![]() 4 Mary Rambaran-Olm, for instance, has discussed the use of England's pre-Conquest history to evidence an imagined past that better reflects modern ideologies of nationalism, Christianity, and western exceptionalism. 3 As conversations in the field of medieval studies continue to demonstrate, the desire to represent the past as a monument to an idealized, mythical time not only simplifies historical reality but also creates space for erroneous notions of European racial and cultural superiori-ty. Discourse on both poems illustrates this longing, as scholars evoke the language of purity and origins to assign to the poets (and thereby medieval people more generally) feelings of cultural loss in the wake of the Norman Conquest. The tendency to read Durham and the Lament as works mourning an early English past largely stems from the modern audience's desire to witness and participate in historical loss, specifically the loss of an imagined "Anglo-Saxon" age. Within these poems, in other words, the past does not need to be recovered or restored because it is already present. Understanding the poems in this way not only undermines the notion that medieval writers longed to return to an uncontaminated, more intellectually rigorous origin (and that such an origin existed in the first place) it also demonstrates the complexity with which medieval thinkers could conceptualize time and see their presence within a broader timeline. They characterize the material memorials of the past as unstable and continuous markers flowing into the present. Both depict time's passage as alternatively fluid and still. ![]() Durham and the Lament centre the gaps, fragments, and remnants that bleed across the seams of archival memory, creating narratives that can be unified but never recreate an imagined historical wholeness. Rather than reading these works primarily as projects of recovery and restoration, I maintain that they must be read as works deeply invested in issues of historical breakage and trauma. In looking to the English past, they bear witness to the despair of loss and to the joy of fragmented preservation and continuation. Yet, rather than mourn a separation from an idealized origin, these poems contemplate and revel in the paradox of experiences at once distant and near, remote and local. ![]() To be certain, Durham and the Lament are preoccupied with the past and its effects on the present the poems are, in that sense, nostalgic. 2 Characterization of both works as late, inferior, and unimaginative, I argue, is not just a typical feature of the scholarly history of works that survive in the space between Old and Middle English: it is tied to an expectation of nostalgia, an assumption that post-Conquest England desired to recover a heritage that had been lost. Though temporally sitting within the scope of Early Middle English verse (roughly from the Norman Conquest to the early years of the fourteenth century), Durham and the Lament are generally considered representative of a decline of the poetic artistry often associated with Old English, a mere anticipation of later poetry in Middle English. Neither poem fits clearly into our artistic and political expectations of Old or Middle English literature-not as narratives of the empowered or disempowered, nor of bodies, thoughts, or experiences apparently central to a cultural ethos-nor do they comfortably meet linguistic expectations. BOTH DURHAM AND A Lament for the English Church (also called The First Worcester Fragment or, less frequently, Saint Bede's Lament) occupy a perimetric space in the English literary timeline. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |