JOURNAL OF ENGLISH AND GERMANIC PHILOLOGY最新文献

{"title":"Murder in the <i>Baðstofa</i>: Bathing and the Dangers of Domestic Space in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature","authors":"Katelin Marit Parsons","doi":"10.5406/1945662x.122.4.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/1945662x.122.4.04","url":null,"abstract":"A famous scene in Eyrbyggja saga describes how a farmer, Styrr of Hraun, uses a baðstofa, “bathhouse, bathing chamber,” to dispose of two troublesome berserker brothers.1 One brother has demanded the farmer's daughter as his bride, threatening the farmer if he will not agree to the match. After seeking counsel from his wise neighbor, Snorri Þorgrímsson, the farmer sets three labor-intense tasks for the berserkers to complete while he has a baðstofa prepared for their arrival. Having exhausted their strength through physical labor, Styrr invites the berserkers to relax in the baðstofa and then barricades their only exit, heating the space to an unbearable temperature and murdering them when they attempt to clamber out. A now-lost chapter of Heiðarvíga saga describes the same event, with the probable narrative difference that the berserkers in Heiðarvíga saga ask whether anyone else will join them in the baðstofa, with Styrr craftily responding that it would be unfitting for the other men to bathe with such mighty personages.2Eyrbyggja saga emphasizes that the architecture of the baðstofa at Hraun is vulnerable by design. Constructed while the berserkers are away cutting a road through the lava, Styrr's bathing house is dug into the ground with only a single narrow exit up and out, and it has a small opening in the wall that allows it to be easily (over)heated from the outside. Most medieval Icelandic farmers did not custom-build themselves a baðstofa for the purpose of ridding themselves of unpleasant suitors. Nevertheless, when the baðstofa makes an appearance in medieval Icelandic writings, it tends to be situated within a narrative episode depicting home invasion, murder, or attempted murder. In this paper, I argue that making the baðstofa visible in such a context is a deliberate violent inversion of its normal association with socialization, hospitality, and restoration. This is particularly true of the baðstofur in Sturlunga saga, a compilation that describes a particularly bloody period of Icelandic history and records numerous contemporary events in which mundane domestic spaces became sites for reprisal killings.The baðstofa as it appears in literature cannot be disassociated from changing social practices, material cultures, and environmental conditions. As examined here, the function and architecture of the baðstofa did not remain stable throughout the medieval and Early Modern period. Conceptions of bathing changed, and so too did the availability of firewood in the Icelandic landscape. Increasingly, the term baðstofa described a heatable room but not one associated in literature with heightened danger to its occupants.The restoration of the baðstofa in a literary context occurs in a folktale recorded (and perhaps partly invented) by Jón Eggertsson (ca. 1643–1689) in the late seventeenth century, which describes a bungled home invasion of a church farm in the fifteenth century. In this story, the hunted becomes the hunter and the baðst","PeriodicalId":44720,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ENGLISH AND GERMANIC PHILOLOGY","volume":"99 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135606655","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Viking Mediologies: A New History of Skaldic Poetics","authors":"Ármann Jakobsson","doi":"10.5406/1945662x.122.4.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/1945662x.122.4.15","url":null,"abstract":"Reading is fundamental. This phrase is the name of a respected nonprofit literacy organization in the United States but also a stock phrase in the popular TV series RuPaul's Drag Race (2009-), where reading has a somewhat different meaning as the “the real art form of insult,” as it is defined in Jenny Livingston's documentary film Paris is Burning (1990), and it is fundamental to “throwing shade,” an important drag queen skill that borrows the phrase from Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814).None of this would have been relevant to previous studies of skaldic poetics, but Kate Heslop's Viking Mediologies is a very different kind of book. The main reason the phrase came to my mind is that the reader does not get far into it before realizing that this is not only an ambitious and clever but a fundamental study that does not leave Skaldic Studies the same. But it is also relevant because reading is among the many issues taken up in the book, which is mainly concerned with remembering, seeing, and hearing, and also because an exploration of the complex semantic relationship between book reading and drag reading would probably