The argument and structure of this book

Chapters Three and Four demonstrate how the growing demand for biblical translations in the tenth century was met by the production of a series of ambitious prose translations of large parts of the Old and New Testaments. Chapter Three explores three different approaches to the translation of the gospels in the tenth century. Serving a monastic readership engaged in intense study of the Bible, the Old English glosses added to the Lindisfarne and Rushworth Gospels take a scholarly approach to the scriptural source, though at times there are passages that read as if they are derived from another free-standing prose translation.2 Julia Fernández Cuesta and Sara M. Pons-Sanz, eds, The Old English Gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels: Language, Author and Context, Anglia Book Series 51 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016). The Wessex Gospels, by contrast, provide a fluent and confident translation of all four gospels. This major but frequently overlooked prose translation was probably produced in the second half of the tenth century, perhaps for private reading by laity and priests before being repurposed as a liturgical aid. Towards the end of the tenth century, Ælfric responded to the circulation of gospel translations lacking an exegetical framework by composing his own two series of Catholic Homilies. Finally, this chapter highlights the popularity of two apocryphal gospels, the Gospels of Nic(h)odemus3 The most common modern English spelling is Nicodemus, and this is therefore the one I have used throughout, though the edition by J. E. Cross cited below (pp. 110–15) favours Nichodemus as this is the form used in the Old English text. and Pseudo-Matthew, both of which were translated into fluent Old English prose in this period despite their exclusion from the orthodox canon of the Bible. Chapter Four then turns to the Old English Heptateuch, an ambitious translation of the first seven books of the Old Testament made for noble lay readers c. 1000. This chapter focuses on the involvement of Ælfric in this project, despite his reservations about the wisdom of making the Old Testament available to the laity, as well as analysing the translation strategies of the various anonymous contributors, all of whom strove to make these biblical narratives accessible and meaningful to contemporary readers.

In Chapter Five, I argue that Ælfric found a solution to the problem of translating the Bible for the laity in his Treatise on the Old and New Testaments (also known as the Letter to Sigeweard), another largely neglected work which represents the culmination of his career as a biblical translator and exegete. The Bible (from Greek biblia, ‘books’) was rarely presented as a single book in the medieval period: more typically, copies were made of individual biblical books, most frequently the Psalms and Gospels.4 For debates about the unity of the Bible in the medieval period, and the rarity of complete Bibles, see van Liere, Introduction to the Medieval Bible, pp. 20–52. In Ælfric’s Treatise, we see the first move towards the creation of an English Bible, though here conceived as a library of sanctioned books containing a mixture of reliable vernacular translation and authoritative commentary on Scripture. Taken together, Chapters Three to Five highlight the tension between, on the one hand, the increasing demand for scriptural translations among the laity in the decades following Alfred’s reforms, and on the other, Ælfric’s ongoing reservations about making the Bible available to such readers without a robust exegetical framework. The Conclusion considers the lasting impact of Old English biblical prose on conceptions of the English nation, Church and language, its continuing use in the centuries following the Norman Conquest and its influence on later medieval and early modern translations of the Bible.