Byrhtferth of Ramsey’s great computistical handbook, the Enchiridion, contains a challenging lesson about the irregularities in the lunar calendar. Byrhtferth – a Benedictine monk who was active c. 988–1016 – seems to have had some difficulty understanding the saltus lunae (‘moon’s leap’) as part of the complex series of corrections necessary to calculate a lunar year.Footnote 1 In the middle of the lesson, he therefore quotes a long excerpt from Bede’s De temporum ratione in Latin to explain the finer points of the saltus lunae, and then repeats it in Old English.Footnote 2 Immediately before the inserted text, Byrhtferth pauses and asks his students to engage in an imaginative exercise. He instructs them to pretend that Bede is sitting in Moses’ tabernacle, where he is teaching the wonders of the natural world to them. The passage begins with an apparently defective line before invoking Bede’s presence:
Kynewyrðe ræde hyt ys geþuht and trumlic þæt we binnan þissum cafertune onmang þisre spræce*** Hyt wæs wundorlic Moyses geteldgehli<w>ung þæt Beda se æglæca lareow mæge to gebungan and gesyttan fægere gebolstrod and us glædum mode geswutelian þa þing þe him cuðe synt. We lætað þæt se getiddusta wer her sitte, nu we his gewritu smeagað. He cwæð on þære boc þe he gesette be gerimcræfte, and hig De temporibus genemde.Footnote 3
In this passage filled with obscure language, Byrhtferth brings his students into the presence of the great teacher. The classroom becomes the transcendent space of the tabernacle, where the wonders of created cosmos might be unfolded for them.
This prompt to visualise Bede in the tabernacle occurs in the second book of the Enchiridion, a bilingual handbook composed by Byrhtferth in c. 1010–12 as part of his role as schoolmaster of Ramsey Abbey in the remote East Anglian fens. It is filled with interjections addressed to clerics (often of a derogatory nature) and young monks, like the one in the saltus lunae lesson. As Rebecca Stephenson has argued, these serve as part of the text’s ‘epideictic rhetoric’, designed to encourage his monastic students by comparing their disciplined studiousness to that of imperiti (‘ignorant’) and decides (‘lazy’) clerics.Footnote 4 The Enchiridion is preserved in its entirety uniquely in a manuscript from the middle of the eleventh century.Footnote 5 Nearly a century ago, the philologist Heinrich Henel observed that the contents of the Enchiridion correspond to a group of twelfth-century manuscripts containing copies of an earlier collection of computistical material (tables, diagrams, and a metrical calendar), which is attributed to Byrhtferth and called his Computus. Footnote 6 This is best preserved in a manuscript made at Thorney Abbey in c. 1110.Footnote 7 The Enchiridion and the Computus were designed to facilitate the reckoning of key dates in the liturgical calendar (above all Easter), either in a classroom context or in individual study.Footnote 8 Both texts are filled with numerological and cosmographical information to illustrate the underlying principles of God’s creation.
While Byrhtferth’s unusual description of Bede in the saltus lunae lesson has been the subject of longstanding debate among philologists, the wider significance of this imaginative exercise remains unexplained. This article considers the saltus lunae interpolation in three parts. The first section assesses Bede’s posthumous reputation in late Anglo-Saxon England and in Byrhtferth’s preface to the Computus (the so-called Epilogus). It also suggests a reason for the Northumbrian monk’s imagined presence in Moses’ tabernacle. The second section considers Moyses geteldgehliwung as a teaching aid in the lesson. It uses Mary Carruthers’ concept of ‘machine of meditation’ to argue that the imagined tabernacle was placed in the lesson to draw the student into deeper meditation on the underlying harmony of the cosmos, as described by Bede.Footnote 9 Finally, the third section turns to the wider study of computus and builds on Faith Wallis’ work on diagrams as a form of ‘visual exegesis’.Footnote 10 It proposes that Byrhtferth’s imagined tabernacle is a sacred mystery underlying his cosmography, which he alluded to across his writings and diagrams as a visual enigma on the nature of the divine.
I. Bede’s Posthumous Reputation and Afterlife
Bede’s posthumous reputation can broadly be divided between his status as a saint and his reception as an authority on computus, exegesis, and history. In the eighth century, efforts by Jarrow monks to create a cult of Bede had not prospered, and no successful cult was established in England until after the Norman Conquest.Footnote 11 There are some signs that a cult of Bede was emerging in the 1020s and 30s, when the early medieval date of his feast (26 May; shared with Augustine of Canterbury) was included in two kalendars made at New Minster at Winchester.Footnote 12 But this was a limited phenomenon: he was not included in the list of saints’ resting places which was copied into the New Minster’s Liber Vitae in c. 1035, nor was his feast included in the anonymous metrical calendar from Ramsey (preserved uniquely in Byrhtferth’s Computus).Footnote 13 A real surge in interest in Bede’s cult did not take place until the 1060s, when Wulfstan II, bishop of Worcester (1062–95), dedicated a church to the Northumbrian monk in his first act as bishop.Footnote 14 In the following decade, the Worcestershire abbeys sponsored the re-establishment of monasticism in Northumbria, inspired by Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica. Footnote 15
While Bede was probably not viewed as a saint in the early eleventh century, his reputation as a scholar was exceptionally high. His computistical and historiographical writings were read widely in England in this period (although the real surge in interest in his historical writings occurred in the next century).Footnote 16 This was especially the case among monastic reformers, who held Bede’s homiletic, computistical, and historiographical authority in extremely high regard. For example, Ælfric, abbot of Eynsham (c. 950–c. 1010) listed Bede among his primary homiletic sources: ‘Hos namque auctores in hac explanatione sumus sequuti, videlicet Augustinum Hipponensem, Hieronimum, Bedam, Gregorium, Smaragdum, et aliquando Haymonem’.Footnote 17 Ælfric also relied on Bede’s computistical writing and made an abridged English translation of De temporum ratione, combined with excerpts from De temporibus and De natura rerum, in which he called Bede ‘se snotera lareow’.Footnote 18 As well as an exegete and a computist, Bede was also remembered as an historian. In a discussion of ecclesiastical tradition in the distribution of pallia, Wulfstan II, archbishop of York (d. 1023), explained his rejection of the journey to Rome for a pallium based on Bede’s history: ‘sicut legimus in historiis Anglorum, scribente Beda, historiographo et laudabili doctore nostro’.Footnote 19 This interest in the ecclesiastical practices of the seventh and eighth centuries is significant because Bede’s monastic life at Jarrow – as described in his Historia ecclesiastica and Historia abbatum – inspired Bishop Æthelwold and some of the later monastic reformers.Footnote 20
Byrhtferth far outstripped his contemporaries in his use and praise for Bede’s computistical and historiographical writings, referring directly to the Northumbrian on twenty-eight occasions across his writing. Byrhtferth describes him as a venerable computist, truthful historian, and holy man (see Table 1).Footnote 21 He also frequently associates Bede’s writings with light, through variations on either luce clarius or luculenter. Footnote 22 The one exception to Bede’s glowing posthumous reputation is Byrhtferth’s use of the word æglæca (‘marvellous’ in Baker and Lapidge’s translation) to qualify his role as a teacher in the saltus lunae lesson. This has long been recognised as exceptional because it is the unique adjectival use of the noun aglæca (‘awesome opponent, ferocious fighter’) in Old English.Footnote 23 A word found exclusively in verse, aglæca was often used for monstrous or superhuman creatures, as in the poem Beowulf. This proximity to monstrosity is surprising, as Bede was otherwise always portrayed in terms of his holiness and intellectual authority. In light of this, Alex Nicholls has suggested that Byrhtferth used æglæca in the sense of ‘awe-inspiring’, perhaps to capture the meaning of Bede’s Latin epithet uenerabilis. Footnote 24 To date, this is the most plausible explanation for the appearance of the word in this context, affirming the depth of Byrhtferth’s admiration for Bede.
