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9 - Dangerous Voices, Erased Bodies: Reassessing the Old EnglishWifgemædla and Witches in LeechbookIII
- Edited by Robin Norris, Carleton University, Ottawa, Rebecca Stephenson, University College Dublin, Renee Trilling
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- Book:
- Feminist Approaches to Early Medieval English Studies
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 19 April 2023
- Print publication:
- 02 February 2023, pp 253-278
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Summary
Abstract
Entry 57 of Leechbook III is a brief, vague remedy thatis ambiguous but has a long history of being interpreted as a referenceto witchcraft. This essay assesses how potential female voices andbodies in the Old English medical corpus have been interpreted as agentsof harm by modern scholars, based on thin philological evidence. Thisessay relies on a combination of lexis, syntax, and context to interpreta thinly attested Old English illness label and propose a previouslyoverlooked female patient in Leechbook III. The case ofwif gemadla serves as a reminder that scholarshipof early medieval English medicine continues to rely heavily onnineteenth-century translations and editions, which has left us with alegacy of outdated editorial and cultural assumptions that now requireupdating.
Keywords: medicine, charms, women’s bodies,women’s voices, mental health, Leechbook III
It seems hardly wise therefore to argue backwards from sixteenth-centuryconditions beyond this date … The chain does not seem strongenough, and we should be at fault in breathing life over it from theanecdotes of post-conquest writers, those men who, looking back over thepast, wove into history from their own experience and knowledge manylegends of evil women and demonical arts, until at last mediævalhistorians were themselves unable to disentangle fact from fantasy, andhitherto innocent men and women of earlier generations were condemnedfor dabbling in black arts which they cannot have known.
Jane Crawford, 1963 (114–116)Wiþ wif g[e]madlan g[e]berge o[n] neahtnestig radicesmoran ty dage ne mag te se gemadla scettan (Against/in thecase of wif gemædlan, partake of a radish rootat night-fasting, [on] that day the gemadla will not beable to injure you).
Leechbook III, c. 875–900 (Entry57)Entry 57 of Leechbook III, above, is a brief, vague remedyrecommending that someone (it is not clear who) consume aradish to remedy something (it is not clear what). Thesource of the ambiguity stems from the challenges of assessing how theaffliction that the charm claims to remedy—wifgemadla—should be best understood. Wif(woman) is clear enough, of course, in purely philological terms, but itssemantic relationship to gemadla is not.
Entry 57 of Leechbook III, above, is a brief, vague remedyrecommending that someone (it is not clear who) consume aradish to remedy something (it is not clear what). Thesource of the ambiguity stems from the challenges of assessing how theaffliction that the charm claims to remedy—wifgemadla—should be best understood. Wif(woman) is clear enough, of course, in purely philological terms, but itssemantic relationship to gemadla is not.
12 - Mitchell & Robinson’s Medievalism: Echoes of Empire in the History of Old English Pedagogy
- Edited by Rachel A. Fletcher, University of Glasgow, Thijs Porck, Universiteit Leiden, Oliver M. Traxel, Universitet i Stavanger, Norway
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- Book:
- Old English Medievalism
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 17 December 2022
- Print publication:
- 29 November 2022, pp 225-242
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Summary
In the Foreword to his 1965 first edition of A Guide to Old English, Bruce Mitchell explains that Henry Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer and Anglo-Saxon Reader (alongside Alistair Campbell’s Old English Grammar) are two of three textbooks that have ‘been my almost daily companions in the class-room and study.’ He declares that ‘they have so influenced my teaching and my thinking that echoes of them cannot fail to appear in my work’ and continues: ‘while hoping that the echoes are not so strong that they deafen my own voice completely, I acknowledge my debt to them humbly, gratefully, and sincerely.’ Mitchell’s (and, later, his co-author Robinson’s) indebtedness to the Victorian Sweet, especially, endures across all eight editions of the Guide as it expands from a slim 160 pages in 1965 to a hefty 400+ as of its most recent, 2012, eighth edition. Thus, Mitchell & Robinson’s relationship to Sweet evidences a tight connection between late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth-century understandings of Old English language and language-learning pedagogy that continues into the present day.
This chapter examines the influences of Sweet’s Primer and Reader on Mitchell & Robinson’s Guide, arguing that in Sweet’s textbooks Old English is subjected to a Victorian medievalism that has significant afterlives not only in mid-twentieth-century Old English textbooks but also in ones of the present day. We first explore the educational, cultural, and intellectual values of Sweet and the colonial moment in which he lived, which are encoded in his textbook architecture. Specifically, we discuss the principles that guide Sweet’s treatment of phonology and his emendation and organisational practices, arguing that these are undergirded by British ideologies of empire. Mitchell & Robinson’s Guide, which openly acknowledges its debts to Sweet, necessarily if unconsciously folds both Sweet’s pedagogy and colonial ideology into itself. Thus, Mitchell & Robinson’s Guide presents an Old English that is medieval and medievalism. In the Guide, Old English is an artifact of early medieval England and of the English language but, also, in the hands of Sweet and his inheritors, it is a mediated and modern product that has been efficiently ‘normalized’, to use Sweet’s term.