A number of years ago, I walked into a small museum display about Western culture from the Middle Ages to today. At the end of the gallery, I was startled to see an Apple IIe desktop computer and a music CD in the display case. Both were objects that I had used at some point in my life, and both were cutting edge technology when they first came out. Until that point, I would have considered them objects of the present—old, but not “historical.” But placing them under glass in a museum rendered them archaeological, and in the space of the museum I experienced them simultaneously as tools of my everyday life and artefacts of the cultural past. That temporal disjunction was suddenly and shockingly disorienting, as I felt pulled between two different, and competing, relations to time.
In Remains of the Past in Old English Literature, Jan-Peer Hartmann explores what he calls the “archaeological imagination,” borrowing a term from Philip Schwyzer and Jennifer Wallace, of Old English literature. Put simply, the “archaeological imagination” describes writers’ deployment of ruins and other material remnants of the past within various genres of Old English literature, from elegies and lyrics to heroic verse and hagiography. Such deployment should not be understood as merely a marker of antiquity or the evocation of loss and nostalgia. Instead, Hartmann challenges us to consider the multiple temporalities that these material images can evoke and to trace their aesthetic and rhetorical implications along those various paths, “testifying to the complex ways in which premodern people...imagined their own place in history” (2). Hartmann moves slowly and deliberately through the theoretical underpinnings of contemporary thought on temporality, historicity, and historical consciousness and the assumptions that have led many of these thinkers to dismiss the Middle Ages as insufficiently nuanced in its contemplation of historical contingency. The result is a book that is part literary criticism, part philosophical contemplation, and wholly engaging.
Hartmann begins by reminding us that material objects can encode a range of relationships to the past that depend very much upon the perspective of the viewer. In many cases, objects are presumed to be stable and fixed, to perdure while the world changes around them, especially in contrast to the flesh and bone that decay so quickly with time. From a new materialist perspective, however, even the most durable substances change over time—though the timescale of their changes vastly exceeds human lifetimes. As a result, objects can participate in, or instantiate, multiple temporalities, depending on their context, on the needs and desires of their users, and on a host of other factors that may or may not fall under human control.
Having established the polychronicity that characterizes the continued existence of material objects through time, Hartmann then traces a set of distinct but overlapping themes through four main chapters. Chapter 1 examines the excavation of the True Cross in the Old English poem Elene, arguing that the holy object works to transfer power in two directions at once: religious authority moves westward, from Jerusalem to Rome, while the secular authority of imperial power moves back eastward, from Rome to Jerusalem. Elene, Hartmann explains, “highlights the convergence of two erstwhile separate time schemes at precisely the historical moment when sacred and imperial history came to intersect” (39). This supersession underscores the superior authority of Western Christendom as a teleological progression of studii et imperii.
Chapter 2 takes up the repurposing of historical objects in The Ruin and The Wanderer to unpack the multiple temporalities that remnants create when they are removed from one historical situation and reused in another. “Ruins,” Hartmann writes, “are always inherently polychronic. Their contemplation automatically opens up a multitemporal perspective” (87). Their ruined state implies a clear separation between the present and the past, but the fact of their continued existence makes them objects of the present as well. This tension between decay and survival creates an opportunity for polychronic reflection in poems like The Ruin and The Wanderer, allowing poets (and audiences) to understand their own role in creating historical perspective as they ruminate on the remnants of the past.
In Chapter 3, Hartmann takes on the supposition that the Middle Ages lacked an awareness of anachronism--that its sense of historical consciousness was too naïve and undeveloped to recognize historical epochs as distinct from one another. To counter these assumptions, Hartmann points to Beowulf and The Legend of the Seven Sleepers as texts where the discovery and interpretation of ancient artefacts is narrated through a nuanced understanding of their untimeliness and its implications for the characters in the stories. The anachronism of the Seven Sleepers signifies the historical disjunction between a pure Christianity of an earlier age and the heresies of the current one, while also prefiguring the temporal disjunction of resurrection. In Beowulf, ancient heirlooms and the giants’ sword evoke the several distinct epochs that operate in the poem, from the antediluvian giants to the pagan heroes to the Christian present of poet and audience. In both texts, it is precisely the anachronism of these objects that prompts their contemplation in the first place, and they serve as a node for the intersecting layers of history of which readers and listeners were all too aware.
Chapter 4 returns to the True Cross, setting it as a lynchpin connecting Elene with Dream of the Rood and the Ruthwell Cross. The cross as a symbol points toward multiple temporalities: the past of the crucifixion and its various histories of invention and veneration, which operate along a linear temporal path, but also its figurative temporality and its future promise of salvation. In Elene, these temporalities intersect in the dual nature of the cross as both material historical artefact and spiritual (that is, extra-temporal) signifier. Historical and figural temporalities similarly intersect in Dream of the Rood, where the psychedelic nature of the dreamer’s vision allows two material versions of the cross—the historical vehicle for crucifixion and the divine signifier of redemption—to coexist simultaneously. And the Ruthwell Cross serves as a kind of apotheosis of intersecting material and divine temporalities, as a performance of the cross on a cross, in which the viewer is interpolated.
Medievalists are keenly aware of the separation between then and now, as well as the strong pull that the past exerts on the present, and textual scholarship is one of the ways we try to reach across that divide. We are likewise aware that the people we study had a similar fascination with those who preceded them, and it is not hard to find evidence of their efforts to understand their own historicity. Remains of the Past in Old English Literature offers its readers an opportunity to contemplate the nature of temporality in one corner of the early medieval world.