Reading the Anglo-Saxon Self Through the Vercelli Book (Medieval Interventions) [New ed.] 9781433140549, 9781433140556, 9781433140563, 9781433140570, 1433140543

Table of contents :
Cover
Table of Contents
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: Bodies, Souls, and Selves in Anglo-Saxon England
Souls, Bodies, and Selves in Vercelli
The Body and Subjectivity
Notes
References
Chapter 1: Souls With Bodies: Parsing the Self in Vercelli Homilies IV, XXII, and Soul and Body I
Homily IV
Soul and Body I
Notes
References
Chapter 2: Baptism, Conversion, and Selfhood in Andreas
Baptism, Conversion, and Typology
Eschatology and Baptism in Andreas
Doubt, Conversion, and Sainthood
Notes
References
Chapter 3: The Self and the Community: Rogationtide and the Ascension in The Dream of the Rood and Vercelli Homilies X, XI, and XXI
Introduction
Baptism and the Doctrine of Ascension
The Ascension in Christ II and The Dream of the Rood
Identity and Community
Rogationtide
The Ascension in Vercelli Homilies X, XI, and XXI
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 4: Hagiography and the End(s) of the Vercelli Book: Models of Ideal Selfhood in Homilies XVII, XVIII, and XXIII
Vercelli’s Eremitic Saints: Martin and Guthlac
Vercelli XVII, The Purification of the Virgin
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

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century compilation of Old English religious poetry and prose. The Vercelli Book’s selection and arrangement of texts has long perplexed scholars, but this book argues that its organizational logic lies in the relationship of its texts to the performance of selfhood. Many of the poems and homilies represent subjectivity through “soul-and-body,” a popular medieval literary motif that describes the soul’s physical departure from the body at death and its subsequent addresses to the body. Vercelli’s soul-and-body texts, together with its exemplary narratives of apostles and saints, construct a model of selfhood that is embodied and performative, predicated upon an interdependent relationship between the soul and the body in which the body has the potential for salvific action. The book thus theorizes an Anglo-Saxon conception of the self that challenges modern assumptions of a rigid soul/body dualism in medieval religious and literary tradition. Its arguments will therefore be of interest to students and scholars of literature, history, philosophy, and religious studies and would be appropriate for upper-level courses on Old English literature, Anglo-Saxon history, sermons and preaching in medieval England, and medieval religious practice.

Amity Reading received her BA from the University of Chicago and her MA and her PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. She is currently Assistant Professor of English at DePauw University and has previously published on Anglo-Saxon and later medieval religious poetry.

Reading the Anglo-Saxon Self Through the Vercelli Book MEDIEVAL INTERVENTIONS

in Anglo-Saxon England by analyzing the contents and sources of the Vercelli Book, a tenth-

READING THE ANGLO-SAXON SELF THROUGH THE VERCELLI BOOK | Reading

Reading the Anglo-Saxon Self Through the Vercelli Book explores conceptions of subjectivity

www.peterlang.com PETER LANG

Cover art: Biblioteca Capitolare of Vercelli, Vercelli Book, f. 101v, […] © Fondazione Museo del Tesoro del Duomo e Archivio Capitolare, Vercelli

AMITY READING

7

century compilation of Old English religious poetry and prose. The Vercelli Book’s selection and arrangement of texts has long perplexed scholars, but this book argues that its organizational logic lies in the relationship of its texts to the performance of selfhood. Many of the poems and homilies represent subjectivity through “soul-and-body,” a popular medieval literary motif that describes the soul’s physical departure from the body at death and its subsequent addresses to the body. Vercelli’s soul-and-body texts, together with its exemplary narratives of apostles and saints, construct a model of selfhood that is embodied and performative, predicated upon an interdependent relationship between the soul and the body in which the body has the potential for salvific action. The book thus theorizes an Anglo-Saxon conception of the self that challenges modern assumptions of a rigid soul/body dualism in medieval religious and literary tradition. Its arguments will therefore be of interest to students and scholars of literature, history, philosophy, and religious studies and would be appropriate for upper-level courses on Old English literature, Anglo-Saxon history, sermons and preaching in medieval England, and medieval religious practice.

Amity Reading received her BA from the University of Chicago and her MA and her PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. She is currently Assistant Professor of English at DePauw University and has previously published on Anglo-Saxon and later medieval religious poetry.

Reading the Anglo-Saxon Self Through the Vercelli Book MEDIEVAL INTERVENTIONS

in Anglo-Saxon England by analyzing the contents and sources of the Vercelli Book, a tenth-

READING THE ANGLO-SAXON SELF THROUGH THE VERCELLI BOOK | Reading

Reading the Anglo-Saxon Self Through the Vercelli Book explores conceptions of subjectivity

www.peterlang.com PETER LANG

Cover art: Biblioteca Capitolare of Vercelli, Vercelli Book, f. 101v, […] © Fondazione Museo del Tesoro del Duomo e Archivio Capitolare, Vercelli

AMITY READING

Reading the Anglo-Saxon Self Through the Vercelli Book

MEDIEVAL INTERVENTIONS New Light on Traditional Thinking Stephen G. Nichols General Editor Vol. 7

The Medieval Interventions series is part of the Peter Lang Humanities list. Every volume is peer reviewed and meets the highest quality standards for content and production.

PETER LANG

New York  Bern  Berlin Brussels  Vienna  Oxford  Warsaw

Amity Reading

Reading the Anglo-Saxon Self Through the Vercelli Book

PETER LANG

New York  Bern  Berlin Brussels  Vienna  Oxford  Warsaw

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Reading, Amity, author. Title: Reading the Anglo-Saxon self through the Vercelli Book / Amity Reading. Description: New York: Peter Lang, 2018. Series: Medieval interventions; vol. 7 ISSN 2376-2683 (print) | ISSN 2376-2691 (online) Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017013138 | ISBN 978-1-4331-4054-9 (hardback: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4331-4055-6 (ebook pdf) | ISBN 978-1-4331-4056-3 (epub) ISBN 978-1-4331-4057-0 (mobi) Subjects: LCSH: Vercelli book. English literature—Old English, ca. 450–1100—Criticism, Textual. Self (Philosophy) in literature. | Christian literature, English (Old)—History and criticism. Christianity and literature—England—History—To 1500. Civilization, Anglo-Saxon, in literature. | Civilization, Medieval, in literature. Classification: LCC PR1495 .R43 2018 | DDC 829/.09—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017013138 DOI 10.3726/b12683

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

© 2018 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York 29 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, NY 10006 www.peterlang.com All rights reserved. Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm, xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.

For my mother and father, without whom this would not have been possible.

table of contents

List of Tables Acknowledgments Abbreviations

ix xi xiii

Introduction: Bodies, Souls, and Selves in Anglo-Saxon England 1 Chapter 1. Souls With Bodies: Parsing the Self in Vercelli Homilies IV, XXII, and Soul and Body I 33 Chapter 2. Baptism, Conversion, and Selfhood in Andreas 61 Chapter 3. The Self and the Community: Rogationtide and the Ascension in The Dream of the Rood and Vercelli Homilies X, XI, and XXI 85 Chapter 4. Hagiography and the End(s) of the Vercelli Book: Models of Ideal Selfhood in Homilies XVII, XVIII, and XXIII 117 Index

147

tables

Table 1.1 A comparison of Vercelli IV and the “Three Utterances” texts.42 Table 1.2 A comparison of lines 42–48 of Vercelli’s Soul and Body I and Exeter’s Soul and Body II, with notes where the ASPR editions differ from their respective manuscripts. 48 Table 2.1 A comparison of Andreas lines 782–96a and 1623–29, demonstrating verbal echo. 70

acknowledgments

I owe many debts of gratitude. I received a development grant from Albion College in 2012, and I received both a grant and the time to use it from DePauw University in 2016, without which I could not have finished this book. My initial research was completed with the support of the graduate program in English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, under the excellent tutelage of Charles D. Wright, whom I cannot thank enough. He is an inspiring scholar and a gifted mentor, and I would have been lost without his insights and his proof-reading skills. I would also like to thank my other graduate advisors, Renée R. Trilling, Martin Camargo, Thomas N. Hall, and Robert W. Barrett for their many helpful suggestions, and my undergraduate mentor, William Veeder, who first showed me close reading. I would like to thank Stephanie Clark and Shannon N. Godlove, with whom I spent many hours discovering the joys of Old English, and Kyle J. Williams for his conversations and his last-minute fact-checking. I owe a special thanks to Anthony J. Pollock, whose patience, guidance, and support over the years has been essential. I also owe a debt to the organizers and attendees of the International Medieval Congress (Leeds), and the International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo), for the many opportunities to present and discuss the

xii reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book texts and ideas that eventually became this book. There is material in all five chapters that was formally presented at these conferences, or came up in questions, or was discovered in wine hours. My thanks, as well, to the editors of Peter Lang, who have been most helpful during the publishing process and went out of their way to help me achieve the best book possible, and the editors of Studies in Philology, who granted permission to reprint Chapter 2. I am also grateful to the many libraries and librarians the world over who supplied the access and materials I needed to perform this research. I am especially indebted to the Capitulary Library in Vercelli, Italy, for their generous permission and assistance. Above all, I would like to thank my parents, Margaret and Timothy Reading, who have worked tirelessly to give me everything I needed to succeed.

abbreviations

ÆCHom I

Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The First Series (Text), ed. Peter Clemoes, EETS s.s. 17 (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1997). Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The Second Series (Text), ed. ÆCHom II Malcolm Godden, EETS s.s. 5 (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1979). AN&Q American Notes and Queries AS Anglo-Saxon ASE Anglo-Saxon England ASPR Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, eds. George Philip and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, 6 vols. (New York: Columbia UP, 1931–42). Bosworth-Toller Joseph Bosworth, T. Northcote Toller, and Alistair Campbell, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, 3 vols, with supplement by T. N. Toller and enlarged addenda and corrigenda by A. Campbell (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1882–98, 1908–21, 1972). CCCC Corpus Christi College, Cambridge CCSA Corpus Christianorum, Series Apocryphorum (Turnhout: Brepols, 1983–).

xiv reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book CCSL ChauR Clark Hall

CMRS CSASE CSEL DRA EEMF EETS o.s. s.s. EMS ES Gneuss

JEGP JMEMS JTS Ker MÆ MGH

MLN MnE MP MS Neophil N&Q

Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina (Turnhout: Brepols, 1953–). Chaucer Review J. R. Clark Hall, A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, 4th edition, with a supplement by Herbert D. Meritt (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1960). Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (Vienna: Gerold etc., 1866–). Alcuin, De ratione animae Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile Early English Text Society Original Series, 319 vols. to date (London: EETS, 1864–). Supplementary Series, 19 vols. to date (London: EETS, 1970–). Essays in Medieval Studies English Studies Helmut Gneuss, Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: A List of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England up to 1100, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 241 (Tempe: CMRS, 2001). Journal of English and Germanic Philology Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies Journal of Theological Studies Neil R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing AngloSaxon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Medium Ævum Monumenta Germaniae historica inde ab anno Christi quingentesimo usque ad annum millesimum et quingentesimum, edited by Societas aperiendis fontibus rerum germanicarum medii aevi (Berlin: Weidmann; Hannover: Hahn, 1826–). Modern Language Notes Modern English Modern Philology Mediaeval Studies Neophilologus Notes and Queries

abbreviations NM n.s. OE OEN PG PL

PMLA PQ RSB SASLC

SN SP ZfdA

xv

Neuphilologische Mitteilungen New Series Old English Old English Newsletter Patrologia Graeca, edited by J.-P. Migne, 161 vols. (Paris: n.p. 1857–1903). Patrologia Latina, edited by J.-P. Migne, 221 vols., with 5 supplements edited by A. Hamann (Paris: n.p. 1844–1974). Publications of the Modern Language Association Philological Quarterly Regula Sancti Benedicti, edited by R. Hanslik (Vienna: Tempsky, 1977), cited by chapter and verse. Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture, edited by Frederick M. Biggs, Thomas D. Hill and Paul E. Szarmach (in progress). Studia Neophilologica Studies in Philology Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum

introduction Bodies, Souls, and Selves in Anglo-Saxon England

The rationale behind the compilation of the manuscript known as the Vercelli Book (Vercelli, Biblioteca Capitolare, MS CXVII, s.x2)1 has long puzzled scholars. The individual pieces within the tenth-century codex do not seem to be ordered by liturgical year, source text, or genre,2 and past scholarship has posited many conflicting explanations for both the manuscript’s purpose and its mysterious journey to Italy. Most scholars will agree, however, that the codex has an eschatological focus. Eamonn Ó Carragáin’s extensive work on the manuscript leads him to say with some confidence that “[i]t was a central preoccupation of the Vercelli compiler to ensure regular recurrence throughout the manuscript of material describing Last Things (death, Judgment, hell or heaven: eschatological material),” and indeed many of the homilies and poems pertain to the interim after death as well as the need to prepare for death through penance.3 Based in part on this arguably personal overarching theme, the codex’s idiosyncratic organization and contents, and the connections between Italy and the manuscript’s marginalia, Ó Carragáin further postulates that the compilation could have been the private devotional reading text of a canon traveling to the shrine of St. Eusebius in Vercelli.4 Other scholars have reached similar conclusions, and the consensus would appear to be that the manuscript was likely the property of a secular pilgrim, either traveling directly to Vercelli or stopping there on the road to Rome.5

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Although the riddle of the manuscript’s ownership and eventual transfer to Italy will likely remain unsolved,6 the proposition that the Vercelli Book was compiled for private devotional reading continues to interest scholars for several reasons. If we view the contents of the book from this perspective, the penitential message and eschatological concerns of the individual pieces take on a unique valence. Although eschatology is inarguably a general motif threading through the manuscript, it is not difficult to locate others,7 nor is there need to designate the whole of Vercelli as an unsystematic compilation of writings about death. I argue that another concern traces through both the poetry and the prose of the Vercelli Book, one intimately connected to its potential value for private contemplation: the construction and performance of the self. Rather than view this dimension of the Vercelli Book as incompatible with its eschatological content, I propose to demonstrate how the representation of selfhood is inextricably bound up with and in fact contingent upon tenth-century Christian notions of death and the after-life. Indeed, the principal vehicle through which the texts in the Vercelli Book construct the self is a common theme in Christian eschatological and penitential writings, and is linked to Judgment: the soul-and-body motif.8 This Introduction lays the groundwork for this overarching claim by beginning to articulate a theory of Anglo-Saxon ‘subjectivity,’ connected through the context of Judgment to the soul-and-body motif.

Souls, Bodies, and Selves in Vercelli Editors have customarily parsed the contents of the Vercelli Book into 29 individual items: six poems and 23 homilies. Among these, Vercelli contains three overt soul-and-body texts (homilies IV and XXII, and the poetic Soul and Body I), which contain either addresses of the soul to the body or explicit treatments of the soul/body divide. The manuscript also contains nine eschatological pieces that make direct or oblique reference to souland-body at general or particular judgment (homilies II, VIII, IX, X, XI, XIII, XV, and the poetic Fates of the Apostles and The Dream of the Rood).9 Together, these texts comprise close to half of the manuscript’s contents. But the soul/body dynamic in the Vercelli Book extends beyond explicit dramatizations of the moments of separation and reunion. The remaining texts in the codex can be separated into two broad categories, with some inevitable overlap: penitential (homilies III, VII, XII, XIV, XVI, XIX, XX, XXI) and

introduction

3

hagiographical (homilies I, V, VI, XVII, XVIII, XXIII, and the poetic Andreas, Fates of the Apostles, and Elene). The texts in both categories are also related to the conceptual (and indeed, linguistic) divide between soul and body, either through their discussions of Judgment and resurrection, their presentation of the efficacy of penance and sacramental ritual, or their treatments of martyrdom and the saintly body. This apparent interest in soul-and-body materials on the part of the Vercelli compiler is unlikely to be mere coincidence, but it is also not necessarily surprising. The dramatic parting of the soul and the body was one of the most prevalent literary and artistic motifs of the medieval period. It is most commonly referred to in scholarship as the legend of the soul and body or the soul and body tradition.10 This designation characteristically refers to a group of conventional scenes in which the soul returns to its body at some point after death and, depending on its fate, either blames the flesh for damnation or (much more rarely) thanks it for salvation. This address can take either monologic form (the soul’s address to the body), amounting to the soul’s castigation/ praise of a silent corpse; or dialogic form (the body and soul debate), in which the body responds to the soul’s accusations with a series of rational counter-points.11 Elements of this tradition issue from and contribute to a number of more broadly-related eschatological motifs with which it is commonly found, including explicit descriptions of the soul’s forcible ‘removal’ from the body by attending angels or demons,12 the devil’s account of the next world,13 the ‘Three Utterances’ motif,14 cautionary addresses of corpses to the living (e.g., ‘the dry bones speak’),15 ubi sunt motifs,16 the Ego te, homo speech taken from St. Caesarius of Arles’s Sermo 57,17 and the ‘pledge of the soul.’18 Because I am interested in the theme of soul and body as a cultural and ideological structure as well as a literary one, and because I am in part writing against purely generic studies of the subject, I will be referring broadly to the entire corpus of related motives depicting the soul’s departure from the body as soul-and-body. Although examples of soul-and-body are plentiful in the Vercelli Book, the motif is not, of course, unique to it. The origins of soul-and-body can be traced back generally to Egyptian ascetic traditions associated with early Coptic Christianity, and specifically to the genre of the religious vision. Both Théodor Batiouchkof and Louise Dudley, whose works are to date the most comprehensive studies on the subject, identify elements of the motif in a number visions associated with the fourth-century Egyptian monk St. Macarius the Younger.19 Each of the works connected to the Macarius legend details in one way or another the parting of the soul from the body and the

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fate of the soul after death. In one vision, for example, Macarius is traveling through the desert with two angels who explain to him the fates of both sinful and saved souls. The angels tell Macarius that every soul, regardless of whether it is wicked or righteous, is terrified by the spirits who visit it at death, and its only defense at this time are the good deeds performed by the body during life.20 Batiouchkof and Dudley also identify resonances between later soul-and-body material and the Visio S. Pauli, or The Apocalypse of Paul, an apocryphon that was popular throughout Christendom during the medieval period.21 In Chapter 13 of the Visio, St. Paul is allowed to witness the deaths of both a just and a wicked man, and later, in heaven, he see the judgment of three souls, two sinful and one just.22 As Douglas Moffat notes in his edition of the Old English Soul and Body poems, “something similar to either The Apocalypse of Paul or the Macarius material must lie behind the development of a soul’s address to its body.”23 From these initial materials, a trajectory of narrative can be traced to a work that Batiouchkof identifies as the earliest extant version of a soul’s address proper, a homily of which four versions survive, two in Latin and two in Old English.24 Both Batiouchkof and Dudley isolate individual passages in this homily that may have contributed to the Old English poetic version of the soul’s address to the body, of which two survive: one found in the Exeter Book (fols. 98a–100a)25 and one found in the Vercelli Book (fols. 101b–103b). But in the homiletic versions discussed above, the soul’s address is only part of the larger narrative of the ‘Soul’s Journey,’ a separate but related motif.26 The two Old English poems, which detail only the address, must still represent some creative and/or ideological departure from these foundations, either on the part of the poet(s) or on the part of some intermediate source material. As Moffat concludes in his review of source studies on the poem(s): some continuity in the development of the theme in England must have existed; however … Soul and Body stands somewhat apart from this tradition. It reveals little correspondence in specific detail to any of the extant works related to the bodyand-soul theme, nor is there an obvious structural relationship to these other works, except in a very general way.27

This suggests that the authors disseminating soul-and-body in Anglo-Saxon England were adapting the tradition according to their own style and purpose. The particularly ‘Anglo-Saxon’ aspects of the tradition that are discernible in this process, expressed in both the poems and the prose, will be discussed in more detail in the following chapters.

introduction

5

Soul-and-body material has attracted academic interest for several reasons, many of which demonstrate its natural connection to perennial questions of existence, and by extension, subjectivity. Scholarship on the subject up to the present day can be divided into roughly three categories: first, literary analyses of soul-and-body as a genre; second, semantic analyses of Old English words corresponding to metaphysical ‘parts of the self’ (soul, mind, body, etc.), or of the self as a deictic grammatical category (ic), especially in the poetry; and third, analyses of the philosophical or theological antecedents of Anglo-Saxon metaphysics. Previous scholarship on the literary aspects of soul-and-body has focused almost exclusively on tracing a ‘lineage’ of the motif—locating its origins as a means of sourcing what is typically considered its most ‘full’ form,28 the literary debates of twelfth- to fourteenth-century Europe; and creating a taxonomy of its instances to chart its development.29 Although this trend in scholarship has led to a number of productive studies of the motif that illuminate its literary sources and analogues, it has also resulted in the tendency to categorize rather than analyze extant examples. Such studies have primarily examined the ways in which each example of the motif does or does not conform to a set of internally-derived and historically non-specific generic conventions.30 Little attention has been paid to differences among examples except insofar as these might justify aesthetic evaluation by providing a chronology of sophistication.31 The inevitable outcome of such an approach is the conclusion that early iterations of the motif are simplistic, incomplete, or even barbarous as compared to their later cousins. This conclusion is especially problematic because it can—although it does not have to—preclude the possibility that earlier versions of soul-and-body might have had different ideological or rhetorical goals than their later progeny or avatars, goals that manifest themselves in the thematic nuances of each text. Semantic studies are likewise narrowly focused, but are somewhat more tentative in their conclusions, and perhaps rightfully so. Although individual Anglo-Saxon texts might disagree about the faculties of the soul or the naming of its constituent parts, in the aggregate they seem to maintain a distinction between the thinking incorporeal self (the mind); the feeling incorporeal self (something like the heart or even the will); and the animating life-spirit (the soul). The range and complexity of what is meant by these concepts is suggested by the sheer size of the Old English vocabulary for such words, and the frequency of their usage in both poetry and prose. This surfeit, however, is problematic for the same reasons it is interesting: even more so than other

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word-types, the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary for ‘mind,’ ‘heart,’ and ‘soul’ is notoriously non-specific. Although the words can be divided into groups based in part on their connotations in various works, even simple and common words such as mod can incorporate meanings as disparate as ‘mind,’ ‘heart,’ ‘spirit,’ and ‘temper’—a range that perfectly confounds attempts to think more precisely about the exact faculty that mod describes. How can we distinguish between the conceptual seats of emotion and intellect when the corresponding vocabulary can mean either? In the case of mod, the matter is further complicated, as M. R. Godden notes in “Anglo-Saxons on the Mind”: “[i]n Anglo-Saxon generally, however, mod also carries the meaning ‘courage’ and ‘pride,’ and its derivatives all point in the direction of these latter meanings: modig, ‘brave,’ ‘proud,’ modignes and ofermod, ‘pride,’ ‘arrogance,’ modigian, ‘to be arrogant,’ ormod, ‘devoid of spirit,’ ‘hopeless.’”32 Indeed, Godden concludes that the Old English ‘mind,’ in the ‘vernacular’ tradition at least, refers most often neither to rational thought nor the immortal ‘self,’ but instead to the seat of the will. Though not all Old English words for such concepts are as distressingly polysemous as mod, it serves to demonstrate the difficulty of attempting a purely language-based analysis of metaphysical vocabulary. Nevertheless, a few studies33 have attempted to chart the semantic fields of these ‘mind’/’soul’-words as a way of thinking about how the Anglo-Saxons might have theorized the holistic self. Perhaps unsurprisingly, critics have tended to favor a dualistic approach to interpreting the semantic data. Studies typically conclude with the author suggesting a binary into which various metaphysical terms can be slotted; popular binaries include thinking versus feeling, immaterial versus material, theological/religious versus secular, eternal versus earthly. Godden’s article, cited above, remains one of the most influential, and he identifies a classical tradition, represented by Alcuin of York (c. 735–804), King Alfred (d. 899), and Ælfric of Eynsham (c. 950–1010); and a vernacular tradition, represented by the anonymous poets of the period, though also occasionally by Alfred and Ælfric.34 Godden looks at explicit philosophical treatments as well as translations and glosses in order to determine what the dominant interpretation of the period would have been. He concludes that the major division between conceptions of the self can be found precisely in the division between ‘high’ writers (concerned with the rational/emotional divisions of mental faculties and the proper applications of the terms for ‘soul’); and vernacular writers (concerned with the personal conception of the self, and presenting a more understandable, in some senses a more ‘modern,’ version of selfhood), most strikingly manifested in The Seafarer and The Wanderer.

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7

Most of the semantic studies sift through the entire Old English corpus to compare uses of words such as hyge, sefa, ferhð, hreðer, breost, heorte, mod, sawol, and gast only to corroborate the distinction put forward by Godden, but a few nuances are worth mentioning. Margrit Soland’s and Michael Phillips’ book-length studies demonstrate that the Anglo-Saxon writer/translator seems to have had some criteria (or criterion) for selecting a given ‘soul’-word, even if the criteria varied from individual to individual and may seem inscrutable to the modern eye.35 Contrary to the general assumption that alliterative verse can account in large part for the number of synonyms in Old English, at least in the deployment of ‘mind’/‘soul’-words, Anglo-Saxon authors seem to have had specific connotations in mind, particularly when negotiating a Latin translation. Phillips’ overarching claim, like Soland’s, stems from what seems to be the most important and the most basic division between these connotations: [t]he distinctions existing among the Old English words [for mind/soul] must not be imagined as corresponding to the modern division of such terms into intellectual, emotional, and moral realms. Instead, the basic division within the soul-term group in Old English is one between those names given to the soul after a person has died and when his soul departs into the after-life (called ‘transcendent’ in this paper) and those given to the soul as the center or seat of the intellect, emotions, and/or moral activity in this life (called ‘non-transcendent’).36

James T. McIlwain, in “Brain and Mind in Anglo-Saxon Medicine,” similarly acknowledges that there must have been specific criteria in play when authors selected a specific ‘mind’ or ‘soul’ term.37 However, he suggests that at least one criterion must have been aesthetic, which explains why poets regularly chose cardiocentric terms to describe the self when medical treatises demonstrate that the Anglo-Saxons were in fact encephalocentric—McIlwain suggests that ‘heart’ words may simply carry more symbolic meaning and scriptural resonances than ‘brain’ words, and therefore made more appropriate choices in literature. The limits of these kinds of semantic studies can be somewhat mitigated by moving toward a more historicized discussion of Anglo-Saxon texts in conversation with their classical sources and analogues (which can in many cases reveal what words in isolation cannot), and these comprise the final broad category of scholarship on soul-and-body. Earl Anderson’s Folk Taxonomies in Early English, for example, contains an illuminating chapter on the folk psychology of the mind/soul divide,38 which offers something of a blend of semantic and theory-based analysis. Anderson begins the chapter with a productive summary of the persistent scholarly trend, carried into the last decade

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in the works of Michel Foucault39 and Harold Bloom,40 of crediting the Italian and English Renaissances with the ‘invention’ of the modern self. Recent medieval scholarship has addressed this longstanding myth, but in large part only to claim the ‘invention’ anew, this time for the long twelfth century.41 Anderson calls for the need to obviate both misconceptions with systemic treatments of Anglo-Saxon subjectivity, approached from three possible angles: first, through the identification and analysis of articulations of ‘selfhood’ in Old English texts; second, through the reevaluation of the criteria used by scholars to determine what constitutes ‘selfhood’ in a given period; and third, through the demonstration “from the perspective of historical linguistics that the vocabulary of ‘mind’ and ‘soul’ implies a folk-psychology of the self that affirms a conception of selfhood that is just as complex in Old English as it is in modern English.”42 The remainder of Anderson’s chapter is devoted to the third of these three approaches. Despite these differences in attitude, Anderson’s conclusions largely line up with the previously mentioned studies: that Old English mod and sawol, being the thinking and the feeling aspects of the incorporeal self, were not quite as clearly differentiated as they are in modern English; and that the Anglo-Saxon period preserves two separate traditions of the incorporeal self, one classical and one vernacular. Anderson does, however, make a firmer conclusion about the vernacular tradition, claiming that mod is the dominant term for the immaterial part of a person in that tradition,43 and traces the evolution of mod into modern English mind: Modern English mind includes the faculties of apprehension and reason, but excludes the emotions. The advent of mind as the dominant term for the ‘immaterial half of the person,’ then, resulted in a compartmentalization of the human personality, according to which the emotions are marginalized as a separate, nonlexicalized entity that is located in the heart, whereas apprehension and reason comprise the elements of mind, located in the brain.44

Although Anderson’s call to reassess Anglo-Saxon subjectivity is wellfounded, the limited scope of the study necessitates that he adopt previous scholars’ criteria for determining what constitutes ‘selfhood,’ a shortcoming which he himself acknowledges.45 Such criteria privilege the immaterial over the material46 and thinking over feeling, and treat the religious and the secular separately. Anderson’s historical-linguistic approach provides important data, but the result of his study is a conclusion that endeavors to show continuity between Old English and modern English language of the self that reaffirms modern definitions of selfhood in place of theorizing medieval ones.

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Two other recent book-length studies also move toward a more historicized, more complete analysis of Anglo-Saxon subjectivity: Leslie Lockett’s Anglo-Saxon Psychologies in the Vernacular and Latin Traditions and Britt Mize’s Traditional Subjectivities: The Old English Poetics of Mentality.47 Though in many ways these texts present more evidence than has been previously amassed on the subject of the self in Old English literature and culture, they remain bound to the parameters established in earlier scholarship: Lockett refines but ultimately upholds Godden’s original binary of classical and vernacular; and Mize, like Antonina Harbus before him, limits his study to the poetic self and the preoccupation with mentality in Old English poetry.48 This problem of back-reading pre-existing categories onto Old English literature is one that all scholars working on remote historical periods must inevitably face: Michael Matto notes in his review of both Lockett’s and Mize’s books, “they remind us how difficult it is to perceive pre-Christian ‘traditional’ attitudes—whether about poetic conventions or psychological ideas— in the relatively late manuscript evidence we have.”49 As another example, we can consider a metaphysical term that has been conspicuously absent from the above-mentioned semantic analyses: sylf. This absence can be explained largely by sylf’s linguistic function in Old English (most often as a reflexive), where it signifies much more transparently than its modern equivalent ‘self.’ In discussions of the term in Anglo-Saxon literature, much of the complexity of Modern English ‘self’ can be problematically back-read onto sylf, though the Old English word carries few of ‘self’s’ philosophical and metaphysical connotations, and it is for this reason that most scholars now choose to avoid the term in synchronic analyses. Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe comments on this in her study of the body and Anglo-Saxon law,50 citing as proof of the problem the exchange between John C. Pope and Stanley B. Greenfield over sylf in The Seafarer, and its status there as either a reflexive pronoun or a substantive one.51 O’Brien O’Keefe concludes that in studies of Anglo-Saxon subjectivity, “the familiar word ‘self’ is unhelpful as much from its imprecision in analyses of discourse and of power as from the weight of historical interpretation freighted on ‘self.’”52 She advocates for the term subject exclusively.

The Body and Subjectivity It may not be surprising that sylf has been largely absent from these discussions of subjectivity for the reasons cited above, but it is surprising that body words such as lichoman or flæsc-compounds have also been. Most of the previously

10 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book mentioned studies emphasize the differences between the literary self of vernacular poetry and the didactic self of homilies and Latin treatises,53 and this may explain the lack of interest in the body as a meaningful part of the self, but as trends in recent medieval scholarship demonstrate, the relationship between selfhood and the flesh is of increasing interest. In their essay exploring the possible contributions of materialism to Anglo-Saxon studies, Jacqueline A. Stodnik and Renée R. Trilling ask, “[c]an we attempt to discern how early medieval bodies were … imbricated in their environments, and how this imbrication gave rise to particular modes of subjectivity?”54 and Caroline Walker Bynum’s landmark study Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion addresses issues of subjectivity in its seventh chapter, “Material Continuity, Personal Survival and the Resurrection of the Body: A Scholastic Discussion in Its Medieval and Modern Contexts.”55 Bynum begins with a discussion of the medieval period’s fascination with the doctrine of bodily resurrection and its connection to modern concepts of subjectivity. Despite the current preoccupation with materialism (and an attendant unconscious anxiety about personal survival post-mortem), Bynum notes that modern audiences are nonetheless stymied by the medieval period’s analogous preoccupation with bodily resurrection. She discusses at length the debates of the later medieval period in which theologians like Thomas Aquinas and Peter Lombard tackled curiously specific questions about the size, shape, and condition of the physical resurrected body, and whether resurrected bodies would be able to taste or touch in heaven. In his Four Books of Sentences, Peter Lombard even addresses the status of lost matter (e.g., trimmed hair or fingernails) with respect to the resurrected body—will such pieces be returned to the owner at Judgment?56 Bynum goes on to give a summary of later twentieth century philosophies of mind, as well as some examples of popular culture, that suggest that despite our revulsion at the thought of resurrected fingernails, we have largely the same concerns as our medieval brethren. Bynum concludes that “[w]hile no one thinks that a self is only a body, recent discussion seems to find it difficult to account for identity without some sort of physical continuity,” a point which suggests to Bynum that medieval theories of subjectivity have more in common with our modern theories than we might have previously thought.57 However, Bynum also points out that medieval and modern theories differ significantly on one point: while the soul has all but disappeared from modern discussions, “[a]ll medieval thinkers held a soul-body dualism.”58 The remainder of Bynum’s chapter is devoted to arguing that the medieval debate over

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the particulars of resurrection revolved around the issue of bodily continuity more than anything else, and that this issue was not merely an intellectual riddle to be puzzled over by theologians—it informed the complex system of beliefs underpinning material religious practice in the medieval period.59 Two of Bynum’s assumptions are worth querying further. The first is the assumption that an empiricist approach to the problem of material continuity is the basis of both medieval and modern debates about the nature of the self. Though material continuity is unquestionably part of the discussion, more recent developments in object-oriented ontology, performance theory, gender and queer studies, and intersectional theory have all identified the role of performance and agency in the construction of the subject and have attempted to de-center traditional theoretical positions that privilege static essentialist categories over dynamic processes.60 Modern identity theories are largely in agreement that selves are not born, but are rather made, through a complex interaction between self-performance and social pressure. Even historicized studies, such as Stephen Greenblatt’s still-famous Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare,61 acknowledge that a ‘self’ is not a thing one is, but rather a thing one does; and, furthermore, demonstrate that the ‘doing’ is dependent upon the specifics of historical and cultural context. Selfhood has come to be seen as a collaborative, communal, performed state rather than an isolated, private, essential one. Likewise, subjectivity literally refers to the property of being a subject, and conceptually (and grammatically) refers to the quality of beingness that constitutes ‘a self’ in most if not all modern theories of selfhood: agency.62 I am a subject because I can call myself “I.” This way of being can only be experienced and understood particularly, of course, as the product of the unique situation and characteristics of the person experiencing it. Because it assumes that the collective aspects of being are not universal but local, subjectivity, both modern and medieval, comprises the intersection of multiple ontological vectors. These vectors include religion, race, gender, sexuality, and social status, all of which contribute to the historically and culturally situated self, a complex and nuanced construct that resists broad, totalizing analyses. Though the connection between performance and identity may be a modern theoretical construct, a close reading of Old English literary and legal texts suggests that the Anglo-Saxons must have grappled with their own version of it. Peter Clemoes’ article “Action in Beowulf and Our Perception of It”63 attempts to explain one of the more peculiar aesthetic qualities of Old English verse—its deliberate avoidance of concrete details of movement—in

12 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book just these terms. Clemoes notes that the actions of characters in Beowulf (Cotton MS Vitellius A.XV, fols. 132r–201v)64 are almost always described in relation to the qualities or characteristics of the person performing them—in other words, a person does something because that is part of who he is. Action, according to Clemoes, is described in terms of potential: what the agent can do or has done in the past, and what the agent does as a customary habit. Thus, descriptions of actions in Old English poetry are necessarily vague because once the originary quality of the actor has been described, little else remains to say: “[m]ovement in Beowulf is not portrayed as a detachable outward concept: it merely identifies action as part of the doer; action belongs to him as part of an innate, inherent attribute—it is what philosophers call ‘immanent.’”65 Indeed, Clemoes’ reading of Beowulf could be read alongside modern philosophers like Giorgio Agamben with an apparent synchronicity, if not perfectly deliberate overlap.66 Clemoes’ argument is firmly rooted in close reading, and as just one example, he cites the passage following the warriors’ victorious return from looking on the bloody tracks leading to Grendel’s mere, when they allow their horses to race on the path: Hwilum heaþorofe   hleapan leton, on geflit faran   fealwe mearas ðær him foldwegas   fægere þuhton, (864–867a) cystum cuðe. [At times, the battle-brave ones allowed the fallow mares to leap, to proceed in competition, where to them the paths seemed fair, known as the best.]

Clemoes argues that any further description of the mares’ activity would be superfluous: “[t]he men allowed their steeds to exert their natural tendency, identified as a certain kind of movement (hleapan) and as movement in competition (on geflit faran). It would be quite foreign to the poet’s mentality to give the act of galloping any further description.”67 Action is subordinate to both the agent performing it (thus galloping is merely an extension of the mares’ potential) and the implications of the action in its given circumstances (the mares leap in celebration). In his book-length study on the same topic, Interactions of Thought and Language in Old English Poetry,68 Clemoes draws heavily on Old English riddles and zoomorphic designs to stress the importance of the essential in AngloSaxon art and iconography as well as literature—essential meaning what is

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inherent in an agent, whether that be manifested in the form of a discrete action, a bodily trait, or even spoken language.69 Clemoes argues that ‘action’ can designate not only a physical act, but, more broadly, any instance of agential performance, including those of speech and thought.70 Clemoes directs attention to the poet’s characterization of Wiglaf just before he strikes the dragon: Ða ic æt þearfe [gefrægn]   þeodcyninges andlongne eorl   ellen cyðan, cræft ond cenðu,   swa him gecynde wæs. (2694–6) [Then I have heard at the need of the people-king, the warrior by his side manifested courage, might and keenness, as was natural to him.]

Clemoes stresses that “[Wiglaf] possessed certain potentials for action by virtue of his gecynd, his inherent nature, and that was the central fact which needed stating about him at this supremely testing moment. By comparison, other (we might well think important) considerations, such as the training he had received, did not rank a mention.”71 I would add that modern audiences might even expect a mention of exactly what it was that Wiglaf did when he “ellen cyðan”—a basic description of action, as might be found in a contemporary mass market novel, for instance. But the next lines in the poem are predictably difficult to follow precisely because they lack specificity: they are almost universally glossed for sense in Old English versions of the poem as well as translations.72 But according to Anglo-Saxon aesthetics and, possibly, identity theory, Wiglaf’s individual actions need no further description, because they have already been ‘described’ within the characterization of Wiglaf’s person: they are understood implicitly to be simply ‘the things that a brave warrior would do.’ Clemoes’ characterization of Anglo-Saxon identity through action may seem to recapitulate rather than problematize the kind of essentialism described above, if it weren’t for the tendency toward tautology inherent in these and other examples: Wiglaf does the things a brave warrior ought to do because he is a brave warrior. Such redundancies may reveal that the AngloSaxons were all too aware of the constructed and deeply prescriptive quality of what is presented as gecynd. An apt comparison is the anxious way gnomic sceal is deployed in Maxims II (British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius B.i, fols. 115r–115v)73 to both describe and prescribe ‘natural’ behaviors: “Draca sceal on hlæwe, / frod, frætwum wlanc. // Fisc sceal on wætere / cynren cennan. //

14 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book Cyning sceal on healle / beagas dælan” [The dragon shall [be] in a barrow, old and proud of treasures. The fish shall in water spawn its kind. The king shall distribute rings in the hall] (26b–29a), and so on. Each entity is defined by its most salient act, but the seemingly neutral description is coercive. The importance of the relationship between performance and identity is likewise reflected in Anglo-Saxon legal texts. II Cnut 21,74 a theft law of Cnut’s reign in the late Anglo-Saxon period (r. 1016–1035), under the heading “Be ðeofan” [concerning thieves], reads: “We wyllað þæt ælc man ofer twelfwintre sylle þone að, þæt he nyle ðeof beon ne ðeofes gewita” [We intend that each man over twelve years old give an oath that he will not be a thief or a thief’s accomplice].75 While this law is remarkable for several reasons, including its preemptive rather than punitive approach to the problem of theft,76 what is particularly striking is the phrase ðeof beon. The law does not stipulate that a man must promise not to steal, but rather stipulates that he must not be a thief. The connection is implicit, of course: thieves steal, and so a man who promises not to be a thief is also, by extension, promising not to do what thieves do. But the law’s phrasing is a striking reversal of the process observed by Clemoes (identity produces action), implying that a person can choose to construct his identity (to be or not to be a thief) based on taking or not taking action.77 This is also, of course, the central concept of the sacrament of penance and its attendant legalistic language: the repetition of penitential action is capable of reforming the contrite Christian subject and (re)making him acceptable to God.78 But the relationship between penance and reformation is paradoxically reciprocal: the already-contrite Christian subjects himself to penance, but it is the penitential act that confers absolution. The process may seem a little backward in that contrition (true sorrow over sin) follows confession, rather than precedes it as the motivating factor: the implication is that sorrow and true repentance can come only after the wrongdoing has been publicly or privately admitted, and satisfaction is completed only after the performance of the prescribed penitential acts.79 The second of Bynum’s assumptions to be queried is the blanket statement that “[a]ll medieval thinkers held a soul-body dualism.” Since the focus of this study is the soul-and-body tradition, I am not, of course, suggesting that medieval thinkers did not believe in the soul, or that the soul and body divide was not of theological and literary import. I am suggesting, rather, that close reading of medieval literary texts, particularly those from the Anglo-Saxon period, seem to suggest a more complicated relationship between soul and body than merely an antagonistic dualism. By way of introduction, we can

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turn briefly to the Exeter Book’s famous elegy, The Seafarer (fols. 81v–83r),80 one of the more frequently studied texts on the theme of subjectivity. Michael Matto in his article “True Confessions: The Seafarer and Technologies of the Sylf,”81 addresses the vernacular strain of the self as conceived against the religious one, and furthermore illustrates the difficulty of interpreting a text’s representation of the relationship between the soul, the body, and the self. After examining the contextual and linguistic specifics of The Seafarer, Matto begins to approach some interesting conclusions about the poem: based on the narrator’s preoccupation with transience and the confessional tone of the work, Matto postulates that “[t]he Seafarer as a whole thus takes up a difficult stage of the process of conceiving the Christian self, one in which the state of earthly life itself remains a hindrance to imagining the self as dependent on but ultimately not tied to the body.”82 This struggle with identity is one that can be made to seem comfortingly modern and familiar. Despite the Seafarer’s belief in the Christian afterlife (and presumably the resurrected body), he is still forced to grapple with the very palpable presence of his earthly body and its relationship to his selfhood. For Matto, the lament of the Seafarer is distinctly linked to his awareness of his own self’s status as a being both physical and incorporeal; and contrary to the reader’s expectation, the Seafarer himself (linguistically, for certain) identifies most closely with that part of him which is physical. As the Seafarer narrates the famously ambiguous lines that trace the flight of his hyge, his modsefa, “as the spiritual interior breaks free from the body, the perspective of the speaker—the subject—remains with the physical body as it observes the spiritual center—the object—fly away.”83 Matto concludes that one facet of the Seafarer’s narrative ‘journey’ is the journey towards accepting the need to deny the body in a confessional mode in order to rejoin the Christian community (penance); and the shift in tone in the latter half of the poem represents a move to the impersonal, “that is, [the Seafarer] can finally claim without troubling reference to himself that earthly selves are not selves at all and cannot be equated with the flesh.”84 Although the poem does seem to confirm the theologically ‘correct’ response to such a conceptual struggle—the conclusion that the eternal soul is the only real self—that conclusion itself apparently does not come naturally or easily to the Seafarer. He is used to being embodied, and the embodied self is the only one he knows. Moving even beyond Matto’s tentative suggestions, then, we can speculate that the elegiac tone of the poem issues in part from the narrator’s eulogizing of his own body. The Seafarer acknowledges that the body must necessarily pass away, but his mourning betrays that he is

16 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book ambivalent toward and even frightened by that knowledge, despite the reassurances of his faith. If this is what he knows to be ‘himself’ now, what could that other, incorporeal, eternal self be like? Matto compares the complexity of this position to what he views as the simple binary represented in the soul-and-body tradition, wherein neither flesh nor spirit denies the obvious privileging of the soul over the body. In his brief mention of Exeter Book’s Soul and Body II, he suggests that in contrast to the nuanced embodied self-awareness of the Seafarer, in the soul-and-body dialogues “the self can be fully equated with the transcendent soul and feel no attachment to the body—other than as its unwilling victim—only because the poem is set long after death.”85 Matto implies that both the natural attachment to the flesh and the anxiety over identifying the locus of the ‘self’ that we see operating in The Seafarer are absent from examples of soul-and-body: detachment from the earthly self is an easy task for the soul-and-body poet because he is already fully accepting of the soul as the seat of subjectivity. This connection is supposedly obvious from the fact that the soul-and-body poems do not treat the living body, only the obviously transient rotting corpse. And who would question the soul’s primacy over the body in such a case? Implied is the conclusion that soul-and-body’s vilification of the flesh reflects a simple theological stance, but betrays an anxiety to protect that stance. The dogmatic unrelenting certainty of soul-and-body opposes the philosophical, but still faithful, musing of the Seafarer: “Unlike The Seafarer, Soul and Body II simply assumes that culpability lies completely with the body and is unwilling to consider the problem of where to locate the (culpable) self during the first period of unification, the period of life.”86 Matto’s discussion raises questions, particularly about the role of the body in Anglo-Saxon conceptions of subjectivity. Imbedded in his argument is the assumption that ambivalence toward the body must necessarily end in a rejection of it—but acknowledging the transience of the flesh is different than rejecting the body. Although Matto assumes otherwise, soul-and-body as a literary tradition is very much invested in the living body, as well: it is, after all, the body’s deeds during life that determine the soul’s fate in the afterlife (salvation as well as damnation), as extant examples of the motif clearly articulate. Even putting this aside, the two traditions (elegy and soul-and-body), although very different in genre and tone, are in effect quite similar with respect to ideology. Both formulations assume that there is a corporeal body that decays at death, but at the same time also imply that the task of locating the self, the seat of subjectivity, is more difficult than merely locating the eternal.

