The Harrowing of Hell in Medieval England (review)

Karl Tamburr’s book offers a collection of essays exploring the motif of the Harrowing of Hell in medieval English literature and art. The book is the fruit of the author’s life-long fascination with the tradition of Christ’s Descent into Hell, a once pivotal but now mostly neglected tenet of Christian belief. Tamburr convincingly demonstrates its centrality in popular medieval view of salvation and, with a wealth of illuminating detail, exposes the larger trends in its reception and treatment in the medieval England.

The collection opens with a brief exposition of the ancient tradition of incorporating the themes, imagery, and typology of the Descent into Hell in liturgical celebrations, especially those connected with Easter. That tradition not only remained very much alive in the Middle Ages but was further expanded, as the fourteenth-century Latin liturgical play of the Harrowing of Hell from the Abbey of Barking clearly shows.

The second chapter introduces two important themes of the Descent: the deliverance of the righteous souls and Christ the warrior-king. The author surveys early Christian sources for the two motifs and investigates their adaptations in visual arts and in selected Old English texts.

Chapter 3 presents in-depth analyses of representations of the Descent in several Old English poems (Christ I, the Exeter Book Descent into Hell, Christ II, Christ and Satan, the seventh Blickling homily, etc.) and in Anglo-Saxon art. These nuanced readings reveal that, while acknowledging the historicity of the event, Old English writers tended to view the Descent as a nexus of typological, tropological, and eschatological meanings and as a focal point in “the larger, providential scheme of human history” (p. 102). The Harrowing took on for them “significance as a paradigm for the salvation of the individual Christian as well as an image of the redemption of the race as a whole” (p. 70).

The fourth chapter discusses later medieval representations of the Harrowing, inspired—directly or indirectly—by the Gospel of Nicodemus. In contrast to their Anglo-Saxon antecedents, these later depictions emphasize the human dimension of Christ’s salvific work and usually occur in the context of other episodes from his life. Since the dramatic potential of the Gospel of Nicodemus was most fully realized in medieval plays, the bulk of this chapter is devoted to medieval English drama, although other texts (e.g., Piers Plowman) also receive some attention.

Recognizing that not all later medieval versions of the Harrowing were influenced by the Gospel of Nicodemus, the fifth chapter investigates several independent, often highly creative and idiosyncratic depictions of the Harrowing, both visual (psalters) and textual (e.g., Dunbar’s “Done is the battell on the dragon black,” St. Erkenwald, Malory’s Morte Darthur, the Digby play of Mary Magdalene, and Julian of Norwich’s Showings). The final, sixth chapter traces the post-medieval decline of the Descent into Hell as a tenet of belief, challenged by Reformation and downplayed by Counter-Reformation, and the demise of the Harrowing of Hell as a literary motif, making its last stand in the poetry of Edmund Spenser.

Since the book is a collection of “interrelated essays” (p. ix) rather than a fully integrated monograph, it does not always provide full background information for the sometimes complex uses of the motif. A reader might have appreciated, for instance, a brief, strategic exposition of medieval theologians’ views on the Descent (like the exposition of the sixteenth-century attitudes that opens chapter 6), or a brief summary of the relevant theories of redemption. As it is, the format of the book makes such information, given piecemeal in several places in the text, rather difficult to locate. Because the essays were written over a period of several years, the opening remarks on “The Harrowing of Hell and the Easter Liturgy” and, more generally, the treatment of patristic sources might benefit from some bibliographic updating. While MacCulloch’s 1930 study remains useful because of its thematic approach, R. Gounelle’s La...