benefit a great deal by the subtle theoretical framework used by Kate Heslop in Viking Mediologies.The book begins and ends with the saddest and most successful of skaldic poets, Egill Skallagrímsson and his complicated friendship with his Arinbjörn, the eventual recipient of one of Egill's greatest poems, now only extant in a single fragmentary text, which is probably one of many reasons Heslop uses it as a point of entrance. Heslop goes on to discuss the content of the poem: “Generosity is to miserliness as praise is to a slander, Egill insists” and page 1 thus already conveys to the reader what so many of us teachers of skaldic poetry fail to impress upon our sleepy students, that skaldic poetry, like other gifts, is also concerned with fundamental issues. She goes on to declare war on the “exclusionary dualism” of the holiest of cows in Old Norse Studies, the binary opposition of orality and literacy (p. 5), and this book is brilliantly successful in gently but firmly tearing down that statue, leaving us to explore what lies beneath the imagined dichotomy. The short but remarkably significant introduction also offers a brief but sufficient insight into the concepts of medium, media, mediality, and mediologies with which the study is concerned. This part, not least due to its succinctness, will make the book particularly useful to all Old Norse and medieval scholars wanting to understand this exciting new theoretical framework.Like Tolkien, Kate Heslop divides her book both into three and into six, with one coda. The three parts concern memories, seeing, and hearing, which she establishes as the core elements of skaldic poetry. The parts can be read independently to the reader's gain but also complement each other. Each and every one is replete with new analytical insights, with which the book is so plentiful that reading it ","PeriodicalId":44720,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ENGLISH AND GERMANIC PHILOLOGY","volume":"98 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135606648","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Continental England: Form, Translation, and Chaucer in the Hundred Years’ War","authors":"Marion Turner","doi":"10.5406/1945662x.122.4.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/1945662x.122.4.10","url":null,"abstract":"Elizaveta Strakhov's fascinating and compelling book establishes her as one of the most interesting and important voices emerging in a new generation of Chaucer scholars. At the same time, although Chaucer appears in the subtitle of the book, Continental England in fact makes an argument for decentering Chaucer, as it interrogates the categories of author, nation, and language (p. 14).The category at the center of this book is undoubtedly form. The formes fixes—the ballade, rondeau, virelay, chant royal, lay, and complainte—have long been at the heart of discussions of later medieval French poetry, but have been far less central to scholarly work on medieval English verse. Critics remain less interested in what are generically called Chaucer's “shorter poems” than they are in his narrative poetry. Yet, as Strakhov points out, earlier generations of readers encountered Chaucerian material skewed towards his ballades and other Francophone texts, and influential readers such as Lydgate emphasized Chaucer's “compleyntis, baladis, roundelis, virelaies” as the culmination of his poetic activity (p. 213).In exploring what happens to the formes fixes as they move between languages, Strakhov develops a nuanced argument about translation and identity. As she discusses, Chaucer composed the majority of his short-form lyrics in English rhyme and stanza forms that he had himself developed, but when he translated a French cycle, to produce his Complaint of Venus, he replicated the French rhyme and stanza form. Similarly, when Charles d'Orleans translated his own French formes fixes cycle into English, he precisely reproduced the French formal features such as stanzaic length and rhyme scheme, but when he composed English formes fixes he used established English rhyme and stanza forms (pp. 3–4). While the formes fixes are in some ways a unifying, recognizable mode of writing, they are also regionally inflected.Strakhov's argument throughout Continental England is underpinned by a particular understanding of translation as reparative rather than antagonistic. The “displacement” model of translation, identified by Rita Copeland as the foundational idea of translation activity for the Latin West, enabled an agonistic relationship between source and translation, a relationship of competition and supremacy. However, Copeland also identifies a second model of translation deriving from patristic authors, particularly Jerome. This reconstitutive model is interested in preservation and accretion rather than displacement and expulsion. Strakhov's contention is that writers such as Chaucer practice a secular version