Chapter 5 asks how translators reconciled divergent, seemingly conflicting portrayals of God within the Gospels. Although Matthew’s Wedding Feast and Luke’s Great Supper likely derive from the same source, the two parables project radically different images of divine power: one conveys inclusive, hospitable love and the other exacting, punitive justice. To demonstrate the theological difficulty of reconciling the two feasting parables, the chapter explores the varied exegesis of the stories in the Wycliffite Glossed Gospels. Against this nexus of historical interpretations, the chapter analyses the hybrid Wedding Feast/Great Supper parable retold in the Middle English poem Cleanness. It argues that the interpretive variety typical of academic exegesis can help us understand a poem that so often foregrounds multiplicity of meaning and paradox. Although the poet harmonises disparate biblical passages, he maintains and sometimes sharpens the contradictions that emerge between the two parables and between the two testaments of scripture. By foregrounding narrative discord, the poet asserts that divine truth ultimately transcends human understanding.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen deftly pairs ‘heavy atmosphere’ – ideas about weather and mood – in Chaucer’s works, while at the same time unsettling received ideas about a unidimensional human and elemental world. In Cohen’s exploration of them, the ‘weighty’ atmosphere of the Reeve’s Tale and the fate of Arcite in the Knight’s Tale contrast sharply with Troilus’s celestial transcendence.

This chapter takes Beowulf as its subject. It looks at several memorable and representative examples of plunder in which objects escape human efforts to contain them. They include the torque that the Danish queen Wealhtheow gives to Beowulf, and the sword carried by a Dane but formerly belonging to a Heathobard that will bring about discord, according to Beowulf’s prophecy. The chapter then turns to the hoard at the end of the poem. Acts of hoarding would seek to deactivate individual objects, but even so some of their previous change remains. The interplay between hoards and plunder, or the subsuming and the subsumed, highlights the paradox at the heart of Beowulf: a poignant, pervasive sense of loss seems to carry a material weight. The poem exhibits ambivalence towards pagan material culture, which it can neither fully embrace nor condemn.

The Exeter Book riddles present a symphony of acoustic effects, deploying a multitude of linguistic resources to reflect aesthetically on the metaphysical relationship, long examined by philosophers and grammarians, between sounds, speech, concepts, and subjects and objects both animate and inanimate. This chapter discusses the different ways that sounds signify in these riddles, especially the sensory, cognitive, and culturally formed categories through which sound effects evoke the rhythms and textures of natural phenomena, human artefacts, and human and animal experience. Like all Old English poetry but especially vividly, the riddles pleasurably combine received fields of knowledge and familiar poetic forms with the surprising, sometimes unsettling aural effects produced by specific lines. The chapter teases out connections between the concepts of sound, noise, and voice as early English writers inherited them from the classical and early medieval philosophical and grammatical traditions, and the achievable performative effects of sound via the techniques of English enigmatic poetry. Finally, following the lead of Maurizio Bettini, the chapter gestures toward the possibilities of a ‘sound anthropology’ of early medieval England.

This first chapter introduces how riddles work in the tradition of early medieval England and its neighbours. It argues that the balance between the communal and individual, struck by Aldhelm in the preface to his Enigmata, lies at the heart of the early medieval riddling tradition and underlies its current popularity. A brief reading of Heanmode Twa (Exeter Book Riddle 42) illustrates the interplay between the demand for solution and the other kinds of work—on value, literacy, sex, interpretation—that these texts initiate. An overview of scholarship, from 1857 to the present day, follows. The chapter notes particularly the past focus on solution-hunting, questions about genre, different contexts for interpretation, linguistic play, and categorisation. Above all it stresses the multifarious nature of the riddles themselves and the scholarship this has inspired. Finally the General Introduction summarises the book’s chapters, divided into three sections. Part I, ‘Words’, exemplifies interpretations based on close readings of texts. Part II, ‘Ideas’, engages with theory to examine how the riddles invite new ways of thinking about objects, relationships, and experiences. Part III, ‘Interactions’, showcases the ways in which the riddles lead us to make connections with other fields, languages, times, and places.

