Description
Book SynopsisReading the Anglo-Saxon Self Through the Vercelli Book explores conceptions of subjectivity in Anglo-Saxon England by analyzing the contents and sources of the Vercelli Book, a tenth-century compilation of Old English religious poetry and prose. The Vercelli Book's selection and arrangement of texts has long perplexed scholars, but this book argues that its organizational logic lies in the relationship of its texts to the performance of selfhood. Many of the poems and homilies represent subjectivity through soul-and-body, a popular medieval literary motif that describes the soul's physical departure from the body at death and its subsequent addresses to the body. Vercelli's soul-and-body texts, together with its exemplary narratives of apostles and saints, construct a model of selfhood that is embodied and performative, predicated upon an interdependent relationship between the soul and the body in which the body has the potential for salvific action. The book thus theorize
Table of Contents
List of Tables – Acknowledgments – Abbreviations – Introduction: Bodies, Souls, and Selves in Anglo-Saxon England – Souls With Bodies: Parsing the Self in Vercelli Homilies IV, XXII, and Soul and Body I – Baptism, Conversion, and Selfhood in Andreas – The Self and the Community: Rogationtide and the Ascension in The Dream of the Rood and Vercelli Homilies X, XI, and XXI – Hagiography and the End(s) of the Vercelli Book: Models of Ideal Selfhood in Homilies XVII, XVIII, and XXIII – Index.
