Spatial Memory, Historiographic Fantasy, and the Touch of the Past in St. Erkenwald

This article reads the anonymous Middle English alliterative poem St. Erkenwald as a historiographic exemplum germane to contemporary scholars' concerns about the mandate to "always historicize." The poem stages upon London's polytemporal cityscape a physical encounter between the present—conversion-era Anglo-Saxon London—and an unfamiliar pagan British past embodied in the undecayed (and eventually revivified) corpse of a long-buried judge. Using Maurice Halbwach's theories of collective identity and Michel de Certeau's insights on historiography, I consider the poem's critique of the processes of recuperating, erasing, and incorporating the civic past. This reading lays out interrelations among the operations of memory, desire, and malleable corporate identity that are relevant to contemporary discussions about historicism, revealing the limitations of different historiographic and commemorative processes while insisting upon their necessity, and their potential, for (re)constituting both civic identity and scholarly endeavor.