Medieval English soul and body poems such as the twelfth-century The Soul’s Address to the Body or the thirteenth-century Latemest Day offer a post-mortem totally unlike that of Andrew Marvell’s seventeenth-century “Dialogue between the Soul and Body.”¹ Although soul and body poems generally have often been designated “debates,” the former two poems are not even dialogues but monologues, in which a soul berates a silent corpse.² In the form of these monologues, we witness a post-Conquest continuation of a distinctively English strain of the soul and body tradition that, as we have seen, begins in pre-Conquest vernacular poetry. In their dramatic speeches, soul and body poems generally draw upon what M. Bradford Bedingfield called “‘quasi-dramatic’ liturgical elements”: such things as impersonation and dialogue that, as Bedingfield points out, can be traced back as far as the fourth century.³ Bedingfield carefully cautions against approaches to liturgical rituals that “strip the individual rituals of their contexts, forcing upon us a false view of their functions and effectiveness.”⁴ Rather, the present approach considers what poetic texts influenced by the liturgy may do that the liturgy itself does not, combining conventions of exhortation with those of poetry. As devotional poetic rather than liturgical productions, they may take a degree of poetic license, allowing the semi-allegorized soul to speak as a distinct entity within the individual. Yet as we saw in Chapter 3, pre-Conquest English soul and body poems consistently afforded speech, desire, and feeling in death to the soul alone: Soul and body poems in Old English literature are one-sided stories. In this way they recall the solitary speakers of the more famous Old English elegies, although the soul as poetic speaker has received only sparse critical attention. Yet in the twelfth-century Soul’s Address to the Body, we witness again a conventional lone speaker who laments her fate in ways that evoke and reflect earlier Old English elegiac conventions. We see these conventions continuing even in poems as late as the thirteenth-century Latemest Day. And the late Old English poem known as The Grave, composed in the decades just after the Norman Conquest, shows how powerfully these conventions continue to speak long after their own era, when a thirteenth-century reader adds new lines, “squeezed into the bottom margin” below the original poem, riffing on another adjacent version of the soul and body tradition.⁵ These post-Conquest poems evince crucial and, as I argue, distinctive survivals of poetic convention within early English literature. In looking closely at twelfth- and thirteenth-century examples, we will see not only the continuities of the soul and body poetic tradition but sometimes surprising continuities between Old and Middle English verse more broadly. Affective devotion as embodied in early English literature does not arise wholesale from changing devotional practices in the later period only, but reflects shifting practices and new literary forms that combine with the old.

Although the Norman Conquest marks the beginning of English’s alteration from Old to Middle as Norman French exerts its influence on the language, the rupture is neither so complete nor sudden as those categories might imply. New transmission of Francophone texts “in much greater volume from the continent to England than the reverse” remaps the English literary landscape, as Laura Ashe has argued, but that very fact “render[s] the distinctiveness of insular production all the more significant.”⁶ The same period also witnesses the vernacular record of and lament for the Conquest in the Peterborough Chronicle, and Henry of Huntingdon’s History of the English in the decades soon after. As Susan Rifkin and Emma Mason have argued, Wulfstan of Worcester upheld liturgical and scribal practices as well as the place of English saints within the life of the English church after the Conquest, and these practices continued beyond Wulfstan’s own life.⁷ Pre-Conquest English continued to be not only read but “rewritten,” particularly in manuscripts dating to the twelfth century that include homiletic and hagiographic material by Ælfric and others, gospel translations, laws, Alfredian translations, psalters, dialogues, and more, as well as extensive glosses to pre-Conquest texts.⁸ Post-Conquest manuscripts bear crucial witness to Old English texts otherwise lost or damaged,⁹ while post-Conquest glosses evince careful and continuous reading of pre-Conquest texts,¹⁰ and new works including those discussed in this chapter and Chapter 5 speak to the continuing shaping influence of Old English poetic conventions and literary tropes.

Medieval accounts recognizing the upheaval of the Norman Conquest and grieving the alteration of Old English textual culture begin as early as the century after the Conquest. Christopher Cannon cites the twelfth-century First Worcester Fragment as a poem “almost certainly written after 1066” that “proceeds as if 1066 has not yet happened”; in so doing it memorializes a litany of great learned men it avoids acknowledging as lost.¹¹ D. Vance Smith has described the poem and others like it as “a lament over the death of Old English, or at least of the cultural knowledge lodged in it,” that by the same token attests to “the continued vitality of English” and “twelfth- and thirteenth-century interests in the Anglo-Saxon past.”¹² Indeed, the sense that continuing interest in the pre-Conquest past must persist or recur even in the later Middle Ages formed the foundation of the idea of the so-called alliterative revival as a “revival of the dead and the past,” even when the written works of the past might themselves have been “indecipherable to fourteenth-century readers.”¹³ As Christine Chism rightly observes, “ignorance of an ancient writing does not beget indifference.”¹⁴ Yet even if Old English writings might only have remained easily legible into the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, scholars have argued for several ways that pre-Conquest literary forms and conventions might have nevertheless persisted into later work. In 2008, Ralph Hanna offered an alternative to the argument for alliterative “revival” as such, in his words, “disrupt[ing] the commonplace while offering what purported to be a literary introduction to his subject” by “examining an early – and almost thoroughly ignored – alliterative verse effusion” before the supposed revival took place in the fourteenth century.¹⁵ This reconsideration of the history of alliterative meter was taken up by Eric Weiskott, who developed a literary historical account of the changes wrought by prosody upon alliterative verse from the early period to the late, arguing that, in fact, “alliterative poetry, now lost, continued to be composed and copied” during the period of only ninety years in which it is not attested in the manuscript record (ca. 1250–1340).¹⁶ Ian Cornelius likewise worked to show how gaps in the record do not entail lapses in the practice of alliterative poetry; our absence of evidence does not constitute evidence of its absence.¹⁷ Still other work has demonstrated, beyond poetry, how the conventions of pre-Conquest literature survived in various iterations into the later Middle Ages, even after medieval writers would likely have had access to or linguistic competence for Old English texts themselves. Stephen M. Yaeger has demonstrated how pre-Conquest legal and homiletic forms, in addition to poetic and proverbial ones, “[point] towards the origins of Langlandian discourse in Anglo-Saxon legal-homiletic discourse.”¹⁸ As I argue, the English vernacular soul and body topos works in much this way, preserving pre-Conquest forms through iterations across the centuries, recombining these with new formal influences and innovations but imbuing older forms with remarkable durability.

