Forms of Devotion in Early English Poetry: The Poetics of Feeling

The best summary of Jennifer Lorden's new book is the one she offers herself: “I argue . . . that while the conventions of later affective piety are often taken as the thing itself, the earliest English devotional poetry already has conventions for engaging devotional feeling” (p. 9). Lorden is not the first to suggest that types of affective piety were practiced before the days of Anselm, Bernard of Clairvaux, and their ilk; for Old English and Anglo-Latin, one might cite contributions from Allen J. Frantzen, Scott DeGregorio, Frances McCormack and Helen Foxhall Forbes (among others), and Lorden does. What is most original about this elegantly-written monograph is how Lorden connects devotional uses of verse to the accrued emotional associations of topoi within a traditional poetics. In addition, Lorden highlights the distinctiveness of the modes of affectivity found in Old English and traces the emergence in early Middle English material of motifs and forms that are more readily recognized as affective, in particular the religious lyric as love song.The book is organized into an introduction, five chapters, and an epilogue. The introduction begins in lively fashion, pointing out that in Bede's story of Cædmon what Cædmon brings to his material through transforming it into vernacular verse is suavitas and compunctio–the capacity to delight and move its audience. Though scholarship associates affectivity with high and later medieval piety, already in the fifth century John Cassian stresses the role of affectus in reading and praying the Psalms. On the one hand, as Leslie Lockett has argued, the mod in Old English is the site of both emotion and thought, with no sharp division between emotion and reason; on the other, commentators such as Origen and later Bede recognize that the message of Biblical texts is bound up with their aesthetic impact on the senses, which in turn has an affective dimension. The last part of the introduction gives the customary outline of the chapters to follow, which explore different faces of affectivity and aesthetics in Old English and early Middle English verse.Chapter one looks at sympathy and suffering in The Dream of the Rood and Guthlac B. While the heroic Christ of The Dream of the Rood is unlike the tender savior of later medieval passion piety, suffering is nonetheless central in the poem and the reader is invited to “co-feel” with the Cross and the Dreamer as they partake in and witness the crucifixion. The poem deploys the poetic topos of the love of the retainer for his lord, and so does Guthlac B in its presentation of Guthlac's death and the sorrow it provokes in his disciple Beccel. Guthlac himself approaches death with serenity, looking forward to the joy of heaven. Lorden discusses how the poem negotiates between worldly ties and heavenly hope, showing the limitations of Beccel's understanding and yet continuing to affirm, and invite readers to be moved by, the bonds of love and loyalty between the saint, Beccel, and also Guthlac's sister Pega.A similar negotiation of potential contradictions is addressed in chapter two, which deals with depictions of Paradise in The Phoenix and Genesis A and B. These poems deploy poetic conventions for the depiction of treasure and outstanding works of human craft; these are yardsticks for beauty and convey the joy of Paradise, even though the poems also confront how the divine lies beyond the reach of the senses. The section on the composite Genesis poem comments intriguingly on the role of perception, sense, and affect in the fall of the angels and the deception of Eve; the devil “play[s] on the experience of created beauty by which [Eve] and Adam had been able to understand their world” (p. 74).Chapter three turns to eschatological materials: the Old English Soul and Body poems and Bede's De die iudicii and its Old English version, Judgment Day II. Here Lorden argues that shame and the fear of social rejection are central in portrayals both of the despised, disgusting corpse and of the general Judgment. As with the depictions of Paradise but now in a negative vein, these poems tackle the limits of what the senses can access, including the loss of sensory experience in death, while insisting on the embodied nature of affect. The chapter is a rich and wide-ranging one; in fact, shame is less prominent in it than one might expect, since there is so much else to say.Chapter four moves into early Middle English, looking at continuity and change in the Soul and Body tradition after the Conquest. Focusing on two twelfth-century poems, The Grave and The Soul's Address to the Body, and the thirteenth-century Latemest Day, Lorden analyzes the meeting between the tropes of the monologic Old English tradition, in which the soul addresses a mute body, and a new dialogue or debate form modeled in Latin and French. The Old English evocation of shame and “the worms’ gruesome feasting” (p. 115) continues, but the emphasis is now more on death itself than on Judgment; new verse forms also come into play.Chapter five examines religious lyrics that invoke romantic love. While the representation of Christ as lover is genuinely new in post-Conquest poetry, Lorden argues for the Old English Advent Lyric VII as a precursor of sorts, which can be associated with other examples of “the wronged woman's lament” in the Exeter Book, The Wife's Lament, and Wulf and Eadwacer. The reading of Advent Lyric VII inevitably has to tackle the difficult question of speech boundaries in the poem; I have written on this poem and come to different conclusions to Lorden, but her solution, that the poem shows an “intended ambiguity” (p. 151) which helps to involve the audience in the drama, is ingenious. The Middle English poems discussed, On God Ureisen of Ure Lefdi and Luue Ron, are clearly very different, but Lorden succeeds in making connections with tropes current earlier (if not unique to Old English), such as the ubi sunt topos. “Conventions of language and poetic forms shift . . . but the affective investments of early English devotional poetry persist” (pp. 159–60). Finally, the epilogue stresses the importance of conventions shared between poems, as opposed to word choices in individual texts, and urges reading across boundaries of period and language.The detailed insights in Lorden's delicate readings of poems deserve attention beyond what can be conveyed in a brief review; in broad terms, too, she decisively establishes the role of a varied affectivity in Old English religious poetry, as well as the continuation of aspects of this tradition into Middle English. The claim about conventions, while important and inherently plausible, would nonetheless merit further exploration. The “wronged woman's lament,” for example, may or may not be a well-established element in Old English verse: arguably the influence of classical models is at work behind Wulf and Eadwacer (see Sebo, Neophilologus 105 [2021]). In chapter three, Lorden notes that the soul and body tradition also incorporates homilies and the poems show “the interplay between affectively evocative poetic and homiletic topoi” (p. 93); do similar topoi in poetry and homilies gain their emotional impact in different ways, perhaps through different performance practices or different verbal formulae? This is only to say that the seam Lorden is mining is by no means exhausted. Her book is a welcome contribution to scholarship on the history of emotions and affect, medieval spirituality, and Old and Middle English poetry.