E. J. Christie assembles ten interdisciplinary essays in this volume covering texts and topics relevant to early medieval England, a fitting tribute to its honoree, Patrick W. Conner. When historian Joyce Hill reviewed Conner’s Anglo-Saxon Exeter: A Tenth-Century Cultural History in 1995, she concluded that “[w]hether or not one accepts its conclusions, it is a book which certainly cannot be ignored”--not least because it included “valuable editions of essential primary texts (including the Athelstan relic-lists and the Leofric inventory), and a sixth which traces the history of the Exeter book since 1100” (Hill, 313). [1] Besides his editorial work on these cultural documents from Leofric’s Exeter, Conner’s “Booklet Theory,” argued on exhaustive codicological and paleographical grounds, posited that the Exeter Book of Old English Poetry (Exeter Cathedral, Dean and Chapter MS 3501) began as three separate booklets written by a single scribe over a time and assembled in the order two (quires VII-XII), three (quires XIII-XVII), one (quires I-VI). As Hill predicted, Conner’s book provoked a flurry of arguments, notes, and responses concerning the Exeter Book’s early provenance, origins, and date. By challenging assumptions regarding Exeter MS 3501’s origins, Conner struck a nerve, and some of his arguments concerning precise date(s) and location(s) of the manuscript’s production drew intense scrutiny--not all of it charitable. Nevertheless, Conner’s rigorous, materially informed re-assessment of this important vernacular anthology pushed conversations about late Old English verse forward, as did his editorial work on the Abingdon Chronicle, A.D. 956-1066. In the decades following the publication of Anglo-Saxon Exeter and The Abingdon Chronicle, Conner refined his transformational theory by contextualizing many of the Exeter Anthology’s most celebrated lyrics--the so-called “elegies”--into a series of articles and book chapters (sorted under headings by the editor on 243-45). In short, Conner breathed new life into Exeter’s poetic anthology by articulating myriad reading- and performance-contexts keyed to the guild statues, relic lists, and other localized cultural documents appended to it by its earliest caretakers.

As Christie observes in his editorial introduction, Conner’s “Booklet Theory...provides a foothold for literary analysis of the Exeter Book” (2) as a whole, and Conner’s interest in reading the Exeter Anthology’s poetry in the light of the cultural materials appended to it enriched our understanding of a transitional period of early English literary history. Following Conner’s lead, Christie’s introduction schematizes The Wisdom of Exeter as a scholarly triptych. Chapters 1-4 (by, respectively, Elaine Treharne, David F. Johnson, Thomas A. Bredehoft, and Timothy Graham) are concerned with material manuscripts, while Catherine E. Karkov and Stuart D. Lee share an interest context and reception studies in chapters 5 and 6. The last four chapters Christie categorizes broadly as “literary criticism,” with contributions from Bob Hasenfratz, Thomas N. Hall, Thomas D. Hill, and Jill Frederick. Christie’s organization of the volume into three groupings, like his mentor’s Booklet Theory, guides readers in stimulating ways should they wish to read the volume from cover to cover.

Chapter one, Treharne’s “The Conners of Exeter, 1070-1150,” focuses on post-Conquest scribes at Exeter who wrote “short legal documents and annotations” linking three Exeter manuscripts: the Exeter Book, the West Saxon Gospels (Cambridge University Library, Ii.2. 11), and the sacramentary known as Leofric’s Missal (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 579). Using these legal records and their scribes to shift our understanding of Old English literary history forward into the post-Conquest period, Treharne invites us to read these three books as localized municipal repositories possessing a “sacralized Englishness” witnessed among eleventh and twelfth century communities that “venerated vernacular book[s] selected by a corporate audience” (17). For Treharne, the mise-en-page of various manumissions and their associations with guild statues at a scribal center invested in a shifting vernacular preserve a “specialist lexis” recording not (as is typically assumed) the freeing of slaves, but rather dues payments for “the admittance of freemen and freewomen” into local guilds (22). Whether or not one accepts Treharne’s admittedly “speculative” (11 and 26) readings of these documents is up to the reader; nevertheless, she cogently fuses codicology with close lexical study of an “undoubtedly legal argot” from the post-Conquest period to cement the “vernacular legacy” resulting from Leofric’s tenure as bishop of Exeter.

Chapter two, Johnson’s “Winchester Revisited: Æthelwold, Lucifer, and the Place of Origin of MS Junius 11,” considers the provenance and dating of the titular poetic manuscript, beginning with a synthesis of four categories of evidence that have a bearing on the issue: “the paleographical, the philological, the iconographical, and what may loosely be termed external or circumstantial” (28). Johnson extends his earlier argument regarding the exordium to the Old English poem Genesis Aand its possible connections to two Anglo-Latin diplomas originating at Winchester in the “late quarter of the tenth century” (54)--King Edgar’s Privilege to New Minster, Winchester (BL Cotton MS Vespasian A.viii) and a Burton Abbey charter from the Peniarth Cartulary (Wales, Aberystwyth, Peniarth, MS 390)--based on their shared use of a unique cosmogonic interpretation known as the “replacement doctrine” which posited that God created earth as a direct consequence of Lucifer’s fall from heaven. Synthesizing diplomatic studies and art historical evidence with information from the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England project, Johnson reasonably speculates that “a royal minister named Ælfwine, who was active in the second half of the tenth century and present at Winchester, may have been the patron, commissioner, or intended recipient” of Junius 11 (61).

