The Old English Exodus is known for its typological density and poetic fervor. Recently, it has been analyzed as an intellectual challenge, exercising modes of fourfold exegesis. Yet its emotional work has been largely overlooked. This article focuses on the varied ways in which Exodus taps into Anglo-Saxon networks of fear as an emotional component to its hermeneutic challenge, with mixed registers speaking to lay and ecclesiastical audiences together. The article traces the increasingly fearful atmosphere of the poem as it builds up to the Beasts of Battle moment (lines 161–69). The Beasts here are more polyvalent than previously thought, luring readers into expecting not only the destruction of Israel, but, on extra-literal levels, suggesting the destruction of Anglo-Saxon society by threats ecclesiastical, legal, and national. The poem’s use of sound also dilates this fear, encouraging audiences, lay and clerical alike, to doubt God’s deliverance before ultimately showing them a more deserving object of fear: divine punishment of the Egyptians. The poem thus conjures up fear and misdirects its audience in order to dramatize the struggle of humbly maintaining faith in the face of trial.

This article examines the fictionalized alphabets in a unique manuscript of The Book of John Mandeville, British Library MS Egerton 1982. While critics have long debated the extent to which The Book is cosmopolitan or colonizing in its outlook, I argue that close study of the work’s alphabets emphasizes the extent to which The Book is wholly neither. Rather, the narrator is both, in turn, depending on the culture being described and its relationship to his own English culture. I examine pseudo-Greek, pseudo-Hebrew, and Egyptian/Saracen alphabets to demonstrate that, rather than asserting an English identity, The Book uses language to reinforce cultural difference at moments of contact and exchange.

This article explores Blake’s writing on infinity in relation to the scientific worldviews that emerged over the long eighteenth century. Over this period, the infinite universe hypothesis established itself in the scientific consensus; however, it also presented major challenges to the premise that the natural world adhered to uniform laws or lent itself to definitive empirical understanding. I explore Blake’s navigation of these problems by addressing how his writing reworks the infinite into a concept for envisaging his “human form.” In “Milton,” “There is No Natural Religion [b],” and “Visions of the Daughters of Albion,” the encounter with the infinite assumes form in the cross-cultural contact with other human forms, “worlds” whose laws appear wholly differentiated. However, these encounters also illustrate transformative possibilities for the self, as Blake reworks anxieties about our isolation in an infinite universe into a vision that affirms the fulfilling roles of other lives in our experience. Blake’s infinite thus provides a language for reconsidering problems in human experience by embracing new uncertainties about the constitution of the natural world.

It is well known that William and Dorothy Wordsworth habitually hummed and murmured lines of poetry to themselves and to each other both indoors and while they paced backwards and forwards outside. While this was a lifelong habit for the poet, there are two specific periods at Dove Cottage—the spring and early summer of 1802 and the months following John Wordsworth’s death in 1805—during which the repetition of verses alongside various types of iterative physical activity may be interpreted as an “extra-liturgical” practice performed to induce and support meditation and consolation. In shaping their own “familiar rhythm[s],” the Wordsworths are aligned with Jeremy Taylor, whose mid-seventeenth-century writings promoted the cultivation of private, individual repetition and ritual. Although William and Dorothy act independently of corporate worship in 1802 and 1805, their habits—in sympathy with Taylor’s teaching—reveal a craving for the kinds of structures William later celebrated in Ecclesiastical Sonnets. Consequently, the apparent disparity between the high-Romantic poet of Dove Cottage and the high-Anglican Tractarian sympathizer of Rydal Mount is shown to be less severe than is often assumed.

