SOURCE: Joseph Wittig, "Figural Narrative in Cynewulf's Juliana," in Anglo-Saxon: England, Cambridge University Press, Vol. 4, 1975, pp. 37-55.

[In the following essay, Wittig claims that the critical "dissatisfaction" with Cynewulf's Juliana neglects the poem's successful representation of the significance of the saint's passion.]

Old English saints' lives, as a group, have not generated a great deal of critical enthusiasm; and Cynewulf's Juliana has often been regarded as the worst of a bad lot. One of the poem's recent editors sees in it a 'uniformity verging on monotony' and finds it 'unrelieved by any emotional or rhetorical emphasis or by any other gradations in tone'.¹ While critics concede that all Cynewulf's signed poems have a smooth texture and contain 'fine passages', they regard Juliana as something of an embarrassment and generally assign it to the poet's adolescence—or senescence.²

In her article on saints' lives in a recent survey of Old English literature, Rosemary Woolf reveals what seems to be the key to this dissatisfaction with Juliana and with hagiography in general. While admitting that the saint's life is a highly conventional form, Miss Woolf feels the need to apologize for the 'dissolution' and 'distortion' of history in the genre.³ Finding hagiography embarrassing as history, the Bollandist Hippolyte Delehaye made fashionable an explanation which saved the intelligence of the hagiographer at the expense of his audience: hagiography is not history, but homiletic literature for the popular mind; by hyperbole, oversimplification and repetition, it drives home basic truths of faith in a way which even the common man could not miss.⁴ This attitude explains Miss Woolf s apology for distortion and her conclusion that Juliana is 'an uncomfortable mixture of the didactic and the spectacular'.⁵ Such judgements reveal a twofold disappointment: Juliana offers neither a story which is psychologically credible and interestingly real, nor a history shaped by rational judgement and proportion such as the more sober medieval chroniclers at times produced. The purpose of this essay is to suggest that a critical understanding of the poem can best be achieved by emphasizing, not how it fails as realistic narrative or chronicle, but how it succeeds as something else: in a manner both deliberate and learned, Cynewulf uses biblical, liturgical and homiletic themes in an attempt to render the passion of the saint significant. This is achieved, it is true, without regard for realism, psychological probability or historical accuracy. But the poem's force arises from something other than convincing mimesis—from the connection of Juliana with central and potent Christian events, of which she is the imitator, embodiment and new exemplar.

The best rubric under which to discuss this sort of poetry is 'figural narrative'. Figural thinking, in Erich Auerbach's words, 'establishes a connection between two events or persons, the first of which signifies not only itself but the second, while the second encompasses or fulfills the first.'⁶ Although the Christian use of this term originally pertained to the relationship of Old Testament to New (Moses is a figura of Christ), Auerbach thinks there is reason for using it in an extended sense; when the mind is called a figura Trinitatis, the mind and God are each claimed to be real, distinct from one another, and really related—a way of thinking clearly influenced by neo-Platonic analogism.⁷ And there may be more than one figura of what is figured just as there may be more than one of what is figured—as the various levels of scriptural interpretation suggest. Thus the crossing of the Red Sea may be taken to refer to the historical event in Hebrew history, the redemption wrought by Christ, the imitation of that event in the church's sacrament of baptism and the individual act of spiritual conversion. All these events were regarded as both actually real and actually related.

In the following pages I will try to show how such a multi-term figural relationship operates in Juliana between Christ, the church, the saint and the individual Christian soul. Such a figural reading explains a number of the poem's details which make no literal sense; it grows quite consistently out of the poem's spiritual milieu; and it suggests how a poem which disappoints modern expectations might be understood in terms of the learning and preoccupations of an Old English religious poet.

Critics have noted Cynewulf's 'blackening' of Heliseus and his tendency to 'concentrate on the great spiritual struggle' between good and evil.⁸ Thus it is evident from the poem's very beginning that it is so constructed as to derive impact from something other than realistic story-telling. The opening lines (1-31) make little attempt to portray the concrete or the individual: the events take place in the days of Maximian (2b-3a) and involve 'sum gerefa' (18-19a) and a 'fwmne' (27a), whose names almost incidentally are Heliseus and Juliana.⁹ Much more attention is paid to the creation of a general background of pagan persecution (3b-17), while the heroine and her antagonist are so presented as to embody the city of God versus the city of men. Heliseus is immediately portrayed as a creature of Mammon and a worshipper of idols (22-4a), that is, of the devil, as ps. xcv. 5 says: 'Quoniam omnes dii gentium dwmonia.¹⁰ Juliana, on the other hand, is immediately presented as a virgin pledged to the love of Christ (28b-31). This is the same mentality found in Tychonius's canons for the interpretation of scripture, canons used by Augustine in shaping his approach to history, which became commonplace habits of symbolic thinking. One of these rules was 'de domino et eius corpore', according to which scriptural statements were variously understood as applying to Christ or to his body, the church. Another was 'de diabolo et eius corpore'. As Wilhelm Kamlah succinctly phrased it: 'As the church is the body of Christ, so all the evil are the body of the devil."¹¹

The tendency to view Christian life in terms of such an absolute and all-embracing struggle is, of course, founded on the gospels themselves. The very passages in which Christ predicted persecution are either explicitly connected with the ultimate events of the second coming¹² or easily applied to them.¹³ When these passages, or selections from the Apocalypse, are chosen to be read at Mass on the feasts of martyrs,¹⁴ one can see evidence of how the church conceived each individual struggle in terms of the ultimate battle between the two bodies and the value-systems to which they pertain. Juliana, in as much as she is a martyr, is the archetypal Christian who suffers, then vanquishes the devil and the infernal powers which work through Heliseus and his idols.

The same deliberate concern for general significance, as opposed to realism, seems to shape Cynewulf's presentation of Juliana's virginity. This virtue could be considered in other than personal and literal terms, as is attested by the following passage from Ælfric's homily for the common of virgins:

Nis na gewunelic þæt mægðhad si gecweden on sinscipe, ac swa-ðeah ðær is þæs geleafan mægðhad, þe wurðað ænne soðne God, and nele forligerlice to leasum hæðoengylde bugan. Eal seo gelaðung, ðe stent on mædenum and on cnapum, on ceorlum and on wifum, eal heo is genamod to anum mædene, swa swa se apostol Paulus cwæð to geleaffullum folce, 'Desponsaui uos uni uiro, uirginem castam exhibere Christo': þæt is on Englisc, 'Ic beweddode eow anum were, þæt ge gearcian an clæne mæden Criste.' Nis ðis na to understandenne lichamlice ac gastlice. Crist is se clæna brydguma, and eal seo cristene gelaðung is his bryd, þurh ða he gestrynð dæghwomlice mennisce sawla to his heofenlican rice. Seo gelaðung is ure modor and clæne mæden, forðan þe we beoð on hire ge-edcynnede to Godes handa, þurh geleafan and fulluht.¹⁵

If Juliana's purity seems unrealistically adamantine, is it not because the poet wanted his audience to see, suggested in it, the virgin church and that absolute virginity which homilists took as a symbol for the Christian's relationship to the world?¹⁶

