Old English Literature and the Old Testament ed. by Michael Fox and Manish Sharma (review)

This important collection offers a wide-ranging treatment of all of the major Old Testament–based productions in the Old English literary tradition (to c. 1100). On the whole, the work comprises a cohesive and carefully edited group of groundbreaking essays. Nevertheless, each essay exhibits its own approach to the sources and reflects its own theoretical grounding. Those seeking comprehensive and more dispassionate surveys still will need recourse to the Blackwell guides and other handbooks.

The larger sectional divisions here involve distinctions between prose and poetry. The Biblically informed works of the prolific translator and prose author Ælfric (who died c. 1010) and the unique Old Testament–themed verse of the so-called Junius manuscript at Oxford (notably in poetry assigned the titles Genesis A, Exodus, and Daniel) effectively have sections all to themselves. This differentiation between prose and poetry accords well with the Old English evidence, even if it occasionally appears less natural with respect to certain medieval Latin liturgical settings of Biblical texts, as well as some of the Old Testament originals (psalms, canticles, prayers, and so on), which often occupy a grey area between poetry and prose. Here, for example, the major comments (by Stephen J. Harris) on some translations of Latin psalms into Old English prose, attributed to the great king Alfred of Wessex (who died in 899), appear in a section nominally given over to Old English poetry. The whole body of the literature studied here, as well as the state of research addressing each text, is cogently reviewed in the introduction by Michael Fox.

The collection is notable for the generous attention paid to little-known Anglo-Saxon texts and sources. Fox considers Ælfric’s seldom-discussed rendering from the Quaestiones in Genesim – that title having now been established authoritatively by Fox – of the Anglo-Saxon scholar Alcuin (who died in 804), Ælfric’s rendering evidently following “a now-lost manuscript of the [Latin alpha] family.” Fox shows that the work offers a neglected example of an observed tendency among Anglo-Saxon authors to curtail treatments of Genesis fairly early on, with the accounts of Abraham and Isaac, as seen elsewhere in Bede’s work on Genesis, in the Junius Genesis A, and in Ælfric’s own translations from Genesis.

Paul Szarmach notes that Ælfric’s little-studied and textually problematic paraphrase of the story of Judith, occurring outside of that author’s voluminous Catholic Homilies and Lives of Saints, presents a narrative that is predominantly neither sermon-like nor saintly. In the light of a very close comparison with the text of the Latin Vulgate, Szarmach finds that Ælfric’s prose – anachronistically, of course, in an Old Testament tradition – frequently recalls details of accounts of martyred virgins in early Christian tradition. Szarmach also includes valuable comments on Aldhelm’s treatments of the figure of Judith and, elsewhere, on alliterative features of Ælfric’s prose. Next, in a provocative and broadly cultural study, Samantha Zacher considers Anglo-Saxon perceptions of ancient and largely unfamiliar rituals of circumcision described in Old Testament sources.

Confronting some of the complications arising out of previous attempts to link the verse of the Junius Genesis A to patristic works by Augustine, Avitus, and others, a long and thoughtful study by Charles D. Wright explores the possible influence of the more literalistic (and occasionally even list-like) narratives associated with the early medieval genre of the world chronicle. Wright’s most detailed comments address the spurious Exordium libri that attached itself (by c. 500) to Jerome’s translation of Eusebius’s great Greek Chronicon; works by Prosper and Isidore; the Chronicon of Sulpicius Severus (including remarks on recent discoveries that throw new light on this badly transmitted text); and, as a sort of culmination of this early medieval sequence, Bede’s De temporum ratione. Wright’s study, inter alia, includes cautious consideration of issues relating to the dating, authorship, and textual integrity of the...