of this patristic model of translation, whereby cross-regional Francophone culture is preserved through textual synergies and exchanges, even as the Hundred Years’ War plods or rages in the background. Strakhov terms this kind of work “reparative translation” (p. 9) and this concept infuses and energizes Continental England.The book is written with clarity and","PeriodicalId":44720,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ENGLISH AND GERMANIC PHILOLOGY","volume":"65 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135606844","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England","authors":"Tiffany Beechy","doi":"10.5406/1945662x.122.4.08","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/1945662x.122.4.08","url":null,"abstract":"Translation Effects is a quietly, even stealthily radical book. Translation is a concept with a long pedigree, in scholarship as well as in the medieval period. It can have the most traditional of connotations, from philological notions of original and derivative to ideas of faithfulness and accuracy and consistency through time. Yet, as we all know, medieval “translation” was often practiced as the loosest kind of adaptation—invention operating under cover of transmission. Hurley's study defines its titular concept with beguiling capaciousness, essentially as the traces of carryover from one language to the next, or one text to the next, or even one telling to the next, in time: “translation effects foreground translation as an act even when they do not technically perform it” (p. 3). In this way, translation effects partake of a basic mystery of language, the way the ghosts of past utterances make any present one possible, though this is not really where Hurley takes her argument. The book proceeds gradually, starting with actual translation (the Alfredian Orosius, Ælfrician saints’ lives) and eventually moving beyond it to depicted and finally metaphorical senses of the term, in Middle English treatments of the “Saxon” past and Beowulf's fabric of received narratives, respectively. But even from the very beginning, for Hurley, translation effects “are not aberrations affecting a translation's quality . . . but moments of literary invention that imagine new textual communities” (p. 3). In recognizing “translation effects”—the “products of linguistic transfer”—not as aberrant but as normal aspects of medieval literary invention, Hurley dissolves some of the very grounds for source studies and philology. Medieval invention carries over elements of tradition while making something new, leaving traces—effects—of this process that are key to its imagined community, a community which is not synchronic, furthermore, but diachronic, including past audiences and past transmitters but also future iterations of both. Neither a stable ur-text, the object of philology, nor the unidirectional relation often implied by “source” can very well sustain themselves in the light of such insights.Another radical aspect of the book is its scope, encompassing pre- and post-Conquest works which themselves reach backwards and forwards in time. Chapter 1 treats the Old English Orosius and specifically the phrase marker “cwæð Orosius” (Orosius said) as a moment, repeated multiple times, of a text showing its seams. Hurley reads this foregrounding of engagement with an original text as constructing a complex, heterotemporal “now” that looks back on the coming of Christianity both to Rome and to Britain. It engages anxiety over the weakening of empires and takes pains to construct a community backwards as well as forwards in time, one that sees the pre-Christian past as inferior to the Christian present and the troubled Christian present redeemed in a projected future. In t","PeriodicalId":44720,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ENGLISH AND GERMANIC PHILOLOGY","volume":"165 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135606654","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Entering Behind the Veil: <i>Uurd</i> and the Evangelistic Ingenuity of the <i>Hêliand</i>","authors":"David Pedersen","doi":"10.5406/1945662x.122.4.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/1945662x.122.4.05","url":null,"abstract":"Much recent scholarship on the ninth-century Old Saxon gospel harmony known as the Hêliand has focused on how the poem presents Christ to its original audience. Written in the early days of the Franks’ religious domination of the Saxons, the Hêliand was almost certainly a pivotal text in shaping the Saxons’ understanding of their new religious identity. Indeed, as Stephen Pelle notes, by the middle of the ninth century, “Continuing rebellions against Charlemagne and the new faith soon convinced Carolingian churchmen that forced baptism and mandatory church attendance were not enough to ensure obedience and compliance.”1 As scholars have continually observed, the Hêliand very deliberately responds to