Manmade Marvels in Medieval Culture and Literature

Abstract

The New Middle Ages is a series dedicated to transdisciplinary studies of medieval cultures, with particular emphasis on recuperating women's history and on feminist and gender analyses. This peer-reviewed series includes both scholarly monographs and essay collections.

The ‘thingness’ of time in the Old English riddles of the Exeter Book and Aldhelm’s Latin enigmata

“…Following the lead of Riddle 39 itself, I have so far been speaking in negative terms, relating what is taken away from us as sentient humans, unable to make sense of the bodiless entity, the wiht we are somehow meant to resolve: 'reselan recene gesecgan' (28). Yet if time is neither an artefact organised by us nor a being that organises us, we are granted the flexibility to exist fluidly within time.…”

“…27 However, in the Augustinian Christian view of technology, as the world declined into the future, the enfeebled body of postlapsarian mankind could 'improve through artifice' whereby the artefactual serves as 'a prosthesis to supplement the fallen body of mankind'. 28 The human body and the body of the artefact are bound together, a continuousness between the two formed in the act of making. Some artefacts (swords, shields, cups, books) may outlive their human makers but others, like the candle, have a shorter life course; they deteriorate and die before human eyes, while we watch.…”