Gripla - 20.12.2009, Blaðsíða 168
GRIPLA168
Latin, though undoubtedly a poor command of Latin must sometimes
have been the spur to vernacularity. In the early medieval period Anglo
Saxon and Irish textuality was much more pronouncedly vernacular than
that of Continental europe, and yet it is hardly the case that english and
Irish scholars were less capable Latinists than their Continental counter
parts (Lapidge 1993, 1996; esposito 1990). Characteristically also, these
communities both translated learned or ecclesiastical sources into the ver
nacular and were able to record at least some of their indigenous literary
genres in manuscript, though the latter were of course not untouched by
either the new written medium or the culture of Christian Latinity.
However, the very fact that vernacular literature was permitted to be
recorded in manuscript books is an important indicator of its relative
acceptance in the world of those who controlled manuscript production
and owed some kind of allegiance to the medieval Church.
thus vernacularity in early medieval europe is both a trope of transla
tion and a trope of independence and appropriation. Although it may have
arisen for pragmatic purposes, to make the doctrine and culture of Latin
Christendom available to a nonLatinspeaking and reading linguistic
world, the very act of translating works that were what the Anglo-Saxon
king Alfred called “most necessary for all men to know” (ða ðe niedbeðear
fosta sien eallum monnum to wiotonne)2 also gave the vernacular a higher
official status than it held in societies in which it was not used for such
purposes. This is likely to explain why indigenous vernacular literature
was able to flourish in such a manuscript environment and why it throve
there, appropriating to itself, at least to some extent, the status and privi
lege that Latin occupied elsewhere. Rita Copeland has written of medieval
vernacular academic texts that “these texts have demonstrable relations
with exegetical traditions, not simply in terms of content, but in terms of
the character of exegesis, which works by displacing and appropriating the
materials it proposes to serve” (Copeland 1991, 8). It is arguable that the
same sort of phenomenon can be identified in less academic vernacular
productions, including those largely developed from indigenous and origi
nally oral textual genres.
2 from king Alfred’s letter (Bodleian Library oxford, MS Hatton 20, quoted from White
lock 1967, 6) prefixed to the copy of the old english translation of Gregory the Great’s
Cura Pastoralis sent to the see of Worcester.