Dan Brown eat your heart out
"This book provides an edition, with a facing translation and detailed commentary, of the three apocryphal gospels of Mary written in Old English. The gospels, which deal with Mary's birth, childhood, death and assumption, are found in manuscripts in Oxford and Cambridge, but have rarely been treated as a group before and in fact have been almost totally neglected by English scholars. An extensive introduction explains the origins and development of the apocrypha from the second to the eleventh century, discussing the Syriac, Greek, Coptic and Latin evidence. Clayton goes on to consider in detail the influence of these apocrypha in Anglo-Saxon England by placing the Old English texts in a very broad context. Editions of Latin analogues from eleventh-century English manuscripts are also included in appendices."
No startling revelations here: these are devotional works centred on the life of the Virgin Mary.
Britishness - the Orwellian version
I was going to do a joke about
schools teaching Britishness to avoid the dreadful danger of middle-aged Englishwomen being radicalised by reading the Anglo-Saxon epic of
Judith but life
beat me to it.
There's a nice flavour of 1984 in the way the council were then sent for
political re-education cultural awareness training, although, assuming the trainers didn't actually get to drop rats down her neck, I don't really see why we should think it's achieved anything beyond making everyone very careful what they say in front of witnesses.
It also turns out that the reason why the travellers in question were there in the first place is that the Cambridgeshire Constabulary are rubbish at
police harassement. We're English: we don't do that sort of thing.
Bizarrely, while trawling for an online Anglo-Saxon site for the Judith, google threw up a link to the BNP site as a place to buy Alfred the Great's
translation of Boethius (link here is to amazon). Not exactly Mein Kampf, is it?
"I now think that foolish men will marvel at what I said a while ago, that wicked men were naught, seeing they are more in number than the others. But even if they were never to believe it, yet it is true nevertheless; the wicked man we can never account pure and single-hearted, any more than we can call or account a dead man a living one. The living man is of even less account than the dead, if he repent not of his sin; but he that liveth an unruly life, and will not be true to his own nature, the same is naught.
Yet I fancy thou wilt say the cases are not alike that the wicked man is able to do evil though not good, whereas the dead man can do neither; but I say unto thee that the power of the wicked comes not from any virtue but from sins. If the wicked were ever good, they would do no evil. That a man can do evil is not power, but weakness; and if that be true which we proved before, that there is no evil, then he that works evil does naught."
