Kalamazoo 2012: Landscape and Culture in Medieval Britain

With the help of the SLU Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies I have organized the following sessions for the upcoming Medieval Congress. Please attend if you are interested and tell your friends!

• Saturday 10:00 am: Session 384, Schneider 1340

Landscape and Culture in Medieval Britain I: Spaces and Buildings

Spatial Paradox and the Ambiguity of Guthlac A

Lindy Brady, Univ. of Connecticut

This paper addresses the crucial role of borderlands as spaces where identity slippages take place in the Old English Guthlac A, calling into question the poem’s traditional interpretation as a triumph of Anglo-Saxon sanctity over native resistance.  While Guthlac is typically understood as a heroic conqueror who enters a hostile wilderness for righteous battle, I argue that the complex narrative of Guthlac A creates a paradoxical landscape that reveals Guthlac’s own character to be equally unstable.  The poem places three simultaneously occurring yet mutually exclusive conditions of ownership on the beorg—it is granted to the demons as a space of respite, awaits the claim of a better owner, and stands outside all patrial rights.  These paradoxes are necessary to the unity of the narrative, for while Guthlac is tasked with righteous battle, the demons are given just cause to resist him; yet moreover, the suggestion that Guthlac is unjustly seizing another’s land complicates his saintly identity. Crucially, the nature of the landscape itself is as ambiguous as its legal status.  Previous criticism on Guthlac A has assumed that the beorg undergoes a linear transformation from dangerous wilderness to locus amoenus and taken this as evidence of the triumph of (Anglo-Saxon) civilization over (native British) wilderness, particularly in recent postcolonial studies of the work.  Yet such theoretical approaches are predicated upon a transformation of the landscape only once the saint has triumphed.  Guthlac A, however, depicts the beorg as simultaneously dangerous and aesthetically desirable to both Guthlac and the demons before the saint’s victory, and to read him as the sole transformative force is to ignore these positive elements of the landscape that make his role as an agent of change far less clear.

“Eald is þes eorðsele”: The Ancestral Landscape of The Wife’s Lament

Joanna A. Huckins MacGugan, Univ. of Connecticut 

[Joanna cannot attend the conference this year, but her abstract is still pretty darn interesting!] The nature and meaning of the narrator’s physical space in the semantically ambiguous Anglo-Saxon poem “The Wife’s Lament” has been the focus of considerable scholarly debate. The wife describes þes eorðsele, the place of her confinement, as eald, which suggests that she inhabits a place of considerable antiquity. R.F. Leslie was the first to identify this space as a chambered barrow in 1961, and Sarah Semple suggested in 1998 that the Wife’s situation represents secondary burial in a prehistoric barrow tomb. A careful analysis of the language surrounding eorðsele and its synonym eorðscræfe reveals not only that “grave” is the most likely meaning for the Wife’s physical space, but also that this grave corresponds with the known archaeological context for Anglo-Saxon reuse of earlier burial monuments. The poem describes an ancient underground location within a constructed enclosure that is now isolated, abandoned and overgrown, a place imbued with pre-Christian meaning and associated with death and damnation. All of these characteristics, particularly the poet’s emphasis on a connection with the ancestral past, are perfectly in keeping with what we understand of Anglo-Saxon monument reuse. Yet nowhere in Anglo-Saxon literature does an ancient barrow actually serve as a prison for the living, and this is the central problem with a living narrator. The idea that the Wife is imprisoned for her sins suggests a possible penitential context for the poem that has not yet been addressed in the scholarship. The present study builds on Leslie’s original argument for a monumental barrow tomb, evaluates textual and archaeological evidence for secondary burial, and explores how the “monument reuse” interpretation can both clarify and complicate the text.

Jedburgh Abbey: A Case Study of Kingship

Jessica M. Aberle, Lehigh Univ.

The Border Abbeys were conceived of as active political strategies by David I as part of his campaign to conquer Northumbria and Cumbria. If the abbeys are examined within the framework of the twelfth-century Normano-Scottish Border, a pattern emerges suggesting that the iconography and locations were intentionally chosen to create a visually complex program that proclaimed David I’s royal identity as the new Northern King of Britain by asserting his claim to the ancient kingdom of Northumbria. David I created a new royal heartland at Roxburgh Castle with the foundation of Kelso, Melrose, and Jedburgh Abbeys (1128-1138). David I’s approach to landscape can be explored using three themes: Location as it Defines Influence, the Creation of a Lordly Landscape, and the Appropriation of Site. David I manipulated the placement of the ecclesiastical foundations within the landscape in order to lay claim to Northumbria as the Northern King of Britain. Through the creation of a carefully crafted landscape focused on Roxburgh, David I challenged Stephen the Norman king of England with the intention of creating a Scoto-Northumbrian kingdom with its center at Roxburgh. For the purposes of this conference, I would use Jedburgh Abbey (1138) as a case study to discuss how David I used both architectural cues and the careful selection of location to express both his identity as the Northern King of Britain and his claim to Northumbria.

Spatiality, Ecclesiastics, and Community in The Book of Margery Kempe

Chiu-Yen Lin, Tamkang Univ.

This paper aims to employ Henri Lefebvre’s theory of social space in discussing the issue of spatiality and its relation to Margery’s mystical space, her audience, and their community in The Book of Margery Kempe. The concept of spatiality is composed by three parts: mystical space, religious space, and communal space. The first part of the paper surveys the social and historical context of King’s Lin and Norwich in relation to the development of commerce and the changes on the communal life and religious space. Lefebvre’s conception of absolute space and abstract space will be employed to aid this survey. It attempts to sketch out the context of The Book which Margery’s mystical space is derived from. The second part of the essay deals with Margery’s mystical experience in relation to the communal space and religious space. I attempt to argue that the unconventional manner of Margery’s mystical experience which comes from her meditative dialogues with Christ and her performance of affective piety is produced from and shaped by the specific communal space which allows her to intrude the male dominated religious space. The third part traces the interaction between Margery’s mystical space, communal space and religious space with an emphasis on how Margery’s unconventional mystical experience negotiates and alters power relations and social relations in the communal and religious space. In conclusion, by brining Lefebvre’s theory into the discussion I attempt to sketch out the interconnection of mystical, religious, and communal spaces in that it reveals different levels of power struggles in terms of seizing religious and communal places and spaces while at the time Margery’s mystical experience is deeply embedded in the intertwined spaces.

 

• Saturday 1:30pm: Session 443- Schneider 1340

Landscape and Culture in Medieval Britain II: Places and Maps

England in the Douce 98 Place List

Camin Melton, Fordham Univ.

In the manuscript Douce 98 in the Oxford Bodleian Library there is a list of 108 places in England written in Anglo-Norman French and dating to c. 1300. Each location featured in the list is coupled with a single notable characteristic, ranging from the industry or food that a particular town or region was presumably known for at the time to more abstract and often surprising characteristics like the “whores of Charing” or the “marvel of Stonehenge.” Though this list is unique among the surviving corpus of Anglo-Norman literature, it has only received passing interest from historians and literary critics. In this paper, it is my goal to provide a modern edition of the list and to present a translation of its places and things. I will also speculate on the nature and purposes of the list by considering it in relation to the earlier and later lists that attempt to do something similar. This text is worthy of greater consideration than it has received because it occupies a space between the itinerary and the map, between the simple listing of counties, bishoprics, and saints’ resting places and the more elaborate description of medieval towns and countrysides, between the assertion of the voracity of English religious history and the assertion of England as a locus for widespread mercantile activity, and finally between the practical text and the narrative text (if such a distinction can be made). Any attempt to render this place list a simple apparatus for achieving one practical end must surely give way upon further examination of and close attention to its narrative movement, its humor, and the multiple cognitive activities it encourages, from remembering the names of places to understanding those places’ collectively imagined part in the English whole to mapping out the industrial nexuses of the island.

My Land, Myself: Topographical Narrative and the Construction of Identity in

Sir Isumbras

Andrew Richmond, Ohio State Univ.

