Trinity Homilies

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The Trinity Homilies are a collection of 36 homilies found in MS Trinity 335 (B.14.52), held in Trinity College, Cambridge. Produced probably early in the thirteenth century in the Early Middle English period, the collection is of great linguistic importance in establishing the development of the English language, [1] since it preserves a number of Old English forms and gives evidence of the literary influence of Latin and Anglo-Norman as well as of the vernacular used in sermons for lay audiences. The same manuscript, like that of the Lambeth Homilies, also preserves a version of the Poema Morale .

A homily is a commentary that follows a reading of scripture. In Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, and Eastern Orthodox Churches, a homily is usually given during Mass at the end of the Liturgy of the Word. Many people consider it synonymous with a sermon.

Trinity College, Cambridge constituent college of the University of Cambridge in England

Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge in England. With around 600 undergraduates, 300 graduates, and over 180 fellows, it is the largest college in either of the Oxbridge universities by number of undergraduates. In terms of total student numbers, it is second only to Homerton College, Cambridge.

Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest historical form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers probably in the mid-5th century, and the first Old English literary works date from the mid-7th century. After the Norman conquest of 1066, English was replaced, for a time, as the language of the upper classes by Anglo-Norman, a relative of French. This is regarded as marking the end of the Old English era, as during this period the English language was heavily influenced by Anglo-Norman, developing into a phase known now as Middle English.

Contents

Date and provenance

The manuscript contains twelve quires totaling 91 folios, with sections written in English Vernacular Minuscule by three or four hands between 1060 and 1220. Two main scribes were responsible for most of the text, working in an alternating manner and easily distinguished by the very different ways in which they wrote the symbol & (a scribal abbreviation) and the letter ð ("edh", a voiced or unvoiced dental fricative). The MS has rubrics in red ink, and the initials of each homily are in red or sometimes green. The MS was rebound in October 1984. [2]

Scribal abbreviation abbreviations used by ancient and medieval scribes writing in Latin, and later in Greek and Old Norse

Scribal abbreviations or sigla are the abbreviations used by ancient and medieval scribes writing in various languages, including Latin, Greek, Old English and Old Norse. In modern manuscript editing "sigla" are the symbols used to indicate the source manuscript and to identify the copyists of a work. See Critical apparatus.

Rubric word or section of text that is traditionally written or printed in red ink for emphasis

A rubric is a word or section of text that is traditionally written or printed in red ink for emphasis. The word derives from the Latin: rubrica, meaning red ochre or red chalk, and originates in Medieval illuminated manuscripts from the 13th century or earlier. In these, red letters were used to highlight initial capitals, section headings and names of religious significance, a practice known as rubrication, which was a separate stage in the production of a manuscript.

Produced in the South-east Midlands, the Trinity Homilies may date back to c. 1175, though a usual date range given is 1200–1225. Written in the dialect characteristic of London with possible influence of East Anglian immigrants, it contains Old English forms, though this may point to a scribe well versed in the older language rather than an Old English exemplar; still, Old English exemplars are a possibility. [3] According to Margaret Laing, the two scribes have very different backgrounds: the first is, she says, a "copier" who more or less faithfully transmits the two dialects of the two exemplars he was working from, and the second was a "'translator' whose language belongs probably in West Suffolk". [4]

In textual criticism, an exemplar is the text used to produce another text. In the study of the history of a text an especially important exemplar is that which precedes any split in the tradition of that text, that is, before significant textual variations occur in different versions--such an exemplar is called an archetype.

