The Conspectus

I originally designed the predecessor of this volume (A Conspectus of Scribal Hands Writing English, 960–1100, published in 2012) as a stepping-stone towards a history of late Old English spelling, and as such its scope was limited to manuscripts and documents generally ascribed to the latter half of the tenth century and the entirety of the eleventh. That projected history having now been abandoned, I felt there would be value in expanding the Conspectus by taking the starting date back to the year 700, thereby allowing for the inclusion of around 300 new entries.

For ease of reference, I have retained the layout of the 960–1100 volume, with holding libraries listed alphabetically and individual hands numbered sequentially. To preserve the sequence, new entries have been inserted into the list with a decimal point in the hand number (e.g. 298 Chichester, 298.5 Cologne, 299 Copenhagen). Hand 671 (previously blank) has been added, and hand 1004 has been changed to 1005.2; otherwise, the hand numbers from the 960-1100 volume are unchanged. In places, discontinuous numbering of the decimal points has been used to allow for further additions by future scholars and, particularly in the case of some continental libraries, to allow for future discoveries. Errors that occurred during the composition of the earlier volume have been silently corrected, sporadic instances of English in Latin charters have been noted, and more information regarding facsimiles has been supplied (particularly in relation to the more recent volumes in the Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts in Microfiche Facsimile series, which have useful bibliographies). ‘App’ before a number in the column listing Ker numbers is now used to signify an entry in his Appendix. In the apparatus, a small number of new entries has been incorporated into the Indices of Names and Places and the Subject Index has also been expanded to accommodate new material. The Appendix to the 2012 volume has been omitted, however, in that it has no bearing on the present work.

Unchanged and unchanging is my debt to Simon Keynes for his assistance with charters, and my appreciation of the unremitting helpfulness and patience shown to me by everyone at Boydell, especially Caroline Palmer. Above all, words cannot convey my gratitude for the help given to me by my son Tim, without whose assistance, when I became too ill for sustained academic work, this project could never have come to fruition.

Although the lessons on Silvester in Sarum breviary manuscripts are more unpredictable than those on the other saints in my sample, they all seem to descend from the same ultimate source: a version of the legend like the one in the late medieval collection by Mombritius. The Mombritius text, which comes from branch A of the Gesta Silvestris (BHL 7726–31), provided these English traditions with biographical information plus three long, dramatic stories from Silvester’s life: (1) In a time of persecution the young Silvester champions an outspoken preacher named Timothy, sheltering him until his arrest and boldly confronting the persecutor Tarquinius after Timothy’s execution. (2) Silvester converts and heals the emperor Constantine. (3) Silvester liberates the city of Rome from a dragon that has been terrorizing the people and converts the priests of the old religion in the process.

Most of the sixty-five Sarum versions I have examined seem to be following one – or, remarkably often, one and then another – of five differently abridged recensions of the Mombritius text. (The frequency of breviaries that switch from one recension of Silvester’s legend to another, most often after the third lesson, can be explained when one recalls that early Sarum ordinals prescribed only three proper lessons for this saint. After the number was increased, sometime early in the fourteenth century, there must have been a considerable period during which most of the existing breviaries had too few lessons and needed to be supplemented from additional sources when they were copied or updated.) Instead of starting as usual with the version published in PW, I will list and discuss the recensions in the order suggested by their earliest manifestations in English breviaries.

Detailed Census of the Manuscripts

Recension A* appears first. Excerpts from it survive in a number of thirteenth-century English breviaries, including the monastic ones from Chertsey and Hyde Abbey and the earliest copy of the Hereford breviary, and subsequently in four Sarum manuscripts, the 1505 printed edition of the Hereford breviary (hereafter Hereford P), and some York ones. The Sarum books that use it are these:

Bodl Auct. E. 1. 1 (lectionary with the fullest version, c.1400)

Liverpool (mid to late fourteenth cent.), lecc. 1–3 only; remainder mostly from B*

Bodley 976 (c. 1400), lecc. 1–3 only; remainder from B*

CUL Dd. x. 66 (1435), lecc. 1–3 only; remainder from D

There are two Bartóks. The first passed away in New York on 26 September 1945. The second is the mythical Bartók that emerged when the actual and historical musician died in exile. The story of Bartók’s reception in Italy has shown that the moralisation and politicisation of his legacy were not merely consequences of the composer’s deeds, but a collective process of myth-making that took place in a traumatic and disruptive period of Italian history – the 1940s – and whose origins dated back to the first decades of the twentieth century and the fascist period. The Italian case is not anecdotic. By examining the foundations of the Bartók myth in the late fascist years, and its crucial association with anti-Nazi resistance and democratisation, I have tried to elucidate not only the genesis, structure and far-reaching diffusion of the myth per se, but also the role played by music heroes in the memorialisation of the history of the last century.

