Elaine Treharne

The Life of English in the Mid-Twelfth Century: Ralph D’Escures’s Homily on the Virgin Mary

Throughout the post-Conquest period, manuscripts written in English continued to be produced,1 usually at monastic centers, in much the same way as they had been during the Anglo-Saxon period. The preponderance of surviving material based on Old English exemplars that was copied and adapted from ca. 1100–1200 is homiletic and hagiographie in nature. Its recontextualization in the twelfth century provides opportunities for investigating textual transmission and dissemination, for codicolog-ical and paleographical analyses, for assessing the uses of English texts, and for determining the characteristics and aims of the native literate elite.

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.