The Refashioning of Christ's Passion in an Anonymous Old English Homily for Palm Sunday (HomS 18)

I. INTRODUCTION

The purpose of the ensuing essay is to highlight and attempt to account for some of the remarkable features of an anonymous Old English homily in order to shed light on the nature of pre-Ælfrician Old English homiletics. At first sight the homily, to be preached on Palm Sunday, may appear less than promising material for analysis, since it is a rather faithful rendering, at times even slavish, of the story of Christ's Passion related in the Gospel of St. Matthew, chapters 26 and 27, with very nearly no additions to the gospel account. Closer examination, however, reveals some rather peculiar features, including some surprising interpretations of what the gospel says, along with a variety of features that suggest that one of the homilist's aims was to lend the story of the Passion some of the heroic qualities characteristic of Old English narrative verse, both religious and secular. The peculiarity of the work was recognized in its own day, since two of the three manuscript copies show extensive alterations to the text in order to remove some of its idiosyncrasies. The homily thus furnishes particular insights into the nature of the vernacular homily before Ælfric set out to reform the genre.

"Dominica in ramis palmarum. Passio domini nostri Iesu cristi secundum Matheum" is the title provided the homily in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 340 (here designated E). A similar or identical heading appears in the other two manuscripts: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 198 (here designated F) and Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 162 (here designated G).¹ No edition has ever been printed, though the homily was edited in an unpublished doctoral dissertation by Kenneth Schaefer, taking F as the base text.² The Dictionary of Old English, however, instead uses in its database its editors' own transcript from E, assigning it the short title HomS 18.³ It should be said that the language of E shows that copy to be closest to what must have been the original text of the homily, but the text has been so extensively altered in other hands in both E and G that the substance of the work has been best preserved in F, and that is the version that will serve as the base text for present purposes.⁴ The text will thus be cited from Schaefer's edition. Schaefer's dissertation is indeed a valuable contribution to the study of the homily, though it should be said that it lacks some of the features required of a fully adequate edition, especially a full consideration of the significance of the extensive scribal alterations made to the text in E and G, and a discussion of the text's linguistic features and their implications for a proper understanding of the homily and its origins.

II. LANGUAGE AND DATE OF COMPOSITION

Certainly the work cannot have been written later than the early eleventh century, the period to which Ker assigns all three manuscripts.⁵ Other considerations, however, suggest an earlier date of composition. It is notable that the language of the homily, though in the main Late West Saxon, shows an unmistakable admixture of Anglian features. For example, West Saxon diphthongization by initial palatal consonants is missing from the words scæðe (l. 76: sheath)⁶ and gate (l. 87: gate; West Saxon sceaðe, geate), and verbs in the second- and third-persons singular present indicative usually lack the syncope characteristic of West Saxon (e.g., singeð, l. 52—though F reads singað—for West Saxon singð [sings]), with the exception (among a few others) of cwyst (ll. 30, 130: [you] say), which is also an exception in the Mercian gloss on the Vespasian Psalter.⁷ Likewise, the homilist uses ne wære (l. 34: were not; corrected to West Saxon nære in EG); and the preposition mid is used with the accusative case in the phrase mid aðswara (with swearing of oaths).⁸ The nominative and accusative plural pronoun hio, heo (3× in E) is generally otherwise spelled...