In the Middle English romance of Sir Isumbras, the experience of the narrative itself is intimately entwined with the presentation of landscape. Progressing from the loss of a cultural power for manipulating the use of his geological, vegetative, and animal surroundings, the eponymous hero is forced to learn the contours, “nature” and uses of his environment(s) by physical experience. In addition to the trying experiences of dangerous (or ultimately beneficent) beasts, forests and rivers characteristic of the romance genre, Sir Isumbras demonstrates a peculiar fascination with the rise and fall of the “londe” itself, tracing the minute progress of the hero up hills and across stones. These elevated spaces serve as literal and figurative platforms upon which Isumbras can decry (and in doing so define) his state, while often simultaneously providing stages for the scenes of sudden action that thrust the plot forward. This paper, then, will seek to demonstrate how Sir Isumbras ultimately ties the social and cultural “ascension” of the hero and his family to his ability to manipulate the matter of the earth, as he moves from stone-bearer to blacksmith to recast knight, ready to employ his environmental education to reassert his control over the cultural as well as physical landscape of the Sultan’s kingdom. For Isumbras, worth (practical, economic, social) remains inextricably entwined with the land, and narrative itself becomes a literal mapping of one’s progress across a countryside of cause and effect.

Aerial and Serial Perspectives in the Description of Cities Genre

Chelsea Maude Avirett, Univ. of Wisconsin–Madison

When Gregorius first encounters Rome, he stands overlooking it from a panoramic perspective. He later describes this vista in his description of the city (in The Marvels of Rome), by presenting the city as a landscape object, viewing it from a distance and as a single entity. This type of panoramic and aerial view of cities — or natural landscapes — occurs frequently in medieval literature: Chaucer gazes across the countryside as he dangles from an eagle’s claws, manuscripts depict contained civic spaces, and the descriptio or encomium urbis genre describes cities, including depictions of London, from a dual (and dueling) perspective: from a distance and from the city’s streets. This paper examines how authors use the imagined aerial perspective of cities throughout the late fourteenth century, at a time when depictions of serial civic walkers become more prevalent as well. Does the aerial perspective offer an ideal of community, which nuances or conflicts with the individual’s serial and often solitary movement? Or does it offer an atemporal and asocial view of society in which architecture and topography replace the living breathing city? This paper draws on intersections between landscape studies and the geographic subfield of mobility. While usually considered as disparate disciplines — landscapes are, after all, static while mobility studies seeks to interrogate the cultural implications of movement — this paper looks at what happens when medieval authors switch from and between an aerial, landscape perspective to a serial, mobile one. I focus on cities because — as Michel de Certeau demonstrates in his analysis of city walkers — the experience of viewing one and moving through one are, on the surface, radically different. However, for medieval authors, both offered a rich way to examine the productive tension between two modes of interacting with architectural space.

“His Troublous Dysease”: John Leland, Mental Illness, and the Map of England

Ruth Babb, St. Louis Univ.

In 1549, John Bale published a letter by John Leland, a noted antiquarian who had worked for King Henry VIII before he “fell besides his wittes” in 1547. This letter, which Bale calls a “newe yeares gyft” and dates in 1546 (though some scholars have put it as early as 1543) details Leland’s attempt to catalog and make available the contents of the holy libraries of England. While this task is daunting enough, and one that both authors consider a “laboriouse journey and costly enterprise,” it is not the end of Leland’s ambition. The bulk of his letter is taken up with a plan to show “the old glory of your renouned Britaine to reflorish through the world.” This plan, which Bale says would have been “one of the greatest wonders that ever yet was seane in this regyon,” was meant to consist of a map of the land engraved on a silver table, fifty-six books of English history, and a catalog of England’s royalty. Unfortunately Leland’s madness interfered, and his work was lost. I will argue that Leland’s obsession with the land and his then-unique approach to presenting it were linked to his illness. In order to accomplish this, I will contextualize the “Gift” within the historical conception of madness and Leland’s extant corpus to illuminate the time and nature of his sickness. Then Leland’s project will be compared to other cartographical undertakings of the time to show its unusual nature, and a close reading of Leland and Bale’s writing will tie Leland’s ambitious pitch with Bale’s prayers for his health. While I will not attempt a diagnostic stance from this evidence, I will argue that conceptualizing England played a large role in Leland’s eventual madness.

 

• Saturday 3:30pm: Session 501- Schneider 1340

Landscape and Culture in Medieval Britain III: Domestic and Wild Spaces

Wild Spaces, Wild Creatures: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Heide Estes, Monmouth Univ.

The narrative of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight contains three very different landscapes: the courts of Arthur and Bertilak; the wilderness through which Gawain travels between the two; and the site of the Green Chapel. Gawain’s wilderness is populated by ferocious (but real) wild animals as well as monsters we understand as fictional. Gawain must fight them off at every turn — but the weather is worse. And so is the Green Chapel, with the Green Knight grinding his axe to a point and threatening Gawain’s death. In this paper, I investigate these kinds of spaces using Lawrence Buell’s paradigm separating “space,” “place,” and “non-space” to argue that the locations and landscapes described in the poem veer between these categories. In addition, I use the insights of authors such as Andrew Furman and Kimberly N. Ruffin, who challenge ecocritical valorizations of wilderness, to explore the meanings of wilderness and wildness in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. A careful reading of that text illuminates some of the assumptions that underlie contemporary discussions of place and wilderness, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of ecocritical discussion of landscape.

Gawain in Space

Ally McNitt, Univ. of Oklahoma

Theories of literary analysis are valuable tools for reading The Weddynge of Syr Gawen and Dame Ragnelle.  The poem’s setting is freighted with significance; forests are not merely forests, and  sprawling, open spaces are far from empty.  Spatial analysis of the poem offers a new perspective on an old story, a new and illuminating way to examine the significance of Gawain’s quest to represent Camelot’s social position through his actions at a distance and through his bearing the “essence” of that place while physically remote from it.

Enclosed in the Castle: Gwenyver in Malory’s Morte Darthur

Molly Martin, McNeese State Univ.

Castles play a prominent and very visible role in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, acting as geographical landmarks, political centers, homes, prisons, and custom keepers. They are fortified and defended, attacked and overrun. They witness tournaments and battles. They are loci for the commencement and completion of countless quests. Castles even participate in the narrative, notably in the text’s construction of masculinity and femininity, creating gendered relationships through their ownership, their habitation, and especially their spatiality. The placement of knights and ladies within and without the castle walls, at and below—and even through—their windows, betrays the precarious nature of Malorian gender identity. For women, the castle often becomes a means of enclosure. This narrowing of space can reflect the Arthurian society’s need to restrict females both literally and figuratively. Whether by choice or by force, a woman enclosed in the castle feels the imposed architectural and geographical restrictions. In theory, the walls of the castle define her overlapping (and often small) spheres of movement and influence. At several crucial points late in the Morte, Queen Gwenyver is emphatically enclosed behind and within walls. However, from within this space she wields authority uncharacteristic of females. This paper looks closely at Gwenyver in the Tower of London, where she secures and defends herself from the sieging Mordred. What becomes clear is a surprising conflict between the expectations of an enclosed, female space, and Gwenyver’s ability to maneuver around the gender and space restrictions that she faces. The result is a redefinition of the social space of the castle, one that to a large degree rejects seemingly engrained notions of male hierarchy. The walls do not narrow or limit Gwenyver, but rather enlarge her authority and force a reconsideration of gender roles at this moment in the text.

L’Eau et le merveilleux: Water and the Marvelous in French Arthurian Literature

Katherine Snider, Univ. of Washington–Seattle

In French Arthurian romances of the 12-13th centuries I propose to examine the reciprocal relationship between people and the water they dream.  At this time, in this place, in literature inspired by the characters and/or landscapes of Britain, these authors have not lost the dream of water, and water has not been reduced to the (urban) utility of H20 that Ivan Illich identifies as concurrent with that loss.  The ways in which these people have made water the bearer of meaning reflect concrete realities of water’s effect on the landscape.  Sometimes water determines boundaries.  Bridges and fords across a river are places of challenge and attempted separation between the land of Arthur’s court and “elsewhere”, often explicitly the Other World. Sources of water such as fountains are also the meeting-place of danger, challenger, and/or love—consensual or otherwise, marvelous or otherwise. The marvelous is but one manifestation of the cultural construction of certain peoples’ relationship to water.  In this paper, ecocriticism brings to medieval studies a focus on the non-human world as exemplified by water—which these texts often populate with the marvelous.  Ecocritical theory also valorizes water’s and human’s effect on place.  Texts considered will include: Marie de France’s Lanval, Chrétien de Troyes’ Yvain ou le Chevalier au lion and Lancelot ou le Chevalier de la charrette, the 13th century prose Lancelot du Lac, the Lai de Tyolet, and La Bataille Loquifer.

