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1 - The Manuscripts and Editions of the OEHE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2012

Sharon M. Rowley
Affiliation:
Christopher Newport University
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Summary

Manuscripts dismissed as worthless by editors of critical texts are often the very ones where scribal editors have participated most fully in the activity of [that text], often at a high level of intellectual and even creative engagement. … certainly their activities provide a wealth of insight into a contemporary or near-contemporary reading of a text … into the tastes of the age and the expectations of readers.

The OEHE survives in five manuscripts and three brief excerpts copied from the tenth to the late-eleventh centuries. These are, as Allen Frantzen puts it, ‘eventful’ texts; that is, they are ‘“sites” of multiple and simultaneous conflicts’. They reflect a tremendous amount of scribal activity and intervention, as well as the fragility of the material texts over time. Most editions of the text have sought to repair the losses and erase layers of scribal intervention, so as to present a version of the OEHE that is as close as possible to Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica or a hypothetical reconstruction of the lost original translation. By treating the OEHE manuscripts as eventful, this study explores the history of the manuscripts as the history of the reception of the text. The variants and interventions in the manuscripts reveal much about the status and uses of the manuscripts, as well as about the transmission and reception of the OEHE, and through it, Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica, in later Anglo-Saxon England.

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Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2011

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