1 Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969) [hereafter, Historia ecclesiastica, cited in text by book and chapter], iv.24; p. 414. Translations from this text are my own. Bede includes his own verse in the Historia ecclesiastica, including his hymn to Æthelthryth in Historia ecclesiastica, iv.20. On the Old English poetic version of the Hymn, see Kevin S. Kiernan, “Reading Cædmon’s ‘Hymn’ with Someone Else’s Glosses,” Representations 32 (1990): 157–74; and Paul Cavill, “Bede and Cædmon’s Hymn,” in “Lastworda Betst”: Essays in Memory of Christine E. Fell, ed. Carole Hough and Kathryn A. Lowe (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2002), 1–17. For the vernacular version of the Ecclesiastical History, see Thomas Miller, ed., The Old English Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, EETS o.s. 96 (London: Oxford University Press, 1891).

2 Both dilectio and amor have connotations of both physical or worldly and spiritual love; see DMLBS, s.v. “amor”; “dilectio.”

3 Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 2.

4 Judgment Day I, line 83; “who now sorrowfully considers his sins.” Quotations from Old English poems are from George Philip Krapp and Elliot van Kirk Dobbie, eds., ASPR, 6 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931–42), unless otherwise indicated. Translations are my own unless noted otherwise.

5 Charles Altieri argues for the importance of intention and engagement in affective states, The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 5–15.

6 Christopher A. Jones, “Performing Christianity: Liturgical and Devotional Writing,” in The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature, ed. Clare A. Lees (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 427–50, at 435.

7 On the use of such conventional apologies for translation, see Helen Gittos, “The Audience for Old English Texts: Ælfric, Rhetoric and ‘the Edification of the Simple.’” ASE 43 (2014): 231–66.

8 On the form of catechetical instruction in the early Middle Ages, see Virginia Day, “The Influence of the Catechetical Narratio on Old English and Some Other Medieval Literature,” ASE 3 (1974): 51–61, esp. 54.

9 See Michael Lapidge, “Bede the Poet,” in Anglo-Latin Literature, 600–899 (London: Hambledon Press, 1996), 313–38; Emily V. Thornbury, Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), esp. 183–97.

10 Nicholas Watson, Balaam’s Ass: Vernacular Theology before the English Reformation, Volume 1: Frameworks, Arguments, English to 1250 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), 147.

11 On the associative potential of Old English poetic formulas, see John Miles Foley, “Reading the Oral Traditional Text: Aesthetics of Creation and Response,” in Comparative Research on Oral Traditions: A Memorial for Milman Parry, ed. John Miles Foley (Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1987), 185–212; John Miles Foley, Immanent Art: From Structure to Meaning in Traditional Oral Epic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Mark Griffith, “Convention and Originality in the Old English ‘Beasts of Battle’ Typescene,” ASE 22 (1993): 179–99; Donald K. Fry, “The Cliff of Death in Old English Poetry,” in Comparative Research on Oral Traditions: A Memorial for Milman Parry, ed. John Miles Foley (Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1987), 213–33; and Hugh Magennis, “‘Monig Oft Gesæt’: Some Images of Sitting in Old English Poetry,” Neophilologus 70 (1986): 442–52. On the persistence of cultural knowledge of the conventions of Old English verse, see Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990; repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

12 Foley, “Reading the Oral Traditional Text,” 193.

13 Sara Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 29–51, at 35.

14 Foley, Immanent Art, 7.

15 Heather Maring, Signs that Sing: Hybrid Poetics in Old English Verse (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017), 3.

16 See, for example, Jennifer A. Lorden, “He eft astod: A Verbal Motif in Beowulf,” Notes and Queries 67, no. 3 (2020): 351–54.

17 Donald K. Fry, “Old English Formulaic Themes and Type-Scenes,” Neophilologus 52, no. 1 (1968): 48–54.

18 For a study of the combination of forms in Old English verse specifically, including consideration of oral and written sources, see Maring, Signs that Sing, esp. 2–4, 8–33.

19 Barbara Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 8–9.

20 R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 223. For a reading of the ways in which obedience as practiced within Benedictine monasticism requires rather than excludes the exercise of agency, see Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, Stealing Obedience: Narratives of Agency and Identity in Later Anglo-Saxon England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012).

21 Southern, Making of the Middle Ages, 226. Bernard’s sermons on the Song of Songs are considered especially influential; see Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs, in Sancti Bernardi Opera, ed. Jean LeClercq, C. H. Talbot, and H. M. Rochais, 7 vols. (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957–74).

22 Southern, Making of the Middle Ages, 231–32.

23 Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), esp. 50–69. On the monastic context of what is considered early affective piety, see Lauren Mancia, Emotional Monasticism: Affective Piety in the Eleventh-Century Monastery of John of Fécamp (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019).

24 McNamer, Affective Meditation, 59–62.

25 Michelle Karnes, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 12–15.

26 Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings (London: Routledge, 1993), 3–4, 21–42.

27 For a critique of many approaches to studying affect in the Middle Ages, see D. Vance. Smith, “The Application of Thought to Medieval Studies: The Twenty-First Century,” Exemplaria 22, no. 1 (2010): 85–94; Smith contrasts the approaches of affect theory and psychoanalytic theory.

28 Thomas Bestul, “St. Anselm and the Continuity of Anglo-Saxon Devotional Traditions,” Annuale Mediaevale 18 (1997): 20–41, at 20; see also 33–8 on the continuation of this tradition across the Norman Conquest. Bestul further develops the evidence for Anselm’s interest in pre-Conquest literary and devotional culture before his arrival in England in Thomas H. Bestul, “St Anselm, the Monastic Community at Canterbury, and Devotional Writing in Late Anglo-Saxon England,” Anselm Studies 1 (1983): 185–98; esp. 186–93.

29 Bestul, “Continuity,” 21; the Book of Cerne is Cambridge, University Library, MS Ll.1.10.

30 Scott DeGregorio, “Affective Spirituality: Theory and Practice in Bede and Alfred the Great,” Essays in Medieval Studies 22 (2005): 129–39, at 130.

31 DeGregorio, “Affective Spirituality,” 131, see also 133. For editions of these works, see Bede, In Cantica Canticorum, ed. D. Hurst, CCSL 119B (Turnhout: Brepols, 1985), 166–375; Asser’s Life of King Alfred, ed. William Henry Stevenson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904); reprinted with a new introduction by Dorothy Whitelock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), cap. 24, 88.

32 Helen Foxhall Forbes, “Affective Piety and the Practice of Penance in Late-Eleventh-Century Worcester: The Address to the Penitent in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 121,” ASE 44 (2015): 309–45.

33 Frances McCormack, “Those Bloody Trees: The Affectivity of Christ,” in Anglo-Saxon Emotions: Reading the Heart in Old English Language, Literature, and Culture, ed. Alice Jorgensen, Frances McCormack, and Jonathan Wilcox (London: Routledge, 2016), 143–61, at 160.

34 McCormack, “Bloody Trees,” 160; Foxhall Forbes, “Affective Piety,” 310; DeGregorio, “Affective Spirituality,” 131.

35 Through what follows, I use the terms “Old English” to refer to the forms of English spoken and written in England before the Norman Conquest and “early Middle English” generally to refer to English from the Norman Conquest through the 1200s, although of course it is impossible to draw a hard boundary between either the languages or the people who spoke and wrote them – this indeed is one of the contentions of my project. When referring to the cultures or periods of time in which these languages are used, I refer to specific locations or centuries where possible, but refer to “early medieval England” or “early medieval English” at times when it is necessary to include a broader range of peoples or forms of these languages. On the problems with the term “Anglo-Saxon,” see Susan Reynolds, “What Do We Mean by ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Anglo-Saxons?’” Journal of British Studies 24, no. 4 (1985): 395–414; Mary Rambaran-Olm, “Misnaming the Medieval: Rejecting ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Studies,” History Workshop (2019), historyworkshop.org.uk/misnaming-the-medieval-rejecting-anglo-saxon-studies/; and David Wilton, “What Do We Mean by Anglo-Saxon? Pre-Conquet to the Present,” JEGP 119, no. 4 (2020): 425–56; on the nationalist interests of the earliest scholars of Old English, see Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); as well as many of the sources in T. A. Shippey and Andreas Haarder, eds., Beowulf: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1998).

36 Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 1–25.

37 John Cassian, Conférences, ed. Dom E. Pichery (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1955–59), vol. 2, conf. 10, chap. 11, p. 92. For translation, see Boniface Ramsey, trans., Conferences (New York: Newman Press, 1997), 384. See discussion of this passage in Amy Hollywood, “Song, Experience, and Book in Benedictine Monasticism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism, ed. Amy Hollywood and Patricia Z. Beckman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 59–79, at 66.

38 Cassian, Conférences, conf. 10, chap. 11, p. 92.

39 Amy Hollywood, “Song, Experience, and Book,” 59–79; by contrast, see discussion of this passage in Southern, Making of the Middle Ages, 223–5. On the focus on “internalization” of biblical prayers in early commentaries on the Psalms, see also Brian Daley, “Finding the Right Key: The Aims and Strategies of Early Christian Interpretation of the Psalms,” in Psalms in Community: Jewish and Christian Textual, Liturgical, and Artistic Traditions, ed. Harold W. Attridge and Margot E. Fassler (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), 189–205, at 192. On the importance of the Psalms to monastic life and education more generally, see James W. McKinnon, “The Book of Psalms, Monasticism, and the Western Liturgy,” in The Place of the Psalms in the Intellectual Culture of the Middle Ages, ed. Nancy Van Deusen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 43–57; as well as Adalbert de Vogüé, “Daily Readings in Monasteries (300–700 C.E.),” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 26, no. 4 (1991): 286–294. On the importance of this tradition to pre-Conquest England, see George Hardin Brown, “The Psalms as the Foundation of Anglo-Saxon Learning,” in The Place of the Psalms in the Intellectual Culture of the Middle Ages, ed. Nancy Van Deusen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 1–24; as well as Patrick P. O’Neill, “Latin Learning at Winchester in the Early Eleventh Century: The Evidence of the Lambeth Psalter,” ASE 20 (1991): 143–166.

40 Benedicti regula, ed. Rudolph Hanslik, CSEL 75 (Vienna: Holder, 1960), chap. 7, line 9. Translations from the Regula are my own.

41 As Hollywood writes of Cassian’s use of affectus: “There is no distinction here between mediation (through the words of scripture) and immediacy (that of God’s presence), between habit and spontaneity, the impersonal and the personal, or feeling and knowledge”; see “Song, Experience, and Book,” 67. On the ways in which this affective potential of the Psalms is reflected in their Old English translations, see Stephen J. Harris, “Happiness and the Psalms,” in Old English Literature and the Old Testament, ed. Michael Fox and Manish Sharma (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 292–314.

42 Thomas Symons, ed., “Regularis concordia Anglicae nationis,” in Consuetudinum saeculi X/XI/XII monumenta non-Cluniacensia, ed. Kassius Hallinger, Corpus Consuetudinum Monasticarum 7.3 (Siegburg: Franz Schmitt, 1984) 61–147, at 74. See also Joseph Dyer, “The Psalms in Monastic Prayer,” The Place of the Psalms in the Intellectual Culture of the Middle Ages, ed. Nancy Van Deusen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 59–89, at 61, 64.

