Andrew Scheil

The Footsteps of Israel: Understanding Jews in Anglo-Saxon England

This book considers the various strategies used to portray Jews during the Anglo-Saxon period. Scholars agree that England lacked any significant Jewish population prior to the Norman Conquest, and it is not Scheil’s objective to challenge that consensus. Rather, he argues that the terms “Jews” and “Judaism” functioned as “a nexus of rhetorical effects, a variety of representational strategies built into the very structure of medieval Christianity” (3). Deploying this rhetoric, he claims, provided Anglo-Saxon writers with “a variform way of fashioning a Christian populus in England and continually redefining its nature” (3). In posing this argument, Scheil avoids writing what he calls “another chapter in the grand recit of Oppression” (5), though he also refuses to diminish in any way the inherently anti-Jewish nature of much pre-Conquest writing. Instead, he argues for a more complex understanding of Anglo-Saxon anti-Judaism, claiming that such beliefs manifest specific anxieties about cultural history and identity. Underlying the book’s principal argument is a secondary one regarding the continuing value of figural hermeneutics to literary criticism. Citing the work of Northrop Frye and Erich Auerbach, Scheil calls for a more nuanced understanding of typological interpretation in the early Middle Ages. He argues that scholarship on figural hermeneutics often “presupposes a unity to typology that is questionable: e.g., in the often overstrenuous attempt to separate allegory from typology” (337). To combat this sort of overly rigorous approach, Scheil suggests that we employ a notion of “figural ‘understanding’ or ‘thinking’ rather than ‘typology’; use terms that imply open-ended movement and negotiation rather than predetermined stasis and edifice” (338). This aspect of Scheil’s argument seems curiously out of date. While I agree that too many dubious readings have been justified as “typology,” the critics with whom Scheil engages here—Frye, Auerbach, Leonhard Goppelt, Jean Danielou, G. W. H. Lampe and K. H. Woolcombe, Henri de Lubac, and A. C. Charity—largely wrote between

Anti-Judaism in Ælfric's Lives of Saints

Anti-Judaism existed in Anglo-Saxon England without the presence of actual Jewish communities. The understanding of Jews and Judaism in Anglo-Saxon England is therefore solely a textual phenomenon, a matter of stereotypes embedded in longstanding Christian cultural traditions. For instance, consider the homily De populo Israhel (written between 1002 and 1005), a condensation and translation of selections from Exodus and Numbers by the prolific monk AElfric of Eynsham ( c . 955– c . 1020). The text narrates the tribulations of the Israelites in the desert: AElfric explains that although God ‘worhte feala wundra on ðam westene’, the Israelites were ‘wiðerraede witodlice to oft’ and angered him. The intractable attitude of Gods chosen people in the desert demands an explanation; why did the Israelites spurn the heaven-sent manna and long for the repasts of their Egyptian captivity? AElfric clarifies their behaviour through a string of typological associations. He explains that the manna ‘haefde Þa getacnunge ures Haelendes Cristes’.

The Narrative Pulse of Beowulf: Arrivals and Departures (review)

English; although no Latin manuscripts for this text have survived from AngloSaxon England, it is clear from textual differences between the three Old English translations that they are derived from separate recensions. The entries vary in length, with some providing very full discussions of themes, images, and influences in Anglo-Saxon texts that derive from these apocryphal materials. The sections on the Old Testament apocrypha are particularly detailed in this regard as they contain inventories of images that were seemingly adopted and adapted by Anglo-Saxon authors. One intriguing case in point is the entry for De plasmatione Adam, which Wright cites as possibly one of a group of texts responsible for the detail in the eighth-century Liber de numeris that Adam was created from eight substances, and in the Old English prose Solomon and Saturn that Adam’s eyes were created from a “pound of flowers” (possibly, Wright argues, also responsible for the image on the Alfred Jewel and Fuller Brooch). The entries brim with such curiosities that demonstrably stirred and fueled the imagination of at least some Anglo-Saxon writers. In order to keep track of many of these richly detailed textual echoes and borrowings, a theme-index would have been desirable; however, this task would have obviously exceeded the aims of the SASLC project. A minor additional point concerns those works produced beyond the Anglo-Saxon period (and hence beyond the main purview of this study), which are generally not cross-referenced evenly across the volume. A case in point is the Saltair na rann, which is cited as a possible transition text for the theme of “the fifteen signs before Judgment” (entry on p. 76), although its own probable links to the apocryphal “Life of Adam and Eve” (entry on p. 3), as asserted by David Greene and Brian Murdoch (in The Irish Adam and Eve Story from Saltair na rann, 2 vols. [Dublin, 1976]) is not mentioned. Biggs’s volume will be reprinted as the entry for the “Apocrypha” in SASLC Volume II, covering entries from “Adalbero of Laon” to “Audax.” Since the entries are already remarkably full and meticulously researched, it is hard to imagine points for further expansion. Perhaps additional information about booklists, libraries, and citations can be gleaned from Michael Lapidge’s monumental The Anglo-Saxon Library (2006), which unfortunately was published too late to have been cited at length in the volume, although it was included in the bibliography. As it stands, the volume offers an exceptional resource of great important for every Anglo-Saxonist. Designed as a reference work, Biggs’s volume can also be read with enjoyment as a fascinating and comprehensive study of the use of apocryphal materials in Anglo-Saxon England. Samantha Zacher Cornell University

A Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature@@@Satan Unbound: The Devil in Old English Narrative Literature

The devil is perhaps the single-most recurring character in Old English narrative literature, and yet his function in the highly symbolic narrative world of hagiography has never been systematically studied. Certain inconsistencies characteristically accompany the nebulous devil in early medieval narrative accounts - he is simultaneously bound in hell and yet roaming the earth; he is here identified as the chief of demons, and there taken as a collective term for the totality of demons; he is at one point a medical parasite and at another a psychological principle. Satan Unbound argues that these open-ended registers in the conceptualisation of the devil allowed Anglo-Saxon writers a certain latitude for creative mythography, even within the orthodox tradition. The narrative tensions resulting from the devils protean character opaquely reflect deep-rooted anxieties in the early medieval understanding of the territorial distribution of the moral cosmos, the contested spiritual provinces of the demonic and the divine. The ubiquitous conflict between saint and demon constitutes an ontological study of the boundaries between the holy and the unholy, rather than a psychological study of temptation and sin.