The hermeneutic style is a style of
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
in the later
Roman
Roman or Romans most often refers to:
*Rome, the capital city of Italy
*Ancient Rome, Roman civilization from 8th century BC to 5th century AD
*Roman people, the people of ancient Rome
*''Epistle to the Romans'', shortened to ''Romans'', a letter ...
and
early Medieval period
The Early Middle Ages (or early medieval period), sometimes controversially referred to as the Dark Ages (historiography), Dark Ages, is typically regarded by historians as lasting from the late 5th or early 6th century to the 10th century. They ...
s characterised by the extensive use of unusual and arcane words, especially derived from
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
. The style is first found in the work of
Apuleius
Apuleius (; also called Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis; c. 124 – after 170) was a Numidian Latin-language prose writer, Platonist philosopher and rhetorician. He lived in the Roman province of Numidia, in the Berber city of Madauros, modern-day ...
in the second century, and then in several late Roman writers. In the early medieval period, some leading Continental scholars were exponents, including
Johannes Scotus Eriugena
John Scotus Eriugena, also known as Johannes Scotus Erigena, John the Scot, or John the Irish-born ( – c. 877) was an Irish people, Irish Neoplatonism, Neoplatonist Philosophy, philosopher, Theology, theologian and poet of the Early M ...
and
Odo of Cluny
Odo of Cluny (French: ''Odon'') ( 878 – 18 November 942) was the second abbot of Cluny. He enacted various reforms in the Cluniac system of France and Italy. He is venerated as a saint by the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches. His feast da ...
.
In England, the seventh-century bishop
Aldhelm
Aldhelm ( ang, Ealdhelm, la, Aldhelmus Malmesberiensis) (c. 63925 May 709), Abbot of Malmesbury Abbey, Bishop of Sherborne, and a writer and scholar of Latin poetry, was born before the middle of the 7th century. He is said to have been the so ...
was the most influential hermeneutic writer; Latin scholarship declined in the ninth century, and when it revived in the tenth, the hermeneutic style became increasingly influential. Unlike in continental Europe, where it was used only by a minority of writers, in tenth-century England it became nearly universal. It was the house style of the
English Benedictine Reform
The English Benedictine Reform or Monastic Reform of the English church in the late tenth century was a religious and intellectual movement in the later Anglo-Saxon period. In the mid-tenth century almost all monasteries were staffed by secular ...
, the most important intellectual movement in later
Anglo-Saxon England
Anglo-Saxon England or Early Medieval England, existing from the 5th to the 11th centuries from the end of Roman Britain until the Norman conquest in 1066, consisted of various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms until 927, when it was united as the Kingdom o ...
. The style fell out of favour after the
Norman Conquest
The Norman Conquest (or the Conquest) was the 11th-century invasion and occupation of England by an army made up of thousands of Norman, Breton, Flemish, and French troops, all led by the Duke of Normandy, later styled William the Conque ...
, and the twelfth-century chronicler
William of Malmesbury
William of Malmesbury ( la, Willelmus Malmesbiriensis; ) was the foremost English historian of the 12th century. He has been ranked among the most talented English historians since Bede. Modern historian C. Warren Hollister described him as "a ...
described it as disgusting and bombastic. Historians were equally dismissive until the late twentieth century, when scholars such as
Michael Lapidge Michael Lapidge, FBA (born 8 February 1942) is a scholar in the field of Medieval Latin literature, particularly that composed in Anglo-Saxon England during the period 600–1100 AD; he is an emeritus Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, a Fellow of ...
argued that it should be taken seriously as an important aspect of late
Anglo-Saxon culture
The Anglo-Saxons were a cultural group who inhabited England in the Early Middle Ages. They traced their origins to settlers who came to Britain from mainland Europe in the 5th century. However, the ethnogenesis of the Anglo-Saxons happened wi ...
.
Definition
In 1953,
Alistair Campbell argued that there were two principal styles of Latin in Anglo-Saxon England. One, which he called the classical, was exemplified by the writings of
Bede
Bede ( ; ang, Bǣda , ; 672/326 May 735), also known as Saint Bede, The Venerable Bede, and Bede the Venerable ( la, Beda Venerabilis), was an English monk at the monastery of St Peter and its companion monastery of St Paul in the Kingdom o ...