William Morris, Medievalism, and Social Media

We had an excellent discussion on Monday, and while I don’t want to supersede the presenter (Amanda Cherian) and post the content here, I thought I would share one item in response: I livetweeted the presentation, and having done so compiled the tweets and responses into a Storify image. I welcome responses here to this experiment in medievalism and social media.

[View the story “Woode Walkers Session on William Morris and Medievalism” on Storify]

Ernst H. Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology

Presentation by Amanda C. Barton 2.6.12

To introduce our discussion of The King’s Two Bodies, I turn to Marie Axton’s comment on the peculiar metaphor of the two-bodied monarch:

Prior to England’s break with Rome and immediately after, English common lawyers “were formulating an idea of the state as a perpetual corporation, yet they were unable or unwilling to separate state and monarch. Their concept of the king’s two bodies was an attempt to deal with a paradox: men died and the land endured; kings died, the crown survived; individual subjects died but subjects always remained to be governed. Perhaps the lawyers were unwilling to envisage England itself as a perpetual corporation because the law had always vested land in a person” (12).

Hence, in Tudor common law we see an articulation of “pre-nation” abstractions of the corporate state.  It is important to note that this metaphor is separate from, but related to, the notion of the subjects as the members (ie, body parts such as hands, feet and stomach) of the state and the monarch as the head. The the metaphor of the two-bodied monarch is also distinct, looking even further back, from the metaphor of the king marrying the land.  However, there are some important themes of notions of corporality and the relationship of abstract state and physical land running through all of these that are important.

Detail from the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, depicting the monarch as the head of the state's corporate body.

History and Reception

Published in 1957, Kantorowicz’s study, which ranges across the Middle Ages and late Antiquity, was immediately well-received and has remained an important text. Reviewers compared Kantorowicz’s methodology to Frederic William Maitland’s Domesday Book and Beyond: Three Essays in the Early History of England (1897). Despite near universal acclaim, reviewers, even those who praised the text, took issue with aspects of the text: 1) its “too-much-ness,” the excess of material at the expense of cogency (Antony Black called it “a masterpiece of erudite confusion”; 2) not enough discussion of practical politics, how did this metaphysical legal theory affect day-to-day court cases?; 3) despite the nimiety, it was thin on discussion of the papacy.

Kantorowicz was born in Posen, Prussia (now Poznan, Poland) in 1895. He held a post at Frankfurt from 1930 to 1934, when he refused to take the oath to Adolf Hitler. In 1938, he left Germany for the US and accepted a position at Berkeley. He moved to Princeton in 1951 after leaving UC-Berkeley because he refused to take the loyalty oath required during McCarthy’s anti-communism investigations.

The Argument <<l’état c’est moi>>

The King’s Two Bodies explores the paradox of the two-bodied sovereign in Renaissance and medieval jurisprudence: the king has both a body natural and a body politic; the king is immortal, never underage, incapable of doing or thinking wrong, invisible, cannot judge but is “the Fountain of Justice,” is omnipresent in all his courts. Kantorowicz’s study attempts “to understand . . . certain axioms of a political theology, which mutatis mutandis was to remain valid until the twentieth century, began to be developed during the later Middle Ages”(xviii). “Political theology” is associated with Carl Schmitt’s description of authoritarian governments; Kantorowicz prefers this term to “political thought” used by his reviewers because “theology” encompasses metaphysical aspects of this legal philosophy and its relationship to medieval Christian theology.

Kantorowicz explores the christological nature of the discussion of these legal speculations, by beginning his study with a specific case in Tudor jurisprudence and working backwards through the Middle Ages. He notes that through this conception the king acquires a character angelicus, the body politic represents the “Immutable within Time” (8). This development seems most particularly indebted to the organic unity of the “sacred” and “secular” during the Middle Ages, that is, the line was not nearly as bright, and there were “cross-relations between Church and State” in nearly every century (193). For example, consider the imperial appearance of the sacerdotium. Perrhaps most useful, Kantorowicz analyzes the semiotic switch that takes place between the terms corpus verum and corpus mysticum (the terms for the Host and the Church) and how it influenced medieval notions of corporation.

Pertinent passages from Plowden’s Report

. . . by the Common Law no Act which the King does as King, shall be defeated by his Nonage. For the King has in him two Bodies, viz., a Body natural, and a Body politic. His Body natural (if it be considered in itself) is a Body mortal, subject to all Infirmities that come by Nature or Accident, to the Imbecility of Infancy or old Age, and to the like Defects that happen to the natural Bodies of other People. But his Body politic is a Body that cannot be seen or handled, consisting of Policy and Government, and constituted for the Direction of the People, and the Management of the public weal, and this Body is utterly void of Infancy, and old Age, and other natural Defects and Imbecilities, which the Body natural is subject to, and for this Cause, what the King does in his Body politic, cannot be invalidated or frustrated by any Disability in his natural Body. (Kantorowicz 7).

For when the Body politic of King of this Realm is conjoined to the Body natural, and one Body is made of them both, the Degree of the Body natural, and of the things possessed in that Capacity is thereby altered, and the Effects thereof are changed by its Union with the other Body, and don’t remain in their former Degree, but partake of the Effects of the Body politic. . . . And the Reason thereof is, because the Body politic wipes away every Imperfection of the other Body, with which it is consolidated, and makes it to be another Degree than it should be if it were along by itself. . . . And the Cause [in a parellel case] was not because the Capacity of the Body natural was drowned by the Dignity royal . . . , but the Reason was, because to the Body natural, in which he held the land, the Body politic was associated and conjoined, during which Association or Conjunction the Body natural partakes of the Nature and Effects of the Body politic. (11)

The King has two Capacities, for he has two Bodies, the one whereof is a Body natural, consisting of natural Members as every other Man has, and in this he is subject to Passions and Death as other Men are; the other is a Body politic, and the Members thereof are his Subjects, and he and his Subjects together compose the Corporation, as Southcote said, and his is incorporated with them, and they with him, and he is the Head, and they are the Members, and he has the sole Government of them; and this Body is not subject to Passions as the other is, nor to Death, for as to this Body the King never dies, and his natural Death is not called in our Law (as Harper said), the Death of the King, but the Demise of the King, not signifying by the Word (Demise) that the Body politic of the King is dead, bu that there is a Separation of the two Bodies, and that the Body politic is transferred and conveyed over from the Body natural now dead, or now removed from the Dignity royal, to another Body natural. So that it signifies a Removal of the Body politic of the King of this Realm from one Body natural to another. (13)

Selected bibliography

Axton, Marie. The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession.  London: Royal Historical Society, 1977.

Kantorowicz, Ernst H. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton U P, 1985.

Maitland, Frederic William. Domesday Book and Beyond: Three Essays in the Early History of England. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge U P, 1897.

Schmitt, Carl. Political theology: four chapters on the concept of sovereignty. Trans. George Schwab. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1985. 

The Annolied: Received History, Politics, and the Sensorium (Anthony Cirilla, 2012)

The Annolied is a hagiography of Saint Anno, a theocrat who lived from 1010 to 1074, who was immensely popular with his parishioners but not terribly popular with rival bishops or other political rivals. The text sets up his history with two backgrounds, first sacred and then secular history, which are integrated in the person of Saint Anno. After discussing his ascent to sainthood, the text portrays a blasphemer Volprecht being punished by having his eyes destroyed for denying Anno’s saintliness, and then restored after giving confession. The text ends with a sentence on remembering the signs God has given us.

My reading of this poem’s aesthetic of “two worlds which combine to make a third,” that is, human beings, is symbolized by the combination of the sense of sight and of sound in the written world, which itself combines with the twofold (secular and sacred) history of the human race, which explains the aesthetic purpose of Volprecht’s mode of punishment. For the meeting I brought in a paper I am revising for publication, which essentially presents this thesis statement. Thomas Rowland helpfully pointed out some imprecisions in my language, initially objecting to the notion that the Annolied, in any simplistic sense, privileges one part of the sensorium over the other. He’s quite right – both the aural and visual knowledge play key roles in this text, although the roles do, I think, play out a bit differently with different emphasis. Thomas also pointed out the deeply political nature of this text, something covered in scholarship such as Benjamin Arnold’s essay in the bibliography, but Thomas drew out some very useful passages where the poem seems to be valorizing some sense of Germanic pride, or at least pride of Cologne. Thomas also brought up the notion of “spots,” whether present or absent, being a sign of holiness – such as the Pearl maiden being without spot, and some points of comparison between the Annolied and the 7 fold history of the world found in Bede.

