Leeds Medieval Studies, 2 (2022)
Download this Issue
ISSN 2754-4575 (Print)
ISSN 2754-4583 (Online)
Articles
- Crying Out for Two Lords: Sex and Supplication in Wulf and Eadwacer
This article provides a significant reinterpretation of Wulf and Eadwacer, departing from a new understanding of the function of the word eadwacer as an apt compound to refer to the Christian God. This is demonstrated through a survey of compounds that take ead-as their first element elsewhere in the Old English corpus, alongside a discussion of the possible pastoral implications of wacer. The concluding lines of the poem can, consequently, be understood more positively as a prayer of supplication on the part of the speaker, who repudiates her wretched relationship with the inconstant Wulf in favour of intimacy with God, providing the poem with a moment of consolation at its close, as is typical of the Old English elegies more generally. The article concludes with an extrapolation of the argument advanced up this point, in testing this soteriological reading’s productivity in relation to Wulf and Eadwacer’s ambiguous opening lines. - The Animality of Work and Craft in Early Medieval English Literature
Does the ability to craft make us human? Some modern philosophers have seen humanity in its role of homo faber as distinct from and superior to other animals. They contend that human workers manufacture with a creativity that animals do not possess. However, other scholars have argued that animals can be understood as both workers and crafters. Recent scientific studies have even shown that animals can use tools to manipulate their environments in sophisticated ways. This article brings such findings and debates into conversation with the earliest English literature. It examines when, where and how animal weorc (painful, passive suffering) shades into animal cræft (purposeful, active making) in Old English and Anglo-Latin texts. A wide range of sources, from Ælfric’s Colloquy to the riddles of the Exeter Book, represent animals as workers who labour for, with and alongside humans. But do these animals ever display technical skill? While some early medieval writers viewed craft as a quality that makes us human, there are also multiple examples of literary animals who can craft as well as work, create as well as labour. Ultimately, I argue that we should situate representations of early medieval weorc and cræft within a continuum that includes both human and nonhuman actors, from the drudgery of the ploughman and the ox to the artistry of the goldsmith and the phoenix. - Late-Medieval Prison Writing in Context: The Values of Confinement
This article is concerned with writing in and about confinement in the Middle Ages. It considers different types of late-medieval cell — anchoritic, monastic, and carceral — and explores some of their shared contexts, characteristics, and values. Through a close analysis of literature concerned with confinement, this article suggests that there is a difference in the value of cellular space and living in early and late medieval texts. It suggests several reasons for this change and focuses, in particular, upon work and labour. - Sigvatr’s Tears: The Phenomenology of Emotion in Skaldic Verse
This article suggests that skaldic verse — as a direct result of its famously complex formal features — is able to encode and convey complex, dynamic emotional interiorities in ways that move beyond the possibilities of saga prose. Through a close analysis of Sigvatr Þórðarson’s lausavísa 20 that is attuned to the temporal nature of reading, it is shown that common features of skaldic poetics — including dislocated syntax, tmesis, and obscure and ambiguous diction — can function to stage the unfolding of emotion through time and to evoke the oscillation between, and synthesis of, varied emotional states. - Leeds Studies in English: A History
Despite the epistemological importance of the scholarly journal, few thorough histories of individual academic journals have been written, especially of journals in the arts and humanities. This article uses both archival material and oral histories to construct a multifaceted history of Leeds Studies in English (LSE) from the beginning of its ‘new series' in 1967 to its merger with the Bulletin of International Medieval Research and transformation into Leeds Medieval Studies in 2021. Where appropriate, the article also examines LSE's earlier incarnation, Leeds Studies in English and Kindred Languages, which ran from 1932 to 1952. By studying a journal embedded in a particular university department, the article develops a novel institution-based and intergenerational history of English Studies and Medieval Studies over the last century, distinct from histories that focus on the biographies of individual scholars, or on intellectual developments without regard to the quotidian institutional structures that shape and mediate intellectual life. The history of LSE provides nuanced perspectives on the fracturing of nineteenth-century philology into English Literature, English Language, and Linguistics during the twentieth century, and the internationalist reconfiguration of philological methods as Medieval Studies in the later twentieth century and early twenty-first. The article also lends time-depth to current debates about the place of voluntarism in journal editing and about how journals and libraries can best make research as widely available as possible. Moreover, it offers perspectives on these debates specific to the arts and humanities, which tend to be marginalised in discussions of academic publishing due to their focus on the natural sciences.
Reviews
- Review of Representing War and Violence 1250–1600, ed. by Joanna Bellis and Laura Slater. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2016. x + 219 pp. ISBN 9781783271559.
- Review of Vilmundar saga viðutan: The Saga of Vilmundur the Outsider, ed. and trans. by Jonathan Y. H. Hui, Viking Society Texts. London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 2021. lx + 57 pp. ISBN 9781914070006.
- Review of Jane Bliss, An Anglo-Norman Reader. Cambridge: Open Book Publishing, 2018. x + 404 pp. ISBN 9781783743131.
- Review of Flaying in the Pre-Modern World, ed. by Larissa Tracy. Cambridge: Brewer, 2017. vii + 406 pp. ISBN 9781843844525.