This chapter looks at the Old English Exodus. It begins with a sudden, enigmatic appearance of an African woman, who helps the Israelites divide the treasure stripped from the drowned Egyptian army. The chapter frames this episode with the repeated figure of burh [city or enclosure] and the metamorphosing pillar of cloud, a biblical element largely expanded in Old English. Both iconic images exhibit spolia-like effects due to their specific relationship to space and time. Functioning at once as a memory of old cities and a premonition of future cities for the Israelites, the burh constantly changes and acquires new meanings. The pillar, on the other hand, functions as a fragment of the future, able to suggest on its own the larger protective structure of the Christian Church. These three key textual moments together provide the key to the work’s modus operandi. Exodus seems to encourage both exegetical and political readings, but it also produces an excess of meaning, indicating that something irreducibly strange always remains.

This chapter considers the fall of the angels in Old English saints’ lives, wherein holy men and women articulate the narrative as though it were a charm, a verbal defence mechanism offering spatial, geographical, and bodily protections. Just as Anglo-Saxon charms master something threatening by defining and reciting its name, properties, and origins, so too in Elene and Juliana do Cynewulf’s saintly protagonists Judas Cyriacus and Juliana master their demonic tempters by identifying them and recounting their originary sin. While in these poems the origin narrative is itself apotropaic, in Andreas the fall of the angels narrative is linked to the protective power of the baptismal seal (or sphragis) that safeguards Christians against the devil. Similarly, Guthlac A relates how Guthlac disarms his demonic tormentors by recounting the story of their fall and by expressing his faithful expectation that he will be one of their replacements in heaven.

This chapter focuses on the biographical, political andliterary aspects of the Epitaphium Arsenii. Itintroduces the author, Paschasius Radbertus, who wasa monk of Corbie and later its abbot, and hissubject, Abbot Wala of Corbie (d. 836), who wasCharlemagne’s controversial cousin. It explains thedifferent political context in which the two booksof this work originated. Whereas the first book wasprobably composed while the Emperor Louis the Piouswas still alive, the second followed only in themid-850s, when Louis’ son Charles the Bald ruled theWest-Frankish kingdom. The changed perspective ofthe second book and the author’s polemical stancestand in contrast to the more reticent first book,which makes this such an interesting text.Furthermore, this introduction also explicates thisfuneral oration for Wala as a literary work, andcomments on the author’s Latin and his use ofclassical and patristic sources.

The introduction defines and distinguishes different types of recycled artefacts. It begins with a reading of the Old English lyric The Ruin that demonstrates interest of Anglo-Saxons in incomplete objects from the past that inspire literary imaginings. It then turns to the role of relics in the Middle Ages in order to interpret the dream vision, The Dream of the Rood. Finally, it provides evidence for preponderance of spolia, both architectural and textual, in medieval England and on the Continent. The introduction argues that ruins, relics, and spolia shape Old English poetry in similar ways because they complicate the boundaries between temporal layers (present/past/future), the global and the local, the textual and the visual, and the animate and the inanimate.

This chapter considers the proems of land charters that evoke the angelic rebellion. After providing an overview of the legal outlook surrounding treachery and rebellion from the age of Alfred – whose legal reforms sought to establish that landed entitlements were privileges descending from kings – onwards, I consider this social context alongside Genesis A, a vernacular poem that includes a striking episode detailing earthly creation alongside the doctrine of replacement using distinctly legal terminology. The connection between the charters and the biblical story thus allow us to see how notions of replacement may have had physical, earthly repercussions, and how new modes of sovereignty emerged through a growing reliance on biblical authority.

Aldhelm’s Enigmata depict a range of monstrous figures described in terms of a dual nature. Against this backdrop of monstrous duality, the leech (sanguisuga) reveals itself through a monstrous visage but a healing touch. The monstrous appearance of the leech builds into a figure of apparently monstrous touch. Stripped of appendages, the leech is reduced to a biting mouth, even as Aldhelm’s characteristic sound-play puts emphasis on the mouth of the speaker with strings of bilabials. A sudden turn at the end turns the bite of the monster into a beneficial kiss. This chapter contextualises the metaphor of the salvific kiss with reference to Aldhelm’s own depiction of Christ’s kiss as a synecdoche for the healing touch, reinforced by the connection of the leech with the dead. The disjunction between the leech’s sensory reduction and the human’s misleading sensory richness allows for a reappraisal of the phenomenological tradition’s treatment of flesh. The leech’s reduced capacity gives the lie to the idea that these expressions are equivalent and points to a way in which senses not only enhance each other, but also deceive.

John Ganim unpacks William Morris’s eroticised but anxious politics in News from Nowhere. Ganim highlights the significance of the emotional attachment to environment in the formulation of Morris’s utopia. He also considers the enabling influence of the medieval dream vision, especially Chaucer’s, for promoting ‘psychological experience and fantasy’. Both themes illuminate Morris’s conflicted approach to subjects that caused him discomfort due to his perverse familial situation.