Jorgensen’s compelling study takes the “actions” or “techniques” of emotion as its starting point (2). Rather than focusing narrowly on terms or categories of emotions, Jorgensen’s method enables her to look for evidence of “emotional practice,” or “actively doing things with emotion” (4) across poetic, philosophical, and devotional texts that do not always name their emotions straightforwardly. Through this wide-ranging work, Jorgensen examines what we can reconstruct about the emotions audiences of Old English texts might have had, might have expected to have, and might have worked to either cultivate or control through the writing and receiving of literature.
Jorgensen uses The Wanderer as a focal point for bringing together many of the book’s central ideas in her introductory chapter. The idea of “emotive scripts,” in conversation with Sif Rikhardsdottir’s work on Old Norse genres, intertwines with Sarah McNamer’s important consideration of “scripts” for performing devotional feeling (21). In this way, Old English texts like The Wanderer may invoke emotion by means of their genre-specific scripts, into which audiences may performatively and affectively enter, whether a given text may have been orally performed in any context or not. Finally, the introduction sets out the structure of the chapters that follow: there are two chapters on heroic poetry and two on devotional literature (in poetry and prose); these are bridged in the middle by the Old English Boethius, a translation in which theology and philosophy, devotional material, and poetic and classical references all combine.
In Chapter One, Jorgensen considers heroic poetry as a “species of emotional practice involving the performance of a distinctive emotional style” (30). Beowulf furnishes the first example of this style, as Beowulf “allows audiences not only to encounter models of heroic emotional restraint within the story-world but, through the self-reflective character of the text, self-consciously to participate in this ethic, since the consumption of the poem itself enacts such a model” (32). Beowulf is not unique in its valorization of restraint, and Jorgensen acknowledges that some of the audience’s feeling with the protagonists of the poem must be surmised from what the poem depicts and how. But the evidence of emotional depictions in art remains crucial evidence for emotional experience of art, and the threads first appearing in the chapter on Beowulf appear throughout the fabric of the rest of the book. For example, Jorgensen close reads the focus on posture and projection of future action in the poem as reflecting and underlying the “readiness for violence that Beowulf is apparently able to induce in himself” (42). In this light, Beowulf approaches the dragon having already settled the question of whether he will face it himself, “what is at issue is the spirit in which he approaches the task” (55). Through the poem’s heavy foreshadowing, the audience’s knowledge and resulting sense of irony distinguishes the audience’s emotional response from that of the characters even in the moments when the poem allows the most about the characters’ emotional states to be revealed.
Chapter Two carries on the examination of emotional practice in heroic poetry, by looking at The Battle of Brunanburh and The Battle of Maldon: one poem on a victory and the other on a defeat. Jorgensen traces how the “active English” in Brunanburh are contrasted with their passive enemies, as the emotions relegated for victors “point not just to joy but to assertive social and emotional display” (74-75) as it revels in the humiliation of its protagonists’ enemies. At the other end of the emotional spectrum is The Battle of Maldon, a poem that, in the vein of other heroic poetry, “incarnates the restrained emotional style associated with heroic courage and asserts the connection between contemporary, tenth-century warriors and models in heroic literature” (89). Crucially, in contrast with the emphatic celebration of victory inBrunanburh, Maldon presents deep ambiguity. Taking up the divergent readings of ofermod--is Byhrtnoth sinfully proud or just heroically spirited?--Jorgensen makes a compelling case that the “meaning of ofermod responds to reader desire” (95), allowing both meanings to coexist. In both chapters on heroic poems, what might be termed emotional action must be restrained action--but properly controlled emotional response enables heroic action to take place.