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Although there is both the call and the material to support studies of Anglo-Saxon subjectivity that treat questions of race, gender, sexuality, and social status, it is my goal to engage primarily with another category of identification: religious belief. Religious belief is unique among markers of identity for multiple reasons. To begin with, it is not a ‘natural’ category, even in the understanding of the Anglo-Saxon period, which was, of course, predominantly religious. One can arguably be born Mercian, male, and noble, but one cannot be born a Christian, only made one by baptism. There are no inherent external markers of Christianity to be interpreted from afar, and the category ‘Christian’ potentially embraces all other categories of identity, other than competing religious ones. Although no more constructed than any other category, religious belief is unusual because it clearly and consciously presents itself as such. Indeed, it signifies through its constructedness: the theology of Christianity is predicated upon choice, and the Christian subject must continually choose salvation by constructing himself87 (through his behaviors) in relation to that goal. Medieval Christian subjectivity is therefore determined by death, but not, as Bynum assumes, wholly because of the terrifying and uncertain relationship between selfhood and physical existence. The Christian subject must instead negotiate a selfhood that arguably only begins with bodily death, and must do so by continually orienting himself toward an imagined future existence. In any case, Bynum’s real bodies are beyond the scope of this study. I am more interested in how Anglo-Saxon authors deployed the language of subjectivity and selfhood for parenetic purposes than in what they may or may not have believed about metaphysics (though there is, of course, overlap between these two concerns, as we shall see below). To reflect this literary focus, I employ the term generic Christian subject to refer to a non-specific member of the intended (as opposed to actual) audience of the texts I am analyzing.88 In contrast, self and selfhood refer here, as in equivalent modern theories, to the abstract first-person experience of subjectivity, articulated from a third-person perspective as a person or that which constitutes being a person.89 A successful theory of Anglo-Saxon subjectivity, then, must be historicized, which necessitates that it be situated within, rather than against, the religious framework in which it was operating. Clare Lees and Gillian Overing have observed that in historical considerations of Anglo-Saxon culture, scholars have paradoxically ignored the ubiquitous Christian belief system, in part because the idea of a Christian selfhood inevitably does not match up with “what we have come to expect from modern, liberal notions of the

18 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book subject.”90 Lees and Overing suggest that the Christian rhetoric of influential medieval texts is, in fact, an ideal lens through which to view historicized categories like ‘self’ and ‘gender’ because it occupies a unique position: it must simultaneously address both the temporal secular self and the idealized religious self, and can therefore reveal the tensions and anxieties surrounding the points of contact between the two.91 They argue that current scholarship must address this reality in order to develop truly historicized readings of medieval culture: “Christianity is, after all, intimately connected to social practice throughout the medieval period and is crucial to any historical understanding of such variable categories as self, psyche, and body.”92 And yet, even in studies which do address the religious aspect of medieval subjectivity, critics have tended to implicitly align the binary between learned and lay theology with an analogous binary in subjectivity: religious orthodoxy produces the homogenous, un-modern, prescriptive, eternal self; while heterodoxy (i.e. the vernacular) describes the recognizable authentic self, the self that is unique, embodied, and imperfect. The assumption is that the more interesting reading of subjectivity from the period must be developed from heterodox vernacular, or even supposedly secular texts, such as older poems that bear witness to their pagan ancestry. It is my intention here to investigate the various articulations of soul-andbody within the Vercelli Book as a way of thinking about broadly medieval and specifically Anglo-Saxon conceptions of subjectivity and their relationship to Christian theology. As one of the most popular recurring narratives of the Middles Ages, soul-and-body begs a reading that situates it not only within theological discourses, but also within cultures of popular religious practice. Such readings, however, often interpret the tradition’s articulation of apparent dualism as either an unlearned and potentially heretical example of liminal folk theology or a straightforward re-phrasing of orthodox doctrine for mass consumption. Both tendencies not only over-simplify the complex and shifting relationship between received and popular Christian belief in the Middles Ages, but also over-simplify the tradition itself and what it may have represented to the medieval imagination. The temptation has been to reduce medieval attitudes toward the self to yet another binary: the body is bad; the soul is good. As I hope to demonstrate, soul-and-body itself is a rhetorical structure as much as it is a descriptive narrative—the ideological goal of the motif was not simply to answer a question (which is self, soul or body?), but to concretize a way of thinking about the relationship between performance and identity.

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Although it may seem to represent a description of the composition of the Christian subject, soul-and-body instead operates as a constitutive rhetorical model, a fluid and adaptable if didactic way of thinking about the self that seldom functions identically within two different texts. Careful consideration of soul-and-body reveals its complicated relationship to orthodox theology and received Church doctrine: rather than a passive reflection of homogenous eschatological theology, the tradition proves to be an active dramatization of the Christian subject constituted through that theology. I argue that soul-and-body itself, as it is employed in Vercelli, subverts the very idea of the reified flesh/spirit dichotomy in surprising ways. It seems that the tendency in the period was to define the self relative to the end of that self’s participation in earthly communities: the self before and the self after death. This begins to suggest a conception of subjectivity that substantially differs from our modern one, in a variety of ways. It also suggests the need to think about the body along with the soul: beyond the simple ‘soul versus body’ construction, it seems the Anglo-Saxons delineated a selfhood that was predicated upon a dependent and collaborative relationship between the two. This book explores this way of being. Chapter 1 analyzes the Vercelli Book’s direct soul and body material, Soul and Body I and Vercelli homily IV, along with homily XXII, to unpack the successful model of embodied selfhood they present. Although the motif is usually set at death or particular judgment, when the soul has been parted from her body, the addresses in these texts are explicitly framed in connection to Last Judgment, when the two will be eternally reunited. The motif’s adjusted setting in Vercelli discloses a complex relationship between soul and body, in which only the two together can be held accountable for their actions during life, and which emphasizes the body’s positive role in salvation achieved through penance. The texts rhetorically juxtapose the thematic unity of Judgment with the dichotomy of the soul-and-body motif to foreground the spiritual need for a concordant and cooperative flesh/spirit relationship, in which neither part is privileged over the other. In Chapter 2, I address Andreas, examining the passions and baptisms in the poem and their relationship to Christian conversion. Although Andreas clearly narrates the conversion of others (by the poem’s end, Andrew has converted and baptized the pagan cannibals of Mermedonia), it simultaneously narrates a conversion of the self: Andrew is depicted as a saint in doubt, whose education over the course of the poem models for the generic Christian audience the need for perpetual reform of the self. Even the already-baptized

20 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book Christian, even the saint, must be continually turning himself toward God, a process that is repeatedly enacted in the poem’s cyclical deaths and resurrections. Chapter 3 begins by examining the connection between the self and the community that underlies the theology of the Feast of the Ascension and Rogationtide, the three-day period of repentance immediately preceding it. Rogationtide staged the need for the ritual performance of penance, and prepared Christian subjects for the Ascension, a feast which celebrated the union of humanity and divinity, represented in the person of Christ and completed in his bodily ascent forty days after his resurrection. Vercelli’s rich corpus of Rogationtide texts, including Vercelli homilies X, XI, and XXI, and, I argue, The Dream of the Rood, mobilize this same imagery of completion and use it to depict salvation as a fantasy of absorption, at which time the individual self will be both literally and theologically incorporated as one of the elect. Chapter 4 looks at three of Vercelli’s prose hagiographic texts, homilies XVII on the Purification of the Virgin Mary, XVIII on St. Martin of Tours, and XXIII on St. Guthlac of East Anglia. The previous chapters examine Vercelli’s religious selves largely in the abstract, but these three texts provide narratives of individual ideal subjects to serve as concrete, though discursive, paradigms of proper Christian behavior. Like Andreas, Vercelli’s prose hagiographic texts present holy men and women whose achievement of salvation is dependent upon successfully utilizing embodiment and human frailty, not denying it. These saints’ lives are sophisticated revisions of their sources, subtly adjusting the original monastic and ascetic themes inherent in their subject matter to produce models of pious and pure living that would still be accessible to and imitable by generic Christian audiences. I maintain that Vercelli is not a book about Judgment, but rather a guide to Judgment through meditation on the self and its salvation through its relation to the body. What we have in the Vercelli Book is a handbook for Christian being, seemingly fitting as a private devotional subject because of its private devotional implications; and the apparently inscrutable organization and contents of the codex offer us a working definition of the Anglo-Saxon religious self.

Notes 1. Ker, no. 394; Gneuss, no. 941. The standard edition of the manuscript’s prose homilies is Donald G. Scragg, The Vercelli Homilies and Related Texts, EETS o.s. 300 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992); the complete standard edition of the poetry remains George Philip Krapp’s The

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3.

4.

5.

6.

21

Vercelli Book, ASPR II. See also Celia Sisam, The Vercelli Book (Vercelli Biblioteca Capitolare cxvii), EEMF 19 (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1976); and Donald G. Scragg, “The Corpus of Vernacular Homilies and Prose Saints’ Lives Before Ælfric,” Old English Prose: Basic Readings, ed. Paul E. Szarmach (London and New York: Garland, 2000), 78 ff. For a general description of the Vercelli Book’s relationship to manuscripts containing its sources and analogues, see Scragg, The Vercelli Homilies, xxiii–xlii. For a thorough bibliography of the manuscript, including lists of full and partial editions as well as relevant scholarship up to 2009, see Paul G. Remly, “The Vercelli Book and Its Texts: A Guide to Scholarship,” in New Readings in the Vercelli Book, eds. Samantha Zacher and Andy Orchard (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2009). For more in-depth studies of the codex’s compilation and organization, see Kenneth Sisam, “Marginalia in the Vercelli Book,” Studies in the History of Old English Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998), 109–18; Donald G. Scragg, “The Compilation of the Vercelli Book,” Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: Basic Readings (New York: Routledge, 1994), 317–43; and Paul E. Szarmach, “The Scribe of the Vercelli Book,” SN 51 (1979): 179–88. Éamonn Ó Carragáin, “Rome, Ruthwell, Vercelli: The Dream of the Rood and the Italian Connection,” in Vercelli tra oriente e occidente tra tarda antichità e medioevo, ed. Vittoria Dolcetti Corazza (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 1999), 89. For a general consideration of the Vercelli Book’s eschatological content, see especially Milton McC. Gatch, “Eschatology in the Anonymous Old English Homilies,” Traditio 21 (1965): 117–65. Ó Carragáin, “Rome, Ruthwell, Vercelli,” 96–7. For more on Ó Carragáin’s theory that Vercelli belonged to a canon, which seems to be corroborated by other evidence in the manuscript, see below, Chapter 4, 118–9. A. S. Cook, “Cardinal Guala and the Vercelli Book,” University of California Literary Bulletin 10 (Sacramento: J. D. Young, Supt. State Printing, 1888), suggests it was brought back to Italy by Cardinal Guala, an Italian visiting the priory of St. Andrew in Chester during the early thirteenth century, but Sisam’s examination of the manuscript’s marginalia, cited above, concludes it must have been in Italy in the eleventh century. S. T. Herben, “The Vercelli Book: A New Hypothesis,” Speculum 10 (1935): 91–4, suggests it was brought there by a dissolute Norman bishop traveling to Vercelli to be disciplined. Maureen Halsall, “Vercelli and the ‘Vercelli Book,’” PMLA 84.6 (1969): 1545–50, confirms Sisam’s dating of the eleventh century and suggests that the manuscript was brought to Italy by a pilgrim. Robert Boenig, in “Andreas and Doctrinal Controversy in the Early Middle Ages” (PhD diss., State University of New Jersey, 1978), 127–34, and “Andreas, the Eucharist, and Vercelli,” JEGP 79.3 (1980): 313–31, puts forward the theory that an English prelate took the manuscript to Italy to submit it to the Eucharistic Council for review of potentially heretical content. In his introduction to The Vercelli Book, Krapp says “No direct evidence is available to explain the presence of the Vercelli Manuscript in Italy, and the indirect evidence is far from conclusive” (xvi). More recently, theories have been put forward by Boenig, Saint and Hero: Andreas and Medieval Doctrine (Lewisberg: Bucknell UP, 1991), 55–77; Ó Carragáin, “Rome, Ruthwell, Vercelli,” and “How Did the Vercelli Collector Interpret The Dream of the Rood?” Occasional Papers in Linguistics and Language Learning 8 (1981): 487–505; and Mary Dockray-Miller, “Female Devotion and the Vercelli Book,” PQ 83 (2004): 337–54.

22 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book

7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

In his edition of the homilies, Scragg, examining the sources and analogues of Vercelli’s prose texts, suggests only a potential provenance for the manuscript (lxxiv–lxxix): “Superficial evidence from the surviving books points towards Rochester as the place where the library used by the scribe of A [i.e., the Vercelli Book] was located” (lxxviii). However, Scragg suggests that the likelihood that the homiletic materials used to compile the Vercelli Book could all be found in Rochester is relatively slight, and concludes it to be much more reasonable that homiliaries from Canterbury provide the ultimate source for Vercelli’s materials. “Perhaps … [Vercelli] was at Rochester at some time during the eleventh century, but it seems most likely that the library where the scribe of [Vercelli] was able to find a series of books of different ages and origins, containing a considerable range of homiletic material which was available a generation before the work of Ælfric was published, was at St Augustine’s” (lxxix). E.g., the theme of cross veneration, the devotional importance of reading, and the role of the Christian woman are all concerns in the individual pieces of the text, worthy of investigation in their own right. See Ó Carragáin, “How Did the Vercelli Collector Interpret The Dream of the Rood?”; Dockray-Miller, “Female Devotion and the Vercelli Book,”; and Samantha Zacher, Preaching the Converted: The Style and Rhetoric of the Vercelli Homilies (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2009), 3–29. I originally treated this theme in my dissertation, “Soul and Body: Reading the AngloSaxon Self Through the Vercelli Book” (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009). In Chapter 5 of Preaching the Converted (140–78), Zacher notes the impressive presence of soul-and-body material in the Vercelli Book, but does not address the body’s complicated position in the manuscript’s versions of the motif or the connection between soul-and-body and selfhood. Her analysis instead focuses largely on the relationship between Vercelli XXII and its source, Isidore of Seville’s Synonyma. Éamonn Ó Carragáin has since published “‘Soul and Body’ Texts and the Structure of the Vercelli Book,” Romanobarbarica 20 (2010–11): 109–28. Vercelli contains eight penitential homilies (II, III, IV, VIII, IX, X, XXI, XXII) and seven, arguably eight, homilies for Rogationtide, six explicitly rubricated as such (XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XIX, XX). Half of the Rogationtide homilies discuss Judgment in detail, and even those that do not (XII, XIX, XX) can be considered broadly eschatological because of that feast’s connection to the Parousia. See below, Chapter 3, 85–116, for a detailed discussion of Vercelli’s Rogationtide texts. These are the two names given to the motif broadly, along with the generically specific address of the soul to the body or the body and soul debate. On the general topic of the soul and body tradition in medieval literature, see J. Justin Brent, “The Legend of the Soul and Body in Medieval England” (PhD diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2000), and “From Address to Debate: Generic Considerations in the Debate Between Soul and Body,” Comitatus 32 (2001): 1–18. On the divide between the two categories, see J. D. Bruce, “A Contribution to the Study of ‘The Body and The Soul’: Poems in English,” MLN 5 (1890): 193–201. See Louise Dudley, Egyptian Elements in the Legend of the Body and Soul (PhD diss., Bryn Mawr College, 1910), 18–35. Found in Vercelli IX. See Fred C. Robinson, “The Devil’s Account of the Next World: An Anecdote from Old English Homiletic Literature,” NM 73 (1972): 362–71; Donald G.

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14. 15. 16.

17.

1 8. 19.

2 0. 21.

22.

23

Scragg, “‘The Devil’s Account of the Next World’ Revisited,” AN&Q 24 (1986): 107–10; and Charles D. Wright, The Irish Tradition in Old English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), 175–214. Adapted version found in Vercelli IV. On the ‘Three Utterances,’ see below, Chapter 1, note 35. Found in Vercelli XIII. See J. E. Cross, “The Dry Bones Speak—A Theme in Some Old English Homilies,” JEGP 56 (1957): 434–9. Found in Vercelli IV and X. See J. E. Cross, “‘Ubi Sunt’ Passages in Old English—Sources and Relationships,” (Vetenskaps-Societetens i Lund, Årsbok 1956), 23–44; and Claudia DiSciacca “The Ubi Sunt Motif and the Soul-and-Body Legend in Old English Homilies: Sources and Relationships,” JEGP 105 (2006): 365–87. See also Donald G. Scragg, “Napier’s ‘Wulfstan’ Homily XXX: Its Sources, Its Relationship to the Vercelli Book, and Its Style,” ASE 6 (1977): 197–211. Found in Vercelli VIII and arguably omitted, by the loss of a folio, from Vercelli XV. See Scragg, “Corpus of Vernacular Homilies,” 80. On the Ego te, Homo speech and Old English literature, see Rudolph Willard, “Vercelli Homily VIII and the Christ,” PMLA 42 (1927): 314–30; Edward B. Irving, Jr., “Latin Prose Sources for Old English Verse,” JEGP 57 (1958): 588–95; Mary Clayton, “Delivering the Damned: A Motif in OE Homiletic Prose,” MÆ 60 (1986): 92–102; Charles D. Wright, “The Pledge of the Soul: A Judgment Theme in Old English Homiletic Literature and Cynewulf’s Elene,” NM 91 (1990): 23–30; Paul E. Szarmach, “Caesarius of Arles and the Vercelli Homilies,” Traditio 26 (1970): 315–23; and Joseph B. Trahern Jr., “Caesarius of Arles and Old English Literature: Some Contributions and a Recapitulation,” ASE 5 (1976): 105–19. Adapted version found in Vercelli VIII. See Wright, “The Pledge of the Soul.” Théodor Batiouchkof, “Le Débat de l’âme et du corps,” Romania 20 (1891): 1–55 and 513–78; Dudley, Egyptian Elements, and “An Early Homily on the ‘Body and Soul’ Theme,” JEGP 8 (1909): 225–53; and Rudolph Willard, “The Address of the Soul to the Body,” PMLA 50 (1935): 957–83. For a less rigorous survey of soul-and-body metaphors in non-Western texts, see Henry Malter, “Personifications of Soul and Body: A Study in Judaeo-Arabic Literature,” The Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s. 2 (1912): 453–79. For lucid and compact reviews of both soul-and-body’s sources and a history of its criticism, see Douglas Moffat, The Old English Soul and Body (Wolfeboro: D. S. Brewer, 1990), 28–44, and The Soul’s Address to the Body: The Worcester Fragments, Medieval Texts and Studies (East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1987), 39–51. Batiouchkof, “Le Débat,” 9–10. On the Visio S. Pauli, see Theodore Silverstein, Visio Sancti Pauli: The History of the Apocalypse in Latin together with Nine Texts (London: Christophers, 1935); and Theodore Silverstein and Anthony Hilhorst, eds., The Apocalypse of Paul: A New Critical Edition of Three Long Latin Versions (Geneva: Patrick Cramer Editeur, 1997). On the Visio in the British Isles, see Wright, The Irish Tradition in Old English Literature, 106–74; Antonette DiPaolo Healey, ed., The Old English Vision of St. Paul (Cambridge: Medieval Academy of America, 1978), 41–57; and her “Visio Sancti Pauli,” in SASLC: The Apocrypha, 67–70. See also A. B. van Os, Religious Visions: The Development of the Eschatological Elements in Mediaeval English Religious Literature (Amsterdam: H. J. Paris, 1932). M. R. James, The New Testament Apocrypha (Berkeley: Apocryphile Press, 2004), 530–5.

24 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book 23. Moffat, Old English Soul and Body, 29. 24. The Latin homilies are the Nonantola sermon, Rome, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, MS 2096(52) (the only copy Batiouchkof knew); and Pseudo-Augustine Sermo 69, Sermo ad Fratres in Eremo Commemorantes (PL 40.1356–7). The Old English homilies are translations from the Latin, found in CCCC MS 201 (Ker no. 50, art. 2) and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 113 (Ker no. 331, art. 22; edited as Napier Homily XXIX). Dudley provides a parallel edition of the soul’s address from all four versions in “An Early Homily on the ‘Body and Soul’ Theme,” 225–53. 25. Exeter, Cathedral Library, MS 3501, Ker no. 116. 26. See Dudley, Egyptian Elements, 51–90, for a discussion of the Soul’s Journey and its relationship to soul-and-body. 27. Moffat, Old English Soul and Body, 35. 28. E.g., Eleanor K. Heningham, “Old English Precursors of The Worcester Fragments,” PMLA 55 (1940): 291; and Mary Heyward Ferguson “The Structure of the Soul’s Address to the Body in Old English,” JEGP 69 (1970): 72. 29. In these later versions, the focus is on the rhetorically savvy verbal sparring of the soul and the body as they debate their respective culpabilities as seats of sin. See Brent, “From Address to Debate,” 2–3; Robert W. Ackerman, “The Debate of the Body and the Soul and Parochial Christianity,” Speculum 37 (1962): 554–5; and Michel-André Bossy, “Medieval Debates of Body and Soul,” Comparative Literature 28 (1976): 144–63. 30. E.g., Ferguson, “The Structure of the Soul’s Address.” Ferguson, in an effort to make the Old English poem conform to generic conventions, goes so far as to argue that the body’s inability to reply in the poem “balanced against the logical necessity to answer, creates tension. Thus the very muteness of the Body heightens the drama of the poem,” making the text a ‘dialogue’ in the dramatic sense (74). 31. A notable exception is Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Paradise, Death, and Doomsday in AngloSaxon Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001). Kabir’s book analyzes the AS concept of an ‘interim paradise’ for the dead, and therefore pays close attention to OE texts’ details about the after-life. 32. M. R. Godden, “Anglo-Saxons on the Mind,” in Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies Presented to Peter Clemoes on the Occasion of his Sixty-Fifth Birthday, eds. Helmut Gneuss and Michael Lapidge (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), 287. 33. E.g., Soon-Ai Low, “Approaches to the Old English Vocabulary for ‘Mind,’” SN 73 (2001): 11–22; and Antonina Harbus, The Life of the Mind in Old English Poetry (Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 2002). Low challenges Godden’s binary but still acknolwedges that with OE ‘mind’ words at least, context is the single most important indicator of connotation; and Harbus maintains that the diversity of OE ‘mind’-words is a testament to the importance of the Anglo-Saxon conception of the poet, and thus the concept of ‘self’ that such a vocabulary describes is limited to include only the ‘self’ that writes poetry. 34. Godden, “Anglo-Saxons on the Mind,” 271. 35. Margrit Soland, Altenglische Ausdrücke für ‘Leib’ und ‘Seele’: Eine semantische Analyse (Zurich: Juris, 1979); and Michael Phillips, “Heart, Mind, and Soul in Old English: A Semantic Study” (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1985). 36. Phillips, “Heart, Mind, and Soul,” 19.

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3 7. James T. McIlwain, “Brain and Mind in Anglo-Saxon Medicine,” Viator 37 (2006): 103–12. 38. Earl Anderson, Folk Taxonomies in Early English (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2003), 327–51. 39. See especially Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self, vol. 3 of The History of Sexuality (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). 40. See Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998). 41. E.g., Collin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual, 1050–1200 (New York: Harper & Row, 1987). 42. Anderson, Folk Taxonomies, 330. 43. Ibid., 342. 44. Ibid., 350. 45. Ibid., 330. 46. Anderson does not treat terms for the body in the chapter, although he does treat the related vocabulary of the five senses on his 309–26. 47. Leslie Lockett, Anglo-Saxon Psychologies in the Vernacular and Latin Traditions (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2011), and Britt Mize, Traditional Subjectivities: The Old English Poetics of Mentality (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2013). Michael Matto offers a useful review of both in “Vernacular Traditions: Exploring Anglo-Saxon Mentalities,” JEGP 115.1 (2016): 95–113. 48. See above, note 33. 49. Matto, “Vernacular Traditions,” 95. 50. Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe, “Body and Law in Late Anglo-Saxon England,” ASE 27 (1998): 210. 51. John C. Pope, “Dramatic Voices in The Wanderer and The Seafarer,” in Franciplegius: Medieval and Linguistic Studies in Honor of Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr., eds. J. B. Bessinger and R. P. Creed (New York: New York UP, 1965), 164–93; Stanley B. Greenfield, “Min, Sylf, and ‘Dramatic Voices in The Wanderer and The Seafarer,’” JEGP 68 (1969): 212–20; Pope, “Second Thoughts on the Interpretation of The Seafarer,” ASE 3 (1974): 75–86; Greenfield, “Sylf, Season, Structure and Genre in The Seafarer,” ASE 9 (1981): 199–211. 52. O’Brien O’Keefe, “Body and Law,” 210. 53. See especially Godden, “Anglo-Saxons on the Mind”; and Peter Clemoes, “Mens absentia cogitans in The Seafarer and The Wanderer,” in Medieval Literature and Civilization, ed. D. A. Pearsall and R. A. Waldron (London: The Athlone Press, 1969), 62–77. 54. Jacqueline A. Stodnik and Renée R. Trilling, “Before and After Theory: Seeing Through the Body in Early Medieval England,” postmedieval 1.3 (2010): 349. 55. Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), Chapter VII, 239–97. 56. Ibid., 241–2. Bynum discusses Peter’s Four Books of Sentences on her 240–3. 57. Ibid., 247. 58. Ibid., 247. 59. Ibid., 253–4. 60. For pertinent examples, see Graham Harman, “On Vicarious Causation,” Collapse 2 (2007): 187–221; J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955, ed. J. O. Urmson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962);

26 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book

61. 62.

63. 64.

6 5. 66.

6 7. 68. 69.

70.

71. 72.

7 3. 74.

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990; repr., New York: Routledge, 2007); Claire Colebrook, “Queer Aesthetics,” in Queer Times, Queer Becomings, eds. E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011); and Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality (Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2016). Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980). In a series of articles in Semiotica, Paul Kockelman provides a lucid summary of the development of modern theories of subjectivity and their relationship to agency and selfhood: Kockelman, “Agent, Person, Subject, Self,” Semiotica 162 (2006): 1–18; “Residence in the World: Affordances, Instruments, Actions, Roles, and Identities,” Semiotica 162 (2006): 19–71; and “Representations of the World: Memories, Perceptions, Beliefs, Intentions, and Plans,” Semiotica 162 (2006): 73–125. See also Dan Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006). Peter Clemoes, “Action in Beowulf and Our Perception of It,” in Old English Poetry: Essays on Style, ed. Daniel G. Calder (Berkeley: U of California P, 1979), 147–68. All subsequent quotations of Beowulf are taken from Klaeber’s Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, 4th ed., edited by R. D. Fulk, Robert Bjork, and John D. Niles (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2008), and cited parenthetically by line number. All translations are mine. Clemoes, “Action in Beowulf,” 155. In the third section of Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999), Agamben traces the development of the philosophical debate over action as a function of faculty or potentiality. Clemoes, “Action in Beowulf,” 155. Peter Clemoes, Interactions of Thought and Language in Old English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995). Clemoes sees the stylized zoomorphic images as pertaining to active potential: as with the horses, who leap according to their nature, so a depiction of a horse would focus on characteristics fundamental to ‘horse-ness’. A bird would be portrayed as all wings, since that is the quintessential ‘bird’. For more on this quality of representation in AngloSaxon literature, see also Ruth Waterhouse, “Spatial Perception and Conceptions in the (Re-)Presenting and (Re-)Constructing of Old English Texts,” Parergon 9 (1991): 87–102. Although Clemoes does not make the explicit connection between his own work and the speech-act theory of linguists such as Austin, the importance of oaths and binding legal language in AS England suggests that language certainly carried performative weight. On speech-act theory, see Austin, How to Do Things with Words. Clemoes, Interactions of Thought and Language, 74. E.g., in Klaeber’s edition (gloss on 254, note 2697 ff.); Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson’s edition (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) (gloss on 142, ll. 2697–9); and E. Talbot Donaldson’s translation (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002) (gloss on 45, note 2). In Klaeber’s edition, the editors give a summary of previous scholarship debating the lines. ASPR VI, 55–7. I am grateful to Jill D. Hamilton Clements for pointing me toward this law in a personal correspondence following her paper “‘He nyle ðeof beon’: A Consideration of Theft and Oath-Making in the Laws of Cnut,” given at the 2009 International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo).

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75. F. Liebermann, ed., Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, vol. I (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1903), 324–5. See also Patrick Wormald’s entry on “Oaths” in The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England, eds. Michael Lapidge et al. (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 338–9. 76. Clements, “‘He nyle ðeof beon.’” 77. Cf. Ælfric’s Colloquy, ed. G. N. Garmonsway (Exeter: U of Exeter P, 2005): “beo þæt þu eart; forþam micel hynð 7 sceamu hyt is menn nellan [w]esan þæt he ys 7 þæt þe he [w]esan sceal” [be what you are, because it is great humiliation and shame to a man who will not be what he is and what he should be] (242–3). 78. On the concept of the continual reformation of the Christian subject, see Gerhart B. Ladner, The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1959), and below, Chapter 2, 61–83. 79. Indeed, modern orthodox (Roman Catholic and Eastern) churches place contrition before confession and absolution. 80. ASPR III, 143–7. 81. Michael Matto, “True Confessions: The Seafarer and Technologies of the Sylf,” JEGP 103 (1998): 157–79. 82. Ibid., 171–2. 83. Ibid., 171. 84. Ibid., 175. 85. Ibid., 171. 86. Ibid., 177. 87. I will be referring to the generic Christian subject throughout as he, since it is apparent from writings of the period that authors generally assume a male audience. It is not surprising that even in texts for which a female audience is implied, the mode of address is often identical, suggesting that AS women would have been expected to male-identify. This is not to say that the question of gendered or sexed subjectivity in AS literature cannot or should not be addressed. Rather, I am choosing to assume a male subject in a conscious effort to narrow the focus of this study to one identity category: religious belief. The issue of female subjectivity in AS England deserves its own analysis. 88. This distinction is taken from Paul Strohm, “Chaucer’s Audience(s): Fictional, Implied, Intended, Actual,” ChauR 18 (1983): 137–64. 89. Cf. Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood. 90. Clare Lees and Gillian Overing, “Before History, Before Difference: Bodies, Metaphor, and the Church in Anglo-Saxon England,” Yale Journal of Criticism 11 (1998): 316. 91. Ibid., 329. 92. Ibid., 316.

References Ackerman, Robert W. “The Debate of the Body and the Soul and Parochial Christianity.” Speculum 37 (1962): 541–65. Ælfric. Ælfric’s Colloquy. Edited by G. N. Garmonsway. 1939. Reprint, Exeter: U of Exeter P, 2005.

28 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book Agamben, Giorgio. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Edited and translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. Alcuin. “Alcuin, De Ratione Animae: A Text with Introduction, Critical Apparatus, and Translation.” Edited and translated by James J. M. Curry. PhD diss., Cornell University, 1966. ———. De ratione animae. PL 101.613–38. Anderson, Earl. Folk Taxonomies in Early English. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2003. Austin, John L. How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Edited by J. O. Urmson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Batiouchkof, Théodor. “Le Débat de l’âme et du corps.” Romania 20 (1891): 1–55, 513–78. Biggs, Frederick M., ed. Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture: The Apocrypha. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007. Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998. Boenig, Robert. “Andreas and Doctrinal Controversy in the Early Middle Ages.” PhD diss., State University of New Jersey, 1978. ———. “Andreas, the Eucharist, and Vercelli.” JEGP 79, no. 3 (1980): 313–31. ———. Saint and Hero: Andreas and Medieval Doctrine. Lewisberg: Bucknell UP, 1991. Bossy, Michel-André. “Medieval Debates of Body and Soul.” Comparative Literature 28 (1976): 144–63. Brent, J. Justin. “From Address to Debate: Generic Considerations in the Debate Between Soul and Body.” Comitatus 32 (2001): 1–18. ———. “The Legend of the Soul and Body in Medieval England.” PhD diss., SUNY at Stony Brook, 2000. Bruce, J. D. “A Contribution to the Study of ‘The Body and The Soul’: Poems in English.” MLN 5 (1890): 193–201. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. 1990. Reprint, New York: Routledge, 2007. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion. New York: Zone Books, 1992. Clayton, Mary. “Delivering the Damned: A Motif in OE Homiletic Prose.” MÆ 60 (1986): 92–102. Clements, Jill D. Hamilton. “‘He nyle ðeof beon’: A Consideration of Theft and Oath-Making in the Laws of Cnut.” Words and Deeds in Anglo-Saxon England, Session 264. International Congress on Medieval Studies. University of Western Michigan, Kalamazoo. May 8, 2009. Clemoes, Peter. “Action in Beowulf and our Perception of it.” In Old English Poetry: Essays on Style, edited by Daniel G. Calder, 147–68. Berkeley: U of California P, 1979. ———. Interactions of Thought and Language in Old English Poetry. CSASE 12. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. ———. “Mens absentia cogitans in The Seafarer and The Wanderer.” In Medieval Literature and Civilization, edited by D. A. Pearsall, and R. A. Waldron, 62–77. London: Athlone Press, 1969. Colebrook, Claire. “Queer Aesthetics.” In Queer Times, Queer Becomings, edited by E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen. Albany: SUNY Press, 2011. Collins, Patricia Hill, and Sirma Bilge. Intersectionality. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016.

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Cook, A. S. “Cardinal Guala amd the Vercelli Book.” University of California Literary Bulletin 10. Sacramento: J. D. Young, Supt. State Printing, 1888. Cross, J. E. “The Dry Bones Speak—A Theme in Some Old English Homilies.” JEGP 56 (1957): 434–9. ———. “‘Ubi Sunt’ Passages in Old English—Sources and Relationships.” Vetenskaps-Societetens i Lund, Årsbok, 23–44. 1956. Dockray-Miller, Mary. “Female Devotion and the Vercelli Book.” PQ 83 (2004): 337–54. Donaldson, E. Talbot, trans. Beowulf: A Prose Translation. 2nd ed, edited by Nicholas Howe. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002. Di Sciacca, Claudia. “The Ubi Sunt Motif and the Soul-and-Body Legend in Old English Homilies: Sources and Relationships.” JEGP 105 (2006): 365–87. Dudley, Louise. “An Early Homily on the ‘Body and Soul’ Theme.” JEGP 8 (1909): 225–53. ———. The Egyptian Elements in the Legend of the Body and Soul. PhD diss., Bryn Mawr College, 1910. Ferguson, Mary Heyward. “The Structure of the Soul’s Address to the Body in Old English.” JEGP 69 (1970): 72–80. Förster, Max. “Der Vercelli-Codex CXVII nebst Abdruck einiger altenglischer Homilien der Handscrift.” In Festschrift für Lorenz Morsbach, edited by F. Holthausen and H. Spies. Studien zur englischen Philologie 50, 20–179. Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1913. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. 3 vols. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Fulk, R. D., Robert Bjork, and John D. Niles, eds. Klaeber’s Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg. 4th ed. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2008. Gatch, Milton McC. “Eschatology in the Anonymous Old English Homilies.” Traditio 21 (1965): 117–65. Gneuss, Helmut. Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: A List of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England up to 1100. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 241. Tempe: CMRS, 2001. Godden, Malcolm. “Anglo-Saxons on the Mind.” In Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies Presented to Peter Clemoes on the Occasion of his Sixty-Fifth Birthday, edited by Helmut Gneuss and Michael Lapidge, 271–95. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985. Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. Greenfield, Stanley B. “Min, Sylf, and ‘Dramatic Voices in The Wanderer and The Seafarer.’” JEGP 68 (1969): 212–20. ——— “Sylf, Season, Structure and Genre in The Seafarer.” ASE 9 (1981): 199–211. Halsall, Maureen. “Vercelli and the ‘Vercelli Book.’” PMLA 84, no. 6 (1969): 1545–50. Harbus, Antonina. The Life of the Mind in Old English Poetry. Costerus n.s. 143. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002. Harman, Graham. “On Vicarious Causation.” Collapse 2 (2007): 187–221. Healey, Antonette DiPaolo, ed. The Old English Vision of St. Paul. Speculum Anniversary Monographs 2. Cambridge: Medieval Academy of America, 1978. ———. “Visio Sancti Pauli.” In Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture: The Apocrypha, 67–70.

30 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book Heningham, Eleanor K. “Old English Precursors of The Worcester Fragments.” PMLA 55 (1940): 291–307. Herben, S. T. “The Vercelli Book: A New Hypothesis.” Speculum 10 (1935): 91–4. Irving, Edward B., Jr. “Latin Prose Sources for Old English Verse.” JEGP 57 (1958): 588–95. James, M. R. ed. and trans. The New Testament Apocrypha. Berkeley: Apocryphile Press, 2004. Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. Paradise, Death, and Doomsday in Anglo-Saxon Literature. CSASE 32. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Ker, Neil R. Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon. 1957. Reprint, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Kockelman, Paul. “Agent, Person, Subject, Self.” Semiotica 162 (2006): 1–18. ———. “Representations of the World: Memories, Perceptions, Beliefs, Intentions, and Plans.” Semiotica 162 (2006): 73–125. ———. “Residence in the World: Affordances, Instruments, Actions, Roles, and Identities.” Semiotica 162 (2006): 19–71. Krapp, George Philip, and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, eds. The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records. 6 vols. New York: Columbia UP, 1931–42. Ladner, Gerhart B. The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1959. Lapidge, Michael et al, eds. The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Lees, Clare, and Gillian Overing. “Before History, Before Difference: Bodies, Metaphor, and the Church in Anglo-Saxon England.” Yale Journal of Criticism 11 (1998): 315–34. Liebermann, F., ed. Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen. 3 vols. Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1903–16. Lockett, Leslie. Anglo-Saxon Psychologies in the Vernacular and Latin Traditions. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2011. Lombard, Peter. Sententiarum libri quatuor. PL 192.519–964. Low, Soon-Ai. “Approaches to the Old English Vocabulary for ‘Mind.’” SN 73 (2001): 11–22. Malter, Henry. “Personifications of Soul and Body: A Study in Judaeo-Arabic Literature.” The Jewish Quarterly Review n.s. 2 (1912): 453–79. Matto, Michael. “True Confessions: The Seafarer and Technologies of the Sylf.” JEGP 103 (1998): 157–79. ———. “Vernacular Traditions: Exploring Anglo-Saxon Mentalities.” JEGP 115, no. 1 (2016): 95–113. McIlwain, James T. “Brain and Mind in Anglo-Saxon Medicine.” Viator 37 (2006): 103–12. Migne, J.-P., ed. Patrologia Latina. 221 vols., with 5 supplements edited by A. Hamann. Paris: n.p. 1844–1974. Mitchell, Bruce, and Fred C. Robinson, eds. Beowulf: An Edition. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Mize, Britt. Traditional Subjectivities: The Old English Poetics of Mentality. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2013. Moffat, Douglas, ed. and trans. The Old English Soul and Body. Wolfeboro: D. S. Brewer, 1990. ———, ed. The Soul’s Address to the Body: The Worcester Fragments. Medieval Texts and Studies. East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1987.

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Morris, Collin. The Discovery of the Individual, 1050–1200. New York: Harper & Row, 1987. Ó Carragáin, Éamonn. “Cynewulf’s Epilogue to Elene and the Tastes of the Vercelli Compiler: A Paradigm of Meditative Reading.” In Lexis and Texts in Early English: Studies Presented to Jane Roberts, edited by Christian J. Kay and Louise M. Sylvester. Costerus n.s. 133, 187–201. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001. ———. “How Did the Vercelli Collector Interpret The Dream of the Rood?” Occasional Papers in Linguistics and Language Learning 8 (1981): 487–505. ———. “Rome, Ruthwell, Vercelli: The Dream of the Rood and the Italian Connection.” In Vercelli tra oriente e occidente tra tarda antichità e medioevo, edited by Vittoria Dolcetti Corazza, 59–100. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 1999. ———. “‘Soul and Body’ Texts and the Structure of the Vercelli Book.” Romanobarbarica 20 (2010–11): 109–28. ———. “The Vercelli Book as an Ascetic Florilegium.” PhD diss., Queen’s University of Belfast, 1975. O’Keefe, Katherine O’Brien. “Body and Law in Late Anglo-Saxon England.” ASE 27 (1998): 209–32. Os, A. B. van. Religious Visions: The Development of the Eschatological Elements in Mediaeval English Religious Literature. Amsterdam: H. J. Paris, 1932. Peter Lombard. Sententiarum libri quatuor. PL 192.519–964. Phillips, Michael. “Heart, Mind, and Soul in Old English: A Semantic Study.” PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1985. Pope, John C. “Dramatic Voices in The Wanderer and The Seafarer.” In Franciplegius: Medieval and Linguistic Studies in Honor of Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr., edited by J. B. Bessinger and R. P. Creed, 164–93. New York: New York UP, 1965. ———. “Second Thoughts on the Interpretation of The Seafarer.” ASE 3 (1974): 75–86. Reading, Amity. “Soul and Body: Reading the Anglo-Saxon Self through the Vercelli Book.” PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009. Remly, Paul G. “The Vercelli Book and Its Texts: A Guide to Scholarship.” In New Readings in the Vercelli Book, edited by Samantha Zacher and Andy Orchard. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2009. Robinson, Fred C. “The Devil’s Account of the Next World: An Anecdote from Old English Homiletic Literature.” NM 73 (1972): 362–71. ———. “Old English Literature in Its Most Immediate Context.” In Old English Literature in Context, edited by John D. Niles, 11–29. Woodbridge: Brewer, 1980. Scragg, Donald G. “The Compilation of the Vercelli Book.” In Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: Basic Readings, edited by Mary P. Richards, 317–43. New York: Routledge, 1994. ———. “The Corpus of Vernacular Homilies and Prose Saints’ Lives Before Ælfric.” In Old English Prose: Basic Readings, edited by Paul E. Szarmach, 73–150. London: Garland, 2000. ———. “‘The Devil’s Account of the Next World’ Revisited.” AN&Q 24 (1986): 107–10. ———. “Napier’s ‘Wulfstan’ Homily XXX: Its Sources, Its Relationship to the Vercelli Book, and Its Style.” ASE 6 (1977): 197–211. ———., ed. The Vercelli Homilies and Related Texts. EETS, 300. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. Silverstein, Theodore. Visio Sancti Pauli: The History of the Apocalypse in Latin together with Nine Texts. Studies and Documents 4. London: Christophers, 1935.

32 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book ———., and Anthony Hilhorst, eds. Apocalypse of Paul: A New Critical Edition of Three Long Latin Versions. Cahiers d’Orientalisme XXI. Geneva: Patrick Cramer Editeur, 1997. Sisam, Celia, ed. The Vercelli Book (Vercelli Biblioteca Capitolare cxvii). EEMF 19. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1976. Sisam, Kenneth. “Marginalia in the Vercelli Book.” In Studies in the History of Old English Literature. 1953, 109–18. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Soland, Margrit. Altenglische Ausdrücke für ‘Leib’ und ‘Seele’: Eine semantische Analyse. Zurich: Juris, 1979. Stodnik, Jacqueline A., and Renée R. Trilling. “Before and After Theory: Seeing Through the Body in Early Medieval England.” postmedieval 1, no. 3 (2010): 347–53. Strohm, Paul. “Chaucer’s Audience(s): Fictional, Implied, Intended, Actual.” ChauR 18 (1983): 137–64. Szarmach, Paul E. “Alcuin, Alfred and the Soul.” In Manuscript, Narrative, and Lexicon: Essays on Literary and Cultural Transmission in Honor of Whitney F. Bolton, edited by Robert Boenig and Kathleen Davis, 127–48. Lewisberg: Bucknell UP, 2000. ———. “Caesarius of Arles and the Vercelli Homilies.” Traditio 26 (1970): 315–23. ———. “The Scribe of the Vercelli Book.” SN 51 (1979): 179–88. Trahern, Joseph B., Jr. “Caesarius of Arles and Old English Literature: Some Contributions and a Recapitulation.” ASE 5 (1976): 105–19. Waterhouse, Ruth. “Spatial Perception and Conceptions in the (Re-)Presenting and (Re-) Constructing of Old English Texts.” Parergon 9 (1991): 87–102. Waters, Claire M. “Talking the Talk: Access to the Vernacular in Medieval Preaching.” In The Vulgar Tongue: Medieval and Postmedieval Vernacularity, edited by Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson, 31–42. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2003. Willard, Rudolph. “The Address of the Soul to the Body.” PMLA 50 (1935): 957–83. ———. “Vercelli Homily VIII and the Christ.” PMLA 42 (1927): 314–30. Wormald, Patrick. “Oaths.” In The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England, 338–9. Wright, Charles D. The Irish Tradition in Old English Literature. CSASE 6. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. ———. “The Pledge of the Soul: A Judgment Theme in Old English Homiletic Literature and Cynewulf’s Elene.” NM 91 (1990): 23–30. Zacher, Samantha. Preaching the Converted: The Style and Rhetoric of the Vercelli Homilies. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2009. Zahavi, Dan. Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.

·1· souls with bodies Parsing the Self in Vercelli Homilies IV, XXII, and Soul and Body I

As we have seen, the relationship between the soul and the body was a subject that captured the imaginations of theologians as well as poets throughout the Anglo-Saxon period, and manifested itself in patristic treatises, Latin and vernacular sermons, lay and clerical devotional writing, and poems. Though my reading of soul-and-body is informed by this corpus of texts, a comprehensive survey of doctrinal and philosophical writings on the subject is beyond the scope of this study. I am interested primarily not in the theological orthodoxy of soul-and-body, the generic conformity of soul-and-body material in the Vercelli Book, nor even the metaphysical beliefs of the Anglo-Saxons. I am interested instead in how soul-and-body rhetorically enacts models of selfhood for parenetic rather than philosophical ends. I begin by focusing on Vercelli’s three most explicit treatments of souland-body: homilies IV (fols. 16v–24v) and XXII (fols. 116v–120v), and the poetic Soul and Body I (fols. 101v–103v).1 I will examine how each of the three Vercelli soul-and-body texts reflects the performative subjectivity introduced in the previous chapter, specifically through representations of the body and penitential acts.2 This symbiotic relationship between flesh and spirit complicates the modern understanding of the Anglo-Saxon soul-body dichotomy by showing that the faculties of each constituent part were neither

34 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book systematically nor consistently delineated, but were instead conceptualized jointly as a model of cooperative performance; and that as such, neither corresponds to the divisions of conventional dualism. Because the body in such representations is the essential means to salvation, and shares in the eternal rewards or punishments of the soul, it cannot be dismissed either as an inevitable evil or as a mere burden. We must then consider the possibility that the soul-and-body motif was not describing a sanctioned or even a coherent metaphysical belief about the make-up of the self. That was perhaps the interest of the so-called classical writers identified by Malcolm Godden,3 but even such philosophical exercises had a parenetic telos, and as the previous chapter demonstrated, the classical/ vernacular binary is limiting. The purpose of theorizing the soul was always determined by the practical end to which that knowledge was to be put: the attainment of salvation. Classical and vernacular Anglo-Saxon authors were interested in the nature of the soul because that information was necessary for the proper care of the soul. How, then, did the literary soul-and-body function, if not as a description of a metaphysical or theological reality? In the same way, I argue, as the other eschatological material in the Vercelli Book— as a prescriptive and exemplary model for attaining salvation through action. Vercelli homilies IV and XXII and Soul and Body I illustrate the paradoxical unity of the soul-and-body dichotomy as a performative and efficacious model of Christian selfhood.

Homily IV Allen J. Frantzen summarizes the medieval principle of penance as such: “the salvation of the soul depends on the mortification of the body; unless the body suffers in repentance, the soul will be damned.”4 This basic tenet appears frequently in Old English literature, e.g., the tenth-century Old English Confessionale Pseudo-Egberti: “Se þe ðurh his lichaman gesýngige, he eac þurh his lichaman bete” [He who sins through his body also atones through his body].5 Penance in Anglo-Saxon England consisted of three discrete parts: confession, contrition, and absolution. Confession took one of three forms: public confession before a bishop; private confession before a priest; or personal confession as part of private devotion (sometimes completed with the help of a written list of set sins and tariffs).6 Following confession, the priest offered counsel and prescribed any requisite penitential acts, the most common of



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which was fasting (anywhere from a few days to several years) followed by prayer and almsgiving.7 The act of contrition followed, during which the penitent said a prayer of repentance for wrongdoing and promised to avoid repeating the sin in the future. The confessor then granted the penitent absolution and sent him back out into the world to perform the prescribed penance (the modern component ‘satisfaction’). Because it is through the body that penance must be performed, it is not surprising that explicitly penitential motifs like soul-and-body might reflect a more nuanced view of the physical self than is first apparent.8 Three texts in Vercelli deal explicitly with the separation of soul-and-body, two of which are formal soul-and-body addresses. It is to these three that we now turn our attention, as a means of establishing some of the general rhetorical and conceptual concerns of the motif in the Vercelli Book. Vercelli Homily IV is the codex’s first soul-and-body address.9 Although parts of it are unique, much of Vercelli IV’s content appears elsewhere in the corpus of Old English homilies: a second complete copy is to be found in the mid-eleventh-century CCCC MS 41, and a short fragment is preserved in a twelfth-century section of CCCC MS 367 Part 2.10 The homily’s penitential introduction borrows from a composite tenth-century Old English sermon known as the ‘Macarius’ homily, which survives in CCCC MS 201, 179–262.11 Finally, a portion of Vercelli IV was used by the compiler of the anonymous eleventh-century eschatological sermon known as Pseudo-Wulfstan XXX, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 113.12 Vercelli IV’s relationship to the soul-and-body tradition has been traced somewhat predictably through the line to the Macarius material identified by Théodor Batiouchkof and Louise Dudley,13 but Charles D. Wright has also traced the introductory material to a discourse on penance attributed doubtfully to the Syriac Father Ephraem of Edessa (d. 373).14 I will return to the significance of this connection with penance later in the chapter. For now, I will focus on how the homily represents the relationship between the soul and the body. After its general penitential opening about the soul’s need and the terrors of hell (IV.1–116),15 Vercelli IV turns to a saved soul’s address to its body, set at Last Judgment. According to the homilist, when an individual dies, his soul and his body separate and remain separated until Judgment, at which point both stand before God to receive their doom, and then join to experience either eternal reward or eternal punishment. The saved soul praises and thanks her body for its deeds during life, asking God “‘Dryhten hælend, ic bidde ðe eaðmodre stefne 7 mildre þæt ðu ne læte minne lichoman on forlædan þa he

36 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book swiðost swanc for me on þinum naman’” [“Lord Savior, I ask you in a humble and a mild voice that you not let my body be led to destruction when he so greatly toiled for me in your name”] (IV.141–3). The body then changes forms or hues (bleon [IV.156]),16 which are increasingly more beautiful, until finally the Judge proclaims, “‘On þyses lichoman hiwe man mæg gesion þæt hit is gelic þe sio sawl him onstælð’” [“In the form of this body, one may see that it is just as the soul says17 of him”] (IV.162–4). The word onstælan has a legal sense (‘charge with,’ ‘impute to,’ ‘accuse of,’ etc.);18 in effect, the soul is acting as an ‘oath-helper’ to the body in the tribunal of Judgment,19 and the body’s subsequent transformation stands as proof positive of what the soul has imputed to him: the performing of good deeds during life.20 Soul and body are then commanded to rejoin, after which they joyously praise God. The homilist then describes an analogous, though somewhat longer, scene for the damned soul and body (IV.202–87). The damned body also undergoes a physical transformation after Judgment; however, as Thomas N. Hall has pointed out in “The Psychedelic Transmogrification of the Soul in Vercelli Homily IV,” in this case a physical transformation of the soul also occurs “swa same swa se lichoma” [the same as the body] (IV.293).21 The homily then concludes with a description of the bows and arrows of the devil, and the corresponding shields provided by God as protection from the devil’s onslaughts (e.g., constancy in good deeds).22 As the physical transformation of the soul and the spiritual value of the body in this homily suggest, the incorporeal and the corporeal have a more complex and symbiotic relationship than their oppositional natures suggest. Hall observes that “Such abilities to think and feel which we now associate with the mind are shared by body and soul alike in Vercelli IV […] Both [damned and saved] bodies, moreover, are said to possess a will that is independent of the soul, and it is in the body’s will that sin is said to originate.”23 In fact, Vercelli IV goes so far as to indicate that the wills, or desires, of the soul and body can be and are often at odds with one another: the damned soul reproaches the body “‘Næron wyt næfre ane tid on anum willan’” [“Never were we two at one time of one will”] (IV.286–7).24 Thus, the conscious actions and desires of a person in life can be contrary to the desires of the soul without any indications of disagreement in the mental and emotional faculties of the body. To further complicate the matter, since, as Hall notes, the ‘soul’ in this souland-body address ceases to claim exclusive rights to volition and thought, it seems ‘soul’ as a concept comes to connote a self separate from what might be designated as ‘consciousness’ or ‘rational thought’—a distinction that aligns the motif with Godden and Michael Matto’s previously discussed vernacular



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readings of the mod, rather than classical readings of the rational soul. Matto notes the same somewhat troubling implication in The Seafarer: the hyge (the ‘soul’-word Matto associates with rational thought and the mind) is distinctly separated in The Seafarer’s language from both the body and the soul, and in the poem’s meditation on fleshly transience, the Seafarer considers rational thought merely another of the bodily faculties. The “prediction that [at death] the body will lose the powers of taste, of touch, and of movement, is followed by the telling observation that the flesh will also no longer think with the hyge. No more is said on the subject, leaving open the possibility that the hyge will simply cease to exist along with the bodily senses.”25 As in the soul-andbody motif, rational thought is distinguished from the soul proper, and is, in fact, identified with the body. Hall further points out that sensual perception and action (seeing, speaking, feeling, etc.) in Vercelli IV are also the province of both body and soul: the soul ‘looks,’ the body is ‘confounded.’ That the damned soul suffers a transformation akin to the damned body reflects the symbiotic, rather than oppositional, relationship between the two: though in the case of the damned soul, the transcendent self might claim to have no connections with the corporeal self, since the body is the seat of sin and since sin affects the soul in the afterlife, there is necessarily a connection, one the soul most certainly is meant to feel at Judgment. Although it may seem obvious, it is necessary to emphasize this idea here, if only because in modern readings of medieval literature, the assumed superiority of the soul seems by default to overshadow the possibility that the body might determine (or even in part constitute) the eternal self. Conversely, the soul’s desire to place all blame on the body is likewise problematic. The soul might claim that the fleshly sins of the body led to damnation against the soul’s will, but God declares to the damned soul “‘Gang þu, sawl, in þæt forlorene hus. Ða gyt ætsomne syngodon, gyt eac ætsomne swelten’” [“Go you, soul, into that damned house. Since you two sinned together, you two shall also die together”] (IV.303–4). Even if the body may be tempted by desires, it is at least partly the responsibility of the soul to maintain moderation, both spiritual and fleshly. What this seems to suggest is that each part, soul and body, is conceived of as having equal responsibility, but not equal agency, when it comes to salvation. Because the soul is depicted as passive in Vercelli IV and always willing to return to God, it is the body alone that can actively decide the fate of the pair during their time on earth together, through both his actions and his abstinences. But since the soul has been entrusted to the body for protection during

38 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book life, she will be considered guilty or innocent by association at Judgment. This is what motivates the homiletic injunction to continually think of (gemunan) the soul’s need during life: the penitent is exhorted to act on behalf of a thing that cannot act for herself. Even if the damned body were to have died early in life and released his soul (which the soul confesses she had long desired [IV.221ff.]), both would still be doomed to eternal punishment, not only because the body sinned, but more importantly, because he performed no mitigating penance afterward: “‘On anum dæge he geworhte oft þusend scylda, 7 to nænigre hreowe gehweorfan nolde’” [“In a day he often committed a thousand sins, and did not wish to do [lit. turn to] any penance”] (IV.236–7).26 Even the saved body is unable to remain completely pure, due to the very nature of the flesh, but in contrast, he is described as having willingly and contritely repented of his sins: in lines 144–51 alone, the soul uses the verb willan six times to say of the body that he wished or willed to work for his soul’s salvation, specifically in the context of penance (almsgiving). Negotiating embodiment is not simply a question of avoiding sin or escaping the corporeal. It is rather a question of atoning for those sins that will inevitably be committed by the body and the soul alike. Such atonement, however, can only be performed while the body lives. Death marks the cessation of salvific performance: the homilist of Vercelli IV warns his audience “Nis nænig medsceat to þæs deorwyrþe on ansyne þæt þær þone dom onwendan mæge, butan he her hwæthwuga to gode gedo” [There is no bribe so valuable in appearance that may there [i.e., at the eschaton] change that judgment, unless one here [i.e., on earth] does something for good] (IV.8–10). Death also heralds completion in the form of final Judgment, when soul and body will be reunited for eternity. As an organizing center, death (literal, conceptual, and metaphysical) operates in soul-and-body to emphasize not only the interdependent nature of the two parts of the self (corporeal and incorporeal), but also the importance accorded to the body in both efficacious penance and the doctrine of resurrection, which in the medieval period referred to the reconstitution of a very real body to receive Judgment.27 It is in this way that soul-and-body, although rhetorically retrospective, is inarguably concerned with the living body prospectively. It offers a model for the responsibility of salvation and illustrates for its audience the relationship between being and doing. The parts of the earthly self are equally responsible for the condition of the eternal self based on how well each performs its own duties in respect to the other. The body in soul-and-body is therefore not de facto ‘bad,’ nor is it simply ‘corporeal.’ It is essentially the part that does, and it is the soul’s duty to guide the doer.



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But what is the nature of that guidance? As the previous chapter demonstrated, in Old English literature in general, mental faculties, consciousness, and personality are all vaguely and unsystematically connected to the broader designations of ‘body,’ ‘soul,’ and ‘mind.’ Perhaps the most concrete conclusion that can be reached is that desire, volition, and thought seem to be the responsibility of the body’s ‘mind’-faculties; and the ‘soul’ seems to be defined simply as the animating, though passive, spiritual counterpart.28 The difficulty of taxonomizing these faculties, for medieval and modern authors alike, suggests that the soul/body divide may not be so much metaphysical as metonymic, a rhetorical tool that is used to represent performance or action as a fundamental component of selfhood. And the rhetorical aim of placing reason and thought within the body would therefore be to represent mental work as having spiritual agency. If thought is action, it must be found in the locus of action—the body—even if it corresponds to what modern philosophers might consider the incorporeal self. This would appear to contradict the teachings of Neo-Platonic Christian writers following the tradition of St. Augustine of Hippo. For Augustine, the soul, not the body, is the source of sensation and appetition as well as the seat of thought, will, and reason,29 and it is with the soul that Augustine identifies the self.30 Will springs from desire and the intent to act on that desire, and as such determines moral responsibility for action. Reason provides the means to govern desire. The will, however, can be in direct opposition to reason, leading a person who rationally understands a behavior to be spiritually void to perform that behavior nonetheless. The only thing that makes it possible for reason to prevail over the will is actual divine grace. In the Old English texts we have been considering, however, reason is a faculty of the body, as is the will. This suggests that thinking and feeling may have been conceptualized more strongly as actions rather than states of being in the Anglo-Saxon period.31 This seems obvious, given that thinking as a process is lexicalized with verbs, just like other actions. But it also appears to complicate the Augustinian/Platonic model of reason as associated with ‘being,’ whence its connection to the immortal soul, and its uniqueness to man. This is also borne out by Anglo-Saxon words for emotions, which also take active constructions: e.g., modigian, ‘to be proud.’ As Godden notes, “Linguistically, at least, passions can resemble mental actions rather than mental states.”32 Taking its cue from both of its sources, however, Vercelli IV makes it clear that thinking as an action, like its physical counterparts of penance and almsgiving, is for one purpose only: salvation. “Lytel is betwyh mannum

40 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book 7 nytenum butan andgite. Þy us sealde dryhten þæt andgyt þe he wolde þæt we ongeaton his willan 7 ure sawle hælo” [Little separates men and beasts except understanding. Therefore, the Lord gave to us the understanding because he wished that we should understand his will and the soul’s health] (IV.77–9).33 The rational or thinking distinction between man and beast is of note only as it pertains to the achievement of salvation. But the body in the soul-and-body motif is also capable of a more direct kind of action, extending beyond the mental: penance. At Judgment, the saved soul publicly credits her body with enabling her to participate in good works, and even God himself and the angels praise the meritorious relationship between the two: [þ]yssum wor[d]um þonne onfoð þa englas þære sawle, 7 hire to cweðað: “Eadigu eart ðu, sawl, for ðan þu name on þe gode eardunge in þinum huse—7 ic geseah gearwian þin huse on ðam halgan heofona rices wuldre—7 we ðe lædað to ðam þe ðu ær lufodest.” Cwið þonne sio sawl to þam englum bliðheorte stefne: “Ic gesio hwær min lichama stent on midre þisse menigo. Lætaþ hine to me. Ne sie he næfre wyrma mete, ne to grimmum geolstre mote wyrðan. He swanc for me, 7 ic gefeah on him. He unrotsode on þære scortan worulde, þæt he wolde þæt ic blissode unawendelice. Ic gladude on minre myrhðe, þær he geomrode 7 sorgode hu ic on ecnesse lybban sceolde. He swencte hine mid fæstenne, 7 ic gamenode in oferfyllo. Ic plegode on him, 7 he weop for me. Uncra synna he sworette 7 uncra scylda, 7 ic glædlice in wynsumnesse wæs ferende.” (IV.120–32) [with these words, then, the angels receive the soul, and say to her: “Blessed are you, soul, because you occupied in yourself a good dwelling in your house—and I saw your house prepared in the holy glory of the heavenly kingdom—and we are leading you to that which you previously loved.” Then the soul with joyous voice says to the angels, “I see where my body stands amid this multitude. Let him come to me. Let him never be worms’ food, nor become dire decayed matter. He toiled for me and I rejoiced in him. He was saddened in this brief world, because he wished that I would rejoice unceasingly. I was made glad in my joy while he worried and was anxious about how I was to live in eternity. He afflicted himself with fasting, and I played in surfeit. I played in him and he wept for me. He moaned for our sins and our guilts and I was gladly faring in happiness.”]

The passage quoted above is striking because of its implication that in the case of the saved soul, not only were the soul and body working in perfect accord during life (“‘He swanc for me, 7 ic gefeah on him,’” etc.), but their reunion in the afterlife is a joyous one (“‘Lætaþ hine to me,’” “‘we ðe lædað to ðam þe ðu ær lufodest,’” “‘Ne sie he næfre wyrma mete [wyrðan],’” etc.). This hardly reflects the frustrated disgust Matto and others34 have attributed



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to the soul-and-body tradition, but neither does it conflict with his reading of The Seafarer: in both, the flesh is an important, and constitutive, part of the self, one that will be difficult to surrender (literally and conceptually) at death, but which will inevitably be reclaimed at final Judgment (the setting of Vercelli IV). Vercelli IV’s remarkable treatment of the body is thrown into even greater relief, however, when we consider the homily in conjunction with its analogues. The above-quoted passage is a clear echo of the ‘Three Utterances’ exemplum,35 a motif often found alongside soul-and-body, in which the soul is extracted from her body at death (i.e., particular judgment) by attending angels or devils (depending on the state of the soul), and upon release gives three ‘utterances’ as to her fate. The experience of the damned soul mirrors that of the saved one, but it is the latter that is most pertinent to Vercelli IV and to which I now turn. After the angels ‘defeat’ the devils in combat over the soul, they surround her in two bands and escort her away from her body, singing Psalm 64 (65): 5–6, “Blessed is he whom you have chosen and received; he will occupy your dwellings,” and praising the soul for her good deeds. The soul then exclaims ‘How great is the light!,’ ‘How great is the joy!,’ ‘How easy is the journey!,’ to which the angels reply each time ‘Greater still awaits you.’ Since Rudolph Willard and Louise Dudley first published their editions of the ‘Three Utterances’ materials in the early twentieth century, numerous additional sources and analogues have been identified.36 Charles D. Wright has recently inventoried the fifty known manuscripts of the motif in the appendix to his article on the related ‘Two Deaths.’37 All versions of the ‘Three Utterances’ are in relatively close agreement about the details of the motif, but for comparison with Vercelli IV, I have selected parts of two of the Old English homilies taken from MS Junius 85/86 (Fadda I), and MS Hatton 114 (BazireCross 9), and the Latin text originally published by Dudley in the appendix to her Egyptian Elements in the Legend of the Body and Soul (see Table 1.1).38 As is clear from even a brief comparison of the four quotations, there are some notable differences between Vercelli IV and the ‘Three Utterances’ texts. The first and most obvious is the setting of the motif. In the ‘Three Utterances’ texts, the motif occurs at death, as the soul is being led out of her body.39 In Vercelli IV, the scene has been transposed to the resurrection of final Judgment, a choice that deliberately inserts the body into a context with which it was not originally associated. The decision to do so necessitates some careful revision on the part of the homilist. In the ‘Three Utterances’

42 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book Table 1.1:  A comparison of Vercelli IV and the “Three Utterances” texts.

texts, the function of the verse from Psalm 64 (65) is relatively clear, as is most thoroughly demonstrated by the Latin homily. Although it is directed at and refers to the soul, the quotation is addressed to God: ‘Blessed is he [i.e., the soul] whom you [i.e., God] have chosen …’ As the soul is being led from her body, the angels bless and comfort her by telling her that she has laid up for herself a good dwelling in heaven, in the “dwellings” of God, a structure that sets the earthly dwelling of the body against the eternal dwelling of heaven. In response to her liberation from her body and the promise of her salvation, the soul makes the three utterances as an expression of joy, leaving her body behind without a second thought. The passage is adapted somewhat differently in the two Old English homilies, but because of the retention of the Psalm quotation in both, the “hus” is still clearly understood to be a reference to a dwelling in heaven.



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In contrast, Vercelli IV retains neither the Psalm verse nor a complete Old English paraphrase that would identify the source of the language, and so the lines “‘Eadigu eart ðu, sawl, for ðan þu name on þe gode eardunge in þinum huse …’” must be interpreted in a new context. Because of the Last Judgment setting in Vercelli IV, the implicit contrast between the earthly dwelling and the heavenly one that situates the Psalm verse in the other homilies is also missing: in Vercelli IV, the soul is being led to her body for Last Judgment, not away from it at particular judgment. And in place of the ‘Three Utterances,’ the soul in Vercelli IV responds to the angels by praising her body. The juxtaposition of the angels’ reference to “hus” and the soul’s exclamation “‘Ic gesio hwær min lichama stent on midre þisse menigo …,’” forces “hus” to be read in the context as referring to the body, not to the courts of heaven. It is also clear that this must have been how the homilist of Vercelli IV understood the reference, as well: later in the homily, Christ-as-Judge commands the damned soul “‘Gang þu, sawl, in þæt forlorene hus. Đa gyt ætsomne syngodon, gyt eac ætsomne swelten’” [“Go, soul, into that forsaken house. Since you two sinned together, you will also die together”] (IV.303–4), where “hus” must refer to the body. 40 Indeed, this quotation illustrates what must have been at least part of the Vercelli homilist’s concern in adapting the ‘Three Utterances’: the necessity of the reunion of body and soul before either can receive true judgment. In his discussion of Vercelli’s eschatology, Milton Gatch identifies the difficulty in understanding Vercelli IV’s details. “The lack of unity in resurrection tradition [in the Vercelli Book] is compounded in Homily IV by the assertion that the reunion of the soul and body of the saved takes place after the judgment … The address of the soul to the body, usually an event of the post mortem interim, has been transferred to Doomsday.”41 Gatch maintains that the effect of such a transfer is the de-emphasis of theological consistency in favor of rhetorical flair and efficacy; in other words, the compiler of Vercelli was more concerned with collecting striking images than with ensuring doctrinal consistency. I agree that the Vercelli compiler was not concerned with establishing an internally coherent record of Doomsday theology, though where Gatch sees a scribe of questionable learning searching for lurid images, I see a compiler working to collate texts that represent ideas to motivate action rather than discrete events or doctrines to profess—ideas that are all structured (even if not uniformly) around the relationship between the flesh and the spirit. The codex’s explicit references to death and last things are thus framed not by a concern for cataloguing accurate descriptions of Doomsday, but for illustrating the positive and negative outcomes proceeding from the

44 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book relationship between the soul and the body. This overarching purpose is borne out in individual pieces like Vercelli IV. In the original ‘Three Utterances’ material discussed above, the soul alone is judged at death, and receives either punishment or reward at that time. In this setting, the question of final Judgment is unaddressed, but also ultimately unimportant: it is already clear what the eternal fate of the soul will be, and the final Judgment of Doomsday will simply be a reaffirmation of that fate. In contrast, the adapted material in Vercelli IV suggests the need to judge both body and soul together, which is possible only at final Judgment. The soul pleads before God “‘Dryhten, ne todæl ðu me 7 minne lichoman’” [“Lord, do not part me and my body”] (IV.136–7), validating the body’s fleshly existence by proclaiming that “[o]n godum worcum he wæs arod’” [“by good works he was pardoned”] (IV.138). The reference to “good works” brings us back to the homily’s opening. The soul-and-body material discussed above forms the core of Vercelli IV, but the beginning and ending of the homily are clearly penitential. The first lines of the homily read: Men þa leofestan, ic eow bidde 7 eaðmodlice lære þæt ge wepen 7 forhtien on þysse medmiclan tide for eowrum synnum, for þan ne bioð eowre tearas 7 eowre hreowsunga for noht getealde on þære toweardan worulde. Her gehyrð dryhten þa þe hine biddað, 7 him sylð hira synna forgifnesse. Her he is swiðe forebyrdig for us, ac he bið eft us swiðe reðe 7 egesful 7 ongryslic þam synfullum gemeted on ðam domdæge þær eal manna cyn to gelaþod is. (IV.1–7) [Dearly beloved, I ask and humbly enjoin that you weep and fear in this short time for your sins, because your tears and your penance will count for nothing in the world to come. Here, the Lord hears those who pray to him, and gives them forgiveness for their sins. Here, he is very forbearing toward us, but afterwards he will be found very wroth and terrible and angry toward those sinful ones on that Judgment Day, to which all of mankind will be summoned.]

The first section of the homily continues this rhetorical pattern of contrasting the ‘here’ of the transitory world with the ‘there’ of eternity, and stressing the need to perform good works while on earth: “Hwæt, us is la selre on þysse worulde þæt we symle ure synna hreowe don 7 hie mid ælmessan lysen, þæt we eft ne þurfon þa ecan witu þrowian” [Lo, it is better for us in this world that we always do penance for our sins and mitigate them with almsgiving, so that afterwards we need not suffer eternal tortures] (IV.63–5). Though the soul is credited with the penitential ‘work’ (God commands the angels to receive the soul because “‘[e]alle min beboda hire wæron ieðe to donne. Næs hio næfre



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weorca agæled’” [“all of my commands were easy for her to do. She was never neglectful of works”] [IV.119–20]), that work is still characterized as performative, not essential, and is something that must be “done” (to donne). Because it is the body alone that is capable of such action, the soul herself publicly acknowledges his role in salvation: “‘He unrotsode on þære scortan worulde, þæt he wolde þæt ic blissode unawendelice’” (IV.127–8). This is only logical if we remember that linguistically the ‘body’ refers not only to the corporeal form, but also to the mental and judgmental faculties: the body is metonymically connected to performance of all kinds. The divide represented by soul and body is not a ‘being’ one, but rather a ‘doing’ one, in the active though not necessarily physical sense. Thus, Vercelli IV models the concept of the good soul working in accord with her body, and demonstrates a successful soul and body partnership: the relationship with the body doesn’t necessarily have to be an antagonistic one, though it may be a difficult one. The point is not to question the transience of the carnis, but rather to stress the work of the corpus. The joyous reunion of the saved soul and body in Vercelli IV illustrates that the body, although a potentially dangerous seat of sin, is also the only way the pious Christian can achieve salvation, and is central to the concept of completion that all Christian subjects anticipate at Judgment.

Soul and Body I Soul and Body I (S&BI) differs in significant ways from Vercelli IV: instead of a Doomsday event, the address in S&BI is part of the soul’s weekly night-visit to its body after death but before Judgment, for the space of “þreo hund wintra, // butan ær þeodcyning, / aelmihtig god, // ende worulde, / wyrcan wille” [three hundred winters, unless before then the king of peoples, almighty God, wishes to bring about the end of the world] (S&BI 12–4a).42 But because part of the soul’s castigation of the body is a fearful prediction of the judgment process, the effect is similar to that achieved in Vercelli IV: the soul’s repeated returns to her body both heighten the anticipation of their final reunion and draw attention to the incomplete nature of the particular judgment that has already been passed on the soul alone. Like the mute body in Vercelli IV, the corpse in S&BI lies motionless in response to the soul’s rebuke: “Ligeð dust þær hit wæs, / ne mæg him ondsware // ænige gehatan” [The dust lies where it was, nor may it give [the soul] any answer] (S&BI 105b–6).43 The very basis of the poem is the

46 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book uselessness and complete inertia of the flesh after death, which from the beginning strikingly foregrounds the importance of performing penance while the body yet lives. The poet chooses to reinforce these themes of separation and unity on the level of individual word choice. After the damned soul’s address, the decay of the body is described in stunning detail (S&BI 108–26). This passage has occasioned remark for its seemingly superfluous graphic realism,44 but like the arresting passages in Vercelli IV, the body’s putrefaction in S&BI is serving a didactic purpose, as is demonstrated in the following quotation: Bið þæt heafod tohliden,   handa toliðode, geaglas toginene,   goman toslitene, sina beoð asocene,   swyra becowen, fingras tohrorene.   (S&BI 108–11a) [The head is split open, the hands disjointed, the jaws agape, the gums torn, the sinews are sucked away, the neck chewed through, the fingers dropped off.]

The repetition of the “to-” prefix, which signifies separation, creates a series of images not only of bodily decay, but also of rupture and disunity. Matto notes this language of separation in the Exeter Book’s largely overlapping Soul and Body II (S&BII), but assumes it to represent a parodic commentary on the body’s general failure as the soul’s ‘container,’ and more broadly, on the essential schism between soul and body.45 But the frame of the passage provides the context for a more integral reading of the body’s disintegration. Just prior to the body’s decay, the soul ends her harangue with a reference to the coming Judgment, at which time the body will pay for its sins according to the joint:46 “Þonne ne bið nan na to þæs lytel lið   on lime aweaxen, þæt ðu ne scyle for anra   gehwylcum onsundrum riht agildan,   þonne reðe bið dryhten æt þam dome.”    (S&BI 97–100a) [“Then there will be no joint that grows in any of your limbs so small that you will not have to pay the proper price for each one separately, when the Lord will be so harsh at the Judgment.”]

Although the soul has been speaking to the body about their inevitable reunion at Judgment and their future of suffering together as one, the imagery of dismemberment surrounding the passage—it is preceded by the reference to punishment by the joints, and followed by the description of ruptured



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flesh—allows the soul to distance herself from her body. It also represents the fundamental disunity of the soul and the body, but not, as Matto assumes, from an ontological perspective. It functions rhetorically instead, as a means of dramatizing the eternal outcome of ‘disunity’ (i.e., discord), during life: damnation. Indeed, the damned soul in Soul and Body I, like that in Vercelli IV, cannot wait to be separated from her body, and admonishes him, “‘[a] ic uncres gedales onbad / earfoðlice’” [“always I awaited our parting with difficulty”] (S&BI 37b–38a). Despite the soul’s acknowledgment that Judgment will bring reunion, the effect of the damned soul’s address is to highlight the discord experienced by a soul and a body unable to work together successfully. But like Vercelli IV, S&BI is unusual among extant soul-and-body materials for its presentation of a saved soul’s address (SSA) as well as a damned soul’s, and it is this fundamental difference that separates the poem from the version in the Exeter Book, fols. 98r–100r.47 The SSA in Vercelli, which ends the poem, has been a point of much contention, but for reasons of form rather than content. Instead of analyzing S&BI as a rare example of the saved soul’s address among extant soul-and-body materials, scholars have tended to focus on the metrical and stylistic ‘deficiencies’ of the SSA as compared with the rest of the poem(s), all of which ostensibly point to the conclusion that the SSA must have been a later addition to the poem, and a poor one at that.48 But the evidence is equivocal at best. First, the SSA is metrically deficient in several places, as compared to the very regular meter of the DSA. Even champions of the integrity of Vercelli’s S&B as compared with Exeter’s are forced to admit the SSA’s inferior poetry.49 Second, the SSA’s beginning in the Vercelli Book is offset quite clearly by a capital edh in the manuscript, indicating that the scribe may have considered the two addresses to be separate poems.50 Finally, taking their cue from what they interpret to be the period’s preference for the graphic aspects of the soul-and-body motif over the encouraging ones, scholars have dubbed the SSA less interesting and its themes less well-managed than its counterpart.51 In his comparative edition of the S&B poems, Douglas Moffat admits that the evidence is far from clear, but concludes “what evidence there is does point toward [the SSA] being a later, less inspired addition, probably not by the same poet.”52 The metrical and linguistic evidence for interpolation may be interesting, but the question is immaterial for the purposes of this study: whether the SSA was deliberately added by the Vercelli scribe as an afterthought or whether it was an earlier addition to the poem present in the exemplar he had in front of him, the version of S&B unique to the Vercelli Book differs in exactly

48 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book the way we might expect. Rather than a focus strictly on damnation and the dangers of the body, Vercelli’s version of the poem deliberately preserves a positive example of the uses of the flesh. Those parts of the SSA that indicate its poetic ‘inferiority’ also supply significant clues as to the ideological import of Vercelli’s version of the poem. Exactly those points where Vercelli’s poem differs from Exeter’s suggest that the version of S&B in Vercelli had been subtly adapted to fit that manuscript’s particular needs, or, perhaps more likely, was selected because it already did. In his explanatory notes, Moffat identifies several such revealing discrepancies between the two versions and summarizes the attending scholarly debates, but can only offer tentative suggestions as to their meaning. As an intriguing example, we can compare the two passages in Table 1.2. Table 1.2:  A comparison of lines 42–48 of Vercelli’s Soul and Body I and Exeter’s Soul and Body II, with notes where the ASPR editions differ from their respective manuscripts.

First we need only concentrate on the pairs gestryned / gestyred and ne generedest / ne gearwode (italicized and bolded). Of the former, Moffat suggests that Exeter’s “sinful steering” conceptually balances the soul’s “stabilization” of the body, whereas what may be Vercelli’s oblique reference to original sin (in gestryned, ‘begat’) seems less logical in the context and may be a simple scribal error.53 In his edition, T. A. Shippey retains strynan as ‘beget,’ considering the reference to sexuality to be in keeping with the rest of the poem’s ascetic tenor,54 but P. R. Orton glosses Vercelli’s gestryned as the past participle ‘claimed.’55 Both editorial choices, Moffat points out, result in “an image of a considerably more passive body than is depicted in E[xeter].”56 In addition to passivity, the soul’s lamenting of original sin in Vercelli also attributes less conscious wrongdoing to the body compared to the description of Exeter’s willfully wicked flesh, whose life is



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entirely led by sin, not merely conceived in it. There is an analogous difference in ne generedest / ne gearwode: the body in Vercelli refused to save his soul (a feat which is implied to have been in his power), whereas the one in Exeter actively prepared his soul’s damnation. After a general consideration of the two versions together, Moffat concludes “[i]t is my view that the variants unique to E[xeter] combine to show a body actively engaged in bringing about the damnation of its soul … In V[ercelli], on the other hand, the unique variants contribute to the depiction of a body considerably less active than its counterpart in E[xeter].”57 In Vercelli, the critique of the damned body’s in-action, as Moffat calls it, downplays the inherent evilness of the flesh—it may be passive, but it is not necessarily immoral. But more importantly, this critique also sets up the potential for the salvific action of the body that will be praised in the poem’s final lines: the body retains the power to save his soul, a feat which is implicitly more significant and more difficult than damning her. The body in Vercelli thus seems passive to Moffat because he assumes the body’s only possible agency to be negative, and he privileges grammatical agency over conceptual (to ‘do’ something is more active than to ‘not do’ something). The key to this connection lies in the SSA. Not only does the saved soul praise the deeds of the body in life, but she also eagerly anticipates their reunion at Judgment: the soul exclaims to the body “‘[e]ala, min dryhten, / þær ic þe moste // mid me læden, / þæt wyt englas // ealle gesawon, / heofona wuldor, // swylc swa ðu me ær her scrife!’” [“Oh, my lord, if [only] I were permitted to lead you with me, where we two might see all the angels in the glory of heaven, just as you previously ordained for me!”] (S&BI 138b–41). In comfort, the soul later adds “‘[w]olde ic þe ðonne secgan // þat ðu ne sorgode, / forðan wyt bioð gegæderode // æt godes dome. / Moton wyt þonne ætsomne // syþan brucan / ond unc on heofonum // heahþungene beon’” [“I wished then to say to you that you should not be anxious, because we two will be reunited at God’s Judgment. After that the two of us will be able to enjoy ourselves together and will be of high rank in heaven”] (S&BI 156–57). Though the body must undergo physical death, it is not forsaken or forgotten by its eternal counterpart, and the soul acknowledges the body’s active role in salvation, a role that is structured around penance. The line “‘swylc swa ðu me ær her scrife,’” like the above passage in Vercelli IV, recalls penitential language: just as hreow was used to translate pœnitentia,58 OE scrift/scrifan were associated with confessio in glosses of Latin penitentials.59 The actions of the saved body in life, like the inaction of the damned, clearly indicate that the power to determine the fate of the eternal self lay with the body, framed in terms of efficacious performance.

50 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book The soul is thus appropriately reverent in her address to the body, calling him “‘Wine leofesta’” [“most beloved lord/friend”] (135a), “‘min dryhten’” [“my lord”] (138b), and “‘leofost manna’” [“most beloved of men”] (152b), indicating a relationship of mutual love and respect, and perhaps most importantly, indebtedness.60 This language clearly inverts the traditional hierarchy articulated in other instances of soul-and-body61 to achieve a rhetorical effect. In his study of the poem’s relationship to orthodoxy,62 Frantzen has noted the penitential echoes of the poem, particularly the references to fasting in the SSA, concluding that “the body performs penance, and registers the punishment which results when penance is rejected. Neither point could be made unless the body could be given responsibility for the soul’s welfare.”63 Vercelli Homily XXII, which is unique to the Vercelli Book, echoes these same concerns, but also adds new considerations. Books I and II of St. Isidore of Seville’s Synonyma provide the source material for around two-thirds of the homily,64 but careful analysis of the piece reveals that it is hardly a slavish translation. Claudia Di Sciacca, whose scholarship deals explicitly with the works of Isidore in Anglo-Saxon England, argues that XXII instead represents a “vernacularization” of a Latin source.65 DiSciacca looks at specific word-level rhetorical devices that give XXII a decidedly Anglo-Saxon rather than late-antique aesthetic, even where the homily appears to be translating Isidore closely. Also, the Old English homily is much more eschatologically focused than is the Synonyma. The homily relates the purported words of Isidore, mainly exhortations for the good Christian to consider his death: “7 eowres deaðes daeg gemunað, for ðan ælce dæg us nealæceð þære sawle gedal 7 þæs lichoman” [and be mindful of your death day, because each day the parting of the soul and the body draws closer to us] (XXII.113–4). Isidore instructs his audience that we cannot know when we ourselves will die, and “[f]or ðan us let God on þyssum life þæt oðera manna forðfor sceolde bion ure gelicnesse […] Gehyrað, men þa leofstan, ða ðe her syndon on þyssum folce dysige 7 recelease. Gangað to deadra manna bebyrignesse 7 geseoð þær lifigendra bysene” [therefore God granted us that other men’s death should be a similitude of our own … Hear, men most beloved, those who are here foolish and reckless among this people. Go to the dead men’s graves and see there an example for the living] (XXII.119–20, 123–5).66 Here, in direct statement, is perhaps the crystallization of the concept I have been intimating. The motivation of the eschaton is to cause one considering the future to determine the correct action in the present: the dead, paradoxically, provide the clues to good living. But more importantly, by considering death, the Anglo-Saxon



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distilled a personal sense of identity, one intricately bound up with the end of that identity. The way to be a good Christian is dependent upon recognizing the proper functions of various ‘selves’ in relation to communities, both transient and intransient. By considering how the individual will one day not be, the Anglo-Saxons came to understand what it meant to be. Moreover, this beingness is related specifically to being in the scheme of Christian belief, and as such was framed in terms of salvific performance. And, indeed, Vercelli XXII reinforces this notion: “[f]or þan ne mæg se lichama nanwiht don butan hit þæt mod wille. Utan clænsian ure geðohtas, þonne ure lichoma ne syngað” [therefore the body may do nothing unless the mind/heart wills it. Let us cleanse our thoughts, then our bodies will not sin] (XXII.155–6). The mod here is responsible for thought and it controls the body; but even more striking is the implication that the mod—which may be part of the body but is not the flesh—is the origin of sin. If this is true, it is not surprising that the Vercelli Book would contain not just the ‘bad’ example, serving to frighten an audience into doctrinal submission, but also the ‘good’: rather than a book about Judgment, Vercelli serves as a guide to Judgment. This may also explain why the body, although potentially a danger to the soul, is nevertheless presented as a spiritual and not just a material necessity in the Vercelli Book. It therefore seems only logical that the Vercelli compiler would prefer pieces that are theoretically rather than theologically consonant; or perhaps, more accurately, the logic behind the pieces’ compilation is not exclusively one of concerns with eschatology abstractly, but with selfhood as represented from an eschatological perspective. Unfortunately, critics have long simplified Vercelli’s complex organization by assuming a careless redactor whose eclecticism results in a somewhat confused and only personally decipherable collection. Gatch concluded that “the Vercelli redactor was more prone than the Blickling man to juxtapose formally conflicting pictures of the interim after death and of the Doomsday events because his taste for the florid combined with his freedom from the restraints of the homiliarist led him to choose what was arresting as opposed to what was correct.”67 Implicit in this statement is Gatch’s assumption that there was a single ‘correct’ catalogue of the events of Judgment,68 but also, that the events depicted in the Vercelli Book themselves, and not the concepts contained within them, were what was of interest to Vercelli’s compiler. As we progress through the Vercelli Book, however, it becomes apparent that the Vercelli Book’s compiler was potentially interested in more than just ‘being right’—he was interested in the Christian way of ‘being.’

52 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book

Notes 1. For more detailed information about the Vercelli Book itself and the texts within it, see above, Introduction, notes 1 and 2. 2. For general discussions of penance and penitentials in Anglo-Saxon England, see Allen J. Frantzen, The Literature of Penance in Anglo-Saxon England (New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1983); “The Tradition of Penitentials in Anglo-Saxon England,” ASE 11 (1983): 23–56; and “Spirituality and Devotion in the Anglo-Saxon Penitentials,” EMS 22 (2005): 117– 28. For considerations of the function of penance and its relationship to lay piety, see Rob Meens, “Penitentials and the Practice of Penance in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries,” Early Medieval Europe 14 (2006): 7–21; and Catherine Cubitt, “Bishops, Priests and Penance in Late Anglo-Saxon England,” Early Medieval Europe 14 (2006): 41–63. For a history of scholarship on penance and penitientials in the period, see Rob Meens, “Penitential Questions: Sin, Satisfaction, and Reconciliation in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries,” Early Medieval Europe 14 (2006): 1–6. 3. See above, Introduction, 6. 4. Allen J. Frantzen, “The Body in Soul and Body I,” ChauR 17 (1982): 79. 5. Das Altenglische Bussbuch (sog. Confessionale Pseudo-Egberti), ed. Robert Spindler (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1934), 174, quoted in Frantzen, “The Body in Soul and Body I,” 79. The Confessionale Pseudo-Egberti is one of four vernacular penitential texts circulating during the AS period, the other three being the Poenitentiale Pseudo-Egberti (ed. J. Raith [Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellchaft, 1964]); “A Late OE Handbook for the Use of a Confessor” (ed. R. Fowler, Anglia 83 [1965]: 1–34); and The Old English Canons of Theodore (eds. R. D. Fulk and Stefan Jurasinski, EETS SS 25 [Oxford 2012]). The “Canons” is not well attested (Frantzen, “Penitentials,” in The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of AngloSaxon England, eds. Michael Lapidge et al [Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2001], 363). 6. Frantzen, “Confession and Penance,” 120. 7. Ibid., 120. 8. Frantzen observes that “The Anglo-Saxons seem to have been the first to organize comprehensive collections which included penitentials, ceremonies for public penance, and confessional prayers, and to excerpt these sources to form collections for devotional reading and instruction” (“Penitentials,” 363). 9. Cf. Rudolph Willard, “The Address of the Soul to the Body,” PMLA 50 (1935): 965, note 1. 10. Donald G. Scragg, ed., The Vercelli Homilies and Related Texts, EETS o.s. 300 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992), 87–8. 11. Vercelli IV’s relationship to the ‘Macarius’ homily is discussed at length in Charles D. Wright, “The Old English ‘Macarius’ Soul-and-Body Homily, Vercelli Homily IV, and Ephraem the Syrian’s De paenitentia,” in Via Crucis: Studies in Medieval Sources and Ideas in Memory of J. E. Cross, ed. Thomas D. Hill with Thomas N. Hall and Charles D. Wright (Morgantown: U of West Virginia P, 2002), 210–34. 12. Scragg re-edits Pseudo-Wulfstan XXX in The Vercelli Homilies and Related Texts, 395–403. See also Donald G. Scragg, “Napier’s ‘Wulfstan’ Homily XXX: Its Sources, Its Relationship to the Vercelli Book, and Its Style,” ASE 6 (1977): 203, 209. The manuscript history



1 3. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

2 3. 24. 25. 26.

27.

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53

suggests that Vercelli IV’s eschatology was popular if eccentric, a point to which I shall return, particularly as it relates to the whole of the Vercelli Book compilation. See above, Introduction, 3–4. See above, note 11. This and all subsequent quotations of the homilies are taken from Scragg, The Vercelli Homilies and Related Texts, and cited parenthetically by homily and line number. All translations are mine. On the colors of the body, see Willard, “Address,” 77–81; Donald G. Scragg, “The Old English ‘bryt’ in the Vercelli Book,” N&Q n.s. 13 (1966): 168–9; and Claudia Di Sciacca, “Due Note a Tre Omelie Anglosassoni sul Tema dell’Anima e Il Corpo,” in Antichità Germaniche, II Parte, eds. V. Dolcetti Corazza and R. Gendre (Alessandria: dell’Orso, 2002), 223–50. This translation doesn’t capture the legal force of onstælan, but it does achieve a more neutral connotation of the term, which is appropriate considering the context of the saved soul’s address. Bosworth-Toller, s.v. onstæl, and Clark Hall, s.v. onstælan. On ‘oath-helpers’ in Anglo-Saxon law, see Wormald, “Oaths.” Cf. Blickling X (The Blickling Homilies of the Tenth Century, edited by Richard Morris, EETS o.s. 58, 63, 73 [1874–1880. Rpt. 1 vol., London: EETS, 1967]), in which the body becomes clear like glass at Judgment, through which all his deeds can be seen: “þa deadan up astandaþ, biþ þonne se flæschoma ascyred swa glæs, ne mæg ðæs unrihtes beon awiht bedigled” [The dead shall stand, then the flesh shall be as transparent as glass, nor may its wickedness be at all concealed] (56–8). Thomas N. Hall, “The Psychedelic Transmogrification of the Soul in Vercelli Homily IV,” in Time and Eternity: The Medieval Discourse, eds. Gerhard Jaritz and Gerson Moreno-Riafio (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003): 315. On motif of the devil’s arrows in Vercelli IV, see Joseph B. Trahern, Jr., “Caesarius, Chrodegang, and the Old English Vainglory,” in Gesellschaft. Kultur. Literatur: Rezeption und Originalität im Wachsen einer Europäischen Literatur und Geistigkeit, Beiträge Luitpold Wallach gewidmet, ed. Karl Bosl (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1975), at 170, 173, and 176. Hall, “Psychedelic Transmogrification,” 314. Ibid., 315. Michael Matto, “True Confessions: The Seafarer and Technologies of the Sylf,” JEGP 103 (1998): 175. See also above, Introduction, 15–6. Although hreow can have the general meaning ‘sorrow,’ in penitentials it is used to translate the Latin pœnitentia. However, in cases where pœnitentia is sub-divided (into contritio, confessio, satisfactio), OE vocabulary is less specific, and hreow is most often used to translate contritio. Even still, hreow is clearly semantically linked to the sacrament of penance, whether in a specific phase or in toto. Cf. Bosworth-Toller, s.v. hreow; the Dictionary of Old English, s.v. hreow; and especially Albert Keiser, The Influence of Christianity on the Vocabulary of Old English Poetry (PhD diss., University of Illinois, 1919), 112 ff. See also Cubitt, “Bishops, Priests and Penance,” 44–8. See Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body (New York: Columbia UP, 1995); and above, Introduction, 10–11.

