Edited by Matti Peikola and Birte Bös
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 317] 2020
► pp. 115–134
The remarkably extensive and diverse Anglo-Saxon text corpus clearly testifies to the literary precocity and self-awareness of both writers and book producers in Anglo-Saxon England, the first period of literacy in English. This becomes particularly evident in prologues and scribal colophons, the two kinds of framing material discussed in the present chapter. Clearly modelled on classical or early Christian genre conventions, the famous Alfredian and Ælfrician prologues frame the reading of the following vernacular texts by investing them with the authority implicit in Latin literacy. At the end of texts or manuscripts, scribal colophons exploit the value of manuscripts as material objects, by presenting the – in a manuscript culture typically individual – agents of literacy, namely the book and its producer(s). Similar in their formal characteristics to maker formulae in epigraphy, colophons further serve independent functions in keeping the names of the scribes in remembrance through the centuries. Both kinds of framing material thus attest to the authorial and medial (self-)awareness of the agents of Anglo-Saxon literacy, who understood the great potential of the written medium to carry authority and to secure longevity.