In A Life Both Public and Private, Brent R. LaPadula argues that Old English poetry is able to shed light on the actual, historical nature of the Anglo-Saxon individual self. With reference to methodologies from contemporary fields of psychology and neuroscience, LaPadula sees select Old English poems as capable of expressing a sense of self that is both orientated towards the community but that can also shift outwards towards an individuality not dependent on wider social identity. The overall claim is that the "individual," as understood in European and North American discourses, is not a product of the twelfth or sixteenth centuries, but can be found in a developmental stage as early as the Anglo-Saxon period.
For the sophistication and ambition of this thesis, the book, which has its origins as a PhD dissertation at the University of Nottingham, falls somewhat on the slimmer side with an introduction, four central chapters, and a conclusion. The first chapter treats, specifically, the characters of Satan and Eve in Genesis B, and the cross in TheDream of the Rood; chapter two focuses on The Wanderer and The Seafarer; chapter three on Deor and Widsið; and chapter four on The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer, with some reference to the women of Beowulf.
The book is interesting for two particular reasons: the first is its interdisciplinary endeavor to utilize fairly disparate fields. LaPadula tackles contemporary studies in cognitive science and presents the general conclusions in a readable manner that is accessible to what will be the book's main readership, scholars and students of Anglo-Saxon literature who are not specialists in contemporary psychology. Studies on identity recognition among amnesia patients or on how the brain differs among people of different cultural backgrounds when solving the exact same mathematical problems will not be frequently encountered by most of the regular readers of, say, Anglo-Saxon England. But LaPadula's real strength comes about in his specific interpretations of some of the primary texts under consideration. The interpretation of Satan's fall from the one community of heaven to the other community of hell alongside Eve's similar transition from community of Eden to community of fallen humankind is insightful. Similarly, LaPadula makes some interesting comments on the use of memory to understand the transformation of the selves of the wanderer and the seafarer. He argues that these characters use recollection in meditations that eventually create an individual capable of living without a worldly community because that individual is now focused on God. On the contrary, LaPadula interprets the female characters of The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer as undertaking a journey towards individuality through poetic expression that interacts directly with their communal identities. LaPadula's statements on the use of pronouns in these poems (either the frequency of the first person pronoun or the use of dual pronoun) is one of the highlights of the book.
A Life Both Public and Private, however, is not without its faults. While, as just mentioned, LaPadula's description of the studies from the social studies that form the basis for his interdisciplinary approach is fascinating, this approach is ultimately not convincingly applied to the interpretation of the primary texts at hand. This problem stems, ultimately, from methodological issues. The first is a lack of clarity on the concept of the self and the actual psychological experience of the self. LaPadula claims that Anglo-Saxon culture held "the prototypical western concept of the 'self' as individual, unique, and separate from society"; fair enough, but it does not follow that "Old English literature can tell us much about how selfhood formed, was nurtured, and/or at times distanced from society" (18; emphases mine), nor can the poetry allow "the researcher to 'see' this very personal and intimate change of the psychological self" (125), as if real human minds can be examined. LaPadula assumes it likely that "a lot of what we read in Old English came directly from life, because much of the literature highlights events and circumstances that were common at some point in Anglo-Saxon England" (19). Despite this claim, it is impossible to know how realistically Old English poetry, which for the most part consists of literary (not autobiographical) characters, depicted actual Anglo-Saxon psychological experiences. Literary characters do not and cannot function so simply as windows into the Anglo-Saxon mind that may then provide material similar to that of modern subjects of psychological experiments. LaPadula's assumption that they can is extremely problematic, and the constant appeals throughout the book seem to show that he is aware of it. The Wanderer may indeed give some notion of an Anglo-Saxon concept of the self and how it may be used to reinforce ideologies at work in the poem, but it cannot be used in any serious way to analyze how the Anglo-Saxon poet actually thought. That information will unfortunately always be inaccessible, despite contemporary methods in cognitive science that are able to see how patients of amnesia, for example, actually understand the nature of their individual selves. LaPadula is at his best when he uses the methods of literary studies, specifically close reading, to analyze the poetry. And as ambitious as his interdisciplinary approach is, his endeavors to employ these methods from the social sciences ultimately fail. He would have been much better off realizing the limitations to this adopted methodology in order to abandon or greatly refine it.
The second major issue of the book is its failure to engage more rigorously with the scholarship of the field of Anglo-Saxon literature. Realistically, the book will not be read by non-specialists, nor will it likely be read much, if at all, by cognitive scientists. The book's main audience, specialists of Anglo-Saxon literature, will certainly be aware of some conspicuous gaps. For example, Peter Clemoes's fundamental article, "Mens absentia cogitans in The Seafarer and The Wanderer," in Medieval Literature and Civilization: Studies in Memory of G.N. Garmonsway, ed. D.A. Pearsall and R.A. Waldron (London, 1969), is mentioned indirectly through another source but never cited directly. Britt Mize's monograph, Traditional Subjectivities: The Old English Poetics of Mentality (Toronto, 2013) does not appear in the bibliography, although two of his other related articles do. And Renée Trilling's monograph on nostalgia, The Aesthetics of Nostalgia: Historical Representation in Old English Verse (Toronto, 2009), would have much benefited LaPadula's reading of the use of memory in The Wanderer and The Seafarer. The bibliography also confusingly separates "Historical Studies" from "Textual Studies," which makes it more difficult than needed to trace down a reference. And the section on "Editions and Translations" includes only eight items--tellingly, it is not the standard fourth edition of Klaeber's Beowulf that is used, but Seamus Heaney's facing page translation. LaPadula's thesis would certainly have been much strengthened by engaging with more of the Old English and Anglo-Latin corpora, or with the patristic and continental sources that are fundamental for understanding the literature of the period.
With these criticisms aside, the book does have its fascinating moments and will be of value, particularly, for some of LaPadula's insightful close readings of the Old English elegies.