Vercelli Homily Research Articles

Male and Female Devotion in Three Texts of the Vercelli Book: Vercelli VII, XVII and Elene

ABSTRACTIn this article, I propose that the interaction of male and female devotion is a significant concern in three texts of the Vercelli Book, Vercelli Homily VII, Vercelli XVII and Cynewulf’s Elene. I consider the repetition of theme and trends in the adaptation of source material across these three texts to show how they each emphasise women’s obedience to God and generosity towards the church. Studies of the Vercelli Book have conventionally assumed a male audience. In this article, I argue that Vercelli VII, Vercelli XVII and Elene could have been read with considerable effect in a context commensurate with their internal evidence, where male and female devotion had shared economic and spiritual goals. In this article I re-evaluate evidence for the interaction of male and female religious in Anglo-Saxon England and propose that the selection of texts in the Vercelli Book reflects this mixed gender context.

Dramatizing Devotion in the Old English Vercelli Homily IV

Dramatizing Devotion in the Old English Vercelli Homily IV

Redeeming Wastelands, Building Communities in the Old English Guthlac A

Although ecocriticism has recently flourished in the scholarship of medieval English literature, the majority of attention has focused on Middle English literature;1 as Alfred K. Siewers notes, “Modern scholarship long believed that descriptions of nature in Anglo-Saxon literature tended to be more alienated and distanced in tone and theme than those in neighboring contemporary Insular literary cultures” (199). However, when we examine the literature of the Anglo-Saxon period, ecological concerns appear, even if seemingly on the margins. Such is the case, I argue, for the Old English poem Guthlac A, found in the late tenth-century Exeter Book, which details the religious life of Saint Guthlac. Guthlac, a member of the Mercian royal family born in 673 AD, abandoned a successful military life in order to enter a monastery at the age of twenty-four.2 A few years later, in 701 AD, he withdrew from the secular world even further by removing himself to the wild fens of East Anglia, where he lived for thirteen years, constantly repulsing demonic attacks, as attested by the various accounts of his life. In 740 AD, approximately thirty years after Guthlac’s death, which occurred in 714 AD, a monk of Crowland by the name of Felix composed the first-known hagiography of Guthlac, the Vita Sancti Guthlaci. Vernacular accounts soon appeared in various Old English texts, specifically, the Old English Martyrology, the Vercelli Homily XXIII, and an Old English prose Life.

Dualism in Old English Literature: The Body-and-Soul Theme and Vercelli Homily IV

Scholarship on the Old English body-and-soul theme has largely focused on the damned soul’s hostility toward its body, especially as this is represented in the poem Soul and Body . Yet, whether censuring the poem’s perspective or attempting to rehabilitate it, studies of this theme have not clearly described the concept at its heart, anthropological dualism. This article argues that we as critics must clarify our terms when discussing the body-and-soul theme if we are to gain purchase on just how anthropological dualism is represented in the theme’s various instantiations. Following my treatment of anthropological dualism, I read Vercelli Homily IV as a unique instantiation of the body-and-soul theme that ultimately affirms the complementarity of body and soul and their mutual implication in one another—specifically through the use of dramatic form in the homily’s Judgment scene. Christ’s speeches in this scene produce a structural irony out of the traditional material, simultaneously including the familiar positions while critiquing them internally through an anthropological dualism that is complementary, not hostile, and found in Latin patristic texts commonly studied in Anglo-Saxon England.

Scott T. Smith Land and Book: Literature and Land Tenure in Anglo-Saxon EnglandLand and Book: Literature and Land Tenure in Anglo-Saxon England. Scott T. Smith. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Pp. xii+288.

<i>Scott T. Smith</i> Land and Book: Literature and Land Tenure in Anglo-Saxon England<i>Land and Book: Literature and Land Tenure in Anglo-Saxon England</i>. Scott T. Smith. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Pp. xii+288.

Soð and Sense: Language Problems and Affective Solutions in Anglo-Saxon Treatments of the Guthlac Legend

Augustine of Hippo stresses the simultaneous necessity and unreliability of poetic rhetoric in expressing spiritual truth, pointing to its efficacy in delighting and moving audiences as well as its capacity to dangerously distract listeners from the true meaning of the words. Augustine’s ambivalence about language was widely influential to later medieval authors, including the various Anglo-Saxon hagiographers of Guthlac of Crowland. The Old English Guthlac poems reflect an Augustinian anxiety about the limits of language in different ways. Following their source, a Latin prose vita by Felix of Crowland, both Guthlac A and a Vercelli homily account of the saint’s life stress the dangerous noise of Guthlac’s demonic adversaries even as both accounts hint at their rhetorical power. In a way that approaches the eloquent silence advocated by Pseudo-Dionysius and the via negativa, Guthlac B begins to negotiate this tension around language by highlighting a more intuitive, sense-based epistemology that makes us...

