Abstract
Throughout the post-Conquest period, manuscripts written in English continued to be produced,1 usually at monastic centers, in much the same way as they had been during the Anglo-Saxon period. The preponderance of surviving material based on Old English exemplars that was copied and adapted from ca. 1100–1200 is homiletic and hagiographie in nature. Its recontextualization in the twelfth century provides opportunities for investigating textual transmission and dissemination, for codicolog-ical and paleographical analyses, for assessing the uses of English texts, and for determining the characteristics and aims of the native literate elite.
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Notes
All the texts are edited by R. N. Warner, Early English Homilies from the Twelfth-Century MS. Vesp. D. XIV, EETS os 152 (London: Oxford University Press, 1917 for 1915).
For the contents and description, see N. R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957; repr. with supplement 1990), item 209; and Jonathan Wilcox, Wulfstan Texts and Other Homiletic Materials, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts in Microfiche Facsimile 8 (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies. Tempe: Arizona, 2000), pp. 53–64. For the Diets of Cato, see E. M. Treharne, “The Form and Function of the Old English Diets of Cato,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 102.4 (September 2003): 65–85. On the possible origins and purposes of the manuscript, see Mary P. Richards, “On the Date and Provenance of the MS Cotton Vespasian D.XIV, ff. 4–169,” Manuscripta 17 (1973): 31–35, which argues for a Rochester origin; Rima Handley, “British Museum MS. Cotton Vespasian D. xiv,” Notes and Queries 219 (1974): 243–50, which argues for a Christ Church, Canterbury origin; and Elaine Treharne, “The Dates and Origins of Three Twelfth-Century Manuscripts,” in Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts and Their Heritage: Tenth to Twelfth Centuries, ed. P. Pulsiano and E. M. Treharne (Ashgate, 1998), pp. 227–52.
See, for example, Susan Irvine, “The Persistence of Old English in the Twelfth Century” and E. M. Treharne, “The Production of Manuscripts Containing English Religious Texts in the First Half of the Twelfth Century,” in Swan and Treharne, Rewriting Old English, pp. 41–61 and 11–40 respectively. See also Mary P. Richards, Texts and Their Traditions in the Medieval Library of Rochester Cathedral Priory, Transactions of the American Philosophical Association, 78.3 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1988).
Hans Sauer, “Knowledge of Old English in the Middle English Period?,” in Language History and Linguistic Modelling: A Festschrift for Jacek Fisiak on his 60 Birthday, ed. Raymond Hickey and Stanislaw Puppel, Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs 101 (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997), pp. 791–814, at 796.
For which, see, for example, Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record (Oxford: Blackwell, 2d ed., 1993), pp. 212; Seth Lerer, “Old English and its afterlife,” chap. 1 in Wallace, Cambridge History of Medieval Literature, pp. 7–34
R. C. Love, states that: “The relics [of St. Neot] were inspected in the late eleventh century, and certified to be authentic by Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury;” see R. C. Love, “St. Neot,” in Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Michael Lapidge, et al. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 331. Tentatively, this might assist in the attribution of Cotton Vespasian D. xiv to Christ Church.
See the discussion in Mary Clayton, “Homiliaries and Preaching in Anglo-Saxon England,” Peritia 4 (1985): 207–42; repr. in Old English Prose: Basic Readings, ed. Paul E. Szarmach, Basic Readings in Anglo-Saxon England 5 (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), pp. 151–98, where the use of the vernacular in homiletic writing is consistently associated with the laity, and Latin texts with the educated monastic environment.
Clayton, “Homiliaries and Preaching,” 151–98; for a description of this manuscript, and Plate 26 for a portion of the text, see Rodney M. Thompson, Catalogue of Manuscripts of Worcester Cathedral Library (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1999).
For the cult of the Virgin Mary generally in Anglo-Saxon England, and the Feast of the Assumption particularly, see Mary Clayton, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Anglo-Saxon England, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 232–44.
See Giles Constable, Three Studies in Medieval Religious Thought: The Interpretation of Mary and Martha, The Ideal of the Imitation of Christ, The Orders of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 3–141, esp. 8–10, 45.
See, for example, Denis Renevey, “Enclosed Desires: A Study of the Wooing Group,” in Mystidstn and Spirituality in Medieval England, ed. William F. Pollard and Robert Boenig (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), pp. 40–62, at 50–52.
Malcolm Godden, ed., “l6fric’s Catholic Homilies, Second Series, EETS ss 5 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), Homily p. xxix, 256, lines 38–40: “On ö isum twam geswustrum wæron getacnode twa lif. pis geswincfulle ỗ e we on wunia ỗ. and påt ece ỗ e we gewilnia ỗ;.” For the commentary and sources of this homily, see Malcolm Godden, Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, Series I and II: Commentary, EETS ss 18 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 588–92.
For this thematic focus in twelfth-century hagiography, see E. M. Treharne, ed., The Old English Life of St Nicholas with the Old English Life of St Giles, Leeds Texts and Studies 15 (Leeds: University of Leeds, 1997).
On these emerging trends, and on theological and scholastic emphases in general in this period, see M.-D. Chenu, Nature, Man and Sodety in the Twelfth Century, ed. and trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little, Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching 37 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997).
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© 2006 Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones
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Treharne, E. (2006). The Life of English in the Mid-Twelfth Century: Ralph D’Escures’s Homily on the Virgin Mary. In: Kennedy, R., Meecham-Jones, S. (eds) Writers of the Reign of Henry II. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-08855-0_8
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