Byrhtferth’s Descriptions of Bede
Cumulatively, these references to Bede across Byrhtferth’s corpus indicate that he was a uniquely significant authority as a historian, exegete, and computist. But by far the best example of Bede’s importance to Byrhtferth comes from a short text in his Computus, which also provides a possible explanation for Bede’s imagined presence in a tabernacle.
Byrhtferth’s Epilogus
The rubric to the short text – called the Epilogus – at the beginning of Byrhtferth’s Computus reads: ‘PROEMIUM BRIHTFERTHI RAMESIENSIS CENOBII MONACHI SVPER BEDAM DE TEMPORIBVS’.Footnote 25 While the rubric suggests that this text is a preface to Bede’s De temporum ratione (using its medieval title), in the text itself Byrhtferth referred to it as the epilogus (‘epilogue’) to the liber (‘book’). He also mentions that the liber will be followed by writing by Abbo of Fleury and Helperic of Auxerre:
Post huius denique epilogi descriptionem libet articulum flectere ad totius libri recapitulationem, quia post huius terminationem constant Abbonis sophistę dicta, alumni Benedicti patris, per cuius beniuolentiam percepimus huius rei intelligentiam necnon aliarum rerum peritiam. Dissertissimi uiri itaque Heririci expositiones ultima pars huius codicis concludit honestissime.Footnote 26
Lapidge partly resolved the confusion around whether this was intended as a preface or an epilogue by pointing out that Byrhtferth regularly used the word epilogus to mean preface.Footnote 27 Despite the rubric, the Epilogus is not really an introduction to Bede’s De temporum ratione or Byrhtferth’s Computus, but is principally an account of Bede’s life and writings – it might even be a sort of ‘eulogy of Bede’ as Henel suggested.Footnote 28
The Epilogus begins with an account of how the breath of the Holy Spirit inspired the apostles, and subsequently the Church Fathers. Byrhtferth mentions Jerome of Stridon, Augustine of Hippo, and Gregory the Great, who he says were endowed with great wisdom about chronography and orthography.Footnote 29 He then explains that the next great scholar to emerge after the Fathers was Bede. There is a sense of real pride here in Bede’s origins as an English scholar who ‘nostratis extitit’.Footnote 30 Later in the Epilogus, Byrhtferth emphasizes this again, stating that: ‘Anglis uero suis depromsit sectandam glorię sempiternatitis uiam, per quam gradientes capere ualent brauium supernę hereditatis’.Footnote 31 This is an example of what Wilhelm Busse describes as ‘the “genealogy” of teachers’, writing that ‘in their function as instructor, teacher or master, the reformers [notably Ælfric and Wulfstan] saw themselves as æftergengan, as the spiritual descendants of Christ’s disciples, and as such they claimed pre-eminence’.Footnote 32 In other words, Byrhtferth paints Bede as part of a spiritual lineage of teachers stretching back to the Church Fathers, the apostles, and ultimately the Holy Spirit, a chain of descent through which he and his students gained their authority as spiritual teachers.
Part of what made Bede a key figure in the genealogical lineage of the English priestly teachers was his exemplary life of monastic discipline and learning. Byrhtferth states that Bede rejected a secular life in his early adolescence, and devoted himself to meditating on scripture:
Qui, abdicatis practicę huius uite discrimen<ibus>, uenustam exercuit uitam, desudans in diuina lege diebus ac noctibus. Is, ut delectet lętabundis faucibus dulcibusque preconiis carptim glorificari, dindima prisc<e> legis mysteria <similiter atque> rudis suaui meditatione intellexit, eaque subtili indagatione tyrunculis aecclesię ceu limpidissimus cenobialis militię contemplator propinauit.Footnote 33
Byrhtferth also notes that Bede had spent his life ‘lectitando uel docendo, meditando’.Footnote 34 This is a freely paraphrased version of the phrase ‘semper aut discere aut docere aut scribere’ from Bede’s short autobiography, from the end of his Historia ecclesiastica. Footnote 35 It is interesting that Byrhtferth should have used the verb meditari in the place of scribere for, as we will see, meditation was central to Byrhtferth’s ideal of monastic wisdom.Footnote 36 Byrhtferth was very familiar with Bede’s autobiography, as he had copied it almost verbatim (only a few lines are omitted for brevity) into the second book of his Historia regum. Footnote 37 Evidently, he thought that Bede’s monasticism was central to his holiness and scholarship.
The middle part of the Epilogus is concerned with Bede’s wisdom as a computist and exegete. Byrhtferth mentions that Bede wrote gospel commentaries, although he does not specify on which gospels.Footnote 38 He then describes the contents of De temporum ratione. To convey the magnitude of Bede’s understanding of divine knowledge, Byrhtferth quotes repeatedly from the book of Wisdom:
Sequuntur in eodem loco uerba quae non incongrue ex persona huius esse possunt prolat<a>: ‘Ipse dedit mihi, […] ut sciam dispositionem orbis terrarum et uirtutes elementorum, initium et consumationem et medietatem temporum’ [Wisdom VII.17–18]. Et infra: ‘Anni cursum et stellarum dispositions’ [Wisdom VIII.19].Footnote 39
Byrhtferth portrays Bede as an authoritative source: knowledge of the elements, the stars, and time are accessible through his writings. He frames inquiry into the nature of the cosmos and time as part of one discipline of understanding the will of God.Footnote 40 This is reminiscent of a similar passage in the Enchiridion, where Byrhtferth describes computus as a deopan cræft (‘profound craft’) and explicitly links it to the study of theology: ‘Hesterna die, dum serenus iubar aurei solis tenebras depullisset cordis interioris antri, theologia exorsa est (id est sermo de Deo) de inceptione compoti et post hec de diebus solaris anni’.Footnote 41 According to Byrhtferth, wisdom is acquired through the quantification of the visible world, through which one might begin to approach the invisible order of heaven.Footnote 42 After this description of Bede’s holy life and works, the Epilogus concludes with Bede’s death and ascension to heaven:
Credendum est, ut is, qui <dum> circumuallatus fuerat oppressione corpor<al>i Deumque inuisibilem perspicere meruit in oromate spiritus, multo magis iam glomeratus meritorum lucris mereatur gratulabundus cernere ‘Deum deorum in Syon’ [Ps. LXXXIII.8], quae mystica interpretatione ‘speculatio’ dicitur. Enimuero gratuit<a>m Dei gratiam flagitemus non eneruiter, ut qui tot eum ineffabilibus donis ditauit, nobis saltim in ualle huius patriae degentibus prebeat caelestis desideria dulcedinem, ut fontem ueri luminis, qui Deus est, finetenus pudica tuitione cernere ualeamus.Footnote 43
This final image is of Bede on Mount Sion (i.e. heaven), eternally contemplating God. Byrhtferth prays that he and his students might also receive the same ineffabilia dona as Bede, so that they too might see God in heaven. The claim that Bede was granted a vision of God while still alive is puzzling, as he did not report having personally experienced visions in his lifetime. Perhaps Byrhtferth had in mind Cuthbert’s ‘Epistola de Obitu Bedae’, where Bede is said to have expressed his desire to see God by loosely quoting Isaiah XXXIII.17 (‘etenim anima mei desiderat Regem meum Christum in decore suo uidere’).Footnote 44 Whatever he meant about the pre-death vision, Byrhtferth is clear that Bede had been elected to heaven where he experienced perpetual theophany.
Bede was evidently an important authority on theological and computistical matters in late Anglo-Saxon England. The Epilogus and the huge number of references to Bede across Byrhtferth’s corpus stand out as exceptional, far exceeding any of his contemporaries in appeals to Bede’s computistical authority and his depiction as the key figure in the genealogy of English priestly monks. The Epilogus reveals that Byrhtferth thought of Bede as the font of wisdom about the divinely created universe. It is also an encomium of Bede’s pious childhood, monastic life, and eternal life in heaven. It is surely significant that this sketch of Bede’s life should have been written within a few decades of the first appearance of his feast in liturgical calendars, and within half a century of the beginnings of his cult.Footnote 45 Monastic reformers had a great enthusiasm for early English history and a special interest in the example of monastic life and wisdom set out by their own English forefather. But the Epilogus does not account for the imagined presence of Bede within the Moyses geteldgehliwung in the Enchiridion. Why should students envision Bede in this Old Testament setting, far removed from eighth-century Northumbria and unconnected from any known biographical details of his life? A close reading of both the Enchiridion and the Epilogus in the following section provides a possible solution.
