Mind, Body, Soul, And Self in the Alfredian Translations

5/26/2018 Mind, Body, Soul, And Self in the Alfredian Translations

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MIND, BODY, SOUL, AND SELF IN THE ALFREDIAN TRANSLATIONS

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate School

of the University of Notre Dame

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

byHilary E. Fox

Thomas N. Hall, Director

Graduate Program in English

Notre Dame, Indiana

November 2011


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Copyright 2011

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MIND, BODY, SOUL, AND SELF IN THE ALFREDIAN TRANSLATIONS

Abstract

by

Hilary E. Fox

This dissertation examines how the texts associated with the translation program

of King Alfred the Great of Wessex (d. 899) engaged with the interrelationship of mind,

body, soul, and selfhood. While the authenticity and composition of the Alfredian corpus

is currently under contention, these translations share an approach that I call Alfredian;

that is, regardless of who authored or authorized them, they possess common ways of

describing mental and interior spaces and their relationship to the individual. I argue that,whether or not they emerged from Alfreds court, these translations demonstrate a shared

scholarly preoccupation, a school of understanding evident in the texts elaboration of

vocabularies and metaphors of interiority and epistemology. This language articulates

relationships between mind, soul, and body that have ramifications for our own

understanding of the constitution of different forms of identity and a developing notion of

a self; the language and metaphors employed by the translators allow us access to the

various methods by which the Anglo-Saxons conceptualized a complex set of interactions

that were not always described or thought of in specific, unchangeable ways. Rather, the


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Hilary E Fox

self was understood not as a stable, fully-knowable entity, but rather one that was in a

constant state of flux and negotiation, and through the process of self-scrutiny or

examination refiguring its relationships between itself, the physical world, and the divine.

The first two chapters set out the intellectual background of the translations. The

last three chapters set out discussions of the Alfredian texts that read them as texts

concerned with the fashioning of a form of selfhood. Chapter Three focuses on the role

the body plays in the translations of theBoethiusand Soliloquies, with reference to the

complicated relationship that obtains between it and the mind that is supposed to harness

its desires. In Chapter Four, I explore how two terms, ingeanc and inneweard mod,associate the mind with interior space, and how the metaphor MIND AS HOUSE articulates

the construction of that interiority. The fifth chapter turns to a consideration of self-

governance and the relationship between bodily states, the social individual, and the

private self.


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For my parents.


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CONTENTS

Abbreviations and Short Titles ............................................................................................v

Citations and Orthographical Conventions ....................................................................... vii

Acknowledgments............................................................................................................ viii

Chapter 1: The Alfredian Canon and Anglo-Saxon Selves .................................................11.1 The Alfredian Corpus: Traditional Views .........................................................8

1.1.1 The Matter of the Canon: Identifying the Alfredian Corpus ............121.1.2 What, Then, Is Alfredian?.............................................................22

1.2 Medieval Selves: Toward Alfredian Self-(sylf?)hood ..................................261.2.1 The Incorporated Self versus the Individual.................................31

1.3 Outline of the Project .......................................................................................36

Chapter 2: The Embodied Mind and Soul in Classical and Early Medieval Thought .......432.1 Mind, Soul, and Body from Ancient Greece to the Patristics ..............44

2.1.1 The Presocratics ....................................................................452.1.2 Plato ......................................................................................502.1.3 Roman Stoicism ....................................................................53

2.1.4 Early Christianity ..................................................................562.2 Alcuin of York .....................................................................................662.3 Embodiment in the Early Middle Ages: Theorizing Medieval Culture....................................................................................................................682.4 Mind, Body, Soul, and Self: Phenomenology and ConceptualMetaphor ....................................................................................................782.5 Conceptual Metaphor: Language and Access to Knowledge ..............812.6 Anglo-Saxon Psychologies and Conceptual Metaphor........................85

Chapter 3: Alfredian Metamorphoses: Body, Metaphor, and Narrative in the Boethius andSoliloquies ................................................................................................................92

3.1 The Sawl-licDuality and the Properties of the Body ..........................963.1.1 The Qualities of the Body in theBoethius..........................1043.2 The Mind Is A Body: Metaphorical Schema For Understanding Howthe Mind Works .......................................................................................1083.3. Transformations: Body Matching Soul .............................................117

3.3.1 Odysseus and Circe ............................................................1213.4 Impairment: The Disabled or Diminished Body and the Mind .........132


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3.4.1 Double Blindness and Mental Handicap .............................1333.4.2 Disability and Inability to Obtain True Felicity ..................1403.4.3 Medicine and Rumination: Digesting Psychotherapy.........141

3.5 Knowledge and the Resurrected Body in the Soliloquies ..................1463.6 Conclusions ........................................................................................157

Chapter 4: Inner Space in the Alfredian Translations ......................................................1594.1 The Language of the Interior .............................................................160

4.1.1 Radical Reflexivity: The Turn Inwards ..............................1624.2 Dimensionality in the Alfredian Translations ....................................1674.3 The Mind as Constructed Dwelling ...................................................1814.4 Conclusions ........................................................................................191

Chapter 5: Self-Governance, Memory, and the Social Self .............................................1955.1 Narrative and the Ethics of Self-Care ................................................1995.2 Interpretation and Exemplary Narrative ............................................2135.3 Knowledge and Self-Rule in theBoethius.........................................220

5.3.1 The Work of Interpretation: Unpacking the LiberiusExemplum.....................................................................................2295.3.2 TheRex insipiens and the NegativeExemplum..................237

Conclusion .......................................................................................................................243

Bibliography ....................................................................................................................253


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ABBREVIATIONS AND SHORT TITLES

ASE Anglo-Saxon England

ASPR George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, eds., TheAnglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 6 vols. (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1931-53).

Boethius Malcolm Godden and Susan Irvine, eds., The Old English

Boethius: An Edition of the OldEnglish Versions of BoethiussDe Consolatione Philosophiae,2 vols. (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2009).

CCCM Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis

CCSL Corpus Christianorum Series Latina

Consolatio Boethius,Philosophiae Consolatio, ed. Ludwig Bieler, CCSL 94(Turnhout: Brepols, 1957).

CSASE Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon EnglandCSEL Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum

DOE Angus Cameron, Ashley Crandell Amos, and Antonette diPaoloHealey, eds.,Dictionary of Old English: A-F(Toronto: PontificalInstitute of Mediaeval Studies, 2003)http://tapor.library.utoronto.ca.proxy.library.nd.edu/doe/ (accessedJanuary-December 2010).

Dialogi Gregory the Great,Dialogi, ed. A. de Vog, 3 vols., SC 251, 260,265 (Paris: Les ditions du Cerf, 1978-80).

Dialogues Hecht, Hermann, ed.,Bischof Wrferths von Worcesterbersetzung der Dialoge Gregors des Grossen, 2 vols. (Leipzig:1900-7). References are to page and line number.


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Fontes Fontes Anglo-Saxonici: World Wide Web Register, ed. FontesAnglo-Saxonici Project. http://fontes.english.ox.ac.uk/ (accessedJanuary 2009)

Hierdeboc Henry Sweet, ed.,King Alfred's West-Saxon Version of Gregory's

Pastoral Care, 2 vols., EETS 45, 50 (London: Oxford UniversityPress, 1871-73). References are to page and line number.

JEGP Journal of English and Germanic Philology

Meter Meters of Boethius, in Godden and Irvine, eds., The Old EnglishBoethius. Cited by meter number and lineation.

N&Q Notes and Queries

NM Neuphilologische Mitteilungen

OEN Old English Newsletter

Pastoralis Gregory the Great,Regula Pastoralis, ed. Bruno Judic, FloribertRommel, and Charles Morel, 2 vols., SC 381-82 (Paris: ditionsdu Cerf, 1992).

PL J.P. Migne, ed.,Patrologia Latina, 221 vols. (Paris, 1844-64).

SC Sources chrtiennes

Schreiber Carolin Schreiber, ed.,King Alfreds Old English Translation ofPope Gregory the Greats Regula pastoralis and Its CulturalContext: A Study and Partial Edition According to All SurvivingManuscripts Based on Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 12(Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2003).

Soliloquia Augustine, Soliloquiorum libri duo, De inmortalitate animae, Dequantitate animae, ed. Wolfgang Hrmann, CSEL 89 (Vienna:Tempsky, 1986). Citations are to book and section number.

Soliloquies Thomas A. Carnicelli, ed.,King Alfred's Version of St. Augustine's

Soliloquies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969).Citations are to page and line number.


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CITATIONS AND ORTHOGRAPHICAL CONVENTIONS

Except where otherwise noted, all translations of foreign-language texts are my

own. Citations to the Latin Bible are taken from Robert Weber, Bonifatius Fischer, et al.,

eds.,Biblia Sacra iuxta vulgatam versionem, 4thed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche

Bibelgesellschaft, 1994). English translations of the Vulgate are taken from The Holy

Bible: Douay-Rheims Version (Baltimore, 1899; repr. Rockford, IL: TAN Books, 2000).

