A Saxon Treatise Concerning the Old and New Testament

A Saxon Treatise is by Abbot Aelfric of Eynsham (c.955-c.1010), author of the Catholic Homilies and Lives of the Saints and the most prominent known figure of Old English literature. Its editor and translator, William Lisle (c.1569-1637), was significant as an Anglo-Saxon scholar who pioneered the recovery of Old English. But equally important here is Lisle’s religious and political purpose in translating the work, which he explains in a forty-page preface, extremely long in proportion to Aelfric’s text, with its own table of contents. Just as in the previous generation Archbishop Matthew Parker had collected works, including Aelfrician manuscripts, to find evidence for the existence of Protestantism in Britain’s past to rebut the Catholic taunt of where the Protestant church was before Luther, Lisle explains his desire to preserve ‘an auncient monument of the Church of England’ (b1r), and therefore to validate the Church of England as an ancient body. He further emphasises the value possessing the Scriptures in a known tongue to promote clear understanding, and stresses the long tradition of the English Scriptures, as shown by the existence of much of the Bible in Anglo-Saxon.