Life, Literature and Prayer in Early Anglo-Saxon England

229 Pages·2017·1.41 MB·English

Life, Literature and Prayer in Early Anglo-Saxon England

Imogen Volkofsky
307152030

A thesis submitted to fulfil requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Department of English

The University of Sydney
2017
Chapter Two of this thesis contains materials published as “Psalmody and the Role of
Penance in the Book of Cerne’s Abbreviated Psalter”, English Studies, Volume 97,
Issue 1 (2017), pp. 5-14. These materials appear on pages 92-100 of this thesis.

This is to certify that to the best of my knowledge, the content of this thesis is my own
work. This thesis has not been submitted for any degree or other purposes.
I certify that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work and
that all the assistance received in preparing this thesis and sources have been
acknowledged.

Imogen Volkofsky

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Abstract

This thesis deals with the representation of prayer in literary texts from early Anglo-
Saxon England, investigating the role of reading in the life of prayer and the various
ways in which literary texts from the eighth and ninth centuries attest to cultures of
prayer in this period. Chapter One looks at writings about saints, especially Bede’s
Ecclesiastical History of the English People and a number of early saints’ lives, to
identify the features most common to early Anglo-Saxon prayer. Prayer, in these
texts, is most frequently ascetic and extra-liturgical, with an emphasis on the night
vigil as the most important form of private devotion and a keen interest in the
sanctification of time and space through prayer and communion with the saints. The
representation of prayer in these texts represents both ideal and reality and, as this
chapter argues, part of the purpose of these texts was to teach people how to pray.
Chapter Two looks to the prayers of the ninth-century Mercian tradition, preserved in
four private prayer books: Cambridge, University Library Ll.I.10 (The Book of
Cerne), B.L., Harley 2965 (The Book of Nunnaminster), B.L., Royal 2.A.XX (The
Royal Prayer Book), B.L., Harley 7653 (The Harley Fragment). This chapter
investigates the way in which these books encourage meditative engagement with the
Gospels through reading. These books focus on penance, the person of Christ, the
Incarnation, the Passion and Judgment, themes that also emerge in Old English
literary volumes. Chapter Three turns to the Old English poems of Junius 11,
suggesting that prayer is central to the purpose of Junius 11’s construction. This
chapter argues that the manuscript as a whole is centred on the theme of moral
behaviour and the appropriate response to God, on the one hand, and the rejection of
God and judgment, on the other. Thus, the manuscript frequently juxtaposes the
prayers of the Old Testament figures and, in Christ and Satan, the prayers of the
saints with the ‘anti-prayers’ of God’s enemies. In this way, the volume is
preoccupied with the contemplation of judgment as well as with redemption.
Furthermore, the volume bears witness to some aspects of the practice of prayer
contemporary with the composition of each poem. Finally, Chapter Four dicusses the
Old English poem The Dream of the Rood in light of the ascetic, penitential and
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Christological focus of eighth- and ninth-century Anglo-Saxon prayers discussed so
far in this thesis. This chapter argues that The Dream of the Rood is a poem about
prayer and that its setting draws on conventional descriptions of the night vigil, which
are discussed at length in Chapter One, and that the visionary experience of the
dreamer represents a sustained poetic reflection on the kinds of meditative
contemplation to which the Mercian prayer books bear witness.
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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the University of Sydney and the Australian government for
their financial support of this research. I am also grateful to the Rev. and Mrs. F.W.A
Roberts whose trustee scholarship assisted greatly in the completion of this thesis.
Very special thanks are due to to my supervisor Daniel Anlezark, who introduced me
to Anglo-Saxon literature as an undergraduate. In many ways, this work is a testament
to his patient, insightful questioning and careful supervision, and the successful
completion of this thesis would be unimaginable without his encouragement and
generosity. I am also thankful to the members of the University of Sydney’s Old
English Reading Group for their friendship and warmth and to the members of the
University of Sydney’s Medieval Research Seminar for their helpful discussion of
some parts of this thesis. I would also like to thank my mother and father for all their
support: emotional, financial and spiritual; my brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews and
friends, for helping me to see through the many highs and lows of the doctoral thesis;
and my husband Aidan for his unfailing love, patience and kindness, and for
developing an interest in a completely new topic so as to keep me company in the
sometimes lonely world of books and writing. Finally, I am thankful to the men and
women whose devotion is the topic of this study. They have, over the last four years,
delighted, informed and challenged me, taught me how to read and taught me how to
pray.