In quoting Latin texts, I have standardized spelling to u and i to represent both

consonantal and vocalic u and i. Greek texts are transliterated according to a single

convention throughout. Accordingly, orthography in some Greek and Latin texts may

have been changed from the printed editions.


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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

but, it seems to me, if you are too unwell, then you cant write itall, and even if you were completely well, it would be best for youif you had a secret place empty of distractions, and a few familiarand clever people with you, who will not hinder you in the leastbut help you in your work. (Soliloquies49.17-21)

Throughout my career, I have been very fortunate to have, not a few, but many

familiar and clever people who have helped me on the way. I would like to thank first my

advisor, Tom Hall, for his unending encouragementand unending bibliography, good

humor, and support in the past several years, and especially for his enthusiasm and love

of Anglo-Saxon studies, which has reminded me of my own. Both Katherine Zieman and

Leslie Lockett put me on to the theoretical framework I use in my dissertation, and Leslie

very kindly forwarded me an advance version of a chapter on Alfred from her book;

Katherines generosity with her time and expertise has helped me come to grips with the

complexities of Foucault and Ricoeur, both of whom become important later in my work.

In the English Department and Medieval Institute at Notre Dame, my friends and

colleagues gave me feedback and insight in our seminar groups as the dissertation moved

through various stages of thought and finally into reality. Thanks also are due to

Katherine OBrien OKeeffe, whose class on identity and agency in the Old English

Boethiusprovided first the paper and then the general topic that eventually became my

dissertation, and to Paul Szarmach, whose conversations with me on the project have


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given me valuable direction. I must also thank my good friends and colleagues Karrie

Fuller, Megan Hall, Amanda Madden and Theresa O'Byrne, who have lent supportive

and tolerant ears to me in the past several years.

My project has been generously funded by both the Notre Dame First Year

Writing Program, which provided a writing fellowship for the 2009-10 academic year,

and the joint support of the Mellon Foundation and American Council of Learned

Societies, who awarded me a Dissertation Completion Fellowship for 2010-11. Both

these sources have allowed me, insofar as these things are possible, to complete my work,

and I thank both of them for their support and confidence in what follows. The generosityof Notre Dames English Department, the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts,

and the Graduate Student Union allowed me to present portions of my work publicly at

numerous venues.

None of this would have been possible without the love and support of my

parents, Steve and Kristina Fox. I cant begin to say how much theirencouragement, in

this endeavor and over the past eleven years, means to me. My aunt and uncle, Jeanne

and Thomas Strining, very kindly opened their home to me when I transferred to the

University of Rochester; the second home they gave me has in turn given me so many

opportunities. Without my cousin, Julie Desmarteau, this dissertation may well not exist;

it was her support, advice, and example that prompted me to change my major, transfer,

and begin a new career as an English student and medievalist.And, of course, many thanks to Finn.

Hilary E. Fox


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CHAPTER 1:

THE ALFREDIAN CANON AND ANGLO-SAXON SELVES

While this dissertation examines texts written over a thousand years ago, I would

like to begin with a brief discussion of a more contemporary work, Louise Glcks 2006

poem Prism. In Prism, Glck explores the strained, reluctant relationship between the

flesh and the mind, between the demands placed on the female body and the yearning

toward an autonomous interiority. Glcks narrator, who fights to preserve the priority of

her self against the intruding rituals of womanhood and expectation, poses the selfs

central dilemma as a riddle:

17.The self ended and the world began.They were of equal size,commensurate,one mirrored the other.

18.The riddle was: why couldnt we live in the mind?The answer was: the barrier of the earth intervened.1

Prism takes as one of its running themes the boundary between the individual and the

world, a boundary effaced by the fact that the self and world are of equal size, /

1 Louise Glck,Averno(New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2006), 26.


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commensurate and mirrors of each other. In contradistinction to philosophies and

epistemologies that forsake the world and instead attempt to turn to the purely conceptual

or ideal, Glck insists on the barrier of the earth, which places itself between the mind

and transcendence: even if we seek to live in the mind, flesh, the fact of our embodiment,

makes such a life impossible. Much of Western philosophy, from the Pre-Socratics down

through (and beyond) the phenomenologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,

have, in their various ways, sought to come to an accommodation between the mind, the

body to which it is fastened, and the world in which both participate.

The barrier of earth runs back through much of the history of Western thought onthe mind, to Platos Cratylus and Gorgiasand Aristotle's Fragment 60; the uncomfortable

pun on Greeksoma(body) andsma(grave) inaugurated a tradition that has tended to

see the body as the tomb or prison of the soul, as in the Depression-era gospel song Ill

Fly Away, in which the soul, like a bird, escapes from the prison bars of the world and

takes flight to eternal joy. The narrator of Prism, like her philosophical forebears,

struggles with an existence in which the self, even as it attempts to disengage from the

demands of convention and narrative, inevitably finds itself drawn back to earth, to a

biography whose events are constituted by the action that takes place in the body.

In addressing the mirroring, commensurate entities that are self and world,

Glcks work picks up one of the long-running threads in the complicated tapestry that is

Western philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, ontology, and theology: the more-or-less continual inquiry into what is now called the mind/body problem. I use

mind/body problem not in the Cartesian sensethat is, asking how a completely

incorporeal mind can be housed in and use the physical bodybut rather in the sense of


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what the mind and body are, and how their different natures are unified to create a

fleshly, thinking being. To some extent, Western philosophical traditions have always

understood mind and body asdifferent things. The difference is not necessarily

between incorporeal or corporeal, but at times between how entities of differing

types of material (for example, fire and earth, or air and earth) could not only co-exist,

but form one cohesive being called human. Moreover, the human body and its attendant

soul also formed the microcosm, the mirror in miniature of the universe; like the created

world, the microcosm is itself characterized by structure, order, and harmony. 2 The

multiplicity of theories developed, abandoned, and rediscovered over the course ofhistory have sought to explain the respective natures of soul and body, their relationship

to each other, and how care or neglect of one affects the well-being of the other.

Whether recognizing it as a barrier of earth, or arguing, as Philolaus did in the

fourth century BCE, that the soul is the bodys prisoner, Western attitudes toward the

body have, historically, been uneasy. Anglo-Saxon writers (including the translators of

the texts to be discussed in this dissertation) characterized the body and world as the

carcern, literally the prison house,from which the soul would eventually escape on its

way to eternityhowever, there is also the promise, guaranteed by the Gospels and

buttressed by hundreds of years of exegetical writing, that the body and soul are restored

to each other at the end of time. Thus, for all that unease, these traditions also

acknowledge the important fact that a living human is constituted by an embodiedrational mind, and that the body itself is central not only to species identity, but to

2The word kosmos literally means order; see Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, Henry StuartJones, and Roderick McKenzie,A Greek-English Lexicon(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), s.v. kosmos.


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individual identity as well. That is, perhaps, the simplest statement of human identity that

can be offered from the classical and early medieval philosophers whose work forms the

background against which I set my discussion of embodiment in early English writing.

This dissertation considers the difficult relationship between body and soul more

closely in the Old English translations traditionally associated with the reign of King

Alfred the Great of Wessex (r. 871-899).3The translations of Gregory the GreatsDialogi

and Cura pastoralis, Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethiuss Consolatio philosophiae, and

the Soliloquiaof Augustine of Hippo collectively represent the earliest extant vernacular

translation project known to the West, as well Englishs first substantial foray into therealms of theology, philosophy, ethics, and history. What makes this particular group of

texts particularly intriguing is not only its relative age, but the hypothesized

circumstances of its production and the scope of work it sought to tackle. As Anglo-

Saxonists well know, according to the preface to thePastoral Care, in the late ninth

century, King Alfred instituted his project to translate those books most necessary for all

men to know, for the sake of furnishing competent clerics for English churches and

educating the scions of noble families;4this ambitious project, already (possibly)

3Other texts associated with Alfreds program of education and translation include the OldEnglish translations of BedesHistoria ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, OrosiussHistoria contra paganisand prose translations of the first fifty Psalms and the gospels; for their place in the canon, see Janet Bately,The Alfredian Canon Revisited: One Hundred Years On, inAlfred the Great: Papers from the Eleventh-Centenary Conferences, ed. Timothy Reuter (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 107-20. Bately holds

that the Old English Bede, Orosius, and theDialoguesof Wrferth are only Alfredian in the sense thattheir composition can reasonably be considered to have been undertaken during Alfreds reign (109).

