ABSTRACT
By 1516, when Richard Fox began work on Here begynneth there was already a long tradition of translating or adapting the Benedictine Rule in English for nuns. He was, as Charlotte D’Evelyn has said, the Tast in the direct line of translators from Aethewold’.1 The Benedictine Rule as such had been translated several times from Latin into Old English, and these translations, including the version of Ethelwold, Bishop of Winchester (963-84), continued to be copied and revised until the twelfth century. Thereafter they were gradually succeeded by Middle English translations of the Rule, of which the five extant versions were addressed to both men and women, or to women alone, but with no apparent connection between the five translations apart from their common source. The Wintney text, of the thirteenth century, included both Latin text and a Middle English version of Ethewold’s Anglo-Saxon translation, written for nuns, but was a paraphrase rather than a translation of the Rule. Fox may have read it but there is no sign of his having been influenced by it.2
