Abstract
André Crépin begins his essay “Bede and the Vernacular” by reminding his audience not only that Bede reputedly died while dictating an English translation, but also that none of Bede’s own translations survive.2 Crépin ponders whether Bede’s Latin could possibly tell us anything about his English. Playing what he calls a “donnish parlour game,” Crépin attempts to reconstruct the “lost sagas woven into the Latin text of the Ecclesiastical History” by framing Bede’s famous account of imperiumwielding kings from Book 2, chapter 5, in the style of Widsith and Beowulf.3 Although Crépin makes light of this antiquarian ventriloquism as he settles down to a serious discussion of Bede’s analyses of Old English place names and Cædmon’s Hymn, he has made an astonishing suggestion: Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica (HE)4 itself can be read as a palimpsest. Through these playful reinscriptions, Crépin reminds us that Bede’s own layers of authoritative Latin prose not only reshape Pliny, Solinus, Gildas, and Orosius for new audiences, but they also recast the oral accounts that he had heard, probably in English, from some of his informants.5
This essay examines literal and metaphorical palimpsests in the OEHE, emphasizing the strategies through which Bede’s translators represent Bede’s voice in direct and indirect discourse.1
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Notes
André Crépin, “Bede and the Vernacular,” in Famulus Christi: Essays in Commemoration of the Thirteenth Centenary of the Birth of the Venerable Bede, ed. Gerald Bonner (London: SPCK, 1976), p. 170 [170–92].
Bede, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors (1969; repr. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). All quotations of the HE hereafter are taken from this edition.
Thomas Miller, ed. and trans. The Old English Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, EETS, o.s., 95, 96, 110, 111 (1890–8; repr. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2003).
s. x1, Ker, Catalogue, no. 351; Gneuss, Handlist, no. 668. N.R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957); Helmut Gneuss, Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: A List of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England up to 1100, MRTS 241 (Tempe: ACMRS, 2001); see also Richard Gameson, “The Decoration of the Tanner Bede,” ASE 21 (1992): 129 [115–59].
On the “eventful” nature of the HE, see Allen Frantzen, Desire for Origins (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990).
These dates reflect the window determined by the earliest manuscript evidence. David Dumville argues for the earlier date of London, British Library Cotton MS Domitian A.ix. See Dumville, “English Square Minuscule Script: The Background and Earliest Phases,” ASE 16 (1985): 147–79.
The manuscripts have been described by Ker. Gameson and Bately also describe manuscript T in detail. I will also provide complete new descriptions in my forthcoming study and new edition. Janet M. Bately, ed. The Tanner Bede: The Old English Version of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, Oxford Bodleian Library Tanner 10 Together with the Mediaeval Binding Leaves, Oxford Bodleian Library Tanner 10* and the Domitian Extracts, London British Library Cotton Domitian A IX Fol. 11, EEMF 24 (1992).
For a fuller discussion of the problem of the OEHE stemma, see Dorothy Whitelock, “The List of Chapter-Headings in the Old English Bede,” in Old English Studies in Honour of John C. Pope, ed. Robert B. Burlin and Edward B. Irving, Jr. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974)
S.M. Rowley, “Nostalgia and the Rhetoric of Lack: The Missing Old English Bede Exemplar for Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 41,” in Old English Literature in Its Manuscript Contexts, ed. Joyce Tally Lionarons (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2004), pp. 11–35.
JJ. Campbell, “The OE Bede: Book III, Chapters 16–20,” MLN (1953): 381 [381–86].
On the replacement of the Libellus Responsionum, see Sharon M. Rowley, “Shifting Contexts: Reading Gregory’s Letter in Book III of the Tanner Bede,” in Rome and the North: The Early Reception of Gregory the Great in Germanic Europe, ed. Rolf Bremmer, Kees Dekker, David F. Johnson, Mediaevalia Groningana n.s. 4. (Louvain: Peeters, 2001), pp. 83–92.
The debate about the relationship of the OEHE to Alfred’s program is extensive. For a fuller discussion, see Sharon M. Rowley, “Bede in Later Anglo-Saxon England,” in The Cambridge Companion to Bede, ed. Scott DiGregorio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 216–28.
See also Whitelock, “The Old English Bede,” Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture 1962, in British Academy Papers on Anglo-Saxon England, ed. E.G. Stanley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 227–61;
Malcolm Godden, “Did King Alfred Write Anything?” Medium Ævum 76.1 (2007): 1–23;
Janet Bately, “Old English Prose Before and During the Reign of Alfred,” ASE 17 (1988): 93–138, and “The Alfredian Canon Revisited,” in King Alfred The Great, ed. Timothy Reuter (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 107–120;
Gregory G. Waite, “The Vocabulary of the Old English Version of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica,” (PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 1985). DAI 46A (1985), pdf version.