The apparent rupture in English literary history coincides with the apparent rupture of the rise of affective piety, both located roughly in and around the twelfth century, compounded and accelerated by the institution of universal mandatory confession following the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Yet as I argue in this chapter and Chapter 5, forms of both earlier literature and earlier affective devotion persist even as they evolve across these periods of upheaval and change. For its part, as it moves across the Conquest, the English soul and body topos still evokes the anticipatory aversion discussed in Chapter 3, especially aversion to shame and related affects arising from social rejection or the anticipation of it. But from the twelfth century onward, instances of the topos shift from a focus squarely on Judgment Day to ponder the rupture of death itself, and consequently the feelings of loss and grief arising from the loss of worldly community disgusted by the dead body. The shift is a subtle one, pointing to the dangers of simple categorizations of complex affect. The shift points simultaneously to the persistence of poetic conventions and their adaptability. The metaphor of body and soul as a troubled married couple becomes more elaborate, as do the reminders of the dead body’s rejection by loved ones on earth. While shame requires the anticipation of possible rejection by the community, these poems increasingly make that future rejection a present certainty. The extended intimacies of these conventions demand reflection on the part of their readers. In this, we see the ways that the affective associations of these poems continue to be attendant upon and intricately connected with their shifting forms. The combining of pre-Conquest topoi with new forms after the Conquest creates fresh dynamics of affect from very old poetic traditions.

In what follows, I begin by establishing late Old English conventions that survive across the Conquest. Although pre- and post-Conquest soul and body poems are often considered separately in scholarship, the twelfth-century Soul’s Address to the Body at times finds itself grouped with the earlier Old English poems it draws upon so overtly. As Masha Raskolnikov has written, the fragments of The Soul’s Address to the Body “tend to be considered as part of the Anglo-Saxon canon and are not included in the few extant discussions of Middle English Body/Soul debates except as evidence of the topic’s ubiquity.”¹⁹ This scholarly tendency should give us pause. Although the Old English poems and the Soul’s Address are bracketed together as representative of an earlier phenomenon, a consideration of these texts alongside the post-Conquest evidence shows a far more prevalent, persistent survival of distinctively pre-Conquest conventions alongside newer, developing traditions. So, for example, in The Grave, we find a late Old or early Middle English poem relying on its audience’s recognition of pre-Conquest conventions: The single extant copy does not explicitly name itself as a soul’s address and, just as in the Old English poems, the body is afforded no reply. Yet audience recognition of the genre in spite of these facts can be shown to have lasted into later centuries: A thirteenth-century reader has added to the manuscript three concluding lines adapted from Un Samedi par nuit, a later soul and body poem in French. This reader’s response illustrates the power of the soul and body genre conventions to evoke related affective associations. This chapter restores The Grave not simply to either pre- or post-Conquest tradition, but to its place in the continuum between the later Soul’s Address to the Body and the earlier Old English poems. In laying out this history, new patterns and significant continuities emerge, including the persistence of the soul’s monologue form and particular tropes of the furnishings of the grave. From there, we will progress to the thirteenth-century Latemest Day to see how pre-Conquest conventions still survive even when the form of poetry has dramatically changed. These varied examples show how post-Conquest English poetry recombines old and new conventions to develop a poetics of death and dying that had never been more alive.

Soul and Body Literature across the Conquest

Across the Conquest, we see a continuing tradition of soul and body poems that take the form of monologues rather than debates. Medieval debate poetry thrives alongside the soul and body monologues, taking part in a long debate tradition – as Helen Fulton has written, “the debate form appears in early Greek and Hebrew texts before emerging into other vernacular and Latin versions.”²⁰ Meanwhile, the English soul and body verse monologues, unusual in the broader corpus of soul and body literature, persist unimpeded, and retain numerous other distinctive poetic features across the Conquest: The relationship between soul and body continues to be conventionally gendered, and features such as worms and rot that some scholars had considered endemic to the Old English imagination carry on unimpeded.²¹ These monologue poems, and the shifting set of affects attendant upon them – shame, grief, the interplay of remembered sweetness and present disgust – are the focus of the present chapter. Raskolnikov has traced how the broader Middle English soul and body tradition changes as English loses the grammatical gendering of nouns in the centuries after the Conquest, both with regard to the gendered relationships between soul and body and between various allegorized parts of the self.²² The worms’ gruesome feasting continues unabated, although their role in debate poems may alter.²³ The soul and body tradition, of course, both predates Old English literature and extends beyond Middle English, and many features shared by the pre- and post-Conquest English examples are also shared with, for example, Welsh or Latin versions. As early as 1891, Theodore Batiouchkof traced the origin of the soul and body genre to Egyptian narratives of a soul’s journey, through the Latin Visio Pauli and the Nonantola Version of the legend of St. Macarius, and the relationship between these early texts and the Old English tradition was subsequently explored by Louise Dudley and Julius Zupitza.²⁴ Yet while many of the essential features of the genre cannot be thought specific to either Old or early Middle English, those conventions that are seem particularly salient.

The Old English poems are distinctive in denying the body any chance to reply to its soul,²⁵ and this convention continues into early Middle English examples even as the debate format in which both parties speak becomes more popular, especially following the twelfth-century Latin Royal Debate and Visio Philiberti, both copied in England in the same century that the Soul’s Address was composed.²⁶ Although the Royal Debate also seems to draw upon the same traditions as the Soul’s Address, it incorporates numerous other influences not seen in England before. In particular, the Royal Debate draws upon the conventions of the Latin soul and body homily found in the Irish Leabhar Breac, and the Royal Debate and poems following it evince new theological concerns over the mechanisms of atonement following Anselm’s writings in the late eleventh century.²⁷ But even very learned poetry such as the Royal Debate constructs an aesthetic and affective experience of devotion, taking license with metaphysical and theological concepts elucidated more precisely in such homilies or treatises. But perhaps most saliently, the Royal Debate also gives the body a chance to speak. Indeed, the bodies of the Royal Debate and the Visio Philiberti seem to be aware of the existing convention of the soul’s monologues: In the Visio, after ending its long condemnation of the body it claims has sealed its fate, the soul turns to leave, remarking, “hic non possum amplius stare, jam recedo: / nescis ad opposita respondere credo” (I can no longer stand here, I withdraw at once: I believe you do not know how to answer in response).²⁸ With a dramatic flourish, the body then raises its head, admits some of the soul’s arguments, and advances its own.

Before the Royal Debate, soul and body poetry in England uniformly featured only the soul’s speech, denouncing the pleasures of the flesh and cataloguing its decrepitude in the grave – the horror, grief, and regret are brought into sharp focus for the audience that must consider its own fate. The affective atmosphere of soul and body poetry changes when the body replies: The metaphysical concerns of whether agency lies in the soul or the body, whether one’s sin lies in indulging the flesh or a corrupted spirit, move these debate poems to produce differing sets of affects from those modeled in the earlier tradition. In her foundational work on the influence of the Royal Debate on later soul and body literature, Eleanor Heningham located the extant copy of the Royal Debate to the north of England in the late twelfth century.²⁹ This text marks the start of profound changes in the soul and body poetic genre and in the devotional and theological contexts in which it existed. Numerous poems based on the Royal Debate and examples from adjacent traditions all demonstrate the two-sided debate convention gaining prominence in soul and body verse in post-Conquest England.³⁰ Welsh and Irish examples from this period likewise follow the debate format.³¹ In the twelfth-century Old French Un Samedi par nuit, another poem based on the Royal Debate, the body accuses the soul of having poorly steered it through the stormy seas of life.³² And from this time, there are indeed Middle English poems that follow the two-sided debate form in which soul and body both speak: The poems In a þestri stude and Als i lay in a winteris nyt (also known as the Desputisoun bitwen the Bodi and the Soule) are both based on twelfth-century Latin verse.³³ Yet in the series of English poems considered in this chapter, we see a number of Middle English poems that do something else, both before and after the influence of the Royal Debate: We see post-Conquest English poems continuing familiar pre-Conquest conventions of earlier vernacular poetry in which the soul condemns a body that never speaks.

