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The Originality of the Orrmulum Laura Ashe The Originality of the Orrmulum Laura Ashe Early Middle English, Volume 1, Number 1, 2019, pp. 35-54 (Article) Published by Arc Humanities Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/731646 [ Access provided at 28 Sep 2021 11:13 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] THE ORIGINALITY OF THE ORRMULUM LAURA ASHE 7 Þin macche birrþ þe lufenn wel, ȝiff þatt ȝho Drihhtin dredeþþ, 7 tu mihht follȝhenn hire will Inn all þatt7 wac, niss 7 wicke,nan sinne, Inn all þat ȝho ȝeorneþþ wiþþ skill, To ȝunnkerr baþre7 gode. ȝiff þatt iss þatt ȝho iss all Wittlæs, All birrþ þe don þin mahht tærto,7 To ȝemenn7 wilde, hire gætenn, Swa þatt ȝho muȝhe7 borrȝhenn beon7 Att hire lifess ende; Forr ȝiff þatt ȝho iss gætelæs, eȝȝelæs 7ȝho gillteþþ sket, ȝiff þut7 god, wast, 7 te niss nohht7 wicke, tæroffe, Þa narrt tu nohht all sinnelæs Off­þatt ȝho liþ i sinne. ȝiff þin macche iss wis tu wittlæs 1 Þa birrþ þin macche gætenn þe All þatt ȝho maȝȝ fra sinne; You should genuinelyForr eȝȝþerr love birrþ your þurrh wife, asoþerr long beon as she Hollpenn is God-fearing, to wurrþenn and you borrȝhenn can obey her will in all things that are not sinful, in all that she prudently yearns for, to the good of both of you. But if it’s the case that she is wholly witless, weak, and drawn to evil, you must put all your strength to it, to guide and lead her, so that she might be saved at her life’s end. For if she is rudderless, and fearless and wild, she will soon come to grief: and if you know this, and you do nothing about it, then you are not without sin yourself when she lies in sin. And if your wife is wise and good, and you’re witless and drawn to evil, then your wife must lead you away from sin with all her might: for it is the duty of each of you to help the other to be worthy of salvation. twelfth century. If it is disarmingly direct, it does not appear unconventional in its piety; norThis are thoughtful we necessarily advice surprised for married by aChristians pastoral plea was to written laypeople in the to supportthird quarter one another of the in maintaining a virtuous life, and to take partial responsibility for the sins of those they striking. Much better known and more widely circulated poetic sermons for the laity, in bothlove. FrenchNevertheless, and English, in the offeredcontext sharply of its time contrasting there is viewsgood reason of family to life:find the sentiment Kar ueez de cest secle com il est perillus Or se entre heent ceus. v deust estre amors Heom ne creit sa moiller ne la moiller lespus 2 A dulur est torne e tut uait a reburs … En cest terrien secle nen ad parfit amur 1 The Ormulum (printed in long lines with caesura rather than the editors’ short lines, here and throughout). The Dedication is numbered, ed. Robert separately Holt and and R. M.its White,line numbers 2 vols (Oxford: are indicated Clarendon, with a 1878), D. The lines Preface 6178–201 and all the ensuing homilies are line-numbered continuously. 2 Le Sermon de Guischart de Beauliu: édition critique de tous les manuscrits connus, ed. Arvid Gabrielson (Uppsala: Akademiska Bokhandeln, 1909), lines 206–9, 289. 36 laura ashe For you should know of this world how dangerous it is: people hate one another where there should be love; the man doesn’t trust his wife, nor the wife her husband; everything has gone awry, turned to sorrow … In this earthly world there is no perfect love. Ne lipniebeo þe wif loure to hireþene were. þe solf ne : werene þin to mei. his wiuene þin maȝe. BoSoht for is him þet issolue oðers ech monnes .Mon. þe frond hwile betre þet heþen bo his aliue. aȝen.3 Do not love any more than yourself—not your kinsman or kinswoman. He’s a fool who is a better friend to another man than to himself. Let no wife trust in her husband, nor husband in his wife: let each man be for himself, for as long as he lives. Despairing and critical declarations are entirely conventional of twelfth- and thirteenth- century literature of instruction,4 which routinely dwells on the meaninglessness of sec- ular life and its transitory human relationships. Even greater austerity was introduced directed to the laity, they typically show little or no adaptation in their harsh dismissals ofby ordinarythe frequent life andrepurposing the ties of of world writings and originally family. Edmund intended of Abingdon’sfor cloistered Speculum clergy; newlyreligi- osorum was written for a clerical audience, but it was translated into both French and English with little alteration, and enjoyed immense popularity throughout the Middle Ages, despite (or because of?) its uncompromising harshness:5 sicCur et ergo vermes parentes nati suntdiligis ab carnaliter eis.6 qui te genuerunt in sordibus et peccato? Nichil habes ab eis, nec corpus, nec animam, sed a Deo per eos. Si diligis eos quia generatus es ab eis, nothing from