Western Medieval Manuscripts : Prayerbook ('The Book of Cerne')

Western Medieval Manuscripts

The Book of Cerne is a prayerbook made in Mercia, probably in the 820s. It is one of the most interesting and least famous of early Anglo-Saxon illuminated manuscripts, over-shadowed by the compelling presence of the great Insular gospel books, bibles and psalters and by the prodigious works of Bede and Aldhelm. Yet this complex and visually attractive book, and its relationships with other artefacts of its period, cast a strong beam of light upon the history and culture of its age and upon the kingdom of Mercia. The sobriquet 'The Book of Cerne' stems from the book's later medieval provenance, for the 9th-century manuscript is now sandwiched between two lengthy sequences of documentary and liturgical materials from the monastery of Cerne Abbas in Dorset. These date from the 14th to the 16th century and are unlikely to have been added to the manuscript during the Middle Ages, and possibly not until after 1697 (when the manuscript was recorded in the possession of John Moore, with only the copy of the Magna Carta noted in addition to the 9th-century contents). Codicological evidence of previous bindings furthermore indicates that the 9th-century portion was probably bound independently of other materials during the medieval period. We cannot be sure when the Anglo-Saxon book reached the Benedictine Cerne Abbey, which was founded (or perhaps refounded) in 987 by Æthelmær the Stout, a leading thegn of King Æthelred and ealdorman of the Western Provinces. He was the patron of the famous homilist Ælfric of Eynsham, who became a priest at Cerne and taught there. Might this prayerbook have reached Cerne as part of Ælfric's devotional books, or through Æthelmær? Whatever its later ownership, internal evidence points to the Book of Cerne having been made as the personal prayerbook of Bishop Æthelwald of Lichfield (818-830). It contains an abbreviated psalter that has previously been attributed to Bishop Æthilwald of Lindisfarne (722-740), since it is introduced by a now almost illegible rubric in Latin: 'hoc argumentum forsorum [sic. versorum] oeðelpald episcopus decrepsit' ('Bishop Ædeluald has worn out these lines of proof'); see f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(228);return false;'>2:87v</a>). This may refer to his priestly diligence in being 'psalteratus': that is, able to recite the Psalms by heart. There is also an acrostic poem on f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(95);return false;'>2:21r</a>, written in lines of several alternating colours, some of which are now very faded and difficult to read with the naked eye. The first letters of each line read (vertically) 'AEDELVALD EPISCOPUS'. David Dumville argued that both occurrences indicate that the manuscript was wholly or in part a copy of one made a century earlier on Holy Island in Northumbria. However, the spelling of Æthelwald's name uses the Mercian 'el' rather than the Northumbrian 'il' for the second syllable. I have proposed instead that, rather than being a direct copy, the manuscript was a 9th-century compilation which drew upon earlier materials from various sources, including 8th-century Northumbria. Cerne is one of a group of four Mercian prayerbooks, the others being: <ul><li>London, British Library, Harley MS 7653 ('The Harleian Prayerbook')</li><li>London, British Library, Harley MS 2965 ('The Book of Nunnaminster')</li><li>London, British Library, Royal MS 2.A.xx ('The Royal Prayerbook')</li></ul> They are the first such books, before the advent of Books of Hours in the 13th century, in which their contents are arranged thematically as a protracted devotional meditation. These comprise extracts from the Gospels followed by a selection of prayers, hymns and charms - and, in Cerne's case, the breviate Psalter, Harrowing of Hell and acrostic poem, plus four evangelist miniatures prefacing its four Passion narratives from the Gospels. However, there are notable differences. Whereas the three British Library manuscripts contain linguistic and provenance evidence that points to them having been made by and probably for women, Cerne – the latest and most developed member of the group – was made for a man. There is also a slightly varying focus in each example. The Book of Nunnaminster takes salvation as its theme, while the Royal Prayerbook's focus is on Christ as the physical and spiritual health of humankind and tends to select miracles of healing in its Gospel extracts that relate to women. The Harleian Prayerbook is very fragmentary but still reveals some grammatical features indicating the female voice, like the other two, and similar Mercian set minuscule script and little decorated or zoomorphic initials. The theme of the Book of Cerne, meanwhile, revolves around the Communio Sanctorum (Communion of Saints): the body of the Church comprising those on earth (the Church Militant), those awaiting resurrection (the Church Expectant) and those already in heaven (the Church Triumphant), with Christ as its head. There