What we see in the two to three centuries after the Conquest, then, is the presence of Old English traditions in the soul monologues, coexisting with a debate tradition particularly following the Royal Debate and the poems based upon it. While, as we saw in Chapter 3, scholars of Old English had often focused on just how gruesome the meditation on the body in the grave could become, the soul and body poems use the trope as a staging ground for a complex interaction of revulsion and grief – and both these affective dynamics and the gruesome imagery continue into their post-Conquest successors. As time goes on the traditions do not stay separate, but salient pre-Conquest conventions and the attendant evocations of horror, grief, revulsion, and contempt for the world continue to operate. The soul monologues are not invested in the metaphysics of the self and agency in the way some of the debate poems are; rather they remain concerned with using physical imagery to turn their audiences away from the world. English conventions for evoking feeling in devotional poetry, including the conceit of the speaking soul, refuse to be silent after their ostensible death. The particulars of the body’s lived experience are broad enough that any living person could be imagined into them: the trappings of life being finer than those of the dark, narrow grave, or one’s family and friends who would be horrified to look on the body now. Although devotional affect in the early English tradition was understood to be embodied, in the poetic conceit of the soul and body dialogue, the body lies senseless, and the affects belong to the soul, whose harm at the hands of the body goes on, and whose terms of lament echo other poems of loss and betrayal. These conventions evoke a very particular form of grief – not only that of a lord who has been lost, as in The Wanderer, but of a lord who has abandoned someone, particularly a wife, as in The Wife’s Lament. These terms are specific enough to evoke a certain strain of the vernacular poetic tradition, but narratively broad enough that any who heard or read such a poem might find themselves in its grief: each a faithless lord of their own mortal souls, a potential traitor to themselves. But the grief of the feminized soul in turn anticipates the increasing influence of the love lyric in devotional poetry, as we will see in Chapter 5. Late Old and early Middle English devotional poetry carries on the affective associations of earlier tropes and combine with those of later lyrics and lyric traditions in other languages that become newly prominent in England after the Conquest. But the perseverance of vernacular English forms shows that not only are affective devotional tropes not new, but that the affective associations of earlier devotional tropes continued to speak.

Echoes of The Grave from the Twelfth Century to the Thirteenth

The Grave may be an unlikely example for this discussion, since in its extant form it only implicitly models the soul and body topos. A late Old English – or perhaps very early Middle English – poem, The Grave, survives in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 343, a manuscript dated by Ker to the second half of the twelfth century; the poem itself thus dates to within the century immediately following the Conquest.³⁴ Its parallels with earlier conventions are striking. The only thing The Grave lacks from among the conventions of Old English soul and body poetry is the explicit extradiegetic description of a soul’s returning to its body lying in its grave. This absence, moreover, is likely to be misleading. Louise Dudley had cautioned that The Grave “does not necessarily belong to the body and soul literature,”³⁵ but as Haruko Momma has demonstrated, “it is more than probable that readers who were familiar with the theme of soul and body imagined the address to the body as an invective uttered by a condemned soul” as evidenced by the lines added later from a different soul and body poem, lines which are “clearly the product of a reader […] who was attentive to the tone and phrasing of the original portion of the poem.”³⁶ In these cramped lines we, too, hear the echo of a soul’s lament as it was heard by a medieval reader. Such echoes continue in poems like the Soul’s Address, considered below, which will “[describe] the grave occupied by the body in lines almost identical to those of The Grave.”³⁷ Indeed, although quite short, the poem packs in numerous images relishing the decay and isolation of the dead that strongly evoke those we see in the Old English Soul and Body poems. The Grave carries on a tradition of post-mortem poetry, persisting through the century after the Conquest, when Old English poetry itself has often been considered to be in a post-mortem state, and in doing so, evinces continuing interest in pre-Conquest English traditions.

The poem as it survives consists of an address entirely in the second person. And the speaker of that address describes at length the addressee’s dwelling in the grave, along with its repulsing of former friends who have utterly abandoned it, and its being dismembered by worms. Indeed, as Momma argues, “The Grave’s variation on the trope of ravenous worms gives a new perspective on the theme of soul and body.”³⁸ And of course, the trope of grim meditation on the worms that feast upon the corpse in the grave extends far beyond the Old English Soul and Body of the Exeter and Vercelli Books. But this trope will begin to shift and recombine with other poetic devices in new ways: A thirteenth-century reader of the late Old English Grave adds three further verse lines where the poem leaves off, squeezed into the bottom margin of folio 170r by a markedly different hand.³⁹ Speaking to both the changes and continuities in the tradition of English devotional literature, these three lines in English are adapted from an Old French poem, Un Samedi par nuit, adapted in turn from the Latin Royal Debate.⁴⁰ Even though The Grave does not explicitly name itself as a soul’s address, its conventions thus speak powerfully enough to recall for this late reader a whole tradition that had evolved dramatically through contact with new conceits in other languages and different cultural milieus. And what The Grave prompts from this reader is a deeply affective response, consisting of lines lamenting with deep grief what must be lost with embodied life.

We should look to the body of The Grave itself for the continuance of the tradition that it plays upon. The replacement of worldly dwellings with the grave that had always been awaiting the body appears in the first line: “Đe wes bold gebyld, | er þu iboren were” (A house was built for you, before you were born; The Grave, line 1). In an appeal to its audience denigrating the value of material property, the poem promises that the only house one may ever have is the house one has always had, the grave that awaits it. The poem continues to play with time, holding past, present, and future in view simultaneously. As Marjorie Housley observes, “every evocation of a living body is in a temporal construction” in the poem.⁴¹ The grave was appointed before the body was born – the dust to which it must return existed before it had first come from the dust, after all. And embodied life can only lead to one place in the end. We are told that this dwelling in the earth is being appointed now: “Nu me þe bringæð, | þer ðu beon scealt. / Nu me sceæl þe meten | and þa mold seoðða” (Now they bring you where you must be. Now they must measure you and the earth afterward; The Grave, lines 5–6). The close repetition of Nu me heightens the drama of the body’s present confrontation with death – what remains for the audience in the future appears insistently present. No judgment day nor resurrection appear in this formulation. Rather, the poem’s imagery, like the dead body, must stay in the grave:

Many features of The Grave recall the damned soul’s speech in the earlier Soul and Body poems. The grave is dark and closed fast; here the body does and must dwell. Its only company is that of the worms that presently must break it into pieces (todelen). But apart from the physical dismemberment, separating one part from another, the horror of the grave lies in the separation of the body from other bodies. The body is not only separated from its friends by death, but its decayed state would make it repulsive (ladæst) to those who might have loved it once. The emphasis on shame from the Old English Soul and Body poems and related poems looking forward to Judgment Day has faded, and any reference to future judgment is absent. Instead, focusing on the revulsion of those same earthly friends who lock the body in its doorless house, The Grave dwells on the body’s isolation and loss of worldly comfort, whether that of things or of other people. The very narrowness of its scope performs a kind of mimetic function, locking its audience into the space of the grave along with the body. These meditations nevertheless recall the invective of the Old English Soul and Body and of Vercelli Homily IV, as the soul promises that none of its worldly friends will care for it now.⁴² Just as the plight of the body continues, the tradition of soul and body poetry, or at least that of excoriating the body decaying in its grave, lives on in The Grave.