The description of Juliana's trial and persecutions can also be seen as an attempt to draw significance from the individual's sufferings by so portraying them as to recall for the audience that passion which each martyr imitates. Indeed, the likening of the martyrs to Christ is exactly what one would expect in medieval hagiography. As early as the Acts of the Apostles, Luke has the protomartyr Stephen say as he dies 'Domine Jesu, suscipe spiritum meum' and 'Domine, ne statuas illis hoc peccatum' (VII.59-60), thus echoing Luke's own gospel account of Christ's last words: 'Pater, dimitte illis', and 'Pater, in manus tuas commendo spiritum meum' (XXIII.34 and 46). Those gospel passages which urge the Christian to imitate Christ's death were naturally chosen to be read on the feasts of the church's first martyrs and later join the pericopes for the common of martyrs: 'Et qui non accipit crucem suam, et sequitur me, non est me dignus' (Matthew X.38); 'Si quis vult post me venire, abneget semetipsum, et tollat crucem suam, et sequatur me' (Matthew XVI.24 and Luke IX.23); 'Si quis mihi ministrat, me sequatur' (John XII.26). Passages in the same vein were chosen as epistle readings: 'Christo igitur passo in carne, et vos eadem cogitatione armamini' (I Peter IV. 1); 'Quoniam sicut abundant passiones Christi in nobis: ita et per Christum abundat consolatio nostra' (II Corinthians I.5). Homilies for the common of martyrs gather other scriptural injunctions on the same theme.¹⁷ Ælfric's homily on the protomartyr Stephen remarks that Stephen was the first man to imitate the death of Christ.¹⁸ In the early arrangements of the church's liturgical year, moreover, Christmas did not belong to the proper 'of the time' (Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter and so on); instead it began the cycle of the saints' feast days, for Christ was regarded as the first of the martyrs.¹⁹ And Apocalypse 1.5, which calls Christ 'testis fidelis, primogenitus mortuorum', was explained as meaning that Christ was the first of the martyr witnesses.²⁰ In sum, not only did Christ urge Christians to take up his cross, he himself came to be regarded as one of the martyrs: just as they die his death, he dies theirs. As the anonymous treatise De Duplici Martyrio expressed it: 'Vita Domini, qui summus fuit martyr, quique et hodie pugnat et vincit in martyribus plurimis, fuit offendiculo Quemadmodum igitur ille suo mirabili testimonio clarificavit Patrem in hoc mundo, atque etiam in coelis, ita testimonium illius quodammodo consummatur testimonio sanctorum, quasi sit una passio Domini et servorum.²¹

Given this body of tradition, the audience of Juliana might well be struck by the way in which her passion recalls that of Christ. The saint is interrogated and beaten by her angry father (89-129 and 140-3 a); she is given over to Heliseus for judgement (158-60a) and scourged a second time on his orders (186b-8); she is then hung 'on heanne beam' (227b-30) where she suffers for six hours; finally she is taken down and shut in the dark prison (231-3a). Christ, one recalls, was first seized and taken before the Sanhedrin of his own people (Matthew XXVI.57ff., Mark XIV.53ff. and Luke XXII.54ff.); they beat and buffeted him (Matthew XXVII.67ff., Mark XIV.65 and Luke XXII.63ff.); he was then sent to Pilate for judgement (Matthew XXVII.2ff., Mark XV.lff. and Luke XXIII.lff.) who had him scourged again (Matthew XXVII.26ff., Mark XV.15ff. and John XIX.lff.); he was then hung on the cross where, according to Mark, he suffered for six hours (XV.25-7); finally he was taken down and laid in the tomb. Even the interrogations of Christ by the Chief Priest and by Pilate, concerned as they are with blasphemy and the rights of Caesar, are echoed by the dialogues of the poem.

Juliana, of course, does not expire at this point; she is not Christ and cannot rise again to complete her work as he did. Nor is she nailed to a cross. But the imitation of Christ is not literal identity with Christ. Elfric recounts the legend about St Peter's request to be crucified upside down, because 'ne eom ic wyroe Wet ic swa hangige swa min Drihten';²² and one recalls the legendary reason for the new shape of St Andrew's cross. Both remind us that there were reasons for avoiding exact parallelism. But taken in the whole context, Juliana's suffering 'on heanne beam' is enough to suggest the parallel with Christ's passion.²³

The parallels between Juliana's persecution and the passion of Christ are, to some extent, present in Cynewulf's apparent source;²⁴ but it is worth noticing that he has so altered the Latin Vita as to make these parallels considerably more obvious. For example, in the Latin account the prefect simply orders Juliana to be suspended by the hair;²⁵ the Old English adds 'on heanne beam' (228b). In the Latin the suspended Juliana prays to Christ: 'Clamans dicebat: Christe fili Dei, veni, adjuva me';²⁶ by deleting this prayer, which calls attention to her individuality just at this moment, Cynewulf allows the saint's suffering to merge with Christ's in the audience's mind. In the Latin, when Juliana is taken down, the prefect immediately exhorts her to idolatry; upon her refusal he has her tortured and only then is she put in prison.²⁷ The Old English keeps the parallel with Christ's deposition by eliminating this scene as well.

The next section of the poem, in which Juliana triumphs over a demon, also seems largely shaped by the imitation of Christ's deeds. Towards the end of her confrontation with the devil he exclaims to her:

              Ic asecgan ne maæeg,
þeah ic gesitte    sumerlongne dæeg,
eal þa earfeþu    þe ic ær ond siþ
gefremede to facne,    siþþan furþum wæs
rodor aræred    ond ryne tungla,
folde gefæstnad    ond þa forman men,
Adam ond Aeva,    þam ic ealdor oðþrong,
ond hy gelærde    þæt hi lufan dryhtnes,
ece eadgiefe    anforleton,
beorhtne boldwealn,    þæt him bæm gewearð
yrmþu to ealdre,    ond hyra eaferum swa,
mircast manweorca.    Hwæt sceal ic ma
  riman
yfel endeleas?    Ic eall gebær,
wraþe wrohtas    geond werþeode,
þa þe gewurdun    widan feore
from fruman worulde    fira cynne,
eorlum on eorþan.    Ne wæs ænig þara
þet me þus þriste,    swa þu nu þa,
halig mid hondum,    hrinan dorste,
næs ænig þæs modig    mon ofer eorþan
þurh halge meaht,    heahfædra nan
ne witgena.    þeah þe him weoruda god
onwrige, wuldres cyning,    wisdomes gæst,
giefe unmæte,    hwmæþre ic gong to þam
agan moste.    Næs ænig þara
þæt mecþus bealdlice    bennum bilegde,
þream forþrycte,    ær þu nu þa
þa miclan meaht    mine oferswiðdest …
(494b-521)²⁸

Taken as a piece of realistic narrative this would indeed be an example of rather shrill hagiographic hyperbole: no one before Juliana has thus conquered the devil, instigator of all the crimes that men have ever committed. But Juliana's uniquely powerful chaining of the devil is surely meant to recall Christ's harrowing of hell. In the passage just quoted the devil concludes that no man had yet so boldly 'mec … bennum bilegde' and 'miclan meaht mine oferswiodest'. In the Old English prose Harrowing Christ says to the devil: 'Nu Ou scealt beon untrum and unmyhtig, and myd eallum oferswyped.²⁹ Earlier in Juliana the devil had asked the saint how it was 'þæt þu mec þus fwste fetrum gebunde' (433). Describing Christ's triumph over the devil, the prose Harrowing says: 'and he [Christ] Satan gegrap and hyne fwste geband'.³⁰ Thus both the concepts expressed and the very language of the poem suggest that the audience should compare Juliana's binding of the devil with Christ's binding of Satan.

