Justice in Anglo-Saxon England: A New Approach to an Old Concept
Abstract
Understanding the minds of Anglo-Saxon people who lived over nine hundred years ago is a difficult if not impossible task. Even to attempt such an understanding is pretentious, for it requires the reader to cross numerous barriers: temporal, cultural, social, linguistic, technological, and even conceptual. Reading Anglo-Saxon works requires the reader to do more than simply apply his (or her) knowledge to the text; he must defer some of his or her cultural assumptions in order to avoid the temptation, as T.A. Shippey terms it, of making lithe subject fit what he happens to know" (Old English Verse 16).
This temptation of the modern audience to mould any given aesthetic work to its own understanding makes it difficult for twentieth-century individuals to read works from the past without losing integral portions of meaning. This problem multiplies when one must bridge what C.S. Lewis calls the “Great Divide” separating pneumatic from scientific methods of thought (10). Thus, an individual must comprehend not only the words of Anglo-Saxon texts. He or she must also perceive the way in which pre-modern men and women thought about themselves and their universe, the Anglo-Saxon "act of knowing", or cognition (Gholson 7).
This research seeks to ferret out the Anglo-Saxon concept of justice by employing a Piagetian model of analysis to a broad and varied sample of Old English works. This sample includes a wide range of "genres", including epics, elegies, homilies, sermons, saints’ lives, law codes, and even maxims. Some of the works have identifiable authors; some do not. Some are specifically religious works; some are secular in nature. Moreover, the sample includes works of both prose and verse, works written to entertain and works written to instruct, with dates ranging from the seventh to the eleventh century. Such a varied selection is necessary, for the broader and more representative the sample, the more likely the researcher will be to resist the temptation to make the subject fit her expectations.
I hope to demonstrate that application of a Piagetian framework to Old English studies is a pertinent and innovative method of historicist criticism, even if it does no more than circumvent some of the culture-bound assumptions that a modern reader brings to Old English works.
Description
Program year: 1988-1989Digitized from print original stored in HDR
Subject
justiceOld English
Anglo-Saxon
Piagetian model of analysis
modes of thought
assumptions of the modern reader
genre
Citation
Barnett, Lyrissa C. (1989). Justice in Anglo-Saxon England: A New Approach to an Old Concept. University Undergraduate Fellow. Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /CAPSTONE -BarnettL _1989.