Introduction

Summary

The Title

Ever since Hickes, the poem has generally been called the Menologium, although many modern scholars have regarded this as inappropriate. Dobbie, for instance, regards it as ‘not quite appropriate’, Hart ‘not wholly appropriate’ and Henel ‘nicht recht passend’. Baker also says that the poem is ‘mistakenly known as the “Menologium”’, Lapidge writes that it ‘normally passes under the utterly inappropriate title “Menologium”’ and Fulk and Cain refer to it as the ‘misnamed Menologium’. Some have even avoided using it, adopting some other title such as ‘Old English Metrical Calendar’. The main problem with the title is that it is originally a term for a certain service-book used in the Eastern Church, with which the Old English poem has nothing to do.

When Hickes entitled the poem ‘Calendarium seu Menologium Poeticum’ in his editio princeps published at the beginning of the eighteenth century, he seems to have had in mind a sort of martyrology arranged by the month, for which the term had been used in Western religious orders since the seventeenth century; in fact, he repeatedly refers to the Old English Martyrology as Menol(ogium) Sax(onicum). The word ‘menologium’ used to be applied, more often in Latin writing but also in English (often in the form ‘menology’), to various works with characteristics similar to a martyrology arranged by the month, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This led to its use for the Old English Martyrology as well as for the verse Menologium. Its use both in Latin and in English for this sort of work does not seem to have been unusual in the nineteenth century; the Old English poem, in other words, was not named irrelevantly after some Greek service-book; rather, the use of the term for this sort of work has become obsolete in English, and as a result, it has come to seem irrelevant.

Thus its use for the poem does not seem totally inappropriate given its semantic history, but I also admit that it does not always represent the nature of the poem effectively. Following the advice of the editor of this series, therefore, I decided to entitle the book The Old English Metrical Calendar (Menologium).