In the Old English Soul and Body poems, a damned soul periodically visits the grave of its decaying body to accuse the body of causing their terrible fate. The harrowing details of the body’s devoured flesh and disjointed bones culminate with the statement that the body, being dead, lies now insensible to its own state: “Eart ðu nu dumb ond deaf” (you are now mute and deaf; Soul and Body I, line 65a).¹ This final point of the soul’s speech makes an aesthetic observation as well as a didactic one: Like the ineffable beauty of paradise considered in Chapter 2, the experience of death can neither be directly sensed nor described because death represents the end of all sensory experience. Not only does the body fail to apprehend its own state, but the audience of the poem can apprehend it only imperfectly, through bodily imagery that the body itself can no longer access. The poems’ aesthetic strategy for rendering the horrors of death reflects another crucial point about their treatment of affect: Affect, and the perceptions that give rise to it, are fundamentally embodied experience, and embodied action.² Early English poetic meditations upon death must paradoxically appeal to bodily sensations that were understood by their authors and audiences to operate differently, if at all, in the world to come – this becomes their central conventional conceit. But in their depictions of bodily horror, these poems have become known all too well for their affective work – described by one critic, for example, as “a perverted essay in the loathsome,” that plays upon fear and contempt to compel submission to its moral lessons.³ Yet while physical and spiritual death occasion terror, grief, or disgust at visions of decay, Judgment Day poems composed in England before the Norman Conquest consistently link the dread of death to poetic conventions of shame, in particular the shame encountered when every previously hidden sin becomes exposed at the Final Judgment. We witness this dynamic in poems and homilies focused on judgment, or with the soul’s preparation for it. But in other Old English verse, the dynamic by which the dread of shame attends or even surpasses the fear of death already appears as a distinctive poetic convention with powerful associations: We see, for example, Beowulf repeatedly risking his life to avoid shame after death.⁴ In the hybrid conventions of early English Judgment Day poetry, then, the poetic deployment of shame figures as an affect attendant upon deeply seated poetic tropes. Shame can become an affect more to be dreaded than death alone, and thus an affect that is aesthetically effective as a means of evoking affective associations from other contexts. Ironically, although modern scholars have recognized the affects of revulsion and shame in these poems all too vividly, this appears in stark contrast to the evocations of pity and love associated with later devotional poetry. Nevertheless, the portrayal of shame in early English poetry on Judgment Day combines early English poetic conventions with early English homiletic conventions, and creates a set of hybrid, affective poetic tropes that will carry on through devotional poetry across the Conquest.

Shame is a social affect, occasioned by the internalized sense of the judgment of others.⁵ Although the body in the Soul and Body poems has been deprived of its community, even here the literary conventions surrounding shame and the Final Judgment insist upon the fundamental persistence of socially occasioned affect: Shame arises from being confronted by God in the presence of all humanity, and from the exposure of previously hidden misdeeds. According to the logic of these conventions, death will be experienced by all, but shame will be suffered primarily by those who fail to respond appropriately – through proper actions and proper affects – to the inevitability of death in life.

This chapter shows that the earliest English poetry combines poetic tropes revolving around shame with conventional homiletic language to evoke an affective response to post-mortem experience, and demonstrates how these texts modeled and managed affective engagement for their audiences. Poems such as those in the Old English soul and body tradition help us to see how the mixed conventions of the earliest English poetry convey devotional affect within their cultural landscape, and yet have, by that same token, obscured it from modern scholars. Having explored poems on sympathy and ineffable beauty that most recall the conventional hallmarks of affective piety and establish their importance in the pre-Conquest period, we must now account for the handling of negative affects, the affects that might seem most at odds with the typical hallmarks of affective devotion. Yet even shame and revulsion, in these poems, repeatedly depend upon the individual’s sympathetic connection with the community of other believers and with God. As we see in this chapter and Chapter 4, attention to these apparently grim poetic tropes reveals foundations from which later forms of affective devotion arise, as vernacular poetic forms persist across the Conquest. Even as the language of poetry shifts and new forms become available, both the poetic topoi considered here and their associated affective investments endure across texts and across boundaries of history and language.

The pre-Conquest poems considered in the present chapter urge affective identification against shame, death, and perdition, or identification with positions of self-denial, invoking anticipatory aversion through vivid depictions of post-mortem experience. Poems involving the Final Judgment bring these dynamics sharply into focus, playing upon the very limits of poetic language to show how both awe and terror exceed what their audiences can presently know. Works such as the Soul and Body and Judgment Day poems deal with a number of affective states, but shame, most strikingly, conventionally defines the fate of the believer in the afterlife. While shame is a social affect, these poems manifest the experience of that shame within the limits of the body. Old English Judgment Day poetry continually involves bodily and affective states with one another. This situation partly reflects how early English concepts of affect and interiority are located in the body.⁶ But they also reflect how aesthetic representations of the lack of bodily sense in death, and thus paradoxically, the impossibility of aisthesis or sense perception, must nevertheless appeal to embodied experience in order to depict anything at all. Perhaps because of the ineluctable relationship between affect and embodied experience, poems such as Soul and Body particularly dramatize the sinner’s conflict with the flesh.⁷ The earliest English poetic meditations on the Final Judgment invoke the affective response of shame to question the penitents’ relationship, not so much to their society or community, but to their own mortal flesh.

Pre-Conquest English poetry rarely provides overt explanations of its aesthetic methods. Yet the Judgment Day poems show their devotional preoccupation with shame in several ways, through hortatory address to an audience drawing upon homiletic language; stated or implied application of exemplary narratives; or gnomic conclusions reflecting upon the lessons to be gleaned from the text. While these features appear throughout the corpus of medieval poetry, the Judgment Day poems evince a kind of aesthetic excess similar to that of Chapter 2: Each text must present moral lessons about the world to come that exceed the capacity of human sense in this present world. Yet the appeal to bodily and affective sense remains essential, as devotional precepts are not introduced by these poems but appealed to, alluded to, and elided in the course of poetic meditations on death and judgment.

