@@@@95.8.3, Wright, Irish Tradition in Old English Literature
Charles D. Wright, <i>The Irish Tradition in Old English Literature</i>.
Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 6. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993.). Pp. xiii + 321.
Reviewed by Allen J. Frantzen -- Loyola University Chicago
It did not take very long, when I began combing book sale
catalogues, to learn to beware the title before the colon. A book (to
fabricate an example) called "Sex and Sin in Medieval Italy" would have
instant appeal, but after the colon came disillusionment: "A
twelfth-century Tuscan marriage contract and its sources." If the title
before the colon promised the world, the words that followed shrank that
world to an example so specific that I could find little in it that
addressed the concerns of my own work.
Charles Wright's book on the Irish tradition in Anglo-Saxon
literature does not have a title after its colon, but, for the best
reasons, it should have been given one. The book appears to undertake a
broad assessment of the Irish influence on Anglo-Saxon culture but is, in
the main, an analysis of the Irish textual affiliations of a single
Vercelli homily. Wright gathers a wealth of information about the sources
of this text but does so at the expense of the larger significance of the
subject. Acknowledging the narrow range of the book by narrowing its
title might have taken away some sheen, but it would have cushioned the
reader's sense of disappointment that this learned book traverses so
little ground. The cautious introduction, which discusses Irish influence
in general terms, gives only minimal attention to the history of this
influence, how it was defined in its early phases, or how it might be
redefined along the lines of more recent interdisciplinary concepts.
Wright uses "Irish influence" to describe "the direct or indirect
transmission of specific themes and rhetorical formulations from Irish or
Hiberno-Latin writings," as opposed to "an infusion of a transcendental
Celtic spirit or <i>mentalite</i>" (p. 11). Explaining that he
differentiates Irish influence from Irish authorship, Wright observes that
his "concern is with the reception and assimilation of characteristically
Irish thematic and stylistic elements in Old English literature," Wright
asserts (p. 18). He then narrows Irish features to numerical motifs and
apocryphal lore, especially that concerning eschatology and cosmology (pp.
21-23).
The word <i>mentalite</i> might convey a bit more than vague
cultural associations; it also evokes the procedures of the Annales
historians, whose contribution to the discussion of cross-cultural
influences would have enriched this study considerably. Apart from his
title, Wright wisely refrains from efforts to represent his study as
anything other than a limited inquiry into textual analysis; there is no
attempt either to explain or to examine the methodological implications of
source study and no acknowledgment of the need to do so. The book speaks
of an era in which the premises of scholarly investigations could pass
unexamined because they were presumably impervious to change, revision, or
criticism outside any but the laws of their own tradition. Even in
Anglo-Saxon studies, as the work of Martin Irvine and Clare Lees, among
others, has now shown, that age is over. Within the Old English-Old Irish
periods, tracing textual traditions across and within cultures is a
process that raises ideological and political issues, both in the texts
and their transmission; within the period of modern scholarship, the study
of these texts and traditions is invested with similar concerns. Wright
makes only brief mention of the romanticism and nationalism evident in the
history of Irish-Anglo-Saxon connections in the early medieval period,
allowing that these impulses have exaggerated the Irish achievement (pp.
4-5, 47-48). He might also have observed that such biases, working in the
other direction, have minimized the Irish achievement and discouraged
inquiry into Irish influence. Such characterizations of Irish influence
as Bernhard Bischoff's "Irish symptoms" and "family resemblances" reveal
the dismissive assumptions that have governed inquiries into this topic.
That language is not exclusive to discussions of Irish sources, of course
(Wright notes references to "Spanish symptoms" by Ludwig Traube and Edmond
Bishop, p. 12, n. 46), but it is, after all, figurative, not analytical,
and it requires scrutiny.
Wright is evenhanded, but he does not always counteract the
prejudice against the standing of the Irish. For example, he quotes
Theodore of Canterbury's condemnation of Irish paschal customs and tonsure
(pp. 39-40) without noting that, in the same penitential, Theodore drew
from Irish sources and, after all, authorized a penitential, a document
that was as odd and distinctively "Irish" in its time as the Irish customs
that were perceived as threats to ecclesiastical unity. It is not only
true that the Irish were, in the main, orthodox in their observances, as
Wright points out; it is also true that authorities in the Anglo-Saxon
church adopted some Irish customs at the same time as they denounced
others. Their double attitude, as I pointed out some time ago, was shared
by Bede (Wright discusses his attitude on pp. 40, 42-43), where
denunciation of the Irish alternates with admiration for their piety.
Wright's book is strong on analysis, weak on synthesis. The book needs
but lacks an integrated overview that categorizes previous claims about
the Irish influence on OE poetry and prose and on Latin sources. Such an
overview would have differentiated the assumptions of the many art
historians, historians, and literary critics who have pursued this topic.
Instead of offering his own historical summary, Wright lists previous
studies without supplying a guide to the preoccupations of scholars as
different as Ludwig Bieler and Walter Goffart. (pp. 2-3, note 5). He
hurries over claims for literary influences in two pages (pp. 9-10),
although the presence of "Old English Literature" in his title would
suggest that a more generous approach were in order. There is no
attention to the impact that genre must have had on the relations between
Irish and Anglo-Saxon sources, and although there are sporadic discussions
of style there is no concentrated attention to that aspect of the problem.
