Sunday Observance and the Sunday Letter in Anglo-Saxon England by Dorothy Haines (review)

Dorothy Haines’s Sunday Observance and the Sunday Letter in Anglo-Saxon England collects and translates into modern English the six extant Old English versions of the Sunday Letter, which derive from an apparently sixth-century Latin original purportedly written by Christ to impose rest and worship on the Lord’s Day. Belabouring God’s anger against those who would break this rule, the various Old English texts will seem sadistic to modern readers. It is thus to her credit that Haines so clearly illuminates the contexts of these documents for those who may associate Anglo-Saxon literature with more familiar works like Beowulf or The Wanderer.

Along with a preface, acknowledgements, and list of abbreviations, Haines’s volume comprises a lengthy introduction, facing-page critical editions with more or less literal translations of versions A to F of the Sunday Letter, a commentary, six appendices, a glossary, bibliography, and index. A virtual monograph in its own right, the four-part introduction traces the rise of Sunday observance in early medieval England, Ireland, and the Continent back to late Roman and subsequent Carolingian legislation. It also adduces relevant Anglo-Saxon laws, penitential texts, and sermons and provides background to the three Latin recensions and six vernacular texts themselves and their transmission. Haines shows that the Sunday Letter enjoyed widespread popularity and was translated into a dozen languages; she judiciously considers this popularity in light of the early medieval Church’s logical need to set aside one day of the week for pastoral teaching. Sensitive to the Letter’s ecclesiastical and social contexts, Haines also demonstrates that those contexts were polyvalent rather than monolithic, as in her observation that ‘[f]ortunately, though the popularity and survival of the Sunday Letter may confirm our worst suspicions about the gullibility and lack of discernment of medieval clergy, we can also derive some comfort from the fact that it was regularly recognized as a fraud.’ Even prelates deemed the Letter suspect because of its unusual severity and its tacit claim to supplement scripture.

The richness of the Letter’s historical background finds a parallel in the variety of the vernacular texts themselves. Although all six versions preach their dubious gospel by threatening scofflaws with temporal and eternal punishment, they display intriguing differences of tone. Letter A begins by recounting its divine origin and then proceeds to forbid Sunday work lest God destroy the world; Letter C, however, acknowledges that bishops and priests are obliged to upbraid their flocks to rest on Sundays because failure to do so will make the prelates themselves guilty in God’s eyes. Haines’s scrupulous editing and translating do textual justice to a body of works obsessed with divine justice, and one could not ask for a more thorough critical apparatus. There are moments when the translation seems excessively literal: ‘And there are three things which will not be forgiven either in this world or in the future life: one is that one hold God in derision; another, that one not believe in the Resurrection […]’ for Letter C’s ‘And þreo þing syndon, þe ne beoð forgifene ne on þissere worulde ne on þam toweardan life: an is, þæt man God to tale habbe; oðer, þæt man ærestes ne gelyfe […].’ Using the passive voice would perhaps render the two enumerating clauses more idiomatically as ‘one is that God (should) be held in derision; another, that the Resurrection (should) be disbelieved.’ In another case, fidelity to the original’s syntax produces ‘Remember, you rich, that you possess your abundance rightly,’ for Letter D’s ‘Gemunað ge weligan þæt ge eowre wiste rihtlice gehealden’; but the imperative + subjunctive construction of the command gemunað … þæt ge … gehealden requires something like ‘Remember, you rich, to keep your abundance rightly,’ coupling an imperative with an infinitive to convey the same meaning.

These are quibbles on my part, however. Haines’s book is an impressive feat of scholarship and textual editing that adds...