Inventing History : forgery: a great British tradition (British History)

[Komorikid]

I had not been aware that the original Beowulf MS had been doctored by a technique known as palimpsest, which is the process of scraping the surface of velum to remove text in order to re-rule and re-write over the removed script. The article on the website below concludes that several critical pages in the BMS have been redacted which leads to the question why.

I'm not sure whether it helps or hinders your discussion but it may be of benefit as it uses the latest technology to analyse both the manuscript and the written text on it.

http://www.uky.edu/~kiernan/Nathwylc/nathwylc-restore.htm

[Hatty]

The answer to the quite reasonable question as to why the revision wasn't simply replaced by a fresh sheet of vellum seems to be that there wasn't any. The palimpsest appears to be a bit of a botched job which would be surprising if it was the work of a tenth- or eleventh- century scribe, after all as vellum was so difficult to obtain it must have been quite routine for scribes to recycle the material to hand.

As you say, digital technology seems to be immensely helpful for making hand-writing legible (and analysing it) but not for dating purposes.

[Mick Harper]

I was rather depressed reading Komori's excellent find. The botchery seemed much more likely to be Anglo-Saxon amateurishness than smooth Tudor skullduggery. But I was cheered up by Hatty's observation that actually it is the A/S's who are the professionals when it comes to writing on vellum (and finding vellum to write on too).

The best stuff though was all that about how amateurish the British Museum was (and surely is). Hatty is right to say that electronic techniques are not much good for dating and, assuming the Tudors used A/S vellum (which is surely what all this palimpsest business amounts to), then it will all be down to the inks.

[DPCrisp]

I'll follow you anywhere, Komori... provided you look like you know where you're going. Unfortunately, you seem to be stumbling about a bit here.

[Komorikid]

[Mick Harper]

Are you then taking Frisian and Anglo-Saxon to be co-determinant? Orthodoxy has a curious stance on this question. They concede that Modern Frisian is the closest of all known languages to Anglo-Saxon but this seems not to move them greatly from their other position which is that there is no connection between Frisians and Anglo-Saxons save that they are both members of the great Germanic family of languages. To orthodoxy (I think I am being fair) the Frisians are a fairly modern race who somehow emerged out of the Dark Age Batavian mists 400-1200 AD and stayed put, whereas the Anglo-Saxons are...well, they just emerged out of the Dark Age Germanic mists but relocated all over the place including eventually Australia.

It is my (general) position that Anglo-Saxon is the alphabetical language adopted by Frisian-speakers in their mercantile (and military) struggles against their local alphabetical rivals ie the Romans, the Old Norsians and the Goths (and perhaps the Punics and the Irish).

[Komorikid]

[DPCrisp]

I was having a quick google for cruciform brooches and found this:

Oldest English writing

What is believed to be the oldest form of writing in English ever found has been uncovered in an Anglo-Saxon burial ground. It is in the form of four runes representing the letters N, E, I and M scratched on the back of a bronze brooch from around AD650. The six inch cruciform brooch is among one million artefacts recovered from a site at West Heslerton, near Malton, North Yorks, since work began there in 1978. Dominic Powlesland, the archaeologist leading the excavation team, said: "This could well be the earliest example of written English we know of.
"Only one or two other runic inscriptions from around this period have been found, but this is either the earliest or one of them. We have no idea what the letters mean, except that it would have been something in early English.
"Whether it is a charm of some form, a person's initials or the first letters of a phrase is something only future research will be able to determine. It was obviously something treasured by its owner as it had been carefully repaired."

Of course, this isn't even evidence of written Anglo-Saxon, let alone English!

[Mick Harper]

This is a typical piece of Anglo-Saxonists' double-dealing. Notice it is NOT Anglo-Saxon at all! It is four runic letters. The language might be Mandarin Chinese for all we know. But what's this? The leader of the excavation, no less, assures us "This could well be the earliest example of written English we know of."

Note also the splendid "Only one or two other runic inscriptions from around this period have been found..." Well, guv, is it one or is it two? Blimey, this is quite a significant matter--first ever record of the most important language in the world and all that--so I think we might expect a bit more by way of exactitude. Or is he being deliberately vague...

Now look at this: "...but this is either the earliest or one of them." So, now we know. There are exactly three runic inscriptions, all dating to around the middle of the seventh century. And that's yer fuckin lot, John. And since proper Anglo-Saxon writing started around this time, it has absolutely no significance at all.

Did I say no significance? Well, yes, it does rather. You see we have zillions and zillions of Anglo-Saxon burials so if they were using runes at all, we'd have found plenty from the fifth century on. But we ain't find any -- apart from these three -- so, sorry Komoro, we can safely assume that Anglo-Saxons didn't use runes.

