Date of Award

Fall 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Medieval Studies

First Advisor

Thornbury, Emily

Abstract

This dissertation presents an early medieval vision of pastoral education and its desired political effects through analysis of the Old English Pastoral Care, which was translated from Latin in the ninth-century Alfredian educational revival. My study is grounded in the educational formation of the clerics whom Alfred recruited in the decade prior to the initiative: men of letters from neighboring Wales, Mercia, and Francia. These grammarian-translators envisioned forming vernacular readers in prudentia, that is, practical wisdom. I read Latin and Old English sources in light of the educational (chs. I- III), linguistic (ch. IV), philosophical (ch. V), and political (ch. VI) experiences of their readers, translators, and audience. Part I argues that grammatical practice localizable to the British Isles and Western Francia informed the goals of rendering the Pastoral Care into the vernacular. The Regula pastoralis was a popular tool in ninth-century Latin classrooms (ch. I), and a fragment of the RP connected with Wales was annotated with the same symbolic syntax markers ('construe marks') used in classbook copies of Ovid and other auctores (ch. II). Chapter III establishes that grammatical practice permeated the translation extensively. Part II treats the theoretical content of the Pastoarl Care as it relates to ethics, establishing new lines of continuity with Late Antique thought. Chapter IV, 'Case for the Consuetudinal Sceal', treats the linguistic equipment for ethics in Old English, showing that the modal sceal could be used for reflection on ethical goals as well as prescription of specific actions. Many of sceal‘s four hundred uses in the PC evidence such invitations to reflection in its readers. Chapter V, 'All the King's Gnomes,' assesses the philosophical consequences of mistaking an auxiliary verb marking habitual or generic aspect for one marking deontic modality, and not only in the Pastoral Care: I argue that gnomic literature constitutes a site of philosophical reflection on the connection between naturalism or functionalism and human moral excellence. In a similar vein, I read passages of with 'sceal ' in the Pastoral Care as consonant with classical ethical reflections on virtue and its political ramifications. The sixth and final chapter shows the political stakes of education in prudence and other virtues by situating it in the contemporary practice of assembly politics. As the dominant institutional practice in secular and ecclesial political life in ninth-century England, the pursuit of consensus among society's leading men served King Alfred's political vision better than the top-down exercise of regnal power; to pursue this consensus, the Wessex court enacted a program of education in virtue along two axes: literary practice and ethical reflection through the Pastoral Care supported the formation of civic virtues. Thus, my dissertation establishes the centrality of ethical ideals and formation to the intellectual and political history of early medieval Europe.

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