It has long been said that poets who do not succumb to clichés will try to “revitalize” them. This article considers a poet, Seamus Heaney, whose work differs strikingly from these accounts. Heaney openly criticized the clichés that saturated public discourse during the Troubles; at the same time, he was conscious of how difficult it is for a politician, a citizen, or (indeed) a poet to speak of the Troubles without resorting to clichés. Faced with this problem, Heaney deployed two techniques. First, he echoed political phrases in his poetry so as to then take them apart and study their implications. Second, he invented a range of near-clichés: viz., phrases that evoke existing platitudes while also complicating them. His aim with both of these techniques was to draw our attention to the stock phrases of public discourse and make us more critical of them, without denying his own (and our own) susceptibility to cliché.

Bringing together six essays by renowned scholars, this special issue on “earth writing,” a literal interpretation of geography, seeks to involve the material existence of the planet humans inhabit (geo) with the practice of extending or translating it into meaningful forms (graphein). The introduction aims to establish a theoretical context for this endeavour as well as to situate each of the subsequent contributions within recent debates in ecological criticism and environmental thought.

Building on the renewed interest in surfaces as sites for the generation of meaning, this article compares two kinds of surface: the page and the ground. In medieval Europe, reading was likened to wayfaring through the landscape and the lines inscribed on parchment to paths trodden on the ground. Based on this analogy, the ground resembles a multiply reused parchment—a palimpsest. But as a surface, the palimpsest is built up by taking layers away. The principle of its formation is anti-stratigraphic. How come, then, that modern people tend to understand both ground and page in stratigraphic terms? The answers are found in the technologies of paving and printing. Both separate the space of imagination from our habitation of the earth. Is it possible, then, to reunite the two? The paper concludes with two literary examples of how this might be done. At stake are different ways of thinking of the mind: as palimpsest or substrate. Perhaps by returning to the medieval idea of reading as wayfaring we can finally restore geography to its literal sense, as earth writing.

Trees frequently feature in the early memories of writers and artists, judging by their autobiographical writings. This essay compares key childhood recollections by William Blake, A. S. Byatt, John Clare, Thomas Hardy, Seamus Heaney, Zaffar Kunial, Paul Nash, John Ruskin, and William Wordsworth in order to explore the recurrence and significance of tree memories. In these accounts, trees are often associated with moments of vision and a degree of alienation, which contribute to the self-realization of the writer as a creative being. At the same time, the longevity of trees and awareness of their separate, independent meaning for others enhances a sense of community, stretching into the past and future. The essay is a contribution to dendro-criticism and environmental humanities, using literary-critical methods to suggest a way of rethinking the relationship between humans and the nonhuman world.   

This paper seeks to advance understanding of landscape, earth writing, and inhabitation through two parallel discussions. My aim is to work toward an argument that landscape names a not-belonging, through which “earth” and “experience” can be understood as noncoincident with themselves and each other. I do so firstly via tracing and examining understandings, primarily from within cultural geography, but more widely from anthropology and literary and cultural theory, of landscape as the narrated and storied earth. Running alongside and through these discussions, I also offer here a sequence of commentaries on Gerald Murnane’s The Plains, perhaps the best-known work by this reclusive Australian writer. The Plains remains notable and distinctive, I argue, precisely for its refusal to console or to reveal in respect of landscape, and for its insistence that earth and experience cannot be conjoined. Far from showing us as marooned within some ideal realm of writing, The Plains is an earth writing, precisely because it acknowledges instead the distances that cleave between word and world, the distances that give us the very possibility of landscape.

At the end of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck plans “to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest.” As David Plank and Gary Sykes observe, “to ‘light out for the territory’ and a new life is the essential American story.” Twain, however, complicates Huck’s action by situating it amidst the contradictions and aporias of American westward expansion. Laurie Anderson, in her postpatriotic echo of Twain’s expression, similarly ironizes the prospect of escaping to “a new life.” Both writers are included here in order to illuminate the work of Edward Thomas. In his 1916 poem, “Lights Out,” Thomas took up and developed Twain’s complex relation to the romance of departure. What lies outside the boundaries of Huck’s “sivilised” becomes for Thomas somewhere radically unknown. I suggest, further, that this quality in Thomas’s late poetry corresponds with recent articulations of an environmentally attuned spatiality.

