This panel also celebrates the 2019 launch of Early Middle English (ARC/Amsterdam UP), the first journal devoted to British literature in the period between Old English and Chaucer. The Executive Editor (and organizer of this panel) will provide all three early-career presenters with the opportunity to publish in the journal’s 2020 issues. As a recent press announcement noted, EME is “breaking open ‘Early Middle English’—a label long associated with anthologies of dry texts that relatively few study—and remaking it.” These 15-minute papers do just that: each engages a text that is either canonical (i.e., once included in anthologies of the “dull”) or usually consigned to Old English; they each remake an EME text as something it has never been before.
Carla María Thomas examines the well-known debate poem The Owl and the Nightingale (ca. 1225), specifically its conclusion—which leaves the argumentative birds’ debate unjudged and the poem unresolved. This poem’s terms of debate have been studied through rhetoric and dialectics, feminist theory, animal studies, historicism, and manuscript studies (for composition date and origin). However, despite the birds’ desire to seek a final “dome” (judgment), no one has combined eschatology with manuscript contexts. To remedy this, Thomas explores how the birds seek judgment throughout the poem (the word “dome” appears 19 times) and its juxtapositions in the two surviving manuscripts (British Library MS Cotton Caligula A.ix, Jesus College MS 29). Through this mixed approach, she argues that they seek spiritual judgment when they agree to ask a certain Master Nicholas to judge them “word after worde” (1786), a reading corroborated by the eschatological Poema Morale that immediately follows the poem in the Jesus MS and the death and the Judgment Day poems that follow it in Caligula. Thomas shows that, with these juxtapositions and a metaphorical reading of the figure of Master Nicholas, The Owl and the Nightingale can be understood as a meditation on the spiritual ramifications of words.
The two papers that follow examine texts from Bodleian Library MS Bodley 343, famous for its preservation of Old English homilies but copied in the late twelfth century with several Latin and EME works as well. Erik Wade and Marjorie Housley explore how Bodley 343’s lesser-known texts reflect their late twelfth-century moment and their (perhaps nostalgic) Anglo-Saxon manuscript context.
Wade explores Bodley 343’s little-discussed EME homily, The History of the Holy Rood-Tree, which appears to be the work of a West Saxon author first writing just before the Conquest. The homily appears in fragmentary form in several other manuscripts and so is one of the earliest examples of a longer tradition. In it, the three rods of Moses perform a number of miracles, including turning the skin of several Ethiopians white. Using critical race theory to focus on this episode, Wade argues that the History is a curious early commentary on religious and bodily conversion. While later Middle English versions of the same legend (e.g., Cursor Mundi) represent the Ethiopians as Muslim, the History does not state their religion. Rather, the Ethiopians know and understand a Christian God, and their black skin is less of an obstacle to moral behavior than Judaism. Set amidst the History’s antisemitic depictions of Jews, the episode makes Ethiopians proto-Christians whose physical transformation signals confirmation of proper religious behaviour. Wade argues that the History’s twelfth-century popularity spoke to Anglo-Christian antisemitism in the wake of the Conquest, which also marked the settlement of Jewish communities in England. This text offers a glimpse, therefore, into categories of religious and racial difference in the twelfth century and lends new insight into contemporary debates about religious and racial identity.
Finally, Marjorie Housley uses Bodley 343 to reveal porous boundaries between historical periods and disciplines. Her paper uses the Old English poem The Grave as an entry point to explore affective connections across language, identity, and time. The Grave is temporally and affectively unmoored in Bodley 343, while its subject is similarly disconnected from the world of the living: “Ðus ðu bist ilegd and ladæst þine fronden. /Nefst ðu nenne freond, þe þe wylle faren to, / ðæt efre wule lokien, hu þet hus þe likie (17-19: There you are laid, and loathsome to your loved ones. / No one, never will a friend come near to see how you are, / to look and see how you like that house). The poem draws upon the affective potential of past memory and future experience, creating a link between the corpse, the friends who will never come, and the reader. Housley argues that just as a grave acts as a memorial to a person, The Grave acts as a memorial to the Anglo-Saxon past. Within a post-Conquest manuscript, The Grave elicits grief for a pre-Conquest language and identity no longer entirely accessible. At the same time, it draws that past into the twelfth century. By examining The Grave as a memorial to Old English in the EME context, Housley cautions that cleaving to periodization and canonicity can reinscribe boundaries and marginalization in literary studies, while crossing temporal boundaries makes new pathways for reading early medieval literature.