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

Old English scholarship’s view of the Anglo-Saxon past has always tended toward myopia, producing a distorted vision in which a somewhat romanticized emphasis on vernacularity is out of all proportion to its relatively minor role in the textual culture of early medieval Europe. As obvious a point as it is, we still have to bear in mind that the production of Old English texts was wholly incidental to the production of Latin texts in Anglo-Saxon England. To be sure, some scholars, notably Bertram Colgrave, W. F. Bolton, and Michael Lapidge, have worked to illuminate forms of Anglo-Saxon Latinity, but the literary study of Anglo-Saxon England still has much ground to gain through greater attention to the Latin tradition. And this is part of the reason why Haines’s volume is such a welcome addition to the literary study of Anglo-Saxon England; her book, while compiled for the purpose of gathering and editing the six extant copies of the Old English Sunday Letter, is a demonstration of the fundamental bilingualism of Anglo-Saxon literary culture, a demonstration that is instructive not only with regard to the texts under discussion but also to the general study of Old English.

In its scope and in its meticulous handling of the subject, Haines’s book supersedes all other commentary on the Old English Sunday Letters. And in fact, the first sixty-two pages of the introduction easily stand as an authoritative essay on the development of sabbatarianism and on the origin, content, sources, versions, and dissemination of the Latin Sunday Letter. Although Sunday was naturally recognized as a special day in Christian ideology because of Christ’s resurrection, Sunday observance was not a settled matter in the early Christian centuries and required extensive ecclesiastical and secular commentary before practices became more-or-less standardized and regulated. Haines traces the historical roots of Sunday observance in interpretations of Mosaic law, in Roman law, and in the statements of early Church councils. Sermons and other sources in which Sunday observance is encouraged point to the conclusion “that by the sixth century there was a powerful movement towards a sabbath-like Sunday of rest and worship” (p. 14). But Haines is also careful to say that, since there was no theological basis for making Sunday a day of abstention from physical exertion, a body of regulatory texts, including law codes, sermons, and penitentials, materialized to form justification for increased sabbatarianism, and the Latin Sunday Letter, which claims Christ as its author and its delivery from Heaven, emerged in this context as a tool in the promotion of Sunday rest.

The six extant Old English versions of the letter (a seventh was preserved in a Cotton manuscript destroyed at Ashburnham house [pp. 72–74]) all date from the eleventh century and show reflexes of different Latin versions of the letter, which Haines is careful to distinguish. Letter A is found in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 140 as an addition to Mark in this West Saxon version of the Gospels; Letters B and E appear back-to-back in CCCC 419, a collection of homilies; Letter C was copied into London, Lambeth Palace 489, a collection of sermons that may have been prepared for the use of a bishop; Letter D, the earliest Old English version (dating to the early eleventh century) is in CCCC 162, another sermon collection; and Letter F, from the mid-eleventh century, is in London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A.iii, an eclectic book of texts ranging from Ælfric’s Colloquy to homilies, monastic texts, charms, hagiography, and a lapidary. Haines’s careful discussion of the transmission of the Old English Sunday Letters (pp. 74–86) shows that “an early version of [Latin] Recension I was circulating in the British Isles and was the ancestor of the sources of Letters A, B and E/F” (p. 76). Furthermore, Letters E and...