The contextual control of meaning: Saint Christopher in late Anglo-Saxon England
Medieval History
Final Report Abstract
The most significant advances are the identification of the nearest available source for the Old English translation of Saint Christopher; and clarification of the history of the legend in western Europe. This includes the identification of two different translations into Latin, producing the Spanish ‘Decius’ and the north Italian ‘Dagnus’ branches of the text; and some tracking of the subsequent movement of these texts, including the relatively limited spread of the Decius text. This is particularly significant because one text in this branch (BHL 1764) is the oldest, and is therefore the most frequently referred to in scholarship on the saint; but was, it is now clear, almost unknown in the period outside of Spain. The project has also been able to associate some variations within the Dagnus branch with particular regions, and thereby to develop understanding of the connections between regions in this period, such as that between northern England and Bavaria. The project has also been able to demonstrate some of the story’s key concerns, particularly its investment in strangeness and – a major shift from previous understanding of the text – its interest in disruptive, powerful women. As part of unpacking these ideas in the text, the project has been able to work with others in order to advance understanding of the processes of storytelling and of reactions to and constructions of the idea of foreignness and the strange more broadly in the period. The key surprise has been the extent of variation across manuscript copies, paying testament to the extreme flexibility and complexity of storytelling in this period, but making work on stories like this challenging. This points to the second surprise, which is the relative unsuitability of the traditional classification of hagiographical texts.
Publications
- ‘Grotesque, fascinating, transformative: The power of a strange face in the story of Saint Christopher’, Essay in Medieval Studies 34 (2019): 83–98
S. C. Thomson
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1353/ems.2018.0007) - ‘Telling the Story: Reshaping Saint Christopher for an Anglo-Saxon Lay Audience’, Open Library of Humanities, 4.2 (2018): 1–32
S. C. Thomson
(See online at https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.306) - ‘The overlooked women of the Old English “Passion of Saint Christopher”’, Medievalia et Humanistica: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Culture 44 (2018): 61–80
S. C. Thomson
- ‘Introduction: Stories and Their Tellers’, in Medieval Stories and Storytelling: Multimedia and Multi-Temporal Perspectives, Medieval Narratives in Transmission 2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021), 13–30
S. C. Thomson
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MNT-EB.5.121599)
