Bede and Aethelthryth: An Introduction to Christian Latin Poetics

by Stephen J. Harris

Overview

Bede and Aethelthryth asks why Christians in Britain around the year 700 enjoyed Latin poetry. What did they see in it? What did they get from it? This book attempts to reconstruct the horizon of expectation of a highly learned, Latin-speaking nun as she encounters a fifty-line poem by the Venerable Bede, the Hymn to Aethelthryth. 

The reconstruction is hypothetical and derived from grammatical manuals, learned commentaries from the early medieval period (especially Servius’s commentary on Virgil), and a wide variety of aesthetic observations by classical and medieval readers. The first four chapters describe basic expectations of a reader of Christian Latin poetry. The fifth chapter places the Hymn in its context within Bede’s Ecclesiastical History. A few pages after Bede records his hymn, Caedmon will recite his own hymn under the watchful eye of Whitby’s Abbess Hild, who was a friend of Aethelthryth. 

Both hymns are attempts to reform the lyric traditions of pagan Rome and pagan Anglo-Saxon England in the light of Christian teaching. The last three chapters contain a line-by-line commentary on Bede’s alphabetic, epanaleptic elegy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781940425931
Publisher:	West Virginia University Press
Publication date:	05/01/2016
Series:	WV MEDIEVEAL EUROPEAN STUDIES , #18
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Stephen Harris teaches in the Department of English and in the Department of German and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, MA. His books include Race and Ethnicity in Anglo-Saxon Literature;Misconceptions about the Middle Ages, edited with Bryon Grigsby; and Vox Germanica: Essays on Germanic Literature and Culture in Honor of James E. Cathey, edited with Michael Moynihan and Sherrill Harbison.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Note on Orthography xv

Abbreviations xvii

1 On Beauty 1

2 Metrical Arts 33

3 Rhetoric 60

4 Sources 88

5 St. Aethelthryth in the HE 126

Hymn to Aethelthryth (English) 158

Hymn to Aethelthryth (Latin) 161

Hymn to Aethelthryth (Edition) 164

6 Hymn to Aethelthryth, A-G 167

7 Hymn to Aethelthryth, H-R 203

8 Hymn to Aethelthryth, S-end 243

Works Cited 273

Index 295