Wærferth's Old English "Dialogues" of Gregory the Great

The Dialogues of Gregory the Great (c. 540–604), translated into Old English by Bishop Wærferth of Worcester in the late ninth century, offer a combination of didacticism and drama. The work opens with Gregory complaining to his deacon, Peter, that being a bishop means spending too much time tossing on a sea of worldly troubles, far from the contemplative peace of the monk’s cell. He compares himself sadly to those who have climbed to the pinnacles of the spiritual life. Peter wonders whom Gregory is talking about—surely Italy hasn’t produced anyone of the stature to perform miracles. On the contrary, says Gregory; and thus begin four books of dialogue in which Gregory describes the deeds of holy people in (from his perspective) recent Italian history. Books One and Three collect stories of the miracles, prophecies and virtuous habits of abbots, monks and bishops of the recent and slightly less recent past. Book Two is a life of St Benedict of Nursia. Book Four is devoted to the existence of the soul and the nature of the afterlife, again addressed largely through miracle stories.

      Because of its emphasis on miracles and obvious differences from Gregory’s more exegetically knotty works such as the Moralia in Iob, Gregory’s authorship of the Latin Dialogues has sometimes been questioned. One notorious episode is the story of the nun, the devil and the lettuce, from Book One, here quoted in Wærferth’s version (MS C–see below for more on the manuscripts):

Soðlice sume dæge hit gelamp, þæt an nunne of þam ylcan mynstre þara fæmnena eode in þone wyrttun. Þa geseah heo ænne leahtric. Þa lyste hi þæs ⁊ hine genam 7 forgeat, þæt heo hine mid Cristes rodetacne gebletsode, ac heo hine freclice bat. Þa wearð heo sona fram deofle gegripen ⁊ niðer on þa eorðan gefeoll ⁊ wæs swiþe geswenced. ⁊ hi þa hrædlice to heora fæder Equitio ærendracan sændon ⁊ him þis sædon ⁊ him bædon, þæt he hraðe come ⁊ mid his gebedum heora swuster gehælde. ⁊ þa se halga man gebiddinde arn. ⁊ sona swa se halga fæder in þone wyrttun ineode, þa ongan se deofol, þe þa nunnan swencte, of hire muþe clipian swylce he dædbote don wolde ⁊ þus cwæð: ‘hwæt dyde ic hire? hwæt dyde ic hyre? Ic me sæt on anum leahtrice, þa com heo ⁊ bat me.’ He þa se Godes wer mid mycelre æbylignysse bebead, þæt he of hire gewite, ⁊ þæt he þa stowe on þæs ælmihtigan Godes fæmnan læng ne hæfde ne on hire ne wunede. (ed. Hecht, pp. 30-31)

[Truly one day it happened that a nun from the same monastery of women went into the vegetable garden. Then she saw a lettuce. Then she desired it and took it; and she forgot to bless it with the sign of Christ’s cross, but she bit it greedily. Then she was immediately seized by a devil and fell down on the ground and was greatly afflicted. And they quickly sent a messenger to Father Equitius and told him this and prayed him to come quickly and heal their sister with his prayers. And then the holy man ran praying and, as soon as the holy father entered the vegetable garden, the devil who was afflicting the nun began to call out with her mouth as though he wanted to make amends, and spoke in this way: ‘What did I do to her? What did I do to her? I was sitting on a lettuce when she came and ate me.’ Then that man of God commanded with great indignation that he should depart from her and no longer occupy a place in the virgin of Almighty God nor remain in her.]

Charlotte Kingston has argued that, so far from being a trivial episode unworthy of a Doctor of the Church, this story aligns with Gregory’s teaching on sin and temptation in his exegesis of Genesis: the devil here compounds his evil deed by trying to excuse himself, just like Adam and Eve do in the Garden of Eden. Moreover, the devil’s wily words and seeming harmlessness are precisely what makes him so dangerous. Across the miracle stories of the Dialogues, Gregory builds a picture of how easily one can be trapped by sin, how ever-present is the devil, but also how great is the power of holy people who are moved by compassion and love of God. Nonetheless, the lettuce story, like many other episodes in the text, is undeniably entertaining; didacticism is delivered in an appealing form.