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Biblical References and Translations

Biblical references in this thesis follow the numbering of the Latin Vulgate and
quotations from the Psalms similarly follow the Vulgate numbering. Quotations from
the Bible are taken from Robert Weber, B. Fischer, J. Gribomont,
H. F. D. Sparks, W. Thiele and Roger Gryson, eds., Biblia sacra iuxta vulgatam
versionem, 4 edition (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1983).
th

Translations of the Bible are from the Douay-Rheims translation of the Vulgate.

Non-Biblical translations, unless otherwise stated, are my own.
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Abstract ....................................................................................................................................... iii
Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................... v
Biblical References and Translations ................................................................................. vi
Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1
Review of Critical Literature: Prayer and Reading ........................................................................ 3
Overview of Thesis ................................................................................................................................ 16
Chapter One ............................................................................................................................... 21
Prayer in Anglo-Saxon England ............................................................................................ 21
Sources ....................................................................................................................................................... 25
Contexts for Reading Saints’ Lives in Anglo-Saxon England ................................................ 27
Private Prayer at Night ......................................................................................................................... 29
Prayer and Sacred Space ...................................................................................................................... 37
Prayer and Scriptural reading ............................................................................................................. 49
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................ 57
Chapter Two ............................................................................................................................... 60
Writing Prayers in Anglo-Saxon England ........................................................................... 60
The Mercian Prayer Books .................................................................................................................. 62
The Gospel Lections .............................................................................................................................. 67
Prayers to Christ’s Body ...................................................................................................................... 74
Prayers against Enemies ....................................................................................................................... 85
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................ 99
Chapter Three .......................................................................................................................... 100
Poetry and the Practice of Prayer: Devotional Reading ................................................. 100
Genesis ..................................................................................................................................................... 109
Exodus ...................................................................................................................................................... 123
Daniel ....................................................................................................................................................... 131
Christ and Satan .................................................................................................................................... 145
Conclusion .............................................................................................................................................. 153
Chapter Four ............................................................................................................................ 155
Praying Alone: Asceticism and Compunctio in The Dream of the Rood ...................... 155
The Vigil in The Dream of the Rood ............................................................................................. 160
Prayer and Scriptural Reading in The Dream of the Rood ..................................................... 173
Prayer, Speaking and Writing: the Word of God in The Dream of the Rood ................... 178
Conclusion .............................................................................................................................................. 185
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 187
Bibliography ............................................................................................................................. 191
Primary materials ............................................................................................................................... 191
Secondary works ................................................................................................................................ 196

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Introduction

For the medieval monk, the moment of death was the climax of a life lived in prayer.
It is unsurprising, then, that the Venerable Bede, who joined his monastic community
at the age of seven, died an exemplary death. Bede’s disciple Cuthbert records the
details of Bede’s final days of prayer, spent in the Northumbrian monasteries of
Wearmouth and Jarrow, in a letter written soon after the event.1 First, Bede died at
precisely the right time according to the liturgical calendar. Beginning to ail two
weeks before the celebration of Christ’s Resurrection, Bede spent the prelude to
Easter in constant prayer and thanksgiving. Thus, Bede prepared for his own death
while also preparing to celebrate Christ’s death. Throughout the night Bede prayed
between short sleeps. At night he also sang, not merely lying on his bed but with
uplifted hands, praising God with his body as well as his mouth. At other times Bede
gave himself to constant repetition of the Psalter. Bede recited scripture and liturgical
antiphons, many of which would bring him to overwhelming tears. Bede also taught
his students, inviting them to imitate him in his final hours while enlisting help in
finishing his final books, a translation of John’s Gospel into Old English and some
selections from Isidore of Seville. In the midst of all this prayer, Bede offers a ‘native’
poem to his students ‘concerning the dread parting of souls from the body’.2 Finally,
on the Eve of the feast of Christ’s Ascension (and, we understand, the eve of Bede’s
ascent into heaven), Bede chose to die while sitting in his cell facing his own holy
place, in which he prayed to God most often and alone.