Beth asked why the secular details were so expanded, which may have many reasons, but I think at least two are appropriate: first, the poem seems, as Thomas pointed out, to be very politically motivated, and secondly that the disparity of sacred versus secular is something combined by the guiding aesthetic of the poem – secular history is not simplistically separate from sacred history. Beth also pointed out an apt parallel between Volprecht’s punishment and Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus.

Amanda Barton brought up Mircea Eliade (sp?), a theologian I confess no conversance with, but who apparently has worked with the notion of believing without seeing. She also mentioned the oral nature of confession in Catholicism, which seems connected to the sensibilities of the poem in interesting ways.

Below is the handout I gave for the poem. Comments and questions are welcome.

Annolied (ca. 1077-81): “Song of Anno”, a.k.a, Eyeball Explosions

Early Middle High German Hagiography of “Saint Anno” (ca. 1010-1074):

1. Sacred History: Creation, Fall of Lucifer and Adam, Christ’s Victory, Disciples Evangelize, Cologne Christianized, Anno among the saintly bishops. (st. 1-7)

1. Secular History: Origin of Cities, Ninus founds Nineveh, Four Beasts of Daniel Prophesies Translation of Empire: Babylon, Chaldea, Greece (Alexander), Rome. Caeser – Backtrack to Troy – Caesar, Augustus, birth of Christ, Rome Christianized by Peter, Cologne Christianized by Romans, Anno is 33^rd bishop to preside in Cologne since then. (st. 8-33)
2. History of Anno: Anno welcomed to Cologne, Ecclesiastical Rockstar, Wholly Holy, makes 5 monasteries, including Siegburg (where he is now buried), Persecution by secular lords and compared to David, Holds a Grudge, Gets Sick, starts going to heaven but he has a stain on his heart, so he forgives Cologne and is admitted into heaven. Performs many miracles. Volprecht, servant of a nobleman named Arnold, goes in league with the Devil and starts to blaspheme against God and all of the saints, including Anno. When he begins to insult Saint Anno one of his eyes melts. He persists in defaming Anno until he has a stroke, falls to the ground, and his other eye goes shooting out. He is persuaded to confess, and then his eyes grow back and he is reconciled to Arnold and to God. Final comparison between Anno and Moses, then closes with comments about the goodness of God. (st. 34-49)

Guiding Aesthetics:

1. 3 Worlds, the material and the spiritual which make up the third, the human
2. Concern to show Anno as a positive figure (hagiography)
3. Concern to have ecclesiastical literature stand up to heroic literature (chronicle)

Important Background:

1. Patristics – i.e., Augustine
2. Numerology
3. Orality and Literacy

My Take:

I think the best way to read this poem is as establishing a sacred aesthetic of the sensorium, to use Ong’s terminology. Hearing and seeing are the two stressed senses, and while seeing is important, it is hearing which rules the day – hearing which represents best the spiritual world. With the deep code of numerical structure, it is the ear, not the eye, which for most in the audience will matter, and the punishment of the servant suggests that visual knowledge must be subordinated to auditory knowledge to attain spirituality for the lay person. But this is reversed for the ecclesiaste: Anno is not admitted into heaven until the visual stain on him is removed. And yet the stain is something only heard about through the song, thus reasserting the primacy in right-hearing over right-seeing in the pursuit to live the good life.

Relevant Primary Sources:

Augustine’s City of God (Latin)

Vita Annonis (Latin)

Kaiserchronik (Middle High German)

Book of Daniel (Probably Latin rather than Hebrew-Aramaic?)

Relevant Secondary Sources:

Arnold, Benjamin. “From Warfare on Earth to Eternal Paradise: Archbishop Anno II of Cologne, The History of the Western Empire in the Annolied, and the Salvation of Mankind.” Viator 23 (1992): 95-113.

Batts, Michael S. “Numerical Structure in Medieval Literature (with a Bibliography).” Ed. Stanley N Werbow.  Formal Aspects of Medieval German Poetry. University of Texas Press, 1969. 93-122.

—. “On the Form of the Annolied.” Monatshefte 52.4 (1960): 179-182.

Dunphy, R. Graeme. “Historical Writing in and after the Old High German Period.” Ed. Brian Murdoch. German Literature of the Early Middle Ages. Camden House, 2004. 201-226.

—. Dunphy, R. Graeme. Opitz’s Anno: The Middle High Gerrman Annolied in the 1639 edition of Martin Opitz. Glasgow, 2003.

Green, D.H. Medieval Listening and Reading: The primary reception of German literature 800-1300. Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Schultz, James A. Sovereignty and Salvation in the Vernacular, 1050-1150. Western Michigan University, 2000.

Thurlow, P. “Augustine’s City of God, Pagan History and the Unity of the Annolied.” Reading medieval studies: annual proceedings of the Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies in the University of Reading 6 (1980): 44-67.

Walshe, M. O’C. “Early Middle High German Literature.” Medieval German Literature. Harvard UP, 1962. 34-70.

Whitesell, Frederick R. “Martin Opitz’ Edition of the ‘Annolied’.” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 43.1 (1994): 16-22.

Anglo-Saxon Wisdom, Culture, and Landscape

Space, Place, and landscape

Fen Remnants outside Crowland, Lincolnshire, England (Justin Noetzel, 2009)

*“Landscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock.” Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory

*“Landscape is first of all an effort of the imagination—a construed way of seeing the world which is distinctive to a people, their culture, and even their anticipated means of encountering the holy… Landscape is always an expectation which is brought to the environment, an interpretative lens placed over an otherwise dull, placeless void.” Belden C. Lane, Landscapes of the Sacred

*The landscape that is constructed in the Old English poetry and Latin Vita of St. Guthlac is a “cultural image of the physical environment that mediates between the human mind and nature.” (Alfred K. Siewers, “Landscapes of Conversion: Guthlac’s Mound and Grendel’s Mere as Expressions of Nation Building”)

Wisdom Poetry

1. What was the function of wisdom poetry for Anglo-Saxon culture, and what does it tell us about cultural beliefs and values? What differences exist in content or style between Maxims I and Maxims II?

2. What metaphors and images are the most prevalent, and why? (Lightness and darkness come to mind, for instance). How do the heroic cultural values compare to the Christian ones, and does one ethos in any way conflict with the other?

[***When we discussed this question, Anthony recommended A Store of Common Sense: Gnomic Theme and Style in Old Icelandic and Old English Wisdom Poetry by Carolyne Larrington. She is a fantastic dinner companion, by the way, because Michael and I had the pleasure to join her, Dr. Acker, and a few others at the London Grill in Kalamazoo a few years ago.]

– The Seafarer and The Wanderer?

–Norse Wisdom Literature: “Hávamál” from The Poetic Edda

• Maxims I (Raffel 120; Exeter Book)

-The poem’s context in Exeter Book with so much other wisdom literature “indicates how attractive to the AS mind was the rehearsal and propagation of received wisdom and knowledge in formulaic utterances, and the exercise of intelligence, often of ingenuity, in probing through the surface form of things to their inner construct and in perceiving in circumstantial detail of events the general precept. Broadly speaking, all this lore is anthropocentric: knowledge—of the phenomena and creatures of the physical world, as of kings and communities of history and the accrued experience of the human condition—is highly prized in so far as it forms a pattern according to which the discerning individual may rough-hew the ends of his own life.” (Bradley 344)

-Section A begins with nature of wisdom poetry and discusses the order of life on earth; Section B (and C) discusses nature, materialism, daily human activities, and proper gender roles; Section C discusses kings, warriors, and poets (and their proper places)

• Maxims II (D&M 217; Cotton Tiberius B)

-Cotton Tiberius B MS Context and what precedes and follows this poem: “Menologium defines the process of the liturgical year, by which men may make the purposive orderliness of sacred history the organizing principle of daily living; Maxims II offers general precepts about the divinely ordained laws of the natural world and of the human hierarchy; and the [C-version of the Anglo-Saxon] Chronicle keeps the historical record of the actual vicissitudes of governing and being governed in an imperfect and transient world” (Bradley 512)

-the proper order and place of all things with the formula “X sceal on Y”: the wolf must be/ lives in the grove, the boar must be in the woods, etc.; the thief must go about in the dark weather, the demon/troll/monster must dwell in the fen, alone within the land (“þeof sceal gangan þystrum wederum. þyrs sceal on fenne gewunian ana innan lande.”)