Alerted by such clear echoes, a Christian audience should notice other parallels which confirm that the poem is imitating the harrowing. In the latter Satan expects to hold Christ easily in hell,³¹ but his expectations are thwarted and the infernal powers are astounded by Christ's courage and prowess.³² Similarly the devil expects to vanquish Juliana with ease (357-62a and 452b-3), but he is thwarted and marvels at her daring and strength (518b-22a). In the harrowing Inferus (OE Hell) sends Satan out to stop Christ's advance;³³ in Juliana the devil has been sent to the saint, obviously in an attempt to forestall her victory over death through martyrdom (321-2 and 523b-5a). During the harrowing Christ is repeatedly described in terms of light;³⁴ in the midst of the devil's interrogation Cynewulf calls Juliana 'seo wlitescyne wuldres condel' (454). At the end of the harrowing Inferus mocks Satan as a failure and receives him into his power;³⁵ and the devil of the poem expects to be mocked and punished in hell for his failure with Juliana (328b-41a and 526b-30a). And just as Christ immediately afterwards leads Adam and his children out of the stoutly barred prison of hell,³⁶ Juliana is immediately brought out of the narrow house of her jail (532).

Juliana, of course, does not literally harrow hell any more than she is literally crucified or buried. The barred work of hammers which shuts her in (236-7a) may be reminiscent of hell's barred gates,³⁷ but Juliana is neither dead nor in the lower world. Cynewulf seems to present a view of the harrowing deliberately inverted. Instead of Christ seeking out the devil, the devil seeks out the saint. The series of interrogations which the devils of the harrowing address to Christ, 'Who are you? Where are you from? How dare you venture among our powers?'³⁸ becomes Juliana's series of questions to the devil, 'Who are you? Who sent you? How do you dare come among the righteous?'. It is appropriate that the interrogations and the entire harrowing motif be thus inverted, for since Christ's victory the advantage in man's struggle with hell has shifted to the human soul, freed from Satan's power and no longer held by right; now hell must pursue. Indeed both Juliana and the devil refer to the redemption as an event in the past (427b and 448a). But just as Juliana's passion is described in details which fit a mortal, New Testament saint yet imitating the passion of Christ, so her victory over the devil is described in details suitable for her situation, which also recall the victory of Christ which she imitates. Admittedly the devil over whom she triumphs is only one of many, with brother devils (312a) and a father in hell (321a). Admittedly he calls Juliana 'meg' (352a) and 'wigprist ofer eall wifa cyn' (432), and implies that she is but one of the numerous stalwart Christians who will not forsake God (382-9a). Nevertheless in his last speech the devil becomes the power responsible for all the sins of history, becomes all devils; and he then describes Juliana's victory in terms that could only apply to Christ, and which force the audience to understand Juliana's deed as a re-enactment of Christ's harrowing.³⁹

As with his references to the passion, so with the harrowing of hell Cynewulf seems to change his source in order to sharpen the audience's awareness of the figural comparison. For example, in the Latin Vita Juliana responds to the devil's initial and deceiving advice by weeping bitterly and begging God not to desert his handmaid. God's response begins, 'Confide, Juliana, ego sum tecum qui loquor ad te.'⁴⁰ These lines are omitted from the Old English; they would, at the very beginning of the scene, suggest that it is God, distinct from and beside Juliana, who overpowers the devil. In the Old English God, addressed clearly as the Father (274a), simply says to Juliana: 'Forfoh pone fratgan' (284a). In another instance the Latin text, a little more than midway through the scene with the devil, describes how Juliana binds the devil and beats him: 'Tunc Sancta Juliana ligavit illi post tergum manus, et posuit eum in terram, et apprehendens unum de vinculis de quibus ipsa fuerat ligata, caedebat ipsum daemonem.'⁴¹ When Cynewulf eliminates these lines from his version, it is probably not just to exercise good taste, as some have suggested. The Old English Juliana does not beat the devil. She does not simply tie his hands behind his back. She herself is not bound. Rather it is at this point that the devil cries out to her: 'lu mec 'us fwste fetrum gebunde' (433), and one imagines the devil bound since Juliana first seized him, under her power since that time, the whole scene expanding upon the moment of Christ's harrowing. To note one final instance, in his closing speech the devil of the Latin Vita exclaims that Juliana is stronger than the apostles, the martyrs, the prophets and patriarchs. He says that even Christ, when tempted in the desert and on the mountain, treated him more kindly. At last he exclaims: 'O virginitas, quid contra nos armaris?⁴² It is obvious that these details would distract the audience from the figural comparison, and the only part of this speech which Cynewulf retains is the reference to the Old Testament patriarchs and prophets. A reference to the loss of paradise by Adam and Eve is substituted⁴³ and the devil goes on to describe its effects among mankind since the fall. The deletion of the reference to Christ is especially noteworthy, since it might set Juliana and Christ side by side and distinct in the audience's mind just when Cynewulf is inviting us to see Juliana as Christ, or Christ in Juliana. The poet simply has the devil conclude:

                    Næs ænig þara
þæt mec þus bealdlice    bennum bilegde,
þream forþrycte, ær þu nu þa …
(518b-20)

And so he presents Juliana re-enacting the victory, long awaited, which frees the entire race of Adam and Eve from the power of hell.

The argument to this point may be summarized as follows. Cynewulf has been concerned to retell Juliana's passion, not as a realistic story, but as an event which is assimilated through a combination of Christian themes to those central events from which martyrdom takes its inspiration and its meaning. The characters are 'flat' because they are deliberately generalized. Juliana's virtue is unrealistic because it is made into an emblem of the Christian's attitude towards the world. The details of her suffering are hyperbolic to remind the audience that Juliana's passion is a replica of Christ's. The apparently digressive scope of the devil's confession, indeed one reason for his very appearance in the poem, becomes clearer when seen as an allusion to the defeat of Satan by Christ. Juliana's life is not merely her own. It has a place in the context of salvation history; it achieves its full significance as it is imagined in terms of the archetypal life it follows and to which it bears witness.

Another aspect of Juliana's confrontation with the devil is fairly obvious: her behaviour in temptation is a witness for all tempted Christians. Her example constitutes an a fortiori argument—if Juliana can endure death (as Christ endured it for men), surely a Christian can bear the less ultimate inconveniences of slighter temptations. And it is logical that the devil should confess when and where he does, for Juliana, by her Christlike strength and fidelity, holds the devil powerless just as the harrowing did: thus for the Christian who follows Christ the devil's wiles are exposed and his force vitiated. That the confession includes details which instruct the faithful in the psychology of temptation is indeed a homiletic touch; but it is one completely in harmony with the understanding of a martyr as 'witness' to a life which, after all, all Christians are called to imitate.

There is a tradition about martyrdom which supports this fairly obvious reading and which makes the intention of the poem perfectly clear. There were 'two kinds of martyrdom', one exterior and one interior. Exterior martyrdom was suffered by the body; interior martyrdom was suffered by the soul resisting temptation. A sermon of Gregory which found its way into Paul the Deacon's homiliary for the common of martyrs says that Christians suffer interior martyrdom 'si patientiam veraciter in animo custodimus'; it continues: 'Perfecte enim adversarius vincitur quando mens nostra et inter tentamenta eius a delectatione atque consensu non trahitur … ⁴⁴ Juliana's victory, then, is both a figural re-enactment of Christ's and a paradigm for every Christian's. The parallel between bodily and psychological martyrdom is drawn in terms almost identical to those the poem implies in the De Duplici Martyrio:

Neque enim semper saeviunt Nerones, Diocletiani, Decii, ac Maximini, nunquam tamen cessat diabolus exercere Christi militiam professos … Cum tyrannus dicit: 'Abnega Christum, et immola Jovi, et esto amicus noster; aut morere:' saepe lingua negat, corde reclamante, et manus adolet thus, cum animus intus adoret Christum: quanquam hoc quoque gravissimum est crimen, tamen aliquam impietatis culpam elevat humanae naturae imbecillitas. Ibi Satanas tibi loquitur voce tyranni; at quid tibi dicit idem per tuam concupiscentiam: 'Abnega Christum, et esto dives; sacrifica Mammonae, et Christo nuntium remitte … Oblecta oculos … Lucrare pecuniam … ⁴⁵

The treatise then elaborates 'idolatry', in this metaphor, as various types of sin: gluttony, avarice, calumny, oppression of the poor and so on. The sufferings and temptations of Juliana's public trial, therefore, precisely parallel those of private temptation. Set within the exemplary argument of the saint's exterior martyrdom, the devil's confession exposes how he tempts to an internal idolatry; Christians must resist by imitating, in an unbloody manner, the martyrdom and victory of Juliana and of Christ.