Rhetorics of Revulsion

Previous scholarship on the nature of shame, both by affect theorists and by scholars of early literature, has focused on shame as the reverse of honor. Such work often considers shame primarily in terms of its role in regulating something like the “heroic code” of poems like Beowulf or The Battle of Maldon. So, for example, William Ian Miller distinguishes between shame, which requires “groups of rough equals,” and humiliation, which might work across the social spectrum, yet argues that both “carry out the same kind of rough work of punishing moral and social failure.”⁸ That work of punishment depends on the economy of social reciprocity set out by Miller and others, including Marcel Mauss in his work on gift economies.⁹ But, as Miller points out, Christian understandings of social obligation undermine the cold calculus of reciprocity,¹⁰ not least because, within Christian understanding, each person’s ultimate debt is sin, unpayable except by the grace of God himself. Within this system, simple reciprocity becomes impossible, the debt to God incommensurable. In spite of grace, sinners must bear the knowledge of their misdeeds intact until their revelation at Judgment Day. The attitude required for true penitence thereby requires continual identification with shame for these misdeeds, beyond any ability to repay. As much as Christian understandings of shame and guilt (including those operative in devotional poetry) differ from those of “honor societies,” however, Miller’s framework, distinguishing between shame and humiliation, does point to one of the crucial dynamics of the Final Judgment as an occasion for shame. The cause of shame is not only certain abasement before God, who already knew every deed to be revealed; it is also the presence of the rest of humanity, with worldly markers of social status stripped away, that provokes shame as distinct from the fear of eternal punishment.¹¹

Along the same lines, in his Shame and Necessity, Bernard Williams argues that shame does not proceed simply from fear of what others will do in response to one’s shameful actions. Drawing examples from ancient Greek literature, Williams posits the notion of an imagined “other” who need not be a real person or group of people, but who represents an internalized idea of one: “[T]he imagined gaze of an imagined other will do.”¹² For this process to work, however, it is necessary that this other “is conceived as one whose reactions I would respect,” whether any such reactions ever occur in reality or not.¹³ For Williams, this feature defines the working of shame. To feel ashamed, one must already respect and effectively agree with the contempt or derision of this internalized other; the sense of shame is hardly relieved if the action in question remains a secret.¹⁴ Moreover, while shame does not necessarily deal with moral content in the way that guilt does, for Williams, guilt nevertheless relies upon the sense of shame to produce an identification with moral action. Guilt may be expiated by reparation, while “shame may be expressed in attempts to reconstruct or improve oneself.”¹⁵ Williams of course describes the workings of shame in ancient Greek culture and with reference to modern culture, and distinguishes his model from those associated with Christianity, Kantian philosophy, and other systems by which moral principles may be derived from reason. In Williams’s formulation, without the internalized other, “the convictions of autonomous self-legislation may become hard to distinguish from an insensate degree of moral egoism.”¹⁶ Considering these ideas in relation to medieval Christianity requires some revision to his framework. As much as Christianity emphasizes the adoption of internal attitudes as the key to moral rectitude, God serves as the ultimate arbiter of human deeds, external and uniquely knowing already what will eventually be known to all. For Williams, as for Miller, the affective dynamics of shame are illustrated most clearly in the workings of an honor society,¹⁷ but (again in spite of the contrary machinations of Christianity)¹⁸ Williams asserts that the fundamentals apply more broadly, arguing that the archaic Greek notion of shame bears more resemblance to the modern one than is typically thought.

Williams explains that shame provokes a desire to hide or disappear from view, “the wish that the space occupied by me should be instantaneously empty.”¹⁹ While Williams is not alone in asserting that shame involves desire for self-negation, Steven Justice demonstrates that the Virgilian concept of shame denoted by the noun pudor provokes anything but the impulse to disappear.²⁰ Among numerous examples, Justice shows how, in the Aeneid, Entellus’s shame at his weakness in a boxing match spurs him to overpower his opponent.²¹ Curiously, Homeric examples (of shame as denoted by the noun aidōs) reveal the same thing.²² For example, Williams counters his own definition when he cites Ajax rallying his companions: “Dear friends, be men; let shame be in your hearts […] / among men who feel shame, more are saved than die.”²³ A similar shame operates, according to Williams, when Hector decides he must face Achilles lest an inferior man should hold him in contempt. These examples show that, in fact, there are two concepts or at least two aspects of the concept that Williams describes uniformly as shame: First, the burden of shame after the fact of some failing, and second, the sense of shame that produces anticipatory aversion to shameful action, what Williams calls a “prospective shame.”²⁴ To take Williams’s examples, Ajax experiences the former type of shame when deciding to commit suicide,²⁵ the latter while urging his men on into battle.

Both aspects of shame exert corrective force in medieval literature: a process of “error, rebuke, and shame” traceable from Boethius to Langland helps to draw the mind, cognizant of past failures, toward anticipation for and avoidance of greater shame in future.²⁶ As Alice Jorgensen has importantly argued of the Old English corpus, Ælfric posits shame for sin as something experienced before others, but urges experiencing shame presently and privately before the confessor rather than before all humanity at the Final Judgment.²⁷ In the conventions of early English Judgment Day poems, both retroactive and anticipatory shame operate at different times. Yet the anticipatory aversion to shame seems crucial to the role of shame as an affective and determinative force; indeed, failure to anticipate shame becomes in itself an occasion for further shame. And whether or not societal standards are internalized, God stands as the actual, external other from whom no action can be hidden.²⁸ While the faithful must internalize God’s judgments, God is not an imagined but real other for medieval Christian believers, and the Final Judgment entails the real rather than imagined gaze of humanity. While believers are exhorted to behave rightly, particularly when no one else will know, they are also promised that others will know at the Day of Judgment.²⁹ Some headway toward reconciling these ideas is offered in Virginia Burrus’s argument that Christianity embraces shame rather than replacing it with the more apparently moral notion of guilt.³⁰ In this way, Christianity demands that the believer be accountable to God, but accountability to God is most adamantly expressed in terms that reinforce social obligation: “Amen I say to you, as long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me.”³¹ Similarly, the demand is made: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”³² Throughout the Gospels, believers are encouraged to understand both themselves and God in their relationships with other people, even when doing so puts one in conflict with the law.³³ Paradoxically, however, one’s status among other persons must be ignored or even despised, because Christianity is ultimately not an honor culture: Individuals’ primary responsibility is to God, who alone truly knows their intentions. Believers are warned not to prioritize their communal standing by making a show of their piety or charity.³⁴ Christian morality thus requires more than objective standards or even the stated standards of the community; it requires an acute sense of obligation to others and an identification of those others’ needs with one’s own. It presents more than an internalized “other” such as that Williams posits for the ancient Greeks, because God as the ultimate judge supersedes and settles all moral judgments. Shame for early medieval believers, then, was both social and personal as well as of the highest significance. All these dynamics come sharply into focus in representations of the Day of Judgment.

