In the middle of the twelfth century, a tax collector suddenly sold his property, gave away his money, and began a wandering life of poverty. He eventually founded a religious establishment where young adherents gathered. The former tax collector preached an eschatological and prophetic vision of a coming saving figure, whose religious authority and sacred leadership would derive solely from his holy character. His followers, known as “the strangers,” thought that he himself might be that prophesied figure, and reported that he performed miracles. This poor preacher even seized a city and ruled it for a year, until he was overthrown by a rival political faction. He then sought refuge with a revivalist religious movement seeking restoration of its faith's original purity. But after running afoul of his own followers, he was killed by some of them in 1151.

That former tax collector was Ibn Qasi, a Sufi who once served the Almoravid rulers of Muslim Iberia. The city he ruled in his rebellion was Mertola, in what is now Portugal, in the southwestern corner of the Iberian Peninsula. Ibn Qasi might remind us of Leutard from our last chapter, who after his strange dream of bees told his neighbors that they need no longer pay tithes to the church. He might also recall the heretics described by Heribert of Périgord, who even condemned alms as tainted by their ties to property.

Ibn Qasi's rejection of goods and money also evokes Francis of Assisi (c. 1180 –1226), founder of the Franciscan Order, who abandoned his possessions to serve “Lady Poverty” as a beggar, nakedly following the naked Christ. As German scholar Herbert Grundmann argued in 1937, high-medieval Europe witnessed the emergence of several religious movements that shared a desire to emulate the wandering “apostolic life” of Jesus Christ and the apostles, emphasizing poverty, simplicity, preaching, and evangelism.

Along with The Wife's Lament (Text 40), Wulf and Eadwacer is a rarity in the OE poetic corpus: a secular lyric in a female voice. It is also one of the most enigmatic of poems and has generated intense but largely unresolved argument about its interpretation, for at the simple narrative level it is full of undeveloped allusions and unexplained ambiguities – not least the question of who ‘Wulf’ is and what his relationship with the speaker is, and who ‘Eadwacer’ is and whether he is a separate person at all. In the Exeter Book, the poem immediately precedes a long section of riddles, and some readers have found it useful to see it in the same light, as a deliberate enigma. Only at the more abstract level of theme and tone does the poem become more or less coherent, as a bitter personal reflection on separation and longing, an expression of intense feeling, apparently addressed by the female speaker (her gender confirmed by the feminine form of the adjective reotugu in line 10 [§C3c]) to an absent ‘Wulf’. This has led to a plausible, but not particularly helpful, association of Wulf and Eadwacer with the genre of poems in Germanic literature known as Frauenlieder (‘women's songs’).

In the structure of the poem, there is a sense of both economy and completeness. What is striking, especially in view of the complexity (to us) of its literal meaning, is the comparative simplicity of its syntax. The obscurities do not arise from muddy grammatical relationships, syntactical dislocations or, as far as we can tell, from bad copying; they are in the semantics and the allusive terms of reference. Thus it is likely that the enigmas of the poem are deliberate. Simplicity is especially evident in the first eight lines, with the stark clarity of the discrete half-lines in 4 and 5 formally underlining the theme of separation. This section is given shape by the exact repetition of line 2 in line 7, followed in both cases by the cryptic statement, ungelīc(e) is ūs, meaning (apparently) either ‘it is different for us’ or ‘there is a difference between us’ (see 3n).

The Wanderer is a memorable example of meditation in a lyrical vein, in which universal rules are generated from intense personal experience. Though the context is unequivocally Christian, the poem is striking for the intimate allusions it makes to the conduct and ethos of the secular ‘heroic’ world. These occur notably in the retrospective brooding of the persona of the ‘wanderer’ himself (that being the widely accepted rendering of the word eardstapa in line 6 – literally ‘earth-stepper’ or ‘earth-hopper’), as he mourns separation from his treasure-giving lord, on whose knees he once ceremoniously laid hands and head, and from his boon companions of the mead-hall. It is (or was) a world of ritual, good companionship and human warmth, the memory of which is all the more compelling in contrast with a forlorn present of coldness and isolation.