(c. 672–735), while the English bishop
Aldhelm
Aldhelm ( ang, Ealdhelm, la, Aldhelmus Malmesberiensis) (c. 63925 May 709), Abbot of Malmesbury Abbey, Bishop of Sherborne, and a writer and scholar of Latin poetry, was born before the middle of the 7th century. He is said to have been the so ...
(c. 639–709) was the most influential author of the other school, which extensively used rare words, including Greek ones derived from "hermeneutic" glossaries.
Andy Orchard
Andrew Philip McDowell Orchard (born 27 February 1964) is a scholar and teacher of Old English, Norse and Celtic literature. He is Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Pembroke College, Ox ...
contrasts the "limpid and direct prose style of Bede, with its basically biblical vocabulary and syntax" with the "highly elaborate and ornate style of Aldhelm, with a vocabulary and syntax ultimately derived from Latin verse". Aldhelm was the most learned man in the first four centuries of
Anglo-Saxon Christianity
In the seventh century the pagan Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity ( ang, Crīstendōm) mainly by missionaries sent from Rome. Irish missionaries from Iona, who were proponents of Celtic Christianity, were influential in the conversion o ...
, with a profound knowledge of
Latin poetry
The history of Latin poetry can be understood as the adaptation of Greek models. The verse comedies of Plautus, the earliest surviving examples of Latin literature, are estimated to have been composed around 205-184 BC.
History
Scholars conven ...
(unlike Bede). His style was highly influential in the two centuries after his death, and it was dominant in later Anglo-Saxon England. Borrowing from Greek was not confined to hermeneutic writers of Latin. In a 2005 study, J. N. Adams,
Michael Lapidge Michael Lapidge, FBA (born 8 February 1942) is a scholar in the field of Medieval Latin literature, particularly that composed in Anglo-Saxon England during the period 600–1100 AD; he is an emeritus Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, a Fellow of ...
and
Tobias Reinhardt observe that "the exhumation of (poorly understood) Greek words from Greek-Latin glossaries for purposes of stylistic ornamentation was widespread throughout the Middle Ages."
In the preface to his 1962 edition of
Æthelweard's ''Chronicon'', Campbell referred to the "hermeneutic tradition". In 1975, Michael Lapidge developed Campbell's distinction in an essay on the "hermeneutic style". He stated that the term implies that the vocabulary is based mainly on the ''
Hermeneumata
The ''Hermeneumata'' ( el, Ἑρμηνεύματα; also known as the ''Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana'' or ''Hermeneumata pseudo-Dositheana'') are anonymous instructional manuals written in the third century CE to teach the Greek language to Latin- ...
'', a name for certain Greek-Latin glossaries. He did not consider the term entirely satisfactory, and suggested that "glossematic" would be an alternative, but adopted "hermeneutic" because it had been used by other scholars. Jane Stevenson also expresses dissatisfaction with the term, and in the view of Rebecca Stephenson: "The word "hermeneutic" itself is misleading, since this style has nothing to do with the modern field of
hermeneutics
Hermeneutics () is the theory and methodology of interpretation, especially the interpretation of biblical texts, wisdom literature, and philosophical texts. Hermeneutics is more than interpretative principles or methods used when immediate c ...
, nor does it feature words drawn from the ''Hermeneumata'', a set of Greek and Latin glossaries, from which its exotic vocabulary was once thought to derive." However, both scholars reluctantly accept the term. The style was formerly called "
Hisperic", but scholars now reject this term as wrongly suggesting that it is Irish, and think "Hisperic" should be confined to the language of the very obscure ''
Hisperica Famina''.
Lapidge states:
Early development
![Apuleuis](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Apuleuis.jpg)
The hermeneutic style was possibly first seen in the ''
Metamorphoses
The ''Metamorphoses'' ( la, Metamorphōsēs, from grc, μεταμορφώσεις: "Transformations") is a Latin narrative poem from 8 CE by the Roman poet Ovid. It is considered his ''magnum opus''. The poem chronicles the history of the wo ...
