Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, a philosophical dialogue in the “prosimetric” or mixed form (prose and poetry), has attracted broad literary and philosophical readerships in both the Latin West and Greek East from the ninth century on. The two readerships, however, have not regularly overlapped or engaged with one another in their respective efforts to interpret the work. The purposes of this study are to enable a more informed appreciation of the philosophical implications of its more “literary” books (I–II) and the literary significance of its more transparently philosophical ones (III–V), and to bring its overall architecture into clearer focus. To these ends, a case is made at the outset for the complete state of the transmitted text of the work.

Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy was one of the most influential texts in medieval Europe. Yet it does not receive enough attention in contemporary scholarship on medieval philosophy. This is in part explained by the content and literary form of the Consolation. The direct influence of Plato and late antique Neoplatonism, the dialogue form, the alternating prose and poetry sections, and the wealth of references to classical literature and mythology contrast sharply with the sort of texts most contemporary scholars of medieval philosophy focus on. The essays in this volume tackle these interpretive challenges and reveal some of the rich philosophical insights the Consolation offers. Chapters 1–3 directly address its literary features and their philosophical significance. Chapters 4 and 5 consider the relationship between the Consolation and Boethius’ Christianity. Chapters 6–8 offer three different takes on the philosophy of selfhood, or philosophical anthropology, so central to the Consolation. Chapters 9–13 deal with the more standard metaphysical and theological issues, such as Boethius’ accounts of goodness, being, God, time, eternity, and human freedom.

The Introduction describes the distinctive character of Old Norse-Icelandic literature, arguing that in range, quality and originality this body of literature rivals anything produced elsewhere in the Middle Ages. Highlighting the enduring importance, influence and popularity of this unique corpus of literature, it sets out the rationale for a volume providing a comprehensive account of its history and development. It then outlines the reasons for organizing the chapters of this volume primarily by the time and place of their texts’ setting, rather than any putative order of composition, in order to emphasize the fundamental intertextuality of Old Norse-Icelandic literary genres and the diversity of genre, style and worldview which these texts encompass. After this, the contents and approach of each section of the History are introduced in turn.

This chapter focuses on the literary debates provoked by the appearance of mechanical clocks – and “clockworks” more generally – in medieval England. Invented in China in the eighth century, the first European mechanical clocks were manufactured in the early fourteenth century. The contemporaneous literary record shows that clocks did not immediately impose a secular conception of time that regulated human life; instead, the population of medieval Christian Europe continued to reckon time through cycles of light and dark and according to the liturgical calendar. Drawing on readings of Christine de Pizan, Philippe de Mézières, Jean Froissart, and Geoffrey Chaucer, Lightsey argues that clocks were primarily received in the time of their invention as mechanical wonders, and primarily employed as displays of wealth.

Old English poetry sometimes suggests that normative life phases are experienced by each person in the same way, but it also disrupts this idea, directing our attention to the contingencies, surprises, and sudden shifts which shape each person’s life course. This study’s introductory chapter advances this central argument and establishes the literary-critical scope of the wider monograph. It also provides a theoretical grounding in sociological and philosophical approaches to the life course, as well as the theories of the nonhuman which inform this study’s inclusion of narratives of the lives of objects, animals, and other natural phenomena in its discussion of human ageing – illustrated by a case study of the ‘oyster’ riddle of the Exeter Book (Riddle 74). Relevant material-cultural and linguistic contexts are then surveyed, and the structure of the rest of the book outlined.

When the Riddles of the Exeter Book depict early life in the world, they show a striking lack of interest in birth imagery – rather than focusing on a moment of parturition (like many aenigmata in the Latin tradition), these texts instead present early life as a time of gradual growth, contingent on continued care provided by others. To contextualise these scenes in the Riddles, this chapter considers other Old English poems such as The Fortunes of Men, contemporary embryological thought, prose accounts of the ages of man and the world, and plastic art, including carved scenes of animals nurturing their young on an eleventh-century baptismal font and the depiction of Romulus and Remus on the Franks Casket. In the chapter’s later stages, it stresses another kind of transformation as the riddle-creatures take up a variety of social roles, frequently involving the perpetration, witnessing, and suffering of violence.

Constructions of adulthood tend to be under-studied and under-theorised. In the face of this challenge, this chapter focuses on three vernacular verse hagiographies – commonly known as Guthlac A, Juliana, and Andreas – as well as Judith, which centres on a deuterocanonical Old Testament figure. In different ways, these poems all depict maturity as associated with increased social usefulness. Masculine youthful waywardness seems to be more of a source of interest to poets than similar behaviour in women, but it is an underappreciated quality of Old English poetry that unruly youth in women is represented; in particular, St Juliana rebels against societal expectations in a manner that is explicitly linked with her youth. Nonetheless, the seemingly later poems, Andreas and Judith, both problematise – in different ways–the idea that growth through adulthood is always, or even commonly, a linear, teleological drive towards physical and intellectual excellence.

