Dualism in Old English Literature: The Body-and-Soul Theme and Vercelli Homily IV

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Scholarship on the Old English body-and-soul theme has largely focused on the damned soul’s hostility toward its body, especially as this is represented in the poem Soul and Body . Yet, whether censuring the poem’s perspective or attempting to rehabilitate it, studies of this theme have not clearly described the concept at its heart, anthropological dualism. This article argues that we as critics must clarify our terms when discussing the body-and-soul theme if we are to gain purchase on just how anthropological dualism is represented in the theme’s various instantiations. Following my treatment of anthropological dualism, I read Vercelli Homily IV as a unique instantiation of the body-and-soul theme that ultimately affirms the complementarity of body and soul and their mutual implication in one another—specifically through the use of dramatic form in the homily’s Judgment scene. Christ’s speeches in this scene produce a structural irony out of the traditional material, simultaneously including the familiar positions while critiquing them internally through an anthropological dualism that is complementary, not hostile, and found in Latin patristic texts commonly studied in Anglo-Saxon England.