4 Fory me ync betre, gif iow sw ync, t we eac sum bec, a e niedbeearfosta sieneallum monnum to wiotonne, t we a on t geiode wenden e we ealle gecnawan mgen[Therefore it seems better to me that, if it seems so to you, we also take some books, of those which aremost necessary for all men to know, and translate them into that language which we well know](Hierdeboc Preface, ll. 47-49).


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complicated by the perilous state of Latinate learning in England, faced the additional

and significantdifficulty of being unable to resort to a sophisticated, philosophically-

oriented vernacular vocabulary that could handle the nuances of the Latin texts of interest

to Alfred and his circle.5Despite the lack of precedent for the translators work and the

shortage of tools at hand, the topics with which the Anglo-Saxon translators engaged

were among the most complex that Latin philosophy and theology had to offer: the search

for wisdom, the nature of humanity, memory and the recovery of self-identityand, in

addition to theology and philosophy (as in the Consolatio), brief lessons on geography,

astronomy, classical literature, and history. Given the relatively thin linguistic resourceson which these translators relied, the Old English translations represent not only one of

the first known attempts to bring Latin intellectual discourse into the vernacular, but also

demonstrate the richness of the linguistic and interpretive resources Anglo-Saxon

scholars could bring to bear on such challenging texts as the Consolatioand Soliloquia.6

5Nicole Guenther Discenza, The Kings English: Strategies of Translation in the Old EnglishBoethius (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2005), 13-14. The West Saxon texts pre-datingAlfreds reign run more toward glosses, wills, and legal codes. However, Mercian texts from the ninthcentury include a slightly wider range of prose works, including apocrypha, hagiography, catalogues ofmarvels, medical texts, and homilies; see Janet M. Bately, Old English Prose before and during the Reignof Alfred,ASE17 (1988): 93-138, at 93-98. For discussion of a possibly Mercian intellectual context forthe translations, see Rudolf Vleeskruyer, ed., The Life of St. Chad: An Old English Homily (Amsterdam:

North Holland, 1953), 61 for his contention that there was a significantly large tradition of pre-AlfredianEnglish prose, and Stanley B. Greenfield and Daniel G. Calder,A New Critical History of Old English

Literature(New York: New York University Press, 1986), 38-39. Worcesters contributions to the pre-Alfredian and Alfredian intellectual milieu are discussed in Christine B. Thijs, Levels of Learning inAnglo-Saxon Worcester: The Evidence Re-Assessed,Leeds Studies in Englishn.s. 36 (2005): 105-31.

6Bately, Old English Prose, 93 offers a salutary warning against assuming that the Anglo-Saxons lacked competency in Latin writing. The argument has been made that Alfred is prone toexaggeration in making his claims as to his fellow West-Saxons deficiency when it came to literate,Latinate reading and writing; see Jennifer Morrish, King Alfreds Letter as a Source on Learning inEngland in the Ninth Century, in Studies in Earlier Old English Prose: Sixteen Original Contributions, ed.Paul E. Szarmach (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), pp. 87-108, at 87 and 107 and C.P. Wormald, The Uses


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This dissertation considers the interrelationships of mind, soul, and body in a set

of Old English translations traditionally associated with the reign of King Alfred the

Great of Wessex (r. 871-899). While Anglo-Saxonists have become interested in

questions of what Antonina Harbus terms mentalities, that is Anglo-Saxon ideas about

the mind and the self, how these two entities interact in the individual person, the bulk

of their interest has been devoted to poetry, as well as to the rich, complex vocabularies

deployed by both Old English poetry to conceptualize the mind and its operations, and

consequently to those works most often associated with Anglo-Saxon introspection, The

Wandererand The Seafarer. My project here seeks to address two related gaps: first, therole, or roles, of the body in determining both personal and human identity in early

medieval England; and second, how philosophies of the individualwhat we might call a

precursor of a modern notion of selfcan exist comfortably alongside the philosophies

of power (or philosophies of subject-formation, in the political sense) so often seen to be

the main concern of Alfredian prose. In doing the latter, my work also seeks to move

beyond the discussions of canonicity and identity that are traditionally associated with

scholarship on the Alfredian corpus, and to examine other ways in which this set of

remarkable texts may be conceptually related. In doing the former, it engages with

historiographies and literary histories of the self or individual which have, on the whole,

elided early English vernacular literature in their discussions.

of Literacy in Anglo-Saxon England and Its Neighbours, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society15thser. 27 (1977): 91-114.


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The existence of the individual was predicated on the possession of a body

(corpus, lic) that was specifically fitted to its soul (anima,sawl) and that, for all its

weakness and perishability, was guaranteed to be reconstituted and rejoined with its soul

at the end of time. Beyond its eschatological promise, however, the body was that thing

which was in the world, not only of it, but the device with which the soul experienced

sensation and exercised its propensity to virtue. The translator of the Boethius, who knew

well the importance of good tolato work in the world, might have agreed with Marcel

Mausss assessment that the body is the first and most natural instrument7even as he,

like so many of his contemporaries, expressed reservations about the bodys capacities,and its role in determining the nature and permanence of human identity. Moreover, the

body provided an important reference pointone of the very fewfor discussions about

the mind and soul, and the experiential aspects of human spiritual life that evaded direct

discussion. While most discussions of the Alfredian corpus (and the Alfredian corpus)

focus on the governing of that body, and the training of that mind, for the ends of the

state, this dissertation seeks to explore ways in which the body, and the mind and soul it

was home to, stood in for concerns that were not strictly political, and that even on

occasions could resist its politicization. Thus, while one of the major concerns of this

work is the translations use of metaphor, I set to the side discussions of metaphors of

regnal authority in favor of metaphors and narratives of transformation and change, and

the search for permanence while housed in mutable flesh.

7 Marcel Mauss, Sociology and Psychology: Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Routledge,1950; repr. 1979), 104.


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Although my major project is to explore how the Old EnglishDialogues,

Pastoralis,Boethius, and Soliloquiesconceptualized relationships between mind, body,

soul, and self from a stance that does not explicitly associate them with the direct

authorization or involvement of Alfred the Great, it nonetheless relies on scholarship that

has accepted Alfreds involvement. In a sense, I am asking questions about identity in

two ways: first, how can we identify a text as Alfredian (common attribution,

manuscript transmission, shared vocabulary, shared theology); and second, how do

Alfredian texts conceptualize different forms of identity? I would like to turn first to

the Alfredian corpus, and ask, in light of recent scholarship, what the term Alfredianhas traditionally meant, and what it might now mean. I will then take up some of the

history of scholarship on the medieval self and individual, and then lay out a plan for

investigating how the Alfredian individual might have been understood.

1.1The Alfredian Corpus: Traditional ViewsBecause of the translations traditional association with Alfred the Great,

scholarship has, until recently, approached these texts from three directions: the political

and intellectual contexts of late ninth-century Wessex; the theories of and approaches to

translation (hwilum word be wordum, hwilum andgit of andgiete, as Alfreds prefatory

letter to theHierdebocsays) across the corpus; and the nature of the affiliation the texts

have with Alfred, whether they were translated by him personally, undertaken by him in

conjunction with a circle of advisors, executed by a group of scholars by his orders but

without his immediate personal involvement, oras has been most recently suggested


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entirely independent of Alfreds authority but still seeking to claim it.8To a certain

extent, none of these questions can be divorced from each other, dependent as they all are

on the implication of the translations in the early literary history of English, and the close

relationships that obtain between, for example, social or political goals and translation

practice, and between royal authority striving to gain legitimacy as intellectual authority

and the deployment of the vernacular in the development of national identity.9

8 I will discuss the most recent state of the debate with reference to dating and attribution in thefollowing pages. For Alfreds translation theory, see among others, Janet Bately, The Literary Prose of

Alfreds Reign: Translation or Transformation? Toller Lecture(London, 1980; repr. OEN Subsidia10[1984]), pp. 10-13; Robert Stanton, The (M)otherTongue: Translation Theory and Old English, inTranslation Theory and Practice in the Middle Ages , ed. Jeanette Beer (Kalamazoo: Medieval InstitutePublications, 1997), pp. 33-46 and the chapter on King Alfred and Early English Translation, in hisTheCulture of Translation in Anglo-Saxon England(Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002), pp. 55-100; KathleenDavis, The Performance of Translation Theory in King Alfreds National Literary Program, in

Manuscript, Narrative, Lexicon: Essays on Literary and Cultural Transmission in Honor of Whitney F.Bolton, ed. Robert Boenig and Kathleen Davis (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2000), pp. 149-70;Christine Thijs, Early Old English Translation: Practice before Theory?Neophilologus91 (2007): 149-73, in which Thijs argues that the approach to translation across the Alfredian corpus is text-specific, notdependent on any single theoretical stancethat the theories guiding the translations were, in some cases,ad hoc. Particular strategies of translation in theBoethiusand Soliloquieswill be discussed as they comeup.