54 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book 28. This is suggested by the semantic studies summarized in the previous chapter, as well as M. R. Godden, “Anglo-Saxons on the Mind,” in Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies Presented to Peter Clemoes on the Occasion of his Sixty-Fifth Birthday, eds. Helmut Gneuss and Michael Lapidge (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985); and Matto, “True Confessions.” 29. Roland J. Teske, SJ, “Soul,” in Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, eds. Allan D. Fitzgerald, OSA, et al. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 807. 30. Confessiones 10.9.6: “ego interior cognovi haec, ego, ego animus” [The inner man knows this, I, I the soul]. Augustine says of the mind in De Trinitate XV.7: “Non igitur anima sed quod excellit in anima mens uocatur” [Not the soul, therefore, but that which excels in the soul is called mind] (CCSL 50.457). 31. The OE homiletic convention of enjoining auditors to gemunan their souls’ need thus may be more active than it seems. 32. Godden, “Anglo-Saxons on the Mind,” 286. 33. Sourced in both Macarius and Ephrem. See Wright, “Old English ‘Macarius’ Homily,” 225–6. 34. Particularly Benjamin P. Kurtz, “Gifer the Worm: An Essay Toward the History of an Idea,” University of California Publications in English 2 (1929): 235–61, but also almost all other scholars commenting on the style or content, and not the generic form, of the AngloSaxon version of the motif. Frantzen, “The Body,” Hall, “The Psychedelic Transmogrification,” and Cyril Smetana, “Second Thoughts on ‘Soul and Body I,’ MS 29 (1967): 193–205, are thus exceptional in their recuperation of Anglo-Saxon soul-and-body. 35. On the ‘Three Utterances’ motif, see especially Rudolph Willard, Two Apocrypha in Old English Homilies (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1935), 31–149, and “The Latin Texts of The Three Utterances of the Soul,” Speculum 12 (1937): 147–66; and Charles D. Wright, “The Three Utterances,” in Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture: The Apocrypha, ed. Frederick M. Biggs (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007), 80–3. See also Mary F. Wack and Charles D. Wright, “A New Latin Source for the Old English ‘Three Utterances’ Exemplum,” ASE 20 (1991): 187–202; and Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Paradise, Death, and Doomsday in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), 50–9. On the relationship between the ‘Three Utterances’ and Vercelli IV, see Charles D. Wright, The Irish Tradition in Old English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), 264–5; and Di Sciacca “Due Note,” 236–43. 36. In Two Apocrypha, Willard discusses in parallel the Irish homily (found in the Liber Flavus Fergusiorum, published with an English translation by Carl Marstrander, “The Two Deaths,” Ériu 5 [1911]: 120–5); the three Old English homilies, Be Heofonwarum and be Helwarum (in two MSS: London, British Library, MS Cotton Faustina A.ix, homily IV, fols. 20v–22v; and CCCC MS 302, homily X, 71–3), an untitled homily for Lent (in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 85/86, homily VI, fols. 25r–40r), and De Letania Maiore (in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 114, homily XVI, fols. 97v–105v); and one of the Latin texts, first published by Louise Dudley as an appendix to The Egyptian Elements in the Legend of the Body and Soul (PhD diss., Bryn Mawr College, 1910), 164–5 (in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS lat. 2628) (32–33). Several other versions of the Latin sermon have since been discovered: Willard, “The Latin Texts,” 147–8; Wack



37.

38.

39.

40.

41. 42. 43.

44.

4 5. 46.

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55

and Wright, “A New Latin Source,” 187–8; and Wright, “More Latin Sources for the Old English ‘Three Utterances’ Homilies,” MS 77 (2015): 45–79, at 50 and 69. Quotations of Junius 85/86 are from Wack and Wright, 190; full text originally edited in Nuovo omelie anglossasoni della rinascenza benedettina, ed. A. M. Luiselli Fadda (Filologia germanica, Testi e studi 1 [Florence: Felice le Monnier, 1977]), 8–21. Quotations of Hatton 114 are from Bazire-Cross Homily 9, Eleven Old English Rogationtide Homilies, 115–24; and quotations of Paris, BnF lat. 2628 are from Willard, “Latin Texts,” 156–7. The two textual emendations of Paris, BnF lat. 2628 in Table 1.1 are following several other MSS; my thanks to Charles D. Wright for suggesting these. Wright, “Latin Analogue for The Two Deaths: The Three Utterances of the Soul,” in The End and Beyond: Medieval Irish Eschatology, edited by John Carey, Emma Nic Cárthaigh, and Caitríona Ó Dochartaigh (Aberystwyth: Oxbow Books, 2014), 128 ff. Dudley, The Egyptian Elements, 164–5. Willard considers Dudley’s Latin text and the Rogationtide homily to be the “fullest and best versions of our theme” (Two Apocrypha, 58). On the manuscripts, see above, note 36. In one of Willard’s six texts, Be Heofonwarum, the motif occurs at Judgment, but it is only one of two versions that specifies a setting at all, beyond the assumed particular judgment implied by the soul’s extraction from her body. Perhaps more importantly, Be Heofonwarum completely omits any reference to the saved soul, relating only the experiences of the damned one. Vercelli IV is thus the only homily to combine the two elements, Judgment setting and saved soul. See also Antonette DiPaolo Healey, ed., The Old English Vision of St. Paul (Speculum Anniversary Monographs 2. Cambridge: Medieval Academy of America, 1978), Introduction, 41–57. Cf. the corresponding directive to the saved soul and body: “‘Gang in þin hus, ðær ðu ær wære. Nu gyt ær inc geearnodan ece reste; hæbben hie eac nu awendedlice’” [“Go into your house, where you previously were. Before now, you two earned for yourselves eternal rest; now let them have that unendingly”] (IV.164–6). Milton McC. Gatch, “Eschatology in the Anonymous Old English Homilies,” Traditio 21 (1965): 155–6. This and all subsequent quotations of Vercelli’s poetry are taken from The Vercelli Book, ed. George Philip Krapp, ASPR II. All translations are mine. Cf. Vercelli IV.288–9: “þonne stent ðæt deade flæsc aswornod, 7 ne mæg nan andwyrde syllan þam his gaste” [then stands the dead flesh confounded, and may not any answer give to his spirit]. In both texts, though the settings differ, the body’s inability to reply signifies the same idea: though God is merciful to the living (those who repent during life), after death the body is incapable of action (penance). Both Kurtz, “Gifer the Worm,” and T. A. Shippey, in his edition of the poem (Poems of Wisdom and Learning in Old English [Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1976], 105–11, 139–40) express horror at what they consider to be the poem’s ‘sensationalist’ gore. Matto, “True Confessions,” 177. On Irish analogues for the punishment according to the joints, see Thomas D. Hill, “Punishment According to the Joints of the Body in the OE Soul and Body,” N&Q 213 (1968): 409–10, and “Punishment According to the Joints of the Body, Again,” N&Q 214 (1969): 246.

56 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book 47. The Exeter Book, ASPR III. 48. E.g., Stopford A. Brooke, The History of Early English Literature, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1892), 166; Kurtz, “Gifer the Worm”; and P. R. Orton, “Disunity in the Vercelli Book Soul and Body,” Neophil 63 (1979): 450–60, and “The OE ‘Soul and Body’: A Further Examination,” MÆ 48 (1979): 173–97. Douglas Moffat summarizes the scholarship on 41–44 of his edition, The Old English Soul and Body (Wolfeboro, NH: D. S. Brewer, 1990). 49. See Frantzen, “The Body,” 83; Kurtz, “Gifer the Worm,” 236; and Charles W. Kennedy, The Earliest English Poetry: A Critical Survey of the Poetry Written Before the Norman Conquest (London: Oxford UP, 1943), 321. 50. This is inconclusive at best, since the homilies in the MS are often offset by capitals and spacing, and because many of the poems in Vercelli preserve clear section divisions. Cf. Celia Sisam, The Vercelli Book (Vercelli Biblioteca Capitolare cxvii), EEMF 19 (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1976). 51. See especially Kurtz, “Gifer the Worm”; Orton, “Disunity,” and “OE ‘Soul and Body’”; and Moffat, Old English Soul and Body, 36–44. Orton, for example, claims that the Vercelli S&B “suffers from emotional flatness, a negative and retrospective bias, and a lack of explicitness” compared to Exeter, but the addition of the SSA can offer no “convincing sense of optimism or hope” in place of Exeter’s terrifying immediacy (453). 52. Moffat, Old English Soul and Body, 44. 53. Ibid., 72. 54. Shippey, Poems of Wisdom and Learning, 139. 55. P. R. Orton, “An Edition of the OE Poem Soul and Body as contained in The Exeter and Vercelli Codices, with a Linguistic and Literary Investigation” (Thesis, University of Manchester, 1974). 56. Moffat, Old English Soul and Body, 72. 57. Ibid., 73. 58. See above, note 26. 59. Bosworth-Toller, s.v. scrift and scrifan, and especially Albert Keiser, The Influence of Christianity on the Vocabulary of Old English Poetry, 113. See also Cubitt, “Bishops, Priests and Penance,” 44–8. 60. Moreover, the lord-words of S&BI (dryhten and wine) echo the words of the mourning thegn of the Old English elegies, who is longing for, not glad to escape, reunion with his lord. 61. E.g., Riddle 43 of the Exeter Book (fol. 112v), in which the soul is the Master and the body her potentially disobedient Servant. 62. Frantzen, “The Body,” 80–1. 63. Ibid., 85. 64. Isidore, Synonyma (PL 83.827–43). There is no certainty as to whether the homilist was working with the Synonyma directly or through an epitome. However, Di Sciacca, Scragg, and others convincingly suggest that the homilist was likely working with a Latin intermediary rather than an OE translation of Isidore. Claudia Di Sciacca, Finding the Right Words: Isidore’s Synonyma in Anglo-Saxon England (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2008), 78; and Scragg, The Vercelli Homilies, 367. 65. Di Sciacca, “Chapter Four: The Vernacularization of the Synonyma: The Case of Vercelli XXII,” Finding the Right Words, 77–104.



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6 6. Cf. the ‘dry bones speak’ exemplum, discussed above, Introduction, note 15. 67. Gatch, “Eschatology,” 159. 68. For a discussion of the various versions of Judgment connected explicitly with soul-andbody traditions, see especially Willard, “Address.”

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Krapp, George Philip, and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, eds. The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records. 6 vols. New York: Columbia UP, 1931–42. Kurtz, Benjamin P. “Gifer the Worm: An Essay Toward the History of an Idea.” University of California Publications in English 2 (1929): 235–61. Lapidge, Michael et al, eds. The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England. Malden: Blackwell, 2001. Malter, Henry. “Personifications of Soul and Body: A Study in Judaeo-Arabic Literature.” The Jewish Quarterly Review n.s. 2 (1912): 453–79. Marstrander, Carl. “The Two Deaths.” Ériu 5 (1911): 120–5. Matto, Michael. “True Confessions: The Seafarer and Technologies of the Sylf.” JEGP 103 (1998): 157–79. Meens, Rob. “Penitentials and the Practice of Penance in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries.” Early Medieval Europe 14 (2006): 7–21. ———. “Penitential Questions: Sin, Satisfaction, and Reconciliation in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries.” Early Medieval Europe 14 (2006): 1–6. Migne, J.-P., ed. Patrologia Latina. 221 vols., with 5 supplements edited by A. Hamann. Paris: n.p. 1844–1974. Moffat, Douglas, ed. and trans. The Old English Soul and Body. Wolfeboro: D. S. Brewer, 1990. ———, ed. The Soul’s Address to the Body: The Worcester Fragments. Medieval Texts and Studies. East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1987. Morris, Robert, ed. The Blickling Homilies of the Tenth Century. EETS o.s. 58, 63, 73. 1874–80. Rpt. 1 vol. London: EETS, 1967. Orton, P. R. “Disunity in the Vercelli Book Soul and Body.” Neophil 63 (1979): 450–60. ———. “An Edition of the OE Poem Soul and Body as contained in The Exeter and Vercelli Codices, with a Linguistic and Literary Investigation.” Thesis, University of Manchester, 1974. ———. “The OE ‘Soul and Body’: A Further Examination.” MÆ 48 (1979): 173–97. Raith, J., ed. Das altenglische Version des Halitgar’schen Bussbuches (sog. Poenitentiale Pseudo-Egberti). 1933. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellchaft, 1964. Scragg, Donald G. “Napier’s ‘Wulfstan’ Homily XXX: Its Sources, Its Relationship to the Vercelli Book, and Its Style.” ASE 6 (1977): 197–211. ———. “The Old English ‘bryt’ in the Vercelli Book.” N&Q n.s. 13 (1966): 168–9. ———., ed. The Vercelli Homilies and Related Texts. EETS o.s. 300. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. Shippey, T. A. Poems of Wisdom and Learning in Old English. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1976. Sisam, Celia, ed. The Vercelli Book (Vercelli Biblioteca Capitolare cxvii). EEMF 19. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1976. Smetana, Cyril. “Second Thoughts on ‘Soul and Body I.’” MS 29 (1967): 193–205. Spindler, Robert, ed. Das Altenglische Bussbuch (sog. Confessionale Pseudo-Egberti). Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1934. Teske, Roland J., SJ. “Soul.” In Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, edited by Allan D. Fitzgerald, OSA, et al. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999. Trahern, Joseph B. Jr. “Caesarius, Chrodegang, and the Old English Vainglory.” In Gesellschaft. Kultur. Literatur: Rezeption und Originalität im Wachsen einer Europäischen Literatur und

60 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book Geistigkeit. Beiträge Luitpold Wallach gewidmet, edited by Karl Bosl. Monographien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 11, 167–78. Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1975. Wack, Mary F., and Charles D. Wright. “A New Latin Source for the Old English ‘Three Utterances’ Exemplum.” ASE 20 (1991): 187–202. Willard, Rudolph. “The Address of the Soul to the Body.” PMLA 50 (1935): 957–83. ———. “The Latin Texts of The Three Utterances of the Soul.” Speculum 12 (1937): 147–66. ———. Two Apocrypha in Old English Homilies. Beiträge zur englischen Philologie 30. Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1935. Wormald, Patrick. “Oaths.” In The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England, 338–9. Wright, Charles D. “Docet Deus, Docet Diabolus: A Hiberno-Latin Theme in an Old English Body-and-Soul Homily.” N&Q 232 (1987): 451–3. ———. The Irish Tradition in Old English Literature. CSASE 6. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. ———. “Latin Analogue for The Two Deaths: The Three Utterances of the Soul.” In The End and Beyond: Medieval Irish Eschatology, 2 vols., edited by John Carey, Emma Nic Cárthaigh, and Caitríona Ó Dochartaigh. Aberystwyth: Celtic Studies Publications, 2014. ———. “More Latin Sources for the Old English ‘Three Utterances’ Homilies.” MS 77 (2015): 45–79. ———. “The Old English ‘Macarius’ Soul-and-Body Homily, Vercelli Homily IV, and Ephraem the Syrian’s De paenitentia.” In Via Crucis: Studies in Medieval Sources and Ideas in Memory of J. E. Cross, edited by Thomas D. Hill with Thomas N. Hall and Charles D. Wright, 210–34. Morgantown: U of West Virginia P, 2002. ———. “The Three Utterances.” In Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture: The Apocrypha, 80–3.

·2· baptism , conversion , and selfhood in andreas 1

The literal souls and bodies of the Vercelli Book’s homilies offer one way of reading the relationship of the soul-and-body motif to Anglo-Saxon selfhood. Through them, we begin to understand how the Anglo-Saxons understood themselves, which parts of identity were considered eternal, which ephemeral, and how the two were meant to interact. However, the codex’s preoccupation with the corporeal/incorporeal division does not end with delimiting the faculties ascribed to each part. Vercelli envisions soul-and-body as both a literal and a metaphorical way of portraying the potential of subjectivity. This is particularly significant for understanding the connections between the first prose texts of the compilation and its first poetic work, Andreas (fols. 29v–52v).2 Bridging the gap between the two is the idea of soul-and-body as completion fantasy rather than antagonistic dichotomy—a concrete representation of wholeness and the achievement of potential, and the externalization of ‘being’ that both declares and performs selfhood. The fantasy is clearly represented in the sharply differentiated but always about-to-be rejoined souls and bodies of the homilies’ Judgment scenes;3 but it is equally as present in the figura of Andreas,4 and the poem’s metaphorical work with baptism, eschatology, and the resurrected body.

62 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book Before turning to Andreas, however, it will help to examine the text that opens the codex and sets its tone. Vercelli’s first homily (fols. 2r–9r), which explicitly connects Christ’s passion and baptism, is a close translation of John 18–19, beginning with the passion and ending with the placing of Christ’s body in the tomb and an allusion to the Harrowing of hell. The homily is sparse in its exegesis, but it does offer one revealing comment: “mid his spere his sidan wundode, 7 þa sona eode þær blod 7 wæter ætsomne ut of þære wunde. Þæt tacnode hælo middangeardes, þæt ðurh his blod fulwihtwæter gewyrþan sceolde” [With his spear [the centurion] wounded [Christ’s] side, and then immediately blood and water together issued out of the wound. That signified the salvation of the world, that the water of baptism should come to be through his blood] (I.258–62). 5 This connection was apparently of some significance to the author of Vercelli I: it is one of the few interpretive moves made in an otherwise unadorned paraphrase of the gospel, and it is explicitly flagged as such (“þæt tacnode”). Though the Vercelli Book begins with Christ’s death, that death is deliberately framed in terms of the life it brings— Christ’s side is the baptismal font that brings new life to the world. The focus is on embodiment, the purpose of which is to enable Christ to suffer human death, and the purpose of Christ’s death is his subsequent resurrection, an event that models the resurrection shared by the elect. But while Christians commemorate Christ’s death through the Eucharist, they acknowledge their own death through baptism. And because Vercelli is concerned with general eschatology more than anything else, this perhaps explains why Eucharistic tropes are not as plentiful in the codex as baptismal ones, though the former might, on the surface, seem to fit more perfectly with Vercelli’s dead bodies than do the latter. Among its other typological resonances,6 various scholars have noted the figural function of baptism in Andreas, as represented by the cleansing flood called forth by Andrew at the end of the poem.7 In Andreas, Andrew suffers his own passion (1398–491),8 which consciously evokes Christ’s, and even the apostle’s doubts are modeled on Christ’s own (1412–13). But though Andrew begs for death after three days of torment—“‘Bidde ic, weoroda god, / þæt ic gast mine // agifen mote, / sawla symbelgifa // on ðines sylfas handa’” [“I pray, God of hosts, joy-giver of souls, that I might give my spirit into your own hands”] (1415b–17)—Christ commands Andrew to look at the trail of gore left behind by his bloodied body, and “Geseh he geblowene // bearwas standan / blædum gehrodene, // swa he ær his blod aget” [he saw blossoming bowers standing, bedecked with flowers, where he previously shed his blood] (1448–9).9 Like Christ’s, Andrew’s blood brings life. And just as, according to Vercelli I, Christ’s



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passion led to the salvific water of baptism, so Andrew’s occurs just prior to his summoning of the cleansing flood (1503–21) that signifies figural baptism of the Mermedonians. Typological resonances like this suggest that the poem’s baptisms represent in figura the conversion of the cannibalistic Mermedonians, which seems to be the climax of the narrative: the Mermedonians are killed by the flood only to be resurrected and converted immediately afterwards (1623–32). However, as Daniel G. Calder has pointed out, identifying the typological structures at work in an Old English poem is only the first step: “discovery is not the same thing as understanding.”10 What is further needed is investigation of the poem’s unique engagement with those structures in the creative process of making meaning. In this chapter, I examine Andreas’s use of its own unique incomplete typological structures to present its saint as a model not of perfect sanctity, but of continuous, fallible conversion.11 I argue that the fantasy of conversion represented by the baptismal imagery in the poem is not the conversion of the ‘other,’ but rather the true conversion of the self. Theologically speaking, baptism is the central event in the earthly life of the Christian self. The sacrament both literally and figuratively initiates converts into the Church: literally, by labeling them (spiritually and socially) as Christians; and figuratively, by enacting a symbolic death and rebirth that denotes unity with the body of the faithful and with Christ himself. But baptism is also closely associated with the continuing reform or renewal (anakainosis) of the Christian self,12 a spiritual conversion that requires the reformation of the inner man to the image of God. In Andreas, the titular hero is of course already a baptized Christian, but he remains subject to temptation and lack of faith and must therefore undergo a reformation of the self. The model Andrew provides, though couched in the person of a sacrosanct apostle, is consistently presented as one of an ongoing and perpetually incomplete spiritual process.13

Baptism, Conversion, and Typology Previous critics have interpreted baptismal typology in Andreas only in relation to the conversion of those who are physically, spiritually, and hermeneutically ‘other.’14 These include scholars such as James Earl, who maintains that the Mermedonians are figural representations of Jews, an association that is promulgated by their only slightly disguised stereotypical Jewish characteristics (literal-mindedness, cannibalism, sorcery, etc.).15 As Earl convincingly argues, “the mission to the Mermedonians is explicitly patterned upon Christ’s (and the apostles’) mission to the Jews,”16 making the Jewish-Mermedonian

64 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book association operative on both the narrative plot and deep structural levels.17 The conversion of the Mermedonians then becomes a figural representation of the fantasy of the conversion of the Jews, an event that would resolve the tension inherent in the acknowledgement of Judaism as both the source of Christianity and its doppelganger, the threatening ‘other.’18 The almostJewish Mermedonians are converted in a fulfillment of that fantasy, as are the figurally baptized Jewish forefathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, whose resurrection is narrated by Andrew in the first part of the poem as one of the miracles performed by Christ. Like the Mermedonians, the Jewish patriarchs are raised from the ground after death (781 ff.), and though this detail is not part of the plot of Andreas as it is unfolding in the present of the poem’s narrative, it is clearly an event of importance: it is related by Andrew to Christthe-Helmsman during the voyage to Mermedonia, and as such frames the audience’s understanding of the events that occur there. Andreas’s fantasy of conversion, however, remains incomplete. Whereas the Mermedonians instantly convert following the miraculous rejoining of soul and body, the (living) Jews in Andrew’s tale apparently persisted in their rejection of Christianity. The living stone called forth by Christ to fetch the patriarchs declares to the Jews that “‘þis is se ilca // ealwalda god / ðone on fyrndagum // fæderas cuðon’” [“This is the same All-Wielding God whom the patriarchs knew in days of yore”] (751–52), and Christ performs before their very eyes miracles that inarguably demonstrate his divinity. The poem juxtaposes the animation of the non-living stone with the resurrection of the once-living patriarchs to demonstrate both the omnipotence of Christ-as-God and the life-giving power of Christ-as-Savior. But after describing the patriarchs’ testimony to the Jews in Jerusalem, Andrew merely states that “‘þæt folc gewearð / egesan geaclod’” [“those people [i.e., the Jews] became stricken with terror”] (804b–5a), and the saint concludes his tale by telling the Helmsman “‘he wundra worn // wordum cuðde, / swa þeah ne gelyfdon // larum sinum / modblinde menn’” [“[Christ] made known many wonders by his words, although men blind in spirit did not believe in his teachings”] (812–4a). The implication is that the Jews in the temple had remained unconvinced and “modblinde.” Although they are shown miracles that seek to convert them by appealing to both their past (the three patriarchs) and their present (the animation of the stone), it is only in the perpetually approaching future that the Jews will finally be converted.19 Earl and others20 maintain that the poem somewhat anxiously attempts to disarm the ‘other’ with this conversion fantasy—and that the poem evokes eschaton only because that is when this final conversion will occur.



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However, the incomplete conversion of the Jews has another, equally viable typological valence that connects it to Judgment: the conceptually incomplete conversion of the earthly Christian subject that always looks forward to the complete conversion represented by eschaton. Although baptism outwardly represents a kind of conversion, the sins that occur after baptism are like the residue of the pre-converted subject, or, as in Andreas, the continuing intransigence of the Jews even after their forefathers have been converted. Even the more obviously eschatologically framed baptism of the Mermedonians implies an imperfect conversion: as Andrew prepares to leave the newly converted ex-cannibals, God tells him, “‘Ne scealt ðu þæt eowde // anforlætan / on swa niowan gefean, // ah him naman minne / on ferðlocan // fæste getimbre’” [“You will not leave the flock so new in joy, but firmly establish my name in their hearts”] (1669–71).21 The baptismal event, although necessary, is not sufficient for true conversion, and the proclamation of belief that it represents comprises only a portion of the ongoing process of anakainosis or continual spiritual reform. A brief summary of the theological connection between baptism and eschaton will help to elucidate this idea. Baptism’s eschatological aspect is old, rooted in the sacrament’s very inception. In his study of the biblical origins of the liturgy, Jean Daniélou discusses baptism’s Old Testament and New Testament precedents, and its figuration of final Judgment: Baptism, by the symbol of immersion, is, as it were, a sacramental anticipation, through imitation, of the final Judgment, which will be baptism of fire. And it is thanks to Baptism that the Christian will escape the Judgment, because in that sense, he has already been judged.22

This is to say, like Judgment, baptism is both a reckoning of deeds and an acknowledgment of mortality, anticipating actual death and enacting symbolic death so that one may be spiritually reborn. The very act of participating in the sacrament connects each catechumen with his own death by inviting him into a specific kind of imitatio Christi, and it is only after death that the faithful will obtain the state of perfect purity: in the words of St. Paul, “he who is dead is freed from sin” (Rom 6:7). Through baptism, the participant is essentially judged before Judgment. Baptism has been connected to eschaton since the New Testament. In Matthew 3: 7–11, John the Baptist himself proclaims the connection while rebuking the Jews, using language that the Andreas-poet will take up:

66 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book But seeing many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to where he was baptizing, he said to them: “Brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Therefore produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not hope to say amongst yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham … I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me will come one who is greater than I, whose sandals I am not fit to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. (Matt. 3:7–11)

John characterizes his own baptizing of converts in the Jordan as a prefiguration of the fires of Judgment that are to come. There is, of course, a necessary paradox built into the baptismal covenant. With the arguable exceptions of persons baptized immediately before death and infants, the baptized Christian subject remains immanently susceptible to sin even after conversion. No human, no matter how saintly, could reasonably expect or even hope to avoid all sin during the course of his life. Indeed, the imperfect Christian subject is expected to relapse into sin, and this expectation is implied by the material practices of the sacraments. By its nature, then, the covenant of baptism is paradoxically both performatively final and continuously fractured. It remains a promise that must be reasserted constantly.

Eschatology and Baptism in Andreas But baptism connects to more than just the figurative death that ideologically regulates pious Christian behavior. Following death is bodily resurrection, not merely a release from the flesh. The death and resurrection that are prefigured in baptism predict the literal death and resurrection that attend Judgment. Multiple passages within Andreas concretize the connection between the two registers, figurative and literal, baptismal and eschatological, thus illustrating the possibility that, for the early medieval Christian, allegory was a valid system for interpreting not just abstract texts, but also human lives. Just as a figurative death might mean a literal baptism, just so a literal death might mean a figurative baptism. This connection is most clearly illustrated in the various thematic and structural similarities linking the Jews and the Mermedonians of the poem. If the Mermedonians are meant to figuratively represent the Jews, as Earl so convincingly argues they are, then the pagan cannibals must also be read against the Jews who are literally represented in the poem: the patriarchs and the “modblinde” priests in the temple. In the first part of the poem’s narrative, Andrew tells the Helmsman of the miracles



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Christ performed during his ministry on earth, focusing on one in particular: the resurrection of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and their appearance before the Jews in the synagogue. Andrew relates how Christ had animated a stone (713), and dispatched it to summon the patriarchs before the unbelieving Jewish priests. “Gewat he þa feran,   swa him frea mihtig, scyppend wera,   gescrifen hæfde, ofer mearcpaðu,   þæt he on Mambre becom beorhte blican,   swa him bebead meotud, þær þa lichoman   lange þrage, heahfædera hra,   beheled wæron. Het þa ofstlice   up astandan Habraham ond Isaac,   æðeling þriddan Iacob of greote   to godes geþinge, sneome of slæpe þæm fæstan.   Het hie to þam siðe gyrwan, (786–96a) faran to frean dome.” [“Then [the stone] went as the mighty Lord, the Creator of men, had ordained, over the march-paths until it came to Mamre, gleaming brightly, as the Creator had commanded, where the bodies, the corpses of the patriarchs were buried long ago. Then it commanded Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the third prince, to rise immediately from the dust, out of that deep sleep, at God’s behest/to God’s fate.23 It commanded them to prepare for the journey, [and] to travel to the judgment of the Lord.”]

The phrase “‘sneome of slæpe þæm fæsten’” is almost identical to line 889a of Christ III, which clearly refers to the resurrection of the dead at Judgment in that poem.24 The attendant resurrection scene in Andreas follows soon after. The stone travels to the graves of the patriarchs, and, through his messenger, Christ resurrects them, granting life to the “lichoman” that had lain soulless since death. They are commanded to “of eorðscræfe   ærest fremman, lætan landreste,   leoðo gadrigean, gaste onfon   ond geogoðhade, edniwinga   andweard cuman frode fyrnweotan,   folce gecyðan, hwylcne hie god mihtum   ongiten hæfdon.” (780–85) [“Perform a resurrection from their graves, to leave their resting place in the earth, to collect their limbs [and] receive their spirit and youth, [and] to come renewed, wise counselors, to make known to the people through miracles that which God would have them understand.”]

68 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book The language of the passage implies that the patriarchs are not merely temporarily resurrected: the entire scene ends with the stone’s command that they “‘faran to frean dome,’” and although they first journey back to Jerusalem to testify to the Jews, the high-fathers’ “slæp” is over and their bodily resurrections conclude with an eschatologically appropriate apotheosis. It is the physical presence of the patriarchs (whose resurrections are clearly miracles) that is meant to convince the Jews that Christ is the Messiah, not only because Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are embodying the doctrine of resurrection, but also because they are embodying the supersession of the Old Law by the New. This passage clearly evokes John’s words to the Pharisees and Sadducees quoted above. The Andreas-poet presents John’s words in figura, with a literal “stan” as the agent raising both Abraham and his “filios” to strip the Jews of their excuse for unbelief.25 While Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are not formally baptized, the newness of their resurrected bodies aligns them with Paul’s ‘new man,’ and the patriarchs’ ascent to heaven completes their judgment in the poem: “‘Hie ða ricene het // rices hyrde / to eadwelan // oþre siðe / secan mid sybbe // swegles dreamas, / ond þæs to widan feore // willum neotan’” [“Then the guardian of the kingdom immediately commanded them to happiness by another journey, to seek in peace the delights of heaven and to have joy of their desires forever”] (807–10). The “oðre siðe” that the fathers are commanded to make echoes the first “sið” they undertake, that to the “judgment of the Lord” (795–96); and the phrase “to widan feore” clearly implies that their release from death is permanent. Their physical ascent to heaven echoes both Christ’s Ascension after the Harrowing and the bodily resurrection and reward of Judgment.26 Although the original Greek version of the story contains reference to the resurrection of the patriarchs, the Latin source thought to be closest to Andreas, the Recensio Casanatensis, does not.27 Whatever the exact source or combination of sources the Andreas-poet was using, it is clear that he chose to elaborate on the resurrection scene in a way that emphasizes the typological association between baptism, resurrection, and eschaton.28 The depiction of the patriarchs’ resurrection and assumption would easily evoke other resurrections for a medieval Christian audience, including Christ’s and that of the generic Christian at Judgment.29 Most immediately, however, the Jews’ bodily resurrection prepares the audience for the bodily and spiritual resurrection of the Mermedonians that ends the poem.



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Het þa onsunde   ealle arisan, geonge of greote,   þa ær geofon cwealde. Þa þær ofostlice   upp astodon manige on meðle,   mine gefrege, eaforan unweaxne,   ða wæs eall eador leoðolic ond gastlic,   þeah hie lungre ær þurh flodes fær   feorh aleton. Onfengon fulwihte   ond freoðuwære, wuldres wedde   witum aspedde, mundbyrd meotudes.   Þa se modiga het, cyninges cræftiga,   ciricean getimbran, gerwan godes tempel,   þær sio geogoð aras þurh fæder fulwiht   ond se flod onsprang. (1623–35) [Then he commanded all the young men who were previously killed in the flood to rise up unharmed from the earth. Then, I have heard, the multitude immediately rose up there, heirs not yet full-grown who were all whole, bodily and spiritually, though before they had suddenly lost their lives in the peril of the flood. They received baptism and the covenant of peace, the pledge of glory to escape torments [and] the protection of the Creator. Then the spirited one, the craftsman of the King, ordered them to build a church, to prepare God’s temple, where the youths had arisen through the baptism of the Father and where the flood had issued forth.]

Here, the cannibals, having just been killed by Andrew’s cleansing flood, are commanded to rise, like the patriarchs, “eall eador / leoðolic on gastlic,”30 and they immediately receive baptism and fully convert. Because of proximity, the rejoining of body and soul is thus immediately associated with baptism, both as requisite act and figural representation. In discussing the passage describing the moment of the heathens’ conversion, Thomas D. Hill observes: The clause “Onfengon fulwihte …” can of course mean that after the miracle [of the resurrection] the “geoguðe” then received baptism, but the juxtaposition of this clause with the summary of the miracle and the fact that “onfengon” can be understood in a perfective sense might suggest that the “geoguð” had received baptism in figura “þurh flodes fær.”31

Indeed, the poem makes this connection explicit: “sio geogoð aras / þurh fæder fulwiht” [the youth arose through the baptism of the Father] (1634b– 35a, emphasis mine). Death is here the symbol of baptism. This explains the Andreas-poet’s use of a flood to kill, resurrect, and baptize the Mermedonians all at once—all three components are already contained within the

70 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book conversion act as represented by the sacrament of baptism itself. The death and resurrection of the Mermedonians are in effect a typological representation of a sacramental truth. The Andreas-poet highlights the association between the resurrections of the patriarchs and the Mermedonians with verbal echo that seems beyond the incidental similarities expected in formulaic poetry (Table 2.1). As both rise “of greote,” the youthfulness of the resurrected Mermedonians (they are “geonge,” young or fresh, “eaforan unweaxne,” and “geogoð”) also echoes the condition of the resurrected patriarchs, who are “edniwinga,” having received “geogoðhade.” The baptism of the Mermedonians also looks backward to the death and resurrection in which they have already participated—they are described as “fæge” or doomed as soon as they fall to the flood (1530b). The passing of the Old Law to the New is highlighted by the characterization of the former cannibals specifically as “eaforan,” which can have the general meaning of children, but also the specific connotation of successors, sons, or heirs,32 a connotation that is reinforced by the phrase “fæder fulwiht.” The newly converted are thus the successors of Israel, heirs of both the Old and the New Jerusalems, representing completion, fulfillment, and consummation.33 And like the patriarchs, the Mermedonians receive judgment immediately following their resurrection. Table 2.1:  A comparison of Andreas lines 782–96a and 1623–29, demonstrating verbal echo.

Typological readings of the poem assume that the kinship between Christ and his apostle operates primarily to foreground Andrew’s role as the agent of this miraculous conversion of the Mermedonians.34 In Mermedonia, the saint continues Christ’s work as both a suffering body and a missionary or mediator between man and God. In revealing to Andrew his coming hardships of torture at the hands of the cannibals, God himself makes the connection between thegn and lord: speaking of his own passion, God says “‘Ic adreah feala / yrmþa ofer eorðan. // Wolde ic eow on ðon / þurh bliðne hige // bysne



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onstellan, / swa on ellþeode // ywed wyrðeð’” [“I suffered many miseries on earth. In this I wished, with kind heart, to set an example for you that will be fulfilled in foreign lands”] (969b–72). Both functions of the saint’s body (to suffer and to preach in word and deed) will together bring about the desired conversion of those separated from God. This assumes, of course, that the “ellþeode,” those separated from God, are the Mermedonians. But Andrew himself, and Matthew, too, are also called “ellþeode” (16a) and described as exiles in a foreign land.35 And it was Matthew’s mission to convert the Mermedonians. Andrew’s mission is to rescue Matthew,36 who, as God informs Andrew, “‘þurh gares gripe // gast onsendan, / ellorfusne, // butan ðu ær cyme’” [“will send forth his spirit, eager for another place, through the force of the spear, unless you come before that”] (187–88). All of this suggests the possibility that the conversion effected by Andrew’s trip to Mermedonia is not only the Mermedonians’ but also his own; or rather, it will only be through Andrew’s own turning that he can hope to turn the ‘savage cannibals.’ Andrew’s suffering is described in the above quotation as “to be fulfilled in foreign lands,” and God says that the pattern of his passion is for Andrew—but the language of the passage is not specific about who is to benefit from the example, the Mermedonians or Andrew himself. This perhaps also explains why Matthew’s faith is depicted as so much stronger than Andrew’s: Matthew is already figurally dead, as typological readings of the poem’s harrowing of Mermedonia suggest,37 waiting in the hell-like prison for the Last Judgment. But in reenacting events that predict his own judgment, Andrew is at the very least able to learn what it is he is supposed to become—a saint—and he can begin to fulfill that destiny in his instruction of his new flock.38

Doubt, Conversion, and Sainthood If the heart of the poem is Andrew’s conversion, what does it look like and how are we to understand it? David Hamilton has suggested that dramatic irony is the principal rhetorical deliverer of Andreas’s allegorical messages, an irony that reaches its peak when Andrew is describing the above-quoted resurrection of the patriarchs to the Helmsman.39 At that moment, Andrew is castigating the Jews for not recognizing Christ’s divinity while he was standing right in front of them; but all the while Christ is standing right in front of Andrew, and he, too, fails to recognize him. Now, it seems, everyone in the poem is being implicitly compared to the Jews.

72 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book But the pervasiveness of this idea of Jewish conversion within Andreas highlights the idea of Judgment as becoming rather than event. Every Christian, even the saint, is always in a state of conversion, of attempting to complete but never completing spiritual potential. Paradoxically, it is only after death, when conversion becomes impossible, that true spiritual completion (which is only represented in figura by earthly conversion) is attained. This paradox necessitates that ‘Judgment’ be read not as a discrete event that will occur, but as an ideal spiritual state that is to be striven after continuously. The fantasy is that of the actualization promised by Judgment, the moment of true conversion in the sense of a “turning around.”40 If this is true, then all Christians are like the figural Jews—unconverted until the very end.41 Andrew is no exception. He is a Christian in doubt, despite being destined for sainthood. In “The Old English Prose Legends of St. Andrew,” Scott DeGregorio analyzes the two Old English homiletic vitae of Andrew and makes an analogous argument about vernacular prose legends of the saint.42 DeGregorio points out that several popular actae of Andrew that were circulating in Anglo-Saxon England (which included his experiences with the Mermedonians) would have potentially been considered unorthodox during the period but were nonetheless widespread. Indeed, the story of Andrew among the cannibals provides the plot for Andreas as well as Blickling Homily XIX.43 Orthodox writers might have excised such elements from their own lives of Andrew, as does Ælfric from his Homily 38, but not only because of the sensationalism of the story. DeGregorio argues that part of what may have been unappealing to writers like Ælfric is the fallibility of Andrew, which is so clearly central to the narrative of the Mermedonians. As an example, DeGregorio points to Andrew’s response to God’s mission in Blickling XIX, in which the saint excuses his inability to help his fellow apostle Matthew by claiming that he is only “flæsclic man,” a man of flesh, embodied and therefore weak.44 Ælfric’s Homily 38, in contrast, focuses on Andrew’s saintly heroism, including his unwavering response to Christ’s call to serve as the first apostle (Matt. 4:18–22). Following other homilists before him,45 Ælfric even discusses how the saint’s name itself evokes steadfastness: “gefylð he on his þeawum andrees getacnunge þe is gereht þegenlic” [in his conduct he fulfills the signification of Andrew, which means ‘loyal’] (ÆCHom I.38.161–63).46 DeGregorio postulates that the story of the Mermedonians may have been part of a separate, heterodox hagiographic tradition in which Andrew figured as a fallible, flæsclic, and imperfect apostle.



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Andreas seems to support this view, and Andrew’s fallibility is emphasized in the text by exactly those points that complicate typological readings of the poem. The first of these is the moment at which Andrew doubts God’s plan, which appears in slightly more elaborate form in Andreas than in Blickling XIX. When God tells Andrew that he must go to Mermedonia to save Matthew, Andrew replies by listing the reasons why the mission is impossible: he won’t make it in time, he doesn’t know the way, and he doesn’t have any friends in Mermedonia (190–201). Andrew wallows in the limitations of his own embodiment by assuming that the constraints he is listing, which would be real obstacles to the journey of a mere mortal, could somehow overpower the divine plan for the faithful, and concludes by suggesting “‘þæt mæg engel þin // eað gefaran,’” [“Your angel may do that easily”] (194). God replies “‘Eala, Andreas, // þæt ðu a woldest / þæs siðfætes // sæne weorþan!’” [“Alas, Andrew, that you should ever be negligent of this journey!”] (203–4), and Andrew is marked as the doubting hero early in the poem. This characterization is strengthened by the implicit comparison between Andrew’s doubt and Matthew’s faith, which opens the poem and sets its tone. In the division of lands, Matthew has drawn the shortest straw and must travel to a land known to be inhabited by cannibals. But though it might mean his death, he goes willingly, and even in the clutches of the Mermedonians, he keeps his faith and prays calmly to God: “Gif þin willa sie,   wuldres aldor, þæt me wærlogan  wæpna ecgum, sweordum, aswebban,   ic beo sona gearu to adreoganne   þæt ðu, drihten min, engla eadgifa,   eðelleasum, dugeða dædfruma,   deman wille.” (70–75) [“If it be your will, Lord of Glory, that the traitors slaughter me with the edges of weapons [and] with swords, I shall be eager to suffer whatever you, my Lord, treasure-giver of angels, Creator of hosts, may ordain for me in exile.”]

Matthew readily accepts the will of God, asking only that his body remain physically intact (that he keep his senses and sight) until his death. Andrew makes similar claims, but it is clear from the number of times he questions God’s will that his faith is not as strong as Matthew’s. Andrew doubts God during his passion, as well, and though his words serve to align him with Christ, they simultaneously distance thegn from lord—as like to Christ as Andrew might be, the ways in which the apostle falls short of

74 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book his potential are only made more obvious by the comparison. This distance is made especially clear through Andrew’s own phrasing. He does not speak the words of Christ as though they were his own. Rather, he quotes Christ back to God, excusing his own doubts by reminding God of when he himself “‘to fæder cleopodest, / cininga wuldor, // ond cwæde ðus: / “Ic ðe, fæder engla, // frignan wille, / lifes leohtfruma, // hwæt forlætest me?”’” [“called to the Father, the King of Glory, and said: ‘I wish to ask you, Father of the angels, protector of life, why do you forsake me?’”] (1410b–13). But even if one reads Andrew’s doubts as typological echoes of Christ’s own, their juxtaposition with Matthew’s eager willingness to suffer whatever tortures the Mermedonians have in store serves to emphasize the ironic inversion of the typological resonance itself. Andrew falters one more time before the end of the poem, by leaving the newly converted Mermedonians too soon (1663–77). God must tell him to return, so that the former cannibals may be prevented from straying in their practices. Dissonant details like these add up to suggest that Andrew is not a perfect type of Christ, but rather a weak one, full of promise but flawed. The saint’s turning is achieved when he returns to Mermedonia to complete the conversions that he has started—his own as well as the cannibals’. In spending time instructing, not just baptizing, the new Christians, Andrew comes to a fuller sense of his own identity: his purpose as an apostle, his mission to Mermedonia, and his place as a member of the Church on earth.47 The final step of the resurrection/baptism of the Mermedonians is the building of a church: “Þa se modiga het, / cyninges cræftiga, // ciricean getimbran, / gerwan godes tempel, // þær sio geogoð aras / þurh fæder fulwiht // ond se flod onsprang” [Then the spirited one [i.e., Andrew] commanded them to build a church, to prepare God’s temple, where the youths had arisen through the baptism of the Father and where the flood had issued forth] (1632b–35). Andrew’s resurrection raises up not only the converted Mermedonians but also the body of Christ in the form of the Church, represented both by the temple that Andrew commands to be built and also the new congregation that will occupy it. This is a process that is only begun with Andrew’s passion, and its completion requires his physical presence as a preacher and teacher, not just as a miracle worker. The completion of the church and the instruction of the Mermedonians is a conversion that enables a conversion, and it is only at this point in the poem that Andrew recognizes what he has been shown throughout. The fact that Andrew is both a holy man and an incomplete one helps to explain those tensions inherent in the poem’s typology that have long been noted by scholars. This is not to say that the primary typological reading



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(Andrew as Christ) observed by so many is not present, nor is this to say that there is ever an expectation that a typological reading will be perfectly consistent. By nature, allegoresis turns approximations into equations. Perhaps most importantly, like Judgment, typology is all about the fantasy of completion. The type is fulfilled in the antitype, and the potential, the shadow provided by the former, is made complete in the latter. Yet the discontinuities between the saintly human Andrew and his perfect divine counterpart Christ suggest that completion is realized only through the divine. Saints like Andrew provide ways of reading the processes of completion, but not their fulfillment. Heathens like the Mermedonians obviously need to be converted, but so, too, do doubting, incomplete, or recalcitrant Christians: such is the purpose of penitential seasons like Rogationtide and Lent. Viewed through this lens, Andrew models conversion as well as sainthood. In the poem, the apostle is able to perform the moment of conversion by baptizing the Mermedonians, but also by being baptized himself through his own figural death. In his article, “The Passion of Andreas: Andreas 1398–1491,” Frederick M. Biggs argues that the poet reads Andrew’s passion as much more significant than the authors of the source legends apparently did, and consequently adapts his poem to reflect that significance.48 Unlike the Latin and Greek analogues of the narrative, however, in Vercelli’s text Andrew never actually dies—his martyrdom is performed by a living body.49 This produces the narrative ‘imbalance’ upon which Biggs bases his reading of the poem: the creation of two climaxes, one at Andrew’s pseudo-death and one at the poem’s conclusion. The poet attempts to ‘correct’ the imbalance, according to Biggs, by inserting an authorial interjection to signal the finality of Andrew’s martyrdom without actually ending the poem: “it confuses the plot to have the main character undergo a passion three hundred lines before the conclusion of a story that does not even contain his death. The poet went far to solve the problem when he introduced a first-person interjection into the middle of his story.”50 As Biggs observes, this point is apparently a crux taken up by the Andreas-poet but not his sources, for “the poet could have avoided this difficulty by mechanically translating his source and thus minimizing the emphasis on the saint’s suffering. Alternatively, he could have changed the order of the events or edited other scenes in order to allow [Andrew’s] passion to stand as the climax that its meaning seems to demand.”51 Biggs concludes that both the awkwardness of Andrew’s passion and the poem’s authorial interjection, which is meant to offset that awkwardness, are items of importance to the poet and unique to Andreas.

76 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book While I agree that the specifics of Andrew’s passion were of particular concern to the Andreas-poet, we can consider alternate explanations for both of Biggs’s observations (anti-climax and interjection). First, it is worth pointing out that the typological resonances of Andreas need not provide us with a traditional narrative structure, and this precludes the need to identify a single climax at all. More importantly, the signifying heart of the poem is arguably not Andrew’s passion at all, but rather the revelation of his conversion, which is completed only at the poem’s conclusion, and appropriately so. This suggests an alternate reading of the poet’s personal interjection, as well. In addition to the moment identified by Biggs at Andrew’s passion (1478–89a), the Andreas-poet also interjects, even if only briefly, during the crucial moment of the resurrection/baptism of the Mermedonians (“mine gefrægne” [1626b]). Both interjections flag important eschatological points in the poem’s narrative, and these moments of personal reflection consciously draw the audience’s attention to the fact that a person is witnessing these true events by retelling them, as Andrew does for the Helmsman in the first part of the poem.52 The interjections also emphasize the personal relevance of the poem’s episodes. There is an ‘I’ commenting on the poem, and a ‘me’ listening. Like Andrew, the audience is meant to recognize themselves (not just typological resonances) in the events that they are experiencing, Andrew through action, the audience through reenactment. The incomplete Christians in the audience are thus able to realize that they are more like the ‘saintly’ Andrew than they might have originally thought.

