Benedictine Reform Research Articles

The Collectio Canonum Hibernensis and the Literature of the Anglo-Saxon Benedictine Reform

The Collectio Canonum Hibernensis is an eighth-century Hiberno-Latin compilation of patristic florilegia that was brought to England by Breton ecclesiastics and employed by Anglo-Saxon reformers as a canonical resource. This article addresses the Hibernensis as an Irish product that was subsumed into the corpus of continental regulatory materials which then circulated throughout the Anglo-Saxon centers and assisted in the articulation of the ideological framework for the English Benedictine Reform in the tenth and eleventh centuries. This discussion delineates the ways in which the Hibernensis was transmitted throughout the English centers, in company with Anglo-Saxon and continental regulatory materials alike (including the Amalarian liber officialis, the Regularis Concordia and Wulfstan’s Canon Law Collection), and shows that the Hiberno-Latin text was employed in the regulatory scholarship of Oda of Canterbury (the Constitutiones), Ælfric of Eynsham (the Letter to Brother Edward), and Wulfstan of York (the Institutes of Polity).

Anselm and the <i>Articella</i>

Sometime between 1070 and 1077, Anselm, then prior of the monastery of Bec in Normandy, wrote to his friend Maurice, a former Bec monk residing at Christ Church, Canterbury, and asked him to seek out copies of various texts, including Bede's De temporibus and the Regula of St. Dunstan — presumably the Regularis concordia, the platform-document of the English Benedictine reform of the tenth century. Shortly thereafter, Anselm wrote again to Maurice, indicating that another text had been added to his desiderata: Should it come to pass that, with [Archbishop Lanfranc's] favor always embracing us, you return to us (as is expedient for you, and as you and I desire), bring with you what you will have copied of the Aphorisms. In the meantime, however, do as much of the text as you can without inconvenience to yourself, and then, if you are free, of the commentary, giving heed above all that whatever you will have brought with you has been corrected with the utmost diligence. If after your return any of it still remains to be done, and if Dom Gundulf is able to finish it through someone else, leave it to the person whom he designates. But it would be much better if Dom Gundulf were able to obtain by request the exemplar itself, so that it could be lent to me.

Anselm and theArticella

Sometime between 1070 and 1077, Anselm, then prior of the monastery of Bec in Normandy, wrote to his friend Maurice, a former Bec monk residing at Christ Church, Canterbury, and asked him to seek out copies of various texts, including Bede'sDe temporibusand theRegulaof St. Dunstan — presumably theRegularis concordia, the platform-document of the English Benedictine reform of the tenth century. Shortly thereafter, Anselm wrote again to Maurice, indicating that another text had been added to his desiderata:Should it come to pass that, with [Archbishop Lanfranc's] favor always embracing us, you return to us (as is expedient for you, and as you and I desire), bring with you what you will have copied of theAphorisms. In the meantime, however, do as much of the text as you can without inconvenience to yourself, and then, if you are free, of the commentary, giving heed above all that whatever you will have brought with you has been corrected with the utmost diligence. If after your return any of it still remains to be done, and if Dom Gundulf is able to finish it through someone else, leave it to the person whom he designates. But it would be much better if Dom Gundulf were able to obtain by request the exemplar itself, so that it could be lent to me.

The Old English Benedictine Rule: writing for women and men

The Regula S. Benedicti was known and used in early Anglo-Saxon England, but it was not until the mid-tenth-century Benedictine reform that the RSB became established as the supreme and exclusive rule governing the monasteries of England. The tenth-century monastic reform movement, undertaken by Dunstan, Æthelwold and Oswald during the reign of Edgar (959–75), sought to revitalize monasticism in England which, according to the standards of these reformers, had ceased to exist during the ninth century. They took as a basis for restoring monastic life the RSB, which was regarded by them as the main embodiment of the essential principles of western monasticism, and in this capacity it was established as the primary document governing English monastic life. By elevating the status of the RSB as the central text of monastic practice in England and the basis of a uniform way of life the reformers raised for themselves the problem of ensuring that the RSB would be understood in detail by all monks, nuns and novices, whatever their background. Evidence of various attempts to make the text accessible, both at the linguistic level and at the level of substance, survives in manuscripts dating from the mid-tenth and eleventh centuries; the most important of these attempts is a vernacular translation of the RSB.