is a preface in Old English – one of the earliest pieces of English vernacular prose – which instructs the bishop on how to use the book, prostrating himself before the Communion of Saints each day and reciting it, in order to reinforce his place within it. Another unusual text in Cerne is a responsorial Harrowing of Hell, which recounts how Christ freed all those already languishing in hell on Easter Saturday. This takes the form of spoken dialogue between Adam and Eve and has led to the suggestion that it represents the first known text of a piece of liturgical drama, which may also have originated in Lindisfarne. The Harrowing of Hell text extends the message of Christ's salvific mission to those who had been languishing in hell, and the breviate Psalter links them all in prayer with those already in heaven. The Psalter was the mainstay of both public liturgical, communal monastic and individual private prayer. It is complemented by the suite of prayers and hymns that follow the Gospel extracts. Thus each of the parts of the Communio Sanctorum are unified and united under Christ, the head of the body of the Church and Bishop Æthelwald of Lichfield reaffirmed his own place in that communion when he performed his own devotions with his prayerbook – a much more sophisticated compilation that the usual florilegia or pamphlets of prayers otherwise encountered before the high Middle Ages. At the beginning of each Gospel's Passion narrative, a miniature of the relevant evangelist faces the text page, where an elaborate decorated initial and coloured display script are used for the opening words. In each of these miniatures, a full-length 'terrestrial' evangelist symbol is set within an architectural arcade at the apex of which is a roundel containing a half-length human bust of each evangelist. These are clean shaven, long-haired and slightly effete, whilst the symbols are robust and slightly naïve in style (other than the strong graphic design of the eagle). The bull is a full-length adaptation of the half-length one seen in the St Augustine Gospels (<a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://parker.stanford.edu/parker/catalog/mk707wk3350'>Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 286</a>, f. 129v), the famous Gospels thought to have accompanied St Augustine to Canterbury from Rome in 597. The figure style and the palette, with its distinctive slate grey/blue and brick-red/brown alongside its yellow, red, blue, white and purples may seem somewhat provincial, but costly powdered gold is also used in the initials and display panels of the Gospel incipits. These also feature iconographic messaging: for example, the St Matthew initial features a 'manticore' – the half lion, half-human harbinger of death in the Physiologus – announcing the Passion of Christ. It is the Latin inscriptions in display capitals that accompany the busts and symbols of the evangelists, however, that really give the clue to the sophistication of this manuscript. They announce the busts of the evangelists – 'Here is Matthew [/Mark/Luke/John] in his human guise' – and then describe their symbols in distinctive terms that perform a hypertextual and intertextual function by alluding to the phraseology of relevant passages in the Gospels. For example, Luke's inscription reads 'Hic Lucas formam accepit uituli' ('Here Luke accepts the form of a calf/bull'), which would remind informed readers of one of the key Easter readings from Phillipians 2:7: 'Rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness'. As Gregory the Great and Bede both wrote, the sacrificial calf or bull of St Luke symbolises the crucified servant Christ. These exegetical interpretations are also pursued in the other evangelist miniatures. Each recalls the practice of explaining the different yet complementary character of each Gospel, and of its symbolism of different facets of Christ's persona and mission, with the aid of visual images during the 'Apertio aurium'. This was the practice by which adult baptismal candidates were instructed in the forty days leading up to Easter, at which point they would be baptised and enter the Communion of Saints to serve God in the world as a member of the Church Militant.The prayers – all in Latin – open with an initial and display panel akin to the Gospel extract openings, and thereafter each prayer begins with a decorated initial, many featuring bird or animal heads. The first text is the Lorica of Laidcenn / Loding, an Irish prince, and it is accompanied by its original interlinear Old English gloss. As with the Preface, this bears witness to Mercia's espousal of the written vernacular before the ascendancy of Wessex and the Alfredian revival of religion and learning. Rather than declining, Mercia was embracing new cultural challenges during the first half of the 9th century, until Viking raids destroyed its ecclesiastical buildings and their libraries, and pushed these manuscripts westwards: the Royal Prayerbook to Cornwall, and Cerne and the Book of Nunnaminster to Wessex. Professor Michelle Brown