Abstract
This chapter investigates the literary representation of disability and other forms of bodily difference in the Old English heroic verse saint’s life Andreas. By highlighting often overlooked bodies that are disabled, monstrous, posthuman, damned, tortured, dead, and resurrected, I articulate “systems of aberrance” as a narrative pattern that utilizes bodily variation, both positively and negatively coded, to articulate the contours of Christian eschatological hope. Where scholars of modern disability have recognized the tendency of narratives to depend on disability for their efficacy, narrative systems of aberrance utilize disability among somatic diversity more broadly as a means of not only enforcing earthly norms, but also limning the path to salvation and the promised Christian afterlife. The system of aberrance in Andreas encompasses the blinded and drugged St Matthew, a community of cannibals, animalized captives, St Andrew’s tortured and hyper-abled body, and the drowned and resurrected Mermedonians that Andrew converts to Christianity. This system of aberrant bodies with all their various moral and social connotations functions in surprising harmony, modeling the narrative necessity of bodily variation in order to convey theological promises of salvation.
I am grateful to Martin Foys, Rick Godden, Kelsey Ihinger, Asa Mittman, and Haylie Swenson for their generous conversation and feedback regarding this chapter. Any errors that remain are my own.
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Notes
- 1.
All quotations of Andreas are from Richard North and Michael D. J. Bintley, eds., Andreas: An Edition (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2016). Translations are the author’s.
- 2.
On the dating of Andreas and the Vercelli Book, see Robert E. Boenig, “Andreas, the Eucharist and Vercelli,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 79:3 (1980): 313–31; Maureen Halsall, “Vercelli and the Vercelli Book,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 84:6 (1969): 1545–50; Elaine M. Treharne, “The Form and Function of the Vercelli Book,” in Text, Image, Interpretation. Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Its Insular Context in Honour of Éamonn Ó Carragáin, ed. Alastair Minnis and Jane Roberts, Studies in the Early Middle Ages 18 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 253–66.
- 3.
See, for example, Peter Dendle, “Pain and Saint-Making in Andreas, Bede, and the Old English Lives of St. Margaret,” in Varieties of Devotion in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Susan C. Karant-Nunn (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 39–52; Christopher Fee, “Productive Destruction: Torture, Text, and the Body in the Old English Andreas,” Essays in Medieval Studies 11 (1994): 51–62; Shannon N. Godlove, “Bodies as Borders: Cannibalism and Conversion in the Old English Andreas,” Studies in Philology 106:2 (2009): 137–60; Fabienne L. Michelet, “Eating Bodies in the Old English Andreas,” in Fleshly Things and Spiritual Matters: Studies on the Medieval Body in Honour of Margaret Bridges, ed. Nicole Nyffenegger and Katrin Rupp (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011), 165–92.
- 4.
See, for example, Boenig, “Andreas, the Eucharist and Vercelli”; Thomas D. Hill, “Figural Narrative in Andreas: The Conversion of the Mermedonians,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 70:2 (1969): 261–73; Marie Michelle Walsh, “The Baptismal Flood in the Old English Andreas: Liturgical and Typological Depths,” Traditio 33 (1977): 137–58; Carol Jean Kathleen Wolf, “An Apocalyptic Reading of the Old English Andreas” (PhD dissertation, SUNY-Stony Brook, 1982).
- 5.
See Elizabeth Bearden, “Before Normal, There Was Natural: John Bulwer, Disability, and Natural Signing in Early Modern England and Beyond,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 132:1 (2017): 33–50.
- 6.
See Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (New York, NY: Verso, 1995).
- 7.
See Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1997).
- 8.
For example, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson uses “aberrance” to describe the bodily variability of “freaks” in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century circus sideshows that constructed the normalcy of their audiences through difference; Extraordinary Bodies, 17. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder use “aberrance” to describe the stakes of disability in narrative: “The prosthesizing of a body or rhetorical figure carries with it ideological assumptions about what is aberrant”; Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, Corporealities: Discourses of Disability (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 6.
- 9.
Edna Edith Sayers (as Lois Bragg), Oedipus Borealis: The Aberrant Body in Old Icelandic Myth and Saga (Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004), 9.
- 10.
