Dissertation Revelation: Pervasive Apocypha

When I first started writing my dissertation proposal, I knew that apocrypha were important in Anglo-Saxon England. Otherwise, why would it be suitable for a dissertation? Of course, many others have written about the subject, but I wanted to offer a larger scope, a fuller examination beyond just a few topics. So I planned a project in which I use each chapter to look at a specific apocryphal genre--extra-canonical gospels, Acts, apocalyptica--and how texts in that genre are adapted into Old English sermons. That's all been there from the beginning, and it still is.

But I recently had a revelation that pushed all of this forward for me. Apocrypha were not just important for the sermons, or for specific (mostly anonymous) authors who wrote the texts in which I am most interested. No, I realized something else. I realized an important fact about the transmission of apocryphal materials: namely, that apocrypha were pervasive.

That should have seemed obvious from the amount of scholarly discussion amassed on the subject. The collaborative SASLC volume on The Apocrypha, ed. Biggs is around 100 pages summarizing and condensing all of this scholarship, ranging across the range of Jewish and Christian apocrypha and pseudepigrapha that possibly influenced Anglo-Saxons. But, for my own topic--focused just on Christian apocrypha--the mass of media hadn't quite hit me until recently. I was writing about Ælfric and the apocryphal Acts of the apostles when it happened. The following is what I wrote.

Ælfric would have had access to apocryphal apostolic Acts all around him, in a variety of forms. Further confirmation of this notion is found in the extensive list of Latin works that Ælfric directly cites, as reconstructed by Michael Lapidge.[1] Including works by forty-two named authors, as well as several more anonymous titles, “These writings in sum,” Lapidge writes, “reveal him [Ælfric] as an author of very wide reading, particularly in patristic sources, and imply that he had access to a substantial library.”[2] Of the anonymous works, nine are apocryphal apostolic Acts. Since apostolic apocrypha comprise just one part of this array of materials, Ælfric (like the anonymous authors of the Vercelli and Blickling sermons) would have had little reason to regard them with suspicion; indeed, the inclusion of these texts in the same libraries--and, in some cases, in the same codices--as authoritative works by authors such as the Church Fathers would have likely encouraged his use of them.

That, in a nutshell, is the whole argument of my dissertation, and I've explored many more of the details in the few individual chapters I've written so far. But thinking about Ælfric finally put it all in perspective. Admittedly, that's the argument I've been making all along. That last point is the clincher for me, the idea that I've suspected along, but hadn't quite clicked the way it needed to for me to push the implications even further, closer to the polemical argument I want to make in my project. No matter how modern scholars have classified apocryphal materials, and no matter what bias they bring to these so-called "heterodox" texts, apocrypha were rampant in Anglo-Saxon England, and they were considered orthodox to Anglo-Saxons because they were just as pervasive as any number of other authoritative texts. Even for Ælfric--though some scholarship has not acknowledged it.

[1] The Anglo-Saxon Library (Oxford, 2006), 250-66.
[2] Ibid., 250.

Tracing Apocrypha, Medieval to Modern

The other day I started wondering about how to relate my dissertation research on apocrypha in Old English sermons to more contemporary topics. So, on a whim, I returned to a blog post by Michael Peppard that I had read about Pope Benedict XVI's quotation of a saying of Jesus (an agraphon) that ultimately goes back to the Gospel of Thomas. This lead me to the online papal archives (see here), where I started searching and reading around in Benedict's other sermons.

As I soon discovered, serendipitously, the papal archives reveal a wealth of information about Benedict's attitudes toward and uses of apocrypha. Benedict's sermons show a variety of references and appropriations of apocrypha, including allusions, citations, quotations, and narrative adaptations. Even more, his appropriations of apocrypha strike me as very similar to the ways apocryphal materials appear in Old English sermons--typology, allegory, and a number of other connections to Anglo-Saxon cultural currents. Perhaps I should not be surprised to find such strong resonances of the medieval (and such strong connections to Anglo-Saxon sermons) in Benedict's sermons, but I was. Here I share one instance that struck me, with some thoughts about the parallels I found.