But as the tradition lives on, it changes. We see the soul and body tradition continue to shift in the final lines of The Grave, added decades after the main poem text was copied. Scholars have debated whether the famed thirteenth-century glossator of Old English texts, the Tremulous Hand of Worcester, might indeed have added these lines.⁴³ The added lines locate the loss of the body not only in a loss of its own pleasure but in the pleasure of another person:

Whoever may have written these lines, they tell us two things irregardless: First, that some reader well into the post-Conquest period not only read and engaged with this late Old English poem, but that this reader wrote their own associations into the tradition, carrying on where the late Old English poem left off as if little had changed. Second, these lines tell us that the tradition of post-mortem warning could still speak to readers across the Conquest. The Grave does not explicitly name itself as a soul’s address, but this later reader certainly recognized it as such.

Here the plot thickens. In 2006, Eve Siebert pointed to similarities between the three added lines and a passage in the twelfth-century Latin Royal Debate; the passage from the Royal Debate in turn seems to be adapted in the Old French Un Samedi par nuit:⁴⁴

Rather than focusing on the object that occasions disgust, the body eaten by worms (more on this later), the Royal Debate and Un Samedi par nuit both locate the disgust in a fictive other person. The connection of hair that might have been finely stroked by a most powerful lady (domina potentissima) but now would be rejected by a meretrix publica reiterates the dead body’s loss of community and status beyond the horror of rot and decay in and of itself. This gendered distinction appears in the French (dome/putain) although only the bodily specificity of the fingers makes its way into the English adaptation appended to The Grave. Following Siebert, then, we see the reader of The Grave not only recognizing a soul and body trope but adapting a later, multilingual thread of the tradition to extend a late Old English poem. Poetic forms mix, and recombine again, the affective associations of later traditions meeting those of earlier traditions on the pages of Bodley 343.

These three appended lines moreover show us how later readers’ sensibilities might have been changing: They add a depiction of worms devouring not only functional sensory organs as we might expect from the Old English Soul and Body poems but the body’s hair.⁴⁷ The image of what we might consider a superfluous part of the body or a source of vanity, Momma argues, “generates a new sensation, for it appeals to the sense of touch, so that those who meditate on this motif may think of the ephemeral nature of physical beauty every time they touch their own hair, or someone else’s, and let it run through the fingers.”⁴⁸ Indeed, we can see in the persistence of the worms of the grave across the English tradition not just the loss of bodily integrity but a macabre reversal of the damned body’s indulgence of the senses: The very fact of the body’s vulnerability to sensuality in life makes it the more susceptible to the corporeal horror of these images. All of these techniques for evoking bodily sense, bodily intimacy, and bodily horror work to manage the affective engagement of the reader. Yet the thirteenth-century reader’s engagement, introducing the adapted lines about stroking the body’s hair, unnervingly displaces the reader’s empathy from the body in the grave to another person unable to reach the body. While other soul and body poems emphasize the loss of community, in The Grave we may also imagine death not only as the loss of self but another self’s loss of oneself.

The Grave lingers as a late Old English poem, evincing linguistic and poetic traditions that would change significantly after the Norman Conquest. But the refusal of this poetics to actually die shows itself in the continued copying of Old English poems in later manuscripts, the continued recognition of Old English poetic forms even in short and partial texts such as The Grave, and lines such as those of the late hand in Bodley 343, responding to the archaic lines of The Grave with lines in a later form of a related poetic tradition drawn from Latin through French into Middle English adaptation. For a reader to speak back to The Grave in this way, its own unnamed soul must still possess the power to speak.

The Soul’s Address in the Twelfth Century: The New Is Old

How deeply familiar pre-Conquest soul and body traditions might have remained after the Conquest will require us to consider later instantiations of that tradition – indeed, including but not limited to the work of the Tremulous Hand. The poem known as The Soul’s Address to the Body may be an unsurprising example of this continuity, copied in Worcester of the late twelfth century, a time and place described as “the last seat of Anglo-Saxon learning in England.”⁴⁹ The Soul’s Address appears in Worcester Cathedral MS F. 174, copied in the thirteenth century, the only extant manuscript in which the primary hand is that of the “Tremulous Hand,” who otherwise is most famous as a glossator of Old English texts.⁵⁰ The manuscript itself, as it has been left to us, might tempt us to consider it an homage to the Old English past from its post-Conquest present: It begins with a copy of Ælfric’s Grammar and Glossary, and continues with the poem known as Sanctus Beda (Saint Bede) or simply as the First Worcester Fragment. This poem memorializes Bede, Ælfric, and a litany of pre-Conquest English bishops – a poem steeped in a tradition of literature and learning in which it can no longer take part, and yet by that same elegiac token, inhabits completely.⁵¹ The next item in the manuscript is The Soul’s Address to the Body. This poem reflects the transition from late Old English to early Middle, featuring many of the same orthographic changes of the Tremulous Hand’s practice elsewhere: the ge- prefix has shifted to i-, a change that, as Christine Franzen has noted, prevents confusion between the Old English prefix and a form of the second-person pronoun ge.⁵² An early edition of the text designated it a “semi-Saxon poem”; it was excluded from the ASPR but included in the Dumbarton Oaks collection of Old English Shorter Poems.⁵³ The poem evinces tropes and traditions familiar from Old English poetry, alternating between alliterative and rhymed verse.⁵⁴ But Worcester MS F. 174 is not a lone repository of some historical curiosities. It is one of many pre-Conquest manuscripts housed at Worcester and annotated by the Tremulous Hand; and one of dozens of Old English manuscripts copied between the Conquest and the start of the thirteenth century.⁵⁵ Smith has argued that rather than mourning the death of Old English, the texts in this manuscript meditate on Old English literary history as a way of thinking about death itself.⁵⁶ They can only do so, of course, because that tradition remains present, with its own prescient meditations on death remaining recognizable even at a historical moment in which its forms are continuing to pass away.

