Verbal Encounters: Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse Studies for Roberta Frank (review)

The essays in this volume, dedicated to Roberta Frank, are written by her former doctoral students at the Centre for Medieval Studies and Department of English at the University of Toronto. The 14 original contributions aim to 'recognize and celebrate' Frank's 'abiding interest in cultural and linguistic exchange in Old Norse, Old English and medieval Latin literature' (p. 1). Accordingly, the volume is divided into four parts – 'On Words', 'On Anglo-Latin and Old English Prose', 'On Old English Poetry', and 'On Old Norse Literature'.

Antonina Harbus's and Russell Poole's 'Introduction' provides a succinct biography of Frank's career, and includes a Bibliography of her publications, 1970-2003. Harbus and Poole exclude from the Bibliography Frank's editorial projects in her role as General Editor for the Toronto Old English Series and for the Publications of the Dictionary of Old English, as well as her public lectures and book reviews. Whilst this decision, made 'in order to keep the Bibliography to a manageable length' (p. 2), is sound, it is nevertheless a shame that such omissions had to be made in a volume written to honour Frank.

The first four essays of the volume constitute Part I, 'On Words'. In 'Early Medieval Chaos', Christopher A. Jones traces the semantic development of the concept of 'chaos'. By detailed lexicographical study, Jones analyses the usages and connotations of 'chaos' from its early appearances in Greek through to Early Modern literature, via Latin and Early Germanic. In 'Composing and Joining: How the Anglo-Saxons Talked about Compounding', Don Chapman poses the question: 'how aware were the Anglo-Saxons' of word creation and formation (p. 39)? With a focus on the category of figura or compounding, and by examining the Anglo-Saxon grammatical tradition, Chapman concludes that 'literate Anglo-Saxons would have recognized compounds as results of combining words, and as such the combinations would have been felt to be less natural and perhaps less permanent than simplexes' (p. 54).

The next two contributions – Pauline Head's 'Cennan, "to cause to be born"/"to cause to know": Incarnation as Revelation in Old English Literature' and Soon-Ai Low's 'Pride, Courage, and Anger: The Polysemousness of Old English Mod' – are notable contributions to the volume. Head's essay 'concerns the semantic ranges of cennan and acennan' (p. 56). Casting doubt on the often-held assumption that cennan should be defined as two distinct words ('to cause to be born'; 'to cause to know'), Head analyses its usages in reference to 'revelatory meanings of Christ's incarnation' to show that cennan is often deployed as wordplay in which both meanings of the term are invoked simultaneously (p. 74). Contributing to the steadily growing body of criticism regarding the Anglo-Saxon lexicon for, and understandings of, 'inward experience' (p. 77) and psychology, Low examines Old English mod, with its various connotations of 'mind', 'heart', 'spirit', 'pride', 'anger'. Low evaluates the presupposition that mod is polysemous and explores the issue of 'just how we are to understand mod's polysemy' (p. 80). By examining the genealogy of mod, 'by considering a number of other words that appear to show a similar semantic profile to mod' (p. 80), and by using modern linguistic theories, Low examines processes of polysemization to argue that mod is significant for its metonymic and lexicographical qualities, rather than for its anthropological insight into Anglo-Saxon concepts of interiority.

Two essays comprise Part II, 'On Anglo-Latin and Old English Prose'. Carin Ruff's 'Desipere in loco: Style, Memory, and the Teachable Moment' examines examples of figurative language in technical description or analysis. According to Ruff, Isidore, Aldhelm, Bede, Alcuin, Ælfric, and Bryhtferth 'play with the explanatory, imaginative, mnemonic, and dramatic possibilities of figurative language' as pedagogic tools (p. 103). In 'Courtroom Drama and the Homiletic Monologues of The Vercelli Book', Dorothy Haines...