these religious tensions by tailoring the depiction of Christ's life and work to the political and cultural circumstances of the original audience.But scholars have been quite divided regarding what, precisely, the ninth-century Saxons were supposed to understand about their new faith from this text. There is no doubt that Christ and his followers are in a sense “Germanized” in the Hêliand, and these alterations seem to offer the original audience a familiar exemplum to emulate. But the precise nature of the emulation is far from settled. Fr. G. Ronald Murphy, for example, finds a tacit condoning of violence in certain changes to the Hêliand's handling of the Sermon on the Mount and in its expansion of Peter's attack on Malchus in Gethsemane, while Richard Fletcher asserts forcefully that the author of the Hêliand “presents Christianity as a mild, peaceable faith” and “nowhere even implicitly suggests that the faith might come in another manner.”2 On a more politically acute note, Perry Neil Harrison sees in the Hêliand's pathos-laden expansion of the Massacre of the Innocents episode a condemnation of the violence that characterized the Frankish efforts to convert Saxony, while Samuel J. Youngs views Christ's passive acceptance of his “fate” in the text as an admonishment to the Saxons to accept their political circumstances with the same passivity.3 Thus, while there can be no doubt that the deliberate Germanization of the narrative communicates something specific to the original Saxon audience, there is little agreement among scholars about what, precisely, that something is.The present essay seeks clarity to these questions of purpose in the evangelistic as opposed to the political agenda of the work. However political the work may be, it is certainly also, and perhaps even primarily, a work of evangelism. Indeed, as the author notes in a prefatory fytt for which the source text has no parallel, his purpose in recording Christ's life and work is to present “hw sia [is gibodskip skoldin/ frummian, firiho barn” (ll. 8–9; how best God's bidding to carry out, the children of mankind).4 Given that the author of the text was likely a highly educated Saxon cleric, it strains credulity to think that his own feelings about the means by which Saxony was con","PeriodicalId":44720,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ENGLISH AND GERMANIC PHILOLOGY","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135606644","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Mappae Mundi of Medieval Iceland","authors":"Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough","doi":"10.5406/1945662x.122.4.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/1945662x.122.4.11","url":null,"abstract":"In the opening to his book, Dale Kedwards describes a school geology trip to Iceland. In one of those quirks of fate, he ended up at Safnahúsið, visiting an exhibition about Iceland's medieval manuscripts. Afterwards, in the gift shop, he picked up copies of Njáls saga and the Poetic Edda. From that point on, there was no looking back, for, as he notes wryly, “These purchases were fatal to my aspirations as a geologist” (p. xii). Yet, as he explains, these interests have come full circle in writing a book about Iceland and its medieval mappae mundi. Indeed, this is a particular strength of what he has produced. The study is impressively interdisciplinary in nature, combining a thorough grounding in Old Norse palaeography, philology, and culture with broader knowledge of scientific processes and phenomena, theories about the world and the cosmos going back to the Classical period, and the transmission of these ideas between cultures over the centuries. It seems that the author's preexisting interests in the study of the earth, its materials, and its processes continued to stand him in good stead, even as he made his way further into the world of Old Norse Studies.The book focuses on five Icelandic mappae mundi (“maps of the world”), drawn between ca. 1225 and ca. 1400 CE. Kedwards aims to situate them in their intellectual, literary, and material contexts in order to demonstrate how they function as “complex registers of Icelandic national self-perception and imagining” (back cover). The first two are hemispherical world maps, preserved in the manuscripts AM 736 I 4to (ca. 1300) and AM 732b 4to (ca. 1300–25). The third is a zonal map from the manuscript GkS 1812 I 4to (1315–ca. 1400), showing the Earth's climatic zones. Kedwards names the last two maps the “larger Viðey map” and the “smaller Viðey map,” both from GkS 1812 III, 4to (ca. 1225–50). The former contains 104 legends including the names of the three continents (Asia, Africa, Europe), rivers, seas, mountains, places, and peoples, with a further thirty-two legends that designate cosmological concepts. On the next page of the manuscript, the latter is a smaller, simpler affair, a T–O map with the names of the three