For example, in Proverbs 14:22: “errant qui operantur malum” [“they err that work evil”]; Psalms 118:110: “Posuerunt peccatores laqueum mihi, et de mandatis tuis non erravi” [“Sinners have laid a snare for me: but I have not erred from thy precepts”]; and Ecclesiastes 10:5: “Est malum quod vidi sub sole, quasi per errorem egrediens a facie principis” [“There is an evil that I have seen under the sun, as it were by an error proceeding from the face of the prince”]. Paul’s first epistle to Timothy uses the prefix ab- to describe the deviant teaching of ignorant preachers: “A quibus quidam aberrantes, conversi sunt in vaniloquium” [“From which things some, going astray, are turned aside unto vain babbling”] (1 Timothy 1:6). All citations and translations of the Vulgate Bible are from Angela M. Kinney and Edgar Swift, eds., The Vulgate Bible (Douay-Rheims Translation), 6 vols., Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 1, 4–5, 8, 13, 17, 21 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2010–13).
- 11.
See Bruce Wallace’s chapter in this collection: “Grendel and Goliath: Monstrous Superability and Disability in the Old English Corpus.” These ideas are developed at greater length in Karen Bruce Wallace, “Unhælu: Anglo-Saxon Conceptions of Impairment and Disability” (PhD dissertation, Ohio State University, 2014). I am grateful to Karen Bruce Wallace for sharing her unpublished dissertation with me.
- 12.
On the posthuman as an existence beyond the body, see N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
- 13.
Asa Simon Mittman and Christine Sciacca, “Robed in Martyrdom: The Flaying of St Bartholomew in the Laudario of Sant’Agnese,” in Images of Flaying in the Middle Ages, ed. Larissa Tracy (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017), 140–72.
- 14.
Wolf, “An Apocalyptic Reading of the Old English Andreas,” 162.
- 15.
Hamilton, “The Diet and Digestion of Allegory in Andreas,” Anglo-Saxon England 1 (1972): 147–58 at 151; see also James W. Earl, “Typological Structure of Andreas,” in Old English Literature in Context, ed. John D. Niles (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1980), 66–89 at 78–79.
- 16.
See Alexandra Bolintineanu, “The Land of Mermedonia in the Old English Andreas,” Neophilologus 93 (2009): 149–64 at 152.
- 17.
On the typology of cannibalism in Andreas, see Boenig, “Andreas, the Eucharist and Vercelli”; Godlove, “Bodies as Borders”; Constance B. Hieatt, “The Harrowing of Mermedonia: Typological Patterns in the Old English Andreas,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 77:1 (1976): 49–62; and Michelet, “Eating Bodies in the Old English Andreas.”
- 18.
Casteen, “Andreas: Mermedonian Cannibalism and Figural Narration,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 75:1 (1974): 74–78.
- 19.
Malcolm R. Godden and Susan Irvine, eds., The Old English Boethius: An Edition of the Old English Versions of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae, trans. Malcolm R. Godden and Susan Irvine, 2 vols. (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009), C-text Prose 21.95–99, vol. 1, 480–81. Translation by the author.
- 20.
Sheehan, “Posthuman Bodies,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed. David Hillman and Ulrika Maude (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 245–60 at 257.
- 21.
On the continuity of identity and concerns about cannibalism regarding the resurrection of the body in patristic and medieval theology, see Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1995), especially 30–33, 40–43, and 103–4.
- 22.
Augustine of Hippo, The City of God Against the Pagans: Books 21–22, trans. William M. Green, vol. 7, Loeb Classical Library 417 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), XXII.xx, 296/297.
- 23.
Ibid., XXII.xx, 298/299.
- 24.
Karl Steel, How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2011), 124.
- 25.
On the medieval theological debate regarding the afterlives of animals, in which it was frequently argued that animals would not be resurrected, see Steel, How to Make a Human, 92–108.
- 26.
Hugh Magennis, Anglo-Saxon Appetites: Food and Drink and Their Consumption in Old English and Related Literature (Dublin: Four Courts, 1998), 146.
- 27.