Notes 1. A version of this chapter was previously published in Studies in Philology, 112.1 (2015), 1–23, and is reprinted here with generous permission. 2. For more detailed information about the Vercelli manuscript itself and the texts within it, see above, Introduction, notes 1 and 2. Andreas is unique to the Vercelli Book, but it is one of three Old English vitae for Andrew, the other two being Blickling Homily XIX (The Blickling Homilies of the Tenth Century, ed. Robert Morris, EETS o.s. 58, 63, 73 [rpt. 1 vol., London: EETS, 1967]), 228–49; and Ælfric’s Homily 38 (ÆCHom I.38), 507–19. For a comparative study of the two homilies, see Scott DeGregorio, “Þegenlic or flæsclic: The Old English Prose Legends of St. Andrew,” JEGP 102 (2003): 449–64. George Philip Krapp (ed., The Vercelli Book, ASPR II) suggests that Andreas was likely based on “a Latin version of the Greek text [of the Acts of Andrew and Matthew in the Land of the Cannibals] not now extant, so far as is known, in a complete form” (xxxvi), and most scholars agree. Kenneth Brooks in his edition of Andreas (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1961), identifies the Latin



3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

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Recensio Casanatensis as the source closest to the OE poem: although it is not “the immediate source, [it] fulfills more of the conditions than any other” (20). References to the Latin and Greek originals are quoted in translation only from Franz Blatt, ed., Die lateinischen Bearbeitungen der Acta Andreae et Matthiae apud anthropophagos (Gießen and Cophenhagen: A. Topemann, 1930); Robert Boenig, ed. and trans., The Acts of Andrew in the Country of the Cannibals: Translations from the Greek, Latin, and Old English (New York: Garland, 1991); and Richard Allen and Daniel G. Calder, “Acts of Andrew and Matthew Among the Cannibals,” in Sources and Analogues of Old English Poetry I: The Major Latin Texts in Translation (Cambridge: Brewer, 1983). See above, Chapter 1, 33–60. For general introductions to the typological interpretation of medieval literature, see Erich Auerbach’s seminal articles “Figura” and “St. Francis of Assisi in Dante’s Commedia,” both in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays by Erich Auerbach, trans. Ralph Manheim et al. (New York: Meridian, 1959), 11–76 and 79–98; and Jean Leclerq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, trans. Catherine Misrahi (New York: Fordham UP, 1961), 60–8. See also Auerbach, “Typological Symbolism in Medieval Literature,” Yale French Studies 9 (1952): 3–10. The most thorough book-length study is Jean Daniélou, From Shadows to Reality: Studies in the Biblical Typology of the Fathers, trans. W. Hibberd (London: Burns & Dates, 1960). On the eschatological typology of Andreas in particular, see Thomas D. Hill, “Figural Narrative in Andreas,” NM 70 (1969): 261–73; Constance Hieatt, “The Harrowing of Mermedonia: Typological Patterns in the Old English Andreas,” NM 70 (1969): 261–73; Penn Szittya, “The Living Stone and the Patriarchs: Typological Imagery in Andreas, Lines 706–810,” JEGP 72 (1973): 167–74; and James Earl, “The Typological Structure of Andreas,” in Old English Literature in Context, ed. John D. Niles (Cambridge: Brewer, 1980), 66–89. On Christological typology in the poem, see especially Frederick M. Biggs, “The Passion of Andreas: Andreas 1398–491,” SP 85 (1988): 413–27; and Robert E. Bjork, “Andreas: Typology and the Structure of Repetition,” in Old English Verse Saints’ Lives: A Study in Direct Discourse and the Iconography of Style (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1985), 110–24. On the need to extend the analytical implications of typological readings of the poem, see Daniel G. Calder, “Figurative Language and Its Contexts in Andreas: A Study in Medieval Expressionism,” Modes of Interpretation in Old English Literature: Studies in Honour of Stanley B. Greenfield, eds. Phyllis Rugg Brown, Georgia Ronan Crampton, Fred C. Robinson (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1986), 115–36. This and all subsequent quotations of the homilies are taken from Donald G. Scragg, The Vercelli Homilies and Related Texts, EETS o.s. 300 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992) and cited parenthetically by homily and line number. All translations are mine. See above, note 4. Most notably, Hill, “Figural Narrative in Andreas,” opens the discussion of baptismal figuration in Andreas, which is thoroughly fleshed out in Marie Michelle Walsh, “The Baptismal Flood in the Old English Andreas: Liturgical and Typological Depths,” Traditio 33 (1977): 137–58. See also Hill, “The Sphragis as Apotropaic Sign: Andreas 1334–44,” Anglia 101 (1983): 147–51. This and all subsequent quotations of Vercelli’s poetry are taken from Krapp, The Vercelli Book, and cited parenthetically by line number. All translations are mine.

78 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book 9. Biggs, “The Passion of Andreas,” reads the miracle of Andrew’s blossoming body as “an image that expresses the importance of the saint’s imitation, not only for his own salvation but also for the continuation of Christ’s work by suffering for Him,” significantly dramatized by the poet’s minor adjustments to his sources (422). 10. Calder, “Figurative Language and Its Contexts in Andreas,” 119. 11. On the general concept of reading typology against its primary meaning(s), see Patrick Hermann, Allegories of War: Language and Violence in Old English Poetry (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1989), who productively illuminates the ideological coercions that are imbedded within allegorical structures, and that remain hidden because of the interpretive hegemony of typological hermeneutics. He treats Andreas on his 119–49. As his title suggests, Hermann’s concern is primarily with allegories of destruction, by which torture and violence become legitimized (though problematically) through their absorption into justifying typological patterns. The multiple alternate associations (which Hermann calls residues) that remain at work outside of the primary figural association are always informing an audience’s understanding of a typological text, at times as much as the primary association does. Hermann reads these residues as unconscious products of ideology. Although I agree with Hermann’s emphasis on residual typological associations for understanding texts, I read such associations as conscious literary technique. 12. On the idea of reform as a central concept in Christian theology, see Gerhart B. Ladner, The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1959), especially 49–62. 13. On the figural quality of representative saints’ lives, see Hill, “Imago Dei: Genre, Symbolism, and Anglo-Saxon Hagiography,” in Holy Men and Holy Women: Old English Prose Saints’ Lives and Their Contexts, ed. Paul Szarmach (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 35–50, 44–45; Raymon S. Farrar, “Structure and Function in Representative Old English Saints’ Lives,” Neophilologus 57 (1973): 83–93; and James W. Earl, “Typology and Iconographic Style in Early Medieval Hagiography,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 8 (1975): 15–46. 14. That is, instead of merely reading the entire conversion as a type of baptism or penitence. Such readings maintain that a real conversion is at stake, though the question then becomes ‘conversion of whom?’ The typical answer is Jews, but for the tentative suggestion of the Mermedonians as figures of pagan Vikings, see Shannon N. Godlove, “Bodies as Borders: Cannibalism and Conversion in the Old English Andreas,” Studies in Philology 106 (2009): 137–60, 158–60; for the Mermedonians as Celtic Britons, see Lindy Brady, “Echoes of Britons on a Fenland Frontier in the Old English Andreas,” The Review of English Studies 61 (2010): 669–89; and for the Mermedonians as otherworldly spiritual enemies, see Alexandra Bolintineanu, “The Land of Mermedonia in the Old English Andreas,” NeoPhil 93 (2009): 149–64. In “Insulae Gentium: Biblical Influence on Old English Poetic Vocabulary,” in Magister Regis: Studies in Honor of Robert Earl Kaske, ed. Arthur Groos et al. (New York: Fordham UP, 1986), 9–21, Charles D. Wright convincingly argues that the Old English ealand and igland (‘island’), like the one on which the Mermedonians are to be found (15), carries with it specific biblical resonances and figurally connotes Gentile, not Jewish, nations, specifically those that are destined to be converted. 15. Earl, “The Typological Structure of Andreas,” 73–78. See also Godlove, “Bodies as Borders”; Brady, “Echoes of Britons”; and Hill, “Hebrews, Israelites, and Wicked Jews: An Onomastic Crux in ‘Andreas’ 161–67,” Traditio 32 (1976): 358–61.



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1 6. Earl, “The Typological Structure of Andreas,” 73. 17. See Charles D. Wright, “Matthew’s Hebrew Gospel in Andreas and Old English Prose,” Notes &Queries 30 (1983): 101–4), for a discussion of the connection between the reference to Matthew having first wordum writan among the Jews (11b–13) and his mission to the Mermedonians. 18. On the treatment of Jews and Judaism, and especially the ‘othering’ of Jewishness, in medieval English literature, see Lisa Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2004); and Andrew P. Scheil, The Footsteps of Israel: Understanding Jews in Anglo-Saxon England (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2004). On the representation of Jewish ‘magic’ in Andreas, see Charles D. Wright, “Jewish Magic and Christian Miracle in the Old English Andreas,” in Imagining the Jew in AngloSaxon Literature and Culture, ed. Samantha Zacher (Toronto: U Toronto P, 2016), 167–93. On the importance of distinguishing between figurative and literal ‘Jewishness’ in Andreas, see Hill, “Hebrews, Israelites, and Wicked Jews.” 19. One of the signs of the imminence of Judgment is the conversion of the Jews. Among numerous other texts, Augustine’s De ciuitate Dei lists the primary signs that will herald the Parousia: “In illo itaque judicio vel circa illud judicium has res didicimus esse venturas, Eliam Thesbiten, fidem Judaeorum, Antichristum persecuturum, Christum judicaturum, mortuorum resurrectionem, bonorum malorumque diremptionem, mundi conflagrationem, ejusdemque renovationem” [At or around that Judgment we have learned that these things will come about: Elias the Tishbite will come, the Jews will believe, the AntiChrist will persecute, Christ will judge, the dead shall rise, the good and the evil will be separated, the earth will be consumed in flames and then renewed] (CCSL 48.20.30.5, translation mine). As Earl points out, all these events occur in figura during the course of Andreas. 20. E.g., Godlove, “Bodies as Borders,” 138. 21. See Wright, “Matthew’s Hebrew Gospel.” 22. Daniélou, The Bible and the Liturgy (Notre Dame: Notre Dame UP, 1956), 79. 23. In his edition of Andreas, Brooks glosses geþinge as ‘command’ at 794b, but elsewhere in the poem glosses it as ‘result,’ ‘settlement,’ and even ‘fate.’ My thanks to Charles D. Wright for directing me to Brooks’ glossary on this point. 24. “Sneome of slæpe þy fæsten” (Chr III 889a), from Christ III, Exeter Book, fols. 20b–32a, ASPR III, 27–49. 25. This may also explain why the poet chooses a “stan” instead of a statue or an angel, as in the sources, although Szittya convincingly argues for various other reasons that “stan” is appropriate to the poet’s project. See Szittya, “The Living Stone.” 26. On the Harrowing typology of Andreas, see Hill, “Figural Narrative in Andreas,” Earl, “The Typological Structure of Andreas,” and especially Hieatt, “The Harrowing of Mermedonia.” 27. On the sources of Andreas, see above, note 2. 28. This significance is treated among other places in Szittya, “The Living Stone.” Szittya argues that the Andreas-poet’s inclusion of the resurrection and not just the animated “sphinxes” found in most other versions of the legend is part of his larger project of establishing typological significances. The entire episode “rests upon the translation of three biblical images into narrative form … [t]he first image is of Solomon’s temple; the second is of the living stone …; and the third is of the resurrection of the patriarchs” (167).

80 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book 2 9. Szittya, “The Living Stone,” 174. 30. The patriarchs are commanded to “leoðo gadrigean, / gaste onfon // ond geogoðhade” [gather their limbs and received spirit and youth] (781b–82). 31. Hill, “Figural Narrative in Andreas,” 269. 32. Bosworth-Toller, s.v. eafora. 33. Jacob himself provides the origin for the word Israel, being so named after defeating an angel in combat (Gen. 32:28). 34. See above, note 4 on the Christological typology of Andreas. 35. Godlove, “Bodies as Borders,” notes this on her page 141 but connects it instead to the poem’s anxieties about otherness and conversion. 36. In the Latin source, God’s mission for Andrew includes “preach[ing] the saving word” to the Mermedonians, as well as rescuing Matthew (Blatt, Die lateinischen Bearbeitungen, trans. in Allen and Calder, “Acts of Andrew and Matthew Among the Cannibals,” 17). The poem Andreas contains no such specification, though one may be loosely inferred from the above passage in which God specifies that Andrew will suffer in foreign lands. 37. See especially Hieatt, “The Harrowing of Mermedonia.” 38. Earl, “The Typological Structure of Andreas,” 82–86, notes the poem’s concern with Andrew’s ‘education’ but does not fully develop the idea. 39. Hamilton, “The Diet and Digestion of Allegory in Andreas,” Anglo-Saxon England 1 (1972): 147–58. 40. From the Latin conversiō, ‘a turning around,’ from conversus, past participle of convertere, ‘to turn around.’ 41. Bolintineanu, “The Land of Mermedonia in the Old English Andreas,” suggests that such a connection is reflected even in the otherworldly landscape of the poem’s insular mearcland of Mermedonia—the whole of humankind is spiritually ‘separated’ from God until Doomsday. 42. DeGregorio, “Þegenlic or flæsclic,” 449–64. 43. From Princeton, Scheide Library, MS 71, the Blickling Homilies, another anonymous and potentially heterodox homiliary like the Vercelli Book. 44. DeGregorio, “Þegenlic or flæsclic,” 455. 45. Ibid., 456, note 31. 46. DeGregorio discusses this quotation on his page 456, and translates þegenlic as ‘brave,’ which is the primary definition given in Bosworth-Toller (s.v. þegenlice). The word, however, can also mean ‘noble’ or ‘loyal’ (Clark Hall, s.v. þegenlic), and since the preceding passage in Ælfric is elaborating on Andrew’s remarkable endurance of hardships in God’s name, ‘loyal’ seems an appropriate translation. 47. Christopher Fee, “Productive Destruction: Torture, Text, and the Body in the Old English Andreas,” Essays in Medieval Studies 11 (1994): 51–62, also argues that Andrew’s mission to Mermedonia is one of fulfilling his own identity, but Fee suggests that this is achieved through Andrew’s torture, through the inscription of the suffering martyr’s body. Peter Dendle, “Pain and Saint-Making in Andreas, Bede, and the Old English Lives of St. Margret,” Varieties of Devotion in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 39–52, makes a similar connection between the necessity of suffering and the saintly identity.



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4 8. Biggs, “The Passion of Andreas,” 413–27. 49. Brooks, Andreas and the Fates of the Apostles. Cf. Blatt, ed., Die lateinischen Bearbeitungen der Acta Andreae et Matthiae apud anthropophagos; and Calder and Allen, “Acts of Andrew and Matthew Among the Cannibals,” in Sources and Analogues. 50. Biggs, “The Passion of Andreas,” 427. 51. Ibid., 427. 52. For more on the poet’s interjections and their relationship to the narrative of conversion, see Dabney A. Bankert, The Poetics of Conversion in Medieval English Literature (PhD diss., University of Illinois, 1997), 59–115. On the poet’s self-interruption and the composition of oral poetry, see John Miles Foley, “The Poet’s Self-Interruption in Andreas,” in Prosody and Poetics in the Early Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of C. B. Hieatt, ed. M. J. Toswell (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1995), 42–59.

References Ælfric. Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The First Series [Text]. Edited by Peter Clemoes. EETS s.s. 17. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Allen, Michael J. B., and Daniel G. Calder, eds. and trans. Sources and Analogues of Old English Poetry: The Major Latin Texts in Translation. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1976. Appleton, Helen. “The Book of Isaiah as an Influence on Andreas.” N&Q 62, no. 1 (2015): 1–6. Auerbach, Erich. “Figura.” In Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays by Erich Auerbach, translated by Ralph Manheim, et al., 11–76. New York: Meridian, 1959. ———. “St. Francis of Assisi in Dante’s Commedia.” In Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays by Erich Auerbach, translated by Ralph Manheim, et al., 79–98. New York: Meridian, 1959. ———. “Typological Symbolism in Medieval Literature.” Yale French Studies 9 (1952): 3–10. Augustine of Hippo. De civitate Dei. Edited by B. Dombart and A. Kalb. CCSL 47–48. 2 vols. Turnhout: Brepols, 1955. Bankert, Dabney A. “The Poetics of Religious Conversion in Medieval English Literature.” PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1996. Biggs, Frederick M. “The Passion of Andreas: Andreas 1398–1491.” SP 85 (1988): 413–27. Bjork, Robert E. “Andreas: Typology and the Structure of Repetition.” In Old English Verse Saints’ Lives: A Study in Direct Discourse and the Iconography of Style, 110–24. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1985. Blatt, Franz, ed. Die lateinischen Bearbeitungen der Acta Andreae et Matthiae apud anthropophagos. Gießen: A. Topemann, 1930. Boenig, Robert, ed. and trans. The Acts of Andrew in the Country of the Cannibals: Translations from the Greek, Latin, and Old English. New York: Garland, 1991. ———. “Andreas and Doctrinal Controversy in the Early Middle Ages.” PhD diss., State University of New Jersey, 1978. ———. “Andreas, the Eucharist, and Vercelli.” JEGP 79, no. 3 (1980): 313–31. ———. Saint and Hero: Andreas and Medieval Doctrine. Lewisberg: Bucknell UP, 1991.

82 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book Bolintineanu, Alexandra. “The Land of Mermedonia in the Old English Andreas.” NeoPhil 93 (2009): 149–64. Bosworth, Joseph, T. Northcote Toller, and Alistair Campbell. An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. 3 vols. Supplement by T. N. Toller; Enlarged Addenda and Corrigenda by A. Campbell. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1882–98, 1908–21, 1972. Brady, Lindy. “Echoes of Britons on a Fenland Frontier in the Old English Andreas.” Review of English Studies 61, no. 252 (2010): 669–89. Brooks, Kenneth, ed. Andreas and the Fates of the Apostles. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1961. Calder, Daniel G. “Figurative Language and Its Contexts in Andreas: A Study in Medieval Expressionism.” In Modes of Interpretation in Old English Literature: Studies in Honour of Stanley B. Greenfield. Edited by Phyllis Rugg Brown, Georgia Ronan Crampton, and Fred C. Robinson, 115–36. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1986. Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina. Turnhout: Brepols, 1953. Daniélou, Jean. The Bible and the Liturgy. Notre Dame: Notre Dame UP, 1956. ———. From Shadows to Reality: Studies in the Biblical Typology of the Fathers. Translated by W. Hibberd. London: Burns & Dates, 1960. DeGregorio, Scott. “Þegenlic or flæsclic: The Old English Prose Legends of St. Andrew.” JEGP 102 (2003): 449–64. Dendle, Peter. “Pain and Saint-Making in Andreas, Bede, and the Old English Lives of St. Margret.” In Varieties of Devotion in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, edited by S. C. KarantNunn, 39–52. Turnhout: Brepols, 2003. Earl, James W. “The Typological Structure of Andreas.” In Old English Literature in Context, edited by John D. Niles, 66–89. Cambridge: Brewer, 1980. ———. “Typology and Iconographic Style in Early Medieval Hagiography.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 8 (1975): 15–46. Farrar, Raymon S. “Structure and Function in Representative Old English Saints’ Lives.” Neophil 57 (1973): 83–93. Fee, Christopher. “Productive Destruction: Torture, Text, and the Body in the Old English Andreas.” EMS 2 (1994): 51–62. Foley, John Miles. “The Poet’s Self-Interruption in Andreas.” In Prosody and Poetics in the Early Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of C. B. Hieatt, edited by M. J. Toswell, 42–59. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1995. Foot, Sarah. “‘By water in the spirit’: The Administration of Baptism in Early Anglo-Saxon England.” In Pastoral Care Before the Parish, edited by John Blair and Richard Sharpe, 171–92. Leicester: Leicester UP, 1992. Garner, Lori Ann. “The Old English Andreas and the Mermedonian Cityscape.” EMS 24 (2007): 53–63. Godlove, Shannon. “Bodies as Borders: Cannibalism and Conversion in the Old English Andreas.” SP 106 (2009): 137–60. Hall, J. R. Clark. A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. 4th ed., with a supplement by Herbert D. Meritt. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1960. Hamilton, David. “The Diet and Digestion of Allegory in Andreas.” ASE 1 (1972): 147–58. Hermann, Patrick. Allegories of War: Language and Violence in Old English Poetry. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1989.



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Hieatt, Constance. “The Harrowing of Mermedonia: Typological Patterns in the Old English Andreas.” NM 70 (1969): 261–73. Hill, Thomas D. “Figural Narrative in Andreas.” NM 70 (1969): 261–73. ———. “Hebrews, Israelites, and Wicked Jews: An Onomastic Crux in ‘Andreas’ 161–67.” Traditio 32 (1976): 358–61. ———. “Imago Dei: Genre, Symbolism, and Anglo-Saxon Hagiography.” In Holy Men and Holy Women: Old English Prose Saints’ Lives and Their Contexts, edited by Paul Szarmach, 35–50. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996. ———. “The Sphragis as Apotropaic Sign: Andreas 1334–44.” Anglia 101 (1983): 147–51. Irving, Edward B., Jr. “Latin Prose Sources for Old English Verse.” JEGP 57 (1958): 588–95. Krapp, George Philip, and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, eds. The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records. 6 vols. New York: Columbia UP, 1931–42. Ladner, Gerhart B. The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1959. Lampert, Lisa. Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2004. Leclerq, Jean. The Love of Learning and the Desire for God. Translated by Catherine Misrahi. New York: Fordham UP, 1961. Migne, J.-P., ed. Patrologia Latina. 221 vols., with 5 supplements edited by A. Hamann. Paris: n.p. 1844–974. Morris, Robert, ed. The Blickling Homilies of the Tenth Century. EETS o.s. 58, 63, 73. 1874–1880. Rpt. 1 vol., London: EETS, 1967. Schaar, Claes. “Andreas.” In Critical Studies in the Cynewulf Group. 1949. New York: Haskell, 1967. Scheil, Andrew P. The Footsteps of Israel: Understanding Jews in Anglo-Saxon England. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2004. Scragg, Donald G., ed. The Vercelli Homilies and Related Texts. EETS o.s. 300. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. Sisam, Celia, ed. The Vercelli Book (Vercelli Biblioteca Capitolare cxvii). EEMF 19. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1976. Szittya, Penn. “The Living Stone and the Patriarchs: Typological Imagery in Andreas, Lines 706–810.” JEGP 72 (1973): 167–74. Walsh, Marie Michelle. “The Baptismal Flood in the Old English Andreas: Liturgical and Typological Depths.” Traditio 33 (1977): 137–58. Wightman, Brett A. “‘I Will Never Forsake You’: The Divine Protection Theme in Andreas.” In Geardagum 25 (2004): 47–60. Wright, Charles D. “Insulae Gentium: Biblical Influence on the Old English Poetic Vocabulary.” In Magister Regis: Studies in Honor of Robert Earl Kaske, edited by Arthur Groos, et al., 9–21. New York: Fordham UP, 1986. ———. “Jewish Magic and Christian Miracle in the Old English Andreas.” In Imagining the Jew in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Culture, edited by Samantha Zacher, 167–93. Toronto: U Toronto P, 2016. ———. “Matthew’s Hebrew Gospel in Andreas and Old English Prose.” N&Q 30 (1983): 101–4.

·3· the self and the community Rogationtide and the Ascension in The Dream of the Rood and Vercelli Homilies X, XI, and XXI

The mode of subjectivity discussed in the previous chapters is constructed within a system of religious belief. The Christian selfhood that is constituted by baptism and Judgment is irreducibly individual, yet is predicated upon each subject’s investment in the Christian ideology shared by all members of the religious community. Even the self that undergoes individual judgment is imagined to be judged simultaneously with all humanity, and the thoughts, words, and deeds1 of each will be revealed to all at Judgment.2 The Vercelli Book texts discussed in Chapters 1 and 2 are not so much de-scribing selves as pre-scribing them, even if in an explicitly literary medium (as is the case with Andreas). Chapter 4 will return to the concept of ‘ideal’ selves as modeled in Vercelli’s saints’ lives, but the present chapter turns toward texts more explicitly concerned with the participation of the Christian self in the community: Vercelli homilies X, XI, XXI for Rogationtide (fols. 65r–71r, 71v–73v, 112r–116v, respectively), and The Dream of the Rood (fols. 101v–106).3 The crucial link between these apparently unrelated texts is the imagery of the Ascension, the theological event whereby the physical body is assumed into heaven and the completed Christian self becomes one of the elect, whose beatitude is simultaneously individual and communal.

86 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book

Introduction In the previous chapter, we examined the function of conversion and baptism in the process of Christian identity formation, not only as discrete events but also as diachronic processes of faith. Andreas contains, in effect, two conversions: while converting the pagan Mermedonians, Andrew also (re-)converts himself, a process that models the iterative, and performative, nature of faith for the poem’s Christian audience. Baptism is the event whereby a Christian is made a Christian. During the ceremony, the catechumen is symbolically branded a Christian and marked by the sphragis, an identifying seal so strong it was thought to guide the soul safely through the after-life by repelling the demons who would drag it to hell.4 Baptism thus simultaneously declares faith and confers salvation, and as such is intimately related to Christian identity in both this life and the next. That ideal identity, however, remains an unattainable fantasy of completion, but one that discloses very real ideological investments. The faithful are exhorted to mimic the forward-looking typological structure of salvation history in their own lives; that is, to anticipate, through the performance of good thoughts, words, and deeds, what they will become at the end of time—saved. The Christian subject therefore derives a sense of identity not by ‘being’, but by doing. Baptism is thus a necessary but not sufficient event for salvation,5 as the narrative of Andreas aptly demonstrates: even seemingly perfect saints like Andrew must continually re-enact the theological antecedents of baptism in a process of perpetual conversion that attempts to make good on the baptismal covenant. This connection helps to explain why baptism is regarded as an explicitly paschal event, with the sacramental rites almost exclusively reserved for Easter or the attendant Pentecost. Yet baptism also has strong ties to another important liturgical event: the Ascension. This chapter picks up the thread of baptism and follows it to the liturgical events of Rogationtide, the three days of preparatory penance immediately preceding the feast of the Ascension. As we shall see, Ascensiontide figures prominently in the Vercelli Book, both structurally and conceptually. Of Vercelli’s twenty-nine prose pieces, at least seven, arguably eight, are Rogationtide homilies,6 making it by far the most thoroughly represented of all the liturgical feasts in the manuscript.7 But the doctrine of Ascension bears immediately on one of Vercelli’s poems, as well, though less obviously so: The Dream of the Rood. This chapter argues, first, that the Ascension dramatizes a crucial stage in the development of the religious self (absorption into and identification with a community); and, second, that Vercelli’s Rogationtide and Ascension texts model the proper relation between the Christian self and



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the Christian community, which is analogous to that between the body and the soul.

Baptism and the Doctrine of Ascension In his De mysteriis,8 a late-fourth-century treatise crafted explicitly for catechumens, St. Ambrose explains the constituent parts of the sacrament of baptism, connecting it to both eschatology and Christology, and using it to simultaneously explain and demonstrate key points of doctrine for the newly converted. In Chapter 7 (34–6), Ambrose explains the meaning of the white garment donned by the catechumen immediately following baptism, connecting it both to the purity conferred by the ritual and to Christ’s own white garments at the Resurrection and the Ascension, saying: dubitaverunt enim etiam angeli, cum resurgeret Christus dubitaverunt potestates caelorum videntes, quod caro in caelum ascenderet … et cum alii dicerent: tollite portas, principes vestri, et elevamini, portae aeternales, in introibit rex gloriae, alii dubitabant dicentes: quis est iste rex gloriae? in Esaia quoque habes dubitantes virtutes caelorum dixisse: quis est iste, qui ascendit ex Edom, rubor vestimentorum eius ex Bosor, speciosus in stola candida? (CSEL 73.102–4) [Truly, the angels, also, were in doubt when Christ arose; the powers of heaven were in doubt when they saw that flesh was ascending into heaven … And when some said: “Raise your gates, you princes, and be raised, everlasting doors, and the King of glory shall come in” (Ps. 23 [24]: 7–10); others doubted, saying: “Who is this King of glory?” In Isaiah, also, we find that the powers of heaven doubted and said: “Who is this that comes up from Edom, the redness of his garments is from Bosor, he who is resplendent in white clothing?” (Is. 63:1)]9

In the section, Ambrose provides typological readings of several Old Testament books (Exodus, Isaiah, Song of Songs, the Psalms) in order to illustrate the complex of signification surrounding baptism; but as Jean Daniélou has demonstrated, in so doing he is also setting precedent for the doctrine of the Ascension.10 In De sacramentis,11 likewise intended for catechumens, Ambrose returns to the red and white garments of Christ presaged in the quotation from Isaiah (63:1), explaining that they represent Christ’s physical body, in which he was garbed when he led the patriarchs out of hell after the Harrowing12—red for the base and bloody flesh that underwent the passion, white for the glorified body that was redeemed thereby. Because at the Ascension Christ appeared to the angels guarding the gates of heaven as a human being still bearing the wounds of the crucifixion, they

88 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book failed to recognize him as God. This same idea is echoed by numerous patristic authors, such as Justin Martyr, Origen, Athanasius, and Gregory of Nyssa, and in the pseudepigraphal Ascension of Isaias.13 It is worth noting, however, that although the powers of heaven do not recognize Christ as God, they do recognize him as a king coming in glory, and their questioning is characterized by amazement and curiosity more than anything else: amazement at the glorified but still physical body they see before them and curiosity about the power, as-yet unknown, that must lie behind it. That this doctrine was current in Anglo-Saxon England is attested by its presence in Gregory the Great’s Homily for the Feast of the Ascension,14 which was the partial source for the Exeter Book’s Christ II (The Ascension) of Cynewulf (fols. 14r–20v),15 as well as in Bede’s Ascension hymn (6.19–25),16 all of which are discussed at greater length below. Ambrose further connects the universal glorification of the body enabled by Christ’s incarnation to the particular redemption signified by the baptism of an individual Christian. Addressing the newly baptized in De mysteriis, Ambrose uses the same language previously applied in the De sacramentis to Christ’s Ascension.17 The white garment of the catechumen is thus also a symbol of the resurrected body of the generic Christian, a connection already appearing early in the post-apostolic period, e.g., Tertullian’s De resurrectione carnis, a treatise written to defend the doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh against Gnosticism: “Habemus etiam vestimentorum in Scripturis mentionem ad spem carnis allegorizare … Adeo nobis quoque suppetit allegorica defensio corporalis resurrectionis” [We also have in Scripture an allusion to garments as being the symbol of the hope of the flesh … So this symbolism also presents us with a defense of bodily resurrection] (PL 2.834A–B). But without the physical return staged by the Ascension, Christ’s resurrection would be incomplete. From an anagogical perspective, then, the multiple ‘ascensions’ of Christian theology—Christ’s bodily resurrection, return from the Harrowing, and Ascension to heaven, as well as the bodily resurrection of all humanity at Judgment—are always already conflated: they all model the physical body’s incorporation into the community of heaven, the generic (all Christians) by way of the particular (Christ).

The Ascension in Christ II and The Dream of the Rood In an inversion typical of exegesis, the Ascension also typologically evokes Christ’s return to earth at Judgment (Acts 1:11): God-as-Christ condescended



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to take human form, which he subsequently glorified by the Ascension, and he will re-descend at Judgment in a similarly spectacular manner.18 Cynewulf’s Christ II exemplifies both the eschatological and the incarnational aspects of the descent-ascent motif, taking its cue from the metaphorical ‘leaps’ of Christ found in its source, Gregory the Great’s Homily.19 In their article on the apocalyptic dimension of the poems of Cynewulf, Roberta Bux Bosse and Norman D. Hinton discuss the explicitly eschatological elements of Christ II, which are most clearly demonstrated in the poem’s juxtaposition of the first and second comings of Christ.20 As George Hardin Brown has demonstrated, however, the incarnational elements of the motif are just as prevalent in the poem. Cynewulf’s indebtedness to Ascension theology extends beyond his source, and points to the same patristic tradition as is exemplified in the quotation from Ambrose cited above.21 Brown notes that Cynewulf opens Christ II with a reference to the garments of the angels at the Nativity and at the Ascension (Chr II 440–58),22 and he connects Cynewulf’s Ascension theology to the exegesis of Psalm 23 (24), the same that provides Ambrose with his scene of angelic doubt at the gates of heaven. Following Gregory, Cynewulf relates the color of the angels’ garments directly to the descentascent motif: the angels wear white only at the Ascension because while Christ’s divinity was humbled at the Nativity, his humanity was exalted at the Ascension. Brown goes on to explain that because the multiple ‘ascensions’ of Christ evoke each other, they are sometimes represented out of chronological order in literary texts.23 This is done to emphasize theological import and to demonstrate the common signification inherent in all three events. After discussing the patristic sources, Brown observes that “[n]early all of the Ascension hymns existing before the twelfth century incorporate [Christ as victor returning from hell]. Bede and Cynewulf, in accord with patristic tradition, relate the Ascension event, then recall the Harrowing of hell descent before continuing with the Ascension theme once more and ending with the apocalyptic vision of the final descent on the Last Day.”24 A similar chronological disjunction is found in the closing lines of the Vercelli Book’s Cynewulfian Dream of the Rood (Dream):   Hiht wæs geniwad mid bledum ond mid blisse   þam þe þær bryne þolodan. Se sunu wæs sigorfæst   on þam siðfate, mihtig ond spedig,   þa he mid manigeo com, gasta weorode,   on godes rice, anwealda ælmihtig,   englum to blisse

90 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book ond eallum ðam halgum   þam þe on heofonum ær wunedon on wuldre,   þa heora wealdend cwom, ælmihtig god,   þær his eðel wæs.   (148b–56)25 [Hope was renewed, with dignity and with joy for those who endured burning there. The Son was victorious in that undertaking, mighty and successful, when he came with many, a troop of souls, into God’s kingdom, the almighty Ruler as a joy to the angels and to all the saints who were in heaven before, who dwelled in glory, when their Ruler came, Almighty God, to where his native land was.]

These somewhat disputed lines have been traditionally understood as referring to the Harrowing of hell,26 a natural connection since the Harrowing is an Eastertide event and the Dream is a passion poem.27 But in her article on the Dream and the Last Judgment, Monica Brzezinski argues that the lines cannot refer to the Harrowing because of chronology: “By placing the Harrowing of hell episode at the end of the poem, the poet has created a flaw in the chronological order of the poem, a warp in the temporal structure. I suggest that this time warp was intended by the poet, and furthermore that The Dream of the Rood’s coda refers not to one event in salvation history, but to several; in addition, its main reference is not to the Harrowing of Hell, but to the Last Judgment.”28 For evidence, Brzezinski relies on the reference in line 154a to “halgum” or saints who dwelt in heaven before the return of the Ruler, which ostensibly precludes the possibility that the passage refers to Christ’s return after the Harrowing since heaven contained only angels until then.29 Brzezinski concludes that the lines can therefore refer only to the Last Judgment, even though no explicitly eschatological motifs are present and no judging occurs in the passage.30 As valuable as Brzezinski’s reading is, it does not take into account the strength of the theological connection between the Harrowing and the Last Judgment, and thus unnecessarily forecloses one dimension of the poem’s multivalent conclusion. We have just seen the same temporal layering effect in both patristic exegesis and in Christ II, Ascension texts which connect all three events we have been discussing: the return to heaven, the Harrowing, and the anticipated Judgment. Such a reading would help to explain the poem’s presence in the Vercelli Book, where it sits alongside many other Judgment texts, and several critics of the Dream have already pointed out its penitential and eschatological themes.31 But the Dream’s relationship to the theology of Ascension extends beyond thematic resonances. The poem opens with the Dreamer approached by the Cross, “leohte bewunden” [wound with light] (5b): “Beheoldon þær engel dryhtnes ealle” [All(?) there beheld the angel(?) of the Lord] (9b).32 The reference



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to the “engel dryhtnes” has occasioned much remark, and has been variously interpreted as referring to an unspecified angel or messenger of God (singular or plural), the Cross, and even Christ himself.33 The grammar of the clause is debatable, leading to various translations, and many scholars have suggested that, like the final lines of the poem, “engel dryhtnes” must be erroneous. Bernard Huppé declares that the MS reading “cannot be defended,”34 and most editors assume that “engel,” not “ealle,” must be the subject of the sentence, paralleling “halige gastas” in line 11, which also appears with “beheoldon.” But “beheoldon” requires a plural subject in both 9b and 11a. John C. Pope, in his Eight Old English Poems, emends to “engeldryhta feala (fela),” ‘many angelic hosts,’ which, as Exeter Press Dream editor Michael Swanton observes, “ingeniously accounts for the entire MS line; insular f and s are easily confused.”35 In a recent article, Charles D. Wright has further suggested that the passage refers to the doctrine of the “confirmation of the faithful angels,”36 which he supports with a reassessment of the word “forðgesceaft” in the passage. The emended line, read in the context of Wright’s confirmation doctrine, would read something like “many angelic hosts, fair by perpetual decree, looked thereon [i.e., at the Cross].” Taken in the context of the Ascension, the line evokes the angels in white raiment who celebrate Christ’s triumphant return. The association is strengthened by the description of the Cross as “wædum geweorðode” [honored with garments] (15a). The Dreamer witnesses the Cross wendan wædum ond bleom; beswyled mid swates gange,

hwilum hit wæs mid wætan bestemed, hwilum mid since gegyrwed. (22–3)

[change its garments and colors; at times, it was soaked with wetness, stained with the coursing of blood, at times adorned with treasure.]

The Cross’s oscillation between colors (from shining to bloody) as well as garments recalls the passages from Ambrose quoted above, in which Christ is described as wearing two garments, one of red and one of white, to exemplify his dual nature.37 The iconography of the Ascension is evoked throughout the rest of the poem, as well. Scholarship has focused on Christ’s heroic ascent onto the Cross, which was likely meant to evoke all his ascensions, and the general motif of descent-ascent is apparent throughout the poem, e.g., the passage contrasting the first and second comings of Christ (101–9). But one of the most notable instances is the poem’s description of resurrection-ascension. Although the Cross narrates Christ’s crucifixion and death—“‘Crist wæs on rode’” [“Christ was on the rood”] (56b)—and his body is taken down from

92 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book the Cross by his loyal thegns, no subsequent resurrection is described. It is, instead, the Cross’s resurrection that is related, in passage which falls almost exactly at the poem’s center: “Bedealf us man on deopan seaþe.   Hwæðre me þær dryhtnes þegnas, freondas gefrunon, [ond] gyredon me   golde ond seolfre.” (75–7) [“Men buried us [i.e. the three crosses] in a deep pit. Nevertheless, the Lord’s thegns, friends, discovered me there and adorned me with gold and silver.”]

The Ascension themes that are already obvious in this passage are heightened by the fact that this resurrection stands in for Christ’s—a structure which supports Thomas D. Hill’s reading of the Cross as a representation of Christ’s literal body.38 This passage is immediately followed by the Cross’s shift from narration to direct address of the Dreamer in the next line. Clearly, the resurrection-ascension passage marks a significant moment for the Dreamer—it is only after this moment that the Dreamer receives the direct attention of the Cross.39 The Cross then exhorts the Dreamer to remember the coming Judgment: “Ne þearf ðær þonne ænig   [a]nforht wesan þe him ær in breostum bereð   beacna selest, ac ðurh ða rode sceal   rice gesecan of eorðwege   æghwylc sawl, seo þe mid wealdende   wunian þenceð.” (117–21) [“Then there will be no need for any to be afraid who bear before them on their breast the best of beacons, but each soul who thinks to dwell with the Ruler must seek the kingdom through the rood from the earthly way.”]

After the Cross departs, the Dreamer is described as being alone, “mæte werede” [with little company] (124a), a line which associates him with Christ, whose solitude is described with the same litotes (69b). The effect of these shifting identifications, which associate the Cross with Christ, Christ with the Dreamer, and the Dreamer with the Cross, is to create a sense of absorption, completion, unification, all of which are inherent themes of Ascension. Perhaps most striking is the Dreamer’s statement that no one who bears the sign of the cross need fear Judgment. This is arguably a reference to the baptismal sphragis, the ‘imprint’ that is made upon the newly converted Christian at the time of baptism. In addition to labeling the recipient as a Christian and



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claiming him as one of Christ’s own, the sphragis offers protection from the attacks of devils, both during life and at the time of death.40 The sphragis also offers protection at Judgment because it signifies, in effect, that the baptized person has already been judged.

Identity and Community The Dreamer longs for death after his vision, and desires to be reunited with his friends, whom he says   forð heonon gewiton of worulde dreamum,   sohton him wuldres cyning, lifiaþ nu on heofenum   mid heahfædere, wuniaþ on wuldre. (132b–35a) [have gone forth from here, from the joys of the world, sought the King of Glory for themselves, [and] they live now in heaven with the High Father, they dwell in glory].

The dominant affect of the Dreamer’s final lament is loneliness, and his hope of salvation is articulated specifically in terms of companionship. But how are we to understand the Dream’s community, crystallized in its final line, which triumphantly proclaims Christ’s return to his “eðel” [homeland] (156b)? Does the Dreamer not declare that it is his life’s hope that he “þone sigebeam secan mote / ana oftor þonne ealle men / well weorþian” [might seek the victory-beam, alone more often than all other men, to honor it well] (127–8)? The tone of the Dream has often been described as elegiac, and both the Dreamer’s mournful lament of his spiritual exile and his longing to join the “symle” [feast] in heaven provide the generic echoes (141a). But the contrast of the Dreamer’s hope-filled promise to seek the Cross alone and his desire for companionship is also spiritually exemplary—the Christian subject must endure solitude and hardship on earth to earn the joyful fellowship of the saints and angels in heaven.41 These ideas of companionship return us to Ambrose, and the passages quoted above on baptism. Ambrose’s exegesis outlines a striking concept of Christian identity, constructed through ritual. By ‘identity’ here I mean identification and also sameness. First, identification: the donning of the white robes, and the act of public baptism itself, identify the catechumen as a member of the earthly Christian community to that community—a signification made concrete by the first part of the baptismal rite (naming of the catechumen) as

94 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book well as the final part (verbal recognition of the catechumen by the witnessing congregation).42 The sacrament supplies the catechumen with a new spiritual family in the form of godparents,43 but also joins him or her to the larger community of Christians. It is important to note that it is following the Dream’s resurrection-ascension passage that the Dreamer is first hailed by the Cross. Second, sameness: as Ambrose’s reading confirms, the newly baptized are equated with the ascendant Christ, both made visibly glorious through their ascensions. The incorporation signified by Christ’s Ascension is thus a figuration of both the annexation of the resurrected flesh at Judgment and also the symbolic inclusion of the generic Christian in the community of the faithful. Both facets, the eternal eschatological and the temporal communal, are thus necessary to complete the Christian subject. The one organizes the individual self against an event that can only ever be experienced in isolation (death), the other organizes the self against an event that can only ever be experienced in communion (salvation). The Ascension, as the final segment of the paschal event, informs the aspect of the Christian self that is defined against community.

Rogationtide The previous section helps to demonstrate the theological connection between the concept of Ascension and the Christian self-in-community. From here, we can extend the idea of the relationship between community and Ascension to analyze several more relevant texts preserved in the Vercelli Book: the Rogationtide homilies X–XI and XXI. In so doing, we can begin to consider the particularly Anglo-Saxon expression of the fundamental Christian identity that derives from the theology of the Ascension. Commonly referred to as the gangdagas in vernacular Anglo-Saxon texts and the letania maiores (Major Litanies)44 in contemporaneous Latin texts, Rogationtide comprises three days of penance and processions before the celebration of the feast of the Ascension on Holy Thursday, forty days after Easter.45 Although Ascension and Rogationtide have different origins, the two have been linked since Rogationtide’s inception: the purpose of the three days’ penance is to purify the participant so that he or she may be worthy of experiencing the union with the divine that is signified by the feast itself. Numerous Old English homilies have been identified as being designated for Rogationtide, and although the Rogations were apparently popular in England during the Anglo-Saxon period, the relative paucity of liturgical witnesses to



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the season’s material practices complicate its study: despite a clear presence in extant sources, descriptions of specific Rogationtide observances are somewhat vague.46 But what Rogationtide texts lack in specificity, they make up for in number, and some generalizations can safely be made from surviving references. The season would have included fasting, vigils, almsgiving, prayer, and, most significantly, processions, both within the church and throughout the surrounding countryside. During these processions, holy relics, crosses, and books of scripture would have been carried, possibly through a series of fixed stations, in a procedure meant to symbolically demarcate territory as belonging to God. Participants were urged to complete the perambulations barefoot, in penitential supplication. Land, cattle, and crops were blessed, and God was called on to protect the countryside from harm, both earthly and diabolical. The observances were public, and involved both the actual cooperation of the community of worshippers and the symbolic inscription of the community of God—both of which follow from the theological implications of Ascensiontide discussed above.47 The processional component suggests a connection between Rogationtide and the inscription of community, a connection that would continue to be strengthened as the summer processionals of Ascensiontide and Pentecost came to be associated with the literal marking of town borders in the later medieval period.48 But because Rogationtide was also a time when the greatest number of people would have been gathered for public worship, it defined social as well as spatial community. In The Dramatic Liturgy of Anglo-Saxon England, M. Bradford Bedingfield observes: Most of the high liturgical festivals in late Anglo-Saxon England seem to involve ceremonies and liturgical elaborations that were developed in monastic settings and extended, to some extent, to include lay participation. Rogationtide is an exception, for from the time of its inception it was a practice for the common people, and would have involved the whole demographic of Anglo-Saxon society.49

The ecumenical character of the season follows from both the participatory nature of its observances and its unique place in the liturgical calendar as a vital pastoral event. Joyce Bazire and J. E. Cross demonstrate in their edition of eleven Old English Rogationtide homilies that the audience of such preaching texts would have been large and primarily lay, if we are to trust the homilists’ strenuous injunctions against such worldly activities as adultery, bearing weapons, and gaming.50 And in the Canons of Edgar, Wulfstan of York (d. 1023) advises the clergy of their obligations to the laity at Rogationtide:

96 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book And riht is þæt preostas folc mynegian þæs þe hi Gode don sculon to gerihtum on teoþungum and on oðrum þingum. And riht is þæt man þisses mynegige to eastrum, oðre siðe to gangdagum, þriddan siðe to middan sumera þonne bið mæst folces gegaderod.51 [And it is right that priests remind the people of what they must do for God with respect to right practice in tithing and in other things. And it is right that one exhort this at Easter, and again at Rogationtide, and a third time at Midsummer when the most people are gathered.]

Wulfstan is here urging priests to take advantage of Rogationtide, along with Easter and Midsummer, as prime preaching opportunities because they would draw the widest audiences. At such times, it would clearly be profitable to stress basic tenets of Christian observance that would be applicable throughout the year,52 not just at the specific feasts themselves—after all, these might be the only times of the year that certain members of the laity could attend church.

