Creating the cloud-tent-ship conceit in Exodus

2011 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 103-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miranda Wilcox
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Old English ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Hostile Environment ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Culturally Specific ◽  
God's People ◽  
Pastoral Relationship ◽  
Interpretative Framework

AbstractThe enigmatic description of the columna nubis in lines 71b–92 of the Old English Exodus juxtaposes images of substances that shield God's people from their hostile environment; understanding the relations among these protective coverings requires cultural and literary knowledge not explicitly articulated in Exodus. Metaphors and typologies developed in Arator's sixth-century Historia apostolica and subsequently conventionalized in Bede's eighth-century Expositio actuum Apostolorum, texts used in the Anglo-Saxon monastic curriculum, provide an interpretative framework for the complicated accretion of images in Exodus. Using insights about metaphorical processing from cognitive science, this article argues that the Exodus-poet crafted a sophisticated tripartite conceit to generate a pastoral relationship with his audience, first by adapting metaphoric mappings from Arator and Bede and then by extending their domains with culturally specific entailments about how ships and tents functioned as protective covers in Anglo-Saxon material culture.

Sepulchral Jews and Stony Christians

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathy Lavezzo
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Old English ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
English Poem ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Temple

This chapter examines the unstable geography of Christian and Jew during the Anglo-Saxon period through an analysis of Bede's Latin exegetical work On the Temple (ca. 729–731) and in Cynewulf's Old English poem Elene. It takes as its starting point how Bede and Cynewulf tackle a material long associated with Jewish materialism, stone, in comparison with Christian materialism and descibes their accounts of the sepulchral Jew as well as the stony nature of Jews. It also considers how Bede and Cynewulf construct Christianity by asserting its alterity and opposition to an idea of Jewish carnality that draws on and modifies Pauline supersession. The chapter concludes with an assessment of how Bede's and Cynewulf's charged engagements with supersession and “Jewish” places contribute both to our understanding of Anglo-Saxon material culture and to the important role that ideas of the Jew played in such materialisms.

Regional identities Angles and Saxons?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Rippon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
The West ◽  
East Anglia ◽  
Southern Scandinavia ◽  
Burial Rites

Writing in the early eighth century, Bede described how three separate peoples— the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes—had settled in Britain some three hundred years earlier, and ever since the genesis of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ scholarship in the nineteenth century archaeologists have sought to identify discrete areas of Anglian, Saxon, and Jutish settlement (e.g. Leeds 1912; 1936; 1945; Fox 1923, 284–95). The identification of these peoples was based upon different artefact styles and burial rites, with most attention being paid to brooches. The degree of variation in the composition of brooch assemblages across eastern England is shown in Table 9.1. Cruciform brooches with cast side knobs, for example, were thought to have been ‘Anglian’, and saucer brooches ‘Saxon’ (although even in the early twentieth century Leeds (1912) had started to doubt the attribution of applied brooches to the West Saxons). In recent years, however, this traditional ‘culturehistorical’ approach towards interpreting the archaeological record has been questioned, as it is now recognized that, rather than being imported from mainland Europe during the early to mid fifth century, regional differences in artefact assemblages emerged over the course of the late fifth to late sixth centuries (e.g. Hines 1984; 1999; Hilund Nielsen 1995; Lucy 2000; Owen- Crocker 2004; 2011; Penn and Brugmann 2007; Walton Rogers 2007; Brugmann 2011; Dickinson 2011; Hills 2011). In early to mid fifth-century England, in contrast, it now appears that Germanic material culture was in fact relatively homogeneous, with objects typical of ‘Saxon’ areas on the continent being found in so-called ‘Anglian’ areas of England, and vice versa. The earliest material from East Anglia, for example—equal-arm, supporting-arm, and early cruciform brooches—are most closely paralleled in the Lower Elbe region of Saxony, with the distinctive ‘Anglian’ identity of EastAnglia onlyemerging through later contact with southern Scandinavia (Hines 1984; Carver 1989, 147, 152; Hills and Lucy 2013, 38–9). Indeed, many elements of the classic suite of early Anglo-Saxon material culture actually developed within Britain as opposed to having been created on the continent (Hills 2003, 104–7; Owen-Crocker 2004, 13), with new identities beingmade in Britain rather than being imported frommainland Europe (Hills 2011, 10).

