Empire, Shame, and Medieval Text Editing: The Case of Beowulf Line 1382a

Abstract

This essay applies the concept of postimperial melancholia, taken from the work of Paul Gilroy, to describe the affective undercurrents of medieval text editing in the latter half of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first through an example from Beowulf. The discussion is focalized through the emendations to line 1382a, where an ambiguous series of minims leads to different editorial choices in Klaeber's first three editions of the poem, in his second supplement to the third edition, in the fourth edition produced by R. D. Fulk, Robert D. Bjork, and John D. Niles, and in Kevin Kiernan's Electronic Beowulf. The emendation proposed by Klaeber in his second supplement is imbricated in the shameful history of Old English studies and the project of constructing legendary origins for whiteness. Kiernan and the fourth edition editors each reject Klaeber's reading without addressing this history, focusing attention instead on technological and methodological interventions that produce other readings which are then represented alongside Klaeber's. The result is representative of how the closed and nonrecuperative temporality of melancholia is manifest in the principal development of postwar medieval text editing more generally, which is the abandonment of the notion that scholarly interventions constitute progress toward a better representation of a text, in favor of imagining them as expansions of a spatialized critical field around nodes of dissent. The essay concludes that the best way forward for the field is to recognize its melancholia and its causes, so that it might contribute to more productive futures.