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  • Weaving Words and Binding Bodies: The Poetics of Human Experience in Old English Literature by Megan Cavell
  • Tiffany Beechy
Megan Cavell. Weaving Words and Binding Bodies: The Poetics of Human Experience in Old English Literature. University of Toronto Press. xii, 348. $70.00

The last fifteen years have seen a resurgence of work on style in Old English literature, and on poetic style, in particular, from Thomas Bredehoft's influential work on late Old English verse to multiple monographs with "poetics" in the title. In roughly the same period, aspects of material culture such as textile production have garnered increasing attention. In using poetic style to interrogatethe themes of weaving and binding in Old English literature, Megan Cavell's book Weaving Wordsand Binding Bodies relates in a limited way to the recent work on textiles while primarily concerning itself with a more traditional, philological approach to literary scholarship.

Cavell's study can be characterized as traditional in multiple ways. Her main goal, as stated in the first sentence, "is to provide a comprehensive survey of material and metaphorical weaving and binding in Old English poetry." The book's comprehensiveness, particularly in its documentation, is one of its strengths. Cavell is further concerned with tradition in the sense of poetic convention, as the critical usefulness of "formulaic environment" is the premise of her methodology and also of her justification for limiting the study to verse. Formulaic environments prove useful, indeed, for Cavell, as her close readings are often superb and illuminating, showing the ways that poets draw on formulaic expectations and the resources of conventional technique (such as alliteration, assonance, and rhyme) to build expressive images of construction and constriction throughout the poetic corpus, from riddles to biblical poetry. Her work joins recent work in the field that treats form as more than mere ornamentation.

Several important insights emerge from this book. Cavell reveals that weaving in the poetic corpus involves high-status, not ordinary, objects. Thus, when weaving as an activity is invoked in poetry, we should probably read it as suggestive of high status, preciousness, and worth. Second, the image of binding has two functions, which sometimes overlap: as constructive and as constrictive. Objects may be bound in a way that makes them useful to human beings, for example, but this binding may also involve pain and servitude. Finally, and perhaps most significantly in relation to received wisdom in the field, the figure of the peace-weaver is not gender specific. Women can serve this function, but so do men, and the image of the female weaver of peace is largely a scholarly construct. The weaving of peace is in fact a constructive-constrictive act associated with the weaving of fate and the construction of the world. Indeed, Cavell concludes more broadly that Old English poetry imagines a world [End Page 312] bound by paradox, in which the constructive acts that bring order necessarily involve tension and conflict in the imposition of will.

Despite the quality of Cavell's readings, the book lessens its impact by invoking theory only to withhold it. The appearance of "experience" in the subtitle, for example, which is echoed in the subtitle for each of its three parts ("Experiencing Objects"; "Experiencing Bondage"; "Experiencing the Internal and Abstract"), suggests an engagement with phenomenology or aesthetics that never happens. No doubt, this will be unobjectionable to many in the field. However, it may be more troublesome for scholars that "formulaic context" is invoked innocently, disregarding the complex debates over the definition, function, and significance of the formula in the Old English poetic tradition. It would have deepened the impact of Cavell's study had she engaged with these debates in her introduction, which is extremely short and telegraphic. Relatedly, her invocation of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's Metaphors We Live By is not well integrated into her analytic framework, which, as I have said, remains largely implicit. Elsewhere, too, the discussion can be outdated, as when Cavell relies on scholarship from the 1960s to characterize wisdom literature. Several tired dichotomies pervade the book, such as "scientific" understanding versus metaphorical or literary (in a medieval context), magic versus divine power, and metaphorical versus "concrete...

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