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The Yale fragments of the West Saxon gospels

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Roy Michael Liuzza
Roy Michael Liuzza
Affiliation:
Ohio State University
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Extract

The manuscripts which contain the Old English translation of the gospels have been little studied since Skeat's compendious editions of the last century, yet the interest and importance of these codices, no less than that of the texts they preserve, should not be underestimated. The vernacular translation of a biblical text stands as a monument to the confidence and competence of Anglo-Saxon monastic culture; the evidence of the surviving manuscripts can offer insights into the development and dissemination of this text. The following study examines two fragments from an otherwise lost manuscript of the West Saxon gospels, which are preserved as an endleaf and parchment reinforcements in the binding of a fourteenth-century Latin psalter now in the Beinecke Library at Yale University, Beinecke 578. I shall first discuss the psalter and its accompanying texts in the attempt to localize the manuscript and its binding. I shall then turn to the West Saxon gospel fragments; after presenting a description and, for the first time, a complete transcription, I shall attempt to locate this text in the context of other Anglo-Saxon gospel manuscripts.

Type
Research Article
Information
Anglo-Saxon England , Volume 17 , December 1988 , pp. 67 - 82
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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References

1 Skeat, W. W., The Holy Gospels in Anglo-Saxon, Northumbrian, and Old Mercian Versions, 4 vols. (Cambridge, 1871–1887); the four separate volumes appeared as follows: Mark (1871), Luke (1874), John (1878) and Matthew (1887), and were subsequently collected into one volume. The edition ofGoogle ScholarBright, J.W. for the Belles-Lettres series (4 vols., Boston, 1904–1906), though later than Skeat, is generally neglected today. The edition ofGoogle ScholarGrünberg, M., The West-Saxon Gospels: A Study of the Gospel of St Matthew with Text of the Four Gospels (Amsterdam, 1967), is complete only for Matthew.Google Scholar

2 Ker, N.R., Catalogue of Manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford, 1957).Google Scholar

3 The endleaf and manuscript have been described in the following catalogues: Ker, Catalogue, p. i; Collins, R. L., Anglo-Saxon Vernacular Manuscripts in America (New York, 1976), pp. 36–7 (a plate of the verso of the endleaf is included); and ‘Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts at Yale’, Yale Univ. Lib. Gazette 52 (1978), 182.Google Scholar

4 For the most part, these large initials conform to the normal tenfold division of the later medieval psalter. Ps. XCVIII is emphasized instead of ps. XCVII, which receives only minor decoration here; this may be no more than an error, as both ps. XCVII and XCVIII begin with the words Cantate Domino canticum novum. Ps. CXIX (Ad Dominum cum tribularer), the beginning of the gradual psalms (CXIX-CXXXIII), is emphasized with a five-line initial without border; such emphasis is not uncommon in some other, earlier English psalters: see Hughes, A., Medieval Manuscripts for Mass and Office: a Guide to their Organization and Terminology (Toronto, 1982), p. 228 and also p. 374, n. 17.Google Scholar

5 See The Victoria History of the County of Gloucester (hereafter VCH), ed. W., Page, 2 vols. (London, 1907) 11, 11.Google Scholar

6 See Wormald, F., English Benedictine Kalendars After A.D. 1100, 2 vols., HBS 77 and 81 (London, 1939–1946) and English Kalendars Before A.D. 1100, HBS 72 (London, 1934). The calendar of Evesham Abbey, Worcester, is ed. in the former work (11, 21–38), and some Anglo-Saxon calendars from Worcester are found in the latter (pp. 197–209, 211–223 and 225–237). See alsoGoogle ScholarMiller, B.D. H., ‘The Early History of Bodleian MS Digby 86’, Annuale Medievale 4 (1963), 23–56, where other Worcester calendars are discussed.Google Scholar

7 Oxford, Jesus College 10 (ptd Wormald, Kalendars after 1100 11, 39–55, and dated there ‘before 1170’), The calendar of Winchcombe is found in London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius E. iv (Winchcombe, s. xii).

8 These are identified as having been made in Hereford by Wormald, Kalendars after 1100 11, 39–43.

9 Germanus is found, e.g., in the calendars ptd Wormald, Kalendars after 1100 11, nos. 4 (Glastonbury), 5 (St Augustine's, Canterbury), 6 (‘West Country’), and 7 (Exeter); Evortius is found in Wormald, Kalendars before 1100, nos. 7 and 8 (Wells, Somerset), as well as in the twelfth-century calendar from Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, cited above, n. 7.

10 Ker, Catalogue, p. lxiv (corrigendum to no. 1).

11 Some of these feasts, it should be noted, are also found elsewhere: Paul the Hermit (10 January), Ignatius (1 February), Octave of BVM (9 February, though graded more highly in Tewkesbury calendars), Teilo (9 February), Æthelwold (added to Beinecke 578 in a later hand, 1 August), Cuthburg (31 August, with the same unusual grading of twelve lessons in Beinecke 578 and CUL Gg. 3. 21), and Ordination of Ambrose (7 December). The grading of twelve lessons given in Beinecke 578 to Kenelm (17 July) is also found in these other Tewkesbury calendars.

