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University of Exeter Press - John D. Niles

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229 pages

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This monograph is a critical study of the medieval manuscript held in Exeter Cathedral Library, popularly known as ‘The Exeter Book’. Recent scholarship, including the standard edition of the text, published by UEP in 2000 (2 ed’n 2006), has re-named the manuscript ‘The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry’. The book gives us intelligent, sensitive literary criticism, profound readings of all of the poems of the Anthology.

God’s Exiles and English Verse is the first integrative, historically grounded book to be written about the Exeter Book of Old English poetry. By approaching the Exeter codex as a whole, the book seeks to establish a sound footing for the understanding of any and all of its parts, seen as devout yet cosmopolitan expressions of late Anglo-Saxon literary culture.

The poems of the Exeter Book have not before been approached primarily from a codicological perspective. They have not before been read as an integrated expression of a monastic poetic: that is to say, as a refashioning of the medium of Old English verse so as to serve as an emotionally powerful, intellectually challenging vehicle for Christian doctrine and moral instruction.

Part One, consisting of three chapters, introduces certain of the book’s main themes, addresses matters of date, authorship, audience, and the like, and evaluates hypotheses that have been put forth concerning the origins of the Exeter Anthology in the south of England during the period of the Benedictine Reform.

Part Two, the main body of the book, begins with a long chapter, divided into seven sections, that introduces the contents of the Exeter Anthology poem by poem in a more systematic fashion than before, with attention to the overall organization of the Anthology and certain factors in it that have a unifying function. The five shorter chapters that follow are devoted to topics of special interest, including the volume’s possible use as a guide to vernacular poetic techniques, its underlying worldview, its reliance on certain thematically significant keywords, and its intertextual versus intratextual relations. The riddles, especially those of a sexual content, receive attention in a chapter of their own.

In addition, there is a translation of the popular poem The Wanderer into modern English prose, a folio-by-folio listing of the contents of the Exeter Anthology, and a listing of a number of the poems of the Anthology with notes on their genre, according to Latin generic terms familiar to educated Anglo-Saxons.

This book is the first of its kind - an integrative, book-length critical study of the Exeter Anthology.

Part One: Reading the Anthology in its Historical Context

Monastic Poetics                                                                                                                  Scribes, Authors, Compilers, and Readers

Exeter, Glastonbury, and the Benedictine Reform

Part Two: Reading the Anthology as a Codicological Whole

An Overview of the Book’s Contents

Principles of order

The book’s opening parts, Advent Lyrics to Juliana

Voices of wisdom: The Wanderer and related poems

The voice of the sage: A Father’s Precepts and related poems

Voices from the Germanic past: Widsith and related poems

Diversity within unity: the role of simulated speech

The book’s closing parts, The Panther to the end

Teaching the Tools of the Poet’s Trade

The Enigmas — a Special Problem?                                                                Poetry and Worldview                                                                             Keywords

