Abstract
Over the past few years I have become obsessed by speculation as to just what Anglo-Saxons thought they were up to when they added vernacular glosses to some of their finest and oldest manuscripts. From our perspective, Aldred’s thick encrusting of the Lindisfarne Gospels with English words and phrases is shocking,1 unless we adopt the point of view that he has thereby given us the first gospel books in English (the incidental benefits to language historians were hardly in his mind).2 The gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels, written in 950–970, is as intrusive as the Vespasian Psalter gloss written a century or so earlier. In both cases the glosses were added to great books that had, as far as we can tell, long been prized among altar furnishings, and the same must have been true of the Macregol Gospels (alternatively named the Rushworth or Birr Gospels), however that Irish book got to England. The first glossed psalters extant from Anglo-Saxon England have ninth-century glossing. Earliest perhaps is the scattering of glosses in red ink added to the eighth-century Blickling Psalter.3 The fuller cover given in the ninth-century glossing of another eighth-century book, the Vespasian Psalter, has led to its being commonly regarded as the first of the psalters substantially glossed in Old English.4
This essay looks closely at three Anglo-Saxon glossed psalters and how the palimpsestic layers of gloss and text, language and layout, speak to the meditative reader.
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Notes
In Andrew Prescott’s terms, “every manuscript is a palimpsest,” with all added written materials to be regarded as part of continued use. See his “What’s in a Number? The Physical Organization of the Manuscript Collections of the British Library,” in Beatus Vir: Studies in Early English and Norse Manuscripts in Memory of Phillip Pulsiano, ed. A.N. Doane and Kirsten Wolf, MRTS 319 (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2006), p. 471 [471–525].
See, for example, Michelle P. Brown, The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, Spirituality, and the Scribe (London: British Library, 2003), p. 7: “the earliest surviving translation of the Gospels into the English language.” Aldred saw himself as the fourth of the makers of the Lindisfarne Gospels
Jane Roberts, “Aldred Signs Off from Glossing the Lindisfarne Gospels,” in Scribes and Texts in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Alexander Rumble (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 28–43.
New York, Pierpont Morgan Library 776. These glosses are printed, together with the second later campaign of glossing, by Phillip Pulsiano, Old English Glossed Psalters: Psalms 1–50, Toronto Old English series 11 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), p. xxxvii, who dates the older series to the late eighth or early ninth century.
N.R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (1957; reissued with suppl. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), no. 287, dates the pointed glosses to the ninth century and the square minuscule glosses to the tenth
E.A. Lowe, Codices Latini Antiquiores, 11 vols. plus supplement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–72), XI, 1661.
London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian A. i: Ker, Catalogue, no. 203. The Blickling and Vespasian psalters are two of the five eighth-century English psalters whose readings are recorded in Weber, Robert, ed. Le Psautier romain et les autres anciens psautiers latins (Rome: Abbaye Saint-Jérôme and Libreria Vaticana, 1953). Of the psalters mentioned later in this essay, Weber also uses Winchcombe, Bosworth, and the Romanum text of the Eadwine Psalter in his footnotes.
See Mechthild Gretsch, “The Junius Psalter Gloss: Its Historical and Cultural Context,” ASE 29 (2000): 87 [85–121], for twelve psalters “glossed continuously or in substantial parts” as “some forty-one per cent” of extant Anglo-Saxon psalters.
For this point, see Celia Sisam and Kenneth Sisam, eds., The Salisbury Psalter, EETS o.s. 242 (1959), p. 75: “[W]e must reckon the English glossed psalters of the tenth and eleventh centuries in hundreds.”
Mechthild Gretsch, The Intellectual Foundations of the English Benedictine Reform (Cambridge: University Press, 1999), p. 285.
William Davey, “The Commentary of the Regius Psalter: Its Main Source and Influence on the Old English Gloss,” Mediaeval Studies 49 (1987): 350 [335–51].
Sisam and Sisam, eds., Salisbury Psalter, p. 55. See also Mechthild Gretsch, “The Roman Psalter, Its Old English Gloss and the Benedictine Reform,” in The Liturgy of the Late Anglo-Saxon Church, ed. Helen Gittos and M. Bradford Bedingfield. Henry Bradshaw Society Subsidia 5 (London: Henry Bradshaw Society, 2005), p. 19.
P.M. Korhammer, “The Origin of the Bosworth Psalter,” ASE 2 (1973): 173, points out that this is “the earliest surviving English manuscript in which all the important texts of the Benedictine Office—psalter, canticles, hymns and monastic canticles—have been placed together.”
Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Ff. i. 23: Ker, Catalogue, no. 13. Gretsch, Intellectual Foundations, p. 283, reports recent reconsideration that would date this manuscript to c. 1000 rather than c.1050 and place its origin in Ramsey or St. Augustine’s Canterbury, but Michelle P. Brown, Manuscripts from the Anglo-Saxon Age (London: British Library, 2007), p. 136, dates it to c.1030–50, retaining attribution to Winchcombe Abbey.