them, neither body, nor soul, but from God through them. If you love those throughWhy then whom do you you love were your produced, parents carnally,so too should who producedyou love the you worms in filth who and are sin? born You fromhave them. Against this background, our text stands in precocious isolation: both in terms of its - gious works for the laity; and in terms of the approach taken to its audience, which isdate, markedly since it idiosyncratic was composed even just when ahead setting of this out efflorescence conventional of expositions. new and adapted The work’s reli author, the Augustinian canon Orrm, wrote his English homilies for the laity about a cen- 3 Poema Morale, ed. Richard Morris, in Old English Homilies and Homiletic Treatises. EETS, o.s., 29, 4 “A staple set of religious teachings:” George Younge, “Monks, Money, and the End of Old English,” 34 (London: Trübner, 1867–68), lines 29–32. New Medieval Literatures 5 See Laura Ashe, The Oxford English Literary History, vol. 1: 1000–1350. Conquest and Trans- 16 (2016): 39–82, at 76. formation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 335–39. Nicholas Watson has recently argued of Salisbury Cathedral: Watson, “The Original Audience and Institutional Setting of Edmund Rich’s Mirrorfor a composition of Holy Church: date inThe the Case 1220s, for the and Salisbury that the work’sCanons,” first in Medievaladdressees and were Early the Modern secular Religious canons Cultures: Essays Honouring Vincent Gillespie on his Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. Laura Ashe and Ralph Hanna (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019), forthcoming. 6 Edmund of Abingdon, Speculum religiosorum, §11, in Speculum religiosorum and Speculum ecclesie, ed. Helen P. Forshaw (London: British Academy, 1973). orrmulum 37 The originaliTy of The years.7 Long known as a striking experiment in vernacular orthographic and linguistic practice,tury after the the poem Norman has Conquest,received little apparently attention drafting of any andother revising kind. This the workessay overwill arguesome against current critical orthodoxy by making a case for Orrm as8 an original thinker: a man seriously engaged with the developing theology of his time, profoundly concerned with the structures of society and community, and precociously focused on the needs Orrmulum reveals contemporary transforma- tions in the understanding of sacramental practice, particularly in relation to confes- sionand difficultiesand purgation. of laypeople. The work Reading vividly theilluminates the ideological, economic, and social conflict between monks and canons, and at the basis of that struggle it demonstrates isthe in intense the vanguard concern of of developments an ordinary preacher in the Church’s for his attitudeflock. Furthermore, to the laity which Orrm iswe no associ mere- atereflection with a oflater his period;times: he and stands he shows in combative himself to relation be a notably with much original, orthodox idiosyncratic, teaching; and he humane interpreter of his sources and authorities. no doubt some of the clergy’s) need for religious instruction in the majority vernacu- lar. ThisSurviving was a twelfth-century period when writing English-language in English was manuscripts chiefly sustained largely bycontain the laity’s homiletic (and - ing many of Ælfric’s writings—alongside some original compositions, and one or two worksand hagiographical newly translated material—much from contemporary of it copied texts in from French pre or­Conquest Latin.9 Preachers authors, sawinclud the 7 see M. B. Parkes, “On the Presumed Date and Possible Origin of the Manuscript of the Orrmulum: Oxford,For a Bodleiancompletion Library, date beforeMS Junius 1180, 1,” inwith Scribes, composition Scripts and possibly Readers: beginning Studies inas theearly Communication, as the 1160s, Presentation and Dissemination of Medieval Texts 8 Studies of the Orrmulum as text, rather than as linguistic or orthographic phenomenon, have (London: Hambledon, 1991), 187–200. largely discussed its intervention in theories of writing and vernacularity: Meg Worley, “Using the Ormulum The Vulgar Tongue: Medieval and Postmedieval Vernacularity, ed. Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, to 2003),Redefine 19–30; Vernacularity,” Christopher Cannon,in “Right Writing: The Ormulum,” in The Grounds of English Literature Imagining an English Reading Public, 1150–1400 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 109–21; A. Joseph McMullen, “Forr(Oxford: Þeʒʒ Oxfordre Sawle University Need: The Press, Ormulum 2007),, Vernacular82–110; Katharine Theology, Breen, and a Tradition of Translation in Early England,” English Studies 95 (2014): 256–77. Such studies often read against Ormulum exists to see clearly what we cannot see:” Cannon,authorial “Right intention Writing,” and dwell110.
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