Rebecca Stephenson & Jacqueline Fay 
Textual Identities in Early Medieval England 
Essays in Honour of Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe

Throughout her career, Professor Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe has focused on the often-overlooked details of early medieval textual life, moving from the smallest punctum to a complete reframing of the humanities’ biggest questions. In her hands, the traditional tools of medieval studies — philology, paleography, and close reading – become a fulcrum to reveal the unspoken worldviews animating early medieval textual production. The essays collected here both honour and reflect her influence as a scholar and teacher. They cover Latin works, such as the writings of Prudentius and Bede, along with vernacular prose texts: the
Pastoral Care, the
OE Boethius, the law codes, the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and Ælfric’s
Lives of Saints. The Old English poetic corpus is also considered, with a focus on less-studied works, including
Genesis and
Fortunes of Men. This diverse array of texts provides a foundation for the volume’s analysis of agency, identity, and subjectivity in early medieval England; united in their methodology, the articles in this collection all question received wisdom and challenge critical consensus on key issues of humanistic inquiry, among them affect and embodied cognition, sovereignty and power, and community formation.

Table of Content

Introduction

Jacqueline Fay, Rebecca Stephenson, and Renée R. Trilling

Part I: Affect and Embodied Cognition in Medieval Didactic Texts

1. Prudentius’s
Apotheosis and
Hamartigenia in Early Medieval England

Leslie Lockett

2. Wonders Never Cease in the Old English
Boethius

Nicole Guenther Discenza

3. The Desiring Mind: Embodying Affect in the Old English
Pastoral Care

Jennifer A. Lorden

4. Adam and Eve’s Hands and Eyes: Covering the Face in the Junius Manuscript

Benjamin A. Saltzman

5. Hawk Taming and Humanity in
The Fortunes of Men

Stacy S. Klein

Part II: Sovereignty, Power, and English Textual Identities

6. A Taste for the Law: The Preface to Alfred’s Law Code and Hannah Arendt’s Reading of Kant

Emily V. Thornbury

7. The Bodies Politic: Conflict, Consent, and English Identity During Godwin’s Exile

Jacob Hobson

8. Abraham Wheelock, Agent of Anglicanism, and the Deployment of Old English Texts in the 1643 Edition of Bede’s
Ecclesiastical History of the English People

Timothy Graham

Part III: Acts of Public Record in Making and Sustaining Communities

9. Writings Among the Ruins: The Peterborough Chronicle and the House Archive

Scott T. Smith

10. St. Rumwold and the Social Network of Belief

Miranda Wilcox

11. Holy Women on Display in Ælfric’s
Lives of Saints

Jonathan Davis-Secord

Overview of Career

Visible Mód: The Scholarship of Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe

Maura Nolan

The Writings of Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe

Bibliography

Index

Tabula Gratulatoria

About the author

Renée R. Trilling is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Program in Medieval Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.