Old English and Middle Irish preaching texts form substantial portions of what survives in both stages of those languages.Footnote 1 Anonymous homilies alone comprise twenty per cent ‘of all surviving text written in Old English’, according to Winfried Rudolf and Susan Irvine, a tally that does not include the copious surviving works of Ælfric and Wulfstan.Footnote 2 The exact extent of the Middle Irish corpus is unclear, both in terms of the absolute number of texts and witnesses, and of the percentage of surviving material, but it is undoubtedly extensive. A preliminary estimate would place the number of homilies (a term I will use for convenience)Footnote 3 in the dozens, with many extant in multiple copies.Footnote 4
These Old English and Middle Irish homilies have much in common. They appear to have been composed around the same period (broadly speaking, between the tenth and twelfth centuries), and they sometimes rely upon the same sources, a feature especially apparent in homilies drawing on apocryphal or eschatological material.Footnote 5 In a few instances, it is possible to retrace the process of transmission from one island to the other in detail, as in the case of the ‘Sunday Letter’, which provoked a stir in the English ecclesiastical hierarchy when a priest named Pehtred began disseminating unorthodox doctrines drawn from the visions of an Irishman named Níall.Footnote 6 Stylistic similarities are also common, including a shared fondness for lists, as in the invocation of the various beings in heaven, typically in linked pairs or triplets, found at the end of several Old English homilies and numerous Irish ones.Footnote 7
In general, however, the two corpora have been analysed separately. The one scholar to have attempted a wide-ranging comparison, Hildegard Tristram, came to a negative conclusion: she argued that each tradition was largely independent of the other, with Irish homilies showing no sign of dependence on the English, and English homilies showing only indirect dependence on Irish tradition. Furthermore, she suggested that this indirect dependence consisted of certain ‘Irish’ styles of exegesis and oratory being transmitted at first on the Continent and then back to England, instead of from one island to the other.Footnote 8
While Tristram’s overall assessment remains largely unchallenged, recent work has uncovered many further connections between Irish and English preaching texts and exegetical materials.Footnote 9 This has allowed for increasingly detailed descriptions of the mobility of texts and motifs across languages and geography, although the precise route is rarely clear. Once these contributions are taken into consideration, it appears that points of connection are likely to be considerably more common and more complex than once believed. This conclusion will presumably only be strengthened once the Irish materials have been surveyed in greater detail; Middle Irish homilies have, as a whole, been poorly served by scholarship.Footnote 10 Several texts remain wholly unedited, and most others are available only in a flawed edition from 1887.Footnote 11 Few have seen detailed comment. This is hardly fertile ground for productive comparison.
To give a sense, therefore, of the sorts of overlooked parallels between the two traditions – and of the value in setting them side by side – a pair of homilies on the Temptation, one English, one Irish, will serve as a case study. These texts, as I will establish, clearly drew from a common Insular exegetical framework, one adapted and reworked to suit separate audiences: where the Irish material seems to have been designed for a literate, Latin-comprehending community, the English homily appears to envision a mixed audience, with lay members included.
It is to be hoped, too, that closer attention to Irish-language preaching texts, and their relationships to English and Latin materials, will help to resolve the lingering controversy about ‘Hiberno-Latin’ exegesis. Bernhard Bischoff set the direction of scholarship nearly seventy years ago in his well-known ‘Wendepunkte’, in which he laid out certain ‘irische Symptome’, as he described them, of exegesis he had encountered in the course of his extensive reading.Footnote 12 The ‘Irishness’ – whatever we take this to mean – of the texts in his list was the cause of much dispute in the following decades.Footnote 13 Now that the worst of the vitriol seems to have dissipated, recent publications have brought welcome nuance to the discussion of this topic.Footnote 14 Both homilies examined here have close connections with Hiberno-Latin exegesis; while here, as elsewhere, it is unclear how these parallels came to be, every further one identified will help build a better picture of the origins and dissemination of that sprawling corpus.