The Ascension in Vercelli Homilies X, XI, and XXI The significance of Rogationtide as a performance of Christian community is borne out by the Vercelli Book’s eight homilies for the season. To the extent that they are largely representative of the concerns present in all of Vercelli’s Rogationtide texts and are sampled from both of the manuscript’s groupings thereof, homilies X, XI, and XXI provide appropriate case studies. The three homilies are all heavily dependent on their sources, and therefore do not necessarily serve as testaments of uniquely Anglo-Saxon material—though they do, at times, deviate from their sources in important ways. They also, however, serve to illustrate the common themes and concerns of the season as it seemed to function for all first-millennium Christians, and by extension inform our understanding of how Rogationtide likely functioned in AngloSaxon England, as well. For illustrative purposes, it will perhaps be best to begin with a shorter piece that is relatively faithful to its source. Vercelli XI, titled “spel to forman gangdæge,” opens with material from Sermo 207 of St. Caesarius of Arles (d. 542), rubricated explicitly for Rogationtide (CCSL 104.828 ff.).53 Vercelli XI then continues for about eight lines with a brief summary of the history of the season and the importance of its observations (material which has no known source), after which it picks up translating another Caesarius sermon, Sermo



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215, which was intended to commemorate the fifth-century saint Honoratus (CCSL 104.855 ff.). The opening of the homily, constructed specifically to introduce what was functionally a Rogationtide text, suggests that in the mind of the author of Vercelli XI, the material in the Honoratus sermon was obviously consonant with the concerns of the season. Of course, as we have already seen, given both the general penitential and eschatological elements of Rogationtide and its wide audience, all preaching material could be rightfully considered appropriate to the season. But Vercelli XI makes use of specific images in Caesarius that likewise figure prominently in other Rogationtide texts, including those in Vercelli. These are images of celestial fellowship and community, though Vercelli XI’s differ from those found in Caesarius. Softening Caesarius’ stringent exhortations to “carnem adflixesse” [‘battle the flesh’] (Sermo 215, CCSL 104.856), the Vercelli homilist instead emphasizes the need for fasting and penance during Rogations to regain the lost homeland of heaven: For þæs ærestan mannes synnum, Adam[e]s, we wurdon aworpene of neorxnawanges eðle 7 on þas wræcworuld sende, 7 we swa syndon on þyssum middangearde swa we her nænig eðel ne habbað. Be ðon Paulus se apostol cwæð: ‘Dum sumus in corpore peregrinamu[r] a domino.’ He cwæð, sanctus Paulus: ‘Þenden we bioð on lichoman, we bioð [el]þiodige fram Gode.’ We magon heonon us geearnian þone ecan eðel 7 þone soðan gefean. Ne magon we þæra ægðer her on worulde agan, ac we sculon on þære toweardan gesittan þæt us is on eðle gehealden. (XI.46–54)54 [Because of the sins of the first man, Adam, we were turned out of the homeland of paradise and sent into this exile-world, and so we are here in this middle-earth as if we have no homeland at all. Concerning this Paul the Apostle said: “While we are in the body, we are exiled from God.” He said, Saint Paul: “While we are in the body, we are exiled from God.” We may from here earn the eternal homeland and the true joy. We may not possess either of them here in the world, but we shall in the future possess that which is held for us in the homeland.]

The Vercelli author follows Caesarius in using the quotation from Corinthians to illustrate the isolation of the physical Christian subject on earth: embodiment represents separation from God, the dreaded exile that is so central a theme in Old English elegiac poetry, and arguably Anglo-Saxon heroic culture, as well. But the Vercelli author goes on to elaborate that embodiment serves a purpose, and from the state of exile, one can begin the process of regaining the lost homeland: “We magon heonon us geearnian þone ecan eðel …” Caesarius’ language is less forgiving:

98 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book Non ergo requiramus gaudium in hoc mundo, quia, sicut supra dictum est, uerum gaudium conparari hic potest, possideri non potest. Non quaeras in uia, quod tibi seruatur in patria. (CCSL 104.857)55 [Therefore let us not seek joy in this world, because, as was said before, true joy can be prepared for here, but cannot be possessed here. Do not seek on the way what is kept for you in the fatherland].

Although both advocate eschewing the transitory in favor of the eternal, the Vercelli author’s language outlines a more practical version of Caesarius’ strict admonition, a difference best illustrated by the two authors’ choice of verbs: to ‘earn’ (geearnian) a thing involves more agency than to simply ‘prepare’ for it (conpar­ō). Of course, Caesarius was not implying that the individual Christian need do nothing to attain salvation; nor was the Vercelli homilist denying the power of grace. But the difference in tone does suggest that the Vercelli homilist’s interest lay in presenting a model not of meditative, spiritual religiosity detached from the world, but of material, performative piety that makes use of the embodiment that is by nature a part of the subject that inhabits it. In this way, the body of the Christian subject represents both separation from God, and therefore ontological incompleteness, but also, paradoxically, the means by which reunion with God must be achieved, both as it was modeled by Christ’s Ascension and as it is enacted by the material observances of the individual Christian subject. The reward for such earning is the heavenly homeland, described in comforting and familiar language: Utan we nu forð tilian þæt we geearnien þæt we becuman moton gesæliglice to þam ecan 7 to þam ealdorlican eðle, þær ure magas wilniað þæt hie us gesion, 7 ure gefion moton usse yldran, þa syndon heahfæderas 7 witegan 7 apostolas, þær ure bidaþ ure ceasterliode, þæt syndon englas 7 heahenglas, 7 þær is sio wundorlice ceaster Hierusalem, þær ure bideð mid aþenedum earmum ure dryhten hælend Crist. (XI.55–61) [Let us now henceforth strive so that we merit [lit. earn] that we might come happily to that eternal and to that ancestral homeland, where our kinsmen desire that they may see us, and our ancestors that they might rejoice with us, who are patriarchs and prophets and apostles, where our townsmen await us, who are angels and archangels, and there is the glorious city of Jerusalem, where with open arms our Lord Christ the Savior awaits us.]

In contrast to the usual eschatological descriptions of heaven as an abstract place of eternal joy, this portrayal of heaven as a native land, and its angelic



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inhabitants as “ceasterliode,” immediately calls to mind Rogationtide’s focus on the inscription of the earthly community as well as the Ascension theology of return. Perhaps most striking is the reference to the patriarchs, prophets, and apostles as “magas,” or kinsmen. In earning salvation, the Christian subject joins the family of the blessed members of the human race, becomes the neighbor of the celestial races, and all reside together in the New Jerusalem. The extended metaphor supplies concrete analogies for the abstract spiritual concepts inherent in the doctrine of Ascensiontide, and would have provided accessible images of salvation for lay audiences. The rhetorically sophisticated Vercelli homily X makes use of similar images.56 Homily X, like XI, is a compilation of multiple sources, but with a much more complicated transmission history, surviving in whole or in part in nine copies.57 Though largely dependent on its sources, at times Vercelli X appears highly original, elaborating significantly on minor points in its sources or straying from them entirely.58 Vercelli X’s opening fifty-eight lines are unsourced, but contain many of the same images we find in XI and Vercelli’s other Rogationtide texts. Homily X begins with a scriptural passage (not in the other copies of the homily) that initially appears to have little connection to the penitential concerns of Rogationtide, but which does explicitly frame the discourse that follows in terms of Christian fellowship: “þeah man anum men godspel secge, þonne bio ic þæronmiddan” [Even if a man tells the gospel to one man, then I will be there in the midst (Matt. 18:20)] (X.3–4). The same quotation appears in Vercelli XII, lines 46–9. This metaphor of Christ-as-community extends throughout Vercelli X. The language of inclusion operates on multiple levels, however. The first is the obvious level of inclusion in a social group, be that familial, civic, or even military. In highlighting the magnitude of Christ’s redemption, the author of the homily declares Ær þan we wæron steopcild gewordene, ða we wæron bewerede þæs hiofoncundan rices, 7 we wæron adilgode of þam þryðfullan frumgewrite ða we wæron to hiofenum awritene. Wæron we nu syðþan amearcode þurh þone soðan scyppend 7 þurh þone lyfigendan [God] 7 þurh þone acennedan sunu, urne dryhten, to þan gefean neorxnawanges. (X.35–40) [Before, we were made orphans, when we were forbidden from that heavenly kingdom, and we were erased from that glorious document, when we were to be written down for the heavens. Afterwards, we were now marked, through the true Creator, and through the living God, and through the begotten Son, our Lord, for the joy of paradise.]

100 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book Here we see the same familial language used to describe both the break with God occurring in Eden, when humanity was orphaned, and the subsequent reconciliation achieved by Christ, after which humanity is re-inscribed as rightful heirs to the kingdom of heaven.59 But Vercelli X uses the same imagery in multiple ways, extending it also to the particular human condition at Judgment. The following quotation, an elaboration on the gospel of Matthew (25: 41, 46), describes Christ’s words to the damned at the end of time: He þonne ofer eaxle besyhð, se soðfæsta dema 7 se rihtwisa, to ðam [forworhtum 7 to ðam] scyldegum, 7 þus cwið worda grimmost: “Nelle ic eow habban on minre geferrædenne, ac ge fram me gewitað, wuldres bedælede, freondum afyrde, feondum betæhte, [in þam] hatan wylme hellefyres, þær ge awirgedan sculon sincan 7 swincan in ðam hatan hellebrogan 7 in þam witum wunigan a butan ende.” (X.103–7) [He then looks over his shoulder, the true judge and the righteous one, at the [wrongdoers and the] sinners, and thus speaks the grimmest of words: “I do not wish to have you in my company, but go you from me, parted from glory, removed from friends, delivered to fiends, [into the] hot surge of hellfire, where you, damned, must sink and suffer in the hot hell-terror and dwell in those torments forever without end.”]

The Vercelli homilist stresses what is only implicit in his source text, framing the sifting of the wheat and chaff at Judgment not only in terms of life and death, but also in terms of inclusion and exclusion. The damned are parted (“bedælan”) from glory and separated from God’s company, only to be associated, by shared exclusion, with devils. The effect of Christ turning his back on the damned and delivering his sentence looking over his shoulder (“eaxle”), as opposed to simply his ‘left’ as in Matthew, both concretizes the separation as an intimate, personal one and also evokes poetic images of the heroic lord and his retinue.60 As discussed above, however, the fantasy of unification represented by Ascension theology comprises the unity of the body of the faithful in both senses: communal and corporeal. The concept of inclusion is thus simultaneously modeled by images of completion and integrity of the same kind as those that govern the soul-and-body materials discussed in Chapter 1. The connection is a natural one because both the soul-and-body motif and the doctrine of Ascension model the resurrection of the flesh, one literally, the other theologically. For a clear demonstration of the two senses in parallel, we may turn to Vercelli XXI. Homily XXI is an unusual piece, unique to the Vercelli Book. It is the last homily in the manuscript’s second series of Rogationtide pieces (XIX–XXI), all of which draw extensively from a single source, an apparently



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popular Carolingian collection known as the homiliary of St. Père of Chartres, the earliest extant copy of which is Cambridge, Pembroke College 25.61 Material from the Pembroke 25 homiliary informs approximately the first half of Vercelli XXI, but what makes the Vercelli piece so unusual is not its use of a Latin source, but rather its apparent use of vernacular ones. Homily XXI either used as a source or was the source for the poem now known as An Exhortation to Christian Living, found in CCCC MS 201 (fols. 165–6), which has a general penitential focus grounded in the importance of good works.62 But even more striking is the nearly perfect overlap between the second half of Vercelli homily XXI and the first half of Vercelli II, one of the manuscript’s many Judgment homilies. Vercelli homily editor Donald G. Scragg proposes that II itself could not have been the source for XXI, but manuscript and linguistic evidence suggest that perhaps “the compiler of homily XXI and the scribe of [the Vercelli Book] when writing homily II both used the same exemplar.”63 Whatever the nature of the relationship between the two texts, the redundancy continues to perplex from a standpoint of content alone. Scragg argues, “[t]he fact that the second half of homily XXI is a version of homily II suggests that the compiler was working so haphazardly that he inadvertently repeated material.”64 However, as this book has endeavored to demonstrate, parts of the Vercelli Book exhibit what appears to be very careful planning, including the presentation of the Rogationtide groups themselves; the non-sequential copying of quires 3 and 4; and the re-copying of The Dream of the Rood and the entirety of quire 15.65 For this reason alone, it may be more productive to suppose instead that the material contained in II and XXI, like the soul-andbody material discussed in Chapter 1, is over-represented in the manuscript because it was of particular importance to the compiler of the Vercelli Book.66 Such a supposition is already suggested by the number of other Rogationtide pieces in the manuscript. The connection between Ascensiontide and soul-and-body is not merely codicological, however. Vercelli XXI models for us the extent to which the concerns of Rogationtide are infused with the penitential language of the soul-and-body motif. If soul-and-body functions as a rhetorical image of the fundamental incompleteness of the Christian subject prior to Judgment, then the Ascension themes of Rogationtide anticipate exactly that conceptual completeness that Judgment promises. In addition to the general language of community inclusion/exclusion found in the other Rogation texts,67 XXI contains passages, some taken from Pembroke 25, some analogous to Vercelli II, that implicitly connect the two ideas:

102 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book Men ða leofestan, uton us nu ymbscrydan 7 gefrætuwian mid godum weorcum 7 mid mægenum urum sawlum on þyssum andweardan life, þy læs we beon on þam toweardan dome fram Gode 7 fram eallum his haligum werede aworpene, 7 deoflum betæhte 7 besencede on helle witum. (XXI.57–61) [Dearly beloved, let us now clothe and adorn with good works and with virtues our souls in this present life, lest we be in the future Judgment cast away from God and from all his holy troop, delivered to devils and sunk into hell torments.]

This passage contains verbal resonances with the passages from Vercelli X discussed above (e.g., “deoflum betæhte,” “besencede on helle witum”) that speak to images of separation, but it also contains the safeguard against such exclusion: though the soul is sometimes negatively described as wearing a ‘garment of flesh,’ here it is garbed in “godum weorcum,” and later in the homily we are told about the twelve strengths of the soul, in which “beoð ymbscridde eallra rihtwisra manna sawla on domes dæge” [the souls of all righteous men are clothed on Doomsday] (XXI.82–3). Near the end of the text, where the homilist transitions from a discussion of the general turmoil that will herald the Day of Judgment to a more specific description of the soul’s parting from the body, the following passage appears in both Vercelli XXI and Vercelli II, and is not otherwise sourced: La hwæt, we us ne ondrædað þæt we dæghwamlice geseoð beforan urum eagun ure neahstan sweltan, 7 þonne þa[m] lichoman byþ ladlic leger gegyred, innan þære cealdan eorðan gebrosnad, 7 þæt læne lic gerotaþ to fulnesse, 7 þam wælslitendum wyrmum to æte. Hwæt, þæt bið þonne sarlic sar 7 earmlic gedal þæs lichoman 7 þære sawle, gif þonne se earma innera mann, þæt is seo werie sawl þe her forwyrht byð 7 agymeleasudu Godes beboda, þæt heo þonne æfter þam gedale aslidan sceolde on þa ecan hellewitu, 7 þær mid deoflum drohtnian on morðre 7 on mane, on susle 7 on sare, on wean 7 on wyrmum, betweox deadum 7 deoflum, on bryne 7 on biternesse, 7 on fulnesse 7 on eallum þam witum þe deof[l]um wæs geearwod fram þære þe hie onforwurdon 7 hie sylfe geearnodon. (XXI.207–18) [What, lo! We do not fear that we daily see our neighbors die before our eyes, and thereafter a loathly bed is prepared for the body, and within the cold earth it will decay, and that transitory body will rot to foulness, and [become] as food for slaughter-greedy worms. Lo, that will be a grievous sorrow and a wretched parting of the body and the soul, if then the wretched inner man, which is the cursed soul that here is damned and neglectful of God’s law, that she [i.e. the soul] then after the parting must slide into eternal hell-torments, and there dwell with devils in death and in sin, in misery and in sorrow, in woe and in worms, between corpses and devils, in burning and in bitterness, and in foulness and in all torments which have been prepared for devils since they were lost and which they themselves earned.]



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The language of this passage is dense. It contrasts the image of the transitory earthly community, in which “neahstan” must eventually part, with the eternal community of the afterlife, in which the damned will literally have corpses and devils for neighbors, and all will have earned their fate. It is crucial to note, however, that the un-souled “dead” in hell and the disembodied “sawl” of the damned represent quite different concepts: there is no mention of the resurrection of the flesh in the passage, and the part of the self that receives judgment and endures damnation is apparently the soul alone, the ‘wretched inner man,’ which is simultaneously paired with descriptions of the decay of the body in its grave. The function of foregrounding bodily decay as a crucial component of damnation, however, is not merely to titillate an audience with images of gruesome putrefaction, as has been sometimes supposed.68 It also serves as an arresting counter-point to the fantasy of completion dramatized in resurrection theology. This does not necessarily suggest that the author of Vercelli XXI/II believed that only the saved were resurrected at Judgment or that physical and spiritual obliteration was the fate of the damned.69 Rather, the purpose of such a contrast is to highlight the transience of the flesh as a representation of incompleteness, concretized in the image of the body continuing to rot in the ground even while the soul is languishing in hell—a theme of division which is stylistically echoed by the series of dyads enumerating the torments of hell. Thus, even though it ostensibly represents a doctrinally universal concept, the image of the re-unification of soul and body is typically reserved for passages that describe the fate of the just or blessed souls—the bodily integrity represented by resurrection mirrors the spiritual integrity of the pious soul, and both reiterate re-union with the divine.

Conclusion Although it is a Rogationtide text, Vercelli XXI was intended for preaching on the Eve of Ascension and its themes reflect this. It provides us with images that lead us back to the Ascension passages in The Dream of the Rood, including the promise of the great feast of heaven: “we beoð fram him forð gecigede to þam heofonlican gebeorscipe mid þam mærum heahfæderum Abrahame 7 Isace 7 Iacobe 7 eallum haligum werude [we shall be called forth by [Christ] to the heavenly feast with the great patriarchs Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the holy troop]” (XXI.117–9). But XXI also contains a passage that links it to the eschatological themes in the Dream, describing the image of the Cross-as-Christ70 returning on Judgment Day:

104 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book On ðam dæge dryhtnes rod byð blode flowende betweox wolcnum, 7 on ðam dæge byð dryhtnes onsyn swiðe egeslicu 7 ondrysenlicu, on þam hiwe þe he wæs þa hine Iudeas swungon 7 ahengon 7 hyra spatlum him on spiwon. (XXI.165–8) [On that day the Cross of the Lord will be flowing with blood between the clouds, and on that day the Lord’s countenance will be very frightful and terrible, in the form which he was [in] when the Jews scourged and hanged him and spat on him with their spittle.]

As an example of the descent-ascent motif, these lines predict eschaton by evoking Christ’s Ascension as it is described in Christ II: shining in glory and surrounded by angels, at his ascent “wæs wuldres weard  //  wolcnum bifongen …” [the guardian of glory was enveloped in clouds …] (527); but when he returns from the clouds at Judgment, his countenance will reflect the other aspect of his nature. The lines from XXI also, of course, resonate with the opening passage from Dream cited above, in which the Cross, issuing from the clouds, alternately shines in glory and bleeds in abasement. This perhaps begins to explain the Vercelli Book’s lack of an Ascension homily, despite its numerous Rogationtide homilies.71 The Dream of the Rood, in effect, serves as one, as it seems to synthesize many of the primary Ascension themes and was obviously important enough that the Vercelli compiler chose to include the poem in the manuscript, despite some difficulty. However, such speculation is tenuous at best, and while the Dream, like Vercelli’s Rogationtide homilies, is clearly invested in the theology of Ascension, we need not press the connection any further. After all, it is the eschatological aspect of Ascension that is the focus of Rogationtide penance,72 and, as is clear, this is the shared dominant preoccupation of the other texts in the Vercelli Book, as well. What these texts model for the Anglo-Saxon Christian subject, however, is guidance toward the completion of Judgment that is couched specifically in terms of community, both the earthly one and the celestial.

Notes 1. On the Irish triad of ‘thought, word, and deed,’ see Patrick Sims-Williams, “Thought, Word and Deed: An Irish Triad,” Eriu 29 (1978): 78–111. On the ‘pledge of the soul,’ which must be given at judgment for all deeds performed in life, see Charles D. Wright, “The Pledge of the Soul: A Judgment Theme in Old English Homiletic Literature and Cynewulf’s Elene,” NM 91 (1990): 23–30. Cf. the epilogue to Elene, 1281b–6a (George Philip Krapp, The Vercelli Book, ASPR II).



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2. On the eschatological motif of ‘no help from kin,’ see Patrizia Lendinara, “‘frater non redimit, redimet homo …’: A Homiletic Motif and its Variants in Old English,” in Early Medieval Texts and Interpretations: Studies presented to Donald D. Scragg, eds. Elaine Treharne and Susan Rosser (Tempe: CMRS, 2002), 67–80. On the motif of the three Judgment hosts, see Malcolm Godden, “An Old English Penitential Motif,” ASE 2 (1973): 221–39; Charles D. Wright, The Irish Tradition in Old English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), 85–8; and Andrew Breeze, “The Three Hosts of Doomsday in Celtic and English,” Miscelánea 15 (1994): 71–9. On the Ego te, Homo speech, see above, Introduction, note 17. 3. For more detailed information about the Vercelli manuscript itself and the texts within it, see above, Introduction, notes 1 and 2. 4. Jean Daniélou, Primitive Christian Symbols, trans. Donald Attwater (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1963), 138, provides the following quotation from Severian of Gabala (fl. 400), On Baptism: “As sheep without a shepherd are the ready prey of wild beasts, so the soul that has not the sphragis is at the mercy of the devil’s snares” (PG 31.432C, translation from Daniélou). 5. On this point, Daniélou, Primitive Christian Symbols, 141, again provides excellent documentation of theological precedent in both Eastern and Western Christianity, quoting from a vision narrative called The Shepherd of Hermas (c. 100), a text cited as scripture by Tertullian, Origen, St. Irenaeus, St. Athanasius, and St. Eusebius: “If you bear the Name [i.e. the cruciform sphragis] without having his power you will be bearing the Name in vain. The stones which you saw rejected are those who bore the Name but had not put on the raiment” (Sim. IX.13.2–3, PG 2.991, translation from Daniélou). For Daniélou, the meaning of the passage is clear: “whoever is baptized but does not sanctify himself cannot be saved” (141). The ‘raiment’ is discussed at length below. On the knowledge of The Shepherd in AS England, see Charles D. Wright, “The Shepherd of Hermas,” Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture: The Apocrypha, ed. Frederick M. Biggs (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007), 63–6. 6. Not all are clearly labeled as Rogationtide homilies, but the compiler of the manuscript almost certainly would have regarded them as such. Homilies XI, XII, XIII are rubricated for Rogationtide, and are linked by their presentation in the manuscript, their style, and their content, all of which seem to indicate that they were written by the same author and were taken all together from the same exemplar. Homily X is likewise linked by presentation to this group, and is thematically consistent with the season, but is not explicitly rubricated for it. Its analogue Blickling IX, however, is certainly a Rogationtide homily. Homily XIV, immediately following the first Rogationtide group, is designated as “larspel to swylcere tide swa man wile” (the Old English equivalent of ‘quando volueris’), but its sources and analogues (including Vercelli XI) are designated for Rogationtide, making it a strong candidate for inclusion in the manuscript’s Rogationtide corpus. Homilies XIX– XXI are untitled, but contain clear internal references to the origins of Rogationtide and its observances. Donald G. Scragg, “An Old English Homilist of Archbishop Dunstan’s Day,” in Words, Texts and Manuscripts: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Culture Presented to Helmut Gneuss on the Occasion of his Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. Michael Korhammer (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992), 181–92, argues that all three (and a fourth Ascension piece in CCCC 162, item 38), are the work of a single author. Although Vercelli contains many Rogationtide homilies, it contains no text for the feast of the Ascension itself. On this, see

106 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book

7. 8.

9. 10. 1 1. 12.

13.

14.

1 5. 16. 17.

18.

Scragg, “An Old English Homilist,” and Joyce Bazire and James E. Cross, eds., Eleven Old English Rogationtide Homilies (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: U of Toronto P, 1982). The significance of this is discussed below. The only other season that comes close is Epiphany, for which there are three homilies. For manuscript evidence that the works of Ambrose, including De mysteriis and De sacramentis, were known in late AS England, see “Ambrose in Anglo-Saxon England, with Pseudo-Ambrose and Ambrosiaster,” Dabney Bankert, Jessica Wegmann, and Charles D. Wright, SASLC, OEN: Subsidia 25 (1997): 9–18, 46–8. All Latin translations in this chapter are mine unless otherwise noted. Jean Daniélou, The Bible and the Liturgy (Notre Dame: Notre Dame UP, 1956), 198–9, 306–8. See above, note 8. This reading is made by analogy, in part through the Ascension-related exegesis of the passage in Psalm 67 (68) describing the Lord bringing out “those which are bound with chains” (Ps. 67 [68]: 6), which is taken to be a reference to the Harrowing. See Daniélou, The Bible and the Liturgy, 303–18. Of course, the “chains” are also a general reference to sin, from which all of humanity is released by the Incarnation. The concept of Christ embodied when he harrows hell remains problematic, however. See below. Dialogue of Justin (PG 6.554A–5A); Athanasius, Exp. Psalm 24 (PG 27.141D); Origen, Against Celsus (PG 11.1560); Ascensio Isaiae (CCSA 7.77–129), all quoted in Daniélou, The Bible and the Liturgy, 304–6. Hom. 29 in Ev., 9–11 (PL 76.1218–19). The homily was first identified as a source by Franz Eduard Christoph Dietrich, “Cynevulfs Crist,” ZfdA 9 (1853): 193–214. On the circulation of Gregory’s Homiliae in Evangelia, see Thomas N. Hall, “The Early English Manuscripts of Gregory the Great’s Homiliae in Evangelia and Homiliae in Hezechihelem: A Preliminary Survey,” in Rome and the North: The Early Reception of Gregory the Great in Germanic Europe, eds. R. H. Bremmer, Jr., K. Dekker, and D. F. Johnson (Leuven: Peeters, 2001), 115–36. For a more comprehensive discussion of the sources of Christ II see George Hardin Brown, “The Descent-Ascent Motif in Christ II of Cynewulf,” JEGP 73 (1974): 1, note 1; and R. E. Greenman, “The Sources of Christ II (Cameron A.3.1.2),” 1992, in Fontes Anglo-Saxonici: World Wide Web Register. ASPR III, 15–27. Bede, In Ascensione Domini (CCSL 122.419–23). Cf. Ambrose, “viderunt vos advenientes, et humanam condicionem illam, quae ante peccatorum tenebroso squalore sordebat, aspexerunt subito refulgere. Ideoque dixerunt: Quae est haec quae ascendit a deserto dealbata? Mirantur ergo et angeli” [[the angels] arriving saw you, and that human condition, which before was all stained with the dark filth of sins, suddenly shining brightly. And therefore they cried out: ‘Who is this that comes up from the desert clothed in white?’” Thus the angels are also astonished.] (De sacramentis, CSEL 73.47). Cf. Daniélou, The Bible and the Liturgy, 199. Brown, “The Descent-Ascent Motif,” 3. Jean Daniélou, The Theology of Jewish Christianity, ed. and trans. John A. Baker (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1964), discusses the prevalence of the descent-ascent motif in early Christianity, particularly in the apocrypha (248–56). Brown points out that “Gregory of Nyssa and John Chrysostom in the



19. 20. 2 1. 22.

2 3. 24. 25. 26.

27.

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East, and, in the West, Novatian, Hilary, Ambrose (who also contrasts the descent into hell and the Ascension), and Augustine all press the antithesis between Incarnation and Ascension” (4). For more on common Ascension motifs in OE literature, see Jerome Oetgen, “Common Motifs in the Old English Ascension Homilies,” Neophil 69 (1985): 437–45. Roberta Bux Bosse and Norman D. Hinton, “Cynewulf and the Apocalyptic Vision,” Neophil 74 (1990): 285 ff. Brown, “The Descent-Ascent Motif,” 8–11. In their edition of the Exeter Book (ASPR III), Krapp and E. V. K. Dobbie lineate all three of the Christ poems continuously. ASPR line 440 corresponds to the first line of Christ II as edited in Bernard Muir, The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry, 2 vols., 2nd edition (Exeter: Exeter UP, 2000). Brown, “The Descent-Ascent Motif,” 5, 10. Ibid., 10. This and all subsequent quotations of Vercelli’s poetry are taken from Krapp, The Vercelli Book. All translations are mine. Dream editors Michael Swanton (Exeter: U of Exeter P, 2000) and Albert S. Cook (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1905), as well as J. A. Burrow, “An Approach to The Dream of the Rood,” Neophil 43 (1959): 123–33, for example, all consider the lines to be referring to the Harrowing. But because of their ambiguity, many of the poem’s critics have gone so far as to suggest that the last eight lines of the poem are a later addition. Cook, for example, proposes that the last passage “has either come here by accident, or that the poet’s judgment was at fault” (liv). The liturgical influence apparent in the poem was first noted by H. R. Patch, “Liturgical Influence in The Dream of the Rood,” PMLA 34 (1919): 233–57, who identified a scant number of resonances between the Dream and several liturgical texts, most convincingly in the popular Pange lingua hymn, which has been attributed to Fortunatus (d. 600). Swanton, The Dream of the Rood; John V. Fleming, “The Dream of the Rood and Anglo-Saxon Monasticism,” Traditio 22 (1966): 43–72; and Julia Bolton Holloway, “The Dream of the Rood and Liturgical Drama,” Comparative Drama 18, no. 1 (1984): 19–37 (citing Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933]), all mention but do not pursue the structural and thematic similarity between the Dream and an Eastertide liturgical ritual known as the depositio crucis, first recorded in Æthelwold’s Regularis Concordia (c. 973). The ritual, intended to strengthen the faith of the “indocti uulgi,” consisted of the symbolic burial of a small cross representing the body of Christ which took place on Good Friday, and its subsequent ‘resurrection’ and glorification on Easter Sunday (Regularis Concordia: The Monastic Agreement, trans. Thomas Symons [London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1953], 44). Thomas D. Hill, in “The Cross as Symbolic Body: An Anglo-Latin Liturgical Analogue to The Dream of the Rood,” Neophil 77 (1993): 297–301, more thoroughly explores the ritual’s significance for understanding the Dream by pointing out the poem’s similar conflation of the body of Christ and the form of the cross, suggesting that the Dream is at least loosely based on the same common liturgical motifs if not directly dependent on the depositio itself. The relatively late date of the ritual’s first-known attestation is slightly problematic, since parts of the Dream appear on the Ruthwell Cross,

108 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book

28. 29. 30.

31.

3 2. 33.

3 4. 35. 36. 37. 3 8. 39.

40.

which has been dated with some certainty to the late seventh or early eighth century, and the poem itself is dated to around the same time or perhaps even earlier (Swanton, The Dream of the Rood, 41). However, the details of and extant manuscripts containing the depositio are discussed at length in Sarah Laratt Keefer, “The Veneration of the Cross in Anglo-Saxon England,” in The Liturgy of the Late Anglo-Saxon Church, eds. Helen Gittos and M. Bradford Bedingfield (London: Boydell, 2005), 143–84, and she concludes that the ritual must be considerably older than its witnesses suggest. For a thorough summary of the poem’s history and scholarship, including its relationship to the Ruthwell Cross, see Swanton’s introduction (9–78). Rosemary Woolf, “Doctrinal Influences on The Dream of the Rood,” MÆ 27 (1958): 137–53, provides a useful treatment of the poem’s relationship to orthodox theology. Judith N. Garde, Old English Poetry in Medieval Christian Perspective: A Doctrinal Approach (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991), reassesses past scholarship on the poem via a doctrinal approach in her Chapter 4, 90–112. Monica Brzezinski, “The Harrowing of Hell, the Last Judgment, and The Dream of the Rood,” NM 89 (1988): 253. Ibid., 254. Brzezinksi does not account for Enoch and Elijah, who according to some sources did dwell in heaven before the Ascension. It follows from this that the phrase “those who endured burning” must refer to saved souls who had undergone purgatory-like purification by fire before being brought to heaven at the end of time (Brzezinski, “The Harrowing of Hell,” 260–1). In addition to Brzezinski, “The Harrowing of Hell,” see Bosse and Hinton, “Cynewulf and the Apocalyptic Vision”; John Canuteson, “The Crucifixion and the Second Coming in The Dream of the Rood,” MP 66 (1969): 293–7; Christopher L. Chase, “‘Christ III,’ ‘The Dream of the Rood,’ and Early Christian Passion Piety,” Viator 11 (1980): 11–33; and especially Richard Payne, “Convention and Originality in the Vision Framework in ‘The Dream of the Rood,’” MP 73 (1976): 329–41, who explicitly compares the structure of the Dream to Christ III. MS reading, followed by Krapp and Swanton. Charles D. Wright, “‘Færgere þurh Forðgesceaft’: The Confirmation of the Angels in Old English Literature,” MÆ 85.2 (2017): 22–37, gives a thorough summary of the scholarship on 28–32. Bernard F. Huppé, The Web of Words (Albany: SUNY Press, 1970), 79, note 6. Swanton, The Dream of the Rood, 107. Charles D. Wright, “‘Færgere þurh Forðgesceaft,’” 30–1. James Smith, “The Garments that Honour the Cross in The Dream of the Rood,” ASE 4 (1975): 33–4. Hill, “The Cross as Symbolic Body.” See above, note 27. The Cross’s narration of the crucifixion is not addressed to the Dreamer. It begins, instead, with the impersonal “‘Þæt wæs geara iu, (ic þæt gyta geman) …’” [‘That was long ago (I remember it still) …’] (28). On the theology of the sign of the cross and the sphragis, see Daniélou Primitive Christian Symbols, 136–45. On the protective powers of the sphragis and its connection to Judgment in AS literature, see Thomas D. Hill, “The Sphragis as Apotropaic Sign: Andreas 1334– 44,” Anglia 101 (1983): 147–51; and Jane Roberts, “Guthlac of Crowland and the Seals



41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

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of the Cross,” in The Place of the Cross in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Catherine E. Karkov (Cambridge: Boydell, 2006), 113–28. Kenneth Florey, “Community and Self in ‘The Dream of the Rood,’” Connecticut Review 1 (1987): 23–9, identifies this connection between the isolation first experienced by the Dreamer and the imagery of companionship in the latter half of the poem. Although there was some degree of variability in its practice, the sacrament of baptism itself has survived into the modern era in much the same form in which it began, as is clear from studies of the liturgy in the early Christian church. For a discussion of baptismal liturgy in the early Christian church, see Henry A. Kelly, The Devil at Baptism: Ritual, Theology, and Drama (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985); and Daniélou, The Bible and the Liturgy, 35–114. For a discussion of baptism in the early AS church, see Sarah Foot, “‘By water in the spirit’: The Administration of Baptism in Early Anglo-Saxon England,” in Pastoral Care Before the Parish, eds. John Blair and Richard Sharpe (Leicester: Leicester UP, 1992), 171–92; in the late AS church, see M. Bradford Bedingfield, The Dramatic Liturgy of AngloSaxon England (Woodbridge and Rochester: Boydell, 2002), 171–90. In Early and Medieval Rituals and Theologies of Baptism: From the New Testament to the Council of Trent (2006; repr., Surrey and Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), Bryan D. Spinks discusses the spiritual importance of the relationship between godparent and catechumen in the AS church in his Chapter 6, 125–33. The three days of Rogations were originally called the ‘Minor Litanies’ to distinguish them from the ‘Greater Litany’ observed on April 25 in the Roman calendar, and these two separate designations are to be found in some of the Old English martyrologies. However, sometime around the ninth century, the Rogations came to be called the ‘Major Litanies’ in England, and are referred to as the letania maiores in all late Anglo-Saxon witnesses (Bedingfield, The Dramatic Liturgy, 194). On the question of the terminology letania majores versus minores, see Joyce Hill, “The Litaniae maiores and minores in Rome, Francia, and Anglo-Saxon England: Terminology, Texts and Traditions,” Early Medieval Europe 9 (2000): 211–46. See Geoffrey Nathan, “The Rogation Ceremonies of Late Antique Gaul: Creation, Transmission, and the Role of the Bishop,” Classica et Mediaevalia 49 (1998): 275–303; and Stephen J. Harris, “The Liturgical Context of Ælfric’s Homilies for Rogation,” in The Old English Homily: Precedent, Practice, and Appropriation, ed. Aaron Kleist (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 143–69. In their introduction to Eleven Old English Rogationtide Homilies, Bazire and Cross give a good summary of the history of Rogationtide, including a discussion of extant sources for its origins (xxi–xxiv). See also Gordon Sellers, “The Old English Rogationtide Corpus: A Literary History” (PhD diss., Loyola University of Chicago, 1996), 1–25. Although apparently unprecedented, the naming of Peter as the originator of the Rogations is fitting for the season: as I discuss below, Rogationtide is deeply invested in community-building, and Peter, as the founder of the Church, makes an appropriate figurehead. See also Harris, “The Liturgical Context of Ælfric’s Homilies for Rogation,” for a discussion of the specific liturgical context of Ælfric’s works. The Ascension liturgy of AS England is surveyed in Brian Éanna Ó Broin, “Rex christus ascendens: The Christological Cult of the Ascension in Anglo-Saxon England” (PhD

110 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book

48.

49. 50.

51. 52.

53.

54.

5 5. 56.

57.

58.

diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2002), 168–97. See also Johanna Kramer, Between Earth and Heaven: Liminality and the Ascension of Christ in AngloSaxon Literature (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2014). Jill M. Fitzgerald, “Measuring Hell by Hand: Rogation Rituals in Christ and Satan,” Review of English Studies 68.283 (2016): 1–22, discusses at length the implications of the communal rituals of Rogationtide for OE poetry. On the connection between Rogationtide and Pentecost/Whitsun, and the beating of the bounds, see Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003), 277–87. Bedingfield, The Dramatic Liturgy, 196. See for example the introductory comments on their Homily 3 (Bazire and Cross, Eleven Old English Rogationtide Homilies, 41). Such injunctions, however, are absent from Vercelli X–XIII. Wulfstan, The Canons of Edgar, ed. Roger Fowler, EETS o.s. 266 (London, New York: Oxford UP, 1972), 13. E.g., the reference to tithes, which, in the second codes of Edgar (d. 975), for example, would be paid at Pentecost, the Equinox, and Martinmas, not at Easter, Rogationtide, or Midsummer. Cited in William A. Chaney, The Cult of Kingship in Anglo-Saxon England: The Transition from Paganism to Christianity (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1970), 241, notes 81 and 82. For discussion of the sources, see Rudolph Willard, “Vercelli Homily XI and Its Sources,” Speculum 24 (1949): 76–87; and Charles D. Wright, “Vercelli Homilies XI–XIII and the Benedictine Reform: Tailored Sources and Implied Audiences,” in Preacher, Sermon and Audience in the Middle Ages, ed. Carolyn Muessig (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 203–27. Wright suggests that XI, along with XII and XIII, might have been intended for canons. See below, Chapter 4, 118–19. This and all subsequent quotations of the homilies are taken from Donald G. Scragg, ed., The Vercelli Homilies and Related Texts, EETS o.s. 300 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992) and cited parenthetically by homily and line number. All translations are mine. Quoted in Scragg, The Vercelli Homilies, 223. Unlike XI–XIII, Vercelli X is not rubricated in the Vercelli Book, but it is rubricated for the second Rogation day in other MSS. The compiler may have removed the rubric and put in front of the sequence XI–XIII because he already had a homily for the second day (Vercelli XII), just as he may have rubricated XIV ‘quando volueris’ for a similar reason. See Samantha Zacher, Preaching the Converted: The Style and Rhetoric of the Vercelli Homilies (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2009), 106–39; and “Sin, Syntax, and Synonyms: Rhetorical Style and Structure in Vercelli Homily X,” JEGP 103 (2004): 53–76. Its sources include chapter 62 of Paulinus of Aquileia’s Liber exhortationis ad Henricum comitem (PL 99.271); Pseudo-Augustine Sermo 310, known from the Caesarian collection Collectio quinquaginta (PL 39.2340–42); and Isidore’s Synonyma, Book II (PL 83.865). For a detailed account of the manuscript’s transmission history, see Scragg’s introduction to the piece (The Vercelli Homilies, 191–5). See also Zacher, Preaching the Converted, 106–39. This explains in part why homily X, among all the Vercelli homilies, has been the frequent subject of critical study. E.g., Donald G. Scragg, “Napier’s ‘Wulfstan’ Homily XXX:



59.

60.

61.

62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67.

68. 69.

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Its Sources, Its Relationship to the Vercelli Book, and Its Style,” ASE 6 (1977): 197– 211; Lynn L. Remly, “Ars praedicandi: Poetic Devices in the Prose Homily Vercelli X,” Mid-Hudson Language Studies 1 (1978): 1–16; Paul E. Szarmach, “The Vercelli Homilies: Style and Structure,” in The Old English Homily & Its Backgrounds, eds. Paul E. Szarmach and Bernard F. Huppé (Albany: SUNY Press, 1978), 244–8; Zacher, “Sin, Syntax, and Synonyms,” and Preaching the Converted, 107–39. Scott T. Smith discusses Vercelli X and the connection between land and inheritance in Land and Book: Literature and Land Tenure in Anglo-Saxon England (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2012), 135–48. Cf. the uses of the word eaxle in Beowulf lines 358b, 1117a, 2853b, in Klaeber’s Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, 4th ed., eds. R. D. Fulk, Robert Bjork, and John D. Niles (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2008); and Dream line 32a. For detailed discussions of the homilies’ indebtedness to Pembroke 25, see Scragg’s introductions to each, The Vercelli Homilies, 310 ff. For a discussion of MS Pembroke 25 itself, see J. E. Cross, ed., Cambridge Pembroke College MS 25: A Carolingian Sermonary used by Anglo-Saxon Preachers (London: King’s College London, 1987). Scragg, The Vercelli Homilies, 347–50; and The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, ASPR VI, lxix–lxxiv. Scragg, The Vercelli Homilies, 349. Donald G. Scragg, “The Compilation of the Vercelli Book,” in Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: Basic Readings, ed. Mary P. Richards (New York: Routledge, 1994), 319. E. G. Stanley, “The Judgement of the Damned (from Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 201 and Other Manuscripts), and the Definition of Old English Verse,” in Learning and Literature in AngloSaxon England: Studies Presented to Peter Clemoes on the Occasion of his Sixty-Fifth Birthday, eds. Helmut Gneuss and Michael Lapidge (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), 363–91, edits the II and XXI parallels (383 ff.), arguing that they are taken from a lost OE poem which he titles The Judgement of the Damned (found also in CCCC 201, 78–80). For more poetry in XXI, see Charles D. Wright, “More Old English Poetry in Vercelli Homily XXI,” in Early Medieval Texts and Interpretations. Studies presented to Donald D. Scragg, ed. Elaine Treharne and Susan Rosser (Tempe: CMRS, 2002), 245–62. Scragg, “Compilation,” 319; and Celia Sisam, ed., The Vercelli Book (Vercelli Biblioteca Capitolare cxvii), EEMF 19 (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1976), 39. The rhetorical function of repetition in the hortatory materials of the Vercelli Book is discussed at length in Zacher, Preaching the Converted, 61–105. E.g., Vercelli XXI.178–81: “Hwæt la, þæt ys ofer eallu þing to smeagenne þæt þa earman fyrenfullan sceolon sarie aswæman fram ansyne ures dryhtnes 7 fram his haligra 7 fram þam wuldre heofona rices, 7 þanon gewiton on þa tregan þære ecan helle” [What, lo! That is beyond all things to contemplate, that the sinful wretches must in sorrow wander from the countenance of our Lord and from his holy ones and from the glory of the heavenly kingdom, and from thence they will go into the torments there in that eternal hell]. See for example Benjamin P. Kurtz, “Gifer the Worm: An Essay Toward the History of an Idea,” University of California Publications in English 2 (1929): 235–61. In support of her claim about Judgment Day in the Dream, however, Brzezinski, does point to passages in Augustine’s De civitate Dei that suggest that only the damned are physically

112 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book resurrected and judged on the Last Day (“The Harrowing of Hell,” 257–8). But given the preponderance of counter-evidence in OE poetry and prose, it seems unlikely that the author of the Dream, or the majority Anglo-Saxons, shared this view. 70. On the cross as the ‘sign of Christ’ in the heavens at Judgment (Matt. 24: 29–30), see also Christ III, ll. 1081–9. 7 1. It is, of course, quite possible that the compiler simply didn’t have an Ascension homily to use; only two have survived, as opposed to fourteen for Rogationtide (not counting Ælfric). See Scragg, “An Old English Homilist,” and Bazire and Cross, Eleven Old English Rogationtide Homilies. 72. For more on the connection between Rogationtide and eschaton, see Bosse and Hinton, “Cynewulf and the Apocalyptic Vision,” especially 285–6.

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Burrow, J. A. “An Approach to The Dream of the Rood.” Neophil 43 (1959): 123–33. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion. New York: Zone Books, 1992. Caesarius of Arles. Sermones. Edited by G. Morin. CCSL 103–4. Turnhout: Brepols, 1953. Canuteson, John. “The Crucifixion and the Second Coming in The Dream of the Rood.” MP 66 (1969): 293–7. Chaney, William A. The Cult of Kingship in Anglo-Saxon England: The Transition from Paganism to Christianity. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1970. Chase, Christopher L. “‘Christ III,’ ‘The Dream of the Rood,’ and Early Christian Passion Piety.” Viator 11 (1980): 11–33. Clayton, Mary. “Delivering the Damned: A Motif in OE Homiletic Prose.” MÆ 60 (1986): 92–102. Cook, Albert S., ed. The Dream of the Rood: An Old English Poem Attributed to Cynewulf. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1905. Corpus Christianorum, Series Apocryphorum. Turnhout: Brepols, 1983. Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina. Turnhout: Brepols, 1953. Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum. Vienna: Gerold etc., 1866. Cross, J. E., ed. Cambridge Pembroke College MS 25: A Carolingian Sermonary used by AngloSaxon Preachers. London: King’s College London, 1987. Daniélou, Jean. The Bible and the Liturgy. Notre Dame: Notre Dame UP, 1956. ———. Primitive Christian Symbols. Translated by Donald Attwater. Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1963. ———. The Theology of Jewish Christianity. Edited and translated by John A. Baker. London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1964. Dietrich, Franz Eduard Christoph. “Cynevulfs Crist.” ZfdA 9 (1853): 193–214. Fitzgerald, Jill M. “Measuring Hell by Hand: Rogation Rituals in Christ and Satan.” Review of English Studies 68, no. 283 (2016): 1–22. Fleming, John V. “The Dream of the Rood and Anglo-Saxon Monasticism.” Traditio 22 (1966): 43–72. Florey, Kenneth. “Community and Self in ‘The Dream of the Rood’.” Connecticut Review 1 (1987): 23–9. Fontes Anglo-Saxonici Project. Fontes Anglo-Saxonici: World Wide Web Register. 2012. Accessed April, 2017. http://fontes.english.ox.ac.uk/ Foot, Sarah. “‘By water in the spirit’: The Administration of Baptism in Early Anglo-Saxon England.” In Pastoral Care Before the Parish, edited by John Blair and Richard Sharpe, 171–92. Leicester: Leicester UP, 1992. Fulk, R. D., Robert Bjork, and John D. Niles, eds. Klaeber’s Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg. 4th ed. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2008. Garde, Judith N. Old English Poetry in Medieval Christian Perspective: A Doctrinal Approach. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991. Godden, Malcolm. “An Old English Penitential Motif.” ASE 2 (1973): 221–39. Gradon, P. O. E., ed. Elene. 1977. Reprint, Exeter: U of Exeter P, 1996. Gregory of Nyssa. On Christ’s Ascension. PG 690B–4D.

