The Electronic Beowulf, and: The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, vol. 1: Corpus Christi College, Oxford, MS 201 (F), and: Ductus: a History of Handwriting, and: The Book of Kells (review)

In the late third century Eusebius of Caesarea, better remembered now for his work as a historian of the church, produced an apparatus for the reconciliation of the disagreements found in the four Christian gospels. It was a remarkable work in its own right for it preserved, as the tradition demanded, the plurality of the gospels, while allowing them to be presented and studied as a single entity, “the gospel,” and so succeeding in Tatian's aim in hisDiatessaron— as exegesis and apologetics demanded. Moreover, though now largely forgotten, it remained an important element within theology for centuries. This paper's aim is to locate the significance of Eusebius's work in its original setting in the world of late antiquity and the Christian defense of pagan challenges to the gospels' integrity, and then to follow the influence of his work within just one strand of the tradition: that which forms the background of western, Latin theology. So it will note how that work was adopted and adapted by Jerome, how it then passed on to the late-patristic Latin schoolmasters who sought to transform all learning into convenient modules of defined value, and then was taken up by others in just one region of the Latin West, the insular world, such as the anonymous scribes of the Book of Kells, the Stowe Missal, and the Book of Deer, for whom Eusebius's work was a mystery that they could not simply abandon, even when they could not understand it. Throughout this period, the Eusebian Apparatus roused the intellect of scholars, teachers, and scribes, but in each milieu the significance and perceived utility of the Apparatus was different. The history of ideas is about changes within intellectual and textual continuities, and with the Apparatus we have a clearly identifiable scholarly tool that does not in itself change over the period, but whose reception and exploitation vary greatly.

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The Anglian collection of royal genealogies and regnal lists

Anglo-Saxon England ◽

10.1017/s0263675100000764 ◽

1976 ◽

Vol 5 ◽

pp. 23-50 ◽

Cited By ~ 22

Author(s):

David N. Dumville

Keyword(s):

Old English ◽

British Library ◽

Anglo Saxon ◽

Corpus Christi ◽

History Of ◽

The Subject

This collection of Old English royal records is found in four manuscripts: London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian B. vi; London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. v, vol. 1; Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 183; and Rochester, Cathedral Library, A. 3. 5. The present paper aims both to provide an accurate, accessible edition of the texts in the first three of these manuscripts and to discuss the development of the collection from its origin to the stages represented by the extant versions. We owe to Kenneth Sisam most of our knowledge of the history of the Anglo-Saxon genealogies. Although his closely argued discussion remains the basis for any approach to these sources, it lacks the essential aid to comprehension, the texts themselves. It is perhaps this omission, as much as the difficulty of the subject and the undoubted accuracy of many of his conclusions, that has occasioned the neglect from which the texts have suffered in recent years.

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Brian Twyne: University History and the Traditions of English Antiquarianism

History of Universities ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198848523.003.0016 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 287-312

Author(s):

Antony Grafton

Keyword(s):

Corpus Christi ◽

University History ◽

History Of

This chapter focuses on Brian Twyne, who, by 1625, was a recognized authority on Oxford’s medieval documents. In 1633, he would become Oxford University’s first archivist. Even more important were the archives themselves: especially his own collections, which would serve as the basis for every history of Oxford for centuries. Brian Twyne’s official education took place at Corpus Christi College, to which he came as a scholar in 1594, at the age of 14. From his twenties until his death in 1644, Twyne was fascinated by the history of Oxford. However, his training in the techniques of documentary scholarship had little to do with his official education. Rather, quite early in life, he encountered three distinct traditions of antiquarian scholarship. Each was embodied in a person or a text, and from each he took away ideas and practices that went into the finished body of his work.

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Ethical Adjacency in Piers Plowman

The Arts of Disruption ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198860242.003.0004 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 75-113

Author(s):

Nicolette Zeeman

Keyword(s):

Middle English ◽

Literary History ◽

Piers Plowman ◽

Intellectual Work ◽

Intellectual Tradition ◽

Nature And Grace ◽

History Of ◽

Body And Soul ◽

The Relationship ◽

Special Relevance

The chapter argues that the intellectual tradition that underlies medieval personification debate is Aristotelian and medieval logical teaching on ‘opposites’, the relationship by which opposed terms illuminate each other—available in Aristotle’s elementary logical works. This teaching has a special relevance to personification debate, where the heuristic drive is dramatized in speakers that represent opposed positions and phenomena, each of which is explored in the process of debate itself. This suggests why personification debate provides for over a thousand years one of the main tools with which allegory unpacks its structuring terms and reflects on its conflictual work. Aristotle’s teaching on opposites also enables us to query some aspects of the literary history of medieval debate literature; it suggests that a critical concern about resolution in debate, or its lack, fails to see where the real intellectual work of debate occurs. It also suggests that the critical distinction between supposedly open ‘horizontal’ debates and closed ‘vertical’ debates may be misguided. In fact, Aristotle’s subcategory of the ‘relative’ opposition (master and slave, artisan and tool) often involves a hierarchy. The chapter uses these materials to argue that personification debate can be formally unresolved and ‘vertical’, and yet also challenging and seriously investigative. This is illustrated with analyses of some debates, several hierarchical: ‘four daughters of God’, body and soul, Nature and Grace (Deguileville) and the Middle English Pearl.

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What Is Charity? William Langland’s Answers with Some Diachronic Questions

Religions ◽

10.3390/rel10080458 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 10 (8) ◽

pp. 458

Author(s):

David Aers

Keyword(s):

Fourteenth Century ◽

Piers Plowman ◽

Late Medieval ◽

The Reformation ◽

History Of ◽

The Subject ◽

Medieval Christianity ◽

Ethics And Politics

Charity turns out to be the virtue which is both the root and the fruit of salvation in Langland’s Piers Plowman, a late fourteenth-century poem, the greatest theological poem in English. It takes time, suffering and error upon error for Wille, the central protagonist in Piers Plowman, to grasp Charity. Wille is both a figure of the poet and a power of the soul, voluntas, the subject of charity. Langland’s poem offers a profound and beautiful exploration of Charity and the impediments to Charity, one in which individual and collective life is inextricably bound together. This exploration is characteristic of late medieval Christianity. As such it is also an illuminating work in helping one identify and understand what happened to this virtue in the Reformation. Only through diachronic studies which engage seriously with medieval writing and culture can we hope to develop an adequate grasp of the outcomes of the Reformation in theology, ethics and politics, and, I should add, the remakings of what we understand by “person” in these outcomes. Although this essay concentrates on one long and extremely complex medieval work, it actually belongs to a diachronic inquiry. This will only be explicit in some observations on Calvin when I consider Langland’s treatment of Christ’s crucifixion and in some concluding suggestions about the history of this virtue.

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