The Review of English Studies - current issue

Suicide in the Works of Aelfric

Clayton, M. — 2009-06-23

This article deals with the treatment of suicide in the works of Ælfric (c.950–c.1010). Suicide in the Middle Ages has recently been the subject of a two-volume study by Alexander Murray but he does not deal in detail with the period before 1000; this article attempts to remedy this deficit for one late Anglo-Saxon author. After an overview of how suicide was regarded in the early Middle Ages, Ælfric's treatment is considered in three parts: the suicides of biblical characters (those he omits as well as those he treated), the suicides of characters in texts concerned with saints (in his Catholic Homilies II texts for the feasts of St Stephen, St Matthew and St Martin) and, finally, a very suggestive passage in which he links fasting and suicide. The immediate sources for each of these passages are considered, as are other texts which appear to have influenced Ælfric's thinking. He evidently had at his disposal texts which took very different stances on suicide and, in some cases, as in the Life of St Martin, his own thinking seems to have been at odds with that of his source. How he negotiated these tensions is therefore revealing about his views on the matter. Ælfric's stance appears to have been a hard-line one, opposed to any concessions which would mitigate the guilt he attached to suicide. He knew, however, and occasionally drew on, the influential pronouncements on suicide in the group of texts associated with Theodore of Tarsus, archbishop of Canterbury from 668 to 690; these texts took into account the mental state of the person who took his or her own life and proposed various concessions with regard to burial rites depending on the circumstances. In linking fasting with suicide, Ælfric appears to have in mind the kind of suicidal delusions associated with excessive fasting in Cassian's Conlationes; he was clearly unwilling to discuss these in any detail but his cryptic allusion to the link between fasting and self-harm is in keeping with his suspicions about the ascetic solitary life. The article concludes by considering Ælfric's choice of word for a suicide; his preference was for agenslaga, recorded in his work only, at the expense of the seemingly more common sylfcwala.

The Criteria for Scribal Attribution: Dublin, Trinity College MS 244 Reconsidered

Horobin, S. — 2009-06-23

This article questions Alan J. Fletcher's recent attribution of the copying of Dublin, Trinity College MS 244 to the professional London scribe Adam Pynkhurst. A reconsideration of the palaeographical and linguistic evidence presented by Fletcher demonstrates that many of the idiosyncratic features of Pynkhurst's hand are missing from Trinity 244, while the features that they share are not sufficiently distinctive to support a claim for identity. The article also questions Fletcher's desire to associate the manuscript with a Pynkhurst ‘school’, arguing that the similarities he identifies lie in the Trinity Dublin scribe's use of a similar type of script, common to many vernacular manuscripts of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.

C. L. Kingsford: The Stonor Letters, and Two Chronicles

Hanham, A. — 2009-06-23

Norman Davis's edition of the Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, now completed by Richard Beadle and Colin Richmond, with a long-awaited glossary, enables linguists and historians to read for the first time what the Pastons and their correspondents actually wrote. No such authority attaches to the edition of the Stonor Letters and Papers, 1290-1483, which C. L. Kingsford offered in 1919. All too often, Kingsford's texts seriously misrepresent their originals. In one or two cases, a transcript owed everything to the copyist's imagination. In others, Kingsford printed readings that made no sense, without investigating their accuracy. His errors were perpetuated in the re-issue of the work that was published in 1996 as Kingsford's Stonor Letters and Papers, 1290–1483. At his time, Kingsford was the leading authority on fifteenth-century English history and historical writings, and some of his assumptions in English Historical Literature in the Fifteenth Century (1913) remain unchallenged. Two are here re-assessed in the light of a closer examination of the texts.

'A Credible Omen of a More Glorious Event': Sir Charles Cotterell's Cassandra

Major, P. — 2009-06-23

One of the most prevalent modes of writing in the English Revolution was romance translation, yet relatively few detailed studies of such works have been undertaken. This article explores the personal, political and psychological influences in Sir Charles Cotterell's Cassandra (1652), a translation of La Calprenède's prose romance, Cassandre (1642–9). It examines the work in the context of the widespread popularity of the romance genre in mid-seventeenth-century England, and considers the linguistic skills that Cotterell deployed, skills already demonstrated in his translation (with William Aylesbury) of Davila's Storia delle guerre civili di Francia (1630). It is most fundamentally concerned with locating Cassandra within the contemporary political climate of the early 1650s, when the royalist cause with which Cotterell sided was at its lowest ebb, and with setting it against the background of exile in Antwerp. It appraises the significance of the royal request to carry out the translation, and shows how this was imaginatively incorporated by Cotterell into an explicitly partisan dedication. The monarchical and pseudo-historical nature of La Calprenède's plots and characterisation meant that Cotterell's translation could remain rigorously faithful. This betrays telling complexities and ambiguities in royalist responses to defeat, though it fails to weaken the impression that Cassandra was a strategically aggressive act of cultural appropriation.

