Books by Stephen Pelle
This book sheds new light on the Latin background of various Old English homilies, and of certain... more This book sheds new light on the Latin background of various Old English homilies, and of certain homilies from related vernacular traditions. Two broad themes are treated, the Nativity of Christ and Christian eschatology; the volume contains five Latin texts dealing with each theme. Critical editions, full English translations, and detailed introductions and commentaries are included, as well as case studies that demonstrate the relevance of each text to one or more homilies written in Old English, and, in a few cases, early Middle English and Old Norse. While the volume is intended for scholars of early English preaching, many of the texts hold considerable intrinsic interest and should have general appeal for medievalists, students of preaching, and those working on the transmission of biblical apocrypha in the Latin West.
LMS Thesis by Stephen Pelle
Thesis for the degree of Licence in Mediaeval Studies (LMS) from the Pontifical Institute of Medi... more Thesis for the degree of Licence in Mediaeval Studies (LMS) from the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies.
PhD Thesis by Stephen Pelle
Papers by Stephen Pelle
Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik, 2024
This article identifies new Latin sources and new Latin and vernacular analogues for noteworthy n... more This article identifies new Latin sources and new Latin and vernacular analogues for noteworthy non-legal passages in late Old Frisian law texts. Several items in Thet Autentica Riocht from Codex Unia and the related “Autentica-Sammlung” preserved in Codex Aysma are shown to descend from Insular catechetical triads (including a triad popularized by Alcuin) that were also adapted by the authors of Old English and Old Norse homilies. Other passages in the Autentica collections can be traced to the works of Gregory and Isidore (likely via a florilegium like the Liber scintillarum), to popular twelfth- and thirteenth-century theological texts like the Stella clericorum and Peter Cantor’s Verbum adbreviatum, and to the Disticha Catonis. Meanwhile, a late, variant conclusion to The Seventeen Statutes is shown to utilize an inexpressibility motif derived from the apocryphal Visio Sancti Pauli that is deployed in similar ways in Old English and Old Norse texts. The identification of these sources and analogues has significant implications for the textual criticism of the Old Frisian works and can also help improve our understanding of their relationship to other medieval European vernacular religious traditions.
Source of Knowledge: Studies in Early Insular Literary Cultures in Honor of Charles D. Wright, 2023
New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, vol. 3, 2023
New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, vol. 3, 2023
Anglia, 2021
This article presents the Old English lexicographical materials compiled
by the humanist scholar ... more This article presents the Old English lexicographical materials compiled
by the humanist scholar Friedrich Lindenbrog (1573–1648), some of which were considered lost after World War II, but have been restored to the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg during the 1980s and 1990s. It traces the origins and provenances of the Old English glossaries contained in Hamburg, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Codd. germ. 22 and philol. 263, and discusses a selection of notable glosses and spellings, some of which are uniquely preserved in these manuscripts. Lindenbrog’s lexicographical collections were considered useful in the eyes of other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scholars from Germany, whose materials are referenced here as well.
Saints and their Legacies in Medieval Iceland, 2021
The Anonymous Old English Homily – Sources, Composition, and Variation (eds. Winfried Rudolf and Susan Irvine), 2021
The Anonymous Old English Homily – Sources, Composition, and Variation (eds. Winfried Rudolf and Susan Irvine), 2021
Old English Lexicology and Lexicography: Essays in Honor of Antonette di Paolo Healey, 2020
Apocrypha 30, 2019
This article is the first in-depth study and critical edition of a Latin text on Antichrist and t... more This article is the first in-depth study and critical edition of a Latin text on Antichrist and the Last Judgment, which I here call The Revelation of Matthew about the End Times. This apocryphon is found in two manuscripts, one from the late thirteenth century (Dublin, Trinity College MS 347), the other from the late fourteenth (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 404). The first half of the text is presented as a revelation from Christ to the apostle Matthew and describes (among other things) the physical appearance, rule, and defeat of Antichrist. This section of the Revelation of Matthew is significant for its preservation of certain elements of the predominantly eastern tradition of Antichrist physiognomy and for other important parallels to early eschatological apocrypha. The second half of the text as it survives in its two known manuscripts appears to be a later addition derived from a version of the Revelations of Pseudo-Methodius. Another Latin description of Antichrist, preserved in a late ninth- or early tenth-century Spanish manuscript (Madrid, Real Academia de la Historia, Cod. 60), is briefly discussed in an appendix.
