Many Paths Across Pale Fields: Repetition and Doubling in Early English Missionary Literature

The early medieval English missionaries in Germany cultivated an intense and sometimes dizzying self-referentiality in their writing and have been characterized as working within an “echo chamber” of favorite phrases and formulae. But this self-referential repetition—the doubling of poetic phrases and formulae in Boniface’s Enigmata and entire “scenes” in Hygeburg’s prose Vitae Willibaldi et Wynnebaldi—also reveals an acute sensitivity to the accretive potential of language. The Boniface circle cultivated a literary style that foregrounded intratextual repetition and rewarded the rereading of texts. Although this iterative aesthetics has led modern scholars to dismiss their texts as imitative or derivative, I argue that the very qualities that have prompted such critique are what most clearly mark these works as part of a shared milieu, with a deliberately cultivated style that rewards the returning reader.