Vestigial Signs: Inscription, Performance, and The Dream of the Rood

PMLA ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 125 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seeta Chaganti
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Old English ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
English Text ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Dream Of The Rood ◽  
Media Performance ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
And Performance

Anglo‐Saxonists often explore connections between The Dream of the Rood and two ritual objects, the silver Brussels cross and the sandstone Ruthwell monument, inscribed with verses related to the poem. This essay offers a new perspective on these artifacts, elucidating not a historical narrative linking them but rather an Anglo‐Saxon poetics made visible in their juxtaposition. It argues that these three manifestations reveal a dialectic of inscription and performance in Anglo‐Saxon poetics. Reading the familiar Old English text through J. H. Prynne's “A Note on Metal” (1968), which imagines dialectics both of metal and stone and of inscription and performance, the essay also interrogates certain divisions between premodern and modern aesthetic traditions. Theories of media, performance, and inscriptionality help to stage an interdisciplinary analysis of The Dream of the Rood and to show that its poetics originate in the formal frameworks of Anglo‐Saxon material culture. (SC)

Domiciling the evangelists in Anglo-Saxon England: a fresh reading of Aldred's colophon in the ‘Lindisfarne Gospels’

2012 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
pp. 101-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis L. Newton ◽  
Francis L. Newton ◽  
Christopher R. J. Scheirer
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
British Library ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Lindisfarne Gospels

AbstractThe Codex ‘Lindisfarnensis’ (London, British Library, Cotton Nero D. iv, early eighth century) was glossed in Old English by the tenth-century priest Aldred. Aldred's colophon purports to give information about the eighth-century makers of the manuscript, at Lindisfarne. What is actually reliable about this highly literary colophon is Aldred's purpose in writing the gloss: to give the Evangelists a voice to address ‘all the brothers’ – particularly the Latinless. We propose new interpretations of three OE words (gihamadi, inlad, ora) misunderstood before. Aldred was learned; his sources extend from Ovid through the Fathers to contemporary texts.

scholarly journals The Language of Baptism in Early Anglo-Saxon England: The Case for Old English

2017 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 39-50
Author(s):  
Miriam Adan Jones
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
General Knowledge ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Standard Language ◽  
Old Saxon ◽  
Faith Commitment ◽  
Correct Pronunciation ◽  
The Church

This article explores the possibility that the vernacular (Old English) may have been used in the baptismal rite in Anglo-Saxon England before the middle of the eighth century. Statements made by Bede (d. 735) and Boniface (d. 754), provisions in the Canons of the Council ofClofesho(747) and the probable existence of a lost Old English exemplar for the ‘Old Saxon’ or ‘Utrecht’ baptismal promise (Palatinus latinus 755, fols 6v–7r), all suggest that it was. The use of the vernacular was most attractive in a context of ongoing Christianization, where the faith commitment of the baptizand was foregrounded and his or her understanding of the rite correspondingly highly valued. Later, the shift of focus towards the correct pronunciation of the Trinitarian formula and the increase of general knowledge about the baptismal rite reduced the impetus for translation, and Latin became the standard language of baptism. The translation and non-translation of the baptismal rite reflect broader concerns about the place of the Church of the English and its ethnic and cultural particularity within the universal Church, and particularly its relationship with Rome.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Jones
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Old English ◽  
English Studies ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Two Phases ◽  
Scholarly Contribution ◽  
Anglophone World ◽  
The Relationship

This introductory chapter contextualizes the philological study of language during the nineteenth century as a branch of the evolutionary sciences. It sketches in outline the two phases of poetic Anglo-Saxonism for which the rest of the book will subsequently argue in more detail. Moreover, the relationship between Anglo-Saxonism and nineteenth-century medievalism more generally is articulated, and historical analogies are drawn between nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism and more recent political events in the Anglophone world. Finally, the scholarly contribution of Fossil Poetry itself is contextualized within English Studies; it is argued that ‘reception’ is one of the primary objects of Anglo-Saxon or Old English studies, and not merely a secondary object of that field’s study.

Anglo-Saxon Glosses and Grammars

2020 ◽  
pp. 942-956
Author(s):  
Patrizia Lendinara
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Anglo Saxon

This chapter surveys Old English glosses of Latin works in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and discusses the format of glosses, the types of texts that were glossed, hermeneutic texts, merographs, dry-point glosses, glossae collectae, class glossaries, and alphabetical glossaries. The author also treats the production and study of grammar in Anglo-Saxon England, touching on the works of Bede, Tatwine, Boniface, Alcuin, Priscian, and Aelfric.

scholarly journals The northern world of the Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 ◽  
pp. 275-305
Author(s):  
Helen Appleton
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
British Library ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
The Mediterranean

AbstractThe Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi, sometimes known as the Cotton map or Cottoniana, is found on folio 56v of London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. v, which dates from the first half of the eleventh century. This unique survivor from the period presents a detailed image of the inhabited world, centred on the Mediterranean. The map’s distinctive cartography, with its emphasis on islands, seas and urban spaces, reflects an Insular, West Saxon geographic imagination. As Evelyn Edson has observed, the mappa mundi appears to be copy of an earlier, larger map. This article argues that the mappa mundi’s focus on urban space, translatio imperii and Scandinavia is reminiscent of the Old English Orosius, and that it originates from a similar milieu. The mappa mundi’s northern perspective, together with its obvious dependence on and emulation of Carolingian cartography, suggest that its lost exemplar originated in the assertive England of the earlier tenth century.

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