This book situates Alfred the Great in his hagiographic context. For 150 years, the fables told in the ninth century about Alfred’s childhood have posed interlocking disciplinary challenges to historians committed to evicting romance from history. Blending current Hagiography Studies with historical, literary, and biblical hermeneutics can help us forgo the anti-hagiographic commitments which motivated the scholars who purified the Victorian cult of Alfred by expunging his legends and salvaging his historicity. The book focusses on the typological functions of three Alfredian fables from the Old English Chronicle, the Old English Boethius, and Asser’s Vita Ælfredi, analyses the plot common to all three, critiques the psychological conjecture that Alfred’s childhood memory was their common source, and shows that synoptically they can help us see how Alfred shaped the curve of his own life’s destiny and how he engaged in the formation of his own cult to last a thousand years.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- I. Cult and Canon: The Chronicle
- 1. Kiss the Reliquary
- Victorian reliquarianism
- The death of Alfred
- The birth of Alfred
- A relic of Alfred
- 2. Remember the Pope
- Hagiography
- Chronology
- Psychology
- 3. Fix the Date
- Harmony from dissonance
- From Rome to Athelney
- The Infidel vs The Believer
- Stubbs’ Gambit
- Plummer’s blind spot
- II. Too Good to be True: The Life
- 4. Write the Life
- Respect
- Allusion
- Plagiarism
- Echoes
- Clichés
- Irony
- 5. Win the Book
- Transcendental flotsam and jetsam
- Redaction criticism
- The Poem Itself.
- Et legit
- Appendix A Six translations of Race for the Book
- III. The Curve of Destiny: The Works
- 6. Cross the Border
- The Pope and the Book
- Legere et interpretari simul
- From Bonifatian to Alfredian biliteracy
- A game of figures
- Typologie interne
- 7. Win the Crown
- Envoi
- Scylla and Charybdis
- When I was young
- Race for the crown
- Commentary
- Bibliography
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