After her release from prison and her reaffirmation of faith, Juliana is subjected to a series of further torments before being finally beheaded (559b-671a). Such multiple torments have vexed students ȯf hagiography, and their presence here has been another embarrassment to the poem's critics. Hippolyte Delehaye explains this hagiographic habit in a way which tends to minimize the intelligence of both author and audience: not only is the hagiographer trying to impress his hearers with the bravery of the martyr and the power of God; he is also simply giving free rein to his imagination and memory, using up all the torments he can think of, knowing that an angelus ex machina can always save the victim for yet another round.⁴⁶ Granted that Christian patience and divine omnipotence are argued by the lives of the martyrs, one might wonder if some further rationale lies behind the presentation of these multiple sufferings. One is struck by the fact that homilies for the feasts of martyrs do not engage in this sort of hyperbole, nor do they use the lives of the martyrs to entice a credo from neophytes. (It might be objected that these homilies were intended for a different audience from that towards which 'popular' hagiography was directed; but then it would have to be shown that Latin hagiography was more 'popular' than, say, Gregory's homilies 'ad populum'.) Rather, in the manner of the De Duplici Martyrio, the homilies explore the meaning of the martyrs' lives in an effort to make them exemplary for the interior lives of Christians.⁴⁷ When a list of various tortures is given, it is presented as having been endured by the church in the age of martyrs, not by one individual.⁴⁸ A homily of 'Paul the Deacon', for example, exclaims: 'Quanti enim ab initio impugnaverunt Ecclesiam, cum fidei semina jacerentur, et arma contra eam commota sunt? Sed quanto impugnabatur, tanto clarior reddebatur.'⁴⁹ The homily then gives a list of tortures clearly regarded as testing, not a single martyr, but the collective church.

Given Juliana's figural imitation of the life of Christ, and considering the poem's paralleling of the saint's exterior martyrdom with the Christian's interior battle, it might be worth asking whether, in the final section of the poem, Juliana is meant to suggest the church. Thomas D. Hill has shown how in Cynewulf's Elene Helen's confrontation with the Jews is meant figurally to portray the conflict between church and synagogue.⁵⁰ It would not be all that surprising, therefore, if a Cynewulfian female saint 'bore the person' of ecclesia. Moreover, biblical women are frequently allegorized as representing the church, and suffering women as portraying the early, struggling church. John XVI.21 says: 'Mulier cum parit, tristitiam habet, quia venit hora eius; cum autem pepererit puerum, iam non meminit pressurae propter gaudium, quia natus est homo in mundum.' Alcuin interprets this woman as the church suffering in the world and adds that, historically, it happened during the time of persecution.⁵¹ Apocalypse XII describes the woman clothed with the sun and the child she brings forth, both of whom are immediately menaced by a dragon. Although the woman is generally explained as the Virgin Mary, commentators also regularly interpret her as a figure of the church: Bede, pseudo-Alcuin and Haymo all explain that she is the church, persecuted ceaselessly but in vain. Bede writes: 'Inextricabili astu diabolus Ecclesiam impugnans, quanto plus dejicitur, tanto magis persequitur.⁵² And Haymo, commenting on Apocalypse XII. 13, says:

[diabolus] persecutus est mulierem, quae peperit masculum, id est fortem populum, sicut fuerunt sancti martyres, qui ante potuerunt mori quam a fide Dei separari … post adventum Filii Dei acrius persequi aggressus est, et ad argumentum persecutionis callidus semetipsum convertit alios per membra sua crucifigens, ut Petrum, alios lapidibus obruens, ut Stephanum, alios igne consumens, ut Laurentium, alios quoque serpentibus tradidit, ungulis laniavit, in mare praecipitavit, et per varia instrumenta similia transire coegit.⁵³

If the suffering Juliana can 'bear the person' of the primitive church, there is a rationale for the multiple tortures. Instead of being merely an individual enduring repeated hurts, she might be meant to suggest the vigour of the community which the martyrs' witness established. One might hazard a further generalization. When he subjects a saint to a series of tortures, the hagiographer's aim is less to convert the naive through tales of marvellous deliverance than it is to reaffirm and celebrate the belief that the martyrs share and confirm Christ's victory. The world in which the hagiographers lived knew violence intimately, and often knew that an individual martyr's death was a bloody and unspectacular event. These writers give us, it might be argued, not naively believed and literally intended wonders, but a symbolic idealization of the event, an idealization which commemorates an individual by associating him or her with the whole church in the age of martyrs, suffering, witnessing and finally following Christ triumphantly to heaven. Indeed the collective assembly of martyr-witnesses is the church, according to a homily for the feast of martyrs. The homilist is speaking of Christ's words to Peter as the rock upon whom the church is to be built:

Sed forsitan interrogabis, utrum haec aedificatio suscipiat lapides aut ligna aut ferrum? Non, inquit: Nec enim est sensibilis aedificatio. Quod si talis esset, dissolveretur tempore. Confessionem autem pietatis, neque daemones, neque ulla creatura vincere potest. Testantur martyres quorum latera radebantur, sed fides non frangebatur. O nova rerum materies! Paries effoditur, et thesaurus non aufertur. Caro scinditur et fides non rumpitur. Talis quippe est martyrum virtus.

The materies of the church is the martyrs, whose confessio pietatis is enduring.

Therefore, when Juliana is led before Heliseus after her suffering on the beam and her victory in the prison, she seems figurally to suggest the church. There is really no question about the outcome of her further trials; the remainder of the poem merely confirms her victory, just as the church confirmed Christ's and the martyrs confirmed the church's. Although Heliseus, his idols and the devil all rage against her, they only enhance and spread her triumph. 'Sed quanto impugnabatur, tanto clarior reddebatur.'