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 57: a witness to the early stages of the Benedictine reform in England?

Manuscripts can be studied, first, and most obviously, as objects of material culture. Such study may provide valuable information concerning the parchment, the arrangement of quires, the type of script, the letter forms, the decoration, and so on. Manuscripts can also be studied as witnesses to the intellectual preoccupations of the scholars who compiled and copied them: such preoccupations are most apparent in the selection and glossing of the texts which manuscripts from various periods transmit. There is yet a third class of information to be gleaned, from some manuscripts at least, by a combined study of both their physical appearance and of the texts they contain: this information pertains to the time when, the place where, and the reasons why a collection of texts (which is preserved only in a later book) was first put together. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 57 is a manuscript which invites such an approach. The book, its physical appearance (including its numerous later additions), the texts it presents, and the way it was used in late Anglo-Saxon England have been thoroughly and competently studied, and such studies are invaluable for what I shall attempt to do here: to uncover the ambience in which the ultimate exemplar of Corpus 57 was compiled and used, and to uncover the reason why this exemplar was copied into Corpus 57 and why it was copied in the fashion in which it appears there.

The tenth-century Benedictine Reform in England

The tenth-century Benedictine Reform in England

Anglo-Saxon prognostics in context: a survey and handlist of manuscripts

The various Latin and Old English texts which have come to be called ‘prognostics’ have not, in general, been well served by scholars. For some texts the only available edition is Oswald Cockayne's Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England from 1864-6; most others are available only in the broad but somewhat unsystematic series of articles published by Max Förster in Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen in the 1910s and 1920s. Anselm Hughes does not include the eight prognostic texts in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 391 in his otherwise fairly thorough edition of much of that manuscript; Peter Baker and Michael Lapidge omit any discussion of such texts from their excellent survey of the history of the computus in the preface to their edition of Byrhtferth's Enchiridion. The mid-eleventh-century Christ Church manuscript now known as London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iii has attracted the notice of many fine scholars, including liturgists, linguists and monastic and art historians, who have been drawn to the series of texts at the beginning of the manuscript (fols. 117-73 and 2-27), including two magnicent full-page drawings (117v and 2v) and glossed copies of the Benedictine Rule and the Regularis Concordia. Helmut Gneuss describes this carefully presented series of interrelated texts as ‘a compendium of the Benedictine Reform movements in Carolingian Francia and in tenth-century England’; Robert Deshman has argued that the very sequence of texts is ‘laden with meaning’. Despite their appreciation of these manuscript sequences, however, few scholars have included in their study of this material the eighteen prognostic texts which follow the Regularis Concordia in the manuscript (27v-47), though most of these are in the same hand and are arranged, it may be argued, with equal care.

Review: The Intellectual Foundations of the English Benedictine Reform * Mechthild Gretsch: The Intellectual Foundations of the English Benedictine Reform

Review: The Intellectual Foundations of the English Benedictine Reform Mechthild Gretsch : The Intellectual Foundations of the English Benedictine Reform Get access Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 37, Issue 2, 1 April 2001, Page 234, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/37.2.234-a Published: 01 April 2001

Reading Old English TextsNew Approaches to Editing Old English Verse by Sarah Larratt Keefer (review)