Bede in the Geteldgehliwung: Sion, the Tabernacle-Temple, and Theophany
There are very few clues about the meaning of the geteldgehliwung in the Enchiridion. Byrhtferth describes Bede as seated and gebolstrod (‘couched with pillows’), perhaps indicating that he is in an elevated position or special seat. He also uses the word cafertun (‘courtyard’) in the first, defective sentence of the passage. This was commonly used to gloss the atria of the tabernacle in the psalms. It therefore seems likely that the defective sentence provided a longer description of the material structure of the tabernacle.Footnote 46 By far the best indication of the meaning of this passages comes from the word geteldgehliwung (literally ‘shelter-tent’), which is a hapax legomenon and may have been Byrhtferth’s own invention.Footnote 47 In Old English, a biblical tabernaculum (‘tabernacle’) was usually translated as a geteld or eardung (‘tent’), although a wider range of translations were also available, especially in verse.Footnote 48 Instead of employing one of these more standard terms, Byrhtferth chose to qualify the nature of Moses’ tabernacle by adding the noun hliwung (‘shelter’), emphasizing the refuge offered within the tent. Patrizia Lendinara drew attention to how this compound might have been an attempt to render the Greek word σκηνή (‘tabernacle’), which is derived from σκιά (‘shade’).Footnote 49 Whether or not Byrhtferth was attempting to capture the Greek, he was evidently at pains to convey that this was a significant, even sacred, place of refuge. Through the compound geteldgehliwung, Byrhtferth evoked a space that was explicitly linked to Moses’ tabernacle, and at the same time captures the numinous and multifaceted symbolism of the tabernacle across the Bible.
Because the tabernacle and temple were understood typologically in medieval exegesis, their material structures could be imagined through a variety of sacred architecture which served as the earthly dwelling places of God. These structures include the tabernacle of Moses (Ex. XXV–XXVII and XXXV–XL), the account of the First Temple as built by Solomon (1 Kings VI), Ezekiel’s account of an angel measuring a fantastical temple (Ezek. XL–XLII), and the description of New Jerusalem with the arrival of New Heaven and New Earth (Rev. XXI). This hybrid of architectural features formed what Mary Carruthers has labelled as a ‘Tabernacle-Temple’, a term which I have adopted here to indicate a typological amalgamation of the dwelling places of God in the Old and New Testaments.Footnote 50 It is possible that Byrhtferth’s ideas about the spiritual meanings of the Tabernacle-Temple were influenced by Bede, who wrote the three most comprehensive early medieval treatises on the topic (De tabernaculo, In Ezram et Neemiam, and De templo).Footnote 51 Byrhtferth probably did not have access to these commentaries, but it is likely that he knew Bede’s brief exegetical interpretation in De schematibus et tropis (which was an important source for the Enchiridion), where the temple of Solomon is used to illustrate fourfold exegesis:Footnote 52
[T]emplum Domini, iuxta historiam domus quam fecit Salomon; iuxta allegoriam corpus Dominicum de quo ait: ‘Soluite templum hoc, et in tribus diebus excitabo illud’ [John II.19], siue ecclesia eius, cui dicitur: ‘templum enim Dei sanctum est, quod estis uos’ [1 Cor. III.17]; per tropologiam quisque fidelium, quibus dicitur: ‘An nescitis quia corpora uestra templum est Spiritus sancti qui in vobis est’ [1 Cor. III.16]; per anagogen supernae gaudia mansionis, cui suspirabat qui ait: ‘Beati qui habitant in domo tua, Domine, in saeculum saeculi laudabunt te’ [Ps. LXXXIII.4].Footnote 53
In this reading, the temple of Solomon is not just a historical building, but an allegorical precursor of the body of Christ and the Church, a tropological lesson about the inner divinity of the faithful Christians, and an anagogical figure of heaven.
It is this fourth sense – the Tabernacle-Temple as heaven, reinforced by Psalm LXXXIII – that fits best with Bede’s imagined presence in the geteldgehliwung. In the final image of the Epilogus, where Bede gazes eternally on God on Mount Sion, Byrhtferth quotes from a psalm to describe the fate of Bede’s soul (Ps. LXXXIII.8: ‘the God of gods shall be seen in Sion’). The earlier verses of the psalm make clear that this is not the literal Mount Sion in Jerusalem, but the heavenly city where souls go to reunite with God (Ps. LXXXIII.2–5: ‘How lovely are thy tabernacles, O Lord of hosts! […] Blessed are they that dwell in thy house, O Lord: they shall praise thee for ever and ever’). The idea that holy souls would live in the city of heaven – which is in the form of a tabernacle, according to the description of New Jerusalem in the book of Revelation – was a common medieval trope.Footnote 54 In his historical and hagiographical writing, Byrhtferth’s accounts of the deaths of holy people are also filled with images of them ascending to the city of heaven (which is described either as Jerusalem, Mount Sion, or the tabernacle).Footnote 55 In Byrhtferth’s life of St Oswald of Worcester, he notes that the saint had always desired to see God, and had sung psalms before his death, so that he might climb Mount Sion and look on God forever (‘desiderans magnopere gradus ascendere montis Sion et de profundis ad Deum istius uite proclamare, qualiter “celsitudinem posset diuine maiestatis intueri” in eterna beatitudine’).Footnote 56 After Oswald’s death, Byrhtferth records that the saint attained the holy city (‘factus est conciuis Hierosolime beatissime ciuitatis’) and stands on Mount Sion (‘[n]unc super Sion montis culmen stat’).Footnote 57 In a strikingly similar account of St Ecgwine’s death in the early eighth century, Byrhtferth records that the saint ascended into the tabernacle of God (‘festinauit quantocius in tabernaculum domus Dei ascendere, quo triumphum percepturus esset supernum’).Footnote 58 Here the tabernacle is no longer the historical tent erected by Moses as an earthly dwelling place for God, but a figure of the heavenly kingdom.
For Byrhtferth, it is not just that Bede has gone to the heavenly Tabernacle-Temple, but that he has gone there to see God. In the description of Bede’s afterlife, he glosses Sion as speculatio (‘observation’).Footnote 59 Byrhtferth also prays that God gives him and his readers the same spiritual gifts which he gave to Bede, including a longing for heaven: ‘ut fontem ueri luminis, qui Deus est, finetenus pudica tuition cernere ualeamus’.Footnote 60 The focus on posthumous visions of God can be understood through a numerological passage in the Enchiridion, where Byrhtferth explains the Eighth Age of the world, when the saints will join God on Mount Sion:
et, peracto iudicio, cum fuerit celum nouum et terra noua ipse erit, ut prephati sumus, sempiternus […] Quales ad istam uenire possint, ipsa ueritas uera et uita nostra, Iesus, ostendit cum dicit: “Beati mundo corde, quoniam ipsi Deum uidebunt” [Matt. V.8].Footnote 61
Here Byrhtferth links the arrival of New Heaven and New Earth on Judgement Day with the Sixth Beatitude, which promises that the pure of heart will see God. This passage may have been influenced by the closing lines of De temporum ratione, which address the same subject. There Bede connected the coming of the Eighth Age, the nature of the Tabernacle-Temple as described in Psalm LXXXIII, and the promise of the Sixth Beatitude that the pure of heart will see God.Footnote 62 Whether or not Byrhtferth was consciously following Bede, he evidently believed that these passages of scripture were essential for understanding the nature of heaven and the afterlife as a perpetual theophany. In short, Byrhtferth imagines Bede in the geteldgehliwung because it is a model for heaven, the celestial Tabernacle-Temple where the pure of heart gaze eternally on God.
