Aesthetics and the Incarnation in Early Medieval Britain: Materiality and the Flesh of the Word

by Tiffany Beechy

Overview

This rich study takes Insular art on its own terms, revealing a distinctive and unorthodox theology that will inevitably change how scholars view the long arc of English piety and the English literary tradition.

Drawing on a wide range of critical methodologies, Aesthetics and the Incarnation in Early Medieval Britain treats this era as a “contact zone” of cultural clash and exchange, where Christianity encountered a rich amalgam of practices and attitudes, particularly regarding the sensible realm. Tiffany Beechy illustrates how local cultures, including the Irish learned tradition, received the “Word that was made flesh,” the central figure of Christian doctrine, in distinctive ways: the Word, for example, was verbal, related to words and signs, and was not at all ineffable. Likewise, the Word was often poetic—an enigma—and its powerful presence was not only hinted at (as St. Augustine would have it) but manifest in the mouth or on the page. Beechy examines how these Insular traditions received and expressed a distinctly iterable Incarnation. Often disavowed and condemned by orthodox authorities, this was in large part an implicit theology, expressed or embodied in form (such as art, compilation, or metaphor) rather than in treatises. Beechy demonstrates how these forms drew on various authorities especially important to Britain—Bede, Gregory the Great, and Isidore most prominent among them.

Beechy’s study provides a prehistory in the English literary tradition for the better-known experimental poetics of Middle English devotion. The book is unusual in the diversity of its primary material, which includes visual art, including the Book of Kells; obscure and often cursorily treated texts such as Adamnán’s De locis sanctis (“On the holy lands”); and the difficult esoterica of the wisdom tradition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780268205157
Publisher:	University of Notre Dame Press
Publication date:	06/15/2023
Pages:	340
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.06(d)

About the Author

Tiffany Beechy is professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is the author of The Poetics of Old English.

Read an Excerpt

This book is, at heart, about form in Insular art and literature, but it is also, inevitably, about theology. This is of course due in part to the absence of a distinctly secular realm of common life in the Middle Ages, meaning that most serious endeavors involved religion in some degree. It is also due to the demographics governing the means of production: much of what survives of early medieval art is in manuscripts and, to a lesser degree, stone sculpture, and both were the domains of the church. And yet the inescapable presence of the church can lead to misunderstanding regarding its influence over individual artifacts and their meaning. For certain features of Insular art are difficult to account for if we assume that all art was controlled by patristic (orthodox) doctrine. While the objects and texts I treat are about the central themes of Christianity, these are often construed in surprising ways, ways that were sometimes explicitly condemned by contemporary authorities. Such waywardness, I contend, deserves to be approached with great interest rather than with discomfort or scorn.

Medieval Christianity inherited several pre-Christian intellectual and aesthetic traditions with diverse premises about the status of the felt world, or the sensible, and its relationship to a transcendent plane of abstractions—if the latter were imagined at all. A central question amid the metaphysical inquiry, both explicit and not, that attempted to sort out these differences was how and whether God could be perceived. It is a conundrum that informed in some way all religious representation (which was, in some way, all representation) and fueled centuries of controversy. Yet one thing was clear: on at least one occasion the divine had come into the world of sense perception, at the Incarnation, when God had deigned to become a man. This was in many ways a hot potato, as the authorities recognized—where do you draw a line, contain divinity, once it has been brought into the world, lest it start popping up under every stock and stone (as it did among the pagans)? The problem would eventually be solved by circumscribing the Incarnation within Christ’s human form, officially restricting it to the physical body plus its trace in the increasingly controlled, prescribed rite of the Eucharist. Later medieval commentators would therefore emphasize the Incarnation as an act of humility, God lowering himself into a body for the purpose of suffering, and the need for all Christians to emulate that humility, if not that suffering. In early medieval Britain, however, amid diverse attitudes informed by distinct intellectual, cultural, linguistic, and religious traditions, an expansive rather than a restrictive interpretation of the “Word that was made flesh” prevailed, according to which the Word might in fact be sensed in the world in surprising ways. Understanding how form, as a manifestation of the sensible (not “form” in the Aristotelian or Platonic senses), embodies and construes theological precept is crucial to understanding the products of this tradition.

The particular character of Insular Incarnationalism has been obscured by several factors, notably the tendency of the study of Insular Christianity to bifurcate into Celtic studies, on the one hand, and “Anglo-Saxon” studies on the other (more on this term in the next chapter). The scholarship on the latter then tends to be overwhelmed by the copious evidence from Carolingian Francia, which provides tantalizing but also potentially misleading material. For the Carolingians had empire on their minds, and continuity with Rome foremost in their rhetoric. The trends toward circumscription of the body of Christ, toward regulated and uniform observance of the mass, were Carolingian projects, ones that had English contributors (notably Alcuin of York) and acolytes (Ælfric of Eynsham), but whose influence only trickled into England, widening with the Benedictine reform in the tenth century and again with the Conquest, with its influx of Continental power both sacred and secular. Insular artworks, however, often make it clear that they did not get the imperial memo. They embody the flesh of the Word in ways that show unconcern with their evident materialism, ways that emphasize Christ’s divinity and its effect on his and our humanity as well as the ontological mystery of the hypostatic union. As Johanna Kramer has recently demonstrated the early English church to have had a characteristic way of conceiving of the Ascension (as limen and transit), this book will attempt to show that it had a similarly characteristic reception of the Incarnation.

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

1. “Supereffability” and the Sacraments of Christ’s Humanity

2. Seeing Double: Representing the Hypostatic Union

3. No Ideas but in Things: Aesthetics and the Flesh of the Word

4. Concealing is Revealing I: Opacity and Enigma in the Wisdom Tradition

5. Concealing is Revealing II: The Shadow Manuscript in the Margins of CCCC 41

Conclusion

Works Cited

List of Figures

Editorial Reviews

This book is a timely, valuable contribution to scholarly conversations about medieval religious cultures, early British literature, and disciplinary boundaries. It covers an impressive range of texts and puts texts into dialogue with each other in productive, original, and unexpected ways.” —Nancy Bradley Warren, author of Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras

"This is a profoundly original book that challenges us to reread familiar works and look more closely at unfamiliar ones. On every page, Beechy’s work is provocative and exciting, substantial and serious, and it offers nothing less than a new understanding of faith and art in early medieval England." —R. M. Liuzza, editor of Old English Poetry: An Anthology

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