9This is the position taken by Discenza in The Kings English, when she observes that Alfredsstrategic translation methods served first to authorize writer and text. The authority of a warrior-kingdid not automatically translate into authority in the role of philosopher-translator (13). The same can besaid of David Pratt, who examines the translations as instantiations of Alfreds authority, an authorityderived from his association with Solomonic kingship, which wedded royal power to wisdom; see The

Political Thought of King Alfred the Great(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). For thedeployment of the translations in the education of the aristocracy, see Paul Anthony Booth, King Alfredversus Beowulf: The Re-education of the Anglo-Saxon Aristocracy,Bulletin of the John RylandsUniversity Library of Manchester79 (1997): 41-66; Conrad Leyser, Vulnerability and Power: The EarlyChristian Rhetoric of Masculine Authority,Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester83 (1998): 159-73; Gernot R. Wieland, Ge mid wige ge mid wisdome: Alfreds Double-Edged Sword,inFrom Arabye to Engelond: Medieval Studies in Honour of Mahmoud Manzalaoui on His 75thBirthday,ed. A.E. Christa Canitz and Gernot R. Wieland (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1999), pp. 217-28;David A. Lopez, Translation and Tradition: Reading the Consolation of Philosophythrough King Alfreds

Boethius, in The Politics of Translation in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Luise von Flotow, and Daniel Russell (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2001), pp. 69-84;

Nicole Guenther Discenza, Alfreds Verse Preface to thePastoral Careand the Chain of Authority,Neophilologus85 (2001): 625-33 and Wealth and Wisdom: Symbolic Capital and the Ruler in theTranslational Program of Alfred the Great,Exemplaria13 (2001): 433-67; Ross Smythe, King AlfredsTranslations: Authorial Integrity and the Integrity of Authority, Quaestio Insularis4 (2003): 98-114;Antonina Harbus, Metaphors of Authority in Alfreds Prefaces,Neophilologus91 (2007): 717-27; Janet


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With respect to the translation-adaptation hybrids of theBoethiusand Soliloquies

in particular, much scholarship has also concentrated on working out the sources that

conditioned the translators interpretations and free re-workings of their Latin

exemplars.10One motive for some of this work is rehabilitative in nature, an ongoing

project to rescue the translations from the charges of sloppiness, intellectual laxity, and

insufficiency that have dogged them in some scholarship.11Much of it, though, has been

L. Nelson, Knowledge and Power in Earlier Medieval Europe, Quaestio Insularis8 (2008): 1-18 for theinterrelationship of knowledge (bothsapientiaandscientia) in Carolingian Francia and Alfredian Wessex,

as well as Nicole Guenther Discenza, Alfred the Great and the Anonymous Prose Proem to theBoethius,JEGP107 (2008): 57-76. The (auto-)biographical nature of the translations is explored in Susan Irvine,Ulysses and Circe in King AlfredsBoethius: A Classical Myth Transformed, in Studies in EnglishLanguage and Literature: Doubt Wisely. Papers in Honour of E.G. Stanley, ed. M.J. Toswell and E.M.Tyler (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 387-401; David Pratt, The Illnesses of King Alfred the Great,ASE30 (2001): 39-90; John Lance Griffith, Tasking the Translator: A Dialogue between King Alfred andWalter Benjamin,Medieval and Early Modern English Studies16 (2008): 1-18.

10 One of the perpetual difficulties with theBoethiusis the relationship between it and the body ofcommentary that had accumulated around the Consolatioby the mid-ninth century. The two main groups ofcommentaries, the Remigian and St. Gall, have not yet been fully edited; however, the consensus is that the

Boethiusowes little of its material from them. For discussion of theBoethiusand the commentary traditionsee, among others: Dorothy Whitelock, The Prose of Alfreds Reign, in Continuations and Beginnings:

Studies in Old English Literature, ed. Eric G. Stanley (London: Nelson, 1966), pp. 67-103, at 82-83; DianeK. Bolton, The Study of the Consolation of Philosophyin Anglo-Saxon England,Archives dhistoiredoctrinale et littraire du Moyen Age44 (1978): 33-78; Joseph S. Wittig, King AlfredsBoethiusand ItsLatin Sources: A Reconsideration,ASE11 (1982): 157-98; Paul E. Szarmach, building on Wittigs work,argues for the independence and elusiveness of the translations in Alfred, Alcuin, and the Soul, inBoenig and Davis,Manuscript, Narrative, Lexicon, pp. 127-39, at 139, n. 40; Discenza, The Kings

English, 131-36 summarizes the state of the scholarship. Currently, The Boethius Project, under thedirection of Malcolm Godden, Rohini Jayatilaka and Rosalind Love, is in the process of preparing editionsof Anglo-Saxon commentaries. The most recent discussion on the state of scholarship is Godden andIrvine, ed.,Boethius, 1.54-58.

11Davis, The Performance of TranslationTheory, pp. 150-51 takes issue with understandings ofAlfreds meaning in his prosePrefaceto theHierdeboc, arguing that instead of Alfred apologizing for anydeficiency in his comprehension of those books niedbeearfosta to witonne, thePrefaceis a statement ofAlfreds intention to interpret the text in the best way possible. See also J.C. Frakes, The Fate of Fortune inthe Early Middle Ages: The Boethian Tradition(Leiden: Brill, 1988), 81-122. However, Alfred P. Smythsees the departure of theBoethiusfrom the Consolatioas a failure of understanding on Alfreds part, aninability to cope with philosophical discussion (Alfred the Great[Oxford: Oxford University Press,1995], 580); the argument is perhaps obliquely referred to in Szarmach, Alfred, Alcuin, and the Soul,when he remarks that explanations of failure are always unsatisfactory because they imply a certainlaziness on the part of the explicator for, after all, such explanations become an easy way out of any and alldifficulties (131).


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directed at teasing out the intellectual traditions that lie behind the translations, traditions

that are,prima facie, Augustinian and Gregorian in nature, but which also passed through

the filters of Carolingian ecclesiasts such as Alcuin and reached the translators libraries

with an accretion of commentary and modification. In the case of theBoethius, Whitney

Bolton has argued that the Old English text should be understood not as primarily

Boethianin its intellectual preoccupations and philosophical orientation, but Alcuinian,

with a pedagogical and political turn that distinguished theBoethiusfrom the

Consolatios more abstract, speculative, and detached philosophy.12Following the 2009

publication of the new edition of theBoethius, the Boethius Project, under the directionof Malcolm Godden and Rosalind Love, has been working out the complicated textual

histories of the early Continental and Insular commentaries on the Consolatio, but at the

moment the sourcing of theBoethiusitself remains vexed.13The sources of the

Soliloquieshave been, in part, compiled and worked out by Carnicelli, but on the whole

both it and theBoethiushave escaped discussion outside the realm of source work and

12Whitney Bolton, How Boethian Is AlfredsBoethius? in Szarmach, Studies in Earlier OldEnglish Prose, pp. 153-68, at 161. See also Paul E. Szarmach, AlfredsBoethiusand the Four CardinalVirtues, inAlfred the Wise: Studies in Honour of Janet Bately on the Occasion of Her Sixty-Fifth

Birthday, ed. Jane Roberts, Janet L. Nelson and Malcolm Godden (Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 1997), pp.223-35 and Alfred, Alcuin, and the Soul, n. 10 above. The glosses discussed by Joseph Wittig in TheRemigian Glosses on Boethiuss Consolatio Philosophiaein Context, in Source of Wisdom: Old Englishand Early Medieval Latin Studies in Honour of Thomas D. Hill, ed. Charles D. Wright, Frederick M. Biggs,and Thomas N. Hall (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), pp. 168-200, at 178 suggest Alcuinsinfluence as well.

13See Section 1.1.2 below for a discussion of Malcolm Goddens arguments as to the dating andauthorship of theBoethius. His arguments have implications for the authorship of theMetersand theSoliloquies.


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the relationships the texts bore to Alfreds wider interests in consolidating both political

and intellectual authority.14

While (as I will discuss below) I am setting discussions of Alfreds involvement,

whatever the nature of that involvement may be, to the side, the present work relies

heavily on one of the major points of agreement that runs through previous discussions of

the Alfredian translations: that the translator (or translators) knew what he was doing, and

that the choices madeto translate hwilum word be wordum, hwilum andgit of

andgieteare to be understood as conscious decisions, decisions that were made in the

executions of both the more faithful translations of theDialoguesandPastoralisand thetranslation/commentary-hybrids that are theBoethiusand Soliloquies. The hybridity of

theBoethiusand Soliloquiesmakes them particularly rich texts to mine for descriptions

of body, mind, and self that are not taken from their putative sources. Two points before

laying out the methodology and plan of the project: the contentious issue of Alfreds

association with the translations; and what, in light of recent scholarship, it might mean to

be Alfredian.

