Abstract
In the early medieval period, history was commonly organised into six epochs lasting roughly one thousand years each, according to certain calculations of the world’s age. The idea of the six ages emerged from and was consolidated by allegorical interpretations of the Hexameron in which the material endurance of the world was thought to mirror the initial length of its Creation. This historical schematisation enjoyed widespread currency in Anglo-Saxon England, even after Bede had proved that the world was not, in fact, approaching 6,000 years. This article analyses how the topos of the six ages is used and adapted within a hitherto understudied group of related encyclopaedic notes in three Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. How these texts relate to and differ from the wider corpus of encyclopaedic texts on this subject is also charted. The following study investigates the ways in which encyclopaedic texts on the six ages were adapted, expanded and transmitted, and the religious and political motivations driving such changes. This article offers the first in-depth analysis of this particular group of texts, foregrounding the sophistication of micro-texts that explain the six ages. Overall, this study emphasises the pedagogical, theological and historiographical applications of this concept in early medieval English thought.
Highlights
Outlining the ages of the world and their biblical parameters was an abiding intellectual and spiritual concern throughout the early medieval period in England
The dates given for the manuscripts and the textual evidence of augmentation into a longer macaronic version seem to confirm that the Old English note in CCCC 178 is the older and, perhaps, original authorial form of the text
The additional sections of Napier LXII not found in CCCC 178 are Latin and form a later augmentation of the Old English note into a longer, bilingual reference text
Summary
A Latin version or analogue of the second part of this note, the sections that outline the ages by reference to their defining figures and events, is found in London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iii, fols. The dates given for the manuscripts and the textual evidence of augmentation into a longer macaronic version seem to confirm that the Old English note in CCCC 178 is the older and, perhaps, original authorial form of the text.18 Since both CCCC 201 and Hatton 113 contain word for word the expanded version of the text, it follows that there was an intermediary, extended version between CCCC 178 and its later two witnesses.
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