Poetry, Place, and Gender: Studies in Medieval Culture in Honor of Helen Damico (review)

This wide-ranging tribute to Helen Damico, excellently edited by Catherine Karkov and with an introduction by Patrick Conner, brings together scholarly contributions from fourteen friends, associates, and colleagues of the honorand, all of whom express their admiration of her in the varying roles in which they have known her. As appropriate in a volume for Damico, the emphasis is very much on Anglo-Saxon England, which is the primary focus of more than half of the contributions here, but the Norse world is also represented, and there is an essay on a later medieval French series of religious poems and one on Dante. Thirteen of the fourteen contributors have produced essays, some of which grow out of larger projects in which they are engaged, others of which are one-offs. Instead of an essay, Roberta Frank offers a translation of the thirteenth-century Norse poem Málsháttakvæði.

The title, Poetry, Place, and Gender, attempts to supply a sense of overall unity and coherence to the volume, though as is usual with festschrifts, there is little in the way of thematic connectedness between the individual items. The interests that emerge include (unevenly) those of poetry, place, and gender, but it is really the emphasis on Christianity that is most evident in the collection. There are (no doubt pleasing to Helen Damico) the translation of Málsháttakvæði and two essays on Beowulf—one literary, the other textual—but all the other essays are concerned with the Christian religion in one way or another, exploring under that general rubric aspects of liturgy, literature, art, and society; and the figure whose name recurs most in the book is Bede.

The scholarly quality of the pieces that make up Poetry, Place, and Gender is consistently high, with no sign at all of bottom-drawer material having been dusted off, as can sometimes happen with festschrifts. The contributions here represent significant statements on ongoing research issues or they identify interesting new topics for consideration. Thus, in a brilliant account of the icon of the Virgin Mary brought back to Wearmouth by Benedict Biscop in 679, Éamonn Ó Carragáin returns to the theme of imitatio Romae, which he has written about so eloquently elsewhere, with particular focus here on the liturgy but bringing detailed knowledge of church history and iconography enablingly to bear; Sarah Keefer draws striking parallels between The Dream of the Rood and the liturgy of the Good Friday office of Nones, suggesting in the process a later rather than an earlier date for the poem; Thomas N. Hall uses Gregorian epistemology (particularly to do with the knowledge prophets have) and twentieth-century psychiatric research (on "janusian thinking") to throw light on the shifting imagery at the beginning of The Dream of the Rood; Leslie Donovan revisits Hunferth in Beowulf, showing that he is not a treacherous or disruptive character but a respected figure in Hrothgar's court and placing him in relation to the tradition of the court jester; Kevin Kiernan brings his formidable textual expertise to bear in an examination of fol. 179 of the Beowulf manuscript, insisting convincingly that this leaf was not touched up and rewritten in the early modern period but is the work of a third Anglo-Saxon scribe, the nathwylc scribe (a happily appropriate name for the scribe supplied from the appearance of the word nathwylc on the relevant folio itself), and thereby opening up again major questions about the composition and transmission of the poem; Paul Szarmach considers the treatment of St. Etheldreda in Bede's Ecclesiastical History and its Old English translation, noting in particular that the Old English writer passes over Bede's poem on Etheldreda in silence, and offering a lead in bringing the (unduly neglected) Old English Bede into scholarly focus; and Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe applies detailed source analysis in making a compelling case for locating the composition of...