as a vital shiftfrom narrationin Confessions on the way to meditationin the Reveries of a SolitaryWalker.But in spite of much fine close analysis of Rousseau's 'selfcenteredness ' (p. I26), a de-centred spin threatens to stall the momentum of the argument, an effect which the second 'interlude'does nothing to dispel. The very wide trawl of Beckett texts that follows -more than forty, many invoked more than once - is ambitiousbut only intermittentlyenlightening. Beckettonce spoke (in one of the few texts of his not cited here, a reviewof the poems of Denis Devlin) of'the need that in its haste to be abolished cannot pause to be stated', and a long book becomes overlong under the pressure of an analogous need. James Olney is too well-informed and too professionalfor the 'weave' of his writing ever to look threadbare. But by the end one is thinking and looking back to the crystal clear beginning, 'Saint Augustine Solo' and his 'Multitudinous Narrative' (p. 26), wonderingwhere such singlenessof purposewent, and why. UNIVERSITY OFREADING JOHNPILLING ReadingOldEnglish Texts. Ed. by KATHERINE O'BRIEN O'KEEFFE. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 1997. xi +231 pp. ?37 50; $59-95 (paperbound I 3.95; $ 8.95). New Approachesto Editing Old English Verse. Ed. by SARAHLARRATTKEEFERand KATHERINE O'BRIEN O'KEEFFE. Cambridge: Brewer. I998. vii + 126 pp. ?30; $54. NewApproaches considersmodern editing techniques, a topic also presented towards the end of nine reading methods considered in Reading OldEnglishTexts.Whereas the latterbook can be read as a useful revisionprimerfor the initiated, or learning aid for the beginner, New Approaches is understandably written for the scholar (mostly, of course, for the scholar whose interests begin with the Benedictine Reform). This book follows on from TheEditingof OldEnglish,edited by D. G. Scragg and Paul E. Szarmach (Woodbridge,Suffolk,and Rochester NY: Brewer, 1994),althoughsome of its seven essayshave been in preparationsince beforethen. Throughout New Approaches there is a leitmotiv by which the responsibility for editing Old Englishworksis graduallyseen to fall away from the prescriptivetextediting giants of this and the last century, through the open-ended remarks of today's commentators, into the hands of the computer-literatereaderof the future. Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe warns us in her introduction about 'the platonic notions' of positing an original 'best' text more authoritative than the scribe's version we have before us (pp. 4-5). To believe in this textual ideal was to be an 'Optimist'.To do otherwise,to respecttheuncertaintiesofpreservationbyfavouring the scribe's text over that of his lost exemplars, is to be the modern version of a manuscriptconservative, a 'Recensionist'. To emend or not to emend? EdwardB. Irving, Jr (pp. I -20) returns to his 1953 edition of Exodus in order to measure present-day virtues against the New Critical formalistera in which he first edited this poem. He proposes four levels of probability for emendations, in ascending order of difficulty. Sarah Larratt Keefer treats the book context of Old English poems (pp. 21-44), particularlywith regardto the scribeof Kentish Psalm50 in folio 70v 73r of BL Cotton Vespasian D.vi, for whose scriptorium it seems money matteredmore than the presentationof the copied poem. This and LarrattKeefer's other observationsservenotice on standardeditions for the spuriousauthoritythey conferon a poem in itsprinted,clinicallyisolated,form.A. N. Doane arguesthat in books from the eighth century onwards Old English verse was copied quite as a vital shiftfrom narrationin Confessions on the way to meditationin the Reveries of a SolitaryWalker.But in spite of much fine close analysis of Rousseau's 'selfcenteredness ' (p. I26), a de-centred spin threatens to stall the momentum of the argument, an effect which the second 'interlude'does nothing to dispel. The very wide trawl of Beckett texts that follows -more than forty, many invoked more than once - is ambitiousbut only intermittentlyenlightening. Beckettonce spoke (in one of the few texts of his not cited here, a reviewof the poems of Denis Devlin) of'the need that in its haste to be abolished cannot pause to be stated', and a long book becomes overlong under the pressure of an analogous need. James Olney is too well-informed and too professionalfor the 'weave' of his writing ever to look...

Norse Romances , and: Volume I: The Tristan Legends , and: Volume II: Knights of the Round Table , and: Volume III: Hœrra Ivan ed. by Marianne E. Kalinke (review)

