Textual Identities in Early Medieval England

Textual Identities in Early Medieval England celebrates the scholarship and career of Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe. O'Brien O'Keeffe likely needs no introduction to JEGP's readership: her scholarship and mentoring are, at least for this reviewer, part of the lore one absorbs simply by being around other scholars of early medieval England. Textual Identities consists of eleven essays grouped into three sections, each organized around a specific theme. As a collection, the essays in this volume pay tribute to O'Brien O'Keeffe's use of traditional tools of medievalist literary criticism to ask and answer difficult questions about medieval culture.Part one, “Affect and Embodied Cognition in Medieval Didactic Texts” consists of five essays. The first, Leslie Lockett's “Prudentius's Apotheosis and Hamartigenia in Early Medieval England,” argues persuasively that those two poems have been unjustly neglected in scholarship on the tenth- and eleventh-century understanding of the nature of the soul. While Lockett does not offer a specific argument about Prudentius's influence in this essay, she does identify profitable directions for further study.The second essay in part one, Nicole Guenther Discenza's “Wonders Never Cease in the Old English Boethius,” examines the use of Old English words for “wonder” in the Boethius. The approach is familiar from Discenza's work in The King's English, and here as there it yields worthwhile results, revealing that the Old English Boethius invests more deeply in wonder than its Latin source. Discenza concludes, therefore, that the Boethius offers a sort of master class in Christian wonder: “for the Boethius, wonder does not cease with the concluding words of the text but remains as an exercise for the reader” (p. 41).Discenza's essay is followed by Jennifer A. Lorden's “The Desiring Mind: Affect in the Old English Pastoral Care.” Lorden begins with a claim made by O'Brien O'Keeffe herself: that the Pastoral Care is “driven by a political consciousness marked by an anxiety about power and the desire for it” (p. 45). Lorden's own contribution is to emphasize the Pastoral Care's unique perspective on desire and morality, as the text “modifies Gregory's admonitions of all affective states within a paradigm that requires proper affect to coincide with proper action” (p. 46). In pursuing a coincidence of feeling and action, the Pastoral Care opens up the possibility to ethically wield, and even desire, power.Fourth in the section is Benjamin A. Saltzman's “Adam and Eve's Hands and Eyes: Covering the Face in the Junius Manuscript.” Saltzman, too, takes a page out of O'Brien O'Keeffe's book, interpreting the narrative of the fall in the Old English Genesis in light of its unusual manuscript illustrations. These illustrations are distinguished by the way the couple cover their faces after the fall and before their expulsion from Eden, indicating their desire both not to see and not to be seen. Saltzman connects this gesture to an understanding of shame as a spiritual state which occludes the sight and directs it towards improper objects. The impact of the illustrations, Saltzman suggests, is to implicate the viewer, as we realize that our sight lingers on fallen humanity rather than rising towards God.The first section ends with Stacy S. Klein's “Hawk Taming and Humanity in the Fortunes of Men,” which argues that the Old English Fortunes of Men “presents a story of humans who are denied flight yet gifted with song” (p. 71). Klein offers a thorough and detailed analysis of the many episodes in Fortunes in which humans act like birds, both successfully and unsuccessfully. These analogies, Klein argues, allow the poet to consider how humankind may seek its own place in the created order by imitating—in song if not in flight—the birds.Part two, “Sovereignty, Power, and English Textual Identities,” contains three essays, beginning with Emily V. Thornbury's “A Taste for the Law: The Preface to Alfred's Law Code and Hannah Arendt's Reading of Kant.” Thornbury offers a persuasive argument that the preface to Alfred's laws presents the law as a matter of taste, assigning to the king the role of selecting laws which were the most pleasing to him. Thornbury develops her approach from Hannah Arendt's reading of something similar in Kant's idea of the sensus communis: an individual “mental model” derived from a sense of what one shares with one's fellows (p. 91). While Kant and Arendt's presence may or may not delight readers, Thornbury's insight that the preface to the Laws connects aesthetic, moral, political, and spiritual judgment is more than worth the price of admission.Jacob Hobson's “The Bodies Politic: Conflict, Consent, and English Identity During Godwin's