7 - Æthelwold and the Old English Rule

Summary

In our attempt to trace the intellectual home of the Royal Psalter and of the core of the Brussels Aldhelm glosses, our attention has focused thus far on verbal and to some extent on stylistic links between the Old English Benedictine Rule, the Psalter and the Aldhelm glosses. It has also focused on some general principles which seem to have been crucial in the choice or coinage of Old English interpretamenta (such as a taste for words with a ‘hermeneutic’ flavour) and which are shared between the three texts. In a philological study concerned with the origin and authorship of texts, such verbal and stylistic links and shared common principles must be the cornerstones and the conditio sine qua non for any hypothesis assuming for the texts in question an origin either with a single author or within a distinct intellectual group or school. However, philology is not an island. Therefore, philological arguments for a common authorship of any two or more works must bear scrutiny in the light of various kinds of external evidence and must seek confirmation and supplementation by such evidence as may be gleaned from (say) history, liturgiology, palaeography or art history. We may best begin this task by briefly reviewing and reassessing what is known about the authorship and the date of the Old English prose translation of the Regula S. Benedicti, since this is the one text which has been assigned to Bishop Æthelwold for centuries.