Insignis Sophiae Arcator: Medieval Latin Studies in Honour of Michael Herren on his 65th Birthday

318 Pages·2006·24.148 MB·English

by  Gernot Wieland, Carin Ruff, Ross G. Arthur

PUBLICATIONS
OF
THE JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL LATIN
6
PUBLICATIONS
OF
THE JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL LATIN

A publication of The Medieval Latin Association of North America

Guest Editors:

Gernot R. Wieland University of British Columbia
Carin Ruff Cornell University
Ross G. Arthur York University
Insigni^ Sophiae Arcator
Essays in Honour of Michael W. Herren
on his 65th Birthday
edited by
Gernot R. Wieland, Carin Ruff
and Ross G. Arthur

F
©2006, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN 2-503-51425-1
Printed in the E.U. on acid-free paper

Table of Contents

Introduction, by Carin Ruff ix

GREGORY HAYS, Flumen orationis 1
HAIJO WESTRA, Frisians, Saxons, and Franks: Ethnogenesis and
Ethnic Identity in Roman and Early Medieval Sources 28
SCOTT BRUCE, Hagiography as Monstrous Ethnography: A Note
on Ratramnus of Corbie’s Letter Concerning the
Conversion of the Cynocephali 45
DANUTA SHANZER, The Cosmographia Attributed to Aethicus Ister
as Philosophen- or Reiseroman 57
WESTLEY FOLLETT, Cassian, Contemplation, and Medieval Irish
Hagiography 87
BERNICE KACZYNSKI, Reading and Writing Augustine in Medieval
St. Gall 107
BRENT MILES, Irish Evidence for Shared Sources of Classical
Mythology in Anglo-Saxon England and Medieval Ireland 124
JAN ZIOLKOWSKI, Blood, Sweat, and Tears in the Waltharius 149
CARIN RUFF, The Perception of Difficulty in Aldhelm’s Prose 165
GERNOT WIELAND, A New Look at the Poem “Archalis clamare
triumuir” 178
CHARLES WRIGHT, The Prouerbia Grecorum, the Norman
Anonymous, and the Early Medieval Ideology of Kingship:
Some New Manuscript Evidence 193
ROGER WRIGHT, Latin Glossaries in the Iberian Peninsula 216
GRETI DINKOVA-BRUUN, Peter Riga’s Aurora and its Gloss
from Salzburg, Stiftsbibliothek Sankt Peter, MS a.VII.6 237
PAUL GERHARD SCHMIDT, Narrationes mirabiles: Geistliche
Unterhaltungsliteratur in einer Handschrift des
Zisterzienserklosters Quarr 261

Michael W. Herren: Bibliography, 1963–2006, compiled by
Gernot Wieland 273
Index I: Manuscripts 287
Index II: Authors, People, Places, and Texts 291

Introduction
by Carin Ruff

The throng of rhetors here assembled bears flowers in gratitude for Michael
Herren’s generosity. We are grateful for his generosity in bringing together
medieval Latinists in print, through his long stewardship of the Journal of
Medieval Latin and its Publications, and in person, for occasions formal and
informal. Many of us have been the recipients of Michael’s and Shirley
Ann’s hospitality at their home in Toronto, where lurconum conglobatio
lectorum ac residua sagax discipulorum caterva have traditionally gathered
to celebrate the visits of distinguished Latinists for the Centre for Medieval
Studies’ annual O’Donnell Lecture. His gatherings are notable for bringing
together generations of junior and senior scholars, and are typical of
Michael’s enthusiastic promotion of still-emerging careers; the present
volume bears witness to just such a trans-generational collaboration. It bears
witness, too, to the vigor and interconnectedness of the scholarly world of
medieval Latin studies. The contributors to this volume include Latinists of
several stripes, of course, as well as historians, Celticists, Anglo-Saxonists,
and, appropriately enough, a Hispanist, and many would self-identify with
more than one of those categories. Although Michael, with his tenacious
commitment to texts whose inextricabilis obscuritas makes them forbidding
to even the most zealous readers, might seem to occupy at times a remote
island in a stormy sea, in fact almost all roads pass through his domain, as
almost all medieval Latinists eventually (and sometimes repeatedly) pass
through Toronto.
The diversity of the papers here collected is united by several threads of
approach, interest, and theoretical concern. A central preoccupation of
several contributors is the imaginative and textual geography through which
authors, narrators, words, ideas, and manuscripts move. We have, for
example, explorations of the relationship between geopolitical location and
ethnic identity; of imaginative geography as an imitable authorial construct,
and of medieval uses of what moderns would call fanciful or fictional
sources for practical geographical information. Always weaving its way
through the arguments is, of course, the movement of textual traditions and
their content to and through Ireland and the Insular world. Many contributors
are concerned with new ways of reading our sources for evidence of such
a transmission: hagiographies as evidence for real-life practices and
ix
x Ruff
experience; vernacular texts as carriers of classical lore; library catalogues as
evidence for textual communities; glossaries not just as vehicles of words
but as indices of cultural anxieties. Several contributors take as their subjects
the sometimes elusive relationship between words and their referents and
seek to contextualize the meanings of lexical puzzles in the times and places
where they were received. Thus we have studies of the shifting frame of
reference of an extremely old metaphor; of the literary significations of a trio
of terms with very tangible referents; of the deceptive nature of lexicon as an
index to the whole experience of a text; of the relationship between the
inheritance of technical terminology and the understanding of practices
denoted by that language; of the assignment and reassignment of names and
the allusive ways those names are encoded in a text. Reception, too, is a
recurring theme, as contributors imagine multiple audiences hearing,
reading, copying, and intervening in texts.
Our collection begins with a cluster of papers that share a geographical
frame of reference. Taking his cue, appropriately, from the Hisperica
Famina, Gregory Hays opens the floodgates of discourse with an exploration
of the figure flumen orationis and related expressions equating discourse to
running water. Ranging backwards to Homer and forwards to Elizabeth
Bishop (from Greece to Canada, by way – of course – of Ireland), Hays
navigates the meanders and tributaries of his stream. In tracing the river’s
course from classical sources to Christian writers, Hays discerns a shift in
the figure’s connotation from negative to positive and in its referent “from
form (eloquence) to content (wisdom).”
Haijo Westra’s temporal scope is almost as sweeping, but his
geography is more real than figurative. Westra begins by exploring the
relationship between Roman ethnography of the Frisians and the real
frontiers along which the two peoples met. He takes up the question of
continuity between the Frisians of Roman antiquity and the emergence of
Frisians as a people (self-identified) after the period of the migrations.
Westra finds evidence from Willibald’s Life of Boniface for Frisians’
identity as a gens and suggests that their geographical diffuseness was no
barrier to ethnic identity. He notes a similarity between the place Frisians
occupied in the Frankish and the Roman imagination, as border people,
barbarians, and, for the Franks, pagans. Westra connects the Frisians’
preservation of distinct traditions and identity down to the present with their
marginal status in the world of European states.
The relationship between real and imaginative geographies is also a
focus of Scott Bruce’s essay on hagiography as an ethnographic source on