Another alternative, if a cannibalized Matthew is resurrected, is likewise unappealing because the incorporation of one flesh into another confounds distinct individuality in the resurrection. Steel observes, regarding later medieval conversations about humans eating animals and animals eating humans, “Humans would have to share their resurrected bodies with the creatures they had eaten or that had eaten them. This would be an afterlife either populated by humans and animals both, or, more horrifying, one of humans and animals conjoined in monstrous assemblages of eater and eaten”; Steel, How to Make a Human, 111. The Mermedonians’ cannibalism, if it does not prevent resurrection, nonetheless potentially creates the specter of resurrection as a “monstrous assemblage” of cannibal and victim.
- 28.
As Steel notes, Biblical passages such as this justified Christian open-mindedness regarding food laws, but this permissiveness generally did not extend to condone cannibalism; see Steel, How to Make a Human, 67–91, 118–35.
- 29.
For an extended discussion of the social and cultural construction of disability out of physical impairment in the Middle Ages, see Irina Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking about Physical Impairment during the High Middle Ages, c.1100–1400 (New York: Routledge, 2006). Metzler concludes that while impairment certainly existed during the High Middle Ages, disability did not exist as a unified category or concept. However, following Bruce Wallace’s argument in “Unhælu” that Anglo-Saxons did conceive of a spectrum of bodily difference that could be quite disabling, I employ “disability” here to describe physical differences in and transformations of literary bodies that carry negative connotations, whether because they are culturally or spiritually stigmatized (as with Matthew’s temporary blindness) or because they would prove barriers to daily life (as in the extreme injury Andrew undergoes during his torture).
- 30.
I explore the trope of metaphoric blindness and its spiritual connotations within early medieval English eschatology, including the concept of the “eyes of the mind,” in my dissertation, “Embodied Lives and Afterlives: Disability and the Eschatological Imaginary in Early Medieval England,” recently completed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. On the correlation between blindness and sin in the later Middle Ages, see Edward Wheatley, Stumbling Blocks before the Blind: Medieval Constructions of a Disability, Corporealities: Discourses of Disability (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2010).
- 31.
Irina Metzler discusses the common medieval correlation between intellectual or cognitive disability and animality, albeit not specifically in Anglo-Saxon England, in Fools and Idiots?: Intellectual Disability in the Middle Ages, Disability History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), especially 184–220.
- 32.
For parallel instances of humanity being undermined by treatment similar to animals, see Steel, How to Make a Human, passim.
- 33.
Antecedents and analogues of the legend found in Andreas are edited in Robert E. Boenig, ed., The Acts of Andrew in the Country of the Cannibals: Translations from the Greek, Latin, and Old English (New York and London: Garland, 1991).
- 34.
North & Bintley, eds., Andreas: An Edition.
- 35.
R. M. Liuzza, trans., Old English Poetry: An Anthology (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2014); this is also the suggested translation in the glossary of George Philip Krapp, ed., Andreas and the Fates of the Apostles: Two Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poems, The Albion Series (Boston: Ginn & Company, 1906).
- 36.
Robert Kilburn Root, trans., Andreas: The Legend of St. Andrew (New York, NY: H. Holt and Co., 1899).
- 37.
For reasons of space, I pass over the scene of Andrew’s confrontation with demons in prison, though the demons may also be said to contribute to the system of aberrance in Andreas, as foils for Andrew’s humanity and saintly empowerment.
- 38.
I thank Haylie Swenson for pointing out to me the connection between torture and butchery as potentially similar means of fragmenting the body.
- 39.
Frederick M. Biggs, “The Passion of Andreas: Andreas 1398–1491,” Studies in Philology 85:4 (1988): 413–27 at 422.
- 40.
Joseph Bosworth, “An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online,” Swæþ. March 21, 2010. Accessed January 5, 2017. http://www.bosworthtoller.com/029526
- 41.
For example, Dendle, “Pain and Saint-Making,” 46; Fee, “Productive Destruction,” 56; and Edward B. Irving, “A Reading of Andreas: The Poem as Poem,” Anglo-Saxon England 12 (1983): 215–37 at 231.
- 42.
See Bruce Wallace, “Grendel and Goliath” in this volume.
- 43.
See Walsh, “The Baptismal Flood in the Old English Andreas.”
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Parker, L.P. (2019). Eschatology for Cannibals: A System of Aberrance in the Old English Andreas. In: Godden, R.H., Mittman, A.S. (eds) Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25458-2_11
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