This figural explanation might clarify another aspect of the poem which has annoyed critics: Juliana's 'preaching.' Judged as the literal behaviour of an individual, this may well make her seem a shrill and spectacularly stubborn person. But if she figures a collective persona the objection misses its mark. Even her speeches earlier in the poem, which have been called monotonous and monochromatic, might reflect what some commentators on the Apocalypse call the arma ecclesiae. These arms of the church are faith and innocence, which Ambrosius Autpertus explains as follows: 'Dumque [Christiani] falsa audiunt, vera praedicant: dum tormenta excipiunt, fidem proferunt.'⁵⁵ At any rate, in the final section of the poem Juliana's preaching seems well able to suggest the collective testimony of the church. The loss of at least one manuscript leaf between lines 558 and 559b makes detailed interpretation of the section impossible; but when the text resumes two third person plural verbs are used: 'heredon' (560a) and 'segdon' (561a): 'they' are praising God. Now the Latin text corresponding to the gap tells how Juliana preaches to Heliseus, who responds by having her tortured by spiked wheel and fire. Delivered from these torments by an angel, Juliana proclaims a long thanksgiving prayer which recapitulates God's protection of his people—his church—through salvation history: from Lot, Jacob, Joseph, Moses and David down to the sending of Christ, Christ's death and resurrection and the mission of the apostles. In response to this prayer a large number of Nicomedian bystanders are converted, whereupon 130 are beheaded for their faith. It is noteworthy that Juliana, also to be eventually beheaded, is not killed at this time. Does she remain, not because she is an indomitable individual, nor because the writer can think of more tortures to which he wants to subject her, but because she is conceived of as an embodiment of the triumphant and enduring witness of the primitive church, sowing the seeds of faith? All this is from the Latin text,⁵⁶ in which Juliana is next submitted to burning at the stake. The Old English poem resumes in the midst of this torture, and 'they', presumably bystanders converted by Juliana's preaching and witness, are praising God.

Just before being beheaded, Juliana preaches a last sermon—fitting, if she figures the primitive church. This homily urges Christians to apply the lessons of the martyrs to themselves: to establish themselves upon the rock of a virtuous life (647-52a)—compare the confessio pietatis of the martyrs—and to suffer one another in peace and charity (652b-7a), a standard homiletic application of the martyrs' example to a peace-time church.⁵⁷ Juliana is not the church, any more than she is Christ; she began as an individual virginmartyr and she dies a mortal saint's death. But her trials and endurance have been so portrayed as to suggest the church spreading and confirming the faith in a hostile world.

One last remark about Juliana as ecclesia. Cynewulf has added numerous references to Juliana's wisdom.⁵⁸" Walter Howard Frere has pointed out that the sapiential books were used heavily for the first readings on the feasts of saints,⁵⁹ and selections from Proverbs and Wisdom, for instance, are frequently prescribed for the common of virgins and martyrs.⁶⁰ That the saipts are wise is a commonplace. It is also a commonplace that the assembly of saints presents the collective wisdom of the church. Now the teaching of the church and the witness of the martyrs were thought to affect the good for their salvation, but to justify the damnation of the evil.⁶¹ That Heliseus and some of his followers perish at the end of the poem, while others are converted through Juliana, seems to put this idea into action. The very manner of Heliseus's death recalls a passage from the book of Wisdom, parts of which were read on feasts of martyrs:

Et reddidit iustis mercedem laborum suorum, et deduxit illos in via mirabili, et fuit illis in velamento diei, et in luce stellarum per noctem; transtulit illos per mare Rubrum et transvexit illos per aquam nimiam. Inimicos autem illorum demersit in mare. Et ab altitudine inferorum eduxit illos. Ideo justi tulerunt spolia impiorum; et decantaverunt, Domine, nomen sanctum tuum, et victricem manum tuam laudaverunt pariter.⁶²

This notion might well underlie the poem's presentation of Heliseus's end. Juliana embodies the wisdom of God's people. On the one hand, she leads the good to baptism and salvation, even to the possession of Heliseus's city; on the other, she brings a watery death to those too perverse to survive the figurative crossing of the Red Sea. Behind her, she leaves an exultant and rejoicing people.

Cynewulf s Juliana, therefore, does not seem to be a piece of realistic fiction ruined by clumsiness and naivete. It is certainly shaped, in rather definite ways, by themes of scripture, liturgy and homily. It seems to be aware of, and to sharpen the form of, figural tendencies already present in the Latin Vita. The poet was certainly deliberate, and most probably learned.

Whether or not Cynewulf's presentation of Juliana in such a way as to cause the audience to see in her Christ, the church and a Christian paradigm is a necessarily 'poetic' conception is another matter. Bede, commenting on Apocalypse XII.27, expresses fundamentally the same kind of idea when he connects the struggles of the woman, the church, Christ, the martyrs and the interior lives of Christians.⁶³ Yet one can at least insist that Cynewulf's imagination and his sense of intellectual symmetry were active in visualizing Juliana figurally. Surely he believed that he was relating the real persecution of an historical martyr. He probably believed that the saint had endured protracted torture. But while he never denies her irreducible individuality, he also seems to have believed that her meaning could be fully expressed only if that individuality were seen in all its essential, complementary relationships. In the framework of salvation history and divine exemplarity, part of a figura's very being points forward to, or back to, or up to, the fulfilment of its being. The human mind, therefore, only realizes the whole import of the individual when it is able to imagine the figura's essential connections within the hierarchy of being and the flow of time. Cynewulf's imagination explores these relationships and manifests them so that his audience can realize them as well. And that last 'making real' is, of course, the rhetorical aim of the poem.

But in the last analysis, acknowledging that Juliana is consistently shaped by figural and rhetorical design will not promote the poem to the ranks of the greatest Old English poetry. That an intelligent Old English audience would have regarded it, according to the criteria of the age, as a 'just representation of general nature' will fail to satisfy an age whose criteria have so radically altered. One can only urge that its matter, which may not interest us, and its form, which may not meet our own expectations, need not obscure the care, learning and imagination with which Cynewulf composed it.

Notes

¹Juliana, ed. Rosemary Woolf (London, 1955), p. 17.

²Ibid. p. 19; Theodor Wolpers, Die englische Heiligenlegende des Mittelalters (Tubingen, 1964), p. 124; and C. L. Wrenn, A Study of Old English Literature (London, 1967), p. 125.

³ Rosemary Woolf, 'Saints' Lives', Continuations and Beginnings: Studies in Old English Literature, ed. E. G. Stanley (London, 1966), pp. 40-5.

⁴ Hippolyte Delehaye, Les Legendes Hagiographiques, 4th ed. (Brussels, 1955), p. 23; cf. pp. 88-9.

⁵ Woolf, 'Saints' Lives', p. 45.

⁶ Erich Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (New York, 1959), 'Figura', trans. Ralph Manheim, p. 53.

⁷ 'The analogism that reaches into every sphere of medieval thought is closely bound up with the figural structure; in the interpretation of the Trinity that extends roughly from Augustine's De Trinitate to St Thomas I, q. 45, art. 7, man himself, as the image of God, takes on the character of a figura Trinitatis' (Auerbach, 'Figura', pp. 61-2). The usefulness of the term figura for the following discussion is that it both suggests the scriptural model for comparing Juliana to Christ or his church and reminds one that each member of the relationship, and indeed the relationship itself, was regarded as actual and ontologically valid; cf. Elizabeth Salter, 'Medieval Poetry and the Figural View of Reality', Proc. of the Brit. Acad. 54 (1968), 73-92. 'Allegory', on the other hand, often connotes the relationship between a mere fiction and its 'meaning', or suggests the more whimsical varieties of Philonic exegesis. A. C. Charity has recently pointed out that figural validity was also claimed for what is usually called the tropological level (Events and Their Afterlife (Cambridge, 1966), pp. 152-3 and passim). He has also shown that figural thinking was very much utilized in relating the events of Christian times back to those of the New Testament (ibid. pp. 150-2 and passim).

⁸ Stanley B. Greenfield, A Critical History of Old English Literature (New York, 1965), p. 111; Woolf, Juliana, p. 15; and Wolpers, Heiligenlegende, pp. 122-3.

⁹ The text quoted is that of The Exeter Book, ed. George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records 3 (New York, 1936), 113-33.