78ARTHURIANA the high points, it is not always up to date. In many chapters John adopts a chatty tone (comparing Woden to a 'Premier league football manager,' Suetonius to a 'bitchy gossip columnist,' King David to a 'shifty politician'), and examples could be multiplied throughout. The odd casual ethnic stereotype will irritate a number of readers. Along with the deliberately conversational style and the light annotation comes a seemingly casual handling ofhard information, as ifremembered, but not checked. This mode of scholarship occasionally gets the book into trouble. In reference to pagan ritual intoxication, John writes 'Contemporary Christian writers called them deoflumgylde, devil's guilds' (24). There are at least seventeen instances ofthe word 'deofolgylde,' eleven of which are in /Elfric, two in the OE translation of the Ecclesiastical History, and four in the Old English Martyrology, that is, ranging over the ninth, tenth, and early eleventh centuries. Apart from the badly remembered (indeed, impossible) compound form and the tendentious translation ofgield, what 'contemporaries' are being referred to? We are not told. Similarly, in a chapter on the politics of the Benedictine Reform (Ch. 6), John means to illustrate his contention that life in the newly reformed houses of the late tenth century was harsh. He recounts the well-known story of/Ethelwold and the stew pot, claiming that one Foldbriht, later abbot of Pershore, was the parboiled Abingdon cook in vEthelwold's test of obedience. No source is given for the story, but surely this is a lapsus memoriae, since both Wulfstan ofWinchester and Aelfric, in their 'Lives of yEthelwold,' identify the monk as one iElfstan (Aelfstanus or Elstanus). Chapter 2 is structured around much-told tales. Students of literature will not wish to consult the chapter for its take on Beowulf. While Mr. John is welcome to his view that the poem is early, his reference to Busse and Holtei's 1981 study as published 'recently' leads one to suspect that this chapter had a life well before that ofthe book. And his refusal to update the considerable bibliography on the dating of Beowulf(see, especially his n. 33 and 34) is either cavalier or sloppy. The final note of this chapter, n. 38, is a self-indulgent personal narrative about how the author scored a public bon mot put down ofa 'lady' from the 'City system' in New York by drawing her attention to the difference between 'copulate' and its fourletter street partner. The note cries out for editorial excision. ReassessingAnglo-Saxon England is a provocative and often entertaining read for someone well-versed in Anglo-Saxon history. But it should be used by a neophyte with some caution. KATHERINE O'BRIEN o'kEEFFE University of Notre Dame Marianne E. KALiNKE, ed., Norse Romances, Arthurian Archives IH-V. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1999. Volume I: The Tristan Legends. Pp. x, 294. isbn: 0-85991-552-2. $90. Volume II: Knights ofthe Round Table. Pp. 329. isbn: 0-85991-556-5. $90. Volume III: Harra Ivan. Pp. 313. isbn: 0-85991-560-3. $75. This three-volume set makes available for the first time a critical edition and facing- REVIEWS79 page English translation ofeleven Arthurian romances from Scandinavia. The tales, ranging in length from 60 to 6446 lines, comprise seven translations from Old French poetry into Old Norse prose, one translation from Old French poetry into Old Swedish verse, and three Icelandic compositions from the fourteenth and fifteenth century. Two other medieval Scandinavian works touching on Arthur— Breta sögur (The Sagas of the British) and Merlínusspá (The Prophecy of Merlin), both translated from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae—are not included, as they fall outside the category of roman courtois. The first set oftranslations are associated in many manuscripts with the court of King Hákon Hákonarson of Norway (1217-1263). The French texts to which the Norwegian translators were drawn include Thomas's Tristan (Tristrams saga ok !sondar); three courtly romances by Chrétien de Troyes—Erec et Enide (Erex saga), Le chevalier au lion or Yvain (fvens saga), and the fragmentary Le conte du graal or Perceval (ParcevaL· saga, verses 1-6513), and Valvenspáttr, verse 6514 to the end); two...

The Monasteries of the Benedictine Reform and the ‘Winchester School’: Model Cases of Social Networks in Anglo-Saxon England?

The Monasteries of the Benedictine Reform and the ‘Winchester School’: Model Cases of Social Networks in Anglo-Saxon England?