'' of
Apuleius
Apuleius (; also called Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis; c. 124 – after 170) was a Numidian Latin-language prose writer, Platonist philosopher and rhetorician. He lived in the Roman province of Numidia, in the Berber city of Madauros, modern-day ...
in the second century, and it is also found in works by late Latin writers such as
Ammianus Marcellinus
Ammianus Marcellinus (occasionally Anglicisation, anglicised as Ammian) (born , died 400) was a Roman soldier and historian who wrote the penultimate major historical account surviving from Ancient history, antiquity (preceding Procopius). His w ...
and
Martianus Capella
Martianus Minneus Felix Capella (fl. c. 410–420) was a jurist, polymath and Latin prose writer of late antiquity, one of the earliest developers of the system of the seven liberal arts that structured early medieval education. He was a nati ...
. In Britain and Ireland, the style is found in authors on the threshold of the medieval period, including the British monk
Gildas
Gildas ( Breton: ''Gweltaz''; c. 450/500 – c. 570) — also known as Gildas the Wise or ''Gildas Sapiens'' — was a 6th-century British monk best known for his scathing religious polemic ''De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae'', which recount ...
, the Irish missionary
Columbanus
Columbanus ( ga, Columbán; 543 – 21 November 615) was an Irish missionary notable for founding a number of monasteries after 590 in the Frankish and Lombard kingdoms, most notably Luxeuil Abbey in present-day France and Bobbio Abbey in pr ...
and the Anglo-Saxon bishop Aldhelm, and works such as the ''Hisperica Famina''. The Anglo-Saxons were the first people in Europe who had to learn Latin as a
foreign language
A foreign language is a language that is not an official language of, nor typically spoken in, a given country, and that native speakers from that country must usually acquire through conscious learning - be this through language lessons at schoo ...
when they converted to Christianity, and in Lapidge's view: "That they attained stylistic mastery in a medium alien to them is remarkable in itself".
The influential ninth-century Irish philosopher
Johannes Scotus Eriugena
John Scotus Eriugena, also known as Johannes Scotus Erigena, John the Scot, or John the Irish-born ( – c. 877) was an Irish people, Irish Neoplatonism, Neoplatonist Philosophy, philosopher, Theology, theologian and poet of the Early M ...
had a thorough knowledge of Greek, and through his translations and use of unusual Greek words in poetry helped to raise the prestige of the hermeneutic style. The style became fashionable at
Laon
Laon () is a city in the Aisne department in Hauts-de-France in northern France.
History
Early history
The holy district of Laon, which rises a hundred metres above the otherwise flat Picardy plain, has always held strategic importance. In ...
, where Johannes's colleague and fellow Irishman,
Martianus Hiberniensis
Martin Hiberniensis (Martin the Irishman) (c. 819 - 875), was a teacher, scribe, and master of the cathedral school at Laon.
Background
Hiberniensis, "one of the greatest Irish Carolingian scholars," notes that he was an exile in the ''Annals o ...
, lectured.
Hincmar of Rheims rebuked his nephew,
Hincmar of Laon Hincmar, called the Younger, was the Bishop of Laon in the West Frankish Kingdom of Charles the Bald from 858 to 871. His career is remembered by a succession of quarrels with his monarch and his uncle, archbishop Hincmar of Rheims. After initial lo ...
:
Continental Europe
The style is found in several centres on the Continent in the tenth century. In Italy, the leading proponents were
Liutprand of Cremona
Liutprand, also Liudprand, Liuprand, Lioutio, Liucius, Liuzo, and Lioutsios (c. 920 – 972),"LIUTPRAND OF CREMONA" in ''Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium'', Oxford University Press, New York & Oxford, 1991, p. 12 ...
,
Eugenius Vulgarius Eugenius Vulgarius (Italian ''Eugenio Vulgario''; ''fl. '' 887–928) was an Italian priest and poet.
Eugenius' epithet may allude to a Bulgar heritage, and he may have been a descendant of the horde of Alzec that settled in the Molise in the ...
and
Atto of Vercelli Atto of Vercelli or Atto II (c. 885–961) was a Lombard who became bishop of Vercelli in 924. He served as Grand Chancellor to Hugh of Provence and Lothar II, both Kings of Italy in the 10th century. During his time as bishop, Atto was known for ...