The Texts and their Sources
The Middle Irish homily on the Temptation is found in a single manuscript: Dublin, Royal Irish Academy, 23 P 16 (also known as ‘An Leabhar Breac’), at pp. 45a–48b (cited as ‘B’ below). This massive compendium – one of the largest surviving manuscripts from medieval Ireland – holds mostly religious texts, including several dozen homilies.Footnote 15 The manuscript was written between c. 1408 and 1411 at several locations in south-central Ireland; the scribe has been identified, on palaeographical grounds, as Murchadh Ó Cuindlis.Footnote 16 The exact intent of Ó Cuindlis’s compilation is unclear. There are no explicit indications of any patron, but the monumental format of the book – over a foot tall by nearly a foot wide (roughly 38 × 25 cm) – and its occasional flourishes of decoration suggest the manuscript was not created for the scribe’s personal use. The nature of the contents, as Ó Concheanainn argued, suggest an ecclesiastical patron, perhaps a religious community.Footnote 17 The monastery of Lorrha and the Carmelite friary of Loughrea have both been put forward as possible sponsors, although the evidence in their favour is little more than geographical proximity to Ó Cuindlis’s known places of work.Footnote 18
The contents of the Leabhar Breac are manifold, but many of the homilies within it share a highly formulaic style, especially in the opening exordium and concluding peroration.Footnote 19 It has been argued (albeit on very slender grounds) that these homilies, along with other similar texts found in other volumes, were derived from a much earlier collection, supposedly put together in the late eleventh century.Footnote 20 On the basis of their language, many homilies written in this style appear to have been composed in the eleventh century or earlier, but at least some were likely written after that date.Footnote 21 Internal indications suggest that these texts were written to be performed; they feature frequent direct addresses to the audience, and many homilies contain a dating clause that can be adapted at will to the current year, as in the following example:
Is ann-sin tra airmitnigit na Cristaigi lith ⁊ foraithmet na da noem apstal-sa; itat Kalaind Iúil ar-ái lathi mís grene, is-in lathi-sea indíu ar-ai lathi sechtmaine is-in bliadain hi-tam.Footnote 22
That, then, is when the Christians honour the feast-day and remembrance of those two holy apostles: they are the Calends of July according to the day of the solar month, and today according to the day of the week in the year in which we are.
The order of the collection is not completely irregular, but it cannot be called consistent. The Homily on the Temptation, for its part, is one in a series of similar texts, arranged very loosely by the Church calendar. The two homilies before it are rubricated for Palm Sunday (pp. 40a–43b) and Spy Wednesday, the Wednesday before Easter (pp. 44a–45a), and the one following it is on the Lord’s Supper (pp. 48b–52b). It is possible the homily on the Temptation is a later insertion into this sequence; the content of the homily supposedly meant for Spy Wednesday is completely unrelated to that day, and is rather a homily on fasting.Footnote 23 Perhaps the homily on fasting and the homily on the Temptation, being on similar themes, once formed a textual unit that was inserted at this point in the manuscript by mistake. The Homily on the Temptation has been edited once; to my knowledge, this homily has not seen any further comment in the 138 years since its initial publication.Footnote 24
The Old English homily on the Temptation, for its part, is found in the collection of eighteen homilies known as the ‘Blickling homilies’, which forms the main portion of the manuscript now known as Princeton, University Library, Scheide Collection 71.Footnote 25 This text, which runs from 14r–21v, is the third homily in the collection: thus its customary title, ‘Blickling III’.
