The Shedding of Tears in Late Anglo-Saxon England 1

Recent years have seen a burgeoning of scholarly interest in the history of emotions, and, with it, in the history of tears. ² Much of the ongoing examination of tears in the medieval milieu, however, has concentrated on accounts in the literature, hagiography, and art of the high and late Middle Ages, while scholars of the early Middle Ages (ca. 400–1050) have focused primarily on patristic or monastic texts, which seek to explicate or categorize tears in terms of Christian theology or practice. ³ This disparity reflects the available evidence—the medieval period from the twelfth century onwards simply produced more texts with a greater focus on the emotional and religious life of individuals. ⁴ We are left, however, with something of a gulf between theological ruminations on the purpose of pious tears in the Christian life from the first millennium and accounts of actual copious outpourings of holy tears from the first half of the second millennium. This chapter seeks to begin to bridge this gap, albeit in a small way, with a study of variety of texts from the last century of Anglo-Saxon England (ca. 966–1066) in which tears are reported as having been shed. This period saw a revival of Benedictine monasticism and a proliferation of writing in both Latin and Old English across many genres, including poetry, homilies, chronicles, penitentials, confessional directives, and hagiography, which have never before been studied comparatively for their references to tears. Despite the scarcity of these references, two broad points can made here. First, contrary to what the idiom of heroic poetry might lead us to believe, tears, as described in historical chronicles, seem to have been an expected response to highly emotional or religious stimuli in both men and women. As reports of the shedding of tears were still something of a rarity in the Anglo-Saxon milieu, where they do occur authors often use them, with an unanticipated degree of deftness and deliberateness, to alert their audiences to the profound significance of the situation they were describing, and to signal that the event was particularly noteworthy or that the weeper was especially praiseworthy. A second, and related, point is that the appearance of tears in homiletic texts and Christian poetry is also configured as part and parcel of religious discourse; the monks responsible for these texts adopted and adapted patristic theology as the foundation for their ideas about pious tears that could transcend the boundaries of heavenly and earthly realms, acting as a conduit between man and the divine.