The Old English Bee charm, "For a swarm of bees," is found in an eleventh-century Missal that contains various kinds of Latin liturgical material. Another charm in the manuscript is intended to protect against the theft of cattle, and a third against a wen, a benign tumor. All three are translated by Crossley-Holland pages 270-71.
The bee charm has obvious practical significance for our knowledge of Anglo-Saxon culture. So does the fact that the charm occurs in a liturgical manuscript, since the context shows how functions modern culture divides were unified or at least closely related in the earlier period.
In Monastery Link 5, we discuss a literary device incorporating the bee, a tradition familiar to classical scholars as well as Anglo-Saxonists: that is the bee as an anthologizer. This tradition is alluded to in the introduction to King Alfred's translation of Augustine's Soliloquies and is briefly discussed by Milton McC. Gatch in his essay on this text in Paul Szarmach, Ed., Studies in Earlier English Prose . 1986. 23-25. Martin Irvine has recently discussed this topos with others in Alfred's text; see Irvine's essay on textuality in Speaking Two Languages . (1991, 199-202).
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