This chapter tracks the fate of a particular category of literature that was popular then and is not now: wisdom literature. Works such as Barlaam and Josaphat, Kalilah and Dimnah, the Book of Secundus and the Seven Sages of Rome were widely read in the pre-modern world in both Arabic and a variety of western European languages. Then gradually, between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, they vanished. Modern scholars have generally assumed that readers’ tastes changed. These works are all categorised as ‘wisdom literature’, and modern readers seek entertainment, not wisdom, in their leisure reading. But this account is incomplete, in part because each of these works has a distinct ethical footprint. Barlaam and Josaphat talks about religion and society. Kalilah and Dimnah focuses on the wiles of ministers or those who serve men in power. The Book of Secundus is an analytical wordlist of key terms used to describe the natural world, religion and society. And the Seven Sages of Rome is a tangled knot of sexual mores, investigating the games played by men and women, the tension between older and younger men, and the difficulty of establishing trust between men and women and between the young and the old. This chapter asks what ‘wisdom’ looks like in pre-modern literature, and why modern audiences have stopped reading these works.

The afterword begins by summarizing how the book formulates the ‘heat’ of Beowulf, cataloging its operation on the level of diction, variation, and narrative, characterizing it in ecopoetical, sensological, and phenomenological terms. After reflecting on the medievalness of Blaser’s and Spicer’s modern poetics, the Afterword then points to larger implications of the book and areas for further study. First, the Afterword notes the book’s attention to the convergence of sensology, phenomenology, and ecopoetics, suggesting possible comparisons between twentieth-century poetry by John Ashbery and Bernadette Mayer with early medieval texts and monastic orthopraxis. This is followed by pointing to potential future considerations of historical discourses and experiences of sensory impairment in relationship to the possibility of non-representational, sensological ecopoetics, noting especially the importance of early medieval medical and legal texts. Finally, the Afterword explores how Blaser’s and Spicer’s revision of Ezra Pound’s medievalism invites a new consideration of the non-representational functions of ornament in early medieval poetics. This last possibility is briefly explored in a reading of Exeter Book Riddle 31.

Today, the Ṭawq al-ḥamāma is not only the most famous work of the Andalusian scholar Ibn Ḥazm (d. 456 / 1064), it has become a nearly ubiquitous text: in the Arabic-speaking world it is found on school curricula and is widely read; on a global scale it has been translated into numerous languages; and it has not only sparked much scholarship, but has also inspired modern literary adaptations. It is considered a quintessential guide to the theme of love in Arabic literature. Yet this modern popularity is in stark contrast to its perilous transmission. How can it be that a text so fundamental today could have been transmitted to us on the feeble thread of a single manuscript, now held in Leiden? Its singularity, however, does not mean a lack of interest in the book between its inception and its rediscovery in the nineteenth century. The manuscript bears many traces of former possessors and readers, traces that have hitherto not been analysed. This chapter charts the path of this manuscript in the East, explains how it ended up in Leiden, and shows how it was first edited and popularised in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

This chapter revisits the debates about Old English poetic diction that formed the bedrock of the mid-century interest in Beowulf’s aesthetics, rewound through Blaser’s and Spicer’s responses to Arthur G. Brodeur’s instruction. For Brodeur and his followers, the aesthetics of Old English poetic diction were legible to the extent that they participated in the organic unity of the poem and exhibited the individuality of poet. Brodeur was interested in the ‘inner workings’ of compound poetic diction in order to measure its originality. Blaser’s and Spicer’s attention to Brodeur’s interests, as evidenced in their coordinated experiments translating the compound words of the poem, indirectly point towards a fundamental instability within compound words stemming from the ease of their capacity for rephrasing, or what the chapter calls ‘translatability’. The chapter theorizes translatability by way of Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of basic concepts of translation theory, including the phenomenological valences of its vocabulary and Roman Jakobson’s concept of ‘interlingual translation’. Attending to the translatability of compound diction as the locus of a corporeal experience, the chapter then performs a close reading of Beowulf at Hrothgar’s verbal map to the so-called ‘Grendel-mere’. By ‘opening up’ the kineticism that inheres in the emphatic rephrasability of compound poetic diction, the chapter describes a deforming lexical ‘movement’ that constitutes the rhetorical ductus (path) through passage. The resulting earmsceapen (ill-shaped) style resonates with the cardiocentric hydraulic model of cognitive-affective vernacular psychology in Old English verse and indexes an ecopoetical process by which the poem deforms the human sensorium.

