Hearing and Speaking in the Margins of CCCC MS 41

The "earmlicost," the "most miserable" punishment of all for sinners condemned to hell at the end of "The Homily on Doomsday" in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 41 (CCCC 41), "is þæt he næfre God ne geðence ne God hine · ne ðæs nowiht elles bið gehired nimðe wop ·¬ hrop ·¬ wea."1 Nor may the condemned "ne gestigeð heo æfre godes rice ne mæg næfre nænig mon asecggan heofona rices gefean."2 Forget about rivers of fire, intolerable cold, or being eaten and disgorged by twelve dragons consecutively in order to be cast naked into perpetual darkness and cold—the worst punishment is to hear nothing but pain, and to lose forever the ability to use one's voice in pursuit of heaven or comfort.

A tremendous amount of work has been done on the texts copied into the margins of CCCC 41, from sourcing the liturgical texts, masses, and prayers or analyzing them in relation to the main text (the Old English version of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum), to deducing the phases of copying and determining the "hybrid" cultural and oral performative contexts of the charms. Further work has been done editing and analyzing some of the homilies and the fragment from "Solomon and Saturn."3

This brief essay approaches two of these texts, specifically, the "Homily on Doomsday" and "Solomon and Saturn," in relation to the almost overwhelming aurality of this bilingual collection. While the oral performativity of the charms in CCCC 41 has been explored extensively, the extent to which a substantial majority of the marginal texts are recordings of words meant to be spoken and heard in eleventh-century England has not been as thoroughly examined. Carol Harrison's book The Art of Listening in the Early Church discusses new ways in which "aural audiences" might have listened to, embodied, and been transformed by these texts.4 The main focus here will be on aurality and the uses of voice in the "Homily on Doomsday" and "Solomon and Saturn," where contrasting images of iron tongues and golden songs combine with clear enunciations of the ways in which humans should use their ears to hear and voices to pray, or—as in the quote with which this essay begins—be trapped for eternity, unable to speak of heaven and hearing only lamentations of pain.

A contrast with the well studied charms in CCCC 41 helps to bring forward a distinction between the speaking of charms to act on the world, and the aural processes by which liturgical and homiletic texts act on auditory audiences themselves. In her book, Popular Religion in Late Anglo-Saxon England, Karen Jolly reminds us that "[i]n a world where everything was alive with spiritual presence, where the doors between heaven and earth were open all around, then saints, demons, and elves were equally possible."5 Jolly describes the charms as "middle practices," falling "between popular and formal, between magic and religion…and between liturgy and medicine" in a hybrid early English culture.6 Jolly steers away from scholarship that treats charms as, "the lowest, degenerate fringe of a dominant Christian orthodoxy."7 After all, as John D. Niles puts it, the texts of the charms make it clear that "the celebrant is assumed to be so well acquainted with the liturgy that he will be prepared to intone not only the Paternoster …[but also] the Tersanctus…the Benedicite…and the Magnificat, all in good Latin."8

More recently, Leslie K. Arnovick has built on the performativity discussed by Stephanie Hollis to rethink the charms that specifically evoke the power of the Paternoster and the names of the saints.9 She argues that the "utterance of a performative [speech act, like a charm]…initiates a change in reality: if successful, it will cause the world to be changed to reflect the speaker's words." For Arnovick "orality is not a static artifact enshrined within a written text. Rather, like a saint's relic, it possesses a vital force whose literary or incantatory effect warrants exposition."10 She quantifies the surviving charms to discover that a full quarter of them incorporate Paternosters.11 Many others invoke litanies of holy names, like some of the charms in CCCC 41 the "utterance [of which] is intended as an implicit request or as a pronouncement that in itself has power"—and so can change the world.12

Arnovick points out that, for the early English, "the power of the utterance may be rooted in the phenomenology of an oral culture," and she cites Walter Ong's observation that "[d]espite their transitoriness, words are in essence oral events."13 She focuses on "entexted oral phenomena" and "spoken acts" in ways that get at some of the complex "linguistic and cultural processes" and "discursive contexts" that seem to have been active in eleventh-century England.14 Harrison, in contrast, approaches early medieval "auditory culture" from an ontological and physiological perspective. She points out that "great divide" between orality and literacy articulated by Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong in the second half of the 20th century has been profoundly influential, but that auditory culture has been more continuous than their work suggests.15 Harrison and Leigh Eric Schmidt, among others, discuss the ways in which "[t]he identification of visuality as supremely modern and Western has…been sustained…through the othering of the auditory as ‘primitive.'"16 According to Schmidt, "the history of the senses, like the history of the body, has to be written tradition by tradition, era by era."17 In our world of podcasts, YouTube, Alexa, Spotify (among many other streaming services), the first Grammy awarded for the "spoken word" in 2023—and even the number of people who turn on their televisions to listen to them—it seems important to question assumptions about the predominance of the visual and vulgarity of the auditory.