The Wanderer is a frame poem, which begins and ends with lines of explicit Christian statement – first about the availability of God's mercy, even to the abject exile (1–5), and last about the rewards of faith (112–15). Within this outer frame is another one (6–7 and 111), in which brief ‘stage directions’ are given, introduced by the formula swā cwæþ, ‘thus spoke’ – first, ‘thus spoke the wanderer’, and then, ‘thus spoke the wise man’ (snottor). Enclosed by this double frame is the long central section of the poem (8–110), which, in the simplest interpretation, may be seen as the monologue of the wanderer, in whose reflective voice the poet develops his theme. The monologue itself is structured, moving from personal despair to detached observation. Its integrity is not affected by its closing lines (92–110), in which the wanderer rounds off his own ruminations by invoking the voice of a world-weary ‘everyman’, who has perceived the transience of all people and all things and asks where they have gone, using a literary topos known by the Latin words for ‘where are they?’, ubi sunt, and frequently exploited in homiletic literature.

The main structural problem in the poem involves the question of whether those stage directions of the inner frame (6–7 and 111), which are clearly in the voice of the scene-setting poet, refer backwards or forwards – i.e. to the voice which speaks the outer, Christian, frame or to the voice of the central monologue.

The entry for 755 in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (see 8/headnote) is remarkable for its length. Breaking from the pattern of terse entries restricted to the major events of successive years, it expands into an account of a power struggle lasting almost thirty years between two royal kinsmen for the kingdom of Wessex. The entry is a carefully crafted narrative with a purpose beyond mere record. It has been argued that the piece, the ‘Cynewulf and Cyneheard’ episode, must have derived from a preexisting source outside the Chronicle, perhaps a poem or an oral tradition; it has been claimed also that the style has something in common with that of the Icelandic sagas, though there is little to support this. Lexical evidence in fact associates the writer of this annal with the one who put together the entries for the 870s. After the episode, the Chronicle returns to 756 and resumes with a more typical assortment of short annals.

The style of the episode, with its paratactic syntax (mostly short sentences joined by ‘and’), is breathless. It can be confusing, too, as the result of the swift alternation of subjects, which often leaves the reader doubtful about the referents of ‘he’ and ‘they’. The copyist of the ‘Parker Chronicle’ (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 173), the version used for the text below, seems to have become confused himself at one point, writing plural cȳðdon instead of the correct singular cȳðde (24). Below, the subjects of pronouns are indicated by glosses where confusion is likely.

After allusion to the events which saw Cynewulf take the throne of Wessex from Sigebyrht, thus fomenting future trouble from the latter's brother, Cyneheard, the narrative is largely taken up with events towards the end of the thirty-year period covered. Two armed encounters are presented, with clearly parallel features. First, a small group of King Cynewulf's men, caught off-guard in an attack on their stronghold by Prince Cyneheard, are offered safety and reward if they will desert their king; they choose not to do so and die fighting.

There are some sixty vernacular documents of varying length which may loosely be described as Anglo-Saxon ‘wills’. They were made by kings and ecclesiastics as well as laymen and laywomen. The beneficiaries may be family and friends when personal effects are involved, but in the case of land, it is the church or monastery which usually benefits. Because such institutions needed to maintain a record of dispositions, to guard against possible litigation over their property, many wills survive only as copies in ‘cartularies’ – volumes of charters kept by the churches. The ‘Codex Wintoniensis’ (now London, British Library, Additional 15350) is the cartulary of St Swithun's, Winchester, written in the first half of the twelfth century. Among the items there is the will of Ælfgifu.

