Chapter 8 FRITHEGOD AND STEPHEN: ADAPTING THE VITA SANCTI WILFRIDI

TRISTAN MAJORthe literary phenomenon of the so-called opus geminatum or geminus stilus has been well documented in lateantique and early medi eval Latin literature. 1 In sum, this genre produces two texts of essentially the same content but of different form: one in prose and the other in poetry.Though it is common for both texts to be by the same author-opera geminata of Caelius Sedulius, Aldhelm, and Bede are good examples 2the poetic companion piece to a prose work was also often composed by a different author, sometimes centuries apart, and even sometimes in a different language.So Alcuin, who incidentally has his own poetic and prose lives of Willibrord, composed a kind of poetic version of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica in his poem on York; 3 and, to stretch the genre to its limits, some Old English poetry can be read as "twinning" Latin prose sources.4 One of the more elaborate of these opera geminata was composed in the mid-tenth century, after Oda, Archbishop of Canterbury, probably taking advantage of military expeditions in Northumbria, was able to acquire the relics of Saint Wilfrid, which apparently were withering away, unkept and 1 Godman, "The Anglo-Latin Opus Geminatum," 215-29; Wieland, "Geminus stylus," 113-33; and Friesen, "The Opus Geminatum and AngloSaxon Literature," 123-44.2 Caelius Sedulius, Opera omnia; Aldhelm, Opera; Bede, Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert; and Bede, Bede's Latin Poetry.See, especially, Brooks, Restoring Creation, 69-76.3 Godman, "The Anglo-Latin Opus Geminatum," 215.For the lives of Willibrord, see Alcuin, Vita Willibrordi Archiepiscopi Traiectensis, 81-141; and "De vita sancti Willibrordi episcopi," in Alcuini Carmina, 207-20.4 For example, the Old English Guthlac A, in Roberts, The Guthlac Poems of the Exeter Book, is an Old English, versified form of the Latin life, in Felix's Life of Saint Guthlac.See Thornbury, Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England, 52, who locates the Old English literary tradition in the closely related genre of biblical verse paraphrase.Scholars have also read the two versions of the Old English Boethius as an opus geminatum; see Irvine, "The Protean Form of the Old English Boethius," 4; and Weaver, "Hybrid Forms."

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