Medieval Vernacular Bibles

‘In our own tongues’: The Medieval Vernacular Bible and its European Contexts’ is organised jointly by the Oxford and Augsburg research teams of the ‘Medieval Vernacular Bibles as Unity, Diversity and Conflict’. The project is based at the universities of Oxford and Augsburg and is supported by the UK-German Funding Initiative in the Humanities (Arts and Humanities Research Council and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) and the Bavarian Academy. As part of the conference, we will be hosting the following session on Wednesday 1st October 2025:

3pm-5pm Bodleian Library, Lecture Theatre
Chair: Andrew Dunning (University of Oxford)

Emily Davenport Guerry (University of Oxford), MS. Duke Humfrey c. 1: Illuminating the French New Testament and its readers, from Jean le Bon to Duke Humfrey https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/d5298278-6c9f-4eeb-a5a7-b6a3afa10720/

Freimut Löser (University of Augsburg), MS. Laud Misc. 479: The Paradisus-collection  https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/3d773133-2ecd-4dcb-b330-6879de4250ec/

Henrike Lähnemann (University of Oxford), MSS. Bodl. 969-970: A Fifteenth-century German Bible https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/c7d33325-585c-4b2c-9a8b-e5689b58f893/

Catherine Mary MacRobert (University of Oxford), MS e Mus. 184: The Vicissitudes of the Church Slavonic Psalter https://medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/catalog/manuscript_9100

Cosima Gilhammer (University of Oxford), MS. Bodl. 243: Wycliffite Glossed Gospels https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/49847fce-6618-481d-b7f5-2e31985995f4/

Elizabeth Solopova (University of Oxford), MS. Bodl. 441: Gospels in Old English https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/759999c2-7a29-46a7-9182-734449e2b8c3/


The full conference programme is as follows:
30 September

9am-10.30am St Stephen’s House

Chair: Elizabeth Solopova (University of Oxford)

Elizabeth Solopova (University of Oxford), Welcome

Hannah Schühle-Lewis (University of Oxford), ‘Þe pope, maister of bischopps’: Translating an Episcopal Oath in 1380s England

Michael Kuczynski (Tulane University), Hebrew and Greek Words in the Wycliffite Bible

10.30am – Coffee

11am-12.30pm St Stephen’s House

Chair: Nadine Popst (University of Augsburg)

Domenic Peter (University of Augsburg), ‘Als Daniel gesprochen hat’: The Book of Daniel in the Work of the Austrian Bible Translator and Beyond

Stefanie Katzameyer (University of Augsburg), ‘Ungefüerte pfaffen’, ‘Stiffter alles kriegs vnd streytz’, ‘Discipuli Antichristi’: Criticism of the Clergy by the Austrian Bible Translator, Austrian Heretical Movements, and the Wycliffites

Angila Vetter (Hamburg University), Modelling Lay Authority in Digital Editions: When the Austrian Bible Translator Invokes Wolfram von Eschenbach

1-2pm Lunch at St Stephen’s House

Afternoon: Walk to the Norman church of St Mary, Iffley, with Henrike Lähnemann, followed by viewing of the Old Library, St Edmund Hall.

Evening: Buffet dinner, followed by Compline in the Norman Crypt of St-Peter-in-the-East (library church of St Edmund Hall).

1 October 

9am-10.30am St Stephen’s House

Chair: Catherine Mary MacRobert (University of Oxford)

Kateřina Voleková (Charles University / Czech Language Institute), Old Czech Glosses on the Psalms in Latin Biblical Dictionaries

Andrea Svobodová (Czech Language Institute), Colophons in Late-medieval Bohemian Biblical Manuscripts

Katarzyna Jasińska-Różycka (Institute of Polish Language, Polish Academy of Sciences), Scriptural Echoes in the Prologues to Medieval Dictionaries: Motifs, Citations, and Inspiration

10.30am – Coffee

11am-12.30pm St Stephen’s House

Chair: Freimut Löser (University of Augsburg)

Vladimir Agrigoroaei ( CNRS / Centre for Medieval Studies, Poitiers), The Cultural Implications of God’s Preference for the French Speech in the Old Testament Poem Written by Évrat (Late–Twelfth Century)

Corentin Delattre (University of Poitiers / Centre for Medieval Studies, Poitiers), ‘To furnish the priests to maintain the law’: Structures and Contents of London, British Library, MS Arundel 230

