Tuesday, August 01, 2006

More Aelfric

Its all Aelfric, all the time. Right now I'm up to my neck in the hexameral tradition. Something I didn't know though, and may still be wrong on, is that Anglo-Saxon England seems the first place where we find a single, connected NARRATIVE about Creation, Fall of the Angels, Creation and Fall of Man etc...all these are talked about in several places in patristic and early medieval exegesis and so on, but not all in one place, and certainly not as a narrative that I've been able to discover so far.

I'm working on the question of Aelfric's dependence on the tradition and finding that while he is quite orthodox, he isn't dependent on a lot of sources that one would expect.

1 comment:

Derek the Ænglican said...

You may well be right. I can't think of any others if narrative is a requirmenet. Martin of Braga's is the clost I can think of but I haven't read Pirmin.

btw, what do you think of Jerome's first letter to Paulinus of Nola?