. In Germany, works which display it include the anonymous ''Gesta Apollonnii'' and the letters of Froumond of
Tegernsee
Tegernsee is a town in the Miesbach district of Bavaria, Germany. It is located on the shore of Lake Tegernsee, which is 747 m (2,451 ft) above sea level. A spa town, it is surrounded by an alpine landscape of Upper Bavaria, and has an e ...
. French works which display the hermeneutic style include
Dudo of Saint-Quentin
Dudo, or Dudon, was a Picard historian, and dean of Saint-Quentin, where he was born about 965. Sent in 986 by Albert I, Count of Vermandois, on an errand to Richard I, Duke of Normandy, he succeeded in his mission, and, having made a very favor ...
's ''Gesta Normanniae Ducum'' and the ''Libellus Sacerdotalis'' by Lios Monocus.
Two other French authors were particularly influential in England. The first two books of
Abbo of Saint-Germain's ''Bella Parisiacae Vrbis'' describe the siege of Paris by the Normans from 888 to 895; they received very little circulation. However, in order to make the work a trinity (three-volume work) he added a book described by Lapidge as "a series of exhortations to the monastic life … written in a fiercely tangled and often inscrutable Latin whose vocabulary is nearly all glossary-based". This became a very popular textbook, especially in England. The other influential French author was
Odo of Cluny
Odo of Cluny (French: ''Odon'') ( 878 – 18 November 942) was the second abbot of Cluny. He enacted various reforms in the Cluniac system of France and Italy. He is venerated as a saint by the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches. His feast da ...
, who was probably a mentor of
Oda,
Archbishop of Canterbury
The archbishop of Canterbury is the senior bishop and a principal leader of the Church of England, the ceremonial head of the worldwide Anglican Communion and the diocesan bishop of the Diocese of Canterbury. The current archbishop is Justi ...
(941–958), a driving force behind the
English Benedictine Reform
The English Benedictine Reform or Monastic Reform of the English church in the late tenth century was a religious and intellectual movement in the later Anglo-Saxon period. In the mid-tenth century almost all monasteries were staffed by secular ...
and a proponent of the hermeneutic style. Lapidge suggests that the style in northern France was particularly associated with centres of the
Cluniac (Benedictine) reform, and the leading figures in the English reform, Oda,
Dunstan
Saint Dunstan (c. 909 – 19 May 988) was an English bishop. He was successively Abbot of Glastonbury, Abbot of Glastonbury Abbey, Bishop of Worcester, Bishop of London and Archbishop of Canterbury, later canonised as a saint. His work restor ...
,
Æthelwold Æthelwold was a common Anglo Saxon name. It may refer to: Royalty and nobility
*King Æthelwold of Deira, King of Deira, d. 655
*King Æthelwold of East Anglia, King of East Anglia, d. 664
*King Æthelwold Moll of Northumbria, King of Northumbria ...
and
Oswald Oswald may refer to:
People
*Oswald (given name), including a list of people with the name
*Oswald (surname), including a list of people with the name
Fictional characters
*Oswald the Reeve, who tells a tale in Geoffrey Chaucer's ''The Canterbur ...
, were all practitioners of the hermeneutic style and had strong connections with Continental Benedictine centres. Lapidge argues:
:One might surmise that the hermeneutic style was cultivated energetically in England in an attempt to show that English learning was as profound and English writing as sophisticated as anything produced on the Continent. The impetus for the cultivation of the style in tenth-century England was therefore probably of Continental origin.
A late proponent of the style was the German
Thiofrid of Echternach, abbot of
Echternach
Echternach ( lb, Iechternach or (locally) ) is a commune with town status in the canton of Echternach, which is part of the district of Grevenmacher, in eastern Luxembourg. Echternach lies near the border with Germany, and is the oldest town in L ...
between 1083 and 1110, who was strongly influenced by Aldhelm.