¹⁰ Miss Woolf calls attention to this as 'a basic proposition of the saint's life' ('Saints' Lives', p. 41). It is found, e.g., in Ælfric's 'Life of Eugenia' Ælfric's Lives of Saints, ed. Walter W. Skeat, Early Eng. Text Soc. o.s. 76, 82, 94 and 114 (London, 1881-1900; repr. in 2 vols., 1966), 1, 26).

¹¹ Wilhelm Kamlah, Apokalypse und Geschichtstheologie (Berlin, 1935), p. 11. For Augustine's formulation of these two Tychonian canons, see De Doctrina Christiana III.31 and 37. On the widespread knowledge of the canons, see Kamlah, pp. 10-11.

¹² See, e.g., Matthew XXIV. 1-12, Mark XIII. 1-13 and Luke XXI.9-19.

¹³ E.g., Matthew X.16-22, 26-32 and 34-42; Luke XII.l-8; and John XV. 17-25.

¹⁴ The passages cited in the two preceding notes were all gospel pericopes for the common of martyrs. From the Apocalypse, the following passages were pericopes for the first reading: IV. 1-7 and 9-12, VI.7-9 and 17 and VII.13-17. Since Juliana's was not a feast with proper pericopes, these had to be selected from those in the commune sanctorum. Although Wolpers simply consults the Missale Romanum for evidence of ninth-century liturgy (Heiligenlegende, pp. 120-1), the Missale alone does not seem to be a reliable guide for the period. Cyrille Vogel (Introduction aux Sources de 1'Histoire du Culte Chretien au Moyen Age (Spoleto, 1965), p. 321) points out that 'I'uniformite des livres liturgiques est inconnue de l'Eglise ancienne et de celle du moyen age' and emphasizes that 'chaque éveque … est libre de creer le formulaire et d'ordonner les lectures'. Thus, while it is agreed that the English liturgy was 'Roman', this ought not be taken to imply modern uniformity. Klaus Gamber ('Die kampanische Lektionsordnung', Sacris Erudiri 13 (1962), 326-52) edits the pericopes of the Lindisfarne Gospels type and discusses their relationship to a continental model apparently brought to England by Hadrian, companion to Theodore (see Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica IV. 1). For related manuscripts see Gamber, Codices Liturgici Latini Antiquiores (Freiburg, 1963), nos. 401 and 405-7. The pseudo-Bede homiliary seems to have been based on a lectionary of the Lindisfarne type; see G. Godu, 'Evangiles', Dictionnaire d'Archeologie Chretienne et de Liturgie, ed. F. Cabrol and H. Leclercq, col. 900. The pericopes of Durham, Cathedral Library, A. II. 16 and A. II. 17 are printed by C. H. Turner, The Oldest Manuscript of the Gospels (Oxford, 1931), p. 217. Guided chiefly by Vogel's bibliography and by his discussion of the medieval lectionaries, I have consulted editions of epistle and gospel pericopes representing the chief medieval types. Also useful for the pericopes of the commune are Walter Howard Frere, Studies in the Early Roman Liturgy (Oxford, 1930-5) II and III, and Henri Barre, Les Homeliaires Carolingiens de I'Ecole d'Auxerre (Vatican City, 1962), pp. 214-35. The edition of the Missale Romanum consulted was the Milan, 1474 (repr. Henry Bradshaw Soc. 17 (London, 1899)).

¹⁵ 'Maidenhood is not usually spoken of in connection with marriage, but, nevertheless, there is a maidenhood of faith, which worships one true God, and will not adulterously bow to an idol. All the church, which consists in maidens and in youths, in husbands and in wives, it is all named as one maiden, as the apostle Paul said to the believing folk, "I have betrothed you to one man, that you may prepare a pure maiden for Christ." Christ is the pure bridegroom, and all the Christian church is his bride, by which he daily begets human souls to his heavenly kingdom. The church is our mother and a pure maiden, because we are in her born again to God's hand, through faith and baptism' (The Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church: the First Part containing the Sermones Catholici or Homilies of Alfric, ed. Benjamin Thorpe (cited henceforward as Catholic Homilies), 2 vols. (London, 1844-6) II, 567). Cf. Augustine, 'Sermo 93 de Scripturis', Migne, Patrologia Latina 38, col. 574. The latter homily was included in Alan of Farfa's collection (pt II, no. 105, for the common of virgins), described by Reginald Gregoire, Les Homeliaires du Moyen Age (Rome, 1966), p. 69.

¹⁶ Virginity is a symbol for the renunciation of the world's goods. For instance, scorning a wealthy marriage for the love of God is explained by Haymo of Auxerre as purchasing the 'pearl of great price': 'Huius margaritae pulchritudinem, beatissima N., cuius hodie festivam celebramus festivitatem, multis divitiis datis comparavit, quando pro eius amore regni potentiam derelinquens, et thorum regalis matrimonii spernens, ad spontaneam paupertatem se contulit. Unde sine dubio quia regis terreni conjugium contemsit, sponsa effecta est regis coelestis: et quae noluit cum terreno rege regnare in mundo, regnat cum Christo in caelo' (PL 95, col. 1563, attributed to Paul the Deacon; Barre (Les Homeliaires Carolingiens, p. 160) lists it as belonging to Haymo's collection, pt II, no. 54). Renouncing earthly riches is, in fact, a commonplace in homilies for the feast of virgins and martyrs. See Paul the Deacon's collection, nos. 114, 117, 119 and 123 (here and throughout cited according to the revised list given by Gregoire, Les Homeliaires, pp. 110-12); and see also Elfric's Catholic Homilies on Lawrence (I, 420-2), Bartholomew (I, 458) and Simon and Jude (II, 484). When Cynewulf introduces the saint's scorning of riches and power (42b-4a, 100b-2a and 114a-16) he is surely adapting this symbolic tradition.

¹⁷ See, e.g., Rabanus Maurus's homily no. 36, 'In Natali Martyrum' (PL 110, cols. 68-78), and Caesarius of Arles's homily no. 223, 'In Natale Martyrum' (Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 104, 882-5). The currency of the latter is attested by its use in the homiliary of Alan of Farfa (pt II, no. 94) as well as in the Ottobeuren collection (no. 99); see Gregoire, Les Homeliaires, pp. 67 and 159.

¹⁸ 'Done deað soðlice þe se Hælend gemedemode for mannum þrowian, ðone ageaf Stephanus fyrmest manna þam Hælende' (Catholic Homilies I, 50).

¹⁹ Vogel, Introduction aux Sources, p. 276.

²⁰ Ambrosius Autpertus, In Sancti Johannis … Apocalypsim Libri Decem (Cologne, 1536), p. 14: 'Nam cum omnis electorum ecclesia in sanctis praedicatoribus testimonium perhibeat de Christo, illi tamen principaliter dicuntur martyres, qui pro Christi testimonio mortem pertulerint. In eo ergo Christus martyr fidelis extitit …' Cf. Bede. Explanatio Apocalypsis (PL 93, col. 134) and pseudo-Alcuin Commentariorum in Apocalypsim Libri Quinque (ibid. 100, col. 1093).

²¹ 'The life of the Lord, who was the first martyr, and who today fights and conquers in many martyrs, was as a stumbling block … Therefore, just as he glorified the Father with his own marvellous testimony in this world as well as in heaven, so his testimony is, in a way, consummated by the testimony of the saints, as if the passion of the Lord and that of the servants were one' (PL 4, cols. 965-6). This and all subsequent translations are my own.

²²Catholic Homilies I, 382.

²³ The same phrase 'on heanne beam' is used later (309b) to describe the crucifixion of Andrew.

