affairs, hardly ever says anything about events on the
Continent, but that need not imply lack of awareness; the rare, brief entry
for 782, “Here the Old Saxons and the Franks fought,” has the ominous
rumble of distant Carolingian thunder that just might burst into a storm
over England.26
There is admittedly no clear agreement on the dating of Beowulf in
its earliest oral form, though many find Peter Clemoes’s arguments in
favor of the reign of Æthelbald, king of Mercia (716-57), persuasive.27
If Beowulf was first composed in the early or mid-eighth century, then it
corresponds closely to the end of the Merovingian era and the rise of the
Carolingians. Anglo-Saxon kings were fully aware of political changes
on the Continent, and anxious to maintain good relations with the
Franks, hence no doubt their familiarity with events and characters dat-
ing from two centuries before. We cannot know if the Anglo-Saxon scop
learned of such ancient events through oral tradition handed down by his
predecessors or through contact with contemporary Frankish poets. But
even if the poem’s composition in something like its present form were
to be placed much later, in the ninth or the tenth century, a similar line
of argument would still hold good, since the Anglo-Saxon kings were in
frequent contact with the Carolingian dynasty and anxious to remain on
good terms with the later rulers of Francia.28 Indeed, it has been argued
that the sense of kinship among the Germanic peoples, rather than fad-
ing away as time went on, actually increased in the ninth century, as
Charlemagne brought Goths, Burgundians and Lombards into the
Frankish empire.29 One example of Anglo-Frankish diplomatic relations
will demonstrate both English awareness of this empire and Frankish
anxiety to gain recognition from another Germanic nation—an anxiety
that, unfortunately, was surpassed in this case by Charlemagne’s well-
known possessiveness in regard to his daughters. In 789 Charlemagne
sought an Anglo-Saxon princess, Ælff læd of Mercia, daughter of the
famous King Offa (757-96), as a bride for his son, Charles the Younger.
Although the Frankish king later withdrew the proposal in irritation
146 L E O C A R RU T H E R S

because the lady’s father hoped to arrange a double alliance, wanting

his son Ecgfrith to marry Charlemagne’s daughter Bertha at the same
time, his initial interest shows how important he felt Offa to be. And the
king of the Franks needed support in Europe: though soon to be granted
imperial dignity by the pope and crowned in Rome, Charlemagne was
not recognized as such by the Roman Emperor in the East, the legitimate
successor of Constantine the Great.
This Offa of Mercia has also been taken, as we have seen, as a likely
patron of the Beowulf-poet. It is probably not a coincidence that one of
his famous ancestors from the migration period, Offa, king of the Angles
(died c.456), is mentioned in the poem (ll. 1949, 1957). This could be an
indication that Beowulf was composed at the Mercian court under Offa;
or else, if the poem dated from the reign of his uncle, Æthelbald (716-57),
the reference to the Continental Offa may have been inserted later in
order to f latter the Anglo-Saxon king of the same name. The reference
occurs in one of the so-called “digressions,” giving an unf lattering por-
trait of the Continental Offa’s proud and murderous wife Thryth, or
Modthryth. This, however, may be quite intentional on the poet’s part,
as the name echoes that of Cynethryth, wife of Offa of Mercia, a woman
of remarkable character and one of the very few Anglo-Saxon queens
known to have shared power with her husband.30 If this is meant as an
indirect criticism of a contemporary of the poet’s, it reinforces Beowulf ’s
relevance to political issues of its own day. It also raises the possibility that
such relevance may have been ongoing, lending itself to new, rewritten
versions of the poem, an argument that seems especially applicable to the
prologue which may be designed to f latter a much later king, Cnut the
Dane (1016-35).
All of the English kingdoms, from the period of conversion (597-686)
to the Norman Conquest (1066), enjoyed a homogeneous Anglo-Saxon
culture which blended the ancient Germanic heroic traditions with
Roman religion and Latin learning. The Vikings, indeed, radically
disrupted the political situation during the ninth century; and a later
generation of Danish invaders would eventually take over the whole
kingdom during the eleventh. But once settled in Britain, little by little
they established peaceful relations with the English and were converted
to Christianity, beginning in 878 with the baptism of Guthrum—whose
former enemy in battle, Alfred the Great, became his godfather. Despite
the rule of Danish kings from 1016 to 1042, the Scandinavian settlers
were finally integrated into the prevailing culture. Although as said ear-
lier there can be no certainty about the exact date of the Beowulf manu-
script, if it was copied early in Cnut’s reign (1016–35), it is not improbable
that the prologue was specially added in his honor. For it recounts the
 R EW RITING GENR ES 147

foundation of the Danish royal family, beginning with the eponymous

ancestor Scyld Scefing and concluding with the accession of his grandson
Hrothgar, who is king of Denmark when the main story opens (l. 64).
This glorification of Danish royal ancestry looks suspiciously like a late
interpolation, which would have been particularly easy to slip in at the
beginning of the text. Such an addition would hardly seem necessary
in an English poem composed in eighth-century Mercia, and would
not even be politically correct in ninth- or tenth-century Wessex; but
it would be very suitable at the Anglo-Danish court of Cnut.31 While
this argues in favor of the rewriting of at least some parts of the poem to
take into account the political situation of the English kingdom at the
time the copyist may have been working, it does not follow that such
rewriting can be extended into the 1040s, a suggested dating that the
manuscript can hardly justify.
That the opening scene of Beowulf was not a mere fancy on the part of
the poet, but was an authentic ref lection of historical burial practice, was
demonstrated by the 1939 discovery of the Sutton Hoo ship burial, prob-
ably meant as a cenotaph for Rædwald, king of East Anglia who died in
624 or 625.32 It also showed, as Mayr-Harting has pointed out, that the
coming of Christianity did not immediately put an end to pagan customs
among the English, and that an Anglo-Saxon writer could speak with
knowledge of such things without himself being a pagan. 33 It follows that
the prologue of Beowulf could have been composed by a Christian, which
refutes the earlier supposition that it was of very ancient pagan origin. For
kings like Rædwald, the memory of the ancestral homeland was certainly
still very close—much closer than in the time of Offa of Mercia who lived
more than a century later. Continental kings like the historical Hrothgar
and Hygelac had reigned scarcely a hundred years before Rædwald’s day;
Germanic legends were the stuff of entertainment in Anglo-Saxon royal
halls. We may well imagine that in the courts of such kings, tales of their
pagan kinsmen in Denmark circulated from the earliest times, and con-
tinued to do so for many generations. Rædwald’s attempt at religious syn-
cretism, mixing pagan and Christian rituals, is hardly surprising, however
much execrated by Bede. It is remarkable that a century after Rædwald’s
death, Bede, who lived far away in Northumbria, was able to learn this
scandalous detail which had probably been handed down by generations
of disapproving monks; it was, no doubt, one of those oral accounts “ex
traditione maiorum” mentioned by Bede in his autobiographical note. We
may thus observe the ongoing interest of the English—certainly in royal
and noble circles—in their Continental origins and their connections with
other Germanic peoples. This Beowulf strongly ref lected, and continued to
do during the period of both oral and written transmission.
148 L E O C A R RU T H E R S

It is interesting to contrast the method used by the best modern his-

torical novelists, from Scott’s time onwards, with the type of attitude to
the past found in medieval writers in general. From at least one point of
view, that of the apparent anachronisms, Beowulf does not conform to
the model historical novel of the Waverley type. This is because of the
modern effort to use reliable sources in order to create an authentic view
of a former age, meaning, as Leerssen puts it with reference to Scott and
the “new attitude to the past” which dates only from the late eighteenth
century, “that the past should be studied not as a collection of moral
exempla and in terms of its applicability to the present, but ‘intrinsically,’
in its own right and in its own moral and epistemic frame of reference.”34
Although the Old English poem does look back to an older time, the
type of culture it ref lects is largely that of the audience of its own day. In
fact, it is a ref lection of what Christian English kings and nobles admired
between the seventh and the eleventh centuries. It is less a description of
pre-Christian Scandinavia than a ref lection of Christian England. The
so-called historical and religious anachronisms disappear if we under-
stand that the poem is not meant as a history-lesson; it ref lects, rather, its
own place and time, which is Anglo-Saxon England after the conversion
period. Regardless of its exact date of composition, therefore, the poem
was and remained an “epic romance” in the historical mode designed to
appeal to a noble Anglo-Saxon audience of any century.
It is perhaps impossible for any historical poem, romance or novel
to avoid ref lecting its author’s culture to some extent. No work of art
can merely be a mirror held up to the past, a sort of time-machine suc-
cessfully taking the audience back to another age. It is, rather, a vision,
an attempted re-creation, whose success depends on the author’s skill,
knowledge and intentions. This attempt is perhaps what most radically
separates the medieval epic or romance from the modern historical novel.
Beginning with Scott, serious historical novelists have not only been
imaginative writers but also historians; they do their research in order
to get the historical background as right as possible according to their
lights, and they fill it in with what they believe to be authentic historical
details; they try to avoid anachronisms which would betray the fact that
they write from a later perspective. Whether or not they do get it right is,
of course, another question; historical novelists, like other kinds of his-
torians, may misunderstand the facts, or misrepresent them, or play with
them for literary effect. Scott’s Ivanhoe, for example, has been derided
by modern critics for its exaggeration of the supposed enmity between
“Saxons” (depicted as “real” Englishmen) and “Normans” (seen as foreign
intruders) in the reign of Richard the Lionheart, by which time, it is now
believed, the distinction that had existed in William the Conqueror’s day
 R EW RITING GENR ES 149

was no longer current—a salutary reminder that the novel is not, after all,
“history,” but a story with a historical background that is only partially
accurate. It may be difficult ever to achieve complete authenticity, since
every writer remains a person of his/her own century and cannot help
being the product of the culture and time in which they live. But at least
the effort is made: the attempt is there to relive, and recreate, another
place and time. It is the conscious historical approach made by one who
knows the past well. This was certainly how Scott, who was a competent
historian as well as a poet and novelist, thought of his historical novels.
Moreover, he liked to insert authorial comments in order to distance the
period under question from the society of his own day: thus Waverley’s
subtitle, ’Tis Sixty Years Since, recurs repeatedly throughout the novel as a
reminder that things have changed in the intervening period.35
But we do not find this attitude in the hands of medieval poets and
writers who placed their stories in the past. Conscious of the passage of
time they certainly were; just as one generation succeeds another, it was
clear to them that their ancestors had lived hundreds of years before, and
individuals like Bede were aware that language itself had changed since
then. But there is no desire in Old English poetry to create historical
authenticity in literary terms—no attempt to portray a radically different
culture, to ref lect the mentality of another age, or to reproduce realistic
speech from another century. Even among medieval historians, there is
little writing of that kind. For Bede the main difference between men of
his own time and those of earlier generations, whether Roman, Celt or
Anglo-Saxon, seems to be religious; his people are either Christians or
not, or on the point of being converted. But there is no attempt to place
the reader in the mind-set of an earlier age. Bede does not try, for exam-
ple, to understand King Rædwald’s religious syncretism, or to see his side
of the story as a modern historian or historical novelist might do.
In like manner we may say that the Beowulf-poet, though conscious of
writing about the past, does not make the kind of imaginative leap into
history that one would expect in a historical novel. Criticism of the poem
on the grounds of historical anachronism therefore seems misdirected,
since the poet did not try to make that past seem very different from his
own day. Yet Beowulf is a story of olden days, recreated through the art
of a poet who lived perhaps hundreds of years after the period evoked.
Some of the basic details were historical, especially the names of kings—
Hrothgar, Hygelac, Ongentheow—and the large-scale depiction of tribal
conf lict, especially the Swedish-Geatish wars. These things were part of
the common fund of tradition which circulated among all the Germanic
peoples. Other important elements were imaginative, depending on the
creative ability of the poet who first invented the story: such is the hero,
150 L E O C A R RU T H E R S

Beowulf himself, who does not correspond to any known person in the
recorded chronicles. This does not mean that the scop who composed the
extant version, if late, was incapable of using archaic style and diction in
order to create a deliberately ancient effect, a literary “air of antiquity.”
It is possible, as Roberta Frank says, that “Beowulf was invoking semiob-
solete linguistic markers in order to paint a heroic past, just as Anglo-
Latin poets confected new hexameters out of authoritative old ones . . . .”36
Nevertheless one does not find that projection of self into “wholly van-
ished conditions” that Leerssen defines as literary historicism—that
“attempt to reconnect with the nation’s past” which became marked in
Europe from 1790 onwards.37 For this reason Beowulf may be said to be
closer to epic romance than to the historical novel.
Although historiography and literature may share storytelling tech-
niques, historical composition and fictional writing are not, indeed,
the same thing, as we have seen in the case of novels like Waverley and
Ivanhoe. Tolkien also reminds us of this in his most famous essay, “The
Monsters and the Critics,” drawing attention to Beowulf ’s fictionality in
contrast to those who would read it as “history.” He objects to the way
in which Beowulf had been treated: “Beowulf has been used as a quarry of
fact and fancy far more assiduously than it has been studied as a work of
art . . . And it is as an historical document that it has mainly been exam-
ined and dissected.”38 Nor did he accept the suggestion, current in his
day, that Beowulf was a “primitive” poem. On the contrary, he says, “it
is a late one, using the materials . . . preserved from a day already chang-
ing and passing, a time that has now for ever vanished, swallowed in
oblivion; using them for a new purpose . . . , its maker . . . expended his art
in making keen that touch upon the heart which sorrows have that are
both poignant and remote.”39
Another example of such an attitude among the Anglo-Saxons is pro-
vided by The Battle of Maldon, which is, after Beowulf, the longest and
most important heroic poem in Old English. It is a commonplace of Old
English literary criticism to say that this poem, based on an event of the
year AD 991, preserves evidence of certain heroic traditions said to be
typical of Germanic society of the first century, like those described by
the Roman historian, Tacitus, in his Germania of AD 98—always sup-
posing Tacitus to be a reliable witness, which is by no means certain.
Maldon is thus seen as an expression of the survival, fully eight hundred
years after Tacitus and five hundred after the Anglo-Saxon settlement
of Britain, of the ancient heroic code of the Germanic tribes. But rather
than “survival,” it would be better to speak of a nostalgic memory; the
heroic age echoed in Maldon, and in other poems like Beowulf, was long
past, so that writers or copyists of around the year 1000 were not without
 R EW RITING GENR ES 151

a certain taste for the antique. As Michael Swanton says, the Maldon poet
was writing in the heroic style at a time which was no longer heroic.40 It
is a literary mode: the poet is concerned less with the figure of Byrhtnoth
as a “hero” than with the code of honor which leads his men to die for
their leader. It is this which makes Maldon seem an authentic echo of that
ancient Germanic heroic code which Tacitus admired so much while
perhaps exaggerating it for his own purpose. The “traditional” values of
the comitatus seem to live again: honor, loyalty, courage and self-sacrifice.
And Beowulf, too, belongs to this romantic, nostalgic mind-set typical of
a sophisticated society looking back on its past.
One may even attribute to the Maldon poet a spirit of nostalgic didac-
ticism, in the same vein as that which Malory would show several cen-
turies later in his Morte Darthur (1469), i.e. a vision of a lost golden age.
The Anglo-Saxon love of Germanic legend is comparable to both the
medieval and the modern fascination with King Arthur and the Knights
of the Round Table. While being aware of the danger of anachronism,
one may say that what makes them similar is the wistful evocation of
heroic virtues and of chivalric values. And the feelings expressed by
Tacitus could in turn be described as the first example in European his-
tory of the “noble savage” theme. It indicates a recurring tendency to
look back on an earlier stage of history as a golden age, “the good old
days.” Tacitus does not present his Germans as Romans in disguise, but
he does use them to draw attention to the loss of heroic values—indeed,
of the old virtues of the Republic—in the Rome of his own day. In his
view, Rome would do well to revive and imitate the comitatus mentality
of the so-called “barbarians.” And this same nostalgia is the source of the
“heroic elegy” that Tolkien wrote about in regard to Beowulf, with its
“sorrows that are both poignant and remote.” If André Crépin is right in
describing Beowulf as a “mirror for princes,” the hero being presented as
an “ideal king,”41 here again one may see in the poem’s idealism an echo
of that lost world, that glory of olden times which Tacitus observed—or
wished his readers to believe in.
For all of these reasons it would therefore be a mistake to seek too
much historical verisimilitude in Old English poetry in general and
in Beowulf in particular. The poem, whether as an early oral compo-
sition or as a late rewriting in the extant manuscript, needs to be set
in perspective—both the multiple historical perspective implied by
the extensive time scale from the eighth to the eleventh centuries, and
the “interpretive plurality” (to use Breizmann’s phrase) that criticism
requires.42 It is a story, told for its own sake, including some genu-
ine historical references but telling us more about the literary taste
of Germanic kings and Anglo-Saxon noblemen who enjoyed the
152 L E O C A R RU T H E R S

“nostalgic reconstruction of a northern heroic age.”43 Beowulf therefore

portrays a society that is both pagan Germanic and Christian English,
in which not everything that is pagan is to be disdained. The poet
clearly understood the religious difference between English Christians
and their pagan Germanic ancestors, but this is downplayed or ignored:
Beowulf and his companions are “good pagans,” almost, one might
say, like the English themselves before the conversion—paralleled,
indeed, at least from the Christian viewpoint, by the people of the Old
Testament waiting for the coming of the Savior. Anachronistic this may
well appear to be, but the poem transcends the “realistic” genre. If we
accept an eighth-century date for the original composition of Beowulf,
the fact that it was still being copied around the year 1000 (or soon
after) means that Anglo-Saxon taste had not changed much in three
hundred years, at least in this respect. Its audience in the late tenth or
early eleventh century was still fascinated with Continental origins,
and still at war with other Germanic peoples—witness the actual battle
at Maldon, which was only one engagement in a long series of Viking
attacks leading to the deposition and death of Æthelred (978–1016) who
would be replaced by a Danish king, Cnut. Cultured and pious the
English scribes may have been, but they were still interested in a story
of the olden days, in the heroic deeds of a romantic warrior-king who
recalled their ancestors of the bygone pagan era.

Notes
1. The standard edition is Frederick Klaeber, ed. Beowulf and the Fight at
Finnsburg, 3rd edn. with suppl. (1922; Boston & London: D.C. Heath,
1950). It has now been superseded by Robert Fulk, Robert Bjork and John
D. Niles, eds. Klaeber’s Beowulf, 4th edn. (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2008).
2. Roberta Frank, “Germanic Legend in Old English Literature,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, ed. Malcolm Godden and
Michael Lapidge (Cambridge: CUP, 1991), p. 95.
3. “Beowulf is not an epic, nor even a magnified lay. No terms borrowed
from Greek or other literatures exactly fit: there is no reason why they
should.” J.R.R. Tolkien, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” in An
Anthology of Beowulf Criticism, ed. L.E. Nicholson (Notre Dame: Notre
Dame University Press, 1963), p. 85. Originally published in Proceedings of
the British Academy 22 (1936): 245–95.
4. See, for example, Natalia Breizmann, “ ‘Beowulf ’ as Romance: Literary
Interpretation as Quest,” MLN 113 (1998): 1022–35.
5. Joseph Harris, “Beowulf in Literary History,” Pacific Coast Philology 17.1-2
(November 1982): 16 [16–23].
 R EW RITING GENR ES 153

6. Harris, “Beowulf in Literary History,” 17, 19, 20. As this list makes clear,
the notion of “genre” adopted by Harris attaches importance to the
formal structures of written texts as well as to their content. A similar
approach is used in the present article.
7. “The medieval metrical romances were akin to the chansons de gestes
and epic,” according to J.A. Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary
Terms and Literary Theory, 3rd edn. (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 804 (s.v.
“Romance”). Under “Epic,” p. 284, he defines an epic as “a long narrative
poem, on a grand scale, about the deeds of warriors and heroes . . . incor-
porating myth, legend, folk tale and history.” Beowulf is included as a
“primary epic,” i.e. one of originally oral composition.
8. Joep Leerssen, “Literary Historicism: Romanticism, Philologists, and
the Presence of the Past,” Modern Language Quarterly 65.2 ( June 2004):
221–43, emphasizes the “scholarly and nonescapist aspect of Romantic
authors” like Scott, whose learned endeavors we wrongly tend to “belit-
tle” and “marginalize” (222), whereas he was in reality “an antiquarian of
note” and a “historian-novelist” (224).
9. Both genres, the historical novel and the historical romance, have
remained productive and popular down to the present day. Good exam-
ples of writers seeking to express historical authenticity in their fictional
work would include Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose, 1980) and Peter
Tremayne (the “Sister Fidelma” series, 1994–2010), both of whom are
also known as historians and anthropologists.
10. Scott’s Waverley (begun in 1805 but not finished until 1814) is often
called the first historical novel. The introduction states that it is “nei-
ther a romance of chivalry, nor a tale of modern manners,” indicating
the author’s awareness of the novelty of the genre. The sub-title, ’Tis
Sixty Years Since, not only clarifies the period concerned (1745) but also
defines one of the requirements of the genre, namely its setting before
the writer’s lifetime. Since the author remained officially anonymous
for many years, the term “Waverley novels” was rapidly applied to the
numerous fictional works, mostly on historical themes, which Scott
published between 1814 and his death in 1832. One of the most famous
is certainly Ivanhoe (1819), often considered to be the first historical
romance.
11. K.S. Whetter, Understanding Genre and Medieval Romance (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2008) recognizes that the two genres share a number of features
(p. 95), and himself coined a “generic hendiadys,” tragic-romance, to define
Malory’s Morte Darthur (pp. 8, 48, 109).
12. Frank, “Germanic Legend,” p. 89.
13. On the dating of the Old English manuscripts of Bede’s H.E., see Sharon
M. Rowley’s essay in the present volume.
14. Roberta Frank, “Germanic Legend,” has much more to say about
these topics, not only in general but with specific reference to Beowulf
throughout.
154 L E O C A R RU T H E R S

15. Klaeber’s list of Proper Names, even after one has grouped together mul-
tiple tribal epithets—most notoriously in the case of the Danes, who may
be referred to in the poem as North, South, East, West, Ring, Spear
(Gar-), or Bright Danes—still has 117 head words. Some are place names,
but the majority are those of individuals and tribes from Germanic myth
and history. Many, though not all, can be identified.
16. The classic edition which identifies most of these tribes and individuals
is Kemp Malone, ed., Widsith, rev. ed. (1936; Copenhagen: Rosenkilde
and Bagger, 1962). There is a more recent edition in Joyce Hill, ed., Old
English Minor Heroic Poems, Durham Medieval Texts 4, rev. ed. (Durham,
1994). Deor, a shorter Old English poem containing some material of the
same type, may also be consulted.
17. Many commentators, including Tolkien and Bliss, believe the two
Hengests to be the same man. The question has been most thoroughly
dealt with in J.R.R. Tolkien, Finn and Hengest: the Fragment and the Episode,
ed. Alan Bliss (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982; paperback HarperCollins,
1998).
18. This highly vexed question remains controversial. Roberta Frank gives a
most useful and illuminating survey of the various theories which were
discussed at a 1980 conference, plus the many developments since then,
in her 2007 presidential address to the Medieval Academy of America,
“A Scandal in Toronto: The Dating of Beowulf a Quarter Century On,”
Speculum 82.4 (Oct. 2007): 843–64.
19. Helen Damico, “Beowulf ’s Foreign Queen and the Politics of Eleventh-
Century England,” in Virginia Blanton and Helene Scheck, eds.,
Intertexts: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Culture Presented to Paul E. Szarmach
(Tempe: ACMRS and Brepols, 2008), pp. 209–40 (see especially notes 5
and 6 for references to the earlier dating).
20. Leo Carruthers. “History, Archaeology and Romance in Beowulf,” Lectures
d’une œuvre : Beowulf, ed. Marie-Françoise Alamichel (Paris: Éditions du
Temps, 1998), pp. 11 and 22 [11–27].
21. Helen Damico, “Beowulf ’s Foreign Queen,” pp. 220–3, interprets the
name Wealhtheow to mean “Norman captive” and applies it to the histori-
cal Emma, who was the daughter of the Duke of Normandy.
22. Hygelac’s death in campaign against the Franks and Frisians is mentioned
twice, starting at line 1202, and then at line 2913. Beowulf, ed. Klaeber,
p. xxxix, gives credit to N.F.S. Grundtvig for identifying Hygelac as
Gregory’s Chlochilaicus. The Historia Francorum was composed when
Gregory was Bishop of Tours, from 573 to his death in 594.
23. J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Barbarian West 400–1000, rev. ed. (1952;
London: Blackwell, 1996).
24. Wallace-Hadrill, The Barbarian West, p. 68.
25. Wallace-Hadrill, The Barbarian West, p. 86.
26. “Her Ald Seaxe & Francan gefuhtun.” Entered at 779 in manuscript
E, and at 780 in manuscript A, the date is corrected to 782 in Michael
 R EW RITING GENR ES 155

Swanton, transl., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 2nd edn. (1996; London:

Dent, 2000). Swanton explains, p. 52 n. 1, that “the Saxons slaugh-
tered Frankish invaders east of the Teutoburgerwald, and in retaliation
Charlemagne carried out a large-scale massacre at Verdun.”
27. Peter Clemoes, Interactions of Thought and Language in Old English Poetry
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. xiii.
28. In addition to “the Merovingian king” already mentioned, other refer-
ences to the Franks in Beowulf occur at l. 1210, genitive plural Francna,
and l. 2912, dative plural Froncum.
29. See Frank, “Germanic Legend,” p. 93.
30. See the account in Michael Lapidge, John Blair, Simon Keynes and
Donald Scragg, eds., The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 133.
31. This suggestion is in line with Kiernan’s work on the late dating of the
manuscript and his belief that the text as we have it was altered by the
scribe. See Kevin S. Kiernan, Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript, 2nd edn.
rev. with a foreword by Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe (1981; Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1996).
32. For a complete archaeological report see R.L.S. Bruce-Mitford et al., The
Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial, 3 vols. (London: British Museum, 1975, 1978,
1983).
33. Henry Mayr-Harting, The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England,
3rd edn. (1972; University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1991).
34. Leerssen, “Literary Historicism,” 229.
35. Sir Walter Scott, Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since [1814], ed. Claire
Lamont, Oxford World Classics (Oxford, 1986). The subtitle recurs on
pp. 5, 34, 56, 171, 319, etc.
36. Frank, “A Scandal in Toronto,” 859 and 862.
37. Leerssen, “Literary Historicism,” 237, 239, 242.
38. Tolkien, “The Monsters and the Critics,” p. 53.
39. Tolkien, “The Monsters and the Critics,” p. 88.
40. Michael Swanton, English Poetry Before Chaucer (Exeter: University of
Exeter Press, 2002), p. 188.
41. André Crépin, ed. and trans., Beowulf. Édition revue, nouvelle traduction,
Lettres Gothiques (Paris: Livre de Poche, 2007), p. 23 (my translation).
42. Breizmann, “ ‘Beowulf ’ as Romance,” 1023 passim.
43. Frank, “A Scandal in Toronto,” 863.
CHAPTER 8

PALIMPSESTIC PHILOMELA: REINSCRIPTION

IN CHAUCER’S “LEGEND OF PHILOMELA”

Gila Aloni

In rewriting Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book VI, Chaucer partially erases his

source to make room for his own “Legend of Philomela.”