Anticipating the Final Judgment in the Soul and Body Poems

The aesthetics of the end of the world, in the earliest English poetry, draw its audience to identify with negative spiritual and affective states that produce feelings of revulsion, disgust, and loathing, as well as shame. It does this so well that the brutal imagery of the Soul and Body poems has provoked distaste among modern critics. One scholar has said of the Old English Judgment Day II that “[b]ecause of its purpose as a warning to those living this present life it tends to stress punishment and reward, not to describe the events of the last times.”³⁵ This summation characterizes the poem and others like it as literature meant to exhort readers and hearers to right thinking and behavior. Visions of the afterlife are thus “constructed to admonish those who heard or read of it to strive to win the final goal,” and largely because the poems’ primary aims are apparently didactic, they are “not all among the great writings of European history.”³⁶ Of course, the earliest English writers would have conceived of their place in literary history, if they did so at all, quite differently. Even in light of their obvious devotional commitments, it does not suffice to say simply that the literary works in question paint a horrific picture of suffering merely to encourage the good by dissuading the bad. The presentation of negative affect participates in a web of literary conventions, enabling certain kinds of rhetorical appeals, associating certain affective states with particular textual situations, and evoking the associated atmospheres of similar scenes that had gone before.³⁷ The conventions by which these poems evoke shame as the predominant associated affect of the Final Judgment reveals more complex, hybrid medieval aesthetic and literary practices than modern critics have understood. Combining the poetic conventions of shame with a particular devotional context allows for a sophisticated manipulation of devotional affect: The poems studied in this chapter draw upon conventions from numerous medieval genres, evoking the affective associations of devotional literature to produce a complex, allusive devotional aesthetic.

If Williams and Miller agree that Christianity changes the workings of shame, Christianity nevertheless puts shame to use, as numerous writers have recognized. Julia Kristeva, for one, argues that Christianity internalized the previously external rules of purity and cleanness that had characterized Jewish practice.³⁸ And if we believe Williams, the attitudes that define shame were already at least partly internalized to begin with in ancient literature. Negative affect has attracted substantial critical attention, especially in the work of Sianne Ngai, whose work has explored unsatisfying emotions and their representation as embodiments of the cultural conditions of modernity.³⁹ As opposed to dynamic, cathartic emotions such as anger, Ngai dwells upon the noncathartic, static emotions such as envy and irritation – in other words, feelings that are not just bad but ugly. Involving a shift to the aesthetic of the mundane, such affects and their attendant aesthetic matter because they demonstrate a contemporary “blurring of the distinction between aesthetic and work-related production” – in other words, the aesthetic of late modernity no longer distinguishes the rarefied realm of the autotelic aesthetic as it had before.⁴⁰

Distinctions between instrumental or autotelic art could hardly seem further removed from the concerns of the early Middle Ages, but for this very reason they enable a new understanding of the aesthetics of early medieval verse. A removal from, and perhaps suspicion toward, the autotelic aesthetic of modernity broadly reveals what the assumption of that aesthetic means. To an autotelic aesthetic, art stands removed from perception of the natural or everyday, and from cultural productions with any kind of utility, which are denigrated as didacticism or propaganda. To interrogate or complicate these concepts clarifies their contingency, the fact that their values are not the inherent characteristics of aesthetic experience but historically located phenomena. As postmodern culture questions these distinctions, premodern culture never makes them. Far from excluding works of artifice with instrumental value as objects of influence or instruction, the aesthetics of premodern culture may, in fact, frequently insist upon their inclusion. But rather than limiting or diluting what we might consider their aesthetic appeal, these very factors enhance the affective resonance of aesthetic objects.

Modern scholars have, in fact, openly questioned the aesthetic appeal of the Old English Soul and Body poems. The two versions of the poem portray the horrors of both death and decay in grotesque detail, emphasizing sensory perception of the body’s decay juxtaposed with the equally horrifying loss of all sense perception attendant upon that decay. Each of these poems opens with a brief homiletic address, followed immediately by a striking narrative of a damned soul returning to speak to its body after death. Both Soul and Body poems appeal to bodily sensation, affect, and the individual will to achieve the poems’ chilling, hortatory effect. While both poems portray a damned soul returning to berate its earthly body, the poem designated Soul and Body I includes the beginning of a further speech offered by a blessed soul, returning from heaven to honor its own fleshly vessel. Although the portrayal of bodily decay has been seen as punishment for the damned body’s sins, the extant portion of the blessed soul’s monologue makes clear that this cannot be so: Death and decay are inevitable and common to both the blessed and the damned, with the difference in their souls’ fates determined by their orientation toward this fact during earthly life.

The poem fairly revels in the gruesome condition of the damned body, with its “ban bereafod / besliten synum” (deprived bones, torn from their sinews; Soul and Body I, lines 61b–2a), and in the misery of its condemned, cearful (full of care) soul who calls out with caldan reorde (cold voice), to censure the body that has sealed both of their fates (Soul and Body I, line 15). Stanley Greenfield asserts that the poem “makes living flesh creep,” and describes the damned soul’s “grim satisfaction” as it “vilifies” its body,⁴¹ while Benjamin Kurtz calls the poem “a perverted essay in the loathsome,” accusing it of a “degenerate realism,”⁴² and Allen Frantzen speaks of “the evil soul’s contempt for the rotting corpse.”⁴³ While we may have critical consensus on the brutality of the poem’s imagery, the import of that imagery nevertheless raises unresolved questions. Frantzen argues that “decay in the grave acquired a punitive force” in Old English literature, looking to parallels in Judgment Day II and Christ III, as well as to Ælfrician and Vercelli homilies that describe wyrmas (worms) that feast upon the damned in hell.⁴⁴ But there are two main problems with this line of argument. First, the trope of worms in soul and body poetry was not unique to Old English literature. Haruko Momma has mapped the literary history of the trope of worms in soul and body poetry to Latin prose homilies from the Late Antique period, through the early Middle English period (as we will see in Chapter 4).⁴⁵ Heather Maring has also traced the motif of eating the dead, associated especially with the conventional half-line “grædige and gifre,” through the webs of associations it weaves across the Old English corpus.⁴⁶ Second, the fact that the body of the blessed soul has also decayed poses a problem for this reading. Frantzen describes how “the poet was anxious to draw attention away from the good body and concentrate his energies on the damned. However effectively he had employed physical corruption as a vehicle for denouncing the evil body’s sinfulness, he could not disguise the inevitable truth that the good body too was decaying.”⁴⁷ It is true that the curtailed dialogue between the blessed soul and its body lacks the grotesque fixation on the destruction of individual members of the body evinced in the speech of the damned soul, although the missing end of the poem makes arguments from absence especially problematic. But in the lines that we have, whenever the blessed soul invokes the body’s decay, it cushions these observations by asserting that there are better days to come for them both. In spite of its optimism about the body’s future, the blessed soul hardly avoids the issue of the body’s decay. Indeed, the blessed body not only meditates extensively on its body’s current condition, but twice invokes the very wyrmas that have been seen as an invocation of the torments of hell (Soul and Body I, lines 135, 154).