1.1.1The Matter of the Canon: Identifying the Alfredian CorpusThe twentieth century (to say nothing of the twenty-first) has seen a radical shift

in scholarly assessments of the Alfredian canon. In part, these reassessments are due to

14Outside of Carnicellis 1969 edition, the only sustained attempt to trace the sources of theSoliloquieswas theFontes Anglo-Saxoniciproject, which has since been abandoned. The question ofsources is especially relevant to SoliloquiesBook Three, which advertises itself as being anotherAugustinian work, theDe uidendo deo(Epistula147), but is in fact an almost completely originalcomposition interpolating a bit of Augustine, but also a significant amount of (modified) Gregorian andJulian eschatology. See Malcolm Godden, Text and Eschatology in Book III of the Old EnglishSoliloquies,Anglia121 (2003): 192-205.


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work done on the linguistic and stylistic particulars of the texts, as well as the

reconsideration of how modern scholarship conceptualizes medieval theories of

authorship and attribution, kingship, and history. As a result, the translations attributed to

Alfred by William of MalmesburytheBoethius,Hierdeboc, Orosius, Bede, and the

Psalms, with a translation of theDialogioutsourced to Wrferth of Merciahave had

their status as Alfredian texts contested and, in some cases, removed or modified. The

only text to be added to the canon that went unmentioned by Asser and William is the

translation of Augustines Soliloquies.15

Several reasons can, and have been, marshaled against the argument that theentirety of the corpus was translated by one man, and/or Alfred in particular: first, the

range of translation habits that separates, for example, the relatively straightforward

rendering of thePastoral Carefrom the adaptive, much looserBoethius; second, the

stylistic data which (while it cannot identify an author) distinguishes theBede, Orosius,

and perhaps thePsalmsfrom thePastoral Careand theDialogues; third, Alfreds ill-

health and already rather jam-packed schedule; and fourth, Alfreds late-starting

education. In the Vita, Asser does not mention Alfreds translation projects, only his

15 Both William and Asser also discuss AlfredsEnchiridion, a handbook said by Asser to containtranslations of the psalms and other Scriptural passages, hymns, and possibly quotations from patristicwriters or other authorities; see Williams Gesta regum Anglorum, ed. and trans. R.A.B. Mynors, R.M.Thomson, and M. Winterbottom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 192-93 and Assers Vita AlfrediinAlfred P. Smyth, The Medieval Life of King Alfred the Great: A Translation and Commentary on the Text

Attributed to Asser(New York: Palgrave, 2002), 42-43. Further, the thirteenth-century Middle Englishpoems The Proverbs of King Alfredand the Owl and the Nightingaleboth attribute various maxims toAlfred, englene derling (Englands darling) and englene frowere (Englands comfort); see O. Arngart,ed., The Proverbs of Alfred, 2 vols. (Lund: Hkan Ohlssons Boktryckeri, 1955) and Neil Cartlidge, ed. andtrans., The Owl and the Nightingale: Text and Translation (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2001). For thereception of Alfred in the later Middle Ages, see Simon Keynes, The Cult of King Alfred the Great,ASE28 (1999): 225-356 and Robert Allen Rouse, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance(Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2005), especially Remembering Alfred in the Twelfth Century, 11-53.


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eager acquisition of knowledge and his collaboration with Asser in the compilation of his

handbook.16Of the texts accepted as members of the canon, only thePastoral Care,

Boethius(both the prose and prosimetrum versions), and Soliloquiesinternally identify

themselves as texts translated by Alfred; consequently, in most cases, association with

Alfred has been inferred based on other textual features, or accepted by tradition. 17The

famous prose preface to thePastoral Care, and its verse counterpart, attribute the act of

translation to the king, as do the prose and verse introductions to theBoethius, but such

attributions do not appear elsewhere. The first part of the preface to the Soliloquieshas

gone missing; Alfred is named in the closing paragraph of Book Three, in the sense thatthe third book is composed of a cwidas e lfred kining als of re bec de

uidendo deo [the sayings which King Alfred took from the bookDe uidendo Deo]

(97.17-18).18Of the remaining texts, only theDialoguesinvokes Alfred as its patron or

commissioner, under whose auspices Bishop Wrferth executed the translation. Work by

Whitelock and Bately has removed the translations of BedesHistoria ecclesiasticaand

OrosiussHistoria aduersus paganosfrom the Alfredian canon on dialectal and stylistic

grounds.19More recently, Michael Treschow, in collaboration with Paramjit S. Gill and

16Asser, Vita Alfredi, in Smyth,King Alfred the Great, 50-51.

17The translator of the Orosius expanded Orosiuss information on the North by including thereport now known as The Voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan. Ohthere, a Norwegian, and Wulfstan,

probably himself an Anglo-Saxon, had visited Alfreds court. Alfred, apparently impressed, had scribescopy down their narratives.

18 The beginning of the Soliloquiesis manifestly incomplete, with no firmly-identified subjectbehind the anonymous first-person voice that announces Gaderode me onne kigclas, and stuansceaftas,and locsceaftas and hylfa to lcum ara tola, e ic mid wircan cue [Then (I) gathered for myself the

beams and props and crossbeams and handles as all the material with which I knew to work] (47.1-2).


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Tim B. Swartz, has used statistical analysis of the texts stylometrics to argue, contra

Bately and Patrick ONeill, that the fifty prosePsalmsshould not be considered part of

Alfreds corpus, either.20

Sifting through the translations to determine canonicity has, at times, obscured

larger questions of authorship and authorial identity. When Treschow, in describing the

removal ofBedeand Orosiusfrom Alfreds publication list, remarks that Alfred no

longer gets credit for translating theHistoria ecclesiastica and theHistoria aduersus

paganos, there is no real attempt to further discuss what Alfred is getting credit for. That

is, attempts to attribute texts to Alfred have tended to ignore investigating the role Alfredplayed in the translations (de factoassuming that Alfred had sole responsibility for their

production); moreover, they have not, generally speaking, sought to explore why

Alfred occupies such a central position in the origin of the translations. As Bately has

noted, lexical studies cannot put a name on a text if no name is provided.21Consequently,

newer work has moved away from the question of attribution and toward a

19 For theHistoria ecclesiastica, see Dorothy Whitelock, TheProse of Alfreds Reign, inContinuations and Beginnings, ed. E.G. Stanley (London: Nelson, 1966), pp. 67-103; for Orosius, see JanetBately, ed., The Old English Orosius,EETS s.s. 6 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), lxxiii-xciii,

particularly lxxxvi-lxxxix for Batelys analysis of the association of the Orosiuswith Alfreds program, andsee now Janet Bately and Anton Englert, eds., Ohtheres Voyages: A Late Ninth Century Account ofVoyages along the Coasts of Norway and Denmark and Its Cultural Contexts (Roskilde: Viking ShipMuseum, 2007).

20 A more detailed discussion of the critical background and more extensive analysis of thetranslations can be found in Michael Treschow, Paramjit Gill, and Tim B. Swartz, King Alfreds Scholarly

Writings and the Authorship of the First Fifty Prose Psalms,Heroic Age12 (2009) (accessed September 24, 2009). Thetechnical details underlying the results, and the statistical method, can be found in Paramjit S. Gill, Tim B.Swartz, and Michael Treschow, A Stylometric Analysis of King Alfreds Literary Works,Journal of

Applied Statistics34 (2007): 1251-58.

21Janet Bately, Lexical Evidence for the Authorship of the Prose Psalms in the Paris Psalter,ASE10 (1982): 69-95, at 95.


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reconsideration of other ways in which Alfred might be connected to the translations,

whether he (as in the case of theDialogues) commissioned the texts, took an active role

in supervising their production, or even contributed to the process without translating

them entirely as his own.22Work done in the past decade has, overall, tended to distance

Alfred from the works usually attributed to him, whether by giving him credit for

patronage or interested (but not direct) participation or by, in some cases, removing him

from the scene entirely. In the words of Treschow, Gill, and Swartz,

The legendary sage depicted by the Anglo-Normans is not quite the historicalAlfred that we understand today. We still, of course, tend to see him as a scholarlyruler, though the question arises whether that image might be too good be true.Should we believe that Alfred, amidst all his efforts and troubles, actually laboredthrough any translation at all? Is this propaganda playing to our wishfulthinking?23

Treschow et al. call into question the line of argument accepted unquestioningly by,

among others, Patrick Wormald, who sees no good reason to doubt that the four books

22 Asser prefaces his own entry to Alfreds circle by mentioning the cadre of scholars who workedin the royal court, including Wrferth, bishop of Worcester, his student Peter, Plegmund of Canterbury,

thelstan, Wrwulf, and others (Smyth, The Medieval Life of King Alfred the Great, 36-40 and 42-43). Inthe Gesta, William emphasizes that Alfreds work was not undertaken alone, but rather with the aid of hiscircle: Nichil in ista uel aliis interpretationibus ex suo dicere, sed omnia a spectabilibus uiris Pleimundoarchiepiscopo, Asserione episcopo, Grimbaldo et Iohanne presbiteris hausisse [Nothing, he adds, in this orthe other translations is said on his own responsibility, but he has derived everything from men of h ighreputation, Archbishop Plegmund, Bishop Asser, and the priests Grimbald and John] (Gesta, 194-95).Ealdorman thelweard, whose Chronicon(written c. 998) was known to William, celebrates Alfred as askilled translator, who translated unknown numbers of books from Latin to English ita uarie, ita

propime (with such variety and richness) for the edification of both scholars and the unlearned; see A.Campbell, ed. and trans., The Chronicle of thelweard(London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1962), 51-52.The range of texts traditionally associated with Alfred, encompassing national (Bede) and world (Orosius)history, along with philosophy, theology, natural history (theBoethius, Soliloquies, andDialogues) andmanuals for ecclesiastical leadership (Hierdeboc), would certainly represent the variety celebrated by

thelweard.