Exile” follows, analyzing the narrative sources for Godwin's exile (the Northern Recension of the Chronicle and the Vita Ædwardi regis) to explore the entanglement of politics and “national-ethnic legitimacy” (p. 98) in their accounts. One intriguing result comes late in the paper, when Hobson points out that the Vita narrates the resolution of Edward and Godwin's conflict via a deditio (a Continental ritual of forgiveness), while the Chronicle tells the story as the restoration of Godwin's tenure over his family lands. While Hobson does not offer a tidily packaged conclusion to his analysis, the thoroughness and perspicuity of his reading is tremendously enriching.The final piece in section two is Timothy Graham's “Abraham Wheelock, Agent of Anglicanism, and the Deployment of Old English Texts in the 1643 Edition of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People.” Graham's essay offers a fascinating glimpse into 17th-century English antiquarianism, with an emphasis on its place in post-Reformation theological polemics. Since Wheelock's annotations draw heavily on other Old English texts, his edition of the Ecclesiastical History provides a window into his mental synthesis of early English ecclesiastical culture. Graham's ultimate argument that Wheelock was looking to Bede as a locus of Anglican ecclesiastical authority is a fascinating one, and it provides a helpful corrective to the periodization implied by our terms “medieval” and “Early Modern.”The third and final section, “Acts of Public Record in Making and Sustaining Communities,” also consists of three essays. The first, Scott T. Smith's “Writing Among the Ruins: The Peterborough Chronicle and the House Archive,” reads the Peterborough Chronicle against the Relatio Hedde abbatis, a series of forged charters found in the Black Book of Peterborough. Smith argues persuasively that the interpolations in the Peterborough chronicle draw on the forged charters to strengthen their claims by situating them within a larger historical framework. Smith's analysis of the language of both chronicle and charter is admirably close, and his essay elucidates the intricacy and care with which early medieval institutions forged (in multiple senses) their own narratives.Smith's essay is followed by Miranda Wilcox's “St. Rumwold and the Social Network of Belief,” which explores the tension between individual and communal agency in the eleventh-century Vita S. Rumwoldi. Fittingly, Wilcox grounds her analysis in a framework borrowed from Stealing Obedience: the difference between “agent action” (in which individual choice conforms to cultural expectations) and “agency” (in which an individual responds to moments of ideological confusion). Wilcox argues that the infant Rumwold shows both qualities, suggesting a model of Christian initiation in which the individual is prepared both to join an established community of belief and to improvise expressions of faith that find coherence amid confusion or dissonance. The essay is well argued and persuasive, offering a tribute to O'Brien O'Keeffe's work and a nuanced reflection on conversion and belief.The volume's final essay is Jonathan Davis-Secord's “Holy Women on Display in Ælfric's Lives of Saints.” Davis-Secord focuses on female bodies in the Lives, building on O'Brien O'Keeffe's insight—derived from a study of ordeal trials—that internal guilt manifested itself in external bodily markers, locating the power of moral judgment in the observer. While the effort to historicize Ælfric's Lives by drawing on O'Brien O'Keeffe's work is somewhat fraught, Davis-Secord offers a thoughtful reading of Ælfric's depictions of female saints, observing that female saints’ bodies are displayed in ways that male saints’ bodies are not, and that the display almost always results in conversion and the expansion of the Christian community. Noting that the female saints put on display tend to be unmarried and chaste, Davis-Secord concludes that Ælfric figures their struggles as spiritual reproduction: a means to perpetuate and enlarge the Christian community for women who do not bear children physically.The volume concludes with an overview of O'Brien O'Keeffe's career, Maura Nolan's touching and thoughtful reflection on her scholarship and influence, a partial list of her writings, and tabula gratulatoria that showcases O'Brien O'Keefe's tremendous impact on the field of Old English Studies. The volume is well presented and well edited, a pleasure to read, and a worthy tribute to one of the field's great scholars. Textual Identities is a fine purchase for an institutional or personal library, both for the intellectual weight of its contents and for the window it offers into the life, career, and legacy of an outstanding scholar-teacher

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