REINVENTING THE GOSPEL: ÆLFRIC AND THE LITURGY

Abstract

Tenth-century Anglo-Saxon England boasts what for many is regarded as the cornerstone of medieval dramatic ritual, the Regularis concordia's Visitatio sepulchri, often dubbed by critics of liturgical drama the first `quasi-play'. Because of the dearth of corollary evidence and the scattered nature of liturgical books pertinent to Anglo-Saxon observance, however, the Visitatio, with its `Quem quaeritis' dialogue between the angel and the women at the tomb, is generally treated as singular, and the highly dramatic nature of the liturgy for the other major festivals has been largely dismissed. However, the vernacular preaching that accompanied these rituals, in particular that of AElfric, reveals the remarkably pervasive influence of this dramatic liturgy on Anglo-Saxon perceptions of Christian history. Besides a few overt passages of liturgical instruction provided by AElfric, this influence is evident more subtly throughout AElfric's treatment of biblical figures and events re-enacted in the liturgy. In particular, AElfric's translations of the pericopes for the major festivals of the church year demonstrate how fully biblical narrative and liturgical commemoration have become conflated for the Anglo-Saxon Church. The recent edition of AElfric's First Series of Catholic Homilies by Peter Clemoes has supplied a series of regrettable omissions in Thorpe's edition and translation. When writing an exegesis of a biblical passage, AElfric generally gives the Latin incipit for the pericope, followed by an Old English rendering, before breaking it down into manageable bits for commentary. One tends to assume, partly due to AElfric's oft-quoted conservatism regarding biblical translation, that this rendering will be more or less direct, and not particularly noteworthy, except as an example of AElfric's style of translation, of which we have many others. This assumption is exacerbated by Thorpe's decision to omit much of this Gospel translation, `presuming that all readers of the Homilies have a copy of the New Testament either in Anglo-Saxon or English'.' In the first volume of his study of Biblical Quotations in Old English Prose Writers,2 Cook extracts AElfric's biblical renderings, but only those in Thorpe, ignoring the longer passages of translation left out in Thorpe's edition. He prints the extracts in their biblical order, with the Vulgate Latin beneath. This system is problematic, in part because the Vulgate in AElfric's time was still not entirely standardized, and forms derived from variant versions, including the Old Latin, remained in liturgical usage and may have lent themselves to some of the AElfrician readings. Cook's interest is in correlating these readings (those provided by Thorpe) with the modern Vulgate, again on the assumption that they would correlate fairly closely. As a result, for the passages of translation that Thorpe does include, such as that in ]AElfric's First Series sermon for the Purification, he prints only that which does agree with the supplied Vulgate text, replacing exactly what is most interesting in ]AElfric's renderings with ellipses and further obscuring the fact that AElfric's departures from the pericopes are, at times, much more drastic than one tends to expect. In his second volume, reprinting Napier, Cook provides the readings omitted by Thorpe, but again his interest is in comparing them with the Vulgate.' He presents them, again, in their biblical order, this time leaving in sections that do not fit with the Latin (which, in his first-volume passages, would have been excised and replaced with ellipses), instead replacing matching sections of the Latin with ellipses. Cook's supplementary presentation of these readings is useful in identifying passages that derive from biblical accounts other than that represented in the pericope, but leaves obscure the fact that AElfric's departures from Scripture are often too substantial to be considered simple paraphrasing, or to be attributed entirely to choices in collation, leading us to wonder from where and why AElfric has chosen, in several instances, to reinvent the Gospel narrative. …