114 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book Gregory the Great. Homilia 29 in Evangelia. PL 76.1213B–19D. Greenman, R. E. “The Sources of Christ II (Cameron A.3.1.2).” Fontes Anglo-Saxonici: World Wide Web Register. 1992. Accessed April, 2017. http://fontes.english.ox.ac.uk/ Hall, Thomas N. “The Early English Manuscripts of Gregory the Great’s Homiliae in Evangelia and Homiliae in Hezechihelem: A Preliminary Survey.” In Rome and the North: The Early Reception of Gregory the Great in Germanic Europe, edited by R. H. Bremmer, Jr., K. Dekker, and D. F. Johnson, 115–36. Leuven: Peeters, 2001. Harris, Stephen J. “The Liturgical Context of Ælfric’s Homilies for Rogation.” In The Old English Homily: Precedent, Practice, and Appropriation, edited by Aaron Kleist. Studies in the Early Middle Ages Vol. 17, 143–69. Turnhout: Brepols, 2007. Hermas. The Shepherd. PG 2.819–1011B. Hill, Joyce. “The Litaniae maiores and minores in Rome, Francia, and Anglo-Saxon England: Terminology, Texts and Traditions.” Early Medieval Europe 9 (2000): 211–46. Hill, Thomas D. “The Cross as Symbolic Body: An Anglo-Latin Liturgical Analogue to The Dream of the Rood.” Neophil 77 (1993): 297–301. ———. “The Sphragis as Apotropaic Sign: Andreas 1334–44.” Anglia 101 (1983): 147–51. Holloway, Julia Bolton. “The Dream of the Rood and Liturgical Drama.” Comparative Drama 18, no. 1 (1984): 19–37. Huppé, Bernard F. The Web of Words. Albany: SUNY Press, 1970. Hutton, Ronald. The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003. Isidore. Synonyma. PL 83.827–43. Justin Martyr. Dialogue with Trypho. PG 6.470A–800D. Keefer, Sarah Laratt. “The Veneration of the Cross in Anglo-Saxon England.” In The Liturgy of the Late Anglo-Saxon Church, edited by Helen Gittos and M. Bradford Bedingfield. Henry Bradshaw Society Subsidia 5, 143–84. London: Boydell, 2005. Kelly, Henry A. The Devil at Baptism: Ritual, Theology, and Drama. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. Kramer, Johanna. Between Earth and Heaven: Liminality and the Ascension of Christ in AngloSaxon Literature. Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2014. Krapp, George Philip, and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, eds. The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records. 6 vols. New York: Columbia UP, 1931–42. Kurtz, Benjamin P. “Gifer the Worm: An Essay Toward the History of an Idea.” University of California Publications in English 2 (1929): 235–61. Lendinara, Patrizia. “‘frater non redimit, redimet homo …’: A Homiletic Motif and its Variants in Old English.” In Early Medieval Texts and Interpretations: Studies presented to Donald G. Scragg, edited by Elaine Treharne and Susan Rosser, 67–80. Tempe: CMRS, 2002. Migne, J.-P., ed. Patrologia Graeca. 161 vols. Paris: n.p. 1857–903. ———, ed. Patrologia Latina. 221 vols., with 5 supplements edited by A. Hamann. Paris: n.p. 1844–974. Muir, Bernard, ed. The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry. 2 vols. 2nd ed. Exeter: Exeter UP, 2000.



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Nathan, Geoffrey. “The Rogation Ceremonies of Late Antique Gaul: Creation, Transmission, and the Role of the Bishop.” Classica et Mediaevalia 49 (1998): 275–303. Ó Broin, Brian Éanna. “Rex christus ascendens: The Christological Cult of the Ascension in Anglo-Saxon England.” PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2002. Oetgen, Jerome. “Common Motifs in the Old English Ascension Homilies.” Neophil 69 (1985): 437–45. Origen. Against Celsus. PG 638A–1632C. Patch, H. R. “Liturgical Influence in The Dream of the Rood.” PMLA 34 (1919): 233–57. Paulinus of Aquileia. Liber exhortationis ad Henricum comitem. PL 99.197–282. Payne, Richard. “Convention and Originality in the Vision Framework in ‘The Dream of the Rood’.” MP 73 (1976): 329–41. Pope, John C. Eight Old English Poems. 3rd ed. Revised by R. D. Fulk. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000. Pseudo-Augustine. Collectio quinquaginta. PL 39.2340–42. Remly, Lynn L. “Ars praedicandi: Poetic Devices in the Prose Homily Vercelli X.” Mid-Hudson Language Studies 1 (1978): 1–16. Roberts, Jane. “Guthlac of Crowland and the Seals of the Cross.” In The Place of the Cross in Anglo-Saxon England, edited by Catherine E. Karkov. Cambridge: Boydell, 2006. 113–28. Scragg, Donald G. “The Compilation of the Vercelli Book.” In Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: Basic Readings, edited by Mary P. Richards, 317–43. New York: Routledge, 1994. ———. “The Corpus of Vernacular Homilies and Prose Saints’ Lives Before Ælfric.” In Old English Prose: Basic Readings, edited by Paul E. Szarmach, 73–150. London: Garland, 2000. ———. “Napier’s ‘Wulfstan’ Homily XXX: Its Sources, Its Relationship to the Vercelli Book, and Its Style.” ASE 6 (1977): 197–211. ———. “An Old English Homilist of Archbishop Dunstan’s Day.” In Words, Texts and Manuscripts: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Culture Presented to Helmut Gneuss on the Occasion of his Sixty-Fifth Birthday, edited by Michael Korhammer, 181–92. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. ———., ed. The Vercelli Homilies and Related Texts. EETS o.s. 300. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. Sellers, Gordon B. “The Old English Rogationtide Corpus: A Literary History.” PhD diss., Loyola University of Chicago, 1996. Severian of Gabala. On Baptism. PG 31.423–44. Sims-Williams, Patrick. “Thought, Word and Deed: An Irish Triad.” Eriu 29 (1978): 78–111. Sisam, Celia, ed. The Vercelli Book (Vercelli Biblioteca Capitolare cxvii). EEMF 19. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1976. Smith, James. “The Garments that Honour the Cross in The Dream of the Rood.” ASE 4 (1975): 29–35. Smith, Scott T. Land and Book: Literature and Land Tenure in Anglo-Saxon England. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2012. Spinks, Bryan D. Early and Medieval Rituals and Theologies of Baptism: From the New Testament to the Council of Trent. 2006. Reprint, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009. Stanley, E. G. “The Judgement of the Damned (from Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 201 and Other Manuscripts), and the Definition of Old English Verse.” In Learning and Literature

116 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies Presented to Peter Clemoes on the Occasion of his Sixty-Fifth Birthday, edited by Helmut Gneuss and Michael Lapidge, 363–91. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985. Swanton, Michael, ed. The Dream of the Rood. 1970. Reprint, Exeter: U of Exeter P, 2000. Symons, Thomas, trans. Regularis Concordia: The Monastic Agreement. Medieval Classics. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1953. ———, and Sigrid Spath, eds. “Regularis Concordia.” In Consuetudinum saeculi X/XI/XII monumenta non-Cluniacensia, edited by Kassius Hallinger. Siegburg: F. Schmitt, 1984. Szarmach, Paul E. “Caesarius of Arles and the Vercelli Homilies.” Traditio 26 (1970): 315–23. ———. “The Vercelli Homilies: Style and Structure.” In The Old English Homily & Its Backgrounds, edited by Paul E. Szarmach and Bernard F. Huppé. Albany: SUNY Press, 1978. Tertullian. De resurrectione carnis. PL 791–886C. Trahern, Joseph B. Jr. “Vercelli Homily VIII and the Christ.” PMLA 42 (1927): 314–30. ———. “Vercelli Homily XI and Its Sources.” Speculum 24 (1949): 76–87. Woolf, Rosemary. “Doctrinal Influences on The Dream of the Rood.” MÆ 27 (1958): 137–53. Wright, Charles D. “‘Færgere þurh Forðgesceaft’: The Confirmation of the Angels in Old English Literature.” MÆ 85, no. 2 (2017): 22–37. ———. The Irish Tradition in Old English Literature. CSASE 6. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. ———. “More Old English Poetry in Vercelli Homily XXI.” In Early Medieval Texts and Interpretations. Studies presented to Donald D. Scragg, edited by Elaine Treharne and Susan Rosser, 245–62. Tempe: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002. ———. “The Pledge of the Soul: A Judgment Theme in Old English Homiletic Literature and Cynewulf’s Elene.” NM 91 (1990): 23–30. ———. “The Shepherd of Hermas.” In Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture: The Apocrypha, 63–6. ———. “Vercelli Homilies XI–XIII and the Benedictine Reform: Tailored Sources and Implied Audiences.” In Preacher, Sermon and Audience in the Middle Ages, edited by Carolyn Muessig, 203–27. Leiden: Brill, 2002. Wulfstan. The Canons of Edgar. Edited by Roger Fowler. EETS o.s. 266. London: Oxford UP, 1972. Young, Karl. The Drama of the Medieval Church. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933. Zacher, Samantha. Preaching the Converted: The Style and Rhetoric of the Vercelli Homilies. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2009. ———. “Sin, Syntax, and Synonyms: Rhetorical Style and Structure in Vercelli Homily X.” JEGP 103 (2004): 53–76.

·4· hagiography and the end ( s ) of the vercelli book Models of Ideal Selfhood in Homilies XVII, XVIII, and XXIII

If, as I have argued, the Vercelli Book is a manuscript that is at least partly concerned with the discourse of subjectivity articulated through performance, then an appropriate ending to the compilation might predictably include examples of successfully constructed individuals to serve as model subjects for the manuscript’s audience. The delicate but crucial relationship between soul and body that provides the rhetorical structure by which Anglo-Saxon Christians seemed to have ordered their lives would require carefully considered illustration, through examples that would model the necessity of salvific performative action without over-simplifying the role of either the corporeal or incorporeal aspects of existence—that is, without dangerously emphasizing the power of one part over the other. The use of exempla to illustrate proper personal behavior was, of course, extremely common in the religious writing of the Anglo-Saxon period. Saints’ lives also provided narrative models of right living that could be interpreted with remarkable consistency. The typological nature of the vita has been demonstrated in a number of critical studies,1 and the broad applicability that typology lends to what is (formally at least) the biography of an individual person makes it both a repository of ideal generic Christian behaviors and an example of a specific Christian successfully performing those behaviors. Vercelli does indeed provide a cluster of model lives in the last third of the manuscript,2 some of them recognizable

118 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book saints’ lives, some of them simply hagiographically-themed texts: the unique homily XVIII on the Purification of the Virgin Mary (fols. 90v–94v), the vitae-based homilies XVIII on Saint Martin of Tours (fols. 94v–101r) and XXIII on Saint Guthlac of East Anglia (fols. 133v–135v), and Cynewulf’s Elene (fols. 121r–133v).3 In addition to their narrative and generic similarities as hagiographic texts, these texts also have linguistic and codicological affinities. Donald G. Scragg tentatively assigns a Mercian origin to all of the texts’ exemplars,4 and their quiring and presentation suggest shared sources.5 The first group contains XV, XVI, XVII (Mary), and XVIII (Martin), and the second group contains Elene and XXIII (Guthlac), with the poetic grouping of Soul & Body I, Homiletic Fragment I, and Dream of the Rood, and the second Rogation group XIX–XXI and homily XXII on soul-and-body in between. This chapter considers the three prose texts about Martin, Guthlac, and finally Mary: their individual hagiographic concerns, their relationship to each other, and their function within the Vercelli Book as examples of ideal Christian behavior.

Vercelli’s Eremitic Saints: Martin and Guthlac In part because of its impressive range of material and its eschatological focus, the Vercelli Book has been described as an ascetic florilegium,6 intended for monks. Eamonn Ó Carragáin, however, has recently reassessed its suitability for a monastic audience, observing that “there is no sign in the book that its compiler lived the full community life enjoined in the Regularis Concordia.”7 Ó Carragáin has convincingly argued that the compilation was more likely to have been the private devotional book of a pilgrim, specifically a canon, traveling to the shrine of St. Eusebius, patron saint of canons, in Vercelli. This theory explains both the manuscript’s journey to Italy and its idiosyncratic organization.8 The evidence for a non-monastic, or at least non-Benedictine, audience within the Vercelli Book’s individual texts themselves, however, is even more convincing. Charles D. Wright has argued that three of the prose texts in the manuscript, homilies XI, XII, and XIII, were deliberately adapted from their sources to reflect a secular clerical reaction against the initiatives of the Benedictine Reform, possibly from the perspective of dispossessed canons.9 Wright observes that the homilies omit all references to the inherent sinfulness of the possession of material goods and wealth in their sources, which would seem to be an implicit defense of the canons’ way of life in reaction to the reformers’ insistence on communal poverty in accordance with



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the Benedictine Rule. Ó Carragáin posits a pre-Reform context for the entire manuscript, whereas Wright suggests that the tone and material of at least some of its contents best fit a post-Reform context; but both conclude that Vercelli’s spirituality must have lain outside the parameters of Benedictine monasticism as it resurfaced in tenth-century Anglo-Saxon England.10 To this ongoing conversation about Vercelli’s asceticism, purpose, and connection to monasticism I would like to add analysis of its saints’ lives, beginning with homily XVIII on Martin and homily XXIII on Guthlac. Like the other prose pieces in Vercelli, Martin and Guthlac are conventionally labeled homilies though neither is one in the true generic sense.11 Both texts are, instead, redactions of longer hagiographic works, adapted only loosely for a preaching context.12 The homilies are largely faithful to their respective sources. Homily XVIII preserves an almost complete life of St. Martin, based on Sulpicius Severus’ Vita Beati Martini and his Epistola Tertia ad Bassulam (both c. 400),13 with only three brief homiletic interjections on the part of the Vercelli author (lines 1–5, 44–5, and 300–11). The homily on St. Guthlac closely follows Chapters 23–32 of Felix’s Vita Sancti Guthlaci (ca. 730–40), with few, albeit important, departures from Felix’s text, and little homiletic frame to speak of, excepting the final line of the text (discussed below).14 Because the two Vercelli homilies generally follow both the form and content of their sources, it has been assumed that there is little productive scope for detailed source analysis; and indeed, beyond the identification of source materials, little criticism of any kind has been devoted to the Guthlac homily, and even less to the one on Martin.15 Despite their general fidelity, however, both homilies do make significant local changes in translating their sources, and the editorial choices made by their redactors, particularly in terms of omissions, warrant closer examination. For example, both of the Vercelli vitae excise the majority of their sources’ explicit references to cenobitic monasticism, despite the fact that both Martin and Guthlac were monks living the full communal life.16 And even in their descriptions of the saints’ pious conduct outside the walls of the cloister, the homilies consistently edit references to extreme asceticism, discussions of abstract spirituality, and classical or doctrinal allusions,17 foregrounding instead a brand of piety that would have been more accessible to secular or even lay audiences—one that is founded on the performance of good works. Broadly speaking, the texts specific to the Vercelli Book do two things: 1) downplay asceticism and monasticism; and 2) emphasize pious living through concrete acts. The systemic changes operative in the Guthlac and the Martin homilies, which are thrown into greater relief by comparative

120 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book analysis with Vercelli’s other hagiographic texts, produce a pair of homilies that translate canonical saintly lives into paradigms of Christian living that are embodied, performative, and imitable, rather than transcendent, essential, and sacrosanct. As we shall see, such lives are crucial for modeling the specifically Christian, but not distinctively monastic, subjectivity that informs the structural, rhetorical, and thematic aims of Vercelli: like the other texts we have seen, Vercelli’s hagiographic pieces describe selves that are predicated upon action and are constructed against the final reckoning of Judgment. Of course, it would be indefensible to claim that all of the adjustments made to the Martin and Guthlac homilies—or, indeed, to any of the texts appearing in the Vercelli Book—were the work of its single scribe and were none of them inherent to his exemplars. It is nonetheless both productive and plausible to regard the selection of specific texts, and specific versions of those texts, as reflecting the interests and points of view of the compiler and scribe of the manuscript.18 It would be difficult to approach any sort of integral reading of the Vercelli Book otherwise, save by exclusive recourse to reader-response theory; but to assume that the manuscript’s creator had no discernable programmatic criteria or ideological basis for the selection and organization of its constituent pieces is to significantly limit the horizon of interpretation.19 And I do believe that an integral reading is worth the hazards of speculation: even if we cannot narrowly define the origin and purpose of each apparent deviation from an established textual tradition or source, we may yet recognize in the placement and preservation of particular textual variants within the manuscript a deliberate and consciously-motivated thematic program.20 The possibility of such a revisionist project is already suggested by analogous examples from the period, among which the following, provided by Ælfric, is particularly relevant. In her introduction to the contemplative life in Anglo-Saxon England, Mary Clayton discusses the editorial practices employed by Ælfric in a number of his works, especially his preaching texts.21 In a subtle effort to downplay the traditional superiority of the contemplative life in the hierarchy of Christian sanctity, Ælfric, in his redaction of St. Augustine of Hippo’s Sermones 103 and 104 (ÆCHom II.29),22 manipulates exegesis of the story of Mary and Martha in Luke 10:39–42 to serve his own ends. Ælfric follows neither the traditional exegetical reading (which interprets Mary as the contemplative life and Martha as the active one), nor that of his source, Augustine (who interprets Mary as the future life and Martha as the earthly one). Instead, he covertly adjusts Augustine’s exegesis, preserving its de-emphasis of the contemplative life but shifting its allegorical binary



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from celestial/terrestrial to spiritual/corporal, which are both, in Augustine’s reading, aspects of the earthly active life. Mary thus becomes the symbol of one who provides spiritual nourishment, not one who receives it, while Martha symbolizes one who provides bodily nourishment, and both are presented as models of active living. Mary’s chosen path is still the superior one, but she comes to symbolize not the life of the withdrawn contemplative but that of the active teacher or preacher, giving spiritual sustenance to those in need. Clayton postulates that because of Ælfric’s own education23 and relationship to monasticism, his exegetical maneuver had a dual purpose: His training cannot have been conducive to viewing withdrawal and total “stilnysse” as the monastic ideal, especially in an England rife with apostasy and where education outside the monasteries was poor. So, although some lip service was paid to the ideal of monasticism as dissociated from the world … Ælfric in practice seems to have been far more concerned to exalt the ideal of teachers and preachers.24

Clayton argues that, with the Benedictine Reform’s emphasis on cenobitic and communal living and England’s need for active pastoral care during the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, the eremitic and severely ascetic lifestyle of the pure contemplative fell out of fashion, both in theory as an ideal of sanctity and in practice as a mode of existence—and that the record of this development is at least partially preserved in the works of Ælfric. Clayton observes multiple instances in which Ælfric can be seen making similar editorial decisions, one of which is especially pertinent to this study. In his Lives of Saints,25 Ælfric does not mention hermits, not even those like St. Anthony who figure prominently in early Christian history. Many of the eremitic saints whom Ælfric fails to mention in his Lives are found in the Cotton-Corpus legendary, his principle hagiographic source collection, which would seem to indicate conscious omission on his part. Some hermits, however, are not found in the legendary, even though their cults may have been popular in Anglo-Saxon England. Such is the case with Guthlac of East Anglia, whose cult was both popular and relatively widespread. In his study of Ælfric’s hagiographic sources, Patrick Zettel shows that Ælfric selected saints for inclusion based on their prominence in English calendars, and the relative paucity of hermits in such calendars may explain their corresponding absence in the Lives.26 Clayton, however, maintains that “even in Zettel’s count we should expect Guthlac to figure in the Lives of Saints,”27 and his absence is therefore striking. For Clayton, the obvious conclusion to be drawn from such evidence is that Ælfric was systematically omitting hermits from his canon:

122 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book “[t]here is no doubt that Ælfric could have included solitaries [in his Lives of Saints], had he so desired, but he obviously did not wish to provide models of the hermit’s life.”28 The motivation behind this omission, Clayton concludes, was Ælfric’s desire to foreground pastoral cenobitic monastic life as the paradigm for saintly living, even though such teaching contradicted the longstanding tradition of the supremacy of the solitary contemplative. Because evidence for the practice of eremitism during the Reform period is virtually non-existent, Clayton asserts, it is safe to assume that Ælfric’s attitude toward the purely contemplative life is representative of the community of Reformers at large.29 Like Ælfric, the Vercelli compiler was forced to contend with a tradition that praised the contemplative life above all others. But unlike Ælfric, he did not avoid the lives of contemplative or hermit saints: indeed, Vercelli includes the lives of two of the more popular ones in Anglo-Saxon England— Martin and Guthlac. The Vercelli compiler chose instead to adapt these lives to make them compatible with clerical and lay spirituality. The inclusion of these saints’ lives in the Vercelli Book already suggests that the theology and the practices of the Vercelli compiler were not the same as those of the Benedictine Reform. But the evidence internal to each of the homilies is perhaps even more striking. I begin with the second of the two texts, the Guthlac homily, which is the final piece in the Vercelli manuscript. The Old English prose versions of the life of St. Guthlac have traditionally, and somewhat predictably, received less attention than their poetic siblings, Exeter Book’s Guthlac A and B (fols. 32b–52b, ll.1–818 and 819–1379 respectively).30 Though Guthlac A may have been derived independently, Felix’s Vita Sancti Guthlaci serves as the source, to varying degrees, of the remainder of extant Old English Guthlac material: Guthlac B and also two prose translations. The prose Guthlac materials survive in two manuscripts. The first is the eleventh-century London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian D.21 (fols. 18–40), which preserves a more or less full account of the saint’s life.31 The second is the Vercelli Book (fols. 133–135). Both extant Old English prose versions, the Vespasian (sometimes called the London) Life and Vercelli homily XXIII, must descend from a common but now lost translation of Felix’s Latin text.32 Jane Roberts tentatively argues that in part because of its archaic vocabulary, the Vercelli homily may stand closer to the original translation than does the Vespasian Life.33 Homily XXIII comprises most of the material found in Chapters 28–32 of Felix’s Vita, which roughly corresponds to Chapters 4–5 of the Vespasian Life.



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The redactor of Vercelli XXIII makes three major changes to his material that differentiate it from both its ultimate source and its Old English analogue. The first is the omission, without summary, of the first 27 chapters of Felix’s Vita, which contain Guthlac’s early life as a solider as well as his temporary vocation as a monk at the monastery at Repton. The second major alteration is the omission of the final 21 chapters of the Vita, which contain Guthlac’s miracles and death scene. The third and most significant change is the insertion of an alternate death scene for the saint, in which Guthlac is assumed into heaven by the apostle Bartholomew instead of dying in his cell with a servant (as is the case in both Felix’s text and the Vespasian Life, as well as the poetic Guthlac B). I will address each of these changes in turn. The material that the Vercelli redactor does retain begins, rather abruptly, with Guthlac’s taking up of the hermit’s life, creating his anchor-seat within an abandoned barrow in the Fens of East Anglia and embarking on a life of solitude. In Felix’s Vita and the Vespasian text, these chapters are part of the larger narrative and so require no exposition. But the Vercelli redactor begins in medias res, so to speak, and offers no introductory material or summary of the previous action. He even goes so far as to translate Felix’s praedicta insula as sprecenan iglande, even though, of course, no island has yet been mentioned.34 Both Max Förster and Paul Szarmach suggest that this opening may be simply the result of scribal transmission and not necessarily part of the exemplar from which the Vercelli scribe was working.35 Förster indeed implies that the Vercelli scribe himself was first responsible for excerpting the entirety of the Guthlac material as it stands in the homily.36 Whether the result of personal whim or slavish copying, this abrupt beginning is somewhat more appropriate than it appears: Felix’s modern editor Bertram Colgrave has characterized the chapters leading up to the material that starts homily XXIII as “a kind of prologue to the Vita proper,”37 and so their exclusion is not necessarily surprising.38 Moreover, the Vercelli text begins almost exactly at the start of Felix’s Chapter 28, the only omission being the following sentence: “Igitur ut de sancti Guthlaci solitaria vita, sicut proposui, scribere exordiar, quae a frequentatoribus eius Wilfrido et Cissan audivi, eodem ordine, quo conperi easdem res narrare curabo” [So to begin the account of St. Guthlac’s solitary life as I have proposed to do, I will seek to narrate the story as I heard it from Wilfrid and Cissa who were his frequent visitors, and in the order in which I learnt it] (92–3). Omitting this sentence removes both Felix’s problematic personal “I” and the reference to the external witnesses Wilfrid and Cissa, which is irrelevant in

124 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book the context of the homily. What remains is a natural point of departure for the text’s narrative of Guthlac’s eremitic life, but one which completely omits his cenobitic one. This itself may serve as explanation for the Vercelli homily’s omission of the first 27 chapters of Felix’s Vita, but the selection of the Vercelli homily’s material is ultimately more deliberate, a point to which I will return in my reading of the homily’s ending below. After he establishes his cell, Guthlac is led by demons to despair over his choice of the solitaria vita, but he successfully resists and is comforted by St. Bartholomew. We then learn of two temptations: the first is by two devils who try to lead Guthlac to excessive fasting; the second is by a horde of them who try to frighten the saint by physically taking him to the gates of hell. Bartholomew appears and rescues Guthlac from the hellmouth, and it is at this point that the Vercelli homily departs significantly from both its ultimate Latin source and its Old English brother. Felix’s Vita and the later Vespasian Life have Bartholomew commanding the devils to return Guthlac safely to his cell, after which both texts go on to relate the numerous miracles performed by the saint leading up to his extended, and hagiographically-conventional, death scene. Homily XXIII, in contrast, ends with Guthlac’s abrupt assumption. The last lines of the Vercelli homily read: And þa æfter þam fleah se haliga Guthlac mid þam apostole sancte Bartholomei to heofona rices wuldre, and hine se hælend þær onfeng, and he þær leofað and rixað in heofona rices wuldre a butan ende on ecnesse, Amen fiat. (XXIII.149–52)39 [And after that, the holy Guthlac flew with the Apostle Saint Bartholomew to the glory of the kingdom of heaven, and the Savior received him there, and he lives there and reigns in the glory of the kingdom of heaven forever without end, Amen.]

This ending is all the more striking because of the Vercelli text’s relative fidelity to its source up until this point. The particular rhetorical effect of Guthlac’s apotheosis has been variously interpreted. Taking his cue from the disproportionate emphasis on Bartholomew that results from the Vercelli redactor’s choices, Paul Szarmach has suggested that the incidents in the Vercelli homily may have been selected “from Guthlac’s vita as much for St. Bartholomew’s glory as for Guthlac’s.”40 Jane Roberts adeptly counters this reading by pointing out that we have extant sermons on Bartholomew from just a few centuries later that make use of the Guthlac legend, and they do not much resemble the Vercelli text.41 But in response to the alternative assumption that the “homiletic frame” and revised ending of XXIII are merely hasty additions on



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the part of the earlier translator or even scribal afterthoughts on the part of the Vercelli compiler himself, Roberts maintains that “[w]hoever abstracted the material that now stands at the end of the Vercelli Book must have known Felix’s casting of the materials for the saint’s life, and it would have been a simple task for him to add some bridge words in line with the Vita translation. Therefore, his separate ending does not deserve to be overlooked.”42 Roberts herself offers no definitive explanation for the alternate ending, except to point out that structural proximity causally connects Guthlac’s steadfast and pious behavior with his assumption, demonstrating a clear link between right living and heavenly reward—an appropriate focus for the Vita text as adapted for a preaching context. Roberts’s impulse to engage the homily’s ending is productive, but her solution is formal, and only superficially treats the redactor’s motivations at the level of structure. Moreover, both readings, Szarmach’s and Roberts’s, assume a focus on the homily in isolation, as a discrete redaction of a larger work that was formatted for the pulpit.43 While we may never identify the exact origin of or impetus behind the homily’s discrepancy at this point in the narrative, the ending of XXIII nonetheless denotes a conscious manipulation of source material at some point in transmission. That manipulation, I would argue, fulfills particular ideological goals that were at the very least compatible with, if not representative of, the Vercelli compiler’s concerns. Indeed, such changes imply preference for a particular version of the Guthlac legend among the many circulating in Anglo-Saxon England, one which may have appealed more to lay or clerical audiences than monastic or contemplative ones. Guthlac A, most likely derived independently from Felix’s text, preserves roughly the same narrative material as the Vercelli homily, beginning with a general meditation on the transience of the earthly life and a vague reference to Guthlac having “his // in godes willan / mod gerehte, // man eall forseah, / eorðlic æþelu, // upp gemunde” [held out his heart to the will of God, renounced all wickedness and earthly pre-eminence and set his mind on high] (GuthA 95–7), but moving quickly to Guthlac’s solitary existence in the Fens and his struggles with temptation. As in the Vercelli homily, the narrative of Guthlac A ends with the saint’s return from the gates of hell, after which the poet merely says that Guthlac dwelt in the Fens until “[his] gæst gelæded / engla fæðmum // in uprodor” [[his] soul was brought into heaven in the arms of angels] (GuthA 781b–2). Guthlac B, in contrast, focuses almost exclusively on the saint’s miracles and protracted death and is inarguably dependent on Felix’s text for both content and narrative structure.

126 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book What this may suggest is that the legend of Guthlac gave rise to two separate popular traditions: one that focused on Guthlac’s eremitic life in the Fens and his struggle against the devil; and one that described the saint’s perfected charism44 and blessed death. The former, like the physical, embodied, and imperfect sainthood modeled in Andreas, would resonate more clearly with an audience of generic Christian subjects than avowed religious ones. In Vercelli, for example, we witness both Guthlac’s despair at having chosen the solitary life and his repeated temptations. Although Vercelli’s Guthlac successfully overcomes his trials, he is not rewarded with the attendant miracles, the privilege of holy teaching, or the ordination that he earns in Felix and the Vespasian Life. Like Andrew, he is instead depicted as a saint who, even in his saintliness, continued to struggle, who woke each morning and “ymb ða drohtunga smeade his lifes” [thought about his life’s ordering] (XXIII.47–8), and whose saintly identity is inherently bound up in his body and its salvific actions. Indeed, the means by which he overcomes his temptations are patently performative. During his first demonic assault, his response to “wolberendan geþohtum” [pestilential thoughts] is to sing and call out loud to God (XXIII.30–3). He counters the demons’ exhortation to excessive fasting by eating. The acts that we witness Guthlac perform (praying, eating, singing) are acts that all Christians would be expected to perform on a regular basis. Their power, for both saints and sinners, lies in their iterative nature. And as an audience, we are shown the concrete reward for Guthlac’s concrete piety: assumption into heaven. That this version of the Guthlac legend was more than just the unique creation of the Vercelli compiler or his source may be suggested by its survival in both the independently derived poetic Guthlac A and the Vercelli homily. Of course, Guthlac’s general popularity was considerable, as is evidenced by the number of extant copies of Felix’s Vita and its epitomes, the numerous mentions of the saint in martyrologies and calendars, and the sustained vibrancy of his cult at Croyland Abbey. But many of these surviving Guthlac materials display a dependence on popular tradition and have a regional flavor, which serve to distinguish Guthlac from his canonized eremitic brethren, including the Northumbrian St. Cuthbert—the only hermit whose contemplative life features prominently in Ælfric’s work.45 Despite his holiness, Guthlac reads as a local Anglo-Saxon saint, and one with whom secular or lay Christians could perhaps more easily identify. Indeed, the redactor of homily XXIII made choices, in omissions more so than in alterations, which emphasize exactly those parts of Guthlac’s life that



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differentiate him both from other ascetic hermits like Cuthbert and Anthony (whose vitae served as Felix’s models),46 and from cenobitic saints of the kind that were more favored during the Reform,47 to judge from Ælfric’s apparent preferences.48 The Vercelli redactor’s abrupt ending, for example, omits the generically conventional miracles and death scene while still illustrating Guthlac’s direct reward for his piety. Felix’s text structurally links Guthlac’s holiness to his miracle-working: it is only after the saint’s successful escape from the hellmouth, signifying his ultimate defeat of the devil and his attainment of salvation, that he is able to perform the miracles of prescience, healing, exorcism, etc. This trajectory is consonant with the conventions of hagiographic texts, in which sanctity is demonstrated by miracles, but only after the saint has successfully climbed the ladder of contemplation. The Guthlac homily, on the other hand, represents sanctity by means of a literal assumption, which confirms Guthlac’s exceptional holiness while also strengthening his identity with the generic Anglo-Saxon Christian subject: not all Christians can perform miracles, but that need not mean that they cannot all be holy.49 The homily thus reworks both the rhetorical structure and the content of its source to reflect a more ecumenical form of piety that is based not on the veneration of perfect sainthood, but on the potential for any Christian subject’s imitation of an embodied and performative holiness. Vercelli XXIII also preserves Guthlac’s vision of hell and his spiritual battles with demons, choices that align the saint with Anglo-Saxon lay theology by shared connection with unorthodox apocrypha like the Visio S. Pauli. And Guthlac’s ex-profession of soldier is one with which many Anglo-Saxon aristocratic men would be familiar, and which continues to serve as the model for his ‘spiritual’ life even after he has renounced its earthly manifestation. The saint is undoubtedly a miles Christi, but his repeated struggles with demons are concretizations of sin, successfully defeated by equally concrete performative actions. Guthlac’s response to the demons who torment him is physical, though not combative: he prays, sings, and eats. Within the material that Vercelli homily XXIII retains, we see Guthlac explicitly rejecting the kind of severe asceticism associated with the Desert Fathers and which is also present in Felix’s original Vita. The first of the saint’s temptations is to extreme fasting, to which he responds almost comically by shoving bread in his mouth. Lines 80–3 of the homily read: [Guthlac] þa sona forseah þa deofollican lare, forþan he þa ealle idle and unnytte ongeat; ac þa feng to þære teala myclan andleofone, þæt wæs to þam berenan hlafe, and þone geþygde and his feorh big ferede. (XXIII.80–3)

128 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book [Guthlac then immediately rejected the devilish teachings, because he perceived them to be all idle and useless, and then he grabbed the very substantial nourishment, that was barley loaf, and partook of it and sustained his life.]

This incident is in Felix as well, of course, and warnings against immoderate fasting were not uncommon, especially in the works of authors adapting eastern monastic practices for western monks, like, for example, St. Cassian, St. Jerome, and even St. Benedict.50 However, as Sarah Downey points out in her recent article on extreme fasting and the Guthlac legends,51 Guthlac’s temptation is more than merely an echo of the Evagrian translation of the Life of Saint Anthony.52 Downey argues that the references to food and drink in the Old English Guthlac materials paint a picture of the saint as a moderate, not extreme, ascetic, one whose behaviors would have been in line with western, and specifically Anglo-Saxon, monastic traditions. Guthlac’s moderation, Downey concludes, would have been an important sign of his alignment with Roman practices of asceticism (and by extension Roman theology in general) against the traditionally more severe Celtic ones.53 It would have been part of his specifically Anglo-Saxon identity, which is perhaps why the scene continued to be preserved, even in much later redactions, as an iconic moment in the saint’s life.54 That Guthlac’s dietary moderation may have functioned as an important part of his overall identity as a saint seems clear. But what is missing from the Vercelli version of the vita is the monastic material surrounding it, which is so crucial to Downey’s argument. Completely omitted from Vercelli is the description of Guthlac’s normal practice of consuming only a little bread and water after sunset.55 Likewise missing is the comment that Guthlac was unpopular among his monastic brethren at Repton because he refused to drink any alcohol, which, as Downey aptly points out, is an observation that would have pleased Benedict himself, who only grudgingly allowed that monks could drink wine.56 Even the lengthy descriptions of the general desolation of the Fens and the hardships of living there (e.g., Vita Chs. XXIV–XXV) are missing from Vercelli, leaving a vita that suggests the moderation (i.e., non-eremitism) of its saint, but also distances him from the moderation that might have been imposed by living a regulated monastic life (non-monasticism). In extant admonitions against extreme fasting, one of the most commonly suggested guards against the practice is the virtue of obedience: monks who are ordered to fast only moderately but who disobey to engage in more severe abstinence are to be corrected by their abbot.57 Guthlac’s moderation, however, is presented as self-generated, and the omission of any reference to his



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time at Repton sidesteps the reading of his cenobitic training as preparation for his eremitic life in this as in other areas of practice.58 In the Vercelli homily, then, this lessening of Guthlac’s asceticism, coupled with the omission of his miracles and his death scene, together have the effect of presenting a particular version of sainthood, one that is more than compatible with the ideological aims of the other texts in the Vercelli Book. Indeed, it will perhaps be most illuminating to consider homily XXIII and its discrepancies specifically within in its manuscript context, particularly in comparison with another similar hagiographical text in the collection, homily XVIII, a Life of Martin of Tours.59 Homily XVIII is based on two late-fourth or early-fifth-century texts of Sulpicius Severus: his Vita Beati Martini and his Epistola Tertia ad Bassulam. Martin, like Guthlac, is an accomplished soldier who gives up his profession to enter a life of piety and who earns sainthood without enduring martyrdom, and so the comparison is a natural one. The obvious yardstick that the Martin homily provides has consistently led scholars to question anew the motivations behind the redaction of the Guthlac text, the assumption being, of course, that generic and not thematic consistency was the concern not only of the redactors of each text, but of the Vercelli compiler as well. Though the texts were taken from different exemplars, copied at different times, and represent different modes of hagiography,60 both were obviously of interest to the Vercelli compiler, and I would argue that they select and adapt their source material in analogous ways. As we have seen, the Guthlac homily omits material that refers specifically to the saint’s time in the monastery at Repton and also the extremity of his asceticism. What remains is a holy man, but one who is represented as living a conceptually (if not literally) active life in the world (suggested thematically by his numerous temptations), and whose ties to cenobitic monasticism are significantly downplayed. Even Guthlac’s ability to successfully endure the eremitic life—made possible only by his intense piety—is presented as self-generated, and not, as in Felix, as the result of years of preparation at Repton. The Martin homily reflects similar adjustments. Like the Guthlac homily, Vercelli XVIII omits references to Martin’s monastic vocation. Sulpicius’ text describes Martin’s early interest in the church: Nam cum esset annorum decem, inuitis parentibus ad ecclesiam confugit, seque catechumenum fieri postulauit. Mox mirum in modum totus in Dei opere conuersus, cum esset annorum duodecim, eremum concupiuit: fecissetque uotis satis, si aetatis infirmitas non obstitisset. Animus tamen aut circa monasteria, aut circa ecclesiam semper intentus,

130 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book meditabatur adhuc in aetate puerili quod postea deuotus impleuit. Sed … cum esset annorum quindecim, captus et catenatus sacramentis militaribus implicatus est. (Vita 2.3, emphasis mine) [Thus, when he was ten years old, against the wish of his parents, he fled to the church, and begged to become a catechumen. Soon afterwards, becoming in a wonderful manner completely converted to the service of God, when he was twelve years old, he desired to be a hermit; and he would have completed that desire with the necessary vows, had not his unfit age prevented it. His mind, however, being always intent on the monasteries or the church, already contemplated in his youth what he afterwards, as a devotee, fulfilled. But … when he was fifteen years old, caught and chained, [he] was compelled to take the military oath]

The Vercelli homily says much the same thing: 7 þa he wæs .X. wintre, þa tihton hine his yldran to woruldfolgoðe, 7 þa fleah he to Godes cirican 7 bæd þæt hine man þær gecristnode (þæt bið sio onginnes 7 se æresta dæl þære halgan fulwihte), 7 þa he wæs wundorlice nu on eallum his life on Godes þeowdome gecyrred. Þa he wæs .XV. wintra, þa genyddon hie hine, his yldran, to þan þæt he sceolde wæpnum onfon, 7 on cyninges þegna geferræddenne beon. Ða wæron þreo gear ær his fulwihte þæt he woruldlicu wæpen wæg. (XVIII.17–24) [And when he was ten years old, his parents intended for him a worldly occupation. He then fled to God’s Church and asked that one christen him (which is the beginning and the first part of holy baptism), and then he was now wonderfully for all of his life converted to the service of God. When he was fifteen years old, his parents compelled him to take up weapons and be in the fellowship of the king’s thegns. There were three years before his baptism that he bore worldly weapons.]

There are, however, two discrepancies in the Vercelli text. Unlike Sulpicius’ Vita, Homily XVIII goes on to ‘explain’ what it means doctrinally to “be christened” (“which is the beginning and the first part of holy baptism”), a point which is repeated twice more in the course of the abbreviated homily, but which is absent from the other two extant versions of the homily: 7 þeah ðe he þa gyt ne wære fullice æfter cierican endebyrdnesse gefullad, ac he wæs gecristnod, swa ic ær foresægde, hwæðre he þæt geryne þæs halgan fulwihtes mid godum dædum heold 7 lufade. (XVIII.32–5) [And though he was not then yet fully baptized according to the rule of the church, he was christened, as I said before. Nevertheless, the mystery of baptism he cherished and loved with good deeds.]



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Ða he ða hæfde eahtatyne wintra, ða gefullade hine man æfter cirican endebyrdnesse. Wæs he ær beforan þa þreo gear gecristnod, swa ic ær sægde. (XVIII.82–4) [When he was eighteen years old, then one baptized him according to the rule of the church. He was previously christened three years before, as I said earlier.]

Sulpicius’ text makes no such observations, except metaphorically, by referring to the as-yet un-baptized Martin as “Necdum … regeneratus in Christo” [not yet made new in Christ] (Vita 2.8). The repeated and simplified explanations of baptism may suggest a young-in-faith congregation, but they also point toward a model of sainthood which, like that of Andrew, is predicated upon continual reaffirmation. The repetition also throws emphasis on Martin’s holy humanity: he is a model Christian even before he is a literal Christian. It is Martin’s performance of good deeds that makes him so, a point that is unmistakably illustrated by the legend’s (and the homily’s) central miracle: the catechumenal Martin’s cutting of his cloak to share it with a beggar at Amiens, which leads to a vision in which Christ, appearing to Martin as the beggar, praises the saint’s charity (XVIII.46–79). As is also clear from the above quotation, the redactor of homily XVIII, like the redactor of the Guthlac homily, omits his source’s references (in italics above) to Martin’s desire to enter the monastic life, and instead skips to his forced entry into military service. Several other similar omissions are made throughout the text.61 Those few references to monasticism in Sulpicius that Vercelli XVIII does preserve are presented with a clearly modulated tone. For example, in referring to Martin’s extreme piety even while forced to live in the world, Sulpicius writes “nam frugalitatem in eo laudare non est necesse, qua ita usus est, ut iam illo tempore non miles, sed monachus putaretur” [for there is no need to praise the temperence he displayed: it was so great that, even at that time [i.e., before his baptism], he was regarded not as a soldier but as a monk] (Vita 2.7). Clearly, Sulpicius’ comparison is meant to glorify Martin’s ability to remain as pious and devoted as a monk would be, even while continuing in his earthly profession of soldier—a sentiment that is reflected in the Blickling version of the vernacular homily, which reads “7 ðeah þe he þa gyt on læwedum hade beon sceolde, hweðre he toðon wærnesse hæfde on eallum ðingum, þæt he efne munuclife gyta swiþor lifde þonne þonne læwedes mannes” [and though as yet he was compelled to lead the life of the layman, nevertheless he had such circumspection in all things that he even led more the life of a monk than that of a layman] (XVIII.28–30).62 The Vercelli redactor’s version of the same passage implies something rather different:

132 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book 7 þeah þe he gyt on læwedum hade beon sceolde, 7 hwæðre he to þæs mycle forhæfdnesse hæfde on eallum þingum þæt he munuclif 7 git swiðor lifde þonne sume gehadode men. (XVIII.28–30, emphasis mine) [And though he still had to live in the condition of a lay person, nevertheless he possessed such great continence in all things that he lived a monastic life and even more greatly than certain consecrated men.]

