This dissertation, a study in political hermeneutics, claims the practice of biblical interpretation as one of the primary shaping forces of Anglo-Saxon literature and society. From the educational reforms of King Alfred (r. 871-99) through the end of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom (c. 1066), anyone who received an education in England began by memorizing the Psalms and progressed to the study of biblical exegesis, a method of reading that moves from the historical analysis of scripture to the figurative description of moral action in the present and eternal punishment or reward in the future. Exegetical theory inscribes human action in the morally charged temporalities of Christian salvation history, encompassing all historical time from Creation to Judgment Day. It provides a foundational method by which Anglo-Saxons read texts, but it also becomes a powerful structuring principle of sacred and secular society as a whole. The practice of scriptural interpretation interpellates individual subjects as historical actors, and it frames social institutions, from monasteries to the kingdom itself, as agents in the unfolding progress of world history. The chapters that follow study its role in the Alfredian translations, Ælfrician liturgy, hermeneutic Latin diplomas, and classical verse of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Although land conveyances and the heroic Battle of Brunanburh might be the last places we would expect to find the effect of exegetical reading, I show that it is precisely such texts where exegetical theory makes its influence known most effectively. These texts frame real politics and warfare as moments in the progress of salvation history, and they place contemporary individuals at the center of the action. In late Anglo-Saxon England, salvation history provides the absolute and universal horizon of present action, subsuming the lives of individuals and the developing history of the kingdom. At the same time, individual writers saw this horizon approaching at different rates, and no two writers perceived the shape of its curve in quite the same way. My dissertation reveals how the exegetical interpretation of texts and events produces the Anglo-Saxon political subject as an actor in salvation history, one who is shaped by it at the same time that he or she works to further its progress.

“Learning to Feel: Affect and Piety in Anglo-Saxon Verse,” argues that not only did affective piety exist centuries before the dates commonly held in current scholarship, but that early medieval English poetry employed a complex set of poetic conventions for devotional affect. “Learning to Feel” engages the literary history of later periods as it contests scholarly narratives that date affective piety—that is, deep emotional engagement with religious devotion—to the twelfth century advent of mandatory confession and shifts in artistic representations of Christ’s suffering. By contrast, “Learning to Feel” argues that profound emotional engagement with devotion inheres centuries earlier, and is central to understanding devotional poetry in the Anglo-Saxon era (i.e., the eighth through twelfth centuries). Not only is the devotional literature of this era affectively engaged, but the earliest English verse uses affective devotion to heighten its aesthetic effect, rather than merely using affective art as a means to didactic ends. Indeed, the allusive nature of devotional poems’ religious content demands cultivated devotion as a prerequisite to their effectiveness. Building upon scholarship that has revised anachronistic concepts of Anglo-Saxon ideas of psychology and affect generally, “Learning to Feel” shows how Anglo-Saxon devotional literature in fact lays the groundwork for affect and piety in literature for centuries that follow.

In the earliest medieval devotional poetry, neither devotional nor artistic conventions may be simply subordinated to one another. This body of literature instead evinces a devotional aesthetic deeply invested in affective identifications and associations that are culturally defined and understood. The aesthetic of the medieval period was not, of course, the autotelic or a priori models that pervade post-Kantian aesthetics, but one closer to the sense of the Greek word aisthesis, one involving perception and those things that work upon it. The devotional aesthetic of the earliest English literature relies upon the affective associations evoked by homiletic, hagiographic, and penitential conventions. Yet where, for example, homily carefully explicates the lessons to be derived from exemplary narratives, devotional verse uses such narrative and its formulaic language allusively, in conjunction with poetic conventions (e.g., elegy, exile, kinship, etc.), to heighten portrayals of powerful devotional affect. The differences between these early conventions and those of later periods account in large part for the dramatic differences in their devotional aesthetics. Challenging current pieties about affective devotion from the twelfth century on, this dissertation shows that earlier literature deeply involves affect in its devotional poetic conventions. This evocation of devotional affect is neither merely instrumental to didactic ends nor an aesthetic for its own sake—affect and aisthesis are intricately connected within the devotional aesthetic of the earliest English verse.

