Michaela Selway(University of Tübingen)

Paul the Deacon’s Strategies of Patterning the Bible

It has long been recognised that Late Antique and Early Medieval sources have an abundance of allusions to or quotations of the Christian scriptures. A technique that has yet to receive adequate scholarly attention, however, is patterning, where authors frame entire episodes from their recent past on a model story found in another (usually ancient) text. This paper focuses on the three strategies of patterning the Christian Scriptures employed by Paul the Deacon across his various texts: 1) inventing his own pattern, 2) extending a pattern created by a prior author, and 3) veiling a pattern created by a prior author.

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