Most obviously, The Soul’s Address to the Body recalls the Old English Soul and Body poem found in two different versions in the Exeter Book and the Vercelli Book. As we saw in Chapter 3, those two older versions feature a virtually identical address by a damned soul to the body who failed to save them both, with the major difference at the very end: Where the Exeter version ends, the Vercelli Soul and Body has the beginning of a subsequent monologue featuring a blessed soul that comes to thank its body for denying itself in life and thereby saving them both in the afterlife. Moments in the Old English Soul and Body are echoed in the later Soul’s Address. For example, the Soul’s Address, like the Soul and Body, offers catalogues of sorrows from a soul to her erstwhile body in alliterative verse:

The verse here uses alliterative meter but moreover carries on the same alliterating letter from one line to the next, connecting the body’s (licame) being luþer (wicked) while it had lif (life) and the luf (love) that it had for being leas (deceitful). But there’s more to recall the Old English than just the alliterating lines. For example, the Old English version gives us a damned soul lamenting its ever having met its body:

Had the body been made animal rather than human, its indulgence of bodily appetites might have suited it. But its having received a soul, and having been baptized, now makes its corporeal indulgence a reproach to it. The soul’s regret, unanswered, must become the audience’s own. In the Soul’s Address, we find similar laments, in slightly different forms: “Weile, þet ic souhte | so seorohfulne buc!” (Alas, that I sought such a sorrowful body!; Soul’s Address, Fragment B, line 19); and “Walawa and wa is me | þet ic efre com to þe” (Alas and wo is me, that ever I came to thee; Soul’s Address, Fragment F, line 4). Here, the woe doesn’t just alliterate, it rhymes. We see Old English poems (such as The Phoenix and Christ II) that also use ornamental rhyme at crucial moments. The continuity between the Soul’s Address and the Old English tradition becomes more apparent when we consider the Royal Debate, dated to the same century as the Soul’s Address, in which the lament for ever having taken human form is given not to the soul but to the body, which is now able to reply: “O dominus, o utinam, / dedisses cuiuspiam / me fuisse uolucris corpus. / uel quadripedis” (O God, I would that you had given me the body of any bird or four-footed animal; Royal Debate, lines 1717–20). This lament given to the body introduces new conflict: The body wishes it had not been itself but an animal, which might have saved it from its wicked soul; neither side escapes blame. The older vernacular tradition by contrast cannot allow space for the body’s remorse; the point is that the time has passed for all that. The only bodies that might feel remorse for the Soul’s Address are the audience’s own.

The grammatically feminine soul is portrayed as literally feminine in the Soul’s Address, even more so than it is in the Old English Soul and Body. Raskolnikov locates traditionally gendered portrayals of masculine body and feminine soul in the Latin and Anglo-Norman traditions contemporaneous with the Middle English debates, since Latin and Anglo-Norman French have grammatical gender. But since Middle English loses the grammatical gender Old English once had, she argues “primarily in the Middle English tradition […], the absence of gendered hierarchy itself becomes a marked issue, complicating any attempt to adjudicate between Soul and Body.”⁵⁷ Yet the Soul’s Address, following the Old English tradition, plays up the gendered difference between body and soul, and this metaphor of the feminized soul may have had broader purchase in the Old English tradition beyond soul and body verse alone. In his De auguriis, Ælfric declares: “Ac se sawl is ðæs flæsces hlæfdige, and hire gedafnað þæt heo simle gewylde ða wylne þæt is þæt flæsc to hire hæsum” (But the soul is the lady of the body, and it befits her that she should always rule the handmaid, that is the flesh, by her commandments).⁵⁸ Ælfric seems to mean simply that the soul’s eternal welfare must take priority above the body’s worldly comfort; he uses the conceit of lady and handmaid metaphorically, perhaps even poetically.⁵⁹ While Ælfric’s formulation similarly conceives of the relation between soul and body as one of a struggle for control, he also curiously feminizes the body as a lowly handmaid (wyln).⁶⁰ In poetry, however, the trope of the feminized soul conceived as a wife subjected to the cruel masculinized lord of the body works subtly in the Old English Soul and Body poems, but reaches its narrative and affective conclusions in the Soul’s Address.

In the later poem, the soul declares that before it came to its body, it was taught by the Father: “Ic was godes douhter” (I was God’s daughter; Soul’s Address, Fragment G, line 31). The metaphor of the soul as a feminine creation that journeys to live with its body continues: “ic was þin imake | so þeo bec siggeþ: / uxor tua sicut uitis habundans. / Ic was þe biwedded” (I was your mate as the book says: your wife will be like a fruitful vine. I was wedded to you; Soul’s Address, Fragment G, lines 34–6). The metaphor of soul and body as husband and wife extends here, through a vision of their hypothetical children – notice the repeated use of the dual possessives and pronouns here as well:

Playing up even further the relationship between soul and body as one between wife and husband, the poem draws upon further elegiac convention. From here the poem offers other strikingly familiar passages of verse, recalling the pre-Conquest topoi of soul and body monologues considered in Chapter 3:

The alliterative pairing of forms of dyrne and deogol occurs in Old English literature: It appears in Elene 1089 in reference to the concealed nails of the True Cross, for example.⁶¹ Yet this particular conceit of the body as a lord who conceals his thoughts also recalls the conflict of The Wife’s Lament:

The Soul’s Address however reverses the conceit of The Wife’s Lament: Rather than a husband whose dyrne geþoht (concealed thought) leads to a wife lamenting that they are separated now – as if their freondscip had never been, she says – the Soul’s Address frames the soul as a wife tormented by her inescapable bond to a mate who would bidernan (conceal) his thoughts, whose fate is intertwined with hers forever (Wife’s Lament, lines 24–5; Soul’s Address, Fragment F, line 6). As Benjamin Saltzman has written, there are several ways that death takes on “distinct forms of secrecy” in Old English verse.⁶² Both The Soul’s Address to the Body and The Wife’s Lament are part of a highly conventional vernacular poetic tradition in English, one whose conventions are flexible and evocative, and this particular convention readily adapts to poetic requirements on either side of the Conquest. Amy Clark has argued that the Soul’s Address emphasizes the torment of the soul and body’s particular individual bond by repetition of the dual pronoun just as The Wife’s Lament does.⁶³ The associated tropes of intimate, doomed marital bonds pervade the later Soul’s Address. To be clear, by suggesting this parallel, I do not mean to argue that the author of the Soul’s Address had access specifically to The Wife’s Lament; it would suffice that the conventions of the tradition that produce The Wife’s Lament survive into the era and tradition that produce the Soul’s Address. The grief of the divided marital bond from the poetic elegy shades the devotionally oriented grief of the sinner’s divided body and soul. But in twelfth-century Worcester, in the books of the Tremulous Hand, we might expect such conventions to persist. We might be tempted to think this combining of conventions from different Old English elegiac speakers makes The Soul’s Address to the Body something of a pastiche of what its author found in verses from an older time – were it not that other surprising poetic forms survive into less likely post-Conquest verse.