M y analysis focuses on one aspect of literary production in the

Middle Ages—the erasure and rewriting of old texts, as seen in
Geoffrey Chaucer’s rewriting of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book VI,1 the
main source of his “Legend of Philomela,” one of the nine legends in
The Legend of Good Women. It is the story of the bond between two sisters
separated by marriage, distanced by an act of rape, which ultimately
brings them together.2 Chaucer rewrites the Ovidian story, portraying
his Philomela as one in a series of “good women”; in the place of the
grisly ending of the Ovidian tale, Chaucer’s conclusion leaves Philomela
and her sister “in here sorwe dwelle” (l. 2382). The analysis that follows
looks at “dwelle” as a psychological, mental connection between two
sisters. 3 In reworking the story of Philomela, Chaucer shifts relationships
in a way that deconstructs certain archetypical images of women as well
as their passivity and inability to react to violence in the male- dominated
society of the Middle Ages; he also constructs ways to schematize these
alternative relationships.
The relationships that this analysis explores fall outside the category of
the exchange of women to cement relations between men, as in Claude
Levi-Strauss’s anthropological insights on kinship structures, which are
generally applicable to medieval society.4 In the commercial triangle of
two men and one woman, Levi-Strauss explains, the woman is transacted.
Such a structural, economic view of women emphasizes her passivity. In
158 GILA A LONI

her feminist reading of Levi- Strauss’s theory, Gayle Rubin suggests that
what is at stake in the exchange of women in marriage is not so much
the circumvention of incest, but the forging of ties between men. Rubin
explains that “if it is women who are being transacted, then it is the
men who give and take them who are linked, the woman being a con-
duit of a relationship rather than a partner to it.”5 Rubin’s model applies
to Chaucer’s rewriting of the “Legend of Philomela,” and yet the leg-
end includes elements that go beyond it to underscore the bond between
women. The woman cements the bonds of men with men, yet at the same
time she functions as a bar, a third element interposed between them.6
It is instructive to read Rubin’s interpretation of Levi- Strauss’s insights
into kinship structures alongside legal and historical documents regarding
the role and meaning of rape in medieval England. Two terms dominate
medieval discourse on forced coitus: abduction and raptus.7 Over the past
century or so, critics have debated the meaning of the second term, the
source of the modern English word “rape.” Some insist that raptus lacked
sexual connotations in medieval Latin and would not have been used to
denote forced coitus.8 Others are certain raptus could have no other mean-
ing but forced coitus.9 Still other scholars claim that raptus was charged
with so many meanings that it is impossible to tell in any given case
whether it means forced coitus or abduction.10 This lack of clarity regard-
ing the word raptus in the Middle Ages is best exemplified in Chaucer’s
personal story. Chaucer was accused of raptus, but it is not certain in what
sense the word was used.11 Recently, Christopher Cannon has explained
that acts termed “abduction” and “rape” in medieval documents relate
to a “complex continuum of behavior” and constitute a “persistent gray
area” in legal thinking.12 Whether abduction or rape, assault of a woman
was perceived as an offense against her father or husband.13 Ravishment,
as defined, for instance, in one of the important medieval English codes
on this issue, Westminster I, ch. 13, was considered as “committed not
against the person ravished (the woman) but against those, either husband
or guardian, who have an [economic] interest in her.”14 J.B. Post’s analysis
of Westminster I (written in 1275) and II (1285) explains that “accusation
of rape was often used as a procedure for invoking family shame.”15 Egidis
Bossi (1487–1546) noted that rape was a crime against a woman’s parents
as well as against the victim.16 Writing between 1187 and 1189, Glanvill,
the most important legal authority before Bracton, states that redemption
through marriage does not efface the damage done to the family’s honor:

Sic enim frequenter contingeret seruilis conditionis homines generosissimas mulieres

unius pollutionis occasione perpetuo fedare . . . et ita claram parentum eorum famam
indecenter denigrari.
 PA L I M P S E S T I C P H I L O M E L A 159

[For if he could it would frequently happen as a result of a single defile-

ment that men of servile status disgraced forever women of good
birth . . . and thus the fair repute of their families would be unworthily
blackened.]17

The medieval attitude toward rape has its roots in early Roman law:
“[I]n Roman terminology the emphasis in the law relating to raptus gen-
erally centered on the damage that the household suffered rather than on
the personal hurt and injury done to the victim.”18 In addition to gloss-
ing rape as the act of sexually assaulting a woman or abducting her, or
both, the Middle English Dictionary explains rape as an act done in “haste,
hurry; quickly, hurriedly,” and as the “forceful seizure of somebody or
something, plundering, robbery, extortion.”19 Rape in Chaucer’s time,
then, was also related to theft, to moving something from one space to
another.
Whether rape is understood as sexual violence, abduction, or the unlaw-
ful seizure of property, scholars often view the “Legend of Philomela” as
portraying one type of women’s suffering in The Legend of Good Women.
Earlier critics of this story have seen the women as victims of violence
and lust.20 Robert Frank claims that “Progne and Philomela possess the
requisite of helplessness and innocence.”21 Frank sees the tone of the
“Legend of Philomela” as pathetic.22 Others still, looking at women as
passive sufferers, see Philomela as victim of her aggressor.23 The focus on
women’s weakness continues with Carolyn Dinshaw pointing to women
losing motor control of their bodies as they shake and tremble out of
fear.24 According to Priscilla Martin, Philomela simply is “voiceless,”
which is part of the “final image of each poem [where there is] a silenced
heroine.”25 Richard Ireland sees Philomela as a woman who, without a
male protector or tongue to speak, is legally silenced.26 For Jill Mann,
the pathos of the last scene of Philomela and Procne mourning in each
others’ arms acts against the threat of infection by the tale’s “venym.”27
But as Corinne Saunders has pointed out, this argument “ignores the
new voice found by Philomela through her weaving.” 28 Indeed, feminist
theorists have seen Philomela’s weaving as a symbol of a new feminine
mode of power and creativity, where the woman is the artist telling her
own story.29
On the whole, however, relatively few critics have discussed The
Legend of Good Women, and even fewer have turned their attention to
the “Legend of Philomela.” Criticism of the “Legend of Philomela” has
focused either on the relationship between man and woman, aggressor
and victim, or on weaving as an alternative language. No one has seen
how a woman so seemingly weak can demonstrate strength in bonding
160 GILA A LONI

with another woman outside the male- dominated social structure. What
has been overlooked, therefore, is Chaucer’s treatment of relations
between women in this legend. This treatment is the product of erasure
and reinscription of his Ovidian source. Lack of critical attention to this
crucial aspect of the story, the bond between Procne and Philomela, may
be due to the general interest in what seems to be the main theme of the
legends and in Chaucer’s work in general: the relationship between men
and women. Martin states:

There are two simple things that one can say with confidence. The first is
that women and the relationship between the sexes are Chaucer’s favorite
subject. . . . The second is that he treats their relationship as a problem area.
He writes of the suffering caused to both sexes in their involvement with
each other. 30

The issues of marriage and of rape, which are central to the narrative
of the “Legend of Philomela,” may create the critics’ impression that
Chaucer’s major concern is the victimization of women by men.31
An examination of precisely the scenes where Philomela becomes
a victim makes it clearer that another kind of relationship is at issue.
Threatened with rape, Philomela calls “ ‘Syster!’ with ful loud a ste-
vene, / And ‘Fader dere’! and ‘Help me, God in hevene’ ” (ll. 2328–29).
Chaucer adopts this plea with a slight but significant variation, from his
main source, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book VI. In his source, Philomela
calls, “clamato saepe parente, saepe sorore sua, magnis super omnia divis” [hav-
ing called often to her father, often to her sister, but above all to the
great gods] (ll. 525–26). Philomela’s cry for help, in Chaucer’s inversion
of order—where she first calls her sister and then her father—indexes
one fundamental structure of bonding. This is the relationship between
Philomela, her sister, and her father. The fact that Chaucer inverts the
order of Philomela’s cry in his legend draws attention to the relation-
ship between the two sisters. This bond between Procne and Philomela
can best be studied in comparison with the other relationships in the
story: those between Pandion and Tereus, Tereus and Procne, and Tereus
and Philomela, as well as those involving Pandion and Philomela, and
Pandion and his two daughters.
The series of alliances and relationships in the “Legend of Philomela”
take on various configurations, the most significant of which occur
between the two women. This is the only bond that is sustained through-
out the story, and it is the one with which Chaucer chooses to end his
legend. Ties between men, forged through the exchange of a woman, are
based on legal/economic alliances that move the woman from her father’s
 PA L I M P S E S T I C P H I L O M E L A 161

territory to her husband’s. Bonds between women, which are outside the
basic kinship structure, exist beyond the limits of geographical space.
Sisterhood in Chaucer’s legend is based on love, support, and comfort
in times of emotional distress. Chaucer fictionalizes the same type of
bond in “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” where the queen and other ladies rise
in support of the raped maiden and beg the king to place the knight’s fate
in their hands.32 The similarity between these two cases of raped women
lies in the support they receive from other women. In both cases women
are involved in “a permanent relationship unformalized by pledge or
contract, a sisterhood whose informal obligation is the furtherance of
its members.”33 In marrying Procne to Tereus, Pandion acted accord-
ing to the dictates of convention and political considerations: he mar-
ried her to a king. Chaucer’s source, Ovid, elaborates on this marriage
of convenience: “quem sibi Pandion opibusque virisque potentem/ et genus a
magno ducentem forte Gradivo / conubio Procnes iunxit” [since he [Tereus] was
strong in wealth and in men, and traced his descent, as it happened, from
Gradivus, Pandion, king of Athens, allied him to himself by wedding
him to Procne] (ll. 426–28).
Chaucer’s text erases all information about Procne’s first five years
of marriage, which appears in his Ovidian source. In Chaucer’s version,
the first reference to Procne after her wedding appears when she is said
to “desyr” (l. 2262) to see her sister. By contrast, Ovid speaks of a son
named Itys who was born to Procne and Tereus, the joy the parents
shared with the people of Thrace and the festivities in the celebration of
the birth (ll. 435–38). The effacing of the son is necessary for Chaucer to
avoid the murder that occurs at the end of Ovid’s story. But this erasure
also focuses Chaucer’s version on the women. Lack of reference to any
detail regarding Procne’s marriage suggests that the emotional signifi-
cance of the bond between the sisters is greater than that of the marital
ties that bind Procne to Tereus.
When Tereus returns to Athens and asks Pandion to let him take his
second daughter to Thrace, Pandion seems unwilling to part with her:
“Of al this world he loveth nothyng so” (l. 2282). Tereus has to promise
Pandion he will bring Philomela back after “a month or tweye” (l. 2273).
On this matter, Chaucer leaves his source unaltered. But Chaucer makes
an alteration to his source by changing the moment of Pandion’s weep-
ing. In Ovid’s text, Pandion weeps the day following his consent to
Philomela’s departure (l. 494) as he says his farewell to her (l. 510). In
Chaucer’s text the weeping appears exactly at the moment he gives his
permission for Philomela to go. Pandion’s hesitation, in Chaucer’s ver-
sion, might be seen as resulting from an anxiety of loss, his fear that he
might never see his beloved daughter again since he is old and could
162 GILA A LONI

soon die. Yet it seems Pandion simply does not trust Tereus. Two textual
details reinforce this conclusion: the first is that Pandion seems to make
the whole city his witness as he accompanies Tereus and Philomela to
the sea “through the mayster- strete / Of Athens” (ll. 2305–06) to ensure
that Tereus will keep his promise. This information does not appear in
Ovid. Secondly, Chaucer explains that Pandion returns home without
thinking of any malice being intended against Philomela: “no malyce
he ne thoughte” (l. 2305). This line, too, is a Chaucerian addition. It
can, as Edgar Finley Shannon has suggested, be read simply as meaning
Pandion could not even conceive of malice against her.34 Nevertheless,
it may indicate that he was in fact anxious about Philomela’s suffering
some wrong. Had he not been, there would have been no reason to deny
Pandion was afraid of “malice.” Pandion agreed to Philomela’s journey
not solely because of Philomela’s tears or Procne’s request; his consent
may be seen as a political gesture towards his son-in-law, Tereus, king
of another land. After all, he could have asked Tereus to bring Procne to
Athens to see both her old father and the sister whom she misses. Instead,
however, he grants the request of the more politically powerful Tereus.
Earlier in the legend, furthermore, Pandion had agreed to Procne’s mar-
riage to Tereus although he was not “cheere” (l. 2246). This indicates
that relationships between men function only through a connecting third
term, the woman. These are bonds that, unlike the one between women
in the Legend, are not based on trust but on power relations.
The homosocial bond between Tereus and Pandion is forged not only
through the normative exchange of Procne through marriage to Tereus,
but also by means of the exchange involving Pandion’s other daughter,
Philomela. This exchange between men is nonnormative on two counts:
it takes place outside of marriage, and it entails enforced coitus. Yet, like
marriage, it reaffirms the ties between them. Such a view of rape as link-
ing the rapist and the victim’s father is founded on the role and mean-
ing of rape in medieval England. The medieval legal view, presented
in the introductory paragraphs above, makes it possible to see Tereus’s
ravishment of Philomela as an aspect of his relationship with Pandion.
Furthermore, as explained above, rape was related to theft—in other
words, the illicit transfer of property from one owner to another.
Tereus commits this offense when, upon arrival in Thrace, he abducts
Philomela and hides her away in a cave within a forest as if she were stolen
goods:

And to a cave prively hym spedde;

And in this derke cave, yif hir leste,
Or leste nat, he bad hire for to reste (ll. 2311–13).
 PA L I M P S E S T I C P H I L O M E L A 163

After the rape, Tereus cuts out Philomela’s tongue to avoid his expo-
sure: “For fere lest she shulde his shame crye / And don hym openly
a vilenye” (ll. 2332–33). He then locks Philomela away “So that she
myghte hym neveremore asterte” (l. 2338). This is done because of his
fear of what she can do to him publicly if she openly tells her private story
of what has been secretly done to her. By confining Philomela, Tereus
wants to have full control over her tongue 35 at once literally and concep-
tually. Woman is seen here as threatening and powerful. Her power lies
in her rhetorical capacities. Men’s weakness is the most telling, the text
suggests, precisely when they demonstrate physical force and control.
Chaucer describes the rape in a few lines:

By force hath this traytour don a dede,

That he hath reft hire of hire maydenhede,
Maugre hire hed, by strength and by his myght
Lo! here a dede of men, and that a ryght! (ll. 2324–7)
...
Al helpeth nat; and yit this false thef . . . (l. 2330, my emphasis)

The word thef, or theef, as it is spelled in the Wife of Bath’s prologue,

carries interesting connotations for Chaucer, especially when examined
in the context of the relationship between men and women. Thus, for
example, after the Wife of Bath’s fifth husband hits her so hard that she
“lay as [she] were deed” (l. 796), she accuses him of being a thief: “O!
hastow slayn me, false theef? I seyde, / And for my land thus hastow
mordred me?” (ll. 800–801). In the Wife’s case, the theft appears in the
intersection between stealing her property, her land, and her life. In
Philomela’s case, Chaucer uses the words reft, which suggests a theft, and
thef, to describe the rape. In the Middle Ages, under English Common
Law the rape of a woman was considered an affront to her male guardian.
Thus rape as theft of a woman has the same basic structure in a patriarchi-
cal society as the exchange of women.
Seen as an offense against Philomela’s father rather than against her as
a woman, rape in this context, then, is another aspect of communication
between men. The rape shows that Tereus negotiates relations by means
of force, emphasized in the text by the use of the couplet “strength” and
“might.”36 In the relation between Tereus and Pandion, the basic element
is power—political rather than physical. In the “Legend of Philomela,”
then, relations between men are mediated by women. In the exchange of
a woman in a politically motivated marriage as in the case of rape, men
relate to one another in terms of power.37
Chaucer’s “Legend of Philomela” shows how female relationships are
not without boundaries (physical distance and marriage that transfer the
164 GILA A LONI

woman to another household), yet these bonds are structured differently

from those between men. Between women there is no third element; the
relationship is direct. It may seem that Tereus functions as a third ele-
ment between Procne and Philomela, for Procne asks him to fetch her
sister from her father. This is, however, a transfer of a woman outside the
traditional structure of the exchange of women. A woman initiates this
transfer and it is not an exchange between men. It is one of the instances
in the Legend where the traditional structure breaks down and makes
possible the bonds between women in which each participant is simulta-
neously a partner and a boundary.
In interactions between men in the Legend, boundaries are constituted
and function differently. They have clear geographical limits: Pandion
and Tereus each, as king, has his own territory. Pandion remains within
his territory. Tereus crosses from his territory to Pandion’s twice, but
he always returns to Thrace. In contrast, the bond between women is
independent of geographical confines. Indeed, in the scene of Philomela’s
rape Philomela cries for help to people she knows are not within the space
she occupies.
As an unmarried woman, Philomela is under the custody of her father
and should expect his protection. In Chaucer’s revision of his source,
however, she calls her sister first. While Philomela is geographically
closer to her sister than to her father, her choice seems more than a simple
matter of proximity. It indicates the father’s lack of power in the context
of the structure of the exchange of women. Although a king, he is unable
to help his daughter at the moment she is under the control of his son-
in-law. He did not refuse Tereus’s request to take Philomela with him,
although he did not seem to have much confidence in Tereus, nor did
the old king want to part with his beloved daughter. The cry for help
from the sister also indicates the strong emotional bond between the two
women, the only ones who can help each other in times of trouble, as
indeed happens at the end of the legend.
When Procne married Tereus, she had to leave her family and follow
her husband to a foreign country. There are indications of trouble for
the marriage as early as the wedding night when the owl f lies about the
beams of the house (l. 2253), and we are told the marriage was celebrated
under the inf luence of the Furies instead of under the favor of Juno and
Hymen, the deities of marriage (ll. 2249–50). These may be seen as pre-
dictions of the rape, while at the same time they foretell Procne’s marital
unhappiness. Procne’s relationship with her husband does not seem to
have much emotional substance. We hear nothing about her wedded life
besides the fact that “Fyve yer his wif and he together dwelle” (l. 2259).
 PA L I M P S E S T I C P H I L O M E L A 165

Procne’s pining for her sister, her daily petitions to her husband, for
“this was day by day al hire preyere, / With al humblesse of wif hod,
word and chere” (ll. 2267–68), indicate the strength of her relationship
with her sister. These two lines describing the frequency of Procne’s
request to see her sister were Chaucer’s addition to his source. In Ovid’s
text, Procne expresses her request only once with the alternative that
she could also be sent to visit her sister: “ ‘si gratia’ dixit ‘ulla mea est, vel
me visendae mitte sorori, vel soror huc veniat’ ” [if I have found any favor in
your sight, either send me to visit my sister or let my sister come to me]
(ll. 440–42).
Another addition of Chaucer’s underscores of the two sisters’ devotion
to each other: Philomela’s emotion expressed with teary eyes when she
tries to convince her father to let her go. “For Philomela with salte teres
eke / Gan of hire fader grace to beseke / To sen hire syster that she loveth
so, / And him embraseth with her armes two” (ll. 2284–87). The tears do
not appear in the Ovidian version of the story, where Philomela puts her
arms around her father’s neck and coaxes him to let her visit Procne (ll.
475–77). Philomela is willing to leave her beloved father and undertake
a sea voyage with a man she hardly knows, all because her sister needs
her. Both sisters do all they can in order to persuade the men to bring
them together. The two women have an exceptionally strong emotional
bond and the determination to maintain it within the social structure
controlled by men.
One of the most striking manifestations of the bond between the
sisters is the tapestry into which Philomela weaves a vivid description
of her woes. Since Philomela does not know how to write with a pen,
she weaves her story, communicating the horror of her rape to her sis-
ter. Procne’s first reaction when she receives the tapestry is described
as follows: “No word she spak, for sorwe and ek for rage” (l. 2374). She
becomes momentarily dumb—an Ovidian detail Chaucer chooses to
rewrite: “Dolor ora repressit, / verbaque quaerenti satis indignantia linguae /
defuerunt” [Grief chokes the words that rise to her lips, and her quest-
ing tongue can find no word strong enough to express her outrage]
(ll. 583–85). Procne’s speechlessness ref lects absolute identification
with Philomela’s situation. Grief and anger are the explicit cause of
her silence, although no mention was made of her sister’s rage against
Tereus earlier in the legend. Chaucer chooses to remove this infor-
mation in his rewriting of his source: Ovid has an entire paragraph
on Philomela’s anger when she recovers her senses after Tereus’s attack
(ll. 533–48). She accuses Tereus of committing a barbarous crime that
disturbs the order of things as well as the interfamilial relationships of
166 GILA A LONI

father–daughter, father and son-in-law, two sisters, sister and brother-

in-law, or husband and wife.

. . . ait, ‘nec te mandata parentis

cum lacrimis movere piis nec cura sororis
nec mea virginitas nec coniugialia iura?’
omnia turbasti; paelex ego facta sororis,
tu geminus coniunx, hostis mihi debita Procne!
[ . . . she cried: ‘Oh, what a horrible thing you have done, barbarous, cruel
wretch! Do you care nothing for my father’s injunctions, his affectionate
tears, my sister’s love, my own virginity, the bonds of wedlock? You have
confused all natural relations: I have become a concubine, my sister’s rival;
you, a husband to both. Now Procne must be my enemy] (ll. 534–538).

Philomela’s statement in the Ovidian source that her sister will now be
her enemy is eliminated from Chaucer’s retelling.
After the first shock of reading the story of her sister’s rape, Procne
sets out to find Philomela. Yet unlike the other story of rape in The
Legend of Good Women, that of Lucrece, the story of Philomela does not
end with suicide. Lucrece changed the course of Roman history after
killing herself. The change Philomela makes is within her own life, a
personal rather than public overcoming of her initial status as victim.
Chaucer leaves his audience with the strong image of the sisters in each
other’s arms: “In armes everych of hem other taketh, / And thus I let
hem in here sorwe dwelle” (ll. 2381–82). Chaucer’s focus is on the sol-
ace simultaneously given and received by the two women. Ovid says
that Procne folded Philomela in her arms (significantly, “pro voce manus
fuit” (l. 609)), and continues the story for another 112 lines. Chaucer
scrapes away this entire passage. This is probably the most significant
obliteration on his part, as it not only avoids portraying women as vio-
lent avengers, but creates the textual focus on women’s bonding through
grief. This ending is different from Chaucer’s other tales of rape, such as
that of The Legend of Lucrece, where the rapist, Tarquinius, is punished.
The fate of the rapist at the end of the “Legend of Philomela” is also
different from that of other rapists in The Canterbury Tales. The knight
in the “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” is tried and punished. Similarly, when
Apius threatens Virginia with rape in “The Physician’s Tale,” he lands in
jail, where he commits suicide. In the “Legend of Philomela,” however,
Chaucer elides the ending of Ovid’s Metamorphoses where Procne takes
revenge against her husband. Ovid tells how Procne’s five-year- old son,
Itys, greets his mother, puts his little arms around her neck, and kisses
her. Procne drags Itys off to a remote part of the house, kills him, cuts
 PA L I M P S E S T I C P H I L O M E L A 167

him up, cooks the body, and serves it to Tereus for supper. She watches
Tereus as he eats, and then tells him what he has eaten. In his first sick-
ened moment of horror he cannot move and the two sisters f lee. He
pursues them with a drawn sword, when suddenly the gods turn Procne
into a swallow and Philomela into a nightingale; Tereus is changed into
a hoopoe (ll. 619–74).
Chaucer adapts the closing scene in his legend (ll. 2371–82) only up
to the point where Procne finds Philomela. He is concerned neither
with the sisters’ revenge nor with their transformation.38 In the words of
Ovid’s Procne: “non est lacrimis hoc” inquit “agendum, / sed ferro” [This is
no time for tears, she said, but for the sword] (ll. 611–12). Ovid’s Procne
declares that she is prepared for a great deed: “magnum, quodcumque paravi”
(l. 619). This omission in Chaucer’s text becomes even more significant
considering that Chaucer was familiar with the ending of Ovid’s story,
for he had already used it in Troilus and Criseyde. In the latter, the swallow
Procne sings a mournful “lay” (l. 64) about her transformation and awak-
ens Pandarus on the morning he goes to Criseyde’s house to persuade her
to fall into Troilus’s arms:

The swallowe Proigne, with a sorowful lay,

When morwen com, gan make hire waymentynge
Whi she forshapen was; and ever lay
Pandare abedde, half in a slomberynge
Til she so neigh hym made hire cheterynge
How Tereus gan forth hire suster take,
That with the noyse of hire he gan awake. (ll. 64–70)

In these lines, there is an implicit warning of the rape of Criseyde.39 The

mythological reference that brings the case of Philomela into Troilus and
Criseyde raises the issue of rape within the family in the story of Criseyde.
As Jane Chance has suggested, it shows Pandarus—in mental projection,
at least—in “an incestuous relationship with his niece through Troilus,
for he plays an ironic role as agent of ravishment.”40 Here Chaucer asso-
ciates the myth of Philomela with a betrayal of trust. In the “Legend
of Philomela,” when an incestuous bond occurs between a man and a
woman (Tereus and Philomela), it involves power relations and the vic-
timization of the woman. When a structurally incestuous bond exists
between women (Procne and Philomela), it involves mutual sustenance.
In this relationship, woman does not function as victim or third term,
but as a partner, a subject. With a view of this mutually sustaining bond,
Chaucer concludes his Legend: “In armes everych of them other taketh”
(l. 2381).
168 GILA A LONI

This last modification that Chaucer makes to his source is the most
important, because it forms the impression that remains with the audi-
ence. By omitting the revenge scene, Chaucer allows Tereus to be
upstaged by the two women. Philomela and her sister “in here sorwe
dwelle” (l. 2382). Earlier in the legend, Chaucer wrote: “in teres lete
I Progne dwelle” (l. 2348). The verb “dwelle,” to reside, indicates that
Chaucer conceives of shared sorrow as a psychological space of women’s
bonding. It is a communal feminine space contrasting with masculine
territorial space.
The patterns of female bonding in the “Legend of Philomela” can
be studied by way of opposition to the “Legend of Ariadne,” another
tale in Chaucer’s series. The opening lines of Ariadne’s story seem to
point to a similar case of women who share an intimate bond of sister-
hood and are related to each other through the same man. Ariadne and
Phedra, Mynos’s two daughters, deceive their father and help Theseus kill
the minotaur and escape from prison. Once Theseus is saved, however,
he betrays Ariadne, abandoning her on a lonely island and running off
with her sister. This closing image of Ariadne with no one to comfort
her sharply contrasts with the final scene of the “Legend of Philomela.”
Whereas in the “Legend of Philomela,” the male’s betrayal makes him
function as a bonding agent between the two women, Theseus’s treach-
ery in the “Legend of Ariadne” has the opposite function: he causes phys-
ical and mental distance between the two sisters who had been bonded
through him in their joint effort to save him.
Though the structure of women’s bonding is unique to the “Legend
of Philomela” because of its plot, they are similar to patterns of female
bonding that occur in other legends. The Legend of Good Women offers
another example where Chaucer’s erasure and reinscription of his source
cast a different light on the bond between two women that is strength-
ened by betrayal of a man. In the “Legend of Hypsipyle and Medea,” the
eponymous heroines are connected to each other not through sisterly
blood, but through a similar pattern of a man’s betrayal. Jason betrays
one woman, Hypsipyle, and replaces her with Medea, whom he then
abandons in favor of a third woman. Chaucer’s Medea lacks one of the
famous traits of the classical Medea, a woman who slays her own chil-
dren. Chaucer elides the entire end of Medea’s story and instead directs
his audience to Ovid.41 Chaucer’s omission of the ending is one of the
keys to the structural and conceptual connections he draws between her
story and the other legends. Without the cruel conclusion, Chaucer’s
Medea is characterized by womanly virtue and, above all, moral good-
ness.42 Yet, contrary to the “Legend of Philomela,” here there is no blood
relation between the women who are betrayed by the same man. In the
 PA L I M P S E S T I C P H I L O M E L A 169

“Legend of Hypsipyle and Medea,” Chaucer creates an affinity between

women that transcends boundaries between texts as well as the distances
created by men’s treachery. This affinity is embodied in the intrinsic
quality of the women, unrelated to blood and independent of them. This
quality—goodness—is the one Chaucer chooses to emphasize in rewrit-
ing the legends. Such goodness is rhetorically embodied in the copula
“and” connecting and separating the legends of Hypsipyle and Medea,
and implying the potential extension of this conjunction among good
women who are betrayed by the same man.
Chaucer’s focus on the relationships between women would have
appealed to the initial female audience for which the poem is intended.43
Furthermore, a story that focuses on women’s bonding would have
worked well in Richard II’s notoriously “feminized” court. One feature
of the “feminization” of Richard’s reign is, as Nicola F. McDonald has
recently suggested, “the king’s sponsorship of a sorority of the garter, a
significant adjunct to the prestigious Order of the Garter, founded by
Edward III” in 1348.44 Richard II’s foundation of the feminine “frater-
nity” of the Ladies of the Garter participated in his grandfather’s attempt
to revive Arthur’s Round Table. “These ladies were people who either
directly or indirectly mattered in the power structures of their times.”45
Chaucer’s “Legend of Philomela” depicts a different kind of sorority, that
between Procne and Philomela.
To conclude, Chaucer acted as a palimpsest writer who erased and
reinscribed his main source so as to reconfigure structures of women’s
bonding. My analysis reveals that in Chaucer’s version, a man has no
structural function as a factor in relations between women. Chaucer’s
reinscribed story provides the framework for a new structure of relation-
ships between women that subverts existing systems. In bonds between
women the relationship is direct, each participant is simultaneously a
partner and a boundary. This alternative is seen as positive in the text,
as it is juxtaposed with male relationships and thus functions as a cri-
tique to existing structures of kinship that exclude women from power.
Such a structure, which does not apply to traditional kinship, has never
been examined in relation to Chaucer’s “Legend of Philomela.” It is hard
to imagine how a mutilated, raped woman can be empowered without
opposing her oppressor, as in the Ovidian resolution involving violent
vengeance. However, this analysis has shown that although Philomela is
a victim in appearance, she finds a way to overcome physical degradation
and reclaim autonomy through her connection with another woman.
Unveiling the palimpsestic layers of Chaucer’s text exposes the way in
which Chaucer empowers women independently of men and makes the
bond between women the structural substratum of his text.
170 GILA A LONI