II. Mediators And Meditation on the Tabernacle-Temple
The image of Bede in the heavenly Tabernacle-Temple of Mount Sion is appropriate in the context of Bede’s afterlife at the end of the Epilogus, but why invoke it in the saltus lunae lesson? Byrhtferth’s instruction to pretend that Bede is with them in a geteldgehliwung raises the possibility that the Tabernacle-Temple had a further practical purpose, as a means of drawing students into deeper meditation on the computistical lesson as divine knowledge.
The Tabernacle-Temple is a numinous space where priests and mediators come face to face with God and imbibe divine wisdom. In the Old Testament, the purified High Priest entered the presence of God in the sanctum sanctorum once a year to atone for the sins of the Israelites, after being ritually purified and offering sacrifices (Lev. XVI). In the New Testament, Christ’s Incarnation and Crucifixion transcends the barrier of the veil of the Tabernacle-Temple, making the presence of God directly available to Christians (Heb. VIII.6, IX.15). Byrhtferth makes a handful of references to Moses which illuminate the role of the mediator. In his Vita S. Ecgwini, Byrhtferth cites Moses as an archetypal example of the human capacity for visions of God in partial theophany. He wrote that St Ecgwine had used the biblical precedent set by Moses’ experiences on Mount Sinai (Ex. XXXIII–XXXIV) to give credence to a swineherd’s Marian vision: ‘recordans uisionem quam Moyses in montem cernere promeruit – ne forte et huic aliquid secreti reuelare sit dignatus auctor omnium rerum’.Footnote 63 In his numerological section of the Enchiridion, Byrhtferth assigned a patriarch, apostle, or saint to represent each of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit (cf. Isa. XI.2). For example, Abraham exemplifies ‘spiritus sapientiae’, Oswald of Worcester illustrates ‘spiritus timoris Domini’, and Moses signifies ‘gratia intellectus’.Footnote 64 Byrhtferth provides no justification for his choice of these individuals as the embodiment of each gift.Footnote 65 In patristic commentaries, intellectus was a gift of spiritual perception and the penultimate sixth step before the attainment of true wisdom.Footnote 66 Possibly Moses’ intellectus relates to the knowledge given to him on Mount Sinai about the cosmographical nature of the tabernacle, which is a ‘shadow of heavenly things’ (Heb. VIII.5).Footnote 67
By imagining Bede in Moyses geteldgehliwung, Byrhtferth implies that Bede is also a kind of mediator of divine knowledge, like Moses and Christ. He is an example of understanding and wisdom, acquired through deep learning and meditation, to be emulated by Byrhtferth’s students. As mediators between God and man, monks and priests in Anglo-Saxon England would have regularly practised a form of meditative reading (lectio divina) and private prayer.Footnote 68 They might have followed Gregory I’s instructions in the Regula pastoralis, where he describes the obligation of priests to reflect and consult on difficult matters with God, following the example set by Moses when he retreated into the tabernacle:
Hinc Moyses crebro tabernaculum intrat et exit […] Intus Dei arcana considerat, foris onera carnalium portat. Qui de rebus quoque dubiis semper ad tabernaculum recurrit, coram testamenti arca Dominum consulit: exemplum proculdubio rectoribus praebens, ut cum foris ambigunt quid disponant, ad mentem semper quasi ad tabernaculum redeant; et velut coram testamenti arca Dominum consultant.Footnote 69
According to Gregory, priests had to be constantly purifying their souls and retreating inwardly in contemplation of the arca Domini. Like this analogy of Moses retiring to his tabernacle, the Tabernacle-Temple may have been placed in the saltus lunae lesson as a prompt to deeper inner contemplation. It might therefore be a kind of ‘machine of meditation’ or ‘mnemnotechnical device’ (in Mary Carruthers’ terminology): a mental image used as a tool for memorisation and deep reflection during lectio diuina. Footnote 70
The simplest and most common medieval meditation technique involved visualising information stored in an arca, a word which evokes Noah’s Ark, the Ark of the Covenant, and any number of other enclosed strongboxes, chests, archives, or libraries.Footnote 71 While a visualised arca is a static vessel for storing information, Mary Carruthers has shown that medieval monks used more complex, dynamic ‘machines’ to focus their minds in meditation and generate new interpretations of a text.Footnote 72 She especially focuses on the Tabernacle-Temple as a common ‘machine of meditation’, finding examples in the writings of twelfth-century monks and clerics, including Peter of Celle, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hugh of St Victor, and Adam of Dryburgh. Carruthers argues that such uses of the Tabernacle-Temple originated in Augustine’s commentary on Psalm XLI, where he described meditation as the mental movement through a tabernacle.Footnote 73 By imagining themselves moving through the architectural structure of the Tabernacle-Temple – using the joined rhetorical devices of ductus (‘movement’) and enargeia (‘vividness’) – monks could more effectively focus their minds on a remembered text and generate a series of exegetical meanings.Footnote 74 Through this process, they moved slowly towards an ever deepening spiritual understanding of divine knowledge, and ultimately theophany.Footnote 75 The Tabernacle-Temple is therefore at once a static arca in which to ‘store’ a memorised text (in the case of the Enchiridion, this would be the saltus lunae lesson as explained in Bede’s De temporum ratione), and a dynamic machine used to discover new spiritual interpretations of scripture and wisdom writings.
Evidence that this kind of meditation was practised is very limited for Anglo-Saxon England. Beyond Byrhtferth’s geteldgehliwung, I am aware of only one pre-twelfth-century example. This is the description of the tabernacle found in Goscelin of Saint-Bertin’s Liber confortatorius (written c. 1080–2), which used the figure to instruct the text’s recipient – an anchoress named Eve – in the art of meditation.Footnote 76 In Goscelin’s description, the tabernacle is the historical tent of Moses, but it is also transformed into a vivid and quasi-cosmographical space, decorated ‘[u]t celum sideribus, terra floribus’ and evoking ‘[t]erras et maria, ipsumque ornatum mundi’.Footnote 77 Goscelin encourages Eve to use her scriptural knowledge to paint it in her mind, filled with the images of saints (‘cum sanctorum exemplorum multimodo decore’).Footnote 78 Goscelin’s description, especially the presence of saints in the Tabernacle-Temple, is strikingly similar to Byrhtferth’s envisioning of Bede in Moyses geteldgehliwung. If these are indeed intended as ‘machines of meditation’, they would be very early examples of the Tabernacle-Temple being used to structure contemplation, suggesting that the practice was already developing in England by the eleventh century.Footnote 79
M. Breann Leake has recently shown that there is an example of a simple ‘mnemotechnical device’ in the surviving manuscript of Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion. It is worth briefly reiterating her main points here, as they persuasively show that Byrhtferth did use sacred biblical objects as metaphors for the process of memorisation and meditation. Leake draws attention to a set of computistical verses in the Enchiridion, which Byrhtferth erroneously believed were composed by Bede.Footnote 80 In Ashmole 328, decorative borders in red and green ink were drawn around the introduction to the verses, where they are attributed to Bede.Footnote 81 Immediately before this box, Byrhtferth had broken into a complaint about the ignorance of clerics who neglect their phylacteries, exclaiming: ‘Exterminant huius modi mensuras nonnulli clerici imperiti (heu, pro dolor!) qui non habere desiderant philacteria sua’.Footnote 82 This is a reference to Christ’s admonishment of the hypocrisy of the Pharisees and Sadducees, who displayed their phylacteria (‘phylacteries/tefillin’) but did not obey the spirit of the law contained within them.Footnote 83 For medieval Christians, phylacteries were emblematic of externalized knowledge of the letter of the law, without internalizing the spirit of the law into one’s heart.Footnote 84 In other words, they appeared outwardly pious, but their inner souls were not filled with a disciplined study and worship of God. To avoid hypocrisy, Byrhtferth advises that a student ‘animum suum debet seruituti subicere, implendo alabastrum pretioso unguento, hoc est intus esse diatim debet, diuinis legibus obtemperando (et) monitis redemptoris’.Footnote 85 Leake argues that the ‘pretiosum unguentum’ which Byrhtferth urges his students to store within themselves are Bede’s computistical verses, which follow on from the admonishment.