England
On the Continent, some writers were exponents of the hermeneutic style; in England in the later tenth century almost all were. The study of difficult texts had been a traditional part of Latin education in England since the days of Aldhelm, and he profoundly influenced later writers. In tenth-century England, Aldhelm and Abbo were studied intensively, whereas hermeneutic works did not form an important part of the Continental curriculum. Aldhelm is described by
David Dumville
David Norman Dumville (born 5 May 1949) is a British medievalist and Celtic scholar. He attended at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic; Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München; and received his PhD at ...
as "the father both of English latinity and of the hermeneutic style of Anglo-Latin letters". His ''De Virginitate'' (''On Virginity'') was particularly influential, and in the 980s an English scholar requested permission from Archbishop
Æthelgar
Æthelgar (died 990) was Archbishop of Canterbury, and previously Bishop of Selsey.
Biography
Æthelgar was a monk at Glastonbury Abbey before he was the ''discipulus'' of Aethelwold the Bishop of Winchester.Darlington "Ecclesiastical Reform ...
to go to
Winchester
Winchester is a City status in the United Kingdom, cathedral city in Hampshire, England. The city lies at the heart of the wider City of Winchester, a local government Districts of England, district, at the western end of the South Downs Nation ...
to study it, complaining that he had been starved of intellectual food. A passage in ''De Virginitate'' reads:
:So, against the dread beast of pride and against these sevenfold brutes of poisonous vices, which strive cruelly to tear apart with their rabid teeth and virulent fangs all who are unarmed, despoiled of the cuirass of virginity and stripped of the shield of chastity, the virgins of Christ and the young champions of the church must fight with muscle and strength. Against, as it were, the ferocious legions of the barbarians, which in their troops never cease to batter the tortoise of the soldiers of Christ with the artillery of guileful fraud, the struggle must go on manfully, fought with the darts of spiritual weaponry and the iron-tipped spears of the virtues. Let us not, like timid soldiers who effeminately dread the shock of war and the call of the trumpeter, inertly offer to the ravening foe the backs of our shoulders rather than the bosses of our shields!
Anglo-Latin suffered a severe decline in the ninth century, partly due to the
Viking
Vikings ; non, víkingr is the modern name given to seafaring people originally from Scandinavia (present-day Denmark, Norway and Sweden),
who from the late 8th to the late 11th centuries raided, pirated, traded and se ...
invasions, but it began to revive in the 890s under
Alfred the Great
Alfred the Great (alt. Ælfred 848/849 – 26 October 899) was King of the West Saxons from 871 to 886, and King of the Anglo-Saxons from 886 until his death in 899. He was the youngest son of King Æthelwulf and his first wife Osburh, who bot ...
, who revered Aldhelm.
Asser
Asser (; ; died 909) was a Welsh monk from St David's, Dyfed, who became Bishop of Sherborne in the 890s. About 885 he was asked by Alfred the Great to leave St David's and join the circle of learned men whom Alfred was recruiting for his c ...
's ''Life of King Alfred'' has a hermeneutic flavour. Alfred was assisted by scholars he brought in from continental Europe. One of them was a German,
John the Old Saxon
John the Old Saxon (active c. 885–904), also known as John of Saxony or Scotus, was a scholar and abbot of Athelney, probably born in Old Saxony. He was invited to England by King Alfred and contributed to Alfred's revival of English ...
, and in Lapidge's view a poem he wrote praising the future King
Æthelstan
Æthelstan or Athelstan (; ang, Æðelstān ; on, Aðalsteinn; ; – 27 October 939) was King of the Anglo-Saxons from 924 to 927 and King of the English from 927 to his death in 939. He was the son of King Edward the Elder and his first ...
, and punning on the Old English meaning of Æthelstan as "noble stone", marks an early sign of a revival of the hermeneutic style:
You, prince, are called by the name "sovereign stone",
Look happily on this prophecy for your age:
You shall be the "noble rock" of Samuel the Seer,
tandingwith mighty strength against devilish demons.
Often an abundant cornfield foretells a great harvest; in
Peaceful days your stony mass is to be softened.
You are more abundantly endowed with the holy eminence of learning.
I pray you may seek, and the Glorious One may grant, the ulfilment implied in yournoble name.