Haarlem, Stadsbibliothek, 188 F. 53: N.R. Ker, “A Supplement to ‘Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon,’” ASE 5 (1976): 122–23
Sondershausen, Schlossmuseum, Br. 1: Helmut Gneuss, “A Newly-Found Fragment of an Anglo-Saxon Psalter,” ASE 27 (1998): 273–87.
Cambridge, Trinity College, R. 17. 1: Ker, Catalogue, no. 91. For a recent account of this gloss, see Patrick P. O’Neill, “The English Version,” in Gibson, Heslop and Pfaff, eds., Eadwine Psalter, pp. 123–38. See also André Crépin, “Le ‘Psautier d’Eadwine’: l’Angleterre pluri-culturelle,” in Journée d’études anglo-normandes organisée par l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, Palais de l’Institut, 20 juin 2008, eds. André Crépin and Jean Leclant (Paris: De Boccard, 2009), pp. 139–70.
Ker, “A Supplement,” no. 419; the glosses are edited by H. Hargreaves and C. Clark, “An Unpublished Old English Psalter-Gloss Fragment,” N&Q 210 (1965): 443–46.
Phillip Pulsiano, “The Prefatory Matter of London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius E. xviii,” in Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts and Their Heritage, ed. Phillip Pulsiano and Elaine M. Treharne (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), p. 104, dates this psalter to 1060×1062.
Much useful overall information is to be found scattered throughout Christopher de Hamel, The Book: A History of the Bible (London and New York: Phaidon Press Limited, 2001).
There is no evidence for English being used to make other than occasional glosses in the twelfth century, and the glosses added to the new teaching materials of the twelfth century, where the vernacular glossing was primarily in French, include only a few English glosses (observation made on trawling through Margaret Laing, Catalogue of Sources for a Linguistic Atlas of Early Medieval England (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1993)).
Phillip Pulsiano, “Defining the A-Type (Vespasian) and D-Type (Regius) Psalter-Gloss Traditions,” English Studies 72 (1991): 317 [308–72].
According to Tauno F. Mustanoja, A Middle English Syntax: Part 1, Parts of Speech (Helsinki: Société Néophilologique, 1960), p. 156
Gero Bauer, “Über Vorkommen und Gebrauch von ae. sin,” Anglia 81 (1963): 323–34.
See Jane Roberts, “Some Thoughts on the Expression of ‘Crippled’ in Old English,” Essays for Joyce Hill on Her Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Mary Swan, Leeds Studies in English n.s. 37 (2006): 372–73 [365–78].
“Consistency in anything is rare in the psalter-glosses,” according to Sisam and Sisam, eds., Salisbury Psalter, p. 45 n. 2. For a more recent overview of the difficulties presented by interrelationships among the glossed psalters, see Phillip Pulsiano, “A Proposal for a Collective Edition of the Old English Glossed Psalters,” in Anglo-Saxon Glossography, ed. René Derolez (Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 1992), pp. 167–87.
James L. Rosier, The Vitellius Psalter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962), p. xxxii, notes that “hlyncoton may be an error”; he suggests (footnote p. 36) that it “is perhaps a blend of hlinian (‘to lean, bend’) and hincian (‘to limp’),” comparing the Lambeth reading luncodon, “which may be for hincodon,” and Andreas 1171 hellehinca.
Here I have teased out a little more than reported in Pierre Salmon, Les “Tituli Psalmorum” des manuscrits latins, Etudes Liturgiques 3 (Paris: Cerf, 1959), p. 56.
Interestingly, the Vitellius side notes are related to the headings of the dual-language Paris Psalter. See Phillip Pulsiano, “The Old English Introductions in the Vitellius Psalter,” Studia Neophilologica 63 (1991): 13–35.
See further Patrick O’Neill, “Latin Learning at Winchester in the Early Eleventh Century: The Evidence of the Lambeth Psalter,” ASE 20 (1991): 148–49, who points out that this reflects the glossator’s own use of the Hebraicum. Investigation is needed of the occasional use of the obelus in the Regius Psalter, indeed of these conventional signs in Anglo-Saxon psalters more generally (for example, the manuscript page reproduced in Sisam and Sisam, eds. Salisbury Psalter, shows the use of these signs, but they seem not to be discussed).
Bruce Mitchell, Old English Syntax, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), §290, explains a homiletic instance as “in a passage of almost ‘poetic’ description.” R. Morris, ed., The Blickling Homilies, EETS o.s. 58, 63, 73 (1874–80), 125.21
R. Morris, ed., The Blickling Homilies, EETS o.s. 58, 63, 73 (1874–80), 125.21: “& is sin hwyrfel on wilewisan geworht”/“and its circuit is wrought basket-wise”; but sinhwyrfel is more plausibly to be read as an adjective comparable with the gloss form sinhwyrfende “round” and sharing the first element seen also in the commoner sintre(n)dende and sinewealt.