The Soul’s Address to the Body represents continuing interest in Old English poetic language and poetic forms. This constellation of conventions suggests continuity across the Conquest whether a particular pre-Conquest poem might have been directly available or not. Of course, one such convention is the ubi sunt motif, applied aggressively across the soul and body tradition less as a lament by a solitary speaker than as an accusation flung at the body by the soul:

We see this motif in the Old English Soul and Body poems, and we see it in The Soul’s Address to the Body, but we also see it, for example, in fourteenth-century Welsh.⁶⁴ These lines focus most immediately on material wealth,⁶⁵ which in Old English poetry might signal the social relationships that undergird the exchange of possessions. And indeed here, after asking where the money has gone, the soul evokes those friends, apparently in the moments in which they prayed for the body before its death. But that grief morphs suddenly as the soul reveals that the friends grieve, not for the body’s death, but its too-long life:

The trope of lost friends and that of lost wealth twist cruelly together as the friends we had just seen sorrowing are now revealed to be sad, not for the death, but for its delay. The wealth is lost only in the present, but the friends are lost in the past as well, as their ties of affection are revealed in hindsight to be only for the sake of that wealth. The dead friend is turned out of the house and into the grave. The trope of social ties recurs as the soul next rejoins, “Hwui noldest þu beþenchen me | þeo hwile ic was innen þe, / ac semdest me mid sunne, | forþon ic seorohful eam?” (Why would you not consider me while I was within you, but burdened me with sins for which I grieve?; Soul’s Address, Fragment B, lines 17–18). Both body and soul have been subject to betrayals of social bonds. And just as the former companions have turned the dead body out of the house, it must enter the “durulease huse, / þær wurmes wældeþ | al þet þe wurþest was” (doorless house, where worms rule all that was once worthy to you; Soul’s Address, Fragment B, lines 40–1). Besides the familiar worms, the imagery of the door (itself reminiscent of The Grave) is repeated in the next section, as the body is “utset æt þære dure | (ne þearft þu næffre ongean cumæn)” (turned out of the door, nor shall you ever come again; Soul’s Address, Fragment C, line 6). The trope of the grave and, figuratively, of death itself as a “doorless house” recurs as the Soul emphasizes how its new home shall be:

And again in a passage on how the earth is befouled by the Body’s presence within it, rather than the other way around:

This “doorless house” abides from the late Old English period into the twelfth century, when the Tremulous Hand copies and adapts Old English poetic traditions for an audience for whom some of its forms would have seemed already alien.

It might be tempting to see The Soul’s Address to the Body as a last gasp, so to speak – one of the antiques collected by the Tremulous Hand, the most dedicated commemorator of past forms of English in a Worcester known as the last place where such things had survived. But this is not, in fact, where Old English went to die.

Latemest Days, and Those that Came before

The Soul’s Address and The Grave demonstrate Old English tropes that continue to be available to and drawn on by Middle English literary communities. Since the late nineteenth century scholars have noted that the Soul’s Address continued to have influence on other, later Middle English poems.⁶⁶ But by the time of the thirteenth-century poem known as Latemest Day, poetic forms had begun to change. The verse of Latemest Day features ornamental alliteration, but is no longer alliterative verse per se: As Eric Weiskott’s work makes clear, “alliterative meter is an English inductive meter in two half-lines,” although other verse forms may also use ornamental alliteration.⁶⁷ Instead, Latemest Day is structured by quatrains of end-rhymed lines. Although its ornamental alliteration had led to the poem being “believed to be a ‘condensed version’ of The Soul’s Address to the Body,” the poem represents later poetic forms.⁶⁸ As we shall see, Latemest Day in fact employs a capacious poetics, recalling the elegiac overtones of Old English by way of the Soul’s Address and the rhymed quatrains of Middle English, and incorporating images from the twelfth-century Latin debates while retaining the form of the soul’s monologue. It does not disdain the affective meditation on rot and horror that had put off some of the scholars of Old English, but rather combines those gruesome affective associations and those of elegiac poetry with those of post-Conquest conventions and forms.

A shorter version (designated by editor Carleton Brown as Latemest Day A) is taken from Cambridge, Trinity College Library MS B.14.39 (323), and a version with an extended opening reflection (designated Latemest Day B) appears in Cotton Caligula A. ix; the poem also appears in Digby 86 and Oxford, Jesus College MS 29.⁶⁹ In both of these versions, in spite of its very different verse form, Latemest Day shows us again the familiar trope of the soul who wishes that the body had never had its human soul:

The soul again makes clear that it would have been better had the body never met it: wey þat þu euere to monne yscapet were. But more striking is the fact that the soul, as in the Old English Soul and Body, ascribes agency during their worldly life to the body even though the early vernacular tradition of the embodied mind fades out of English thought around the eleventh century, as Leslie Lockett has comprehensively demonstrated.⁷¹ Indeed, by the time of the twelfth-century Royal Debate, the very crux of the body’s reply is that agency rests with the soul, not the body: While the body performed sinful actions, it could not have done them alone.⁷² Far from the pre-Conquest understanding of the embodied mind, J. Justin Brent argues that the body’s argumentative position in the Royal Debate reflects a renewed embrace of the Aristotelian view that the soul initiated action.⁷³ Whether or not this is true, the striking fluidity in ascribing agency to either the body or soul while emphasizing the inevitable strife between them leads to the “multiple dualisms” Raskolnikov identifies across the soul and body debates; for Raskolnikov the body and soul in Middle English versions of the tradition should be considered as allegorical representations rather than metaphysical realities.⁷⁴ In spite of these competing possibilities, Latemest Day, for its part, carries on the earlier medieval poetic conventions of the soul’s address without the metaphysical commitments that accompanied them in the pre-Conquest vernacular English understanding. The poetic conceit of that particular vein of the soul and body tradition, originating in Old English vernacular convention, requires that the flesh has been allowed to hold sway over spirit – this occasions the soul’s outrage and the audience’s grief. By the time of Latemest Day in the thirteenth century, other soul and body verse conventions, including true debate forms in which both soul and body speak, have become available alongside the older English form. The poetic conceit of the wronged soul’s monologue still operates even when the psychological concept of the embodied mind was otherwise no longer prevalent.

It remains worth noting how much else about this conceit has now changed. In the Old English Soul and Body, both soul and body are awaiting judgment and the soul anticipates their future eternal punishment together. The persistence of their interconnection, their fates bound together, grieves the condemned soul all the more, while in Latemest Day it seems that the two are separated more profoundly: The soul will be explicitly tormented alone by fendes and must return to the devils in hell at the end of its speech, while the body rests senseless in its grave, being eaten by worms. In light of the many formal changes – across the Conquest, across linguistic change, across the shift from alliterative to end-rhymed lines – the persistence of tropes from earlier vernacular English traditions remains all the more remarkable. The speaking soul confronting a silent body, the soul’s monologue grieving that the body ever possessed and controlled it, and the terms of condemnation of a rich but fleeting life in the world are starkly characteristic of Old and early Middle English convention as they are not characteristic of soul and body literature in other languages. Taken together, the consistency in these conventions and the affective associations they bring with them argues for a continuing vernacular tradition of soul and body poetry, observable even as new poetic forms become available and continue to mix with the old.