As Leake points out (building on the work of Rebecca Stephenson), Byrhtferth was deeply interested in phylacteries as they related to a legend about the divine origins of computus.Footnote 86 In both the Computus and the Enchiridion, he tells the story of St Pachomius, a fourth-century desert monk who received the mnemonic Nonae Aprilis verses on the date of Easter from the hands of angels. In his story, the angels descended from heaven with the verses enclosed in a phylactery, which they gave to Pachomius.Footnote 87 In the Enchiridion-manuscript, the Nonae Aprilis verses are set within a decorative box, reminiscent of the phylactery of the Pachomius story.Footnote 88 Given this close association between computistical verses and phylacteries, Leake argues that the decorative box placed around the incipit to the ‘Bedan’ verses in Ashmole 328 functions as a visual phylactery: ‘By setting Bede apart on the page and placing him within these borders, we are left with an archival image of Bede and his verses placed within the drawing of a strongbox – a phylactery that […] tells us not only what to memorize but also how to learn it by heart’.Footnote 89 Here the divine knowledge contained within Bede’s writings is akin to the most sacred texts – the laws and the Easter tables – which are stored in an arca. Leake shows that Byrhtferth did use the ritual objects of the Old Testament as metaphors for meditation, making it far more likely that the image of Bede in the Tabernacle-Temple was also intended to function as a prompt to inner reflection.
The emphasis on the memorisation of Bede’s computistical writings placed them at the heart of monastic education, knowledge to be stored internally and returned to constantly. But the image of Bede in the Tabernacle-Temple in the saltus lunae lesson is more complex than just an image to structure recall of an important text. It positions him typologically as a mediator like Moses and Christ, existing in a heavenly, numinous space from where he makes divine knowledge available to his readers. By entering into the Tabernacle-Temple with Bede and using it as a ‘machine of meditation’ on the underlying significance of De temporum ratione, students were intended to reflect deeply on the order of time and space. Bede’s computistical writings on the underlying harmonious design of the calendar and cosmos therefore approached the status of the most sacred Christian texts, stored in an inner arca. Indeed, Bede supersedes Moses in the ritual objects of the Old Testament, his teaching about the calculation of Easter surpassing what Moses taught about Passover (cf. Enchiridion iii. 1).Footnote 90 By regularly retreating inwardly to gaze on the arca Domini in the Tabernacle-Temple, containing sacred knowledge, monks were brought closer to an understanding of God and theophany in heaven.
III. Byrhtferth’s Diagrams and the Tabernacle-Temple
The meditative function of the Tabernacle-Temple in the saltus lunae lesson raises the question of whether Byrhtferth used ‘machines of meditation’ elsewhere in his writings. The diagrams in Byrhtferth’s Computus – the computistical collection prefaced by the Epilogus and accompanied by the Enchiridion – provide some possible examples. Rather than focusing exclusively on Bede’s writings, these are concerned with communicating general computistical and numerological information. They are part of a long tradition combining astronomical, arithmetic information, and Christian symbolism.Footnote 91 The models used by Byrhtferth derived ultimately from the rotae in Isidore of Seville’s De natura rerum or from Abbo of Fleury.Footnote 92 Many of these medieval diagrams are concerned not only with explaining how to reckon time, but also with gesturing towards the underlying divine structure of the cosmos.Footnote 93 Indeed, the ability to perceive the invisible divine was a major concern of early medieval theologians and computists.Footnote 94 Madeline Caviness describes how ‘diagrams created a syntax for various means, including the representational, of expressing divinity’.Footnote 95 Similarly, Faith Wallis has argued that many of Byrhtferth’s diagrams function as a form of ‘visual exegesis’.Footnote 96 Because they have a visual ‘syntax’, diagrams can be read and exegetically decoded as part of a practice of lectio diuina. Footnote 97
Like rhetorical ‘machines of meditation’, diagrams can be used as tools for drawing nearer to God. The viewer is invited to unravel the layers of the diagram, a process through which the divine becomes partially intelligible. The following section considers how some of Byrhtferth’s diagrams on the symbolism of the numbers four and twelve were intended to be used as tools for approaching theophany.
Byrhtferth’s Diagram on the Harmony of Fours
Byrhtferth’s Computus contains his well-known diagram, De concordia mensium atque elementum (‘On the harmony of the months and elements’).Footnote 98 This diagram interlinks time and space through the correspondence of the quaternities, or the ‘harmony of fours’, a medieval theory of numerological cosmic congruity which recurs across Byrhtferth’s writings. It depicts the interrelation of the cardinal directions, the seasons, the elements, the ages of man, the winds, months, and the astrological signs of the zodiac (see Fig. 1). The diagram is built around a rhomboid figure with a series of interlinking nodes, framed by a ‘figure-eight’ mandorla. Located at its centre is a circular ogham wheel, above which there is an as-yet un-decoded cipher made up of ogham and a series of pictograms.Footnote 99 The ogham wheel has eight spokes, with a ‘χρ̅ς’ inscription on top-left spoke; its shape suggests a Chi-Rho, with the horizontal spoke in the place of the Alpha and Omega. Although these symbols in the centre of the diagram remain undeciphered, the presence of the χρ̅ς on the wheel makes a meaning invoking the presence of Christ likely.
Oxford, St John’s College 17, 7v. By permission of the President and Fellows of St John’s College, Oxford.
The art historians Madeline Caviness and Bianca Kühnel have both discussed how the form of the diagram evokes a maiestas Domini (an image of Christ in majesty).Footnote 100 The use of a rhombus with a circular node, or clipeus, at each of its points is a feature of maiestas Domini images in Carolingian bibles, like the first Bible of Charles the Bald made at Tours in the ninth century. In that image, each corner of the outer frame is filled with an evangelist, each of the four nodes is filled with a major prophet, and each corner of the rhombus is filled by a beast of the tetramorph (the four ‘living creatures’ symbolizing the evangelists).Footnote 101 The wheel of ogham in the middle of Byrhtferth’s diagram is also reminiscent of the sphere, or mundus, which Christ uses as a footstool and/or holds in his right hand in the centre of the maiestas Domini (Isa. LXVI.1: ‘Heaven is my throne, and the earth my footstool: what is this house that you will build to me?’).Footnote 102 The ‘figure-eight’ mandorla of the diagram is also a common feature of Ottonian manuscripts (for example, in the eleventh-century Hitda Codex).Footnote 103 The points made by Caviness and Kühnel can be strengthened by Byrhtferth’s numerological section of the Enchiridion. He states that the number four unites the cardinal virtues, the seasons, the equinoxes and solstices, the winds, the elements, and the ages of man, as well as the four evangelists and the four ‘living creatures’ witnessed by Ezekiel: ‘Ornatur et doctrinis quattuor euangelistarum, qui quattuor animalia esse referuntur in libro Ezechielis eximii prophetae’.Footnote 104 Ezekiel’s vision of the ‘living creatures’ is a key component of the maiestas Domini, with each of them depicted in a wheel and arranged around Christ to form a chariot of God (Ezek. I.4–28; Rev. IV.6–9). In the Enchiridion, Byrhtferth indicates that he is aware of the typological comparison which is inherent in maiestas Domini imagery, prefiguring the evangelists’ missionary role in the Church, and its apotheosis when Christ comes to reign in majesty over New Heaven and New Earth.Footnote 105 By structuring his diagram using the visual syntax of a maiestas Domini, but no actual image of Christ, Byrhtferth seems to expect his students to contemplate the diagram deeply and to unriddle the hidden vision of Christ in majesty. As Wallis observes: ‘on some level that the rubric does not specify, this figura is a theophany, or a making visible of the invisible divine’.Footnote 106
