ABSTRACT
In narrating the inventio of the True Cross, Cynewulf’s Old English Elene lingers upon the moment when the emperor Constantine’s mother discovers the crucifixion nails. Elaborating upon its sources, the ca. ninth-century poem ekphrastically portrays these arma Christi shining forth from the ground in which they lie.1 The particular deployment of luminosity in such an image is in many ways consistent with Anglo-Saxon aesthetics in a general sense.2 But I would like to propose that viewing this imagistic phenomenon through the modern critical lens of “figure and ground” can refine our understanding of the image’s work. Through this theoretical perspective, I shall argue in this essay, we discern the instrumentality of literary and aesthetic form in the structuring of early medieval meditational practice. Jane Gilbert has contended that it is precisely the distance between modern critical constructs and medieval practices that allows the former to elucidate the latter; the introduction to the present volume takes this idea up by suggesting that modern discourses like thing theory and new materialism might underlie our collective examination
1 Cynewulf reflects a late-antique inventio tradition established by Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, in 395. See Jan Willem Drijvers, Helena Augusta: The Mother of Constantine the Great and the Legend of her Finding of the True Cross (New York: Brill, 1992), 5. The text of Ambrose’s inventio appears in Ambrose, De Obitu Theodosii, ed. Otto Faller, Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, vol. 73 (Vienna: Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1955), 4049. Cynewulf’s main source, which included the nails’ discovery, was probably the Acta Quiriaci in the Acta Sanctorum Maii (Michael J.B. Allen and Daniel G. Calder, trans., Sources and Analogues in Old English Poetry: The Major Latin Texts in Translation [Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1976], 60-61). The Judas Cyriacus legend is thought to exist in its most authentic form in a fifth-or sixth-century Syriac text (BL Additional MS 14644). Latin and Greek versions dating from the sixth to eighth centuries also exist, though the relationships
of the arma Christi.3 Anglo-Saxon studies offer an especially interesting site for experimentation with critical discourse.4 Recent work on Old English literature challenges the conventional protocols of historical contextualizing, seeing texts instead as “constellations of aesthetic fragments that afford an opportunity for philosophical reflection.”5 In this essay, I contribute figure and ground to the arsenal of theoretical approaches for its focus on image, aesthetics, media, and form in the consideration of objects and things.