Review of Book: The Intellectual Foundations of the English Benedictine Reform

Review of Book: The Intellectual Foundations of the English Benedictine Reform

The Junius Psalter gloss: its historical and cultural context

Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 27 (S.C. 5139), the Junius Psalter, was written, Latin text and Old English gloss, probably at Winchester and presumably during the reign of King Edward the Elder. Junius 27 is one of the twenty-nine complete or almost complete psalters written or owned in Anglo-Saxon England which have survived. (In addition to these twenty-nine complete psalters, eight minor fragments of further psalters are still extant.) This substantial number of surviving manuscripts and fragments is explained by the paramount importance of the psalms in the liturgy of the Christian church, both in mass and especially in Office. Junius 27 is also one of the ten psalters from Anglo-Saxon England bearing an interlinear Old English gloss to the entire psalter. (In addition there are two psalters with a substantial amount of glossing in Old English, though not full interlinear versions.) Since our concern in the first part of this article will be with the nature of the Old English glossing in the Junius Psalter, and its relationship to other glossed psalters, it is appropriate at the outset to provide a list of the psalters in question. At the beginning of each of the following items I give the siglum and the name by which the individual psalters are traditionally referred to by psalter scholars. An asterisk indicates that the Latin text is aPsalterium Romanum(the version in almost universal use in England before the Benedictine reform); unmarked manuscripts contain thePsalterium Gallicanum. For full descriptions of the manuscripts, see N. R. Ker,Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon.

The Rule, the Bible, and the Council: The Library of the Benedictine Abbey at Praglia by Diana Gisolfi and Staale Sindling-Larsen

BOOK REVIEWS555 pacifism, on the growing tendency to define religious identity largely in terms of such externals as doctrine and public behavior. In this respect, Hôpital resembles not so much Cardinal Richelieu, as KLm suggests, but rather Michel de Marillac. Like Marillac, Hôpital proposed a different course for France than the one historically taken. It was perhaps only symbolically fitting that the last year ofthe Chancellor's life witnessed the horrors ofthe St. Bartholomew's Day massacres , a paroxysm of violence that, as Denis Crouzet has recently argued, destroyed the forlorn hope to forge a sense of brotherhood based on the kind of humanistic understanding of justice and piety so cherished by Hôpital. Michael Wolfe Pennsylvania State University—Altoona College The Rule, the Bible, and the Council:The Library ofthe BenedictineAbbey at Praglia. By Diana Gisolfi and Staale Sindling-Larsen. [College Art Association Monograph of the Fine Arts, Volume LV] (Seattle: University of Washington Press. 1998. Pp. xiii, 201;ills. 73 [4 in col.]. $55.00.) The subject ofthis monograph is the cycle oftwenty-four paintings created ca. 1570 (according to the author's reasoning) by Battista Zelotti (ca. 1526-1578) for the earlier sixteenth-century library room at Sta. Maria di Praglia near Padua. The Renaissance monastic complex there was the result of the Benedictine reform movement begun by Ludovico Barbo (1381-1443), the abbot of Sta. Giustina at Padua. Before they can turn their attention to the paintings, however , the authors must reconstruct the architecture and furnishings of the original room—compromised in the eighteenth century—and reassemble the complete cycle, including the wall paintings now in the refectory, all of which they achieve by means of their examination of the existing space, their reinterpretation of the documents, and the magic of the computer. The result restores to historical knowledge a characteristic Cinquecento library with two rows of reading benches, paintings alternating with openings along the walls, and a geometrically framed painted ceiling. Had the authors set out to do nothing else, this would be a welcome study, as the inventory is short indeed of well-understood Renaissance monastic library rooms.Judging by their bibliography, only a little has been added since my own student survey of a third of a century ago. It is the program of Zelotti's work, however, that is the center of the authors' interest. The paintings represent allegories and scenes from the Old and New Testaments, but they find the program doctrinal rather than narrative. Their exploration of the intellectual, spiritual, and institutional context in which Zelotti worked reveals sources that are stated succinctly in their title: the program relies upon the Rule of St. Benedict, the Benedictine "tradition ofbooks," and Benedictine reform movements within the Church that stem from before and during the Council ofTrent. The theme 556book reviews of the cycle, they suggest, was inspired by the wish to reaffirm sacramental and monastic traditions in the period following the Council. They can find no narrow library iconography here. While their introduction claims without qualification that Zelotti's paintings at Praglia (including those in the church itself) "constitute an important achievement, comparable in size and complexity to that of Paolo Veronese at San Sebastiano in Venice," they are more modest and more cautious about their interpretation of the library program itself. They present a working hypothesis, they say. "Right" or not, their discussion will further the study of Renaissance library rooms and library cycles. That is not to state that this book is without its faults. Although one might say that their larger argument seems reasonable and will further discussion, there are any number of vague or questionable statements that give one pause. In general the authors were ill-served by their copy editor, who allowed some awkward moments to get by (as in"there occurred an activation of" [p. 24]), but I would guess that they are responsible for others. In their eagerness to connect the library paintings to the Benedictine "tradition of books," for example, they "point out that most manuscripts and early printed codices were illustrated"(p. 26). That's a characteristically art-historical distortion: students of the history of the book know better. James...