Notes
1. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book VI, trans. Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1946).
2. Research on the sources of this legend has also suggested that Chaucer
combined two sources: Ovid and Ovide Moralisé. John Livingston Lowes,
“Chaucer and the Ovide Moralisé,” PMLA 33 (1918): 302–25. Robert
Worth Frank compares Philomène in Ovid Moralisé and Gower’s “Tale
of Tereus” in Confessio Amantis. See Frank’s Chaucer and the Legend of
Good Women (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 134.
Edgar Finley Shannon offers a short discussion of Chaucer and Ovid in
Chaucer and the Roman Poets (1929; repr. New York: Russell and Russell,
1964), p. 134.
3. Quotations from Chaucer are from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D.
Benson, 3rd ed. (New York: Houghton Miff lin, 1987). With respect to
scholarship on space and women’s place in private and public space, there
is much to say about parallels between interior physical spaces and the
subjective, internal space of an individual. This is not, however, the focus
of the current essay. I focused on the theme of space in my “Extimacy in
‘The Miller’s Tale,’ ” Chaucer Review 41.2 (2006): 163–84.
4. Claude Levi- Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1969).
5. Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes Toward a Political Economy
of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (London:
Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 173–74.
6. In the economic transaction where a woman changes hands from father
to husband, she functions, as Rubin pointed out, as a binding element
between these men. My contribution to Rubin’s insight into kinship is
that by virtue of being a third element; the woman exchanged makes the
relationship between the two men an indirect one, effectively barring
direct interaction.
7. Hans Kurath and Sherman M. Kuhn, eds. Middle English Dictionary (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956), “rape,” p. 144. Also online:
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/.
8. See George Saintsbury, “Chaucer,” in The Cambridge History of English
Literature, 2; The End of the Middle Ages, ed. A.W. Ward and A.R. Waller
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908), p. 159.
9. Among others, T.F.T. Plucknett, “Chaucer’s Escapade,” Law Quarterly
Review 64 (1948): 34 [33–36].
10. T.R. Lounsbury, Studies in Chaucer: His Life and Writings (New York:
Russell & Russell, 1962), pp. 1–75. Donald Roy Howard, Chaucer: His
Life, His Work, His World (New York: Dutton, 1987), p. 317.
11. Cecilia Chaumpaigne released Chaucer from all her rights of action
against him “de raptu meo” on May 1, 1380. See Derek Pearsall, The
Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 136. Cecilia
Chaumpaigne’s complaint is “perhaps the one biographical fact
 PA L I M P S E S T I C P H I L O M E L A 171

everyone remembers about Chaucer,” Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s

Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), p. 11.
See also P.R. Walts, “The Strange Case of Geoffrey Chaucer and
Cecilia Chaumpaigne,” Law Quarterly Review 63 (1947): 491–515. In
1993 a new document in which “de raptu meo” does not appear at all
was examined by Christopher Cannon, “Raptus in the Chaumpaigne
Release and a Newly Discovered Document Concerning the Life of
Geoffrey Chaucer,” Speculum 68 (1993): 74–94.
12. Christopher Cannon, “Chaucer and Rape: Uncertainty’s Certainties,”
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000): 69 [67–92].
13. Sir Frederick Pollock and William Frederic Maitland, The History of
English Law Before the Time of Edward I. 2nd ed., Vol. 2 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1952), p. 490.
14. Cannon, “Chaucer and Rape,” p. 73.
15. J.B. Post, “Ravishment of Women and the Statutes of Westminster,” in Legal
Records and the Historian: Papers Presented to the Cambridge Legal Conference,
ed. J.H. Baker (London: Royal Historical Society, 1978), p. 153.
16. James A. Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 532.
17. Placitum de crimine raptus (“The plea of the crime of rape”) in The
Treatise on the Laws and the Customs of the Realm of England Commonly
Called Glanvill, ed. and trans. G.D.G. Hall (London: Wm. W. Gaunt &
Sons with the Selden Society, 1983), p. 176. See also Marguerite- Marie
Dubois, “L’expression du viol dans le lexique vieil- anglais,” Bulletin des
Anglicistes Médiévistes 58 (Winter, 2000): 1–4.
18. Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society, p. 48.
19. Kurath and Kuhn, eds., Middle English Dictionary, “rape,” p. 144. On the
development of a law of rape and property in Anglo- Saxon England, see
Corinne Saunders’s chapter, “Secular Law: Rape and Raptus,” in her Rape
and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge: Boydell &
Brewer, 2001), pp. 33–75.
20. For a broad analysis, see Anna Roberts, ed. Violence against Women
in Medieval Texts (Gainesville: Florida University Press, 1998). On
“Chaucer’s Victimized Women,” see Richard Firth Green, Studies in
the Age of Chaucer 10 (1988): 3–21. Paul F. Baum, “Chaucer’s Glorious
Legend,” MLN 60 (1945): 379 [377–81].
21. Frank, Chaucer and the Legend of Good Women, p. 140.
22. Frank, Chaucer and the Legend of Good Women, p. 96, bases his argument
on Northrop Frye’s definition of pathos as representing a hero (usually a
woman or a child) with a certain weakness that appeals to our sympathy
because it is in our realm of experience.
23. Janet M. Cown, “Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women: Structure and Tone,”
Studies in Philology 82 (1985): 433 [416–36].
24. Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, p. 75.
25. Priscilla Martin, Chaucer’s Women: Nuns, Wives, and Amazons (London:
Macmillan, 1990), p. 209.
172 GILA A LONI

26. Richard Ireland, “Lucrece, Philomela (and Cecily): Chaucer and the Law
of Rape,” in Crime and Punishment in the Middle Ages, ed. T.S. Haskett
(Victoria: University of Victoria, 1998), pp. 37–61.
27. Jill Mann, Feminizing Chaucer (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002), p. 46.
28. Corinne J. Saunders, “Classical Paradigms of Rape in the Middle Ages,”
in Rape in Antiquity, ed. Susan Deacy and Karen F. Pierce (London:
Duckworth, 1997), p. 276.
29. See especially Patricia Klindienst, “The Voice of the Shuttle Is Ours,”
in Rape and Representation, eds. Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda A. Silver,
Gender and Culture Series (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991),
pp. 35–64. Saunders, in “Classical Paradigms,” p. 263, suggests that the tale
“allows Chaucer to emphasize the ways in which women are deprived of
voice through male violence, and to offer the possibility of a new voice both
in Philomela’s weaving and in the tale’s rewriting of its classical source.”
30. Martin, Chaucer’s Women, p. vii.
31. Referring to the story of Philomela in Book Five of Gower’s Confessio
Amantis, Carolyn Dinshaw, “Quarrels, Rivals, and Rape: Gower and
Chaucer,” in A Wyf Ther Was: Essays in Honour of Paule Mertens-Fonck, ed.
Juliette Dor (Liège: Liège University Press, 1992), p.118 [112–22], claims
that Gower’s version “is the exemplum of rape,” and sees in the act of
rape “the breaking of all meaningful bonds of society . . . : Tereus breaks
marriage vows, has incestuous relations with his sister-in-law, and breaks
the bond of family relations; Procne breaks maternal bonds and Tereus,
fed by Procne, violates the taboo against cannibalism. This is rape: it is
spectacularly anomalous” (emphasis in the original). Dinshaw does not,
however, discuss one meaningful bond that remains intact—that between
women.
32. Esp. line 894. See also Jerome Mandel, Geoffrey Chaucer: Building the
Fragments of the Canterbury Tales (Toronto: Fairleigh Dickinson University
Press, 1992), pp. 126–27.
33. Mandel, Geoffrey Chaucer: Building the Fragments, p. 126.
34. Shannon, Chaucer and the Roman Poets, p. 270.
35. The “Legend of Lucrece” is another example of how a woman brings
about the destruction of a man when she publicly tells what he has done
to her. Through her rhetoric, Lucrece succeeds in organizing a political
uprising and banishing Tarquinius from kingship. What is interesting is
that although Philomela cannot speak, she does not lose her voice and
finds an alternative way to communicate with her sister: the tapestry.
See my “Lucrece’s ‘myght’: Rhetorical/Sexual Potency and Potentiality
in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Legend of Lucrece,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 29.1
(1999): 31–42.
36. In “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” the Arthurian knight rapes the maid “mau-
gree hir heed” (l. 887) and, as Chaucer tells his audience, by law the
knight should pay with his head: “By cours of lawe, and sholde han lost
his heed” (1992). In this case, the word “heed” connects the knight’s
crime to his punishment.
 PA L I M P S E S T I C P H I L O M E L A 173

37. For a reading of rape as a test of masculinity in French literature, see

Kathryn Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: Writing and Rape in Medieval French
Literature and Law (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).
38. Shannon, Chaucer and the Roman Poets, p. 281.
39. According to Jane Chance, The Mythografic Chaucer: The Fabulation
of Sexual Politics (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1995),
pp. 123–24, the allusion to the rape of Philomela also works backwards
to the rape of Helene that initiated the Trojan War, and forward to the
ravishing of Criseyde by Diomede. It also anticipates the ironically bold
ravishment of Troilus by Criseyde in Book III.
40. Chance, The Mythografic Chaucer, p. 128.
41. Ovid, Heroides XII, p. 153.
42. See my book, Pouvoir et Autorité dans The Legend of Good Women (Paris:
AMAES, 2000).
43. Among accounts of Chaucer’s primary audience, see R.F. Green, Poets
and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980); Green’s “Women in
Chaucer’s Audience,” Chaucer Review 18 (1983): 137–45. See also Paul
Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1989), as well as Strohm’s article, “Chaucer’s Audience(s): Fictional,
Implied, Intended, Actual,” Chaucer Review 18 (1983): 146–54. More
recently, consideration of the sincerity of Alceste’s request, “yive it to the
queen,” has led Minnis, Percival, and Quinn to propose a court audience
for this poem: A.J. Minnis, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Shorter Poems
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 327; Florence Percival, Chaucer’s
Legendary Good Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005),
pp. 299–323; W.A. Quinn, Chaucer’s Rehersynges: The Performability of the
Legend of Good Women (Washington: Catholic University of America
Press, 1994). On female audience, see Nicola F. McDonald, “Chaucer’s
Legend of Good Women, Ladies at Court, and the Female Reader,” Chaucer
Review 35 (2000): 22–42.
44. McDonald, “Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, Ladies at Court,” 27. The
Order of the Garter itself dated from 1348; the sorority was a later devel-
opment. See Leo Carruthers, “ ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’: The Countess
of Salisbury and the ‘Slipt Garter,’ ” in Surface et Profondeur: Mélanges offerts
à Guy Bourquin, ed. Colette Stévanovitch and René Tixier, Grendel 7
(Nancy: AMAES, 2003): 221–34. See also Leo Carruthers, “The Duke
of Clarence and the Earls of March: Knights of the Garter and Sir Gawain
and the Green Knight.” Medium Ævum 70 (2001): 66–79, repr. in Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. Marie Borroff and Laura L. Howes
(New York: Norton, 2010), pp. 217–31.
45. James L. Gillespie, “Ladies of the Fraternity of Saint George and of the
Society of the Garter,” Albion 17 (1985): 278 [259–78].
CHAPTER 9

THE MIDDLE ENGLISH BRETON LAYS AND

THE MISTS OF ORIGIN

Claire Vial

Awareness of generic ancestry offers evidence of the palimpsestuous nature of the

“true” Middle English Breton lays.

I dentifying the Breton lays in Middle English as a coherent corpus is a

challenge for several reasons because they are rather difficult to distin-
guish from the romance genre. Very tellingly, in her contribution to the
Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature dedicated to romance,
Rosalind Field does not consider these lays as a separate group; rather, she
inscribes most of them within the romance genre. In her analysis, there is
no such subcategory as “Middle English Breton lays,” but instead short
romances that occasionally resort to “the procedures of the Breton lai,”
among which she mentions Sir Orfeo and Sir Launfal.1 Although she refers
to features she deems characteristic of the Breton lais, such as “the formal
brevity and the allure of Celtic magic,” she regards them as a tradition more
than as a prescribed genre.2 My contention is precisely that in this particu-
lar case, generic markers consist of a well-informed inscription within a
tradition of composition. Roughly speaking, the diversity of approaches—
thematic, structural, or cultural3 —yields two groups of poems, which vary
depending on the critic. On the one hand, one may consider the lays that
are undoubtedly of Breton descent, namely Lay Le Freine and Sir Launfal,
both translated from lays by Marie de France. Sir Launfal is a palimpsest in
its own right, as Colette Stévanovitch’s essay in this volume demonstrates.
Thomas Chestre’s translation, also referred to as Launfalus Miles, is based on
a previous Sir Landevale, or Landavall, preserved in Bodleian manuscript
Rawlinson C 86, and also on the anonymous Lay of Graelent, among other
176 CLAIRE VIAL

sources.4 Sir Orfeo also deserves to be grouped with them, particularly, but
not solely, owing to its prologue, almost identical to the prologue in Lay Le
Freine, which insists on its belonging to the lay tradition. These three lays
(four if one counts the two translations of the Anglo-Norman Lanval) are
the mainstay of the lays that warrant their appellation of Middle English
Breton lays. Le Freine and Sir Orfeo date to the beginning, Landevale to the
first half, and Sir Launfal to the end of the fourteenth century.
There also exists a group of later Middle English lays, Emare, Sir Gowther,
and The Erle of Tolous, all dating from approximately 1400, whose inclu-
sion in the genre of lay is less defendable. A fourth one, Degaré (c.1325),
is felt to raise questions of its own; it is sometimes taken for a parody
and will not, for this reason, be considered here.5 Emare, Tolous, Gowther,
and Launfal are all written in tail-rhyme stanzas, while the others remain
faithful to the octosyllabic couplets of Marie de France’s lays.6 The ninth
poem is Chaucer’s “The Franklin’s Tale,” of Italian origin (Il Filocolo), but
whose prologue scrupulously links it with the traditional Breton lays.
Paul Strohm classifies these two groups as “true” and “bogus” lays, a
distinction that I will adopt in this essay:

We encounter some Old French and Middle English narratives which

have been deeply inf luenced by abstract ideas of the lay, and others which
use the term for whatever added interest or glamour it can bring without
making any significant changes in what would otherwise simply be called
romances or tales. In discussing the Middle English lay we will encounter
narratives where the term is “earned” and where it is “unearned” and we
must distinguish between the two.7

The lay told by the Franklin can be seen as such an excellent forgery
that it almost belongs to the group of the “true” lays. The present fairly
general survey bespeaks the lack of definition that seems to be one of the
main characteristics of the genre, since this proportionately small corpus
of nine poems displays more exceptions than canonical examples.
At the same time, such a hazy definition contradicts the authors’ claims:
in all cases except Degaré, they clearly mark out their works as pertain-
ing to the genre of Breton lays. This paradoxical assertion is the starting
point of the present analysis: we have nine narrative poems, whose generic
ambition is deliberately outlined, which implies the resort to a form of
authority on the authors’ part, while the authority in question is from
the outset barely discernible. What use is authority if it is untraceable?
My purpose is to demonstrate that the “true lays” all explicitly share a
sense of being inscribed in a “palimpsestuous” line: they are self- conscious
hypertexts, to use Gérard Genette’s terminology, rather than rewritings
offhandedly claiming their link with a tradition. The narrator is aware that
 T H E M I D D L E E N G L I S H B R E T O N L AY S 177

he is telling an event—the “aventure” or “cas”—which had first a nonver-

bal, lived existence that was then translated into words so as to be kept in
memory and given a title. It is now told once more in the narrator’s words.
Palimpsestuous awareness disappears in the later, “bogus” lays—with the
unsurprisingly problematic exception of Chaucer’s “The Franklin’s Tale.”
Let us focus first on the “threshold” or opening of the lays, which
is their prologue. It is not always counterbalanced by an epilogue, but
sometimes with a couple of closing lines only. This opening, when it
figures in the poem, asserts what one could call a prestigious lineage
from which the founding members are absent. The most representative
instance of this practice is found in the prologue common to Le Freine and
Sir Orfeo (regardless of which came first):

Incipit Lay le Freine Incipit Sir Orfeo

1. We redeth oft and findeth ywrite – 1. We redeth oft and findeth y-write,
2. And this clerkes wele it wite – 2. And this clerkes wele it wite,
3. Layes that ben in harping 3. Layes that ben in harping
4. Ben yfounde of ferli thing. 4. Ben y-founde of ferli thing:
5. Sum bethe of wer and sum of wo, 5. Sum bethe of wer and sum of wo,
6. And sum of joie and mirthe also 6. And sum of joie and mirthe also,
7. And sum of trecherie and of gile, 7. And sum of trecherie and of gile,
8. Of old aventours that fel while 8. Of old aventours that fel while;
9. And sum of bourdes and ribaudy, 9. And sum of bourdes and ribaudy,
10. And mani ther beth of fairy. 10. And mani ther beth of fairy.
11. Of al thinges that men seth, 11. Of al thinges that men seth,
12. Mest o love for sothe thai beth. 12. Mest o love, forsothe, they beth.
13. In Breteyne bi hold time 13. In Breteyne this layes were wrought,
14. This layes were wrought, so seith this rime. 14. First y-founde and forth y-brought,
15. When kinges might our yhere 15. Of aventours that fel bi dayes,
16. Of ani mervailes that ther were, 16. Wherof Bretouns maked her layes.
17. Thai token an harp in gle and game, 17. When kinges might our y-here
18. And maked a lay and gaf it name. 18. Of ani mervailes that ther were,
19. Now of this aventours that weren yfalle, 19. Thai token an harp in gle and game
20. Y can tel sum ac nought alle. 20. And maked a lay and gaf it name.
21. Ac herkneth lordinges, sothe to sain, 21. Now of this aventours that weren y-falle
22. Ichil you telle Lay le Frayn. 22. Y can tel sum, ac nought alle.
23. Ac herkneth, lordinges that ben trewe,
24. Ichil you telle of “Sir Orfewe.”

The unstable generic identity is first conveyed through the crisscrossing

of references to written, oral, and sung narratives, the latter accompanied
by music.8 The emphasis is placed on telling and hearing by the grouped
references at the end of the prologue (“tel,” “herkneth,” “telle”), even
though the first lines insist on the written form of the lays. A wide range
of themes is announced, broader than the variety of themes to be found
in the extant French lays.9 Strong stress is laid on the recurrence of mira-
bilia and the love plot,10 all the more since the lines mentioning them are
178 CLAIRE VIAL

situated at the end of the descriptive enumeration: “And many ther beth
of fairy / . . . Mest o love for sothe thai beth” (ll. 10–12). Preceding lays are
referred to only vaguely: a transformation occurs from the indefinite “sum
layes” (ll. 3–10) to the specific “this lays” (ll. 14 and 13, respectively).
The most prominent lexical field remains that of the making of the
lay itself: see in Orfeo “wrought” (l. 13), “y-founde” (l. 14), “y-brought”
(l. 15), and “maked” (ll. 16, 20). The lay focuses on the circumstances
of its production, which testify to a process of metamorphosis implying
a specific chronology: the lay was first the aventure (as in French)—three
mentions in the prologue—which took place at an unspecified time.11
It reached the ears of the harpist kings, who turned it into a musical lay
and “gave it a name,” its title. The originary event is distinguished from
its narration, and the precise nature of the narrative is not specified; it is
simply “a lay.” Thus the generic identification of the poem is based less
on the clear definition of a genre than on a recollection of the process that
engendered it, the ultimate stage of which is the present speaker’s reap-
propriation of the past narrative. Pondering the relationship of Sir Orfeo
to the romance genre and our reception of the poem, R.H. Nicholson
underlines this effect of threshold within the threshold, the conscious
shift from past to present in a continuous line of lay-makers.12
Lastly, the name of the lay is simultaneously the title of the sung nar-
rative, that of the melody that was once played in counterpoint and of
the tale we are about to hear. These three steps offer the exact literary
ref lection of the technical reality of the lay, for all we may assume about
it. The original musical lays commemorated an extraordinary event—not
exclusively Celtic or legendary—in the form of a melody played on the
harp, occasionally accompanied by a song, the two referred to by a title
that apparently pointed to both the melody and the event.13
In the case of Sir Orfeo, the closing lines confirm that the process of
elaboration is the key to the identification of the narrative and a guaran-
tee of its quality:

Explicit Sir Orfeo

597. Harpours in Bretaine after than

598. Herd hou this mervaile bigan,
599. And made herof a lay of gode likeing,
600. And nempned it after the king.
601. That lay “Orfeo” is y-hote;
602. Gode is the lay, swete is the note.
603. Thus com Sir Orfeo out of his care:
604. God graunt ous alle wele to fare! Amen!
605. Explicit
 T H E M I D D L E E N G L I S H B R E T O N L AY S 179

Having told the adventure, the speaker deliberately draws the audi-
ence out of it, recalling how the harp players heard it and turned it into a
lay, which they named after the main character. The threefold structure
already present in the prologue is repeated here: the adventure, the sung
lay, the name. Paradoxically, by dwelling on the authenticating origin of
the tale, the teller exposes the f law inherent in his own narrative: “Gode
is the lay, swete is the note” (l. 602); the poem ends with the evocation of
the melody, the only part of the lay it is unable to reproduce. And yet, the
musical air is mentioned in the present tense, as though it were part and
parcel of the context of narration. The first half-line of line 602, “Gode
is the lay,” suggests a merging between the narrative just told and the lay
first composed after hearing of the adventure.
The last eighty lines of Le Freine are unfortunately missing. This
lacuna was filled by Henry Weber’s translation of Marie de France’s
Anglo-Norman original, in which there was no equivalent of the pro-
logue of the Middle English rendering.14 Weber’s archaizing translation,
made in 1880, offers a simplified finale to the lay compared to that of
Orfeo, but nevertheless insists, as Orfeo does, on the frame that keeps the
events at a distance from the audience by recalling the role of the teller:15
“Thus ends the lay of tho maidens bright / Le Frain and Le Codre
yhight” (ll. 406–7). This plain conclusion is the counterpoint to the
threshold of the narrative as uttered at the end of the prologue: “Befel a
cas in Bretayne / Whereof was made Lay Le Frein” (ll. 23–4). These two
lines brief ly sum up the theoretical modus operandi mentioned more
explicitly earlier in the prologue: the adventure (“cas”) preceded the lay
and the title it received. So, both Le Freine and Orfeo display a symmetri-
cal frame introducing and retreating from the main narrative, at the
end of which the present “dit” of the adventure replaces the former sung
event, the original lay. Such a shifting process may be observed already
in Marie de France.16
Launfal does not open with as wide-ranging a prologue as those of
Orfeo and Le Freine, though it begins by an introductory stanza taking up
the motif of the lay’s concern for its own genesis:

Incipit Sir Launfal

1. Be doughty Arthours dawes

2. That helde Engelond yn good lawaes,
3. There fell a wonder cas
4. Of a ley that was ysette,
5. That hyght “Launval” and hatte yette.
6. Now herkeneth how hyt was!
180 CLAIRE VIAL

The essential structural elements are there: the “cas,” the lay made from
it, and the name it was given. This process omits the sung and melodic
elements, the role played by harper-kings. This unadorned introduction
suggests that the audience knew the various meanings of the term “lay,”
which was also the case in Marie de France’s original:

L’aventure d’un autre lai,

cum ele avient, vus cunterai:
fait fu d’un mut gentil vassal;
en bretans l’apelent Lanval. (ll. 1–4)17

The ending of Chestre’s Launfal stands apart from the vagueness

noted in Orfeo, Le Freine, and Landevale: “Thomas Chestre made this
tale / of the noble knyght Syr Laundeval” (ll. 1039–40). This detail can
be seen as one more instance of Chestre’s practice throughout, which
consists of amplifying his tale through explanation, an attitude that
makes him miss the point of the lay, according to Spearing.18 Such a
reference in conclusion can be seen as an exception to the implicit rule
observable in the other lays: absence of definition and reference to an
authority of unknown origin, where the emphasis is laid on the gene-
sis and not on the ultimate author. It is true that Marie de France also
names herself in her works, for instance in the Lai de Guigemar: “Oëz,
seignurs, ke dit Marie, Ki en sun tens pas ne s’oblie” (ll. 3–4). But
when doing so, she describes her role as that of go- between, the keeper
of adventures that otherwise might be wiped from people’s memo-
ries: “Plusurs en ai oi conter, Ne[s] voil laisser ne oblier” (Prologue, ll.
39–40). Moreover with Chestre, the poem becomes a “tale.” The name
“Launfal” is not transferred to the title of his narrative, as was the case
in the introductory lines, as though the author had forgotten its spec-
ificity in the meantime and pointed at it for what he really thought it
was: “a tale.” He does so regardless of earlier practice, but also of the
poetic interest there might be in inserting word-for-word parallelism
between the opening and ending lines of his narrative. Actually, his
late version of the Lanval story could be compared to the second wave
of lays dating from the end of the fourteenth century, when the generic
claim is more akin to a captatio benevolentiae than to a concern for the
original nature of the work.
Landevale’s ending is closer to Marie’s original, almost dramatic in
the parallelism achieved between form and content. Both Lanval and
Landevale end abruptly and are deprived of generic reference at this
point: “Nul hum n’en oï plus parler, / Ne jeo n’en sai avant cunter” /
 T H E M I D D L E E N G L I S H B R E T O N L AY S 181

“Of hym syns herde never man / No further of Landevale telle I can.”
The final episode of the adventure, when Lanval is taken away to the
otherworld by his fairy mistress, brings the narrative to a rapid close:
their “elopement” prevents further narration. The absence of this part
of the frame offers a meaningful variation in comparison with the end-
ing of the other lays mentioned so far. The hero, though restored to his
knightly status, immediately vanishes from the world of humans. Thus
this lay, too, is generically undefined, in the sense that the teller’s sudden
silence inscribes a final blank into the narrative (in some ways recalling
the abrupt stop in the governess’s narrative at the end of Henry James’s
Turn of the Screw).
The explicit contents of prologues and conclusions consistently display
a tendency to blur formal and thematic landmarks. We are faced with
the intertwining of literacy and orality, the polysemous title, the lexi-
cal instability of the generic term “lay,” and multiple narrative poten-
tialities since the reader/audience is proleptically precipitated into the
topic of aventure linking mirabilia and contingency. The source material is
described as both age- old and authentic (see the lexical field of “befelle”).
The only area where we find any degree of specification concerns the
motif of the making of the lay, suggesting the importance of craftsman-
ship and competence, which will be absent from the later lays. To put it
brief ly, the “true,” earlier lays display a memory of their layered composi-
tion, whereas their later counterparts merely “seek after,” as the narrator
of Gowther suggests: “A law of Breyten long y soghht” (28). This is also
where the implicit contents of the “peritext,” or envelope of the texts, have
a part to play: the authors of these Middle English lays, without overtly
saying so, place themselves at a certain point in the chronological chain
of composition. Going back to their source, on the verge of recounting
the adventure, they suggest a parallelism with the Breton lords and, like
them, they give the audience the name of the lay. Some of the greatness
of those harpists of the past cannot but be associated with the teller of the
present, all the more since, as in Le Freine and Orfeo, their lay has become
this lay. Even though the new narratives also expose a loss, since the teller
cannot sing nor play an instrument, the song, though absent from the
“dit,” remains. It will remain like a contextual trait recalling the refined
atmosphere surrounding the performance of the sung lays of the past. The
unfolding of the present lay exhibits its nature as a rewriting of a presti-
gious, if intangible, original, marked by a process of elaboration that is
complex and consequently all the more fascinating, particularly thanks
to the ephemeral, magical, perhaps heavenly element of the harp perfor-
mance. The explicit qualities of this palimpsest are sufficiently precise
182 CLAIRE VIAL

and evocative to catch the audience’s attention: the rewriting promises

suspense, glamour, and authenticity. The audience is also warned that
they must expect the unexpected. The concern for genre, which fulfills
the function of a welcoming and leave- taking rite, frames the narrative,
producing a closed form that outlines the consubstantial uniqueness of
adventure.19 The last element of authority lies in the fact that the event
now told has already been turned into a lay in the past: the wonders it
narrates have thus already been deemed worthy of telling, and by a select
audience at that.
Such a sequence evoking the three foundational aspects of the narra-
tive lay—the adventure, the melody, the title—conveys no less than the
author’s awareness of the palimpsestic nature of the narrative. Conversely,
the primary characteristic of the later Middle English lays, to which I will
now turn, is the loss of this awareness even as expressed merely in the
form of a topos. I shall now address the incipits and explicits of Emare, Sir
Gowther, and Erle of Tolous, and try to assess the losses and gains of their
generic degenerescence in terms of palimpsestic manipulation.
Emare is deprived of a generic prologue; its framing device provides
a religious background in the form of a prayer to Christ and the Virgin.
The opening statement simply explains that the speaker will “telle / . . . of
a lady fair and free.” We find no reference to an adventure, its poetic or
musical rendering, or to previous tellers of the story. In a manner faintly
recalling that of the Gawain poet, the speaker announces a mixture of
“myrght” and “mornynge” (20–21). The only explicit allusion to the
Breton lays is to be found six lines before the last and contains no refer-
ence whatsoever to the making of the lay. It sounds more like an after-
thought of sorts, whereas the main hypotext is the Constance- Griselda
motif:

Explicit Emare

1030. Thys ys on of Brytayne layes,

1031. That was vsed by olde dayes,
1032. Men callys “playn þe garye.”
1033. Iheso, þat settes yn þy trone,
1034. So graunte vs wyth þe to w[o]ne,
1035. In þy perpetualle glorye! Amen.
1036. Explicit Emare

The framing structure is fraught with Christian piety and the generic
inscription is unstable, reaching at once toward the “tale” (948) and
the “story” (1029) genres prior to this final identification as a Breton
 T H E M I D D L E E N G L I S H B R E T O N L AY S 183

lai, which is both artificial and meaningful: among other secondary

benefits, Rosalind Field suggests the need to give literary justification
to “the secularization of a tale-type which elsewhere merges with the
hagiographic.”20
Sir Gowther refers to a lay in the opening and ending lines, but again
this allusion is framed by a prayer to Christ. In this particular case, the
opening stresses the edifying quality of the narrative; one manuscript
even introduces it as a saint’s life, an attitude that of course puts the
forthcoming mirabilia into a Christian perspective.21 The incipit, though,
is substantially more sophisticated than Emare. The invocation to the
Trinity is followed by a proleptic allusion to the literary motif of devilish
fatherhood, in its turn followed by a contrapuntal invocation to Mary
and Christ. The careful thematic alternation continues with a close-up
on the main protagonist of the story, a “warlocke greytt” (22), preced-
ing the prayer to Christ, which serves a hinge to the core of the narra-
tive, as can be seen in the quotation below. The generic references are
rather blurred: in the incipit, the topos of the historicity of the wonders
is taken up in a fashion redolent of the Orfeo and Freine prologues. 22 But
the original adventure is not distinguished from the lay, whose nature
shifts to that of a “tale.” The lay is again pointed out in the explicit, but
in its written form only (“wreton in parchemeyn,” 751), with no men-
tion of a title:

St. 3 Sir Gowther Explicit Sir Gowther

25. Jesu Cryst, that barne blythe, 751. This is wreton in parchemeyn,
26. Gyff hom joy, that lovus to lythe 752. A story bothe gud and fyn
27. Of ferlys that befell. 753. Owt off a law of Breyteyn.
28. A law of Breyten long y soghht, 754. Jesu Cryst, Goddys son,
29. And owt ther of a tale ybroghht, 755. Gyff us myght with Hym to won,
30. That luf ly is to tell. 756. That Lord that is most of meyn. Amen
757. Explicit Syr Gother

Whatever the reference to the genre of the lay meant for the narrator,
it is literally enclosed within the limits of the tale as exemplum. We also
feel closer to Malory, and his urge to note events before they disappear.
Ultimately, Gowther is not a “true lay” because it is so many things at once
and can serve many different purposes.23 As was the case with Emare, the
generic claim relies on the reader’s supposed foreknowledge of the genre
of the lay.
Erle of Tolous offers the same Christian framing as Gowther, with an
invocation to Christ on the Cross (opening lines) and Christ as Redeemer
184 CLAIRE VIAL

(closing lines). There is no preliminary generic reference to the lay,

let alone to a process of composition. The narrative is only a tale from
ancient times, recalling in a shadowy way the topos of adventure and its
translation into a narrative:

St. 1 Erle of Tolous

1. Leve lordys, y schall you telle

2. Of a tale, some tyme befelle
3. Farre yn unknowthe lede:

True, the generic references return with a vengeance in the conclusion of

the narrative, but they do so hyperbolically: the speaker is seized with a
fit of generic identification. Within the space of seventeen lines, the tale
is considered in turn as a “romaunse” (l. 1198), a “geste . . . cronyculed in
Rome” (l. 1214) and at last “a lay of Breteyne called hyt is” (l. 1215). The
tension between fiction and historicity, orality and literacy, emphasizes
the palpability of the events, as both historical truth and tangible docu-
ment. The centripetal dynamics at work in the reassertion of the closed
form of the palimpsestuous “true” lays tends to be negated by multiple
generic inscriptions. On the surface of things, we still have an envelope
form complete with a closing peritext, but its effect is rather to emphasize
the shifting nature of the tale than to call to mind the original lay-makers.
It is a partial failure of ref lexivity, an imperfect circularity, conveying the
fact that the noun “lay” has now changed cultural meaning.24
Over time, the generative process described, however succinctly, in
the Middle English lays of the first generation disappeared. Only the
term “lay” remained, as the sole reference to an original authority, a
synecdoche of sorts, a trace forced to stand for the successive steps of its
composition, particularly the musical, aristocratic element of the original
poem emphasized in the earlier Middle English lays. This original was
now absent, and the later lays did not pretend to be its literary palimpsests.
The term “Breton lay” bore the implicit added meaning “one of many,”
as a representative of a group considered as a huge stockroom. The noun
“lay” also concentrated the multifarious narrative potentialities that were
evoked in the long prologues and brought into play in the wonderful
adventures of the first four lays, Le Freine, Orfeo, and the two versions
of the Lanval story. The link between the genre stated and the actual
contents was loosened in several respects. In the later lays, the places of
action have nothing Breton about them (neither from Britain nor from
continental Brittany):25 in Emare, although the heroine is daughter to
an emperor named Artyus, he has nothing in common with Arthur of
 T H E M I D D L E E N G L I S H B R E T O N L AY S 185

Britain; the identified loci of action are Galicia and Rome. Gowther takes
place in Austria, Germany, and Rome; Tolous in Germany, too, with
the counties of Toulouse and Barcelona as counterpoints. The narrative
coherence and straightforwardness of the earlier adventures disappear.
The Roman tropism of the narratives and their frames with prayers to
Christ and the Virgin are sustained by a prevailing Christian moral not
to be found in earlier lays. The pursuit of love loses the central role it
fulfilled in the older lays. Eventually, the three essential elements describ-
ing the original Breton lays remain, if at all, in a fragmented form only:
Emare alludes to the sung narrative of “jugglers” (ll. 12, 24); Gowther
mentions wonders (ll. 12, 27); Erle of Tolous alludes once to the authentic-
ity of the narrative (l. 8).
One cannot say, though, that the choice of the term “lay” by the
authors composing at the end of the fourteenth century is made off hand-
edly: it suggests their wish to distinguish their narrative from the tale and
romance genres. If the brevity of the narratives is an apparent similar-
ity to the lays of the beginning of the fourteenth century, the absence
of concern for detailed generic definition—the loss of the reference to
the lay-making process—suggests experimentation with a short form of
romance disguised under several labels, including that of the lay, which
offers a greater degree of freedom in content and form, combined with an
aristocratic aura. Such a relationship between genres would be analogous,
for instance, to the connection between the contemporary novel and the
short story.
The case of “The Franklin’s Tale” brings together two extremes:
the tale is not a lay, but the envelope of the narrative is such a scru-
pulous imitation of the earlier Middle English lays that one would be
tempted to read it as one of them, in the same way, perhaps, as we would
like to think that Walpole’s Strawberry Hill is indeed a Gothic palace.
If we bear in mind the thematic and structural criteria displayed by
the lays that preceded it (both in their prologues and narratives), “The
Franklin’s Tale” is an anti-lay, not least because of the length of the lines.
Thematically, the love- at-first- sight topos is strictly contained within the
scope of rationality and verisimilitude: there is nothing so alien to the
radiant stasis of the fairy palace in Sir Orfeo (ll. 351–75) as the May revels
where Aurelius first sees Dorigen. The lays composed by the passionate
Aurelius display no circumstances similar to those of “true” Breton lays.
That the plot should take place in Brittany, with England as a secondary
location, mainly fulfills a naturalistic concern for a rocky coast subject
to the tides, not at all the possibility of an encounter with the Celtic
otherworld. The dawning, development, and persistence of love, along
with magic, are made explicit and integrated into an exploration of the
186 CLAIRE VIAL

notion of gentilesse. The narrator insists on the “magyk natureel” (ll.

1125, 1155) that has to be fetched from Orleans, and which is duly paid
for at the outset. One may even wonder whether there is an adventure,
in the sense the term has in the lays, in light of the limited role played by
marvels, as opposed, for instance, to the supernatural wish- fulfillment
pattern of the Lanval story. The conjugal crisis brought about by the rash
promise is resolved through extensive discussion and sustained adhesion
to the notion of “truth.”
At the same time, if we compare the respective prologues of the ear-
lier and later Middle English lays we have scrutinized so far, then obvi-
ously the Franklin displays a careful and faithful concern for the generic
tradition:

The Franklin’s Prologue

1. Thise olde gentil Britouns in hir dayes
2. Of diverse aventures maden layes,
3. Rymeyed in hir firste Briton tonge;
4. Whiche layes with hir instrumentz they songe,
5. Or elles redden hem, for hir plesaunce.
6. And oon of hem have I in remembraunce,
7. Whiche I shal seyn, with good-wyl, as I kan.

But such surface-level conformity is deceptive: the obvious attention

paid to the genre is undermined by the very excess of imitative zeal,
which ends up in an overabundance of inaccuracies and a tendency to
blur whatever specifications existed in the earlier lays. The poet-kings
become the “gentil Britons,” undoubtedly an announcement of the cen-
tral concept of gentilesse explored in the main body of the tale. Lines 2 to
4 suggest the anteriority of a narrative lay over the musical performance,
whereas the instrumental melody and the song of the adventure are tra-
ditionally simultaneous. The Franklin does not take any risk as to the
actual instrument(s) involved (l. 4); furthermore, the two possibilities
suggested in lines 4 and 5 do not correspond to the practice set forth
in the “true” lays, which never allude to a narration achieved without
a musical counterpoint. All things considered, all of the keywords are
there, but the pieces of the puzzle do not fit: we have the impression
of a fancy dress rather than an authentic garment. The short conclu-
sion of the narrative sustains the idea that the teller has lost sight of its
nature: what was first introduced as a “lay” has become a “tale” (“I kan
namoore; my tale is at an ende,” last line), which joins the huge store of
the pilgrims’ tales. As is the case with the later lays, the ref lexive circular
 T H E M I D D L E E N G L I S H B R E T O N L AY S 187

structure is broken. In other words, the vigilant faithfulness displayed in

the choice of generic markers—in the two senses of genre and engender-
ing process—exposes the Franklin’s narrative as an imitation. Of course
one can always wonder about the reasons behind such “mistakes,”26
knowing that Chaucer had access to the lays in the Auchinleck manu-
script.27 It is more consistent and satisfying to think that he deliberately
created his Franklin as an amateur of lays, still absorbed in the memory
he had of them and sincerely devoted to re- creating the feeling of a “true
palimpsest.” Indeed, among all the prologues analyzed here, his is the
only one where the activity of the storyteller is explicitly depicted in
terms of “remembrance.” In a thought-provoking essay, Steele Nowlin
analyzes the detour via the label and prologue of a Breton lay as a dis-
tancing strategy to make it possible for the characters and readers to
reconsider the possibilities of action within a given world and time.28
Drawing, in the same way as its late fourteenth- century counterparts,
on the stored knowledge of the genre among the readers, the Franklin’s
so- called Breton lay provides an open space for ref lection leading to cor-
rected action as regards the verbalization and fulfillment of the numer-
ous promises made in the narrative. In the wake of Loomis’ analysis,
Nowlin insists on Chaucer’s knowledge of the Auchinleck manuscript,
but does not question the accuracy of the palimpsestic information
introduced by the Franklin in the prologue of his tale. He chooses to
stress what I think are superficial similarities with the Orfeo prologue,
outlining their common nostalgia for “an imagined past” preceding the
act of storytelling proper.29 In fact, the notion that this prologue should
imperfectly transpose the prologues of the earlier lays can only add water
to Nowlin’s mill: he writes that the Franklin “calls the pilgrims not into
the ancient world of Brittany but into his textual reconstruction of that
world.”30 Reconstruction is indeed the word: the Franklin pays tribute
to a genre he cherishes—for reasons that help f lesh out his character and
his characters—by carefully re- creating a threshold for what we know is
not a lay. The detour is longer, perhaps, than Nowlin says, but nonethe-
less operative.
One may also imagine that Chaucer adopted a clever standpoint and
tried to nip criticisms about the moral of his tale in the bud by placing it
within a genre not attached solely to a Christian outlook.31 This is not
incompatible with the suggestion that awareness of origins and layers
of composition, a motif inseparable from the “true” lays, was known to
Chaucer the connoisseur, and that he deliberately turned it into an ele-
ment of characterization of his Franklin. This awareness is thus to be seen
as part and parcel of the Franklin’s veneration for such values as truth
188 CLAIRE VIAL

and pledge. His lay is a faithful counterfeit, whereas the “bogus” lays
of the second generation had only to reap the twofold benefit of artistic
and literary merit combined with thematic imprecision to increase the
attractiveness of their narratives. Having lost the initial consciousness of
the palimpsestic process of creation and performance, “bogus” lays had
less and less to do with an intrinsically elusive tradition whose indefinable
charm contained the seed of its own subversion.

Notes
1. Rosalind Field, “Romance in England, 1066–1400,” in The Cambridge
History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 173 [152–76]. Field provides a
minimal definition of the Breton lai as composed by Marie de France:
“economically enigmatic tales of love and magic, focusing on female
action, [which] created in the Breton lai an alternative to the long narra-
tives of war and chivalry” (p. 154). She does not address the specific issue
of their Middle English counterparts in any way besides silhouetting them
against Marie’s background.
2. Field, “Romance in England,” p. 173, and, when introducing the
Auchinleck manuscript, a major source in romance—and lai—material,
Field refers to “the inclusion of short, more lyrical pieces under the guise
of the Breton lai” (p. 170).
3. Regarding this type of approach, see John B. Beston, “How Much Was
Known of the Breton Lai in Fourteenth- Century England?” Harvard
English Studies 5 (1974): 319–36.
4. Concerning the various adaptations of the Lanval story, see (among others)
Mortimer J. Donovan, The Breton Lay: A Guide to Varieties (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), especially ch. 3, “The Middle
English Breton Lays in Couplets,” and ch. 5, “The Middle English Breton
Lay in Tail-Rhyme Stanza.”
5. Degaré raises more than one problem of identification; the speaker does not
refer to a particular genre, and neither uses a generic label nor describes
a lay composition process. The criteria grounding its identification as a
lay are the place of action in Brittany, the fairy element, and the univoc-
ity and brevity of the adventure, to which can be added the absence of a
Christian perspective. On the interpretation of this lay as a parody, see
Beston, “How Much Was Known,” 323.
6. All references are based on the following edition: Anne Laskaya and Eve
Salisbury, eds. The Middle English Breton Lays (Kalamazoo: Medieval
Institute Publications for TEAMS, 1995). See also the electronic versions of
Lay le Freine: http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/freiint.htm
Sir Orfeo: http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/orfint.htm
Sir Degaré: http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/degint.htm
 T H E M I D D L E E N G L I S H B R E T O N L AY S 189

7. See Paul Strohm, “The Origin and Meaning of Middle English

Romaunce,” Genre 10 (1977): 1–28, esp. 25–26. The f loating generic
identification is addressed in exactly the same terms by R.H. Nicholson
when referring to “those lais which have always struck readers as the tru-
est examples of the genre” in his “Sir Orfeo: A ‘Kynges Noote,’ ” Review of
English Studies 36.142 (May 1985): 171 [161–79].
8. On the interaction between literacy and orality, see especially Roy M.
Liuzza, “Sir Orfeo: Sources, Traditions, and the Poetics of Performance,”
Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 21.2 (1991): 269–84.
9. Beston, “How Much Was Known,” 327–36.
10. On the gradual loss of the sense of adventure in the Middle English
Breton lays, see Beston, “How Much Was Known,” 334.
11. It bears reminding that in Chrétien de Troyes, “the courtly adventure is
a fortuitous and puzzling event taking place in a magical atmosphere,”
according to Georges Matoré, Le vocabulaire et la société médiévale (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1985), p. 186 (my translation).
12. Nicholson, “Sir Orfeo,” 162: “The introductory description of the genre is
summarily useful in itself, but more importantly it provides a context for
the story, recognizing both historical origins and modern performance.”
Nicholson chooses to set the lays not against Marie’s background, but
against the background of romance at large: “The English lais simply are
different from those of Marie. We might fairly say that they comprise a
late subgenre of the short romance, rather than a late, decadent, recrudes-
cence of a genre epitomized in Marie’s lais” (173). At length he provides
a “fair” definition: “It is a story-telling genre, distinguished less by its
subject-matter or verse form than by the kind of story it tells (the pleasur-
able recovery of prosperity or place after a season or more of distress), and
its articulation of that story by two linked plots” (174). This definition
notably does away with the necessity of assessing the envelopes of the
lays.
13. See Constance Bullock-Davies, “The Form of the Breton Lay,” Medium
Aevum 42 (1973): 18–31. This analysis of the musical Breton lays is mainly
based on literary sources such as Gottfried von Strassbourg’s Tristan, the
Anglo-Norman Roman de Horn, and the Old Norse Strandar Lioth (Lay of
the Coast).
14. See A.C. Spearing’s comments in “Marie de France and Her Middle
English Adapters,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 12 (1990): 126 n. 14
[117–56].
15. For a study of a similar dynamic of distancing between original and trans-
lation, see in this volume Sharon M. Rowley’s discussion of the handling of
authorial asides in the Old English version of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica.
16. Marie insists on the musical quality of the lays in the Lai du Chèvrefeuille:
Tristram a Wales s’en rala / Tant que sis uncles le manda. / Pur la joie
qu’il ot eüe / De s’amie qu’il ot veüe / E pur ceo k’il aveit escrit /
Si cum la reïne l’ot dit / Pur les paroles remembrer / Tristram,
190 CLAIRE VIAL

ki bien saveit harper / En aveit fet un nuvel lai / Asez

briefment le numerai / Gotelef l’apelent en engleis / Chevrefoil le
nument Franceis. / Dit vus en ai la verité / Del lai que j’ai ici cunté
(ll. 105–118). Similarly, in Guigemar: De cest cunte k’oï avez / Fu
Guigemars li lais trovez / Que hum fait en harpe e en rote. /
Bon en est a oïr la note (ll. 883–86). For all citations from Marie
de France, see Lais de Marie de France, ed. Karl Warnke; transl.,
notes, pres. Laurence Harf-Lancner, Lettres gothiques (Paris: Livre
de Poche, 1990).
17. The generative process of lay-making is recalled by Marie primarily but
not solely in the prologue introducing her twelve lays: De lais pensai,
k’oïz aveie. / Ne dutai pas, bien le saveie / ke pur remembrance les firen /
Des aventures k’il oïrent / Cil ki primes les comencierent / E ki avant les
enveierent. / Plusurs en ai oï conter / Nes voil laisser ne oblier. / Rimé
en ai e fait ditié / Soventes fiez en ai veillié! (ll. 33–42).
The Middle English translation of Launfal known as Sir Landevale
begins in medias res and therefore cannot serve as a comparison here.
18. See Spearing, “Marie de France,” 148–56.
19. On adventure and its function in Middle English Breton lays, see
Spearing, “Marie de France,” 119.
20. Field, “Romance in England,” 175.
21. British Museum Royal manuscript 17.B. XLIII, quoted by Donovan, The
Breton Lay, p. 231.
22. See l. 15 in both prologues as quoted at the beginning of this essay.
23. Laskaya and Salisbury, eds., The Middle English Breton Lays, pp. 264–5.
24. Whether the pleasure of reception is diminished by this imperfect circular
structure remains debatable; Nicholson, “Sir Orfeo,” 162, argues, “To rec-
ognize a designed structure of enclosed and enclosing tales is to perceive
at once . . . something of the mechanics of our involvement, the means to
our pleasure.” What if the framing device conveys generic undecidability
instead of generic assertion?
25. It will be recalled that Orfeo is an English lord reigning in Thrace
(the “former name” of Winchester, 47–50); much of the action takes
place in the Celtic otherworld. The plot of Lay Le Freine is transposed
to Cornwall (“In the west cuntré woned tuay knights,” l. 29) from its
original location in Brittany: Le lai del Freisne vus dirai / sulunc le cunte
que jeo sai. / En Bretaine jadis maneient / dui chevaler, veisin esteient
(ll. 1–4). The Lanval story is situated in Arthurian Britain and the fairy
kingdom.
26. See Strohm’s brief comments, “The Origin and Meaning,” 27–28, and
Beston, “How Much Was Known,” 329.
27. See Laura Hibbard Loomis, “Chaucer and the Breton Lays of the
Auchinleck Manuscript,” Studies in Philology 38 (1941): 14–33. The manu-
script contains, among other texts, Lay Le Freine, Sir Orfeo, Sir Degaré, and
several romances.
 T H E M I D D L E E N G L I S H B R E T O N L AY S 191

28. Steele Nowlin, “Between Precedent and Possibility: Liminality,

Historicity, and Narrative in Chaucer’s ‘The Franklin’s Tale,’ ” Studies in
Philology 103.1 (Winter 2006): 47–67.
29. Nowlin, “Between Precedent and Possibility,” 52.
30. Nowlin, “Between Precedent and Possibility,” 51.
31. See Kathryn Hume, “Why Chaucer Calls ‘The Franklin’s Tale’ a Breton
Lai,” Philological Quarterly 51.2 (1972): 365–79.
CHAPTER 10

ENQUIRIES INTO THE TEXTUAL HISTORY OF

THE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY SIR LAMBEWELL
(LONDON, BRITISH LIBRARY, ADDITIONAL 27897)

Colette Stévanovitch

The mid-seventeenth- century romance Sir Lambewell incorporates accretions

from various periods, which reflect the tastes of various audiences and coexist as in
a palimpsest.

T he anonymous Sir Lambewell of the Percy Folio Manuscript in the

British Library (Additional MS 27897) could be termed a palimpsest,
if this word is taken figuratively to refer to a work preserving traces of
earlier layers of text. While medieval scribes reused parchment by scraping
or washing away previous writing to replace it with text of more immedi-
ate interest, medieval authors recycled preexisting works. A poem with a
long history of transmission behind it, like the mid-seventeenth-century
Sir Lambewell, is a fascinating object of study in this respect. It bears the
mark of generations of scribes, performers, and rewriters not merely add-
ing inevitable corruption to the text, but adapting it to the evolving state
of the English language and the tastes of different audiences.
Marie de France’s Lai de Lanval was written in the twelfth century.
Marie claims she based her lays on Breton material, but there is no way of
recovering her sources and assessing her degree of indebtedness to them.
To all intents and purposes, therefore, I shall consider her Lai de Lanval
as the original form of the Lanval story. Marie’s lay was probably trans-
lated into Middle English at the beginning of the fourteenth century.1
Three manuscripts of the Middle English Lanval story are extant (plus
a number of fragments, left aside in the present essay), differing from
194 C O L E T T E S T É VA N O V I T C H

one another in varying degrees, all of them separated by at least a cen-

tury from the original translation. They are traditionally (though perhaps
misleadingly)2 referred to by the name of the main character: Launfal,
Landeval, Lambewell, all variations on the original name Lanval.

• Sir Launfal, by Thomas Chestre. London, British Library, Cotton

MS Caligula A.ii (fifteenth century)
• Sir Landeval, anonymous. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MS
C 86 (end of the fifteenth century)
• Sir Lambewell, anonymous. London, British Library, Additional MS
27897 or “Percy Folio Manuscript” (1650), the main object of the
present study

Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal differs from the other two by extensive rewrit-
ing due to the use of a stanzaic verse form and to the incorporation of epi-
sodes borrowed from other sources. It is the only item of the group that can
claim status as a distinct work. Sir Landeval and Sir Lambewell differ from
each other mainly in details. Neither of these versions is a direct ancestor of
any of the others,3 so that each of the three may and does preserve original
readings altered in the other two, side by side with innovations of its own.
The original version of a medieval text and its most recent representa-
tive are two points in a continuum, of which we often have only a few
witnesses.4 The means of transmission of medieval texts imply that each
copy or each performance differs from the preceding ones. A performer
in front of an audience tended to rephrase the lines while retaining their
rhymes and general sense. A scribe could misread words and produce an
entirely different meaning. Both updated the poem in matters of vocabu-
lary and grammar. Many differences among the various versions of the
Lanval story are obviously due to memorial transmission, as was shown
by Knight.5 Scribal transmission is just as obviously accountable for some
readings, for instance the first line of Sir Lambewell:

Doughty in king Arthures dayes (Sir Lambewell, l. 1)6

Furnivall allows the reading to stand and justifies it in a note: “= In

doughty king: Cp. ‘good my Lord,’ &c.” 7 However, in good my Lord, both the
possessive and the adjective refer to the noun, whereas in doughty in king
the preposition is supposed to apply to the whole noun cluster and should
consequently be in initial position. Comparison with the other two ver-
sions makes it possible to recover the original reading:

Be doughty Artours dawes (Sir Launfal, l. 1)

Sothly by Arthurys day (Sir Landeval, l. 1)
 S E V E N T E E N T H - C E N T U RY S I R L A M B E W E L L 195

Doughty rather than the empty adverb sothly has every chance of being
the right reading, and its logical position is after the preposition as in Sir
Launfal. The transition from be doughty to doughty in and sothly by can be
explained by copying error. Somewhere in the process of transmission
some scribe must have omitted in/be or doughty, then realized his mistake
and written the word above the line without clearly indicating where it
should go. A subsequent scribe read doughty in (doughty be): this reading
was passed on to Sir Lambewell. A more careful scribe realized the line was
nonsense and replaced doughty by sothly, creating the Landeval reading. Sir
Launfal may have the correct form because the branch it belongs to did
not have this mistake, or because a particularly astute scribe corrected it
back into the original reading.
Hale and Furnivall’s edition of Sir Lambewell has few emendations.
Contractions are resolved and the letters added are printed in italics (e.g.,
common words like that, your, quoth, king, and knight, and nasal conso-
nants like the second m of lemman). Where the manuscript is illegible,
the missing words are reconstructed and the emendation placed between
square brackets in the text, e.g., l. 19 [soe largelye] his good he spent, an
emendation suggested by Percy. The editors sometimes also emend when
the manuscript is legible but the reading makes no sense. Line 138 reads I
put my, lady, into your grace. Percy suggests me for my, and Furnivall prints
the emendation in the text. Other corrections are suggested in notes.
Line 475 reads & when thé came it Lamwell by. Percy (in a note) emends it
Lamwell to Sir Lambwell. Lines 47–48 read Certes you shall me neue[r] see; /
ffarwell, I take my leaue of you. Percy suggests reading of yee, rhyming with
see. Some of these suggestions are so obvious that they had better have
been integrated into the text, like drunken for druken (l. 171, possibly just
the loss of the abbreviation for a nasal), madam for madadam (l. 263), or the
knights for they knights (l. 315). Many other errors affecting the sense are
allowed to stand, as when Lambewell “bends” his head and his body in
his despair at having lost his mistress:

he bent his body & his head eke (Sir Lambewell, l. 361)

The correct reading is of course bet, as found in Sir Launfal:

He bet hys body and hys hedde ek (Sir Launfal, l. 751)

Editing a text with a history of transmission spanning several centuries

raises problems of editorial policy. Most editors have no scruples about
correcting obvious errors, but where should one draw the line? Should
one do away with phonetic spellings (e.g., is for his, l. 341), which can
196 C O L E T T E S T É VA N O V I T C H

give interesting indications as to language change? Should one keep or

remove such alterations as more for moe (cf. infra), which bear witness to
linguistic change but spoil the rhyme? Should one remove lines obviously
added in later stages of the transmission? Or, more generally, should one
print a seventeenth- century version of the Lanval story, or the medieval
original that lies behind it—very far behind? Apart from the fact that
one cannot seriously contemplate reconstructing the original from one
or even three versions, a seventeenth- century Lanval is interesting in its
own right, and the additions and alterations to the text cannot all be con-
sidered corruptions.
Some of the alterations to the original text are deliberate. The gram-
mar of Sir Lambewell is not Middle English, nor is its vocabulary medi-
eval. A process of modernization, no doubt spread over the whole period
of transmission, has been at work. It has affected a number of grammati-
cal features.
The comparative of good was once bet.8 This form is used in Sir Launfal:

To lede the daunce Launfal was set;

For hys largesse he was lovede the bet, (Sir Launfal, ll. 643–44)

The word is modernized and the rhyme lost in both Sir Landeval and Sir
Lambewell:

Sir Landevale was to-fore i- sette;

For his largesse he was louyd the better. (Sir Landeval, ll. 191–92)
Sir Lambell he was before sett,
for his large spending they loued him best; (Sir Lambewell, ll. 229–30)

The comparative moe < OE ma tends to be replaced by the modern

form more. Sir Lambewell has nine more against two moe, both of which
come at the end of a line (ll. 224 and 598) and rhyme with alsoe; of the
nine more, two rhyme with thoe (ll. 391–92) and goe (ll. 413–14), which
shows that the original version had moe there, too, as no doubt also in the
seven cases where the word is not in final position. Modernization has
been systematic except at the end of lines, where the reviser was faced
with the dilemma of letting an archaic word stand or losing the rhyme.
Among the changes in word endings is the plural of day (OE dæg,
dagas > ME days, daws > Mod.E (day, days). Sir Launfal still has daws in
the first line:

Be doughty Artours dawes

That held Engelond yn good lawes (Sir Launfal, ll. 1–2)
 S E V E N T E E N T H - C E N T U RY S I R L A M B E W E L L 197

While the rhyme is lost in the other two versions:

Sothly by Arthurys day

Was Bretayne yn grete nobyle, (Sir Landeval, ll. 1–2)
Doughty in king Arthures dayes
when Brittaine was holden in noblenesse, (Sir Lambewell, ll. 1–2)

The plural dawes was already archaic when Sir Launfal was written down,
since all other occurrences in this poem are spelt day(e)s (six times, never
at the end of a line). Though in Chestre’s time dawes was still understand-
able, a few generations later the Landeval and then the Lambewell revisers
found it advisable to use the modern form, though this meant losing the
rhyme.
The plural ending changed between Middle English and Modern
English (-en > zero). The older form is still found in Sir Landeval and
could be used in a rhyme:

So long that the knyghtes comyn

And ther so they hym namyd9 (Sir Landeval, ll. 315–16)

With the loss of endings and the replacement of nim by take, the two lines
could not rhyme in 1650. The Lambewell reviser rearranged the second
line to make it end with a nasal as an approximate rhyme:

soe long he lay that they Knights came,

& in his chamber tooke him then, (Sir Lambewell, ll. 315–16)

In the process of transmission, words that have become archaic tend

to be replaced by modern ones. The noun lease, “lying” or “falsehood,”
as in the formula without les, disappeared from the English language at
the end of the sixteenth century. It is present in both Launfal and Sir
Landeval:

To say the sothe, wythout les,

All togedere how hyt was (Sir Launfal, ll. 784–85)
The sothe to say and no leese
Alle to gedir as it was. (Sir Landeval, ll. 290–91)

Sir Lambewell rewrites the line:

the sooth to say in that case

altogether as it was. (Sir Lambewell, ll. 331–32)
198 C O L E T T E S T É VA N O V I T C H

Technical terms referring to medieval notions are replaced by near-

homonyms with a different meaning. The fairy lady has a purple cloth on
her bed, called byse by Sir Landeval and Sir Launfal. This type of cloth was
no longer in use in the seventeenth century, and Sir Lambewell has vice,
probably to be understood as device, that is to say pattern.10 Compare:

In the pavyloun he fond a bed of prys,

Yheled wyth purpur bys (Sir Launfal, ll. 283–84)
There was a bede of mekylle price,
Coueride with purpille byse. (Sir Landeval, ll. 93–94)
in that pauillion was a bed of price
that was couered ore with goodlie vice (Sir Lambewell, ll. 115–116)

The text of the poem is also affected by changes in pronunciation.