continents.Kedwards begins by cautioning against interpreting the maps as windows onto histories of “geography” and “cosmology,” since, as he points out, these are “modern analytical categories that did not exist as distinct or separate disciplines in the European Middle Ages” (p. 5). Instead, if we want to see the maps as their medieval viewers would have done, Kedwards urges us to “loosen their association with geography in the narrowest sense, and realise that the relationship between them is subtler than is generally supposed” (pp. 5–6). Indeed, as he later concludes, these maps “engage Icelandic understandings of mundus that resonate variously with world, Earth, and globe” (p. 179). Knowledge of world geography, history, and the cosmos itself are visualized in these medieval","PeriodicalId":44720,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ENGLISH AND GERMANIC PHILOLOGY","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135606647","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Bloodlines: Purity, Warfare, and the Procreative Family in the <i>Old English Bede</i>","authors":"Carol Braun Pasternack, Shay Hopkins","doi":"10.5406/1945662x.122.4.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/1945662x.122.4.01","url":null,"abstract":"Completed in 731, Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica (hereafter HE) is perhaps the magnum opus of its period for both its scope and influence. Not only does the HE provide far and away the most important account of seventh-century Britain—the century in which several English kingdoms converted to Christianity—but it has also shaped how we understand early England. Through his account of the Christian conversion and events of English history from the Roman invasion of Britain in 60 BCE to the ascension of Ceolwulf as King of the Northumbrians in 729 and the death of Archbishop Berhtwold in 731, Bede distinguished himself as the preeminent author in early eighth-century Britain and earned praise on the continent as well. It may be needless to say that Bede constructed and shaped his text with the sources available to him and by the Roman leanings of his home monastery, where he lived from age seven. And this monastic background reminds us that Bede consciously composed a moral history. In fact, Bede makes these moral leanings explicit in a dedicatory letter to King Ceolfrith, in which he promotes history as a genre concerned with the “imitandum bonum . . . deuitando quod noxium est ac peruersum” (imitating of the good . . . [and the] avoiding of the harmful and perverse) as well as the “exsequenda ea quae bona ac Deo digna esse” (pursuit of what is good and worthy with respect to God).1 Given Bede's insistence on history's moral edification, it is no surprise that this function is preserved in the text's translation into Old English.Completed in the late ninth or early tenth century, the Old English Bede (hereafter OEB) offers a vernacular translation of the HE that survives in several manuscripts.2 Given the OEB's dating, many scholars have raised the possibility of the OEB's participation in Alfred's educational program and the promotion of a national English identity. Perhaps most famously, Patrick Wormald argued for a highly political reading of the OEB, in which Alfred translated the HE in order to promote his agenda and concept of a “defining English national identity and national destiny.”3 Several scholars have followed Wormald's thesis, including Sarah Foot, who suggested that the OEB was translated as part of Alfred's program in order to promote a cohesive identity. For Foot, the OEB participates in Alfred's political agenda by figuring the “English as a political community” with a shared Christian history.4 More recently, Nicole Guenther Discenza asserts that the OEB sought to create the illusion of continuity between the two texts in order to support “the same sense of English history, and English pride to which the other translations [of Alfred's program] appealed.”5Recently, others have been less certain. Greg Waite argues that there is little evidence suggesting Alfred commissioned the OEB and follows claims by George Molyneaux and Sharon Rowley that the “translator's abridgements and adaptations indicate his interest in the religious and","PeriodicalId":44720,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ENGLISH AND GERMANIC PHILOLOGY","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135606651","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An Icelandic Literary Florilegium: A Festschrift in Honor of Úlfar Bragason","authors":"Jonas Wellendorf","doi":"10.5406/1945662x.122.4.