See Miller, Whitelock, and Waite. See also Max Deutschbein, “Dialektische in der ags. Übersetzung von Bedas Kirchengeschichte,” Beiträge zur Geschichte Deutschen Sprache und Literatur 26 (1901): 169–244;
J. Schipper, ed., König Alfreds Übersetzung von Bedas Kirchengeschichte, Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Prosa 4 (Leipzig: Wigand, 1897 and 1899);
Frederick Klaeber, “Notes on the Alfredian Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People,” PMLA 14 (1899), Appendix I and II: lxxii–lxxiii.
S. Potter, On the Relation of the Old English Bede to Werferth’s Gregory and to Alfred’s Translations, Mémoires de la société royale des sciences de Bohême, Classe des lettres, 1930 (Prague, 1931), p. 33.
Both Whitelock and Raymond Grant have demonstrated the unlikelihood that Miller’s [Y] exemplar existed. See Whitelock, “Chapter Headings,” and Raymond Grant, The B Text of the Old English Bede, Costerus, n.s. 73 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989).
I refer to the main translator as such, the translator of the lists of chapter headings as the second translator, and the section of Book 2 in Ca and O as the third translator. Whitelock, “Chapter-Headings,” p. 270. J.W. Pearce, Francis A. March, and A. Marshall Elliot, “Did King Alfred Translate the Historia Ecclesiastical” PMLA 7 (1892): vi–x.
Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, Visible Song, CSASE 4 (Cambridge: CUP, 1990); Paul Saenger, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading, Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
Fred Orton, Ian Wood, and Clare Lees, Fragments of History: Rethinking the Ruthwell and Bewcastle Monuments (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), Chapter 3, “Style, and Seeing … As,” pp. 63–80.
Donald K. Fry, “Bede Fortunate in His Translators: The Barking Nuns,” in Studies in Earlier Old English Prose, ed. Paul E. Szarmach (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), p. 345 [345–62];
Stanley B. Greenfield, A Critical History of Old English Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1965), p. 32.
H.R. Loyn, “The Term Ealdorman in Translations Prepared at the Time of King Alfred,” English Historical Review 68 (1953): 513–25.
Raymond C. St. Jacques, “‘Hwilum Word Be Worde, Hwilum Andgit of Andgiete’? Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and Its Old English Translator,” Florilegium 5 (1983): 93 and 90 [85–104].
One of the primary claims of a larger project, of which this chapter is a part, is that the main translator understood Bede’s sense of history well. See S.M. Rowley, The Old English Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, forthcoming); J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, “Bede and Plummer,” Bede’ Ecclesiastical History of the English People: A Historical Commentary (1988; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. xx [xv–xxxv];
Calvin Kendall, “Imitation and the Venerable Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica,” in Saints, Scholars, and Heroes, vol. 1, eds. M.H. King and W.M. Stevens (Collegeville: Hill Monastic Library, Saint John’s Abbey and University, 1979), pp. 145–59;
Robert Hanning, The Vision of History in Early Britain (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), p. 67
H. E J. Cowdrey, “Bede and the English People,” Journal of Religious History 11.4 (1981): 501–523;
Patrick Wormald, “The Venerable Bede and the ‘Church of the English,’” in The English Religious Tradition and the Genius of Anglicanism, ed. G. Rowell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 13–32;
Nicholas Howe, Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
Robert Stanton, The Culture of Translation in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002), p. 82.
See Copeland and Stanton. See also Martin Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture: Grammatica and Literary Theory 350–1100, CSML 19 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Henry Sweet, An Anglo-Saxon Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press/Clarendon, 1896).
Clem Robyns, “Translation and Discursive Identity,” Poetics Today 15:3 (1994): 407. Another example of this is the relatively heavy use of the dative absolute in the OEHE. See Bately, “Alfredian Canon,” p. 114.
Paul Ricoeur, “What is a Text?” in A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, ed. Mario J. Valdés (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), p. 57 [43–64].
Fred C. Robinson, “Old English Literature in Its Most Immediate Context,” in Fred C. Robinson, ed., The Editing of Old English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 3–24.
Willi Paul Adams, “The Historian as Translator: An Introduction,” Journal of American History (1999): 1283–88.
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© 2011 Leo Carruthers, Raeleen Chai-Elsholz, and Tatjana Silec
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Rowley, S.M. (2011). “Ic Beda” … “Cwæđ Beda”: Reinscribing Bede in the Old English Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum . 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_6
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