The revival of the hermeneutic style was assisted by foreign scholars at the court of King Æthelstan in the late 920s and 930s, some of them, such as
Israel the Grammarian
Israel the Grammarian ( – c. 965) was one of the leading European scholars of the mid-tenth century. In the 930s, he was at the court of King Æthelstan of England (r. 924–39). After Æthelstan's death, Israel successfully sought the ...
, practitioners of hermeneutic Latin. The style was first seen in tenth-century England in charters drafted between 928 and 935 by an anonymous scribe of King Æthelstan called by scholars "
Æthelstan A
Æthelstan A () is the name given by historians to an unknown scribe who drafted charters (or diplomas), by which the king made grants of land, for King Æthelstan of England between 928 and 935. They are an important source for historians as th ...
", who was strongly influenced by Aldhelm and by Hiberno-Latin works which may have been brought to England by Israel. According to Scott Thompson Smith, the charters of "Æthelstan A": "are generally characterised by a rich pleonastic style with aggressively literary proems and anathemas, ostentatious language and imagery throughout, decorative rhetorical figures, elaborate dating clauses and extensive witness lists." The charters are first seen shortly after Æthelstan had become the first king of all England by his conquest of Viking-ruled Northumbria in 927, and in the view of Mechthild Gretsch the charters are the result of "the affection of a style associated with a glorious intellectual past in order to boost what was conceived as a glorious military and political achievement".
![Blmscottontiberiusaiiifol3r](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/Blmscottontiberiusaiiifol3r.jpg)
David Woodman gives a translation of the start of a charter drafted by "Æthelstan A", S 416 issued on 12 November 931:
The lamentable and loudly detestable sins of this tottering age, surrounded by the dire barkings of obscene and fearsome mortality, challenge and urge us, not carefree in a homeland where peace has been attained but, as it were, teetering over an abyss of fetid corruption, that we should flee those things not only by despising them together with their misfortunes with the whole effort of our mind but also by hating them just like the wearisome nausea of melancholy, striving towards that Gospel text, "Give and it will be given unto you".
Only one short hermeneutic work by the mid-century Archbishop of Canterbury, Oda, survives, but his influence can be seen in his protégé
Frithegod of Canterbury's ''Breuiloquium Vitae Wilfredi'', described by Lapidge as "the most difficult Anglo-Latin text", which "may dubiously be described as the 'masterpiece' of Anglo-Latin hermeneutic style". Lapidge states that "the hermeneutic style was practised with considerable flair and enthusiasm at
Canterbury
Canterbury (, ) is a City status in the United Kingdom, cathedral city and UNESCO World Heritage Site, situated in the heart of the City of Canterbury local government district of Kent, England. It lies on the River Stour, Kent, River Stour.
...
". Other centres of the style were also closely associated with leaders of the Benedictine reform:
Ramsey Abbey
Ramsey Abbey was a Benedictine abbey in Ramsey, Huntingdonshire (now part of Cambridgeshire), England. It was founded about AD 969 and dissolved in 1539.
The site of the abbey in Ramsey is now a Scheduled Ancient Monument. Most of the abbey's ...
, founded by Oswald,
Bishop of Worcester
A bishop is an ordained clergy member who is entrusted with a position of authority and oversight in a religious institution.
In Christianity, bishops are normally responsible for the governance of dioceses. The role or office of bishop is ca ...
,
Glastonbury Abbey
Glastonbury Abbey was a monastery in Glastonbury, Somerset, England. Its ruins, a grade I listed building and scheduled ancient monument, are open as a visitor attraction.
The abbey was founded in the 8th century and enlarged in the 10th. It wa ...
, where the future Archbishop of Canterbury, Dunstan, was abbot in the 940s and Winchester, where Æthelwold was bishop. There are different emphases in the various centres: a predilection for
neologism
A neologism Greek νέο- ''néo''(="new") and λόγος /''lógos'' meaning "speech, utterance"] is a relatively recent or isolated term, word, or phrase that may be in the process of entering common use, but that has not been fully accepted int ...
s at Canterbury and for grecisms at Winchester, while the leading Ramsey scholar,
Byrhtferth
Byrhtferth ( ang, Byrhtferð; ) was a priest and monk who lived at Ramsey Abbey in Huntingdonshire (now part of Cambridgeshire) in England. He had a deep impact on the intellectual life of later Anglo-Saxon England and wrote many computistic, h ...