• The Rune Poem (D&M 207) (examples on Arild Hauge’s Runes website < http://www.arild-hauge.com/eanglor.htm>)

3. What did you find interesting about the less famous and less read Old English poetry (e.g. The Rune Poem, Metrical Charms, and Durham)?

4. What culturally constructed worldview (beliefs, values, landscape, geography, etc.) do these poems illustrate?

           

–Is “is so slippery, cold, / glitters like glass or gems / fashions a floor of frost– / Marvelous thing to behold!”

–Eoh: “Yew is a tree that has rough bark / stands firm in the earth / protects the hearth . Rooted deep, it lights up parks.”

–Ac feeds pigs who feed humans, and used for ship-construction

–Aesc makes good shields

Heroic, Elegiac, and Other Poetry

• Guthlac A (Exeter Book)

-Previous Discussion Topics:

1. Poetics of Space and Architecture in “Guthlac A”

2. “Lichoma ond Sawl”: Bodily Conflict in the Poems

3. The Medieval British Fenland-Literature Tradition

4. Exeter Book and Other Anglo-Saxon (Dis)Continuities

Anglo-Saxon Landscapes

• Metrical Charms (Raffel 216) (find them here)

-“the charms are directed against a wide array of maladies and misfortunes, including fevers, flux, dysentery, nosebleed, wens, chicken-pox, a noxious dwarf, various wounds, the theft of cattle or horses, evil spirits, the loss of a swarm of bees, unfruitful land, and aches in the eyes, ears, stomach, and teeth” (Fulk and Cain 42)

-conceptions of land: Charm for Unfruitful Land involves digging turfs from the edges of your land and mixing them with your cows’ milk, a splinter from each kind of tree on your property, and holy water…

• The Order of the World (D&M 239; Exeter Book)

[***Here’s a follow-up question: this poem describes the binary pairs of the world’s creation, including sky and river, waves and land, flood and fields, but the OE for that last pair is “flod wið flode.” Am I crazy, or should that last OE word instead be “folde”?]

• Durham (D&M 125; Cambridge, Univ. Lib. Ff.1.2)

-“Known through Britain this noble city. / Its steep slopes and stone buildings / are thought a wonder; weirs contain / its fast river; fish of all kinds / thrive here in the thrusting waters. / A great forest has grown up here, / thickets throng with wild creatures; / deer browse in the deep dales” (1a- 8b)

The Fens…

5. Where does mythology, hybridity, and a hybrid landscape fit in this dichotomous world?

[My argument: Delineated coastland is easily understandable, as in the land and sea dichotomy expressed in Maxims I and The Order of the World, but the symbolic fens and the geographic Fens of modern Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire are metaphorically hard to define and don’t fit the simple land and water binary. The Fens muddy the waters in this attempt at distinction (pun intended) and are more three-dimensional space than simple two-dimensional coastline. Here the land and water exist together in a tumultuous and hybridized state—the water of the Fens (both medieval and modern) is often silty and sandy, and therefore hard to navigate, and the land can be so muddy and watery that it is difficult to pass on foot. This land/water hybridity made the landscape hard to pass through physically and difficult to comprehend intellectually, and so the Anglo-Saxon people encoded fens and swamps as a monstrous entity and an isolating force. This claim is demonstrated by the examples below where fens act as an impenetrable boundary, a corruption of the gift of life, a reeking and stagnant plague on the landscape, the location of harmful plant and animal life, and the abode of monsters of demons.]

 

• Wulf and Eadwacer (Raffel 15; Exeter Book)

 6. What the hell is this poem really about? Does it fit better as an anonymous elegy, or a story from Germanic legend that the audience should know, or a riddle with s specific solution? History, myth, or metaphor?

-“Wulf is on an island, I on another. An island of forts [that island is secure], surrounded by swamp. That island belongs to bloody barbarians: Will they receive him, if he comes with force? (“Wulf is on iege, ic on oþerre. / Fæst is þæt eglond, fenne biworpen. / Sindon wælreowe  weras þær on ige; willað hy hine aþecgan, / gif he on þreat cymeð. Ungelice is us” (4a- 7b).

• Alfred’s Epilogue to Pastoral Care (D&M 427; Bodleian MS Hatton 20)

-Alfred describes how water (grace, love, sacredness, and “the drink of life”) is a gift from God that He “pledged for the well-being of His people” (1a- 2b), and Gregory’s text supplies a refill of water for Alfred’s readers

-Water’s source is heaven, and it is drawn from there by “a chosen few / Who make scared books their study” and carefully spread the word among mankind, but, others “pour it freely over the land, / Though care must be taken lest it flow / too loud and fast across the fields, / Transforming them to bogs and fens [fenne]” (19b- 21b)

• Riddle 40 (D&M 306; Exeter Book)

-“enjoyable for their wit and its poetic expression, are also of critical importance for the insight they afford into the intellectual structure of the As mind. The mentality which can simultaneously engage with the sense of the literal statement and with implicit and ‘truer’ import of the concealed meaning is a mentality alert to symbolism and allegory; and not surprisingly techniques of the riddle may be traced in poetry of other genres where ambiguity and systematic symbolism or allegory are deliberately cultivated” (Bradley 368)

• Beowulf  (Cotton Vitelius A XV)

7. How does Beowulf fit into all of this nonsense?

-Grendel is described as “se grimma gæst… mære mearcstapa, se þe moras heold, fen ond fæsten” (“the fierce creature, the famed border-wanderer, he who occupied the moors and fens as his stronghold” (102 104)

*“The incredible nature of [the Guthlac stories] is irrelevant to the argument; the spirit which created them is an indisputable fact. They show something of what the barrier of the fens meant in the lives of people at this time. Only familiarity with the region in its most somber aspects can do justice to the fears of these early settlers. Many centuries did not assuage their terror; and at last the horror of the fen passed into tradition—so deeply was it grounded in the Saxon mind. Nor were all the horrors imaginary. They had indeed a very substantial foundation; for the Fenland was a pestilential place ‘of-times clouded with the moist and dark vapors’ [e.g. ague and malaria]” (H. C. Darby, The Medieval Fenland)

8. What other Landscapes or spaces are especially noteworthy in the Anglo-Saxon World (e.g. in The Wife’s Lament)? Where else is this kind of cultural construction of a landscape present? What about the later medieval world, or areas other than England?

[***This question guided much of our conversation. Amanda brought up the crumbling Roman stone- and earthworks that are being reclaimed by nature in The Ruin, and Thomas wondered how fens figure in gothic literature. Anthony added two examples of hybridized culturally constructed –scapes (Eolus’ mixed sky and sea in The Aeneid, and Prospero’s chaotic land and sea storm in The Tempest) and mentioned a tantalizing detail from The Brut that involved ponds, fish, and elves. Beth compared the Fens to the somewhat analogous otherworldly mist in Irish mythology, which blurs that land/ sea differentiations, and we also discussed peat bogs and coasts and their respective preservational (e.g. Seamus Heaney) and liminal powers. Nicely done, y’all—nicely done.]

 

Select Bibliography [***slightly enhanced from the paper handout]

Acker, Paul. Revising Oral Theory: Formulaic Composition in Old English and Old Icelandic Verse. New York: Garland, 1998. Print.

Aertsen, Henk. “Wulf and Eadwacer: A Woman’s Cri de Coeur—For Whom? For What?” Companion to Old English Poetry. Ed. Henk Aertsen abd Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr. Amsterdam: VU U P, 1994: 119-144. Print.

Daniëlli, Sonja. “Wulf, Min Wulf: An Eclectic Analysis of the Wolf-Man.” Neophilologus 91 (2007): 505–524. Print.

Delanty, Greg and Michael Matto, Ed. The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011. Print.

Desmond, Marilynn. “Voice of Exile: Feminist Literary History and the Anonymous Anglo-Saxon Elegy.” Critical Inquiry 16.3 (1990): 572-590. Print.

DiNapoli, Robert. “The Heart of the Visionary Experience: The Order of the World and its Place in the Old English Canon.” English Studies 79.2 (1998): 97-108. Print.

Fulk, R. D. and Christopher M. Cain. A History of Old English Literature. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. Print.

Howes, Laura L., Ed. Place, Space, and Landscape in Medieval Narrative. Knoxville: U Tennessee P, 2007. Print.

Howlett, David Robert. “The Gnomic Collection of Verse in the Exeter Book.” Philological Review 34.2 (2008): 51-78. Print.

