The contextual control of meaning: Saint Christopher in late Anglo-Saxon England

我打算探索盎格鲁撒克逊晚期英格兰的阅读和解释过程的证据，以圣克里斯托弗的激情的不同版本作为测试案例。克里斯托弗的叙述是这类工作的理想选择：这位圣人似乎在10世纪中后期迅速受到欢迎，他的故事在英语、爱尔兰语、拉丁语、英语和其他本土语言的大陆手稿中有多种版本。一系列学者过去的研究已经开始对古英语文本的不同证人之间的关系有所了解，我的贡献将是澄清这些关系。此外，我打算比过去的工作走得更远。我的目的不仅仅是建立特定文本传统的发展，而是考虑单个人物的表现变化的原因，以及这些变化是如何在中世纪早期的欧洲跨越时间和地点的。特别是，我将试图通过使用不同的叙述细节，手稿中的互文设置和抄写呈现来确定对传说的解释或使用是如何变化的。收集到的有关拉丁文和古英语的生平及其变体的数据，将提供给其他学者用于正字法、圣徒传记、语言学和手稿制作等项目。我将使用这些数据来分析与原产地和日期、社区、生产和使用相关的叙事和描述性变化。这项研究将有助于对叙事的语境和公共用途的理解，以及抄写员和手稿编纂者如何塑造这种叙事的理解。它也将有助于当前对圣徒生活的兴趣增长，作为中世纪时期最流行和最广泛的叙述形式。

I intend to explore evidence for the processes of reading and of interpretation in late Anglo-Saxon England, taking as a test-case the different versions of the passion of Saint Christopher available there. The Christopher narrative is ideal for this kind of work: the saint seems to have gathered popularity quickly in the mid- to late-tenth century, with multiple versions of his story extant in English, Irish, and Continental manuscripts in Latin, English, and other vernacular languages. Past research by a range of scholars has started to develop an understanding of the relationships between different witnesses to the Old English text, and my contribution will be to clarify these relationships. Moreover, I intend to go significantly further than this past work. My aim is not just to establish the development of particular textual traditions but to consider reasons for the variation in the representations of a single figure and how these variations map out across time and place in early medieval Europe. In particular, I will seek to identify how interpretations or uses of the legend may have varied through the use of different narrative details, intertextual setting within manuscripts, and scribal presentation. Data gathered about the life and its variants, in Latin and Old English, will be made available for other scholars to use on projects about orthography, hagiography, linguistics, and manuscript production. I will use the data to analyse the narrative and descriptive variations in connection with place and date of origin and with communities and production and use. This research will contribute to a growing body of understanding about contextual and communal uses to which narratives were put, and about how scribes and compilers of manuscripts worked to shape such narratives. It will also contribute to a current growth of interest in saints' lives as the most popular and widespread narrative form in the medieval period.