Paul E. Szarmach

Medieval England: An Encyclopedia

Alchemy allegory and related symbolism battle of Maldon Beaufort, Margaret Caedmon Carol chivalry Cnut dance, dance music drama, vernacular, Dunbar, William earls and earldoms Ely cathedral Franks casket hagiography heptarchy Julian of Norwich liturgy Magna Carta manuscript illumination Morte Arthure, alliterative music - history and theory navy and naval power the owl and the nightingale Piers Plowman prices and wages printing runes satire the seafarer serfs and villeins songs stained glass technology translation and paraphrase vaulting widows and widowhood the wifes lament Wilton Diptych women and the arts.

Meter 20: Context Bereft

Hams, Lancelot Minor. Studies in the Anglo-Saxon Version of the Gospels. Part I : The Fomi of the Latin Original, and Mistaken Renderings. Baltimore: John Murphy, 1901. Hohler, C. E. “Some Service-Books of the Later Saxon Church.” Tenth-Century Studies: Essays in Commemoration of the Millenium of the Council of Winchester and Regularis Concordia. Ed. David Parsons. London: Phillimore, 1975. 60-83. Krapp, G . P., and E. V. K. Dobbie, eds. The Exeter Book. ASPR 3. New York: Columbia UP, 1936. Liuzza, R. M. The Old English Version of rhe Gospels. Vol. 1 : Text and Introduction. EETS os 304. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. Vol. 2: Notes and Glossary. EETS os 314. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Middleton, Anne. “Life in the Margins, or What’s an Annotator to Do?’ New Directions in Textuul Study. Ed. Dave Oliphant and Robin Bradford. Austin: U of‘ Texas P, 1990. 167-83. Origen. Conrmentury on the Gospel According to fohn, Books 13-32. Trans. Ronald E. Heine. Fathers of the Church 89. Washington: Catholic U of America P, 1993. Schnackenburg, R. The Gospel According to Saint John. Vol. I I : Commentary on Chapters 5-12. New York: Crossroad. 1982.

Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, 2011: Report of the Executive Director

The year 2010, which is the main focus of this report, must surely appear in the Academy annals as beyond imagination. The passage of the Arizona immigration law (SB 1070), and also an Arizona law on ethnic studies, created consternation and confusion as the Academy looked ahead to the scheduling of this meeting. The question was whether or not the Academy should hold the meeting as planned or seek other arrangements, if not cancellation. As tension was building throughout the country, the Academy began to receive advice and more from a variety of sources, including individuals who were not members of the Academy but sought to speak as medievalists through the Academy. For the first time ever the officers and Council held a telephone conference, on June 18, which led to a decision to conduct a poll soliciting from the membership its views on the main issue of holding the meeting in Arizona. The new Academy distribution list registered 1,025 opinions out of a total possible of 3,881. The solicitation of me...

Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, 2011: Report of the Editor of Speculum

The year 2010 was the first year in the five-year publishing agreement between Cambridge University Press (CUP) and the Medieval Academy of America on behalf of Speculum, volumes 85 (2010) through 89 (2014). As might be expected, the conjointure of an eighty-five-year-old journal and a publishing house of more than five hundred years crossed many a traditional line and some new ones. For example, every contribution to the journal now has to be copyrighted, even this report and those that accompany it. One crucial matter is the distinction between subscribers and members. Subscribers are institutions that pay for and receive Speculum, while members are individuals who receive Speculum as a perquisite of membership in the Medieval Academy (along with other perquisites). In other words, CUP manages institutions; the Academy still works with individuals.

Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, 2011: The Robert L. Kindrick–CARA Award for Outstanding Service to Medieval Studies

One of the great historical enterprises of modern scholarship on the Middle Ages is the edition and publication of works of medieval philosophers and theologians. Unlike the great nationalist-inspired projects like the Monumenta Germaniae Historica or the Rolls Series or the well-defined projects of the Maurists and Bollandists, the editors of the great medieval thinkers usually labor alone or in small teams dependent on small government grants or the wavering sponsorship of religious or national organizations. And there is much to do given how few medieval theological works exist in adequate critical editions, even for such central figures as Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham. Rescuing and making accessible the monuments of medieval philosophy has been the life work of Girard J. Etzkorn, professor emeritus of the Franciscan Institute, St. Bonaventure University, for which the Medieval Academy of America is honoring him with the 2011 Robert L. Kindrick–CARA Award for Outstanding Service to Medieval Stu...

The Palimpsest and Old English Homiletic Composition

The invocation or citation of a metaphor or analogue in any explanation of a literary feature runs a set of risks. Arguably the most famous such analogue in the study of Old English literature, viz. John Leyerle’s interlace theory for the composition of Beowulf, gives a perfect example.1 Leyerle sought to explain narrative features of Beowulf, particularly narrative time and the unfolding of incident, by comparing those features to the interlace pattern of Insular art in manuscripts and metalwork. However effective Leyerle’s comparison might be in the classroom, scholars reacted variously at best and sharply at worst in subsequent studies. Morton W. Bloomfield pronounced, “[T]he ‘interlace’ image is not useful when applied to verbal art.”2 Recognizing the risk of such comparisons and nevertheless moving forward, in part at least in reflective homage to Leyerle and his suggestion, I would like to propose here that the palimpsest offers a way to understand the composition techniques of Old English homilists. Some consideration of what a palimpsest is seems obligatory before the word can have application to the prose. As we shall see, a palimpsest is a rewriting and a reuse of both parchment and an idea, for all writing is a rewriting. Crucial to the analogy is the practice of writers and their scribes.

Beowulf: An Edition with Relevant Shorter Texts

Just about everyone who takes the Beowulf final comes muttering out of the exam room that he or she could have done better, had the text set for the translation been clean and clear. As in those same seminar discussions when a crux or locus desperatus reared its head, the ambitious first-timer vows to make the text safe for future generations by a cogent analysis of the offending passage(s) in a crisp note or even an extended article. Fortunately, such vows, or “boasts” in the Anglo-Saxon sense, generally diminish directly proportional to the square of the distance from the Schlachthaus. Those who do try the projects of textual criticism—invariably on a local basis—find they tread over old ground, likely repeating old positions formulated in the former Age of Philology, or they finally wilt in the face of the staggering amount of amassed scholarship, or they take up an easy indictment against Klaeber and his benchmark edition, convicting him as a man of his time for his criticism that the poem lacks a steady advance or for his understanding of the characterization of women. Other editors face other charges with similar results: they do not measure up to the felt need or, in the long view, the ever-changing mantra. Into this fray have stepped Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson with their edition for the renascent Blackwells of “3182 lines of alliterative verse beginning Hwæt we gardena in geardagum printed often, since Kemble (1833) under the title Beowulf.” It is difficult to imagine two senior scholars who could bring more auctoritas to this text, given their long and distinguished careers in Anglo-Saxon studies. They make it clear in their foreword, however, what their project is: “It is designed to give maximum help to those reading the poem for the first time, and consists of four parts with supporting apparatus—illustrations, facsimile pages, a map, bibliography, and glossary” (vii). They furthermore go on to describe seven aims upon which “we have agreed,” the first and seventh of which are worth noting here: