The Old English Translation of the Orosius’s History Against Pagans as a Homiletic Text Zoya Metlitskaya (Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia)
THE OLD ENGLISH translation of the History Against Pagans by Paul Orosius (below Old English Orosius), belongs to the group of the so called ‘Aefredian translations’ – the translations of Latin patristic texts into Old English, produced, presumably, at the end of the ninth century. It is commonly believed that these translations were created by command of and under the supervision of King Alfred the Great; they include, along with Orosius’s work, translations of Pastoral Care and Dialogues by Gregory the Great, The Ecclesiastical History of English People by the Venerable Bede, Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, Soliloquies by St Augustine, as well as prose translation of Psalms 1-50. All these texts extant in the manuscripts dated to 10th-11th century. A legendary tradition states that the translator was King Alfred himself, and the efforts to confirm or reject this legend kept scholars busy until the 1990s. In the twentieth century almost all studies of ‘Alfredian translations’ were focused on an analysis of their syntax and vocabulary to find similarities and variations between the styles and usages of the translators of different texts, in order to address the unresolvable problem of their authorship. The Old English translation of Orosius’s History was not an exclusion. The text had been published twice by the Early English Texts Society (Sweet 1883, Bately 1980); the admirable second edition
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