The extended prologue to the version of Latemest Day found in Caligula A. ix offers explicit warning to its audience, encouraging them to feel empathy with and dread for the state of its dead just as the Old English Soul and Body does:

With this preface, the soul’s condemnation becomes pointedly addressed to those now doing what the body will be accused of having done. In particular, the preface addresses itself to an audience with discernible wealth – the kind that such a poem might move to greater generosity toward the institutions that preserved this poem in libraries.⁷⁵ Like the Soul’s Address, the Caligula preface looks backward to the moment of birth, the beginning of strife between body and soul. But the preface alters the emphasis: Rather than the pain of birth and death, the preface focuses on the poverty of the naked infant entering the world and the dead leaving likewise without any trappings of its worldly wealth (Latemest Day B, lines 12–20). The body that the soul visits is just such a one:

It is to this impoverished body, and, by the same token, to those who for now may be richly enrobed, that “Þe sorie soule makeþ hire mon” (The sorrowful soul makes her lament; Latemest Day B, line 23). Before the soul’s speech even begins, the poem enjoins its audience to mourn their own deaths.

There are, of course, many conventions in Latemest Day which are germane to the soul and body tradition in Christian discourse more broadly, as well as some that seem particularly characteristic of the earlier English vernacular soul and body tradition. To take one obvious example, Latemest Day employs the familiar refrain of the ubi sunt motif:

The soul picks up many of the same images here as in the Old English: the fixation on food and drink and sweet smells. And while we could hardly say that the ubi sunt motif carries on a vernacular tradition specifically, there are further apparent survivals from earlier English: for one, the morbid fixation upon the state of the body as it lies in the grave. While Welsh examples of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries focus on the soul and body just as they are parted at death – “the moment of transition from the mortal world to the next world,” as Fulton has described⁷⁶ – the English versions visit a body that has already been in the grave, and looks like it.⁷⁷ To briefly review: Scholars had told us that the Old English Soul and Body was “a perverted essay in the loathsome,” embodying “degenerate realism”⁷⁸ as “decay in the grave acquire[s] a punitive force” in Old English literature,⁷⁹ and yet much the same atmosphere hangs over the soul’s speech in the thirteenth-century Latemest Day, too.

Yet the focus not just on the grave but on worms that consume the body in the grave is a poetic device not exclusive to the apparently gruesome pre-Conquest period (as some had argued about the poems considered in Chapter 3). The Soul’s Address to the Body carries on this emphasis on the wurmes that wældeþ (rule) the Body (Soul’s Address, Fragment G, line 4), the fact that the Body is “maþemete” (food for worms; Fragment B, line 41) and must “mid wurmen wunien” (live with worms; Fragment C, line 28), “nu waxen wurmes besiden, / þeo hungrie feond | þeo þe freten wulleþ; / heo wulleþ þe frecliche freten for heom flæsc likeþ” (now flourish beside worms, the hungry fiend that wishes to eat you, they will greedily eat you for flesh pleases them; Fragment C, lines 38–40), and will “fostren þine feond | þet þu beo al ifreten” (foster your enemy until you are entirely consumed; Fragment D, line 2), just as it was for the body’s ancestors: “wurmes ham habbeþ todæled” (wormes have broken them apart; Fragment D, line 24). The way that the worms “windeþ on þin ærmes” (wind around your arms) and “brekeþ þine breoste | and borieþ þurh ofer al, / heo creopeþ in and ut” (break your breast and bore through over everything, they creep in and out) occupies lengthy passages of the Soul’s speech (Soul’s Address, Fragment C, lines 43–5).

We also see some elements of the Old English Soul and Body poems’ focus on the loss of senses in the final fragments of the Soul’s Address, when we are told that while the body heard the devil’s teaching and his harp in life, it hears nothing in death and will hear only judgment at the resurrection (Soul’s Address, Fragment E, lines 17–35). The ravages of death upon the body are overtly ravages upon the bodily senses:

Moreover, the ravaging of the senses links to the failure of speech. Quoting from Psalm 118: “os meum aperui” (I opened my mouth; Fragment F, line 2), the Soul mourns, “nu is þiin muþ forscutted” (now your mouth is shut; Fragment E, line 38) and “nu beoþ þine teþ atruked; | þin tunge is ascorted” (now have your teeth failed, your tongue is shortened; Fragment G, line 9), while in life might the body have been able to “mid þin muþe | bimænen þine neode” (bemoan your need with your mouth; Fragment F, line 5).⁸⁰ There are further differences in the way we see the body taken apart. The soul laments that it feels the sharp prick of sin as the body now feels nothing (Fragment F, lines 22–33).

Yet the job of the worms in Latemest Day is not so much the destruction of the bodily senses – hearing, taste, vision – as it was in the Old English Soul and Body, but a reversal of the hoarding of wealth that so preoccupies the Soul’s Address. As its soul says of the worms’ feast: “þet hord is hore owen” (that hoard is their own; Soul’s Address, Fragment C, line 45). The gruesome focus on the worms of the grave continues with difference in Latemest Day. Just as the body’s earthly friends had turned it out of the house and divided its former possessions among themselves: “Nu lið þe clei-clot al so þe ston, / And his freondes striueð to gripen his i-won” (Now the clay clod lies just like stone, and his friends strive to snatch his property; Latemest Day B, lines 37–8). The worms themselves divide the wealth of its decaying flesh. In these topoi, we see continuing English tropes of soul and body poetry continuing and recombining across the Conquest. Latemest Day reflects:

In this stretch of the poem, the ubi sunt motif of the larger soul and body tradition works in concert with the dramatic reversal of fortune the body now endures. Rather than the coins the dead individual had loved in life, we encounter a pit full of worms.

Once again, seeing its body in this state, the soul expresses the wish that it had never been: “Awai! þat þu euere to monne ischape were” (Alas! That you were ever made man; Latemest Day B, line 44). We recognize this, as we recognize from The Grave the morbid description of the grave as a constricted dwelling, shared with worms: “Þe rof, þe firste, schal ligge o þine chinne; / Nu þe sculen wormes wunien wið-inne” (The roof, the beam, shall lie on your chin; now worms shall dwell with you inside; Latemest Day B, lines 78–9).⁸¹ The worms bookend the conventional description of the whole rotting body, attending specifically to the organs of speech:

And the gruesome imagery of worms sliding through the grave of the body is only coldly ameliorated by the grim promise, “Hit bið sone of þe al so þu neauer nere.” Since the body is already dead, and thus without being, this line can only refer to literal consumption by “wormis.”⁸³ But it also evokes the elegiac reversal of “nu swa hit no wære” (now as if it never were; line 24b) of The Wife’s Lament, as well as the “swa heo no wære” (as if it never were; line 96b) of The Wanderer. Moreover, in Latemest Day, the soul again is feminine (“hire”; line 23) although in the absence of more overt conventions conceiving of the soul as a lady or as the mate of a body conceived of as “lord,” here this may be read as a lingering effect of grammatical gender as much as of the lingering convention of the soul as wife.