But the theophanic maiestas Domini is not the only spiritual information to be discerned from the diagram. The cardinal directions in Greek are written at each corner of the mandorla, acronymically spelling ADAM (Anatole, Dysis, Arcton, Mesembrion), with east (Anatole) located at the top of the folio. In the numerological section of the Enchiridion, Byrhtferth explains that the name ADAM is linked to DEUS because they are both made up of four letters: ‘Constat reuerenter fulcitus iste quaternarius quattuor litteris nominis Christi, id est .D.E.U.S., pariterque et onomate protoplasti, hoc est .A.D.A.<M>’.Footnote 107 This was a favourite theme of Byrhtferth’s: he mentions that both Adam and Deus have four letters in his discussion of the solstice and equinox and in his explanation of the AEIOU lunar table, accompanied by diagrams that place the letters around a rota or table in the form of a cross.Footnote 108 By comparing the name of Adam and Christ (Deus), Byrhtferth sets up a typological connection between the first Adam, and Christ as the second Adam (1 Cor XV.45). Effectively, they are both tetragrammata (four-letter names for God). As Faith Wallis has argued, the correspondence between the cruciform arrangement of the cardinal directions and the name of Adam implies that Christ is both micro- and macrocosm, his crucified human body stretching out across the four corners of the world.Footnote 109
This Christological aspect of the diagram is well-established, but the ADAM acronym contains a further and cosmographical meaning, which Byrhtferth implies in his numerological commentary in the Enchiridion:
Hae partes si considerentur, in nomine Adę inueniuntur secundum numerum Grecorum. Ipsi quoque orientem appellant anathole<n>, et occidentem disyn, et aquilonem arcton, et meridiem misymbion; oriens apud eos habet in exordio .A. lit<ter>am, et occidens .D., et septentrio iterum .A., et meridies .M. Si numeru<m> istarum litterarum quis altiori ingenio perscrutatus fuerit, dabit intellectum auditui. .A. in Greco numero significant unum, .D. quattuor, .A. iterum unum, .M. .xl.; h<e>c sunt .xlvi. Hoc in loco sufficiant hec dicta. Inuestigatam diutissime hanc <reor> questionem a patrum dictis; libet ad alia celeriter properare.Footnote 110
Rather coyly, he refuses to explain the numerology of the name Adam further, on the grounds that the significance of this is evident in patristic literature. This is most likely in reference to Augustine’s commentary on the gospel of John, which Byrhtferth perhaps knew second-hand from Hrabanus Maurus’ In honorem sanctae crucis.Footnote 111 In both Augustine and Hrabanus Maurus’ commentaries, the number forty-six is linked to Christ’s statement that he is a sign of the Second Temple, which was built in forty-six years and will be reconstructed in three days (John II.18–22).Footnote 112 The argument here is temporal: the destruction of the Second Temple is symbolised by the Crucifixion and Resurrection. It also represents Christ’s fulfilment of the Tabernacle-Temple through his own body, which is the Church. But the correspondence between the body of Christ and the Second Temple also has cosmographical implications. Microcosmically each person’s body is a temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. VI.19), made in the image of God like Adam (Gen. I.27). Macrocosmically, the tabernacle is a shadow of the pattern of the heavens shown to Moses on Mount Sinai (Heb. VIII.8).Footnote 113 For Byrhtferth, Christ’s body and the Tabernacle-Temple were both signs of the interrelation of heaven and earth, with the earthly tabernacle merely a reflection or shadow of the heavenly city.
The Tabernacle-Temple is not just an anagogical model for heaven, but a pattern of the whole cosmos. The layers of coded and symbolically organised information in the diagram force the student to study it closely, memorising its contents and picturing it in their minds as a ‘machine of meditation’, which yields a fourfold understanding of its visual exegesis.Footnote 114 The ADAM tetragrammaton typologically links the human and divine bodies of Adam and Christ, representing the micro- and macrocosm of Creation. The maiestas Domini imagery tropologically illustrates the moral authority of the earthly Church which is signified by the body of Christ and the four wheels of evangelists, carrying the Ark of the Covenant out into the world. Both the maiestas Domini and the Adam numerology gesture anagogically towards the arrival of the Tabernacle-Temple of New Heaven and New Earth, and the final triumphant enthronement of Christ.
Byrhtferth’s Diagrams on the Harmony of Twelves
The importance of the Tabernacle-Temple in Byrhtferth’s cosmography is illustrated by three further diagrams (two rotas and a rectangular figure) on the exegetical meanings of the number twelve, found in the twelfth-century ‘Peterborough Computus’.Footnote 115 Peter Baker has convincingly attributed them to Byrhtferth on the basis of his ‘perseverative turn of mind’.Footnote 116 All three of the diagrams depict the divinely ordered cosmos. In the rotas, this is achieved through the cruciform arrangement of ADAM and ALFA. The ADAM rota has ‘Ecclesiastica rota’ written in its inner circle (fol. 5r); the ALFA rota has an Omega at the southern end of the cross and a blank inner circle (fol. 5v). The rectangular diagram of twelves (fol. 7v) invokes the presence of God through an empty mandorla, framed with quotations from Heb. I.8 and Psalm IX.5, which are rendered by Byrhtferth as ‘Thronus tuus Deus in seculum seculi’ and ‘Deus qui sedes super thronum et iudicas equitatem’ (Fig. 2).Footnote 117 Like the diagram of fours, this figure seems to allude to an invisible throne of God (or maiestas Domini) at its centre. The modern viewer’s ability to decipher these diagrams is impeded by a missing folio from the numerological analysis of the number twelve in the Enchiridion. Footnote 118 However, there are some commonalities across the diagrams that make it possible to reconstruct a hypothetical list of harmonious connections. Each diagram is framed by sets of twelve biblical figures (patriarchs, prophets, and apostles), arranged in either a circle rota or rectangle around its outer frame. They also contain a selection of natural twelves, including the astrological signs of the zodiac, the winds, the hours in a day, and the months. These are shown to be divisible by the four elements, seasons, cardinal directions, and evangelists.
London, British Library, Harley MS 3667, 7v. From the British Library Collection.
The rectangular diagram of twelves is the most complex of the three. It is labelled ‘Alea celi in qva svnt nomina XXIIII seniorvm’.Footnote 119 The names of the twelve apostles and the twelve patriarchs are arranged around its outer frame in alternating roundels and boxes.Footnote 120 Wallis observes that ‘the ALEA CELI rubric draws our attention to another dimension of the diagram’s form: it is rectangular like a game board, and the apostles are arranged like counters in cells around the perimeter’.Footnote 121 She argues that the diagram’s self-description as the Alea celi invites the viewer to interact with it as a game board. Wallis links this to Byrhtferth’s lamentation in the Enchiridion about how clerics are overly interested in dicing (described as alea) and neglect their meditation on the computus, which is the true means of interpreting the future (‘cepi cordetenus ruminare pauca ex plurimis, quali medicamine possem clericis proficere ut alee ludos relaxarent et huius artis notitiam haberent’).Footnote 122 The viewer is intended to ‘play’, not by gambling or prognosticating, but by deciphering the diagram. Wallis provides a comprehensive interpretation of its possible hidden meanings:
The description of the Heavenly Jerusalem in the Apocalypse also invokes a double series of twelve: twelve foundations and twelve gates inscribed with the names of the patriarchs and the apostles [Rev. XXI.12–14]. On the ALEA CELI, the rectangular shape that accommodates the mandorla is really a square, with three apostles on each side, facing north, south, east and west [Rev. XXI.13]. Finally, the alea may be a reference to the lots hidden in the High Priest’s rational [i.e. breastplate]. Bede compares twelve gems on the rational to the signs of the zodiac and the twelve months of the year, arranged in four seasons of three months each. The entire rational symbolizes the totality of world-history.Footnote 123
This exegetical analysis is surely correct: the arrangement of the prophets and patriarchs points backwards in time to the tabernacle of Moses and forward to the temple of New Jerusalem. It signals the unity of scripture and the constant presence of God in ordering time through the different incarnations of the Tabernacle-Temple.Footnote 124 Like the diagram on the harmony of four, Wallis argues that the Alea celi diagram is a maiestas Domini, as all of its exegetical signifiers point towards the Final Judgement and the enthronement of the Lamb, who is Christ. By ‘playing’ on the game board of heaven, the viewer is intended to see God at the beginning and end of time. Wallis’ examination of the typological and anagogical meaning of the diagram is persuasive, demonstrating the temporal argument at its heart. But there is also a cosmographical element to the Tabernacle-Temple, discernible through examination of Byrhtferth’s other writings on the number twelve.