Þragbysig is one of the most resistant of the Exeter Book collection to being solved, and it has thus received more than its fair share of solutions (fifteen, by the author’s count). These solutions have ranged from the inanimate to the animate, from the homely to the exotic, from the physical to the spiritual, and from the plausible to the implausible. This chapter seeks first to pinpoint where previous solutions have failed, so as to identify the key ambiguous language and the riddling tropes that a successful solution must address. These include the relationship between the subject of the riddle, the thegn, and the lord; the multiple rings; the breaking of the bed; the ‘warm limb’; the idea of speaking and answering; and the foolishness of the thegn. It then suggests that a learned, scientific approach to the physical world—in particular astronomy—provides a different way of understanding the text’s intractable metaphorical surface. Drawing upon Bede, Boethius, and Isidore, the chapter argues that Þragbysig is a description of a winter sun, rising over the horizon accompanied by the planet Mercury.

It is firmly established that Anglo-Latin riddles were known on the Continent. The extent of their influence, however, remains unresearched. This cultural transfer has often been interpreted as one-way, disregarding the influence of continental riddling on insular collections. There are, however, riddles of probable continental provenance, notably the Bern riddles, which were no doubt known to early medieval English authors such as Aldhelm. This chapter attends to the exchange of riddles that took place on both sides of the English Channel and proves how fruitful this cultural interaction was by focusing on a riddlic topos that seems to have been of special interest to insular authors: the metaphor of the nursemaid breastfeeding numerous children. This motif also offers a related variant with clues suggesting a prostitute sharing her physical charms, as well as wine and food, with many men. By looking into several versions of this widespread topos, the chapter aims to trace the history of this popular motif in riddles preserved in both insular and continental manuscripts.

Proems evoking the fall of the angels reach an apex of expression in the ‘New Minster Charter’, the prime textual forerunner to the Benedictine Reform. The charter’s author portrays the secular clerics at Winchester as a subversive threat to English ecclesiastical unity by aligning their alleged sinful behaviour with that of the ‘pride-filled angels’. I examine how the Winchester charters attest to the potency of biblical narrative in the lived experience of Anglo-Saxons through their depiction of adversaries to the English Christian community and in their aim to legally establish the secular canons as rebels. I also consider how these charters were not the first English documents to imagine disobedient and disorderly ecclesiastics as earthly replicas of the rebel angels, but represent part of a longer tradition of viewing the church as a reflection of the heavenly polity.

The chapters in this section explore words as words, sounds, and language, engaging to greater or lesser extents with the long history of philological approaches to Old English language and literature. Working from words outward—to text, genre, language as a whole—is rewarding because the gradual amassing of evidence as the frame of reference expands is orderly, methodical, and systematic. And yet it is never the only, or the correct, way to approach a text. Ultimately, philological approaches rely on the interpretation of words, and there are many ways to interpret both words and the texts in which they survive. These interpretations all rely on good close reading, on grappling with polysemy, and on translation and solving as an act of interpretation.

The first book of the Epitaphium covers the period fromWala’s youth at Charlemagne’s court until the years822–5 when the great man, by then known as‘Arsenius’, served as deputy to Louis’ son Lothar,who was king of Italy and was crowned emperor inRome in 823. In 814 Wala, banished from Louis’court, had retreated to Corbie, yet in 821 he andhis half-brother Adalhard, abbot of Corbie, had beenreconciled with the Emperor Louis. About all this,the first book is almost entirely silent. The maintheme of a lively dialogue among three monks, withsome additional interlocutors, is the deep griefabout Wala’s recent death. We get brief hints to allthis political trouble, but most of this isobfuscated by deft literary tactics, in whichcitations from Terence play a central part. Thefirst book is a masterpiece of allusion, and alsogives an indication of the intended audience: notjust the monks of Corbie, but also a literateCarolingian leadership impressed by Radbert’sbrilliance, and perhaps persuaded to lookdifferently at Wala/Arsenius, who had died in 836 inItaly. Shortly thereafter Radbert embarked on thisfirst book.

James Simpson’s central hermeneutic perception for knowledge in the Humanities is that cognition is re-cognition. Before we can know, we must already have known. He examines this paradox with reference to literary examples of facial recognition from, in particular, Chaucer and his reception in the early modern period. Linking literary face to textual face – the whole text as a kind of face – he applies the lessons learnt from facial recognition to textual recognition; and answers some possible objections to the paradox of knowing being dependent on having already known.

Ruth Evans explores the under-recognised but striking use of rhyme-breaking in Chaucer’s poetry, present in the Canterbury Tales, the Book of the Duchess, the Legend of Good Women and Troilus and Criseyde. Evans draws upon a recent resurgence of critical interest in the politics of form to argue that Chaucerian rhyme-breaking warrants closer attention not only for its ironic effect, but also for its potential to illuminate Chaucer’s position within the multilingual context of late-medieval England.