Saints' lives and miracle stories in Bede, the Old English Bede and Ælfric between translation and rewriting

The aim of my project is to explore the ways in which some of the chapters of Bede?s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum on saints? lives and miracle stories have been re-elaborated in the anonymous Old English translation of the Historia ecclesiastica as well as in the Homilies and in the Lives of Saints written by Ælfric. My project is structured around the analysis of 6 different saintly figures, each of which embodies a different model of sanctity in Bede?s Historia ecclesiastica: - St. Alban: th e martyr; - Oswald: king, warrior, and saint; - Fursey: a model of peregrinatio; - Æthelthryth: queen and abbess; - Cuthbert: the ascetic; - Dryhthelm: a layman who embraces the monastic life. For every figure a comparative analysis will be develope d between the source-text (Bede?s Historia ecclesiastica) and the two target-texts (the Old English Bede and Ælfric?s Homilies and Lives of Saints), each of which is representative of two different stages in the development of the English pre-Norman liter ary system. The saintly figures and the account of their lives acquire an identity of their own in each of the two hypertexts and become a reflection not only of the source-text, but also of the cultural context that produced the translations themselves. As Itamar Even-Zohar (1978) often points out, the analysis of specific translational phenomena can be a very useful tool for interpreting the cultural system of which the translation itself is a product. This comparative approach firstly allows to address the issue of the relationship between the concepts of translation and re-writing; secondly, it also allows to observe the evolution of the hagiographic genre, of its aims, and narrative strategies within two very different contexts of production: histori ography for the Historia ecclesiastica and its Old English translation, homiletics for Ælfric.