IAS Book Launch: Wealth and the Material World in the Old English Alfredian Corpus

Material things, especially things of value, play significant roles in some of the best-known Old English poems: many readers, for example, will remember the heaps of treasure piled onto Scyld Scefing’s funeral barge at the start of Beowulf, or the lost treasures of the ruined Roman city in The Ruin. Treasures such as these store up memories – ancestries, rivalries and loyalties – which remain long after the humans who possessed them have died. They cement social bonds and perpetuate feuds; in poetry, they can represent both faded glory and the ambition for future renown.

The treasures of poems such as Beowulf, however, offer only one perspective on material things in the early medieval world. Wealth and the Material World in the Old English Alfredian Corpus reads the prose translations traditionally attributed to Alfred the Great alongside the Old English poetic corpus, revealing a striking, and less familiar, treatment of material things. The Alfredian translations, which encompass theology, philosophy and biblical translation, provide a glimpse into the way that early medieval people grappled with the material world in a range of different spheres, from day-to-day, practical concerns to philosophical questions about the role material things play in one’s journey to heaven.

In this roundtable event, the author of the book, Dr Amy Faulkner (UCL), will be joined by Dr Robert Gallagher (Kent) and Dr Rachel Burns (Oxford) for a discussion on early medieval material things, chaired by Professor Francis Leneghan (Oxford).