The architectural interest of theRegularis Concordia

TheRegularis Concordiawas issued by the synod which met in Winchester in the early years of the 970s at the height of the English Benedictine reform movement. At this time perhaps as many as fifteen monasteries were either being planned or were in the course of construction. In spite of this building activity, very little is said directly inRCabout the buildings of a community, but it contains a considerable amount of primary evidence concerning the assumptions and expectations which its compilers had about the buildings needed by an English monastery at that time. InRCthere is no consciously stated ideal setting, like that of the later Cistercians, in which a monastic community should live the life prescribed in this consuetudinary. Certain anxieties are shown about the use to which some of the buildings are to be put, and, in one area – the guest house – improvements are suggested, but for the most part any information which we can gather is from incidental or casual reference.

Æthelwold's translation of theRegula Sancti Benedictiand its Latin exemplar

St Benedict wrote his Rule for monastic communities in the first half of the sixth century. It must have reached England in the course of the seventh century and was translated into Old English prose by Æthelwold, bishop of Winchester, in about 970 at the request of King Edgar and Qeen Ælfthryth. Æhelwold was one of the leaders of the tenth-century Benedictine reform in England and his translation of the Rule is among his major contributions to the reform movement. Moreover the Old English Rule holds a key position in the history of the development of Old English language and literature. Manuscripts of the text must have been numerous from the tenth century to the twelfth century and even the thirteenth. Scholars like William of Malmesbury, Lawrence Nowell, John Jocelyn and Francis Junius took an interest in the Old English Rule, but, except for a chapter printed from BM Cotton Faustina A.x by Thomas Wright in 1842, the text was not easily accessible until Arnold Schröer published his edition in 1885, followed in 1888 by his introduction discussing date and authorship, the relationship between the manuscripts and some linguistic points. Comparatively little work seems to have been done on the Old English Rule since then except for Rohr's Bonn Dissertation of 1912 and Professor Gneuss's supplement to the 1964 reprint of Schröer's edition. Rohr, in an investigation of the phonology and the inflexional morphology of the manuscripts of the Old English Rule, was able to show that the language of all of them is basically late West Saxon, while Gneuss gave a survey of what is known about the Old English Rule and the Latin Rule in Anglo-Saxon England; he also pointed out the difficulties involved in an attempt to identify or reconstruct the Latin exemplar which Æthelwold used. In this article I shall consider four topics which seem to me essential for our understanding of the Old English Rule: the question of Æthelwold's exemplar; the relationship between the manuscripts of the Old English Rule; Æthelwold's aims and techniques in his translation; and the vocabulary of the Old English Rule, with special reference to recent research in Old English word geography.

Benedictine Reform Movements in the Later Middle Ages

Benedictine Reform Movements in the Later Middle Ages

Eschatology in the Anonymous Old English Homilies

The vernacular homilies of pre-conquest England fall into two clear groups: homilies whose authorship is unknown and which are generally considered to have been written by the middle of the tenth century and the sermon collections of Abbot Ælfric of Eynsham and Archbishop Wulfstan II of York which were written,ca.990–1020, under the influence of the Benedictine reform.

The Beginning of the Benedictine Reform in England

The Beginning of the Benedictine Reform in England

History and Texts of the Benedictine Reform of the Tenth Century.

History and Texts of the Benedictine Reform of the Tenth Century.