In the wake of a generalised amnesty for the protagonists of a highly divisive civil war, Italian intellectuals tried to erase any link that had existed between forms of artistic modernism and the cultural institutions of the fascist dictatorship. They instead promoted conciliatory models, based on widely shared values. They also took advantage of the polysemy of Bartók’s figure, a quality that underpins the effectiveness of myths. Mila and Rondi, in particular, glorified the messianic advent of Bartók as the dawn of the new republican society: Bartók had sacrificed himself to defend the ideals of freedom and social progress, as well as the traditions and aspirations of the people. A perfect synthesis between modernity and tradition, universalism and nationalism, art and politics, the myth of Bartók-as-hero was thus merged with the myth of the Resistenza, a social myth anchored in the traumatic experience of the ventennio and the Second World War and informed by a narrative of exculpation, foreign invasion and resilience. The myth of the Resistenza fostered a new collective ethos based on the pursuit of freedom, cultural superiority and national resurrection. Mila seemed to be prophetically aware of this process of merging when he wrote in 1950 that ‘the main myths of our time found a lasting expression in Bartók’s music’.

Cleanness is the most complex poem discussed in this book. In some ways it follows the same approach as the poems we have already encountered: it takes a historical rather than allegorical approach to biblical stories, and silently combines its biblical source with historical material and romance influences. It appears after Pearl and before Patience in MS Cotton Nero A X, and as with Patience, the poem’s opening word, ‘Clannes’, announces its theme – something that again sets it apart from most other biblical literature. But here that theme is explored through multiple biblical episodes. The poet’s contention is that God loves cleanness, and is angered by ‘fylthe’ (6), and he initially demonstrates this through a retelling of the parable of the wedding guest in foul clothes, found in Luke 14 and Matthew 22. A short discussion of the Fall of Lucifer and that of Adam and Eve functions as a bridge before a full account of Noah’s Ark from Genesis 6–9, beginning with a discussion of the sins of the people who lived before the Flood. The middle section of the poem tells the story of Abraham receiving a celestial visit, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and God turning Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt, from Genesis 18–19. After another bridging section, the final episode follows: Belshazzar’s Feast, from Daniel 5. This tells how Belshazzar, the proud and decadent king of Babylon, misused the vessels from the Temple in Jerusalem and was first terrified by the apparition of a hand writing mysterious characters and then punished with a horrific death. That episode is preceded by an explanation of how the vessels were created, how God caused Nebuchadnezzar to defeat the Jews and conquer Jerusalem, and how Nebuchadnezzar treated the vessels with respect, all pieced together from Kings, Chronicles and Daniel 1. As the poem proceeds, the meanings of ‘clean’ and its opposites are expanded and explored.

The combination of episodes in Cleanness makes it unique among Middle English biblical poems. As discussed in the Introduction, most of these present either a single episode – as with the other poems in this book – or, at the other extreme, the whole of creation history (as with Cursor Mundi).

The legacy of the Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist and pianist Béla Bartók stretches beyond the boundaries of what is generally called classical music. Think of the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, a masterpiece of the 1930s that is featured in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, or of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater landmark Blaubart based on the opera Bluebeard’s Castle. However, Bartók has not only been acknowledged as a great composer of the Western canon; he is also a moral and political hero of the twentieth century. The two aspects can hardly be separated. Bartók’s moral integrity is celebrated in a wide range of written and visual formats in many different countries, from educational television broadcasts to popular cultural products, such as comics and novels. The writer Kjell Espmark, a member of the Swedish Academy, wrote a novel on this topic in 2004: Béla Bartók Against the Third Reich. His book has been translated into many different languages, including French, Italian, Romanian and Spanish. Bartók’s moral stature is also a recurrent topic in illustrious academic discourse. When in 2006 Richard Taruskin derided the awkward choice of the editors of The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music to ‘leave Bartók out’ of the volume, he was not defending Bartók’s musical beauty, but his moral beauty. Without Bartók the whole history of twentieth-century music would lose any ethical sense. According to Taruskin, Bartók is ‘the only redeeming exception to the dismal saga of modernist responses to barbarism’ and his figure ‘offers a rebuke’ and ‘a possible redemption’ to ‘the sad history whereby over the course of the twentieth century the autonomy of art has degenerated into irrelevance, and the disinterestedness of artists has degenerated into moral indifference’. Passionate statements of this kind have some appreciable – and, it might be added, beneficial – consequences. The support and public funding gained by the Béla Bartók Complete Critical Edition, inaugurated in 2016 after three decades of pre-planning and painstaking permission issues, was due not only to Bartók’s stature as Hungary’s leading composer but also to his ‘wider beacon-of-humanity, moral role’.

Bartók still emerges today as a committed composer who is judged by his political deeds: in the standard narrative, he is venerated as an anti-fascist who fought against totalitarianism through his moral coherence and then his self-imposed period of exile in the United States.

Confessio Amantis, a fine MS, much maltreated, at least twenty leaves lost. London, s.xv, first quarter, early.

Contents

(fols 1ra–171vb) Confessio Amantis, Prol. 504–VIII.2791.