43 Symons, “Regularis Concordia,” 74; Edited and Translated in Thomas Symons, Regularis Concordia: The Monastic Agreement of the Monks and Nuns of the English Nation (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1953), 5r; translations from the Regularis concordia are from this latter edition (italics in original). See I Cor. 14:15. On the importance of the Psalms to the Regularis concordia in particular, see Mechthild Gretsch, The Intellectual Foundations of the English Benedictine Reform, CSASE 25 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 13–17.

44 Hollywood explores the relationship of the Latin participle affectus and the verb afficio (“to do something to someone, to exert influence on another body or another person, to bring another into a particular state of mind”) in “Song, Experience, and Book,” 67.

45 Malcolm Godden, “Anglo-Saxons on the Mind,” in Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies Presented to Peter Clemoes, ed. Michael Lapidge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 271–98, 286. Godden discusses the earlier work of Peter Clemoes in “Mens absentia cogitans in The Seafarer and The Wanderer,” in Medieval Literature and Civilization: Studies in Memory of G. N. Garmonsway, ed. Derek Pearsall and Ronald A. Waldron (London: Athlone, 1969), 62–77. For further discussion of how mind and memory are presented in Old English poetry, see Susan Irvine, “Speaking One’s Mind in The Wanderer,” in Inside Old English: Essays in Honour of Bruce Mitchell, ed. John Walmsley (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 117–33.

46 See Paul E. Szarmach, “Alfred, Alcuin, and the Soul,” in Manuscript, Narrative, Lexicon: Essays on Literary and Cultural Transmission in Honor of Whitney F. Bolton, ed. Robert Boenig and Kathleen Davis (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2000), 127–48, as well as Leslie Lockett, Anglo-Saxon Psychologies in the Vernacular and Latin Traditions (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2011), 184–91, 329–30.

47 On the hydraulic model of the mind, see Lockett, Anglo-Saxon Psychologies, 6–9, 110–78. Lockett further has argued that the brain was not considered the location of rational thought in pre-Conquest England, and so modern oppositions between the logical brain and emotional heart would not have been conceivable; see Leslie Lockett, “The Limited Role of the Brain in Mental and Emotional Activity According to Anglo-Saxon Medical Learning,” in Anglo-Saxon Emotions: Reading the Heart in Old English Language, Literature and Culture, ed. Alice Jorgensen, Frances McCormack, and Jonathan Wilcox (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 35–51, esp. 36–37.

48 On the relationship between form, affective perception, and moral content in the later Middle Ages, see Eleanor Johnson, Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). The idea that emotion could be instrumental to ethical thinking of course does not end with the Middle Ages; see, for example, Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

49 Lockett, “The Limited Role of the Brain,” 36.

50 Lockett, “The Limited Role of the Brain,” 37.

51 Niklaus Largier, “Inner Senses–Outer Senses: The Practice of Emotions in Medieval Mysticism,” in Codierungen von Emotionen Im Mittelalter / Emotions and Sensibilities in the Middle Ages, ed. C. Stephen Jaeger and Ingrid Kasten, Trends in Medieval Philology 1 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), 3–15.

52 Bede, In Cantica canticorum, 166–375; for the Latin translations of Origen, see Homiliae in Canticum canticorum, trans. Jerome, ed. W. A. Baehrens, in Origenes Werke, 8, Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten drei Jahrhunderte 33 (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1925); and Commentaire sur le Cantique des Cantiques, trans. Rufinus, ed. Luc Brèsard and Henri Crouzel, Sources chrétiennes 375, 2 vols. (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1991). On Bede’s use of the Latin Origen, see also Michael Lapidge, The Anglo-Saxon Library (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 220–1. Helmut Gneuss and Michael Lapidge cite two extant copies of Jerome’s Latin translation of the Origen commentary in Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: A Bibliographical Handlist of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England up to 1100 (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2014), 185–6, 191; nos. 229, 239.

53 Largier, “Inner Senses–Outer Senses,” 6. See also Karl Rahner, “Le debut d’une doctrine des cinq sens spirituels chez Origène,” Revue d’ascetique et de mystique 13 (1932): 113–45, at 116.

54 See Rahner, “Le debut,” 116. This is cited as a source of Bede, In I Samuelem prophetam allegorica expositio, ed. D. Hurst, CCSL 119 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1962); see Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Library, 220.

55 On questions of aesthetics and form in pre-Conquest England, see, among others, the essays in Anglo-Saxon Styles, ed. Catherine E. Karkov and George Hardin Brown (Binghamton: State University of New York Press, 2003), as well as those in On the Aesthetics of Beowulf and other Old English Poems, ed. John M. Hill (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010).

56 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987).

57 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, 2nd ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), 27; see discussion in Marjorie Perloff, Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), xix.

58 Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed. David Lodge and Nigel Wood (London: Longman, 2000), 30–55, at 39.

59 For further discussion of modern aesthetic theory with regard to Kant’s divergence from Baumgarten’s aesthetics, see Stefanie Buchenau, The Founding of Aesthetics in the German Enlightenment: The Art of Invention and the Invention of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); as well as J. Colin McQuillan, “Kant’s Critique of Baumgarten’s Aesthetics,” Idealistic Studies 45, no. 1 (2015): 69–80.

60 Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Meditationes Philosophicae De Nonnullis Ad Poema Pertinentibus, trans. Karl Aschenbrenner and William B. Holther (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954); see discussion in Kai Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 11.

61 Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” 35.

62 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), esp. 15–37.

63 For a study of words of emotion in the Psalms and their Old English translations, see Michiko Ogura, Words and Expressions of Emotion in Medieval English, Studies in English Medieval Language and Literature 39 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2013), 191–340.

64 Sharon Turner, History of the Anglo-Saxons, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (London: Longman, 1807), 285.

65 Kenneth Sisam, The Structure of Beowulf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 9.

66 William Carlos Williams, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” in Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems: Collected Poems 1950–1962 (New York: New Directions, 1962), 153–82, at 161–2.

1 A. S. Lazikani, Cultivating the Heart: Feeling and Emotion in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Religious Texts (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2015), 71–92.

2 Émile Mâle, Religious Art in France: The Late Middle Ages. A Study of Medieval Iconography and its Sources, ed. Henry Bober, trans. Marthiel Matthews (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 82, quoted in Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 58–85, at 58.

3 McNamer, Affective Meditation, 60–2.

4 The poem survives in Oxford, Jesus College, MS 29. For further discussion of its origin and devotional character, see Betty Hill, “The ‘Luue-Ron’ and Thomas de Hales,” Modern Language Review 59, no. 3 (1964): 321–30; as well as Sarah M. Horrall, “Thomas of Hales, O.F.M.: His Life and Works,” Traditio 42 (1986): 287–98; for an edition of the poem see Carleton Brown, ed., English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 68–74.

5 Daniel Anlezark, “From Elegy to Lyric: Changing Emotion in Early English Poetry,” in Understanding Emotions in Early Europe, ed. Michael Champion and Andrew Lynch (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 73–98, at 96.

6 On the prevalence of Old English conventions for subjective experience well beyond the bounds of those poems considered “elegiac,” see Emily V. Thornbury, “Lyric Form, Subjectivity, and Consciousness,” in A Companion to British Literature, Volume 1: Medieval Literature, 700–1450, ed. Robert Demaria, Jr., Heesok Chang, and Samantha Zacher (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 30–47.

7 Paul E. Szarmach, “The Dream of the Rood as Ekphrasis,” in Text, Image, Interpretation: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Its Insular Context in Honour of Éamonn Ó Carragáin, ed. Alastair Minnis and Jane Roberts (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 267–88 at 287.

8 Szarmach, “Ekphrasis,” 287. Elaine Treharne connects the violent depictions of the cross’s still-wet wounds to the drastic transformation inherent to baptism; see Elaine Treharne, “‘Hiht wæs geniwad’: Rebirth in The Dream of the Rood,” in The Place of the Cross in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Catherine E. Karkov (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2006), 145–57.

9 See discussion of these conventions and their significance in, for example, Rosemary Woolf, “Doctrinal Influences on The Dream of the Rood,” MÆ 27, no. 3 (1958): 137–53, esp. 144–5; Michael Swanton, ed., The Dream of the Rood (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1970); Mary Dockray-Miller, “The Feminized Cross of The Dream of the Rood,” Philological Quarterly 76, no. 1 (1997): 1–18, esp. 3–5; and Christina M. Heckman, “Imitatio in Early Medieval Spirituality: The Dream of the Rood, Anselm, and Militant Christology,” Essays in Medieval Studies 22 (2005): 141–53, esp. 141–2.

10 Maring, Signs that Sing, 51.

11 On the significance of treasure imagery in Old English verse, see Elizabeth M. Tyler, Old English Poetics: The Aesthetics of the Familiar in Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2006), esp. 9–22.

12 Lazikani, Cultivating the Heart, 72.

13 Lazikani, Cultivating the Heart, 71–2. On the development of the related concept of empathy in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German philosophy, see Karl F. Morrison, “Framing the Subject: Humanity and the Wounds of Love,” in Studies on Medieval Empathies, ed. Karl F. Morrison and Rudolph M. Bell (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 1–58, at 3–4.

14 Seeta Chaganti, “Vestigial Signs: Inscription, Performance, and The Dream of the Rood,” PMLA 125, no. 1 (2010): 48–72.

15 See, for example, Beowulf, lines 2742b–3: “nu se wyrm ligeð,/ swefeð sare wund, | since breafod” (now the dragon lies, sleeps grievously wounded, deprived of treasure); quotations from Beowulf are from Klaeber’s Beowulf, ed. R. D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles, 4th ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008).

16 Dream of the Rood, lines 33b–7a: “Geseah ic þa frean mancynnes / efstan elne mycle | þæt he me wolde on gestigan./ Þær ic þa ne dorste | ofer dryhtnes word / bugan oððe berstan, | þa ic bifian geseah / eorðan sceatas” (I saw then the Lord of mankind hasten with great valor that he would climb up on me. There I did not dare bow or break against the Lord’s word, when I saw the surfaces of the earth shake).

17 See, however, an early dissent to this view attributing the poem’s conventions of exile and loss of community not to poetic conventions but to Benedictine monasticism in John V. Fleming, “The Dream of the Rood and Anglo-Saxon Monasticism,” Traditio 22 (1966): 43–72, esp. 44–7.

18 McCormack, “Those Bloody Trees,” 146–67. On the affective dimensions of the Christ poem, see Chapter 5.

19 Chaganti, “Vestigial Signs,” 64.

20 Compare, for example, Wiglaf’s sitting over the body of Beowulf, attempting sorrowfully to revive him; Beowulf, lines 2845b–54.

21 The verb þenian may mean to stretch out or prostrate, or to strain with effort; see Bosworth, Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, s.v. “þennan,” but see also s.v. “þegnian,” meaning “to serve.”

22 See Matt. 27:45–52.

23 Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); enlarged ed., (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 5.

24 On English saints of the period, see John Blair, “A Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Saints,” in Local Saints and Local Churches in the Early Medieval West, ed. Alan Thacker and Richard Sharpe, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 495–565; as well as John Blair, “A Saint for Every Minster? Local Cults in Anglo-Saxon England,” in Local Saints and Local Churches in the Early Medieval West, ed. Alan Thacker and Richard Sharpe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 455–94. Chief among these domestic saints were Æthelthryth and Swithun. For the history of the cult of Swithun and editions of the uitae, see Michael Lapidge, The Cult of St Swithun, Winchester Studies, 4.2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

25 For an overview including a list of vernacular prose saints’ lives, see E. Gordon Whatley, “An Introduction to the Study of Old English Prose Hagiography: Sources and Resources,” in Holy Men and Holy Women: Old English Prose Saints’ Lives and their Contexts, ed. Paul E. Szarmach (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 3–32.