As we saw in the diagram on fours, the Tabernacle-Temple is a constant in space as well as time, as a sign of the underlying harmony of the micro- and macrocosm. Byrhtferth’s understanding of the macrocosmic relationship between heaven and earth is explained in the Enchiridion:
Seo heofon beligð on hyre bosme ealne middaneard, and heo æfre tyrnð onbutan us; heo ys swyftre þonne ænig mylenhwiol, eall swa deop under þisre eorðan swa heo ys bufan. Eall heo ys synewealt and ansund and mid steorrum amet. Synd swa þeah ma heofena, swa swa se witega cwyð, ‘celi celorum’ [Ps. CXLVIII.4]. Þas heofena tacniað þa apostolas and þa witegan; be heom ys gecweden, ‘Celi enarrant gloriam Dei’ [Ps. XVIII.1].Footnote 125
The statement that the apostles and prophets are signified by the heavens is mysterious, suggesting literally the twelve quadrants of the zodiac. But if we read this passage with reference to the diagram of twelves, the interpretation would be that the twelve divisions of the heavens represent the twice twelve foundations and gateways of New Jerusalem containing the patriarchs and apostles (Rev. XXI.14), and the twenty-four elders of the maiestas Domini (Rev. IV.4). Byrhtferth did not think that the earth or the heavens were literally rectangular like a tabernacle (his imagery of the circular, turning mylenhwiol in the above quotation is a case in point), but by identifying hidden signifiers of God’s dwelling place in the cosmos, the viewer is called to recognise his active and palpable presence in the harmonious organization of time and space, with the pattern of the Tabernacle-Temple in the twelvefold stars, winds, directions, hours, and months.
Another rota by Byrhtferth – on the ‘monthly solar concurrents’ (the calculation of the weekday of the first day of each month in the twenty-eight-year solar cycle) – may also illustrate Byrhtferth’s macrocosmic understanding of the Tabernacle-Temple. The rota has a seated, crowned figure holding a cup at its centre.Footnote 126 In an extensive discussion, Wallis argues that the figure at the centre of the rota is the embodiment of the sun in the solar cycle. She connects the image of the crowned and seated figure to Byrhtferth’s description of the solar year, in which he writes in Latin and then in English about how six additional hours ‘grow’ each year to create a leap year: ‘sex horas perficit, ex quibus quadrans surgit atque procedit uelut rex a solio suo […] Of þissum syx tidum wihst se quadrans swyðe wæwerðlice and forðstæpð wel orglice binnan feower wintrum, swylce hwylc cyng of his giftbure stæppe geglenged’.Footnote 127 Following Baker and Lapidge, Wallis notes that this image of a king arising from his throne or bridal chamber is a paraphrase of Psalm XVIII.6: ‘In [the heavens], He has set a tabernacle for the sun, which is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber’.Footnote 128 Wallis concludes: ‘if Byrhtferth is behind this image, we have to take on board his reference to Psalm [XVIII], where the sun – the bridegroom coming from his chamber – is God’s tabernacle. To put it another way, the king with the cup may be God himself, at once hidden and revealed under the figura of the sun’.Footnote 129 Wallis is principally concerned with how a straightforward set of computistical data could be reformulated to gesture towards the hidden presence of God, rather than focusing on the importance of the Tabernacle-Temple as a cosmographical figure in its own right. But these repeated references to the Tabernacle-Temple suggest that Byrhtferth was concerned with it as the organising principle of the cosmos. Interestingly, Psalm XVIII was also used by Byrhtferth to describe how the heavens are filled with the apostles and prophets proclaiming God’s glory. This particularly cosmographical psalm may be a source of Byrhtferth’s understanding of the created universe.
Returning to the Alea celi diagram, it is hard to identify any obvious microcosmic elements, as there is no equivalent to the four stages of the life of man or the ADAM directions. But a comment in Byrhtferth’s Vita S. Ecgwini illustrates how he understood the number twelve to relate to the human soul:
Nactus potestatem prioris dignitatis, fulgebat in eo diuini feruor amoris qui eum diuinis coniungebat mysteriis, ut simul in eo cernere posses et bis senorum lapidum gloriam rutilantem et beatorum apostolorum ineffabilem traditionem. Sic ‘ex auro, hiacincto purpuraque, bis tincto cocco siue uermiculo cum bisso retorto fulgescere’ [cf. Ex. XXV.3–5] fecit acta bona sue castissime anime, ut digna fieret esse allecta in celesti curia.Footnote 130
The adornment of the saint’s soul is a direct reference to the garments of the tabernacle’s High Priest, who wears multicoloured robes and a breastplate embedded with twelve stones. These are put on as part of the ritual of purity necessary to enter the tabernacle. In Byrhtferth’s example, the twelve jewels decorate Ecgwine’s inner being, rather than being worn externally (a parallel to the distinction between the inner arcae of monks and the outwardly worn phylacteries of the Pharisees, discussed above). Byrhtferth also used contemporary vestments as symbols of the soul adorned through virtues. In his account of the death of Oswald, he quotes from the benedictional prayers on the archepiscopal pallium rite: ‘Adpropinquat hora ut “honor pallii terrene uite sit ornamentum anime tue; et unde aduenit fastigium uisibile, inde crescat et maneat tue inuisibilis honor anime”’.Footnote 131 In his understanding of internalised priestly vestments, Byrhtferth might have been drawing on either Gregory’s Regula pastoralis or Bede’s De tabernaculo, both of which interpret the vestments as symbolic of priestly meditation and virtues. Gregory’s analysis is particularly relevant:
Apud semetipsos ergo quantum debeant mundari conspiciunt, qui ad aeternitatis templum uasa uiuentia in sinu propriae sponsionis portant […] In quo etiam rationali uigilanter adiungitur, ut duodecim patriarcharum nomina describantur. Adscriptos etenim patres semper in pectore ferre est antiquorum uitam sine intermissione cogitare […]Footnote 132
These examples of priestly vestments being used exegetically brings us back to Wallis’ discussion of the Alea celi diagram (quoted above), where she argues that the variegated colours and twelvefold design are suggestive of the High Priest’s breastplate, containing lots used for divination (the Urim and Thummim).Footnote 133 Under the New Covenant, the process of interpreting God’s will becomes a meditative ‘game’; instead of relying on lots, the priests must purify and decorate their souls through exegetical study and meditation. Through this practice, they convert it into a microcosmic Tabernacle-Temple, drawing themselves closer to the macrocosm of heaven.Footnote 134 Ecgwine’s soul shines with jewels and variegated colours indicating that, like a High Priest, he has been deemed worthy to enter the heavenly Tabernacle-Temple.
There is a final comparable example in the Vita S. Oswaldi, where Byrhtferth used similar imagery to describe the reward of the pure soul in heaven. He records that when St Oswald visited Fleury, he blessed the monks for their observance of the Rule and proclaimed: ‘quatinus cum tanto patrono fulgere ualeatis ceu bis seni lapides in astris, super quibus residet alto solio Sapientia pollens’.Footnote 135 The first part of this statement, about the monks gleaming like the twelve jewels in the stars, is reminiscent of the microcosmic description of St Ecgwine’s jewel-studded soul. The second part of the sentence introduces the new concept of Wisdom sitting enthroned above the twelvefold stars. Lapidge suggests that this image is derived from the enthronement of Christ in Revelation XX.11.Footnote 136 However, the final section of Prudentius’ Psychomachia provides a more immediate parallel, with a description of the enthronement of Wisdom in a temple of the human soul. Prudentius explicitly linked this throne of Wisdom to the temple of Solomon and the throne of Christ (who is the ‘wisdom of God’ in 1 Cor. I.24).Footnote 137 Byrhtferth was certainly familiar with the Psychomachia, which was a favourite source for quotation and inspired his allegory of a spiritual battle Babylon in the Vita S. Ecgwini. Footnote 138 He may also have been familiar with an illustrated version of the text, which circulated widely in Anglo-Saxon England.Footnote 139 In the Psychomachia, the Virtues build a temple and embed its walls with twelve gemstones and twelve doors.Footnote 140 It is described as a microcosm of the human soul, because the Holy Spirit enters through the twelve apostolic doors and into the human heart throughout the four stages of man’s life.Footnote 141 The Virtues also build an inner chamber with seven pillars, where Wisdom is enthroned among the star-like jewels, like the seven pillars of the house of Wisdom in Proverbs IX.1.Footnote 142 The enthronement of Wisdom above the jewels of human souls in the Vita S. Oswaldi is strikingly reminiscent of the imagery of the Psychomachia, reminding monks to make a Tabernacle-Temple of their own souls. Like the number four, twelve links the microcosmic soul and the macrocosmic heavens, demonstrating how to see God’s throne and enter into the Tabernacle-Temple through transforming one’s soul into a temple of Wisdom.
