DR ANDREW GILLETT
Department of Ancient History, Macquarie University

GOTHIC CONVERSION: FRAMEWORKS FOR INTERPRETATION

The conversion of the Goths to Christianity in the fourth century, as generally understood in modern studies, offers a sort of prelude for subsequent early medieval conversions.  The way in which conversion is thought to have taken place - imposed 'top down' at the initiative of ruling elites, adopted en bloc by a discrete ethno-political group, imported whole as an alien belief-system, the gift from a sophisticated foreign source to an aspirational periphery - looks like a template for the successive conversions of early medieval 'peoples' including the Franks, Anglo-Saxons and Danes.  The Gothic conversion favours us with access to an early Germanic language and at least one magnificent manuscript, some three centuries before the dawn of Old English literary culture.  The history of Gothic conversion differs from that of later groups in its adoption of 'Arian' Christianity, a Credal form fated to be extinguished by military conquest and political abandonment in the sixth century; even this false start, however, highlights by relief the successful pattern beginning with the Goths' contemporaries and competitors, the Nicene Franks.

Problems lurk within this model.  Standard narratives of the history of 'Arian' Christianity among the Goths see their conversion as arising from a military agreement between Gothic leaders and Roman imperial authorities, made under duress; nevertheless, the Goths thereafter clung to this form of religion for some two centuries as a defining expression of group identity, in opposition to the 'Catholic' creed of Roman provincials and neighbouring 'barbarian' peoples as they came on stream into Christianity.  This reconstruction of the beginnings and socio-political function of Gothic Christianity may be held up for inspection.  Its events and chronology warrant re-examination; discordant with ancient evidence, they have been shaped by modern ideological concerns.  More fundamentally, its explanatory framework calls to be problematised, in particular the role of that late twentieth-century conceptual work-horse, 'identity', in cognizance of the increasing ambivalence towards the concept in current Social Science discussions.  Consideration of Gothic Christianity may be usefully turned from its place in a western, early medieval trajectory of Christianity and considered against the dynamics of its more immediate historical context: the spread in variegated ways of early Christianity beyond its Near-Eastern and Mediterranean heartlands, into Armenia, Iran, Arabia, Ethiopia, Ireland and other regions, characteristically attended by vigorous movements of translation, language codification and ecclesiastical literary culture.
 

DR ANTONINA HARBUS
Macquarie University

TRANSFORMING CONCEPTS IN OLD ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF LATIN TEXTS

This paper traces the transmission and transformation of ideas in vernacular translations of Latin texts produced in Anglo-Saxon England (c 700-c 1100 CE). It treats the conceptual reshaping that occurs in tandem with linguistic recasting in culturally privileged texts: Old English Scriptural Poetry and Old English versions of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy and Bede's Ecclesiastical History.  These texts all take part in a process of cultural and linguistic domestication that involves the combination of local concepts arising out of an oral, heroic, secular, poetic tradition with those imported with Christianity and Latin literacy, of a scribal, scholarly, religious, prose nature.  They demonstrate that Anglo-Saxon writers adapted Latin texts with varying degrees of freedom and different ways of adapting ideas expressed in one language to the resources available in another.

To exemplify this transformation, this paper will focus on a group of ideas of core importance in Old English religious and philosophical texts based on Latin originals: the way human consciousness is represented.  This idea will be examined via a study of the language choices made in the process of translation, especially the metaphors used of the mind and its activities that transmit, develop or diverge from those in the host text.  This information will allow consideration of the broader issue of the divergent ideas about consciousness that underpin the Latin original and Old English translation and the degree to which concepts are carried across textual translation and or reconfigured via that process, even when sacred or culturally significant texts are at stake.
 

DR JONATHAN WOODING
University of Wales, Lampeter

BAPTISING THE ISLANDS OF THE OCEAN: BIBLICAL PROPHECY AND THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF CONVERSION

The islands of the North Atlantic were converted progressively through the first millennium CE.  This paper will explore the idea that the early medieval historiography of these events presents them in terms of the Biblical motif of the preaching of the Gospel to all the nations, beginning with the Patrick dossier and arguably continuing into the early Icelandic historical tradition.