While the precise date of compilation of the manuscript is not entirely certain, another homily in the collection – Blickling XI – contains an explicit reference to the then-present year, in the context of the threat of Doomsday’s arrival: ‘⁊ þisse is þonne se mǽsta dǽl agangen, efne nigon hund wintra ⁊ lxxi. on þys geare’ (in Jonathan Wilcox’s translation, ‘and the greatest portion of this has passed, even 971 winters in this year’).Footnote 26 Thus the manuscript must have been written in or after 971; it is unlikely it was composed too much later, given certain palaeographic and linguistic indicators.Footnote 27
The manuscript appears to have been compiled over some time, albeit according to a well-organised plan.Footnote 28 The collection mostly proceeds in temporal order, and so the Homily on the Temptation – for the first Sunday in Lent – is preceded (6v–14r) by a homily for Quinquagesima (or Shrove Sunday), the preceding week of the Church calendar, and is followed (22r–31v) by one for the third Sunday in Lent. Like the Irish homilies, the Blickling homilies were designed to be performed, and there are even indications that they in fact were; Jonathan Wilcox has pointed out marks in the manuscript that may have been meant to help someone read the text aloud.Footnote 29
Blickling III has been edited several times, most recently as part of the ECHOE project based out of the University of Göttingen.Footnote 30 There has been some comment dealing with this text directly. Three of the homilies on the same pericope – that is, the Bible passage used as the basis for the homily’s commentary – survive, and these have been compared against each other on several occasions.Footnote 31 Susan Irvine suggested these homilies on the same pericope all stemmed from a common Latin homily, but this proposal has not won much support; Malcolm Godden, for one, has suggested rather that each author drew on similar materials but adapted these to their own ends.Footnote 32 There have also been extensive surveys of source material, including the important recent contribution from Thomas Hall on ECHOE.Footnote 33
The Irish and the English homilies both draw on a similar set of sources. They are each ultimately indebted to a homily by Gregory the Great, first performed for the first Sunday in Lent in 591 on the same Bible passage; this homily was later included for the same Sunday in the popular Carolingian homiliary by Paul the Deacon, completed shortly before 800.Footnote 34 Both also cite short passages from a sermon attributed variously in the manuscripts to Caesarius of Arles or Faustus of Riez (recent scholarly judgment supports the former).Footnote 35 Finally, they both relay interpretations indebted to the Hiberno-Latin exegetical tradition of the early Middle Ages.
Despite using a similar body of material, direct points of contact between the two homilies are rare. For the most part, even where they rely on the same source, they make quite different use of it. None of the passages drawn from Caesarius in either homily overlaps with another.Footnote 36 The same conclusion largely holds for the parts of each homily reliant on Gregory. The author of the Old English homily, as Thomas Hall points out, ‘drew on Gregory’s homily quite selectively’:
[T]here are close correspondences only with lines 2–4, 10–17, 24–25, 55–56, 58–69, 71–77, 87–89, 92–94, 100–103, 107–8, 117–18, 120, 122–24, 126–29, and 136–37 of Gregory’s homily in the lineation of Étaix’s edition.Footnote 37
The Irish author made less use of Gregory’s text, and usually in bigger blocks, drawing on lines 17–19, 81–6, 97–108, and 112–28.Footnote 38 Moreover, as Hall has shown, the excerpts from Gregory cluster exclusively in the second half of the Old English homily, while the Irish text makes use of it throughout.Footnote 39
There is evidence, however, that the text of Gregory in both homilies was mediated through a common source. In one passage, the two vernacular homilies share a textual error that changes the interpretation of the passage, as well as an expansion of Gregory’s exegesis not found in the original Latin:
Ex quibus dum sex dies dominici ab abstinentia subtrahuntur, non plus in abstinentia quam triginta et sex dies remanent. Dum uero per trecentos et sexaginta dies annus ducitur, nos autem per triginta et sex dies affligimur, quasi anni nostri decimas Deo damus[.]Footnote 40
From which [42 days], when the six Sundays are removed from the fast, only 36 days remain. As there are 360 days in a year, we are afflicted for 36 days, as though we give a tithe of our year.
Ex quibus dum sex dies dominici abstinentiae subt<ra>huntur non plus in abstinentia quam .xxx. ⁊ ui. dies remanent. O ndigaibther .ui. lathi díb sin .i. na domnaige (uair ni cubaid aine no abstanait no troscud do denum i ndomnach) ni tuairthet and iarsin acht .ui. lathi .xxx.at.
Dum uero per .ccc.tos .lxu. dies annus ducitur nos autem per .xxxui. dies affligimur quasi anni nostri decimas damus. O thochaiter autem in bliadain uile [p. 47b] o choic lathib .lx.ait ar tri .c.aib dia ndernum se lathi trichat dibsin do berum andsin do Dia mar bad dechmad ar mbliadna. Deithber sin uair ro caithsemm in mbliadain ar chena do réir a thoile. Immchubaid duinn innossa coron timorcmis sind fodein tria aine ⁊ abstanit don C[h]oimdid cid in dechmaid ar mbliadna .i. isin chorgus cesta.Footnote 41
From which [42 days], when the six Sundays of abstinence are removed, only 36 days remain. When six days are removed from them – that is, the Sundays, as it is not fitting to fast or abstain or not eat on Sunday – there remain then only 36 days.