26 On the continental sources of early English saints’ lives, see Rachel S. Anderson, “Saints’ Legends,” in A History of Old English Literature, 2nd ed., ed. R. D. Fulk and Christopher M. Cain (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 133–56; Rachel Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2011), esp. 47–59; as well as Catherine Cubitt, “Review Article: The Tenth-Century Benedictine Reform in England,” Early Medieval Europe 6, no. 1 (1997): 77–94, esp. 92–3. On the interaction of traditions surrounding continental and insular saints, see Catherine Cubitt, “Universal and Local Saints in Anglo-Saxon England,” in Local Saints and Local Churches in the Early Medieval West, ed. Alan Thacker and Richard Sharpe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 423–53.

27 On Oswald, see Clare Stancliffe and Eric Cambridge, eds., Oswald: Northumbrian King to European Saint (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1995); on Æthelthryth, see Virginia Blanton, Signs of Devotion: The Cult of St Æthelthryth in Medieval England, 695–1615 (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2007).

28 For Bede’s hymn to Æthelthryth, see Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969) iv.19–20, pp. 392–96; for Ælfric’s later uita, see Aelfric’s Lives of Saints, ed. W. W. Skeat, EETS 76, 82, 94, 114 (London: Oxford University Press, 1881–1900; repr. as 2 vols., London: Oxford University Press, 1966). For editions of the vernacular poems, aside from ASPR, see Kenneth Brooks, ed., Andreas and the Fates of the Apostles (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961); Rosemary Woolf, ed., Cynewulf’s Juliana, rev. ed. (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1977); P.O.E. Gradon, ed., Cynewulf’s Elene (London: Methuen, 1958); Jane Roberts, ed., The Guthlac Poems of the Exeter Book (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979); and Robert E. Bjork, ed., The Old English Poems of Cynewulf, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). In his edition, Bjork includes Guthlac B as one of Cynewulf’s poems; for his arguments for its inclusion, see Old English Poems of Cynewulf, xi, xiii–xiv; and for further discussion of this possibility, see Frederick M. Biggs, “Unities in the Old English ‘Guthlac B,’” JEGP 89, no. 2 (1990): 155–65, at 164–5. For a comprehensive study of the verse hagiographies, see Robert E. Bjork, The Old English Verse Saints’ Lives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985).

29 See, for example, Levi Roach, “Apocalypse and Atonement in the Politics of Æthelredian England,” ES 95, nos. 7–8 (2014): 733–57, esp. at 739–42, 745; Catherine Cubitt, “Sites and Sanctity: Revisiting the Cult of Murdered and Martyred Anglo-Saxon Royal Saints,” Early Medieval Europe 9, no. 1 (2000): 53–83; as well as Susan J. Ridyard, The Royal Saints of Anglo-Saxon England: A Study of West Saxon and East Anglian Cults (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

30 On devotion and liturgy, see Introduction. On the relationship between hagiography and liturgy, see also Alan Thacker, “The Cult of Saints and the Liturgy,” in St Paul’s: The Cathedral Church of London, 604–2004, ed. Derek Keene, Arthur Burns, and Andrew Saint (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 113–22.

31 Benedicti regula, chap. 53, lines 21–4.

32 Thomas Symons, ed., “Regularis concordia Anglicae nationis,” in Consuetudinum saeculi X/XI/XII monumenta non-Cluniacensia, ed. Kassius Hallinger, Corpus Consuetudinum Monasticarum 7.3 (Siegburg: Franz Schmitt, 1984) 61–147, at 76. Translated in Thomas Symons, ed., Regularis Concordia: The Monastic Agreement of the Monks and Nuns of the English Nation (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1953), 7. Translations from the Regularis concordia are from this edition.

33 On such “emotional communities,” see Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).

34 John 13:34, cf. John 15:12, Matt. 22:38–40.

35 Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” 35.

36 See, for example, Ælfric’s discussion of the biblical injunction to leave one’s father and mother to follow Christ (Luke 14:25–6) in Peter Clemoes, ed., Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The First Series, EETS s.s. 17 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), XXVII, lines 193–209.

37 Benedicti Regula, Prologue, line 1.

38 Benedicti Regula, Prologue, line 1.

39 Malcolm Godden, ed., Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The Second Series, EETS s.s. 5 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 102–3, lines 362–75; see discussion in Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, Stealing Obedience: Narratives of Agency and Identity in Later Anglo-Saxon England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 98–104. For the episode in Gregory, see Adalbert de Vogüé, ed., Grégoire le Grand, Dialogues, trans. Paul Antin, vol. 2, Sources chrétiennes 260 (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1979), II.24.

40 Augustine, De doctrina christiana I.xxxiii.37. Translation my own. See discussion in Robin Norris, “The Augustinian Theory of Use and Enjoyment in Guthlac A and B,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 104, no. 2 (2003): 159–78, at 165.

41 Historia ecclesiastica, iv.20. On the history of Æthelthryth’s cult, see Blanton, Signs of Devotion.

42 For an evaluation of the poems’ editorial history and discussion of how they are to be read as both distinct poems and parts of larger wholes, see Roy M. Liuzza, “The Old English Christ and Guthlac: Texts, Manuscripts, and Critics,” RES n.s. 41 (161) (1990): 1–11.

43 For the source of the Guthlac poems, see Felix’s Life of St. Guthlac, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956).

44 Compare this to the Old English prose translation of Felix’s Vita, which “systematically excises much of Felix’s exotic vocabulary, Vergilian flourishes, ornamental repetition, and extensive parallel phrasing, thereby reducing some chapters to half their previous length”; see Sarah Downey, “Too Much of Too Little: Guthlac and the Temptation of Excessive Fasting,” Traditio 63 (2008): 89–127, at 99.

45 Norris, “Use and Enjoyment,” 161; see Felix, Vita Sancti Guthlaci, cap. XXXV.

46 See Mary Carruthers, The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

47 While this image is an expansion of a single reference to bitterness in Felix’s text, Thomas N. Hall traces the imagery of the cup of death in Guthlac B, as well as in Beowulf, Juliana, Bede’s Life of St Cuthbert, Ælfric’s Life of St Vincent, among others, to a recurring image in the writings of Gregory the Great; see Hall, “A Gregorian Model for Eve’s biter drync in Guthlac B,” RES n.s. 44 (174) (1993): 157–75, esp. 167–70. Hall argues further that the integration of patristic material demonstrates that the author of Guthlac B does much more than render Felix’s Life into vernacular verse, see Hall, “Gregorian Model,” 174–5. On the interpretation of this line and its analogues, see Carleton Brown, “Poculum mortis in Old English,” Speculum 15, no. 4 (1950): 389–99; and further discussion in Hugh Magennis, “The Cup as Symbol and Metaphor in Old English Literature,” Speculum 60, no. 3 (1985): 517–36.

48 See Guthlac B, lines 898–900a: “Þær hy mislice | mongum reordum/ on þam westenne | woðe hofun/ hludne herecirm” (There they variously raised clamour in that wasteland with many voices, a loud war cry).

49 The Old English introduces this motif where the Latin merely contrasts the vitae saporem (savor of life) with the amaritudo mortis (bitterness of death); Felix, Vita Sancti Guthlaci, cap. L, p. 152.

50 See DOE, s.v. “ambiht-þegn”; four of the six surviving attestations of this word in the corpus are in Guthlac B. Since Beccel remains unnamed in Guthlac B, this is the term by which he is generally known throughout the poem.

51 Soon-Ai Low, “Mental Cultivation in Guthlac B,” Neophilologus 81, no. 4 (1997): 625–36, at 625.

52 Low suggests that the portrayal of emotions in Guthlac B “do not seem to derive from the native hagiographic tradition so much as from the elegiac”; see Low, “Mental Cultivation,” 625.

53 On the monastery as schola, see Benedicti Regula, Prologue, line 45: “Constituenda est ergo nobis dominici scola seruitii” (“Therefore we must establish a school for the service of the Lord”); on the topos of the lord-retainer relationship in this poem, see Stephen D. Powell, “The Journey Forth: Elegiac Consolation in Guthlac B,” ES 79, no. 6 (1998): 489–500.

54 See Bosworth and Toller, Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, s.v. “magu.”

55 For extensive discussion of the specific denotations of terms for mind, spirit, heart, and soul in the poem, and their correlation with uses of these terms in elegiac poems such as The Wanderer, see Low, “Mental Cultivation,” 628–31.

56 Low, “Mental Cultivation,” 632.

57 Low, “Mental Cultivation,” 630; see Guthlac B, lines 959–61.

58 See discussion of Beccel’s loss as þeodengedal in Powell, “Journey Forth,” 493.

59 Felix, Vita Sancti Guthlaci, cap. L, p. 154.

60 On the limits of self-denial practiced by eremitics, and the protocols enabling them to receive an entertain guests, see Downey, “Too Much of Too Little,” 108–9.

61 On the ways in which medieval depictions of sin allow “this fundamental element of human subjectivity [to take] on a material aspect in the human body,” see Jacqueline A. Stodnick and Renée R. Trilling, “Before and after Theory: Seeing Through the Body in Early Medieval England,” postmedieval 1 (2010): 347–53, at 350.

62 See, for example, the mirus odor that issues from the tomb of St. Swithun at the time of his translation, Wulfstan, Narratio metrica, in Lapidge, Cult of St Swithun, I.v., line 974.

63 Felix, Vita Sancti Guthlaci, cap. L, 158–60.

64 Felix, Vita Sancti Guthlaci, cap. L, 160.

65 McNamer, Affective Meditation, 2.

66 Low, “Mental Cultivation,” 635.

1 See, for example, Kathleen Barrar, “A Spacious, Green and Hospitable Land: Paradise in Old English Poetry,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 86, no. 2 (2004): 105–25; as well as Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Paradise, Death and Doomsday in Anglo-Saxon Literature, CSASE 32 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), esp. 142–7.

2 On the joy the saved experience at the apprehension of the divine, see the florilegeum of Julian of Toledo, Prognosticum futuri saeculi, in Sancti Iuliani Toletanae sedis episcopi opera, ed. J. N. Hillgarth, vol. 1, CCSL 115 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1976), II.15; translated in Julian of Toledo: Prognosticum futuri saeculi, ed. Tommaso Stancati, Ancient Christian Writers 63 (New York: Newman Press, 2010), III.50.

3 Tyler, Aesthetics of the Familiar, 9.

4 Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 1; see also Wendy Love Anderson, The Discernment of Spirits, Spätmittelalter, Humanismus, Reformation 63 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011). On the complexity of ecclesiastical authority in early England, see John Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 40–1; on discernment in Old English poetry, see Jennifer A. Lorden, “Discernment and Dissent in the Cynewulf Poems,” Modern Philology 116, no. 4 (2019), 299–321. I am grateful to Jasmin Miller for conversations about the discernment of spirits in medieval literature.

5 See Paul L. Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley’s incisive history in the introduction to their The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity, ed. Paul L. Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1–19.

6 Tyler, Aesthetics of the Familiar, 14.

7 Tyler, Aesthetics of the Familiar, 14.

8 As Adam Potkay has demonstrated, the vision of joy in the gospels, specifically in the Gospel of John, appears as a unity “expressed in interpenetrating pronouns: ‘I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you’ (14:20). Individuation is in some sense preserved but it is preserved through incorporation.” See The Story of Joy: From the Bible to Late Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 38.

