Graduate Seminar: Thomas Hall

The Anglo-Saxon Seminar: The Exeter Book: A Tenth-Century Poetic Miscellany and It’s Cultural Background

Thomas N. Hall, University of Illinois at Chicago

currently teaching at the University of Notre Dame

The primary aim of this course was to read a broad selection of poetry from the Exeter Book in light of the cultural institutions that shaped and nurtured it in the late Anglo-Saxon period, and to explore the diversity of intellectual traditions current in Anglo-Saxon England during an age of extensive literary production.  Roughly one-third of the poems were read in the original; the rest were surveyed in modern translations.  Attention was paid to establishing connections between the poetry and the events and phenomena central to an understanding of tenth-century English culture, particularly those engendered by the Benedictine reform, by English relations with the Continent, and by contemporary movement in Anglo-Latin and Hiberno-Lation literature and in Old English prose.  A secondary goal of the course was to introduce students to methods of research in the traditions and disciplines that exerted a sustained influence on Old English literature, particularly the liturgy, hagiography, iconology, eschatology, biblical exegesis, cosmology, and folklore of the early medieval west.  A reading knowledge of Old English was required.

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