The loss of vowels in word endings has played havoc with the metrics.
The original fourteenth-century translation was written in the equiva-
lent of the French octosyllable, but the loss of final -e means that many
lines are too short to scan properly. To remedy this, the Lambewell reviser
added line fillers, and sometimes overdid it. In the examples below, Sir
Landeval and Sir Launfal have short lines that have been lengthened in Sir
Lambewell:

Sojournede yn Kardeuyle (Sir Launfal, l. 8)

He soiourned at Carlile (Sir Landeval, l.4)
he sojourned in merry Carlile (Sir Lambewell, l. 4)
yonge knyghtes and squyers (Sir Landeval, l. 11)
both yonge knights & Squires eke (Sir Lambewell, l. 11)
He gaf gyftys largelyche (Sir Launfal, l. 28)
And yaf yeftes largely (Sir Landeval, l. 21)
& he gaue gifts that were larglie (Sir Lambewell, l. 18)

Between the beginning of the fourteenth century, when the Lai de

Lanval was first translated into Middle English, and the mid seventeenth
century, when Sir Lambewell was written down, the English language
underwent a drastic phonetic change known as the Great Vowel Shift.
The spelling gives no clue to this, but the rhyme scheme occasionally
does, since when the stress was moved forward on words borrowed from
French, the last vowel was shortened and did not shift. Compare Sir
Lambewell, where the rhyme has been lost:

& one of them had a gold Bason,

& the other a towell of silke fine. (Sir Lambewell, ll. 72–73)
 S E V E N T E E N T H - C E N T U RY S I R L A M B E W E L L 199

And the earlier Sir Launfal and Sir Landeval, which retain it:

That oon bar of gold a basyn;

That other a towayle whyt and fyn (Sir Launfal, ll. 244–45)
That one bare a golde basyne,
That othir a towail riche and fyne. (Siur Landeval, ll. 63–64)

The loss of rhyme probably explains the singleton in Sir Lambewell, l. 74:

& either of them had a ffresh color, (Sir Lambewell, l. 74)

While Sir Landeval reads:

With facys white as lely f loure,

With ruddy rede as rose coloure; (Sir Landeval, ll. 59–60)

Since flower and color no longer rhymed in seventeenth- century English,

the link between the two lines was weakened, paving the way for the loss
of the first one.
Other alterations cover several lines, and even whole episodes in the
case of Sir Launfal: the story itself was partially modified to suit the tastes
of different audiences, so that a study of these alterations can give indica-
tions as to the fields of interest of the revisers and of their audiences.11
Sir Landeval is a relatively late version with a whole century of trans-
mission behind it. Many of the additions it incorporates ref lect a mate-
rialistic outlook. Alone of the three versions, it hints that it is Arthur’s
generosity in dealing out treasure that attracts knights to his court:

There came men on euery syde,

Yonge knyghtes and squyers
And othir bolde b[a]chelers,
Forto se that nobly
That was with Arthur alle-wey;
For ryche yeftys and tresoure
He gayf to eache man of honoure. (Sir Landeval, ll. 10–16)

It adds lines (in italics below) to Landeval’s speech of despair at find-

ing himself poor, all of which underline the social implications of the
situation:

Who hath no good, goode can he none;

And I am here in vnchut12 londe,
And no gode haue vnder honde.
Men wille me hold for a wreche; (Sir Landeval, ll. 24–27)
200 C O L E T T E S T É VA N O V I T C H

Money is equated with good behavior by the wordplay in the first line,
while the last line implies that Arthur and his court can have no esteem
for a penniless knight. Once rich again, the first thing Landeval buys are
clothes befitting his rank:

Hym sylf he clothyde ffulle richely,

Hys squyer, hys yoman honestly. (Sir Landeval, ll. 169–70)

This materialistic outlook is shared by other characters, since the barons

hesitate to condemn to death such a generous giver:

Butt greatt vilany were ther-vpon

To for- do suche a man,
That is more large and fre
Then eny of vs that here be. (Sir Landeval, ll. 338–41)

Sir Launfal’s specific additions13 take the work even further in the
direction of materialism. Launfal, though still termed generous, does not
exceed his income as long as he stays at the court, and only becomes
poor when he has to live on his own. The passages referring to the hero’s
generosity and to his ruin are separated by some hundred lines, which
suppress any relationship between the two facts:

He gaf gyftys largelyche (Sir Launfal 28)

[Launfal is made a seneschal, is disliked by Guinevere, leaves the court
and takes his lodgings with a former servant, now mayor.]
So savegelych hys good he besette
That he ward yn greet dette (Sir Launfal, ll. 130–31)

Compare with Sir Landeval and Sir Lambewell:

Sir Landevale spent blythely

And yaf yeftes largely;
So wildely his goode he sette
That he felle yn grete dette (Sir Landeval, ll. 20–23)
and euer he spent worthilye,
& he gaue gifts that were larglie;
[soe largely] his good he spent,
much more than euer he had rent,
& soe outragiouslie he it sett
that he became far in debt (Sir Lambewell, ll. 17–22)

Unlike Landeval and Lambewell, who encounter the fairy immediately

after leaving Arthur’s court, Chestre’s hero actually experiences what it
is to be penniless and ill- dressed in a world where clothes and money are
 S E V E N T E E N T H - C E N T U RY S I R L A M B E W E L L 201

a passport to social status.14 Of the three versions, Sir Launfal is the most
realistic as concerns money matters.
Comparison between Marie de France’s lai and the three versions
taken together shows that the hero’s concern for money, though devel-
oped by both Sir Landeval and Sir Launfal, was already present in the (lost)
fourteenth-century Middle English translation. In Marie’s Lai de Lanval,
generosity is only one of the hero’s many qualities (Pur sa valu, pur sa largesce,
/ Pur sa bealté, pur sa pruesce, / L’envioent tuit li plusur, ll. 21–22),15 and is in no
way excessive. Marie’s Lanval becomes poor because the king deliberately
overlooks him when granting land to his knights, while the translator
makes of his lavish spending the direct cause of his downfall. The word
large is repeated as a leitmotiv in all three Middle English versions, with
six occurrences in Sir Launfal (ll. 28, 31, 35, 624, 644, 647),16 seven in Sir
Landeval (ll. 21, 129, 153, 179, 192, 322, 340), and six in Sir Lambewell (ll.
18, 159, 188, 230, 232, 367). The Middle English character, once he has
become rich, does not use his money only to benefit prisoners and min-
strels, but also to buy horses and entertain on a large scale. As other crit-
ics have noted about Sir Launfal,17 such additions indicate a middle-class
audience of a mercantile turn of mind, very different from the aristocratic
circles that Marie’s Anglo-Norman lays had been written for.
While the two fifteenth- century versions further emphasize the mate-
rialistic dimension introduced by the translator, Sir Lambewell tones it
down. Its reviser gives Lambewell other qualities besides generosity to
win popularity among the knights of Arthur’s court:

eche man for him was full woe,

for a larger spender then hee
neuer came in that countrye
& thereto he was feirce & bold,
none better in the Kings houshold. (Sir Lambewell, ll. 366–70)

Rather than on money, the Lambewell reviser lays the stress on interper-
sonal relations. He adds scraps of dialogue here and there and a number
of details on the interactions of characters, thereby evincing an interest
for psychology less medieval than modern.
Lambewell is keenly aware of the social distance that separates him
from his fairy mistress. On first finding himself in her presence, he kneels
(ll. 133–4), and when she offers him her love, he warns her that he is too
poor to support her in the manner to which she is accustomed (as though
a fairy expected a mortal to pay her bills!):

I am a knight without hawere;18

I haue noe goods noe more, nor men,
to maintaine this estate I find your in. (Sir Lambewell, ll. 150–52)
202 C O L E T T E S T É VA N O V I T C H

The sum involved, though high, is more realistic than in the other ver-
sions, since a single pomell of the pavillon is worth one hundred pounds
in Sir Lambewell (ll. 103–104), but has the value of a citie or a towne in Sir
Landeval (ll. 79–80).
When it is time for bed, Lambewell hesitates to lie down beside the
lady, although she has explicitly expressed the wish to have him as her
lover and he has acquiesced:

Sir Lambwell, like a hailow Knight,

by her bedside stood vp full right,
said, “you displease, that wold I nought,
but Iesus leeue, you knew my thought.”
then spake that Lady free,
saies, “vndight thee, Lambewell, & come to me.” (Sir Lambewell, ll. 173–78)

This hesitation sounds rather absurd in the context of the medieval

romance tradition. Lambewell repeats to the king that he is unworthy
of his mistress and would not dare to touch her unless she explicitly
allowed it:

I am to simple to tuch her lappe

or yett to come vnto her bower,
eccept it were for her pleasure,
not displeasing her sickerlie (Sir Lambewell, ll. 382–85)

When she comes to Arthur’s court to save him, he is so unsure of being

forgiven that he asks the king and knights to intercede for him (ll. 591–98).
Similarly, the maidens coming to Arthur’s court greet Lambewell as they
pass by him (ll. 475–78), which is both socially right since he is their mis-
tress’s lover and unthinkable in this context since the lady herself is angry
with him and will not even look at him.
In all of these instances Lambewell behaves not so much like a medi-
eval hero as like a seventeenth-century gentleman transported into a
romance setting to which he tries to apply the social norms of his time.
The modern reader is reminded of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee at
King Arthur’s Court, though the gap between the two worlds is less wide
and the reviser probably unaware of it. Both Lambewell’s delicacy in his
dealings with the other sex, and the narrator’s delicacy in making his
hero popular for qualities other than lavish spending, suggest the audi-
ence has changed once more. It has lost the materialistic outlook on life
that characterized the two fifteenth-century versions and the original
fourteenth- century translation. Its greater refinement is the mark of a
higher social origin: the wheel has come full circle.
 S E V E N T E E N T H - C E N T U RY S I R L A M B E W E L L 203

Three main periods in the transmission of the story and three types
of audiences can be distinguished, from the Anglo-Norman aristocracy
through the Middle English middle class to the more refined readers
of the seventeenth century. The corresponding changes of outlook have
been achieved through additions rather than suppressions, even when, as
in the case of the Lambewell reviser with money matters or Chestre with
generosity as a source of poverty, the writer was obviously uncomfortable
with the details he inherited from his predecessors. As a result, the fin-
ished work incorporates accretions from various periods, added by vari-
ous revisers and ref lecting the tastes of various audiences, all coexisting
as in a palimpsest. It is a fascinating task to identify layers of accretion
corresponding to the different social contexts. It is also an indispensable
task if one is to assess a late version on its own merits rather than on the
tradition that lies behind it.

Notes
1. Alan J. Bliss, ed., Sir Launfal (London: Nelson, 1960), p. 15.
2. See J. Burke Severs and Albert E. Hartung, eds. A Manual of the Writings
in Middle English, 1050–1500, vol. 1 (New Haven: Connecticut Academy
of Arts and Sciences, 1967); for criticism of this practice, see Bliss, ed., Sir
Launfal, pp. 4–5. I maintain this distinction for convenience.
3. See George Lyman Kittredge, “Launfal,” American Journal of Philology 10
(1889): 1–33.
4. For a discussion of this with reference to the Lanval poems, see Colette
Stévanovitch, “Le(s) lai(s) de Lanval, Launfal, Landeval, Lambewell . . . . et
la notion d’œuvre dans la littérature moyen-anglaise,” in Left Out: Texts
and Ur-Texts, ed. Nathalie Collé-Bak, Monica Latham, and David Ten
Eyck (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 2009).
5. S.T. Knight, “The Oral Transmission of Sir Launfal,” Medium Ævum 38
(1969): 164–70.
6. Texts are quoted from the Chadwick-Healey LION (Literature Online)
database. Reference is also made to paper editions, viz. for Sir Launfal
and Sir Landeval: Bliss, ed., Sir Launfal; for Sir Lambewell: John W. Hales
and Frederick J. Furnivall, eds. Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript, Ballads and
Romances, vol. 1 (London: N. Trübner & Co, 1868), pp. 142–64. I would
like to thank Claire Vial for providing me with access to this edition.
7. Hales and Furnivall, eds. Sir Lambewell, p. 144.
8. As in Piers Plowman’s Dowell, Dobet, and Dobest.
9. Obviously a mistake for namyn, corrected by Bliss.
10. As suggested by Percy in a note. Possibly a misreading of v for b (I thank
Jane Roberts for this suggestion).
11. When lines are present only in one version it is assumed that they were
added in the course of the history of that textual branch rather than
204 C O L E T T E S T É VA N O V I T C H

suppressed from the other two. When a passage is common to all three
branches it is assumed to have been part of the fourteenth-century trans-
lation, though it could also have been added by one of the first revisers
before the various textual branches separated.
12. For “uncuth.”
13. I shall leave aside here the episodes borrowed from sources other than the
Lanval story.
14. Between leaving Arthur’s court and meeting with the fairy Launfal lives
in poverty, staying with a former servant whose f luctuating attitude to
him mirrors the state of the hero’s fortunes. His two companions leave
him when their clothes fall to pieces. Launfal himself has to miss church
because of the state of his clothes. See A.C. Spearing, “Marie de France
and Her Middle English Adapters,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 12 (1990):
117–56, and Bliss, ed., Sir Launfal.
15. Marie de France, Le lai de Lanval, ed. Jean Rychner and Paul Aebischer
(Genève: Droz and Paris: Minard, 1958).
16. For a different interpretation of this word (with sexual innuendo), see
Carol J. Nappholz, “Launfal’s ‘Largesse’: Word- Play in Thomas Chestre’s
‘Sir Launfal,’ ” English Language Notes 25 (1988): 4–9.
17. See in particular Bliss, ed., Sir Launfal, p. 42.
18. Possibly for French avoir, “possessions” (Furnivall).
CHAPTER 11

ELUCIDATIONS: BRINGING TO LIGHT THE

AESTHETIC UNDERWRITING OF THE MATIÈRE
DE BRETAGNE IN JOHN BOORMAN’S EXCALIBUR

Jean-Marc Elsholz

Boorman’s film Excalibur enacts medieval theories of light that form the under-
writing of successive layers of the Arthurian romance tradition.

Introduction1
John Boorman’s Excalibur,2 a cinematographic “rewriting” of Arthurian
legend, springs from the seeds that lie within medieval romance, for, as
André Crépin observes, “light radiates at the heart the Middle Ages.”3
Film, a medium that depends on light to express the physical world, is par-
ticularly suited to the enactment of medieval theories of light. Many medi-
eval philosophers held that all bodies consist of light, but that the formal
appearance of this light varies in accordance with the being’s level of per-
fection. Boorman demonstrates how metal, which abounds in stories of the
Grail quest, is a privileged vector for the expression of this aesthetic philos-
ophy. Depictions of the merveilleux, a perfected form of the natural world
embodied in medieval romance, are crafted with a vocabulary of luminos-
ity. It is by transposing this vocabulary onto film through the appearance of
metal that Excalibur exemplifies medieval theories of light that underlie and
illuminate the literary palimpsest that is Arthurian romance.

The Theory of Light: A Medieval Formal Cosmography

“Couldn’t light, too, be matter? A kind of matter more fluid than fluids,
inconsistent matter, but still visible matter? For a very long time, painters
206 J E A N - M A RC E L S HOL Z

hadn’t thought of that.”4 If, in the course of his exposé, art historian René
Huyghe dates this fascinating question to the age of Impressionism, the fol-
lowing extracts from the works of the thirteenth-century ecclesiastic Robert
Grosseteste indicate that people had given it some thought long before then.

Light is a very subtle corporal substance.5

Every creature is created on the basis of universal matter which informs
the universal form of corporeity [i.e., light].6
All bodies are not of the same form (species) even through they all pro-
ceed from light . . . The form and perfection of all bodies is light, but in the
higher bodies it is more spiritual and simple, whereas in the lower bodies
it is more corporeal and multiplied (from On light (De luce) or the Beginning
of Forms).7

Examination of the relationship between Boorman’s film and a phi-

losophy that is highly speculative at the formal level will enable us to
grasp some of the operations and problematics of one and the other recip-
rocally. To analyze Excalibur from the viewpoint of the theology of light
perceptible at the heart of the Arthurian cycle helps us to understand how
cinematography and formal thought envision Arthurian “en-lightening”
anew, on bases that had not escaped the genius of filmmaker Abel Gance.
“I was astounded,” he wrote, “to discover that my theory of living light
had been expounded by Robert Grosseteste (1175–1253).”8
Robert Grosseteste was a spokesman of the “theology of light”
movement at the origin of the inventive, erudite, and many-splendored
conceptualization of light, which nourished Gothic art from the period
in which Chrétien de Troyes composed his Arthurian romances (the
school of Chartres) to that in which Wolfram von Eschenbach wrote
Parzival (the Oxford School, with which Robert Grosseteste, Bishop
of Lincoln, was associated).9 Without dwelling on Huygue’s discus-
sion and its specific context, if one were to speculate about why the
thirteenth- century thinking referred to above has been overlooked,
one would certainly find at the forefront a certain reticence concern-
ing the notion of “form” inherited from Plotinus (c.204–270), a major
philosopher of the ancient world who is widely considered the founder
of Neoplatonism.10
The theology of light is founded on an adaptation of Neoplatonism
inspired most particularly by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite:11 light
is identified with Plotinian form, also called corporeity. The reciprocal
conversion of light into substance is a formal operation that is difficult to
grasp because it differs so radically from contemporary epistemology.12
 E LUC I DAT ION S 207

As St. Bonaventure puts it, light is the fundamental form of body, the first
determination that provides the body with its manner of being.13
By assimilating light with substance, the theology of light opens up
Neoplatonic form to medieval varieties of experimentation: scientific
(Grosseteste studied optics and put forward a law of refraction) but also
artistic, through the celebration of light, for instance in the writings of
Abbot Suger (c.1081–1151).14 The distinction between science and art
was, at any rate, hardly relevant in a culture that celebrated “beauty as the
splendor of truth,” to borrow the famous Thomist expression, which is
valid only in its full, formal sense as it was understood at the time, and not
just as an anachronistic “metaphor of brilliance.”15 According to Edgar
De Bruyne, scholars of the thirteenth century went beyond admiring
light and celebrating it in grandiose images. They demonstrated with the
science of their time that light is, in fact, the source of all beauty because
it is constitutive of “the very essence of things.” Their entire vision of
the world was infused with aesthetics; the theory of light had been trans-
formed into a general model of the universe.16
Because De Bruyne’s work, saluted and cited by Umberto Eco,17 relies
on medieval texts to define issues with respect to art (as do studies by
Erwin Panofsky and, later, Georges Duby), by reading those texts back
the other way through to the artistic production,18 we can restore in con-
creto the “Neoplatonistic” medieval universe. This, however, is admis-
sible only insofar as medieval formal thought, which conceives of the
world as representation in the Foucauldian sense, is essentially aesthetic
in nature: the “visible Great Wholeness” is constructed as an admirable
work of art.19
One discernible motive underlying De Bruyne’s work is his desire
to rehabilitate certain kinds of medieval art that have been neglected
inasmuch as people have tried to reduce all the aesthetic delights of
medieval man to effects of “gold and glitter.” It was actually, he stresses,
a love of light.20 It is revealing that some film criticism has drawn upon
medieval aesthetics, implicitly reformulated as “meaning above all
else,” only to backtrack and denigrate Excalibur’s form as “meaning-
less,” as the nickname “Kitsch Grail”21 and the pejorative turn given to
the association of the film with the work of Gustav Klimt indicate. If it
is true that the film is “shiny,” one would do well to wonder whether
the director’s taste for gleam was pointless, or rather a renewal of
ancient thought transmitted by an artistic heritage sensitively received.
Boorman’s invention of the figurative may be considered a re- creation
of perceived form inherited from Arthurian texts of the Gothic age and
their ongoing reception. 22
208 J E A N - M A RC E L S HOL Z

A Coherent Aesthetic Metaphysics

A Formal Force
The aesthetic signification of physical appearance, more specifically of
physiognomy as represented in medieval treatises, held great interest for
people of the Middle Ages, as the many translations from Latin or Arabic
attest. Such treatises sought to interpret character and temperament from
the shape of parts of the body, the color of the complexion or hair, and
human resemblance to various animals.23 This formal logic operates in
Excalibur as well.

It is noteworthy that . . . the armor worn during the period before Arthur
and the earlier part of his reign . . . is dark and dull . . . Soon after Lancelot
arrives . . . the Round Table knights adopt armor similar to Lancelot’s style
of glossy, chrome-like platemail . . . With the rebellion of Mordred, knights
in the varied, dark armor return . . . The final battle between Arthur and
Mordred’s forces highlights the contrast between the silver and dark armor. 24

Numerous trials are undergone as the men, constantly in armor, accede

to the law of “metallognomy” operating in the cinematographic world of
Excalibur. The dark, bestial armor of Uther’s clan, and later, at Mordred’s
camp, is formidable, but it cannot overcome the gleaming, angelic armor
from Camelot. Of this, the duel pitting Arthur against the unknown
knight (Lancelot) is a perfect example. The blows are violent, signified
by the clang of metal and the high temper of Arthur, weighed down in
his robust cuirass. But it is the anonymous Lancelot, simple and bright,
incomparably quicker, shining in his winged armor, who dominates the
fight, only to be defeated by the brighter blaze: the f lash from the lumi-
nous, enigmatic Excalibur in response to the prone king’s command:

Arthur: “Excalibur, I call on your power!” [from the screenplay]25

Since “in its pure state the luminous force is the fundamental and substan-
tial energy of corporeity,”26 it reigns supreme over the outcome of combat,
which, while aesthetic, is nonetheless “energetic, corporeal, substantial.”
Indeed, a knight possesses the qualities of his armor as an embodiment of
light and its properties, both in Boorman’s film and in medieval romance:
“The superb hero wore bright, luminous iron armor”; “Not once has his
valiant heart betrayed our hero, tempered like steel”; “he looked like an
angel hatched on earth.”27 And, at the other end of the spectrum, the
equation between darkness, metal, and ugliness: “[N]ever had there been
a creature so hideous even on the edge of hell. You would never have
seen iron as black as her neck and hands.”28
 E LUC I DAT ION S 209

Spiritual Immanence

Merlin: “Remember, Arthur, there’s always something cleverer than yourself!”

This warning by Merlin—bested and toppled into the stream by a

small, shiny fish in an immediate foreshadowing of the outcome of the
duel between Arthur and Lancelot in front of a waterfall—is noticeable
for its incongruity. Like the fish, if Lancelot is quick and bright, it is
because of his agility beneath his “metal skin”29 rather than for his men-
tal acumen. It is a question here of another kind of “cleverness,” deter-
mined by a generalized aesthetic order. De Bruyne notes the operation
of a “coherent metaphysics”30 in medieval art and literature, as we do in
Boorman’s film via the mediation of metal.
Formal immanence registers thought as an aesthetic value, and in so
doing it inverts all the usual orders and hierarchies ordinarily imposed
by transcendence. A dynamic of reversal orchestrates each fight in the
episode: the king and all his men are knocked down by the luminous
Lancelot. The scene, having begun with a quicksilver fish besting the
brightest mind, closes with the sword Excalibur, which, with its f lash,
overcomes the best of knights. Nevertheless, “to join together light and
iron does not mean to wield the sword: the sword motif is not martial
but spiritual . . . Weapons of battle [are transformed into] ‘arms of light.’ ”31
This is the lesson that Merlin is getting at by proclaiming Lancelot brighter
than Arthur as he pronounces the elusive little sparkling fish cleverer than
himself. “Indifferent matter,” when sublimated into light, is necessarily
more intelligent because, in accordance with Grosseteste’s remarkably
commutative definition, light is “spiritual body or bodily spirit.”32

Merlin, describing the fish as the camera cuts to Lancelot in all his brightness:
“Look at him, so beautiful, so quick!”