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/1945662x.122.4.13","url":null,"abstract":"This worthy celebration of the scholarship and career of Úlfar Bragason consists of twelve essays of varying length treating a number of occasionally eclectic topics within the general fields of medieval and postmedieval Icelandic literature. In a brief introduction, the editors present the recipient's scholarly achievements and describe his untiring work, as director of the Sigurður Nordal Institute, to promote Icelandic Studies internationally. These outward-facing activities, the editors argue, explain the dominance of contributions from non-Icelandic scholars and the almost total absence of Icelandic contributors to the volume. Another Festschrift, Dansað við Úlfar: Nokkur spor stigin til heiðurs Úlfari Bragasyni sjötugum, with predominantly Icelandic contributors, was published in 2019.As the title indicates, there is no overarching theme to the collection. The editors have therefore arranged the essays alphabetically according to the names of the contributors. In the following, I have divided them into three broad categories: contributions focusing/drawing on medieval prose, contributions treating/discussing medieval poetry, and finally contributions that present postmedieval materials.In the first five essays drawing mainly on medieval prose sources, Theodore M. Andersson observes that the Icelandic sagas (and here he means the “Sagas of Icelanders”) are more apt to begin with a marriage or betrothal than to end with one and argues that there was a pre-Christian tradition of requiring consent of the woman entering a marital union. The occasionally disastrous consequences of ignoring the wishes of the bride were, Andersson argues, an important catalyst for storytelling already at an oral stage of the saga tradition.Annette Lassen turns to a discussion of the depiction of Vínland in the two Vínland sagas and argues that Vínland is represented as an area untouched by Christianity and as such is “a place of strife, conflict and fear” (p. 182). The only benefits that can be gained there, she states, are of a material nature (which might not have been so bad for the Greenlanders who, after all, were at the mercy of the elements and frequently would have had to cope with scarcity). While some earlier scholarship has sought to understand Vínland in terms of an earthly Paradise, Lassen finds that the most obvious parallel to Biblical materials is to be found in the Stjórn's description of Canaan (cf. Num 13). “But,” she continues, “while Canaan is conquered by the Israelites, the Greenlanders give up when they face attacks by the natives” (p. 175).Kirsten Wolf and Sune Wolf Pulsiano, assisted by Jón Atli Árnason, provide a richly documented encyclopedic overview of references to diseases and discomforts in the Sagas of Icelanders, contemporary sagas, and related materials. References to diseases from ámusótt “erysipelas” to útsótt “ diarrhea” are listed, less specific references are discussed, and diagnoses are proposed. An interesting point to eme","PeriodicalId":44720,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ENGLISH AND GERMANIC PHILOLOGY","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135606842","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Saints, Cure-Seekers and Miraculous Healing in Twelfth-Century England","authors":"James G. Clark","doi":"10.5406/1945662x.122.4.09","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/1945662x.122.4.09","url":null,"abstract":"The medieval cult of saints was in equal measure pious and practical. The reputation of the saints, their imagery, relics, and curated shrines together offered both a framework for spiritual self-expression and facilities to stimulate health and wellbeing. Although the legends of the saints carried claims of diverse, tangible benefits brought to their devotees—protection in battle, punishment of enemies—the weight of their tradition was with cures, of congenital conditions and of contracted disease. It is this almost axiomatic association between cult and cure that is the prompt for Ruth Salter's study, derived from her doctoral dissertation of 2015. Her aim is not purely a medical history of cult practice; rather, she hopes that the hagiographical reports of healing at the shrine-scene might present a point-of-entry into the personal experience—physiological, social, and material—of the supplicant. Her source base here is seven of the miracle collections made in twelfth-century England, selected to provide coverage of England's settlements large and small (Norwich, Reading, Burton, Ely) from north (Coldingham) to south (Canterbury, Winchester); no doubt their modest scope, counting only a little more than 250 brief miracula between them, and their ready accessibility in parallel text translation were also important considerations. Nonetheless, the witness of even this small sample of the wealth of hagiography has a certain value given how little hard evidence of post-Conquest healthcare has survived.Surveying the wider landscape in her opening chapter, Salter is frustrated to find it largely obscured. The clearest indications of the study of medicine in monasteries lies largely