| Recent excitement in scholarly and non-scholarly circles concerning the unearthing of the Staffordshire Hoard has shown that splendid, often recycled, artifacts still have as much power to capture our imaginations as they did centuries ago. Critics working in the field of "thing theory" have drawn attention to interactions between things and humans on anthropological, psychological, and cognitive levels, arguing that we contemplate and reach for the inanimate in our effort to constitute selves. I investigate how these insights apply to medieval alliterative verse. Four poems that lie at the heart of my dissertation -- the Old English Exodus, Andreas, and Judith, and the Middle English Cleanness -- contemplate their own status as crafted objects with formidable, but mysterious roots in the past, by calling up fragmented parts of larger structures, both architectural and corporeal, at key moments in their text. These evocative objects demonstrate how an inert, circumscribed presence can easily become moving and elusive.;My first chapter is a general study of artifacts in the poems under consideration. I demonstrate that two categories of ontologically unstable "things," the relic and the spolium (dramatically re-used fragments from the past), play distinct roles in early English textual production. The second and third chapters of the dissertation focus on objects suddenly animated. In Exodus, the pillar of cloud leading the Israelites through the desert presents the vertical axis on which the story develops links with biblical events before and after the Crossing of the Red Sea, while the mutating image of the city, envisioned as a fusion of people, natural features, buildings, and treasures, moves horizontally, connecting the Israelites with other peoples in their midst. In Andreas, artifacts such as an angel sculpture in a temple or a marble pillar in a prison cell suddenly spring into life, starting a chain of animation across time and space. My fourth chapter reveals a reverse transformation in Judith, a living being turning into an object, when Holofernes becomes a decapitated head. The fifth chapter considers hermeneutically fraught vessels in Cleanness, where in his narrative of Solomon's artful assembling of temple artifacts and their manipulation by Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar, the poet foregrounds the issue of proper and improper use of containers (bodies, buildings, pots, texts).;The dissertation is a study of one aspect of alliterative poetics. These four "barbarian" texts display a sophisticated engagement with material culture not as things in themselves but as a medium for thinking about continuity and discontinuity (including that between Old English and Middle English), the concrete and the abstract, and the local and the global. |