Ágnes Korondi (Fragmenta et Codices Research Group of the Hungarian Research Network, National Széchényi Library), Converting the Gospel of Nicodemus into a Sermon: The Old Hungarian Adaptation of the Apocryphon and its Latin Homiletic Background

1-2pm Lunch at St Stephen’s House

3pm-5pm Bodleian Library, Lecture Theatre

Chair: Andrew Dunning (University of Oxford)

Emily Davenport Guerry (University of Oxford), MS. Duke Humfrey c. 1: Illuminating the French New Testament and its readers, from Jean le Bon to Duke Humfrey

Freimut Löser (University of Augsburg), MS. Laud Misc. 479: The Paradisus-collection  

Henrike Lähnemann (University of Oxford), MSS. Bodl. 969-970: A Fifteenth-century German Bible 

Catherine Mary MacRobert (University of Oxford), MS e Mus. 184: The Vicissitudes of the Church Slavonic Psalter

Cosima Gilhammer (University of Oxford), MS. Bodl. 243: Wycliffite Glossed Gospels 

Elizabeth Solopova (University of Oxford), MS. Bodl. 441: Gospels in Old English

7pm Conference Dinner at St Stephen’s House


2 October

9am-10.30am St Stephen’s House

Chair: Vladimir Agrigoroaei (CNRS / Centre for Medieval Studies, Poitiers)

Ana-Maria Gînsac (Institute of Interdisciplinary Research, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași), The Practice of Alternative Translation in Two Seventeenth-century Romanian Psalters

Ileana Sasu (University of Tours), Translating Saint Audrey:Images, Motifs, and Cultural Adaptations Across Europe

Élisa Marcadet (University of Tours), From Latin to Middle English: Vernacular Adaptations of Psalm 135 in the Surtees Psalter 

10.30am – Coffee

11am-12.30pm – St Stephen’s House

Chair: Ian Johnson (University of St Andrews) 

Ondřej Fúsik (Charles University and National Library of the Czech Republic), Latin Gerunds and Gerundives and their Old English Translational Equivalents as Evidenced in Old English Biblical Translations

Audrey Southgate (University of Oxford), Wyclif on Scripture and Islam

Mishtooni Bose (University of Oxford), The Sword of Solomon: John Bury, Reginald Pecock and the Authority of Scripture

1-2pm Lunch at St Stephen’s House

Image credit: Pentecost, Sherbrooke missal, fol. 169v, c. 1320

The Saxon ‘Other’ and the Saxon ‘Self’ in the Translation of Genesis B

Elliot Vale will be exploring the translation of Genesis B in more detail at the first OCCT discussion group of Hilary Term: Monday 22nd February, 12.45–14.00, Seminar Room 10, St Anne’s College. Lunch provided.

The Old English poem Genesis B is unique as the only verifiable example of a vernacular-to-vernacular translation during the Anglo-Saxon period. Interestingly, its source language Old Saxon and target language Old English were closely related and mutually intelligible. John Hines argues that the residual ‘Old Saxon’ nature of the Old English poem ‘displays the cultural connexions of a now Saxon-dominated England with the Christian Continent’. In this, Genesis B epitomizes the Anglo-Saxons’ continued and evolving relationship with the continental Saxons, exhibiting both the Saxon ‘other’ and the Saxon ‘self’.

In this blogpost, I will survey the historical and linguistic interrelation of the Anglo-Saxons and the Old Saxons to understand what might have motivated the translation of Genesis B.

Let’s begin before the beginning with the pre-migration linguistic situation of Germanic Europe. The Germanic dialects spoken in north and north-west Europe around the 5th century are known as the ‘West Germanic’ languages. They consisted of three main groups, the ‘Irminonic’ (which became modern High German), ‘Istvaeonic’ (which became modern Dutch), and ‘Ingvaenoic’ (which became modern Frisian, Low German, and English). This last group, also known as ‘North Sea Germanic’, divides further into Anglo-Frisian (a branch including both Old English and Old Frisian) and Low German (which includes Old Saxon). During the Age of Migration from the 4th to the 6th century, peoples whose languages were closely related and mutually intelligible migrated in groups and merged. This seems to have happened with the Germanic tribes who migrated to Britain in the 5th century.

