On Dating Cynewulf

Abstract

The Cynewulf corpus is especially in need of reconsideration of this sort, because these poems have been used to represent an early ninth-century Mercian textuality, capping what might be called a great Anglian poetic period. Perhaps the next best indicator of the relationship between the Usuardian recension of the martyrology and Cynewulf’s Fates of the Apostles is to be found in the first epitome, wherein a phrase from the recension of the martyrology (and later texts dependent upon it) appears to have been closely rendered in the Old English poem. Political upheaval and the orientation of the English clergy away from Continental developments in the late ninth century makes it likely that the martyrology would not have made its way from the Continent much before the tenth century, thus justifying a terminus a quo for Cynewulf’s work of about a century later than generally has heretofore been assumed.

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