The Trinity Homilies as well as the Cotton Vespasian Homilies in the Cotton library are cited as evidence of the twelfth-century appearance of devotional prose in dialects from the east of England, of which Vices and Virtues is representative. This eastern variety of devotional prose is, in general, marked by less ornate language. [5]

Cotton library manuscript collection

The Cotton or Cottonian library is a collection of manuscripts once owned by Sir Robert Bruce Cotton MP (1571–1631), an antiquarian and bibliophile. It later became the basis of what is now the British Library, which still holds the collection. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries, many priceless and ancient manuscripts that had belonged to the monastic libraries began to be disseminated among various owners, many of whom were unaware of the cultural value of the manuscripts. Cotton's skill lay in finding, purchasing and preserving these ancient documents. The leading scholars of the era, including Francis Bacon, Walter Raleigh, and James Ussher, came to use Sir Robert's library. Richard James acted as his librarian. The library is of special importance for sometimes having preserved the only copy of a work, such as happened with Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

The Trinity Homilies share five sermons (and the Poema Morale [1] ) with the Lambeth Homilies. [6] The language used is not to be pinned down to any particular period, since it preserves grammatical qualities (the indirect passive, in the terminology of Cynthia Allen) that were not necessarily still current in the thirteenth century, though their use suggests that the scribes deemed them intelligible for their readership. [7] The homilies also provide the first occurrence of a number of new words derived from Old French, including chemise and chastien ("chasten"). [8]

The Poema Morale is an early Middle English moral poem outlining proper Christian conduct. The poem was popular enough to have survived in seven manuscripts, including the homiletic collections known as the Lambeth Homilies and Trinity Homilies, both dating from around 1200.

The Lambeth Homilies are a collection of homilies found in a manuscript in the Lambeth Palace Library in Lambeth, England. The collection contains seventeen sermons and is notable for being one of the latest examples of Old English, written as it was c. 1200, well into the period of Middle English.

Old French was the language spoken in Northern France from the 8th century to the 14th century. In the 14th century, these dialects came to be collectively known as the langue d'oïl, contrasting with the langue d'oc or Occitan language in the south of France. The mid-14th century is taken as the transitional period to Middle French, the language of the French Renaissance, specifically based on the dialect of the Île-de-France region.

Content

The Trinity Homilies, like the Lambeth Homilies, the Bodley Homilies, the Cotton Vespasian Homilies, and the Rochester Anthology, are written in a time of competing linguistic interests, which has led some scholars to see in their mixed contents (with "a lack of identifying traits" such as "genre, topic, style or authorship") a reflection of those pressures--"the artificially preserved literacy of Latin and A[nglo-]N[orman], and the undisciplined vigour of emerging oral varieties". [9] When the homilies condemn bodily activities, they seem to do so as a critique of the register of vernacular English. [9]

Related Research Articles

Old English literature or Anglo-Saxon literature, encompasses literature written in Old English, in Anglo-Saxon England from the 7th century to the decades after the Norman Conquest of 1066. "Cædmon's Hymn", composed in the 7th century, according to Bede, is often considered as the oldest surviving poem in English. Poetry written in the mid-12th century represents some of the latest post-Norman examples of Old English; for example, The Soul's Address to the Body found in Worcester Cathedral Library MS F. 174 contains only one word of possible Latinate origin, while also maintaining a corrupt alliterative meter and Old English grammar and syntax, albeit in a degenerative state. The Peterborough Chronicle can also be considered a late-period text, continuing into the 12th century. The strict adherence to the grammatical rules of Old English is largely inconsistent in 12th century work - as is evident in the works cited above - and by the 13th century the grammar and syntax of Old English had almost completely deteriorated, giving way to the much larger Middle English corpus of literature.

Old English Bible translations List of Biblical books in Old English

The Old English Bible translations are the partial translations of the Bible prepared in medieval England into the Old English language. The translations are from Latin texts, not the original languages.

<i>Textus Roffensis</i> medieval manuscript

The Textus Roffensis, fully entitled the Textus de Ecclesia Roffensi per Ernulphum episcopum and sometimes also known as the Annals of Rochester, is a mediaeval manuscript that consists of two separate works written between 1122 and 1124. It is catalogued as "Rochester Cathedral Library, MS A.3.5" and is currently on display in a new exhibition at Rochester Cathedral, Rochester, Kent. It is thought that the main text of both manuscripts was written by a single scribe, although the English glosses to the two Latin entries were made by a second hand. The annotations might indicate that the manuscript was consulted in some post-Conquest trials. However, the glosses are very sparse and just clarify a few uncertain terms. For example, the entry on f. 67r merely explains that the triplex iudiciu(m) is called in English, ofraceth ordel.