“Quick” qualifies not only the movements of the fish and Lancelot, but
corresponds to mental brightness, the “cleverness” to which Merlin alludes.
The corresponding medieval view is explained by the philosopher Paul
Vignaux: “[W]ithout the body to weigh it down, our souls, like angels,
could receive full knowledge through the irradiation of spiritual light
precisely at the highest part of the soul, which Robert Grosseteste calls
intelligence.” The theology of light enables “vision of this kind to apply
to the whole universe and to each of its parts, to movement, to action
on matter and on the very senses.”33 Of this there subsist many traces in
language: the headdress of Merlin the mastermind is an unusual metallic
skullcap that reflects continuously. Sometimes the identification of light
210 J E A N - M A RC E L S HOL Z

with intelligence is more or less lost, as in elucidation, the title word of this
essay, which alludes to a strange Arthurian text, The Elucidation, and is
an homage to Rimbaud’s Illuminations, which perfectly render this kind
of “vision.”34

An Experimental and Ascendant Metaphysics

“The blind spirit surges toward truth through what is material and, see-
ing the light, it revives from its former submersion.” So reads Abbot
Suger’s dedication inscribed on a portal of the cathedral of Saint-Denis.35
The eminent Panofsky considers Suger’s work similar to “the modern
film director’s art of mise en scène,”36 effectively establishing the cathedral
as a visual installation. Its stained-glass windows are optical devices that
filter perceptible light to make it intelligible.37 They “establish the space
of sanctuary in the glimmer of gold and transport the soul in wonder,”38
thereby translating the physical experience of beauty into metaphysical
meaning.
Camelot, a Gothic castle of gold and silver whose light dazzles Perceval,
performs this function in Boorman’s film. Moreover, it is through a
stained-glass window in its chapel that the lightning bolt strikes the royal
armor at the heart and plunges the knights into the Grail quest. Spiritual
sensitivity to light is present at all stages of life. Thomas Aquinas cites

three types of pleasure which may result from the perception of a form. . . .
The enjoyment associated with the exercise of real appetites, . . . aes-
thetic joy, . . . the aesthetic-biological pleasure which we call sexual
beauty . . . where man, both animal and spiritual, delights in harmonious
forms but in accordance with carnal possession.39

Taste or appetite is formal, and its degree of elevation is declared as such

in the film: thus when Merlin the magus—who never sits down at ban-
quets and has trouble eating one of Guinevere’s cakes at the festivities in
Cornwall—goes fishing in a dark body of water, it is not for food but to
nourish his soul with the fish’s quick, bright “cleverness.” “May we not
rightly assume that even in the aesthetic pleasure of perceptible things,
an ecstatic element can occur which vibrates at the very tip of the soul?”
muses Thomas of Saint Victor (c.1190–1246).40 Carnal desire overwhelms
Uther at the sight of Ygerne loosening her hair from its metal ring and
agitating it energetically during her dance. He is as sensitive to its shine as
some medieval poets, whose gaze was “riveted by luminous blond locks
of silken curls, glimmering like gold, more beautiful awry than when
expertly arranged with combs.”41 Arthur is conceived—wrought, so to
 E LUC I DAT ION S 211

speak—by the combined “work” of the male armored body and female
naked f lesh glowing in the heat of the furnace of the giant fireplace.
Metallic brilliance is the last wish of the dying Uther as he plunges the
glistening metal of Excalibur into the ore stone. It is a first motive of the
son who will extract it, in the serendipitous shot where the baby Arthur
firmly grasps and fixes his gaze on his mother’s shiny golden locks as he
is torn from her arms.
Nevertheless, the hierarchy does not depend on immediately percep-
tible appearance, but rather on its intelligible formal perfection, which
may be latent. “Earth is all the higher bodies because all the higher lights
come together in it.”42 Thus, even if the most opaque being is the earth
element, it contains the energy and the beauty of light because from it are
extracted shining metals.43 Metals drawn from the corruptible earth and
rectified by the natural light of human intelligence reveal superior light.
Indeed, metal is the most subtly balanced body in the film; it is, in Gothic
art, the privileged way of expressing how “luminous energy constitutes
the preexisting corporeity in any physical being.”44 To exercise mastery
over light through metal is to master the very form of the world and,
therefore, the world through its form. Richard of Saint Victor construes
this in metaphysical terms:

When they have melted their metals and prepared their molds, smelters
pour any figure as they wish and produce any vase of the right size and
desired shape. The soul, having reached the same stage, bends easily to
every sign of [superior] will, it even lends itself, by spontaneous desire,
to . . . the exact form desired of it.45

This is what Merlin teaches Arthur about knighthood’s greatest qualities:

“They blend like the metals we mix to make a good sword.”
In film, the figurative birth of a person or of humankind, that is,
their first appearance on the screen, is often invested with ontological
value. Like Nature in Jean de Meun’s Romance of the Rose (c.1269–78),
who “hammers and forges ceaselessly, replacing the old generation with
the new,”46 in Excalibur Merlin watches human figures born of ham-
mering in the fires of combat, to the din of the forge. Like earth, the
human clump is heavy, tangled, and corrupt, moving with effort, but it
contains the light of metal, extractable by fire, as well as reason, which
can detect the light and bring it out. Thus to cultivate metal is—in for-
mal terms—a civilizing act. In this respect, Merlin’s lesson to Uther, “I
gave you Excalibur to heal, not to hack,” is no longer paradoxical. The sword
fascinates and, through its spiritual inf luence, does civilizing work. Thus
peace is sealed between the duke and Uther upon the latter’s solemn
212 J E A N - M A RC E L S HOL Z

exhibition of Excalibur, bright “lyke 30 torchys,”47 staged by Boorman to

accentuate its light by subtle movements of the actor’s wrist.

Merlin to Uther: “Show the sword.” . . . “Behold, the sword of power.”

It is according to its law that Arthur governs, through his ability to make
the sword’s shining metal emerge from the stone. As one metaphysician
notes, “The gift of the king’s sword is the gift of light.”48
“It is because of Good and Beauty that emerge, among beings endowed
with reason, all forms of intellectual concord (since concord is born of
the agreement of minds about the same principle). . . .”49 Explaining these
words of Thomas Aquinas, De Bruyne continues by observing that true
beauty makes people unanimous in admiration. It unites them like broth-
ers in reciprocal sympathy out of a common love of the ideal and brings
them together in cohesion with a view to action, that is, with a view to
great common works. This is the social effect that beauty has on minds.
Everywhere these effects are seen, one may be certain that something
beautiful is actively present.50

“You Must Become Visionary”51

Perceval to Lancelot: “Take me with you! I want to be a knight!”

The irrepressible enthusiasm for the beauty of brilliance that motivates a

young man to join the society of men, “whatever the cost,”52 is the theme
of the encounter between Perceval and the knights, and lies at the base
of the Perceval legend as we know it. Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval “sees
very frankly” because of the luster of their armor that the knights are a
“company of angels.” “Joy lends him an impossibly clownish and wild-
eyed expression,” and he “talks with the men about their other life.” Of
course the knights make fun of him, but Perceval knows he sees rightly
when he considers that “this man does not know what he does; he is an
angel.” He perceives naturally what the scholarly cleric Alain de Lille was
proclaiming at the time Chrétien de Troyes was composing his Perceval ou
le Conte du Graal: knights are the earthly version of spiritual angels. Thus
Chrétien may treat as a simpleton the young fool who, in his pursuit of the
“golden spark,” mistakes the maiden’s vermeil53 and gold tent for a church,
for the author is tracing the aptitude and the path that will guide the young
bumpkin from the shadow of the forest to the light-saturated Grail.
Boorman introduces Perceval the same way. Lancelot is amused at the
young man’s forthright, naive fascination for his winged, shining armor.
It is this gift for seeing clearly that, from glimmer to glimmer, will lead
 E LUC I DAT ION S 213

him to the dazzling metallic Grail castle. His similarity to Chrétien de

Troyes’s Perceval leads us to consider the nature of the beauty that unites
men and to explore the forms Boorman uses in a single question: where
does this fascination for light come from?

Perceval’s Naive Questions: Some Erudite Answers

Cristina Noacco analyzes the meaning of light in depictions by Chrétien
de Troyes, and, noting the many occurrences of the word angel in
Perceval’s discourse when he encounters the knights in shining armor,
affirms that “the value assigned to light . . . testifies to Chrétien’s sources,
from the closest, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, to Platonic doc-
trine through the mediation of Plotinus.”54 Augustine of Hippo, stat-
ing that “with these more estimable [Plotinian] philosophers we have no
dispute in the matter,” notes that “they perceived . . . that these [angels]
have the same source of happiness as ourselves: a certain intelligible light,
which . . . illumines them that they may be penetrated with light and enjoy
perfect happiness. . . .”55

An angel knows itself per suam formam: it is itself its own intelligible form
because its natural being and its intelligible being are one. . . . The angel’s self-
knowledge is an instantaneous and immediate vision of self [which], at the
created level, renders the ideal of knowledge as a vision of the essence.56

Man, on the other hand, suffers from separateness; his natural being is not
in phase with his intelligible being. The questions of Chrétien’s Perceval
bespeak the distance that separates the human condition from the angelic,
and how knighthood is the intermediate form apt to bridge the gap.
Perceval exclaims to himself, “Those are angels I see!” and to the knights,
“If only I could be like you, so bright and magnificent . . . Were you born
like that?” and when, mocking him, they deny it, “Tell me of the King
who makes knights, and where he can usually be found.”57
It is in the knight’s angelic luminosity that Perceval identifies his desire
for ontological identification. He instinctively feels that this “mediating
representation” will allow him to face, in “successive steps,” the bridging
of the “spatial distance and temporal succession that stands in the way of
the perfect coinciding” of his two natures.58 One must turn to Boorman
to observe how, by living out his knighthood, by coming closer to angels
through the brilliance of light, man approaches his essential form. It is
Perceval who, “following an itinerary of senefiance,”59 will see the quest
through to its end. He will move from “physical light to metaphysical light,”
from the visible world to the intelligible world, to find ontological form:
human beauty that is capable of founding a just human society.
214 J E A N - M A RC E L S HOL Z

The Grail’s Château Merveilleux: The Film’s Inscription

within a Topos
The most famous Grail castles (those described by Chrétien de Troyes
and Malory, for instance) conform to the paradigm of the château merveil-
leux or “wondrous castle”; the Grail castle in Excalibur is no exception.
The term merveille derives from the Latin mirari, which, according to
Jacques Le Goff, means “open your eyes wide.”60 “The merveilleux forms
a system with the miraculous and the magical.”61 At the Grail castle,
action is reduced to the bare minimum; it remains only to contemplate
the miraculous fulfillment of the quest. Crossing its threshold, we enter
the aesthetic world purified by the gaze whose end is vision.

Metallic Brilliance: The Pristine Form of the World

Christine Ferlampin-Acher analyzes the characteristics of the château
merveilleux with respect to the episode of the Golden Island in Le Bel
Inconnu, an Arthurian romance from the late twelfth or early thirteenth
century.62 Its wondrous otherness is a “hyperbolic development of the
‘real.’ ” By “real,” Ferlampin-Acher means all “realistic, solid, pictur-
esque elements” that compose ordinary depictions within the narrative.
Boorman’s Grail castle confirms the ideal outcome of an aesthetic process
of “movement toward the merveilleux,” which was underway since the start
of the film: the Grail castle is the fulfillment—in intelligible light—of
Camelot, whose interior architecture it reiterates. Camelot, blazing with
gold and silver, already outshined the metalliferous Tintagel, whose
rocky, silver-veined tones gave it the appearance of a working mine, the
stones extracted from it hurled from its heights upon the assailants attack-
ing its walls. The Grail castle rationalizes, trims, cuts to the essential with
a “quantitative amplification”: the brilliance of its solid walls, bare and
smooth, materializes as a gleam. Yet it also effects a “qualitative amplifi-
cation”: if Excalibur is intriguing because of its excessive shine from an
imprecise light source, the Grail castle qualifies true light because this
light proceeds from pure metal. “The amplification announces from the
start that a new dimension has come into play.” The château merveilleux
“dissolves into an abstraction, that of the perfection of the ideal.”63
The Grail castle’s location is intelligible. This Plotinian “there-
beyond” is reached here and now, not by journeying to a place, but rather
through a unique combination of destiny and ability, adventure and spir-
itual state. In Excalibur these criteria are embodied in the unachieved
quest, the despairing hero (Perceval: “I failed”), the edge of the wasteland,
and the approach of death, when one can draw no nearer to “the mysti-
cal aestheticism of beyond”64 without becoming part of it. In the Grail
 E LUC I DAT ION S 215

castle, we thus cross over “from physical light to metaphysical light”65 through
a thematics of medieval vision so concentrated that the dazzled Perceval
feasibly could have uttered the final verses of the illuminated Dante:

On th’ everlasting splendour, that I look’d,

...
I therein, methought, in its own hue
Beheld our image painted . . . 66

Man’s Intelligible Form

An “itinerary of senefiance,”67 the Grail quest exposes Perceval’s f lesh,
stripped of its armor in drowning, to the king’s “other body” or “charac-
ter angelicus.”68 An immanent proto-anthropos, Arthur, whose features
are invisible yet recognizable, is enveloped in full winged armor, show-
ing how every armed knight is a “mediating representation,” his very
brightness elevating natural man to intelligible dignity. Opposite him,
the nude, shining body of the individuated, artfully wounded Perceval is
universalized through saturation of metaphysical light. St. Bonaventure,
for one, would have fully understood the image as the completion and
fulfillment of man’s latent perfection. In his view,

when light—which possesses clarity, impassibility, mobility, universal pen-

etration—completely dominates the other elements with such a superabun-
dance of energy that it predisposes matter to immortal life, the body is entirely
irradiated by the vital principle which itself is completely subjugated to the
intellect and illuminated . . . and becomes . . . as brilliant and impassible as pure
light. In this body . . . even scars, which now sometimes enhance the expres-
sive beauty . . . of a courageous man, accentuate the body’s gracefulness . . . .69

In the luminous Perceval, then, the merveille is fulfilled: the full cohesion of the
“natural being” of flesh with its “intelligible form,” radiance. Boorman’s reso-
lution of the Grail quest through the illuminated human form fully coincides
with medieval thinking about the nature of man and of light. One can admire
Boorman’s fervor and science in the cohesion of his scene with medieval sen-
sibility. Indeed, through the aesthetic narrative of the matière de Bretagne, his
film operates at a level to which his predecessor, Abel Gance, aspired: “Light is
the sole element which moves from one world to another . . . Someday, thanks
to [cinema], Light will be considered the only real character in any perfor-
mance, the creator and transformer of all destinies.”70

And Formal Soul of Arthurian Society and the Natural World

Boorman restores something of a collective enthusiasm for the luminos-
ity of the armored knight, an ideal beauty connecting man to the world
216 J E A N - M A RC E L S HOL Z

through the aesthetics of metal. Retrieved from the invariable metaphysical

world, testifying to the luminous continuity that unifies and legitimizes the
Arthurian court, the shining Grail cup visibly revivifies Arthur, whose lus-
ter returns. Revitalization in terms of metal and light is, of course, exem-
plified in medieval romance: “Parzival . . . washed the marks of rust from his
face, and everyone admired not only the redness (cf. vermeil) of his lips, but
his bright complexion as well.”71 By resuscitating, from beyond, the intel-
ligibility of the form of the knight, Perceval in Boorman’s film reawakens
the Arthurian light buried in the winter of the wasteland.
If cyclomorphic temporality had naturally turned Camelot’s gleam
into the substantial rusting of the king and his despairing knights, the care-
fully orchestrated “springtime ride”72 through the orchard (the stream of
shining armor, farther off, combining with the luminous loop of a river),
shows in the rain of petals that the radiance (vermeil) of the knights is as a
sun irrigating the cycle of life.

Arthur: “Because it will not be forgotten, that fair time may come again. Now once
more I must ride with my knights.”

Through its re-advent, Arthurian knighthood triumphs formally and

“seasonally”—therefore, eternally—over time.

It was the time when the trees were in bloom, . . . and the meadows were
grassy green; when the birds twittered sweet songs . . . and all things were
ardent with joy . . . . When at last [Perceval] saw [the knights] coming out
of the woods, when he saw their sparkling mail and their bright shining
helmets, their spears and shields, things he had never seen before; when
he saw the white and red [vermeil] gleaming in the sunlight, and the gold,
blue and silver; he found it so beautiful and noble.73

Such imagery as this, from Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte du Graal, is the

medieval underwriting made visible through the cinematic art of the
scene from Excalibur.

Literary “Photogenics”
The opening title image of Excalibur is cinematographically illuminated.
Through the use of gold, manuscript illuminations also can go some way
to materializing “the very essence of things.” The only other way manu-
scripts could convey ideas was textually, through words, some of which
gained special significance with respect to the aesthetics of medieval
romance. “There is a color which leaves its mark on the long, adventurous
 E LUC I DAT ION S 217

route of Arthurian knights. Study of the texts [proves] that this color
is, most of all, light. Such is the meaning of vermeil.” 74 Paul- Georges
Sansonetti is referring to the remarkable versatility of the term, which, in
the Middle Ages, broke away from its etymological sense (“vermilion”)
to come to characterize “ref lections of gold combined with the metallic
shine of the warrior.” 75 Enactments of this abound in Boorman’s film:
the armored knights assembled at Arthur’s wedding, the bright blood
from Lancelot’s wound on his armor, or Guinevere’s complexion under
her metallic veil, as if “Nature had illuminated her with a color vermeil
and pure.” 76 If rhyme assimilates it with the sun (soleil),77 that brightest of
lights and, through this analogy, with gold, “the noblest of metals,” the
quality of vermeil does not stop there. It “rises beyond, to another light.
It mixes for a moment with the physical phenomenon before taking on a
metaphysical sense.” 78
It has been remarked that “the Grail problem is inextricably linked to
the word vermeil.” 79 In the quest, Michel Zink emphasizes, the journey
is a metaphor.80 Vermeil converts the adventure into a substantial process.
Sparkling intermittently, at the notable stages it marks along the way,
vermeil achieves its ultimate expression in the Grail castle. The repetition
and redundancy of the word in romance works toward the fulfillment
of its anagrammatic resonance with merveille.81 One of its effects is the
conversion of f lesh into light,82 which takes center stage in the presence
of the Grail. The Grail reveals the true nature, beautiful and luminous,
of corporeity. In Malory’s words, “Than began every knyght to beholde
other, and eyther saw other, by their semyng, fayrer than ever they were
before. . . . Than entird into the halle the Holy Grayle,” while the most
sacred of faces, that of the celestial child descending for the celebration,
is “as red and as bryght os ony fyre.”83 Sansonetti concludes that the radi-
ance of Galahad’s armor is the incandescence of vermeil that fulfills the
luminous identification of the natural body with the intelligible body just
as we see in the film, in Boorman’s staging of Perceval’s gleaming f lesh.
As the ecumenical philosopher Henry Corbin explains, there is a correla-
tion between a being’s divine dimension, the notion of “destiny,” and the
“Light of Glory,” a power that constitutes and conjoins the being with a
being of light.84 Vermeil would be the privileged space of this luminous
revelation. In De Bruyne’s analysis, “what we admire in the white and
vermeil body without realizing it is the light which constitutes corpore-
ity, and which gradually breaks down into indefinite shades.”85 Thus the
indeterminate shine of vermeil is the subtle basis at work within every
color. Isidore of Seville, moreover, had already sensed that color itself,
through which the world “shines and gleams,” has “something metallic
about it.”86
218 J E A N - M A RC E L S HOL Z

Aesthetic Metal
This “something metallic” that constitutes the vermeil in Boorman’s film
is a metal whose purely formal definition is independent of physical com-
position. It can take the shape of the blond hair of Ygerne and Morgana
(a sustained reminder of a medieval topos), or be perceived in the mercu-
rial water with which the Lady of the Lake merges through the oppor-
tune invention of a “chain mail” garment over the white samite gown
depicted by Malory.
Formal logic is stronger than the thread(s) of the plot; even the use
of weapons is subordinated to a constantly and consistently operat-
ing aesthetic semantics of universalized metal. It can be observed in
the ductility of metal, for instance when the shape of Uther’s helmet
metamophoses into that of the duke, or in the sound of metal, when
Arthur’s hand in its metal gauntlet strikes the silvery megalith, resonat-
ing like a gong to wake Merlin. Metalworking at the forge is seen dur-
ing the tournament scene, but metaphorical/metaphysical welding also
occurs: “The spectator sees Merlin fully as a smith with a specializa-
tion in welding in the ‘creation of the Round Table’: a powerful f lame
bursts from his staff to weld the knights together . . . into heralds of a
beneficent civilization.” 87 Electromagnetism, too, is at work: the armor
of Lancelot and Arthur attracts lightning. When optics comes into
play, formal metal is sculpted by light. In a commentary of his work,
Boorman says he resorted to conventional dioptric effects to “build”
Camelot, the impossible castle of gold and silver, in the heart of the
forest.88 The speedy initiation of Perceval, making his dumbstruck way
through the arts and sciences that animate the court of Camelot, ends
with a big magnifying glass, hinting that the parchment rolls Merlin is
mulling over are the plans of a magical- optical castle.89 Lastly, metallic
alchemy:

Merlin: “What is the stone that burns?”

Morgan: “Mercury, to solve with sulfur.”

Alchemy, invoked by Merlin, is visible at court, between astrology and

magic (where the dove transforms into a spark), a reminder that hermet-
icism is without doubt the most considerable aesthetic objectification of
metaphysical questions.90
In all of these ways and others, nothing in Excalibur escapes vermeil;
once its shine is established as the logos of representation, meaning tends
to convert “intelligible properties” into its light, as Pseudo-Dionysius
explains in his De Caelesti Hierachia, taken up later by John Scotus Eriugena
 E LUC I DAT ION S 219

at the very beginning of his own commentary:

Our spirit can rise to what is not material through the conduit of what
is. . . . This is possible only because all things visible are “material lights”
which ref lect “intelligible lights.” . . . Any visible or invisible creature is a
light brought into existence . . . This rock or this piece of wood is a light for
me . . . because I perceive that it is good and beautiful; that it exists accord-
ing to its own rules of proportion . . . its specific gravity. As soon as I see
such things and others like them in this stone, they become lights for me;
that is to say, they illuminate me. I begin by wondering where the stone
gets the properties it is invested with . . . and soon, guided by reason, I am
led through all things to this cause of all things which confers upon them
place and order, number, species and kind, goodness, beauty and essence
as well as all other gifts and qualities.91

The World of Light

When Excalibur appeared in movie theaters, a critic noted that “the tech-
nical resources at work in this vast epic are remarkable. John Boorman’s
film is impeccable, and the images created by the cinematographer, Alex
Thompson, are among the most beautiful ever seen in cinema.”92 Yet what
elicits admiration from one critic eludes another. Despite rightly remarking
that in the Middle Ages images were first and foremost meaningful, not
just decorative, director Olivier Assayas misjudges the film’s splendid “gold
and glitter” by trivializing it as “anything so long as it’s pretty.” Because
even beyond the impression of “beauty” shared by the film’s admirers and
detractors when the film was released, it is useful to note the alignment of
Boorman’s vermeil cosmos with the Gothic universe, “a world like a gigan-
tic gold jewel ‘adorned’ with innumerable decorative forms.”93
In the fourteenth- century poem Pearl, attributed to the anonymous
writer of the Arthurian Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the narrator
resorts to the “elevated ornatus style” frequent in stories involving the
merveilleux 94 to tell the dream through which he arrives in heaven to find
his lost child, his “pearl.” The commentary André Crépin devotes to this
text is particularly relevant because it centers on a key element: “nota-
tions of light.”95 One observes how the author, composing sumptuous
images with a masterly touch, uses art to bring the reader into a regimen
of light, “to a vision where everything, for an instant, is illuminated.”
Crépin examines the minute work of the poet who crafts his bejeweled
world, “the erudite architecture of the poem,” and studies its versifi-
cation, which curves the plot into “a finely crafted circle, the perfect
image of the pearl invoked,” making “the work and the jewel . . . perfectly
round [endeless rounde] (continuous, like Sir Gawain’s pentacle).” Crépin
220 J E A N - M A RC E L S HOL Z

notes that through a “vocabulary of the arts” and the way nature comes
into play solely through art, the poem brings light on stage. “The land-
scape is presented as a set . . . the elements in it are not in the least natu-
ral: tree trunks are blue as Indian pastels, the gravel consists of precious
stones . . . the ref lection of leaves and gems exceeds the sun’s rays in splen-
dor . . . .” As precious materials “transmute the body (hair of gold, face
of ivory),” beings reveal their luminous corporeity. “It is, in the literal
sense of adubement, a transfiguration,” Crépin explains. Indeed Gawain’s
armored body is transfigured likewise in the other poem: “his surcoat bla-
zoned bold . . . the least latchet or loop laden with gold . . . ; his helm . . . all
bound and embroidered with the best gems on broad bands of silk . . . ; the
diadem . . . with diamonds richly set that f lashed as if on fire.” 96
One critic describes the techniques used during the filming of Excalibur
as lending themselves to just such a process of transfiguration by cinemat-
ographic means. In so doing, he employs vocabulary precisely in line
with elements that compose the merveilleux of Arthurian romance:

Down in the valley, green light filtered up . . . . In the shimmering bower

of a forest . . . John Boorman strode between scene and camera, priming
and polishing this tableau . . . [and] surveyed his lighting plan for the shoot-
ing. The green filters placed over the arc lamps bathed the landscape in a
lyric vernal glow.97

This tradition-sensitive critic perceives that nature is qualitatively and

quantitatively amplified to become a lyrical, shimmering tableau. Here,
film technology achieves what is depicted in scenes inhabited by the
merveilleux in medieval romance. “We’re using green gels in the forest
exteriors,” Boorman explains, “to give a kind of luminous quality, and to
emphasize the moss and the leaves. It breathes a little magic into the scene;
it gives it a sense of otherworldliness.”98 Boorman’s meticulous quest for
otherworldliness by means of light and color reenacts the characteristics of
the Pearl poet’s Green Knight, whose garments and equipment “gleamed
all and glinted with green gems about.”99 The poet—who in Pearl calls
his own words “jewels,” and whose writing “leaves upon the memory a
durable impression of luminosity,” according to Crépin—styles himself
a “joyful jueler.”100 Such might the appreciative viewer say of Boorman
when it is acknowledged that “almost every image [in the movie] seems
steeped in metal, that of armor, of weapons, and of the Grail.”101
To resort to metal- or gold-working, therefore, is not preciosity;
rather, it performs a central function in accommodating physical beings
to light. Witness the terms in which John Boorman describes the opera-
tion of conversion: “Alchemy. Film takes a hold of physical things (actors,
 E LUC I DAT ION S 221

sets, equipment, money) and changes them into light. You spend all those
millions, all to [obtain] nothing other than light.”102 His words are, in
their way, similar to those of Abbot Suger: “Do not marvel at gold and
expense, but at the mastery of the work. Luminous is this noble work,
but, nobly luminous, it will illuminate minds . . . .”103
When the result lives up to expectation, “cinema is above all a
visual experience, and Excalibur illustrates better than any other film
the unlimited potential of the medium.”104 This may be because for
Boorman, light is the absolute referent. In his words, “light is unsur-
passable”; it leads to another world.105 Boorman was expressing him-
self when he made Merlin say “there are other worlds,” because, as the
director sees it, “making movies is itself a quest—a quest for an alterna-
tive world . . . . That’s what first appealed to me about making films. It
seemed to me a wonderful idea that you could remake the world, hope-
fully . . . more beautiful than it was presented to us.”106 In his quest for
beauty, Boorman transposes onto the silver screen a medieval aesthetic
that represented the true intelligibility of the Arthurian world in visions
of light and color. Excalibur is, in both its diegetic and aesthetic narra-
tives, an ingenious continuation of Arthurian legend, another magnifi-
cent layer in the successive rewritings or re-presentations that carry on
the tradition down through the centuries.

