p. 18 The beginning of vernacular literacy is not necessarily the same as the beginning of a vernacular literary language. Can we be confident that what we consider the earliest written texts in Occitan or Croatian actually are those languages, or are they in a demotic register of what should still be considered Latin or Church Slavonic? That conundrum leads on to the problem familiar to social scientists as the tension between ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ categories: between the categories of the observers, on the one hand, and those of the people under observation on the other… can prompt us to consider other alliances and trajectories than the single-track one of nationally conceived literary history, which takes the existence of a language for granted.”
p. 19 printing “a transformation of the system of literature from one in which the basic unit is the material book to one in which literature is organised around the ideal concept of the authorial work. In a manuscript culture, where a new text of the ‘same’ work is created with each recopying, authors and scribes are co-producers of literature such that it is not obvious why the category of authorship should be restricted to the person who wrote it first.”
“Scandinavia,” Roberta Frank, pp. 12-22
p. 24 “Iceland was settled at some time in the late ninth century by colonists from Norway and the Viking diaspora of the Hebrides, Northern Isles and Ireland, some of whom had already been exposed to Christianity and letters. Throughout the medieval period, the island remained rural and thinly populated, with never more than 50,000 inhabitants. Iceland had no army, king, or town, and remained a more-or-less independent commonwealth until 1262-4. Yet by the end of the 12th century, members of its clerical aristocracy were studying abroad, reading the same textbooks, law collections, and grammars as the rest of Europe. … There were two episcopal sees (with cathedral schools) and perhaps nine or ten monasteries (Benedictine and Augustinian, along with educational centres run by chieftain families. Latin works were soon translated into the vernacular, replicating a European-style textual culture in Norse and granting the mother tongue the official status that Latin held abroad. Forms of literary analysis began to be applied to vernacular compositions. When around 1220 Snorri Sturlison in his Hattatl (‘list of verse forms’) distinguished between the exuberant fornskald (early poet), and the later, metrically regular hofudskald (‘chief (or main) poet), his sensitivity to historical change suggests exposure to the interpretive frameworks of contemporary Latin grammatical and rhetorical treatises. By 1250, a volcanic island on the far edge of the inhabited world had a spacious stall to itself within the larger European literary theatre.”
p. 25 “Codices, like people, have a tendency to burn, drown and wander off. The anonymous late 12th-century Historia Morwegiae, possibly the first Latin historical text written in Norway, survives in a 16th-century Scottish paper manuscript, discovered near Dundee and first published in 1850; a brief excerpt appears in two (late 14th– and early 15th-century) Swedish codices.”
p. 27 In 1263, the Norwegian king Hakon Hakonarson, on his way home from battle, took ill in Orkney. According to his saga, composed ca 1265 by Sturla Portarson, Hakon on his sick bed … asked to be read to from Latin books, but soon found them tiring; he then asked for books in the Norse language to be read to him night and day, first saints’ sagas; and when those ran out, tales of kings from Halfan swarti, and afterwards about all the Norwegian kings, one after another, ending with the saga of Sverrir, his grandfather, raised in the Faroes, a former priest and guerrilla fighter, who claimed to be the illegitimate son of a former ruler. Near midnight, after the reading of Sverris saga had finished, Hakon died. His death may have been unexpected, but the presence of continuous prose texts in Latin and in Norse in a 13th-century cathedral library in Orkney was taken for granted by the writer.”
Irish and Welsh, Barry Lewis,
p. 52 “The task of building a cohort of Latinists forced teachers to consider the facts of the indigenous language, as issues arose such as how to map its case system onto the Latin one or how to convey categories, like the infinitive, which Lirish lacks. If interpretations of Latin text were one gateway, others were religious instructions (eg the Cambrai homily) and the concern of the church for its property rights under the native legal system(cf. the Armagh records… Irish was doubtless for a time a language of the margin. The Armagh pieces conclude with an awkward justification for writing in Irish ‘not because I could not have penned them in the Roman language, but … because of the great number of Irish names. This suggests that the domain of written Irish was not yet clear in the late seventh century, even though quite ambitious texts in the vernacular were already circulating.”
p. 62 2The beginnings of Welsh vernacular language may lie in praise poetry sustained by revised British kingships after the end of Roman rule. But ait it is not conceded that we have textual witnesses to such early material, then our investigation refocuses on a handful of poems from the 9th century onwards, all isolated and hard to contextualise. Either way, a continuous narrative is impossible – or perhaps we should say inadvisable – before ca 1100.”