Latemest Day ends with a vivid description of a horned devil quite alien to the Old English tradition, drawing on the conclusions of the Royal Debate and Visio Philiberti.⁸⁴ But in spite of the new poetic and devotional conventions it absorbs, much of the familiar tradition remains, particularly in a number of the English verses in Trinity College B.14.39.⁸⁵ Two folios after its version of Latemest Day the very short poem When the Turf is Thy Tower offers a number of the soul and body conventions without the framing device of soul and body dialogue at all:

The grave as constrained home, the ravaging of the body by worms, the call to eschew worldly joy, all recall the soul and body tradition. Even as, as Helen Appleton has noted, When the Turf incorporates “the use of courtly buildings to represent the transitory nature of worldly power,” it draws upon a much older trope of the house of the grave.⁸⁷ Even more overt, in the same manuscript as these, is the poem entitled Shroud and Grave, which envisions a mundane burial before a speaking soul comes onto the scene:

This poem in particular echoes the lines of the Soul’s Address: “Walawa and wa is me | þet ic efre com to þe” (Alas and wo is me, that ever I came to thee; Soul’s Address, Fragment F, line 4). It culminates the fascination with the pit of the grave, the digging of it, that comes to the fore in post-Conquest versions of the same tradition. Although the poem as we have it may be incomplete,⁸⁹ the soul’s speech echoes the characteristics of the earlier monologues: lamenting that soul and body ever met, rehearsing the body’s sins, and bewailing at length the worms that ravage the body, leading to the observation that worldly loved ones are not just lost to the dead body but would reject it utterly. These poems speak to the prevalence of the pre-Conquest vernacular soul and body monologue tradition, without excluding influence from other contemporaneous traditions. In Shroud and Grave, a primary feature marking the poem as Middle rather than Old English is its use of end-rhymed couplets. Just as before the Conquest, forms mix, tropes are borrowed, the associations of one convention shade the meaning of another. The point is not that the conventions of the soul and body tradition are exclusive to English, nor that English soul and body poems uniquely retain their defining conventions – their conventions mix with others in turn. But certain conventions that have been considered oddities of Old English poetry spoke loudly enough to Middle English authors that they carried on, even as Latin and French soul and body poems were being written in England at the same moment. Even as rhymed verse takes its place alongside the alliterative verse tradition, aspects of the alliterative tradition, including the soul’s monologue, and those worms that so repulsed twentieth-century scholars of Old English, are on full view across the numerous copies of The Latemest Day. These topoi continue to be recognizable enough as conventions of the soul and body genre that a thirteenth-century reader of The Grave could recognize it as such even without explicit extradiagetic framing. That this reader’s response was to add lines from a later multilingual soul and body tradition also flourishing in England at that time speaks to the ways that these forms only continued to mix with other forms and to endure.

Things to Come

Not every Middle English soul and body poem follows the pre-Conquest English tradition of elegiac monologue rather than debate, but enough do, even while Celtic and Latin and indeed English models offer the debate form. These monologues attest to a distinctively English vernacular poetic tradition that continues across the Conquest, which challenges stark categorizations about early and late devotional tropes. It remains difficult to trace precise lines of influence and tradition. The twelfth-century Soul’s Address adapts pre-Conquest conventions most directly, while the thirteenth-century Latemest Day offers more subtle echoes in a new kind of verse. Some conventions may evince pre-Conquest English survivals while others – such as the ubi sunt motif – merely evince common participation in broader traditions. When these poems have been considered as part of the larger soul and body topos, little distinction has been made between different traditions within that broad framework.⁹⁰ Yet heeding recent work on the continuations of the English poetic tradition across the Norman Conquest and into the late Middle Ages, the witnesses to the soul and body tradition tell us an important history. As we turn from the earliest English to the start of the Middle English period, I contend that overlooked conventions survive from various genres of pre-Conquest poetry into early Middle English poetry. Mixed poetic forms continue, and begin to mix with new conventions as the context of English poetry changes.

These poems may find themselves caught up in scholarly musings on which text deserves the epithet of the last Old English poem, or the first Middle English poem: Seth Lerer, for example, takes a short poem Carleton Brown had called the “earliest example of the secular lyric” in Middle English and raises the question if it might not be the last Old English poem instead.⁹¹ Eric Weiskott has made a deft argument for Layamon’s Brut as both the last Old English and first Middle English poem.⁹² Christopher A. Jones’s volume of Old English Shorter Poems confidently crosses the boundary of the Conquest to include verse that the earlier ASPR had excluded. But what is at stake in these categorizations, practically necessary as they may be to the divisions of anthologies or syllabi, to limiting the parameters of study, is the question of what precisely ends – and what begins. If the end, or the origin of the new, is not entirely discernible in grammatical forms, nor in poetic conventions, nor strictly in metrical requirements, then scholars are faced with the necessity of reading across the arbitrary bounds that our disciplines have created. Reading beyond such divisions lets us see a living tradition of deeply affective devotional verse, one that shifts and evolves and turns back upon itself, the way that the glossator turns back to The Grave with lines adapted from later Old French, recognizing the affective resonance in the older poem and adding new devotional images, with their own attendant affective resonances.

As devotional poetry moves across the Conquest, there are new influences, combining the poetics of rhymed verse and the particular soul and body conceits of the vernacular tradition. There are certainly multilingual influences across the tradition: English and Celtic conventions drawing from Latin and from one another. But we have, at least, reason to suspect that the Old English tradition, and its affective associations, were more available and perhaps a more dynamic influence than the stark categories of “Old” and “Middle,” and the rupture of Conquest, might have led us to believe. Nor is this persistence limited entirely to places such as Worcester, where Old English learning continued to be preserved and commemorated. “Early” medieval English literary culture continued to be dynamic and multilingual even as it became “late”: Just as The Dream of the Rood adapted heroic laments for a fallen lord to devotional ends in a poem on the crucifixion, so the Soul’s Address extrapolates from the Old English Soul and Body lament an extended portrait of the soul as a betrayed wife. A later reader of The Grave, reminded of the Old French Un Samedi par nuit, elaborates upon a late Old English poem with lines of similar grief in English, bearing new associations of bodily imagery and loss. That profound evocation of devotional feeling was not obscured to that late reader of The Grave, even if it may have been obscure to modern readers. The feelings associated with English devotional poetry are not simply mixed but continue brewing as new forms arise and combine with those that had gone before. Unlike the hapless body of the Soul’s Address, the English poetic tropes of affective devotion did not lose their associations in the world after their purported death. Instead, they accrued new ones: associations and expressions more familiar to modern scholars that, as Chapter 5 shows, would begin to obscure those that came before.