Notes
1. For Yas Banifatemi: “La vraie beauté rend les hommes unanimes” (viz.
notes 49 and 50).
2. John Boorman, dir. and prod., with Rospo Pallenberg, screenplay, Excalibur
(Orion Pictures Corporation, 1981; Warner Home Video DVD, 1999).
3. I have endeavored to provide references to existing English-language
translations whenever possible; otherwise all translations and paraphrases
from the French are mine. André Crépin, “Note sur l’éclat de la perle
(‘Pearl’, poème du 14e siècle),” in La lumière. Culture et religion dans les pays
anglophones (Paris: Didier- érudition, 1996), p. 113 [113–18].
4. Quoted in Jacques Munier, “Les états de la lumière: Symbolique du clair-
obscure,” Les Chemins de la Connaissance, France Culture radio broadcast,
June 6, 2007.
5. Robert Grosseteste quoted in Abel Gance, Prisme: carnets d’un cinéaste, pref.
Elie Faure (1930; re- ed. Paris: Samuel Tastet, 1986), p. 218.
6. Grosseteste citing Avicebron (Solomon ben Yehudah Ibn Gebirol)
in Edouard Wéber, “La lumière principe de l’univers d’après Robert
Grosseteste,” in Lumière et cosmos: courants occultes de la philosophie de la
nature, ed. Antoine Faivre, Geneviève Javary, Jean-François Maillard,
Sylvain Matton, Cahiers de l’hermétisme (Paris: Albin Michel, 1981),
p. 23 [16–30].
222 J E A N - M A RC E L S HOL Z

7. Robert Grosseteste, On Light (De Luce), or the Beginning of Forms, trans.

and intro. Clare C. Riedl (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1942).
Online at the Athenaeum Reading Room, http://evans- experientialism.
freewebspace.com/grosseteste.htm.
8. Gance, Prisme, p. 218.
9. Eleventh to thirteenth century. The Victorines and St. Bonaventure are
also associated with the Oxford School; see Edgar De Bruyne, Etudes
d’esthétique médiévale, pref. Maurice de Gandillac; postface Michel
Lemoine, 2 vols. (1946; Paris: Albin Michel, 1998), 2:3–9 in particular.
10. Along with his teacher Ammonius Saccas. See http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Plotinus. Neoplatonism is an original creation that is both a com-
bination of and a meditation on the philosophical heritage of Greek
Antiquity (especially Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras) with currents of
Eastern spirituality mixed in. Neoplatonism had a decisive inf luence on
medieval thinking and art. See particularly Erwin Panofsky, Architecture
gothique et pensée scolastique, précédé de L’Abbé Suger de Saint-Denis (Paris:
Minuit, 1967), and Esthétique et Philosophie de l’Art. Repères historiques et
thématiques (Brussels: De Boeck et Larcier, 2002).
11. “Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite . . . combined Neoplatonic faith in
the fundamental oneness and luminous life of the world with Christian
dogma.” Panofsky, Architecture gothique, p. 34.
12. In particular, a formal substance like “corporeity” has no equivalent now-
adays. It is a concept that belongs to the Neoplatonic cosmology struc-
tured on a “division” of the world into sensorial and intelligible. Light
and matter that derive from this construction coincide only partially with
our current conceptions. This explains the false familiarity or the trou-
bling foreignness we feel when confronted with works that refer to this
Neoplatonic tradition. In this article, I hope this way of looking at the
visionary cosmography of Boorman’s film will give some notion of how
fundamentally aesthetic and, especially in this respect, how consistent
and comprehensible this tradition of thinking is.
13. De Bruyne, Etudes d’esthétique, 2:20, citing St. Bonaventure.
14. (See notes 35 and 103 and corresponding text.)
15. Etienne Gilson, Le Thomisme: introduction à la philosophie de Saint Thomas
d’Aquin, 6th ed. (Paris: Vrin, 1989), p. 339.
16. De Bruyne, Etudes d’esthétique, 2:16, 1:629, 2:393.
17. Umberto Eco, Art et beauté dans l’esthétique médiévale, trans. Maurice Javion
(Paris: Grasset, 1997).
18. Notwithstanding the critical debates raised by Michel Lemoine in the
1998 postface to De Bruyne’s Etudes d’esthétique.
19. Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les Choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines
(Paris: Gallimard, 1966); De Bruyne, Etudes d’esthétique, 1:639.
20. De Bruyne, Etudes d’esthétique, 2:10, 1:298, 1:439.
21. Olivier Assayas, “Graal pompier,” Cahiers du cinéma 326 ( July–August
1981): 61–62.
22. About Boorman’s extensive knowledge of the Arthurian tradition, see,
for instance, Michel Ciment, “Deux entretiens avec John Boorman,”
 E LUC I DAT ION S 223

Positif 242 (May 1981): 18–31. Boorman’s film has even been called eru-
dite, for the medieval “springtime ride” of the knights is not common
knowledge. See note 72 and corresponding text.
23. De Bruyne, Etudes d’esthétique, 1:287–88.
24. “Excalibur (film),” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excalibur_
(film).
25. Boorman, dir. and prod., with Pallenberg, screenplay, Excalibur. Hereafter,
all citations from the screenplay are formatted in this fashion.
26. De Bruyne, Etudes d’esthétique, 2:27. Italics in the original.
27. Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, trans. Danielle Buschinger, Wolfgang
Spiewok and Jean-Marc Pastré (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1989), pp. 241,
33 and 225.
28. Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval ou Le Conte du Graal, in Œuvres completes,
ed. Daniel Poirion with Anne Berthelot, Peter F. Dembowski, Sylvie
Lefèvre, Karl D. Uitti, and Philippe Walter. Bibliothèque de la Pléïade
(Paris: Gallimard, 1994), p. 799.
29. Lancelot speaks of his “metal skin” at the end of the scene.
30. De Bruyne, Etudes d’esthétique, 2:23.
31. Cynthia Fleury, Métaphysique de l’imagination, 2nd ed. (Paris: Editions
d’écarts, 2001), pp. 263–64.
32. Grosseteste, On Light, trans. Riedl.
33. Paul Vignaux, Philosophie au Moyen Age, ed. Ruedi Imbach (Paris: Vrin,
2004), p. 165 and 166–67, citing Grosseteste’s commentary on Aristotle’s
Posterior Analytics.
34. Albert Wilder Thompson, The Elucidation: A Prologue to the Conte del
Graal (New York: Publications of the Institute of French Studies, 1931).
Introduction and English translation: “The Elucidation,” intro. Norris
Lacy; trans. William Kibler (2007), The Camelot Project, University of
Rochester, http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/elucidation.htm. On
Rimbaud, see note 51 and corresponding text.
35. Georges Duby, L’Europe des cathédrales. 1140–1280, 2nd ed. (Geneva:
Skira, 1984), p. 14.
36. Panofsky, Architecture gothique, p.30.
37. In line with the Plotinian concept of intelligibility.
38. Duby, L’Europe des cathédrales, p. 26.
39. De Bruyne, Etudes d’esthétique, 1:293–94.
40. Cited by De Bruyne, Etudes d’esthétique, 2:493.
41. De Bruyne, Etudes d’esthétique, 1:544, paraphasing a poem by Marbode of
Rennes (c.1035–1143).
42. Grosseteste, On light, trans. Riedl.
43. De Bruyne, Etudes d’esthétique, 2:22, citing Bonaventure.
44. De Bruyne, Etudes d’esthétique, 2:21.
45. Richard of Saint Victor, Les Quatre Degrés de la Violente Charité, ed. and
trans. Gervais Dumeige, Textes Philosophiques du Moyen Age 3 (Paris:
Vrin, 1955), p. 170.
46. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, trans. André
Mary (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), p. 272.
224 J E A N - M A RC E L S HOL Z

47. “[H]e drewe his swerd Excalibur, but it was so bryght in his enemyes
eyen that it gaf light lyke thirty torchys . . .” Sir Thomas Malory, Complete
Works, ed. Eugène Vinaver, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1971), “The Tale of King Arthur,” Bk 1, ch. 9, p. 12.
48. Fleury, Métaphysique de l’imagination, pp. 263–64.
49. De Bruyne, Etudes d’esthétique, 2:304–305, citing Thomas Aquinas,
Opuscula omnia genuina, ed. Pierre Mandonnet (Paris: Letheillieux, 1927),
pp. 365–66.
50. See De Bruyne, Etudes d’esthétique, 2:304–305.
51. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations in this section are from Arthur
Rimbaud, Une saison en enfer, “Délires II, Alchimie du verbe,” in Œuvres
complètes, ed. André Guyaux with Aurélia Cervoni. Bibliothèque de la
Pléïade (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), pp. 263–69; cf. Chrétien de Troyes,
Perceval, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Daniel Poirion et al., pp. 687–704.
52. Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval, in Œuvres completes, ed. Daniel Poirion et al.,
p. 697.
53. Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval, or the Story of the Grail, trans. Kirk McElhearn
(2001), http://www.mcelhearn.com/dl/perceval2.pdf, ll. 641–60. Note:
Vermeil is an indeterminate color; see §”Literary Photogenics” for its defi-
nition as “light.”
54. Cristina Noacco, “Le ‘sens’ de la lumière dans les portraits de Chrétien
de Troyes,” in Feu et Lumière au Moyen Âge II, Travaux du Groupe de
Recherches “Lectures Médiévales,” Université de Toulouse II (Éditions
Universitaires du Sud and Honoré Champion, 1999), p. 143 [129–45].
55. Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods, in A Select Library of
the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ed. Philip Schaff, vol. 2 (Edinburgh:
T&T Clark, 1886), Book 10, chap. 2, p. 181. Online at Christian Classics
Ethereal Library, Calvin College, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/
npnf102/Page_181.html. Note: The replacement of heavenly “spirits”
with “angels” for greater consistency is justified by the same usage in Bk.
10, ch. 1.
56. Tiziana Suárez-Nani, Connaissance et langage des anges selon Thomas d’Aquin
et Gilles de Rome (Paris: Vrin, 2002), pp. 37–38.
57. Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval, trans. McElhearn, ll. 138; 180–81; 282;
332–34.
58. Suárez-Nani, Connaissance et langage, p. 39.
59. This and the following citation from Noacco, “Le ‘sens’ de la lumière,”
p. 130. Italics in the original. Note: Senefiance or sénéfiance can be trans-
lated as “signification” or “meaning,” in line with Daniel Poirion’s
definition—“Senefiance refers to the overarching truth of an allegori-
cal text.” Yet the term can also be understood as the process of achieving
sense, of becoming wise, thus “enlightenment.”
60. Jacques Le Goff, interview with François Busnel, Lire: le magazine littéraire
(May 2005). Online at http://www.lire.fr/entretien.asp?idC=48477&id
R=201&idTC=4&idG=.
 E LUC I DAT ION S 225

61. Jacques Le Goff, Héros et merveilles du Moyen Age (Paris: Seuil, 2005),
p. 10.
62. Christine Ferlampin-Acher, Merveilles et Topique Merveilleuse dans les
Romans Médiévaux. Nouvelle bibliothèque du Moyen âge (Paris: Honoré
Champion, 2003). This and the citations that follow in this section are
from pp. 154–55 unless indicated otherwise.
63. Ferlampin-Acher, Merveilles et Topique Merveilleuse, p. 157.
64. De Bruyne, Etudes d’esthétique, 1:177.
65. Noacco, “Le ‘sens’ de la lumière,” p. 130.
66. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Paradise, trans. Henry Francis Cary.
E-book #1007. Last updated November 21, 2005. Online at Project
Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1007/1007.txt, Canto XXXIII.
67. Noacco, “Le ‘sens’ de la lumière,” p. 130.
68. Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval
Political Theology, pref. William C. Jordan, 7th ed. (1957; repr. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 271–72.
69. De Bruyne, Etudes d’esthétique, 2:224–25, adapted from St. Bonaventure.
70. Roger Icart, ed. Abel Gance, un soleil dans chaque image (Paris: CNRS édi-
tions and Cinémathèque française, 2002), p. 124.
71. Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, p. 224. Cf. Godric of Finchale, who,
toughened by the ascetic practice of wearing heavy chain mail, was nev-
ertheless discovered to have resplendent, glowing, and luminous (nitid-
iorem, relucentem, praeclarissimam) skin. See Katherine Allen Smith, “Saints
in Shining Armor: Martial Asceticism and Masculine Models of Sanctity,
ca. 1050–1250,” Speculum 83.3 ( July 2008): 594–95 [572–602].
72. François-Jérôme Beaussart, “Mass media et Moyen Age: à propos du film
Excalibur,” Médiévales 1.1 (1982): 36 [34–38].
73. Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval, trans. McElhearn, ll. 69–73 and 127–36.
74. Paul- Georges Sansonetti, Chevalerie du graal et lumière de gloire (Menton:
Exèdre, 2005), p. 26.
75. Sansonetti, Chevalerie du graal, p. 26
76. Sansonetti, Chevalerie du graal, p. 25, citing Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval,
ll. 2764 and 7905–06.
77. The rhyme between vermeil* and soleil functions in Old French romance
as well (e.g., vermaus/solaus), frequently alongside merveil*.
78. Sansonetti, Chevalerie du graal, p. 27.
79. Sansonetti, Chevalerie du graal, p. 29.
80. “Non pedum passibus, sed desideriis quaeritur Deus” (Saint Bernard),
cited by Michel Zink in a lecture, “Que cherchaient les quêteurs du
Graal?” at the Collège de France, Dec. 11, 2008, France Culture radio
broadcast.
81. As in medieval descriptions of the château merveilleux, viz. Ferlampin-
Acher, Merveilles et Topique Merveilleuse, p. 154. “En la vile ot cent tors
vermielles . . . et furent de marbre vermel” (ll. 1897–99).
82. Ferlampin-Acher, Merveilles et Topique Merveilleuse, p. 162.
226 J E A N - M A RC E L S HOL Z

83. Malory, Complete Works, “The Departure,” Bk. 13, ch. 7, p. 521, and
“The Miracle of Galahad,” Bk. 17, ch. 20, p. 603.
84. Sansonetti, Chevalerie du graal, p. 64.
85. De Bruyne, Etudes d’esthétique, 2:23.
86. De Bruyne, Etudes d’esthétique, 1:298, quoting from Isidore’s Etymologies,
Book XVI.
87. Georges Foveau, Merlin l’enchanteur, scénariste et scénographe d’Excalibur
(Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995), p. 89.
88. Boorman, Excalibur (Warner Home Video DVD).
89. Merlin: “I built [this castle], dullard!” Perceval: “All on your own?” Merlin:
“Yes.” This dialog implies that the parchments displayed around the
(humorously anachronistic) press are castle blueprints.
90. On alchemy, art, merveilles, and metal, see, for instance, Jean de Meun’s
ref lections in the Roman de la Rose, ll. 1240-1305.
91. Quoted by Panofsky, Architecture gothique, pp. 39–40.
92. Jean-Marc Lofficier, “Sur nos écrans—Excalibur,” L’écran fantastique 19
(1981): 67 [66- 67].
93. De Bruyne, Etudes d’esthétique, 1:628–29.
94. Ferlampin-Acher, Merveilles et Topique Merveilleuse, p. 77.
95. Crépin, “Note sur l’éclat” (see note 3). Citations hereafter refer to pages
114–17, especially 115.
96. Marie Borroff, trans., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (New York:
Norton, 1967), ll. 586–618.
97. Harlan Kennedy, “Excalibur: John Boorman—In Interview,” American
Film (March 1981). http://americancinemapapers.homestead.com/files/
Excalibur.htm.
98. Kennedy, “Excalibur: John Boorman.”
99. Borroff, trans., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, l. 172.
100. Crépin, “Note sur l’éclat,” pp. 114 and 115.
101. See http://tropiqueducancre.free.fr/cinema.html.
102. John Boorman, “Conseils aux débutants,” translated into French by
Alain Masson from an unpublished text in English, Positif 580 ( June
2009): 46 [44–46].
103. Panofsky, Architecture gothique, p .43.
104. Lofficier, “Sur nos écrans,” 67.
105. Boorman, “Conseils aux débutants,” 46.
106. Kennedy, “Excalibur: John Boorman.”
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CONTRIBUTORS

Gila Aloni, associate professor and chair of the English department at

Lynn University (Boca Raton, Florida), has published in French, Hebrew,
and English. After receiving a PhD summa cum laude from the Sorbonne
(Paris 4) in 1999 and publishing her dissertation as her first book, Dr.
Aloni has held several postdoctoral appointments, which include New
York University and Fordham University. Aloni’s interdisciplinary
research on Geoffrey Chaucer’s multilingualism, reinscription of his
classical sources, and use of rhetoric with a psychoanalytical orientation
has been published in various prominent journals in her field, including
The Mediterranean Historical Review, Médiévales, The Chaucer Review, and
Rhetoric Society Quarterly. Aloni’s current work takes two directions: revi-
sion of the core curriculum at Lynn University, for which she edited two
books, and a project on Chaucer’s dream vision.
Florence Bourgne is an alumna of the École Normale Supérieure at
the rue d’Ulm, Paris. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on Chaucer’s
Troilus under André Crépin’s supervision. She is now a tenured associate
professor at the Sorbonne (Paris 4), where she teaches medieval English
literature and culture and runs a medieval English paleography seminar.
Her publications include The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer (Paris:
Armand Colin, 2003).
Leo Carruthers, born in Dublin, Ireland, studied at University College
Dublin (MA, 1972) before moving to France to pursue research at the
Sorbonne (Paris 4). His PhD thesis (1980) was devoted to the English
translations of the Somme le Roi, and in 1987 he was awarded the French
State Doctorate for his work on Jacob’s Well, which belongs to the same
tradition. In 1988 he helped to set up the International Medieval Sermon
Studies Society and was elected its first president. Since 1994 he has
been professor of English at the Sorbonne, and since 2006, president of
the AMAES, the French Association for Medieval English Studies. He
has written on many aspects of Old and Middle English literature, from
252 CONTRIBUTORS

Beowulf to Everyman, with a particular emphasis on religious themes and

the historical contexts.
Raeleen Chai-Elsholz, an independent scholar and technical translator,
is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College (BA/MA) and the Sorbonne (Paris
4). Her doctoral dissertation (2003) explored narrative strategies in Bede’s
Historia ecclesiastica. The historiography and hagiography of late antiq-
uity, Anglo-Saxon England, and the early medieval West, as well as their
reception in later periods, have been her primary focuses of research.
She is currently a member of the board of directors of the International
Medieval Society in Paris, and also publishes on various ecclesiastical top-
ics and personalities from eighteenth-century Italy. She was co- organizer,
with Tatjana Silec, of the CÉMA conference in 2008, from which many
of the papers in this volume developed.
Jean-Marc Elsholz is completing his doctoral dissertation under the
direction of Jean Gili and Nicole Brenez in the art history and film stud-
ies department of the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1). Alongside
his professional activities in information science and knowledge manage-
ment for the legal professions, he has published articles in Positif, one of
France’s foremost journals in the field of cinema. His advanced studies
(DEA) thesis, “Les Voies de l’Immortalité selon Stanley Kubrick: repères
pour une étude esthétique et philosophale de 2001: l’Odyssée de l’espace,”
was distinguished by the Sindacato Nazionale Giornalisti Cinematografici
Italiani (Premio Sacchi, 2000).
Adrian Papahagi (BA, MA, PhD Sorbonne) specializes in early medi-
eval studies. His research areas are Anglo- Saxon and Germanic languages
and literatures, medieval Latin, and manuscript studies. He has edited and
coedited four volumes of proceedings, and has published articles in such
periodicals as Medium Ævum, Scriptorium, Notes & Queries, Neuphilologische
Mitteilungen, Critica del Testo, and Comptes Rendus de l’Académie des
Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. He is currently an assistant professor at the
University of Cluj, Romania, where he teaches Old English language and
literature, and manuscript studies.
Jane Roberts is a senior research fellow at the Institute of English Studies
and emeritus professor of English language and medieval literature in
the University of London. Her recent publications include A Guide to
Scripts Used in English Writing up to 1500 (British Library Publications,
2005); TOE Online (2005) with Flora Edmonds, Christian Kay, and Irené
Wotherspoon; Text, Image, Interpretation: Studies in Anglo- Saxon Literature
in Honour of Éamonn Ó Carragáin (Brepols, 2007) with Alastair Minnis;
Lambeth Palace Library and Its Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts (Taderon Press,
 CONTRIBUTORS 253

2007) with David Ganz. She is one of the four editors of the Historical
Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (2009).
Sharon M. Rowley earned a PhD from the University of Chicago in
1996, with the dissertation “Reading Miracles in Bede’s Ecclesiastical
History of the English People.” Currently associate professor of English at
Christopher Newport University (Newport News, Virginia), Dr. Rowley
has published several articles about Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, the Old
English version of Bede’s HE in its manuscript contexts, and other medie-
val texts. In 2007, Dr. Rowley was awarded a fellowship from the National
Endowment for the Humanities and a visiting fellowship at Corpus Christi
College, Cambridge, to work on a study of the OEHE, The Old English
Version of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, in
press). She is also working on a new edition of the OEHE, which has not
been edited in its entirety for more than one hundred years.
Tatjana Silec is a tenured assistant professor at the Sorbonne, where
she teaches English literature and culture as well as the history of the
English language. She recently earned a PhD summa cum laude from the
Sorbonne with a dissertation on court jesters in medieval and Renaissance
literature. Her research is anthropologically oriented and focuses on the
presentation of folly in drama. She has also written on Tolkien. In 2008
she started studying drama from a professional perspective, as she was
admitted to Les Ateliers du Sudden, an acting school in Paris that offers
training in French and English. She was co-organizer, with Raeleen
Chai-Elsholz, of the CÉMA conference in 2008, which was at the origin
of the present book.
Colette Stévanovitch is a professor in the English department of
Nancy-Université. Her field of research is medieval English literature.
She has edited the Old English poems Genesis and Christ II and published
numerous papers on Old and Middle English poetry. She founded the
GRENDEL research group (Groupe de Recherche et d’Etude Nancéien sur
la Diachronie et sur l’Emergence de la Littérature Anglaise) in 1998, and is
currently head of IDEA (Interdisciplinarité dans les Etudes Anglophones), a
research unit at Nancy-Université.
Peter A. Stokes completed his doctorate at the University of Cambridge
on eleventh- century English vernacular script after receiving honors
degrees in classics and English literature and in computer engineering.
He was then research associate on the LangScape project of Anglo-
Saxon boundary clauses at the Centre for Computing in Humanities at
King’s College London, which involved consulting original manuscripts,
XML markup, and developing new software. He is now Leverhulme
254 CONTRIBUTORS

early career fellow in paleography at Cambridge, where he is developing

new quantitative and computer-based methods for handwriting identi-
fication. He has also worked at the British Library on digital images of
Greek palimpsests and was consultant for the Hearth Tax project and
the European Medieval Medicine Documents Identification System. He
has been lecturing in paleography and codicology at Cambridge since
2004, and is principle coordinator of a UK-wide training scheme called
“Medieval Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age.”
Paul E. Szarmach is executive director of the Medieval Academy
of America and editor of Speculum (from 2006). His previous service
includes thirteen years as director of the Medieval Institute at Western
Michigan University, where he was also professor of English and medi-
eval studies. He retired from Western Michigan in 2007 with emeri-
tus status. His twenty-four years at the State University of New York at
Binghamton included fifteen years as director of the Center for Medieval
and Early Renaissance Studies. Szarmach was a member of the board
of directors of the SUNY Research Foundation (1986–94). He also
received a Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching (1977). He
has been the principal investigator or co-PI in numerous grants from the
National Endowment for the Humanities, including ten NEH summer
institutes or seminars. In 2004 he received the Officer’s Cross of the
Legion of Merit from the Republic of Poland. Szarmach was elected fel-
low of the Medieval Academy in 2006, when he also received the Robert
L. Kindrick Service Award from Centers and Regional Associations, a
standing committee of the Academy.
Claire Vial, agrégée d’anglais, an alumna of the Ecole Normale Supérieure
at Fontenay- Saint Cloud, is an associate professor of English at the
University of Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle. Her research interests are the
history of medieval imagination and its iconographic expressions. Her
initial field of studies centered on feasts and festivals and their literary
representations in the late Middle Ages. She has published several arti-
cles on Chaucer, Lydgate, Malory, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and
Beowulf. Another of her areas of research covers the interplay between
courtly and popular literature. This has led her to work on Middle English
lyrics, the Middle English Breton lays, and English medieval drama, as
well as Shakespearian drama. Her most recent article is “Everyman and
the Bowels of Tragedy” (March 2009). She organized the international
CÉMA conference held in March 2009 at the Château de Vincennes on
the theme “Love and the Sea in Medieval England: From Linguistics to
History and Literary Creation.”
INDEX OF MANUSCRIPTS CITED

Manuscripts, by codex name

Archimedes palimpsest (Baltimore, Walters Art Museum) 35, 56n1, 83, 91n10
Arundel Psalter (London, BL Arundel 60) 64, 67, 70, 75n20, 76n34 & n35
Auchinleck Manuscript (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates
MS 19.2.1) 119, 122, 132n13, 133n16, 187, 188n2 & n27
Beowulf Manuscript (London, BL Cotton Vitellius A. xv) 82–3, 91n8 & n9,
155n31, 240
Blickling Homilies (Princeton, Princeton University W.H. Scheide Library,
Scheide M71) 6, 77n44
Blickling Psalter (New York, Pierpont Morgan Library 776) 61, 64, 74n4
Bosworth Psalter (London, BL Additional 37517) 63, 64, 74n4 & n15, 76n36
Bury Bible (Cambridge, CCC MS 2.1) 125, 134n30
Caligula Troper (London, BL Cotton Caligula A. xiv) 128, 135n43
Codex Amiatinus (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, MS Amiatino 1) 2
Cuthbercht Gospels (Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. Lat. 1224) 127,
134n37
Dover Bible (Cambridge, CCC MS 4) 127, 134n39
Eadwine Psalter (Cambridge, Trinity College MS R. 17. 1) 64-5, 74n4, 75n21,
127, 134n40
Épinal Glossary (Épinal, Bibliothèque Multimédia Intercommunale, MS 72) 91n7
Holkham Bible Picture Book (London, BL Additional 47682) 16n37, 126, 128,
134n34
Junius Psalter (Oxford, Bodleian Junius 27) 62, 64, 70, 74n5 & n8, 78n52
Lambeth Psalter (Lambeth Palace Library 427) xiii, 64–70, 72, 75n18
Lindisfarne Gospels (London, BL Cotton Nero D. IV) 61, 73n2, 77n48
Macregol Gospels (Oxford, Bodleian Auctarium D.2.19) 61, 77n48 (Rushworth)
Paris Psalter (Paris, BnF lat. 8824) 64, 74n6
Percy Folio Manuscript (London, BL Additional 27897) 193-5, 203n6 & n10
Petites Heures du Duc de Berry (Paris, BnF lat. 18014) 128, 135n45
Regius Psalter (London, BL Royal 2 B. v) 62-8, 70-2, 74n11, 76n32, 77n43,
78n50, n55 & n59–60, 79n70
Salisbury Psalter (Salisbury, Cathedral 150) 63–4, 70, 72, 74n7 & n12–14, 76n34 &
n38, 77n43, 78n56 & n61, 79n63 & n67
Vercelli Book (Vercelli, Cathedral Library, MS CXVII) 15n22, 87, 94n33 & n36
Vernon Manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Eng. Poet. a 1) 128–9, 131, 135n48, 136n59
256 IN DEX OF M A N USCRIPTS CITED

Vespasian Psalter (London, BL Cotton Vespasian A. i) 61–6, 70, 74n4, 76n32,

78n50 & n52, 79n66
Vitellius Psalter (London, BL Cotton Vitellius E. xviii) 64-8, 71–2, 75, 75n19 &
n26, 76n34–5, 77n42, 79n70
Winchcombe Psalter (Cambridge, CUL Ff. i. 23) 63, 64, 70, 74n4, 75n16
Winchcombe Sacramentary (Orléans, BM MS 127 (105)) 24, 31n25
Winchester Benedictional (Paris, BnF lat. 987) 24

Manuscripts, by location
Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, Archimedes palimpsest 35, 56n1, 83, 91n10
Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Lat. MS 4° 364 (Fleury palimpsest) 24
Bern, Burgerbibliothek MS 611 (possible Fleury palimpsest) 32n30
Cambridge
Cambridge University Library (CUL)
Ff. i. 23 (Winchcombe Psalter aka Cambridge Psalter) 63, 64, 70, 74n4,
75n16
Ii. 3. 26 (Charter of Christ) 129–30, 135n56
Kk.3.18 (Old English version of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica) 96–9, 111n26
Corpus Christi College (CCCC)
MS 2.1 (Bury Bible) 125, 134n30
MS 4 (Dover Bible) 127, 134n39
MS 41 (Old English version of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica) 96–8, 103,
111n20 & n23
MS 201 (Wulfstan’s Sermo Lupi) 86, 93n28–31
MS 419 (Wulfstan’s Sermo Lupi) 86, 93n28–31
MS 422 (Solomon and Saturn and “Red Book of Darley”) 36, 57n7–8, 82
Gonville and Caius College, MS 350/567 134n33, 125–6
Magdalene College, Pepys 2981 (18) 57n4
St. John’s College, MS 59 76n36
Trinity College, MS R. 17. 1 (Eadwine Psalter) 64–5, 74n4, 75n21, 119, 127,
134n40
Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 71 (Heures d’Étienne Chevalier) 128, 135n46
Durham, Cathedral Library
MS A. ii. 16 57n4
MS B. III. 32 63
Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Adv. MS 19.2.1 (Auchinleck
Manuscript) 119, 122, 132n13, 133n16, 187, 188n2 & n27
Épinal, Bibliothèque Multimédia Intercommunale, MS 72 (Épinal Glossary) 91n7
Florence, Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, Ms. Amiatino 1 (Codex Amiatinus) 2
Karlsruhe, Landesbibliothek Aug. CLXVII 91n5
Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, Voss Lat. Q.106 (contains Leiden Riddle) 24
London
British Library (BL)
Additional 27897 (Percy Folio Manuscript containing Sir Lambewell) 193–5,
203n6 & n10
 IN DEX OF M A N USCRIPTS CITED 257

Add. 35298 (Gilte Legende) 119

Add. 37517 (Bosworth Psalter) 63, 64, 74n4 & n15, 76n36
Add. 47682 (Holkham Bible Picture Book) 16n37, 126, 128, 134n34
Arundel 60 (Arundel Psalter) 64, 67, 70, 75n20, 76n34 & n35
Cotton Augustus ii. 6 36, 57n7
Cotton Caligula A. ii (Charter of Christ and Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal)
129-30, 135n55, 194
Cotton Caligula A. xiv (Caligula Troper) 128, 135n43
Cotton Domitian A.IX (Old English version of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica)
96, 109n10
Cotton Julius A. vi 63
Cotton Nero A.i 85–7
Cotton Nero A. x (Pearl) 132n10, 118
Cotton Nero D. IV (Lindisfarne Gospels) 61, 73n2, 77n48
Cotton Otho B.XI (Old English version of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica)
96–7
Cotton Tiberius B. v 57n6
Cotton Tiberius C. vi (glossed psalter) 75n19
Cotton Vespasian A. i (Vespasian Psalter) 61–6, 70, 74n4, 76n32, 78n50 &
n52, 79n66
Cotton Vespasian D. xii 63
Cotton Vitellius A.xv (Beowulf manuscript) 82–3, 91n8 & n9, 155n31,
240
Cotton Vitellius E. xviii (Vitellius Psalter) 64–8, 71–2, 75, 75n19 & n26,
76n34–5, 77n42, 79n70
Egerton 3245 115–16, 132n2
Harley 2346 (Charter of Christ) 129, 135n54
Harley 4431 (works of Christine de Pizan) 127, 134n42
Royal 2 B. v (Regius Psalter) 62–8, 70–2, 74n11, 76n32, 77n43, 78n50, n55 &
n59–60, 79n70
Royal 7 C xii 84
Royal 4 A. xiv 71
Stowe 2 (glossed psalter) 64, 75n19
Lambeth Palace Library 427 (Lambeth Psalter) 64–70, 72, 75n18
Milan, Ambrosiana M. 12 sup. 91n5
New Haven, Yale University Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
MS 262 83
New York, Pierpont Morgan Library 776 (Blickling Psalter) 61, 64, 74n4
Orléans, Bibliothèque Municipale (BM)
MS 127 (105) (Winchcombe Sacramentary) 24, 31n25
MS 175 (152) 24
MS 192 (169) 24
MS 342 (290) 21-33
Oxford
Bodleian Library
Auctarium D.2.19 (Macregol Gospels) 61, 77n48 (Rushworth)
258 IN DEX OF M A N USCRIPTS CITED

