This rich study takes Insular art on its own terms, revealing a distinctive and unorthodox theology that will inevitably change how scholars view the long arc of English piety and the English literary tradition. Drawing on a wide range of critical methodologies, Aesthetics and the Incarnation in Early Medieval Britain treats this era as a "contact zone" of cultural clash and exchange, where Christianity encountered a rich amalgam of practices and attitudes, particularly regarding the sensible realm. Tiffany Beechy illustrates how local cultures, including the Irish learned tradition, received the "Word that was made flesh," the central figure of Christian doctrine, in distinctive ways: the Word, for example, was verbal, related to words and signs, and was not at all ineffable. Likewise, the Word was often poetic-an enigma-and its powerful presence was not only hinted at (as St. Augustine would have it) but manifest in the mouth or on the page. Beechy examines how these Insular traditions received and expressed a distinctly iterable Incarnation. Often disavowed and condemned by orthodox authorities, this was in large part an implicit theology, expressed or embodied in form (such as art, compilation, or metaphor) rather than in treatises. Beechy demonstrates how these forms drew on various authorities especially important to Britain-Bede, Gregory the Great, and Isidore most prominent among them. Beechy's study provides a prehistory in the English literary tradition for the better-known experimental poetics of Middle English devotion. The book is unusual in the diversity of its primary material, which includes visual art, including the Book of Kells; obscure and often cursorily treated texts such as Adamnan's De locis sanctis ("On the holy lands"); and the difficult esoterica of the wisdom tradition.
Tiffany Beechy is professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is the author of The Poetics of Old English.
Preface Introduction 1. "Supereffability" and the Sacraments of Christ's Humanity 2. Seeing Double: Representing the Hypostatic Union 3. No Ideas but in Things: Aesthetics and the Flesh of the Word 4. Concealing is Revealing I: Opacity and Enigma in the Wisdom Tradition 5. Concealing is Revealing II: The Shadow Manuscript in the Margins of CCCC 41 Conclusion Works Cited List of Figures
"This is a profoundly original book that challenges us to reread familiar works and look more closely at unfamiliar ones. On every page, Beechy's work is provocative and exciting, substantial and serious, and it offers nothing less than a new understanding of faith and art in early medieval England." -R. M. Liuzza, editor of Old English Poetry: An Anthology "This book is a timely, valuable contribution to scholarly conversations about medieval religious cultures, early British literature, and disciplinary boundaries. It covers an impressive range of texts and puts texts into dialogue with each other in productive, original, and unexpected ways." -Nancy Bradley Warren, author of Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras "Tiffany Beechy's book seeks out the body of the incarnate Word through a glorious array of objects, images, texts, and codices from early medieval Britain.. . . This is a well-written, learned, innovative, loving, and I would expect exceedingly teachable book." -The Review of English Studies "Early medieval Christianity is still too often uncritically assumed to be monolithic, and Aesthetics and the Incarnation offers a valuable reminder of its eclecticism and hybridity in practice. Its insights will be of interest to scholars working broadly on art, literature, and the disparate religious beliefs--some "orthodox," some entirely non-Christian--that are almost always somewhere, somehow in the background of the books that have come down to us from the period." -The Medieval Review
