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Article Excerpt
The romance of Apollonius of Tyre was "throughout the Middle Ages, one of the most frequently copied and translated romances of all those which are thought to have originated in the Hellenistic world of the second- and third-centuries A.D. " (1) The earliest extant version of the legend, entitled Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri, was written in Latin prose. This Latin version "strongly suggests that the work was originally composed in Greek," with some later, Latin, innovations, resulting in an amalgamation of Greek and Latin elements. (2) An Old English prose translation of the romance exists in fragmentary form (although it was presumably originally complete) in a sole manuscript dating from the mid-eleventh century: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 201 (henceforth MS 201). The Old English version found in MS 201 is the oldest extant vernacular translation of the Historia Apollonii, (3) and is, according to Clare Lees, "the first heterosexual love narrative in English." (4) It should be noted, however, that it seems likely that the translation of Apollonius in MS 201 was copied from another, now lost, Old English version. (5) Moreover, Archibald notes that "at least one other Old English text is known to have existed, whether or not it was the same version [as in MS 201]. The catalogue of the Benedictine Abbey at Burton-on-Trent [Staffordshire], written about 1175, records number 75, 'Apollonium anglice.'" (6)
MS 201, in which the Old English Apollonius is now uniquely extant, is a composite manuscript consisting of two distinct parts, which were bound together in the sixteenth century, probably by (or for) Matthew Parker: (7) part 1 (pages 1-178) is the focus of this article; part 2 (pages 179-272) is "quite unrelated" to part 1, and was written in Latin and Old English at Exeter (s. xi med). (8) Part 2 was formerly bound with Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MSS 191 and 196, and principally contains the Capitula of Theodulf (of Orleans) in Latin and Old English translation. (9) The provenance of part 1 is uncertain (possibly written at Worcester, York, Canterbury, Winchester, or at a combination of houses). (10) The extant evidence to determine part l's provenance is far from conclusive. (11)
MS 201 has received quite some critical attention, particularly in recent times. For example, the incomplete Old English translation of the Regularis Concordia which opens MS 201 is partially adapted for a female audience, and this peculiarity has occasioned comment, especially from Joyce Hill. (12) For the most part, however, this attention has been stimulated because MS 201 records a considerable amount of Wulfstanian material. (13) A large proportion of the works written by, ascribed to, or associated with Wulfstan is extant in MS 201, and most of these are found after the Regularis Concordia between quires 1 and 11. As Whitelock notes of this Wulfstanian portion, "while it does not always give the best text of the works it contains, it has Wulfstan material that survives in no other manuscript." (14) The manuscript includes many of Wulfstan's homilies, as well as anonymous homilies written in Wulfstanian style. It also includes pastoral letters (including Wulfstan's revised version of AElfric's Pastoral Letter to him); a number of law codes (of AEthelraed and Cnut, interwoven with the non-Wulfstanian codes of Eadgar, Eadmund and AEthelstan); selections from his Institutes of Polity; the Northumbrian Priests' Law (although Wulfstan's authorship of this text is contested) ; his Canons of Edgar, and the prose sections from his Old English translation of the so-called "Benedictine Office." (15)
MS 201 is also of interest because it contains the longest (although not original) example of the so-called "Late Old English Handbook for the Use of a Confessor" (henceforth "Handbook"), which follows on from the Wulfstanian material. The "Handbook" is one of the few examples of Anglo-Saxon vernacular penitential literature, and MS 201 contains it as well as other penitential and confessional texts. (16) Following the "Handbook" are items on the "Saints of England" and their "Resting Places," and an Old English translation of the Old Testament story of Joseph, Genesis 37.1-48.18. Daniel Anlezark has found interest in this Joseph fragment, and its relationship to its manuscript context. (17)
MS 201 then contains five Old English poems. Graham Caie has been particularly attentive to the trio of verses Judgement Day II, Exhortation to Christian Living, and Summons to Prayer, which, he has convincingly and repeatedly argued by detailed reference to their manuscript context, are in fact one poem which is penitential in subject. (18) James Ure and Leslie Whitbread, among others, have been preoccupied with the two poems, Lord's Prayer II and Gloria I, and their relationship, or not, to the prose Old English "Benedictine Office," which, as mentioned above, is also found in MS 201. (19) Part 1 of MS 201 ends then with Latin forms of absolution and confession.