As there are 365 days in a year, we are afflicted for 36 days, as though we give a tithe of our year. As a year takes up 365 days, if we do [abstinence for] 36 days of them, it is thus as though we give God a tithe of our year. That is fitting, as we spend the rest of the year according to its [viz. the body’s] will. It is proper indeed for us now that we subdue ourselves through fasting and abstinence for the Lord even a tenth of our year, that is, in the Lent of the Crucifixion.
[G]eare we witon þæt on þæm geare bið þreo hund daga ⁊ fif ⁊ syxtig daga. [G]if we þonne on þæm syx wucan forlætaþ þa syx sunnandagas þæs fæstennes þonne ne bið þara fæstendaga na ma þonne syx ⁊ þritig ⁊ gif we þa dagas fulfremedlice for gode lifgeaþ þonne hæbbe we ure daga þone teoþan dæl for gode gedon. ⁊ geþencean we þæt we ealne þysne gear lifdon mid ures lichoman willan. [N]u is þearf mycel þæt we þone teoþan dæl for gode gedon ⁊ on forhæfdnesse lifian ⁊ ure synna clænsian ⁊ us ece lif geearnian. Footnote 42
We know very well that there are 365 days in the year. If we then remove the six Sundays of the fast from the six weeks, then there are only thirty-six fast-days, and if we live those days for God to the utmost, then we have then made a tithe of our days to God. And let us consider that we have lived all this year according to the will of our body: now there is great need that we should make a tithe for God, and live in abstinence, and wash away our sins, and attain for ourselves life.
The textual error preserved in the Latin of the Irish homily – abstinentiae for ab abstinentia – must also underlie the wording of the English translation ‘þæs fæstennes’. In the critical edition, Étaix notes this same error is found in several south-German manuscripts. One (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 6263) apparently shares its readings with Paul the Deacon’s versions of Gregory’s texts; the emendation of the number of days of the year to 365 is also found in that manuscript.Footnote 43 As Paul the Deacon’s work proved very popular in England, inspiring many homilies in the tenth century and later, the variants above could, in theory, have been derived through that homily collection.Footnote 44 Yet the additional passage (in bold above) is not found in Gregory’s homily. The English and Irish texts – in this passage, at least – appear, therefore, to go back not to Gregory’s homily directly, but have both been mediated through some third account, which I have not been able to trace.Footnote 45
Another point of contact between the sources of the two homilies is their use of Hiberno-Latin exegesis. The English text, for its part, appears to be indebted to a version of a Hiberno-Latin commentary on the Gospels reflected in a number of Carolingian texts, with the most important of these being a now-lacunose commentary supposedly authored by one ‘F(r)igulus/Fribolus’, as well as the text (derived from ‘Frigulus’) known as the Liber Questionum in Evangeliis (hereafter LQE).Footnote 46
The parallels to the LQE-Frigulus tradition are found strictly in the first half of the English homily. In that same section, there are also several parallels to Hiberno-Latin exegesis that cannot be traced to those texts. Wright noted that two are paralleled in other Hiberno-Latin commentaries: one preserved in a commentary on Matthew preserved in Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek, M.p.th.f. 61, and another in an another anonymous commentary on Luke.Footnote 47 Getz later adduced a third, found in the Glossa Ordinaria to Deut. VI.16:Footnote 48
Deum temptat qui habens quod faciat sine ratione se committit periculo, experiens utrum possit liberari a Deo.Footnote 49
He tempts God who, having means of his own, unnecessarily commits himself to peril, to see whether he may be delivered by God.
[S]e hælend him to cwæþ ne costa þu þinne drihten god; næs his gemet þæt he hine costode, eode swaþeah on þa frecenesse ⁊ wolde gecunnian hweþer he hine gefreolsian wolde[.]Footnote 50
The Saviour said unto him, ‘Tempt not the Lord thy God’. It was not his place to tempt him; nevertheless he went on in his audacity and wished to try whether he would set himself free.
