ABSTRACT
Roberta Bassi explores ways in which the Anglo-Saxon authors Bede and Ælfric of Eynsham worked with images and ideas of the afterlife in the eighth and tenth centuries. What particularly fascinates Bassi is that no attempt is made to produce coherent afterlife imaginary. In Bede’s eighth-century Historia Ecclesiastica, the visions of Fursey and Dryththelm read as though they respectively belong to different otherworlds. Ælfric, writing homiletic material in the tenth century, maintains this complexity. Bassi postulates that this intrinsic diversity can be seen as an implicit attempt to express the inexpressible or, at the very least, it needs to be read as a way of portraying the as-yet uncategorised and undogmatised. Although some images had crystallised by the ninth century, Bassi illustrates that in allowing the imagery to remain open to different interpretations, these Anglo-Saxon authors pushed towards the transcendent, and were able to do so without ever denying the material imagery on which their understandings depend.