Ancrene Wisse is an anonymous monastic rule for female anchoresses written in the early 13th century.

<i>Ormulum</i> 12th century book of Middle English homilies

The Ormulum or Orrmulum is a twelfth-century work of biblical exegesis, written by a monk named Orm and consisting of just under 19,000 lines of early Middle English verse. Because of the unique phonetic orthography adopted by its author, the work preserves many details of English pronunciation existing at a time when the language was in flux after the Norman conquest of England. Consequently, it is invaluable to philologists and historical linguists in tracing the development of the language.

White Book of Rhydderch manuscript

The White Book of Rhydderch is one of the most notable and celebrated surviving manuscripts in Welsh. Mostly written in southwest Wales in the middle of the 14th century it is the earliest collection of Welsh prose texts, though it also contains some examples of early Welsh poetry. It is now part of the collection of the National Library of Wales, having been preserved in the library at Hengwrt, near Dolgellau, Gwynedd, of the 17th century antiquary Robert Vaughan, who inherited it from the calligrapher John Jones and passed it to his descendants. The collection later passed to the newly established National Library of Wales as the Peniarth or Hengwrt-Peniarth Manuscripts.

De duodecim abusivis saeculi is a treatise on social and political morality written by an anonymous Irish author between 630 and 700. During the Middle Ages the work was very popular throughout Europe.

West Saxon was one of four distinct dialects of Old English. The three others were Kentish, Mercian and Northumbrian. West Saxon was the language of the kingdom of Wessex, and was the basis for successive widely used literary forms of Old English: the Early West Saxon of Alfred the Great's time, and the Late West Saxon of the late 10th and 11th centuries. Due to the Saxons' establishment as a politically dominant force in the Old English period, the West Saxon dialect became one of the strongest dialects in Old English manuscript writing.

Mercian was a dialect spoken in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia. Together with Northumbrian, it was one of the two Anglian dialects. The other two dialects of Old English were Kentish and West Saxon. Each of those dialects was associated with an independent kingdom on the island. Of these, all of Northumbria and most of Mercia were overrun by the Vikings during the 9th century. Part of Mercia and all of Kent were successfully defended but were then integrated into the Kingdom of Wessex. Because of the centralisation of power and the Viking invasions, there is little to no salvaged written evidence for the development of non-Wessex dialects after Alfred the Great's unification, until the Middle English period.

The Vercelli Book is one of the oldest of the four Old English Poetic Codices. It is an anthology of Old English prose and verse that dates back to the late 10th century. The manuscript is housed in the Capitulary Library of Vercelli, in northern Italy.

Blickling homilies

The Blickling Homilies is the name given to a collection of anonymous homilies from Anglo-Saxon England. They are written in Old English, and were written down at some point before the end of the tenth century, making them one of the oldest collections of sermons to survive from medieval England, the other main witness being the Vercelli Book. Their name derives from Blickling Hall in Norfolk, which once housed them; the manuscript is now Princeton, Scheide Library, MS 71.

The Pilgrimage of the Soul or The Pylgremage of the Sowle was a late medieval work in English, combining prose and lyric verse, translated from Guillaume de Deguileville's Old French Le Pèlerinage de l'Âme. It circulated in manuscript in fifteenth-century England, and was among the works printed by William Caxton. One manuscript forms part of the Egerton Collection in the British Library.