Benedict's 2007 Easter Vigil sermon (April 7, 2007) provides a remarkable appropriation of the Harrowing of Hell, drawing on the Psalms, Jonah, and the familiar imagery of Christ's descent in apocryphal materials--however traditional this motif has become, filtered through centuries of authorities.[1] For full effect, I quote the passage in full:

Let us return once more to the night of Holy Saturday. In the Creed we say about Christ’s journey that he "descended into hell." What happened then? Since we have no knowledge of the world of death, we can only imagine his triumph over death with the help of images which remain very inadequate. Yet, inadequate as they are, they can help us to understand something of the mystery. The liturgy applies to Jesus’ descent into the night of death the words of Psalm 23 [24]: "Lift up your heads, O gates; be lifted up, O ancient doors!" The gates of death are closed, no one can return from there. There is no key for those iron doors. But Christ has the key. His Cross opens wide the gates of death, the stern doors. They are barred no longer. His Cross, his radical love, is the key that opens them. The love of the One who, though God, became man in order to die—this love has the power to open those doors. This love is stronger than death. The Easter icons of the Oriental Church show how Christ enters the world of the dead. He is clothed with light, for God is light. "The night is bright as the day, the darkness is as light" (cf. Ps 138 [139] 12). Entering the world of the dead, Jesus bears the stigmata, the signs of his passion: his wounds, his suffering, have become power: they are love that conquers death. He meets Adam and all the men and women waiting in the night of death. As we look at them, we can hear an echo of the prayer of Jonah: "Out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice" (Jn 2:2). In the incarnation, the Son of God became one with human beings--with Adam. But only at this moment, when he accomplishes the supreme act of love by descending into the night of death, does he bring the journey of the incarnation to its completion. By his death he now clasps the hand of Adam, of every man and woman who awaits him, and brings them to the light. (par. 6)[2]

It is true that the declaration that Jesus "descended into hell" is part of the Apostles’ Creed and Catechism of the Catholic Church,[3] yet the details added here fully align with apocryphal traditions developed and maintained in early and medieval Christianity. Reading this passage, I was immediately reminded of Blickling VII, which includes a long scene about the Harrowing of Hell. The motifs Benedict incorporates especially relate to iconographic traditions. For example, Benedict appeals to Christ’s cross as key in the Harrowing, and "the Easter icons of the Oriental Church," which are related to similar images in Anglo-Saxon psalters. Benedict’s quotation of Jonah and his incorporation of Adam in this scene are, in fact, typological, rhetorical, and poetic in ways that his medieval predecessors would fully endorse: Adam is not only the first man, with Christ as his typological mirror image, but also a symbol for all of humanity, redeemed from hell through Christ’s Crucifixion, Harrowing, and Resurrection--none of which are independent from the others.

This Easter Vigil sermon is also not devoid of appeal to cultural relevance. Like Anglo-Saxon sermon authors (like all sermon authors are called to do in Pope Gregory the Great's Pastoral Care!), Benedict situates the Harrowing in a contemporary context for his audience. He ends his sermon with an exhortation and a prayer that link the Harrowing with an allegorical spiritual need in the present:

Love made Jesus descend, and love is also the power by which he ascends. The power by which he brings us with him. In union with his love, borne aloft on the wings of love, as persons of love, let us descend with him into the world’s darkness, knowing that in this way we will also rise up with him. On this night, then, let us pray: Lord, show us that love is stronger than hatred, that love is stronger than death. Descend into the darkness and the abyss of our modern age, and take by the hand those who await you. Bring them to the light! In my own dark nights, be with me to bring me forth! Help me, help all of us, to descend with you into the darkness of all those people who are still waiting for you, who out of the depths cry unto you! Help us to bring them your light! Help us to say the "yes" of love, the love that makes us descend with you and, in so doing, also to rise with you. Amen! (par. 8)

For Benedict, as for medieval thinkers, the Harrowing is not merely an event of the historical past; it is soteriological; it is symbolic; it is continual, even up to the present; and it is an act in which believers are called upon to participate. Benedict's Harrowing imagery thus affirms the long tradition, from early Christianity, through the medieval, to the modern, even permeating the postmodern (on which Benedict himself has written in some of his books). In short, I would argue that Benedict's use of apocrypha is, to use the title of this blog, "Modern Medieval."

[1] Pope Benedict XVI, Easter Vigil, Saint Peter’s Basilica, April 7, 2007, Vatican: The Holy See, http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/homilies/2007/documents/hf_ben-xvi_hom_20070407_veglia-pasquale_en.html, cited by paragraph.

[2] Biblical citations provided here are original to the transcription.

[3] Catechism of the Catholic Church, I.ii.2.5.1, Vatican, http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p122a5p1.htm.