Mapping Northanger Abbey: or, Why Austen's Bath of 1803 Resembles Joyce's Dublin of 1904

Barchas, J. — 2009-06-23

Twin cases of mistaken identity activate the plot of Northanger Abbey. Escorted to Bath by a kindly Mr and Mrs Allen, the heroine promptly gets mistaken for the Allen heir. In turn, the Allens, a modestly-well-to-do country couple, are thought vastly rich. These catalysts for Austen's plot have never been investigated with an eye to an historical explanation, because being mistaken for an heiress neatly fits the Gothic model that Northanger Abbey decidedly spoofs. But Austen's fiction has an unacknowledged basis in historical fact, characteristically offering her peculiar brand of hyperrealism as a retort to the Gothic novel. In reality, Bath's largest private fortune, belonging to a genuine Mr and Mrs Allen, was in transition during precisely the years that Austen drafted her novel (Cassandra dated it to 1798 and 1799). The wealth amassed by Bath entrepreneur Ralph Allen (1693–1764), and held by a niece for over three decades, was just then reverting to obscure Allens living in the country. These historical circumstances warrant a fresh look at Northanger Abbey, where the many encoded references to Ralph Allen's architectural legacy reveal a historical specificity to Austen's method that rivals the cartographic exactitude of James Joyce.

Hengist's Brood: Tennyson and the Anglo-Saxons

Love, D. — 2009-06-23

Tennyson's Idylls of the King deepens its historical perspective through an awareness of the heathen as the future Anglo-Saxons. In possibly the first significant literary use of Beowulf, the poem incorporates motifs from Grendel's mere and the legend of Scyld Scefing, imposing them upon Arthur's kingdom and thereby undermining easy distinctions between Christian and barbarian. It invites a vision of civilisations rising and falling which, together with verbal echoes of In Memoriam, extends the evolutionary anxieties of that earlier poem to the realm of human history. The heathen elements from Beowulf become images of doubt about absolute Christian truths, and of the monstrous within that must be overcome for civilisation to prosper. The presence of those elements in the ‘Morte d’Arthur’ shows Tennyson's doubts and anxieties entwined with the death of Hallam, and the Idylls follow In Memoriam as another attempt to work through that grief and its attendant scepticism towards positive values. The Saxon conquest as an evolutionary step towards the British Empire is one such possible value.

MARTIN K. FOYS. Virtually Anglo-Saxon: Old Media, New Media, and Early Medieval Studies in the Late Age of Print.

O'donnell, D. P. — 2009-06-23

J. A. BURROW. The Poetry of Praise.

Woodcock, M. — 2009-06-23

ANDREW COLE. Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer.

Winstead, K. A. — 2009-06-23

AMANDA HOLTON. The Sources of Chaucer's Poetics.

Bowers, J. M. — 2009-06-23

SAMANTHA J. RAYNER. Images of Kingship in Chaucer and his Ricardian Contemporaries.

Echard, S. — 2009-06-23

ELLIOT KENDALL. Lordship and Literature: John Gower and the Politics of the Great Household.

Watt, D. — 2009-06-23

DARRYLL GRANTLEY. London in Early Modern English Drama: Representing the Built Environment.

Gordon, A. — 2009-06-23

KIRK MELNIKOFF and EDWARD GIESKES (eds). Writing Robert Greene: Essays on England's First Notorious Professional Writer.

Dimmick, J. — 2009-06-23

DAVID MANN. Shakespeare's Women: Performance and Conception.

Aebischer, P. — 2009-06-23

DOUGLAS A. BROOKS (ed.). Milton and the Jews.

Reisner, N. — 2009-06-23

BLEVINS, JACOB (ed.) Re-Reading Thomas Traherne: A Collection of New Critical Essays.

Cefalu, P. — 2009-06-23

ELIZABETH KRAFT. Women Novelists and the Ethics of Desire, 1684-1814: In the Voice of Our Biblical Mothers.

King, K. R. — 2009-06-23

SAM GEORGE. Botany, Sexuality, and Women's Writing, 1760-1830: From Modest Shoot to Forward Plant.

Cook, E. H. — 2009-06-23

BRIAN GOLDBERG. The Lake Poets and Professional Identity.

Duggett, T. — 2009-06-23

ANGELA ESTERHAMMER. Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750-1850.

Simpson, E. — 2009-06-23

ISOBEL ARMSTRONG. Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination.

Flint, K. — 2009-06-23

MARION THAIN. 'Michael Field': Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siecle.

Harrington, E. — 2009-06-23

JEAN MICHEL-RABATE. 1913: The Cradle of Modernism.

Walton, O. — 2009-06-23

THOMAS DILWORTH. Reading David Jones.

Corcoran, N. — 2009-06-23

CLAIRE SQUIRES. Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain.

Towheed, S. — 2009-06-23