²⁴ The 'Acta Sanctae Julianae' in Acta Sanctorum, February (II, 875-9), is the closest extant 'source' and seems sufficiently like the Old English version to have supplied Cynewulf with his material. Three Munich manuscripts not used by Bolland are referred to by Anton Schonbach in his edition of Arnold's German version of the story; see Mittheilungen aus altdeutschen Handschriften v (Vienna, 1882). One can gather from Schonbach's 'Anmerkungen' (pp. 75-84) that these versions diverge more widely from the Old English one than does the Bollandist text. Krapp and Dobbie conclude: 'In the absence of any closer Latin version, the text in the Acta Sanctorum may be accepted, for all practical purposes, as Cynewulf's original' (The Exeter Book, p. xxxvii) and Rosemary Woolf concurs: 'The numerous verbal echoes of the Vita in Juliana make it seem probable that Cynewulf was following a Latin source, either identical with, or at least very similar to the text printed by Bolland' (Juliana, p. 17). For general discussions of the poet's alterations of his 'source' see ibid. pp. 15-16, and Wolpers, Heiligenlegende, pp. 119-23. Subsequent references to the Latin Vita are by page number to the Acta Sanctorum.

²⁵ 'Tunc praefectus jussit eam capillis suspendi' (Acta 875).

²⁶Ibid.

²⁷Ibid.

²⁸ 'I cannot declare, though I tarry for all of a long summer day, all the sorrow which I, early and late, treacherously caused, since the firmament was first raised up, and the course of the stars and the earth established, and the first of mankind, Adam and Eve. Them I deprived of life, and so taught them that they lost the love of the lord, eternal happiness, and bright paradise as well. That caused misery to both those parents, and to their offspring also, that darkest of man's works. Why should I count more of countless evils? I originated all the hateful crimes which ever occurred since the beginning of the world among mankind, the kin of men, the well-born upon earth. Nor was there any of them who dared lay hands on me so boldly as you now, holy one, nor was any man on earth this brave, through holy might, none of the patriarchs or prophets; although the God of hosts, the king of glory, revealed to them the spirit of wisdom, gift without measure, yet I could win through to them. There was not one of them who thus boldly bound me up with chains, overwhelmed me with punishment, before you, now, overcame my great power.'

²⁹Bright's Anglo-Saxon Reader, rev. James R. Hulbert (New York, 1935), p. 134, lines 15-16. For the Latin version of the harrowing see Evangelia Apocrypha, ed. Konstantin von Tischendorf (Leipzig, 1876; repr. Hildesheim, 1966), pp. 389-416. All subsequent references to the Harrowing are to these editions, cited as 'OE' and 'Latin'.

³⁰ OE, p. 136, lines 14-15.

³¹ OE, p. 132, lines 16-18; Latin, pp. 395-6.

³² OE, pp. 135-6; Latin, pp. 399-400.

³³ OE, p. 133, lines 20-3; Latin, p. 397.

³⁴ 'þu þe hæfst þæt leoht hyder geondsend … and beorhtnysse hæfst ablend þa synfullan þystro' (OE, p. 135, lines 24-6; cf. Latin, p. 400). See also OE, p. 129, lines 3-7, and Latin, p. 391; and OE, p. 135, line 3, and Latin, p. 398.

³⁵ 'La ðu ealdor ealre forspyllednysse, and la ðu ord and fruma ealra yfela, and la ðu fæder ealra flymena, and la þu þe ealdor wære ealles deaðes, and la ordfruma ealre modignysse, for hwig gedyrstlehtest þu … hæfst ealle fyne blysse forspylled' (OE, p. 136, lines 18-25; cf. Latin, pp. 400-2). Christ then gives Satan into hell's power forever and the mockery of him, in the Harrowing as in the poem, is a jubilant farewell to his powers.

³⁶ OE, p. 137, lines 3-5; Latin, p. 402.

³⁷ 'Belucað þa wælhreowan and þa ærenan gatu, and to foran on sceotað þa ysenan scyttelsas' (OE, p. 133, lines 24-6); 'Portas crudeles aereas et vectos fereos supponite …' (Latin, p. 397).

³⁸ See OE, pp. 135-6; Latin, pp. 399-400.

³⁹ Another instance of a saint re-enacting Christ's harrowing can be found in Ælfric's 'Passion of Bartholomew'. The holy man's presence in a temple dedicated to the idol-devil Ashtaroth renders the creature dumb. Forced by Bartholomew to declare himself to the king of the country, Ashtaroth cries out: 'Geswicað, earme, geswicað eowra offrunga, ðelæs ðe ge wyrsan pinunge ðrowion ðonne ic. Ic eom gebunden mid fyrenum racenteagum fram Cristes englum, ðone ðe ða ludeiscan on rode ahengon: wendon þæt se deað hine gehæftan mihte; he soðlice ðone deað oferswðde, and urne ealdor mid fyrenum bendum gewrað, and on ðam ðriddan dæge sigefæst aras, and sealde his rodetacen his apostolum, and tosende hi geond ealle ðeoda. An ðæra is her, ðe me gebundenne hylt' (Catholic Homilies I, 462). Thus Bartholomew binds Ashtaroth by virtue of and in imitation of the harrowing.

⁴⁰Acta 876.

⁴¹Ibid. 877.

⁴²Ibid.

⁴³ The reference to the fall of Adam and Eve is in the Vita, but occurs earlier (ibid. 876). It is impossible to tell what Cynewulf did with this earlier passage since the Latin here corresponds to the manuscript leaf missing after line 288.

⁴⁴ From a homily of Gregory on Luke XXI.9-29 (PL 76, col. 1259) which is included in the homiliary of Paul the Deacon as no. 116 for the common of martyrs. The notion of the two martyrdoms was a commonplace. Cf. Paul the Deacon's homilies for the feasts of martyrs nos. 117 (from Maximus of Turin, PL 57, cols. 429-30) and 123 (from Gregory, PL 76, cols. 1115-16); see also Elfric's Catholic Homilies II, 536, and 'Sermo de Memoria Sanctorum', Lives of Saints, ed. Skeat I, 352. (On the likelihood that kifric intended the latter piece as an introduction to the Lives of Saints as a whole, see P. A. M. Clemoes, 'The Chronology of Ælfric's Works', The Anglo-Saxons. Studies in some Aspects of their History and Culture presented to Bruce Dickins, ed. Peter Clemoes (London, 1959), p. 222.) Or see the commentaries on Apocalypse XI.3 where the 'two witnesses' are regularly glossed as interior and exterior martyrdom. So Haymo, PL 117, col. 1070; pseudo-Alcuin, PL 100, col. 1147; and Ambrosius Autpertus, In Apocalypsim, p. 205. The same notion probably underlies The Dream of the Rood 112-18, where he who 'for Dryhtnes naman deaðes wolde / biteres onbyrigan' is paralleled with him who 'in breostum bereo beacna selest'.

⁴⁵ 'For Neroes, Diocletians, Deciuses and Maximians will not always rage; but the devil never ceases to attack the soldiers of Christ … when the tyrant says, "Deny Christ, and sacrifice to Jove, and be our friend—or die", then often the tongue denies, though the heart within protests, and the hand offers incense, though the soul adores Christ internally. And in spite of this being a most serious sin, nevertheless the fickleness of human nature alleviates somewhat the guilt of this impiety. But then, Satan speaks to you in the voice of the tyrant, and what does he say but the same thing addressed to your concupiscence: "Deny Christ and be rich; sacrifice to Mammon and renounce Christ … amuse your eyes … make money" ' (PL 4, cols. 971 and 975-6).