Despite this scholarly interest in MS 201, Apollonius of Tyre (which appears on pages 131-45, after the "Handbook" and selections from the law codes I Cnut, II Cnut, VI AEthelraed, and the Institutes of Polity) has received less critical attention than many other of MS 201's texts. The mere handful of secondary literature currently available on the Old English Apollonius is representative of, if not exactly indifference, then at least a certain scholarly reserve in addressing Apollonius. (20) What exists varies in its length and its engagement with the text. Elizabeth Archibald's otherwise comprehensive monograph on the medieval and Renaissance Apollonius tradition has only a smattering of references to the Old English translation. Anita Riedinger's article, on the other hand, engages directly with the Old English translation and the conscious intention of its translator, and she argues that the Old English translator was much more alert to his Latin source text than the text's modern editor, Peter Goolden, supposed. (21) According to Riedinger, the Old English translator manipulated the female character, Arcestrate, to fit the idealized pattern of Anglo-Saxon womanhood. Anlezark has discussed Apollonius peripherally in his chapter on MS 201's Joseph fragment, concluding that both Apollonius and Joseph "would appear to be tales of [the] triumph of good administration, and [the] Scribe [2] may have been interested in making a book on Christian government." (22) David Townsend has examined the Old English Apollonius in terms of the material it offers on constructions of gender and sexuality. Townsend shifts his focus away from the "logic of heterosexual desire" in order "to examine ... a pivotal moment in the homosocial relations that underlie desire between women and men in this text," and his analyses of the homosociality explicit in the text, as well as of the latent "erotic anxieties" lurking between Apollonius and King Arcestrates, are enlightening. (23)
The scholarly reticence to engage with the Old English Apollonius can be, to some degree, put down to an unease with the text in its manuscript context: the questions of what Apollonius is doing in MS 201, and of what its purpose was, are vexed ones. For instance, Patrick Wormald claims that the Old English Apollonius is the most "startling" inclusion in MS 201:
there is no denying the appeal of this saga of true love, conjugal and parental, surmounting incestuous tyranny, envious greed and perverse fortune through ingenuity and positively Pasternakian coincidence.... But what was it doing in a Wulfstanian primer of Christian standards? If broadly edifying in so far as virtue is rewarded and vice finally punished, it is not even obviously Christian. As literature, it may not tend to corrupt, but nor does it do much to instruct. (24)
Wormald concludes that Apollonius "evidently was regarded as exemplary," citing as evidence its inclusion in the libraries of Frankish abbeys, in particular, Cluny, and in the library of Eberhard of Friuli, a marquis whose collection of over fifty books were mostly liturgical, devotional, theological or moralistic. But Wormald does not adduce a reason for why Apollonius was considered appropriate reading, even within the "august portals" of Cluny, beyond that "early medieval monks and nuns would insist on being unsuitably entertained. Apollonius was less shocking than some well-known examples." (25) Archibald, asking whether the Historia Apollonii was ever regarded as an exemplum, follows Raith in arguing that, in relation to the Old English version, "no monk would have dared to translate H[istoria] A[pollonii] had it not been for its exemplary aspects, and the same presumably goes for copying it." Yet her analysis of the Historia Apollonii suggests that it does not fit the pattern of "exemplary romance" or "homiletic romance," and she concludes that there is not a "specific ethical or didactic concern" in the text. (26) Even Anlezark suggests that the Old English Apollonius "comes as something of a surprise given the nature of the material that had gone before," and Townsend's study, although instructive, arguably marginalizes Apollonius from its manuscript context even further. (27) It is difficult to reconcile "the possibility that erotic anxieties might lurk somewhere in the story of the king and the shipwrecked Apollonius bonding at the baths" and the "erotic edginess the bathhouse scene might plausibly have had for an eleventh-century audience," with the manuscript Wormald describes as a "Wulfstanian primer of Christian standards." (28)
Some attempts have been made to account for the inclusion of Apollonius in MS 201. Jennifer Christine Brown has argued that in Apollonius, "writing becomes symbolically and functionally correlated to both temporal and spiritual power," and the inclusion of Apollonius in MS 201 may perhaps be explicable because of its promotion of the text as a locus of wisdom and cultural ideal. (29) In a written manuscript concerned with dictating the values and methods of Christian governance, Brown's observations that Apollonius, on the one hand, thematically and linguistically connects the "spoken word with the misuse of power, the undermining of social order, and the impotence of verbal promises," and, on the other, embodies "wisdom and nobility through literacy," has certain contextual appeal and validity. (30) It may overstate the...
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