This woman has not been positively identified, but she was probably of royal descent and it has been conjectured that she was married to (but then divorced from) King Eadwig (957–9). Her will can be dated between 966 and 975 for two main reasons. First, she makes a bequest to Romsey Abbey in Hampshire, and this is likely to have been after the old foundation was re-established by King Edgar in 967. Second, the Liber Eliensis – ‘Book of Ely’, a twelfth-century compilation treating the history of Ely Abbey in Cambridgeshire – tells us that Edgar gave to Ely the estate at Meassewyrthe, which Ælfgifu, as she says (lines 13–15), left to him at her death; in other words, she must have died before Edgar.

Although Anglo-Saxon wills are the predecessors of the modern ‘last will and testament’, they are not documents which formally effect the transfer of bequests; they are more like written memoranda of the declared intention to make such transfer. Their oral character (attested by the use of cwydes in line 2) reflects their origin in Germanic legal practice.

The extant copy of Ælfgifu's will is full of unusual spellings, though it is not clear how many are original and how many due to the idiosyncrasies of its late copyist. The most prevalent is æ for e, whether medial or terminal, long or short (Ælfgyfæ, 1, Godæs, 2, þǣ, 3 and 26, pæniga, 28, and so on), and in fact, if this is ignored, the language is fairly conventional late WS.

The Durham Proverbs are so called because they are found in a manuscript now in the library of Durham Cathedral. In one of the curious juxtapositions which characterise the preservation of OE literature, they were copied, by a none too skilful scribe, onto five blank pages between a collection of hymns and a series of liturgical canticles. These hymns and canticles are in Latin, but with an OE gloss, and they seem to have been copied out in the second quarter of the eleventh century, with the proverbs being added a little later. The manuscript was made at Canterbury, and a second part contains a copy of Ælfric's grammatical work, his Excerptiones (see p. 400). Two of the proverbs (nos. 37 and 39) appear also as additions to a mid-eleventh-century Latin psalter (London, British Library, Royal 2. B. v) and two (nos. 14 and 42) are included in the thirteenth-century Middle English collection of the Proverbs of Hendyng.

There is one other major set of proverbs in OE (surviving in three manuscripts), a version of the Disticha Catonis (the ‘Dicts of Cato’), a third-century collection of wise sayings in Latin which enjoyed great popularity throughout the Middle Ages; it was widely used as a class-text in the monastic schools of Anglo-Saxon England. The only connection between these and the Durham Proverbs is the occurrence of the first of the latter as part of dict no. 23 (see 1n, below).

The forty-six OE proverbs in the Durham collection are all accompanied by Latin versions, but these derive from no known source. It is indeed not certain that the Latin versions came first and scholars have been tempted to see the collection as an original vernacular work, a native English collection of proverbs which someone then tried to put into Latin. The uneven and in places incomprehensible nature of the latter might suggest that it was supplied by a novice monk attempting the translation as a learning exercise. However, comprehension problems occur in the OE versions of the Durham Proverbs, too, and there are several cases (such as no. 16) where we have to turn to the Latin to make sense of the OE. The relationship between the English and Latin versions thus remains unclear.

INTRODUCTION

A long-standing precept in the field of translation is that translators should have solid, native or native-like proficiency in their languages. Also related to this idea is the belief that once in possession of the necessary linguistic proficiency, reading ability will follow. As a result, reading has received limited attention in translation studies. In this book, we devote an entire chapter to reading, (i) to highlight the significance of reading for translation and translation practice, (ii) to provide the readers of this book with some basic concepts about reading processes and (iii) to guide them in using this knowledge toward a more complete understanding of translation.

If considered at all, reading in translation has been traditionally conceptualized as a language-decoding process. However, current research in language and reading tell us that a text is not a static object and that reading comprehension is a much more complex activity than a “simple” decoding activity. The misguided belief that reading is decoding and that there is an objective meaning hidden in the text has in turn facilitated the view that translation consists of recoding the decoded meaning into another language, namely, reproducing the objective meaning present in the source text. By providing a more accurate notion of reading, this chapter also presents a more accurate view of translation.