This migration made a distinction as well as highlighted a commonality between what would become the Anglo-Saxons in Britain and the Old Saxons on the continent. In his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the Northumbrian scholar Bede names three Germanic tribes who migrated to Britain in the fifth century: the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. He has this to say about them:

‘The people of Kent and the inhabitants of the Isle of Wight are of Jutish origin […] From the Saxon country, that is, the district now known as Old Saxony, came the East Saxons, the South Saxons, and the West Saxons. Besides this, from the country of the Angles, […] which is called Angulus, came the East Angles, the Middle Angles, the Mercians, and all the Northumbrian race […] Angulus is said to have remained deserted from that day to this.’ (Bede 51)

The peninsular Jutes seem have been absorbed by Danish expansion westward into the apparently deserted homeland of the Angles (thought to be Angeln in Schleswig Holstein). Only the Saxons became distinguishable as two peoples, the insular Anglo-Saxons in the southern English Kingdoms of Wessex, Essex, and Sussex and the continental Old Saxons in Old Saxony. Consequently, the Germanic inhabitants of Britain could maintain a connection with the continent they had migrated from, defining themselves both in relation to and in opposition to it.

After their own Christianisation, the Anglo-Saxons pursued missionary activity on the continent among related Germanic tribes, primarily the Frisians and the Saxons. Missionary work was conducted among these groups because they spoke languages (namely Old Frisian and Old Saxon) that were closely related to and mutually intelligible with Old English. In the early 8th century, St. Boniface, a Northumbrian monk, established an important abbey for the Saxons at Fulda in Germany. In a letter, Boniface implored the Anglo-Saxon bishops in England to ‘Take pity upon them [the Saxons]; for they themselves are saying: “We are of one blood and one bone with you”’ (75). Clearly, it was recognized that the insular and continental Saxons were connected historically, linguistically, as well as ethnically.

With Christianity came literacy, and the Saxons seemed to define their nascent literary culture in the light of the Anglo-Saxons who converted them. This is exemplified in a pair of Latin texts, the Praefatio and Versus, which are thought to have once prefaced an edition of Heliand, an Old Saxon gospel poem. Among other points touching on Saxon poetry, these texts describe a Saxon shepherd who was divinely inspired to compose vernacular biblical poetry. This is clearly modelled on the Cædmon legend as narrated in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, a text Anglo-Saxon missionaries took with them to the continent. In Bede’s account, a lay brother at Whitby Abbey abandons a feast in shame at his inability to perform a secular song. Nevertheless, he is visited by an angel and divinely inspired to create religious alliterative poetry, thereby fusing the traditional Germanic verse form with Christian subject matter. A Saxon scribe seems to have borrowed this legend to provide a similar ‘origin story’ for Saxon religious alliterative poetry.

Cultural influence seems to have been mutual, however. For example, Barbara Raw has shown how the illustrations in the Junius 11 manuscript cohere more with Genesis B than Genesis A. From this observation, she argues that the illustrations must derive from an illustrated edition of the complete Old Saxon Genesis. This now lost manuscript was likely given as a wedding gift to King Æthelwulf (Alfred’s father), who married the daughter of the Frankish Emperor Charles the Bald in 856. Furthermore, King Alfred’s educational reforms drew many scholars from the continent, such as a man known as ‘John the Old Saxon’. Alfred’s biographer Asser describes him as ‘a man of most acute intelligence, immensely learned in all fields of literary endeavour’ (93). Alfred’s prioritization of the translation of Latin texts into English also strongly suggests that Genesis B was translated at his court. Thus, Anglo-Saxons helped to establish a Saxon literary culture that consequently influenced the further development of their own.

An important text Alfred commissioned to be translated was the fifth-century Latin History Against the Pagans by the Spanish theologian Paulus Orosius. The Old English version of this work contains an interpolated pair of texts, editorially named ‘Ohthere and Wulfstan’. These texts detail anecdotally the passage of two seafarers all around Scandinavia and the Baltics. An editorial aside as Wulfstan approaches his native Hedeby on Jutland remarks that ‘[t]he English lived in that region before they came to this country’ (Orosius 43–5). So we have come full-circle: the Anglo-Saxons’ continued sense of themselves as a migrant nation only strengthened their ties to their ancestral homelands on the continent.

The Anglo-Saxons never forgot their origins on the continent nor played down their continued relations with it but used it in the formation of their own identity. Genesis B is an Old English poem in language and style but retains enough Old Saxon features to nevertheless convey a deliberate ‘feeling of foreignness’. Lawrence Venuti argues that ‘translation wields enormous power in the construction of national identities for foreign cultures’ (‘Regimes’ 209). As a translation, Genesis B constructs a foreign identity for a national culture, containing in its hybrid language and literary style the Saxon ‘other’ and the Saxon ‘self’.