A version of this statement, rather closer to the Latin version, is also found in the Irish homily, in a discussion of what it might mean to ‘tempt God’. The initial part of the discussion, given in Latin and then in Irish translation, is drawn from Bede’s commentary on Luke;Footnote 51 this thought is then expounded upon at length in the vernacular, including the sentiment relayed in the passages cited above:
Deum temptare est de suis quempiam meritis gloriari: Is amus for Dia do neoch dia maide asa ṡúalchib ⁊ asa deg-gnimaib.
Is amus for Dia didiu dia tairisnige nech ina noime ⁊ ina ḟírénchi fadéssin amal na rissed a less eter a fortacht nach a ḟóiridin o Dia. Is amus didiu for Dia do neoch dia n-us tarda fadéin i ngaibthib ⁊ i nguasachtaib tria anḟaitchius ⁊ tria étrebaire i n-agaid toile Dé. Uair is menic aithnes Dia isin scriptúir co ro imgaibe nech gaibthe ⁊ guasachta in tṡaegail tria ḟaitches ⁊ tria threbaire amal is follus sin isin probeirb choitchend: ‘Omnis astutus longe est a perículo’, ‘is cian o guasacht cech faitech’, ⁊ didiu ata isin derbárusc aile .i. isin probeirb aile: ‘Deuitabis periculum ⁊ deuitabit té’, is inann on ⁊ ‘immgaib ag ⁊ not-imgeba’.Footnote 52
One tempts God when he glories in his own merits. One tempts God when he boasts of his own virtues and good deeds.
One tempts God, moreover, when he relies on his own holiness and virtue, as if he needed no help or assistance from God; one also tempts God when he leads himself into perils and snares through his negligence and imprudence against God’s will: for often does God command in Scripture that one should avoid the perils and snares of the world through care and prudence, as is manifest from the common proverb, ‘Omnis astutus longe est a periculo’, ‘Far from danger is every prudent man’, and also from the other true saying (that is, the other proverb): ‘Deuitabis periculum, et deuitabit te’, which is to say, ‘Avoid danger, and it will avoid you’.
Given that this interpretation is found in the Glossa Ordinaria under Deuteronomy, not the Gospel of Matthew, it seems likely that the English and Irish homilies here again share a source, albeit perhaps accessed at several removes.
Wright, followed by Getz, suggested that behind the first part of the English homily, often dependent on Irish (or Irish-influenced) exegesis, lay a Hiberno-Latin compilation.Footnote 53 The presence of close parallels between the second part of the English homily (reliant on a version of Gregory’s homily), and the Irish homily suggests the influence of Hiberno-Latin exegesis was present in both halves of the English homily. Whether this should all be attributed to a single large compilation is uncertain; it may be safest to state simply that both homilies are indebted to a shared Insular tradition of interpreting this passage.
Putting the Sources to Use
Even as they share a similar background of Biblical exegesis, the two homilies often differ sharply in terms of structure, style, and argument. The Old English homily is entirely in the vernacular; the Middle Irish text contains numerous Latin passages, followed by an Irish paraphrase. Other differences are subtler, but no less telling. Considered as a whole, the impression one gets from reading the two side by side is that the Irish homily is directed towards a learned audience, familiar with Latin, though perhaps not entirely fluent; the English homily, meanwhile, seems directed to an audience less interested in the niceties of exegesis, and in greater need of straightforward moral guidance.