Indeed, in Soul and Body I, the parallel situation of the damned and blessed souls’ bodies is precisely the point. The blessed soul clearly echoes the description of the wyrmas which had fed upon the body of the damned soul only twenty lines prior: “Gifer hatte se wyrm,” we are told, that:

The litany of destroyed and defiled facial features, piled up through the polysyndeton of these verses forces intimate meditation upon the ravages of bodily decay. Notably, the destruction of eyes and tongue and teeth alludes to the destruction of the senses, as the soul will eventually reiterate that the body can no longer hear its lament anyway. This passage comes at the close of the damned soul’s speech, and as the blessed soul opens its own speech, it immediately echoes some of the phrasing of this passage: “ðe wyrmas gyt / gifre gretaþ” (worms now greet you voraciously) it observes, and describes its body as much “wyrmum to wiste” (food for worms) as the damned soul’s body had been (lines 135b–6a; 154a; emphasis added). Although the blessed soul fixates upon the particular destruction of its body’s members, it does so in a way that frankly repeats – albeit with crucial difference – the description of the damned body immediately preceding, invoking the hellish worms with their voracious appetites. How then do we account for the similar experiences of bodies belonging to such differently appointed souls? Quite simply, as we are explicitly told that as the damned soul is “gehæftnedest | helle witum” (seized by the punishments of hell), its body is ensconced in earth, awaiting judgment just as the body of the blessed soul is ensconced when it receives its visitations from heaven (Soul and Body I, line 32). Neither body has yet faced the Final Judgment; they wait, similarly, in their earthly graves. The difference that Soul and Body I presents between these two bodies is not their physical condition. As it turns out, wyrmas feast upon the bodies of the blessed and damned alike in the grave.

Yet the body’s preparation for this fact in life determines its experience of sceamu, shame, at the Final Judgment. The damned soul explains how its body had been “wiste wlanc | ond wines sæd” (proud at the feast and sated with wine) while the soul itself “ofþyrsted wæs / godes lichoman, | gastes drynces” (was filled with thirst for the body of God and the drink of the spirit; Soul and Body I, 39, lines 40b–1). The body filled with wine juxtaposes harshly with the soul, thirsting after the Eucharist. Since the damned body has pampered itself in life, its current debased physical state stands in such miserable contrast that it shall sceame þrowian (endure shame) at the end of days (Soul and Body I, line 49b). Conversely, the blessed body has prepared for its end through a lifetime of self-restraint such that it will have no need to sceamian (to endure shame) for its sorry physical state at the Final Judgment (Soul and Body I, line 145a). The repeated invocation of shame (contrasted with the wlanc body of the damned soul in life) may seem secondary to the immediate visceral terror of physical decay, yet its implications are crucial. The poem asserts that the body’s affective orientation at the judgment reflects its fate, rather than its material decomposition.

Thus the damned soul’s condemnatory “Lyt ðu gemundest” (little did you remember) and “lyt geþohtest” (little did you think) echo the poem’s homiletic opening appeal: “geþence,” (consider) that “Lang bið syððan / þæt se gast nimeð […] / swa wite swa wuldor” (It is long after that the spirit receives punishment as well as glory; Soul and Body I, lines 2, 5b–7a, 19, 23a, 26a). This echo establishes a parallel between the soul’s addressee and the poem’s audience, not as a concluding reflection but as pervasive exhortation throughout. As Helen Appleton has remarked of medieval English grave poems both before and after the Conquest, “the occupant of the grave is consistently addressed in the second person, blurring distinctions between body and reader.”⁴⁸ And the speaking soul enjoins its audience not merely to know about the coming judgment but to remember, to reflect. The verb geþencan, often found in Old English devotional exhortations, denotes not only “to think” but also “to consider” or “bear in mind.”⁴⁹ The brutal litany of the soul’s exhortations enforces this command. The poem thereby forces its audience to vicariously endure what the bodies in the poem no longer can: We are eventually told that the body is nu (now) mute and deaf, no longer able to perceive either its own state or the soul’s appeals.⁵⁰ These monologues exist not for their ostensible addressees at all but for the poem’s living audience, who must prepare for death as the damned did not: by fully perceiving and remaining mindful of the terror to come. The poem thus requires deep empathy to produce the revulsion so integral to its overall effect. This requirement, and its use of a collectively held set of associations with shame and judgment, illuminate one mechanism of pre-Conquest affective devotion – the evocation of shame and fear – as well as the aesthetic strategies used to portray these terrors.

The Old English Soul and Body poems take part in a larger tradition of soul and body literature.⁵¹ Vercelli Homily IV provides a close vernacular parallel: This homily on Judgment Day contains a marvelous scene in which a blessed and damned soul each speak of and to their earthly bodies.⁵² This scene imaginatively depicts what the souls of the Soul and Body poems only look forward to, beginning with a saved soul pleading on behalf of its body that they may now be reunited at the resurrection:

The antitheses in this speech echo the ones found in the blessed soul’s monologue in the poem (although one marked difference is that this blessed body has, apparently, been spared the worm’s tooth thus far). The soul’s response and attachment to its body remains similarly affective – its rejoicing now depends on its body’s grieving in life – and, oddly, similarly bodily in its representation: “Besyhð þonne sio sawl swiðe bliðum eagum to hire lichoman, 7 cwyð to him; ‘Gefeoh, in dryhten God gefeoh. Ic gefeo in þe’” (Then the soul looks upon its body with greatly joyful eyes, and says to it, “Rejoice, in the Lord God rejoice. I rejoice in you”; Vercelli Homily IV, lines 133–4). While the eyes of the soul should of course be understood in a spiritual or metaphorical sense, even when the soul is disembodied, its perception can only be conceived of in physical terms. Whether it feels or only sees its comforts or torments, there is no means of apprehension that could possibly be described that does not rely on the terms of embodiment, although a higher sense (sight) may be involved rather than a lower (touch). It is hard to avoid the impression that this homiletic depiction owes something to vernacular poetry, and vice versa, particularly when the conventional wolf and raven appear:

The homilist revels in the destruction of the once-proud body, in the loss of its strength, and in the absence of the family and community from which it had drawn strength in life. In its indulgence, the failure of the damned body is framed as a failure of perception: hwi ne ongeat ðu me? (why did you not perceive me?) Yet as much narrative freedom as the homily has, its theological lessons continue to restrain its narrative license. It offers practical, biblical injunctions for living righteously: “Utan arian þam earmum, wedewum 7 steopchildum; þonne bioð we sona onfenge mid Gode” (Let us give honor to the wretched, the widows, and the orphans, then are we immediately received by God; Vercelli Homily IV, lines 82–4). And it offers explanations of cosmology:

While the homily promises the presence of all humanity at the Judgment and promises that the high shall be brought low, the grim fixation of the shaming of the damned soul occupies a far smaller portion and receives a much more extensive didactic frame than it receives in the Soul and Body poems.⁵³