The Vercelli homilies are a collection of twenty-three prose entries within the Vercelli book and exist as an important example of Old English prose structure, owing to the predominance of poetry within the pool of extant Old English literature. In keeping with the origins of the Vercelli manuscript in general, little is known about the exact authorship of the Vercelli homilies. It is widely believed that the individual homilies were gathered from several authors and copied by one scribe into the manuscript at random. The compilation of the Vercelli book is typically placed within the late tenth century AD.

The Cambrai Homily is the earliest known Irish homily, dating to the 7th or early 8th century. It is evidence that a written vernacular encouraged by the Church had already been established alongside Latin by the 7th century in Ireland. The homily is also the oldest single example of an extended prose passage in Old Irish. The text is incomplete, and Latin and Irish are mixed. Quotations from the Bible and patristic sources are in Latin, with the explication in Irish. It is a significant document for the study of Celtic linguistics and for understanding sermons as they might have existed in the 7th-century Irish church. The homily also contains the earliest examples in written Irish of triads, a form of expression characteristic of early Irish literature, though the text taken as a whole is not composed in triads.

Cædmon's "Hymn" is a short Old English poem originally composed by Cædmon, a supposedly illiterate cow-herder who was, according to Bede, able to sing in honour of God the Creator, using words that he had never heard before. It was composed between 658 and 680 and is the oldest recorded Old English poem, being composed within living memory of the Christianization of Anglo-Saxon England. It is also one of the oldest surviving samples of Germanic alliterative verse.

A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME) is a digital, corpus-driven, historical dialect resource for Early Middle English (1150–1325). LAEME combines a searchable Corpus of Tagged Texts (CTT), an Index of Sources, and dot maps showing the distribution of textual dialect features. LAEME is headed by the University of Edinburgh's Margaret Laing, and includes contributions from Roger Lass, and web-scripts by Keith Williamson, Vasilis Karaiskos and Sherrylyn Branchaw.

References

  1. 1 2 Conti, Aidan (2006). "The Gem‐Bearing Serpents of the Trinity Homilies: An Analogue for Gower's Confessio Amantis". Modern Philology . 106 (1): 109–16. doi:10.1086/597251. JSTOR   10.1086/597251.
  2. ↑ Treharne, Elaine (June 2012). "Cambridge, Trinity College, B. 14. 52". The Production and Use of English Manuscripts 1060 to 1220. Retrieved 5 September 2012.
  3. ↑ Kroch, Anthony; Taylor, Ann (2001). "Verb-Object Order in Early Middle English". In Susan Pintzuk (ed.). Diachronic Syntax: Models and Mechanisms. George Tsoulas, Anthony Warner. Oxford UP. pp. 136–. ISBN   9780198250272 . Retrieved 5 September 2012.
  4. ↑ Laing, Margaret (2000). "'Never the twain shall meet': Early Middle English--the East-West divide". In Irma Taavitsainen (ed.). Placing Middle English in Context. Walter de Gruyter. pp. 97–124. ISBN   9783110167801 . Retrieved 6 September 2012.
  5. ↑ Zeeman, Elizabeth (1956). "Continuity in Middle English Devotional Prose". Journal of English and Germanic Philology . 55 (3): 417–22. JSTOR   27706777.
  6. ↑ Trips, Carola (2002). From Ov to Vo in Early Middle English. John Benjamins. p. 22. ISBN   9789027227812 . Retrieved 5 September 2012.
  7. ↑ Allen, Cynthia L. (1999). Case Marking and Reanalysis: Grammatical Relations from Old to Early Modern English. Oxford UP. pp. 366–. ISBN   9780198238676 . Retrieved 5 September 2012.
  8. ↑ Miller, D. Gary (2012). External Influences on English: From its Beginnings to the Renaissance. Oxford UP. pp. 65, 154. ISBN   9780199654260 . Retrieved 5 September 2012.
  9. 1 2 Hahn, Thomas (2002). "Early Middle English". In David Wallace (ed.). The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature. Cambridge UP. pp. 61–91. ISBN   9780521890465 . Retrieved 5 September 2012.
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