Thomas A. Bredehoft revisits Conner’s Booklet Theory from the angle of late Old English meter in chapter three, “Metrical Footprints and Pat Conner’s Exeter Booklets.” While the author’s data requires familiarity with his earlier publications (especially his 2005 Early English Metre), Bredehoft revises and endorses Conner’s Booklet Theory, arguing that “Booklet 3...seems more metrically conservative than Booklets 1 and 2” based on a demonstrable “preference for conservative metrical practices” (73). In doing so, Bredehoft offers essential caveats regarding the limitations and value of metrical analyses, querying metrical prescriptivists who promote “inflexible metrical formalisms...by a too-great focus on the meter of one poem (Beowulf) as if it were definitive of all Old English meter” to push back against the idea that late Old English verse was “irregular,” decadent, or flawed (64).

Timothy Graham’s fourth chapter focuses on the early modern afterlife of Exeter’s Pre-Conquest manuscripts. It begins with a reassessment of the person responsible for appending a late eleventh-century copy of Leofric’s booklist to the Exeter Book as its first quire (Cambridge University Library MS Ii.2.11), an act Graham persuasively attributes to Matthew Parker based on two other books owned by the sixteenth-century archbishop containing fragments from CUL Ii.2.11 which is used in one book as a flyleaf and as a pastedown in another. Graham also considers the role of Exeter manuscripts in the production of John Day’s A Testimonie of Antiquitie (1566); the 1571 edition of the Old English gospels with a dedication to Queen Elizabeth by John Foxe; Abraham Wheelock’s use of Cambridge Corpus Christi College (CCCC) 41 in the production of his edition of Bede’sEcclesiastical History; William L’Isle’s wordless annotations in CCC 419 and 421 for a failed editing project of Old English scriptural quotations titled “Saxon-English Remaines”; and the early modern use of Exeter’s bilingual copy of the Enlarged Rule of Chrodegang of Metz (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 191) by Matthew Parker, lexicographer John Joscelyn, as well as Wheelock and his pupil William Retchford. Illustrated with thirteen different manuscript images, Graham’s chapter presents a substantial contribution to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century reception of Old English language and literature.

Chapters five and six of the volume by Karkov and Lee concern the reception of medieval works by modern audiences. Focusing on one of the most-studied sculptures from the pre-Conquest period in chapter five, “The Divisions of the Ruthwell Cross,” Karkov meditates on the monument’s historical legacy as “a monument that divides and establishes borders between and borders around its audiences” (133) in the early medieval period as well as the seventeenth century when the monument was divided and moved from its original place and position. Karkov shows how the monument became “emblematic of different and competing histories and places” (146), including nationalistic approaches to its various linguistic, graphological, and iconographic discourses. Thus, Karkov concludes the monument constitutes “a heritage site” for “competing and conflicting attempts” (156) to understand the monument’s historical circulation and reception by various communities throughout history.

Lee’s “Lagustreamas: The Changing Waters Surrounding J.R.R. Tolkien and The Battle of Maldon,” draws on published and unpublished papers authored by one of Old English literature’s most influential twentieth-century scholars. Lee excavates Tolkien’s annotations and notes to The Battle of Maldon to show how his malleable, fluid ideas about the poem shaped his creative works, especially the alliterative poetic-drama The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son. Attention to Tolkien’s notes as a student and scholar, Lee argues, complicates the accepted notion that his Christianity and war-time experiences during the first World War informed his negative assessment of Byrhtnoth’s ofermod in the Old English poem. Lee provides ample evidence for reading Tolkien’s attitudes toward Byrhtnoth as shifting and changing over time and cautions against facile connections “between Tolkien’s interpretation of ofermod and his own military career” (166). Along the way, Lee shows that Tolkien was ahead of his time when he proposed that “separate prosodic varieties in composition” (170) co-existed in the pre-Conquest period, a direct challenge to metrical formalism articulated by Eduard Sievers which viewed late Old English verse as a degenerate form of Classical verse, thus anticipating arguments advanced in the twenty-first century by Nicolay Yakovlev and Thomas Bredehoft.