9 Mary Carruthers, “Sweetness,” Speculum 81, no. 4 (October 2006): 999–1013; esp. 1003–6.

10 Alban Gautier, “Sweetness and Bitterness: The Sense of Taste in and around Anglo-Saxon England,” in Sense and Feeling in Daily Living in the Early Medieval English World, ed. Maren Clegg Hyer and Gale R. Owen-Crocker (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), 54–69.

11 Malcolm Godden and Susan Irvine, eds., The Old English Boethius: An Edition of the Old English Versions of Boethius’s “De Consolatione Philosophiae,” 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) B Text, cap. 22, line 26. On the ways that the Old English Boethius navigates and embraces aesthetic experience, see Jennifer A. Lorden, “Tale and Parable: Theorizing Fictions in the Old English Boethius,” PMLA 136, no. 3 (2021): 340–55, esp. 343–6.

12 See, for example, Ps. 33:9: “O taste, and see that the Lord is sweet: blessed is the man that hopeth in him.”

13 Juliana, line 369: “Ic him geswete synna lustas” (“I sweeten for him the desires of sin.”)

14 Kabir, Paradise, 1–3. Kabir further explores the origin and decline of the “conceptualisation of the interim condition as a pleasant as well as a penal location,” of a paradise preceding heaven as well as a “‘proto-purgatory,’ or a provisional hell”; see Paradise, 6. On the concept of purgatory in pre-Conquest England, see Sarah Foot, “Anglo-Saxon ‘Purgatory,’” Studies in Church History 45 (2009): 87–96.

15 Kabir, Paradise, 3.

16 Alastair Minnis, From Eden to Eternity: Creations of Paradise in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 1.

17 See Potkay, Story of Joy, 16–20, on the “insistence that the state of joy cannot be described in words.”

18 Barrar, “Paradise in Old English Poetry,” 105–11, 125.

19 Sara Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” 32–3.

20 Vincent Gillespie, “The Senses in Literature: The Textures of Perception,” in A Cultural History of the Senses in the Middle Ages, ed. Richard G. Newhauser (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 153–73, at 160.

21 Leslie Lockett, Anglo-Saxon Psychologies, 54–178.

22 On the relationship between emotions and the will, see Godden, “Anglo-Saxons on the Mind,” 271–98.

23 Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” 34–5.

24 Gittos, “The Audience for Old English Texts,” esp. 252, 265.

25 Day, “Catechetical Narratio,” 51–3. The source for ideas about catechetical instruction is Augustine’s De catechizandis rudibus, see Gustav Krüger, ed., De catechizandis rudibus, 3rd ed. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1934). For further discussions of the parallels to both catechism and liturgy, see J. R. Hall, “‘The Old English Epic of Redemption’: Twenty-Five Year Retrospective,” in The Poems of MS Junius 11: Basic Readings, ed. R. M. Liuzza (London: Routledge, 2013), 53–68.

26 Day, “Catechetical Narratio,” 54.

27 Daniel Anlezark argues that Junius 11, which includes the Genesis poems, was likely compiled for an elite lay reader; “Lay Reading, Patronage, and Power in Bodleian Library, Junius 11,” in Ambition and Anxiety: Courts and Courtly Discourse, c. 700–1600, ed. Giles E. M. Gaspar and John McKinnell (Durham: Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2014), 76–97.

28 Historia ecclesiastica, iv.24.

29 Leslie Lockett, “The Limited Role of the Brain,” 36–7.

30 See E. K. C. Gorst, “Latin Sources of the Old English Phoenix,” N&Q 53, no. 2 (2006): 136–42.

31 N. F. Blake, “Some Problems of Interpretation and Translation in the OE Phoenix,” Anglia 80 (1962): 50–62, at 50.

32 Blake, “Problems of Interpretation,” 56–7.

33 Daniel G. Calder, “The Vision of Paradise: A Symbolic Reading of the Old English Phoenix,” ASE 1 (1972): 167–81, at 168.

34 Calder, “Vision of Paradise,” 174.

35 Calder, “Vision of Paradise,” 169.

36 Calder, “Vision of Paradise,” 169, quoting Augustine’s De civitate Dei: (Calder’s translation); Bernhard Dombart and Alphonsus Kalb, eds., Sancti Aurelii Augustini de civitate Dei libri XII, 2 vols., CCSL, 47 and 48 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1955) Book XI, cap. 22. Hilary E. Fox argues that the emphasis on God as “aurifex” reflects how he “refines all of his creation” at the end of the world; Fox, “The Aesthetics of Resurrection: Goldwork, the Soul, and the Deus Aurifex in The Phoenix,” RES, n.s. 63, no. 258 (2011), 1–19, at 10.

37 Calder, “Vision of Paradise,” 178.

38 Calder, “Vision of Paradise,” 180.

39 The Phoenix, lines 5–10: “singular,” with the sense of “incomparable.”

40 Helen Appleton, “The Insular Landscape of the Old English Poem The Phoenix,” Neophilologus 101, no. 4 (2017): 585–602, at 600.

41 Tyler, Aesthetics of the Familiar, 99.

42 Samuel Brandt, ed., De aue phoenice, L. Caeli Firmiani Lactanti opera omnia, CSEL 27.1 (Vienna: Holder, 1893), lines 5–6; hereafter De aue phoenice, cited by line number.

43 The Phoenix, lines 374b–5a: “Bið him self gehwæðer / sunu ond swæs fæder” (He is to himself son and his own father); see also lines 355b–8: “God ana wat,/ cyning ælmihtig, | hu his gecynde bið, / wifhades þe weres; | þæt ne wat ænig / monna cynnes, | butan meotod ana” (God alone knows, the almighty king, what his nature is, either male or female; nor does anyone of the kindred of men know that, except God alone).

44 Lockett, Anglo-Saxon Psychologies, 56–102.

45 Edited in ASPR 1, as well as A. N. Doane, Genesis A: A New Edition, Revised, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 435 (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2013) and A. N. Doane, ed., The Saxon Genesis: An Edition of the West Saxon Genesis B and the Old Saxon Vatican Genesis (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). Quotations from Genesis A and Genesis B are from the Doane editions.

46 Junius seems to have met John Milton, and scholars have speculated about the striking similarities between Milton’s Paradise Lost and Genesis B; see William F. Bolton, “A Further Echo of the Old English Genesis in Milton’s Paradise Lost,” RES n.s. 25 (97) (1974): 58–61; J. W. Lever, “Paradise Lost and the Anglo-Saxon Tradition,” RES o.s. 23 (90) (1947): 97–106.

47 The Old Saxon Genesis survives in Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica, MS Pal. Lat. 1447. Eduard Sievers had proposed his theory of an Old Saxon source in Der Heliand und die angelsächsische Genesis (Halle, 1875); the excerpts of the Old Saxon poem were found by Karl Zangemeister in 1894 and published in their first edition that year: see Wilhelm Braune, “Bruchstücke der altsächsischen Bibeldichtung aus der Bibliotecha Palatina,” Neue Heidelberger Jahrbücher 4 (1894): 205–94. For history and analysis of Genesis B and its critical fortunes, see R. Derolez, “Genesis: Old Saxon and Old English,” ES 76, no. 5 (1995): 409–23. For the edition of the Old Saxon and discussion of its history, provenance, and relationship to the Old English Genesis B, see Doane, Saxon Genesis.

48 Doane, Saxon Genesis, 49–50. For further consideration of the history of Genesis B, see A. N. Doane, “The Transmission of Genesis B,” in Anglo-Saxon England and the Continent, ed. Hans Sauer and Joanna Story, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 3 (Tempe: ACMRS, 2011), pp. 63–81.

49 Doane, Saxon Genesis, 50.

50 Based on the layout and fitt divisions of the manuscript, Doane demonstrates that the original interpolator of Genesis B into Genesis A was not likely to have been the copyist of Junius 11; see Saxon Genesis, 36–8, 49.

51 In spite of the absence of concrete features in these descriptions, Charles D. Wright argues that the poet’s approach to biblical history is fundamentally historical and uninterested in allegory or typology as opposed to literal language; see Charles D. Wright, “Genesis A ad litteram,” in Old English Literature and the Old Testament, ed. Michael Fox and Manish Sharma (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012): 121–71.

52 On the origin of this illustration and others in the Junius manuscript, see Herbert R. Broderick III, “Observations on the Method of Illustration in MS Junius 11 and the Relationship of the Drawings to the Text,” Scriptorium 37, no. 2 (1983): 161–77, esp. 165–7; see also Barbara Raw, “The Probable Derivation of Most of the Illustrations in Junius 11 from an Illustrated Old Saxon Genesis,” ASE 5 (1976): 133–48. For discussion of the features of this illustration, see Catherine E. Karkov, Text and Picture in Anglo-Saxon England: Narrative Strategies in the Junius 11 Manuscript, CSASE 31 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), esp. 50–2.

53 Barrar, “Paradise in Old English Poetry,” 111, 125.

54 “Residence” or perhaps “seat.” See Bosworth, Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, s.v. “setl.” On the relationship between “setl” and “seld,” see F. Holthausen, Altenglisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, 2nd ed. (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1963), 289, s.v. “setl.” “Setl” reinforces the language of construction and artifice begun in the preceding lines.

55 DOE, s.v. “brucan.” Besides meaning both “to use” and “to enjoy,” brucan also means “to wear clothing, jewellery” and “to have sexual relations with (someone).” While the term must be understood with wholesome connotations in the context of this moment in Genesis A, we should remember that the imperative itself does not explicitly exclude types of use and enjoyment beyond those which God invites them to at this moment.

56 Augustine, De doctrina christiana, I.iv.4. Translation my own. For discussion of this see Norris, “Augustinian Theory,” 164.

57 On the puzzling ambiguity of the term neorxnawang, see Alan K. Brown, “Neorxnawang,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 74, no. 4 (1973): 610–23; on the possible identity of the pagan reference, see also Edgar C. Polomé, “Nerthus/Njorðr and Georges Dumézil,” Mankind Quarterly 40, no. 2 (1999): 143–54.

58 On the relationship between the Old Saxon and Old English versions, see Doane, Saxon Genesis, 41, 43–64. Doane follow’s Barbara Raw’s analysis of the Junius 11 manuscript to conclude that the splicing of Genesis B “was not undertaken for aesthetic reasons” but to fill in an incomplete copy of Genesis A, Exodus, and Daniel. Raw argues that the illustrations to the Junius 11 Genesis correspond more closely to events in the Old Saxon Genesis (including scenes that occur in the Old Saxon but not in either Old English poem) and that therefore the illustrations were originally intended for an Old Saxon Genesis that came to England. For scenes in Genesis B that repeat Genesis A, the illustrator of the Junius manuscript invents new illustrations by remixing elements of the previous ones. See Raw, “Probable Derivation,” 133–48. For a counterargument, see Herbert R. Broderick III, “Metatextuality, Sexuality and Intervisuality in MS Junius 11,” Word & Image 25, no. 4 (2009): 384–401, at 385–6. For a comprehensive consideration of the manuscript’s composition, including text and illustrations and the implications of these for its probable dating, see Leslie Lockett, “An Integrated Re-examination of the Dating of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11,” ASE 31 (2002): 141–73.

59 Minnis, From Eden to Eternity, 1, 6–16.

60 Beowulf, lines 1018–19.

61 Bosworth and Toller, Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, s.v. “wæstm.”

62 Saxon Genesis, lines 2b–3a. Compare Genesis B, lines 792–4: “gesyhst þu nu þa sweartan helle / grædige and gifre. | Nu þu hie grimman meaht / heonane gehyran” (Now you see the darkness of hell, greedy and ravenous. Now you might hear them rage from here).