This essay considers the writings of Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin in the 1830s in the light of recent debates about the Anthropocene epoch. In both the 1830s and the 2010s, the public has been asked to reimagine the relationship between human and geological timescales in ways that might profoundly alter the idea of what it means to be human beings living on the earth. In particular, the grand powers of the geological imagination were defined by Lyell and Darwin specifically by contrast with a racist view of the imaginative inferiority of indigenous peoples. Requiring as it did an insight into worlds beyond human observation, the geological imagination was built upon— even required—an account of a struggle to see nonwhite peoples as human at all. Ultimately, this essay argues, this is a legacy that continues to haunt Anthropocene discourse.

Drawing on recent scholarship on the British georgic, this essay argues that John Dyer’s The Fleece (1757) and James Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane (1764) can be understood as vehicles for considering agricultural economies as what Bruno Latour has called matters of concern. These poems also seek to gather what Latour might call an assembly around these matters of concern: the texts themselves imagine and enact a parliament of humans and things. However, both poems troublingly erase distinctions between human and nonhuman entities in ways that contribute to the subordination of textile workers and enslaved Africans. This essay draws on recent scholarship in new materialism to suggest that Georgic verse focuses its attention on human collaborations with nonhuman materials, assembling in the process a social world that includes both human and nonhuman actors, and fashioning new logics of ecological responsiveness and of subjected labor.

This article reads Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar using the framework of classical rhetorical writings of Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and their Renaissance commentators. Topics include the peculiar oxymoronic nature of orator’s ethos, the uneasy relationship between the performativity of rhetoric and its ethical ends, and the Renaissance anxiety over the hypocrisy and deception potentially involved in the rhetorical representation of one’s self.

Why was the eighteenth-century British monarchy more successful than so many other European monarchies? There are no simple answers to that simple question. There nonetheless are broad areas in which the British monarchy and nation indeed became what Mercier called “Heureuse Angleterre.” That good fortune required restraints upon and expansion of dominant authority. Such events include the removal of James II and framing of the Bill of Rights; trade that increased wealth, enlarged the ranks of merchants and those thought suitable for government and social power; military triumphs that elevated Britain to a Continental and world force, but limited its victor Marlborough’s authority; a changing political theology that allowed resistance under specific circumstances; the good luck of fertile Georgian monarchs; the excesses of the Tory High Church, and the Whig lower church’s ability both to preserve its religious roots and to curb the “tribe of arbitrary ecclesiastics.” These are some of the reasons why in 1771 Samuel Johnson regarded British legislators as a civilizing force, and why in 1774 he called the House of Commons “the supreme council of the kingdom.” That council is a body of distinguished political thinkers for whom “there was hardly ever any question in which a man might not very well vote either upon one side or the other.” George III was not the oracle that Pope fancied Queen Anne to be; but as the third in the Hanoverian line, he denoted stability and a reasonably mature political nation likely to remain a stable and reasonably mature political nation.

As John Donne engages with the doctrine of original sin, this essay argues, he simultaneously stresses the uniqueness of Adam’s responsibility for sin and makes of this uniquely responsible figure a symbol for every person. Adam appears in Donne’s “A Litany” and in several sermons as the only true self-murderer, since those we ordinarily term “suicides” only presume on, rather than create, their deaths. For Donne, however, this capacity for physical and spiritual self-destruction is something that Adam reveals about humanity rather than something he simply causes. In the sober close of the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624), Donne implies a more particular analogy between his prospective relapse into sickness and sin (on one hand) and Adam’s original lapse (on the other). As Donne identifies with Adam, he accentuates the paradoxical nature of original sin, an irreducibly internal evil which is nevertheless inherited from another.

