Nautical Narratives in Anglo-Latin Hagiographies, Ca. 700-1100
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
NAUTICAL NARRATIVES IN ANGLO-LATIN HAGIOGRAPHIES, CA. 700-1100 Annette Rebecca Pomeroy Shores A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature Chapel Hill 2017 Approved by: Patrick P. O’Neill Taylor Cowdery Connie Eble Theodore Leinbaugh Marcus Bull © 2017 Annette Rebecca Pomeroy Shores ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Rebecca Shores: Nautical Narratives in Anglo-Latin Hagiographies, c 700-1100 (Under the direction of Patrick P. O’Neill) The four studies presented here uncover the various ways in which Anglo-Latin hagiographers, from the eighth century until the early twelfth, used nautical narratives in their stories of saints. Each chapter is organized around one type of navigable space: archipelago, the North Sea, rivers, and the eastern Mediterranean. And while they all provide distinct arguments about how hagiographers describe travel by water, the four chapters are unified by the common claim that the authors of these texts—Bede, Felix, Stephen, Willibald, Alcuin, and two anonymous hagiographers in the eleventh century—were not as “sea blind” as scholars once assumed. Significant findings are made in the final chapter, about five “Nicholas poems” that were copied into Cotton Tiberius B.v.i. around the year 1100. This unique set of poems offers the earliest English evidence for St Nicholas as an explicitly nautical saint, complicating the commonly held belief that he was revered as the patron saint of sailors before the twelfth century. Scribal and textual analysis identifies the source of Poem 5 as Nicephorus’s prose translatio Sancti Nicholai, and provides enough evidence to argue that Poem 5 is the first versification of the translatio in England. The appendices provide transcriptions of St Nicholas’s “substituted cup” miracle in Tiberius Poem 2 and its prose corollary in CCCC9 (part of the Cotton-Corpus Legendary), as well as an edition and translation of Tiberius Poem 5. iii Dedicated to all of my parents, and in gloriam Dei. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am a medievalist because of Annabel Wharton, whose undergraduate art history classes were the most formative courses of my adult life, and Holly Crocker and Scott Gwara, who prepared me to pursue a doctoral degree in the field. Thank you all for setting me off on this adventure. Thanks are also due to Fiona Somerset and Robert Babcock, who helped me during my early coursework, and to my committee members, who helped me bring years of work together. I am grateful for Ted Leinbaugh’s unflinching support throughout my time at UNC, and especially during my most doubtful moments in the program. My director, Patrick O’Neill, has shown as much grace and patience as any of the saints studied here. Our frequent meetings have been the greatest gift of the dissertation process, and are already missed. This project might well have been abandoned without the expertise of Dr Jennie Byrne, the professionalism of my son’s many carers, and the friendship of so many fellow graduate students (especially Doreen and Meredith). I am grateful for the Kirby / McLaurin Dissertation Fellowship from the English Department, especially because it gave me the opportunity to find my new work home at the Mothership—the vessel that carried me through the roughest waters of the writing process. To my husband Drew, who took on virtually all of my responsibilities over the past few months: thank you for making this a team effort. To my son John Henry, whose dazzling joy got me through the dreariest days: please note the example I have set by dedicating this work to my parents. v PREFACE My analysis, edition, and translation of the fifth Nicholas poem has been published, with a few slight differeneces, as “An Examination of the Fifth ‘Nicholas Poem’ in Cotton Tiberius B.v (i) and Its Source” in Studia Neophilologica, Vol. 89, 2, 2017, pp. 238-249. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES ......................................................................................................................... ix LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ......................................................................................................... x CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION: BRINGING SAINTS TO THE SEA ....................................... 1 1. Scope ............................................................................................................................... 1 2. Organization .................................................................................................................... 4 3. Methodologies................................................................................................................. 5 CHAPTER 2: CUTHBERT AND GUTHLAC IN THE ENGLISH ARCHIPELAGO .......................................................................................................................... 11 1. Bede’s Vita Cuthberti ................................................................................................... 16 2. Felix’s Vita Guthlaci ..................................................................................................... 40 CHAPTER 3: MARITIME MIRACLES ON THE ALMOST-OPEN SEAS .............................. 53 1. Bede and Stephen .......................................................................................................... 55 2. Alcuin ............................................................................................................................ 77 3. The Anonymous Author of the Vita Birini ................................................................... 83 CHAPTER 4: MEMORY AND LITURGY AT THE RIVERBANK.......................................... 95 1. Rivers at Home ............................................................................................................. 95 2. Rivers Abroad ............................................................................................................. 109 CHAPTER 5: ANGLO-NORMAN NICHOLAS FROM THE ADRIATIC SEA ..................... 128 1. Battle Abbey, and the Cult of Nicholas ...................................................................... 129 2. Poems 1-4.................................................................................................................... 140 Poem 1 ..................................................................................................................... 141 Poem 2 ..................................................................................................................... 143 vii The text common to all prose versions .......................................................... 149 What the Tiberius poem shares with all three prose versions ........................ 151 What the poem [almost] shares with Harley and Namur against CCCC9 ........................................................................................................... 154 What the poem shares with CCCC9 against Harley and Namur ................... 155 Distinct elements to the poem against all three prose .................................... 158 Poem 3 ..................................................................................................................... 162 Poem 4 ..................................................................................................................... 165 3. Poem 5: The account of Nicholas’s translation .......................................................... 177 APPENDIX 1: POEM 2 TIBERIUS BV, POEM 2. [73V] ........................................................ 193 APPENDIX 2: CCCC9: ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPTION (FF. 23V– 24R) .............................. 200 APPENDIX 3: TRANSLATIO TRANSCRIPTION, TRANSLATION .................................... 204 REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................... 210 viii LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Verbal Similarities between Shared Prose and Tiberius............................................... 153 Table 2: Overboard Passages ...................................................................................................... 157 ix LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS Primary Sources AVC Anonymous Vita Cuthberti Bonif. Willibald, Vita sancti Bonifati HA Bede, Historia Abbatum HE Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica VBir Anonymous Vita sancti Birini VC Bede, Vita sancti Cuthberti VCeol Anonymous Vita Ceolfridi VG Felix, Vita sancti Guthlaci VW Stephen, Vita Wilfridi Tertiary Sources BHL Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina DACL Dictionnaire d’Archéologie Chrétienne et de Liturgie DMLBS Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historiae PASE Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England x CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION: BRINGING SAINTS TO THE SEA 1. Scope This dissertation argues that Anglo-Latin hagiographers between the early-eighth and early-twelfth centuries used nautical narratives to transform an imported genre into a reflection of local, experiential conceptions of sanctity. Medievalists have long used Oceanic Studies to peek into a world that was wetter, darker, and more quiet than our own. Yet literary studies of the sea in the ancient, medieval, and early modern eras tend to rely on one central conceptual issue: to the terrestrial human, bodies of water can be mechanisms of isolation and channels of exchange. Often, scholarship regarding this issue ignores the idea that boats are what distinguish a divisive sea from a unifying one.