The Old English Boethius takes up the third chapter, serving as a bridge between the chapters on heroic poetry and those on religious material. While the heroic poetry of the previous two chapters focused on examples of emotional practice as such, the Old English adaptation of Boethian philosophy offers more theory: “Boethius provides not only a set of ideas about emotion but also a model for governing the mind and thus a blueprint for emotional practice” (105). But even so, as readers move through the protagonist’s stages of grief toward a greater understanding of and focus on God, readers are encouraged to move, too. In the Old English Boethius, then, emotion becomes understood as motion, contrasted, as Jorgensen’s reading beautifully demonstrates, with the stillness of God (123). For the Old EnglishBoethius, as for other Old English adaptations, there remains useful emotion after grief is left behind, but it must be moderated and controlled and directed toward God--the still center.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the emotional habits of the Old English Boethius find parallels in the devotional poetry that occupies the fourth chapter. Here, Christ I (also known as the Advent Lyrics) and Christ III are considered as early--although not isolated examples--of affective piety. The two Christ poems, part of the sequence of three that open the Exeter Book, “offer ways to act out, in solitude or together, membership of communities of feeling that look with longing, supplication, wonder, fear and obedience towards God" (148). Many scholars have considered the ways that the liturgy, particularly the “O antiphons,” finds its echoes in the form of Christ I, a series of short lyrics beginning with the interjection, “Eala.” Like the Boethius, the lyrics enact a movement towards God, but Jorgensen notes that where theBoethius translator at times invokes a plural “you” to address a broader audience, Christ I invokes the plural “us.” As Jorgensen moves through detailed reading of the images of Christ III’s meditation on Judgment Day, she demonstrates that even if the poem offers a different kind of affect from what modern audiences might expect, the poem carefully and subtly deploys empathy alongside shame and fear (162-63). The chapter ends with a brief but tantalizing reading of Irish analogues, showing the parallels between the physical responses of created objects and the emotional responses of audiences.
The tempering of fear with empathy becomes even more central to Jorgensen’s fifth and final chapter, on Old English homilies: while homilies in Old English are known for instilling fear, there are, as Jorgensen shows, frequent and important cautions against obeying God merely out of fear (178-79). The balance is perhaps most clearly captured in Ælfric’s concept of the “twyfeald onbryrdnes” (twofold compunction) Jorgensen discusses here, where the necessary fear and shame for sin must complement love for God (179-80). But alongside the necessity for tempered fear in believers, homilists also emphasize the need for lack of fear in preachers as they exhort their flocks, as Ælfric compares weak preachers to mute dogs who cannot bark. Jorgensen here reads Vercelli Homily II as an exemplary homily on Judgement Day, as a text extant in multiple copies and one that performs the fear of Judgment often considered so central to Old English devotion. Indeed, while images of blood flowing in the sky, the dead emerging from graves, and blaring trumpets might reasonably instill a bit of fear, Jorgensen shows the moments at which the preacher is included in first person plural exhortations, making the homily’s emotional practice a shared and social one. A slightly different approach frames Blickling X’s move from the Final Judgment back through an ubi sunt reflection on the transitoriness of life. The homily pits any potential shame associated with confession of sin in the present with the much more harrowing shame of not having confessed when all is exposed at the future Judgment. Social emotional practices continue to pervade Wulfstan of York’s use of legal frameworks in homilies that “create a public affective language” (201). And while famous for his sermon warning of God’s wrath upon the nation, Jorgensen carefully demonstrates how Wulfstan tells audiences to love God more often than to fear him (202), and is careful to urge avoiding despair or anxiety (207).
Jorgensen’s book is wide-ranging, seeking to trace threads of emotional practice through centuries and across genres of Old English literature; its subject could certainly fill many more volumes. The conclusion acknowledges this, suggesting many possible avenues for further research. In turn, throughout this study, Jorgensen carefully and generously reviews and synthesizes the work of other scholars, at some times (reasonably) hesitating to stake a position between them. This gracious attention to the work of others in a book so wide-ranging also attests to the growing scholarly conversation around how much we can know about the feelings of writers who lived and died so many centuries before ourselves. Jorgensen’sEmotional Practice in Old English Literature will be of interest to scholars in the history of emotions as well as of the many primary texts so carefully read here, and will provide a useful foundation for the conversation that it will continue to inspire.