Glossed Psalters

The Vespasian Psalter is the earliest extant witness to the Romanum Psalter, the first of the three Latin translations of the Psalms produced by Jerome in the late fourth century.1 While the Romanum would remain popular in England beyond the Norman Conquest, it was superseded in Ireland and on the continent by Jerome’s revised version, the Gallicanum, and this is the version printed in all editions of the Vulgate Bible and therefore translated in the Douay-Rheims edition. Both the Romanum and Gallicanum are translated from the Greek. For the third and final revision, the Hebraicum, Jerome went back to the Hebrew source that lies behind the Greek. The Hebraicum was known to some scholars in early medieval England but did not have anything like the impact of the Romanum, which remained the standard text for liturgical use and study. See Sarah Larratt Keefer and David R. Burrows, ‘Hebrew and the Hebraicum in late Anglo-Saxon England’, ASE 19 (1990), 67–80. The Latin text of the Romanum, accompanied by a full-page illustration of King David surrounded by his court musicians (now fol. 30v), was executed in majuscule uncial script with beautifully decorated initials in the mid-eighth century in the kingdom of Kent, probably at Canterbury, where Augustine had first established his church in 597. In the mid-ninth century, an interlinear Old English gloss in the Mercian dialect was added in insular cursive minuscule script.2 The manuscript is London, British Library, Cotton MS Vespasian A. I; Ker §203. The standard edition is The Vespasian Psalter, ed. Sherman M. Kuhn (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967). For a facsimile, see D. H. Wright, ed. Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile, XIV: The Vespasian Psalter, British Museum Cotton Vespasian A. I (Copenhagen and London: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1967). The original plan of this Psalter manuscript clearly did not extend to the inclusion of a vernacular gloss, which is squeezed in above the Latin text. The text’s editor, Sherman M. Kuhn, has maintained that the gloss is original to the Vespasian Psalter, but others have argued for its derivation from an earlier, perhaps eighth-century, archetype.3 Kenneth Sisam, Studies in the History of Old English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), p. 4 n. 2; Sherman M. Kuhn, ‘The Vespasian Psalter Gloss: Original or Copy?’, PMLA 74 (1959), 161–77. For the argument that the Vespasian gloss is a copy, see esp. Kenneth Sisam, ‘Canterbury, Lichfield, and the Vespasian Psalter’, RES 7 (1956), 1–10 and 113–31; and Phillip Pulsiano, ‘The Originality of the Old English Gloss of the Vespasian Psalter and its Relation to the Gloss of the Junius Psalter’, ASE 25 (1996), 37–62. See further Blom, Glossing the Psalms, pp. 161–4. It seems safest to concur with Phillip Pulsiano that ‘other psalters, perhaps fully glossed psalters, most likely existed, and we should not presume, without clear evidence to the contrary, that the Vespasian gloss stands as an original and independent production’.4 Pulsiano, ‘Old English Gloss’, 39. Indeed, one earlier glossed psalter does in fact survive, the Blickling Psalter, a Latin psalter produced in the mid-eighth century to which a partial gloss of twenty-six Old English words was added in red ink in the late eighth or early ninth century.5 Pierpoint Morgan Library MS M.776; Ker §287. See further Joseph P. McGowen, ‘On the “Red” Blickling Psalter Glosses’, N&Q 54 (2007), 205–7; Roberts, ‘Some Anglo-Saxon Psalters and their Glosses’, pp. 43–5. Roberts suggests that the Blickling gloss was not part of the original plan for the psalter, but that ‘some early reader added a few translations of words and phrases that had given him pause, using red as a natural means of differentiating his additions from the surrounding text’ (p. 43). Roberts notes that even earlier Old English – and Old Irish – psalm glosses are included in the exegetical catena on Pss 39–151 in Vatican City, MS Pal. lat. 68, fols 1–46 (‘Some Anglo-Saxon Psalters and their Glosses’, p. 43 n. 15); Ker §388. While the Vespasian Psalter gloss may not have been the first such Old English biblical translation produced, it nevertheless remains the earliest substantial witness we have to the vibrant tradition of continuous glossing of the entire psalter in early medieval England.6 For overviews of the glossed psalters, see Toswell, Anglo-Saxon Psalter, pp. 221–82; and Roberts, ‘Some Anglo-Saxon Psalters and their Glosses’. The Sisams surmised that hundreds of similar glossed psalters were produced in the period: Celia and Kenneth Sisam, eds, The Salisbury Psalter, EETS o.s. 242 (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 75. It was long believed that the Vespasian Psalter gloss served as a source for all the later Old English psalter glosses, hence its labelling as an ‘A-type’ gloss.7 The theory that the Vespasian Psalter was the source for all subsequent glosses was first advanced by Albert S. Cook (Biblical Quotations in Old English Prose Writers [London: MacMillan and Co., 1898], p. xxvi). Uno Lindelöf argued that the Junius Psalter gloss (B-type), dating from the early tenth century, is a direct copy of the Vespasian gloss, while the Cambridge Psalter (C) is an eleventh-century copy of the Vespasian Gloss; the tenth-century Regius Psalter gloss (D) served as the source for the twelfth-century Eadwine (or Canterbury) Psalter (E) gloss, as well as the glosses in the Stow (F), Vitellius (G), Tiberius (H), Arundel (J) and Salisbury (K) psalters: Studien zu altenglischen Psalterglossen, Bonner Beiträge zur Anglistik, Heft XIII (Bonn: P. Hanstein, 1904). However, Pulsiano has cautioned against assuming a direct relationship between any of the individual psalter glosses, emphasising that all are copies and that lost intermediaries must have existed.8 Pulsiano, ‘Old English Gloss’. Nevertheless, the fifteen extant glossed psalters, ranging in date from the ninth to the twelfth centuries, are remarkably consistent in their vocabulary, pointing to a standardised approach to Psalter glossing in this period.9 Toswell demonstrates that this uniformity of vocabulary extends even to the Metrical Psalms, which frequently employ the same words as the glossed psalters (Anglo-Saxon Psalter, pp. 242–50). On the recent discovery of fragments of another Old English glossed psalter connected with the D-type gloss (Regius), see Thijs Porck, ‘Newly Discovered Pieces of an Old English Glossed Psalter: The Alkmaar Fragments of the N-Psalter’, ASE 49 (2024), 1–66.

