Borders, Burials, and the Extended Mind in Early Medieval England: <i>Genesis A</i> and Apple Down

Abstract

This article begins by considering the re-presentation of the Biblical landscape of the Binding of Isaac in the Old English text Genesis A. With reference to place-names, landscapes, and other texts, it demonstrates how this setting was presented as a place of cremation on a hilltop border. The poem may, for audiences living in the generations following the cessation of cremation burial, have served as a means of understanding earlier religious praxis. The article then considers a similar moment of cultural transition written into the conversion-era cemeteries at Apple Down in Sussex, similarly sited in a border region and on top of a hill. Here, a mixed-rite cremation and inhumation cemetery was succeeded by an inhumation cemetery set out in a novel fashion, likely reflecting changes in contemporary religious culture. Both the poem and the cemeteries at Apple Down, in marking these changes, can be understood within Material Engagement Theory, a theory of the Extended Mind, as ‘exograms’: material memory records external to the embodied human brain. The article considers both the poem and cemeteries in this light, and shows how exograms of various kinds might be used to assemble an exogrammar, here defined as a set of ideas distributed across one or more exograms. A framework of this kind, assembling evidence across a diverse range of material and textual sources, is presented as an adaptable method of investigation across disciplines in which various forms of evidence can be understood as residual components of embodied human minds.