63 Glenn M. Davis, “Changing Senses in Genesis B,” Philological Quarterly 80, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 113–31, see especially 113, 116–21. For a reading contextualizing Eve’s thought in broader exegetical traditions of human weakness, see Katherine DeVane Brown, “Antifeminism or Exegesis? Reinterpreting Eve’s wacgeþoht in Genesis B,” JEGP 115, no. 2 (2016): 141–66. On the poem’s marked interest in psychology, see Daniel Anlezark, “Old English Biblical and Devotional Poetry,” in A Companion to Medieval Poetry, ed. Corinne Saunders (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 101–24, at 107. For consideration of the role of memory in Eve’s ability to discern, see Lisabeth C. Buchelt, “All about Eve: Memory and Re-collection in Junius 11’s Epic Poems Genesis and Christ and Satan,” in Women and Medieval Epic: Gender, Genre, and the Limits of Epic Masculinity, ed. Sara S. Poor and Jana K. Schulman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 137–58.

64 On the description of Eve’s vision in this section and possible parallels between this portion of Genesis B and a portion in the Heliand on the vision of Pilate’s wife, see Thomas D. Hill, “Pilate’s Visionary Wife and the Innocence of Eve: An Old Saxon Source for the Old English Genesis B,” JEGP 101, no. 2 (2002): 170–84.

65 Davis, “Changing Senses,” 122–4.

66 On the complex portrayal of repentance in Genesis B and its relationship to conversations around lay penance in the Frankish church at the time the Old Saxon original was composed, see Alexander J. Sager, “After the Apple: Repentance in Genesis B and Its Continental Context,” JEGP 112, no. 3 (2013): 292–310. For the possible relationship between theological concepts in Genesis B and Irish texts, see Janet Schrunk Ericksen, “Legalizing the Fall of Man,” MÆ 74, no. 2 (2005): 205–20.

67 Lockett, Anglo-Saxon Psychologies, 9–13, 60, 70–2.

68 For further consideration of the role of the breost in both receiving and producing speech in Old English poetry, see Eric Jager, “Speech and the Chest in Old English Poetry: Orality or Pectorality?” Speculum 65, no. 4 (1990): 845–59, esp. 854, for consideration of Genesis in particular, as well as Eric Jager, “The Word in the ‘breost’: Interiority and the Fall in Genesis B,” Neophilologus 75 (1991): 279–90.

69 Bliðe appears by itself only in Genesis B, although it appears in compounds in four instances in the larger poem, all in Genesis A: bliðheort describes God at creation at line 192; bliðemod occurs in the story of Noah and in the story of Abraham and in both cases describes a state of straightforward joy at the resolution of a difficulty (lines 1465, 1800), and later unbliðe occurs once to describe Sarah’s unhappiness after Hagar bears a son to her husband (line 2261).

1 There are two versions of the poem; each survives in a single extant copy: Soul and Body I appears in the Vercelli Book, ed. Krapp, ASPR 2; while the shorter Soul and Body II appears in the Exeter Book, ed. Krapp and Dobbie, ASPR 3; as well as Bernard J. Muir, ed., The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry: An Edition of Exeter Dean and Chapter MS 3501, 2 vols. (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000).

2 As we have seen in the previous chapters, that this is particularly so in the early English vernacular context is one of the implications of the hydraulic model of the mind demonstrated in Lockett, Anglo-Saxon Psychologies; on the ways in which emotional states are described as actions in Old English, see Godden, “Anglo-Saxons on the Mind,” 271–98.

3 Benjamin Kurtz, “Gifer the Worm: An Essay Toward the History of an Idea,” University of California Publications in English 2 (1929): 235–61, at 235–6.

4 For example, we are told that Beowulf “no […] þære feohgyfte / […] scamigan ðorfte” (he did not need to be ashamed of that reward-gift), lines 1025–6. His retainers, on the other hand, do have cause to be ashamed of their own possession of such gifts when they have failed to be worthy of them, see Beowulf, lines 2846b–51.

5 William Ian Miller, Humiliation and Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort, and Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); both discussed further later in the chapter.

6 Lockett, Anglo-Saxon Psychologies, esp. 25–35.

7 The conflict between spirit and flesh, of course, runs through the history of Christian thought; see, for example, Gal. 5:17: “For the flesh lusteth against the spirit: and the spirit against the flesh; for these are contrary to one another: so that you do not the things that you would.”

8 Miller, Humiliation, x.

9 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. by W. D. Hall (New York: Norton, 1990); from “Essai sur le Don: Forme et Raison de l’Échange dans les Sociétés Archaïques,” L’Année sociologique 1 (1923–4): 30–186.

10 Miller describes the decline of honor culture more vividly as an “assault on honor – by Christianity and later by commerce,” see Humiliation, 6.

11 For contrast, see the complex considerations of social status that determine an individual’s capacity to be humiliated by another in Miller, Humiliation, x, 18. On the semantic range of Old English words for fear, see Javier E. Díaz Vera, “Reconstructing the Old English Cultural Model for Fear,” Atlantis 33, no. 1 (2011): 85–103.

12 Williams, Shame and Necessity, 82.

13 Williams, Shame and Necessity, 84.

14 Williams, Shame and Necessity, 81.

15 Williams, Shame and Necessity, 89–90.

16 Williams, Shame and Necessity, 100.

17 Miller discusses the potential to universalize or, conversely, localize a cultural phenomenon, see Humiliation, 12–13.

18 Williams, Shame and Necessity, 12.

19 Williams, Shame and Necessity, 89.

20 See Steven Justice, “‘Shameless’: Augustine, after Augustine, and Way after Augustine,” JMEMS 44, no. 1 (2014): 17–43.

21 Justice, “Shameless,” 27–8; see Aeneid, in R. A. B. Mynors, ed., P. Vergilii Maronis Opera, Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), Book 5, line 455.

22 Williams discusses of the valences of this term; see Shame and Necessity, 78–81.

23 Williams, Shame and Necessity, 79.

24 Williams, Shame and Necessity, 79.

25 Williams, Shame and Necessity, 75.

26 Spencer Strub, “Learning from Shame,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 32 (2018): 37–75, at 38.

27 Alice Jorgensen, “‘It Shames Me to Say It’: Ælfric and the Concept and Vocabulary of Shame,” Anglo-Saxon England 41 (2012): 249–76, at 249–52.

28 See Benjamin Saltzman, Bonds of Secrecy: Law, Spirituality, and the Literature of Concealment in Early Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 2–3.

29 See, for example, Judgment Day I, lines 40–3a; Judgment Day II, lines 135–44; both discussed later.

30 Virginia Burrus, Saving Shame: Martyrs, Saints, and Other Abject Subjects (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

31 Matt. 25:40: “amen dico vobis quamdiu fecistis uni de his fratribus meis minimis mihi fecistis”; and, conversely, 25:45.

32 Matt. 22:39: “diliges proximum tuum sicut te ipsum.”

33 See, for example, Christ’s healing of a man on the Sabbath under the eye of the Pharisees, and his subsequent rebuke to them; Luke 14:1–6.

34 Among others, see Matt. 6:3.

35 Milton McC. Gatch, “Perceptions of Eternity,” in The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, ed. Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 198–213, at 201.

36 Gatch, “Perceptions of Eternity,” 212, 210.

37 Foley, “Reading the Oral Traditional Text,” 185–212.

38 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, European Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); from Pouvoirs de l’horreur: essai sur l’abjection (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1980).

39 Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); as well as Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

40 See Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 19–20. However, Ngai also points out that this dynamic coexists with a commercial culture in which rarefied art objects are commodified and “more removed from ‘everyday’ existence than ever,” 20.

41 Stanley B. Greenfield and Daniel G. Calder, A New Critical History of Old English Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1986), 236–37.

42 Kurtz, “Gifer the Worm,” 235–6 and 256, respectively. Kurtz offers a wealth of vivid epithets, calling the poem “a dementia of hatred” (256) and a product of the “tendencious medieval brain” (255).

43 Allen Frantzen, “The Body in Soul and Body I,” Chaucer Review 17, no. 1 (1982): 76–88, at 77.

44 Frantzen, “The Body,” 83. On the associations between worms and hell, see Karin Olsen, “Earthworms, Fire Serpents, and the Visual Imagination in the Old English Soul and Body,” in Anglo-Saxon England and the Visual Imagination, ed. John D. Niles, Stacy S. Klein, and Jonathan Wilcox (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2016), 199–209.

45 Haruko Momma, “Darkness Edible: Soul, Body, and Worms in Early Medieval English Devotional Literature,” in Darkness, Depression, and Descent in Anglo-Saxon Literature, ed. Ruth Wehlau (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2019), 237–54, at 240.

46 Maring, Signs that Sing, 40–9.

47 Frantzen, “The Body,” 83. However, Maring points out that only the worm who devours the body of the damned soul is described explicitly as “Gifer,” at least in the part of the poem that survives; Signs that Sing, 49.

48 Helen Appleton, “The Architecture of the Grave in Early Middle English Verse,” Leeds Studies in English 48 (2017), 73–88, at 75.

49 See, for example, “Uton we hycgan | hwær we ham agen, / ond þonne geþencan | hu we þider cumen” (Let us think where we possess a home, and then consider how we may come there) in Seafarer, lines 117–18; “Ær sceal geþencan/ gæstes þearfe | se þe gode mynteð / bringan beorhtne wlite” (He shall consider beforehand the need of his spirit, he who intends to bring a bright countenance before God) in Christ III, lines 1056b–8a; “Lyt þæt geþenceð, / se þe him wines glæd | wilna bruceð, / siteð him symbelgal, | siþ ne bemurneð, / hu him æfter þisse worulde | weorðan mote” (Little does he consider that, he who glad with wine enjoys pleasures, sits debauched at feasting, and does not bemoan the journey, how it must happen for him after this world) in Judgment Day I, lines 77b–80. Bosworth, Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, s.v. “geþencan.”

50 On the significance of the soul’s ability to speak only after death, and that indeed only the soul may now speak, see D. Vance Smith, Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 32–44.

51 For an overview of this tradition, see T. A. Shippey, Poems of Wisdom and Learning in Old English (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1976), 29–36. Besides these poems and a number of homilies, the soul and body topos appears again in the Exeter Book in Riddle 43.

52 Vercelli Homily IV in The Vercelli Homilies and Related Texts, ed. D. G. Scragg, EETS o.s. 300 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 90–107. Hereafter cited by line number from this edition.

53 “Þa he swiðust ofermodgode, þa geearnode he me þære ecan niðrunga” (When he was most high-minded, then he earned for me the overthrow of eternity); Vercelli Homily IV, lines 260–2.

54 Douglas Moffat has argued that, while both the Vercelli Soul and Body I and Exeter Soul and Body II stem from a common exemplar, the shorter Exeter version actually adheres more closely to the “original,” as evidenced primarily by what he takes to be the Vercelli scribe’s “misguided attempts at revision”; see “A Case of Scribal Revision in the Old English Soul and Body,” JEGP 86, no. 1 (1987): 1–8, at 1.

55 Wife’s Lament, line 24. But see the important caution about the allegorizing of gendered nouns in Masha Raskolnikov, Body Against Soul: Gender and Sowlehele in Middle English Allegory (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009), 8, as well as discussion in Chapter 4.

