COMMUNICATING THE FAITH. THE CIRCLE OF BONIFACE, GERMANIC VERNACULARS, AND FRISIAN AND SAXON CONVERTS.

The early medieval Anglo-Saxon missionaries working in the northern Low Countries left traces of their ways of communicating the faith in the descriptions in hagiographical texts produced in the diocese of Utrecht between the eighth and the twelfth centuries, in the vocabulary of the Germanic dialec...

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Publicado en:Amsterdamer Beiträge zur Älteren Germanistik Vol. 70; pp. 87 - 131
Autor principal: Mostert, Marco
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Brill Academic Publishers 2013
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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Sumario:The early medieval Anglo-Saxon missionaries working in the northern Low Countries left traces of their ways of communicating the faith in the descriptions in hagiographical texts produced in the diocese of Utrecht between the eighth and the twelfth centuries, in the vocabulary of the Germanic dialects which would later on become Dutch (and Frisian), and in two texts, a Baptismal Promise which, written in Northumbria, in all likelihood was present in eighth-century Utrecht, and the text known as the Indiculus superstitionum et paganiarum. It is argued that Boniface found these texts in Utrecht and inserted them in a dossier he compiled prior to the Concilium Germanicum of 742. The dossier was copied into MS Vatican Palatinus latinus 577, ff. 2-11 at the end of the eighth century, probably at Hersfeld, by an Old High German-speaking scribe. More important than establishing the language or dialect of these two Latin-vernacular texts is the realisation that the difficulties this entails may be used as arguments for the idea that the texts may have been understandable to speakers of more than one language, and that the Baptismal Promise may therefore have been useful in the Christianisation of the continental Germanic-speaking pagans irrespective of the dialects modem scholars ascribe to them.