Remains of the Past in Old English Literature

Argues for a new understanding of Old English responses to materiality and historical change.


Human communities have interacted with the material remains of earlier periods for millennia. Such "archaeological objects" - including bones, coins, weapons, building materials and architectural landmarks - were physically handled, reused, transformed and reinterpreted; they were also depicted in literature. This book examines how Old English texts imagine such human encounters with the remnants of the past. It explores Elene's perspective on the discovery of the True Cross as a narrative of political, spiritual and epistemic translatio and the multiple ways in which The Wanderer and The Ruin use images of ruins and the poetic formula "work of giants'" to construct an unknown and unrecoverable past; it also considers the engagements with 'untimely objects' in Beowulf and the Anonymous Old English Legend of the Seven Sleepers and how the Ruthwell Cross Poem and The Dream of the Rood play off "figural'" against 'literal' history.

As this study demonstrates, Old English texts combined and creatively adapted a broad variety of ways of conceptualizing not merely history, but indeed the very processes by which historical thought operates. Its careful readings show that these texts not only display a deep and conflicted understanding of the philosophical implications of viewing history and temporality through the prism of material objects, but also exhibit a powerful capacity for expressing such an understanding through aesthetic strategies.

Contributor: Jan-Peer Hartmann JAN-PEER HARTMANN is a fellow at the Interdisciplinary Research Group "Aitiologies" at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Hartmann moves slowly and deliberately through the theoretical underpinnings of contemporary thought on temporality, historicity, and historical consciousness and the assumptions that have led many of these thinkers to dismiss the Middle Ages as insufficiently nuanced in its contemplation of historical contingency. The result is a book that is part literary criticism, part philosophical contemplation, and wholly engaging.