Gripla, 2018
This article is an edition and study of an Icelandic sermon that survives in the manuscript fragm... more This article is an edition and study of an Icelandic sermon that survives in the manuscript fragments AM 696 VIII and IX 4to, both from the first half of the sixteenth century and possibly copied in or around Snóksdalur. The Icelandic text is based on two Latin sermons by the Valencian Dominican friar Vincent Ferrer (1350–1419). Judging by the Icelandic sermon’s source and vocabulary, it is likely that it was composed in the late fifteenth century or early sixteenth century. The sermon is significant because it is the only known Icelandic preaching text based on the works of a Dominican author, and also because it provides valuable evidence of the use of exempla in medieval Icelandic preaching.
Opuscula, 2018
A significant number of Icelandic sermons survive in manuscript fragments from the fifteenth and ... more A significant number of Icelandic sermons survive in manuscript fragments from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, but relatively few of these have been the objects of serious study. The present article is an edition and analysis of one such sermon, now found in two fragments — AM 687 c 1 4to (two bifolia) and AM 667 XVII 4to (one bifolium) — which originally belonged to the same early sixteenth-century manuscript. The text, probably intended for the feast of the Annunciation (25 March), is divided into three sections by its author: (1) a retelling of the Annunciation episode and Christ’s conception, (2) a discussion of the motif of the Seven Last Words of Christ, and (3) an exemplum. Part of the first section and all of the second survive, while most of the third has been lost to a lacuna. The major source of the surviving part of the sermon is the Vita Christi by the fourteenth-century Carthusian Ludolf of Saxony, although the author makes frequent and sometimes significant digressions. The content of some of these digressions and the language of the text, which is notable for its high proportion of loanwords from Middle Low German, suggest that the sermon could not have been composed much earlier its surviving copy (that is to say, earlier than 1500). A probable terminus ad quem for the text is ca. 1540, after which time the diocese of Skálholt (where the text was likely copied) became Lutheran.
Medieval Sermon Studies, 2017
An edition, translation, and analysis of an unstudied Old Norse Christmas sermon that survives in... more An edition, translation, and analysis of an unstudied Old Norse Christmas sermon that survives in AM 655 XX 4to.
Traditio, 2017
The Alphabet of Words (AW), a Latin alphabet text with an interlinear Old English gloss, occurs a... more The Alphabet of Words (AW), a Latin alphabet text with an interlinear Old English gloss, occurs among the additions made to the Durham Collectar (D) by the priest Aldred in the tenth century. Previously thought to be extant only in D, and possibly by Aldred himself, AW also survives (without the OE gloss) in a Kassel manuscript (K) from the second half of the eighth century, as well as in a defective twelfth-century copy in Karlsruhe (Kr). Most of AW is also incorporated in a Latin treatise on the alphabet ("Audiuimus multos": AM) compiled probably in the ninth century. AW belongs to the genre of "parenetic alphabet," widely attested in Greek but also sporadically in Latin, including in a ninth-century Paris manuscript (P: BNF, lat. 2796) that shares lemmata and glosses with AW for the letters X, Y, and Z. We provide the first critical edition and translation of AW from D, K, and Kr, with variants from AM and P, together with a discussion of AW's genre and relation to other alphabetical texts as well as a full commentary on the biblical, apocryphal, and patristic lore transmitted by AW's lemmata and glosses on each letter.
