2 - Violence, Penance, and Secular Law in Alfred's Mosaic Prologue

Summary

King Alfred's place in the literary history of Anglo-Saxon England rests largely on his ambitious if often extremely unfaithful translations of Latin texts. Their inaccuracies have only increased the interest with which they have been studied, as these are now widely understood as evidence for interference either from external textual influences or private beliefs and preoccupations. While the effort to correlate Alfredian renderings of Latin texts with a determinate set of sources has become one of the most fertile areas of scholarly activity in the last several decades, this work has been confined primarily to texts such as his versions of Boethius's De consolatione philosophiae and Augustine's Soliloquia. Largely left out of the discussion is the lengthy recasting of biblical ordinances with which the king began his code. This text, known conventionally as the ‘Mosaic Prologue’ or ‘Mosaic Preface’, is among the earliest known attempts to translate substantial portions of the Bible into English prose. Remarkably, it is no less free in its rendering of Holy Writ than are other Alfredian translations with their sources. That the king should have taken such liberties even as he worked under the guidance of leading Mercian and Frankish ecclesiastics invites serious questions about what kinds of influences may have been exerted on Alfred and his circle as they prepared the Prologue.