The question remains, however, what to make of Soul and Body II, the version of the poem with no blessed soul for comparison, and with little to none of the homily’s didactic framework to clarify the lessons drawn from the soul’s sorry speech.⁵⁴ Here it might seem that the fact of the grave itself serves as punishment and ironic reward for the damned body’s excesses in life. Yet even in this shorter version, the poem evinces the interplay between affectively evocative poetic and homiletic topoi: the damned soul repeatedly appeals to its body’s sense of shame, and laments their fate in elegiac terms. This shame may well be the inverse of the body’s pride and excess in life. Yet the form of the dialogue reasserts the social bonds between the material and immaterial aspects of the individual, and between the individual and others. The damned body’s inescapable connection to the human community in fact becomes the means of its condemnation:

The list of possible creatures the damned body might have been moves from the earth to the sea, from the cultivated land to the wilderness and into the earth itself. It would have been better, we are told, that the body should have been not itself but even one of the worms now feasting upon it than that it should have been made human, and worse, have received baptism. In deploying elegiac terms to berate its body as having failed in a duty of care, the grammatically feminine soul echoes the wronged feminine speaker of The Wife’s Lament: while the soul laments having ever met its body, the wife laments that it is “nu swa hit no wære” (as if it never were).⁵⁵ This body was one fully integrated into the community to which it was obliged and that should have enabled it to do better, and now it will be proven to be lower than the lowest of the animals. The community that it was made part of will be part of its condemnation, too:

While the sinful body will have to make answer to God, the presence of all humanity, the perception of being perceived, will make the revelation of sins particularly painful. The poem fixates particularly on the Body’s speech: It will have to answer (ondwyrdan; line 82) with the voice of his mouth (muþes reorde); the Soul asks rhetorically what it will then say (secgan; lines 87, 88–9). At the most basic level, the revulsion and appeal to shame depend upon the living hearer’s own identification with the sinner in death, whose latter state contrasts so sharply with that in life. Soul and Body II, set amid the elegiac meditations of the Exeter Book, enforces this consideration without recourse to its opposite, the soul in glory. The Body’s sins are described in only general terms, while the description of its decay is extensive and specific. The damned Soul journeys away at the end, certain to return continually until the awaited judgment arrives. Even without explicitly offering the hope of heaven as an alternative, the aversion to decay and shame apparently suffice to the poem’s ends. Yet the aesthetic potential of this decay and shame relies on the intellectual knowledge and moral investment of the hearers to have existed in the first place, instilled by the teaching of their own communities.

The Persistence of Shame at Judgment Day

Soul and Body I and II are not the only pre-Conquest poems to fixate on the affective experience of shame as a defining feature of the Final Judgment. Nor is the phenomenon limited to vernacular English poetry: Bede’s De die iudicii likewise runs through an array of affective states, from grief to shame to terror, and it, rather than the vernacular tradition, serves as the source for the evocation of shame in its Old English version, now known as Judgment Day II. Many early medieval poetic conventions surrounding Judgment appear in Latin sources as well as vernacular counterparts: De die iudicii invokes not only affective devotion generally but shame as a particular defining affect of the impending Judgment.

De die iudicii alternates affective and physical suffering: for example, the paired warnings that all will fear, and strike their breasts (lines 79–81).⁵⁶ However, these are not so much distinct types of suffering that coincide but related facets of experience. While this qualification might seem petty, the dynamics of affect prove essential to the ways in which devotion and suffering operate in the poem. We see these dynamics as the speaker returns to addressing his own flesh, which apparently fails to apprehend the suffering to come:

While much in these lines is biblical or conventional, these lines reflect aesthetic representations of affective devotion particularly familiar from the vernacular poetry. The narration initially proceeds in present tense, eliding temporal separation between the poem and the events it describes. Then the speaker switches from third person to second and from present tense to future in the rhetorical question he flings at his own flesh: Quid, caro, quid facies? (What, flesh, what will you do?) The judgment is not present but imminent, and the flesh, again, bears responsibility both for past sins and for the answer to be given for them. The next pronouncement repeats the disjunction between present and future and asserts the connection between them: The fleeting pleasures of the flesh will in fact endure, but only as a painful meditation, in the judgment to come. Those future torments are even projected into the past; they are already prepared and presently waiting. Yet the affective appeal to fear for the greater terrors to come – cur non tormenta timebis (why will you not fear the torments?) – gives way to appeal to the physical senses, albeit with the assurance that physical sense and description do not nearly suffice to apprehend such suffering.

As with the Soul and Body poems, the salient affects in De die iudicii and other English Judgment Day poems appear as embodied experience, or as experience that may only be represented in embodied terms. The signs and portents of the coming judgment are described in detail (Judgment Day II, lines 99–122; De die iudicii, lines 50–61). And fear again is linked with shame: “Sis memor illius, qui tum pauor ante tribunal / Percutiet stupidis cunctorum corda querelis” (May you be mindful of the fear that will strike the hearts of those gathered before the tribunal at that time, with them grieving, confounded; De die iudicii, lines 62–3); we are told, yet the speaker himself remembers that “quod nunc aliquem uerecundans scire uerebar, / Omnibus in patulo pariter tunc scire licebit” (That which I now, being ashamed, fear for anyone to know, will be admitted in the open for everyone equally to know at that time; De die iudicii, lines 70–1). The community of all saints and sinners present at the tribunal – omnes – occasions the fear as well as the shame of this moment. As Milton McC. Gatch has remarked: “Individual salvation in isolation from the rest of mankind and notions of the continuing existence of the soul in a state of freedom from the physical body were, though present, not at the centre of the early medieval Christian’s conception of the afterlife.”⁵⁷ But the communal experience in this case offers little comfort, as we see in the Old English translation, too:

Distinctions of status evaporate; the paired descriptors of “þearfan | and þeodcyningas, / earm and eadig” and “earm and se welega” abstractly encompass all humanity. We are told that social and legal distinctions between them no longer apply, for one law applies to them all, and they all share in the same terror. Indeed, for a space of some twenty lines in the Latin, the description of standing before the heavenly Judge contains no reference to him, but rather dwells upon the presence of other humans (De die iudicii, lines 62–83). Beyond relying on an internalized other to provoke the sense of shame, these poems provoke that sense through a depiction of the actual others who will stand witness at the Final Judgment.

