The tradition of vernacular prayer in Anglo -Saxon England

Prayers written in Old English have received very little scholarly attention to date, and the studies that have been done have often failed to distinguish between private and public devotional texts. My study begins by establishing a clear definition of private prayer as it may have applied in Anglo-Saxon England. By doing so, I have been able to fix a standard corpus of private prayers in Old English and to produce a full descriptive catalogue of the 28 texts which meet this definition. The remainder of the study examines Old English private prayers in a variety of contexts, with the aim of understanding whether these texts constitute a distinct tradition. Many complex relationships can be found among various Old English prayers and between those texts and Latin prayers which survive from Anglo-Saxon England. I have demonstrated that the authors of Old English private prayers were aware of and made use of an established tradition of Latin private prayers and prayerbooks which originates in the eighth and ninth centuries. Analysis of textual forms and stylistic features in Old English private prayers makes clear, however, that these texts developed, through the late tenth and eleventh centuries, in ways that mark them as ultimately independent from the Latin tradition. Furthermore, the manuscript contexts in which Old English private prayers are found suggests that they may be linked to the late Old English Benedictine Reform and may, thus, have more to do with other vernacular products of that movement than with the earlier Latin prayer tradition. My dissertation concludes that an independent tradition of private prayer in the vernacular did exist and merits further study.