La Chanson de Roland was both a solitary masterpiece and a medieval bestseller: a solitary masterpiece in the sense that the text we today know as the Song of Roland survives in a single manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian MS Digby 23; but a ‘bestseller’ in the sense that the story it tells – of Roland’s death fighting the Saracens in Spain – was well known throughout the Middle Ages, as attested not only in the variant versions collectively known as Roncevaux but in a range of literary allusions, translations, visual representations and even onomastic evidence. No work from the French Middle Ages is better known, nor has been more argued about: it is one of the texts most likely to figure in school curricula and, since the nineteenth century, has been used to exemplify the precociousness of both medieval French literature and of French national identity. This chapter explores some of the discrepancies between the Roland’s political and literary significance in the modern era and the precariousness of its textual tradition. This includes a consideration of its history as a lieu de mémoire – beginning from the text itself, which encodes at least two distinct modalities of memory, both oral and written.

This chapter focuses on one of the episodes in the Poema de mio Cid that has attracted the most critical attention: the hero’s duping of two moneylenders, identified as Rachel and Vidas and understood to be Jews. Exiled by the king, the Cid borrows their money to fund his raids and conquests, leaving them with a chest full of sand. Critics agree that, on the basis of their Jewish identity, the two are associated with avarice and depicted as lacking manly virtues and honour. While some have characterised the passage as antisemitic, others have found that such a reading is anachronistic or lacking in historical context (and have even argued that the hero of Spain’s most celebrated epic later repaid the moneylenders). This chapter first revisits this question in light of more recent approaches to anti-Judaism and the origins of racial categories by David Nirenberg and Geraldine Heng. It then argues that verses in the episode, recorded in the one surviving manuscript, evoke specific biblical language from the Old and New Testaments in a way that links usury and sodomy, in keeping with an anti-Judaic trope that can be found in medieval sermons, Bibles moralisées and other visual imagery from the period.

This chapter begins with the argument that part of what drives the distinction between texts considered medieval masterpieces and those considered ‘popular’ is a (non-medieval) assumption about aesthetics. Masterpieces open themselves to analysis of style, form and literary elements of language (for example, metaphor, allusions to other texts, and so on); and those that survive in one or only very few versions provide a (modern) sense of an authorial hand in their crafting – even where the identity of an author is not known – a position tied to Romantic and modern ideas that art reflects an artist’s genius. Medieval ‘popular’ texts, on the other hand, are rarely recognised for their markers of literariness, perhaps because of the nature of their transmission and circulation: it is difficult to understand widely circulated medieval texts as reflections of a singular authorial intent. To the extent that we have found use for such texts in modern scholarship, we still use methodologies and critical approaches that pay little or no attention to questions of aesthetics and instead think primarily of their ‘cultural’ importance (socio-economic, gendered, religious, interreligious, etc). This chapter considers the case of the medieval ‘greatest hit’ known as the Alexander Romance, to show that its medieval transmitters did indeed consider its aesthetic qualities, and that we too should and can approach this text with an eye to its literary qualities, despite its wide circulation and existence in multiple versions and languages.

This chapter builds on the concept of ‘distributed authorship’ as a means of addressing a widespread phenomenon that has existed since early antiquity, indeed since the compilation of Gilgamesh, the Torah and the Homeric poems: it is a writing practice that informs world literature from its inception. Although the Life of Aḥīqar is not, in its origin, a medieval text, the story of its circulation and reception is nevertheless paradigmatic of many of the texts that were popular in the medieval world. Moreover, it offers a useful reminder that most, if not all, of the texts that were most popular in the medieval world were not native to it, but rather had antique antecedents. Such works, for which no single ‘author’ can be identified, but which are instead the product of a series of ‘participants’, challenge not only attempts to establish histories of national literatures, but also the foundations of the fields of comparative and world literature. Using the Life of Aḥīqar as a focal point, this chapter ultimately questions how and why such significant texts are almost entirely absent both from theoretical discussions of world literature and from the numerous anthologies that have become one of the mainstays of the field.

This chapter tracks the pre-modern popularity of a tale of a scholarly slave girl who wins a knowledge contest over the greatest scholars of her time. It investigates what made the tale of Tawaddud/Teodor so gripping to its medieval readers and translators. The argument is simple: that the tale’s medieval appeal lay in its encyclopaedic capacity for making knowledge into worlds, with the added benefit of moral inculcation into the world it creates. However, this worlding is double-faced – so intimately translatable is this tale that it can be levied not only in the service of colonial indoctrination but also to spur decolonising popular resistance. The translations of this tale, then, enact a literal war of the worlds. The tale seems to have struck a global chord that resonated long beyond the medieval period, only to dwindle to relative obscurity in modern times. Tawaddud in Arabic means ‘To show love or affection, to attract, captivate.’ A looser translation might be ‘Beloved’, and like her counterpart in Toni Morrison’s novel, Tawaddud’s uncanny medieval afterlife is filled with translators who seem unable to let go of her. The chapter ends by charting the ripples of Tawaddud’s post-medieval translations and transculturations – to Spain and Europe, but also to the New World of the Maya, to nineteenth-century Brazil and to the Philippines.