Past and present are juxtaposed in both the Old English and the Latin versions: The speaker who now (nunc) fears, being ashamed (uerecundans) knows that inevitably his fears will come true at a time to come (tunc). While in the earlier sections the speaker had implored his limbs to make his sins known to God in the earthly present, he knows that their revelation will proceed in any event in his celestial future – their revelation not only to Christ, but to every other sinner who has ever lived or ever will:

While the blessed body of Soul and Body I is promised freedom from shame, the speaker of De die iudicii has no such assurance either of salvation or, if saved, of being spared humiliation at Judgment – both bodily decay and affective suffering inevitably await him. The Old English verse plays on the consonance between man (man, human) and mān (sin, crime), suggesting an identity between the two. Again, the offending members of the body – the heart, the tongue, the hand – are enumerated, giving up their secrets at last. The verb sceamian (to be ashamed) appears in the preterite, projecting the experience of shame ostensibly into the past – what one would sceamian to admit in life is what will be made known at the judgment. Shame, for the figure standing at judgment here, apparently did not spur better behavior but concealment of worse. Yet the futurity of judgment for both the speaker and listener of the poem renders this an anticipatory shame, like that found in the Soul and Body poems – a sense of shame that may yet have a reforming influence. The poem continues to play upon the relationship between present and future: none will receive honor (ar) there, “buton he horwum sy | her afeormad / and þonne þider cume, | þearle aclænsad” (unless he may here be cleansed from foulness, and at that time comes there sorely cleansed; Judgment Day II, lines 157–8, emphasis mine). Here and there, now and then, are juxtaposed such that the unavoidable future judgment becomes urgently present.

As in the Soul and Body poems, in De die iudicii, the inaccessibility of worldly physical sense in death, and conversely the inaccessibility of death to living human senses, presents an aesthetic challenge. How can post-mortem experience be rendered perceptible? While the Soul and Body poems focus on the time before the Final Judgment, when the Body lies insensible, De die iudicii and Judgment Day II portray the time when all bodies have risen from their graves. At that time, Bede’s poem promises, the body will have sense perception, but of things that cannot be apprehended by the earthly body in its current state, or cannot be expressed by earthly language by which only earthly experience may be conveyed, or that may be forbidden to be expressed even if it were possible. As the Old English version has it:

The torments awaiting exceed both earthly speech and earthly perception. The motif draws upon a tradition extending back to Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 12:4, declaring that in his vision of Paradise he “heard secret words, which it is not granted to man to utter.”⁵⁸ Although the Soul and Body poems necessarily focus on the lack of sense perception in dead bodies before the Judgment, De die iudicii meditates upon the limits of sense perception in the living. De die iudicii thus meditates at length upon the horrors of hell, but apophatically asserts that the horrors described are not nearly adequate to the reality. The point thus made formally is a poetic one as well as a theological one. Its aesthetic orientation reflects the limits of the aesthetic as a category of experience, and by doing so evokes the affective awe and terror in anticipation of exceeding that limit in the world to come.

De die iudicii carries on its negative theology throughout both the sequence on the damned and the sequence on the blessed. For the damned in hell, there is nothing except horror:

The anaphora of the nisi clauses emphasizes those horrors that will positively be in hell to the exclusion of all else. Each of these horrors represents embodied experience, from the groans that emit from the body itself to the sight of other bodies to the freezing and burning that afflict the body from without. From here the poem goes on to promise that no comfort or help will ever come, but fear and weeping will. Compare this excerpt of the description of the joys of heaven:

Here again, the poem proceeds by listing horrors but negating them – including the repetition of the phrase frigora, flammae that features so prominently in the hell sequence. Those things negated are again concrete, perceptible by or arising from the body itself: night and light, sighing and hunger. Conversely, the good things posited as actually being in heaven – pax et pietas, bonitas, opulentia (peace and faithfulness, goodness, abundance) – are abstract things, theological ideas that are not able to be perceived by worldly senses but must be conceptually extrapolated, insofar as they can be, from sensory perception and intellectual understanding in concert (De die iudicii, lines 135–45). These particular terms, and terms for the affects to be associated with them, are necessarily inadequate to explain the affect they create only cumulatively; they point beyond themselves. While the reluctance to describe the divine in any detail partakes in a long tradition, the juxtapositions of Bede’s poem highlight the inadequacies of sensory perception itself.⁵⁹

The concern with perception becomes an aesthetic problem with ethical implications. Although the Old English translation of De die iudicii has no personal appeal, and no metacritical comment in its final lines, Judgment Day II clearly partakes in the other conventions of devotional and hortatory literature, and indeed of Old English poetics, reflected in the contexts in which it was preserved. Judgment Day II survives in two versions: one in verse, in a collection of similarly devotional poems in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 201; and another in prose, redacted into the middle of an eschatological homily in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 113.⁶⁰ E. G. Stanley has suggested an earlier vernacular prose translation of Bede’s poem as the source for both extant Old English versions, but whatever the case may be, the manuscript witnesses strongly attest that the overtly homiletic bent of Bede’s poem was borne out through its translations. In his edition of both Old English versions, Graham D. Caie speaks of the “homiletic,” even “prosaic” language of the poem, in phrases such as Ic bidde eow (I pray you) or Gemyne eac on mode (be mindful also in spirit.) (Judgment Day II, lines 33 and 92).⁶¹ Of course, homiletic language and even exhortation are common features of Old English verse; the Soul and Body poems also begin with such language. Prosaic as it may be, the homiletic language evokes the necessary associations and investments in the theological themes of the poem, as it moves between the scenes of generalized judgment and the particular, present narrator, sitting alone, contemplating life after death.

Although Bede’s poem reflects Latinate poetic conventions, it also evinces a number of elements typically associated with vernacular poetry: the speaker sits alone in grief,⁶² and sings a mournful song about his life (De die judicii lines 1–17).⁶³ The Old English translation largely follows the descriptions and details of Bede’s poem in its introductory lines: the speaker describes sitting alone in a wood, where

The scene appeals to various senses: winds are felt and heard, the plants suggest pleasing sights and smells. But the turbulent winds (winda gryre) quickly suggest dread.⁶⁴ The landscape portends the contrasts of the poem: the beauty of creation, the violence that awaits it. The consonance of gehrered (stirred up) and gedrefed (disturbed) underscores the tumult in the speaker’s mind as it mirrors the tumult in his surroundings. From the opening lines, the Old English observes less of the contrast between present delight and eternal terror, working a kind of perpetual terror into the landscape from the beginning.⁶⁵

In Bede’s Latin, the physical signs of terror and related affects seem to be essential to the speaker’s experience, as well as to the penitential response it evokes in him:

The poetic positioning of the body in relation to the self reflects some of the same complications we see in Soul and Body: While it is not clear here what the relation of the self is to the soul, the body seems at least figuratively distinct here – vos, as distinguished from ego – and the self must beg the body to make outward signs of inward grief, as if it were an independent entity.⁶⁶ Nevertheless, we note that not only the body but individual parts of the body have a mind of their own, so to speak: While the speaker prostrates himself, his eyes must pour forth tears, and he must beg (rogo, precor) that they shall not hold back when the time comes.

