Translating Felix’s Vita sancti Guthlaci into Old English

Abstract

Based on some of the most recent studies on aesthetic emotions, the purpose of this paper is to examine how aesthetic concepts and aesthetic experience are translated and adapted from Felix’s Vita sancti Guthlaci into Old English prose. Looking into the Old English terms from the lexical domains of beauty and aesthetic pleasure, this paper highlights very specific translation practices on the part of, especially, an Old English author, who implements an additional aesthetic dimension that is not generally found in the Latin source. This paper highlights an apparent hybridity between the cognitive and the sensory in these literary texts, and it also stresses how one of these authors in particular frequently uses sensory evaluations to describe the complex and abstract ideas that are typical of the hagiographical genre.