23Treschow, Gill, and Swartz, King Alfreds Scholarly Writings,p. 2.


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that stand in [Alfreds] name, plus one other, were in a real sense composed by him. 24

Wormald, though, admits of larger possibilities than Alfreds exclusive authorship,

suggesting that the translations were carried out under Alfreds patronage, by scholars

such as Asser, Plegmund, Grimbald, John, and Wrferth, who formed a circle of

intellectuals who advised and educated the king, but whose work nonetheless bear[s] the

impress of a single, royal, mind.25

The royal mind, then, could directly compose the translations or else bear the

responsibility of production in some other way; regardless of the mind or minds who

executed them, the translations all work together as part of a larger program that tiededucation and vernacularity specifically and exclusively to Alfreds political agenda.

Wormalds broad application of the concept of auctorauthor or authorizerin part

addresses long-standing questions about the relationship between Alfred and the

translations, given the curious silence of his biographer on the subject, and Assers

admission that Alfred came to learning late in life.26In this same vein, David Pratts

extensive study of the relationship between the development of the translations and the

24Patrick Wormald, Alfred the Great, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.Matthew and Brian Harrison, 60 vols.(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1.718-23, at 19.

25Wormald, Alfred the Great, 1.721.

26For Alfreds educational attainments and writing, see, among others, Kenneth Sisam, ThePublication of King AlfredsPastoral Care, in his Studies in the History of Old English Literature(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), pp. 140-47; Janet Bately, The Literary Prose of King AlfredsReign: Translation or Transformation?, 7; Allen J. Frantzen,King Alfred (Boston: Twayne, 1986), 1;Smyth,Alfred the Great, 229. Richard W. Clement, The Production of thePastoral Care: King Alfred andHis Helpers, in Szarmach, Studies in Earlier Old English Prose, pp. 129-52 explores the role of Alfredscircle in the execution of the translations.


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development of an Alfredian ethic of kingship takes as its starting point the presumed

controlling presence of Alfreds mind and interests behind the canon.

However, in a series of recent publications, Malcolm Godden has worked to

dispel lingering myths of attribution surrounding Alfred and his role in the translations.

Noting the problems surrounding surviving manuscript evidence, which preserves only

late copies of the translations, Godden interrogates the consensus view that Alfred bore

the primary responsibility for the translations, specifically asking why scholars, over a

thousand years after thelweards attribution of the translations to the king, have not

been willing to more closely examine evidence that could be taken to challenge Alfredsstatus as auctor.27The problem, he writes, does not necessarily lie in depriving Anglo-

Saxon scholarship of one of its precious few named authors, but rather the questions of

education, literacy, and culture that arise when the translations are removed from their

historical relationship to Alfred and instead examined in the broader, more general

context of the Anglo-Saxon period.28Moreover, stripping the descriptive term

Alfredian from the translations, Godden argues, opens up new avenues of interpretation

that are not tied to Alfreds political and social goals:

As long as we believe that the king wrote the texts or controlled their compositionthat will strongly influence the way we read them and the kinds of meanings andemphases and points of view we are prepared to recognize in them. The belief inthe kings personal authorship makes us too inclined to interpret everything in

27thelweards reliability is uncertain. As a kinsman of Alfred (he was the great-great grandsonof thelred of Wessex, Alfreds brother), he may have had insider information regarding Alfredsintellectual activities; however, he may also have been interested in promoting the cult of early West-Saxoneducational and intellectual projects and their legacies, particularly Alfreds.

28Malcolm Godden, Did King Alfred Write Anything?Medium vum 76 (2001): 1-23, at 18.


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terms of a royalist, authority-centred position and to miss much that is critical andsubversive of authority.29

Godden accepts that theDialogueswere likely, following the attribution in the preface

and Assers testimony, composed under Alfreds orders, along with the Hierdeboc. Most

of Goddens interests, for purposes of modern scholarship, lie in reconsidering the dating

and authorial attribution of theBoethiusand Soliloquies, as the much more complicated

attitudes toward kingship and authority voiced in these translations seem to remove them

from an immediately royal purview. As an alternative to the traditionally-accepted

compositional order of theDialogues,Pastoralis,Boethius, and Soliloquies, he suggests

that the preface and text of theHierdebocwere composed with Alfreds authorization, as

is probably the case with theDialogues; on the other hand, theBoethiusand Soliloquies

both post-date his rule, with theBoethiuscomposed either late in Alfreds reign or shortly

after (and before c. 950), and the Soliloquiessignificantly later, possibly as late as the

eleventh century.30

29Godden, Did King Alfred Write Anything? 18. Godden also explores the problematic shift inthe attitudes toward kingship and thegnship expressed by the first-person figures in theBoethiusandSoliloquies, which to him suggest not a royal mind behind the text, but a noble one that is attempting tocome to grips with its position in the natural and political order; see his The Player King: Identificationand Self-Representation in Alfreds Writings, in Reuter,Alfred the Great, pp. 137-50.

30Did King Alfred Write Anything?pp. 17-18. For the dating of theBoethius, see Godden andIrvine, eds.,Boethius1.140-46. Godden and Irvine accept the proseBoethiusas the source for theMeters,with a similar date range, between 890 and 950, noting that theMetersmay more properly belong to theearly tenth century. See also his The Alfredian Project and Its Aftermath: Rethinking the Literary Historyof the Ninth and Tenth Centuries,Proceeedings of the British Academy162 (2009): 93-122. LeslieLockett, in herAnglo-Saxon Psychologies in the Vernacular and Latin Traditions(Toronto: University ofToronto Press, 2010) argues that Alfreds educational profile was not unique, and gives the example of themonk-priest, such as Dunstant or thelwold, whose education would have been equal to the task of

producing the translation of the Soliloquies(360-73).


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Goddens relocating of the translations from the last years of Alfreds reign to

various dates spread throughout (and beyond) the Anglo-Saxon period could potentially

account for the distribution of the manuscript evidence. Aside from two early copies of

theHierdeboc, no surviving manuscript of the translations dates to earlier than the mid-

tenth century.31The earliest surviving copy of theBoethius, the prosimetrum version

surviving in the damaged London, British Library, Cotton Otho A.vi, dates to the middle

of the tenth century (and is the manuscript that serves as Goddens terminus ad quemfor

dating the composition of theBoethius), while the earliest surviving copy of the

Dialoguesis the tenth-century Canterbury Cathedral Library Additional 25, and the onlycomplete witness to the Soliloquiesin a twelfth-century manuscript now part of British

Library, Cotton Vitellius A. xv.32 Given the irregularity of surviving Anglo-Saxon

manuscripts in the recordwhich is certainly characteristic of the late ninth and early

31

Schreiber,King Alfreds Translation of the Regula pastoralis,51-62. The two manuscriptsdatable to 890-896 are BL Cotton Tiberius B. xi/Kassel, Gesamthochschulbibliothek 4 MS theol. 131 andOxford, Bodleian Library MS Hatton 20. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 12 was copied in the secondhalf of the tenth century, while Cambridge, Trinity College R.5.22 (717), British Library, Cotton Otho B. iiand Otho B. x, and Cambridge, Cambridge University Library Ii. 2.4 date from the late tenth through lateeleventh centuries.

