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/aural culture of early medieval England would undoubtedly not have been the same for everyone, and to assume so is to participate in what Lennard Davis has referred to as ‘one of the foundational ableist myths of our culture’. 9 Maren Tova Linett places the growth of ‘these cultural biases in favor of hearing and speech’ as reaching their height ‘during the modernist period’, 10 and indeed in early medieval England we find a situation with arguably less imbalanced assumptions. Law codes from the period provide particular
. That society proves imperfect and that its bonds prove weak is not Beowulf’s fault – the tendency to murder and destruction present in the myth of Cain is to be found even in Hrothgar’s Heorot, and undoubtedly was there in the hall of every Anglo-Saxon Christian ruler. The poet’s presentation of the myth of the Flood does not articulate any law code or any offer of salvation, though the simple
experience, a tendency reflected in the period’s archaeological record, historical texts, and law codes as well. Lastly, with no healer to be found, the endlessly suffering speaker of the riddle Anhaga elicits deep empathy for its trauma, both the pain of endless attacks and also the excruciating loneliness of a solitary warrior. Collectively these analyses have shown both the payoff and the limits of this close-reading approach, and before closing I want to acknowledge explicitly and directly that this ‘conclusion’ is in
understanding of early medieval England as a largely oral/aural culture, and evidence from surviving medical texts, law codes, and the archaeological record indicates a range of sensory perception that seems to have been widely recognized. The entries in Bald’s Leechbook suggest a worldview in which the capacity for hearing, though important in many contexts, was not assumed. Rather, the faculty of hearing itself is described as changing and changeable, in terms of experience rather than identity. Accordingly, the Old English
centuries, which interdict infant abandonment, with the exception of deformity, arguing that ‘[p]hysically impaired children … if reared, would present too great a demand on resources and in the future would be limited in providing for themselves and contributing to the community's economy’. 28 In addition to the sagas and law codes, which mention child abandonment with some frequency, archaeological evidence supports this practice as a fact of early medieval life. Archaeologists have, for several decades, discussed the
sacrificed their noble blood, Nor men, nor coin she spared, to do them good. 25 30 35 40 45 50 30] rex: king. 33] The Salic law: the ancient Frankish civil law code, which contained a passage forbidding female succession. 37] ne’er-run race: Helios drove the chariot of the sun in a never-ending cycle. 38] earth had, once a year, a new old face: refers to the annual arrival of spring. 40] phoenix: a person or thing of unique excellence or matchless beauty; a paragon. 48] Don Anthony: António, Prior of Crato (1531–1595), a claimant to the throne of Portugal used
’s Ecclesiastical History (items 8 and 11). At the opposite extreme, such copies of the laws as have survived are regularly small (items 96, 99, 100 and 102), exceptions being where law-codes are added to other material, as in the Parker Chronicle (item 15). It is possible that copies of particular sorts of material traditionally have a uniform size, or it may be that these are of like size because the copies are in some way related in their transmission history, for example the copies of Ælfric’s Grammar in items 51, 54, 59, 65, and 66, and again 92 and 94, 17 or copies of