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  • The Old English Metrical Calendar (Menologium) ed. by Kazutomo Karasawa
  • Emily V. Thornbury
The Old English Metrical Calendar (Menologium). Edited and translated by Kazutomo Karasawa. Anglo-Saxon Texts, 12. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015. Pp. xvi + 228; 2 illustrations. $99.

For a relatively brief nonnarrative poem, the Old English Menologium has been edited surprisingly often—seventeen times by the count of its most recent editor, Kazutomo Karasawa, whose new volume sets a high bar for an eighteenth contender to clear. His work reveals the Menologium to be a much richer, stranger poem than it had previously appeared, and this edition, equipped with a wealth of other supporting texts as well as detailed notes and introduction, will be essential reading for anyone interested in early medieval thought about time.

The Menologium's unique situation has prompted some of its popularity with editors. Found only in London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. i, it is the first of a pair of poems dividing the Old English Orosius from the C-text of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The Menologium itself is a verse account of the liturgical year, listing in order the chief immovable feasts and locating them in the overlapping frameworks of the solar year's solstices and equinoxes and the Roman and English calendars, in which the first of each new month is the point of reference. Metrical calendars seem to have been a relatively widespread feature of Insular culture, and so the Menologium has often been described as an outgrowth of Irish seasonal calendar poems like the Félire Adamnáin, or of Anglo-Latin works like the Metrical Calendar of York, which in a series of hexameters lists the dates of each saint's feast in the Roman calendar. Karasawa's most important contention is that the Menologium is not a reflex of either the Latin or Irish traditions of metrical calendars, and that its closest—indeed only—real analogue is the Old English prose Menologium found in two eleventh-century manuscripts (London, British Library, Harley 3271, where it is titled "De diebus fesstis," and Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 422).

Karasawa's argument for the uniqueness of the Old English menologium group is based on the quite different ways in which each calendrical tradition reckons time. In the Latin poems, each feast is located in the fixed framework of the numbered days of the Roman calendar. This is an atomized view of events in time: because each line or couplet of the poem is a separate index to an external system, new feasts can be added (or unimportant ones deleted) without any disruption to the poem's structure. The Irish poems, however, are structured according to seasonal cycles. The Félire Adamnáin groups saints' feasts within the four seasons, while the lyric Enlaith betha links the migrations and behaviors of birds and beasts to particular saints' days. These texts, too, are theoretically expansible (new saints could be added to each season, for instance), but their focus seems less mnemonic than devotional: they invite not specific reckonings of days but rather contemplation of the saints' connection to primal creation. But though the Old English texts have something in common with each of these modes, Karasawa shows that they fundamentally rely on a different structural principle, one that might be called relational. The first two entries in the prose Menologium read as follows:

Ærest from middan wintra bið to Sancta Marian mæssan .v. wucan and .iiii. niht. And ðæs on .v. nihtum gæð lengten on tun. [End Page 364] (First from midwinter [i.e. the winter equinox and Christmas] to St Mary's feast [i.e. the Purification] is five weeks and four nights. And then in five nights spring comes to town.)

(pp. 132–33)

Each entry is linked by a count of days to those just before and after it. In the prose text, there are no Roman dates at all. While the solstices and equinoxes, and the arrival of the seasons midway between, anchor the feasts within the solar year, these fixed celestial events are also part of the count of days: again in the prose text, the...

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