Coming to terms with a pagan past: The story of "St Erkenwald"
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Date
2013
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Adam Mickiewicz University
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Abstract
The poem of St Erkenwald and his encounter with the body of a pagan judge preserved in a tomb
underneath St Paul's Cathedral has never provoked an intense scholarly discussion. During the
past two decades, however, the poem has altogether lost the scarce attention it used to receive.
This is surprising in regards to its outstanding quality but also because of a number of peculiar
characteristics the text has in comparison with other works written during the Middle Ages. Arguing
for the importance of the historical details provided by the poem, my article takes a number of
these peculiarities into account and suggests a new reading of the poem. In this approach, I do not
dismiss the major topics of the earlier scholarly discussions, mostly focused on the poem's theological
and stylistic topics or its presumed sources. My article rather presents an additional reading
from the perspective of a literary history, thus arguing that the poem of St Erkenwald can be
placed within a discourse tradition to which a number of earlier authors contributed, the most
famous among them being the Venerable Bede. While the poem addresses a variety of theological
and stylistic topics and is of course influenced by its contemporary religious and social developments,
it also contributes to one of the fundamental problems of English identity in the Middle
Ages: coming to terms with a pagan origin.
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Keywords
St Erkenwald, history of the English, pagan ancestry, Middle English poetry, 14th and 15th century literature
Citation
Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, vol. 48.2-3 (2013), pp. 71-92