Cynewulf's runic signatures have long been understood as a playful means of preserving the poet's name, resembling Latin anagrams or the scrambled runes of Old English riddles. This essay re-evaluates the signatures' function, arguing that their form graphically enacts the concerns about the body, death and salvation that saturate each of Cynewulf's epilogues. When read through the lens of the common medieval grammatical analogy that equates the word's letters to the body and the word's meaning to the soul, the scattered letters of the signatures become a figure of Cynewulf's broken and sinful body; like the worm-eaten flesh described in the epilogue to Fates, Cynewulf's own name is reduced to its most elemental form. The reader's reassembly and comprehension of the dismembered signature as the name CYN(E)WULF thus create a simulacrum of the reconstituted body and its reunion with the soul at the resurrection, anticipating the salvation that Cynewulf asks his readers to help secure with their prayers.
This article examines the concluding entry in the early medieval catalogue of marvels known as Wonders of the East preserved in London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius B.v. The text relates the apocryphal story of two magician brothers associated with Pharaoh: Mambres conjures the soul of his dead brother Jamnes through opening the latter’s ‘magical books’ and the dead Jamnes then speaks a warning from hell about the inevitable doom awaiting Mambres. The accompanying full-page illustration, I argue, does not show the reanimated Jamnes in hell (as is frequently assumed), but instead represents Mambres teetering at the edge of an open pit wherein a hairy, green Satan reaches up toward him. While the text affirms the possibility of communing with the dead, the illustration denies and even warns against that possibility by showing Satan, rather than Jamnes, responding to Mambres’ necromancy. I argue that text and image negotiate two different homiletic traditions about the conjured dead, ultimately functioning as both a warning against practising magic and an admonition to prepare for death.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.