Rather than focusing on Martin’s remarkable piety as a soldier, the redactor of the Vercelli homily is instead critiquing the im-piety of the ‘certain’ monks. The purpose of the adaptation is explicit: one need not be a devoted monastic, living the full communal life, in order to be saintly. Indeed, one is tempted to read into the passage an indictment of cenobitic monasticism itself or at the very least a critique of some of its adherents. Unlike Guthlac, Martin does, however, make an appearance in the works of Ælfric, in both a homily (ÆCHom II.34)63 and in the Lives of Saints (Ch. 31, 218–313), though the emphasis in these texts is on Martin’s miracles as a bishop, not his continence as a monk. Szarmach suggests that as compared to the Vercelli redactor, “Ælfric has a greater command over his sources and a more independent perspective on his role as a hagiographer” because he is able to craft a more linear, more “coherent” narrative of Martin’s life out of an even greater number of sources.64 For Szarmach, this observation hinges most crucially on Ælfric’s omission, in both his homily and his life, of Chapter 27 of Sulpicius’ Vita, the retention of which in the Vercelli homily causes an awkward bump in the narrative. The result is a ‘false’ ending about two-thirds of the way through the Vercelli text: a passage which seems to sum up the saint’s life in appropriately final terms, but which is followed by a continuation of the narrative based on a new source (Sulpicius’ Epistola). Szarmach admits that there may have been a purpose behind the Vercelli redactor’s choice beyond linear biography, though he only begins to unpack its potential significance.65 The material following Vercelli’s ‘false’ ending begins with the announcement that Martin had foreknowledge of his own death. The rest of the material derived from the Epistola details the events leading up to Martin’s death, including his final miracles,66 and his death-scene. The ‘false’ ending, then, functions as an effective bridge between the narrative that relates Martin’s life and the one that relates his death, and serves as a clear causal marker—flagged by the stark proclamation “þis is soðlice eadig wer” [this is truly a blessed man] (XVIII.215–6)—indicating that the saint’s blessed death was made possible



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only by his holy life. As if to drive the point home to his audience, the homilist ends with an injunction to heed Martin’s example so that by this, salvation may be achieved: Ac utan we la tilian, men þa leofestan, þæt we þæs halgan weres, sanctus Martinus, lif 7 his dæda onherien þæs þe ure gemet sie … (XVIII.306–9) [Let us indeed strive, dearly beloved, that we imitate the life and deeds of the holy man, Saint Martin, to the extent our capacity may be …]

The phrase “þæs þe ure gemet sie” suggests that persons of various conditions may still productively imitate, to the degree they are able, the more perfect lives of even saints and contemplatives. In contrast, the final sections of Ælfric’s texts, despite their ostensibly didactic goals,67 are filled with references to Martin’s unparalleled tenure as bishop and numerous miracles, and his Life concludes with a lengthy prayer to the Creator “þe his halgan sacerd swa geglengde mid wundrum” [who so adorned his holy priests with miracles] (1493–4)—all of which have the effect of distancing the figure of Martin from an audience of readers or listeners. Both the Martin and Guthlac homilies, then, present saints’ lives that have been consciously adjusted to model a particular kind of pious living— one that seems to diverge in certain ways from the monastic ideals of their Latin sources. But to what do such editorial choices point? Both Martin and Guthlac are demonstrably pious men because of the concrete acts they perform, acts which came to be connected iconically with the saints themselves: Martin’s cutting of the cloak at Amiens and Guthlac’s demonic dietary temptation in the Fens. Though they are ostensibly representatives of the contemplative life, it is the saints’ actions that characterize them in both texts. And though they are eremites (according to tradition, the highest monastic calling), their level of piety is never presented as inaccessible to clerical or lay audiences. The aspects of their original vitae which might serve to unambiguously inscribe Guthlac and Martin in the paradigm of communal monasticism—and which might attribute their spiritual success to their previous monastic training—are excised or altered in Vercelli’s texts. The purpose of these changes was not to deny the place of monastic training. It seems evident that no religious writer of the period would challenge the primacy of the avowed holy orders. The point is rather to de-specify the performative context of both saints’ behavior—that is, to emphasize that one need not be a monk to live as righteously as one. Such a construction fits well

134 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book with Vercelli’s other texts, many of which seek to actively confront the question of piety for the generic Christian subject. What the lives of Martin and Guthlac provide in the manuscript’s second half are concrete models of that theology: devout Christians whose lives were spent performing salvific acts, even when isolated from the community of Christendom at large. Such models demonstrate the Christian self in action, embodying the ideal spiritual/ corporeal relationship that is theorized in the manuscript’s other texts.

Vercelli XVII, The Purification of the Virgin To continue to broaden our perspective on the ideological aims of these two texts and their function within the Vercelli Book, I turn to a brief examination of another hagiographical prose text in the manuscript: homily XVII on the Purification of the Virgin Mary. Homily XVII is interesting for more than just its uniqueness:68 while it is rubricated for the Purification, it ultimately contains relatively little about Mary herself.69 It focuses instead on a careful if at times surprising exegesis of the gospel pericope under which it appears in the Vercelli manuscript (Luke 2:22–32).70 After a paraphrase of the story of Christ being brought to the temple forty days after the nativity, the homily then turns to allegorical discussions of Judaic Law and the name ‘Jerusalem,’ but spends the most effort developing Simeon as a figure of patient saintliness. Indeed, Clayton remarks that “[t]he epithets used of Mary at the beginning of the homily indicate an exalted view of her ethical purity, but she is not presented as a model to be emulated, as is Simeon.”71 Like XVIII and XXIII, little critical attention has been paid to XVII, but two studies, one by Szarmach72 and one by Samantha Zacher,73 offer productive close readings of the homily’s style and structure. Szarmach concludes that while the apparent lack of Marian material in the homily may seem strange to modern audiences, the author of the text was in fact coherently elucidating his pericope through its the major point, the fulfillment of the Law symbolized by Christ’s incarnation.74 Zacher takes Szarmach’s implication one step further, pointing to the homilist’s skillful use of rhetoric to produce a multivalent explication of his theme, one which uses Mary’s specific purity to connect outward to the general purity introduced by Christ’s first coming and, ultimately, the final purity enforced by his second coming (represented by Simeon, the figure of the completed Church); and “it is precisely through the author’s use of mimesis that Mary, offered here as our exemplar, is powerfully reinserted into the text.”75 Two potential readings predominate, then: either



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the homily is, in effect, as much about the generic model of purity afforded by the Virgin as it is about her specific immaculateness; or, the very singularity of Mary’s immaculateness makes her, in the mind of the homilist, a less appropriate exemplar than Simeon. In either case, the purpose of the homily is understood to be the explicit presentation of a model for conduct, a purpose that was so much the concern of the homily’s author that he may have gone out of his way to manipulate his subject matter to reach this end. Like the homilies on Martin and Guthlac, the homily on Mary represents hagiographical material that perhaps has been altered, and almost certainly has been selected, specifically to be applicable to a wider variety of audiences.76 It is productive to consider both the question of the homily’s star exemplar (whether that be Simeon or Mary or both) and its eschatological focus in tandem. In many ways, homily XVII gracefully combines Vercelli’s overall abstract eschatological focus with the concrete models of pious behavior that are the core of the hagiographical texts discussed above, all focalized in the figure of Simeon. The text carefully explains Mary’s adherence to Jewish purity law, which was technically unnecessary because of her immaculateness, as a sign of pious obedience (XVII.28–46). But it is Simeon’s patient lawfulness and obedience that is rhetorically connected to the allegorical discussion of the heavenly Jerusalem as the “sybbe gesyhðe” [vision of peace] (XVII.48–9),77 when he is praised for his cleanness in life, ge in wordum ge in dædum ge in geðohtum 7 eac in gesiehðe, for ðan him sægde se halga gast þæt he ne moste deaðes byrian ær þan þe he meahte mid his eagan dryhten geseon … (XVII.85–7) [both in words and in deeds and in thoughts, and also in sight, because the Holy Ghost told him that he would not undergo death before he had seen with his eyes the Lord …]

Simeon’s visual confirmation of Christ’s advent is lexically linked to the ‘vision’ of Jerusalem, a decidedly eschatological image: Simeon’s lifelong faith is rewarded with both the literal viewing of the Christ-child and, metonymically, the allegorical attainment of salvation represented by Jerusalem. But because Simeon is both a figural representation of the Church as well as an individual, his salvation evokes the salvation of all the elect that will be completed at Judgment. Although this is already implicit in the gospel’s (and the homily’s) description of Simeon as a faithful servant of Jewish Law who recognizes its completion in Christ,78 the Vercelli homilist echoes Simeon’s universal eschatological figuration when explaining his prayer that he not

136 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book be allowed to die until he has seen the Lord’s advent: “se eadiga Simeon his anes hælo ne bæd he, ac he bæd ealles folces hælo 7 frofre” [the blessed Simeon did not pray for his salvation alone, but he prayed for the salvation and comfort of all people] (XVII.94–5).79 Simeon is then further compared to the audience of the homily itself, in the text’s numerous injunctions to keep purity in thoughts and words and deeds, so that “we beon godum mannum gelice, in ðam mægenum þe we don magon” [we be similar to good men, in those deeds which we might do] (XVII.104–5).80 Like the soul-and-body materials, XVII exhorts its listeners to “sawle frætwian mid godum dædum” [adorn [their] souls with good deeds] (XVII.133). In addition to the eschatological correlation between Simeon’s pious conduct during life and his eternal reward, the homily closes with material that recalls the Ascension themes discussed in the previous chapter. Although the subject of XVII is Mary’s Purification, an event that took place only forty days after Christ’s birth, the eschatological implications of Simeon’s death evoke Christ’s death and resurrection as well, and indeed the homilist makes mention of the angels’ rejoicing at Christ’s human body at the Ascension: “Þa cyrdon þa englas to ure sybbe 7 to ure lufan, þa hie gesegon 7 ongeaton ðæt dryhten Crist wæs gecyrred 7 ymbesald mid mennissce lichoman” [the angels converted to our peace and to our love when they saw and perceived that the Lord Christ was changed and was surrounded by a human body] (XVII.126– 8). The last lines of XVII are devoted to thanking Christ for receiving human form, achieved through Mary and by which the paradigms of the pious life, death, and resurrection of every Christian were made possible. Homily XVII makes explicit, then, what is only implicit in Vercelli’s other hagiographical prose pieces: the eschatological reward for pious behavior (salvation) is the end around which that behavior must be structured.

Notes 1. On typology in medieval literature, see above, Chapter 2, note 4. On typology in OE saints’ lives, see Thomas D. Hill, “Figural Narrative in Andreas,” NM 70 (1969): 261–73, and “Sapiential Structure and Figural Narrative in the Old English Elene,” Traditio 27 (1971): 159–77, as well as his general introduction to hagiography, “Imago Dei: Genre, Symbolism, and Anglo-Saxon Hagiography,” in Holy Men and Holy Women: Old English Prose Saints’ Lives and Their Contexts, ed. Paul Szarmach (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 35–50. See also Raymon S. Farrar, “Structure and Function in Representative Old English Saints’ Lives,” Neophil 57 (1973): 83–93; and Joseph Wittig, “Figural Narrative, Rhetoric, and Poetics in the Old English Juliana,” ASE 4 (1975): 37–55.



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2. For more detailed information about the Vercelli manuscript itself and the texts within it, see above, Introduction, notes 1 and 2. 3. Donald G. Scragg includes the homily on the Purification of the Virgin Mary in “The Corpus of Anonymous Lives and Their Manuscript Context,” in Holy Men and Holy Women: Old English Prose Saints’ Lives and Their Contexts, ed. Paul Szarmach (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 209–30, though it is “closely tied to the pericope, Luke 2:22–32, with relatively little attention being given to Mary” (209), a curious fact that is discussed by Mary Clayton, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990), 218–20, 220, and to which I shall return. The Martin and Guthlac texts are clearly saints’ lives. While Elene is more obviously hagiographic than the Mary homily, the connection between its narrative and its saintly protagonist(s) is likewise complex. On Vercelli’s other hagiographic text, Andreas, see above, Chapter 2, 61–83. 4. Donald G. Scragg, “The Compilation of the Vercelli Book,” in Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: Basic Readings, ed. Mary P. Richards (New York: Routledge, 1994), 336, 339. 5. Scragg, “Compilation,” 335, groups homilies XV–XVIII together into his B3 subsection of the manuscript, of which he says “the items of group B3 have many more features in common than have the pieces in most other groups.” All of the homilies are copied consecutively, with no space left between them in the manuscript, and the headings of each homily are different from every other heading in the manuscript but are all similar to each other: “all four have Latin headings in square capitals and each opens with a capitalized abbreviation [representing Men ða leofstan],” (325). From linguistic evidence, Scragg concludes that the exemplar used for B3 could likely have been Mercian (336). Scragg’s group C contains only Elene and XXIII. The Mercian elements of Cynewulf’s language are discussed at length in P. O. E. Gradon’s edition of the poem (Exeter: Exeter UP, 1996), 9–15, and Scragg discusses the Mercian elements of XXIII on his 339, note 43. Of the pieces in the Vercelli Book, only these two groups (B3 and C) show definite affinities with the Mercian dialect, although several other groups (B2, B4a, and B4c) show possible Anglian influence. See also Paul E. Szarmach, “The Scribe of the Vercelli Book,” SN 51 (1979): 179–88. 6. First suggested by Milton McC. Gatch, “Eschatology in the Anonymous Old English Homilies,” Traditio 21 (1965): 144, building on Kenneth Sisam, “Marginalia in the Vercelli Book,” in Studies in the History of Old English Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998), 118. Cf. Éamonn Ó Carragáin, “The Vercelli Book as an Ascetic Florilegium” (PhD diss., Queen’s University of Belfast, 1975), who most thoroughly discusses the possibility. For a contrasting view, see Samantha Zacher, Preaching the Converted: The Style and Rhetoric of the Vercelli Homilies (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2009). 7. Éamonn Ó Carragáin, “Rome, Ruthwell, Vercelli: The Dream of the Rood and the Italian Connection,” in Vercelli tra oriente e occidente tra tarda antichità e medioevo, ed. Vittoria Dolcetti Corazza (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 1999). 8. Ibid., 96–7. 9. Charles D. Wright, “Vercelli Homilies XI–XIII and the Benedictine Reform: Tailored Sources and Implied Audiences,” in Preacher, Sermon and Audience in the Middle Ages, ed. Carolyn Muessig (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 203–27. 10. In addition, recent criticism on the possibility of a female audience for the manuscript has also called into question the assertion of a strict monastic readership. E.g., Mary

138 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

Dockray-Miller, “Female Devotion and the Vercelli Book,” PQ 83 (2004): 337–54; and Samantha Zacher, “The Source of Vercelli VII: An Address to Women,” in New Readings in the Vercelli Book, eds. Samantha Zacher and Andy Orchard (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2009). On homilies in general, see Thomas N. Hall, “The Early Medieval Sermon,” in The Sermon, ed. Beverly Mayne Kienzle (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), 203–69; and Jacqueline Hamesse and Xavier Hermand, eds., De l’homélie au sermon: Histoire de la prédication médiévale (Louvain-la-Neuve: Université Catholique, 1993). On Old English homilies, see J. E. Cross “Vernacular Sermons in Old English,” in The Sermon, ed. Kienzle, 561–9; and Charles D. Wright, “Old English Homilies and Latin Sources,” in Precedent, Practice, and Appropriation: The Old English Homily, ed. Aaron J Kleist (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 15–66. Paul E. Szarmach, “The Vercelli Homilies: Style and Structure,” in The Old English Homily & Its Backgrounds, eds. Paul E. Szarmach and Bernard F. Huppé (Albany: SUNY Press, 1978), 260–1. For a contrasting view of XXIII’s homiletic frame, see Zacher, Preaching the Converted, 225–68. The standard edition of Sulpicius’ text is Uita sancti Martini Turonensis, ed. Jacques Fontaine (Paris: Cerf, 1967). All subsequent quotations of the Vita are taken from Fontaine and cited parenthetically by chapter. All translations are mine. The texts of Sulpicius are well-attested in AS England; see Michael Lapidge, The Anglo-Saxon Library (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000); and Helmut Gneuss and Michael Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: A Bibliographical Handlist of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England up to 1100 (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2014). The standard edition of Felix’s text is the Life of St. Guthlac, ed. Bertram Colgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1956). All subsequent quotations of the Vita, both Latin and English, are taken from Colgrave and are cited parenthetically by page number. For a survey of all extant Guthlac materials (with the exception of one twelfth-century poetic epitome), see Jane Roberts, “An Inventory of Early Guthlac Materials,” MS 32 (1970): 193–233. On the epitome, see Sarah Downey, “Too Much of Too Little: Guthlac and the Temptation of Excessive Fasting,” Traditio 63 (2008): 89–127. Scholarship on the Guthlac homily is largely comparative, consisting mostly of brief references in articles devoted to Felix’s Vita or its Old English translation, or to the poetic Guthlac A and B of the Exeter Book. A notable exception is Jane Roberts, “The Old English Prose Translation of Felix’s Vita sancti Guthlaci,” in Studies in Earlier Old English Prose: Sixteen Original Contributions, ed. Paul Szarmach (New York: SUNY Press, 1986), and “Two Readings in the Guthlac Homily,” in Early Medieval Texts and Interpretations: Studies presented to Donald G. Scragg, eds. Elaine Treharne and Susan Rosser (Tempe: CMRS, 2002), 201–10, who addresses the Vercelli text in some detail. Scholarship on the Martin homily is almost non-existent, though Szarmach, “The Vercelli Homilies,” includes a pithy reading. If not for their entire lives, at least for a time: Guthlac leaves the monastic life at Repton for a life of solitude at Crowland; and though he does not reside there for his entire life, Martin eventually retires from active clerical duty to the monastery he had previously established near Tours and from whence he had been reluctantly drawn to serve as bishop



17.

18.

19.

20.

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of that city. In the case of Martin, too, emphasis is placed on his extreme asceticism and piety even while serving as bishop: Martin’s hagiographer and source for the Vercelli homily, Sulpicius Severus, writes “atque ita, plenus auctoritatis et gratiae, [Martin] inplebat episcopi dignitatem, ut non tamen propositum monachi uirtutemque desereret” [and so, full of authority and grace, Martin filled the position of bishop, while not deserting the objects and virtues of a monk] (Vita 10.2). In “The Old English Prose Translation of Felix’s Vita,” Roberts points out that the Vercelli homily has undergone “careful revision” to make the material suit “the ears of late tenth-century listeners” (369, 70). E. Gordon Whatley, “Lost in Translation: Some Episodes in Old English Prose Saints’ Lives,” ASE 26 (1997): 187–208, argues that the Old English prose versions all represent compression and simplification of Felix’s complicated Latin text. On the specific adjustments made to Felix’s rhetoric in the Old English texts (in many instances common to both the Vespasian Life and homily XXIII), see Colgrave’s Introduction, 19. On the moderation of Guthlac’s asceticism, see Downey, “Too Much of Too Little,” and below. Though it was suggested otherwise in some late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scholarship, more recent scholars agree that there must have been only one scribe for the whole of the Vercelli Book, since it is almost certainly written in one hand. Given that the manuscript is thought to have been put together over some length of time and from numerous exemplars (Scragg, “Compilation”; Éamonn Ó’Carragáin, “Rome, Ruthwell, Vercelli” and “How Did the Vercelli Collector Interpret The Dream of the Rood?” Occasional Papers in Linguistics and Language Learning 8 [1981]: 487–505; and Szarmach, “The Scribe of the Vercelli Book”), this suggests that the scribe was the compiler. Scragg, “Compilation,” says of the Vercelli Book that “[t]he first thing which can be said with some assurance is that the collection was not planned in its entirety before execution began, and the explanation for the confused order of items, with overlaps in content, is that a number of different exemplars were used” (339–40). While Scragg’s statement is perhaps prudently conservative (after all, the manuscript’s origins and purpose are and will most likely remain unknown), it makes little allowance for productive speculation. Inherent in the statement, too, are the same kinds of assumptions we have seen before which preclude the possibility of alternate explanations. That a number of different exemplars were used over some length of time assuredly explains, at least in part, the layout and groupings of some individual texts in the manuscript, but this need not mean that the creation of the entire compilation was haphazard. In fact, the pursuit of an overarching thematic program could explain why such texts were deliberately sought out and collected in piecemeal fashion. Likewise, Scragg notes the “overlaps in content,” by which he means both verbatim and liturgical overlap (i.e. multiple texts rubricated for the same feast). Rather than just assuming that the scribe had forgotten what he had already copied into the manuscript, it would be at least as productive to consider that those repeated texts and over-determined feasts were of special importance to him. Cf. Chapter 3, above, on Rogationtide, 85–116, and on the point of the manuscript’s general rhetorical uses of repetition, see Zacher, Preaching the Converted, 63–105. Zacher, Preaching the Converted, has recently argued for a similar, holistic interpretation of the manuscript, via an analysis of the style and structure of its homilies. In particular,

140 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book

21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

3 0. 31. 32.

33.

34.

35.

3 6. 37. 38.

Zacher productively illuminates Vercelli’s use of figurative language and thematic echoes to create continuity between texts and to reinforce key concepts. See below. Clayton, The Cult of the Virgin Mary, 158–67. Homily 29, Assumptio Sanctae Mariae Virginis, 255–9. Augustine Sermones 103 and 104, PL 38, 613–18. Ælfric was trained by Æthelwold of Winchester, one of the three leaders of the Benedictine Reform, and arguably the primary goal of Ælfric’s work in the Catholic Homilies and the Lives of Saints was the presentation of ‘orthodox’ material for the consumption of the laity. Clayton, The Cult of the Virgin Mary, 166. Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, ed. Walter W. Skeat (London: N. Trübner & Co., 1881–85, 1890– 1900). All subsequent quotations of the Lives are cited parenthetically by line number. All translations are mine. Patrick Zettel, “Ælfric’s Hagiographic Sources and the Latin Legendary Preserved in BL MS Cotton Nero E.i + CCCC MS 9 and Other Manuscripts” (PhD diss., Oxford University, 1979). Clayton, The Cult of the Virgin Mary, 162. Ibid., 162. This is, of course, assuming that Ælfric can be relied upon as a good representative of the goals and attitudes of the Reform, which is a debated point. See Clayton, The Cult of the Virgin Mary, 272. ASPR III, 49–82. The standard edition is C. W. Goodwin, ed. and trans., The Anglo-Saxon Version of the Life of St. Guthlac, Hermit of Crowland (John Russell Smith: London, 1848). In his Angelsächsischen Prosa-Leben des hl. Guthlac (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1909), Paul Gonser includes a convincing side-by-side analysis of the homily and the prose Life that strongly suggests a single common ancestor. Roberts concurs in “The Old English Prose Translation of Felix’s Vita,” 363. The evidence, however, is mixed. Vercelli’s vocabulary seems older, but the sentence structure of the Vespasian Life is more obviously Latinate, suggesting closer proximity to a Latin source. The two attributes, age and proximity to source, of course, need not be related, and it is equally plausible that the older text is farther from the original. See Roberts, “The Old English Prose Translation of Felix’s Vita,” 364–72. Scragg emends MS sprecenan to foresprecenan to match Felix’s text more closely, though the MS reading is arguably just as logical. The reference could potentially have been the redactor’s attempt at gently emending his text for sense: Crowland perhaps could be considered the “spoken about” (i.e. well-known) island, rather than the “aforementioned” one. Max Förster, “Der Vercelli-Codex CXVII nebst Abdruck einiger altenglischer Homilien der Handscrift,” in Festschrift für Lorenz Morsbach, eds. F. Holthausen and H. Spies (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1913), 86; Szarmach, “Vercelli Homilies,” 262. Förster, “Der Vercelli-Codex,” 86. Colgrave, Felix’s Life, 182. Colgrave draws his conclusion from evidence provided by both codicology (manuscript construction and the presentation of the text) and content (narrative structure).



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39. This and all subsequent quotations of the homilies are taken from Donald G. Scragg, ed., The Vercelli Homilies and Related Texts, EETS o.s. 300 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992) and cited parenthetically by homily and line number. All translations are mine. 40. Szarmach, “The Vercelli Homilies,” 261–2. 41. Roberts, “The Old English Prose Translation of Felix’s Vita,” 374–5. 42. Ibid., 374. 43. On the need to assess texts within their manuscript contexts as well as in isolated dialogue with their sources, see Fred C. Robinson, “Old English Literature in Its Most Immediate Context,” in Old English Literature in Context, ed. John D. Niles (Woodbridge: Brewer, 1980), 11–29. 44. The theological term for the outward manifestation of grace, specific to an individual person or community and bestowed to assist the mission of the Church on earth. Analogous to the collective spiritual gifts or powers of a saint, which are both the proof and the result of sanctity (ex. healing miracles, command over animals, power of exorcism, etc). 45. In “Hermits and the Contemplative Life in Anglo-Saxon England,” in Holy Men and Holy Women: Old English Prose Saints’ Lives and Their Contexts, ed. Paul Szarmach (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 147–75, Mary Clayton is quick to point out that Ælfric retains Cuthbert only by emphasizing the saint’s role as teacher, almost to the exclusion of his role as solitary ascetic (163). On the differentiation of Guthlac from other eremitic saints preserved in extant Guthlac materials, see Roberts, “An Inventory of Early Guthlac Materials” and “The Old English Prose Translation of Felix’s Vita.” 46. The connection is developed at length in Benjamin P. Kurtz, “From St. Anthony to St. Guthlac: A Study in Biography,” University of California Publications in Modern Philology 12 (1926): 103–46. 47. Ælfric may be taking his cue from Benedict himself, who opens his rule with a discussion of the four kinds of monks and places cenobites above all others. Hermits follow, but it is cautioned that the eremitic life is to be undertaken only by monks “monasterii probatione diuturna, qui didicerunt contra diabolum multorum solacio iam docti pugnare” [after long probation in a monastery, having learned by the help of many brethren how to fight against the devil] (RSB 1.3). 48. Clayton, “Hermits and the Contemplative Life,” 167. 49. None of the miracles present in the Old English Vespasian Life (such as Guthlac’s interactions with birds, his healing powers, or his powers of prophecy) are preserved in the Vercelli homily. All that remains are the encounters with demons. On the connection between the contrast of miraculous and ‘nonmiraculous’ events and the Life’s rhetorical aims, see Robin Waugh, “The Blindness Curse and Nonmiracles in the Old English Prose Life of Saint Guthlac,” MP 106 (2009): 399–426. 50. Extreme fasting, i.e. fasting that consisted of abstaining from any food for one, two, three, or even more days, was discouraged because it could lead to the sins of gluttony or pride and could result in sickness and bodily frailty. Fasting was considered particularly hazardous for western monks, who, because of climate and custom, were thought to be less suited to the rigors of abstinence. For a thorough survey of admonitions against extreme fasting, see Downey, “Too Much of Too Little,” 115–21. 51. See above, note 14.

142 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book 52. Downey discusses the following quotation from Evagrius on her 95: “spernendae sunt eorum increpationes, et admonitiones jejunandi, vigiliarum quoque fraudulenta suggestio” [[the demons’] admonishments must be rejected, and their exhortations of fasting, and their deceitful proposals of vigils] (PL 73.139A, emphasis mine). 53. The OE poem Seasons for Fasting (British Library MS Additional 43703 [a transcription], edited in ASPR VI, 98–104), for example, records a vernacular admonition against over-fasting, connecting it to vilified Celtic practices. This is perhaps also why some of the demons Guthlac encounters in the Fens are described as ‘British’ (Downey, “Too Much of Too Little,” 126). 54. Downey, “Too Much of Too Little,” 101–6. For more on Guthlac’s identity as a national saint and the political valences of his vita, see John R. Black, “Tradition and Transformation in the Cult of St. Guthlac in Early Medieval England,” Heroic Age 10 (2007). 55. The reference is absent from the Vercelli text, but Scragg supplies it from the Vespasian Life, assuming that it was omitted by homeoteleuton (ll. 10–3). Scragg is perhaps correct to note the Vercelli text’s instances of scribal error, but some of the omissions are arguably intentional, or at the very least conscious. The omission of Guthlac’s fasting, for example, is indicated in the manuscript by pointing at the corresponding lacuna (fol. 133v, l. 16). To compare, lines 38–9 seem to offer an obvious instance of homeoteleuton with no remark or notation of any kind on the part of the scribe. Scragg does not treat pointing in the homilies, and George Philip Krapp, in the introduction to his volume of Vercelli’s poetry (ASPR II), says of pointing in the manuscript in general: “[a] large part of the pointing in the Vercelli Book seems to be syntactical rather than metrical in purpose” (xxviii). Of the five notable omissions in the text (all of which Scragg emends with the Vespasian Life, assuming scribal error), four have the effect of mitigating the severity of Guthlac’s ascetic lifestyle and are indicated by pointing in the manuscript. E.g., at lines 25–6, in the passage describing Guthlac’s despair over his past sins, the redactor omits the phrase “þa maran 7 unmættran þe he sylfa dyde” [the great and the innumerable [sins] which he himself did], a potentially complicated statement for an unlearned audience in that it can be construed as implying that the saint actually did commit ‘grievous’ sins. 56. Downey, “Too Much of Too Little,” 93. 57. Examples include Smaragdus’s commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict, the sixth-century Life of Caesarius of Arles, and the ninth-century Life of Alcuin. Downey quotes and discusses each on her 120–2. 58. See above, note 47, on Benedict’s Regula. 59. Parts of Vercelli homily XVIII survive in two other MSS: homily 17 in Princeton, Scheide Library, MS 71 (The Blickling Homilies, ed. Robert Morris [London: EETS, 1967]); and art. 8 in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 85/86 (a florilegium strikingly similar to Vercelli). 60. Based on both internal and codicological evidence, Scragg suggests that the Martin homily, like the Guthlac homily, was probably copied from an intermediate Latin redaction of Sulpicius’ texts that is non-extant (“Corpus of Anonymous Lives,” 210, and The Vercelli Homilies, 290). It was apparently taken from the same exemplar as the preceding homilies (XV, XVI, XVII) in the form in which it appears in the Vercelli Book. 61. For example, the significant abbreviation of Martin’s discipleship under Saint Hilary of Poitiers, and the complete omission of the descriptions of the cenobitic monastic



62. 6 3. 64. 65. 66.

67.

68.

69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77.

7 8. 79.

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community he established for his own followers (cf. Chapter 10 of Sulpicius’s Vita). The Vercelli homily retains only the mention that Martin established his own monastery. Taken from Morris, The Blickling Homilies, and cited parenthetically, by homily and line number. All translations are mine. Homily 34, Deposito Sancti Martini Episcopi, 288–97. Szarmach, “The Vercelli Homilies,” 260. Ibid., 260–1. Unlike Vercelli homily XXIII, homily XVIII preserves some of its saint’s miraculous works, although in the case of Martin, the miracles that remain deal almost exclusively with the throwing down of heathen shrines. Martin’s attacks on paganism, miraculous or not, may have been particularly appealing to a tenth-century Anglo-Saxon audience. Malcolm Godden, in “Ælfric’s Saints’ Lives and the Problem of Miracles,” Leeds Studies in English n.s. 16 (1985): 83–100, demonstrates that the Lives of Saints “were to be read, in part at least, as providing important political and ethical lessons for the present” (94). This homily is unique to the Vercelli Book and has no known sources, though “most of its points can be paralleled in Latin homilies or commentaries (for example, by Ambrose, Bede, Ambrosius Autpertus and Haymo)” (Clayton, The Cult of the Virgin Mary, 218). For more on these parallels, see Clayton, The Cult of the Virgin Mary, 219. Ibid., 218. The reason may be liturgical in part. Christological feasts tended to retain an association with the veneration of Christ even at the expense of their titular saints (Éamonn Ó Carragáin, Ritual and the Rood: Liturgical Images and the Old English Poems of the Dream of the Rood Tradition [London: The British Library, 2005], 93–109). As a relatively ‘new’ feast in the tenth century, the Purification was “demonstrably slower to develop the same kind of focus” as other Marian feasts like the Assumption (Samantha Zacher, “Rereading the Style and Rhetoric of the Vercelli Homilies,” in The Old English Homily: Precedent, Practice, and Appropriation, ed. Aaron Kleist [Turnhout: Brepols, 2007], 188). Clayton, The Cult of the Virgin Mary, 220. Szarmach, “The Vercelli Homilies,” 256–8. Zacher, “Re-reading the Style and Rhetoric of the Vercelli Homilies,” 187–207. Szarmach, “The Vercelli Homilies,” 257. Zacher, “Re-reading the Style and Rhetoric of the Vercelli Homilies,” 206. On the probable composite nature of the homily, see Szarmach, “The Vercelli Homilies,” 258; Clayton, The Cult of the Virgin Mary, 218–20; and Zacher “Re-reading the Style and Rhetoric of the Vercelli Homilies,” 187–207. Zacher, “Re-reading the Style and Rhetoric of the Vercelli Homilies,” discusses the images of sight in the homily, especially in relation to the thought-word-deed triad (193–4), but she does not make this connection. See above, Chapter 2, 66–71. See also Simeon’s prayer after viewing the Christ-child, in which he thanks God, saying “nu gesegon mine eagan þine hælo ða ðe ðu geearuwadest to leohte 7 to frofre manigum þeodum 7 to wuldre þines folces” [now I have seen with my eyes the salvation which you had prepared as a light and a comfort for many nations and as the glory of your people] (XVII.118–20).

144 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book 80. See especially XVII.103–8: “Healdan we eac þæt mid godum dædum 7 mid æðelum mancystum þæt we beon godum mannum gelice, in ðam mægenum þe we don magon 7 in ðam dædum þe we þurhteon magon, þæt we þurh ðæt þæs wyrðe syn þæt we Gode ælmihtigne mid godum dædum 7 mid wordum herian 7 wuldrian 7 bletsian, swa se eadiga Simeon Gode ælmihtigne gebledsode” [Also let us hold with good deeds and with noble human virtues so that we be similar to good men, in those deeds which we might do and in those deeds which we are able to perform, so that through that we may be worthy to praise God and glorify him and bless him with deeds and with words, just as the blessed Simeon blessed Almighty God].

References Ælfric. Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The First Series [Text]. Edited by Peter Clemoes. EETS s.s. 17. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. ———. Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The Second Series [Text]. Edited by Malcolm Godden. EETS s.s. 5. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979. ———. Ælfric’s Lives of Saints. Edited by Walter W. Skeat. EETS o.s. 76, 82, 94, 114. London: N. Trübner, 1881–85, 1890–1900. Augustine of Hippo. Sermones. PL 38–9.23–1638. Benedict of Nursia. Regula. Edited by R. Hanslik. CSEL 75. 2nd ed. Vienna: Tempsky, 1977. Black, John R. “Tradition and Transformation in the Cult of St. Guthlac in Early Medieval England.” Heroic Age 10 (2007). Accessed November 10, 2008. http://www.mun.ca/mst/ heroicage/issues/10/black.html Clayton, Mary. The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Anglo-Saxon England. CSASE 2. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. ———. “Hermits and the Contemplative Life in Anglo-Saxon England.” In Holy Men and Holy Women: Old English Prose Saints’ Lives and Their Contexts, edited by Paul Szarmach, 147–75. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996. Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum. Vienna: Gerold etc., 1866. Cross, J. E. “Vernacular Sermons in Old English.” In The Sermon, edited by Beverly Mayne Kienzle. Typologie des sources du moyen âge occidental 81–83, 561–69. Turnhout: Brepols, 2000. Dockray-Miller, Mary. “Female Devotion and the Vercelli Book.” PQ 83 (2004): 337–54. Downey, Sarah. “Too Much of Too Little: Guthlac and the Temptation of Excessive Fasting.” Traditio 63 (2008): 89–127. Evagrius. Vita Beati Antonii. PL 126–94. Farrar, Raymon S. “Structure and Function in Representative Old English Saints’ Lives.” Neophil 57 (1973): 83–93. Felix. Felix’s Life of St. Guthlac. Edited by Bertram Colgrave. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1956. Förster, Max. “Der Vercelli-Codex CXVII nebst Abdruck einiger altenglischer Homilien der Handscrift.” In Festschrift für Lorenz Morsbach, edited by F. Holthausen and H. Spies. Studien zur englischen Philologie 50, 20–179. Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1913. Gatch, Milton McC. “Eschatology in the Anonymous Old English Homilies.” Traditio 21 (1965): 117–65.



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Gneuss, Helmut, and Michael Lapidge. Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: A Bibliographical Handlist of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England up to 1100. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2014. Godden, Malcolm. “Ælfric’s Saints’ Lives and the Problem of Miracles.” Leeds Studies in English n.s. 16 (1985): 83–100. Gonser, Paul, ed. Das Angelsächsische Prosa-Leben des hl. Guthlac. Anglistische Forschungen 27. Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1909. Goodwin, C. W., ed. and trans. The Anglo-Saxon Version of the Life of St. Guthlac, Hermit of Crowland. London: John Russell Smith, 1848. Gradon, P. O. E., ed. Elene. 1977. Reprint, Exeter: U of Exeter P, 1996. Hall, Thomas N. “The Early Medieval Sermon.” In The Sermon, edited by Beverly Mayne Kienzle. Typologie des sources du moyen âge occidental 81–83, 203–69. Turnhout: Brepols, 2000. Hamesse, Jacqueline, and Xavier Hermand, eds. De l’homélie au sermon: Histoire de la prédication médiévale. Louvain-la-Neuve: Université Catholique, 1993. Hill, Thomas D. “Figural Narrative in Andreas.” NM 70 (1969): 261–73. ———. “Imago Dei: Genre, Symbolism, and Anglo-Saxon Hagiography.” In Holy Men and Holy Women: Old English Prose Saints’ Lives and Their Contexts, edited by Paul Szarmach, 35–50. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996. ———. “Sapiential Structure and Figural Narrative in the Old English Elene.” Traditio 27 (1971): 159–77. Krapp, George Philip, and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, eds. The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records. 6 vols. New York: Columbia UP, 1931–42. Kurtz, Benjamin P. “From St. Anthony to St. Guthlac: A Study in Biography.” University of California Publications in Modern Philology 12 (1926): 103–46. Lapidge, Michael. The Anglo-Saxon Library. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Migne, J.-P., ed. Patrologia Latina. 221 vols., with 5 supplements edited by A. Hamann. Paris: n.p. 1844–1974. Morris, Robert, ed. The Blickling Homilies of the Tenth Century. EETS o.s. 58, 63, 73. 1874–1880. Rpt. 1 vol., London: EETS, 1967. Ó Carragáin, Éamonn. “How Did the Vercelli Collector Interpret The Dream of the Rood?” Occasional Papers in Linguistics and Language Learning 8 (1981): 487–505. ———. Ritual and the Rood: Liturgical Images and the Old English Poems of the Dream of the Rood Tradition. London: The British Library, 2005. ———. “Rome, Ruthwell, Vercelli: The Dream of the Rood and the Italian Connection.” In Vercelli tra oriente e occidente tra tarda antichità e medioevo, edited by Vittoria Dolcetti Corazza, 59–100. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 1999. ———. “The Vercelli Book as an Ascetic Florilegium.” PhD diss., Queen’s University of Belfast, 1975. Roberts, Jane. “An Inventory of Early Guthlac Materials.” MS 32 (1970): 193–233. ———. “The Old English Prose Translation of Felix’s Vita sancti Guthlaci.” In Studies in Earlier Old English Prose: Sixteen Original Contributions, edited by Paul Szarmach, 363–79. New York: SUNY Press, 1986.

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index

A Ælfric, abbot of Eynsham, 6, 120–22, 126–27 Colloquy, 27n77 homilies, 72, 76n2, 132; see also homilies, Old English Lives of Saints, 121–2, 132–33 Alcuin of York, 6 Alfred, king, 6 Ambrose, St., 87–9, 93–4 Andreas, 61–76, 86 angels, 3–4, 40–4, 49, 87, 89–91, 98, 106n17, 125, 136 Anthony, St., 121, 127–28 Apocalypse of Paul, see Visio S. Pauli apostles, 63, 98–9 Andrew, St., 62–7, 69–76 Matthew, St., 71–4 Paul, St., 4, 65, 68 Aquinas, Thomas, 10 asceticism, 119, 127–29 Ascensio Isaiae, see Ascension of Isaias

Ascension, 68, 85–92, 94–6, 98–104, 136 Ascension of Isaias (Ascensio Isaiae), 88 Athanasius, 88, 105n5 Augustine, St., of Hippo, 39 Confessiones, 54n30 De ciuitate Dei, 79n19 De Trinitate, 54n30 sermons, see under sermons, Latin

B baptism, 61–6, 68–71, 74, 76, 86–8, 92–3, 109n42, 130–31 Bede Ascension hymn (In Ascensione Domini), 88–9 Blickling Homilies, see under homilies, Old English body, 2–5, 9–11, 14–5, 19–20, 33–51, 70–71, 75, 88, 92, 136 Beowulf, 11–3, 111n60

148 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book Benedict, St., of Nursia, 128, 141n47 Benedictine Reform, 118–19, 121–22 Bible Acts of the Apostles, 88 Gospel of John, 62 Gospel of Luke, 120, 134–35 Gospel of Matthew, 65–6, 72, 99–100, 112n70 Isaiah, 87 Psalm 23 (24), 87, 89 Psalm 67 (68), 106n12 Romans, 65 2 Corinthians, 97

C Caesarius, St., of Arles, 3, 96–8 calendars, 126 canons, 1, 21n4, 118 Cassian, St.128 Christ II, see under Cynewulf Christ III, 67, 79n24, 112n70 codicology, 21n6, 47, 101, 104, 105n6, 110n56, 118, 120, 137n5, 142n55, 142n60 conversion, 63–66, 69–72, 74–6, 78n14, 79n19, 86 Cuthbert, St., 126–27 Cynewulf, 89, 137n5 Christ II, 88–90, 104

D Doomsday, see Judgment, Day of Dream of the Rood, 88–92, 101, 103–4 ‘devil’s account of the next world,’ 3, 22n13 ‘dry bones speak,’ 3, 23n15, 57n66

E Ego te, Homo speech, 3, 23n17 Enoch and Elijah, 108n29

Epistola Tertia ad Bassulam, see under Sulpicius Severus eschatology, 1–3, 22n9, 43, 51, 62, 66–8, 87, 90, 94 Eusebius, St., 1, 105n5, 118 Exeter Book, 4, 15–16, 47–8, 56n61, 107n22 Exhortation to Christian Living, 101

F fasting, 35, 50, 95, 97, 124, 126–28, 141n50, 142n55 Felix Vita S. Guthlaci, 119, 122–29

G Gnosticism, 88 Gregory I, pope (Gregory the Great), 88–89, 106n14 Gregory of Nyssa, 88 Guthlac, St., of East Anglia, 118–29, 133, 142n55 Guthlac A, 122, 125 Guthlac B, 122–23, 125

H Harrowing of hell, 62, 68, 87–90, 106n12 heaven, 4, 10, 42–3, 49, 68, 87–90, 93, 97–100, 103, 108n28, 123 hell, 35, 62, 86–87, 89–90, 103, 124–25, 127 hermits, 121, 127, 141n47 homilies, Old English ÆCHomI.38, 72 ÆCHomII.29, 120–21 Bazire-Cross 9, 41–2 Blickling IX, 105n6 Blickling X, 53n20



index 149

Blickling XIX, 72, 76n2 Blickling XVIII, 131 Fadda I, 41–2 ‘Macarius’ homily, 35 Pseudo-Wulfstan (Napier) XXIX, 24n24 Pseudo-Wulfstan (Napier) XXX, 35 Vercelli I, 62 Vercelli II, 102, 111n64 Vercelli IV, 34–45 Vercelli X, 99–100, 105n6, 110n56 Vercelli XI, 96–99, 105n6 Vercelli XIV, 105n6 Vercelli XVII, 118, 134–36 Vercelli XVIII, 118–19, 129–32, 142n59, 143n66 Vercelli XXI, 100–104, 105n6, 111n64, 118 Vercelli XXII, 50–1 Vercelli XXIII, 118–19, 122–29, 137n5, 139n17 homiliaries Blickling Collection, see Princeton, Scheide Library, MS 71 under manuscripts Collectio quinquaginta, 110n57 Homiliary of St. Père de Chartres, see Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 25 under manuscripts Sermo ad Fratres in Eremo Commemorantes, see PseudoAugustine under sermons, Latin

I Irenaeas, 105 Isidore, St., of Seville Synonyma, 50

J Jerome, 128 John the Baptist, 65–6, 68

Judaism Jews, 63–8, 71 religion, 64, 134–135 Judgment, 2, 4, 20, 51, 68, 70, 72, 85, 101, 103 Day of, 43–45, 102–104 Last (final), 10, 19, 35–8, 40, 41, 43–4, 45–7, 49, 55n39, 65–7, 71, 88–90, 92–3, 100, 120, 135 particular, 41, 43, 45, 55n39

L laws reign of Cnut, 14 reign of Edgar, 110n52 Liber exhortationis ad Henricum comitem, see under Paulinus of Aquileia liturgy, 65, 95, 107n27 Lombard, Peter, 10

M Macarius the Younger, St., 3–4 ‘Macarius’ homily, see under homilies, Old English manuscripts, see also codicology and homilies, Old English Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 41, 35 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 201, 24n24, 35, 101 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 302, 54n36 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 367 Part 2, 35 Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 25, 101 Exeter, Cathedral Library, MS 3501, 4, 47–8 London, British Library MS Cotton Faustina A.ix, 54n36

150 reading the anglo-saxon self through the vercelli book London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian D.21, 122–23 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 113, 35 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 114, 41 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 85/86, 41, 54n36, 142n59 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS lat. 2628, 54n36 Princeton, Scheide Library, MS 71, 51, 80n43, 142n59 Rome, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, MS 2096(52), 24n24 Vercelli, Biblioteca Capitolare, MS CXVII, 1–3; see also codicology and under homilies, Old English Martin, St., of Tours, 119, 129–33, 138n16, 142n61 martyrologies, 126 Mary and Martha, 120–21 Mary, St., 134–36 Maxims II, 13–4 medicine, 7 mind, 5–10, 36–7, 39 monasticism, 119, 121, 128–129, 131–33; see also hermits and monks monks, 3, 118–19, 123, 128, 131–33, 138n16

N ‘no help from kin,’ 105n2

O Origen, 88, 105n5, 106n13

P Paulinus of Aquileia Liber exhortationis ad Henricum comitem, 110n57

penance, 1, 3, 14–5, 34–5, 38–40, 46, 49–50, 53n26, 55n43, 94, 97, 104 penitentials, 49, 53n26 preaching, 74, 80n36, 95–7, 103, 119–21, 125 ‘pledge of the soul,’ 3 Purification of the Virgin Mary, 134–36

R Regularis Concordia, 107n27, 118 Regula S. Benedicti, 141n47 resurrection, 10–11, 66–71, 91–92, 94, 100, 103, 107n27, 136 at Judgment, 3, 38, 41–3, 74 of Christ, 62, 87–8 of the patriarchs, 64 riddles, 56n61 Rogationtide, 85–86, 94–97, 99–101, 103–104 homilies, 105n6, see also under homilies, Old English observances, 94–96

S Seafarer, 6, 9, 15–6, 37, 41 selfhood, 2, 6, 8, 10–1, 15, 17, 19, 22n8, 33–4, 39, 51, 61, 85 semantics, 5–9 sermons, Latin; see also Gregory I, pope and Bede Augustine Sermo 103, 120–1 Augustine Sermo 104, 120–1 Nonantola sermon, 24n24 Pseudo-Augustine Sermo 69, 24n24 Pseudo-Augustine Sermo 310, 110n57 Caesarius of Arles Sermo 57, 3 Caesarius of Arles Sermo 207, 96 Caesarius of Arles Sermo 215, 96–7, ‘Three Utterances’ sermon, 41–42, 54n36; see also ‘Three Utterances’ Shepherd of Hermas, 105n5 Smaragdus, 142n57



index 151

soul, 2–8, 10, 14–16, 18–19, 33–51, 61, 86, 101–103 Soul and Body I, 45–50 Soul and Body II, 16, 47–8 subjectivity, 2, 5, 8–11, 15–19, 33, 61, 85, 115, 120 Sulpicius Severus Epistola Tertia ad Bassulam, 119, 129 Vita Beati Martini, 119, 129 Synonyma, see under Isidore, St., of Seville

T ‘Three Utterances,’ 3, 23n14, 41–4, 54n35, 54n36 Tertullian, 88 theology, 19, 43, 88–90, 103–4, 122, 127–28 tithes, 96, 110n52 typology, 63, 74–5, 78n11, 117

U ubi sunt motif, 3, 23n16

V Vercelli Homilies, see under homilies, Old English Visio S. Pauli, 4, 127 Vita Beati Martini, see under Sulpicius Severus Vita S. Guthlaci, see under Felix

W Wanderer, 6 Wulfstan of York Canons of Edgar, 95–6

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