56 De die iudicii, in Bedae Venerabilis opera IV, ed., David Hurst, CCSL 122 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1955). Cited from this edition by line number; translations from this text are my own.

57 Gatch, “Perceptions of Eternity,” 204–5.

58 “[A]udivit arcana verba quae non licet homini loqui.” Paul mentions that he does not know if this vision occurred while in or out of the body; II Cor. 12:2–3.

59 See also Christ III, in which the damned are confronted with a grim portrait of the wounded Christ while the saved appear to see only Christ in glory; Christ III, lines 1204–61.

60 For a description of this manuscript and its contents, see Graham D. Caie, The Old English Poem “Judgement Day II”: A Critical Edition with Editions of De die iudicii and the Hatton 113 Homily Be domes dæge (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 22–4.

61 See Caie, The Old English Poem “Judgement Day II,” 52.

62 Magennis, “Monig Oft Gesæt,” 442–52.

63 Among others, see the prologues and epilogues of The Wife’s Lament, The Seafarer, and The Fates of the Apostles for examples of this topos in the vernacular tradition.

64 This is, in fact, the first definition of gryre in the DOE; all other definitions similarly suggest violence, terror, or a thing provoking terror. See DOE, s.v. “gryre.”

65 For the groundbreaking study of the ways that communities share “landscapes of fear,” see Yi-Fu Tuan, Landscapes of Fear (New York: Pantheon, 1979).

66 Leslie Lockett has traced the shifting understandings of the relationship between mind, body, and soul throughout the vernacular and Latin traditions in early medieval English literature. The particularities of Bede’s own understanding exceed the scope of the present discussion, but on the Old English translation of the Historia ecclesiastica, see Lockett, Anglo-Saxon Psychologies, 52–3, 94.

67 A variation of line 68 (“and forgifnesse gearugne timan”) closes the initial appeal to the members of the body at line 91.

68 Karma Lochrie, “Wyrd and the Limits of Human Understanding: A Thematic Sequence in the Exeter Book,” JEGP 85, no. 3 (1986): 323–31, at 324.

69 Lochrie, “Wyrd and the Limits of Human Understanding”; Tom Birkett, “Runes and Revelatio: Cynewulf’s Signatures Reconsidered,” RES 65, no. 272 (2014): 771–89.

70 Prognosticum futuri saeculi, in Sancti Iuliani Toletanae sedis episcopi opera, ed. J. N. Hillgarth, vol. 1, CCSL 115 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1976), II.15; translated in Stancati, Julian of Toledo. Translations from Julian of Toledo are from this edition.

71 Prognosticum futuri saeculi, II.16; see Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram, ed. J. Zycha, CSEL 28 (Vienna: Holder, 1894), p. 432–3, 12.35.

72 Prognosticum futuri saeculi, II.17. See A. de Vogüé, Grégoire le Grand, Dialogues, IV.30.

73 Prognosticum futuri saeculi, II.34.

74 See, for example, the discussion of a man whose sense became only more vivid in a dream, when his bodily eyes were closed in sleep; Prognosticum futuri saeculi, II.33.

75 See, for example, the terror upon seeing the condemnation of the devil in Prognosticum futuri saeculi, III.6.

76 Prognosticum futuri saeculi, III.8.

77 Prognosticum futuri saeculi, III.37.

78 Rēðe in line 166 may be a possible pun on reðe, meaning “right” or “just.”

79 Godden, “Anglo-Saxons on the Mind,” 271–98.

80 Prognosticum futuri saeculi, III.50.

1 Andrew Marvell, “A Dialogue between the Soul and the Body,” in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy, 5th ed. (New York: Norton, 2005), 477–8. On the breadth of this tradition, see Abe Davies, “The Poetics of the Soul and Body from the Exeter Book to Andrew Marvell: Dualism and Its Discontents,” in Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 29–72.

2 For the text of the Soul’s Address, see Douglas Moffat, The Soul’s Address to the Body: The Worcester Fragments (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1987); quotations from the text are from this edition. For Latemest Day, see Carleton Brown, English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century. On the Soul’s Address considered within the genre of “debate,” see Mary Heyward Ferguson, “The Structure of the Soul’s Address to the Body in Old English,” JEGP 69 (1970): 72–80 at 72–4; as well as Michel-André Bossy, “Medieval Debates of Body and Soul,” Comparative Literature 28 (1976): 144–63; the generic distinctions are taken up in Michelle Hoek, “Violence and Ideological Inversion in the Old English Soul’s Address to the Body,” Exemplaria 10, no. 2 (1998): 271–85.

3 M. Bradford Bedingfield, “Ritual and Drama in Anglo-Saxon England: The Dangers of the Diachronic Perspective,” in The Liturgy of the Late Anglo-Saxon Church, ed. Helen Gittos and M. Bradford Bedingfield (London: Boydell, 2005), 291–317, at 292–3.

4 Bedingfield, “Ritual and Drama,” 314.

5 Haruko Momma, “Darkness Edible,” 246. On the state of the text in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 343, see later in this chapter.

6 Laura Ashe, Fiction and History in England, 1066–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 10.

7 See Susan Rifkin, “Music at Wulfstan’s Cathedral” in St. Wulfstan and His World, ed. Julia S. Barrow and N. P. Brooks (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 219–29; Emma Mason, St. Wulfstan of Worcester: c. 1008–1095 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).

8 This partial list adapted from Elaine M. Treharne and Mary Swan’s “Introduction” to Rewriting Old English in the Twelfth Century, ed. Mary Swan and Elaine M. Treharne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1–10, at 1–2.

9 See, for example, the Old English Boethius, whose most complete copy, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 180, dates to the twelfth century in spite of the fact that it seems to contain the earlier, entirely prose version of the text. On the provenance of this text see Godden and Irvine, Old English Boethius, vol. 1, 42–3.

10 See, for example, the work of the so-called Tremulous Hand of Worcester, discussed later in this chapter.

11 Christopher Cannon, The Grounds of English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 36.

12 Smith, Arts of Dying, 46, 50.

13 Christine Chism, Alliterative Revivals (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 1, 14.

14 Chism, Alliterative Revivals, 14.

15 Ralph Hanna, “Alliterative Poetry,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 488–512, at 488n1 and 489.

16 Eric Weiskott, English Alliterative Verse: Poetic Tradition and Literary History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 8, 93–126, especially 101–3.

17 Ian Cornelius, Reconstructing Alliterative Verse: The Pursuit of a Medieval Meter (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 2017).

18 Stephen M. Yaeger, From Lawmen to Plowmen: Anglo-Saxon Legal Tradition and the School of Langland (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 6.

19 Raskolnikov, Body Against Soul, 3n2; Raskolnikov here draws upon the catalogue of Francis Lee Utley in “Dialogues, Debates, and Catechisms,” in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, ed. A.E. Hartung, vol. 3 (Hamden: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1972), 669–745, at 691–5. Despite their post-Conquest origins, both The Grave and The Soul’s Address are significantly included in Christopher A. Jones, ed., Old English Shorter Poems, Volume I: Religious and Didactic, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). On the structure of the poem, see Douglas Moffat, “The Worcester Soul’s Address to the Body: An Examination of Fragment Order,” Papers on Language and Literature 20, no. 2 (1984): 123–40.

20 Helen Fulton, “Body and Soul: From Doctrine to Debate in Medieval Welsh and Irish Literature,” in Sanctity as Literature in Late Medieval Britain, ed. Eva von Contzen and Anke Bernau (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 97. On this tradition more broadly, see Michel-André Bossy, Medieval Debate Poetry: Vernacular Works (New York: Garland, 1987).

21 Olsen, “Earthworms, Fire Serpents, and the Visual Imagination,” 199–209.

22 Raskolnikov, Body Against Soul, 22–3.

23 In In a þestri stude, the worms not only devour the body but possess their own judgment and deliberately divide it among themselves, according to the body’s complaint. See Raskolnikov, Body Against Soul, 82–3.

24 Theodore Batiouchkof, “Le Débat de l’âme et du corps,” Romania 20 (1891) 1–55, 513–76; Louise Dudley, “An Early Homily on the Body and Soul Theme,” JEGP 8 (1909), 225–53; Julius Zupitza, “Zu Seele und Leib,” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, ed. Stefan Waetzoldt and Julius Zupitza, vol. 91 (Braunschweig: George Westermann, 1893), 369–404. For more on the history of this tradition in Old English, see Claudio Cataldi, “A Literary History of the ‘Soul and Body’ Theme in Medieval England” (PhD diss., University of Bristol, 2018), 10–13; as well as Douglas Moffat, ed., The Old English Soul and Body (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1990), 28–32.

25 See Ferguson, “Structure of the ‘Soul’s Address,” 72–80. On later instances of soul’s monologues dating from the thirteenth century and later, see Bossy, “Medieval Debates,” 155–7.

26 The latter poem being an adaptation of the former; see Eleanor K. Heningham, “An Early Latin Debate of the Body and Soul Preserved in MS Royal 7 A III in the British Museum” (PhD diss., New York University, 1937), 68–83; J. Justin Brent, “From Address to Debate: Generic Considerations in the Debate between Soul and Body,” Comitatus 32 (2001): 1–18, esp. 3–4. Cataldi argues that the changes to the Visio Philiberti, in which the vision of the debate is seen by a first-person narrator rather than a priest as in the Royal Debate, reflect new academic practices of debate; see Cataldi, “Literary History of the ‘Soul and Body,’” 160–233, esp. 165–71.

27 See Heningham, “Early Latin Debate,” 9–10, 32–42; Batiouchkoff, “Le Débat,” 574. For the soul and body homily in the Leabhar Breac, see Robert Atkinson, ed., The Passions and Homilies from Leabhar Breac (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1887), pp. 266–73, 507–14, no. XXXVI.

28 Thomas Wright, ed., The Latin Poems Commonly Attributed to Walter Mapes (London: Camden Society, 1841), 98. A similar turn occurs in the Royal Debate, see Heningham, “Early Latin Debate,” 166.

29 Heningham, “Early Latin Debate,” 4–5.

30 On the development of debate poetry in Middle English more broadly, see John Conlee, Middle English Debate Poetry: A Critical Anthology (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1991), xiii–xiv.

31 Fulton, “Body and Soul,” 98.

32 Un Samedi par nuit, ed. Hermann Varnhagen, Erlanger Beiträge zur Englishcen philologie 1 (1889), 170; see discussion in Bossy, “Medieval Debates,” 160–1. The Royal Debate as a source for Un Samedi par nuit was first argued by Batiouchkof, “Le Débat.” The broader relationship between the twelfth-century Royal Debate, Un Samedi par nuit, the thirteenth-century Visio Philiberti (also known as the Noctis sub silencio), and the Middle English “Als i lay in a winteris nyt” was established by Heningham, “Early Latin Debate,” i–ii.

33 Fulton, “Body and Soul,” 97–8; Raskolnikov, Body Against Soul, 87. As J. Justin Brent has argued, Als I Lay also incorporates “a persistent concern with the genre of romance” in its use of images of hunting and court to animate the themes of worldly vanity; “The Eschatological Cluster – Sayings of St. Bernard, Vision of St. Paul, and Dispute between the Body and the Soul – in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ms Laud Misc. 108,” in The Texts and Contexts of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ms Laud Misc. 108: The Shaping of English Vernacular Narrative, ed. Kimberly K. Bell and Julie Nelson Couch (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 157–76, at 157.

34 Quotations from The Grave are taken from Christopher A. Jones, Old English Shorter Poems, 230. The poem is omitted from ASPR. See N. R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), item 310.

