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medieval worlds • no. 10 • 2019
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Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften Austrian Academy of Sciences Press
A-1011 Wien, Dr. Ignaz Seipel-Platz 2
Tel. +43-1-515 81/DW 3420, Fax +43-1-515 81/DW 3400 https://verlag.oeaw.ac.at, e-mail: verlag@oeaw.ac.at |
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DATUM, UNTERSCHRIFT / DATE, SIGNATURE
BANK AUSTRIA CREDITANSTALT, WIEN (IBAN AT04 1100 0006 2280 0100, BIC BKAUATWW), DEUTSCHE BANK MÜNCHEN (IBAN DE16 7007 0024 0238 8270 00, BIC DEUTDEDBMUC)
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medieval worlds • no. 10 • 2019, pp. 46-60, 2019/11/28
The ninth century witnessed the compilation of martyrologies in both the Latin Frankish world of the Carolingians and the vernacular world of Anglo-Saxon Wessex. Yet this phenomenon has been treated very differently by modern scholars of these two cultures. For Carolingianists these martyrologies represent a public, shared text, one which was read aloud in chapter as part of the daily life of religious communities across the Frankish kingdoms, and which, as Rosamond McKitterick has suggested, should be viewed as contributing to those communities’ understanding of their Christian past. For recent Anglo-Saxon scholars, the vernacular text known as the Old English Martyrology is rather a work compiled to support private, devotional reading, and better understood as an encyclopaedia of arcane information. This article investigates the reception of one Frankish compilation in tenth- and eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon England, that of Usuard, and compares it to that of the Old English Martyrology. It asks how far both texts should in fact be viewed as historical texts. It concludes with a case study of how they were both read in one late eleventh-century community, Exeter, and suggests that this community, at least, was able to maintain two overlapping but different views of its past and its place in wider Church history.
Keywords: Martyrology; hagiography; history; Usuard; Old English Martyrology; reception; cult of the saints; Exeter; Bishop Leofric