The Life of the Mind in Old English Poetry (review)

Abstract

200 Reviews Parergon 20.2 (2003) Austen attempts to counteract the cultural stereotype of the voracious and threatening widow in order to preserve her social rank and personal autonomy. Like Carey and Trapnel, Austen purposely denies her agency and figures herself as helpless in order to forge a permissible poetic voice with which to defend and enhance her position as a woman without a male protector. Most interesting about the analysis of ‘Book M’, however, is Hammons’s focus upon the interplay between gender and social class, and, specifically, upon Austen’s poem ‘On the Situation of Highbury’, ascribed here to the country house poem tradition. Examining the poem alongside country house poems by Jonson, Carew, and Lanyer, Hammons considers its departures from generic convention as specific to Austen’s self-presentation as a virtuous but independently wealthy widow. As a female poet, her relationship with the estate defied convention on numerous levels. Reading the poem as a social and literary negotiation of this relationship, Hammons suggests the complexity of Austen’s position as an independent widow authoring the worthiness of an estate which she hoped to own. In resisting cultural and religious stereotypes of what constituted acceptable behaviour for a woman, Austen, like Carey and Trapnel, appropriated the essentially male traditions of lyric poetry and reworked them from a feminine perspective. Though this study is valuable simply because it brings to light additional texts relevant to the study of Early Modern women writers, it also examines complex relationships between the social role of the writer and the text as vehicle for cultural comment and change. Poetic Resistance will appeal, therefore , not only to scholars of Early Modern women’s writing, but also to anyone interested in the intersection between social and literary culture, and in the strategic self-presentation of poets during this turbulent period of English history. Alison V. Scott English Department Macquarie University Harbus, Antonina, The Life of the Mind in Old English Poetry (Costerus New Series 143), Amsterdam/New York, Rodopi, 2002; paper; pp. ix, 220; RRP US$54.00, EUR45.00; ISBN 9042008148. Old English studies have changed over the last few decades from a mainly philological perspective to a more subtle understanding of the complexity of Reviews 201 Parergon 20.2 (2003) the society which produced such a comparatively large extant corpus. Adding to an awareness of the sophistication of the Anglo-Saxon writers, and of their uniqueness, is the new volume by Antonina Harbus which draws attention to the way Old English poetry emphasised and privileged the life of the mind. This is an important work and complements the increased interest over the last decade in how earlier cultures viewed memory, mind and psyche. Harbus claims two aims to her book: ‘to investigate the emphasis on the mind in the poetic traditions of Anglo-Saxon England, and to outline the model of the mind on which this poetic discourse was structured’ (p. 13). The first claim is fully realised as she convincingly shows how the poets repeatedly used words associated with the mind (mod, gemynd, hyge, sefa, breostsefa etc). In the hagiographical tradition, where Latin and European counterparts exist, Harbus identifies how the Old English texts added references to mind and thought which were not present in the original. The identification of this uniqueness of perception of the mind as the locus of personality and action will surely stimulate more research into the comparative European traditions of mind. The second aim of the book is ambitious; the paucity of the material, and the medieval refusal to classify terminology in a manner appropriate to the twenty-first century, must inevitably lead to some speculation rather than a definitive taxonomy of psychological terms. Nevertheless, Harbus draws together evidence to show that the Anglo-Saxon writers described the mind as ‘an entity participating in the control of the self in a bipartisan manner. This dual and inherently fraught basis of agency, individual identity and consciousness is presented as a dynamic shaper of personal development’ (p. 186). Emotions occur in the mind, and the mind is also ‘the chief mechanism of an individual’s commerce with the divine’ (p. 187). Importantly, Harbus eschews the simplistic definition of...