UC Berkeley

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.