In light of Brodeur’s assignment instructing students to read the Finn episode of Beowulf ‘as a modern poem’, this chapter traces the multiple critical and poetics genealogies by which this assignment would have been legible to Brodeur on the one hand, and to Blaser and Spicer on the other. The chapter chronicles the processes by which Brodeur’s effort to frame Beowulf as worthy of aesthetic study became possible by an admixture of the New Criticism and an investment in authorial individuality. Beowulf became an object of aesthetic inquiry as a transcendent, yet original, organic unity. Meanwhile, although medievalism was crucial to Poundian modernism and its effort to construct an ecologically and aesthetically charged non-representational poetics, Ezra Pound’s investments in a poetics of masculinist and eventually fascist ‘potency at rest’ led to his dismissal of Beowulf from the avant-garde’s canon of medieval poetry. The chapter argues that amidst the pre-Stonewall queer culture of the Berkeley Renaissance, Blaser’s and Spicer’s encounter with Beowulf unfolds in the wake of, but simultaneously contests, the aesthetics of both Pound’s medievalism and Brodeur’s fragile framework for aesthetic analysis of Old English poetry. Finally, the chapter sketches the intellectual conditions that eclipsed Brodeur’s approach to Beowulf’s aesthetics and makes the case that, within the context of the debates around the advent of oral-formulaic theory to Old English studies, his project harbored an impulse to ensure that the aesthetics of Beowulf were included in contemporary literary discourse.

This chapter reexamines the middle and later twentieth-century critical interest in the aesthetics of variation in light of the ways that variation in Old English poetry shaped Jack Spicer’s early and later poetics. While an anxiety about the possibility of synonymy and lexical redundancy in variation led most critical discourses away from considering its stylistic functions, Spicer’s response to a similar anxiety in literary modernism catalyzes an alternative account of a permutational lexical kinetics. As a comparative frame for revisiting variation in Beowulf, the chapter considers Spicer’s theorization of redundancy and poetic diction. The chapter thus turns to Spicer’s poem ‘A portrait of the artist as a young landscape’ and his explicit writing on poetic diction and translation in After Lorca and A textbook of poetry, exploring Spicer’s play with the redundancy of variation as a way of re-aestheticizing the referential functions of the poem’s diction and rendering the poem radically porous to realities of littoral geography and oceanography. Following Spicer’s lead, the chapter then considers instances of variation in Beowulf across the passages that narrate the sea-crossings of Beowulf and his warriors. The sea-crossings are often read as set-piece descriptions that merely facilitate the human action of the poem. However, the play of redundancy, compound diction, and variation in these passages interacts with the prosodical patterns of Old English verse to disrupt this overt representational logic, reactivating the referential function of variation as an ecopoetical stylization that renders the poem more porous to the non-human world of ‘real’ sea-cliffs.

This introduction constructs a disciplinary context in which to ask how Robin Blaser’s and Jack Spicer’s encounter with Beowulf might furnish a series of critical frames for reading the Old English poem anew. Introducing the reader to Blaser’s and Spicer’s poetics and their general medievalism in the context of the mid-century ‘Berkeley Renaissance’, the Introduction surveys their study of Beowulf under Arthur G. Brodeur and Blaser’s description of his encounter with the ‘heat’ of that poem. Blaser’s and Spicer’s study of Beowulf are positioned with respect to Brodeur’s classroom, their contemporaneous study under historian Ernst Kantorowicz, and their later avant-garde poetics. The Introduction then turns to consider a broader disciplinary context for the project of reading Blaser’s and Spicer’s avant-garde poetics comparatively with Beowulf, asking how to stage an encounter of Old English studies and twentieth-century and contemporary poetics. An examination of critical conversations about translations of Beowulf alongside the translation theory of Brazilian modernist Haroldo de Campos and an analysis of the ‘hypercanonicity’ of Beowulf points to the need to attend more fastidiously to the inherently translative functions of Beowulf criticism and their implicit relationship to what Charles Bernstein calls ‘official verse culture’. The Introduction calls for a concept of translative comparative poetics, arguing that to allow modern and contemporary poetics to shape how we attempt to comprehend Beowulf, we need to accord just as much historicity to ‘modern and contemporary’ poetics as a medievalist would demand for the past.