Antifeminism or Exegesis?: Reinterpreting Eve’s wacgeþoht in Genesis B

Many studies of the Old English poem Genesis B make passing reference to Eve’s wacran hige and wacgeþoht as examples of a medieval antifeminist tradition.¹ The prevailing understanding of these phrases as negative comments on female intelligence has also been used to support interpretations of the poem as an allegory of man and woman as reason and the senses.² However, in light of the variety of exegetical interpretations of the Biblical Fall story potentially available to the poet, a more careful examination of these terms and of similar phrases used in other Old English religious texts suggests an alternative interpretation of Eve’s wacgeþoht as commentary on the human condition of susceptibility to sin. This interpretation finds comparative support in parallel passages in three Continental vernacular retellings of Genesis, which reveal a surprising diversity in their treatment of the Biblical Fall story. Far from replicating a single misogynist tradition, each of these portrayals of Eve selectively draws on the vast exegetical tradition in a manner consistent with the didactic and theological goals of the larger work. The predominance of literal exegesis in Anglo-Saxon commentaries on Genesis 3, I will conclude, provides an alternative theological context for the focus on Eve’s psychology in Genesis B.

I. EVE’S WACRAN HIGE AND WACGEÞOHT: INFERIORITY OR INTERIORITY?

Misogynist attitudes and rhetoric in medieval texts have been well documented, and a growing body of scholarship on literature by and about women has greatly contributed to our recognition of certain antifeminist tendencies in medieval religious thought.³ At the same time, as Alain Renoir has commented, modern scholars who believe that “the Middle Ages had nothing but contempt for the intelligence of women” are likely to interpret medieval texts circularly in such a way that those texts provide further support for the prevalence of medieval misogyny.⁴ Many scholarly analyses of the character of Eve in Genesis B have read her supposedly “weaker” intellect and susceptibility to temptation in contrast to Adam’s strength of mind and will, or at least assumed that the poem’s original audience would have done so. Representative in this regard is the 2011 edition and translation by Daniel Anlezark, which renders the Old English phrase “wifes wac geþoht” (l. 649a) as “the woman’s weak intellect.”⁵ This translation captures the literal meaning of the Old English well enough that its interpretative slant is not immediately apparent, but Anlezark’s perspective emerges more clearly in his notes on the text, which state that “the poet’s invocation of the medieval antifeminist tradition is complex” and that the “casual antifeminism” of the poet’s comments on Eve’s intelligence is designed to create a more sympathetic portrayal of Eve, who would have been less capable of withstanding the devil’s sophisticated temptation than her more intellectually gifted husband.⁶

In spite of the fact that a number of scholars have drawn attention to the poem’s complex portraits of the main characters and their psychological motivations,⁷ the key critical debate in the history of modern scholarship on Genesis B has centered on the degree to which the poem holds Eve responsible for the Fall. Early critics suggested that the poet’s narrative innovations are designed to mitigate the blame placed upon Eve,⁸ and numerous subsequent studies have continued either to reinforce or discredit this viewpoint.⁹ The belief that the figure of Eve serves primarily as a general symbol of womanhood rather than as a concrete historical personage can be seen as early as Stephen Gurteen’s 1896 study The Epic of the Fall of Man, in which he writes that “Cædmon’s Eve is the prototype of true Womanhood, selfless and self-sacrificing.”¹⁰ However, this typological view of Eve is not simply a relic of the nineteenth century but continues to be promoted and debated in the twenty-first century, as evidenced by the 2007 article “Doctrine and Paradigm: Two Functions of the Innovations in Genesis B,” in which P. S. Langeslag argues that through extreme...