Advanced Old English

Catalog description

Early English writers were of two minds about their homeland: they cultivated the mythology that the English were the New Israel, while they were intensely aware (and constantly reminded by Continental authorities) of their status as a backwater at the margins of Christendom. Scripture modeled for them the concept of divinely sanctioned colonization. It also portended for them the precarity of such an elite status, challenged in their day by Viking attacks, corruption in the Church, and various ecological disasters. Such conflicting ideas about their place in the world generated sophisticated reflections about difference with respect to what is now called race, nationality, indigeneity, and the status of the human in the world. Readings include numerous genres (poetry, sermons, riddles, and saints' lives available in Old English and translation) as well as a wide variety of relevant contemporary theory.