outside of her chosen period, as do almost all of the insular contributions to the science, such as Henry of Winchester's De fleubotomandis, and the Anglo-Norman translation of Roger Frugard's Chirurgia. Instead Salter digresses into summary digest of medical lore and treatments transmitted in the work of early and high medieval auctores and in the primary codes and customs of the regulars. In fact, under analysis the testimony of the miracula is somewhat sparse. Naturally a proportion (nearly 20%) of the reports of cures carry scant details of the subject or their circumstances. Of the remainder, more than 40% concern just two conditions: blindness and paralysis. There are only two other conditions that feature with any frequency: tumors and fits. Salter draws particular attention to the absence of gynecological and obstetric complaints which are met in some larger, later miracle collections, not least, William of Canterbury's compilation made at the shrine of Thomas Becket. Notwithstanding, women and girls were the subject of almost as many cure stories as men. In the collection made at Coldingham Priory they formed the largest cohort, a response, Salter suggests, to the restriction of female access to the shrine of St. Cuthbert at Durham. There was likewise an even mat","PeriodicalId":44720,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ENGLISH AND GERMANIC PHILOLOGY","volume":"99 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135606845","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Masculinities in Old Norse Literature","authors":"Holly Mcarthur","doi":"10.5406/1945662x.122.4.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/1945662x.122.4.12","url":null,"abstract":"This volume in the series Studies in Old Norse Literature brings together scholars from all career stages to demonstrate the usefulness of Masculinity Studies to Old Norse-Icelandic literature broadly defined. Evans and Hancock's joint introduction (pp. 1–18) provides an excellent overview of Masculinity Studies and a clear and efficient framework for understanding the volume's essays, which are organized in three four-chapter sections. The first section, “Becoming Masculine,” is further divided into two topics: childhood development and female masculinities, both of which explore masculinities in bodies which are not usually considered masculine. Oren Falk's contribution (pp. 21–35) explores preadult gender identities and the earliest stages of constructing masculinity in the sagas. Matthew Roby's contribution (pp. 37–57) focuses on the trope of the temporary troll lover in legendary sagas as an illustration of attitudes around pre- and extramarital sex for boys and men in the transition between youth and adulthood. Evans's chapter (pp. 59–75) shifts the conversation to female masculinity, drawing on examples from the sagas of Icelanders in which masculinity is entirely separate from male bodies. Jóhanna Katrín Fríðriksdóttir (pp. 77–93) continues this thread in her discussion of Mágus saga jarls, a romance which features both criticisms of hypermasculinity and a cross-dressing woman who rules in her husband's absence.Section two, “Masculinity, Power, and Vulnerability,” explores the interaction of masculinity with ideas about power and vulnerability to create a deeper understanding of Old Norse masculinity. Philip Lavender's work on vulnerability in Göngu-Hrólfs saga (pp. 97–112) opens the middle section of the book with an explicit critique of Carol Clover's one-sex model by examining how masculinity can be influenced by power structures and other aspects of identity, particularly able-bodiedness or disability. Ásdis Egilsdóttir's contribution (pp.113–26) examines Christian influence on masculinity across several genres to determine how Christianity affected the performance of masculinity by churchmen who could not perform other recognizable signs of masculinity. Thomas Morcom's chapter (pp. 127–45) applies the theory of inclusive masculinity to a focused study of the Morkinskinna, particularly the contrasting descriptions of corulers Eysteinn and Sigurðr Magnússon. Brynja Þorgeirsdóttir's discussion of Egill Skalla-Grímsson's emotional vulnerability (pp. 147–63) rounds out the section.The final section, “Men's Relationships,” focuses on how masculinities developed in various relationships between men. Alison Finlay's contribution (pp. 167–82) examines the use and risks of sexualized defamation, nið, between rivals; David Ashurst's chapter (pp. 183–202) discusses bedsharing as a form of nonsexual intimacy between men while stressing the importance of contemporary historical context to interpretations. Carl Phelpstead (pp. 203–16) explores rela","PeriodicalId":44720,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF ENGLISH AND GERMANIC PHILOLOGY","volume":"58 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135606849","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}