Summarising this study’s findings, this concluding chapter explores a little-discussed and much-maligned text in their light: the relatively late, formally innovative, and greatly enigmatic Rhyming Poem of the Exeter Book. This poem is known for its apparently disorganised structure and ambiguous subject matter, moving rapidly between human and nonhuman referents, and operating on both a microcosmic and macrocosmic level. Yet The Rhyming Poem gains a great deal of clarity when approached as an articulation of a human life course, blurring with that of the world itself. Drawing on arguments built throughout the book, this final chapter sets out a new account of the poem, finding more coherence to its structure than scholars have previously detected, and pointing particularly to key connections between form and content in the poet’s bold use of rhyme to accentuate the sudden shifts and transformations of the life course.

“Decolonizing the Medieval Literary Curriculum” shows why the critical teaching of the literatures of the deep past – in the form of a critical canon, and a countercanon – is essential today, at a moment when White supremacist and alt-right groups in the West are weaponizing the symbols, cultures, and histories of the European Middle Ages to assemble a spurious, fantasied past of White racial purity and superiority, prelapsarian Christian homogeneity, and religiopolitical supremacy so as to make this fantasied past the basis of authority for transforming today’s world. At the same time, changing population demographics in the West are creating cohorts of students in higher learning who have diversified substantially in terms of their race, class, countries of origin, sexualities, genders, and physical, cultural, and psychosocial composition. Students, even more than faculty, have called for curricular transformations that are responsive to the urgencies of our time. The pedagogical strategies and curricular offerings in this essay are thus an example of the efforts undertaken today by a community of largely premodernists of color who are working to teach a decolonizing curriculum, and who are profoundly engaged in transforming how the deep past is taught and studied in the twenty-first century academy.

The introductory chapter of this study parses the identity of the medieval North of England as a region desired for its role in defense at the Anglo-Scottish border and for the devotional culture cultivated, which significantly impacted the rest of England, and derided as a region defensive of its own autonomy, in frequent rebellion and, furthermore, a seat for lingering Catholicism in the wake of religious reform. For these reasons, this chapter claims, the North is necessary for understanding the larger negotiations of English identity and the English nation ongoing in the Middle Ages. The regionalism evident in the North of England and its literature both contests and, in a convoluted sense, enables an emergent English nationalism. If the English North–South divide is conceived by critics as a post-industrial phenomenon, then this chapter argues that the rift, and the discourse that makes it, grows out of these contests between region and nation in the Middle Ages.

The changing structures of what we would now think of as “the economy” during the Middle Ages (c. 450 – c. 1500) left deep and extensive marks on the period’s writing and storytelling. Significantly, this was due to the presence of at least two economic systems developing in parallel: an agrarian-based manorial system and a cash-based commercial system. The chance survival of texts from this period does not provide a unified vision of economics throughout England or even from every century of the medieval period. What texts do survive, however, show us that economics in the literature takes many forms beyond simply the exchange of money for goods and services, the establishment of credit and banking, and the development of complex and varied trade networks. It also appears in how a household is run, in gift-exchange, and even in the language of reckoning of sins with punishment or penance.

The ways Jews were represented in several genres of medieval writing is examined. The change over time as new narratives developed is shown, and the role of visual imagery in the operation of such medieval texts is also considered.

This chapter addresses how the Crusades spurred a renewed appropriation of Alexander in historiography, literature, images and cartography in late medieval Europe. Alexander’s legend was particularly relevant because it reflected the era’s geopolitical and epistemological complexity. The chapter focuses first on the ancient Alexander legend’s adaptation in Crusade-era texts including Crusade chronicles, epics, antique romances and encyclopedias. These works compare Alexander to Crusaders, present Alexander as a precursor of the Crusaders who fights Asian tyranny, interpolate Alexander into the stories of Crusaders through ekphrasis, and frequently cite the legend of Alexander’s enclosure of Gog and Magog. The chapter’s second part focuses on how manuscripts present Alexander as a proto-Crusader even if texts do not overtly describe him as such. Particular attention is paid to compilations that join Alexander and holy warriors (Judas Maccabeus, Godfrey of Bouillon), and to images that Christianise Alexander or demonise his foes. The final section examines the influence of Alexander’s legend on the apocalyptic geography of late medieval maps, which often depict Gog and Magog and other elements (toponyms, sites, monstrous peoples) of the Alexander tradition.