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275 Naked in Old English: The Embarrassed and the Shamed Jonathan Wilcox n the famous legend, Lady Godiva agrees to ride naked through the marketplace of Coventry — an impossibilia posed by her husband — in order to free the citizens of Coventry from oppressive taxation. This she does, nuda equum ascendens, crines capitis et tricas dissolvens, corpus suum totum præter crura candidissima inde velavit, et itinere completo, a nemine visa, ad virum gaudens, hoc pro miraculo habentem, reversa est.1 Thus the most famous naked Anglo-Saxon that never was plays with the taboo of public exposure in a vision of nudity that fired the imagination of subsequent eras. Although the story is not Anglo-Saxon — it was first recorded by thirteenth-century chroniclers and is dependent upon a sense of property rights in marriage and even of a marketplace in Coventry that are more probable in the Anglo-Norman than the Anglo-Saxon period2 — it encapsulates a paradoxical sense of exposure and con1 Matthew Paris, Chronica maiora, ed. Henry Richards Luard, Rolls Series 57.1 (London, 1872), s.a. 1057 (pp. 526-57): “mounting her horse naked and loosening the hair and tresses of her head, [which] covered her whole body except her beautiful legs; and when she had finished her journey, not seen by anyone, she returned with joy to her husband, who took this as a miracle,” trans. Donoghue, as next note, p. 198. I wish to thank Stacy Klein and Ben Withers for helpful critiques of earlier versions of this essay. 2 See, most recently, Daniel Donoghue, “Lady Godiva,” in Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Donald Scragg and Carole Weinberg, CSASE 29 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 194-214. See also Katherine L. French, “The Legend of Lady Godiva and the Image of the Female Body,” Journal of Medieval History 18 (1992): 3-19 and H. R. Ellis Davidson, “The Legend of Lady Godiva,” Folklore 80 (1969): 107-21. I Jonathan Wilcox 276 cealment of the naked body, of shame and of defiance, that proves emblematic for an investigation of the spectacle of nudity in Anglo-Saxon England. Nudity and sexuality seem not to be much of an issue in a literary and artistic corpus as decorous as that of Anglo-Saxon England. The literature of the period centers on lords afighting or monks a-praying and so the surviving works give little attention to the naked body: in Beowulf the only nacod things are two swords and a dragon and Ælfric is more concerned with the naked narrative of uninterpreted text than with actual hot and sweaty bodies.3 Such decorousness is unsurprising in a manuscript tradition that survived only by means of a monastic culture.4 With the famous exception of a handful of riddles, the naked or sexualized body is not an obvious part of the surviving Anglo-Saxon record.5 But that is no good reason for not asking questions about the naked body. Anglo-Saxon culture is also reticent about portraying women or discussing gender for many of the same reasons, yet questions about the role of women and the nature of gender have been particularly fruitful sites of enquiry for recent work.6 In this essay I will 3 See Beowulf: An Edition, ed. Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson (Oxford, 1998), lines 539a, 2585a (naked swords) and line 2273a (“nacod ni∂draca,” glossed by Mitchell and Robinson as “bare or smooth hostile dragon”) and Ælfric’s Prefaces, ed. Jonathan Wilcox (Durham, 1994), preface 4, lines 4243 . For more on Beowulf, see the essay by Hill in this volume. 4 See further my “Transmission of Literature and Learning: Anglo-Saxon Scribal Culture,” in A Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature, ed. Phillip Pulsiano and Elaine Treharne (Oxford, 2001), pp. 50-70. 5 For a survey of the literature, see the aptly-titled essay by Hugh Magennis, “‘No Sex Please, We’re Anglo-Saxons’? Attitudes to Sexuality in Old English Prose and Poetry,” Leeds Studies in English n.s. 26 (1995): 1-27. On the sexual riddles, see further the essays of Higley and Salvador in this volume. 6 A first wave of such work was evident in the new and reprinted essays of New Readings on Women in Old English Literature, ed. Helen Damico and Alexandra Hennessey Olsen (Bloomington, 1990) and in the historical study by Christine Fell with Cecily Clark and Elizabeth Williams, Women in AngloSaxon England (Oxford, 1984). For recent studies of...

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