Jolly, Karen. “Father God and Mother Earth: Nature-Mysticism in the Anglo-Saxon World.” The Medieval World of Nature. Ed. Joyce E. Salisbury. New York: Garland, 1993: 221- 252. Print.

Klinck, Anne L. The Old English Elegies: A Critical Edition and Genre Study. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s U P, 1992. Print.

Kries, Susanne. “Danish Rivalry and the Mutilation of Alfred in the Eleventh-Century Chronicle Poem The Death of Alfred.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 104.1 (2005): 31-53. Print.

Lees, Clare A. and Gillian R. Overing, Ed.  A Place to Believe In: Locating Medieval Landscapes. University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State UP, 2006. Print.

North, Richard. “Metre and Meaning in Wulf and Eadwacer: Signý Reconsidered.” Loyal Letters: Studies on Mediaeval Alliterative Poetry & Prose. Ed. L. A. J. R. Houwen and A. A. MacDonald. Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1994: 29- 54. Print.

O’Camb, Brian. “Bishop Æthelwold and the Shaping of the Old English Exeter Maxims.” English Studies 90.3 (2009): 253-273. Print.

Overing, Gillian R. and Marijane Osborn. Landscape of Desire: Partial Stories of the Medieval

Scandinavian World. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1994. Print.

Park, Yoon-hee. “The Meaning of the Cotton “Wulf” Maxim in the Context of Anglo-Saxon Popular Thought and Culture.” Medieval and Early Modern English Studies 16.2 (2008): 247- 263. Print.

Raffel, Burton, Ed. Poems and Prose from the Old English. New Haven: Yale U P, 1998. Print.

Shippey, T. A. “The Wanderer and The Seafarer a Wisdom Poetry.” Companion to Old English Poetry. Ed. Henk Aertsen abd Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr. Amsterdam: VU U P, 1994: 145-158. Print.

Sorrell, Paul. “Oaks, Ships, Riddles and the Old English Rune Poem.” Anglo-Saxon England 19 (1990): 103- 116. Print.

Stanley, E. G. “Wolf, My Wolf!” Old English and New: Studies in Language and Linguistics in Honor of Frederic G. Cassidy. New York: Garland, 1992: 46- 62. Print.

Tasioulas, J. A. “The Mother’s Lament: Wulf and Eadwacer Reconsidered.” Medium Aevum 65.1 (1996): 1- 18. Print.

Tigges, Wim. “Snakes and Ladders: Ambiguity and Coherence in the Exeter Book Riddles and Maxims.” Companion to Old English Poetry. Ed. Henk Aertsen abd Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr. Amsterdam: VU U P, 1994: 95-118. Print.

Wehlau, Ruth. “Rumination and Re-Creation: Poetic Instruction in The Order of the World.” Florilegium 13 (1994: 65- 77. Print.

Smith of Wootton Major

Disarmingly delightful, Smith of Wootton Major by J.R.R. Tolkien packs about as much literary punch as his more widely known Hobbit-based works. Smith is as dense with symbolism and interwoven with Tolkien’s deep seated convictions about faerie, craft, the metaphysical, as it is with his uneasiness about where one fits into a world limited by belief and, uncomfortably, luck. Perhaps fate fits better than luck though, and one wonders how much applicability can be found in such a personal (even, in some ways, exclusivistic) work.

I personally find Smith beautiful for a number of reasons, some of which we brought up in our discussion of the work this week:

1. The family dynamic resonates most powerfully with me. How is the reader to understand the relationship Smith has with his family? When Smith returns from his final wanderings in the land of Faerie, he expresses regret, explicitly and implicitly, at being absent from his wife and children for so long. It is striking to observe that his son, a young man at this point (old enough to oversee the work of his father’s smithy), holds no animosity at his father; indeed the family appears charitably to understand Smith’s long absences. What are we to make of this?

2. Tolkien’s short story, “Leaf by Niggle,” employs the figure of the artist to explore the tension between creative genius and intersocial responsibility (as I read it)–a fitting choice. Smith, on the other hand, elevates the profession of cooking to a priviledged position: It is through the cook’s baking that the gift of creativity is passed to Smith (and others). Certainly, in light of Tolkien’s devout Catholicism, there are eucharistic undertones in this, but how many facets of it does the narrative display?

3. (And I wasn’t aware of this until we compared editions of Smith with each other during the discussion) There may some interpretive difficulties which invite codicological (?) scrutiny: Does Smith encounter “eleven” (Del Rey edition) or “elven” (from Tales from Perilous Realms) mariners, before whom he collapses and who pass over his fallen body?

In the Fall of 2010 I taught Smith in my Introduction to Short Fiction course, and my students had very strong reactions (positively and negatively) to the story; so I include here the discussion points I used for the three days we spent studying and discussing it (page numbers are from the Del Rey edition, which includes Farmer Giles of Ham).

• How do you think we’re to relate to the town of Wootton Major (cf. 9)?
• Why kitchen?
• What about mention of invitation mistakes (10)?
• What of the change of the Master Cook after his holiday, or his up and leaving in general (11-12)?
• What about Nokes’ lack of knowledge concerning children’s tastes (14)?
• What is the significance of memory (15, 26)?
• How should we understand Nokes’ interactions with Alf Prentice?
• How do you read the star coming to the boy, Smithson, and its ultimate unveiling and coming to rest on his forehead (21-22)?
• What about the extra quality of beauty added to the usefulness of Smith’s creations, or hi desire to create simply for delight (23)?
• Why is Faery called a “perilous country” (24)?
• How does the tone change, and what of the different episodes in Faery (26-33)?
• Does the narrative seem deeply personal?
• What of the proper names in the story?
• Why a queen without throne or crown (36)?
• Why is Smith ashamed at the memory of Nokes’ fairy figure on the cake (37-8)?
• What of the emphasis on sorrow (cf. 38)?
• Why do you think there is only one star (cf. 41)?
• What of the idea that Rider had arranged for Alf to give Smith the star, but that Nokes thwarted their carrying it out (44)?
• What do you think of the theme of not-knowing (44-45)?
• Edith Tolkien is the dancing woman!
• What about the oldness of the “new” or the newness of old tradition (45)?
• What do you make of Smith’s inability to see and Alf’s willingness to help (46)?
• How are family ties viewed (46)?
• How about Alf’s willingness to relent (47)?
• Interesting at how freely precious things are held (cf. 49).
• Why is the shadow the truth (50)?
• How should one understand Nokes’ memory (50-53)?
• With respect to Nokes, Tolkien doesn’t seem to be saying people like that are obstinate, but that those who are obstinate become as Nokes was.
• What about the disposition of Alf to Nokes and Nokes to Alf (54-57)?
• Why do you think Tolkien gives Nokes the last word (58-59)?
• Concerning the matter of “determinism” it is interesting that Tolkien doesn’t present it in a deterministic way; in fact he shows how free will acts of its own accord, and that what is determined isn’t affected by it (cf. Then Ilúvatar spoke, and he said: ‘Mighty are the Ainur, and mightiest among them is Melkor; but that he may know, and all the Ainur, that I am Ilúvatar, those things that ye have sung, I will show them forth, that ye may see what ye have done. And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.’ [5]).
• What about the similarity between the endings of this and LotR? Tolkien doesn’t think that the most wonderful things happen in this world, but he thinks that comfort and consolation are very important.

Please feel at liberty to offer possible answers to these points, or to pose points of your own.

ME

Brief Thought Related to the Colin Havard Pub Talk

After thoroughly enjoying Colin Havard’s delightful stories about his memories of and knowledge about the Inklings, I began to think about what other kinds of events the Woode-walkers should organize i nthe future. A large turnout, skillful moderation (with two moderators no less), and inquisitive audience moved my imagination, and in my mind I thought thoughts and dreamed dreams that might have been put this way: “Today SLU; tomorrow the world!” After a second or two, reality returned to my thinking, along with the original question: What can the Woode-walkers do next to sustain its initial success with its Pub Talks?

For me, the question raises an interesting dilemma. How far should this reading group of medievalists go to reach a broad audience? Certainly Tolkien and Lewis were scholars of medieval language and literature, but I suspect much of the audience in our Pub Talk with Colin Havard were interested more in the connection to Tolkien and Lewis as literary producers, if not more, than in their still-important scholarship. This is not a bad thing at all. Indeed, many of us came to be medievalists because of our initial enjoyment of Lord of the Rings or The Chronicles of Narnia. So, is it important to reach wider audiences when planning events as medievalists? I do not have an answer, but I wonder if others ponder this as well.