Sermons & Mass Media Studies

Since this blog, as its name suggests, is founded on pairing the modern with the medieval, and since one of our common connections is a focus on the methodologies of being medievalists, I’d like to offer some musings (ramblings?) about some of the ways I’ve been trying lately to conceptualize my dissertation (“Apocryphal Narratives in Old English Sermon Collections”)--although I think it has larger implications for studying other types of texts (as will be seen). Here’s a sort of brief working abstract to describe my project:

This project focuses on the uses of Christian biblical apocrypha in Old English sermons c.950-1010. More particularly, I examine the ways in which apocryphal gospels, apostolic acts, and apocalypses undergo modes of literary adaptation into texts for preaching. Sermons examined are those included in the anonymous Vercelli and Blickling collections, as well as Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies and Lives of Saints. This research thus offers the first full-length examination of apocryphal narratives in these sources and contributes to understanding medieval literature, history, and religion through the lens of contemporary adaptation studies.

As I say, one of my major methodologies is “adaptation studies” (of course, paired with more traditional approaches, such as source studies). This is a wide-ranging field, and working with film adaptation studies has helped, but I’m also more widely interested in the adaptation of media generally--along the lines of Julie Sanders’s recent Adaptation and Appropriation (New York, 2006), which encompasses all types of media from literature to digital to music and beyond ("texts" and "textually" used broadly works here, and in my own thinking).

Yet lately my approach has shifted somewhat, and I’ve been working toward something akin to the pairings of “old media” and “new media” by Martin Foys in Virtually Anglo-Saxon: Old Media, New Media, and Early Medieval Studies in the Late Age of Print (Gainesville, FLA, 2007). Particularly, I’ve been thinking more about how medieval sermons represent a type of popular/mass media. Part of this reminds me of D. L. D’Avray’s witty but apt notion of “mass communication” for later 12th- and 13th-century Franciscan sermons (Medieval Marriage Sermons: Mass Communication in a Culture Without Print [Oxford, 2001]). These ideas also led to thinking about contemporary cultural theories and approaches to our own popular culture & mass media artifacts. Certainly adaptation studies (of all types of media adaptations) fits into this, but there is a lot more cultural studies work that could come into play with this type of examination.

Especially helpful in sorting out some of these connections, for me, is Mikita Brottman’s High Theory/Low Culture (New York, 2005). One fundamental way that this book works is that it contends for more direct dialogue between critical theoretical scholarship and popular culture artifacts--indeed, she argues that the two are ripe for interaction. These concepts work both as a thesis underlying the whole study and as demonstrated in her case studies. Brottman uses Bakhtin's work on dialogism and poly-/heteroglossia (which is how I found the book in the first place, since I've been working on using Bakhtin's ideas for the chapter I'm presently writing), as well as a host of other cultural criticisms to analyze magazines, football fandom, tabloids, shopping culture, horror fictions, even pornography.

To be honest, there is no medieval in Brottman's book (although the stained-glass image on the front cover is curious), and she is thoroughly focused on late 20th- & 21st-century texts (again, used broadly). What I find most helpful for forming some of my own thoughts is her introductory material. Foremost is her flattening of what is often conceived of as "high" and "low" culture, a dichotomy that she sees as "unstable" (xvii). Fundamentally, Brottman sees cultural products--so-called "high" and "low" alike--as part of "culture's connection to the concrete, the fusion of text and performance, the merging of the textual and the lived" (xxv). Furthermore, "popular and 'high' culture are virtually interchangeable--or at least, the distinction between them is blurred" (xxvi).

I see sermons fitting in well with this conception, as they act as mediators on the medieval spectrum of media. This may be, in a way, similar to Aaron Gurevich's ideas in Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception (English trans. Cambridge, 1990), although his work rests on more of a binary (the kind against which Brottman is working) than is possible to fit comfortably alongside recent work and my own thoughts on multilayered literacies (e.g. Clanchy, Stock, etc.). I think that cultural studies of contemporary mass media provide a way to synthesize, extend, and complicate issues brought up by earlier scholars of medieval popular culture. In my own work, I see that intellectual and popular representations (although even this way of thinking bothers me, as it seems to sit on a binary view) of culture are surely fused in medieval sermons, just as Brottman claims for contemporary mass media. Indeed, the vernacularity of the Old English sermons points to this: they are often translations of Latin, but this does not necessitate that they are somehow "dumbed down" or no longer for the literate. Rather, Old English sermons represent the type of mass media that may be consumed by all, whether orally or visually, on the whole spectrum of literacies.

So there it is. These are just the beginnings of my thoughts, and I'm putting them here for first rounds of feedback. There is plenty more to consider, but I wonder how well it works.  What other intersections come into play? What complications and drawbacks are there? How well can this idea take root? Could this approach bear fruit as a basis for my whole project? I'm looking forward to finding out.