Sources and Analogues for Blickling Homily V and Vercelli Homily XI

Sources and Analogues for Blickling Homily V and Vercelli Homily XI

Vercelli Homily 6 and the Apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew

Vercelli Homily 6 and the Apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew

Vercelli Homily 6 and the Apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo‐Matthew

Vercelli Homily 6 and the Apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo‐Matthew

The Old English 'Soul and Body'

Part 1 Manuscripts: the Vercelli book the Exeter book paleographic features in the versions of Soul and Body textual history editorial history. Part 2 Language: phonology, morphology, syntax vocabulary. Part 3 Prosody. Part 4 Formulaic composition. Part 5 Sources and analogues: origins of the body-and-soul theme the Nonantola version the Junius and Cambridge Addresses Vercelli homily IV and other prose addresses Soul and Body and later English body-and-soul poems. Part 6 Literary criticism: structure and tone the damned soul the blessed soul.

THE USE OF THE NOUN OLEHTUNG IN VERCELLI HOMILY VII

THE USE OF THE NOUN OLEHTUNG IN VERCELLI HOMILY VII Get access ANTONINA HARBUS ANTONINA HARBUS Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 37, Issue 4, December 1990, Pages 389-b–391, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/37-4-389b Published: 01 December 1990

The Reversal of the Jordan in Vercelli Homily 16 and in Old English Literature

Three Epiphany homilies survive in Old English, two by Ælfric and one numbered sixteenth among the anonymous homilies in the late tenth-century Vercelli Book. True to early medieval convention for this feast, the homilies by Ælfric are devoted principally to the adoration of the magi and to Christ's Baptism, the two earliest manifestations of Christ's divinity. The Vercelli homily stands apart from these in several respects, perhaps most obviously in that it opens with a Gospel lection from Mt 3.13–17 (on the Baptism) rather than Mt 2.1–16 (on Herod's meeting with the wise men), and is the only medieval vernacular Epiphany homily to do so. As other scholars have noted, this pericope associates the homily with Gallican or Neapolitan rather than Roman use and links it liturgically to a small group of early Insular texts that include the Lindisfarne Gospels, St. Cuthbert's Gospels, and St. Burchard's Gospels — all of which contain lists of Gospel lections derived from a Neapolitan lectionary system. In addition, though a portion of the text has been lost, the Vercelli homily covers a range of themes seemingly out of place with Ælfric's more sober reflections on the feast, and the central portion of the homily in particular recounts a series of marvels associated with Christ's Baptism that has no parallel in medieval vernacular homiletic literature. The focus of that passage is a dialogue between Christ and John the Baptist, beginning just after the lost folio. Christ and John discuss the wonders of the Baptism, and the homilist interrupts them to explain this miraculous event as the fulfillment of an Old Testament prophecy:

Revisions for Vercelli Homily XX

Revisions for Vercelli Homily XX

Vercelli Homily XI and Its Sources

Vercelli Homily XI and Its Sources

LIX. The Address of the Soul to the Body

There exist in Old English a number of compilations in which an address of the soul to its body is a conspicuous feature. The best known is the poem in the Vercelli and the Exeter Books, in which the soul returns to its body once a week and communes with it, the sinful soul reproaching it vituperatively, the righteous comforting it lovingly and joyously. The fourth Vercelli homily has a remarkable scene, an elaborated account of the judgement of the soul at Doomsday, in which the souls address their bodies as they stand in the presence of the Judge. The Last Judgement is again the scene of an address, and that in one of the homilies presented by Assmann. There is, finally, the Old English vision, printed by Thorpe and Napier, of the bringing forth of the soul, wherein the newly-released soul of a sinner vituperates the body it has just left. To this literature, I wish to add passages from two unpublished Old English homilies, in which the address is made, not at the moment of death, as in Thorpe and Napier, nor at the Last Judgement, as in Vercelli Homily iv and in Assmann, but at some intermediate time, when the soul returns intermittently to its body for that purpose, as in the Old English poem. These two texts are Homilies ii and iv of MS. Junius 85 of the Bodleian Library, and Homily xl of MS. Ii. 1.33 of the Cambridge University Library.

Vercelli Homily VIII and the Christ

Homily VIII of the Vercelli Codex CXVII, is a brief dramatic sermon on penance and the Last Judgment, intended for the first Sunday after Epiphany. It opens with an admonition to the faithful to remember the Lord's warning of the tribulation attending the end of this world. Let us never think our sins too grievous or too shameful for confession: for it is better to confess our sins here before one man, than to confess them at the Day of Judgment, before God and the whole host of Heaven, when all our deeds shall be revealed. The homilist briefly outlines the advent of the Judgment: the coming of the Son of Man in power and great glory, God's mercy to the righteous, the angels blowing their trumpets to the four ends of the world, the resurrection of the dead, and the raging fire. All this, however, is introductory to the central feature of the homily—the address of the Judge to the guilty souls. From His throne of Judgment, God the Son reviews His dealings with man: the Creation, the establishment of man in the joys of Paradise, the Fall, God's mercy to fallen man in His Incarnation, Passion, and Death. The Savior dramatically calls the sinner to behold the wounds in His hands and feet and side; then, charging man with indifference and ingratitude, He sentences him to dwell forever with Satan and his host in Hell. After a brief description of the torments of Hell, the homilist closes with an exhortation to be worthy of the Lord's welcome to the righteous, and of the bliss of Heaven.