'What mine eyes have seen and my ears heard': Testimony in Old English literature and law

As the first extended study of the Anglo-Saxon witness, this project characterizes the different types of testimony in Old English and examines how such discourse expresses early concepts of identity and legal subjectivity. Building upon recent work in both legal history and the study of pre-modern selfhood, this project recuperates Old English law for literary study by drawing parallels between identity construction in juridical discourse and that in more canonical literary works, including Beowulf and Wulfstan's Sermo Lupi ad Anglos. In so doing, this project aims to deepen our understanding of the psychology of selfhood in pre-Conquest England and to open up new avenues for the study of law and literature in Old English.; In pursuing this study, I address two questions: first, how do we characterize subjectivity in Anglo-Saxon England? Secondly, how does the advent of literacy affect Anglo-Saxon notions of the self, particularly the self as a social being? Answering these questions, I argue, requires us to examine Old English representations of testimony, a form of discourse that both validates and is validated by the identity of the speaker. In particular, such "non-literary" works as the Anglo-Saxon law codes suggest that the act of bearing witness played a central role in constituting the Anglo-Saxon subject. In these texts, valid testimony demands that the witness possess an internally consistent, fundamentally knowable unified self. Although this essentialized self may be interrogated, recorded, and archived by juridical authority, it nonetheless is portrayed as naturally external and prior to that authority. As I show, however, this naturalized identity is itself a fiction produced by the rhetorical structure of the testimonial scene. Moreover, the qualities valued in this fictionalized self are identical to those valued in a legal text: fixity, coherence, and legibility. The characterization of the witness as "written" thereby re-enacts the production of the written legal text itself. Recognizing the importance of these early testimony narratives thus illuminates the close relationship between Old English law and literature even as it helps us trace the link between expanding literacy and the development of a surprisingly individualized Anglo-Saxon subject.