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illustrated copies, a visual aid.26 determining the authorship of De sex alis
cherubim has posed significant problems for scholars, many of whom, fol-
lowing an attribution found in some manuscripts and repeated in Migne’s
Patrologia Latina, have claimed that Alan of Lille (ca. 1130–1203) wrote
the work.27 fuller, more recent investigations of the treatise’s origins have
thoroughly debunked this attribution, and have instead focused on the
english Augustinian writer Clement of Llanthony (d. ca. 1176), to whom
the work is ascribed in some early manuscripts.28 further complicating
matters, an introductory discussion of the seraphim in Isaiah 6 found in
some texts of the treatise, including the one printed by Migne, has been
sourced to the De arca Noe morali of the earlier twelfth-century theologian
Hugh of st. Victor, who is not a likely candidate for the authorship of the
rest of the work.29
Below I list the correspondences between Migne’s text of De sex alis
cherubim and the portion of AM 655 XXVII 4to, item 1 that survives on
the comparatively well preserved fol. 2r–2v.30 Conveniently, this part of
the old norse text corresponds almost exactly to the Latin description of
the seraph’s first “wing.” In citing from Hallgrímur Ámundason’s edition
in this article, I have normalized his diplomatic transcription of the old
26 see, for example, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College Ms 66 (s. xii/xiii), p. 100;
Cambridge, Corpus Christi College Ms 459 (s. xiii), fol. 109r. the images are available
online (to subscribers) through the Parker Library on the Web project, accessed july 11, 2013,
http://parkerweb.stanford.edu.
27 see, e.g., Bella Millett, “Ancrene Wisse and the Conditions of Confession,” English Studies
80 (1999): 207; suzanne Lewis, The Art of Matthew Paris in the Chronica Majora, California
studies in the History of Art, vol. 21 (Berkeley: university of California Press, 1987), 318.
on the life and career of Alan of Lille, see L. Hödl, “Alanus ab Insulis,” in Lexikon des
Mittelalters, vol. 1 (stuttgart: Metzler, 1980), col. 268.
28 Alain de Lille: Textes inédits, Marie-thérèse d’Alverny ed., (Paris: j. Vrin, 1965), 155. see also
the introduction to an english translation of the work by steven Chase, Angelic Spirituality:
Medieval Perspectives on the Ways of Angels, Classics in Western spirituality (new york:
Paulist Press, 2002), 121–22. on Clement of Llanthony, see G.R. evans, “Llanthony,
Clement of (d. in or after 1176),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (oxford:
oxford university Press, 2004–), accessed july 11, 2013, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/5600.
29 see Chase, Angelic Spirituality, 121–23. such complexities in the work’s tradition have prob-
ably contributed to its not being edited since Migne. there is little reason to assume that
the PL version of De sex alis cherubim accurately represents the manuscript tradition, or that
it was particularly close to the version behind the old norse text, but since Migne’s is the
only edition widely available, I have made use of it here.
30 All citations of item 1 are from Hallgrímur Ámundason, “AM 655 XXVII 4to,” “útgáfa,”
1–2.
tWeLftH-CentuRy souRCes foR oLd noRse HoMILIes