Charles D. Wright

A Doomsday Passage in an Old English Sermon for Lent, Revisited

Abstract In a 1982 article in Anglia, “A Doomsday Passage in an Old English Sermon for Lent”, J. E. Cross showed that the author of Fadda Homily no. I (HomM 5) made use of a Latin sermon on the Last Judgment falsely attributed to St. Augustine. Citing the Latin sermon from the Patrologia Latina, Cross concluded that the Old English homilist had freely modified this source by making additions from his own memory of Doomsday commonplaces. A variant text of the Latin sermon, however, proves that the homilist was translating a fuller version that accounts for most of the apparent additions, as well as for further material in the Old English homily beyond the passage isolated by Cross. The new text of the Latin homily enables a better understanding of the Old English homilists working methods, but also raises important methodological questions for source studies.

'FÆGERE ƤURH FORÐGESCEAFT': The Confirmation of the Angels in Old English Literature

B. F. Huppé compared a passage in Pseudo-Bede’s Quaestiones super Genesim that states that the good angels were ‘strengthened’ or ‘confi rmed’ (‘confi rmati’) after the fall of Satan so that they could never fall.2 In his edition of Genesis A, Doane explicitly identifi es this passage as an allusion to the doctrine of the ‘confi rmation of the faithful angels’, citing Augustine, De ciuitate Dei XII.9:

6 Ezra and The Apocalypse of Thomas. With a previously unedited 'interpolated' text of Thomas

The earliest previously known quotations from 6 Ezra are in the De excidio Britanniae by the British writer Gildas, who was writing probably between 530 and 545. Hitherto unrecognized quotations occur, however, in the Longer (“Interpolated”) Version of The Apocalypse of Thomas, which dates from the second half of the fifth century. A series of “woe oracles” added in the Longer Version freely adapts a sequence of verses from 6 Ezra and bears witness to a stage of transmission of 6 Ezra prior to the traditional division into two recensions (the so-called “French” and “Spanish” recensions). One of the oracles that borrows wording from 6 Ezra - a warning that those who marry in the endtimes will beget children into captivity and famine - has sometimes been regarded as reflecting Priscillianist encratism, but is instead a traditional prophetic element. An appendix to this article provides a semi-diplomatic edition of a recently discovered Longer Version of Thomas in an eighth-century Kassel manuscript.

An Old English formulaic system and its contexts in Cynewulf's poetry

Abstract A group of half-lines in Cynewulfs poetry that take the form þurh + demonstrative pronoun + adjective + gesceap/gesceaft constitutes a distinctively Cynewulfian realization of a more widespread formulaic system (x X gesceaft). Only Cynewulf substitutes (in two closely similar contexts) gesceap for gesceaft, and Cynewulf consistently uses both words to refer to a specific ‘created thing’ instead of to ‘creation’. Within the system as a whole, the specific referent of gesceaft in the sense ‘creation’ (heaven, or earth, or all of creation) is often clarified by deixis, specifically in the type of demonstrative pronoun that modifies the word. Cynewulfs choice of the distal pronoun þæt likewise indicates that the apparently ambiguous referents of gesceap/gesceaft in Juliana 273b and 728a and Elene 789a are heavenly or unearthly things, and analysis of context as well as Christian-Latin analogues supports a specific identification of the referent in each case. While availing himself of an existing formulaic system, then, Cynewulf was innovative in its metrical realization as well as in its semantic application.