Translating England and the continent in Ælfric’s lives of saints
Keywords: Old English Literature
Hagiography
England and the Continent
Europe
Translation
Ælfric
Benedictine Reform

This thesis argues that Ælfric of Eynsham deliberately adapted information from continental Latin sources in order to emphasise ideals of community, co-operation and collective identity to English audiences in his Lives of Saints, the most stylistically and narratively accomplished collection of hagiography composed in Early Medieval England. Moreover, it examines, for the first time, the Lives as a unified collection whose individual items comprise one thematic and didactic whole. Although the Lives of Saints is composed in Old English and was intended to educate English audiences, its sanctorale consists primarily of Frankish, Italian and Spanish saints rather than English ones, thus providing unique insight into the ways that “the continent” was represented in late tenth-century English literature. No previous study has considered Ælfric’s representation of European characters, geographies and narratives. Through close comparison between Ælfric’s Lives and their Latin sources this thesis demonstrates that Ælfric’s interest in community was both inward and outward looking: he sought on the one hand to situate England within the wider Christian world, and on the other hand to promote the internal unity of the English kingdom and the reformed monastic establishment. As such, it sheds new light on the ways that Ælfric wrote about the Christian world and England’s place within it, and further illuminates of the didactic praxis and ideology of one of the most influential and significant authors of the early medieval period.
The four thematic chapters each address a form of ‘translation’. Chapter One considers the literary translation of descriptions of continental geographies, and establishes that Ælfric conceived of a unified “continental” Christian community, roughly occupying the old territories of the Western Roman Empire and centred around Rome, which was distinct from the rest of the world. Whilst Ælfric presents locations such as Rome, Milan or Sicily as enjoying unique topographical or historical features and as such being distinct from one another, he nonetheless largely homogenises the depictions of continental locations found in his sources, and in doing so suggests that disparate places might nonetheless share in a single sense of community with one another. Chapter Two turns to the translation of saints, arguing that Ælfric adapted the accounts of saintly burial found in his sources in order to minimise difference between geographic locations and to present an idealised vision of a homogeneous universal church. Whilst Ælfric’s Latin sources consistently emphasise localised aspects of the saintly burial, Ælfric adapts these accounts to highlight the communion of saints, the universal church and the single community of praxis in which all the Christian faithful share. Chapter Three continues the idea of physical translation, and turns to Ælfric’s missionary saints, who move between places. In these missionary lives, Ælfric consistently highlights the importance of cooperation between geographic locations and between the lay and monastic spheres, and thereby promotes unity as an ideological imperative for both secular and ecclesiastical success. Chapter Four considers Ælfric’s presentation of Rome, the most culturally significant city of the Early Medieval imagination. Throughout the Lives, Ælfric diminishes Rome’s physical reality whilst emphasising the city’s symbolic importance, thereby emphasising commonality between Rome and England despite the considerable geographic and cultural lacuna between the two places. Rome serves as the heart of Ælfric’s imagined continental Christian community, representing the idealised imperial, scholastic and ecclesiastical achievements that all of the universal church, and particularly England, might share in.
I conclude that Ælfric adapted continental characters, geographies and narratives in order to promote unity, a value that was both the heart of Benedictine ideology and a political necessity in the turbulent landscape of late tenth-century England. This thesis shows how Ælfric’s continental characters and settings served not merely as a convenient skeleton on which to frame his hagiographical narratives, but rather lay at the heart of his didactic praxis and pedagogic aims.