Before History, Before Difference: Bodies, Metaphor, and the Church in Anglo-Saxon England

. . . she was thrust—despoiled of her own clothes, to the infamous disgrace of her family—into the loathsome harlotry of a brothel, where the detestable wantonness of prostitutes runs wild and the shameless impudence of whores is disgustingly flaunted, nevertheless, walled about by the shining splendour of a mighty light, she gazed on angelic faces and was covered with her Lord’s robes.

—Agnes, Aldhelm’s prose De Virginitate

They dragged then the maiden to the harlot’s house, but she at once met there an angel of God shining, such that no man was able to look on her or touch her because of that mighty light, for that house all shone like the sun in day, and the more eagerly they gazed on her, the more their eyes were dazzled.

—Agnes, Ælfric, Lives of Saints

Few cultural historians, and even fewer cultural theorists, would place the study of Anglo-Saxon England at the heart of contemporary debates about the role of history within cultural studies. Indeed, Anglo-Saxon England has been characterized as different from other periods of English history in that it is most frequently located “before history.” Narratives of Western history often elide the early medieval period; its history, compressed beyond recognition or simply omitted, is downplayed in favor of that of Greek and Roman worlds and that of the more modern West, beginning with the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, historians recognize the emergence of the individual (and the heretic), as well as familiar clerical and secular institutions (Gregorian reforms, Lateran councils, clerical celibacy, marriage, the universities, towns, a money economy). The medieval world starts to resemble, however precariously, the modern. Although much work has recently loosened the hold of this master paradigm on the analysis and writing of medieval history after the Anglo-Saxon period,¹ the period itself remains emphatically pre-historical—at the origin, though not at the beginning.² Whether from simple ignorance of this earlier period or for reasons largely unconscious and/or disciplinary, debates in medieval studies on the nature of subjectivity and identity, gender, the body, and sexuality, representation and power continue to operate from, or are conditioned by, the premisses of this master paradigm.³ Cultural history before the twelfth century is thus alienated, offering a history different from later periods, yet one whose difference goes unrecognized and uncontested. The continuing processes of differentiation that construct the Anglo-Saxon period can be seen in a variety of contexts, whether in terms of origins (and their connections to European and North American nationalism), periodization (that is, not post-Conquest England), social formations (tribal to civil state), language (not Latin, not Middle English), religion (pagans and/or Christians), gender (the so-called “golden age” of Anglo-Saxon women), or sexuality (no sex please, we’re Anglo-Saxon).⁴

From the more conventional standpoint of a developmental model of history, Anglo-Saxon England is originary—inescapably different from and often irrelevant to subsequent medieval periods. Commonly held distinctions for periodization (to which we do not necessarily subscribe) are that the Anglo-Saxon period traditionally ends around 1066: excluding the problem of when to locate the “early medieval,” the medieval period itself usually extends either to 1400 or 1500, depending on one’s views on when “high medieval” begins and ends, and on where and when one locates the Renaissance; the newer term, “Early Modern” can encompass late medieval through to the late seventeenth century and beyond. The Anglo-Saxonist working within the field might find these continually asserted and often commutable distinctions as puzzling and arbitrary as the Modernist. What such periodic gradations do elucidate, however, is an ongoing process of dependent differentiation, where one period defines itself against another, and where each preceding period is necessarily constructed as “pre-historical.”

Definition by means of difference, therefore, is not limited to the Anglo-Saxon period. The long view, moreover, elucidates a further analogy: that of the larger processes by which history constructs difference and difference is constructed historically to those...