Chapter 1 addresses those specific devotional affects said only to arise centuries later—sympathetic devotion and sympathy for suffering. Readings of The Dream of the Rood and Guthlac B show how depictions of stoic suffering are complicated by intense pious sympathy, and how both models of suffering and grief participate in Anglo-Saxon poetic conventions surrounding kinship and broader conventions surrounding the ecclesiastical familia. The next chapter demonstrates how Anglo-Saxon poems on Judgment Day rely upon their audiences’ belief in coming Judgment to enhance its allusive and elliptical evocations of extravagant horrors. Similarly, Anglo-Saxon depictions of Paradise simultaneously evoke and forbid delight in luxury objects, yet appeals to its delights exceed the bounds of didactic utility, producing affective pleasure of the same variety they caution against. These disparate conventions contribute to the verse’s aesthetic power, even when their affective associations appear to exceed what their didactic content would allow. The final chapter explores how the Old English prosimetrical translation of Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae displays lingering interest in the affective pleasures of instruction far beyond that of its source text. This study builds upon field-changing work on Anglo-Saxon understandings of affect and psychology to revise existing narratives of literary history and religious culture.

This dissertation argues that kings were central to the formation of vernacular literary culture in Anglo-Saxon England. Kings typically served in early medieval textual culture as the recipients of clerical instruction, not as authors or educators in their own right. They were enjoined to rule wisely: to listen to advice and issue wise decrees. This limited notion of kingship, however, proved inadequate to the depiction of royal wisdom as it operated in history. In the course of exploring the distant past, when kings had no clerics to advise them, or the ongoing scenario of royal lawmaking, Anglo-Saxon authors constructed royal personae that could reflect wisely on their own actions and offer wisdom to others. These authors adapted instructive genres in textual culture, such as the sermon, the explanatory gloss, and the maxim, into the means of expressing a lay wisdom grounded in experience and reflection rather than formal instruction.

Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum is addressed to a royal reader, Ceolwulf of Northumbria, and kings sit at the heart of its plot as the primary subjects of conversion. Bede treats conversion as a problem of epistemology, rhetoric, and politics as he crafts a language of wise self-reflection for his convert-kings—a rational and lofty style with classical overtones. The unknown poet and scribes of Beowulf, meanwhile, staged an even more radical revision of intellectual authority in textual culture: they presented Christian readers with wise pagan characters who reflect at length on some of the central questions of early medieval ethics and theology, including the role of God (or “a god”) in altering the balance of earthly power. In the absence of clerical advisors or biblical authority, Beowulf’s wise kings judge their own actions by extrapolating from their knowledge of history. With the Old English Boethius, a translation of the late-antique Consolation of Philosophy, we arrive at a text purportedly authored by an actual king, Alfred of Wessex. The Boethius shifts the meaning of political action: rather than a distraction from wisdom, as it is portrayed in the original Consolation, it becomes the very means of attaining wisdom. By having the prisoner retain his self-conception as a ruler even after his downfall, the Boethius puts kingship at the center of the universal human drive for wisdom. Finally, English kings and their clerical, literate advisors developed the field of written law into an arena for the performance of political wisdom by adapting the essentially ecclesiastical genres of the diploma (an instrument of pious land donation) and the sermon to the scenario of the king’s legal speech. Within the kingdom as an imagined political community, the king was not simply the most powerful individual, but also a public intellectual who had the authority to interpret the state of affairs—a role that was contingent, however, on his success in protecting the nation.

My chapters cumulatively show that kings functioned in early medieval England as figures to think as and think with. By adapting the genres of textual wisdom to kingly voices and perspectives, Anglo-Saxon authors constructed a vernacular literary sphere with a distinctly political self-conception.