Convivium X: Rebecca Stephenson

Rebecca Stephenson (she / her) Associate Professor of Old and Middle English, School of English, Drama, and Film at University College, Dublin visits CMS for the March 21 Convivium. The Convivium is a hybrid event, with the option to attend either in person or virtually via Zoom.

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Title

The End of the World or merely another Viking raid? Vikings, the Apocalypse, and Byrhtferth’s Scientific Writing around the year 1000

Abstract

Starting in 991 at the Battle of Maldon, England experienced a wave of Viking attacks that began as intermittent pillaging but expanded into a full-scale military takeover of the country. By 1016, Cnut, a Danish king, sat on the throne of England. A range of literary works preserve responses to this historical cataclysm, from tragedy-infused narratives in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the poem The Battle of Maldon to eschatological interpretations in Archbishop Wulfstan’s famous Sermo lupi ad anglos (The Sermon of the Wulf to the English) and numerous saints’ lives. During the same period, and frequently among the same writers, another kind of literature blossomed: scientific writing, particularly of the sort related to computus, that is the medieval method for calculating dates. My book project, The Science of Apocalypse, argues that these two very different kinds of writings share common ground in their use of apocalyptic narratives and motifs. While the apocalypse might seem to be a religious, rather than a scientific, issue, the main sources for apocalyptic information for these writers were scientific tracts like Bede’s De temporum ratione (On the Reckoning of Time).
 
A similar overlap occurs in Byrhtferth of Ramsey’s Enchiridion, a lengthy scientific textbook ending with apocalyptic homilies. The scale of Viking attacks in 1012, when Byrhtferth was writing, spurred a belief that the apocalypse was imminent and lent urgency to scientific questions such as calculating the dates for Christian observances and establishing the events of the end times. The Science of Apocalypse demonstrates that the apocalyptic motifs in Old English literature referencing the Viking attacks are in fact related to the contemporary production of scientific literature and vice versa. The concern for scientific writing was a weapon that a monk could use to fight the spiritual causes of the Viking invasion, in a similar manner to how the Sermo Lupi called for repentance.  This talk will interpret Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion, which is ostensibly a scientific work uninfluenced by contemporary events, as a work deeply informed by the Viking invasion.