Elliot Vale holds a BA in English from the University of York and an MSt in English 650–1550 from the University of Oxford. His research interests lie in applying modern translation theory to medieval texts and the reception of Old English poetry from the 19th to the 21st century, especially through translation. He has written on translational ‘bias’ in the Old English poem Exodus and the Old English Hexateuch and on the stylistic analysis of metrically imitative translations of Beowulf. He translates from Old English and Swedish.

Title image: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Junius 11, p. 31.

Works cited

Asser. Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources, edited and translated by Michael Lapidge and Simon Keynes, Penguin Books, 1983.

Bede. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, edited and translated by Betram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford University Press, 1969.

Boniface. The Letters of Saint Boniface, translated by Ephraim Emerton, Norton, 1976.

Hines, John. ‘Attitude Problems? The Old Saxon and Old English Genesis Poems’. Language Structure and Variation: A Festschrift for Gunnel Melchers, edited by Magnus Ljung, Stockholm Studies in English 92, 2000, pp. 69­–90.

Magoun, Francis P., Jr. ‘The Praefatio and Versus Associated with some Old Saxon Biblical Poems’. Medieval Studies in Honor of Jeremiah Denis Matthias Ford, edited by Urban T. Holmes, Jr. and Alex J. Denomy, Harvard University Press, 1948, pp. 107–136.

Orosius, Paulus. The Old English History of the World: An Anglo-Saxon Rewriting of Orosius, translated and edited by Malcolm Godden, Harvard University Press, 2016.

Raw, Barbara. ‘The Probable Derivation of Most of the Illustrations in Junius II from an Illustrated Old Saxon Genesis’. Anglo-Saxon England, vol. 5, 1976, pp. 133–148.

Venuti, Lawrence. ‘Translation as cultural politics: Regimes of domestication in English’. Textual Practice, vol. 7, no. 2, 1993, pp. 208–223.

Early Text Cultures Workshop: Translating Cultures in Contact

Dear all,

The Early Text Cultures research network at the University of Oxford is pleased to announce the programme of the workshop Translating Cultures in Contact, which will conclude the seminar series on Textual Cultures in Contact. The event will take place online on Zoom, on Tuesday 5th July, from 9:00 to 16:00 BST (UK time). 

The event will explore dynamics of textual and cultural translation in Hellenistic Egypt, the medieval Latin, Greek and Arabic worlds, and Tibet and Mongolia. Please find the programme below; abstracts can be found on our website.

To receive the Zoom link for the event, please register here

9:00–9.10        Welcome and Opening Remarks

Domenico Giordani, UCL / University of Oxford

9:10–10:20       SESSION I: BYZANTINE TRANSLATIONS OF LATIN

CHAIR: Domenico Giordani, UCL / University of Oxford

1.  On the boundaries of philology and history of science: the Greek translation of the Semita Recta

Flavio Bevacqua, Università degli Studi di Padova

2. Translating Saint Jerome into Greek: the Life of Hilarion (BHL 3879)

Anna Lampadaridi, Paris, CNRS (UMR 5189 HiSoMA)

10:20–11:30     FIRST BREAK

11:30–12:30     SESSION II: HELLENISING ANCIENT EGYPT

CHAIR: Jordan Miller, University of Oxford

3.  Textual and Historical Observations on Inscribed Foundation Plaques of Hellenistic Egypt

Efstathia Dionysopoulou, Université de Lyon II

4. Untranslatability and the Case of Ptolemaic Priestly Decrees

Giulia Tonon, University of Liverpool

12:30–13:30     LUNCH BREAK

13:30–14:40     SESSION III: TRANSLATING FOUNDATIONAL FIGURES

CHAIR: Natasha Downs, University of Edinburgh

5.  Tibetan Buddhism and the Cult of Chinggis Khan

Dotno Pount, University of Pennsylvania

6. Greco-Arabic, Beyond Translation: Homer by the Rivers of Babylon

Teddy Fassberg, Tel Aviv University

14:40–15:00     THIRD BREAK

15:00–16:00     SESSION IV: FINAL ROUNDTABLE

CHAIR: Flaminia Pischedda, University of Oxford

If you have any questions, please get in touch with us by replying to this email. Please do feel free to forward this email to anyone who may be interested. 

We look forward to seeing you there! 

All best wishes, 
ETC Board