The final four chapters of Wisdom of Exeter concern literary topics. In “The Curse of Sleep in Anglo-Saxon England,” the volume’s seventh chapter, Bob Hasenfratz offers a stimulating assessment of sleep’s status as “a perilous and toxic thing” (179) among pre-Conquest writers and thinkers. Focusing on the negative associations of sleep in the Exeter Book’s Phoenix, Christ III, and Guthlac A,as well as Judgment Day II (in CCCC MS 201), the author reveals these texts’ shared interest in a “pathology of sleep...that can be traced to the liturgical reforms of the English Benedictine” (186) movement in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Liturgical texts based on continental sources like the Regularis Concordia, the Rule of Chrodegang, and glossed hymns, Hasenfratz claims, link sleep with disease, a curious attitude that appears to inform a number of Old English poems.

Thomas N. Hall’s eighth chapter tackles a curious moment in the Old English Andreas that cannot be explained by analogs such as the apocryphal Acts of Andrew and Matthias or “surviving recensions of this apocryphon in Greek, Latin, Syriac, or Old English prose” (198). The idea that Andrew’s spilled blood miraculously turned into blossoms at a pivotal moment in the narrative, Hall argues, reflects an authorial innovation on the part of a poet who appears to rewrite the miracle to “capitalize on the thematic and symbolic significance of Andrew’s blood” (202). Hall compiles illustrations from two traditions of ancient and early medieval literature featuring “the image of a tree or flower or...plant that grows from the blood of a slain or wounded hero” (202). The first tradition includes mythological and folkloric parallels from ancient Egypt, Greece, and Syria and folktales from Brittany, Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, Russia, Turkey, and Ireland; the second tradition concerns Greek and Latin hagiographic analogs. These traditions, Hall argues, reflect an ancient story pattern derived from “Egyptian and Greek mythology” and “adapted for the literature of Christian martyrdom”--of which the Old English poem Andreas is a key example. Chapter nine is a short note by Thomas D. Hill comparing lines 114-140 of Guthlac A to a passage from the Biblical Book of Proverbs. Conceptual parallels between Proverbs and Guthlac A, Hill suggests, may indicate a poet that sought to contrast secular and monastic life more sharply than the titular saint’s youthful experience as the leader of a war-band fighting Celts along the Mercian border. In this way, Hill tacitly extends Patrick Conner’s insights regarding the monastic authorship of Guthlac A.

The collection’s final essay, Jill Frederick’s “Performance and Audience in the Exeter Book Riddles,” embraces questions of audience for the Exeter Book’s Old English riddles. Rather than identifying specific riddle solutions, Frederick disentangles the vernacular riddles from a more literary “classical tradition” in the Exeter Book to argue for “an attentive communal audience” based on the riddles’ “fusion of subject and object” (229) through the calculated opposition of first- and second-person pronouns, verbal modalities, temporal and locative phrases, and onomatopoeia. Her claim that these lyrical riddles foster “dramatic enactment,” an extension of J. L. Austin’s performatives based on echoing patterns and traces of the manuscript’s vocality, one reveals patterns of thematic clustering across Exeter 3501’s gathered riddles. Such patterns have engaged students of the Exeter Book, but Frederick’s shows how rhetorical style across the Old English riddles might have fostered selective reading in a multitude of contexts. In this way, Frederick’s chapter brings the collection back full circle to the volume’s honoree and his central preoccupation with the Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry.

Overall, the volume stands as a fitting tribute to Christie’s mentor in terms of its content and methodological approaches. Still, the volume could have been improved with additional editorial cross-references or notes to foreground topics and concerns shared between contributors. For instance, by way of explaining why Matthew Parker removed leaves from CUL MS Ii.2.11 and added them to the Exeter Book, Graham observes that many of the documents “have a legal or quasi-legal status” (81), a point developed in detail in Treharne’s contribution. And when Lee considers Tolkien’s fortuitous remarks regarding distinct varieties of poetic composition in the late pre-Conquest period (170-71), the editor misses a key opportunity to cross-reference Bredehoft’s similar position on late Old English prosody in chapter three. Individual translations by different authors would have also benefited from editorial standardization. Hasenfratz’s reliance on Bernard Muir’s two-volume Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry with block prose translations that show line breaks is exemplary, [2] and much easier to navigate than the interlinear practice adopted by Johnson in chapter two. Muir’s two-volume edition of the Exeter Anthology, based on close inspection of the manuscript in situ, is likewise preferable to Krapp and Dobbie’s 1936 edition, itself based on the 1933 black and white “facsimile edition” by Max Förster, R.W. Chambers, and Robin Flower (Krapp and Dobbie, v). [3] These criticisms notwithstanding, Christie has assembled a substantial contribution to the study of the Old English literature, early medieval Exeter, and their Benedictine connections.

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Notes

1. Joyce Hill, “Review: Patrick W. Conner, Anglo-Saxon Exeter: A Tenth-Century Cultural History,” Medium Ævum 64.2 (1995): 312-313.

2. George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, eds. The Exeter Book. Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records vol. 3 (Columbia University Press, 1936).

3. Bernard J. Muir, ed., The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry: An Edition of Exeter Dean and Chapter MS 3501, 2 vols., 2nd edn (Exeter University Press, 2000).