The title "(The) Seasons for Fasting" refers to an incomplete
Old English
Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th c ...
homiletic poem, which deals primarily with the observance of
fasts
Fasting is the abstention from eating and sometimes drinking. From a purely physiological context, "fasting" may refer to the metabolic status of a person who has not eaten overnight (see " Breakfast"), or to the metabolic state achieved after ...
on the appropriate dates of the
liturgical calendar
The liturgical year, also called the church year, Christian year or kalendar, consists of the cycle of liturgical seasons in Christian churches that determines when feast days, including celebrations of saints, are to be observed, and whi ...
, but which also attacks the misbehaviour of lax priests. The piece appears to have been composed by a clergyman and directed at a lay audience, addressed as ' in line 212, whom he perhaps believed to have been potentially misguided.
Witnesses
The original manuscript, MS Otho B XI, was largely destroyed in the
Cotton
Cotton is a soft, fluffy staple fiber that grows in a boll, or protective case, around the seeds of the cotton plants of the genus '' Gossypium'' in the mallow family Malvaceae. The fiber is almost pure cellulose, and can contain minor pe ...
fire of 1731 and "Seasons for Fasting" was among the losses. The antiquarian
Laurence Nowell
Laurence (or Lawrence) Nowell (1530 – c.1570) was an English antiquarian, cartographer and pioneering scholar of Anglo-Saxon language and literature.
Life
Laurence Nowell was born around 1530 in Whalley, Lancashire, the second son of Alexand ...
had made a transcript in 1562, which was recovered by
Robin Flower
Robin Ernest William Flower (16 October 1881 – 16 January 1946) was an English poet and scholar, a Celticist, Anglo-Saxonist and translator from the Irish language. He is commonly known in Ireland as "Bláithín" (Little Flower).
Life
He w ...
in 1934 and which is now contained in MS Add. 43703 (London,
British Library
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the British ...
). Moreover, eight lines of the poem were transcribed by
Abraham Whelock. Nowell's transcript has the poem on ff. 257-60v, where it breaks off suddenly, and continues on ff. 261r-64v with Old English remedies and
leechdoms and on f. 265-67 with a further transcription of the Laws of
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 fir ...
. When
Humfrey Wanley
Humfrey Wanley (21 March 1672 – 6 July 1726) was an English librarian, palaeographer and scholar of Old English, employed by manuscript collectors such as Robert and Edward Harley. He was the first keeper of the Harleian Library, now the Har ...
inspected the manuscript in 1705 for his catalogue, the poem had become the last item.
[Grant, "A Note".]
Notes
Bibliography
*"Seasons for Fasting"
**Dobbie, Elliott Van Kirk (ed.) (1942) ''The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems''. (The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records; 6.) New York: Columbia U. P.; pp. 98–104.
Text available online*Flower, Robin (1934) "Laurence Nowell and a Recovered Anglo-Saxon Poem" in: ''British Museum Quarterly''; 8 (1934); pp. 130–32.
*Grant, R. J. S. (1972) "A Note on ''The Seasons for Fasting''" in: ''The Review of English Studies''; 23 (1972); pp. 302–4.
*Grant, R. J. S. (1973) "Laurence Nowell's transcript of B.M.
Cotton Otho
This is an incomplete list of some of the manuscripts from the Cotton library that today form the Cotton collection of the British Library. Some manuscripts were destroyed or damaged in a fire at Ashburnham House in 1731, and a few are kept in othe ...
B. xi." in: ''Anglo-Saxon England''; 3 (1973); pp. 111–24.
*Hilton, Chadwick B. (1986) "The Old English ''Seasons for Fasting'': its place in the vernacular complaint tradition" in: ''Neophilologus''; 70 (1986); pp. 155–59.
*Magennis, Hugh (2006) "The Seasons for Fasting" in: ''The Literary Encyclopedia''
Online article
External links
Poem read by Michael D. C. Drout ''Anglo-Saxon Aloud''.
Old English poems
Lent
Advent
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