Review of The Peterborough Chronicle

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... Bernard Muir and Nicholas A. Sparks have created a critical edition and modern translation of the best known of the many medieval chronicles associated with Peterborough: Witness E (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 636)

to the Old English annals otherwise known as The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Witness E called the Peterborough Chronicle because it was compiled at Peterborough—is especially important for two main reasons: first, because its Final Continuation extends further in time (to 1154–55) than any of the other major witnesses to these Old English chronicles; and second, because it documents the linguistic shift from Old to Middle English. As Muir and Sparks write in their introduction, “In it the evolution of the English language is readily seen in developments in orthography, phonology, morphology, syntax, and vocabulary” (1:3).

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Although the Peterborough Chronicle has been edited many times over the centuries (most recently by Cecily Clark in 1958 and by Susan Irvine in 2004), this new two-volume edition represents the first publication to date that edits, annotates, and translates Witness E on its own with such an extensive scholarly apparatus. Its introduction covers the manuscript’s origin and provenance, the evolution and highly complicated structure of the text, its post- Reformation history (including its seventeenth-century manuscript context as well as an 1308 Reviews overview of modern editions and translations), paleography and codicology (including

thirteen illustrative diagrams of the manuscript’s gatherings), historical context, and rhetorical style.

 

The first volume provides extensive codicological footnotes on the Old English text

(including detailed notes on the early modern annotations in E and on its interleaves), and the second volume historical and philological footnotes on the modern English translation. The second volume also includes 115 8-by-11-inch pages of captioned high-resolution plates drawn from the manuscript and ninety-five comparanda. This gallery of images gives the reader access to intimate archival details like the stitching across wounds in the parchment (plates 5 and 95a);

drawings of crosses, fish, and faces doodled in the margins (plates 15, 94b, and 95b); and watermarks of posts, pots, flags, and eagles (plates 91a–92d). In sum, this new edition of the Peterborough Chronicle will, as its editors claim on the publisher’s website, “greatly enhance the accessibility and research potential of one of the most important primary sources for the history, language, and culture” of early England.

In their introduction to the first volume, Muir and Sparks thoroughly detail the history of past attempts to edit the so-called Anglo-Saxon Chronicle—a challenging task due to the fact that, as they put it, “there was never any such entity as ‘the’ Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (singular)” (1:22). Although Muir and Sparks do not explicitly take up the recent calls from David Wilton and Mary Rambaran-Olm to replace the term “Anglo-Saxon,” their edition does align with Wilton’s suggestion (made in his “What Do We Mean by Anglo-Saxon? Pre-Conquest to the Present,” JEGP [2020]: 425–56) that the field turn away from the misleading title The Anglo-

Saxon Chronicle and toward “more precise and analytically rigorous” substitutes like the Peterborough Chronicle or Winchester Chronicle.

 

In their introduction, Muir and Sparks make a persuasive case for the aptness of their decision to present Witness E on its own. They review the well-established problems with earlier attempts to squish the Peterborough Chronicle, the Winchester Chronicle, and the Abington Manuscripts, Worcester Manuscript, Canterbury Bilingual Epitome, etc., into a single comprehensive edition under the title The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in particular the 1953 Everyman edition by G. N. Garmonsway and the 1996 edition by Michael Swanton. These attempts, as Muir and Sparks demonstrate, created editions that are in fact “too challenging to use” (1:21). By contrast, Muir and Sparks have constructed a scholarly edition of Witness E that is user-friendly. I feel confident that advanced undergraduate students could navigate these volumes, although I can imagine that they might find it slightly tricky to line up entries in Old English in the first volume (labeled with dates in Roman numerals) with their corresponding translations in the second volume (labeled with dates in Arabic numerals)—but, thanks to helpful connectors like folio numbers, they could quickly figure it out. I will not hesitate to order these volumes for my library and place them on reserve for an undergraduate seminar on Old English that I teach.

 

In a modest disclaimer, Muir and Sparks describe their translation as “idiosyncratic” (22), as any translation must necessarily be. Comparing their idiosyncrasies to those of their predecessors, this new translation comes across as more modern than archaic and more scholarly than literary. For example, whereas Garmonsway in 1953 and Swanton in 1996 translated the final item in the opening sentence’s list of the five languages of Britain—“Bocleden” in the Old English—as “Latin” (3) and “Book-language” (3), respectively, Muir and Sparks translate it with the precise, informative, highly punctuated, and rather clinical phrase “‘scholarly- Latin’”

(2:273). For another example, whereas James Ingram in 1823 and Garmonsway in 1953 translated æthelingas with lofty, lyrical terms like “nobles” (13) and “princes” (13), respectively, Muir and Sparks simply update the spelling (from æthelingas to athelings) and provide an informative six-line footnote glossing the term (2:296).

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Previous translations have often been swept away by the kind of anglophilia that TheAnglo-Saxon Chronicle can exasperate. James Ingram begins his 1823 edition by declaring that the “Saxon Chronicle” is an English monument without peer  “in any nation, ancient or modern” (i), although he goes on to concede that it is actually

the second greatest “phenomenon in the history of mankind” after the Torah (iii).

 

While that kind of excitement soaks through many earlier translations, Muir and Sparks have kept their text nice and dry. These two distinct scholarly projects by King on the one hand and by Muir and Sparks on the other both pull together in service to the mission of Peterborough’s Anthony Mellows Memorial Trust (which funded King’s publication), namely (according to the cathedral’s website), to take advantage of the fact that “more survives from Peterborough than from most

comparable institutions” in order to edit and publish “the complete surviving archive” of this “major medieval monastery.” King, Muir, and Sparks have moved us closer to that end.

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Emma Maggie Solberg, Bowdoin College

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