Saints' lives and miracle stories in Bede, the old english Bede and Ælfric between translation and rewriting

The aim of the present study is to explore the ways in which selected hagiographic sections of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum have been rendered in the anonymous Old English translation of the Historia ecclesiastica, and in the Homilies and in the Lives of Saints written by Ælfric of Eynsham. The analysis is focused on five different saintly figures, each embodying a different model of sanctity in Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica: St. Alban, the martyr; Æthelthryth, virgin queen and abbess; Oswald, king of Northumbria, warrior, and saint; Fursey, a model of monastic peregrinatio who has several visions of the otherworld, and Dryhthelm, a layman who embraces monastic life after experiencing a vision of the afterlife. For every saintly figure, I develop a comparative analysis between the source text and the two target texts; each of them, in their own way, is representative of a different stage in the development of the English pre-Conquest literary system. This study combines a philologically oriented approach to the study of Medieval literature with the theoretical framework developed in the interdisciplinary field of Translation Studies. This descriptive approach allows me to address issues concerning the relationship between the ideas of translation and rewriting. It also shows that the boundary between the two ideas is far from being rigidly fixed, because perceptions of fidelity, the main parameter that defines translation as opposed to rewriting, are themselves subject to change and cannot be reduced to the mere notion of semantic equivalence. With regard to the specific texts examined here, the theoretical framework provided by Translation Studies also allows us to observe the evolution of the hagiographic genre, of its aims, and narrative strategies, within two very different contexts of production: historiography for the Historia ecclesiastica and its Old English translation, homiletics for Ælfric.