This new book by Charles Wright, Thomas Hall, and Thomas D. Hill is a sequel to James E. Cross and Thomas D. Hill’s 1982 book on the Prose Solomon and Saturn and Adrian and Ritheus dialogues. The three contributors dedicate the book to the late James E. Cross. They represent an academic line of descent: Hill directed Wright’s dissertation, and Wright directed Hall’s. In this volume, which supplements the Cross-Hill book rather than replacing it, the authors proceed systematically through every item in the dialogues, detailing possible sources and analogues, manuscript transmission, and the theological background of the various claims.
The idiosyncratic Old English wisdom dialogues are relatively static dialogues in which one person asks questions about obscure knowledge (“Tell me where God sat when He made the heavens and the earth,” “Tell me which bird is best,” “Tell me who first established letters,” “Tell me why the sun is red in the evening”) and another person answers all the questions (“he sat on the wings of the wind,” “the dove is best; it signifies the Holy Ghost,” “Mercury the Giant,” “because it looks on Hell”) (80, 171, 226, 229). The Prose Solomon and Saturn and Adrian and Ritheus dialogues likely date, at the earliest, to the late 900s, though we know little about the specific context of their production (51). While they have received relatively scant attention, the dialogues offer a window into the transmission of ideas and literature in the first millennium CE. They also survive in more manuscripts and versions than almost anything else from the Old English period; as the authors note, “We have in Old English, after all, four Solomon and Saturn dialogues to one Beowulf” (52).
I found this volume exhaustively researched and meticulously edited. It serves as a spectacular reference that attests to the many influences on the intellectual environment of early medieval England. Wright, Hall, and Hill consider literary, theological, scientific, and artistic sources, including manuscript illustrations. Often, they do not argue for a particular line of transmission but instead present every possible parallel so that readers can sort them out themselves.
Their book begins with a careful account of all the major Latin wisdom dialogues and their interrelations, an account that situates Adrian and Ritheus [AR] and Solomon and Saturn [SS] in their immediate context. The authors note that the two dialogues are not “devoid of structure” despite their seeming variety: “While imperfectly realized, the internal organization of SS and AR by small topical groupings, as well as the thematic framing of the dialogues as whole texts, correspond broadly to the principles of organization discerned by Mercedes Salvador Bello in Anglo-Latin collections of enigmata and in Riddles 1-40 of the Exeter Book” (14, 17). The book defines both dialogues as “hybrid dialogues” that mix characteristics of the Joca monachorum [JM] dialogue tradition with “commonplace” and “wisdom items” (categories of dialogues created respectively by the authors and by Martha Bayless) (31). They note that the “JM cores of SS and AR are also notable for the high proportion of rare or unusual items” (31).
Wright, Hall, and Hill make several key arguments about the nature of these dialogues--and wisdom dialogues in general: that the wise responses to questions “always remain undisputed”; that not all wisdom comes down to a “bare statement of fact” but is often “in a way that troubles the very concept of ‘knowledge’ with questions that assert paradoxical or apparently impossible propositions”; and that the answers may have served as “tokens of shared knowledge that index membership in a social group” for the religious groups they were likely composed for (35, 44, 46). The authors disagree with the scholarly claim that “most of the lore proffered in these dialogues is not wisdom but trivia” simply because most of the lore “consists of comparatively minor or obscure details of biblical and ecclesiastical history” (37). To refute this characterization of the dialogues as concerned with trivia, the authors note two things. First, to a medieval audience, “nothing in the Bible was really ‘trivial’.” Second, “unlike in catechesis, the questions asked in curiosity dialogues as a rule did not put one’s salvation or orthodoxy at stake” (47).