Bede’s final days were, first and foremost, days of prayer. And yet this prayer would
be unimaginable without the well developed habits of devotional reading that were a
part of Bede’s monastic training: the memorisation of the liturgy, the psalter and the
scriptures. Reading and writing were activities designed to focus the mind on prayer,

1 Cuthbert, “Epistola De Obitu Bedae”, in Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed.
and trans. Bertram Colgrave, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 580–
587.
2 Ibid., 580–1.
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not just for intellectual stimulation but, most importantly, for emotional involvement
with that pillar of the Christian faith: the story of Easter. To this end, time, space and
physical gesture each play a role. Bede prays at night, dies the evening before the
Ascension, sits for that most solemn moment facing the altar and, drawing emotional
significance from these times and places, weeps in remembrance of his own sin but
also in anticipation of salvation. For scholars of Anglo-Saxon literature, the most
thrilling detail in this letter is the inclusion of Bede’s so-called ‘Death Song’, which
may or may not have been written by Bede himself.3 The poem is conventional but,
for its date and context, a remarkable attestation to the use of vernacular literature as
one of the many tools in Bede’s literary arsenal that allowed him to pray, to confess
and to prepare adequately for the hour of his death.

This thesis is an examination of the activity of prayer in Anglo-Saxon England. It
seeks to examine closely the relationship between prayer and reading and to ask how
the remembrance and composition of literature, both in Latin and Old English, bore
witness to and facilitated the practice of prayer. While both prayer and reading were
activities that could be undertaken both privately and communally in monasteries, this
thesis focuses on the culture of private prayer as it developed between the seventh and
the ninth centuries, culminating in the composition of a series of ‘private’ prayer
books in ninth century Mercia. I begin with the representation of prayer in saints’
lives, which provide the earliest and most detailed attestations to the practice of both
private and communal prayer. Having established some sense of how people prayed, I
turn to the textual record of prayer as it appears in four Mercian prayer books,
interrogating the interaction between prayer, reading, scriptural and liturgical
borrowings and the innovative literary and meditative impulses that sit behind these
books. Finally, this thesis turns to Old English biblical poetry to ask how these poems
may have engaged with the practice of prayer, in an echo of Bede’s recitation of Old
English verse with the intention of fostering meditation in the final days of his life. I
will also ask what evidence resides in the poetic record, and its manuscripts, for the
practice of prayer in Anglo-Saxon England.

3 See Andy Orchard, “The Word Made Flesh: Christianity and Oral Culture in Anglo-Saxon
Verse,” Oral Tradition 24, no. 2 (2009): 296–98.
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Review of Critical Literature: Prayer and Reading

The relationship between traditions of ‘private’ prayer and reading in Anglo-Saxon
England has never been the subject, directly, of a full-length study. This study suffers
from being limited to a small number of texts and manuscripts, and is by no means a
definitive investigation of the relationship between prayer and reading. This thesis
looks to saints’ lives, prayer books and biblical poetry in order to understand prayer in
Anglo-Saxon England, arguing that these texts were designed to exhort men and
women to prayer.

Only one full-length study of prayer in Anglo-Saxon literature has been published, an
article by Donald Bzdyl, based on his doctoral thesis. Bzdyl looks at prayers in Old
English narratives, with a unique focus on the literary construction of prayer in the
Old English corpus. He differentiates between narrative prayers, which are included
in the action of the story, and ‘prayers included by the author as narrator which do not
form part of the action of the tale.’4 Bzdyl draws a link between the frequency with
which monks prayed, the exhortation to prayer in a variety of writers including Bede
and Ælfric, and the way in which prayer functions in some Anglo-Saxon narratives.
He suggests that prayers in private prayer books give us ‘insight into Anglo-Saxon
notions of prayer.’5 His analysis extends, briefly, to the representation of prayer in
poetry. Other studies briefly survey the appearance of prayers in numerous texts: Eric
Stanley’s chapter “Prayers, Praise and Thanksgiving in Old English Verse”
emphasises the ubiquity of prayer in Old English verse, including Beowulf6; Christine
Rauer discusses the narrative use of prayer in the Old English Martyrology7; and Scott
DeGregorio discusses the insertion of prayers into Bede’s spiritual writings.8 More
recently, Francis Leneghan’s essay “Preparing the Mind for Prayer: The Wanderer,
Hesychasm and Theosis” reads the poem The Wanderer within the context of

4 Donald G. Bzdyl, “Prayer in Old English Narratives,” Medium Ævum 51 (1982): 135.
5 Bzdyl, 137.
6 Eric Gerald Stanley, In the Foreground : Beowulf (Woodbridge, Suffolk; Rochester, NY,
USA: D.S. Brewer, 1994).
7 Christine Rauer, “Direct Speech, Intercession, and Prayer in the Old English Martyrology,”
English Studies 93, no. 5 (August 2012): 563–71.
8 Scott DeGregorio, “The Venerable Bede on Prayer and Contemplation,” Traditio 54 (1999):
1–39.
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