Poetry as Image Theory: Recovering art-historical methods from literary archives

This paper frames the literary representation of art in Old English poetry as a valuable resource for theorizing contemporaneous works of art. The Old English poetic corpus is rich with ekphrastic portrayals of precious objects, descriptions of processes of craft, and narrative moments of artistic display. These literary works, in turn, present rich theoretical possibilities for art historians. Indeed, one of the challenges that faces scholars of early medieval art is the absence of recognizable textual and theoretical interpretive frameworks: as Denis Ferhatovic has noted, no treatise on the visual arts, or similar type of work, exists from early medieval England. Yet Ferhatovic argues that this absence is generative—that “a lack of a larger, unified, explicit meta-discourse on art enables rather than prevents poets from engaging with the topic in creative, complex, and multifold ways” (Borrowed Objects, 5). Indeed, just as the absence of a defined discourse on art opened space for a multiplicity of ways for early medieval English poets to engage with it, so it enables modern art historians to be equally creative in recovering the past. Drawing upon works of Old English poetry in which artistic objects, processes and moments of display are prominent—for instance, the Exeter Book Riddles and the Old English Judith—this paper aims to explore how these works could function as archives for art historians, and what possibilities they offer to enrich our understanding of how early medieval viewers thought about art.