The Old English follows these lines fairly closely, emphasizing that the speaker grieves, murcnigende, as he begs his physical body to sufficiently display that grief. While the inward experience of grief precedes these bodily signs, the speaker’s prayers suggest that something in his response is still lacking. If this poem represents the vernacular tradition, it may be that the bodily response must exist for the psychological one to happen at all, as they are one and the same. Yet the speaker prays in part because he is forht (afraid), unrot (unhappy), and gedrefed (disturbed) (Judgment Day II, lines 10, 25), and because his body does not adequately reflect that fact. The mind, its earme geþanc (miserable thought), is included in this appeal:

The apparent lack in the speaker’s physiological display of grief and penitence contrasts dramatically with God’s own: God listens with his earum atihtum (literally, with ears extended), yet if the speaker fails to respond mid hreowlicum tearum (with wretched tears), he will be faced with the þæt yrre […] eces deman (the anger of the eternal judge; Judgment Day II, lines 75–6). The repetition of nu (now) at the beginning of consecutive lines (and again several times in the lines that follow) heightens the sense of urgency that his delaying mind apparently fails to grasp.⁶⁷ Significantly, both the Latin and vernacular list the mind (mens, De die iudicii, line 33; geþanc, Judgment Day II, line 65) among the delinquent members of the body.

In any case, a merely intellectual understanding of the speaker’s sins will not suffice as their acknowledgment, much less as penance for them. If his voice is not gemens (sighing), the poem suggests, some sins may remain hidden from Christ and thereby remain unforgiven. In this representation, his affective state relies upon and resides in the body. The perception of affect may in part precede a physical manifestation, but its expression may not. Sin does not necessarily manifest itself perceptibly, but the poem implies that penance must. De die iudicii metaphorically presents Christ as medicus supernus (celestial doctor), who must be shown the vulnera (wounds) of sin (line 23). This metaphor interacts with the presumably literal tears expected of the penitent. Thus affect manifests physically in both literal and figurative senses. The only and best hope for the sinner is that he make known what will eventually come to light anyway: “Ne þær owiht | inne ne belife/ on heortscræfe | heanra gylta, / þæt hit ne sy dægcuð, | þæt þæt dihle wæs” (May no shred remain of shameful guilts in the heart-cave, that that which was secret not be clear as day; Judgment Day II, lines 38–40). While he must do so with openum wordum (open words; line 41a), it seems that a merely factual account will not suffice for the penitent’s purification.

The mechanism of purification seems somewhat different between the Latin and Old English versions, although in both cases, dread takes physical form. The difference between the two suggests a further difference between the text’s concern with offering human hope or reiterating human frailty. In the Latin, we are assured that:

The reminder that God heals and frees, and thus will not harm, the faithful establishes a sense of reassurance. In the positive image, the objects of God’s salvific works are vulnerable human patients and prisoners; in the negative clause, the objects of the verbs are, in fact, objects: reeds and smoke that might be cast aside without sympathy. While both clauses are metaphors, the positive metaphor uses a human image as its vehicle, subtly underscoring its affirmation of physical integrity. Such hope is not absent from the vernacular, yet its focus changes with a change in metaphor:

From the objects of the Latin metaphors – trembling reeds, tepid smoke – the Old English draws more literal and specifically human forms of weakness: the foolish mind and weak flesh. What these poems share, however, is their emphasis not only on the crucially affective aspect of this devotion, but that affective expression must be embodied. Devotion must be deeply felt, and for it to be so, its effects must be written on the flesh.

Aesthetics at the End of the World: Post-mortem Perception

The wretched company of sinners features prominently throughout other poems on Judgment Day. Even in the rare occasions when the explicit terminology of shame (sceamu, sceamian, pudor, uerecundans) does not appear, the dread certainty that the worst deeds of every sinner will be known to all predominates, promising and provoking anticipatory shame for its audience. Although Judgment Day I mostly proceeds in a third-person, homiletic voice, the end of the poem “switches curiously from a homiletic third-person address to a prayerlike, first-person narrative mode in which the speaker solicits the audience’s participation in his poem.”⁶⁸ This fairly conventional move echoes the hortatory conclusions of any number of pre-Conquest English poems, and has provoked suggestions of a “penitential group” within the Exeter Book.⁶⁹ Again, we see that such poems particularly meditate upon the state of the physical body as it learns its fate:

These lines express the paradoxes of the world to come by inscribing them upon the body, and in so doing, they accomplish something else. They express the inaccessible in terms of the mundane, but as soon as they have done so, they negate the mundane’s existence. How may the body, lic, exist with neither bones nor blood? How will the body hear when it lacks the basic materials for life? The poem’s aesthetic power relies on asserting its audience’s own embodied presence even as it takes the body apart.

The aesthetic problem of representing the suffering of the body after death, a suffering that exceeds anything known to human experience or accountable in human languages, runs throughout the long tradition of Judgment Day literature, although not all of this literature would have been known, or well known, in England before the eleventh century. This problem of aisthesis, of the possibility of sense perception, bears serious devotional implications since both reward and punishment depend upon it. In his Prognosticum futuri saeculi, Julian of Toledo insists that the soul does not lose perception when separated from the body, that it is unthinkable that the soul, in which “imago Dei […] ac similitudo consistit, deposita hac qua retunditur in praesenti sarcina corporali, insensibilem fieri” (“lies the image and likeness of God, becomes insensible once the burden of the body with which it is oppressed in this world is laid aside.”)⁷⁰ Yet Julian here cites Augustine’s explanation that the soul must bear a likeness to the body – corporis similitudo – to be able to perceive like the body.⁷¹ Furthermore, Julian points out – quoting Gregory the Great on this point – that the incorporeal soul was contained by the corporeal body in life, and thus might suffer from corporeal flames in death: “Quamuis colligere dictis euangelicis possumus, quia incendium anima non solum uidendo sed etiam experiendo patiatur” (“from the sayings of the Gospel we can deduce that the soul suffers from fire not only because it sees it, but also because it experiences it.”)⁷² For Julian, the character of the soul’s suffering must at least resemble that of the body, although in fact the soul perceives more intensely when freed from the body.⁷³ Julian particularly focuses, however, upon vision above other senses.⁷⁴ Vision becomes a particular occasion for terror,⁷⁵ and the just will see differently than the unjust.⁷⁶ Indeed the just, too, will hear the punishment of the unjust. However, their affective response does not simply result from what they hear but from their identification with those who have been saved – in this instance, the just will feel no terror or grief at all.⁷⁷ Shame does not appear in Julian’s account of the Final Judgment, but the affective responses of the judged that he identifies remain linked to perception.

