Warning that both nuns and clergymen are dressing inappropriately, he adds: “It shames me to speak of the bold impudence of conceit and the fine insolence of stupidity which are found both among nuns who abide under the rule of a settlement, and among the men of the Church … With many-coloured vestments and with elegant adornments, the body is set off and the external form decked out limb by limb.”
As well as lifestyle advice, Aldhelm - an energetic evangelist and early supporter of women’s education - includes biographies of female saints famed for their virginity who he holds up as role models, including Scholastica, the patron saint of nuns and twin sister of St Benedict; Christina, tortured to death for her faith by her pagan father; and Dorothy, executed for her Christianity after turning down a marriage proposal.
Written in Latin in the seventh century, the book is the first known text from England to be aimed at a female readership. At the time, Barking was a country village outside London and its abbey, founded in 666AD, was home to generations of nuns for more than 800 years.
Whilst Aldhelm had no ecclesiastical authority over the abbey, his advice would have been heeded because he was a noted scholar of his day, of royal blood, who founded two monasteries and served as an abbot and a bishop.
The four pages up for auction at Sotheby’s next month are inscribed on vellum - high quality parchment made from sheep skin or calf hide – from a copy of the book produced in around 800AD, and believed to have been owned at one stage by St Dunstan, a tenth-century Archbishop of Canterbury. They are expected to fetch £500,000.
Timothy Bolton, a specialist in western medieval manuscripts at Sotheby’s, said: “Aldhelm’s work is remarkable because there simply aren’t any texts by English authors addressed to women before this.
"He expects the nuns to study and understand his sophisticated writings, raising the bar of education for women to the same level of men, becoming the first English feminist author.”
The extract forms part of an auction of 60 rare manuscripts, spanning more than five millennia, that are expected to fetch more than £2 million in total.
They include fragments of Homer’s The Iliad dating to the year of Christ’s birth which were used by the Egyptians to wrap around a mummy; a document belonging to the father of King Harold, the last Anglo Saxon king; and the earliest surviving text of one of the most important passages from the New Testament, St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans.
They will be sold by Martin Schoyen, a Norwegian collector and heir to a shipping and transport business.
Dr Christopher de Hamel, the fellow librarian of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and an expert on ancient manuscripts, said: “This sale is exceptional in telling the story of Western script from classical antiquity to the Middle Ages. It contains the bare bone relics of the history of the English language.”
The sale includes The Godwine Charter, drawn up for Earl Godwine, the most powerful English lord in the decades before the Norman Conquest and the father of King Harold, who was defeated and killed at the Battle of Hastings in 1066.
Dated c. 1013 to 1020 and written on vellum in Anglo Saxon, the document details Earl Godwine’s sale of a swine pasture, believed to be in Kent, to one of his tenants, Leofwine the Red, for “forty pence and two pounds and an allowance of eight ambers of corn”.
Expected to fetch up to £250,000 at auction, it is one of the rarest surviving Anglo Saxon texts from before the Norman Conquest, after which Old English, replaced by Latin and French, ceased to be the language of officialdom.
The sale will also include the Wyman Fragment, the earliest surviving version of an excerpt from St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, widely acknowledged as one of the most famous documents in the history of Christianity.
Dating from the late third century when Christianity was still an illegal cult in the Roman empire, the vellum fragment written in Greek comprises Romans 4:23-5:3 on one side, and on the other, Romans 5:8-13, including the crucial passage on the justification by faith which forms the core of the Epistle and of the theology of Christianity: “Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
For this passage of the Epistle, the Wyman Fragment is universally accepted as the earliest surviving version and is expected to fetch up to £200,000 at auction.
The fragment was reportedly found in the early 20th century by a group of Arabs at Fustât, in north-eastern Cairo, Egypt, near the site of the Roman fortress of Babylon.
Mr Schoyen acquired it in 1988 from the heirs of the American anthropologist, Dr Leland Wyman, who bought it from an antiquities dealer in Cairo in 1950.
Fragments from Homer’s The Iliad dating from c. 0 will also feature in the sale. Experts believe the papyrus fragments were once part of a scroll once used by the ancient Egyptians to wrap around a mummy, which survived in the sands of North Africa.
They were first acquired by the Austrian conservator, Dr Anton Fackelmann, in Cairo in 1969 as part of a mummy cartonage. Mr Schoyen acquired them from his heirs in 1998 and they are estimated to fetch £30,000 at auction.
Source: www.telegraph.co.uk
Liddle halts Middlesex charge - SkySports
A sensational penultimate over from Chris Liddle helped Sussex clinch an 11-run victory over Middlesex in the Friends Life Twenty20 at Lord's on Sunday.
Liddle took three wickets in four balls to finish with career-best figures of five for 17 and end Middlesex's hopes of chasing down the visitors' total of 143 for eight.
Tim Roland-Jones (2-19) and Gareth Berg (3-17) had put Sussex in trouble after they had won the toss and elected to bat.
But they fought back from 26-3 to post a competitive total thanks to Murray Goodwin (43) and Scott Styris (48).
Sussex made a terrible start, losing Luke Wright, Matt Machan and Chris Nash inside the opening six overs.
Steven Crook had Wright caught at the wicket for just one while Machan lobbed a simple catch off the same bowler to mid-off for six as Crook finished with figures of 2-29.
Joe Gatting and Goodwin began the fightback by putting on 30 in 21 balls before Tom Smith beat a tentative defensive prod to bowl Gatting for 11.
Breakthrough
Goodwin has been in woeful form this season but came to Sussex's rescue by adding 56 with Scott Styris before being bowled by Roland-Jones.
Styris made the most of being dropped by Dawid Malan on 25 but fell just short of his half-century when he hit Roland-Jones straight to Berg at extra cover on 48.
Sussex's innings tailed off after that as they limped to 143-8, with Berg picking up the wickets of Ben Brown and Mike Yardy in the final over.
Liddle made the initial breakthrough by having Joe Denly caught at long off while Paul Stirling also went cheaply.
Malan top scored with 38 before he picked out Goodwin on the boundary off the bowling of Will Beer.
Berg and Neil Dexter put on 53 for the fourth wicket before Liddle returned to end their partnership by fooling Berg with a slower ball he lobbed straight to point for 23.
Middlesex still looked favourites until Liddle produced some fireworks in the penultimate over by removing Dexter (36), John Simpson and Chris Rogers.
Source: www.skysports.com
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