The saints provide models of virtuous living and the Dialogues are full of moral lessons, some minor, some major. Almost all the holy people described in the text are ecclesiastics of one sort or another and monastic virtues are prominent. Humility and obedience towards superiors are emphasised: for example, the monk Libertinus is unfairly beaten by his abbot but makes no protest and even blames his own sins, leading the abbot to repent and mend his ways (Book One, chapter 2, ed. Hecht, pp. 20–21). Benedict guards his chastity by rolling in briars when he experiences sexual impulses (Book 2, chapter 2, ed. Hecht, p. 101). The saints exhibit pity and compassion towards the unfortunate and a stern willingness to rebuke the sinful. As Kees Dekker shows, the exemplary character of the text is central to its meaning for the Old English translator, who opens Book One by explaining that Gregory spoke ‘about the teachings, customs and life of holy people, as a lesson and example for all those who do and love God’s will’ (be haligra monna larum 7 þeawum 7 life to lare 7 to bysne eallum þam, þe Godes wilan wyrceað 7 lufiað, ed. Hecht, p. 2). Miracle stories help to strengthen faith, but the miracles of the Dialogues are secondary to and bound up with the personal virtue and holiness of the saints.

In addition to inspiring faith and modelling virtue, the Dialogues model a particular devotional style which is an important current in the spirituality of the early middle ages. The Dialogues frequently portray holy people praying to God with tears. In a famous passage in Book Three, chapter 34 (ed. Hecht, pp. 244–46), Gregory connects such tears to compunction, compunctio, translated by Wærferth as inbryrdnes, and explains that there are two types, the lower compunction of fear in which people weep over their sins because of the terror of hell, and the higher compunction of love, in which tears are shed out of longing for God. The Dialogues are not the only vector by which ideas about compunction reached early medieval England—indeed Gregory himself discusses it also in other works, notably the Moralia in Iob—but they vividly tie compunction to the struggles of the saints, who in this text are not remote and perfect but experience self-reproach, failures and loss.

      The dialogue form means that the figure of Peter can be used to help move from topic to topic, raising questions that Gregory wants to address. This includes some doctrinal questions as well as queries about the existence of recent saints. Book Four’s discussion of the immortality of the soul is the most extensive example. The book opens with a chapter on the nature of religious knowledge. Before the Fall, Adam had direct knowledge of God, angels and the joys of heaven, but in post-lapsarian life we are like a boy born to a woman in prison, who can only know of the sun and stars by his mother’s report. This striking chapter was adapted as a free-standing homily, Napier 1 (found in CCCC 201, BL MS Cotton Tiberius A.xiii, and Hatton MS 113). The themes of sensory and intellectual knowledge and the nature of the soul are links to other Old English prose translations that on the surface seem far more abstract and philosophical than the Dialogues, namely the Old English Boethius and Soliloquies.

      It is Asser (Life of King Alfred, ch. 77) who tells us that Wærferth was the translator and that he translated for King Alfred. The choice of text is not surprising. Gregory was regarded as the apostle of the English and his works were held in high esteem; the Dialogues formed one of the core texts of early medieval monastic libraries. (The Dialogues is also the only non-biblical book mentioned by name in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, though admittedly only in the post-Conquest bilingual epitome, MS F, in the annal for 482). The centrality of Gregory to Alfred’s educational project and Wærferth’s role as a collaborator are both underscored in the Bodleian MS Hatton 20 copy of the Old English Pastoral Care, in which Wærferth is the addressee of Alfred’s prefatory letter, charged with keeping the manuscript in his see for use and further copying. Wærferth himself was a close translator. His skill has not always been highly esteemed; Godden, for example, highlights confusion over certain personal names and points of syntax. However, Christine Thijs has brought out the unobtrusive ways in which he rendered densely hypotactic Latin constructions in a paratactic style more congenial for Old English, added emphasis, rendered implicatures explicit, and made the text easier to navigate for English readers.