So, although it is a commonplace to remind modern audiences that most medieval people would have heard a book and that silent, solitary reading, as Paul Saenger reminds us, is a modern phenomenon,18 our understanding of the recordings added in CCCC 41 can benefit from being explored in relation to the act of listening. As Harrison puts it, there are two modes of attention required by the act of listening: one "is open to the sheer ‘is-ness' of a thing [heard] in all its manifold, fleeting, embodied diversity." The other "fixes what comes to the physical ears so that it can be captured, laid out, and presented to the mind for inspection.…Both modes of attention—the embodied and the cognitive—are necessary for sound to be heard." Harrison connects the "physical, temporal, and mutable" matter of listening with the Fall and the Incarnation.19 If Adam and Eve "heard" God intuitively before the Fall:

the Fall effected a revolution in the way in which the senses functioned in Christian life and culture: they became the means through which God revealed Himself, communicated with, indeed, reformed and transformed fallen human beings.…The mystery of the Incarnation was the mystery of God taking a human body in order to communicate with human beings in and through the body—through sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell.20

Harrison's "hearer response theory," emphasizes the classical and medieval cognitive idea that "images were imprinted upon the mind or memory as mental pictures" like impressions in wax, so that listeners would also "embody" divine truths.21 Drawing extensively on the writings of Augustine of Hippo, she develops the concept of "literate listening," an auditory Christian education carefully developed by preachers and teachers—remembering (à la patristic exegesis combined with Saussure) that "language is simply an external mediator, which serves its purposes and then passes away; it is not the reality or thought itself."22 Language points beyond itself, with the caveat that "God's use of language" (for believers) marks "a necessary constraint or limitation of divine meaning to human understanding and powers of perception."23 The "relation between the incarnation, the preacher, and transformative listening" for early Christians elicits new resonances in CCCC 41, where the aural, visual, and embodied come together in dialogues, homilies, and prayers.

"Gylden is se godes cwide," according to Solomon, speaking about the Paternoster: "Lamana he is læce, leoht winci,\e/ndra / Swilce he is deafra duru deadra tunge, / Scildigra scyld, scippendes seld."24 Prayer here is simultaneously a cure, a beacon, an opening, a voice, and a defense in a world of human limits and disabilities. The version of "Solomon and Saturn" in CCCC 41 begins with talk of books, but also speaks of sound, especially songs and canticles, "cantices cwyde" (l. 17), "þæs organes" (l. 33), and "beorhtan gebede" [bright prayer] (l. 43). Solomon also warns:

Unlæde bið on eorþan unnit lifes
Wesðe wisdomes, weallað swa nieten,
Feld[gongende] feoh butan gewitte.
Se [ðe] þurh ðone cantic ne can Christ geherian,
W[a]rað [he] windes full.25

Speaking prayers and singing canticles makes humans human and protects them. While Irina Dumitrescu is not incorrect to say that the Solomon and Saturn dialogue "repeatedly evokes the wonder of books, curiosity, learning, and memory,"26 it is also the case, as Tiffany Beechy points out, that it "participat[es] in an early ‘incarnational poetics'" in which the "words of the Word" have "a special relationship with the Incarnation."27 Praising Christ, in the passage just cited, not only serves as a kind of protection against the devil, it also allows individual Christians to join in, to participate in said "early ‘incarnational poetics,'" to be human in the image and echo of God—to embody, as it were, the same sounds in fleeting, mutable, spoken human language.

Speech, song, embodiment, and the limits of the human body also play a key symbolic role in the "Homily for Doomsday." In contrast with the gold of God's speech in Solomon and Saturn, in the Homily, the preacher tells his audience, "¬ ðeah ðe ,\h/wylc mon hæbbe ·c· tungena ¬ ðara æghwylc hæbbe isene stefne ne magon hi asec[g]an helle tintrego"28 This version of the "‘absymal paradox' of using words to say that we cannot use words"29 derives ultimately from Virgil's Aeneid, most likely via The Vision of St Paul, though indirectly; the phrasing here is closer to Virgil's than to the Vision.30 The multiplication of tongues combined with the impossible iron weight of the voices present a striking, grotesquely embodied sublime that contrasts pointedly with sounds of joy found in the heavenly Jerusalem invoked at the start of the homily:

þær is leoht ealles leohtes ·¬ þær bið se eca gefea ·¬ þær bið sio ece torhtnes ealra engla · þær bið ec sio swete lufu ealra haligra ·¬ þær bið sio ece blis butan ælcum ende · þær bið sio fægruste geoguð butan ælcere ilde · ðær bið se torhta dæg þæs heofoncundan licoman · þær bið sio ece eadignes · simle unonstyrgendlico · ðær bið rice butan ælcere onwendednisse · ðær bioð rihtwisan himseolfe ·¬ þær nænig sunne on setle ne gæð ·¬ þær mona gewanod ne bið · Ac þær bið godes lof þæt singa leste · þær beoð engla sangas simle gehired ðær, /ne\ bið næfre sar ne gnorn,\u/ng, ne heaf ne wop.31

The continual songs of angels—of sounds—combine in this passage with light and love, celestial bodies, and continual, happiness in the "kingdom without change." On the one hand, this idea of the continual sound of angelic song in a permanent place of happiness and love, undisturbed by pain, sadness, lamenting or weeping is an articulation in human language, delimited in ways that can be comprehended by human senses. On the other, it is as impossible as the iron voices, a "sublime paradox" counterbalancing the "abysmal" one that attempts to describe a mode of being that is not limited by the temporality and mutability of post-lapsarian humanity.

In order to impress on its listeners the importance of hearing and listening, "The Homily on Doomsday" takes them on a spoken word journey to doom. Each step is marked by signs, some visual and physical: springs turning to blood, stars falling to earth, the sun dimming and the mood going dark. Others are heard: slander and disagreement, followed by "bið micel gnornung ¬ geomrung geworden ofer ealne middangeard ·¬ micela stefna bioð on heofnum gewordena ¬ stronge ¬ micelu wolcnu astigað of ðissum rodore norðeweardum · ðun[ora]s lihtas bioð ·¬ liges bryne swiðe stronglice ·¬ farað æfter ðæm wolcne ¬ bewreoð eallne heofon oð efen."32 The following two days tokens of doom begin when "bið micel stefn geworden of heofones rodore," before the earth is tipped off its axis and folded together like a book, when all folk will call out, "eala nu hit ende nealeceð nu we sculon forweorðan."33 Thunder, cries, and ruin continue through to the seventh day. The "Signs of Doom" in this homily are as physical and violent as they are literalized and loud. The "Seven Heavens," which follow, present a visual geography of pain for sinful souls voiced in the language of physical torment leading to judgement, and final condemnation to "¬ ðone singalan hungor ¬ ðone unablindendan ð,\u/rst ¬ ða awese,\n/dan nacodnisse ¬ ða ecan þistru ¬ ðone bryme þæs sweartan fyres ¬ þone unarefendlican cile," and—to come full circle in a final passage (following and emphasizing the one with which this essay opened): "þæt seo wirigcwedule tungene gestigeð heo næfre Godes rice, ne mæg næfre nænig mon asecggan heofonarices gefean · ne ðære fægernisse godes mihta ¬ his micelnisse þurh gife usses Dominis hælendes Christes se lifað ¬ rixað in ecnes butan ænigum ende."34 The worst punishment of all is losing of the ability to hear and speak of God and heaven forever.

This homily may be construed as a blunt instrument—scary and apocryphal—but as Harrison points out, some of the earliest Christian orators, the literate preachers making Scripture available to illiterate, auditory audiences, would have been deeply trained in classical rhetoric. They would have been struck by the "‘clash of sensibilities' which Scripture provoked. The jarring vulgarity of Scripture, when heard by classical trained ears."35 Her discussion of Augustine's "self-conscious" and "uneasy" attempts to "come to terms" with the style and expression of Scripture in comparison with the Greek and Latin classics36 raises questions that probably never cross the minds of audiences accustomed to the archaic, even regal English of the King James Bible, or, for that matter, the colloquial, highly readable translation of the New International Version.

But maybe this is an appropriate way to conclude this brief essay about auditory audiences and the texts recorded in the margins of CCCC 41. Scholars familiar with the brilliant, catholic homilies of Ælfric and Wulfstan have long questioned the "Homily on Doomsday" and its companion homilies, prayers, liturgies and charms in CCCC 41. Just as scholars like Niles, Jolly and Arnovick have contextualized the charms as being part of a process of acculturation, applying Harrison's ideas about the act of listening as a process of embodiment and learning, leading to the transformation of the listener helps contextualize the echoes in the margins of CCCC 41 and imagine hearing the sounds of some of the lost voices of the past.

 

This essay was first presented at the Kayden Symposium on CCCC 41, organized by Tiffany Beechy, at the University of Colorado, Boulder, March 2023.