Just as We Read Anywhere: Type Texts, Intertexts, and the Earliest English Lives of Malchus

The life of Malchus survives in three instances in early medieval England: in Aldhelm, in Ælfric, and in an anonymous prose life. In each of these instances, the story appears immediately adjacent to other narratives of chastity and sexual purity. But while these other chastity narratives focus on overcoming desire, Malchus’s story offers a counterpoint to these as a story of a lack of desire, and a model for chaste companionship. Considering each extant instance of the story of Malchus, I argue that his story appears consistently in pre-Conquest writing in England as an intertext, an intertext offering a crucial contrast to stories of overcoming lust. Appearing so consistently in particular contexts, it offers something of a type text, able to evoke connotations of chaste companionship allusively. Rather than mere absence of lust, Malchus’s story offers the presence of chaste companionship, as both a lesson in itself and one teaching its audience to read exempla by means of other exempla.