Abstract
The invocation or citation of a metaphor or analogue in any explanation of a literary feature runs a set of risks. Arguably the most famous such analogue in the study of Old English literature, viz. John Leyerle’s interlace theory for the composition of Beowulf, gives a perfect example.1 Leyerle sought to explain narrative features of Beowulf, particularly narrative time and the unfolding of incident, by comparing those features to the interlace pattern of Insular art in manuscripts and metalwork. However effective Leyerle’s comparison might be in the classroom, scholars reacted variously at best and sharply at worst in subsequent studies. Morton W. Bloomfield pronounced, “[T]he ‘interlace’ image is not useful when applied to verbal art.”2 Recognizing the risk of such comparisons and nevertheless moving forward, in part at least in reflective homage to Leyerle and his suggestion, I would like to propose here that the palimpsest offers a way to understand the composition techniques of Old English homilists. Some consideration of what a palimpsest is seems obligatory before the word can have application to the prose. As we shall see, a palimpsest is a rewriting and a reuse of both parchment and an idea, for all writing is a rewriting. Crucial to the analogy is the practice of writers and their scribes.
This essay proposes that the palimpsest offers a way to understand the composition techniques of Old English homilists, notably Ælfric, Wulfstan, and the anonymous tradition.
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Notes
John Leyerle, “The Interlace Structure of Beowulf,” University of Toronto Quarterly 37 (1967): 1–17.
Morton W. Bloomfield, “‘Interlace’ as a Medieval Narrative Technique with Special Reference to ‘Beowulf,’” in Magister Regis: Studies in Honor of Robert Earl Kaske, ed. Arthur Groos with Emerson Brown, Jr., Thomas D. Hill, Giuseppe Mazzota, and Joseph S. Wittig (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986), pp. 49–59.
But see Peter R. Schroeder, “Stylistic Analogies Between Old English Art and Poetry,” Viator 5 (1974): 185 [185–97], who observes that “a brief consideration of some stylistic analogies between Old English art and poetry will suggest that the hypothesis is not wholly scornworthy, and that a certain light can be thrown on the nature and stylistic premises of Old English poetry by an examination of the contemporaneous art.”
Leslie Whitbread, “Wulfstan Homilies XXIX, XXX, and Some Related Texts,” Anglia 81 (1963): 359.
E.A. Lowe, “Codices Rescripti: A List of the Oldest Latin Palimpsests with Stray Observations on Their Origin,” Palaeographical Papers 1907–1965, ed. Ludwig Bieler, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 480–519. Lowe, p. 480, observes that Emile Chatelain gave the first account of palimpsests in the Annuaire of the École Pratique (1904; publ. 1903). Lowe’s list comes off the Codices Latini Antiquissimi program, where the “lower script” antedates the ninth century. I am following Lowe, pp. 481–84, in this paragraph.
See now Georges Declercq, ed. Early Medieval Palimpsests, Bibliologia 26 (2007), with special reference to Beneventan script and research aided by digital technology. The promising collection Signs on the Edge: Space, Text, and Margin in Medieval Manuscripts, ed. Sarah Larratt Keefer and Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr. (Paris and Leuven: Peeters, 2007), came into my hands too late for mention in these pages. Andrew Prescott takes an extended view of what a palimpsest is in “What’s in a Number? The Physical Organization of the Manuscript Collections of the British Library,” in Beatus Vir, ed. A.N. Doane and Kirsten Wolf, MRTS 319 (Tempe: ACMRS, 2006), pp. 471–525. For further discussion of palimpsests with special reference to the Latin tradition, see the essay in this volume by Adrian Papahagi.
See also André Wilmart, Codices Reginenses Latini, vol. 2 (Vatican Library, 1937), pp. 710–19, for a full description of contents. For a photo of fol. 170v, see my note, “Vatican Library, Ms. Reg. Lat. 497, fol. 71v,” OEN 15.1 (1981): 34–35, and for a sharper photograph and transcript of the text,
Janet M. Bately, “The Vatican Fragment of the Old English Orosius,” English Studies 45 (1964): 224–30, where the photograph is between 224 and 225.
N. Denholm-Young, Handwriting in England and Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1954), p. 58 n. 4, clearly following O.B. Schlutter, who edited Faksimile und Transliteration des Épinaler Glossars, Bibliothek der Angelsäschsichen Prosa 8 (1912), p. iv, says that the Épinal Glossary is a palimpsest, a claim denied by Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (1957; reissued with suppl. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), p. 152.
Kevin Kiernan, Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript, rev. ed. with foreword by Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (1981; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). The frontispiece is a color facsimile of fol. 179r, while the cover on the paperback edition offers a color facsimile of fol. 179v.
See Barbara A. Shailor, The Medieval Book (New Haven: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, 1988), pp. 9–10, with photo under ultraviolet at p. 10. The most available edition is now found in Medieval Academy Reprints in Teaching 28 (1991; repr. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1994).
Leslie Brubaker, “Palimpsest,” in Dictionary of the Middle Ages, vol. 9 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1987), p. 355.
Richard Galpin, “Erasure in Art: Destruction, Deconstruction, and Palimpsest” [February 1998], now moved to http://www.richardgalpin.co.uk/archive/erasure.htm.
N.R. Ker, “The Handwriting of Archbishop Wulfstan,” in England Before the Conquest: Studies in Primary Sources Presented to Dorothy Whitelock, ed. Peter Clemoes and Kathleen Hughes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), pp. 315–31.
Wulfstan, The Copenhagen Wulfstan Collection, ed. James E. Cross and Jennifer Morrish Tunberg, EEMF 25 (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1993), pp. 44–49, where Morrish Tunberg reviews Ker’s work in the context of subsequent criticism and sides with him on the major points concerning Wulfstan and his interventions.
Wulfstan, The Homilies of Wulfstan, ed. Dorothy Bethurum (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), pp. 22–24, for the stemma and discussion; pp. 255–75 for the edited texts.
Donald G. Scragg, “Napier’s ‘Wulfstan’ Homily XXX: Its Sources, Its Relationship to the Vercelli Book, and Its Style,” ASE 6 (1977): 197 [197–211].
Malcolm Godden, “The Relations of Wulfstan and Ælfric: a Reassessment,” in Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, ed. Matthew Townend, Studies in the Early Middle Ages 10 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), pp. 353–74. Godden also detects Wulfstan’s restless habit of composition: “His constant tinkering with his own work suggests a man obsessive about the best formulation but incapable of satisfying himself” (p. 372). In the same collection Eric Stanley focuses on “Wulfstan and Ælfric: ‘The True Difference between the Law and the Gospel,’” pp. 429–41.
Ælfric, Homilies of Ælfric: A Supplementary Collection, ed. John C. Pope, EETS o.s. 260 (1968), vol. 2, pp. 667–724;
Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky; foreword by Gerald Prince (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997).
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© 2011 Leo Carruthers, Raeleen Chai-Elsholz, and Tatjana Silec
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Szarmach, P.E. (2011). The Palimpsest and Old English Homiletic Composition. In: Carruthers, L., Chai-Elsholz, R., Silec, T. (eds) Palimpsests and the Literary Imagination of Medieval England. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118805_5
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