But hold up...some late breaking news...one of our leading Anglo-Saxon specialists has firmed his position somewhat: "We have no idea what the letters mean, except that it would have been something in early English."

[Mick Harper]

This unintentionally amusing posting about the dating of Beowulf was just made on ANSAXnet and has led to the usual frenzied debate

[Komorikid]

[Mick Harper]

As most of you know, Applied Epistemology favours the ju-jitsu principle -- using the weight of orthodoxy to trip itself up. A nice extension of this is now playing itself out with this Beowulf-dating controversy over on the ANSAXnet. What they have discovered (of course) is that modern Anglo-Saxon scholars know far more about Anglo-Saxon than their Tudor counterparts (busy writing Beowulf in what they feel is best Anglo-Saxon) ever did, so that now the hall of mirrors is producing one set of experts unintentionally critiquing another set of experts, hence this hilarious exchange
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Mike,
As to the substance of your question, are you assuming that the BEOWULF poet was subject to constraints on religious officials? Do you think that these constraints would also apply to, say, a court poet?
Best,
Rick

Dear Rick,
No, I think it's clear that those constraints were meant specifically for priests, so unless the Beowulf poet was one of those, and in the latter tenth century, the strictures would be irrelevant.

I was just interested in why, when so many other things in Chambers seem to be taken as writ, this particular section in which he argues that Beowulf could not be tenth century because from Alcuin, through Alfred, Edgar and Dunstan, there was an animus against vernacular poetry (the kind of versifying that Aldhelm is supposed to have done) hasn't even been argued against, as far as I know.

This view of the Benedictine Reform as being opposed to vernacular poetry is certainly not, as best I can tell, held any longer. I don't think Gretsch, for instance, even mentions that particular section of the Canons of Edgar. I wonder why, historiographically, this has happened? I'm guessing that Mary's interpretation (that the stricture is meant to apply to drunken, ale-poeting) is probably the reason.
yours,
Mike
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[Mick Harper]

More high comedy from the 'How can we date Beowulf?' exchange on Ansaxnet
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The original observation was well noticed. Did the similarity between Chamber's idea of the poet ("a scholarly gentleman") and Tolkien's "man learned in the old tales" first impose this passage on Mike's attention? I believe the poet of *Beowulf* was a poet and not an Oxford or Cambridge Don born too soon, but the Chambers-Tolkien idea of a scholarly student of old poetry appeals to many academics and rather neatly matches Tolkien's literary career.
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Takes one to spot one. But after several hundred years of trying to solve the (we know impossible) task of dating Beowulf, this is the current state-of-play
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Chambers thought the early period, say the seventh c., might be receptive to *Beowulf* but not the tenth. Niles argues the late 9th and 10th would have accepted the poem but not the age of Alcuin. No period from the 7th c. to the 11th was so homogeneous that we can say *Beowulf* could or could not have been composed or copied or recited then.
George
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[Mick Harper]

More inadvertent support courtesy of the ANSAXnet
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If we were to argue that Beowulf was written on the sly, underneath the purview of a hostile clerisy, then the clearest evidence is not any supposed monkish interpolation nor quoting any clerical antagonism to the noble set wasting its time with heoric verse, but rather that Beowulf exists in an undistinguished, cobbled together and distinctly unloved codex. It ain't the Benedictional of Æthelwold.

Linguistically, Beowulf is baroque and distinguished in every way possible while Griffith calls the PPM "pedestrian and unimaginative". Funny then that the PPM exist in one of the oddest manuscript contexts from the Anglo-Saxon era. The whole production is incongrous in so many ways.

I haven't read Fulk so I can't judge (or keep up with) the argument and Rick's efforts to propound it, but I think consideration of audience and MS context are equally vital as any technical analysis. This seems as true to me for what others call a lousy, distintegating poetry as a marvelous, maximalist one.
Cheers,
Bruce Gilchrist
------------------------

[Mick Harper]

Here's an interesting piece in this weekend's Guardian Review which I'll reprint here in its entirety since they tend to disappear after a bit from the Guardian's site. If anyone's got access to the original TLS piece, could you let me know?
=====================
Was Shakespeare a crypto-Catholic?
People are prepared to believe any old rubbish about Shakespeare, says James Fenton
Saturday March 24, 2007

Was Shakespeare, or was his father, a Catholic, or a crypto-Catholic? Were they connected to Jesuit missionaries operating undercover in Warwickshire? These questions are asked in an article in the TLS of March 16. The answer to the latter question appears to be a resounding raspberry, which is interesting, since the authors of the article appear well-qualified to judge.