A good example of the English homily’s preferred interpretative technique comes in the following passage. Note how the argument proceeds from the Biblical text being glossed, to a brief interpretation, and finally to an exhortation to the listening audience:
He cwæþ ga þu onbæcling […] [W]el geheowode dauid þæt þa he wolde wiþ goliaþ gefeohtan þa nam he fif stanas on his herdebelig ⁊ þeahhweþere mid anum he þone gigant ofwea\r/p[.] [S]wa crist oferswiþde þæt deofol mid þisse cyþnesse. Us is þonne to geþencenne þæt we þas dæda þus gedone from drihtne mid ealre þoncunga ⁊ mærsunga hine herian ⁊ lufian þæt se þe wæs ær eallum worldum geteod ⁊ geendebyrd wolde mid his suna lichoman þysne middangeard alysan fram deofles anwalde[.]Footnote 54
He said, ‘Get thee behind me’ […] Well did David devise it when he would fight with Golia[t]h, when he took five stones in his shepherd’s bag, and yet with one he struck down the giant. So Christ overcame the devil with this testimony (of holy writ). We must bear in mind then to praise and love our Lord with all thanksgivings and extollings for these deeds thus performed by him, because, as he had decreed and ordained before all worlds, he would by means of his son’s body deliver this world out of the devil’s power.
As has been noted, the exegesis here has a parallel in the Frigulus/LQE tradition, where it glosses a slightly earlier passage (Matthew IV:4).Footnote 55 The point there is that, in the Temptation, Christ cites three passages from Deuteronomy, with which he defeats the Devil; the passage then compares Christ’s use of scripture to David’s knockout blow with a single stone. It concludes by stating ‘thus did Christ, overcoming the Devil, take up the Pentateuch into the flesh, but he defeated the Devil from Deuteronomy in particular’ (Sic Christus diabolum superans pentatechum in carnem suscipit, sed de Deuteronomio specialiter uicit diabulum).Footnote 56 By the time this train of thought reached the Old English homily, only the punchy analogy remained: ‘David : stones :: Christ : Scripture’. The Old English text then pivots to emphasising the concrete actions demanded of its audience as a result: Christ overcame the Devil, thus we must give thanks. This procedure – Scripture, brief interpretation, exhortation – is a consistent rhetorical pattern in the Old English homily.
The Irish homily uses its sources to quite different ends. Where the English homilist skims lightly over the underlying exegesis, in the Irish homily the interpretation is usually the point. The text often proffers multiple interpretations of the same passage, without deciding on any, as in the following passage:
Tunc dixit ei Iesus, ‘Uade retro Satanas’ .i. uade in ignem eternum qui preparatus est tibi ⁊ malis angelis tuis. Is ann sin atbert Ísu fri diabul, ‘Eirc fort chula a chotarsnaig’ .i. eirc isin tenid suthain ro faired duitsi fen a malartnaig ⁊ do to drochmuintir.
Uel ‘uade retro’ .i. ad tempora pasionis uel Antichristi. No ‘eirc fort chulu a chotarsnaig’, is inund ón ⁊ ‘tabair dail dam fadechtsa cen m’aimsiugud co hamsir [p. 47a] i<n> c<h>esta’. No dono ‘tabair dáil don eclais cen a hingréim co hamsir Ancrist’. Uair is ann sin taithmigfider a chuibrech do Diabul ⁊ is and aimsiges ⁊ ingrindfes ind eclais o aimsib ⁊ o ingremannaib doḟulachtaib.Footnote 57
Then Jesus said to him, ‘Go back, Satan’ – that is, ‘go into the eternal fire, which has been prepared for you and for your evil angels’. Then Jesus said to the Devil: ‘Go back, Enemy’ – that is, ‘go into the eternal fire, which has been prepared for you, you destroyer, and for your wicked followers’.
Or, ‘go back’, that is, to the times of the Passion or of Antichrist. Or, ‘go back, Enemy’, which is to say, ‘Promise me now not to tempt me until the Crucifixion’: or, rather, ‘Promise the Church not to persecute it till the time of Antichrist’, for that is when the bonds of the Devil will be loosed, and that is when he will tempt and assault the Church with unbearable temptations and assaults.
The Irish homily provides two potential interpretations of where the retro of vade retro! might be, in line with the practice of identifying two historical interpretations for a given passage.Footnote 58 The initial reading takes it to be a reference to a location (viz. Hell); the second, to a time, be it Jesus’ crucifixion or the Second Coming. I have been unable to trace exact parallels in surviving Hiberno-Latin exegesis, but it is clear that similar interpretations were circulating within that corpus; LQE reads ‘“Retro me”, id est: “Uade in ignem aeternum”’ (‘“Behind me”, that is, “Go into the everlasting fire”’), while the Hiberno-Latin commentary on Matthew in Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, 940 has ‘Vade retro […] id est usque ad Antichristum’ (‘Go back… that is, to Antichrist’).Footnote 59 The homilist’s additions here are relatively minor, intervening only to stress the forthcoming assault by the Devil upon the Church. There is no resolution; there is no encouragement to action, as found in the Old English homily.