, favoured unusual polysyllabic adverbs. The most important document of the Benedictine Reform, the ''
Regularis Concordia'', drafted by Æthelwold, was written in hermeneutic style strongly influenced by Aldhelm. Discussing the ideology of the reform movement, Caroline Brett comments: "The use of hermeneutic Latin with its deliberately obscure neologisms and verbal borrowings must have sent potent signals of a learned hierocratic caste, guardians of arcane yet powerful knowledge."
Lapidge gives a translation of a poem by Dunstan:
Christ, you grant.
O omnipotent Father, may you deign to bring rewards to the donor – (you) who above the depths and realms of the heaven as well as the earth and at the same time the recesses of the sea – throughout all this world you rule the angelic citizens of such bounteous merit; and may you grant to grow in me the seed of holy labour by which I may always be able to hymn appropriately your name.
O you, Son, who, concealed in your mother's womb, you gather together peoples by your Father's act – for I perchance am able to compose a holy narrative because you are seen to be God, because, glorious one, the glittering stars show (you) to the world; and I ask, after the close of my life, that you grant to me from the throne of heaven to take a tiny gift because of the honour (I have) attained.
I beseech you, Holy Spirit of the Father and Son: for when the holy throng re-echoes its songs, may I then with humble voice be able to ascend quickly as I leave the grave, bearing then the holy prayers of the saints who already have scorned this present world of dust with their learned outpourings, and may I fearlessly be able to pour out my glorious song to the triune (God).
Virgin, whom the messenger salutes in angelic speech, you were born without stain: I ask that you implore him – who, born from the conception of celestial seed holds the mysterious command as triunal deity – to forgive me my sins, that he may deign to grant longlasting joys through his own eternity and to look upon me with the sight of his holy vision.
Grant, I beseech you, O prophetic fathers, O you patriarchs, O you prophets of angelic distinction, O you leaders blessedly confessing with the Lord his holy governance – Abraham, Elijah, Enoch his companion, together with all the rest – that the king quickly deign to render skilfully his aid to me in the three sounds of 'O', lest the deceitful one, who rules in the front of the nine fallen orders, be able to say the word "puppup".
Now I beseech the ancient fathers with Peter their leader on behalf of wretched and anxious me: pour out your prayers and aid so that the trinal custodian of each new saint may afterwards forgive me until I may overcome the hideous enemy of this world.
Christ, you grant.
In the late tenth century, Latin had higher prestige than Anglo-Saxon, and hermeneutic Latin had higher prestige than simple Latin. This presented Byrhtferth with a problem in his ''Enchiridion'', a school text designed to teach the complicated rules for calculating the date of Easter, as hermeneutic Latin is unsuitable for pedagogic instruction. His solution was to include passages in hermeneutic Latin condemning the ignorant and lazy secular clergy, who he said refused to learn Latin, thus justifying using Anglo-Saxon to provide clear explanations for their benefit. In a passage in Latin he wrote:
Some ignorant clerics reject calculations of this kind (for shame!) and do not wish to keep their phylacteries, that is, they do not preserve the order, which they have received in the bosom of mother church, nor do they persist in the holy teaching of meditation. They should consider carefully the way of the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and they should spit out their doctrine like filth. A cleric ought to be the keeper of his own soul, just as a noble man subjects a young foal to the yoke, so he ought to subject his own soul to service, by filling the alabaster box with precious oil, that is, he ought to be inwardly subjected daily, by obeying the divine laws and admonitions of the Redeemer.
Byrhtferth aimed for an elevated style, but he was frequently guilty of solecisms caused by overreaching his ability in Latin.
Almost all proponents of the style were clerical, but there is one notable exception.
Ealdorman
Ealdorman (, ) was a term in Anglo-Saxon England which originally applied to a man of high status, including some of royal birth, whose authority was independent of the king. It evolved in meaning and in the eighth century was sometimes applied ...
