Plan: The common Germanic period The ancient Germans Differentiation of common Germanics
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LESSSON 2
William of Normandy with his huge host of fighting men, landed
unopposed in the south. Harold had to march southwards with his tired, weakened army and did not wait for reinforcements before he awaited the charge of William's mounted knights at Hastings. The only standing army in England had been defeated in an-all day battle in which the outcome was in doubt until the undisciplined English had broken ranks to pursue the Normans' feigning retreat. The story is too well-known to be repeated here, but when William took his army to London, where young Edgar the Atheling had been proclaimed king in Harold's place, English indecision in gathering together a formidable opposition forced the supporters of Edgar to negotiate for peace. They had no choice. William was duly crowned King of England at Westminster on Christmas Day, 1066. William's victory also linked England with France and not Scandinavia from now on. Within six months of his coronation, William felt secure enough to visit Normandy. The sporadic outbreaks at rebellion against his rule had one important repercussion, however: it meant that threats to his security prevented him from undertaking any attempt to cooperate with the native aristocracy in the administration of England. By the time of William's death in 1087, English society had been profoundly changed. For one thing, the great Saxon earldoms were split: Wessex, Mercia, Northumbria and other ancient kingdoms were abolished forever. The great estates of England were given to Norman and Breton landowners, carefully prevented from building up their estates by having them separated by the holdings of others. The majority of Old English manuscripts are scattered throughout the libraries of England. The two largest collections belong to the British Library and the Bodleian Library of Oxford University. While these documents are national treasures and should be accessible to anyone, they obviously need to be protected; hence, heightened powers of persuasion notwithstanding, it is unlikely that an individual without an academic position or recommendation will be allowed access. Fortunately, many of these documents are on public display. Most of the existing Old English manuscripts were made in the scriptoria of monasteries by members of the clergy. Anyone who has ever visited the remnants of such a monastery can imagine how difficult this must have been, with such little comfort, light and warmth in winter. It only goes to show the skill of monastic scribes in rendering their words so beautifully. Anglo-Saxon manuscripts were written exclusively on parchment or vellum. While in modern times we know these media as semi-transparent writing papers used for tracing and sketching, they were originally made out of calf, goat or pig skins which had been stretched, shaved and treated. The result of this process was a thin membrane with one completely smooth side and another with a thin layer of leftover hair. Hundreds of animal skins were required to make a single book. This meant that the cost of creating literature during the Anglo-Saxon period was staggering - and hence the value of the finished product. After the skins had been treated, they were folded into page-size squares (one fold created a folio, two folds a quarto, four folds an octavo, and so on - denoting the number of pages created by the folds). The result was a "quire," or section of pages. This process permitted the scribe to prick small holes through the pages of each quire, which could then be ruled, making uniformly straight lines of text on each page. Finally the quires would be bound together and covered. Unfortunately, we have few decent examples of what these covers looked like; one notable exception is the small Gospel book found in St. Cuthbert's tomb, now on display at the British Library. This method of book production meant that manuscripts could be easily unbound, permitting portions of texts to become separated, swapped or lost. For this reason, and because medieval writers frequently wrote wherever they could fit text (in blank spaces, on flyleaves, etc.), many manuscripts contain a wide assortment of different documents. The dominant script of the Old English manuscripts is Anglo-Saxon (also called Insular, a Latin word meaning "island"; in this context, the term means "from England or Ireland"). It stemmed from the Uncial script brought to England by Augustine and his fellow missionaries, and incorporated the initially Irish Roman Half-Uncial. The Anglo-Saxon hand was generally miniscule (a calligraphic term meaning smaller, lower-case letters), reserving majuscule characters (larger, upper-case letters) for the beginnings of text segments or important words (this developed into the norm for modern writing - beginning sentences and "important" words with capital letters). These fonts are perfect for calligraphers who want to work on their hand or experiment with page layouts before writing. They may also be useful for those who are unfamiliar with the slight variations between the appearances of Old English and modern English
characters. The most popular element of medieval manuscripts in general is illumination - the decoration of text with drawings. Latin texts were more often illuminated than were Old English texts. But there are some spectacular examples of Old English illumination, including the stark line drawings, the biblical illustrations of Cotton Claudius, the mysterious Sphere of Apuleius in Cotton Tiberius, the Lindisfarne Gospels (Cotton Nero - one of the few manuscripts that approaches the Book of Kells), and so on. Why would someone want to read a manuscript facsimile of an Old English text rather than a printed edition? A couple answers come to mind. First of all, Old English manuscripts are, by and large, beautiful. Second, you never know exactly what you're getting when you read a printed edition (maybe this is a slight exaggeration, but still only a slight one). Some printed texts are "normalized," reducing the natural variation in spelling, conjugation, declension, etc., common in Old English works (most medieval writers were not nearly as concerned with consistency of spelling as modern writers). Furthermore, some printed texts collate or "average" between multiple manuscripts of the same work, offering a composite text which, while perhaps more representative of that work, loses the qualities which make a manuscript unique. Naturally, this process can thwart anyone trying to make deductions about the dialectical, calligraphic or interlinear aspects of a particular manuscript (sometimes the most interesting aspects). Download 90.94 Kb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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