Epistolary Acts: Anglo-Saxon Letters and Early English Media by Jordan Zweck (review)

An exciting cross-fertilization of media and medieval studies, Epistolary Acts assembles Old English representations of epistolarity and communication in a wide-ranging book that will be of interest to scholars of early medieval literature and culture and to theorists of media and communication alike. Zweck is to be applauded for engaging both without losing either rigor or style. Asking why letters captivated audiences who may never have sent or received them, she begins with an elegant working definition: in early medieval England, “a letter is any written message addressed by one or more persons to another person or group of people to whom the message is expected to be delivered, or anything written in this form” (p. 4). Early medieval letters are thus distinct from oral messages but intersect with them, and, as Zweck shows, they shape key moments in a wide range of genres, including poetry, hagiography, sermons, and prose romance. In each of her subsequent readings, human, matter, and network gracefully coalesce in a broader communication ecosystem, for, as Zweck deftly reminds us, letters both transmit ideas and store them—and were often supplemented by oral delivery, so that the titular “epistolary acts” provide an ideal test case for what emerges as the book’s broader investment in exploring Anglo-Saxon ideas of presence, absence, and memory.

Throughout, it is exciting to see the many different kinds of communication that come into sharper focus when read through Zweck’s epistolary lens, from poems and saint’s lives written in ink on parchment to scenes of oral delivery and inscription, with messages carved on walls, scratched in the ground, and written in wax. Like Thomas Pynchon’s muted post horn, Zweck’s “epistolary acts” soon start cropping up everywhere. Moreover, as Zweck argues, these disparate representations of letters and letter-writing, couriers, and mail-delivery systems together provided a means for early English writers to think through more abstract concepts, such as memory, preservation, and the archive, and this is where her own interests ultimately lie, with the representations of letters providing a corpus for her broader theoretical explorations.

Because no epistolary guides survive from pre-Conquest England, Zweck assembles an archive of her own, focusing on representations of letters and letter-writing that are embedded in longer vernacular texts (i.e., “epistolary acts”) rather than on surviving letters per se—a surprising choice, but one that pays dividends. As Zweck playfully puts it, by remaining squarely in the domain of Old English epistolarity, she thus “ends where other studies of medieval documentary culture begin”—namely, with the Norman Conquest and the eleventh-century cultivation of the ars dictaminis (p. 184). By the time the reader reaches this conclusion, however, Zweck has already demonstrated that these supposedly new documentary impulses, such as the creation of the Domesday Book, rely on the same longstanding culture of epistolarity that she illuminates here.

Four linked chapters build this argument, with each successive chapter complicating or extending the one that came before. The first reconstructs early medieval English epistolary theory, quickly providing a basic overview of surviving letters and surveying Old English salutation formulas before leaving them firmly behind, turning to the writing on the wall in the Old English poem Daniel in order to extrapolate documentary vocabulary from the dramatic scene of divine writing. Across literary periods, there is a growing interest in reexamining form, and Zweck’s focus on materiality and communication here provides a fresh angle.

Then, where Chapter 1 provides a helpful bird’s-eye view, Chapter 2 adroitly complicates the picture, zooming in to consider a fascinating, well-attested, and until now understudied work: the Sunday Letter, an apocryphal text that was supposedly written by Christ and sent out of heaven before finding its way into Old English sermons. Comparing the text to modern chain email, Zweck transitions from literary to material form, extending...