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Translating the Psalms for the Clergy and the Laity
T
he Book of Psalms was by far the most influential biblical book in the Middle Ages. The Psalter’s intense, often lyrical prayers served as the textual bedrock of the monastic office, while exegetes read this Old Testament book as a microcosm of the essential teachings of the entire Bible.
1 See The Psalms and Medieval English Literature: From the Conversion to the Reformation, ed. Tamara Atkin and Francis Leneghan (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017). The Psalms were therefore translated more frequently than any other part of the Bible. Old English psalm translation took three main forms: gloss, continuous prose and verse paraphrase.
2 The major study is M. J. Toswell, The Anglo-Saxon Psalter (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014). For a helpful overview of the range of Psalm translations, glosses and paraphrases in Old English prose and verse, see Morrell, Manual of Old English Biblical Materials, pp. 45–155. This chapter will be concerned with the first two categories.
3 The main verse paraphrases are the Kentish Psalm (a free rendering of Psalm 50) and the Metrical Psalms, a translation of the entire psalter of which Psalms 51–150 are preserved along with the Prose Psalms in the Paris Psalter, while excerpts of Psalms 1–50 appear in other manuscripts. For discussion, see Francis Leneghan, ‘Making the Psalter Sing: The Old English Metrical Psalms, Rhythm and Ruminatio’, in Psalms and Medieval English, ed. Atkin and Leneghan, pp. 173–97.Complete Old English glosses survive in no less than fifteen extant psalters, ranging from what Jane Roberts calls ‘opportunistic’ additions to existing Latin manuscripts to ‘integral glosses’ which involve ‘the thoughtful interaction of Latin psalms and English words’.
4 Jane Roberts, ‘Some Anglo-Saxon Psalters and their Glosses’, in Psalms and Medieval English, ed. Atkin and Leneghan, pp. 37–71 (at pp. 40–2). On the interpretative dimension to these glosses, see Stanton, Culture of Translation, pp. 9–54, 117–20. Old English glosses are usually inserted above or sometimes alongside each individual Latin word to aid the reader in understanding its meaning. Alderik Blom identifies three main forms of psalter gloss: (1) ‘substitution glosses’, which ‘replace a lemma from the principal text with another term, in order to provide more or less exact lexical equivalents or perceived equivalents’; (2) ‘supplement glosses’, which ‘elucidate the morphology and syntax of the principal text by supplying additional clarifying word forms, often repeated, or otherwise deduced, from context’; and (3) ‘commentary glosses’, which ‘provide new information to elucidate a given lemma, but without substituting or supplementing the principal text’.
5 Alderik Blom, Glossing the Psalms: The Emergence of the Written Vernaculars in Western Europe from the Seventh to the Twelfth Centuries (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), pp. 29–34. The majority of the glosses under consideration in this chapter fall into the first category, though in some cases the gloss serves to supplement and even offer interpretive commentary on the Latin source text. On some occasions when the scribe was uncertain of the meaning of a Latin word or wanted to convey more than one meaning, multiple English equivalents – or ‘substitution glosses’ – are provided. The result is that the interlinear psalter glosses are usually not readable as free-standing Old English prose without reference to the Latin text they accompany. Robert Stanton has therefore described the Old English psalter glosses as ‘a hybrid language, unique to the glosses, which is neither wholly subservient to the Latin text nor a fully independent English rendering’.
6 Stanton, Culture of Translation, p. 45. As an example of the ‘opportunistic’ glossing tradition, this chapter begins with a discussion of the Vespasian Psalter, in which an Old English gloss was inserted above the Latin text some considerable time after the first phase of the book’s production. The chapter will then consider the case of the Cambridge Psalter, which by contrast features an ‘integral’ gloss conceived as part of the original design of the codex. For a genuinely independent Old English prose translation of the Latin psalter, the chapter then turns to the
Prose Psalms, a free rendering of Psalms 1–50 made in the late ninth or early tenth century and closely linked with other works associated with King Alfred. Through these three case studies, we will witness the emergence of Old English prose as a flexible and highly effective medium for the transmission of the sacred word of Scripture.