Reading the Old English Bede in Its Manuscript Contexts
FAIN: FB-53049-07
Sharon Melissa Rowley
Christopher Newport University (Newport News, VA 23606-2949)
Reading the OEB in Its Manuscript Contexts re-examines the OE version of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica from a material and cultural perspective to argue that the OEB and its manuscript texts have much to tell us about a relatively inaccessible period of history, and about changes in Medieval and Early Modern English concepts of history, national identity and textual culture. In it, I examine the ways in which the translators transformed their base text, as well as how later scribes and readers continued this process of interpretation. I ask large questions by looking very closely at the text and its history; I study manuscript variants, but with a focus on the cultural context and the ideas of national identity read in and onto the OEB.
Associated Products
The Old English Version of Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica (Book)Title: The Old English Version of Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica
Author: Sharon M Rowley
Abstract: The Old English Version of Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica examines the Old English version of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica and its reception in the Middle Ages from a theoretically informed, multi-disciplinary perspective. Looking closely at the text in its manuscript contexts, The Old English Version argues that the text was an independent, ecclesiastical translation that brought a thoughtfully revised version of Bede’s HE to English audiences from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries. Rather than looking back on the age of Bede from the perspective of a king centralizing power and building community by recalling glorious English past, the Old English version of Bede’s HE transforms its source in a way that reflects a narrow focus on local history, key Anglo-Saxon saints and their miracles. Its reading of Bede’s HE reflects an ecclesiastical setting more than a political one, with uses more hagiographical than royal. Rather than being used as a class-book or crib, it was used as a resource for vernacular preaching, as a corpus of vernacular saints’ lives, for oral performance, and as a resource about episcopal authority. This is the first monograph about this fundamental early English text; it radically revises our understanding of the role of the Old English version of Bede’s HE in medieval England.
Year: 2011
Primary URL:
http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=13695Primary URL Description:
http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=13695Publisher: Boydell and Brewer
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781843842736
The Fourteenth-Century Latin Glosses and Annotations in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Tanner 10 (Article)Title: The Fourteenth-Century Latin Glosses and Annotations in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Tanner 10
Author: Sharon M Rowley
Abstract: While Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Tanner 10 has been studied extensively as the oldest substantial manuscript of the Old English translation of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum (hereafter, OEHE) and because of its striking zoomorphic initials, the fact that it contains fourteenth-century Latin glosses, chapter numerations, running titles and marginal annotations has been almost entirely ignored. This essay contextualizes the glosses, annotations, and running titles in Tanner 10 in relation to Bede’s Latin, and in comparison to the glosses by the Tremulous Hand in Cambridge University Library K.k.3.18, then publishes the glosses, annotations, and running titles for the first time. My examination of these glosses and annotations in the context of the differences between the OEHE and the Latin original suggests that Tanner 10 was being read and used in the fourteenth century as a vernacular resource about the lives of kings, saints and abbesses important to the growth and development of the Anglo-Saxon church.
Year: 2009
Primary URL:
http://slulink.slu.edu/special/vfl/manuscripta.htmlFormat: Journal
Periodical Title: Manuscripta 53.1
Publisher: Brepols