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  • Confessing the Faith in Anglo-Saxon England
  • Miranda Wilcox

Anglo-Saxon Christians believed that confessing or professing the recta fides or riht geleafa (right faith) was necessary to receive salvation. Ælfric summarizes this doctrine at the beginning and end of his Rogationtide homily De fide Catholica:

Ælc cristen man sceal æfter rihte cunnan ægþer ge his pater noster ge his credan; Mid þam pater nostre he sceal hine gebiddan. mid þam credan he sceal his geleafan getrymman; … Uton for þi geearnian þæt ece lif mid gode þurh ðisne geleafan 7 þurh godum geearnungum. se ðe þurhwunað on þrynnysse. an ælmihtig god. á. on ecnysse.1

(Each Christian person must know in accordance with what is right both his Lord’s Prayer and his Creed; with the Lord’s Prayer he shall pray, with the Creed he shall confirm his belief. … Therefore, let us merit that eternal life with God, who exists in Trinity, one almighty God forever, through this belief and through good works.)

Confessing correct belief qualified a Christian for meriting eternal life after death as well as for receiving sacramental grace, through which a Christian is sanctified and united with Christ on earth. Anglo-Saxon Christians had to confess their faith to receive baptism, which cleansed their souls from original sin; to celebrate mass, which brought their bodies in communion with the Eucharist; to do penance, which cleansed their souls from committed sin; and to receive last rites, which prepared their souls for entrance into Heaven. They confessed their faith with formulated definitions of fundamental Christian doctrines. Many confessions of faith were composed and circulated in early medieval Europe, including Anglo-Saxon England. Although the formulations of some confessions became fixed in the liturgy and widely memorized, formulations in other contexts were more flexible and easily adaptable. This paper categorizes the approximately fifty distinct confessions of faith found in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and composed by Anglo-Saxons. [End Page 308]

It is surprising that such an integral practice of Anglo-Saxon Christianity has received little scholarly attention.2 This may be due, in part, to two assumptions fostered by the conspicuously traditional rhetoric of confessions of faith: first, that Anglo-Saxons confessed their faith simply by repeating memorized formulae; and second, that Anglo-Saxons transmitted orthodoxy as a static tradition. Similar assumptions were made about other traditional Anglo-Saxon practices and texts, including preaching and homilies, hagiography and saints’ lives, penance and penitentials, and translation and vernacular retellings, until scholars began recognizing the complex cultural work performed in these practices and texts.3 The deceptive simplicity and repetition in confessions of faith likewise negotiated complex ecclesiastical, social, and cultural relations, including a Christian’s willing inner alignment with a shared system of belief, loyalty to his or her community, and performance of the community’s discourse of orthodoxy.

I argue that confessing faith in Anglo-Saxon England can productively be understood as a ritual discourse that engages with and transmits the tradition of Christian orthodoxy (the recta fides or riht geleafa) through four separate subgenres, namely: liturgical creeds, conciliar definitions, episcopal professions, and personal confessions. These four subgenres can be organized along a spectrum according to their relative fixity of formulation; the degree of the fixity correlates with their distinct social and ecclesial functions.4 [End Page 309]

I. TRADITIONAL FORMULATIONS: A CONTINUUM OF FIXITY

Confessing the faith is a complex form of social communication that regulates, informs, and constructs religious selves and communities. As a ritual discourse, it shapes the modality of communal and personal belief.5 Richard Briggs describes confessing faith as a performative act: a “stance of worship with its connotations of testimony and endorsement which bespeaks self-involvement on the part of the author of the ‘users’ of the text,”6 and he describes confessions as self-involving speech acts because “they bring together both the content (what is confessed) and the force or stance with which it is confessed.”7 Confessions of faith are generally performed in the context of ecclesial rituals.8 Composing a written confession of faith records this speech performance as text; documents that confess the faith constitute a textual genre with conventions and social functions.9

Since a ritual...

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