In the earliest English poems on the Final Judgment, reward and punishment similarly require a perception that at least mimics that of the body, and that perception similarly occasions significant affective response. Connected with this embodied imagery of suffering and punishment, the appropriate affective orientation toward sin and punishment is at times presented in the terminology of payment:

While this passage omits the explicit vocabulary of shame, it implies the concept through deep affective suffering for acknowledged misdeeds: the sinner “his synna nu | sare geþenceþ, / modbysgunge | micle dreogeþ” (now sorrowfully considers his sins, suffers great anxiety of his mind), he is “geomor” (sad), “sarig fore his synnum” (sorry for his sins). Since the reciprocity of the so-called honor culture cannot apply, some new economy must be understood to work here. In these lines, the Lord repays (forgieldan) the debt of sin. Shame or sorrow cannot provoke any sufficient action to atone for these misdeeds, common to all humanity, but identifying with and being possessed of the right affective orientation can, in some sense, repay or signal acceptance of Christ’s having repaid the debt of sin himself. The potential for affective suffering, and the need for it, are portrayed as extending beyond the life of the body that might have seemed necessary for the individual penitent to be affected. Doctrine promises the resurrection of the body, but these poems fixate upon its members, tracing anticipated and realized aesthetic experience.

The Soul and Body poems, De die iudicii, and Judgment Day II, among others, have similar approaches to crucially locate affective suffering in the body, both at the Judgment and, in Bede’s poem, during earthly life. In Judgment Day II, for example, the present, earthly wæterburnan (water streams) contrast with the reðe flod (cruel flood) that will burn the earman saula (miserable souls) at the Judgment (lines 3 and 166–7).⁷⁸ The wyrmas (worms) that tear at hearts are here reserved for all of sinful humanity, without apparent distinction yet between the saved and damned (Judgment Day II, lines 168–9, 211–12). While salvation and damnation are juxtaposed, in the Old English, the sensory images of damnation are rendered with some specificity: “Þær nan stefn styreð | butan stearcheard / wop and wanung” (there no voice rises except unrestrained grief and wailing; Judgment Day II, lines 201–2a). Salvation appears as the negation of hellish images (lines 254–67), or with the vague leohtes scima (splendor of light; line 255b); the saved as “gesælig and ofersælig / and on worulda woruld | wihta gesæligost” (blessed and exceedingly blessed and most blessed of beings anywhere; lines 247–8). The details of heaven are restricted to mention of the Father, the Son, and troops of angels, and the virgins led by Mary through the kingdom of God:

This brief glimpse in the final fifteen lines of the poem offers the most concrete images of the scenes of salvation. Yet here again, the images focus away from the individual penitent. While the images of hell offer generalized details of suffering and pain, they appeal to senses of touch and sound as well as sight; they are a present danger rather than mere spectacle. The apprehension instilled by these images is not quite equal and opposite. The poem’s sensory images and the quality of the affective responses they encourage are of a different kind. The presentation of hell appeals to mundane sense perception heightened to the extreme, while little of heaven can be conveyed in those terms at all. Heaven offers hope and bliss, but the pains of hell appear closer to human understanding.

In the Judgment Day poems, bodies bear responsibility not only for outward actions that constitute sin or penance, but for taking on the inward, affective actions that determine and reveal the individual’s eternal fate.⁷⁹ And for both, the affective orientation depends not only upon the individual but upon the presence of all humanity, and the open revelation of all hidden action. Finally, Bede’s poem, in its envoi, offers a brief comment on the reason for his verse: “En, tua iussa sequens cecini tibi carmina flendi, / Tu tua fac promissa precor sermone fideli” (See! According to your command I have sung to you songs of lament; fulfill your promise, I beg, according to your faithful speech; De die iudicii, lines 158–9). Like other such comments, the envoi’s injunction participates in the convention of an artificer appealing for prayers at the end of his work. It suggests a few other things about the expectations of this kind of poetry: that it should be a song of lament, that it should provoke a pious response. This comment, with the poem it concludes, epitomizes the aesthetic experience of the work: It not only helps to determine but is part of the aesthetic experience of the poem. The comment is not merely aesthetic, but it is the kind of convention on the aesthetic we might expect.

The Potential for Paradise

The end of the world promises terror but holds out the possibility of joy. As Julian of Toledo put it, the reward of the saints is unspeakable joy at the apprehension of the divine.⁸⁰ Affective piety does not simply enable salvation, it prefigures it. The devotional concerns of the poems discussed here are not to do with teaching information, or simply encouraging better behavior in response to information, but with evoking affective investments toward and aesthetic associations with that information, and toward the possibility of redemption itself: Vos, precor, effusis lacrimis non parcite statim (De die iudicii, line 16). Pre-Conquest devotional poems evoke affective responses, and poems on Judgment Day evoke negative affect, particularly shame, to produce their aesthetic and devotional ends. In this we see that the representation of affect is embodied; even when soul and body are ostensibly separated at death, the soul’s experience must be at least represented through the language and images of bodily experience.

So the “degenerate realism” and “grim satisfaction” of meditation on death are not “a perverted essay,” in the end, but a complex strategy of deploying the associated affects of poetic conventions to both aesthetic and devotional ends. Decay is not a potential punishment but a future fact, and this bodily state may either honor or shame the believer when all humanity convenes at the Judgment. These poems’ aggressive depictions of bodily violence allow them to represent what exceeds the capacity of bodily sense. The aesthetics of Judgment Day poems rely upon affective investments in salvation and against decay. They aesthetically represent the embodiment of affective experience and in it the culpability of the individual hearer or reader of the poem. We see this emphasis on embodiment in how early medieval English Judgment Day poems meditate upon the status of the physical body at various stages after death, in the ways that affective orientation toward that state may be explicitly ordered or vividly modeled, in the ways that affect is often located in the specific members of the body, and in the way these poems appeal to but also work to exceed or negate the imagery of worldly embodied experience. The manifestation of affective appeals differs from those that would characterize later affective piety: They do not inspire sympathy for the suffering of Christ so much as for one’s own impending suffering and shame for having deserved it. They play upon communal bonds to provoke shame and revulsion, rather than to inspire compassion. These poems emphatically concern themselves with the types of affective response they inspire and, in turn, play upon the types of affective investments their audiences would be expected to already have.

To the extent that the poems are didactic, they rely upon already understood doctrine that they seek to animate in the imagination of their audience. If at the same time they include familiar homiletic refrains, they do not typically convey explicit doctrinal material in the ways that homilies might be expected to. These didactic features of the poems are as necessary to their aesthetic as their aesthetic is to their didactic elements; the poems’ didactic and aesthetic concerns are inseparable from one another. The poems must be aesthetically effective to function as devotional works, and they do this by relying upon and vivifying images in which their audiences already hold spiritual investment. These poems might teach their audiences to feel, but – crucially – they also assume that they already do.