Wright's real interest is the Vercelli text and its affiliations
with Irish materials, and few will quarrel with the details that are very
capably organized here (although many might wish for broader insights into
them). The second chapter offers the most to the generalist
(Anglo-Saxonist or Celticist); it concerns the "enumerative style" in
Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England (an earlier version was published in
<i>Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies </i>18 [1989]). A sizable portion of
this chapter is given to Vercelli homily IX (pp. 88-105). The third
chapter, which discusses the <i>Visio S. Pauli</i> and insular visions of
hell, contains a valuable summary of the state of scholarship on this
important text and its traditions. Wright takes up the well-known
controversy connecting Vercelli IX to Blickling Homily XVI and
<i>Beowulf</i> 1357b-76a and 1408-17a (pp. 116-35). He reconstructs the
source of the Blicking texts; after re-examining the tradition of the
<i>Visio S. Pauli</i>, he argues that the poet was indebted to the latter
rather than to the former. Wright's work with this question is
impressive; he reverses the position taken by Carleton Brown in 1938,
although he draws no conclusion about the possible impact of this
conclusion on the dating of the poem, or its literary milieu. The fourth
chapter, on cosmology and myth in "The Devil's Account of the Next World,"
pairs better with the second chapter's more general, survey-like focus,
than the investigations of chapter three. The fifth chapter relates
Vercelli Homily IX to other Anglo-Saxon texts in relation to the Irish
tradition. The appendix is an edition and translation of the homily based
on Donald Scragg's recent EETS edition.
The architecture of the book, as this summary suggests, is rather
disjointed. Although the Vercelli homily deserves a prominent place in
this study, its dominant role is disappointing. Wright describes the
homily as "an ideal case study of the assimilation of Irish literary forms
and learned traditions by an Anglo-Saxon author." Anticipating objections,
he continues, "The scope of the book, however, is not so narrow as its
focus on a single anonymous homily may suggest. I have chosen this homily
because it exemplifies literary motifs, stylistic features and theological
preoccupations characteristic of much Irish Christian literature and of
certain other Old English texts formed under Irish influence" (p. 10).
The homily exemplifies the subject of Wright's concern, apocrypha, a
well-known preoccupation of the Irish. But is the apocryphal tradition
really <i>the</i> distinctive feature of Irish vernacular or Latin
literature? It appears that this project began with the homily and set
out to identify its Irish affiliations and features. Then the project was
refashioned, and the affiliations and features derived from inquiry into
this text were re-represented as the main elements of "the Irish
tradition," which the homily was used to illustrate (or exemplify). The
homily was not a "test case" for an independent set of ideas about "the
Irish tradition," in other words, but was instead the source of the ideas
said to constitute the "tradition." This procedure seems to me to be a
miscalculation of method that undercuts the promise of the book, although
it lets Wright off the considerable hook of deciding what "the Irish
tradition" would look like if it were drawn from the wide range of
materials and ideas that the phrase implies.
Irish achievement is vast and various, as Wright acknowledges in
the introduction, and hence difficult to describe. It is difficult to see
how the sources and affiliations of a single homily (and a small number
like it) could preclude discussion of this variety and complexity. Even
within the context of religious literature, the importance of contact
between the vernaculars languages, compared to contact between Latin
sources, and the support of manuscript evidence for textual affiliations,
are among the issues that need fuller discussion. Although art-historical
evidence could not easily have been included, current literary assessments
would seem to be affected by it. Without some engagement with these
questions, any concept of "the Irish tradition"--even the ecclesiastical
tradition--is bound to be no more than very preliminary. It would have
been very useful to embody the idea of "the Irish tradition" by
constructing one--that is, by giving an overview of the evidence for Irish
influence on OE literary culture, beginning with the seventh century and
Bede's world, and correlating the broad outlines of that picture (much of
it already available, of course) with a literary history of Ireland at the
same time (again, some of this available). That would have given the
reader interested in something besides apocrypha and the textual
connections of a single strain of the tradition a more useful point of
departure.
Wright's conclusion is modest. He says that further analysis of
the Irish tradition must await better editions and commentary (p. 271).
This is as obviously true today as it was fifty years ago. It has always
been disappointing and frustrating for Anglo-Saxonists who wish to trace
cultural connections between OE and OI literary sources to find, as Wright
remarks (p. 11), how much Irish material remains unedited since the
appearance of James F. Kenney's work on <i>The Sources for the Early
History of Ireland: Ecclesiastical</i> (1929; a rare misprint on p. 11
gives the date as 1926, but the entry in the bibliography, p. 299, is
correct). Kenney's survey was extensive but not complete, and although
some great work has been done in the area since, no comprehensive attempt
to recover the records of early Irish ecclesiastical history has been
made. Many Celticists pursue only the secular side of the vernacular
texts, and only a few scholars--Patrick P. O'Neill, Richard Sharpe,
Patrick Sims-Williams, and Wright among them--work with ecclesiastical
texts and traditions. That is a short and incomplete list of experts, but
also a formidable one. Let us hope that one of these writers will take up
a broader study of the Irish tradition and its Anglo-Saxon reflexes that
addresses the variety and range of the evidence, the needs of scholars
working generally in both areas, and the relevance of new developments in
cultural and literary history to their comparative endeavors.
In part my expectations of this book were created by the series in
which appears, and two books in particular, Mary Clayton's <i>The Cult of
the Virgin Mary in Anglo-Saxon England</i> (1990) and Sims-Williams'
<i>Religion and Literature in Western England, 600-800</i> (1990). Both
books outline traditions at the same time as they deal with specific
texts. Both are as methodologically unself-conscious as Wright's book,
but both seem more rewarding to me. A book similar to either of them--the
book suggested by Wright's title--would have been an exciting contribution
to Irish and to Anglo-Saxon studies. Wright's book is a fine one,
informative and clear. Those interested in the subject of apocrypha in
Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England will find it especially valuable. Those
whose interest spans "the Irish tradition in Anglo-Saxon literature" can
hope that the next book in the area, building on Wright's and other
studies like it, will approach the topic more generously.