⁴⁶Les Legendes Hagiographiques, p. 89; Wolpers (Heiligenlegende, p. 35) tends to accept this explanation, or at least rests content when he can explain something as having a generally 'homiletic' intent.

⁴⁷ See, e.g., the pseudo-Bede homilies, PL 94, cols. 457-65; the collection is neither English nor eighth-century, but the homilies are from Bede's gospel commentaries, as is pointed out by Jean Leclercq, 'Le Ille Livre des Homelies de Bede le Vnerable', Recherches de Theologie Ancienne et Medievale 14 (1947), 211-18. Or see the homilies collected by Paul the Deacon (Gregoire, Les Homeliaires, pp. 110-12) and MElfric's 'Sermo de Memoria Sanctorum', Lives of Saints, ed. Skeat, I, 350.

⁴⁸ See Rhabanus Maurus, no. 36 (PL 110, col. 68) and the pseudo-Bede homily no. 73 (PL 94, col. 458).

⁴⁹ No. 74 (PL 95, col. 1540). This sermon is listed neither by Gregoire nor by Barre. The PL attribution suggests that it is ultimately from the Chrysostomus Latinus; I have been unable to trace it further.

⁵⁰ 'Sapiential Structure and Figural Narrative in the Old English Elene', Traditio 27 (1971), 165-9.

⁵¹ 'Quod [the suffering described in the verse of the Gospel] primitiva quidem Ecclesia persecutionis tempore historialiter agebat; sed ea, quae nunc est Ecclesia, a Christo pace jam reddita, pia aemulatione spiritaliter repraesentat. Praeteritos igitur parturitionis ejus dolores, in vigiliis sanctorum, jejuniis et afflictione carnis imitamur: sequentem vero ejus jam enixae alacritatem, ipsius jucunditate festivitatis aemulamur' (Liber de Divinis Officiis, PL 101, col. 1215). Cf. Alcuin's Commentarius in Sancti Ioannis Evangelium (PL 100, cols. 955-6).

⁵² Bede, Explanatio Apocalypsis (PL 93, col. 168); cf. pseudo-Alcuin, In Apocalypsim (PL 100, cols. 1152-3) and Haymo, In Apocalypsim (PL 117, col. 1083).

⁵³ '[the devil] persecuted the woman, who brought forth a son, that is, a strong people, such as were the holy martyrs, who were more easily slain than they were separated from God … after the coming of the son of God, she was attacked very sharply, and the cunning one busied himself with the argument of persecution: crucifying some in their members, like Peter; striking some down with stones, like Stephen; consuming some by fire, like Lawrence; others he gave over to serpents, some he tore with claws, some he cast into the sea; and he caused similar things to happen through various instruments' (PL 117, col. 1089). Elsewhere (on Apocalypse XI. 7) Haymo applies a series of tortures to the church as a whole: 'Faciet autem contra Dei testes bellum, et corporale et spirituale, exhibebit cuncta quae in praecedentibus martyribus sunt adimpleta, id est virgas, fustes, plumbatas, candentes ferri laminas, ungulas ferreas, bestias, ignes, et carceres, et si qua sunt similia tormentorum genera' (ibid. col. 1073).

⁵⁴ 'But perhaps you will ask whether this edifice consists of stones or timbers or iron. No, Christ says; for it is not a tangible edifice. If it were, it would be dissolved by time. But neither demons nor any other creature can conquer the profession of piety. The martyrs testified, whose sides were rent, but the faith was not broken. A new stuff, this! The wall is dug up, and the treasure not carried off. Flesh is torn and the faith is not broken. Such indeed is the strength of the martyrs' ('Paul the Deacon', no. 74, PL 95, col. 1541; see above, p. 50, n. 3).

⁵⁵In Apocalypsim, p. 209, commenting on Apocalypse XI.7; cf. Haymo, PL 117, col. 1073. It might also be noted that Juliana's speeches, which continually counter the threats and promises of her father and Heliseus with references to God's controlling power, are paralleled in homilies. Compare, e.g., Juliana 11 1b-13a with 'Ego [qui mitto vos sicut oves …] sum qui coelum extendi, qui terram fundavi, qui mare infrenavi …' (PL 95, col. 1539).

⁵⁶Acta 877-8.

⁵⁷ See Rhabanus Maurus, no. 36 (PL 110, col. 69), and Paul the Deacon for the feasts of martyrs, nos. 112 (from Gregory's homily no. 37, 'In Evangelium', PL 76, col. 1277), 116 (from Gregory's homily no. 35, PL 76, cols. 1263-4) and 118 (from Gregory's homily no. 32, 'De Diversis', PL 76, cols. 1234-5).

⁵⁸ Juliana's wisdom is conveyed negatively, but unmistakably. She is called foolish by her adversaries (96b-8, 120, 145, 192b-3 and 202a), is urged by them to be 'wise' (144-5 and 251b-2), but she rejects their judgements (134) and their errors (138-9); later the devil confesses to being the source of these errors (301a and 368). The events of the poem prove Juliana's apparent folly to be wisdom, her apparent stubbornness to be fidelity. All of these references to wisdom and folly are added by Cynewulf.

⁵⁹Studies in the Early Roman Liturgy III, 92.

⁶⁰ The following passages were common pericopes: Proverbs III. 1-9, III. 13-20, VIII.22-35, and XV.2-4 and 6-9, and Wisdom IV.7-11 and 14-15, V.16-20 and 22, VII.30 and VIII.1-4, and X.10-14.

⁶¹ On the church's preaching see, e.g., pseudo-Alcuin on Apocalypse XI.5 (PL 100, col. 1148), Haymo on Apocalypse XV.5 (PL 117, col. 1122) and Ambrosius Autpertus on the same verse (In Apocalypsim, p. 287). On the witness of the martyrs see, e.g., the pseudo-Bede homily no. 74 for the feast of one martyr (PL 94, col. 460).

⁶² 'And [Wisdom] gave the reward of their labours to the just, and led them out on a marvellous way; and she was a shelter to them by day, and a starry light by night; she led them across the Red Sea and brought them through deep waters. The wicked, however, she drowned in the sea, and she summoned them from the depth of the infernal regions. Therefore the just bear off the spoils of the impious; and they praised your holy name, Lord, and together they praised your victorious hand' (Wisdom X.17-20). Cf. Wisdom V.21-3. Wisdom X.13-14 might incidentally bear on Juliana's victory in the dungeon: '[Sapientia] venditum iustum non dereliquit. Sed a peccatoribus liberavit eum; descenditque cum illo in foveam, et in vinculis non dereliquit illum …'. The fact that Wisdom V.16-20 and 22 and X.10-14 were pericopes for the common of saints would have drawn attention to these passages and their contexts.

⁶³ Apocalypse XII. 17 reads: 'Et iratus est draco in mulierem: et abiit facere praelium cum reliquis de semine eius, qui custodiunt mandata Dei, et habent testimonium Iesu Christi.' Bede comments: 'Mandata Dei in fide Jesu Christi custodire, hoc est pugnare cum dracone, et ipsum provocare in praelium. Et gratias Deo, qui saevi draconis evacuavit incoeptus. Ecce enim, Dominum in carne natum exstinguere molitus, ejus resurrectione frustratur. Post apostolis fiduciam docendi refringere laborans, quasi mulierem, id est, totam Ecclesiam de rebus humanis auferre satagebat. Sed et hoc frustra nisus passim nunc singulas fidelium impugnat aetates' (Explanatio Apocalypsis, PL 93, col. 168).