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1998 Colloquium Paper Abstracts

Digression, Metonymy, and Tropic Hypertrophy in Beowulf
Jon Bornholdt, Medieval Studies

In this paper I use cognitive trope theory to argue that the much-discussed digressions in Beowulf are narrative expansions of formulaic metonyms. Basing my argument on a close analysis of three highly digressive passages, only one of which is normally regarded as a "digression" proper, I claim that the relation between story and discourse is reciprocal: metonymic maneuvers both serve and inform the major themes of the poem. Finally, I suggest that this arrangement produces a poem whose narrative structure is deliberately and irreducibly aleatory.

Stop Making Sense
Dan Barrett, English

My intent is to deal with the Finnsburh Fragment, the section of Anglo-Saxon poetry discovered in the Lambeth Palace Library sometime around 1699, allegedly by the famed scholar George Hickes. Through an analysis of George Hickes' personal correspondence and a careful, diplomatic examination of the one available transcription of the Fragment, I hope to make some important and as yet unstated observations about the Fragment itself. What this paper aims to explain are the basic circumstances surrounding the discovery of the Fragment and flawed editorial decisions which have brought us to our present method of reading the Fragment. If the (perhaps unnecessary) shroud of mystery with which contemporary scholarship has draped the Finnsburh Fragment can be at least temporarily discarded, simple investigative method will bring us to a new understanding of the document.

Defending the Loricae against Defixiones
Dan Turkeltaub, Classics

Loricae, insular poems which seek to protect the speaker from harm, have often been linked with defixiones because of certain shared traits which characterize both of them. This similarity is misleading, however. The traits based on which this link is posited do not exist in any discovered and published insular defixio, even though they do characterize continental defixiones. Furthermore, the scholars who propose the link examine only one Lorica, "The Lorica of Laidcenn," and its characteristics. Yet the characteristics in "The Lorica of Laidcenn" do not even match the characteristics of continental defixiones. Rather, the Lorica more closely mirrors traditional insular incantations to repel elf-shot. I propose, then, that Loricae, or at least the Lorica of Laidcenn, imitate these spells and not defixiones.

Excavating the Ruin: Circling Signification
Roscoe Leasure, English

In an ironic twist of fate, an Anglo-Saxon poem, which muses upon the dilapidated ruins of Bath, has itself become a ruin over the course of a thousand years. Paleographers might rue the damage to the Exeter Book in which this poem occurs; however the lacunae created by fire-damage not only make it a curiosity, but isolate for closer inspection certain details, allowing critical approaches otherwise proscribed by an uncompromised, smooth text. Alvin Lee (1972) once suggested that Anglo-Saxon poetry be treated as an environment of images, and that The Ruin in particular shared the hardness and clarity characteristic of Imagist poetry. It would also seem that The Ruin displays an aesthetic of incompletion, or what I term farragineity, reminiscent of modernists like Pound and Eliot. Traditionally considered a testimony to man's ephemerality, one might just as productively approach this piece as a testimony to the ephemerality of meaning, for its lacunae constitute sites vunerable to the insertion of Derrida's deconstructive lever. As both a document and a monument, The Ruin sends the reader on a circular quest for clues among the debris scattered in deserted places.

Politics and Irony in Harley MS 2253
Nate Johnson, English

Harley MS 2253 is best known as the repository of a number of familiar Middle English lyrics, including 'Erthe toc of erthe.' But to extract the English lyrics from the manuscript context is to ignore the interesting dialogue between which 'Erthe toc of erthe' is sandwiched -- one English, the other Anglo-Norman -- take opposing sides in the baronial conflicts of the 13th century. 'Erthe toc of erthe' might then be read as an ironic commentary on the political posturing of the two ballads since, by the time the manuscript was compiled, all the historical participants in the conflict were probably dead.

The Cursor Mundi's Not-So-Brief History of Time
Mark Hazard, English

The Cursor Mundi is the most ambitious biblical paraphrase in Middle English, encompassing both the Old and New Testaments, and the history of the universe from the beginning of time to the Last Judgment. To fill out its cosmic history, the Cursor Mundi, in fact, offers more than the Bible, supplementing it with a great deal of material from apocryphal books and legends. It is more, however, than a hodgepodge of Bible and legend. The apocryphal material in Cursor Mundi has a role in filling out the poet's conception of history, and of the course of God's revelation in time. This conception constitutes a form of biblical interpretation by which the poet expresses how sign and revelation correspond throughout history.

Singing for Souls or Silver?: Chantries in 14th-Century London
David Rollenhagen, History

The fourteenth century witnessed a surge in the foundation of perpetual chantries in England, and leading this trend was London, the country's largest and most populous city. Wills, chantry ordinations, and municipal and parish records reveal how important Londoners considered chantries to be to their spiritual well-being. But these documents also tell another story: interruption or cessation of chantries, and even failure in their initial establishment, were real possibilities. Perpetual success depended not only on the economic strength of endowments, but also on the trustworthiness of executors, parishioners, parish priests, and chantry chaplains. This paper will examine the reasons for chantry failure and the preventative measures taken, revealing that many of the chaplains who were entrusted to serve London chantries were actually self-serving and unreliable.