When read cover-to-cover, the book exhibits the authors’ erudition and the truly global influences on the literature of early medieval England. In addition to the more-expected continental sources, Cross, Hall, and Hill identify parallels from Persia (210), Egypt (247), Arabic (236, 241, 245), China (236), Syriac (147, 153), and more. Whether these had a direct influence on the early English authors is uncertain. The sheer number of parallels with Jewish texts suggests that, despite the oft-recounted fact that we do not know if any Jewish people lived in England before the Norman Conquest, Jewish texts had a profound influence on English thought (93, 113, 133, 140, 180, 199, 225-226, 235, 246, 272).
The influence of the Canterbury school of Archbishop Theodore of Tarsus and Abbot Hadrian of Africa on the dialogues stands out (see 88, 115-16, 120, 155, 165, 187, 291), and it made me wonder how many of the parallels in these texts to Syrian, African, and Persian texts were due to the influence of the many texts that Hadrian and Theodore brought to England. The influences of Symphosius on the wisdom dialogue tradition that Wright, Hall, and Hill identify, for instance, could point to Hadrian, who likely brought Symphosius’s riddles to England (21).
The book draws heavily on unedited medieval texts, and the authors generously provide links, when possible, to the digitized online versions of the manuscripts. One wonders, given this collection’s extensive use of digital archives, whether link rot--the fact that web links tend to become derelict--will affect the book’s usefulness down the road. How many of these links will be functional in thirty years?
The book offers numerous opportunities for additional examination of the Old English and Latin dialogue tradition’s vast web of sources. Wright, Hall, and Hill have modeled how to expand on such work with their continual reference to the 1982 Cross/Hill book, whose important foundation they have built on here. Even with the authors’ erudition, I am sure there remain more connections for future scholars to discover, connections only possible because of this monumental study. I found myself musing, for example, whether there might be an echo of Durham Proverb 3 (“Æt þearfe man sceal freonda cunnian” [in need, a man shall discover his friends]) in Adrian and Ritheus 46 (“Tell me who is the false friend / I tell you, he is one’s companion at the table and none in necessity”). [1] What other possible connections could scholars find with these dialogues?
For instance, I wonder whether we might discover further sources in the Arabic tradition, to which our authors found a few references (see 236, 241, 245) but which may hold further parallels. No study can examine everything, so the authors can hardly be criticized because Arabic literature receives less attention here. However, al-Andalus was a major influence in Europe at the time of the composition of these dialogues, and scholars such as Michelle Brown have drawn our attention to north African influences on pre-Conquest England. For example, the authors note that Adrian and Ritheus 5 (“Tell me from which side of Adam did our lord take the rib from which he made woman / I tell you, from the left”) “circulated widely in many languages” including several Arabic exemplars (240-241). I identified another analogue beyond the ones that the authors and their source, Sergey Minov, pointed out: fourteenth-century Egyptian writer Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri’s Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition, which notes “God created Eve from a crooked rib on Adam’s left side that was flanked by some cartilage.”[2] Likely, other parallels from the Arabic tradition exist for this and other ideas in the Latin dialogue traditions. Future scholars may wish to turn towards Arabic learning as a potential influence on medieval wisdom collections like this.
Finally, I want to acknowledge the book’s quiet shift to follow emerging trends in early medieval English studies towards shedding some of the field’s racist baggage and acknowledging newer work on race. The book avoids using the term “Anglo-Saxon” and acknowledges racial attitudes in its medieval sources (see, for instance, 207). Such changes--coming from senior scholars in the field--are a welcome sight.
Overall, this book is a monumental achievement of careful, exacting scholarship. For medievalists seeking to understand Old English literature’s global interconnections, this book will be invaluable. One can only hope that medievalists build on this fantastic work, tracing additional parallels to expand our picture of the intellectual and literary world of medieval northern Europe.
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Notes:
1. Adrian and Ritheus 46 quoted from Wright, Hall, and Hill, 294. Durham Proverb 3 quoted from Olof Arngart, “The Durham Proverbs,” Speculum, 56.2 (1981): 288-300, at 3; translation mine.
2. Shihab Al-Din Al-Nuwayri, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition (New York, 2016), 240.