Textiles Text Intertext

Textiles, Text, Intertext

The theme of weaving, a powerful metaphor within Anglo-Saxon studies and Old English literature itself, unites the essays collected here. They range from consideration of interwoven sources in homiletic prose and a word-weaving poet to woven riddles and iconographical textures in medieval art, and show how weaving has the power to represent textiles, texts, and textures both literal and metaphorical in the early medieval period. They thus form an appropriate tribute to Professor Gale R. Owen-Crocker, whose own scholarship has focussed on exploring woven works of textile and dress, manuscripts and text, and other arts of the Anglo-Saxon peoples.

Textiles, Text, Intertext

Textiles and Textile Imagery in Early Medieval English Literature

Identifies and analyses a wide range of textile metaphors and imagery from peace-weaving in Beowulf to word-crafting in Elene. Textile metaphors, or metaphors involving the process and product of cloth-making, occur widely in literary traditions around the world. The same phenomenon holds true among the peoples of early medieval England. As close observers of a long and culturally significant textile tradition, pre-Conquest English writers drew upon their close familiarity with spinning and weaving to create a wide range of metaphorical textile images in both Old English and Anglo-Latin literature. This book examines early medieval English textile imagery in close detail, situating it within its cultural and material contexts and addressing the ways in which lived experience informed these metaphors, whether inherited, invented, or both. It explores imagery linked to themes of creation, peace, death, magic, and fate in a comprehensive variety of texts, including Beowulf and Elene, Anglo-Latin letters and riddles, the Exeter Book riddles, prognostics, penitentials, hagiographic and homiletic texts, medical collections, and glosses. Overall, it demonstrates how an understanding of this important body of textile metaphors alters and shapes the ways in which we read the literature of this period.