Auctarium F.III.15 [=cat. 3511] 91n5

Bodley 89 (Charter of Christ) 129, 135n53
Bodley 343 86
Bodley 596 (Lyfe of Adam) 121–2, 133n21
Eng. poet. a 1 (Vernon Manuscript) 131, 136n59
Hatton 113 (E) 86–7
Junius 27 ( Junius Psalter) 62, 64, 70, 74n5 & n8, 78n52
Rawlinson C 86 (Sir Landevale) 175, 194
Rawlinson Poet. 175 (Charter of Christ) 129, 135n52
Tanner 10 (Old English version of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica) 96–8, 110n15 &
n17, 111n20
Corpus Christi College MS 279 (Old English version of Bede’s Historia
ecclesiastica) 96-9, 111n26
Trinity College MS 57 (apocryphal life of Adam and Eve, or Canticum de
Creatione) 119, 127
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF)
fr. 1586 (Remède de Fortune) 127, 134n41
lat. 74 (twelfth-century Bible) 125, 134n32
lat. 987 (Winchester Benedictional) 24
lat. 6400G (Fleury palimpsest, fols. 112v–145v) 24
lat. 6401 (Boethius) 24
lat. 8824 (Paris Psalter) 64, 74n6
lat. 8846 (glossed psalter) 64–5
lat. 18014 (Petites Heures du Duc de Berry) 128, 135n45
Princeton, Princeton University W.H. Scheide Library, Scheide M71 (Blickling
Homilies) 6, 77n44
Salisbury, Cathedral 150 (Salisbury Psalter) 63–4, 70, 72, 74n7 & n12–14, 76n34 &
n38, 77n43, 78n56 & n61, 79n63 & n67
Sankt Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, 261
Vatican, Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV) 5, 14, 18
Reg. Lat. MS 74 (possible Fleury palimpsest) 32n30
Reg. Lat. 497 (palimpsested Old English Orosius, fol. 71) 57n3, 82, 91n6
Reg. Lat. MS 1283B (Fleury palimpsest) 24
Vat. Lat. MS 5757 (Cicero’s De re publica) 22, 82
Vercelli, Cathedral Library, MS CXVII (Vercelli Book) 15n22, 87, 94n33 & n36
Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. Lat. 1224 (Cuthbercht Gospels)
127, 134n37
INDEX
Abbo of Fleury, 23, 24, 242
Abingdon, abbey, 23
Adams, Willi Paul, 108, 113, 231
Adomnán
Book of Holy Places, 97
Adrevald of Fleury, 30
Aidan, bishop, 98–9
Aldred, scribe, 70, 73, 77, 245
Alfred, king of Wessex, 7–8, 15, 17,
101, 110, 111, 146, 232, 237,
238, 242, 244
translation of Augustine’s
Soliloquies, 7
Aloni, Gila, 11, 157–73, 251
alteration (to a text), 3, 64, 76
addition, 25, 93, 162, 165
see also under erasure and gloss and
writing
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, The, 145,
155, 231
Apollonius of Tyre, 141
Arthurian romance, see under romance
Ashburnham House, see under Cotton,
Robert, Sir
Assayas, Olivier, 219, 222, 231
Augustine of Hippo, St., 87, 93, 143,
213, 224, 227, 228
Ælfric of Eynsham, 6, 69, 81, 84,
87–9, 94, 97, 227, 238, 247
Catholic Homilies, 84–5
De Falsis Diis, 88
Life of Saint Basil the Great,
16n35, 227
Royal manuscript, 84–5, 92, 190
Æthelbald, king of Mercia, 145, 146
Æthelred, king of England, 152
Æthelwold, bishop, 71
Baduthegn (Beadoþegn), 107–8
Basil, St., 16, 227
Baswell, Christopher, 16, 232
Battle of Maldon, The 150
Baudri of Bourgueil, 8, 15n26, 228
Bede, 8, 14, 71, 82, 95–113, 142–3,
147, 149, 228, 234, 235, 240,
246, 249, 250
De Temporum Ratione, 91
Expositio Apocalypseos, 6, 14n20
Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum,
15n25
Old English version of Bede’s
Historia ecclesiastica (OEHE),
8, 95–113, 153n13, 189n15,
228, 230, 233, 237, 238, 244,
246–7, 249
Bel Inconnu, Le, 214
Benedict, St., 23
Benediktbeuern, abbey, 22
Beowulf, 9, 81, 83, 90, 91, 95, 139–55,
228, 229, 232–5, 237, 239–41,
243, 248, 251, 254, 255, 257
see also under Kiernan, Kevin
Bernard of Chartres, 7
Bertha, daughter of Charlemagne, 146
Bethurum, Dorothy, 86–9, 93, 94, 231
Bible, books of
Apocalypse/Revelations, 5, 6, 14, 228
Ecclesiasticus, 126
260
Bischoff, Bernhard, 14, 30, 232
Bloomfield, Morton W., 81, 90, 232
Bobbio, abbey, 22, 30, 232, 239, 248
Boethius manuscript, 24, 257
Bonaventure, St., 207, 215, 222,
223, 225
Boorman, John, 205, 212–13, 215,
218, 220–3, 226, 232, 234, 240
Excalibur, 205–26
Bossi, Egidis, 158
Bourgne, Florence, 1, 8, 17, 115–36,
228, 233, 251
Bracton, Henry, 158
Breton lay (or lai), 10, 175–91, 233, 236
Sir Orfeo, 175–8, 185, 188–90,
241, 243
see also under Chestre, Thomas and
Marie de France
Brubaker, Leslie, 4, 13, 83, 91, 233
Byrhtnoth, ealdorman of Essex, 151
Cannon, Christopher, 158, 171, 233
Canticum de Creatione, 119, 127, 257
Carruthers, Leo, xv, xviii, 9, 139,
154n20, 173n44, 234, 251
Cassiodorus, 62
Cædmon, 101
Hymn, 101
Cerquiglini-Toulet, Jacqueline, 116,
132, 234
Charles Martel, 145
Charles the Great (Charlemagne), 30,
145–6, 155, 232
Charles the Younger, 145
The Charters of Christ, 129, 135, 231
Chartier, Roger, 2, 12, 14, 15, 234
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 1, 10–11, 17,
116, 118, 132, 155, 157–73,
187, 190, 191, 228, 233, 234,
236, 237, 239, 240, 242, 244,
246–9, 251, 254
Boece, 118
The Canterbury Tales, 139, 166, 172,
242, 251
“The Franklin’s Tale,” 176, 177,
185, 191, 240, 243
IN DEX
“The Miller’s Tale,” 170, 231
“The Physician’s Tale,” 166
“The Wife of Bath’s Tale,”
161, 172
The Legend of Good Women, 11, 16,
157–74
“The Legend of Ariadne,” 168
“The Legend of Hypsipyle and
Medea,” 168, 169
“The Legend of Lucrece,” 166,
172, 231, 240
“The Legend of Philomela,” 11,
157–73, 240
Troilus and Criseyde, 116, 132, 167,
173, 228, 251
myswrite/mysmetre, 10, 116
Chestre, Thomas, 180, 194, 203; see
also under Breton lay (or lai)
Launfalus Miles (Sir Launfal), 10,
16, 175, 176, 179, 180, 190,
194–204
Childebert II, king of Austrasia, 144
Childeric III, king of the Franks, 145
Chilperic I, king of Neustria, 145
Chlochilaicus, 154
see also Hygelac
Chrétien de Troyes, 189, 206, 212–16,
223–5, 228, 243
Perceval ou le Conte du Graal, 210,
212–16, 223–6, 228
see also under romance
Christ Church, Canterbury, 63, 71, 78
Christine de Pizan, 127, 257
Cicero, 22
De re publica, 22, 82
Cleanness, 118, 126–7, 132, 227
Clemoes, Peter, 31, 84, 85, 92, 155,
227, 229, 234, 240, 250
Clovis, 144
Cluny, abbey, 23
Cnut the Dane, king of England, 142,
146, 147, 152
Codex Sinaiticus, 35
Coldingham, 104
Colgrave, Bertram, 14, 108, 109,
228, 234
 IN DEX
color
change in pronunciation, 199
computer storage of, 40
of ink, 36, 61, 67–8, 79n62, 98,
116, 129, 131
see also under ink
medieval perception of, 208,
217, 220
pixel(s), 38, 41
in recovery techniques, 40–50
relation to light, 12, 38, 220–1
RGB (red-green-blue monitor
display), 38–40, 58
vermeil, 212, 216–17, 224n53
of wax, 125–6, 128
see also under light
Columbanus, St., 22
Constantine the Great, 146
Copeland, Rita, 102, 112, 234
Corbie, abbey, 22
Corbin, Henry, 217
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge,
xiii, 36, 55, 57, 110, 233,
253, 256
Cotton, Robert, Sir, 37, 57, 58, 244
fire at Ashburnham house, 71
Craig-McFeely, Julia, 54, 55, 57, 58,
59, 60, 234
Crépin, André, xi, xv, xvii–xviii, 1, 7,
9, 12, 14–16, 75, 95, 101, 109,
112, 134, 151, 155, 205, 219,
220, 221, 226, 228, 233, 235
Cursor Mundi, 128, 135, 229
Cuthbert, St., 14, 71, 234
Cynethryth, queen of Mercia, 146
Damico, Helen, 142, 143, 144,
154, 235
Dark Ages, 6
Dead Sea Scrolls, 35
De Bruyne, Edgar, 209, 212,
222–6, 235
Deda, abbot, 96, 105, 106
Degaré, 176, 188, 190
de Kooning, Willem, 83
Deor, 154
261
De Quincey, Thomas, 12, 13, 235
Suspiria de Profundis, 13, 17, 235
Derrida, Jacques, 9, 16, 236, 248
Dillon, Sarah, 13, 15, 236
Dinshaw, Carolyn, 159, 171, 172, 236
Doane, Nick, 73, 90, 244
Dold, Alban, 30, 236
Dubois, Marie-Marguerite, xv, xvii,
171, 236
Duby, Georges, 207, 223, 236
Eadburga, St., 71
Eadgisl, priest, 104
Eadwine, scribe, 127
Ecgfrith, son of Offa of Mercia, 146
Eco, Umberto, 12, 207, 222, 237
The Island of the Day Before, 17
The Name of the Rose, 153
Edward II, 122
Edward III, 169
Eliason, Norman, 84, 92, 227
Elsholz, Jean-Marc, 11, 205, 252
Elucidation, The, 210, 223
Emare, 176, 182–5
Emma, queen consort of England,
144, 154
see also Encomium Emmae Reginae
Encomium Emmae Reginae, 144
engraving, 116, 118, 120, 124, 126,
127, 129–31
enhancement, digital (image)
ethics of enhancement, 35, 53–6
Eomer, son of Offa the Angle, 142
erasure(s), erasing
fear of, 4, 6, 119, 131–2
figurative, 10–11, 166, 157,
160–1, 168
left blank, 82, 115–16
methods of, 1, 4–5, 14n20, 36, 82,
116, 125–6
reasons for, 6, 22, 29, 71, 82
correction/alteration, 36, 84–6,
96, 98, 119
defacement/destruction, 30n11,
115–16, 126
recovery of, 5, 35, 37–56
262 IN DEX
erasure(s), erasing—Continued
and reinscription, 1, 6, 8, 10, 57n6,
76n36, 82–6, 96, 98, 168
types of text subject to, 6, 22, 36,
82, 119
Eriugena, John Scotus, 218
The Erle of Tolous, 176, 182–5
An Exhortation to Christian Living, 87
Ferlampin-Acher, Christine, 214,
225, 237
Field, Rosalind, 175, 183, 237
Fleury (Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire),
abbey, 23, 30–2, 234, 236,
238, 239, 242, 244, 246, 249,
256, 258
Forthere, bishop, 107
Foucault, Michel, 222, 237
Fouquet, Jean, 128
Frère Denis, 30, 31, 32, 235
Fulda, abbey, 22
Fursa, St., 105, 106
Galpin, Richard, 83, 91, 237
Gameson, Richard, 14, 98,
109–11, 237
Gance, Abel, 206, 215, 221, 222, 225,
238, 240
Gauzlin, abbot, 23, 24
Gawain poet, 182
Genette, Gérard
Palimpsests, 3, 13, 89, 94, 176, 238
genre, literary, 9, 139–43, 148–52,
153, 175–91
Derridean analysis of, 9–10
see also under romance
Germanus, abbot, 23
Gildas, 95, 109
Gilte Legende, 119, 129, 256
Glanvill, 158, 229
Glastonbury, 71
gloss, glossator, 7, 61–79, 126
Gneuss, Helmut, 28, 33, 58, 75, 82,
109, 110, 238
Godden, Malcolm, 7, 11, 15, 17, 88,
92, 94, 152, 227, 237, 238
Gottfried von Strassburg
Tristan, 189
Gower, John, 236
Confessio Amantis, 172
“Tale of Tereus,” 170
graffito, graffiti, 130, 131, 135, 244
Grail quest, 12, 205, 210, 215
Gregory of Tours, 144
Historia Francorum, 144
Gregory the Great, 22, 101, 110,
127, 246
Libellus Responsionum, 97
Pastoral Care, 101
Gretsch, Mechthild, 62, 74, 75, 78, 239
Grosseteste, Robert, 206–7, 209,
221–3, 229, 243, 249
Gryson, Roger, 14, 30, 228, 239
Guthrum, king of East Anglia, 146
Harris, Joseph, 139, 152, 153, 239
Heardred, 144
Hebrew Bible, 85, 125, 134, 229
Hemming, scribe, 97–9
Hengest, 142, 154, 248
Herculaneum papyri, 35
Heures d’Étienne Chevalier, Les, 128, 256
Hexateuch, see under Hebrew Bible
histogram, xiii, 40–4
Hoccleve, 129
Hrothgar, (semi-legendary) king of
Denmark, 141, 144, 147, 149
Hygd, (semi-legendary) queen of
Geatland, 141
Hygelac, (semi-legendary) king of
Geatland, 141, 144, 147,
149, 154
hypertext, 13n5, 89, 176
Il Filocolo, 176
Illich, Ivan, 13
infrared, see under light
ink, 8, 36–8, 45, 48, 63, 118, 126–30
black, brown, 63, 79n62, 116, 128, 131
Christ’s blood, 129–30
green ink, 68
ink horn, 4–5
 IN DEX
iron-gall ink, 36
red ink, 36, 61, 63, 67–8, 98, 116,
130–1
see also under writing implements &
materials
inscription, see under engraving and
writing
Institut de France, xi
Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire
des Textes (IRHT), 26, 27, 32
intertextuality/transtextuality, 2, 3, 9,
13n5, 89
Irvine, Martin, 102, 112, 240
Jager, Eric, 13, 135, 240
James, Henry, 181
Jean de Meun
The Romance of the Rose, 211, 223,
226, 229
Jerome, St., 82, 101, 126
John of Salisbury
The Metalogicon, 15, 229
Jost, Karl, 87, 93, 240
Kendrick, Laura, 14, 240
Ker, Neil, 36, 240
Kiernan, Kevin, 82, 83, 91, 142, 155,
240, 243
Klaeber, Frederick, 102, 111, 112,
144, 152, 154, 229, 240
Ladies of the Fraternity of Saint
George, 173, 238
Lambeth Palace Library, xiii, 69, 75,
252, 255, 257
Langland, William
Piers Plowman, 124, 133, 230
Lapidge, Michael, 15, 152, 155, 237,
239, 241
Lara-Rallo, Carmen, 13, 241
Laurentius Surius, 16
law(s)
Anglo-Saxon, 171n19
early Kentish, 69, 77n45
English Common Law, 163
erased, obsolescent, 82
263
of “metallognomy,” 208, 212
of refraction, 207
Roman, 159
Statutes of Westminster I & II, 158
see also under Glanvill and tables of
the (Mosaic) law
layer(s)
in textual recovery techniques,
48–50
of writing, see under writing
Lay of Graelent, The, 175
Lay of the Coast, The (Strandar Lioth), 189
Leclercq, Jean, Dom, 14, 241
Leerssen, Joep, 148, 150, 155, 241
Le Goff, Jacques, 214, 224, 225,
233, 241
Leiden riddle, 24, 32, 244, 256
Leofnoth, scribe, 24, 32, 249
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 157–8, 170, 241
Leyerle, John, 81, 90, 241
libri inutiles, 22, 30, 244
Life of Adam and Eve, 119, 133, 254
Life of St. Alexis, 26
Life of St. Gertrude, 82
Life of St. Nicholas, 26
light
cinematographic, 216, 220
infrared, 26
intelligible, 210–11, 213–9, 222n12
medieval theory/theology of,
205–7, 209, 211, 213, 219
ultraviolet, 26, 27, 91n11
wavelengths, 38–9
see also under color
Lollard, 116
Lowe, E.-A., 22, 24, 26, 28, 29, 30,
36, 91, 242
Codices Latini Antiquiores, 32, 57, 74
Codices Rescripti, 30, 32, 57, 82,
83, 90
Luxeuil, abbey, 22, 32
Lydgate, John, 129
The Life of Our Lady, 124, 230
Reson and Sensuallyte, 133, 230
Temple of Glas, 118, 132, 230
Troy-Book, 123, 133, 230
264 IN DEX
Machaut, Guillaume de, 127
Le Remède de Fortune, 127
Machutus (Malo), St., 71
Magna Carta, 122
Malory, Thomas, Sir, 183, 214, 254
Le Morte Darthur, 11, 151, 153, 217,
218, 224, 230
Manuscripts, see Index of Manuscripts
Cited, 225–8
Marie de France, 10, 16, 175, 176,
179–80, 188, 190, 230, 243,
247; see also under Breton lay
(or lai)
Lai de Guigemar, 180, 190
Lai de Lanval, 10, 16, 176, 180–1,
184–6, 188, 190–4, 196, 198,
201, 203, 204, 243, 247
Lai du Chèvrefeuille, 189, 190
Lay le Freine (Le Fresne), 175–81,
184, 189, 190
Martin, Jean-Claude, xi, xiii
Martin, Priscilla, 159, 160, 171,
172, 242
Master of Simon of St. Albans, 125
matière de Bretagne, 10, 205, 215
see also under Breton lay (or lai) and
romance
McKitterick, Rosamond, 21, 30, 242
Miller, Thomas, 97–9, 108, 109, 111,
113, 228, 230
Mitchell, Bruce, 69, 77, 242
Monte Cassino, abbey, 23
Mooney, Linne, 116, 132, 242
Mynors, R.A.B., 108, 109, 228
Napier, Arthur S., 87, 93, 94, 231, 247
Neoplatonism, 206–7, 213, 222
see also under Plotinus
Nicholson, R.H., 178, 189, 190, 243
Nowlin, Steele, 187, 191, 243
Oda, archbishop, 23
Offa
Continental Offa (also called Offa
the Angle), 142, 143, 146
king of Mercia, 143, 145–7
O’Keeffe, Katherine O’Brien, 90,
91, 111
O’Neill, Patrick, 72, 75, 77, 79, 243
Ongentheow, (semi-legendary) king
of Sweden, 142
optic, optical, optics, 38, 207, 210,
218
see also under color and light
orality & oral transmission, 1, 93n32,
95–6, 101, 108–9, 117, 119,
128, 139, 142–3, 145, 147, 151,
153n7, 177, 181, 184, 189n8,
194, 203n5
Orosius, 82, 91, 95, 109, 232, 258
Osgar, abbot, 23
Oswald, bishop, 23
Oswald, king of Northumbria, St., 105
Ottar Vendel-Crow, also called
Ohthere, 144
Ovid, 11
Heroides, 173, 230
Metamorphoses, 157, 160–2, 165–8,
170, 230
Ovide Moralisé, 11, 16, 170, 242
palimpsest(s)
all writing as, 12, 73n1, 81
compositional, 87–9
literal compared to metaphorical,
2–4, 7, 95–6, 193
literal definition of, 2–4, 7, 21–3,
36, 82–3
literary representation of, 116
metaphorical understanding of,
2–4, 7, 132n1, 139, 157, 169,
175–7, 181–2, 203, 205
Panofsky, Erwin, 207, 210, 222, 223,
226, 244
Papahagi, Adrian, 6, 21–33, 57n4, 252
parchment, see under writing
implements & materials
Parkes, Malcolm, 24, 28, 32, 244
Partney, abbey, 96, 105
Paul the Deacon, 30
Pearl, 118, 132, 219–20, 221, 227,
235, 256
 IN DEX
pen, see under writing implements &
materials
Pepin the Short, 145
Percy, Thomas, bishop, 195, 203, 229
peritext, 181, 184
Les Petites Heures du Duc de Berry, 128,
255, 258
pixel, see under color
Pliny, 95, 109
Plotinus, 206, 213–14, 222n10,
223n37, 230
Potter, Simeon, 97, 111, 244
The Prick of Conscience, 116
Prince, Gerald, 89, 94
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite,
206, 213, 222
De Caelesti Hierachia, 218
pugillar(es), writing tablet, 128, 129
Pulsiano, Phillip, 65, 73–7, 230,
244, 245
Pynkhurst, Adam, Chaucer’s
scribe, 116
quill, see under writing implements &
materials
Ramsey, abbey, 23, 24, 31, 75, 242
Rauschenberg, Robert, 83
Rædwald, king of East Anglia,
147, 149
reception, 3, 6, 9, 13n6, 88, 108–9,
110n17, 178, 190n24, 207
Regularis Concordia, 24
Reynolds, L.-D, 29, 245
Richard I the Lionheart, 148
Richard II, 169
Richard of Saint Victor, 211, 223, 230
Ricoeur, Paul, 103, 112, 245
Rimbaud, Arthur, 223
Illuminations, 210
Une Saison en Enfer, 224, 245
Roberts, Jane, 7, 15, 33, 61–79, 203,
233, 245, 252
Robinson, Fred C., 7, 16, 79, 103,
113, 245
Robyns, Clem, 103, 112, 246
265
romance
Arthurian/courtly, 10–11, 185,
193, 202, 205–6, 208, 214,
216–17, 220
see also under Breton lay (lai) and
matière de Bretagne
epic, 9, 139, 141, 148, 150
generic categorization, 9–11,
139–41, 153n7 and n11,
175–6, 178, 185, 188
see also under genre
historical, 140–1, 153n9 and n10
Roman de Horn, 189
Rosenthal, Joel T., 13, 15, 239,
248, 249
Rouse, Richard H. and Mary A., 125,
133, 246
Rowley, Sharon M., 8, 15, 95–113,
153, 189, 246, 253
Rubin, Gayle, 158, 170, 246
rubric, rubrication, rubricator, 32n34,
36, 57n8, 68, 98–9, 127
St. Erkenwald, 119, 132
St. Gall, see under Sankt Gallen
St. Jacques, Raymond, 100, 101,
112, 247
St. Mary, Lydgate, Suffolk, xiii,
130, 131
St. Mary & St. Clement, Clavering,
Essex, xiii, 130
St. Peter’s Basilica, 2
Sallust
Historiae, 24
Samoyault, Tiphaine, 12, 247
Sankt Gallen, 5, 14, 22, 258
Sansonetti, Paul-Georges, 217, 225,
226, 247
Scott, Walter, Sir, 140–1,
148–9, 153
The Bride of Lammermoor, 141
Ivanhoe, 148, 150, 153
Waverley, 148–50, 153, 155
script, see under writing
Scyld Scefing, legendary king, 147
Sigeric, archbishop, 85
266 IN DEX
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 117–18,
132, 140, 173, 219, 226–8,
234, 254
Sir Gowther, 176, 181–3, 185
Sir Lambewell, 10, 193–204, 229,
247, 256
Sir Landavall (Sir Landevale, Sir
Landeval), 10, 16, 175, 257
Sisam, Celia and Kenneth, 74, 76–9, 231
Solinus, 95, 109
Song of Solomon, 126
Stanton, Robert, 70, 78, 101, 102,
112, 247
Stévanovitch, Colette, 10–11, 173n44,
175, 193–204, 247, 253
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Treasure Island, 140
Stokes, Peter A., 5, 12, 27, 33, 35,
57n7, 58n9, 78n59, 247, 253–4
Strandar Lioth, see Lay of the Coast, The
Strohm, Paul, 16, 173, 176, 189, 190,
232, 248
stylus, see under writing implements &
materials
subtraction, electronic, 33, 232
Suger, abbot, 207, 210, 221, 222, 244
Sutton Hoo, 147, 155, 233
Sweet, Henry, 102, 112, 231
Szarmach, Paul E., 6–7, 13, 15, 57,
81–94, 111, 154, 232, 237, 239,
247–9, 254
tables of the (Mosaic) law, 125–6, 131
tablet(s)
boxwood, 125
bronze, 125
clay, 117, 121–2
pugillar(es), 128, 129
round-topped, 125–8, 134, 242
stone, 4
wax, 4, 8, 115, 122, 124–32,
133, 246
see also under tables of the
(Mosaic) law
Tacitus
Germania, 150–1
Theodulf of Orléans, bishop, 23,
31, 246
Theuderic I, king of Austrasia, 144
Thomas Aquinas, St., 210, 212, 224
Thomas of Saint Victor, 210
Thryth (Modthryth), king Offa’s
wife, 146
Tolkien, J.R.R., 16n36, 139, 253
Finn and Hengest: the Fragment and
the Episode, 154
“The Monsters and the Critics,”
150–2, 155, 248
Tremayne, Peter, 153
Trier, 36, 82, 127
Twain, Mark, 202
Uhlig, Claus, 12, 16, 17, 248
ultraviolet, see under light
van Peer, Willie, 12, 132, 248
vermeil, see under color
Vernon Paternoster, 128, 131, 135,
136, 229, 239, 255, 257
Vezin, Jean, 24, 28, 32, 249
Vial, Claire, 9–11, 175–91,
203n6, 254
Vignaux, Paul, 209, 223, 249
Virgil
Eclogues, 130
Waite, Gregory, 102, 110–12, 249
Wallace-Hadrill, J.M., 112, 144, 145,
154, 249
wax tablet, see under tablet(s)
Wealhtheow, legendary queen of the
Danes, 144, 154
Wearmouth-Jarrow, abbey, 2
Whitbread, Leslie G., 82, 88, 90, 249
Whitby, synod of, 96
Whitelock, Dorothy, 31, 92, 93, 97,
99, 100, 110–12, 231, 240,
249, 250
Widsith, 95, 142, 154, 230
Wiesenekker, Evert, 70, 78, 249
Wilcox, Jonathan, 15, 249
Wilfrid, bishop, 96
 IN DEX
William of Brailles (William de
Brailles), illuminator, 125–6
Wilson, N.-G., 21, 29, 245
Winchcombe, abbey, 23, 75
Winchester, 31, 62, 71, 77, 78, 97,
190, 239, 243, 250
Winchester Bible, 125, 134, 236
Wolfram von Eschenbach
Parzival, 206, 223, 225, 231
Worcester, 23, 62, 71, 87, 97
writing
hierarchy of modes of, 127
layer(s) of, 2–3, 9, 10, 12, 61, 83,
86–9, 95–6, 99, 101, 125,
141, 169, 181, 187, 193, 203,
205, 221
lower (underwriting, scriptio
inferior), 2, 5, 11, 22, 24, 26–9,
43, 45–9, 55, 82–3, 89–90n4,
98, 205, 216
rewriting/reinscription, 1–4, 6–11,
16n35, 22, 24, 28, 36, 57n4,
81, 83–4, 88–9, 95–6, 98,
99, 101–3, 108, 116, 131, 139,
146–7, 151, 157–8, 160, 165,
168–9, 172n29, 176, 181–2,
193–4, 197, 205, 221
267
upper (overwriting, scriptio superior),
2–3, 10–11, 22, 25–6, 28, 36,
43, 45–6, 82, 83, 89, 108
writing implements & materials, 4–5
paper, 125
parchment, membrane, vellum, 1,
3, 8, 13, 24, 25, 28, 29, 36,
37, 42–9, 81–2, 116, 118, 120,
122, 125, 127, 128, 130, 132,
193, 218, 226
pen, quill pen, 4, 132
ruler, ruled lines, ruling, 5, 26,
62–3, 65, 70, 127
stylus, 4, 15n25, 118, 124–8
wax, 125
see also under ink and tablet(s)
Wulfstan of York, 6, 81, 85–9, 90,
92–4, 231, 238, 240, 247,
249, 256
De Falsis Dies, 88, 231
Institutes of Polity, 87, 231
Sermo Lupi, 86, 93, 231
Wycliffite Bible, 126, 134
York, 23
Zink, Michel, 217, 225, 250