The Wonders of the East and the Learned Tradition of Marvels

chapter 2 The Wonders of the East and the Learned Tradition of Marvels

Introduction

The Wonders of the East is an attractive text but it is not a major literary achieve- ment. Its short, descriptive sketches of monsters and marvels intrigue and dis- concert, appealing as much to a reader’s curiosity as to dread. But as much as it is attractive, the crudeness of its form and its rather unsophisticated tone means that reading the Wonders can be a confounding experience. But when the text is seen in its manuscript contexts and, in turn, those manuscripts are read as artefacts, the significance of the Wonders begins to exceed what we might expect from this rather eccentric and peripheral text.1 This chapter pre- pares the way for that discussion by tracing the learned tradition concerning marvels on which the Wonders draws. It then traces the complex relations between the Wonders of the East and the different recensions of its parent text, the Letter of Pharasmenes to Hadrian. The Wonders of the East is preserved, with accompanying illustrations, in three well-known but very different manuscripts. The earliest manuscript, London, bl, Cotton Vitellius A. xv, fols. 94–209 (s. x/xi), presents the Wonders alongside four other vernacular texts (the Life of St Christopher, the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, Beowulf, and Judith). The Wonders is the only item illu- minated in this manuscript. The images in Vitellius A. xv differ both in concep- tion and execution from those in the next surviving example of the Wonders, London, bl, Cotton Tiberius B. v, part 1 (s. xi2/4). Tiberius is a grand computus manuscript that includes, along with compustica, maps and genealogies, texts by Ælfric, Cicero and Priscian. In this company, Mirabilia and the Wonders are presented together in a bi-lingual text. The final manuscript to contain the Wonders is Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 614 (s. xiimed). Bodley 614 is a com- pact little volume, most likely for personal use, in which Mirabilia is presented alongside a calendar and astronomical material taken from Opusculum de

1 For convenience the title Wonders of the East is used to refer to both the Old English and the Latin versions. When it is necessary to distinguish between the Latin text and the vernacular, I refer to the Old English Wonders and the Latin Mirabilia.

The Wonders of the East and the Learned Tradition of Marvels 7 ratione spere.2 Using Andy Orchard’s numbering, we may count thirty-two marvels in Vitellius A. xv. To these, Tiberius B. v adds five; in its turn, Bodley 614 adds a further twelve.3 So the Wonders of the East survives not just in two lan- guages but in a different recension in each manuscript. The textual tradition of both the vernacular Wonders and Mirabilia, and of the larger textual family of which they are just one part, was quite fluid. This extended family descends from a pseudonymous text now known as the Letter of Pharasmenes to Hadrian.4 The Letter is extant in various Latin versions and two vernacular translations – one into Old French, the other the Old English Wonders – but it ‘probably appeared first in Greek’.5 Concerning the earliest history of the Letter there is little evidence but Knock suggests the Greek version was written ‘probably towards the end of the second century’:

All the texts appear to derive from a single translation into Latin. This Latin translation was certainly available by the end of the seventh century and probably much earlier…because of the number of stages of transmission necessary for the development of two groups of texts and so

2 For summary descriptions, see Appendix. For facsimiles, see: The Nowell Codex: British Museum Cotton Vitellius A. xv, Second ms, ed. K. Malone, eemf 12 (Copenhagen, 1963); P. McGurk, D.N. Dumville, M.R. Godden and A. Knock, An Eleventh-Century Anglo-Saxon Illustrated Miscellany: British Library Cotton Tiberius B. v, Part 1, together with Leaves from British Library Cotton Nero D. ii, eemf 21 (Copenhagen, 1983); Electronic Beowulf, ed. K. Kiernan; programmed by I.E. Iacob, 3rd ed. (London, 2011) [1 dvd]; M.R. James, Marvels of the East: a Full Reproduction of the Three Known Copies, with Introduction and Notes (Oxford, 1929). The calendar of Bodley 614 has not been published in facsimile but the astronomical portion (fols. 17–35) is reproduced in D. Blume, M. Haffner and W. Metzger, Sternbilder des Mittelalters: Der gemalte Himmel zwischen Wissenschaft und Phantasie. Band I, 800–1200, 2 vols. (Berlin, 2012) ii, 251–260. See also the images available via the Oxford Digital Library, . 3 A. Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the ‘Beowulf’-Manuscript, rev. ed. (Toronto, 2003), pp. 18–22. 4 The standard edition is C. Lecouteux, ed., De rebus in Oriente mirabilibus (Lettre de Farasmanes), bkp 103 (Meisenheim am Glan, 1979). A translation can be found in R. Stoneman, Legends of Alexander the Great (London, 2012), pp. 20–24. 5 D.J.A. Ross, Alexander Historiatus, Warburg Institute Surverys 1 (London, 1963), p. 32. A summary of the textual and manuscript tradition is found in Ann Knock’s contribution to McGurk et al., Eleventh-Century Miscellany, pp. 88–95. For a more detailed discussion see her ‘Wonders of the East: a Synoptic Edition of The Letter of Pharasmenes and the Old English and Old Picard Translations’ (unpubl. PhD dissertation, Univ. of London, 1982) and especially pp. 25–37 for a discussion of original language of composition and the date of the first Latin translation.