Forr þeʒʒre sawle need: TheOrmulum, Vernacular Theology and a Tradition of Translation in Early England

Abstract

This essay focuses on the Ormulum's Dedication and its call to educate the laity through the vernacular. Although the purpose of the Ormulum is to bring the teaching of the Gospels to the English people because their salvation is dependent on being devotionally literate, the Ormulum has not yet been read under the rubric of “vernacular theology”. This essay seeks to rectify this by reading the Dedication to the Ormulum as vernacular theology and further arguing that it occupies a middle space between the Old English prefaces of Alfred and Ælfric and the explosion of fourteenth-century theological writings in Middle English, not only in terms of its language but also in its approach, focusing especially on the words Orm uses to mean “to translate” (wenden and turnen). The Dedication to the Ormulum shares a great deal with both traditions and deserves to be recognized for the unique place it occupies between two eras in medieval English literary history.

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