Keynote Address:
Titanic Fever: Text as Temporal Icon
Dr. Paul Strohm, Indiana University

Faith in Medicine, Medicine in Faith: The Church and Healing in the Middle Ages
Jennifer Welsh, Medieval Studies

From its inception, when Christ sent his disciples out "to preach the kingdom of God and to heal," Christianity was linked with medicine. Through the Middle Ages, this juxtaposition continued. Health and healing were paramount concerns in people's everyday lives, and prime areas for supernatural involvement. No self-respecting saint would be caught without at least one miraculous cure, and there was an endless array of healing relics, ranging from bits of bone to the water a saint had washed his hands in. Saints could rush in where doctors feared to tread. Yet the Church had to make a clear distinction between the licit and the illicit supernatural. Remnants of earlier pagan magical practices and folk Christianity were seen as a constant threat to the Church's monopoly on divine power which needed to be controlled or eradicted.

The Saint Who Died Twice: Middle English Lives of Winifred
Elisa Mangina, Medieval Studies

The surviving Middle English lives of St. Winifred present, in miniature, several important issues that confront the scholar of late medieval hagiography. For instance, Life "C," hitherto unedited, appears in only one manuscript of the 1438 Gilte Legende and exemplifies the tendency to personalize legendaries to include local or favorite saints. Life "E," printed by Caxton in 1485, emphasizes Winifred's translation to Shrewsbury, and I suggest in this paper that the author of E may in fact have been a monk of Shrewsbury. This early printed version of the saint's life indicates that there was still a vital tradition of monastic hagiographical writing on the eve of the sixteenth century, with the Reformation approaching.

Hermann Joseph of Steinfeld and the Forgotten Spouse of Mary
Chara Armon, History

Efforts to trace the development of devotion to St. Joseph have considered inadequately the thirteenth-century vita of B. Hermann Joseph (1150-1241), Premonstratensian canon of Steinfeld. In showing how Hermann supplants Joseph during a mystical marriage with Mary, Hermann's vita defines thirteenth-century perspectives on the man who was Mary's spouse. The vita's subsequent attentiveness to Joseph's paternal tenderness toward Jesus demonstrates the respect Joseph occasionally received for his role as parent to the Christ Child, thus confirming evidence from later centuries which suggests that Joseph's role often came to be understood as more paternal than spousal. Placing Hermann's vita within the history of Josephine piety, paternity, and the family sheds light on the chronology of attitudes toward St. Joseph, and allows consideration of how those attitudes manifested in private devotion.

"For she is tikel of here tayle, talewys of tongue': The Description of Lady Mede in the C-Text of Piers Plowman
Diane Cady, English

This paper explores the intersection of three registers that are generally dealt with separately in analyses of medieval literature -- money, metaphor, and gender. Conceptual parallels shared by these three phenomena help to explain why the language of money, for example, haunts descriptions of poetic language and sexual perversion. While Langland is not unique among writers to recognize and exploit the isomorphic relationship between money, language, and gender, he provides perhaps one of the most striking examples of it in his depiction of Lady Mede in Passus II-IV of the C-Text. Lady Mede embodies the potential subversiveness of money, language and gender when it seeps beyond the bounds of sanctioned economic activity, poetic propriety, and patriarchal control. An examination of these issues reveals what David Aers has called a "web of interlocution," which contextualizes this complicated and contradictory poem, as well as Langland's own vexed relationship to hierarchy and social controls.

As An Argument to the Whole: Piers Plowman, Robert Crowley and The Mirror for Magistrates
Eli Lehrer, English

A curious story about some rats, some mice and a cat serves as a tangential episode in the prologue of the B and C versions of William Langland's Piers Plowman. The same story also appears in the anonymous poem about Thomas Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester in The Mirror for Magistrates. In retelling the fable, however, the Mirror's poet misreads it. His misreading proves particularly interesting in that the Robert Crowley editions of Piers the Mirror's poet almost certainly would have read emphasize a textually supported reading of the passage. While Langland uses the fable to talk about the danger of challenging powerful lords, the Mirror poem's author uses the same fable to speak about the dangers of challenging kings. The story thus has a very different import in the Mirror's poem. An analysis of how the two poems present the fable suggests that the Mirror's poet's evocation of Piers Plowman is only that. The author departs from the story as Langland wrote it in order to effect the evocation and then returns to a point that has only a little to do with Langland's version of the fable.

Fairness Contested: Public Display of Beauty in Middle English Romances
Sachi Shimomura, English

This paper discusses the public display of beauty in the medieval romance tradition, and its relationship to public and private power and disempowerment. Such public display occurs in Sir Launfal as well as in various romances that employ the loathly lady motif. The lady's fairness is often established by contrast or by contest, either with her previous loathly state, or with another lady. In many of these public scenes, the audience's attention seems to get deflected from the lady onto some other figure -- often the lady's knight or disenchanter. Such deflection functions ambiguously; it has the potential both to empower or disempower the lady. I seek to explore how various romancers use or fail to use this ambiguity.

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