Prologues and Epilogues in the Old English Pastoral Care, and Their Carolingian Models

The Old English Pastoral Care is richly furnished with the kind of framing texts that we call prologues, prefaces, proems, and epilogues.¹ It opens with a long prose preface written in the voice of King Alfred and addressed to the individual bishops. Next comes a short verse preface written in the voice of the book and apparently addressed to readers in general. Then, after a list of the sixty-five chapters and their subjects, comes another prose preface, addressed to a “beloved brother.” At the end there is a short prose epilogue, addressed to “the good man John.” And finally there is a long verse epilogue apparently addressed to the readers in the voice of the translator.² No other Alfredian text has such a rich profusion of these frame-pieces, as one might call them. The Old English version of Gregory’s Dialogues, which was apparently issued perhaps five to ten years before the Pastoral Care, has both a prose preface and a verse one, but the two do not appear together in the same copies.³ The Old English Boethius, in its later, prosimetrical form, had both a prose preface and a verse one, but it is not known what prefaces if any there were in the original prose translation when that was issued, and there is no epilogue (the final prayer that appears in older editions is a very late addition).⁴ The Old English Orosius has neither prologue nor epilogue in the extant manuscripts at least, and the Old English Bede has only versions of the preface and epilogue of Bede himself.

The last of the three prefaces to the Pastoral Care and the first of the two epilogues are versions of Gregory’s own prologue and epilogue, addressed originally to John, bishop of Ravenna, but the other three pieces are new material created for the publication of the Old English Pastoral Care. The additional pieces have had much attention in modern times but hardly ever as a set and seldom in terms of their role in relation to the whole work or to the literary traditions of prologues and epilogues. The prose preface has been repeatedly printed separately from the main text in readers, anthologies, and source-books, heavily cited as historical evidence for the Alfredian revival of learning, and increasingly viewed not as a preface at all but as a circular letter or royal writ somehow attached to the translation. The verse preface and verse epilogue have been printed in collections and anthologies of Old English verse and studied as examples of poetry and evidence for the composition of verse. But the primary and original purpose of these texts was to explain, recommend, and justify the text that they frame, as part of a program of publication, and it is in this context that they have their main significance.

Pinning down an author or initiator for these prologues and epilogues is not easy, perhaps impossible. As we shall see, prefaces in this period were not necessarily written by the authors of the works they introduce or by the person in whose voice and name they speak. Indeed, the Old English Dialogues provide examples of both points: the verse preface was the work of someone other than Wærferth, the author of the main text, and the prose preface is in Alfred’s voice but was not written by him. Verse prologues and epilogues are a particular issue: although the well-educated in Anglo-Saxon England could clearly compose as easily in Latin verse as in prose, as evidenced by Bede, Aldhelm, Alcuin, and Wulfstan Cantor, we still do not know whether the same was true of Old English. Would verse texts that form part of a prose work have been commissioned from a specialist writer of Old English verse, or was this a skill that any educated Anglo-Saxon could be expected to accomplish, at least at the level of expertise that the preface and epilogue required?⁵ Many hands and minds may have been involved in the creation of the Old English Pastoral Care...