Medieval Demons I: From Legion to Demonology

My interest in medieval demons began with my research for an entry in the Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters. I have been interested in monsters in general for a long time now, such as Beowulf’s Grendel and the draugar of Icelandic sagas, but it was a fascinating experience to focus specifically on demons, creatures that I define as fallen angels and malign supernatural beings of a nature intermediate between gods and men. In the early stages of this process I began to think more critically about what exactly a medieval demon is, and the wisdom of those who are more knowledgeable than I was a big help. For instance, in an email Peter Dendle pushed me away from simply classifying kinds of demons and towards thinking about different manifestations of “the demonic” in the medieval world, what he calls “a more nebulous, porous, [and fluid] conceptualization of a force, diffuse agency, or set of active principles, that may take on specific forms but is not necessarily bound by those forms.” Therefore, my revised understanding of “the demonic” refers to fallen angels, of course, but can also include elements of the natural world (storms, floods, and crop failure), harmful animals (whales and wolves), and even humans (invading armies, heretics, Jews, and Ethiopians). Along similar lines, Dendle mentioned how some prayers in the medieval liturgy use the same terminology for casting out demons and fighting storms, and some medical literature conflates demons (or demonic agencies) with elves, poisons, and worms, and considers these the cause of a wide range of physiologic dysfunctions.

After completing my research and my encyclopedia entry, I have come up with a working thesis that tries to account for many manifestations of the demonic in medieval European texts. I claim here (and possibly in a future published project) that medieval conceptions of the demonic evolve over the centuries, from an anonymous demonic plurality in earlier texts (e.g. Anglo-Saxon poetry) towards individually classified, named, and acting demons in later texts (e.g. the writings of Caesarius of Heisterbach, Thomas Aquinas, and Dante). These later medieval literary and philosophical texts describe the activities of individual demons and seek to classify demonic nature. Furthermore, the precise definition of “demon” and “the demonic” expands in the later medieval centuries to include not only fallen angels but also evil spirits in general, especially as we transition into the Early Modern World.

Question 1: Do you have any initial objections or points of clarification for my thesis? In addition to the examples that I list below, what other early or later medieval texts, art, or other sources would you add to this discussion that fit into my thesis, complicate it, or even contradict it? (For instance, my fellow Woode-walkers brought Anselm and Augustine into the conversation and added a great deal to my understanding of demons in medieval theological thought, specifically their ordering among moral and immortal beings and their possible intercessory nature.)

Early Medieval Demonic Plurality

Peter Dendle describes anonymous and plural demonic nature in Satan Unbound: The Devil in Old English Narrative Literature. This manifestation can be found in texts like St. Boniface’s letter of 746 or 747 to King æthelbald of Mercia, in which Boniface describes how a single evil spirit (“malignus spiritus”) drove the king’s predecessor to a “madness clamoring with [multiple] demons” (“cum diabolis sermocinans”) (Dendle 90). Such coordinating (and often apposite) descriptors of demons fluctuate between a singular presence and a host of demons, and this manifestation occurs in Old English as well. Vercelli Homily 12 apposes the plural “helle gæstes” and “dioflum sylfum” (“evil spirits” and “devils themselves”) with the singular “dioful” (Dendle 91), and in the poem Juliana, the son or emissary of Satan is described as “wrohtes wyrhtan” and “fyrnsynna fruman” (“worker of evil” and “author of old sins,” lines 346 and 347), but this individual demon claims responsibility for endless evil and all of the crimes against humanity, including the original temptation in the Garden of Eden. In these examples and many others, demonic nature is a collective entity and one that fluctuates indiscriminately between a singular presence and a host of creatures. Demons also figure prominently in the Latin and Old English texts on the Anglo-Saxon saint Guthlac of Mercia, and I will write about him in the next blog post!

This plurality is also shown in the tenth-century Old English poem Christ and Satan, which centers on Christ’s triumph of Satan in the desert, while looking backwards towards the expulsion of Satan and the rebel angels from heaven, as well as forwards to Christ’s death, the harrowing of hell, and the resurrection. The early section of the poem includes a lot of “woe is me” sentiment by Satan and the demons, as they look back on their short existence in heaven and their current dire fate in the fires of hell, and the poet uses such sentiment to remind his reader to follow the righteous path and avoid such eternal punishment. The poem describes the demons in many colorful ways, including: “atole gastas, swarte and synfulle” (hideous spirits, black and full of sin (line 51)); “earme æglecan” (wretched monsters (74)); “blacan feond” (black fiend (195)); “godes andsacan” (God’s adversaries (279)); and “werige gastas, helle hæftas” (accursed spirits, prisoners of hell (628)). The poem also includes a further description of demonic classification, as one of the demons describes their nature: “Now this multitude must lie here according to its crimes; some to flutter aloft and fly above the ground. Fire envelopes each one, though he may be on high. He is never allowed to touch those blessed souls which seek upwards there from the earth; but I with my hands am allowed to snatch down to the depths the heathen chaff, God’s adversaries. Some are to roam about through the land of men and often stir up strife in the families of men throughout middle-earth” (254ff, all translations are from Bradley). In this poem the demons speak as a collective “we,” but also as a singular “I,” and they/ it are forever intertwined with Satan, but they/ it also seem to hate him for his overweening pride, telling him: “your appearance is hideous; we have all fared as wretchedly because of your lies. You told us a truth that the ordaining Lord of mankind was your son; now you have all the more torment” (53ff).*

Question 2: What connection or similarity exists between the demons (and specifically Satan) and other miserable exiled wanderers in Old English literature? In terms of the circumstances and reasons for exile, or the duration of the sentence, does a comparison between Christ & Satan and The Wanderer (for instance) reveal anything about Anglo-Saxon cultural and religious values?

Late Medieval Individual Demons

John Shinners’ textbook Medieval Popular Religion includes the chapter “Devils, Demons, and Spirits,” which describes a number of encounters with demons in rural Western Europe. In these stories and in texts like the fourteenth-century mystical vision Piers Plowman, we encounter individual demons with fabulous names and distinct personalities—Langland’s Gobelyn, Ragamoffyn, and Astarot are a few demons that immediately come to mind. Dante’s vision of hell in the Inferno includes the demon Alichino (the Allurer), who wields a hook and keeps the souls of the damned in boiling pitch, and he is assisted by Barbariccia (the Malicious), Draghignazzo (the Fell-dragon), and Malacoda (the Evil Tail). Demons also feature prominently in medieval drama, such as the buffoon like “stage demon” who appears in various works, including “Fall of Man” from the fifteenth-century York Mystery Plays, and Tutivillus, from the fifteenth-century morality play Mankind, who parodies monastic life. Also, one of my colleagues mentioned how Satan transgresses traditional dramatic boundaries by starting out in the audience  in the York Plays, and this invasion is echoed and answered by Christ’s invasion of hell in the harrowing episode after his crucifixion.

The later medieval period also featured many religious and philosophical texts that classified demonic nature by describing the different types and characteristics of the demonic. Dyan Elliott’s Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages describes a number of these demonological texts, including Caesarius of Heisterbach’s thirteenth-century Dialogus Miraculorum, which describes demons as a collective, infighting, and chaotic group that is often referred to as “the devil.” Caesarius (among other authors) describes human susceptibility to demonic sexual harassment and nocturnal intercourse by the female succubus and the male incubus, and these demons could fashion their earthly bodies from wasted human seed. Thomas Aquinas writes on demonic nature in his thirteenth-century texts, including De Malo and De Trinitate, where he claims that demons could change sex (and shape) to acquire human seed from a man and deliver it to a woman to propagate monstrous offspring. The Visio of fourteenth-century peasant woman Ermine de Reims describes how she suffered through nightly visitations by demons in the forms of animals, people, angels, and even God, and these demons often engaged in lascivious sexual acts. (During our discussion we also talked about related manifestations of the demonic in medieval visionary literature, such as the writings by and about women like Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe.) The late fifteenth and early sixteenth-century German churchman Johannes Trithemius furthers demonic classification in his writing—the Mystical Chronology divides demons by their elemental nature into Igneum (fiery demons), Aereum (air demons who cause overcast skies, thunder, and lightning), land-demons (who inhabit the woodlands and caves), and Aquaticum (water demons who topple ships and drown humans). Leander Petzoldt describes Trithemius’ demonology in the essay “The Universe of Demons and the World of the Middle Ages” in Ruth Petzoldt and Paul Newbauer’s Demons: Mediators between this world and the Other, which also describes the demonic spirits through which magicians could communicate over long distances in the Stenographia, including the water demon Hydriel, the air demon Icosiel, and Buriel the cave-dwelling light-shunner. (By the way, Jeffrey Cohen provides an insightful meditation on the demonic origins of Merlin in the writing of Geoffrey of Monmouth in his blog In the Middle.)

