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December 2014 A.D. Aldred, English Glossing, & Lindisfarne
Gospels—the 71st CANTUAR, Matthew Parker, was right, to wit, that
the early Anglo-Saxon scholars glossed the Latin into the vernacular for the “Latinless
brothers”
Domiciling the Evangelists in Anglo-Saxon England: a
Fresh Reading of Aldred’s colophon in the Lindisfarne Gospels
By Francis Newton,
Francis Newton Jr. and Chris Scheirer
Anglo-Saxon
England Vol.41 (2012)
Abstract:
The Codex ‘Lindisfarnensis’ (London, British Library, Cotton Nero D. iv, early
eighth-century) was glossed in Old English by the tenth-century priest Aldred.
Aldred’s colophon purports to give information about the eighth-century makers
of the manuscript at Lindisfarne. What is actually reliable about this highly literary
colophon is Aldred’s purpose in writing the gloss: to give the Evangelists a
voice to address ‘all the brothers’ − particularly the Latinless. We propose
new interpretations of three OE words (gihamadi, inlad, ora)
misunderstood before. Aldred was learned; his sources extend from Ovid through
the Fathers to contemporary texts
Introduction:
Some two centuries or more after its creation, that is, around 950, the priest
Aldred, at Chester-le-Street (between Newcastle-upon-Tyne to the north and
Durham to the south) glossed the entire text of the manuscript interlinearly in
Old English – the earliest Old English version of all four gospels that
survives. Aldred tells us that he did this in the colophon he added in his own
hand in Old English and in Latin at the end (259rb). The book is triply
precious, for the history of book-making, for the text of the Latin Gospels and
for the history of the English language. But Aldred’s long colophon says a
great deal more: he asserts that the book was written (by this he must
understand the decoration also) by Eadfrith, bishop of Lindisfarne, who died in
the year 721, bound by Æthelwald, his successor as bishop there, and decorated
with gold and gems by Billfrith the anchorite. This information has been
generally accepted by historians of art and palaeographers – scholars such as
E. A. Lowe and, recently, Michelle Brown. Through most of the history of
discussion of the magnificent manuscript, those who studied it have drawn data
piece by piece from Aldred’s colophon, taking at face value, for the most part,
and literally the separate bits of information so obtained.
It was
only in 2003, in an article in Speculum, that Lawrence Nees looked at
the colophon as a whole; he called attention to its artistic symmetries, such
as the play upon the number four: the invocation of the triune God (3 + 1), the
four gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and, of course, the four
churchmen who are said to have worked on the gospel book: Eadfrith, Æthelwald,
Billfrith and Aldred himself. Nees has also called for an investigation of
Aldred’s sources. This present study traces a background of inspiration that
includes, in the classical period the elegiac poet Ovid and, from the same
century as Ovid, the Gospel writers, in the patristic period the father Jerome,
and later Cassiodorus and Bede, in the Carolingian era the poets Alcuin and
Theodulf, and in Aldred’s own day the law codes and charters of late
Anglo-Saxon England. The result, we hope, is a clearer understanding of
Aldred’s colophon as a literary creation.
Francis L. Newton, Francis L. Newton, Jr and Christopher
R. J. Scheirer (2012). Domiciling the evangelists in Anglo-Saxon England: a
fresh reading of Aldred's colophon in the ‘Lindisfarne Gospels’. Anglo-Saxon
England, 41, pp 101-144 doi:10.1017/S0263675112000026
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