This chapter summarizes what reading as an interactive process means for the practice of the translator, including concepts such as background knowledge and its relation to specialized texts, new and old information, word meaning as activation of a potential meaning within a particular text and the translator as a reader.

Reading comprehension: An interactive process

Top-down and bottom-up models of reading comprehension

In a bottom-up model of comprehension, reading proceeds from smaller units on to larger ones: from letters, to words, to sentences, to paragraphs and texts. It is a serial process that moves up from part to whole.

One of the works which Ælfric probably composed in the first instance to meet his own needs as a teacher in the monastic school at Cerne Abbas (see p. 40) is the Excerptiones de arte grammatica anglice (‘Extracts on Grammar in English’). It is a schoolboys’ Latin grammar-book, written at a fairly elementary level and intended, as Ælfric explains in the preface (given below), to make Latin accessible to boys at an early stage in their monastic careers. These boys, known as ‘oblates’ or ‘novices’ (who in many cases, like Ælfric himself, would have been placed in a monastery at the age of about seven), had to learn not only to read and write but also to speak Latin. From the start, they had to participate in the Divine Office, the series of services performed daily in Latin in the monastic church according to a strict timetable set out in the Rule of St Benedict (see 1/headnote). They were expected to learn by heart the psalter (with its one hundred and fifty psalms) and hymnal (dozens of hymns and chants regularly used in the liturgy), and in the classroom they would have to progress eventually to the texts which constituted the standard medieval curriculum, covering subjects such as rhetoric and dialectic, and grammar itself.

Well-known grammars such as the Ars minor of Donatus had long been adapted for the use of English-speaking learners, but they were still written in Latin. Ælfric's Excerptiones – based primarily on an abridgement of the work of another sixth-century Latin grammarian, Priscian – was the first to be written in English (or indeed in any other European vernacular). The widespread and continuing use of the work is confirmed by the preservation of copies of it in thirteen manuscripts, the last made as late as the thirteenth century. Appended to seven copies is a Glossary, a list of Latin words with OE equivalents which we assume was also compiled by Ælfric; it contains several hundred words, arranged not alphabetically but according to topic.

For his Excerptiones, Ælfric needed a set of English grammatical terms to represent the latinate ones. Most were created (by Ælfric himself or predecessors) by literal translation. Thus, infinitiuus (Latin for the ‘infinitive’ form of the verb) became ungeendigendlic (‘unending’) and accusatiuus (the accusative or object case) was wregendlic (from wregan ‘to accuse’ or ‘impeach’).

As part of his efforts to revive education in England (see p. 38), King Alfred (871–99) distributed copies of a translation of Gregory the Great's Cura pastoralis, a handbook for priests, to churches throughout his kingdom (which now extended beyond Wessex to include Mercia). The letter which he wrote to accompany these manuscripts has become a keystone in our study of the intellectual history of England in the late ninth century. It acts as a sort of general preface, presenting first the king's stark – some would say overstated and ideologically driven – view of the dire state of ecclesiastical (i.e. Latin) learning at this time.

Alfred notes that in days gone by learning and piety went hand in hand and books were even exported abroad (a clear reference to the time of Bede in Northumbria during the first decades of the eighth century). Now, however, few people can read English, let alone Latin. Alfred implicitly links this decline to a neglect of Christian duty by the English and consequent divine punishment in the form of devastation by Viking attacks. Before the knowledge of Latin had declined, no one had thought of making vernacular translations, but now Alfred has embarked on a remedial programme of translation which will make available to the people of England a selection of texts essential for a Christian education. He has assembled a team of learned men from other parts of Britain and the Continent to help with the task. Now it is up to local bishops to organise the learning process using the materials provided. In justifying his ground-breaking experiment – promoting Christian learning by means of vernacular texts – Alfred analyses the history of translation from the sacred languages and shows it to have been a logical and justifiable process. For him, pedagogy is a sacred duty; wisdom is equated with piety, and piety with spiritual wealth.

