Sex and Sexuality in Anglo-Saxon England: Essays in Memory of Daniel Gillmore Calder. Edited by carol pasternack and lisam. c. weston. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 277. Pp. xlix + 284. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2004. £36.

Abstract

Daniel Calder, a leading Anglo-Saxonist at the time of his death in 1994, was particularly noted for his erudite and sensitive readings of Old English poetry, and for his co-authorship, with Stanley Greenfield, of the valuable A New Critical History of Old English Literature, and the significant Sources and Analogues of Old English Poetry, with Michael Allen. This volume pays tribute to his work with some essays at the cutting-edge of theoretically informed criticism. In a lengthy Introduction, the editors explore and analyse medieval sex and sexuality, reflecting on theories and constructions of heterosexuality, homosexuality, the constitutents of normative behaviours, and discourses of the body. They note that most of the studies published through the 1980s and 1990s pay only scant attention to earlier medieval literature—both Latin and Old English (though one might wonder why Old Norse material figures not at all in this cultural context, and not once in the entire volume). They attribute this partially to the few texts that ‘provide representations of sexual acts and desires’ (p. xxxiii). This narrow interpretation of what is textually necessary to determine or interpret ‘sex and sexuality’ leads to a rather rapid overview of Anglo-Saxonists’ attitudes to, and recent work on, these topics in recent years. The discussion at pp. xxxii–xxxvii thus intimates that evaluative legitimacy comes only from using the discourse of theory; such a claim, of course, enhances the newness of this collection of essays, ‘the first focusing entirely on sex and sexuality in Anglo-Saxon England’ (p. xlii). Throughout, though, Pasternack and Weston engage boldly in theorising and closely defining their terminology, a rare and welcome feature in current scholarship on sexuality and gender.