          Wærferth’s name is not found in any of the surviving manuscripts of the Old English Dialogues; however, the manuscripts attest to active use of the Old English version in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The manuscripts are

• London, British Library MS Cotton Otho C. I (MS O), copied in two stages in the early and mid-eleventh century. This manuscript was glossed in the twelfth century by the famous ‘Tremulous Hand’ of Worcester, and the running titles and rubrics may be by the named scribe Coleman. It contains a verse preface in the voice of the book including a statement saying that Bishop Wulfstan ordered it to be written according to an exemplar provided by King Alfred. Sisam argued that Wulfstan here is a substitution for Wulfsige; Wulfsige was bishop of Sherborne in the final decades of the ninth century.
• Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 322 (MS C), of the second half of the eleventh century. This text has a preface in Alfred’s voice saying he asked his friends to translate it so that he could think about heavenly things in the midst of earthly troubles. This manuscript also has glosses by the ‘Tremulous Hand’.
• Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Hatton 76 (MS H), of the first half of the eleventh century. The text in this manuscript represents a revision and modernisation of the ninth-century translation, with a version of the same preface as C.

There is also a late-tenth-century fragment, Canterbury Cathedral Library Additional MS 25. Hecht’s edition presents parallel texts of C and H.

Bibliography

Latin text

Gregory the Great, Sancti Gregorii Papae Dialogorum Libri IV, De Vita et Miraculis, ed. J.-P. Migne, PL 66 (1847) 125-204C (‘Vita S. Benedicti’) and PL 77 (1849) 149-430A.

-----. [Grégoire le Grand] Dialogues, ed. Adalbert de Vogüé, 3 vols, Sources Chrétiennes 251, 260, 265 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1978-80).

-----. Gregorii Magni Dialogi Libri IV, ed. Umberto Moricca, Fonti per la storia d’Italia, scrittori secolo VI, 57 (Rome: Tipografia del Senato, 1924).

Old English text

Bischofs Waerferth von Worcester Übersetzung der Dialoge Gregors des Grossen, ed. Hans Hecht. Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Prosa 5 (Leipzig: Georg H. Wigand, 1900).

Secondary sources

Dekker, Kees, ‘King Alfred’s Translation of Gregory’s Dialogi: Tales for the Unlearned?’, in Rome and the North: The Early Reception of Gregory the Great in Germanic Europe, ed. Rolf H. Bremmer Jr, Kees Dekker and David F. Johnson, Mediaevalia Groningana new series 4 (Paris, Leuven and Sterling, VA: Peeters, 2001), pp. 27–50.

Godden, Malcolm, ‘Wærferth and King Alfred: the Fate of the Old English Dialogues’, in Alfred the Wise: Studies in Honour of Janet Bately on the Occasion of her Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. Jane Roberts and Janet L. Nelson with Malcolm Godden (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), pp. 35–51.

Jeffery, C. D., ‘The Latin Texts Underlying the Old English Gregory’s Dialogues and Pastoral Care’, Notes and Queries 27 (1980), 483–88.

Johnson, David F., ‘Who Read Gregory’s Dialogues in Old English?’ in The Power of Words: Anglo-Saxon Studies Presented to Donald G. Scragg on his Seventieth Birthday, ed. Hugh Magennis and Jonathan Wilcox (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2006), pp. 171–204.

----- ‘Why Ditch the Dialogues? Reclaiming an Invisible Text’, in Source of Wisdom: Old English and Early Medieval Latin Studies in Honour of Thomas D. Hill, ed. Charles D. Wright, Frederick M. Biggs, and Thomas N. Hall (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), pp. 201–16

Jorgensen, Alice, ‘Emotion, Morality and Agency in Wærferth’s Old English Version of Gregory’s Dialogues’, English Studies 105 (2024), 340–57.

Kingston, Charlotte, ‘Taking the Devil at His Word: The Devil and Language in the Dialogues of Gregory the Great’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 67.4 (2016), 705–20

Petersen, Joan M., The “Dialogues” of Gregory the Great in their Late Antique Cultural Background (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1984).

Sisam, Kenneth, 'Addendum: The Verses Prefixed to Gregory's Dialogues', in his Studies in the History of Old English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1953), pp. 225–31.

Thijs, Christine, ‘Wærferth’s Treatment of the Miraculous in his Old English Translation of Gregory’s Dialogi’, Notes and Queries 53 (2006), 272–86.

Thomas, Daniel, ‘Rewriting Gregory the Great: The Prison Analogy in Napier Homily 1’, Review of English Studies 68 (2016), 203–23.

Alice Jorgensen is Associate Professor in English to 1500 at Trinity College, Dublin. She is the author of Emotional Practice in Old English Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2024).