English, Laura Ashe
p. 69 origins “The first of these, and precociously early, was ‘Englisc’, now known as ‘Old English’, the language brought to the island by Germanic invaders in the 5th century and used (alongside Latin) in writings of various kinds as early as the 7th century. The second, after the hiatus brought about by the Norman Conquest, occurred in the 12th-century re-emergence of what we now call ‘Early Middle English’, a non-standardised rendering of a fast-changing vernacular, dialectally highly variant, in constant textual contact with Latin and French. … in the French poetry of royal and aristocratic courts and patrons; that francophone literature was the majority of England’s literature – of English literature – for at least two centuries to come. But English was everyone’s first language, from within a generation or two of the Conquest, and all those trained to read and write in Latin and French in England also spent much of their daily lives in English. Inevitability, the majority vernacular would come to play a part in the literary scene, and would have done so even had it not possessed the astonishing literaty precedents set by Old English.”
p. 71 “In the two earliest extant manuscripts of the Ecclesiastical History, perhaps copied from the autograph, the lines of what we now know as ‘Caedmon’s Hymn’ have been added to Bede’s text. So it is that ‘English literature’ as opposed to irretrievable oral poetry, begins, with a documented poem in English which is explicitly understood in context to be one example of a thiriving genre.”
p. 83 “Extensive religious prose works appeared in Early Middle English from the first decades of the 13th century. The Ancrene Wisse: a Guide for Ancorites, was written at the request of three ‘sisters’ (whether blood relatives or spiritual siblings) who lived in the extreme self-imposed ascetism of the anchorhold. The author gives them a prescription for not only the ‘outer rule’ of their daily life but the ‘inner rule’ of the pure heart, in a work of complex and entirely current theology which shows its immersion in contemporary Latin and French works (including the romance), while expressing itself in fluent, lively and memorably English prose.”
Spain, Marina S Browlee
p. 90 “The exclusionary model (that the Middle Ages are different) and the mentality that subtends it is at least as old as the Renaissance – which promoted itself as the new age of classical rebirth. The effect … had long-term distorting effects on medieval studies and their perception in the academy – a situation which is finally being rectified”
p. 91 Enrest Robert Curtius with his “infamous characterization of Spain’s ‘cultural belatedness’. “Curtius assumes a uniform ‘Spanish’ vernacular, but this is an unfounded assumption since Arabic entered the peninsula from 711 CE and Hebrew had existed there since Roman times. Iberia was a linguistic crucible that included Latin, Occitan, Catalan, Aragonese, Galician-Portuguese, Arabic and Hebrew – as well as Castilian.”
French, David F Hult
P.112 “French “earliest surviving written text” “That honour (and a literary one at that) goes to the Sequence of Saint Eulalia… of slight length (29 verses) it is also distinctive in its being apparently complete in its narrative of the saint’s martyrdom, ending with a brief prayer to God.”
Greek Panagotis A Agapitos
p. 259 “The hundred years covering the reign of the Komnenian dynasty (1081-1185) represents an important period in Byzantine textual production, with a quantitative rise in public oratory and poetry, the reappearance of fictional texts; the rise in the study of Ancient Greek literature and philosophy, with the production of very different forms of historiographical writings, and experimentation with new and complex performative genres. At a rough guess, about twio-thirds of this textual production is related to the imperial family or to the high officials of state and church.”
Afterword
p. 309 “The Igor Tales features the only personalised female lyric voice of early Rus literature, as Igor’s wife, Iaronslavna, ‘sings her lament on the battlements, addressing the wind, the river Dieper, and the sun”. The poem evokes a semi-sacralised, animistic landscale, alive to the touch and dense with ancient allusiveness; it also maps on to the territory of Kursk, site in 1943 of the greatest and bloodiest tank battle in the history of warfare.”
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