Compositional Techniques in Anglo-Saxon Verse Hagiography

My DPhil project addresses the understanding and appreciation of compositional techniques in Old English poetry. Rather than focusing inordinately on decades-old notions of oral-formulaic composition and transmission, it is the literariness of Anglo-Saxon poetry and its aesthetics, its intertextuality, and its reception which are the areas of knowledge my investigations aim to promote. Considered, deliberate, and highly literary compositional practices allow for pointed allusion, a variety of innovative literary-formulaic compositional techniques, and the imaginative and artistic blending of secular-heroic and Latinate-Christian values, are all particularly productive in the Old English verse hagiographies that form my primary corpus (Juliana, Elene, Guthlac A and B, Andreas, and Judith), often overshadowed by the 'heroic' poems of the period. Identifying literary aesthetics and intertextual interactions in vernacular poetic hagiography shows poets responding critically and imaginatively to preexisting texts, and supplements the understanding and enjoyment of these texts for both Anglo-Saxon and modern critical audiences. Shifting critical paradigms, more research tools, and the undermining of long-held certainties, all mean that questions of Old English poetic composition need urgent reconsideration.
As a medievalist, my work is inherently interdisciplinary: without the requisite linguistic capabilities, none of the literary work could be undertaken, and without employing historical, cultural and theological considerations in analysis, the literature of the medieval world would exist only in an unintelligible vacuum. My primary texts in Old English and Latin are not only multilingual and multicultural, but cross genre divides, historical eras, and questions of individual and non-individual authorship. My methodology combines literary, linguistic and poetic close reading, source criticism, and analogue comparison with systematic semantic examination and empirical corpus analysis. Making extensive use of and showcasing the unique functionalities of new research tools which are becoming available via the Oxford-based Consolidated Library of Anglo-Saxon Poetry project, my project does all of this in relief of the entire corpus of the more-commonly studied poetry of Anglo-Saxon England, and forms its literary analysis of language, medium, matter and sense upon innovative technical data available via CLASP. During the course of my research project, I will seek to identify and elucidate evidence that, for example, many omissions and alterations from Latin sources cooperate with Old English narrative poetic sensibilities, that vernacular aesthetic practices of literary-formulaic distribution and compounding collaborate with the process of transforming the Old Testament Book of Judith into a saintly narrative, and that poets indulged in previously-underestimated and perspicacious compositional practices, employing the assumptions, traditions and characteristics of Old English secular poetry to singular ends. Conclusions such as these aim to advance our understanding of practices of Old English versification, in the highly-productive context of the hybrid secular and sacred 'art vitae'. I am also interested in comparanda ranging from Anglo-Latin poetry and Old English prose vitae, to medieval hagiography in other vernaculars, as well as historical, theological and non-literary depictions of saints and sainthood.
The Doctoral Training Partnership provides me the perfect opportunity to develop both the requisite research skills and professional expertise. I hope to use their support and the support of their strategic partners to extend the contemporary relevance of medieval studies, to combat those who demonise the medieval period or falsely weaponise 'medievalist' ideology, and to collaborate and exchange knowledge with academics across the humanities and audiences of the general public alike.