The difference between the homilies is not only apparent in how they treat their sources; it is present, too, in the overall structure of each text. Both, to be sure, proceed fairly steadily through the pericope, discussing the meaning of the Biblical text in order. Yet the English text, unlike the Irish, contains a cohesive throughline: Jesus’s temptation, and his successful resistance, made it possible for us to resist as well. This message is stressed repeatedly throughout the homily, and is made especially clear in passages where there is no traceable source (suggesting we may be reading the author’s own words):
⁊ forþon ealra þara gifa þe he middangearde forgeaf þurh his tocyme nis nænig mare mægen ne þisse menniscan tydernesse nyttre þonne he þone awyrgdan gast oferswiþe ⁊ þone wælhreowan feond þisse menniscan gecynd[.] [F]orðon hine mæg nu ælc mon oforswiþan ⁊ he nænige mehte wið us nafaþ buton hwylc man þurh ða unanrædnesse his modes him wiþstandan nelle[.] [Þ]urh cristes sige ealle halige wæron gefreolsode þa þe him þeowiaþ on rihtwisnesse and on halignesse.Footnote 60
And, therefore, of all the gifts that he has given to this world through his advent, there is no power greater or more useful to the frailty of mankind than his overcoming the accursed spirit and the cruel enemy of mankind. Wherefore now every man may overcome him; and he hath no might against us except against such a man as through inconstancy (weakness) of mind will not withstand him. Through Christ’s victory all holy men, who serve him in righteousness and in holiness, were set free.
To the extent that the Irish homily has a thesis, it is that Scripture forms a cohesive whole, with precepts that, understood correctly, one can attempt to follow. The moral message, such as it is, is similar to the English homily’s – fasting in Lent is necessary, and is justified by Scripture – but the text frequently wanders off to explore various interpretative nuances of the pericope, as in the passages cited above. Exhortation to good deeds or behaviour is not wholly lacking, but it is often phrased indirectly, as with the two proverbs about the value of caution and prudence given earlier. The focus of the homily mostly lies on understanding the pericope in all its possible senses, with the practice of the Lenten fast present only as a subsidiary theme.
In a well-known essay, Milton McC. Gatch described the audience of the Blickling Homilies as ‘unknowable’.Footnote 61 More recent contributions have presented a more nuanced picture, one that holds out the possibility of identifying some aspects of how these texts may have been performed.Footnote 62 Jonathan Wilcox, for one, argued that ‘this sequence of homilies presents a rich array of imagined audiences – mostly secular, occasionally clerical – that can serve well for a historical or imaginative reconstruction of the performance context of these pieces’, while Brandon Hawk has argued Blickling XV was composed as part of a wider project to ‘standardize the liturgy and to teach the laity during the tenth and eleventh centuries’.Footnote 63 Examining Blickling III alongside its Irish cousin buttresses these suggestions of a ‘mostly secular’ audience for the Blickling Homilies. Where the Irish homily remains resolutely scholarly – written in two languages; sticking close to the exegetical bedrock; exploring multiple interpretations and deciding on none – the English homily is fully vernacular and contains a clear moral message, reinforced time and again.Footnote 64 Thus, while it is hard to imagine the Irish homily being recited outside of an ecclesiastical community versed in Latin exegesis, it certainly seems possible that this Blickling homily, at least, was written with a lay audience in mind.
Provisional Conclusions
As the above discussion has shown, setting the Old English homiletic corpus side-by-side with its Irish counterpart can reveal potential sources difficult to trace in surviving Latin material, and, where these sources overlap, can also serve to highlight differences in how the English and Irish homilists approached their task.