32For theBoethius, see Godden and Irvine, eds.,Boethius1.12-13 and 22. The prose versionfound in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 180 dates to the end of the eleventh century or the early twelfth.In his edition of theDialogues, Hecht dates Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 322 to the second half ofthe eleventh century; of the two other versions, British Library Cotton Otho C. i (eleventh century) isincomplete, and Bodleian Library, Hatton 76, a revision, dates to the eleventh century as well (Dialogues,18-26). The Soliloquiessurvives in totoonly in the Southwick Codex, written in the first half of the twelfthcentury (Soliloquies,3-4). A fragmentary translation, from Augustines opening prayer, survives in BritishLibrary Cotton Tiberius A. iii, a manuscript of the mid-eleventh century. For the edition and translation, seePaul E. Szarmach, Alfreds Soliloquiesin London, BL, Cotton Tiberius A. iii (art. 9g, fols. 50v-51v), in

Latin Learning and English Lore: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature for Michael Lapidge, ed. KatherineOBrien OKeeffe and Andy Orchard (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), pp. 153-79. Otherversions of Augustines prayer are found inabbreviated forms elsewhere, including an Alcuinianflorilegium; see David Pratt, The Political Thought of King Alfred the Great(Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2007), 312-13.


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tenth centuriesrelying on the manuscript evidence to support an argument against

Alfreds authorship or authorization of the translations may be unwise.33

However, Goddens suggestion that scholarship should detach the translations

from their putative authorizing figure is one that, I believe, has merit, and the possibility

of offering up readings that are not necessarily subversive of royal authority so much as

complementary to it. That is, instead of reading the translations as primarily concerned

with inculcating the ethics necessary to the production of the ideal subject (although that

is certainly part of their project), I want to explore the possibilities that the texts have to

be read as guides to individual life: to the description of different experiences of the bodyand how those experiences impinge on the mind, the locus of stability within the mind

itself, and the work of memory recovery that forms an essential technology of self-care

and self-recovery. It is the common concern with the body, self-care and languagethe

care of the body, the languages that utilize the body in discussions of the activities of the

interior lifethat suggest one way of reading these four texts, particularly the Boethius

and Soliloquies, together.

33Uncharacteristically, Godden fails to note the existence of Cotton T iberius A. iii in Did KingAlfred Write Anything? While the relocation of the earliest Old English witness to the Soliloquiesto theeleventh century does not of course bring it appreciably closer to Alfreds direct authorization, it does pointto an interest in Augustinian interiority that is roughly contemporary with the resurgence of interest inAugustines personal meditative writings on the Continent. In his study of the manuscript, Szarmachspeculates that the production of Cotton Tiberius A. iii may have been related to the Augustinianism ofAnselm of Canterbury, who supported the dissemination of the devotional-meditative text in thevernacular for the salvation of souls (Alfreds Soliloquiesin London, BL, Cotton Tiberius A. iii, p. 163).


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1.1.2What, Then, Is Alfredian?Whether the manuscripts represent later attestations of ninth-century originals or

texts that post-date Alfreds rule, the manuscript evidence suggests two divergent

hypotheses that still have Alfred at the core: first, that the translations were executed in

some part through Alfreds agency (as translator or authorizer); and second, that the

translators worked independently of Alfred but wanted these texts to be associated with

himthat they wanted his imprimatur, so to speak.As my discussion above suggests,

work on Alfred in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has not unquestioningly

accepted the claims to authorial responsibility put forward by thelweard and William.Instead, scholarship has opened up new avenues of exploration, moving from purely

historical considerations to related questions of, for example, vernacular education, social

practice as evident in translation practice, and Anglo-Saxon polity in general. In a similar

vein, I take as a basic principle for this study a slightly modified version of Goddens

challenge to discard Alfred as the controlling mind behind the canon and instead to

investigate the texts independently of royalist concerns: I want to examine these texts as

Alfredianthat is, not necessarily as products specifically and only of Alfred and/or

his court (that is, their composition dating onlyto c. 890-899), but as texts that participate

in, as it were, a school of thought, a history of ideas that were, throughout and beyond the

Anglo-Saxon period, associated with Alfred. Participation in this tradition can be

hypothesized based on general observations of theDialogues,Hierdeboc,Boethius, andSoliloquies, as well as the history of the texts manuscript transmission and Alfreds

reputation following his death.


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Looking at the four texts selected for discussion here, there are affinities both

obvious and subtle. TheDialoguesandHierdebocshare an ultimate author in Gregory

the Great. Of the four texts, three (Dialogues,Boethius, and Soliloquies) are composed in

dialogue form; theBoethiusand Soliloquiesboth go to additional effort to emphasize the

occasionally frustrated, occasionally colloquial exchanges between their interlocutors.34

Both theHierdebocand theBoethiusare interested in questions of ethics and the duties

of the clerical and secular rector. For three of its four books, the Dialoguesis mostly a

collection of miraculatold by Gregory to his follower Petrus Diaconus; the fourth book,

however, turns to the major theme toward which Gregorys stories have been building: the proof of the souls immortality, and its promised life after death; this is also the

preoccupation of Book Three in the Soliloquies, in which Gesceadwisnes reassures

Agustinus as to the immortality of his mind and soul.35One of the major changes made to

theBoethiuswas to swap the philosophical language of the Consolatiofor a theological

language that more closely matched that of theDialoguesandHierdeboc; the same

changes can also be detected in the Soliloquies, which abandoned Neoplatonic

34Ruth Waterhouse, Tone in Alfreds Version of Augustines Soliloquies, in Szarmach, Studiesin Earlier Old English Prose, pp. 49-59.

35The announcement is made in one of Wrferths few interpolations, the preface to Book Four:Her aspringe seo feore y re hluttran burnan of am mue s elan lareowes, of re am e

yrste and lyste magon drincan and gecnawan, t s mannes sawl ne fre na y gemete e oeranytena fter am gedale s lichaman [Here springs the fourth torrent of the clear riverfrom the mouth ofthe noble teacher (i.e. Gregory), from which those who thirst and long for it may drink and know, that thesoul of men does not fare in the same way as other beasts after parting from the body] (Dialogues260.1-4).For the innovation of the Soliloquiesregarding the assertion of the co-immortality of mind (mod) and soul(sawol), see Lockett,Anglo-Saxon Psychologies, 325-30.


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abstractions in favor of dogmatic assertions.36Lastly, theBoethiusand Soliloquies

especially share close thematic links, concerned as they are with self-knowledge, love,

knowledge of God, and the translinguistic experience of the visio Dei. While the

Soliloquiesabandoned after two books by a frustrated Augustinedoes not

immediately seem like one of those books an Anglo-Saxon absolutely needed to know, it

offers an early view of Augustinian interiority, stripped of the extensive biographical

materials that would have made the Confessions(assuming the translator had access to it)

much more challenging. Further, the dialogue between a personified authority figure

(Philosophia,Ratio) and a despondent mind struggling towards understanding (Boethius,Augustine) also links the two at the level of genreand, perhaps, Boethius himself took

Augustine for his model. E.T. Silk and Anna Crabbe have both suggested that Augustine

was crucial to the concept of the Consolatio.37There are certainly compelling links at the

level of genre as well as material, given that both are struggles toward understanding that

36Discenza, The Kings English38-39: TheBoethiusfits into this program neatly with its story ofan individual reconciling his own fortunes with a broader perspective and the theme of free will, largelyuntreated by the other works in the program. The Soliloquieswould later provide abstract arguments for theimmortality of the soul and mind, placing the journey of the individual soul into an eschatological context.Throughout theMeters, the Neoplatonic law of the Consolatiois reinterpreted as Biblical law; the order ofthe classical cosmos that Boethius borrows from Platos Timaeusbecomes the guide or lawbook that guidesthe soul back to the divine; see Karmen Lenz, Images of Psychic Landscape in theMeters of KingAlfredsFroferboc (Ph.D diss.: University of New Mexico, 2004), 77. For the Soliloquies, see Lockett,

Anglo-Saxon Psychologies, 336.

37A link between the Consolatioand Augustines two dialoguesDe magistroand Soliloquiawasfirst proposed by E.T. Silk, Boethiuss Consolatio Philosophiaeas a Sequel to AugustinesDialoguesandSoliloquia,Harvard Theological Review32 (1939): 19-39; see also Anna Crabbe, Literary Design in the

De consolatione Philosophiae, inBoethius: His Life, Thought and Influence, ed. Margaret Gibson(Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), pp. 237-74, at 241. Seth Lerer,Boethius and Dialogue: Literary Method in TheConsolation of Philosophy(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) proposes theDe magistroandSoliloquiaas generic models for the Consolatio(47); in the case of the Soliloquia, Augustines self-conscious creation of the interior dialogue (the Soliloquiaare set within Augustines own wondering,confused mind) as a new literary genre could also have appealed to Boethius in the early stages ofconceptualizing the Consolatio(51).


