Samantha Zacher - Preaching the Converted: The Style and Rhetoric of the Vercelli Book Homilies

PREACHING THE CONVERTED: THE STYLE AND RHETORIC OF THE VERCELLI BOOK HOMILIES

SAMANTHA ZACHER

University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2009

Toronto Buffalo London

Printed in Canada

ISBN 978-0-8020-9158-1

Printed on acid-free paper

Toronto Anglo-Saxon Series

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Zacher, Samantha, 1973

Preaching the converted : the style and rhetoric of the Vercelli Book Homilies / Samantha Zacher.

(Toronto Anglo-Saxon series ; 1)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8020-9158-1

1. English prose literature Old English, ca. 4501100 Criticism, Textual.
2. Sermons, English (Old) Criticism, Textual. I. Title. II. Series: Toronto
Anglo-Saxon series ; 1

PR1495.Z33 2009 829.8009 C2008-907491-2

The author and publisher greatly acknowledge a subvention granted by the Hull Memorial Publication Fund of Cornell University.

University of Toronto Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, in the publication of this book.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

For my Mother and Father,
Linda and Morris

This project on the Vercelli homilies has come a long way since I first began it in my PhD dissertation at the University of Toronto. I am still inestimably grateful to the members of my thesis committee, Andy Orchard, Toni Healey, and David Townsend, who not only gave me tremendous advice and professional encouragement during the time I worked on this project at the University of Toronto, but who continued to be supportive as the book came to fruition. I likewise thank Toni Healey, whose exquisite class on the Vercelli Book first inspired my interest in the subject, Roberta Frank, who supervised me in the early months of my dissertation research, and, at the project for the Dictionary of Old English, Joan Holland and David and Ian McDougall, who over the years provided me with important references and always stimulating leads.

As the book has nearly doubled in length since I first wrote the dissertation, so has my gratitude and indebtedness to those scholars who have given me advice and suggestions along the way. I am especially grateful to Mark Amodio, Andy Orchard, Tom Hall, Tom Hill, Paul Remley, Jane Roberts, Don Scragg, and Charlie Wright for their meticulous readings of my work. Their contributions have improved it immensely. I also wish to thank those scholars with whom Ive had especially provocative discussions about the Vercelli Book (all of whom are excellent Anglo-Saxonists in their own right), especially Anthony Adams, Sarah Downey, Damian Fleming, Mike Fox, Steve Harris, Aaron Kleist, Patrick McBrine, Robin Norris, Andy Scheil, Manish Sharma, and Emily Thornbury. In the same breath, I mention a few of the long list of mentors, teachers, and friends at both Vassar College and Cornell University who have been supportive. I thank here especially Mark Amodio, Robert DeMaria, and Ken Weedin at Vassar College, who first inspired me to conduct my graduate work in the field of Old English literature, and with whom I returned to teach at Vassar College for three wonderful years. Since coming to Cornell I have found new fonts of inspiration. I include here the stellar medieval faculty, especially Andy Galloway, Tom Hill, Masha Raskolnikov, and Will Sayers, who have all made helpful contributions. My thanks also go to Laura Brown and Molly Hite, who have been vital mentors, and to my colleagues Peter Gilgen, Jenny Mann, Rayna Kalas, and Lyrae Van CliefStefanon, who have been especially encouraging. I also draw deep and constant inspiration from my engagement with my graduate students at Cornell, who have taken classes with me on a variety of Old English subjects (including the Vercelli Book), and whose insightful comments and questions have taught me a great deal. I give special thanks to Matt Spears for providing the indexes for this book, and to Katie Compton, Danielle Cudmore, Will Rogers, and Danielle Wu for their enthusiastic support.

Of course my deepest personal gratitude is to my parents, and so the book is properly dedicated to them. They have been supportive of all of my scholarly endeavours, and have sustained me with their love when the pressure was immense. I am also deeply grateful to my sister Rebecca, and to Venus, who provided frofor for many years.

The book is also devoted, in a less formal way, to Donald G. Scragg, Paul E. Szarmach, and amonn Carragin, whose work on the Vercelli Book has been indispensable to me. I could not have undertaken this project without the excellent editions produced by Don and Paul, and I am grateful for the insights I gleaned from reading amonns doctoral dissertation on the Vercelli homilies. I also include in this dedication Andy Orchard, whose genius with respect to Old English literature has been a constant source of inspiration to me. I am utterly grateful for his careful and tireless reading of multiple drafts of the book, and other articles. Even now, several years away from the dissertation, I cannot express my gratitude sufficiently.

I am likewise appreciative to have received several academic grants and opportunities that made research for this book possible and sustainable. I include here the Research Travel Grant awarded by the University of Toronto, which allowed me to consult the Vercelli Book in Italy for the first time (in July 2002), and also the extremely generous Affinito-Stewart Grant, awarded by Cornell University, which permitted me to return to Italy for extended vital research on the manuscript (in September 2006). I also benefited greatly from my participation in the NEH Summer Institute Anglo-Saxon England, run by Paul E. Szarmach in Cambridge, England (July 2004), which not only allowed me to think more deeply about the wider contexts for my project, but also to spend magnificent hours in the Corpus Christi Library at Cambridge researching MS CCCC 201. Finally, I wish to thank Suzanne Rancourt, Barbara Porter, and John St James at University of Toronto Press for their hard work on this project.

The power of preaching is a theme expressed constantly in the writings that survive from the Anglo-Saxon period. One of the earliest and most memorable pieces of Christian exhortation apparently spoken by an Englishman in the Anglo-Saxon period is found in Bedes account of King Edwins conversion to Christianity in AD 627. In this well-known narrative, composed in 731 (a full century after the event), the king is said to remain in the darkness of his disbelief until an inspired (and presumably pagan) member of his group of counsellors, the so-called