Finally, medieval manuscripts showed the evil and chaos of Satan and demons through their illuminations. In stark contrast to the bright, peaceful, and graceful depictions of angels, the demons of medieval manuscripts are often dark and shadowy creatures with scowling or lascivious expressions and contorted bodies, shaggy hair, horns, long pointed or hooked noses, gaping jaws, faces that combine human and animal elements, goat or bird legs, hooves or claws, tails, and bird- or dragon-like wings. The thirteenth-century De Brailes Psalter (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, MS 330) shows the demons being cast out of the orderliness of heaven and into the folio’s bottom half (image to the left), where they gain snarling and hideous demonic faces. The fifteenth-century Livre de la Vigne nostre Seigneur (Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Douce 134) features numerous images of Satan and his attendant demons, such as fol. 98r at the top of this post. This astonishing manuscript depicts numerous demons attending to Satan or torturing humans with pitchforks, and no two share the same monstrously animalistic facial and bodily features. The overall effect is a haunting tableau of beaks and horns, tails and wings, and the many faces of evil, all with snarling and sadistic grins that forever seek to tempt the innocent and torture the damned. In addition to these visualizations, demons are also pictured as more human-like creatures, albeit with deformed and barbaric features. Norbert H. Ott’s essay “Facts and Fictions: The Iconography of Demons in German Vernacular Manuscripts” in Petzoldt and Newbauer’s collection describes the demonic as “a manifestation of the different, the non-human, the sub-human, signifying a disordered and therefore threatening nature” (27). Because of this sub-human nature, demons were also equated with the cultural and geographic “Other” as defined by medieval Christian Europe, especially Jews, dark-skinned Ethiopians, and the fantastic monsters of travel literature.

Question 3: Where does this impulse to understand and categorize demonic nature come from, and what connection do these texts have to medieval concepts of science and medicine? What changes in religious thought, philosophy, or even English (French, German, etc.) culture lead to such a seemingly different and more complex understanding of demons and demonic nature?

Question 4: How does medieval demonology connect with or progress towards the early modern witch-hunting craze and a broader definition of the term “demon”?

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*There are also a lot of fascinating spatial dimensions to Christ & Satan, and my fellow Woode-walkers know that I am intensely interested in spaces, places, and landscapes. These insights will have to wait for a future post, however, where I will examine how the demons are exiled from the “settled abode” and “wine-hall of the doughty” of heaven and forced to walk to earth as exiles, but also, paradoxically, remain trapped in the dark (but full of blazing fire) and confining (but also cavernous) abode of hell. There is something really interesting about heaven and hell as contrasting (or perhaps negatively related) homes or halls, each of which is heavily fortified in its own right, but such thoughts will have to remain on the back burner for now.

Bibliography

Anderson, M. D. “The Stage Demon.” Drama and Imagery in English Medieval Churches. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1963: 171- 180. Print.

Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Renate. “The Strange Case of Ermine de Reims (c. 1347- 1396): A Medieval Woman between Demons and Saints.” Speculum 85.2 (2010): 321-56. Print.

Boureau, Alain. Satan the Heretic: The Birth of Demonology in the Medieval West. Chicago: U Chicago P, 2006. Print.

Bradley, S. A. J., Ed. Anglo-Saxon Poetry. London: David Campbell, 1982. Print.

Brann, Noel L. Trithemius and Magical Theology: A Chapter in the Controversy over Occult Studies in Early Modern Europe. Albany: State U of New York P, 1999. Print.

Dendle, Peter. Satan Unbound: The Devil in Old English Narrative Literature. Toronto: U Toronto Press, 2001. Print.

Elliot, Dyan. Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages. Philadelphia: U Pennsylvania P, 1999. Print.

Ott, Norbert H. “Facts and Fictions: The Iconography of Demons in German Vernacular Manuscripts.” Demons: Mediators between this World and the Other: Essays on Demonic Beings from the Middle Ages to the Present. Ed. Ruth Petzoldt and Paul Neubauer Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1998. Print.

Roberts, Gareth. “The Bodies of Demons.” The Body in Late medieval and Early Modern Culture. Darryll Grantley and Nina Taunton. Aldershot: Ashgae, 2000: 131- 142. Print.

Russell, Jeffrey Burton. Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages. Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1984. Print.

Shinners, John. Ed. “Devils, Demons, and Spirits.” Medieval Popular Religion, 1000- 1500: A Reader. 2^nd Edition. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2007. 229- 280. Print.

Strickland, Debra Higgs. Saracens, Demons, & Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003. Print.

A Short History of the Woode-walkers

The Original Four

 

In the Spring of 2008, Professor Tom Shippey was preparing to depart the St. Louis University English Department for a well-deserved retirement* back home in England. As a going away present, he left his graduate students with a simple idea–getting together regularly to talk about medieval literature. Four of us began meeting that summer at the Scottish Arms, our favorite local pub**, and we took our name from one of the first texts we read. In the fourteenth-century romance The Tale of Gamelyn, Gamelyn is forced out of normal society and must  take up with the outlaws in the forest. The Woode-walkers are those powerful troublemakers who cannot walk in town, most famously medieval folk-heroes like Robin Hood, William Wallace, Gamelyn, and Hereward. We have taken our name from this outlaw tradition because we see ourselves as rebellious medievalists in a modern American university. But this name also fits our group because of the adjectival meanings of “wood” as mad, insane, or rabid, and as the OED says, “Going beyond all reasonable bounds; utterly senseless; extremely rash or reckless, wild; vehemently excited.” “Woode” or “wod” appears in works such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and in the writings of King Alfred, Layamon, Chaucer, Gower, Henryson, and even Shakespeare, and so we saw it as a fitting descriptor for our new group.

Each week throughout the year the Woode-walkers get together,  and the discussion is led by the “uthwita,” the Old English word for scholar or prophet. We have read and discussed a wide variety of texts, including Old English poetry; Latin saints’ lives and historical chronicles; Old Norse myth and poetry; Icelandic sagas; Irish and Welsh mythology’ Middle English romance, prophecy, drama and political writing; Spanish, French, and German literature; and modern texts on critical theories, orality, medievalism, and medieval studies.*** As Tom envisioned, this reading group has allowed us to research, read, and discuss a vast body of medieval (and later) texts that we otherwise might not have encountered. The Woode-walkers have also expanded beyond weekly textual analysis and have held discussions on St. Louis University’s MA and PhD comprehensive exams, professionalism and the job talk during on-campus interviews, and the current state of medieval studies.

A Meeting in Coffee-shop #2

As testaments to our tenacity and dedication in the pursuit of medieval texts, we have expanded to include more than a dozen active members in the last three years and have outlasted (not one but) two local coffee-shops. Our new favorite gathering place is coffee-shop #3, the SLU institution Cafe Ventana. The fact that we have outlasted two local coffeeshops. The Woode-walkers are actively expanding our views and activities beyond St. Louis by presenting our scholarship at local, national, and international conferences, and also organizing sessions based on material that we read and discussed at our weekly meetings. We have an ongoing relationship with the annual M/MLA Convention, and in 2009 we organized and presented in a panel under the title: “Migration, Movement, and Displacement in Medieval Literature.” This year’s M/MLA Convention will feature 2 sessions organized by the Woode-walkers on “Playing with Medieval Minds.” We are also inviting our first speaker to campus this year and plan to organize additional conference panels and on-campus events in the future.

 

* Tom told me that his retirement would consist of sitting in his garden and relaxing, so that passersby would be unable to distinguish his motionless body from the nearby tree stump. I later learned, however, that Tom has been as busy as ever with publications, especially in many festschrifts of his numerous retirement-aged colleagues.

**I strongly recommend any of the Fuller’s or Belhaven draft beers, especially the Fuller’s ESB when it is available, because a little bitterness now and again can be a good thing.

***A complete list of everything that we have read and discussed will be posted soon and the updated each semester. Prepare to be wowed!

The Saga of Burnt Njal Part II: Topophilia

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