| Abstract | Paper -a:
Clerical engagement with the laity in 5th- and 6th-century Gaul is difficult to trace and even more difficult to assess. It was fundamental, however, to the Church's success at building Christian communities. This paper examines the conceptions of the laity to be found in various clerical sources, and the different senses they convey of what the laity's problems were and how they should be addressed. It demonstrates that pastors struggled at times to understand and engage with 'lay Christianity', but also that they made genuine, and sometimes surprising, efforts to do so.
Paper -b:
This paper will explore the way in which the chapters of Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica on Fursey and Drihthelm have been re-elaborated in the Old English Bede and in the Homilies of Ælfric. If, at least at a first glance, one could say that Bede's vivid descriptions of the spiritual journeys experienced by Fursey and Drihthelm undergo a process of actual translation in the Old English Bede, the same cannot be said for Ælfric's Homilies, where in fact the episodes rely on Bede as a source but are re-elaborated to meet the needs of the homiletic genre. A comparison between the two Old English renderings of these episodes (and - borrowing from Gerard Genette's terminology - between the hypertexts and their hypotext) calls into question different issues, such as the function of spiritual journeys and saints' lives in different contexts (historiographic vs. homiletic), the questions as to whether or how far these episodes have evolved across time as well as the relationship between the concepts of translation and re-writing.
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