35 Louise Dudley, “The Grave,” Modern Philology 11, no. 3 (1914), 429–42, at 431.

36 Momma, “Darkness Edible,” 244, 246. The added lines may be viewed clearly in the lower margin of the manuscript page; for an interactive facsimile including edition and translation, see Leah Pope Parker, The Digital Grave, Digital Mappa, Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, March 2020, https://dm-sims.herokuapp.com/12. On the origin and source of the added lines, see Eve Siebert, “A Possible Source for the Addition to The Grave,” ANQ 19, no. 4 (2006), 8–16; as well as Jennifer Ramsay, “A Possible ‘Tremulous Hand’ Addition to The Grave in MS Bodley 343,” N&Q 49 (2002), 178–80.

37 Appleton, “Architecture of the Grave,” 79.

38 Momma, “Darkness Edible,” 244.

39 See Jones, Old English Shorter Poems, 369.

40 Siebert, “The Addition to The Grave,” 8–16.

41 Marjorie Housley, “Uneasy Presences: Revulsion and the Necropolitics of Attachment,” postmedieval 11, no. 4 (2020): 434–41, at 438.

42 Soul and Body II, 49–52: “Ne eart þu nu þon leofre | nængum lifgendra,/ menn to gemæccan, | ne medder ne fæder,/ ne nængum gesibbra, | þonne se swearta hrefn,/ siþþan ic ana of þe | ut siþade” (Nor are you dearer to anyone living, as a companion for men, neither your mother nor father nor any of your kin, than the dark raven, since I alone journeyed out of you); cf. Vercelli Homily IV, lines 266–74.

43 Jennifer Ramsay identified the added lines with the Tremulous Hand, although Christine Franzen has argued that none of the additions to Bodley 343 are attributable to the Tremulous Hand; see Ramsay, “A Possible ‘Tremulous Hand’ Addition,” 178–80; Christine Franzen, “On the Attribution of Additions in Oxford, Bodleian Library 343 to the Tremulous Hand of Worcester,” ANQ 19, no. 1 (2006), 7–8.

44 Siebert, “The Addition to The Grave,” 10–12.

45 Royal Debate, 951–66. J. Justin Brent has identified the Royal passage in question as one reminiscing on the body’s once-fine hair as a possible converse of the topos of the body as food for worms; see Brent, “From Address to Debate,” 10.

46 Un Samedi par nuit, quoted from Siebert, “A Possible Source,” 11–12; translation is Siebert’s.

47 On the date of the added lines, see Momma, “Darkness Edible,” 246.

48 Momma, “Darkness Edible,” 248.

49 Seth Lerer, “The Genre of the Grave and the Origins of the Middle English Lyric,” Modern Language Quarterly 58, no. 2 (1997): 127–61, at 140. Reprinted in The Lyric Theory Reader, ed., Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 104–14.

50 For the most extensive book-length study of the work of the Tremulous Hand, see Christine Franzen, The Tremulous Hand of Worcester (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991).

51 S. K. Brehe, “Reassembling the First Worcester Fragment,” Speculum 65 (1990), 521–36, at 521–3.

52 Franzen, Tremulous Hand, 23–4, 168.

53 Thomas Phillips, ed., The Departing Soul’s Address to the Body: A Fragment of a Semi-Saxon Poem (London, 1845); Jones, Old English Shorter Poems, 204–29.

54 In fact, Richard Buchholz’s 1890 edition simply analyzed the poem’s language according to Old English paradigms, although its dialect forms often represent the language of the Tremulous Hand rather than that of the poem’s origin; see Moffat, Soul’s Address, 7–9, 16–17; as well as Buchholz, “Die Fragmente der Reden der Seele an dem Leichnam,” Erlanger Beiträge (1890).

55 See Ralph Hanna’s comments in “The Grounds of English Literature (review)” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 28 (2006): 281–4, at 283. For extensive description of the manuscripts annotated by the Tremulous Hand as well as manuscripts containing Old English likely available in Worcester at the time he was active, see Franzen, Tremulous Hand, 30–83. For a list of Old English manuscripts dating to the era after the Conquest, as well as discussion of the difficulties of distinguishing between Old and Middle English, see Ker, Catalogue, xv–xix. On the copying of manuscripts containing Old English throughout the twelfth century, see Susan Irvine, “The Compilation and Use of Manuscripts Containing Old English in the Twelfth Century,” in Rewriting Old English in the Twelfth Century, ed. Mary Swan and Elaine Treharne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 41–61.

56 Smith, Arts of Dying, 46–9.

57 Raskolnikov, Body Against Soul, 5.

58 Ælfric, De auguriis, Lives of Saints, ed. Walter Skeat, vol. 1, EETS o.s. 76 (London: Oxford University Press, 1881), 364.

59 Much has been written on Ælfric’s use of rhythmic prose; on this see Thomas Bredehoft, Early English Metre, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005) as well as Tiffany Beechy, The Poetics of Old English (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). Weiskott demonstrates that Ælfric’s prose does not entirely fit the requirements of alliterative meter, English Alliterative Verse, 10–13; on the syntax of this verse particularly see Mary Blockley, Aspects of Old English Poetic Syntax: Where Clauses Begin (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 169.

60 The phrasing here seems ambiguous. Leslie Lockett has argued that Ælfric’s work represents a move away from the vernacular tradition in which the soul was captive to the embodied mind, see Anglo-Saxon Psychologies, 9–13, 60, 70–2.

61 For discussion of these terms and their pairing in Old English verse, see Benjamin A. Saltzman, “Secrecy and the Hermeneutic Potential in Beowulf,” PMLA 133, no. 1 (2018): 36–55, at 38.

62 Saltzman, “Secrecy,” 39.

63 On the significance on the use of the dual pronoun in The Wife’s Lament, see Amy W. Clark, “As Though ‘Wit’ Never Were: The Dual Pronoun as Interpretive Crux in The Wife’s Lament,” JEGP 121, no. 3 (2022), 321–41.

64 Fulton, “Body and Soul,” 98.

65 Compare the similar concern with wealth in Latemest Day A, lines 45–8.

66 See J. Douglas Bruce, “A Contribution to the Study of ‘The Body and the Soul’ Poems in English,” Modern Language Notes 5, no. 7 (1890), 193–201; Brown, English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century, 180, 189; and Eleanor K. Heningham, “Old English Precursors of the Worcester Fragments,” PMLA 55, no. 2 (1940), 291–307, at 293.

67 Weiskott, English Alliterative Verse, 103–6.

68 Momma, “Darkness Edible,” 249; Heningham, “Old English Precursors,” 293.

69 On the relationships between these manuscripts, see Brown, English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century, xii–xxiv; xxvii–xxxiv.

70 Brown, English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century, Latemest Day A.

71 Lockett, Anglo-Saxon Psychologies, 26–33, 41, 374–422.

72 Royal Debate, lines 1485–601.

73 Brent, “From Address to Debate,” 13–15.

74 Raskolnikov, Body Against Soul, 4.

75 See D. Vance Smith’s comments to this effect with regard to the Soul’s Address; Smith, Arts of Dying, 58.

76 Fulton, “Body and Soul,” 97.

77 Fulton, “Body and Soul,” 98–100.

78 Kurtz, “Gifer the Worm,” 235–6, 256.

79 Frantzen, “The Body in Soul and Body I,” 83.

80 Psalm 118.131.

81 Compare Latemest Day A, lines 30–2.

82 Compare Latemest Day A, lines 45–8.

83 There are worms in a Welsh poem by Siôn Cent, but not until the early fifteenth century, see Helen Fulton, “Body and Soul,” 106.

84 Cataldi, “Literary History of the ‘Soul and Body,’” 173.

85 The manuscript contains verses in English, Latin, and French, as well as saints’ lives, proverbs, tables of sins, and grammar.

86 Text from Brown, English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century, 54.

87 Appleton, “Architecture of the Grave,” 82.

88 Shroud and Grave, in Brown, English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century, 31, lines 9–17, 21–2.

89 Cataldi, “Literary History of the ‘Soul and Body,’” 150–3.

90 A notable exception is found in Claudio Cataldi’s doctoral dissertation, which comprehensively identifies “motifs” within the broader framework of soul and body literature; see Cataldi, “A Literary History of the ‘Soul and Body’ Theme in Medieval England.”

91 Brown, English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century, xii; Lerer, “Genre of the Grave,” 128–30.

92 Weiskott, English Alliterative Verse, 71–92.

1 Text from Krapp and Dobbie, ASPR 3.

2 This tradition in early English poetry contrasts with a tradition in Old Norse poetry in which a woman’s lament may be a call to revenge, see Carol J. Clover, “Hildigunnr’s Lament,” in Structure and Meaning in Old Norse Literature, ed. John Lindow, Lars Lönnroth, and Gerd Wolfgang Weber (Odense, Denmark: Odense University Press, 1986), 141–83, at 143–4; as well as discussion of the gendered nature of lament in Carol J. Clover, “Regardless of Sex: Men, Women, and Power in Early Northern Europe,” Representations 44 (1993): 1–28, at 15–17.

3 The “Wooing Group” was initially named and defined by W. Meredith Thompson, see Þe Wohunge of Ure Lauerd, EETS o.s. 241 (London: Oxford University Press, 1958); for the breadth of scholarship produced on these texts see Bella Millett, Ancrene Wisse, the Katherine Group, and the Wooing Group, Annotated Bibliographies of Old and Middle English Literature 2 (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1996); for a study and edition of the texts see also Catherine Innes-Parker, ed., The Wooing of Our Lord and the Wooing Group Prayers (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2015).

4 McNamer, Affective Meditation, 1, 4.

5 Lara Farina, Erotic Discourse in Early English Religious Writing (London: Palgrave, 2006), 89.

6 See Chapter 1 for discussion of as Daniel Anlezark’s contrast between the Old English elegy as “suspicious not only of earthly goods, but the emotions which are drawn to them,” and the emotional dynamics of the Luue Ron; Anlezark, “From Elegy to Lyric,” 96.

7 See discussion in the Introduction.

8 Julia Boffey and Christina Whitehead, “Introduction,” Middle English Lyrics: New Readings of Short Poems (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2018), 2.

9 Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, eds., The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 2.

10 Thornbury, “Lyric Form,” 46.

11 David Lawton, Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 8.

12 For this reason, Eric Weiskott has suggested that, “what modern criticism recognizes as a poem was, for the makers and users of the Exeter Book, something more like a link in a poetic sequence”; “The Exeter Book and the Idea of a Poem,” ES 100, no. 6 (2019), 591–603, at 594.

13 M. R. Rambaran-Olm, “John the Baptist’s Prayer” or “The Descent into Hell” from the Exeter Book: Text, Translation and Critical Study (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2014), 15–16. See further discussion of the manuscript’s arrangement in Muir, Exeter Anthology, vol. 1, 16–25, as well as Patrick W. Conner, “The Structure of the Exeter Book (Exeter, Cathedral Library, MS. 3501),” Scriptorium 40, no. 2 (1986): 233–42.

14 Clover, “Hildigunnr’s Lament,” 164–6.

15 Moffat, The Soul’s Address to the Body, Fragment G, lines 51–4.

16 Carissa Harris, “Teen Moms: Violence, Consent, and Embodied Subjectivity in Middle English Pregnancy Laments,” RES n.s. 71 (298) (2019): 1–18, at 2.

