St. Erkenwald

Chapter 5 of my first book is a close reading and contextualization of an alliterative romance from the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century. St. Erkenwald narrates the discovery beneath St. Paul’s cathedral of the miraculously preserved corpse of a pagan British judge, who discourses with Erkenwald, seventh-century bishop of London, about his life and times. Erkenwald sheds a tear that accidentally baptizes the judge, whose body disintegrates as his soul rockets heavenward.

My chapter title, “The Erkenwald Poet’s Sense of History,” refers to my PhD adviser Roberta Frank’s “The Beowulf Poet’s Sense of History,” itself modeled on her PhD adviser Morton W. Bloomfield’s “Chaucer’s Sense of History.” The three essays all take a polemical stance against the familiar claim that medieval writers lacked a sense of history. Chaucer’s poetry, Beowulf, and St. Erkenwald, in different ways, belie the still-current narrative of a “birth of the past” (Schiffman: a 2011 book) in early modern Europe.

However, its placement in English Alliterative Verse meant that my chapter could not fully develop this theme with reference to St. Erkenwald. The purpose of the chapter was to illustrate the historical arguments advanced in more schematic form in the rest of the book–arguments about alliterative meter, medieval English literary and cultural history, and Old English/Middle English periodization. Now I have a new book forthcoming on medieval/modern periodization in English literature, and while it doesn’t feature St. Erkenwald, I’d like to revisit the poem’s historicism. St. Erkenwald provides a potent refutation of the ideology of ‘the’ ‘Renaissance,’ insofar as that ideology is expressed as a claim about a swerve in historical perspective. At the same time, the poem is blatantly anachronistic: the judge is dressed like a fourteenth-century judge, for example.

In the book, I described the Erkenwald poet’s sense of history this way:

For a late medieval composition, St. Erkenwald is “full of oddly advanced notions” [Frank 57, of Beowulf]. Its achievement is not to redeem the past, but to traverse a longue durée so broad that it connects Christianity with what Christianity would repudiate. In the course of events every possible response to this conjunction is mooted, but none is endorsed. Like the squabbling clans of Beowulf in the wake of the hero’s death, the Londoners of St. Erkenwald seem doomed to squander the legacy of the past. Construction grinds to a halt; the hoi polloi just gawk. After a week of research and prayer, the tomb is as inscrutable as ever. The tearful baptism is inadvertent and of debatable sacramental efficacy. An attentive late medieval reader would have wondered why God preserved the corpse in the first place, whether He therefore preserved others, what the inscription meant, how old the judge was, what sort of England he lived in, and whether pagan souls could, or should, be saved by baptism. Six hundred years have not made any of these questions easier to answer. The bishop’s confrontation with the unknown is all the more striking for being unexpected. No one in St. Erkenwald goes in search of a tomb, or a judge, or a pagan past. Tomb, judge, and past simply materialize.

I would now emphasize the paradox enclosed in the second sentence. Chakrabarty writes–in a book that welcomes the European Middle Ages into ‘modernity’–“It is because we already have experience of that which makes the present noncontemporaneous with itself that we can actually historicize” (112). This is an idea that the author of St. Erkenwald intuited and expressed at the level of narrative form. The poem, a fourteenth- or fifteenth-century depiction of seventh-century London, literally represents a present “noncontemporaneous with itself.” That distant present has its own past, to which it bears a relation that is, fictionally at least, not reducible to late medieval historicism. The distant past and the proximate past of St. Erkenwald are scenes of which the poem’s readers “already have experience,” through the genres of historiography and hagiography.

In St. Erkenwald, the paradoxical desire for and horror of the past takes on a specifically Christian flavor. A supercessionist religion, Christianity must both absorb and expel (what can thereby be distinguished as) Judaism. Analogously, within Christianity and its history, Protestantism must both absorb and expel (what can thereby be distinguished as) Catholicism.

Chakrabarty’s work in the philosophy of history suggests that anachronism and historicism describe a fully dialectical relationship. If so, no temporal or spatial boundary-line drawn around human experiences of history can be valid. St. Erkenwald reaches the same conclusion. The past in the poem is unlike the present, but it is nevertheless contained within the present: the past is right here, lurking underneath your cathedral. The Erkenwald poet’s sense of history is archaeological (Otter).

St. Erkenwald shows attunement to the possibilities of historical difference; but it balances that attunement against a sense of anachronism. The past did not have to be born, because it has always been present.

further reading

Bloomfield, Morton W. “Chaucer’s Sense of History.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 51 (1952): 301-13.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000; repr. 2007.

Frank, Roberta. “The Beowulf Poet’s Sense of History.” In The Wisdom of Poetry: Essays in Early English Literature in Honor of Morton Bloomfield, ed. Larry D. Benson and Siegfried Wenzel (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1982), pp. 53-65.

Otter, Monika. “‘New Werke’: St. Erkenwald, St. Albans, and the Medieval Sense of the Past.” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24 (1994): 387-414.

Schiffman, Zachary Sayre. The Birth of the Past. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.