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Anglo-Saxon ‘Purgatory’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Sarah Foot
Sarah Foot*
Affiliation:
Christ Church, Oxford
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Extract

Since a countless multitude of misshapen spirits, far and wide, was being tortured in this alternation of misery as far as I could see and without any interval of respite, I began to think that this might be Hell, of whose intolerable torments I had often heard tell. But my guide who went before me answered my thoughts, ‘Do not believe it,’ he said, ‘this is not Hell as you think.’ … As he led me on in open light … [we came to] a very broad and pleasant plain … [where] there were innumerable bands of men in white robes, and many companies of happy people sat around; as he led me through the midst of the troops of joyful inhabitants, I began to think that this might perhaps be the kingdom of Heaven of which I had often heard tell. But he answered my thoughts: ‘No,’ he said, ‘this is not the kingdom of Heaven as you imagine.’

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 45: The Church, the Afterlife and the Fate of the Soul , 2009 , pp. 87 - 96
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2009

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References

1 Bede, Historia ecclesiastica 5.12, ed. and trans. Colgrave, Bertram and Mynors, R. A. B., Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Oxford, 1969), 490–93 Google Scholar [hereafter: HE].

2 Walterspacher, Ralph, ‘Book V of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum: Perspectives on Salvation History and Eschatology’, Archa Verbi: Yearbook for the Study of Medieval Theology 1 (2004), 11–24, at 11—15.Google Scholar

3 Laistner, M. L. W. and King, H. H., A Hand-List of Bede Manuscripts (Ithaca, NY, 1943), 107–08.Google Scholar

4 Bede, HE 5.12 (trans. Colgrave and Mynors, 498–99).

5 Claude Carozzi, Le voyage de l’âme dans l’au-delà d’après la littérature latine Ve-XIIIe siècle, Collection de l’Ecole française de Rome 189 (Rome, 1994), 231; Walterspacher, ‘Book V’, 17.

6 Edwards, Graham Robert, ‘Purgatory: “Birth” or “Evolution”’, JEH 36 (1985), 634–46 Google ScholarPubMed; Brown, Peter, ‘The Decline of the Empire of God: Amnesty, Penance and the Afterlife from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages’, in Bynum, Caroline and Freedman, Paul, eds, Last Things: Death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, PA, 2000), 41–59 Google Scholar; Dunn, Marilyn, ‘Gregory the Great, the Vision of Fursey, and the Origins of Purgatory’, Peritia 14 (2000), 238–54 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smyth, Marina, ‘The Origins of Purgatory through the Lens of Seventh-Century Irish Eschatology’, Traditio 58 (2003), 91–132.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Bede, Historia abbatum, ch. 6, ed. Plummer, Charles, Bedae Opera Historica, 2 vols (Oxford, 1896), 1:369.Google Scholar

8 Goff, Jacques Le, La naissance du purgatoire (Paris, 1981)Google Scholar; trans. Goldhammer, Arthur, The Birth of Purgatory (Chicago, IL, 1983)Google Scholar; for a sceptical reading, see Southern, R. W., ‘Between Heaven and Hell’, Times Literary Supplement, 18 June 1982, 651–52, and Gurevich, A. Ja., ‘Popular and Scholarly Medieval Cultural Traditions: Notes in the Margin of Jacques Le Goffs book’, JMedH 9 (1983), 71–90.Google Scholar

9 As emphasized by Southern, ‘Between Heaven and Hell’, and Edwards, ‘Purgatory’.

10 Bede, HE 3.18 (trans. Colgrave and Mynors, 270–77); Carozzi, Le voyage, 100–12.

11 Bede, HE 3.18 (trans. Colgrave and Mynors, 274–75).

12 Visio Fursei, ch. 9, lines 20–22 (ed. Carozzi, Le voyage, 684; discussed ibid. 110).

13 Carozzi, , Le voyage, 236–37 Google Scholar. For a similarly vivid evocation of an imagined space, compare Bede’s detailed account of the shape of the earth, conceived as a ball divided into five circular zones of different temperatures: De temporum ratione, ch. 34, trans. Faith Wallis, Bede: the Reckoning of Time (Liverpool, 1999), 96–99 [hereafter: DTR].

14 Bede, HE 5.12 (trans. Colgrave and Mynors, 494–95).

15 Augustine, , Enchiridion, 110, ed. Rivière, J., Bibliothèque Augustinienne 9 (Paris, 1947), 304 Google Scholar; Edwards, , ‘Purgatory’, 645 n. 82.Google Scholar

16 Boniface, , Epistola 10 Google Scholar, ed. Tangl, Michael, Die Briefe des Heiligen Bonifalius una Lullus (Berlin, 1916), 7–15 Google Scholar; also Sims-Williams, Patrick, ‘A recension of Boniface’s letter to Eadburg about the monk of Wenlock’s vision’, in O’Keeffe, Katherine O’Brien and Orchard, Andy, eds, Latin Learning and English Lore, I: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature for Michael Lapidge (Toronto, 2005), 194–2:4, at 203–07.Google Scholar

17 Caiozzi, , Le voyage, 199–200.Google Scholar

18 Compare Gregory, Dialogues 4.37 (ed. A. de Vogüé, SC 265: 130–32).

19 For the literary models employed here, see Sims-Williams, Patrick, Religion and Literature in Western England, 600–800 (Cambridge, 1990), 249–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 Sims-Williams, , Religion and Literature, 259–60.Google Scholar

21 Carozzi, , Le voyage, 215.Google Scholar

22 Dunn, ‘Gregory the Great’.

23 Theodore, Penitential 2.5, ed. Finsterwalder, Paul Willem, Die Canones Theodori Cantuariensis und ihre Überlieferungsformen (Weimar, 1929), 318–19 Google Scholar; quotation from 2.5.9.

24 Bede, Homelia 1.2, trans. Martin, Lawrence T. and Hurst, David, Bede the Venerable, Homilies on the Gospels, Book I: Advent to Lent (Kalamazoo, MI, 1991)Google Scholar, 17. Cf. Council of Clofesho (AD 747), ch. 30, cf. chs. 26–7, eds Haddan, Arthur West and Stubbs, William, Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents relating to Great Britain and Ireland, 3 vols (Oxford, 1869-78), 3: 376, 372–3.Google Scholar

25 On Anglo-Saxon wills in general, see Crick, Julia, ‘Posthumous Obligation and Family Identity’, in Frazer, William O. and Tyrrell, Andrew, eds, Social Identity in Early Medieval Britain (London, 2000), 193–208.Google Scholar

26 Boniface, Epistola 10 (ed. Tangl, Briefe, 13). See also Council of Chelsea (AD 816), ch. 10 (eds Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, 3: 583—84).

27 For the question of double judgement, see Shippey, T. A., Poems of Wisdom and Learning in Old English (Cambridge and Totowa, NJ, 1976), 30–31 Google Scholar. Bede stressed the second judgement to be expected on Doomsday: DTR, ch. 70 (trans. Wallis, Reckoning, 243–46); Explanatio Apocalypsis 1.6.11, trans. Marshall, E., The Explanation of the Apocalypse by the Venerable Beda (Oxford 1878), 41–42 Google Scholar. For later Anglo-Saxon views of judgement, see Gatch, Milton McC., ‘Eschatology in the Anonymous Old English Homilies’, in his Eschatology and Christian Nurture. Themes in Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Religious Life (Aldershot, 2000), 117–65, at 161–65.Google Scholar

28 Semple, Sarah, ‘Illustrations of Damnation in Late Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts’, Anglo-Saxon England 32 (2003), 231–45, at 240.CrossRefGoogle Scholar