3.3 (4)

Although Alfred is probably referring specifically here to poorly educated priests who are unable to explain the meaning of the Latin liturgy (hiora ðeninga, ‘their services’) in English, in such straitened circumstances monastic readers may also have felt the need to add glosses to the text around which their spiritual lives revolved.26 See Helmut Gneuss, ‘King Alfred and the History of Anglo-Saxon Libraries’, in Modes of Interpretation in Old English Literature: Essays in Honour of Stanley B. Greenfield, ed. Phyllis Rugg Brown, Georgina Ronan Crampton and Fred C. Robinson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), pp. 29–49. For the argument that Alfred is exaggerating the poor state of learning for rhetorical effect, see Jennifer Morrish, ‘King Alfred’s Letter as a Source on Learning in England’, in Studies in Earlier Old English Prose: Sixteen Original Contributions, ed. Paul E. Szarmach (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986), pp. 87–108. The practice of glossing psalters in the ninth century may thus have originated from the practical needs of the English Church during a time of existential crisis.

In contrast to the ‘opportunistic’ glosses added to existing Latin psalters such as the Vespasian Psalter are the ‘integral’ glosses preserved in manuscripts originally ‘ruled for’ an Old English gloss as well as the Latin text.27 Roberts, ‘Some Anglo-Saxon Psalters and their Glosses’, p. 40. In these more ‘competent’ glosses, the translator typically engages thoughtfully with the Latin source rather than translating mechanically, as in the manner of the Vespasian gloss.28 Evert Wiesenekker, ‘The Vespasian and Junius Psalters Compared: Glossary or Translation?’, Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 40 (1994), 21–39, at 23. Examples include the Royal (Regius) Psalter, in which the D-type gloss is written in the same hand as the Latin text, perhaps for use as a class-book for teaching Latin, and the Lambeth Psalter, which features double I-type glosses that offer the reader alternative translations of a single Latin word, inviting them to reflect on the interpretative possibilities of either translation.29 Evert Wiesenekker, Word be Worde, Andgit of Andgite: Translation Performance in the Old English Interlinear Glosses of the Vespasian, Regius and Lambeth Psalters (Huizen: Bout, 1991). On connections between the Regius Psalter and the Winchester school of Bishop Æthelwold, see Gretsch, Intellectual Foundations. On the Regius and Lambeth Psalters, see Blom, Glossing the Psalms, pp. 189–204, 209–30. On the Lambeth Psalter, see Samira Lindstedt, ‘Prayer as Performance, c. 1050–1250’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Oxford, 2021), pp. 76–124. In some of these later psalters the gloss attains a degree of independence from the Latin source text: Jane Roberts notes, for example, that the scribe responsible for glossing the Regius Psalter ‘sometimes thinks in phrases’ rather than translating word-by-word.30 Roberts, ‘Some Anglo-Saxon Psalters and their Glosses’, p. 49. See further Joseph Crowley, ‘Anglicized Word Order in Old English Continuous Interlinear Glosses in British Library, Royal 2.A.XX’, ASE 29 (2000), 123–51; Mechthild Gretsch, ‘The Junius Psalter Gloss: Tradition and Innovation’, in Edward the Elder 899–924, ed. N. J. Higham and David Hill (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 280–91. Toswell goes a step further in referring to these manuscripts as ‘bilingual psalters’ rather than ‘glossed psalters’, on the grounds that the Old English text has equal status with the Latin on the page, suggesting that in some cases the gloss may even have been read independently as free-standing prose.31 Toswell, Anglo-Saxon Psalter, pp. 250–82.