One of them, Thomas McCoog, is archivist of the British Province of the Society of Jesus, while the other, Peter Davidson, is co-editor of Robert Southwell's poems (Southwell was indeed a Jesuit, arrested, tortured and executed at Tyburn in 1595). A point these scholars make is that no useful discussion of Shakespeare and Catholicism can be undertaken unless a clear distinction is drawn between passive nostalgia for the "old religion" and active participation in the Counter-Reformation.

In other words, if I understand them correctly, it is one thing to try to reconstruct the way an individual in late 16th-century England might have felt about the vanishing, or the abiding, legacy of Catholicism - what Shakespeare could have thought about the afterlife, for instance, about purgatory or intercession for the souls of the departed - and quite another to try to involve him or his father in some plot.

The attempt to prove a connection between Shakespeare and the Catholic underground of his day goes back to the 18th century. In 1757, as one of the recent conspiracy theorists tells the story, "some men working in the Shakespeare birthplace in Henley Street discovered, concealed between the eaves and the joists, a six-page hand-written Catholic testament of faith, in English, each page signed with the name of John Shakespeare". The implication of the document is that Shakespeare would have been brought up secretly in the Catholic faith.

The closer you look at the story, however, the more complicated the question of its authenticity becomes. For a start, the original document no longer exists. Secondly, the many who copied it did so, not in 1757, but in 1784, by which time the first page was missing. The great Shakespeare scholar, Edmond Malone, examined the original in 1790, and was at first convinced of its genuineness. He then printed it. Six years later he wrote that he had "since obtained documents that clearly prove it could not have been the composition of any one of our poet's family". But, alas, he died before he could publish that proof.

Malone was also shown, late in the day, a notebook belonging to the original transcriber, in which the first page was restored, but this part of the document was doubted by Malone and is now proved to have been a forgery.

If the whole text could have been shown to be bogus, the issue could be set aside. Strikingly, however, the wording of "John Shakespeare's Spiritual Testament" was shown, in the 20th century, to derive from an extremely rare source, a spiritual "Testament of the Soul" made by the celebrated Cardinal of Milan, St Carlo Borromeo, translated into English, dated 1638, and printed, probably somewhere on the continent, in a tiny format so that it could be kept about the body.

If you read even the most sober of sources you are likely to find some version of the following story. In 1580, the English Jesuit missionaries Edmund Campion and Robert Persons passed through Milan on their way from Rome to England, where they met Borromeo. Here they were given copies of his spiritual testament.

They became a sort of standard text for covert Catholics to sign up to, and this is what John Shakespeare, at risk of torture and martyrdom, did. He either inserted his name on page after page of a manuscript copy, where a space had been left blank, or he wrote the thing out himself. Weirdly enough, in article XII, he beseeched his parents to pray for his soul's delivery from purgatory, although his parents were by then dead.

What the TLS article makes clear, however, is that there is no reason at all to believe that the Jesuits were distributing any such "testament". There is simply no evidence either for any 16th-century copies of Borromeo's testament, or for this kind of clandestine work. Borromeo was not a Jesuit and there is no reason to have him act in league with the Jesuits.

What there is evidence for is a series of misreadings of texts, to make for instance Warwickshire look like a hub of Jesuit activity, and to conjure up a picture of Jesuits handing out in the 1580s the sort of booklets that are only found in the 17th century. From there it is a short step to the belief that Campion himself reconciled John Shakespeare to the Catholic Church.

The TLS authors ask: "What real evidence do we have for the active participation of either John or William Shakespeare in the Counter-Reformation recusant Catholicism fostered by the Jesuits on their English mission? What evidence do we have that even links Shakespeare to the Jesuits? None that bears examination."

So, once again, we can say: we have been ambushed by bosh. For some reason, Shakespeare as Shakespeare is not interesting enough for the sort of taste that dabbles in this area. It has to be Shakespeare and the great pyramid of Ghizeh, Shakespeare and the knights templar, Shakespeare and the missing Lancashire years (under the name Shakeshafte) leading to Shakespeare and the Jesuits and, of course, Shakespeare and the gunpowder plot.

Someone I know is fascinated by the thought that - as he read somewhere - Shakespeare's works were written by a chap in Sicily. Really he is more interested in this theory, as far as I can see, than in the works that this Sicilian chap actually wrote. We are told that "many of Shakespeare's more devout contemporaries (Catholics among them) seem to have expressed disappointment that he consistently failed (or refused) to write on religious themes". You see? Perfect cover for a Jesuit.