Intratextual Hermeneutics

Summary and Conclusions

Appendix 1: A translation of The Wanderer

Appendix 2: Folio-by-folio contents of the Exeter Anthology

Appendix 3: Latin genre terms and the poems of the Exeter Anthology

Sujets

Religion

Christianisme

Literary Criticism

Medieval

HISTORY

Edad Media

Exeter Book

Christian Church

English poetry

Old English literature

Middle Ages

History of religions

Christianity

Poetry

Europe

Informations

Publié par	University of Exeter Press
Date de parution	31 juillet 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781905816156
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,5625€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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God’s Exiles and English Verse
In this critical study of the Exeter Anthology of Old English poetry, John Niles argues for approaching this unique collection as a shaped miscellany, one that is expressive of the devout yet cosmopolitan culture of English monasticism during the period of the tenth-century Benedictine Reform. Characterizing the authors of these poems as craft poets working in an innovative register, he argues that the Anthology draws on the time-honoured resources of Old English alliterative verse so as to express Christian verities in a manner designed to astonish and delight. In the course of his analysis of the codex as a whole, he offers new insights into many individual poems and problems of interpretation.
John D. Niles is Emeritus Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the University of California, Berkeley.
‘John Niles’s book is premised on one of those simple, but foundational ideas that one can hardly believe has not been attempted before, so fundamentally important is the Exeter Anthology to our understanding of pre-Conquest English poetry. What has been previously lacking is intelligent, sensitive literary criticism of the whole codex: profound readings of the poems as poems. Niles’s book is a carefully thought-out, elegantly written and critically incisive work that will be a landmark study for scholars and students of early English poetry.’
Chris Jones, Professor of English, University of St Andrews
‘A well-written account of the manuscript and its many contents, containing detailed, insightful, and occasionally beautiful readings of the poems themselves.’
Elaine Treharne, Roberta Bowman Denning Professor of Humanities, Stanford University
‘An excellent work that should be well received.’
Professor Bernard J. Muir, University of Melbourne
EXETER MEDIEVAL
Rethinking Medieval Literature – a series from Exeter
God’s Exiles and English Verse
On the Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry
John D. Niles
First published in 2019. Emended second edition published in 2021. University of Exeter Press Reed Hall, Streatham Drive Exeter EX4 4QR, UK www.exeterpress.co.uk
© John D. Niles 2019
The right of John D. Niles to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBNs 978 1 905816 09 5 (Hbk) 978 1 905816 86 6 (Pbk) 978 1 905816 15 6 (ePUB) 978 1 905816 14 9 (PDF)
Cover image: Saint Cuthbert praying by the River Tyne. London, British Library, Yates Thompson MS 26, fol. 10v (© British Library Board, through Bridgeman Images)
Typeset in Gentium by BBR Design, Sheffield
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
PART ONE
READING THE ANTHOLOGY IN ITS HISTORICAL CONTEXT
1. Monastic Poetics
2. Scribes, Authors, Compilers and Readers
3. Exeter, Glastonbury and the Benedictine Reform
PART TWO
READING THE ANTHOLOGY AS A CODICOLOGICAL WHOLE
4. An Overview of the Book’s Contents
5. Teaching the Tools of the Poet’s Trade
6. The Enigmas—a Special Problem?
7. Poetry and World-View
8. Keywords
9. Intratextual Hermeneutics
10. Summary and Conclusions
Appendix 1: A Translation of The Wanderer
Appendix 2: Folio-by-Folio Contents of the Exeter Anthology
Appendix 3: Latin Genre Terms and the Poems of the Exeter Anthology
Bibliography of Works Cited
Index of Modern Authors Cited
Index of Old English Words Discussed
General Index
Preface and Acknowledgements
This book offers a codicologically based account of the Exeter Anthology of Old English poetry: its principles of design, its relationship of parts, its leading themes, its points of formal and stylistic interest, its probable makers and readers, and its possible uses in its time. While I make a point of the value of approaching the Anthology in a historically grounded manner, my main intention is to clarify what each poem brings to the ensemble and what the ensemble brings to each poem. By this means, issues pertaining to the interpretation of individual poems and passages can be resolved with greater confidence, while at the same time the contribution of verse to the culture of late Anglo-Saxon England will more readily be apparent.
It is a source of some wonderment to me that an integrative, book-length critical study of the Exeter Anthology has not been undertaken before. My study will be a success if it is forgotten in another generation or two—forgotten not because of neglect or indifference on the part of its prospective readers, I hope, but because my main argument about the Anthology’s intellectual coherence in the context of late Anglo-Saxon monastic learning will by then be taken for granted, even if it encounters initial resistance on the part of those who are accustomed to reading certain of these poems in a different manner.
A word may be in order on the book’s short title, ‘God’s Exiles and English Verse’. One reason why modern readers have been strongly attracted to certain poems of the Exeter Anthology, I suspect, has been their sympathetic response to the images of exile featured in that volume. They have felt the magnetism of persons who are outcast from society or alienated from society and who must fall back on their own resources for survival in a landscape that is desolate or wintry. Particularly in the middle decades of the war-torn twentieth century, the era of Eliot’s The Waste Land and Camus’s L’Étranger , the Wanderer’s soliloquy must have seemed surprisingly contemporary, as it still does to many of us today.
The sympathetic portrayal of the condition of exile to be found in the Exeter Anthology is understandable given the likelihood that the book was made chiefly by and for ‘God’s exiles’: that is to say, by and for monks and cloistered women, or by extension other Christians who took their religion seriously and strove to live by its tenets. Those people had a well-developed consciousness that they were exiles on this earth, strangers whose true happiness resided elsewhere. Orthodox doctrine confirmed them in that knowledge, elaborating on the matter in a vast intellectual system.
People who had opted for the monastic life were thus well situated to understand the existential situations of the solitary, exiled or destitute persons whose voices are heard in the pages of the Anthology. They may even have thought of those same imagined persons—the Wanderer, the Seafarer and others, including the hermit saint Guthlac and the speaker of The Penitent’s Prayer —as God’s exiles like themselves, in a meaningful sense. From their education and training they would have been aware that the Old Testament figure of Job, for example, a fortunate man before he was singled out for affliction and became in time a prophet, was one of God’s exiles, whether or not he was aware of that fact or chose to be in that condition.
My study owes a great deal to the prior scholarship of others. Although no one else can be held responsible for the views expressed here, my debts to scholars who have written on individual poems of the Exeter Anthology are incalculable, as the notes to the book ought to testify. I am equally conscious of my debt to those scholars who have edited the Anthology as a whole, thereby giving sharp definition to its contents. The two most authoritative current editions are The Exeter Book , ed. George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (1936), and—supplanting it for most purposes— The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry , ed. Bernard J. Muir (2nd edn, 2000). I am fortunate to be in a position to build on Muir’s insights as to how the poems of the codex speak to one another across textual boundaries, thereby constituting what he calls ‘an anthology with a purpose’ rather than a miscellaneous collection. I also owe a major debt to Patrick W. Conner’s researches into the Anthology’s origins, contents, intellectual context and transmission history, even when my own research has led me in different directions.
On palaeographical grounds the Exeter codex is ascribed a date between c .960 and c .990, with the compromise date ‘ c .975’ being used by some. Muir (2000: 1: 1), expressing what may be a growing consensus, identifies c .965–75 as the apparent period when the Anthology was designed and copied out. I see no reason to differ from his judgement, though one should keep in mind that these dates are approximate. As for identifying the date of composition of the individual poems included in the codex, I likewise accept Muir’s conclusion, which is based on the scholarship of others, that ‘there is little reason to believe that any of the poems in the anthology dates from much before the Alfredian period, perhaps with the exception of the three lists embedded in Widsith ’ (2000: 1: 40). Confidence in this matter naturally stops short of certainty. This question of the origin of individual texts—one that I view as unanswerable in most instances—is not my chief concern. The possibility is now increasingly entertained, however, that certain poems or passages of the Exeter Anthology were composed close to the time when the book was compiled and written out, if not contemporaneously with those events. This line of thought directs attention to the period of c .965–75 as a crucial one of reception and shaping of the book’s contents.
Two facsimiles of the manuscript are available in print or on DVD: The Exeter Book of Old English Poetry , with introductory chapters by R.W. Chambers, Max Förster and Robin Flower (1933), and The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry , an electronic edition prepared by Bernard J. Muir (2006). Another facsimile is available in Exeter Manuscripts , ed. Matthew T. Hussey, volume 22 of the series ‘Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts in Microfiche Facsimile’ (2014). Readers are encouraged to consult one or another of these r