Riddles and Wonders: Defining Humanity in Anglo-Saxon England

This book provides a parallel reading of the ExeterBook riddles and theWondersof the East in order to identify the loci in the Early Medieval English literary tradition where animality and humanitymay have overlapped & explores how both collections expose the means by which human, animals and other creatures resist a fixed categorization.

Throughout the history of human civilization, the definition of the animal and its relationship to humans have been contentious issues. This book investigates the notion of what constituted an animal in Early Medieval English culture as well as how the animal-human interaction is portrayed in the Anglo-Saxon literary corpus. In this regard, the animal's portrayals in the Exeter Book Riddles and of monstrous creatures in the Wonders of the East provided a fertile field for research because these texts, rarely connected to allegorical readings and offering viewpoints that might be seen as complementary, deal with fundamental issues regarding what it meant to be human for Early Medieval English society. This study offers fresh insights into the characters and themes explored in the Exeter Book collection and in the Wonders of the East, looking for the spaces of Anglo-Saxon thought in which animality and humanity appear to meet. The author not only discovers the peculiar features in the definition of humanity with regard to animal and non-human figures, but is able to demonstrate that a strong anthropocentric vocation can coexist with an outlook that recognizes a close affinity among different species.

Autorentext

Jasmine Bria earned a PhD in Germanic Philology from the University of Calabria in 2021, where she is now research grant holder and temporary adjunct professor.

She writes on both the Old English and Middle English periods. Currently, she is working on the Arthurian narratives in the textual tradition of the Brut en prose.

Inhalt

Table of Contents - Acknowledgments - Preface - Introduction - Chapter One - The Exeter Book collection and the Riddle Tradition - Chapter Two - Prosopopoeia, Anthropomorphism and Empathy - Chapter Three - Riddles and Metamorphosis - Chapter Four - Wonders of the East: men, animals and in-between - Chapter Five - Uncertain Humanity Denied Humanity - Chapter Six - Alien and Familiar - Conclusions - References