Carthago describenda est: Depicting Carthage in the Old English Martyrology

Abstract The city of Carthage has captured the literary imagination for centuries as the city of Dido, the city of Hannibal, and the centre of the African province of the Roman empire. Yet the representation of this famous city in Old English literature remains largely unstudied. The present study considers one of the most extensive depictions of the city in the Old English literary corpus, the Old English Martyrology: a ninth-century encyclopaedic work which features three entries depicting the saints of Carthage. Though previous scholarship has represented the martyrologist's work as largely adherent to Latin materials, close comparison of the OEM's Carthaginian entries to their sources and analogues reveals that all three entries considerably rework the martyrologist's Latin sources. Through surveying representations of Carthage across the entirety of the Old English corpus, this article proposes three models of Carthage (classical, Roman, and African) that coexisted in Old English sources. It then demonstrates that the martyrologist consistently adapted his source materials in ways that highlighted these three models, and it suggests that the OEM represents an early crystallization of the image of Carthage that existed more commonly in the medieval English imaginary in the following centuries. This depiction of the city constitutes a part of the OEM's larger project to map the breadth of Christian knowledge onto the lives of the saints, and further highlights that the text's interests often lay in non-hagiographical information.