The existence of these parallels also underlines the need for much more basic research. While there has been important work on links between Latin homilies, Hiberno-Latin exegesis, and Old English homilies, investigation of the connections between these corpora and Middle Irish homiletic materials remains limited. The two homilies examined here indicate that these connections may well be extensive.
Establishing the nature of those connections will, in turn, begin to offer answers to other major questions. Here, Latin sources can be shown to exist, or at least inferred. But was there ever any direct translation between the two vernaculars? How, too, did these motifs travel from one island to the other? There is some evidence for direct transmission from Ireland to Britain (as in the Sunday Letter), but many arguably Hiberno-Latin commentaries appear to have been transmitted to England via the Continent. The text supposedly authored by ‘Frigulus’, for instance, may have been composed in northern Italy, given its reliance on a source originating in that area and with very limited circulation outside of it.Footnote 65
This situation would, on the face of it, seem to raise grave doubts about the validity of the term ‘Hiberno-Latin’: if a Latin work was composed on the Continent, using Continental sources, and was used, among others, by scholars working in England, of what use is the prefix ‘Hiberno-’? A full defense of this term is beyond the remit of this article, but I do believe there is value in stressing the connections of this body of exegesis with Ireland. Traces of the LQE-Frigulus tradition, in addition to many other members of Bischoff’s list, can be seen throughout the vernacular Irish homiletic corpus, a point often lost in discussions of Latin texts surviving in Continental manuscripts. Take, for instance, the so-called ‘Tripartite Life’ of St Patrick.Footnote 66 This text – which by and large appears to date to the tenth century – contains three homilies, each, like the homily on the Temptation discussed above, in a mixture of Irish and Latin.Footnote 67 Two of the three contain verbatim parallels with multiple Hiberno-Latin commentaries, including LQE-Frigulus, but these are of a nature that confounds attempts to extract a stemma: any given passage produces a kaleidoscopic pattern of exact matches and apparent paraphrases of works from the Church Fathers and texts otherwise preserved only in Continental manuscripts.Footnote 68 I would predict that, if a full study of the sources for Middle Irish homilies were undertaken, ‘Hiberno-Latin’ would remain a useful term: not necessarily as a marker of the place of birth of the original authors of those Latin works, but rather as an indication of the contexts in which the texts were most commonly used and revised.
Identifying further points of contact between Irish and English homilies, and then coming to understand when and where this contact occurred, would produce dividends far beyond running up the tally of known source material in tenth-century England. The mutual influence of the two homiletic traditions on each other can be pervasive, but it is also rather diffuse. While close parallels exist for motifs, tropes, and phrases, hardly any English or Irish homily can be considered a straightforward version of a counterpart from the other island, in the way that the homiliary in Cambridge, Pembroke College, 25 provided the basis for many Old English texts.Footnote 69 If the parallels were mostly mediated through Continental centres, as Tristram suggested, that would provide one explanation. Such a conclusion would carry with it, however, a striking corollary: that direct contact between English and Irish exegetical scholarship had become quite limited by the tenth and eleventh centuries, in stark contrast to earlier periods.Footnote 70 What could explain this divergence in how English and Irish authors expounded the Bible – provided, of course, that it is real, and not an artefact of modern scholarly interest or the chance survival of texts?Footnote 71 Without further evidence, it is easy to speculate and conjure a host of possible causes for why the exegetical traditions went their separate ways: the increased use of the vernacular, say, or the impact of the Viking raids, or the apparent reluctance of Irish exegetes to introduce material from authors working later than the eighth century.Footnote 72
But for now, such answers must remain hypothetical: the process of source criticism for the Irish material has hardly begun, and so any wide-ranging comparison must remain tentative at best. Whatever results emerge from a full investigation, however, it should be clear that studying these two bodies of homiletic literature together provides a promising route forward to understanding the composition and use of preaching texts in both Ireland and England.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Daniel Donoghue and the medievalists at the Harvard English Department for the opportunity to present an early version of this work, as well as Joseph Shack for his help in readying this for submission. Any remaining infelicities, of course, are my own. Elements of this work are based on my doctoral dissertation: N. Thyr, ‘Homiletic Lives of Irish Saints’ (Harvard University, 2024).
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