Finding the Right Words: Isidore’s “Synonyma” in Anglo-Saxon England (review)

While not breaking much fundamentally new ground, this book refines and develops some of the best scholarship on Anglo-Saxon literary history by focusing on one influential source for both Old English and Anglo-Latin writers, Isidore of Seville’s Synonyma, a work that combines a lamentation of the sinful man with a dialogue between Reason and Man that offers advice for achieving salvation. Di Sciacca divides her material sensibly into seven chapters: 1. “Isidore of Seville: His Life and Culture”; 2. “The Synonyma: Their Structure, Style, and Sources”; 3. “Isidore and the Synonyma in the British Isles”; 4. “The Vernacularization of the Synonyma: the Case of Vercelli xxii”; 5. “The Vernacularization of the Synonyma: the ubi sunt Topos”; 6. “The Synonyma in Anglo-Latin Literature”; and 7. “The Synonyma in Anglo-Saxon England: Some Conclusions.” From this list, one might expect chapters 4 and 5 to contain some of the most original material and, while they do, the use of the Synonyma in Vercelli Homily XXII was identified, as Di Sciacca notes, by Max Förster in 1913, and the ubi sunt topos was investigated, again as she makes clear, by J. E. Cross in 1956. There are, of course, new finds. One example that bridges the two chapters (see pp. 78 and 135–38) is Di Sciacca’s discovery that a brief passage from Vercelli XXII (lines 123–28) concerning the lessons that may be drawn by visiting burials (the dead may no longer delight in this world or preserve its riches) comes from the pseudo-Augustine Sermo ad fratres in eremo 58, which leads her to make both a technical point (the homilist has probably not worked from an Old English translation of the Synonyma but rather from a Latin composite work that drew on Isidore’s work) and a more general one (“the Latin sources for the ubi sunt motif were not kept distinct or felt to be mutually exclusive, but were freely drawn on to create a vast vernacular stock of ubi sunt phrases”; p. 138). The strength of this book is not, then, in having opened new territories but in mapping known ones so carefully.

One benefit of this mapping is to make the centrality of the Synonyma for the literary culture of Anglo-Saxon England readily apparent. Di Sciacca makes a strong case that the text was introduced into England by various routes through Ireland and different Continental centers, yet at an early date (certainly by the end of the seventh century). It is found in eight manuscripts written or owned in England before 1100 (in four of these it has been glossed) as well as six more associated with Anglo-Saxon missionary centers on the Continent in the late eighth and early ninth centuries. Di Sciacca also mentions a lost manuscript of the work recorded in the list of books Æthelwold sent to the monastery of Medeshamstede, which he had restored following the Viking raids. She discusses in detail uses of the work in the Anglo-Latin writings of Aldhelm, Boniface, Alcuin, an unnamed disciple of Alcuin’s, and in one of the witnesses of Wulfstan’s “Commonplace Book,” from which it makes it into Wulfstan’s Sermo ad populum. Finally she considers its dissemination through prayers such as Succurre mihi found in the ninth-century Anglo- Saxon prayerbook, the Book of Cerne, and through the classroom, as exemplified by Ælfric Bata’s Colloquium 28. When one adds to these examples the vernacular uses discussed in chapters 4 and 5, it is clear that the Synonyma figured prominently in the homiletic, devotional, and didactic literature of the period.

One recurring question that Di Sciacca hints at but does not finally resolve is the effect (or effects) of the Synonyma on the style of Anglo-Saxon writers. Perhaps the question cannot be answered because, although the work is a good example of the stilus ysydorianus, a “kind of rhymed...