Jane Roberts and Christian Kay with Lynne Grundy, eds., A Thesaurus of Old English, 2 vols., King’s College London Medieval Studies XI (1995; 2nd impr. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000)
F.L. Attenborough, ed., The Laws of the Earliest Kings (Cambridge: CUP, 1922), p. 14 (Æthelberht (82) “sinne willan”) and p. 26 (Wihtred (10) “sine hyd”). The early Kentish laws are preserved in the early twelfth-century Textus Roffensis.
In C and D texts: see Charles Plummer, ed., Two of the Saxon Chronicles Parallel, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892–99), pp. 194–5.
ÆHom I, 40 (526.55); ÆLS (Agnes) (307)]; Nic (A) (27.4.4); BoGl (Hale) P.3.5.24). These instances, cited according to the conventions established at the Dictionary of Old English project, may be easily found in the Toronto database: Antonette diPaolo Healey, John Price-Wilkin, and Takamichi Ariga, Dictionary of Old English Corpus on the World-Wide Web, rev. ed., Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts (1997; Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000) and online by subscription at http://www.doe.utoronto.ca/.
Evert Wiesenekker, “Word be worde, andgit of andgite”: Translation Performance in the Old English Interlinear Glosses of the “Vespasian,” “Regius,” and “Lambeth” Psalters (Huizen: J. Bout, 1991), p. 67.
Evert Wiesenekker, “The Vespasian and Junius Psalters Compared: Glossing or Translation?,” Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 40 (1994): 38.
Robert Stanton, The Culture of Translation in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002), p. 9.
Fritz Roeder, Der altenglische Regius-Psalter, Studien zur englische Philologie 18 (Halle: Niemeyer, 1904).
Walter Hofstetter, “Winchester and the Standardization of Old English Vocabulary,” ASE 17 (1988): 151 [139–61], does not find the instances sufficient grounds for placing this psalter among his Group I texts, “whose vocabulary is strongly marked by Winchester usage,” but instead places it in his Group II, “which favour vocabulary which does not conform to the Winchester usage.”
Gretsch, “The Roman Psalter,” p. 19. Catherine Cubitt, “Archbishop Dunstan: A Prophet in Politics?,” in Myth, Rulership, Church, and Charters: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Brooks, ed. Julia Barrow and Andrew Wareham (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 158–61, surveys differing opinions on the origin of 2 B. v and argues for its acquisition “at some point” by New Minster, Winchester, where its copy of a Marian office was made.
These are fully examined by Peter A. Stokes, “The Regius Psalter, Folio 198v: A Reexamination,” N&Q 252 (2007): 208–11.
William J. Davey, ed., “An Edition of the Regius Psalter and Its Latin Commentary” (PhD dissertation, Ottawa, 1979), p. xxxi.
Patrick P. O’Neill, “Syntactical Glosses in the Lambeth Psalter and the Reading of the Old English Interlinear Translation as Sentences,” Scriptorium 46 (1992): 256 [250–56]; the construe marks, written later than the gloss, are in brown ink, not the black of the main text.
For expansion of the abbreviation ł by oððe in the English context, see Sisam and Sisam, eds., Salisbury Psalter, §56; also Fred C. Robinson, “Latin for Old English in Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts,” in his The Editing of Old English (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 163 [159–63], repr. from Language Form and Linguistic Variation, ed. John Anderson (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1982), pp. 395–400.
Patrizia Lendinara, “Instructional Manuscripts in England: The Tenth-and Eleventh-Century Codices and the Early Norman Ones,” in Form and Content of Instruction in Anglo-Saxon England in the Light of Contemporary Manuscript Evidence, ed. Patrizia Lendinara, Loredana Lazzari and Maria Amalia D’Aronco (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), p. 68 [59–113]
George H. Brown, “The Psalms as the Foundation of Anglo-Saxon Learning,” in The Place of the Psalms in the Intellectual Culture of the Middle Ages, ed. Nancy Van Deusen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), pp. 1–24.
But see MJ. Toswell, “The late Anglo-Saxon Psalter: Ancestor of the Book of Hours?,” Florilegium 14 (1995–96): 1–24, for rewarding consideration of the layout of a group of Anglo-Saxon psalters; see also her “Anglo-Saxon Psalter Manuscripts,” Old English Newsletter 28.1 (1994): A-23–A-31.
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© 2011 Leo Carruthers, Raeleen Chai-Elsholz, and Tatjana Silec
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Roberts, J. (2011). Some Psalter Glosses in Their Immediate Context. 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_4
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