Review of English Studies, 2017
This article is a contribution to the study of the reception and use of the homilies of Ælfric of... more This article is a contribution to the study of the reception and use of the homilies of Ælfric of Eynsham in the late Old and early Middle English periods, using twelfth- and thirteenth-century scribal alterations to the manuscript Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 302 as a starting point. Several characteristics of these alterations—e.g., their authors’ apparent concern to provide alternatives for certain obsolescent Old English word families, their emphasis on the concepts of sin and confession, and their occasional stylistic similarities to the works of Wulfstan—are paralleled in the work of other later scribes and annotators of Ælfric’s homilies. Of particular interest are the marginal additions of an early-thirteenth-century scribe, who broke up one of Ælfric’s longer homilies into two shorter pieces by inserting a doxology and introduction into the middle of the piece. Such interventions suggest that the homilies in CCCC 302 may have continued to be read aloud to audiences long after the manuscript’s composition.
This article contains editions and brief analyses of three previously unedited Old Norse homileti... more This article contains editions and brief analyses of three previously unedited Old Norse homiletic texts from AM 624 4to (ca. 1500): (1) an Annunciation homily, part of which also survives in AM 655 XXVII 4to (ca. 1300); (2) a fragment of a homily on the tabernacle of Moses; and (3) a fragment of a homily on the proper observance of Lent. The Annunciation homily was copied into the manuscript by Jón Þorvaldsson, abbot of Þingeyraklaustur from 1500 until his death in 1514; the two fragments were copied by another, unidentified scribe. The manuscript’s version of the Annunciation homily is valuable in that it gives us, for the first time, access to the complete text of this piece, about a third of which is missing in its earlier manuscript witness. The first of the two homiletic fragments may have been designed as a companion piece to the famous Stave Church Homily; the second was probably intended for Ash Wednesday or the first Sunday of Lent.
This paper identifies Ælfric's 'Interrogationes Sigewulfi' as the source for an enumeration of th... more This paper identifies Ælfric's 'Interrogationes Sigewulfi' as the source for an enumeration of the seven primordial creations in the Worcester Fragments.
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Books by Stephen Pelle
LMS Thesis by Stephen Pelle
PhD Thesis by Stephen Pelle
Papers by Stephen Pelle
by the humanist scholar Friedrich Lindenbrog (1573–1648), some of which were considered lost after World War II, but have been restored to the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg during the 1980s and 1990s. It traces the origins and provenances of the Old English glossaries contained in Hamburg, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Codd. germ. 22 and philol. 263, and discusses a selection of notable glosses and spellings, some of which are uniquely preserved in these manuscripts. Lindenbrog’s lexicographical collections were considered useful in the eyes of other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scholars from Germany, whose materials are referenced here as well.
by the humanist scholar Friedrich Lindenbrog (1573–1648), some of which were considered lost after World War II, but have been restored to the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg during the 1980s and 1990s. It traces the origins and provenances of the Old English glossaries contained in Hamburg, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Codd. germ. 22 and philol. 263, and discusses a selection of notable glosses and spellings, some of which are uniquely preserved in these manuscripts. Lindenbrog’s lexicographical collections were considered useful in the eyes of other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scholars from Germany, whose materials are referenced here as well.
Most scholarship on the relevant texts has assumed that the cosmological scheme described above derives from a lost Greek source, though direct translation of Latin to Slavonic is also possible. My paper focuses on an unedited Latin dialogue surviving in an eleventh-century El Escorial manuscript, which, despite its origin in the westernmost part of Europe, preserves the cosmological model in a form much closer to the Slavonic works than any other Latin text so far examined. The same Latin dialogue contains other parallels to Slavonic cosmological lore that have not hitherto been identified in any Latin work. I hope to explore some possible explanations for why these elements of apocryphal cosmology survived in texts from the western and eastern fringes of Europe despite their apparent absence (or loss) elsewhere.
[Please email me if you would like a copy of a draft of this work]