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come out of grief, and this understanding is intimately related to Neoplatonic anamnesis,

the recovery of prior, now-forgotten memory.38

Moreover, the distribution of surviving manuscripts, and the afterlife of the

translations in other texts, could be taken to suggest that the Anglo-Saxons (and the later

English) had an abiding interest not only in Alfred and his program of vernacular

education as a historical phenomenon, but in continuing a line of investigation and

thought opened up by theHierdebocandDialogues. Several copies of the translations

can be dated to the years before or during the Benedictine Reform, which also saw the

further development of interest in Anglo-Saxon poetics, prose composition, andtranslation.39The translation program itself is cited by lfric as the precedent and

inspiration for his own vernacular homiletic projects in his First Series of Catholic

Homilies.40The sole complete manuscript of the Soliloquiesbelongs to a transitional

period that saw the resurgence of interest in Anglo-Saxon kingship (it is nearly

contemporary with Williams Chronicle) and interest in Alfred in particular as a figure of

38Szarmach, Alfreds Soliloquiesin London, BL, Cotton Tiberius A. iii, p. 162. HeinrichStirnimann, Grund und Grnder des Alls: Augustins Gebet in den Selbstgesprchen (Freiburg:Universittsverlag, 1992), 28-33 discusses the echoes of Augustines opening prayer in the SoliloquiatoConsolatio3.m.9, O qui perpetua, or the so-called Timaean Hymn.

39For the tradition of Latin glossing and textual history lying behind the Benedictine Reform, seeMechthild Gretsch, The Intellectual Foundations of the English Benedictine Reform, CSASE 25(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

40lfric writes that his Catholic Homilies were in part inspired by the need for vernaculartheological writing to counteract what he saw as intellectual vacuity in England; except for a handful ofLatinate scholars and am bocum e lfred cyning snoterlice awende of ledene on englisc [those bookswhich King Alfred wisely translated from Latin into English]; Catholic Homilies: The First Series, ed.Peter Clemoes, EETS s.s. 17 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997], Preface ll. 48-56), the state oflearning in England was, at least inlfrics opinion, lamentable. He makes use of the Alcuinian conceptsof the soul in the Christmas Homily (LS, B1.3.2) andDe auguriis (LS, B1.3.18) in his Lives of Saints,and also mentions the translations of Bede and theDialogueselsewhere (for discussion, seeBoethius1.207-9).


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royal authority and wisdom in early Middle English texts. TheBoethiuswas also in use

well after its putative translator had died; the Latin commentary on the Consolatioby

Nicholas Trevet, written c. 1300, is clearly influenced by theBoethius, which Trevet cites

on several occasions.41Consequently, when I say that a text is Alfredian, I mean not to

attribute the text to Alfred, but rather to a school of thought that considered itselfto be

participating in traditions of vernacular learning and to be partaking of the authority of

Alfred of Wessex. For the purposes of the present discussion, Alfred as authorizer of

these texts is of secondary importance; instead of focusing on the figure of the king as

textual authority, I would like to focus on the common methods Alfredian texts use tostructure subjectivity, and begin the movement toward what we might today call the self.

Beyond the fragmentary and problematic manuscript evidence, textual evidence suggests

that these translations are all Alfredian in that they deploy linguistic and translation

strategies that conceptualize the mind and body in similar ways, with similar implications

for a common tradition of Anglo-Saxon intellectual, epistemological, and social theories.

1.2Medieval Selves: Toward Alfredian Self-(sylf?)hoodDuring the course of remarks given to a recent conference on medieval and early

modern theorizations of interiority, Paul Strohm commented that intellectual histories of

selfhood tend to describe the interior, isolate self as having beendiscovered, as though

41Brian Donaghey, Nicholas Trevets Use of King Alfreds Translation of Boethius, and theDating of His Commentary, in The Medieval Boethius: Studies in the Vernacular Translations of Deconsolationephilosophiae,ed. Alastair J. Minnis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 1-31;Boethus1.212-14.


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philosophers had excavated the self from beneath the detritus of the non-selfhood of

previous ages.42In the same way that discussion of the Alfredian canon has been driven

by its identification with a particular ruler, discussion of the medieval self has for some

time been driven by responses to historiographies and anthropologies that have seen the

Middle Ages as the age of the non-individual, in which individual or particular identity

was subsumed beneath identities that tied the individual into a collective. The

paradigmatic statement comes from Jacob Burckhardt in The Civilization of the

Renaissance in Italy:

In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousnessthat which was turnedwithin as that which was turned withoutlay dreaming or half awake beneath acommon veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession,though which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues. Man wasconscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, orcorporationonly through some general category.43

Burckhardts assertion that the group (for example, thegensorfamilia) was the only

meaningful locus of identity was particularly influential in sociological and

anthropological studies. In her review of the sparse literature on medieval selfhood,

Antonina Harbus notes that, on the occasions when pre-Modern conceptions of the self

are examined, it is frequently for the purpose of demonstrating the developing biography

of modern ideas about human identity and subjectivity, emerging social behavior, or our

42Paul Strohm, Keynote Address (lecture, University of California, Irvine, CA, January 21,2011).

43Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S.G.C. Middlemore (NewYork: Harper and Row, 1975), 98.


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superior awareness of the self today;44statements by, among others, Roy F. Baumeister,

Frank Johnson, and Peter Smith and Michael Bond all recapitulate two assumptions: that

medieval identity was indissolubly corporate in nature, or that all medievals thought the

same way about the self, regardless of time and place.45Ronald Ganze, in his 2005

dissertation, also remarks on the pervasiveness of the myth of the medieval mono-

mind, and his own project, like Harbuss, is engaged with taking apart Burckhardtian

and other post-Renaissance historiographies that generalize medieval identities as group-

based.46

Reactions to Burckhardtian attitudes toward the Middle Ages have taken issueboth with generalizations out of ignorance and with the assumption that the individual

(whatever that is) either did not exist or existed in a sort of dreamy half-life. Almost

overwhelmingly, reactions have come from scholars of the high and late Middle Ages;

scholars working in the 1970s argued that, rather than looking to the Renaissance for the

fashioning of the individual, the twelfth century provided the earliest evidence for a body

44Antonina Harbus, The Medieval Concept of the Self in Anglo-Saxon England, Self andIdentity1 (2002): 77-97, at 79. She reviews modern literature on the medieval self at 78-81.

45In two separate places, for example, Baumeister reiterates his belief that self-knowledge was nota pressing issue for medieval thinkers: late medieval awareness of selfhood was crude by modernstandards, suggesting that self-knowledge was not regarded as an important problem (How the SelfBecame a Problem: A Psychological Review of Historical Evidence,Psychological Review52 [1987]:163-76) and notions of selfhood in the Middle Ages in the West may have been far more collective thanthey are now (The Self and Society: Changes, Problems, and Opportunities, in Self and Identity:

Fundamental Issues, ed. Richard D. Ashmore and Lee Jussim [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997], pp.191-217); both qtd. in Harbus, The Medieval Concept of the Self in Anglo-Saxon England, 79.

46Ronald Ganze, Conceptions of the Self in Augustine, King Alfred, and Anglo-Saxon England(Ph.D dissertation: University of Oregon, 2004), 18-29. See also his more recent The Medieval Sense ofSelf, inMisconceptions about the Middle Ages, ed. Stephen J. Harris and Bryon Lee Grigsby (New York:Routledge, 2008), pp. 102-16 for criticism of modern attitudes towards pre-Cartesian theorizations ofselfhood.


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of literature actively interested in the exploration of the single, unique person, and that, in

fact, this interest provided the motivation for the composition of theological,

philosophical, and literary works.47In the twelfth century, the individual became the

organizing principle of literature, in contrast to the early Middle Ages, which remained

wedded to collective identity; this attitude is particularly clear in Norman Cantors The

Meaning of the Middle Ages, which considers group and typological thought to have

been characteristic of pre-twelfth century literature, while a sort of proto-humanism can

be detected in the years of and following the twelfth-century renaissance.48Linked to the

twelfth century is the development of vernacular literature, not only in terms of the sizeof the corpus (admittedly considerable compared to pre-1050 vernacular literature, which

is constituted mostly of Old English and Irish), but also the vernacular as a vehicle as a

literary language of self-expression, in contrast to learned, Latinate discourse.49The

individual, then, is a product of romance, and romance in turn generated continuing

interest in the priority of individual self-exploration over corporate identities.

47The assignation of self to the Renaissance is, of course, argued in Stephen Greenblatt,Renaissance Self-Fashioning: More to Shakespeare(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).Greenblatt sees the Renaissance as initiating the view of identity as something that is both individual andmanipulablesomething that, rather than being assigned or static, could be manipulated (3). See also SarahSpence, Texts and the Self in the Twelfth Century(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 13.

48Norman F. Cantor, The Meaning of the Middle Ages(Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1973). A major

disadvantage, Cantor writes of the early Middle Ages, was a weak sense of individual personality.Human complexity was ignored, and people were defined by their status instead of their individualcharacteristics (163), and again, In the twelfth century there emerged a new consciousness of the self andrecognition of the importance and distinctiveness of the individual, marking a significant departure fromthe group and typological thought of the early Middle Ages. Men began to develop a sense of individu

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Mind, Body, Soul, And Self in the Alfredian Translations