Four copies of Alfred's letter are preserved. The text below is based on that in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 20, the version sent with a copy of the Cura pastoralis to Wærferth, bishop of Worcester (873–915), one of the team of helpers whom Alfred gathered round him and who, at Alfred's request, translated into English another work by Gregory, the Dialogi (‘Dialogues’). The manuscript remained in Worcester until the mid-seventeenth century.

Within a few years of Augustine's arrival in Kent in 597 – on a mission which, combined with that of Aidan a few years later in the north, would lead to the Christianisation of most of England by the mid-seventh century – the lawcode of the Kentish king, Æthelberht (d. 616), had been written down in English. One of the priorities of the law-makers (and Augustine himself was presumably involved) was to integrate the needs of the new church within the established legal system, whose origins lay in the Germanic traditions of the Continent. Bede notes with obvious approval, in his Historia ecclesiastica (bk. 2, ch. 5), that the Kentish lawcode opens with an article for the protection of the new religion, especially the property of the church and its officials; thus he corroborates the content of the received text, without citing it directly. From now on this would be a distinctive feature of all the English lawcodes.

Another primary object of Anglo-Saxon law was to formalise and contain the more destructive aspects of the Germanic feud system, whose structure of reciprocal loyalties demanded the exacting of revenge for wrongs done to kin or to associates. Æthelberht's laws, and those of his successors, sought to limit the circumstances under which private revenge might be taken and to set out a sliding scale of compensatory payments, dependent on the status of both the victim and the perpetrator of crime and the circumstances under which it was committed.

Two essential concepts dominate the lawcodes. First, mundbyrd, or simply mund, ‘protection’, which is the right of individuals to peace and security when under the protection of the king, the church, a lord, or even (if you were his employee) a simple freeman; and second, wergeld, literally ‘man-money’ (but, in the absence of a modern equivalent, we use the untranslated OE term today), which is the money, or goods in kind, due to a dead person's kin to compensate for his or her death (see also 7a/22n).

An important development in the formulation of law between the reign of Æthelberht of Kent and that of Alfred of Wessex (871–99) was the association of social order with loyalty to the monarch. It was barely present in Æthelberht's code, but Alfred makes it explicit.

In 1305, when Rabbi Solomon ben Adret advised Jews in Montpellier to impose a ban on studying Greek philosophy, he urged the community to look to Christian heresy inquisitions: “Observe how the Gentiles punish their heretics, even for a single one of such heresies as these men expressed in their books. Why if anyone would dare say that Abraham and Sarah represented form and matter [that is, interpret the Bible as philosophical allegory], they would wrap him up with twigs and burn him into cinders.”

This chapter measures the increasingly high temperature of religious and secular authorities ' response to heresy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It begins with the Albigensian Crusade in 1209 – a papally sponsored war against heresy – and ends circa 1328. That year saw the death of two very different men accused of heresy, the Muslim Ibn Taymiyah and the Christian Meister Eckhart, both of whom had complicated relationships with mysticism, who highlight how “heresy ” depended upon changing circumstances. The notion of God and his believers' hatred for heresy – the violence and punishment they deserved – was a genuinely (if not exclusively) medieval dynamic, commonly visible in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. As in the previous chapter, this helps us to explore how far the persecuting society stretched, how fully it was shared by Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike. While we have repeatedly seen how members of all three religions could associate their internal heresies with the dark influences of rival religions, it's worth pointing out here again that being someone's religious other did not mean being tolerant. Whether majority or minority, Jews, Muslims, and Christians shared a mental landscape of God's punishment, although with real differences in how divine punishment translated into heresy's persecution on the ground. Relatedly, this period introduces some new ways in which these religions, particularly Judaism for Christianity in the West, blurred into heresy.