Nonhuman voices in Anglo-Saxon literature and material culture / James Paz.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Paz, James, author.

Series:

Manchester medieval literature and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--Old English, ca. 450-1100--History and criticism.

English literature.

Civilization, Anglo-Saxon.

Material culture--Great Britain--History--To 1500.

Material culture.

English literature--Old English.

History.

Great Britain.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

History.

Physical Description:

x, 236 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2017.

Summary:

Anglo-Saxon 'things' could talk, Nonhuman voices leap out from the Exeter Book Riddles, telling us how they were made or how they behave. The Franks Caket is a box of bone that alludes to its former fate as a whale that swam aground onto the shingle, and the Ruthwell monument is a stone column that speaks as if it were living wood, or a wounded body. In this book, James Paz uncovers the voice and agency that these nonhuman things have across Anglo-Saxon literature and material culture. He makes a new contribution to 'thing theory' and rethinks conventional divisions between animate human subjects and inanimate nonhuman objects in the early Middle Ages. Anglo-Saxon writers and craftsmen describe artefacts and animals through riddling forms or enigmatic language, balancing an attempt to speak and listen to things with an understanding that these nonhumans often elude, defy and withdraw from us. But the active role that things have in the early medieval world is also linked to the Germanic origins of the word, where a ping is a kind of assembly with the ability to draw together other elements, creating assemblages in which human and nonhuman forces combine. Nonhuman voices in Anglos-Saxon literature and material culture invites us to rethink the concept of voice as a quality that is not simply imposed upon nonhumans but which inheres in their ways of existing and being in the world. It asks us to reconsider the concept of agency as arising from within groupings of diverse elements, rather than always emerging from human actors alone. Book jacket.

Contents:

List of figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction. On Anglo-Saxon things

1. Æschere's head, Grendel's mother and the sword that isn't a sword : unreadable things in Beowulf

2. The 'thingness' of time in the Old English riddles of the Exeter Book and Aldhelm's Latin enigmata

3. Riddles of the Franks Casket : enigmas, agency and assemblage

4. Assembling and reshaping Christianity in the Lives of St Cuthbert and Lindisfarne Gospels

5. Dream of the Rood and the Ruthwell monument : fragility, brokenness and failure

Afterword. Old things with new things to say

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 221-232) and index.

ISBN:

1526101106

9781526101105

OCLC:

964551116