T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets often appears startlingly regressive: proclaiming that “History is now and England,” he structures his metaphysics around a recognizable time and place, seeking to root modernist poetry back into a particular version of the nation. This article argues, however, that Eliot also engages with more alienating experiences, complicating the structures of memory and recognition to uncover a “primitive and forgotten” substrate of our cultural past. It begins by exploring Eliot’s early responses to Wordsworth—whose indulging in childhood memories Eliot distrusted—before reading “The Dry Salvages” as Eliot’s disfigurement of the memorial patterning of The Prelude. It then goes on to discuss the influence of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in “East Coker,” revealing the anxieties about foreignness implicated in Eliot’s return to his ancestral home. These forms of estrangement, it claims, form the basis of Eliot’s shift of focus toward the unknown realm of the “timeless.”

This preface introduces a volume of essays honoring Claire Sponsler (1954–2016), a preeminent scholar of medieval drama. During her illustrious career, Professor Sponsler attended to how dramatic performances were received and reinterpreted. She was less concerned with a later work’s fidelity to original sources—the question conventionally pursued in scholarship on medieval drama—than she was with the animating relationship between them. This volume compiled by her students reflects this critical methodology. Its units are organized by Professor Sponsler’s three monographs, yet individual essays do not reflect a mentor’s impact so much as refract her critical ideas.

This article surveys the scholarship of Claire Sponsler across her career, focusing on its theoretical infrastructure. With assistance from Raymond Williams’s concept of “keywords,” the essay finds Sponsler’s interest in “embodied subjects” characterizes the beginning decade and her first book, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Later Medieval England (1997). In the next decade the idea of “cultural appropriation” structured the arguments of her second book, Ritual Imports: Performing Medieval Drama in America (2004). In the final decade, her books on John Lydgate (2010 and 2014) concerned generic “boundary crossing” of many kinds. The essay shows Sponsler’s important influence in bringing cultural theory to medieval studies.

Using the critical lens of Claire Sponsler’s scholarship on subversive performance, this essay considers the warrior Cú Chulainn’s lament for his foster-brother in the medieval Irish Táin. This ritualized spectacle washes clean and revivifies the slain hero’s body: poetry’s incantatory alliterations and rhymes re-fuse the dismembered body and animate it with story. By considering the lament in terms of caoineadh (“keening”), a genre typically associated with women, we gain insights into the subversive potential of Cú Chulainn’s performance. A man’s transgressive performance of caoineadh provides a critique of gender and disempowerment: the surrounding narrative provides multiple examples of young warriors, noble daughters, and other figures whose bodies and lives are pawned to execute the wishes of morally bankrupt kings and queens. This lament thus participates in the caoineadh’s mode of protest, as a cry against the slaughter of youth in the wargames of the powerful.

To claim that the Virgin Mary as she appears in the medieval N-Town play cycle enacts heresy would seem startlingly misguided, blasphemous, or both. However, at the climax of “The Trial of Mary and Joseph,” as Mary is drinking a potion to prove that she is innocent of the charges of fornication and adultery lobbied at her, this article argues that Mary is an antinomian, or one who eschews civil and religious law in favor of guidance by an internalized Christ, and because Mary is the only figure who literally carries Christ inside of her, she is the only orthodox antinomian possible. Furthermore, while Christ’s influence on her body and behavior can ultimately be verified, after which the new law can be established, she briefly displays the dangerous potential of female bodies and the difficulties of unknowable interiority, complications that cannot be entirely resolved by the action of the play.

Critics have long looked to Francesco Petrarch as the source of a new level of complex literary subjectivity. It has become accepted to see the ongoing contradictions of feeling and position, the shifting awareness of oxymoronic representations in his fourteenth-century lyric sequence Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, as both the marker and the source of this new level of subjective representation. In this light, subjectivity is necessarily fragmented. No unified sense of the subject is possible. But I argue that Petrarch’s concerted use of failure actually binds together these fragmented shards of personality into a unified and coherent subject. Failures of love, of virtue, of understanding are all presented as crucial aspects of the poet/speaker from the very beginning, and this emphasis creates a rhetorical space within which a unified subjectivity can be perceived.

