William of Malmesbury. On Lamentations PDF
Preview William of Malmesbury. On Lamentations
WILLIAM OF MALMESBURY On LAMEntAtIOnS CORPVS CHRIStIAnORVM In tRAnSLAtIOn 13 CORPVS CHRIStIAnORVM Continuatio Mediaeualis 244 WILLELMI MELDVnEnSIS MOnACHI LIBER SVPER EXPLAnAtIOnEM LAMEntAtIOnVM IEREMIAE PROPHEtAE CVRA Et StVDIO Michael WIntERBOttOM Et Rodney M. tHOMSOn OPItVLAntE Sigbjørn SØnnESYn tURnHOUt FHG WILLIAM OF MALMESBURY On LAMEntAtIOnS Introduction, translation and notes by Michael WIntERBOttOM H F © 2013, 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. D/2013/0095/40 ISBn 978-2-503-54849-4 Printed on acid-free paper. tABLE OF COntEntS Preface 7 Introduction 9 ‘I amused myself with histories’ 9 ‘I am forty today’ 10 ‘Something able to warn me off the world and set me on fire towards God’ 12 ‘You have chosen for me the Lamentations of the prophet Jeremiah’ 12 ‘You put in my way Paschasius Radbertus’ 13 ‘Jeremiah’s words are to be understood in three ways’ 15 Historical 16 Allegorical 17 Moral 19 ‘Paschasius ... is unattractive, because he strove for what he regarded as verbal charm’ 20 Scriptural citations 21 notes on the translation 22 The reference system 22 A note on the text 23 Bibliography 24 List of Abbreviations 24 Primary Sources 24 Secondary Sources 30 Changes to the Latin text of CC CM 244 31 5 tABLE OF COntEntS William, monk of Meldunum, On the exposition of the Lamentations of Jeremiah Prologue 35 Book One 41 Book two 172 Book Three 231 Book Four 317 Indices Index of Biblical References 369 Index of non-Biblical Sources 378 Index of Latin Words 380 Index of names 382 Index of Subjects 388 6 PREFACE I wrote the first draft of this translation of William of Malmes- bury’s Commentary on Lamentations in the course of my work on the Latin text that was published as Corpus Christianorum Con- tinuatio Medieualis 244. I translated the book, which had never been printed as a whole before, in the firm conviction that editors should, ideally, demonstrate to themselves that they understand (or at least think they understand) the work they are editing: it being part of their courtesy to their readers to print a text that makes sense. When the proposal to publish my rendering had been accepted for Corpus Christianorum in Translation, I undertook a careful revision of my draft. This gave me an invaluable opportunity to re- visit the text too, and the errors I found, and the new emendations I made, are listed below (pp. 31-32). I am very conscious indeed that my translation remains imperfect. William wrote Latin whose ba- roque elegance and sometimes tortured obscurity can baffle even on repeated readings. Any reader of this book who cares to point out my errors to me will be doing me a service. I was blessed in this work, as in that on the Latin text, by the support of two ideal colleagues, whose names appear on the title page of the Latin text. Rod Thomson, with whom I have collabo- rated on William of Malmesbury for three decades, and a newer friend, Sigbjørn Sønnesyn, were once again always there to answer my questions (as did very promptly, on two occasions, Martin Goodman) and to suggest new approaches, as well as reading 7 PREFACE drafts of the whole. I could not have managed without them. The faults that remain are my own. I was blessed too in my publishers. Loes Diercken, and before her Eric Wierda, were my friendly contacts. When I asked them for advice and guidance, they gave it without delay and with no word wasted: professionalism at its best. I am also grateful to the anonymous reader of the sample I originally submitted to Brepols, for his or her wise comments; I wish that the same reader could have commented on my whole translation, of whose shortcomings I am well aware. Feci quod potui. november 2012 MICHAEL WIntERBOttOM Corpus Christi College, Oxford 8 IntRODUCtIOn ‘I amused myself with histories’ Malmesbury (Wiltshire) is an ancient place. From an Iron Age hill fort in the English Cotswold hills between Oxford and Bris- tol developed a settlement that was for many centuries famous for its Benedictine abbey. traditionally founded by an Irishman, Maeldubh, this house was especially notable in the late seventh century, when the great scholar Aldhelm was abbot. Æthelstan, king of England, was buried there in 939. The place’s flagging in- tellectual life gained new impetus after the Conquest, when the norman Godfrey (abbot in the 1090s) restocked the library. He was assisted by the author of our commentary, William, a local boy of part-English, part norman descent, who went on to spend his adult life in the abbey, serving as its precentor and librarian. Acquaintance with the long story of the house, and with its books, will have fostered William’s passion for history. He had been edu- cated, we do not know where, to complete mastery of Latin. By the time he was thirty-five, it appears, he had read all the classical and patristic texts on which he could lay his hands: virtually all those, indeed, that were available in England at that date. Malmesbury had royal patronage. When William came to write his Gesta Regum Anglorum (History of the English Kings: GR) it was dedicated to King David of Scotland (acc. 1124); and, in his dedicatory letter, William tells us that the book owed its inception to the encouragement of the late Queen Matilda (d. 9 IntRODUCtIOn 1118). In parallel with this William composed an equally ambi- tious work, the Gesta Pontificum Anglorum (History of the English Bishops: GP). These two substantial books, with which William continued to tinker even after their ‘publication’ around 1125, be- tween them covered the political and religious history of England from the coming of the English to William’s day. Both display a remarkable ability to construct a lucid narrative out of a bewilder- ing variety of sources, literary and documentary: a narrative made the more attractive by the elegant Latin and by often highly ap- posite classical borrowings that suggest William had total recall of the literary texts he had read. ‘I am forty today’ In his prologue to the commentary, William represents himself as having reached the age of forty ‘today’; and he connects with this birthday a determination to make a new start. He contrasts with his younger days, when ‘I amused myself with histories’,1 his embarking on ‘a different kind of work’, a sign of his resolve to live for his Maker, and no longer for himself. These words are less helpful in dating the writing of the commentary than we should wish. Authors do not commonly write a prologue before the rest of a work: William’s resolve will go back well before his birthday. What is more, we do not know the date of his birth: 1090 seems about the right time, but we cannot be sure. That would place the writing of the prologue to 1130, oddly near the historical works composed olim, ‘in the past’. nor is it quite easy to know how to bring other books by William into the picture. They include the hagiography that produced surviving lives of Wulfstan and Dun- stan, written appreciably after 1126. However historically William may have conceived them, they are still, surely, themselves ‘a dif- ferent kind of work’ from the great histories that came before. Perhaps they, the book On the Antiquities of Glastonbury and the 1 William speaks of the ‘charm’ of history, in order to contrast it more sharply with the ‘all-important’ things to which he is turning. 10
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