17 John J. Conybeare, Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry, ed. William D. Conybeare (London: Harding, 1826), 201; Francis Joseph Finan, III, “Drama without Performance and Two Old English Anomalies,” Mediaevalia 35 (2014): 23–50, at 23–4, 39.

18 Benjamin Thorpe, ed., Codex Exoniensis (London, 1842), 11–14.

19 Mary Dockray-Miller, “The Maternal Performance of the Virgin Mary in the Old English ‘Advent,’” National Women’s Studies Association Journal 14, no. 2 (2002): 38–55; Patrick W. Conner, Anglo-Saxon Exeter: A Tenth-Century Cultural History (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1993); John D. Niles, God’s Exiles and English Verse: On the Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2019).

20 J. J. Campbell, The Advent Lyrics of the Exeter Book (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 11; see also Albert S. Cook, The Christ of Cynewulf: A Poem in Three Parts (Boston: Ginn & Company, 1900), xli–xlii; as well as Susan Rankin, “The Liturgical Background of the Old English Advent Lyrics: A Reappraisal,” in Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies Presented to Peter Clemoes on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. Michael Lapidge and Helmut Gneuss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 317–40.

21 Campbell, Advent Lyrics, 11.

22 Campbell, Advent Lyrics, 29.

23 Thomas D. Hill, “A Liturgical Source for ‘Christ I’ 164–213 (Advent Lyric VII),” MÆ 46, no. 1 (1977), 12–15.

24 Muir, Exeter Anthology, vol. 2, 397–8.

25 Finan, “Drama without Performance,” 32.

26 Soul and Body II, esp. 71–81.

27 Earl Anderson, “The Speech Boundaries in Advent Lyric VII,” Neophilologus 63, no. 4 (1979): 611–18, at 612.

28 Anderson, “Speech Boundaries,” 611.

29 Anderson, “Speech Boundaries,” 613; John Miles Foley, “Christ 164–213: A Structural Approach to the Speech Boundaries in ‘Advent Lyric VII’,” Neophilologus 59 (1975): 114–18, at 115–17.

30 Christ I, 181–2; Anderson, “Speech Boundaries,” 613.

31 Christ I, 183–5: “Hu mæg ic ladigan | laþan spræce, / oþþe ondsware | ænige findan / wraþum towiþere?” (How may I excuse this loathsome speech, or find any answer to such hateful things?).

32 Finan, “Drama without Performance,” 24–7, 30–3.

33 Beowulf, lines 286, 348, 360, 371, 405, 456, 499, 529, 631, 925, 957, 1215, 1321, 1383, 1473, 1651, 1687, 1817, 1840, 1999, 2510, 2631, 2724, 2862, 3076; Juliana, lines 105, 117, 130, 148, 175, 319.

34 Godden and Irvine, Old English Boethius, C Text, Prose 12, line 125.

35 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 41 (hereafter, CCCC MS 41), pages 196–8. For the edition of this text, see Daniel Anlezark, ed., The Old English Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn (Camridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2009).

36 CCCC MS 41, page 196.

37 Eric Weiskott, “Old English Poetry Verse by Verse,” ASE 44 (2015): 95–130, at 95–6.

38 Weiskott, “Verse by Verse,” 96; E. G. Stanley, “Apo koinou, Chiefly in Beowulf,” in Anglo-Saxonica: Festschrift fur Hans Schabram zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. K. R. Grinda and C. D. Wetzel (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1993), 181–207, at 188.

39 Weiskott, “Verse by Verse,” 101–2, 122.

40 Bruce Mitchell, “The Dangers of Disguise: Old English Texts in Modern Punctuation,” RES n.s. 31 (124) (1980): 385–413; see discussion in Stanley, “Apo koinou,” 189; but see also R. D. Fulk, “On Argumentation in Old English Philology, with Particular Reference to the Editing and Dating of Beowulf,” ASE 32 (2003): 1–26, esp. 4–9.

41 On the history of this topos, see Maja Weyermann, “The Typologies of Adam-Christ and Eve-Mary, and Their Relationship to One Another,” Anglican Theological Review 34, no. 3 (2002): 609–26, esp. 616–19.

42 Man’s Leman on the Rood appears in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B. 14. 39 (323); versions of My Leman on the Rood appear in Cambridge, St. John’s College MS 15; London, British Library, MS Royal 12 E.i; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 57; and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 360.

43 Man’s Leman on the Rood, lines 3–4; My Leman on the Rood I–III in Carleton Brown, English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century, III, lines 4–6.

44 Middle English Dictionary, ed. Robert E. Lewis, et al. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1952–2001). Online edition in Middle English Compendium, ed. Frances McSparran, et al. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Library, 2000–2018), https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary; s.v., “lemman.”

45 Bella Millet, “Vyen I on the rode se,” Wessex Parallel Web Texts (2003), http://wpwt.soton.ac.uk/mouvance/melyric/vyeni/vyeni.htm, n9.

46 Millet, “Vyen I on the rode se,” n9. The former are Cambridge, St. John’s College MS 15 and Ashmole 360 and the latter is London, British Library Royal MS 12.

47 Brown, English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century, 3.

48 Thompson, Þe Wohunge of Ure Lauerd, xiv.

49 Thompson, Þe Wohunge of Ure Lauerd, xvi.

50 See Innes-Parker, The Wooing of Our Lord; for background on the Wooing Group, see Bella Millett, “The Ancrene Wisse Group,” in A Companion to Middle English Prose, ed. A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), 1–17. On the inclusion of On God Ureisen of Ure Lefdi in the Wooing Group, see Denis Renevey, “Enclosed Desires: A Study of the Wooing Group,” in Mysticism and Spirituality in Medieval England, ed. William F. Pollard and Robert Boenig (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997), 40–62; as well as A. S. Lazikani, “Seeking Intimacy in the Wooing Group,” Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 43, no. 2 (2017), 157–85 at 158. On the connection of the four texts in Cotton Nero A.xiv, see Caroline Cole, “The Integrity of Text and Context in the Prayers of British Library, Cotton MS Nero A. xiv,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 104, no. 1 (2003): 85–94. The connection between these texts and the Ancrene Wisse through the dialect known as “AB” language was established by J. R. R. Tolkien; see Tolkien, ed., The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle: Ancrene Wisse, edited from MS Corpus Christi College Cambridge 402, EETS o.s. 249 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962).

51 Thompson, Þe Wohunge of Ure Lauerd, xi.

52 Aelred of Rievaulx, De speculo caritatis, ed. C. H. Talbot, Opera omnia: Opera ascetica, ed. A. Hoste and C. H. Talbot, CCCM 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1971), 3–161. On Aelred’s role in the development of affective piety in the twelfth century, see Mary Dzon, The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), esp. 39–108.

53 Thompson, Þe Wohunge of Ure Lauerd, xix.

54 Annie Sutherland, “The Unlikely Landscapes of On God Ureisen of Ure Lefdi,” in Middle English Lyric: New Readings of Shorter Poems, ed. Julia Boffey and Christiania Whitehead (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2018), 73–86, at 76.

55 Sutherland, “Unlikely Landscapes,” 85.

56 See Moshe Lazar, “Fin’amor,” in A Handbook of the Troubadours, ed. F. R. P. Akehurst and Judith M. Davis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 61–100.

57 Lazikani, “Seeking Intimacy,” 158, 162–3.

58 On the audience of these texts, see Susannah Mary Chewning, “Mysticism and the Anchoritic Community: A Time … of Veiled Infinity,” in Medieval Women in Their Communities, ed. Diane Watt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 116–37; Lazikani, “Seeking Intimacy,” 157–8.

59 Lazikani, “Seeking Intimacy,” 178. The text of Đe Wohunge of Ure Lauerd appears only in London, British Library MS Cotton Titus D. xviii, alongside portions of the Ancrene Wisse, the Sawles Warde, Hali Meiðhad, and Katherine; see Chewning, “Mysticism and the Anchoritic Community,” 119; as well as Thompson, Þe Wohunge of Ure Lauerd, xii.

60 Weiskott, English Alliterative Verse, 5. As Weiskott explains of alliterative meter, “inductive scansion and half-line structure, not alliteration, are its criterial features.”

61 Weiskott, English Alliterative Verse, 5.

62 Richard H. Osberg, “The Alliterative Lyric and Thirteenth-Century Devotional Practice,” JEGP 76, no. 1 (1977): 40–54, at 45; J. P. Oakden, Alliterative Poetry in Middle English, 2 vols. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, vol. 1: 1930, vol. 2: 1935), vol. 1, 201.

63 Osberg, “Alliterative Lyric,” 44; Renevey, “Enclosed Desires,” 48–51.

64 Weiskott, English Alliterative Verse, 26; Nikolai Yakovlev, “The Development of Alliterative Metre from Old to Middle English” (DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2008), esp. 4–5, 9–24. On this continuity, see Cornelius, Reconstructing Alliterative Verse, 6–8, 17–20.

65 Brown, ed., “Friar Thomas de Hales’ Love Ron,” English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century (hereafter Luue Ron), lines 1–4.

66 The verb falwen used here itself carries on an Old English poetic motif of fealo (yellow or yellowing) things connoting death and decay; see Amy W. Clark, “More than Meets the Eye: Cultural Color Resonances in Old English Literature,” in The Daily Lives of the Anglo-Saxons, ed. Carole Biggam, Carole Hough, and Daria Izdebska (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2017), 139–57, at 141–8.

67 See Chapter 1.

68 On the fixation on worldly transience in Old English poetry, see Christine Fell, “Perceptions of Transience,” in The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, ed. Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 180–97.

69 This is not the only occurrence of such a combination of alliteration and rhyme in Old English, for another example, see Phoenix, lines 15–18.

70 On the development of this literature, see Ashe, Fiction and History, esp. 22–6.

71 See Renée R. Trilling, The Aesthetics of Nostalgia: Historical Representation in Old English Verse (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).

72 See Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs.

73 John 14:2.

74 Hales’s use of this image is probably influenced by the Chasteau d’Amour of his contemporary Robert Grosseteste edited in Le chateau d’amour, ed. J. Murray (Paris: Champion, 1918); on this text and the allegorical tradition it draws upon, see Jill Mann, “Allegorical Buildings in Medieval Literature,” Medium Ævum 63, no. 2 (1994): 191–210, at 198–200; I am indebted to Spencer Strub on this point.

75 In particular, the Harley Lyrics and Holy Maidenhead are cited for examples of this convention; see Susanna Greer Fein, ed., “Love Rune,” in Moral Love Songs and Laments (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998), n151.

76 Henry Sweet (ed.), King Alfred’s West-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care, EETS o.s. 45, 50 (London, 1871), First Prose Preface, 4.

1 Turner, History of the Anglo-Saxons, 285.

2 Stanley, “Apo koinou,” 188.

3 Steven Justice, Adam Usk’s Secret (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 133–5.

4 Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, “Deaths and Transformations: Thinking through the ‘End’ of Old English Verse,” in New Directions in Oral Theory, ed. Mark C. Amodio (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2005), 149–78.

5 Other scholars have challenged the hard dividing lines that separate Old and Middle English Literature; see Mark Faulkner, “Rewriting English Literary History 1042–1215,” Literature Compass 9, no. 4 (2012): 275–91; as well as in the Introduction to the present volume.

6 Watson, Balaam’s Ass, 67.

7 Mary Rambaran-Olm, “A Wrinkle in Medieval Time: Ironing out Issues Regarding Race, Temporality, and the Early English,” New Literary History 52, no. 3–4 (2021): 385–406, at 387.