While Lazarus does not talk in John’s gospel account of his resuscitation, he does in medieval English dramatic literature, where he serves as a metacritical agent for a hermeneutic paradox: despite and because of the epistemological uncertainty surrounding death, it is fundamental to literary semiosis. The “Raising of Lazarus” episode in the N-Town manuscript is significant to late medieval England’s burgeoning vernacular literary culture, in particular, its notion of “translation” as an exchange between ancient languages and the vernacular and, by extension, dead and living authors. This affiliation of linguistic and metaphysical translation transpires in the wealth of late medieval English texts in the ars moriendi tradition. N-Town’s “Raising of Lazarus” includes several key tropes from the ars moriendi, clear indication of the genre’s popularity and cultural valence. And as figure for literature’s basis in death, N-Town’s “Lazarus” represents the desire fundamental to vernacular-language ars moriendi: to translate death—the most cryptic of subjects—into legible matter.

This article questions common notions of the early modern English theater as an exclusively male pursuit. In particular, it examines Anna of Denmark’s contributions to English court masques. Using prefatory materials to printed texts, contemporary anecdotes, and Sir Francis Bacon’s essay on masques, it explores how Anna used this theatrical form to extend her influence on England’s cultural and political affairs. Ultimately, this article argues for a reinterpretation of early English theatrical evidence so as to broaden our understanding of the field and, in doing so, to reconsider the place of feminine bodies, voices, and artistic visions within it.

It explores these texts in the context of contemporary public culture, specifically in regard to translation and its complex, precarious position in the late Middle Ages. To rewrite a classic text, a text whose original author was considered an auctor, was not looked at askance, yet, perhaps paradoxically, writing in a vernacular language was. It was this snare, among others, in which medieval translators found themselves caught. Writing in the early-fifteenth century, Lydgate manifests his search for self-legitimacy as a vernacular poet through his beast fables. The article asserts that these tales reflect a conscious concern with contemporary social conditions and with Lydgate’s multiple and conflicting roles as a provincial monk, poet, and translator.

This essay argues that Thomas Hoccleve shapes his final work, The Series collection, as a comment on and critique of the function of English poetry and the role of the vernacular poet in early fifteenth-century public life in London. The prologue to The Series sets up a conflict between the poet and his editor that frames a collection at odds with itself: an author-driven serious contemplative treatise juxtaposed with a formulaic romance and a broad misogynistic fable demanded by courtly interests. Hoccleve’s put-upon eponymous narrator in the prologue critiques (and eventually accedes to) the frivolous social functions of banal English verse. Drawing on Anne Middleton’s description of the emergence of “public poetry” at the end of the fourteenth century, the authors see in The Series Hoccleve’s insistence upon the instructive and consoling, even transformative, possibilities for English verse among a broader serious-minded public.

This article explores Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale, in light of Claire Sponsler’s scholarship on reading and performance. I specifically focus on the moment in which the well-read student Nicholas uses skillful rhetoric to convince the uneducated carpenter John of an impending second flood of Noetic proportions. I argue that Nicholas stages a carefully arranged performance in this moment, one that relies, among other things, on his performative knowledge of astrology and on his books and learning implements, which function as props to strengthen his credibility as a scholar. This moment in the text shows how Chaucer comments on the power of the educated over the uneducated, as has been shown by other scholars, but it is also a moment that shows the slippage between reading and performance during a time in which, as Sponsler shows, genre divisions were far more fluid than literary historians and theorists have carved them.

This Epilogue draws outward beyond the literary focus of the journal and suggests that Claire Sponsler’s influence is felt beyond academia as well. I consider how I found my own path in Claire’s classrooms at the University of Iowa and then detail my current work teaching Shakespeare in various correctional facilities.