BISHOP WÆRFERTH OF Worcester's late ninth century translation of Pope Gregory the Great's Latin Dialogi (late sixth century) into Old English as the Dialogues was an important text in pre-Conquest England: witness the three manuscripts and a bifolium of an otherwise lost manuscript that have survived. This number looks slightly less impressive when compared to the nine extant manuscripts or fragments from England of Gregory's original Latin text which date between the late seventh and late eleventh centuries. While the reception of the Old English Dialogues in both pre-Conquest England and in the past five decades has been adequately addressed, the tale of what people thought of it in the period between 1066 and its first edition in 1907 has largely remained untold. Now that plans have been announced to make a new edition, this essay charts the journey that the Old English Dialogues made from post-Conquest England into the world of the early-modern antiquaries and from there into the modern era. It appears that later medieval historiographers repeatedly mentioned its existence, thus probably drawing the attention of early modern antiquarians, notably Francis Junius and Edward Lye who quarried the text for its lexicographic potential. While Wærferth was frequently praised for his achievement, the contents of the Old English Dialogues, to the extent it was commented upon, met with a fair amount of (Protestant, Enlightened) contempt. Only in the second half of the nineteenth century did a change in the scholarly paradigm emerge in Germany that spread to England and the rest of the Western academic world. The result was a renewed philological attention to the Dialogues, above all aimed at establishing a reliable text edition that would enable it to be analysed by both linguists and literary critics alike.

Post-Conquest references to Wærferth's translation of Gregory's Dialogues show the work did not really sink into oblivion, despite being in Old English. However, awareness of the text did not rest as much on familiarity with the vernacular version itself, as on the man who translated it, owing to Bishop Asser's reference to this feat in his Vita Ælfredi regis Angul Saxonum (Life of Alfred King of the Anglo-Saxons) [hereafter Vita Ælfredi] (893).