Conclusions
Read in isolation, Byrhtferth of Ramsey’s invitation to imagine Bede in Moses’ tabernacle is enigmatic. The obscure language conveys some significant but difficult-to-express ideas about monastic education and the underlying design of the cosmos. This peculiar scene is vital to how we think about the Benedictine classroom and cosmography, given that Byrhtferth is now recognised as one of the most prolific and significant writers of the English monastic reform.Footnote 143 Unfortunately, the defective line and the use of rare and esoteric diction in the passage obscure its meaning, so that the intended purpose of picturing Bede in a tabernacle is lost. Perhaps Byrhtferth would have explained it to his students in person, clarifying exactly how he intended them to contemplate Bede’s role in teaching the saltus lunae. While we cannot listen in on his classroom, Byrhtferth’s mind was obsessive and his interests were idiosyncratic. It has therefore been possible to reconstruct his ideas about the cosmos from reading his Enchiridion alongside his other writings, notably the Epilogus and the Computus diagrams.
Taking together Byrhtferth’s depiction of Bede in the saltus lunae lesson and the Epilogus, Bede emerges as his foremost authority on computus and knowledge concerning God (i.e. theology). Although Byrhtferth pre-dated the foundation of Bede’s cult by more than half a century, he nevertheless called Bede beatissimus (‘most blessed’), reuerentissimus (‘most reverend’), sacer (‘holy’), and uenerandus (‘venerable’) in Latin, and eadig (‘blessed’) and æglæca (‘awe-inspiring’) in vernacular prose. The Epilogus and the Enchiridion also depict Bede as passing his afterlife in heaven. He is to be imagined in Moyses geteldgehliwung, no longer the historical tabernacle, but an anagogical figure of the throne of God, the place where the ‘pure of heart’ (Matt. V.8) go to ‘see the God of God in Sion’ (Ps. LXXXIII.8) in perpetual theophany. Although a cult of Bede had not yet emerged, the writing of the Epilogus occurred within a few decades of the appearance of the first calendar entries for Bede’s feast in the 1020s and 30s, suggesting that Bede was beginning to be seen as a holy man worthy of veneration. His disciplined monastic life and his role as teacher of the English made him an exceptionally important exemplar for young monks to emulate (‘Anglis uero suis depromsit sectandam glorię sempiternatitis uiam’).Footnote 144 This was significant because many reformers were interested in finding precedents and a spiritual genealogy in the teachers of the monasticised Church in the seventh and eighth centuries, as described in the Historia ecclesiastica. Footnote 145 Bede’s life, as related in the Epilogus, illustrates how young monks ought to spend their lives in ‘reading, teaching, or meditating’, so that they might achieve theophany in heaven.
By imagining Bede in a Tabernacle-Temple, Byrhtferth typologically linked him to the biblical mediators of sacred information. The Tabernacle-Temple is an earthly shadow of the heavens built by Moses, the divine dwelling place on earth, the body of Christ, and the throne of God in heaven. Through it, Bede communicates divine mysteries to mankind in the form of computistical theology, so that his students might spiritually discern the invisible, divine order of the harmonious cosmos. By retreating into the Tabernacle-Temple with Bede’s De temporum ratione, students might meditate on the manifold meanings of his writings. The saltus lunae lesson is therefore a very early example of the figure of the Tabernacle-Temple used as a ‘machine of meditation’, a figure designed to produce new exegetical interpretations through frequent retreat and contemplation. I have argued here that this type of figurative meditation on the ordered cosmos was a feature of Byrhtferth’s pedagogy, and can also be seen in his computistical diagrams. It is widely understood that many of his diagrams were intended to proclaim God as the prime mover of the universe by placing a referent to either God or Christ at their centres, and illustrating the numerologically divine order of the universe.Footnote 146 Some of these diagrams contain encoded allusions to the Tabernacle-Temple as the throne of Christ in maiestas Domini over the four-cornered microcosm of man’s earthly body and the macrocosm of the heavens. By engaging in contemplative study of these mysteries, expressed in the diagrams, the viewer might transform their own souls into a microcosmic Tabernacle-Temple (also visualised as a bejewelled breastplate or throne of Wisdom) through which they might join the saints in eternal theophany. In meditatively deciphering the underlying structure of the diagrams, the student is called on to perceive the organising principle of God in the Tabernacle-Temple throughout the entirety of time and space.
The point of Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion and Computus was to teach young monks to ‘see’ God at work in the cosmos, through computistical study and disciplined meditation. Given that the Enchiridion is overtly pedagogical, and claims to use the vernacular to facilitate learning, it is puzzling that Byrhtferth should have indulged in hidden references, numerological codes, and ciphers. Only a well-trained monk, learned in the interpretation of scripture, the writings of the Church Fathers, the computus, and exegesis, would have been able to approach the type of understanding necessary to unravel these divine mysteries. This perhaps speaks to the Enchiridion’s role in the classroom, reifying the distinctions between monks and clerics through language-switching, and making only the most necessary computistical information available in the vernacular (the numerological section is entirely in Latin, presumably accessible only to monks).Footnote 147 He seems to obscure the most important, sacred information in almost impenetrable codes and diagrams, gatekeeping it from clerics and perhaps reserving it only to himself and a select few monks.Footnote 148 The use of codes and riddles may also have been part of the process of training monks to understand the spiritual dimension of the world, teaching them from a young age to read textual and visual signs exegetically.Footnote 149 The monastic vocation required that they read and meditate constantly, avoiding interpretative error and discerning the invisible presence of God. As Wallis puts it, ‘riddles and puzzles train the student to interpret the obscurities of scripture, where truth is veiled from the eyes of the unworthy beneath hard sayings and obscure symbols’.Footnote 150 Stephen Harris’ work on ciphers in Anglo-Saxon England explains why this ‘truth’ had to be hidden in ‘obscure symbols’:
An interest in secrecy and ciphers also corresponds to a larger interest in the complexity of revealed creation […] The Ptolemaic, neo-Platonic universe of concentric spheres which medieval and Renaissance writers inhabited was literally a sphere of seriated moral spaces. The moral space of secrecy is not earth-bound, but a higher sphere located above the multiplicity of earthly life and closer to divine unity. The ‘divine mystery’ which pertains to secrecy comprises a kind of knowledge, an inspired ability to read and to understand the fallen languages of man.Footnote 151
The Tabernacle-Temple is an encoded mystery, in part to conceal it from the ignorant, but also because God can only be seen through contemplative exegesis. The art of deciphering through meditation could offer understanding of the divine, and ultimately eternal theophany in heaven. The Tabernacle-Temple as an expression of micro- and macrocosmic Creation is a kind of secret knowledge that must be encoded, exegetically unpuzzled, and meditatively stored in the arca of the heart. To lay it bare in plain language would be to remove it from the sphere of the divine.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Anthony Harris for providing access to his doctoral work and for discussing aspects of Byrhtferth’s pedagogy with me. Thanks are also due to my PhD supervisor, Rory Naismith, for his guidance, to Davide Salmoiraghi, Alexandra Zhirnova, and the reviewers of Early Medieval England and its Neighbours for insightful comments on versions of this article. Any errors remain my own.
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