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.

The ancient Greek word parrhēsia designates speech that is bold, frank and free, holding nothing back; a parrhēsiastēs is a person who gives voice to such speech. Although the word was little used in Latin literature and had no precise Latin equivalent, the concept was transmitted to medieval western Europe in rhetorical theory and the New Testament. In this chapter I propose that the concept of parrhēsia may help to register the irruptive force, pointedness, risks and complexity of certain acts of saying in Piers Plowman, a fourteenth-century English vision poem. For most of this chapter, I focus on a single discursive feature of Piers Plowman: moral admonishment addressed in the second person to audiences outside the represented world of the poem. I argue that monitory address is an important and well-defined feature of Piers Plowman, that the poet’s confidence in his monitory voice grows during his composition of the poem and that this feature of the poem culminates in Conscience’s parrhesiastic addresses to bishops and the king in the C version Prologue. As a coda to this argument, I propose a reading of the dreamer as a figure of wisdom-seeking parrhēsia.

The introduction stages the concept of ‘voice’ as a narrative, literary and conceptual topos that is then elaborated across the volume. It considers the fraught nature of voice as an embodied yet fleeting phenomenon that leaves only traces of its existence as a memory, a textual remnant or as a transient sensation of aerial vibrations. Tracing the development of the theoretical debate of voice and what it might constitute from antiquity to modern critical theories, it seeks to showcase its multiplicity, its evasiveness and its potentiality, both as a narrative tool and as a mode of understanding medieval approaches to and perceptions of literature, vocality and aurality. It expands across classical theories on voice, narratology, feminist criticism and interdisciplinary studies on auditory perceptions. Ultimately, it presents the multiple meanings of voice – i.e. the notion of the authorial voice, the implicit or intended aurality of the text and vox as authority or moral imperative, but also, in a Bakhtinian sense, the multiplicity of narrative voices within a text and the aural soundscapes provided by absent, imaginary and actual voices.

William Peraldus (middle of the thirteenth century) uses voice to speak the absent moral presence, the authoritative sound that directs humans in choosing ethically correct behaviour, or that interprets what is unclear in human life or that rejects the speech of the sinner. This acoustic instruction occurs as audible sound, sometimes in the voice of ventriloquism (when an authoritative presence speaks in the voice of a sinner) or the voice of natural phenomena we do not think of as speaking our language (birds, for example, that speak clearly to humans, but also the voice of the blood of those who have suffered violence). Voices also speak soundlessly in the minds of those who dream or have visions. These interior voices necessitate our recourse to the concept of the inner senses and what the Aristotelian tradition understood as the imaginative faculty. Peraldus’s ethical voices construct the external and internal soundscape of morality; they make perceptible a chorus of subjectivities that add embodiment to ethical choice. Sound teaches the moral path in Peraldus’s handbooks on the vices and virtues, fulfilling one of the Dominican Order’s key functions in the thirteenth century in regulating the conscience and creating a moral self.