Lori Ann Garner
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When healers are heroes
Hybridity of battle in Wið færstice
in Hybrid healing
Chapter DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526158505.00010
Online Publication Date:
13 Dec 2022
Abstract only
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Extending the previous chapter’s investigation of weaponry into another poetic charm text, Chapter 3 examines the verse incantation of a metrical incantation in Harley 585 (ff. 175r–176r) ‘wið færstice’ [‘against a sudden pain’], which ascribes pain to spears (garas) sent by mighty women from another realm. It is all too easy to dismiss this seemingly incongruous poem as mere superstition or abstract metaphor. But what happens if we look at this incantation in terms of strategies employed within actual Germanic warfare? The speaker – presumably the healer – threatens to return the attack with a flying arrow (‘fleogende flane’), and the incantation makes multiple references to smiths forging weapons of iron. This enigmatic incantation is framed on either side by a recipe and instructions involving herbal preparations. So different in tone and content is the incantation from the herbal recipe that some have argued they constitute entirely separate entries in the Lacnunga. However, when we bring a more complete awareness of specific weapons and battle strategies to our analysis of the text, we see that this incantation not only operates in tandem with the herbal preparation but emerges from the same underlying logic. In this construct, the herbs are the healer’s weapons, and the battle against pain parallels important heroic scenes in Beowulf. An appendix to this chapter then draws from the field of ethnopoetics to offer a newly edited text and translation of the remedy that more fully reflect the complex network of associations in play.
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Hybrid healing

Old English remedies and medical texts

eISBN:
9781526158505
Publisher:
Manchester University Press
Cover Hybrid healing
Subjects:
Literature and Theatre
Keywords:
medieval medicine; oral tradition; folklore; hybridity; old English; Bald’s Leechbook; Lacnunga; Herbarium; medical lore; oral theory
Page Count:
344
Publisher:
Manchester University Press

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Cover Hartly House, Calcutta

Hartly House, Calcutta

Phebe Gibbes

Book

Publication History:

Online Publication Date:
13 Feb 2019
Subjects:
  1. Literature and Theatre
Available In:
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This novel is a designedly political document. Written at the time of the Hastings impeachment and set in the period of Hastings’s Orientalist government, Hartly House, Calcutta (1789) represents a dramatic delineation of the Anglo-Indian encounter. The novel constitutes a significant intervention in the contemporary debate concerning the nature of Hastings’s rule of India by demonstrating that it was characterised by an atmosphere of intellectual sympathy and racial tolerance. Within a few decades the Evangelical and Anglicising lobbies frequently condemned Brahmans as devious beneficiaries of a parasitic priestcraft, but Phebe Gibbes’s portrayal of Sophia’s Brahman and the religion he espouses represent a perception of India dignified by a sympathetic and tolerant attempt to dispel prejudice.
Cover Crossing borders and queering citizenship

Crossing borders and queering citizenship

Civic reading practice in contemporary American and Canadian writing

Author:
Zalfa Feghali

Book

Publication History:

Online Publication Date:
16 Apr 2019
Subjects:
  1. Literature and Theatre
Available In:
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Can reading make us better citizens? This book sheds light on how the act of reading can be mobilised as a powerful civic tool in service of contemporary civil and political struggles for minority recognition, rights, and representation in North America. Crossing borders and queering citizenship reimagines the contours of contemporary citizenship by connecting queer and citizenship theories to the idea of an engaged reading subject. This book offers a new approach to studying the act of reading, theorises reading as an integral element of the basic unit of the state: the citizen. By theorising the act of reading across borders as a civic act that queers citizenship, the book advances an alternative model of belonging through civic readerly engagement. Exploring work by seven US, Mexican, Canadian, and Indigenous authors, including Gloria Anzaldúa, Dorothy Allison, Gregory Scofield, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Erín Moure, Junot Díaz, and Yann Martel, the book offers sensitive interpretations of how reading can create citizenship practices that foreground and value recognition, rights, and representation for all members of a political system.
Cover Howard Jacobson

Howard Jacobson

Author:
David Brauner

Book

Publication History:

Online Publication Date:
12 Jan 2021
Subjects:
  1. Literature and Theatre
Available In:
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This is a comprehensive and definitive study of the Man Booker Prize-winning novelist Howard Jacobson. It offers lucid, detailed and nuanced readings of each of Jacobson’s novels, and makes a powerful case for the importance of his work in the landscape of contemporary fiction. Focusing on the themes of comedy, masculinity and Jewishness, the book emphasises the richness and diversity of Jacobson’s work. Often described by others as ‘the English Philip Roth’ and by himself as ‘the Jewish Jane Austen’, Jacobson emerges here as a complex and often contradictory figure: a fearless novelist; a combative public intellectual; a polemical journalist; an unapologetic elitist and an irreverent outsider; an exuberant iconoclast and a sombre satirist. Never afraid of controversy, Jacobson tends to polarise readers; but, love him or hate him, he is difficult to ignore. This book gives him the thorough consideration and the balanced evaluation that he deserves.