Anglo-Saxon

Reg. lat. 497 includes many palimpsest folios. One of them (f. 71v) is very legible, because a substantial part of it was not overwritten, and the lower text can be read and identified. It includes a section from a manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon translation of Orosius’s popular historical work, the Historia contra paganos, which was copied in the first half of the 11th century. This translation emerged as part of King Alfred’s (r. 871-899) initiative to translate important works from Latin into the vernacular, Old English. This text is a paraphrased text which had been enriched with other sources as well. The upper text contains the concluding section of the life of St Gertrude from a Latin hagiographical collection.

[Cf. Ker, Catalogue of manuscripts, p. 459].