A History of Anglo-Latin Literature, 597-1066. Volume 1: 597-740 PDF
Preview A History of Anglo-Latin Literature, 597-1066. Volume 1: 597-740
A history of AngLo-LAtin Literature $97-1066 A h i s t o ry of A n g L o - L A t in L i t e r a t u re 597-1066 volume 1: $97-740 By W. F. Bolton Princeton, New Jersey Princeton University Press 1967 Copyright © 1967 by Princeton University Press ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 65-17132 Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey pnefAce THIS BOOK is intended to provide students of Old English with a guide to the Latin literature which existed along side the vernacular, and I hope it will be of use to others as well. It takes the period and area of Anglo-Saxon domination as its chronological and geographical limits. It includes the forms associated with individual (although sometimes anonymous) writers, the histories, biographies, letters, poetry, treatises, and some liturgy, but not the institutional or official forms, the laws, charters, glos saries, concilia, or penitentials. Its models were the already available histories of Old English literature, particularly Kemp Malone's contribu tion to A Literary History of England (ed. A. C. Baugh, N. Y. 1947), and the standard surveys of patristic and medieval Latin writings, especially Max Manitius' Ge- schichte der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters (3 vols., Munich 1911-1931). But Malone's chapter on Anglo- Latin is brief, and Manitius' second volume, which in cludes the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, is now forty years old. Besides, it is in German, lacks a national focus, and overlooks some Anglo-Latin. As a literary history, the book describes the primary materials and brings together a listing of the secondary. Apart from the distinction between the "individual" and "official" genres, I have exercised no selection in the pri mary materials: I hope to have included them all, empha sizing the most important ones, but not suppressing the less important. The reader who approaches the book as a continuous account of pre-Conquest English latinity may find irksome the inclusion of a fragmentary letter by an anonymous celibate, but the reader who requires a work of reference may not be entirely disappointed. Both will find a book which seeks chiefly to assemble, rather than to advance, information and opinion about its subject. [ ν ] PREFACE The bibliographies, the listing of the secondary ma terials, have occupied a large part of my attention in writ ing the book. To make them available without further delay, the work has been divided so that the first part could be published while the second was in progress. They are full—more so than any others I know—but not com plete. No enumerative bibliographer ever had enough wis dom or industry to be sure he had missed nothing. I have made limitations in addition to the ones I could not avoid. Where there is a sound modern edition, I have not always attempted to list all the earlier ones. I have included little published before the nineteenth century. I have tried to find all the informative books and articles, leaving the reader to estimate the accuracy and originality of the in formation, but I have excluded reference works and some purely hortatory oeuvres d'edification. Where a work deals at length with more than two of my subjects, I have listed it only once—in the General Bibliography—rather than separately under each subject. In most cases I have given little space to medieval lives of my authors; textual studies of the Tripartite Life of St. Patrick, for example, have not found a place. In the Introduction, I have made no entries for works which appeared prior to the publica tion of the article or book which initiated the modern study of the subject; such are rarely of use to anyone but a historian of scholarship, and they are invariably men tioned in the major works that followed them. In the cases of Pelagius, Patrick, and Columban, I have economized by restricting my bibliographies to works not already listed in one of three recent and readily accessible books; with out this device, the lists would have grown by some 500 items. Apart from these limitations, voluntary and involun tary, the bibliographies aim at completeness, and are an important part of the book's role as guide to the literature. I have read all the items I could obtain; those I could not, [ vi ] PREFACE I have marked with an asterisk. I have avoided footnotes, preserving instead relevant information in the text, omit ting altogether what I took to be irrelevant. For general surveys of medieval Latin, the reader should consult Karl Strecker, Introduction to Medieval Latin (trans, and rev. Robert B. Palmer, Berlin 1957), espe cially pp. 90-105. The same excellent book lists instru ments like dictionaries and grammars, as well as (pp. 11 δ ι 20 et passim) most of the periodicals by means of which the bibliographies in this book may be continued, and it provides a grounding in the linguistic characteristics of medieval latinity. I have added to the General Bibliog raphy a few items, especially dictionaries, that have ap peared since 1957, but an introductory bibliography to the study of medieval Latin will list little that is more acces sible than Strecker's work, and little that is not in it; readers who wish to set about the study of medieval Latin cannot do without Strecker. Some explanation of the texts quoted, and of the trans lations appended, is in order. The texts have been drawn from the best modern editions, but some works have re ceived more recent and more careful attention than others, so the versions printed here are not all equally reliable. It would, on the other hand, have been impossible for me to prepare new editions from the MSS for this book. The editions I have employed are also uneven in editorial practice: the same word may appear as iuuencae, juvencce, iuvencae, and so forth. I have on request attempted a nor malization of these spellings to the standard of the Latin Dictionary of C. T. Lewis and C. Short (Oxford, many editions), an accessible and authoritative work which forms the basis or model of many others. Some of the forms arrived at this way would have looked strange to a medieval author, but medieval practice was by no means uniform itself (see, for example, the discussion in M.L.W. Laistner's edition of Bede's Exp., Cambridge, Mass. 1939, [ vii ] PREFACE xli-xlv). Scriptural references are to the Vulgate Latin or Douay-Rheims English version. I have also on request supplied translations of the pas sages quoted, except where the quotation (usually brief) illustrates an untranslatable feature of the original, such as the morphology, or where the quotation is a title. The translations offered considerable difficulty. Some passages are obscure in themselves, and some words appear to have taken on specialized meanings in medieval Latin which even the latest dictionaries do not clarify. Sometimes, particularly in passages from older editions, there appeared to be something positively wrong with the text, but I have done what I could without emendation. The greatest problem, however, lay in finding the right idiom. Bede's command of Latin sentence structure was very strong. To observe his patterns of hypotaxis when translating his prose is to reveal something about how he wrote, but it is also to compose very awkward English: can awkward English be a faithful translation of polished Latin, par ticularly when literary values are under consideration? Yet to translate more freely than this is to confront one self with innumerable alternatives, any one of which will in some measure misrepresent the original. Many of the passages have, as far as I know, been translated for the first time in this book; but in consulting earlier transla tions where they existed, I have most often been dissatis fied with those that were the freest. I offer my own ver sions with much diffidence, aware that they cannot take the place of the originals, hopeful merely that they will be better than nothing for those who have recourse to this book but cannot read Latin. I have now to thank all those (individuals and insti tutions) who gave me aid in writing this book: the Re search Board of the University of Reading for a Research Fellowship and later repeated research grants; the Depart ment of English at the University of California (Berke- [ viii ]
The list of books you might like