Prologue (fols 1ra–3vb) wants 1–503 (three leaves missing) and 984–I.343 (three leaves missing after fol. 3); Book I (fols 4ra–18vb) wants 1–343, 1531–1890 (two leaves missing after fol. 10), 2405–2558 (one leaf missing after fol. 13) and 3423–II.130 (one leaf missing after fol. 18); Book II (fols 19ra–36vb) wants 1–130 and 779–1117 (two leaves missing after fol. 22); Book III (fols 37ra–52vb) wants 2701–IV.86 (one leaf missing after fol. 52); Book IV (fols 53ra–69vb) wants 1–86, 1622–1806 (one leaf missing after fol. 61), 2492–2854 (two leaves missing after fol. 65), 3555–V.16 (one leaf missing after fol. 69); Book V (fols 70ra–111vb) wants 1–16, 3265–3450 (one leaf missing after fol. 87) and 7763–VI.91 (one leaf missing, but for a stub, after fol. 111); Book VI (fols 112ra–124vb) wants 1–91 (leaf missing after fol. 111); Book VII (fols 125ra–155vb) wants 1192–1359 (one leaf missing after fol. 131); Book VIII (fols 155vb–171vb: fol. 155vb has the Latin verses only; English begins at top of 156ra, with full bar-border) breaks of at 2791, on fol. 171vb, with probably at least two further leaves lost, containing 2792–end, and perhaps Latin concluding material. NB The foliation used in this description does not count missing leaves.

In addition to the twenty leaves missing, others are mutilated. The top halves of fols 2 and 3 are torn away, with loss of text, as also most of the outer side of fol. 6, with a tear down the recto of the first column; a stub (not numbered) follows fol. 111, which would have had V.7763–end and VI.1–91; the lower third of fol. 125 is cut out. In addition, fols 88–89 are misbound.

Text: not collated by Macaulay, but allocated to recension I by Eileen Gardiner (see Doyle and Parkes, ‘Production of Copies’, 195 and note 176).

As a key part of project activities, participants read two stories in the Bible and related these stories to their own perspectives and experiences. In the process, they spontaneously related the stories’ characters and events with figures and experiences in their own day-to-day context and lives. In this concluding reflection, two of us, Adriaan and Johanna, as the lead authors of this book, turn the gaze briefly but explicitly towards ourselves, as white European academics who see ourselves as friends and allies – according to some of our participants ‘members of the family’ – of the Ugandan LGBTQ+ refugees we worked with together in this project. How have the stories come to speak to us? What follows are some tentative thoughts emerging from postcolonial and self-reflexive readings of the Bible stories and inter-reading them with our own experience in this project.

We begin with what might seem to be a slight detour: political theorist Rahul Rao’s recent conceptualisation of a ‘queer politics of postcoloniality’, which he applies specifically to the Ugandan context of sexual politics as crystallised in the discourse around the Anti-Homosexuality Bill (AHB). Rao argues that the AHB infamously

In other words, from the point of view of the proponents of the AHB, queer sexuality and advocates of LGBTQ+ rights threaten the moral purity and cultural integrity of the ‘pearl of Africa’, as Uganda is popularly known, because they allegedly defy Ugandan culture and sell out the body of the nation by engaging intimately with ‘the West’ and copying its supposedly morally degraded sexual culture. In the eyes of these proponents, members of Ugandan LGBTQ+ communities are like the guys charged with indecency in the drama: sexually corrupted, comparable with adulterers, defiantly deviant, and deserving of imprisonment, even the death penalty.

But Rao goes further to observe: ‘Faced with the claim that they were “unAfrican”, Ugandan LGBTI activists responded by pointing to the remarkable internationalism of the AHB itself.’

Once, Middle English popular romances were derided as trite mediocrities. They were written by hacks or minstrels, aimed at an unsophisticated audience who would have been unable to appreciate anything of higher literary value. They were unworthy of serious critical attention. But since the late 1980s, they have come back into fashion. The 1988 Gregynog conference on Medieval Romance in England has been repeated every other year, and studies by Susan Crane and Helen Cooper, and collections edited by Nicola McDonald, Jane Gilbert and Ad Putter, to name just a few, bear witness to what is now a thriving academic field. The artistry of many of these romances has been demonstrated, and they have been recognised as political texts, responding to the issues of the day and challenging and reinforcing medieval ideologies and social relations. This book proposes that Middle English biblical poetry has been similarly unfairly derided and overlooked, and is due its turn in the spotlight. Because they adapt biblical material, the poems have been thought of as nothing more than ‘paraphrases’, a term that suggests little creativity and even less interest, and editorial titles such as A Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament have not helped these unfortunate texts. But many are as rich, lively, interesting and creative as any of their romance contemporaries. They also have just as much to say as do the romances about their own historical moment: lineage, family, marriage and reputation are prominent concerns.

This book will explore six biblical poems from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: the Auchinleck Life of Adam and Eve; another Adam poem, the Canticum de Creatione; Iacob and Iosep; A Pistel of Susan; and the Gawain-poet’s Patience and Cleanness. Together with two fifteenth-century poems, The Storie of Asneth and The Life of Job, which I have discussed elsewhere, these constitute all the extant Middle English poems that retell individual narrative episodes from the Old Testament. The six poems in this book were all written between the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which mandated the vernacular instruction of the laity, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1407–09, which sought to control and limit biblical translation into English. So, although in most cases their exact dates are unknown, and their immediate writing contexts seem to have differed, they share a certain cultural moment.