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Apostolic Discourse and Christian Identity in Anglo-Saxon Literature

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Apostolic Discourse and Christian Identity in Anglo-Saxon Literature View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship Repository APOSTOLIC DISCOURSE AND CHRISTIAN IDENTITY IN ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE BY SHANNON NYCOLE GODLOVE DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2010 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Charles D. Wright, Chair Associate Professor Renée Trilling Associate Professor Robert W. Barrett Professor Emerita Marianne Kalinke ii ABSTRACT “Apostolic Discourse and Christian Identity in Anglo-Saxon Literature” argues that Anglo-Saxon religious writers used traditions about the apostles to inspire and interpret their peoples’ own missionary ambitions abroad, to represent England itself as a center of religious authority, and to articulate a particular conception of inspired authorship. This study traces the formation and adaptation of apostolic discourse (a shared but evolving language based on biblical and literary models) through a series of Latin and vernacular works including the letters of Boniface, the early vitae of the Anglo- Saxon missionary saints, the Old English poetry of Cynewulf, and the anonymous poem Andreas. This study demonstrates how Anglo-Saxon authors appropriated the experiences and the authority of the apostles to fashion Christian identities for members of the emerging English church in the seventh and eighth centuries, and for vernacular religious poets and their readers in the later Anglo-Saxon period. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am indebted to many people for their help and support throughout the duration of this dissertation project. Charlie Wright, my doctoral advisor and chair of my dissertation committee, is foremost among them. His generosity of spirit, wealth of knowledge, and constant encouragement inspired me to persist in my study of Anglo- Saxon literature. Charlie’s enthusiasm for Anglo-Saxon studies and his helpful comments and suggestions on my work made researching and writing this dissertation a genuine pleasure. For that I will be forever grateful. I couldn’t ask for a better Doktorvater. I also wish to thank Renée Trilling for her camaraderie, her interest in my project and her extremely detailed feedback at every stage of the dissertation process. I would like to express my gratitude to Marianne Kalinke for her unfailing support and kindness, and to Rob Barrett for his help, encouragement, and insistence that I get a little “poco” with this. Rob, someday you’ll see the ‘North Sea Nexus’ idea come to fruition. I owe a great deal of thanks to Mary Garrison of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York for supervising the writing of the first two chapters of this dissertation. I deeply appreciate Mary’s willingness to lend her time and considerable expertise to helping me research, write and improve these chapters. During my stay in York, Mary welcomed me into the CMS as if I were her own postgraduate student. I am sincerely grateful for all her help and interest in my work. I would also like to thank the various organizations that provided me with the financial means to complete this dissertation and to travel abroad for research and to present my work. Thanks to the University of Illinois Department of English for the iv University Fellowship and the Liberal Arts and Sciences Humanities Fellowship that enabled me to take some time off from my graduate teaching appointment to focus on my research. I am extremely grateful for the generosity of the Worldwide Universities Network for awarding me a Research Mobility Programme Grant to fund my studies under Mary Garrison in York, and also to the University of York Centre for Medieval Studies, for their warm hospitality and inclusiveness and for letting me enjoy the luxury of an office space in the graduate study room at King’s Manor. A special thanks to the Grays – John, Bronwen, Rosie, and Albie – who opened up their home to me during my stay in York and treated me like family. I also would like to thank the Nordic Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway, for inviting me to participate in their Postgraduate Summer Course on Culture and Society in Medieval Europe, where I presented an overview of my project and an early version of my first chapter. On a more personal note, I wish to thank my two close colleagues and dear friends, Stephane Clark and Amity Reading. It is truly an honor and a privilege to work with both of you, and I cannot express in words my gratitude for your friendship, support, and sisterhood. You never got tired of hearing about the apostles and ‘Boniwulf.’ Charlie’s Anglos forever! Many thanks also to all of the medievalists and other graduate students and friends at the University of Illinois who have who have made graduate school so enjoyable: Karoliina and Jeff Engstrom, Rebecca Brackmann, Lesley Allen, Kimberly Koch, Ann Hubert, Erin Chandler, Kyle Williams, Jill Hamilton, and Jill Fitzgerald. Thank you also to my family, and especially my mother, for supporting my scholarly aspirations and for always encouraging me. Finally, a special thanks to Adam Doskey for his patience, love and support. Thank you for always being there for me. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ABBREVIATIONS…………………………………………………………………… 1 INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………….……. 2 CHAPTER 1: THE CREATION OF AN ANGLO-SAXON MISSIONARY SAINT IN THE LETTERS OF SAINT BONIFACE………………….………. 66 CHAPTER 2: PAULINE APOSTOLIC DISCOURSE AS INTERPRETIVE CONTEXT IN THE EARLIEST VITA BONIFATII……..………….. 123 CHAPTER 3: INTERPRETING APOSTOLHAD IN CYNEWULF’S THE FATES OF THE APOSTLES………………………………….... 189 CHAPTER 4: APOSTOLHAD AND THE GIFTS OF THE HOLY SPIRIT: CYNEWULF’S APOSTOLIC POETICS IN CHRIST II: ASCENSION……………………………………………… 244 CHAPTER 5: THE RELUCTANT APOSTLE: CONFLICTING MODELS OF APOSTLESHIP IN ANDREAS……………………………………….. 296 CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………………….. 354 REFERENCES..……………………………………..……………………………….. 357 1 ABBREVIATIONS ASE Anglo-Saxon England ASPR Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records Bede, HE Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum CCSA Corpus Christianorum, Series Apocryphorum CCSL Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina CSASE Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England EETS Early English Text Society EME Early Medieval Europe HBS Henry Bradshaw Society JEGP Journal of English and Germanic Philology MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica MGH AA Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Auctores antiquissimi MGH Epp. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Epistolae MGH SRG Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi MGH SRM Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum MGH SS Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores in folio OEN Old English Newsletter PL Patrologia Latina SASLC Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture SC Sources Chrétiennes 2 INTRODUCTION APOSTOLIC DISCOURSE: AN INTERTEXTUAL ANALYSIS OF ANGLO-SAXON CHRISTIAN LITERARY CULTURE Overview My project challenges the traditional notion that Anglo-Saxon authors utilized religious discourse primarily as a means of situating (and thus subordinating) their church within the sphere of Rome-centered Christendom. I contend that this move towards participation in the universal Church paradoxically allowed the Anglo-Saxons to claim for themselves and their church a distinctive Christian identity and ecclesiastical authority within northern Europe. Both the Latin literature produced during the Anglo- Saxon missionary movements of the eighth and ninth centuries and the depictions of the apostles in vernacular poetry from the late ninth and early tenth centuries appropriate what I term ‘apostolic discourse’ in a way that registers the tensions between universality and particularism: the desire to identify with Christendom at large, and with Rome in particular, and the desire to maintain a distinctive Anglo-Saxon religious identity and authority. Apostolic discourse develops out the reception of New Testament accounts of the lives of the twelve apostles, the Pauline Epistles, and other patristic and early medieval sources. Anglo-Saxon authors, I argue, make use of apostolic tropes and narratives to endow their own ecclesiastical history and missions (both literal and literary) with the authority of the apostles even as they assert their devotion to the see of St. Peter. 3 In the Introduction and Chapter One I examine apostolic stories that reached England with the Roman missionaries in the sixth and seventh centuries, and I trace their dissemination to Anglo-Saxon churchmen in England through the textual culture of early monasteries. In the Introduction I discuss depicitions of the apostles that circulated thorough the New Testament, the liturgy, the apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, and literary works such as Arator’s epic poem De actibus apostolorum, a text widely used to teach Latin poetry in Anglo-Saxon schools. I also look at representations of the apostles in relation to the Anglo-Saxon church in the works of the highly influential eighth century scholar Bede. Bede’s writings reveal a fascination with the history of the apostles extending from his commentary on the Acts of the Apostles to his late masterpiece, the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum. In studying the transmission, content, and influence of these works, we may begin to identify some aspects of the shared language of apostolicity that developed in Anglo-Saxon circles.1
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