12 Miller, ‘The Early History’, pp. 47–8.

13 VCH (Gloucester) 11, 62.

14 This is a Visigothic feast, according to Holweck, F. G., A Biographical Dictionary of the Saints (London, 1924), p. 518; its presence in Beinecke 578 has yet to be explained, unless it may be ascribed to the fact that the priory of St James, Bristol, since its foundation in 1137, was a dependency of Tewkesbury Abbey. But the feast is not in the Tewkesbury calendars in BL Royal 8. C. VII or CUL Gg. 3. 21; its presence in Beinecke 578 may represent nothing more than memorabilia of a journey to Compostella.Google Scholar

15 The saint is also found in the calendar of the Douce Psalter (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 293), a northern English manuscript; see Temple, E., ‘The Calendar of the Douce Psalter’, Bodl. Lib. Record 12 (1985), 13–38. The abbey of Deerhurst near Tewkesbury was an alien priory of Saint-Denis in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; the proximity of the two houses may account for some of the French saints in Beinecke 578.Google Scholar

16 My description of the binding of Beinecke 578 is indebted to Pollard, G., ‘Describing Medieval Bookbindings’, Medieval Learning and Literature: Essays presented to R. W. Hunt, ed. Alexander, J.J.G. and Gibson, M.T. (Oxford, 1976), pp. 50–65.Google Scholar

17 It need hardly be said that the process by which a Kentish manuscript in Old English, later used as binding, got to Tewkesbury or its environs must remain a mystery. Speculation might centre on Abbot Alan of Tewkesbury (1186–1202), a former prior of Christ Church, Canterbury, whose literary interests are mentioned in VCH (Gloucester) 11, 62 and who might have been responsible for the transfer of manuscripts from one house to the other.

18 See Pollard, G., ‘The Construction of English Twelfth-Century Bindings’, The Library 5th ser. 17 (1962), 1–22, esp. 10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 Ibid. p. 9.

20 Ibid. p. 17.

21 I am grateful to Professor Linda E. Voigts, of the University of Missouri at Kansas City, for pointing out the additional text on these strips, and for her interest and advice during my early examination of Beinecke 578.

22 The OE text, transcribed from the endleaf and binding strips, is presented in the Appendix, below, pp. 80–2.

23 Ker, Catalogue, p. 1; see pl. VI.

24 See Ibid. p. xxvii, for other Anglo-Saxon manuscripts in which this distinction is not observed.

25 Ker (Ibid. p. 1) states that both initials are in red, but this is in error.

26 Campbell, A., Old English Grammar (Oxford, 1959), §§288–98.Google Scholar

27 Ibid.§757.

28 Ibid. §450.

29 Campbell (Ibid. §143) stresses the regularity of ea spellings in eleventh-century WS manuscripts, but this is an optimistic overstatement, especially with regard to the surviving copies of the West Saxon gospels.

30 The manuscript sigla used by Skeat and others, and reference numbers in Ker, Catalogue, are given in parentheses.

31 The conjunction appears in some, but not the most prominent, of the manuscripts of the Vetus Latina; see the edition of Mark by Jülicher, A. (Berlin, 1940). For speculation on the nature of the Latin text from which the Old English translation was made, seeGoogle ScholarGlunz, H., Die lateinische Vorlage der westsächsischen Evangelienversion (Leipzig, 1928); it should be noted that a later text which may have been used to ‘correct’ or modify the translation may have been of a different sort altogether.Google Scholar

32 Many of the alterations shared by two twelfth-century texts (London, BL Royal I A. XIV and Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 38) seem to have arisen from a desire to have the translation conform more precisely to the syntax of the Latin Bible, rather than a simple need to clarify the language, by then archaic, of the original translation.

33 Grünberg, West-Saxon Gospels, p. 369. This assumption has been accepted without question in most casual descriptions of the West-Saxon Gospels, but ought to be considered more closely. There is little evidence, beyond the rubrics in CUL li. 2. 11 themselves, of any Anglo-Saxon liturgy conducted either wholly or partly in English.

34 Skeat, Luke, p. xi.

35 Ker, Catalogue, pp. 47–8.

36 Ibid. p. 376.

37 See James, M. R., Medieval Libraries of Canterbury and Dover (Cambridge, 1903), p. 51 (no. 314).Google Scholar

38 Skeat, Mark, p. vii.

39 Skeat, Luke, p. viii, and John p. vii.

40 Skeat, Luke, p. x.

41 Grünberg, West-Saxon Gospels, p. 364.

42 Ibid.

43 Napier, A.S., ‘Bruchstücke einer ae. Evangelienhandschrift’, ASNSL 87 (1891), 255–61.Google Scholar

44 I am grateful to Professor Fred Robinson of Yale University and Dr Malcolm Parkes of Keble College, Oxford, for their suggestions during the writing and revising of this essay.