Æthelweard was a descendant of King
Æthelred I
Æthelred (; ang, Æþelræd ) or Ethelred () is an Old English personal name (a compound of '' æþele'' and '' ræd'', meaning "noble counsel" or "well-advised") and may refer to:
Anglo-Saxon England
* Æthelred and Æthelberht, legendary pri ...
, grandfather of an Archbishop of Canterbury, and patron of
Ælfric of Eynsham
Ælfric of Eynsham ( ang, Ælfrīc; la, Alfricus, Elphricus; ) was an English abbot and a student of Æthelwold of Winchester, and a consummate, prolific writer in Old English of hagiography, homilies, biblical commentaries, and other genres. H ...
, the one major English writer of the period who rejected the style. Æthelweard's ''Chronicon'' was a translation into hermeneutic Latin of a lost version of the ''
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
The ''Anglo-Saxon Chronicle'' is a collection of annals in Old English, chronicling the history of the Anglo-Saxons. The original manuscript of the ''Chronicle'' was created late in the 9th century, probably in Wessex, during the reign of Alf ...
''. His style is regarded by historians as eccentric and at times unintelligible. In the view of Angelika Lutz his prose was influenced by Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry as well as Latin and Greek sources: "That it was later viewed as a failure may be attributed both to his limited command of Latin grammar and his extreme stylistic pretensions."
In 2005 Lapidge reflected:
Thirty years ago, when I first attempted to describe the characteristic features of tenth-century Anglo-Latin literature, I was rather naively bedazzled by the display of vocabulary which one encounters there. Because much of the vocabulary appeared to derive either from Aldhelm or from glossaries of the type called "hermeneumata", I followed scholarly tradition and described the style as "hermeneutic", on the assumption that the principal impulse behind the verbal display was that of dazzling the reader with arcane vocabulary exhumed from Greek-Latin glossaries and authors such as Aldhelm. I now suspect that the perception needs modification: that the authors' principal aim was not obfuscation, but was their (misguided, perhaps) attempt to reach in their prose a high stylistic register.
Decline
After the Norman Conquest authors rejected the hermeneutic style. The twelfth-century chronicler
William of Malmesbury
William of Malmesbury ( la, Willelmus Malmesbiriensis; ) was the foremost English historian of the 12th century. He has been ranked among the most talented English historians since Bede. Modern historian C. Warren Hollister described him as "a ...
expressed his disgust at language he considered bombastic. In
Frank Stenton
Sir Frank Merry Stenton, FBA (17 May 1880 – 15 September 1967) was an English historian of Anglo-Saxon England, and president of the Royal Historical Society (1937–1945).
The son of Henry Stenton of Southwell, Nottinghamshire, he was edu ...
's view, Byrhtferth's hermeneutic life of Oswald gives a poor impression of the quality of English scholarship. He described it as "a disorderly work, written in a flamboyant prose, studded with strange words, which had to be explained by glosses inserted between the lines".
Lapidge describes the repudiation of the hermeneutic style by modern scholars as disappointing. "Invariably it is castigated as 'uncouth' or 'barbarous' and its practitioners are dismissed with contempt as the fellows of
Dogberry
Dogberry is a character created by William Shakespeare for his play ''Much Ado About Nothing''. He is described by ''The Nuttall Encyclopædia'' as a "self-satisfied night constable" with an inflated view of his own importance as the leader of ...
." In his view: "however unpalatable this style might be to modern taste, it was none the less a vital and pervasive aspect of late Anglo-Saxon culture, and it deserves closer and more sympathetic attention than it has previously received".
See also
* , a set of invented words used in Latin by 12th-century mystic
Hildegard von Bingen
Hildegard of Bingen (german: Hildegard von Bingen; la, Hildegardis Bingensis; 17 September 1179), also known as Saint Hildegard and the Sibyl of the Rhine, was a German Benedictine abbess and polymath active as a writer, composer, philosopher ...
.
Notes
Citations
Sources
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Further reading
* {{cite book, editor1-first=Rebecca, editor1-last=Stephenson, editor2-first=Victoria, editor2-last=Thornbury, title=Latinity and Identity in Anglo-Saxon Literature, year=2016, publisher=University of Toronto Press, location=Toronto, Canada, isbn=9781442637580
Early medieval Latin literature
Anglo-Saxon literature