Source of Wisdom: Old English and Early Medieval Latin Studies in Honour of Thomas D. Hill

446 Pages·2007·3.561 MB·English

by  Charles D. Wright, Frederick Biggs, Thomas N. Hall

SOURCE OF WISDOM:
OLD ENGLISH AND EARLY MEDIEVAL LATIN STUDIES
IN HONOUR OF THOMAS D. HILL
Thomas D. Hill
The Fons
EDITED BY CHARLES D. WRIGHT,
FREDERICK M. BIGGS,
AND THOMAS N. HALL
Source of Wisdom:
Old English and Early
Medieval Latin Studies in
Honour of Thomas D. Hill
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2007
Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada
ISBN 978-0-8020-9367-7
Printed on acid-free paper
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Source of wisdom : Old English and early medieval Latin studies in
honour of Thomas D. Hill / edited by Charles D. Wright, Frederick M.
Biggs, and Thomas N. Hall.
(Toronto Old English series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8020-9367-7
1. English literature – Old English, ca. 450–1100 – History and
criticism. 2. Latin literature, Medieval and modern – England – History
and criticism. I. Hill, Thomas D., 1940– II. Wright, Charles D.
III. Biggs, Frederick M. IV. Hall, Thomas N. V. Series.
PR260.S65 2007 829.09 C2007-904835-8
Frontispiece photo of Thomas Hill courtesy Cornell University Photography
University of Toronto Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance
of the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, in the publication
of this book.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its
publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario
Arts Council.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its
publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book
Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
Contents
Preface ix
Abbreviations xxi
Note on Quotations xxiv
Part I: Beowulf
Beasts of Battle, South and North 3
joseph harris
The Fates of Men in Beowulf 26
james h. morey
Folio 179 of the Beowulf Manuscript 52
frederick m. biggs
Part II: Old English Religious and Sapiential Poetry
Trinitarian Language: Augustine, The Dream of the Rood, and Ælfric 63
james w. earl
The Leaps of Christ and The Dream of the Rood 80
james w. marchand
‘Ðu eart se weallstan’: Architectural Metaphor and Christological
Imagery in the Old English Christ I and the Book of Kells 90
johanna kramer
Remembering in Circles: The Wife’s Lament,Conversatio, and the
Community of Memory 113
sachi shimomura
vvii CProenfatecnets
A Word to the Wise: Thinking, Knowledge, and Wisdom in
The Wanderer 130
alice sheppard
Part III: Old English Prose
Alfred’s Nero 147
paul e. szarmach
The ‘Remigian’ Glosses on Boethius’s Consolatio Philosophiae in
Context 168
joseph wittig
Why Ditch the Dialogues? Reclaiming an Invisible Text 201
david f. johnson
Hagiography and Violence: Military Men in Ælfric’s Lives of
Saints 217
e. gordon whatley
A New Latin Source for Two Old English Homilies (Fadda I and
Blickling I): Pseudo-Augustine, Sermo App. 125, and the Ideology
of Chastity in the Anglo-Saxon Benedictine Reform 239
charles d. wright
Christ’s Birth through Mary’s Right Breast: An Echo of Carolingian
Heresy in the Old English Adrian and Ritheus 266
thomas n. hall
Part IV: Old English beyond the Conquest
The Peterborough Chronicle and the Invention of ‘Holding Court’ in
Twelfth-Century England 293
andrew galloway
Echoes of Old EnglishAlliterative Collocations in Middle English
Alliterative Proverbs 311
susan e. deskis
Part V: Early Medieval Latin
Bede’s Style: A Neglected Historiographical Model for the Style of the
Historia Ecclesiastica? 329
danuta shanzer
CoPnretefanctes vviiii
Crux-busting on the Danube: uel Coniectanea in Cosmographiam Aeth-
ici,ut dicitur,Istri 353
michael w. herren
The Revelationes of Pseudo-Methodius and Scriptural Study at
Salisbury in the Eleventh Century 370
michael w. twomey
Appendix 1. Publications of Thomas D. Hill 387
Appendix 2. Dissertations Directed by Thomas D. Hill 399
Contributors 401
Index 403
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Preface
Source of Wisdom: Thomas D. Hill has been one for all of us, as a scholar,
as a teacher and mentor, and as a friend and colleague. Our title, how-
ever, is a bibliographical descriptor as well as an honorific. Tom’s OE
scholarship has always been about sources, especially the Christian-
Latin sources of OE religious poetry and prose, and much of it has
focused on what Tom, in his 1967 Cornell dissertation, termed the ‘Sapi-
ential Tradition.’1 A student of R.E. Kaske’s (first at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, then at Cornell), Tom was trained in the
methods of primary-source research in medieval literary scholarship by
the man who was to write the book on the subject, or at least one major
aspect of it.2 Back in the day when locating a given idea or motif and
tracing its development in the ocean of printed patristic and medieval
Christian-Latin literature was both a fine art and honest work, no one
was more adept than Tom. If it was in the Patrologia, he could find it.
And no one was more thrilled by the advent of searchable electronic
databases, or quicker to exploit them. Since Tom acquired a personal
copy of the CETEDOC Library of Christian-Latin Texts, no crux of the sac-
ral variety in OE poetry or Piers Plowman has had a safe place to hide.
He gave us fair warning and a chance to compete with his 1992 essay
‘CETEDOC and the Transformation of Anglo-Saxon Studies’ (no. 122;
references are to the bibliography of Tom’s publications in appendix 1
at the end of this volume), but it takes more than databases, user’s man-
uals, and a head full of cruces that need busting. Tom solves cruces that
nobody even realized were cruces, and that is where the art lies now.
Tom is the undisputed master of the scholarly note in Old and Middle
English studies. In the late 1960s and 1970s he practically owned Notes
and Queries, publishing more than twenty concise explications in that