God's Exiles and English Verse: On the Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry by John D. Niles (review)

John Niles contextualizes the 'Exeter Anthology' (Exeter, Cathedral Library, MS 3501) in the English Benedictine reform, and reads it as a collection of poems chosen purposefully to celebrate and teach 'God's exiles', the monks and nuns whose lives of heroic self-denial and prayer anticipate their journey to a heavenly home. He argues that the poems are the work of 'craft-poets', or monastic writers schooled in theology, liturgy, and rhetoric both in Latin and in English. Niles proceeds along varied lines of literary analysis framed within a model of 'monastic poetics' (a term employed by Brian O'Camb in his 2009 University of Wisconsin– Madison doctoral thesis and his subsequent studies of Exeter poems, read in the light of the monastic reform). As Niles puts it, 'monastic poetics is […] a hybrid poetics, based on Latinate and Germanic models yet striving to achieve expansive new forms of expression in the medium of Old English alliterative verse' (p. 5).

Part 1 of the book sets out the background of the Exeter Anthology in relation to later tenth-century reformed monastic culture. While the manuscript cannot be traced to a specific centre, Niles argues that it is the product of a literary culture in the south-west of England emanating from Glastonbury Abbey.

Part 2 explores individual poems and how they relate to one another. Chapter 4, 'An Overview of the Book's Contents', surveys the poems in manuscript order. Niles argues for various principles of ordering, but the main one is hierarchical: the weightier items are placed first, establishing the encyclopedic scope of the work, encompassing the whole of creation. Within this structure, nevertheless, the volume's 'intratextuality' is enhanced by the separation of poems that might be considered closely related, such as Widsith and Deor.

An outstanding part of this chapter is the exploration of ethopoeia and prosopopoeia under the headings 'The Voice of the Sage: A Father's Precepts and Related Poems' and 'Voices from the Germanic Past: Widsith and Related Poems'. Together with other methods of relating poems to one another, such as the exploration of 'keywords' in Chapter 8 (the words focused upon are sīþ 'journey', ellen 'courage', bōt 'redress' or 'recompense', and hām 'home'), or Chapter 9's 'Intratextual Hermeneutics', this book offers fresh and challenging insights into the poems of the Exeter Anthology that vindicate Nile's critical approach, even if questions remain about the thesis of origin.

Niles often illustrates his readings with reference to key texts of the Benedictine reform, the Rule of Benedict itself, and the Regularis Concordia (see p. 101, for example, on the preparation of a body for burial). Yet many of the same points might be made with reference to passages from other texts such as Bede's Historia. That is to say, they involve widely accepted tenets and practices of English monasticism over a long period (whether strictly Benedictine or not). Niles claims that the Exeter Anthology poets can all 'reasonably be taken to have been active during the period c.880–970' (p. 23). 'c.970' is the terminus supplied by the palaeographical dating of the Exeter manuscript. Presumably 'c.880' marks the beginning of Alfred's program of intellectual revival. In the light of Sisam's 1934 observations (in a review of the Exeter Book facsimile, reprinted in Studies in the History of Old English Literature, Oxford, 1953) that the Exeter Book is a fair copy of a pre-existing collection, and that its spellings signal a probable early West Saxon copying of the poems subsequent to their compilation, should not consideration be given to an Alfredian or earlier tenth-century context of production? Megginson's work (for example, his 1995 essay 'The Case against a "General Old English Poetic Dialect"') suggests that Sisam's views on this matter are not outmoded.

Niles interestingly...