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98 3 The riddles of the Franks Casket: Enigmas, agency and assemblage Since its recovery from Auzon, France, in 1859 by English antiquary Sir Augustus Franks, the whalebone chest known as the Franks or Auzon Casket has been a ‘fascinating enigma’ to those who have studied it and among the most ‘intriguing and irritating’ of Anglo-Saxon artefacts to have survived.1 Now held in the British Museum, it has been dated to the early eighth century and is likely to be of Northumbrian craftsmanship, though more exact details of its original context are unknown. The
this work have been the most important part of it? Alongside the religious, monastic audience of the Ruthwell monument, we must take into account its other audience: the British who were still living in the Solway region in the early Middle Ages. The kingdom of Rheged was an important component part of early Northumbria, though there are difficulties in pinpointing exactly when and where this kingdom existed: Rheged is mentioned in a number of British sources, yet, perhaps unsurprisingly, the name does not appear in Bede or the early ninth-century Historia Brittonum
’s development. In The Rise of Western Christendom, Peter Brown identifies this process as part of the formation of a ‘micro-Christendom’ and points to the unusual wealth of Northumbrian kings and aristocracy in the seventh century that made a massive transfer of goods from the Continent to northern Britain possible. This practice can be seen early on with Benedict Biscop, a wealthy Northumbrian nobleman turned monk who was able to move across Europe as a Christian aristocrat, in search of Christian goods, returning to the north-east with not only books but also relics
the British Museum. But who was Beagnoþ anyway? A warrior who liked hunting and combat? Someone interested in runic literacy or mysterious magic? A skilled smith? ‘Beagnoþ’ has become synonymous with the blade itself and so might as well belong to the blade. The seax now owns Beagnoþ as much as Beagnoþ ever owned the seax. Other Anglo- Saxon artefacts are more outspoken still. They want to speak about themselves instead of the humans who crafted them. The eighth- century Franks Casket is a box of bone that enigmatically alludes to its former fate as a whale that
will return to some of these ideas in Chapter 5. 36 Fred Orton and Ian Wood with Clare A. Lees, Fragments of History: Rethinking the Ruthwell and Bewcastle Monuments (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 131. 37 Tupper, ‘Anglo-Saxon Dæg-Mæl’, p. 129. 38 Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion, pp. 104–5. 39 Éamonn Ó Carragáin, Ritual and the Rood: Liturgical Images and the Old English Poems of the Dream of the Rood Tradition (London: British Library, 2005), p. 46. 40 Orton and Wood with Lees, Fragments of History, p. 132. 41 Ibid., pp. 137–40. 42 Ibid., p. 134. 43
secular and one religious, and will argue that the material environs effect alternative modes of reading experience shaped by both architectural space and the embodiment of readers. 130 Participatory reading in late-medieval England The Percy wall texts The secular example with which I begin addresses a series of particularly noteworthy wall texts recorded in the mid-fifteenthcentury English manuscript MS Royal 18.D.ii at the British Library in London. The manuscript is best known as the sole illuminated copy of Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes. The illuminations in the
uinum (rough, inferior wine) and has a sinner speak wealode mid wordum (‘strangely’, ‘impudently’). 33 These associations survive in present-day British slang words such as ‘to welsh’ (to cheat) and ‘welsher’ (an untrustworthy person). 34 As Ryan Craig and Victoria Davis demonstrate, such discursive practices are not divorced from material realities and are often used to reinforce and sustain material inequity by
Beowulf be on anyway? The cool convenience of an app, of swiping right, a pay-to-play matchmaking service, or OkCupid? It would be difficult to get a date with Beowulf – not that function of the text that we name its hero, but the poem itself. If we take the poem's material state quite literally – the sole surviving copy in the charred manuscript held behind glass in the British Library now known as London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius MS A.xv – this is all the more true. Is that the name it puts on its Tinder account, the British Library shelf-mark that
Sharon’s ‘Arabs for breakfast’, absurd. Notes Thanks are due to Ann Rycraft and Hélène Tronc for innumerable conversations about food, medieval and modern, and anthropophagy and to Victoria Stavely for her culinary experiments. 1 Diuersa Cibaria in Curye on Inglysch, eds C. Heiatt and S. Butler, EETS s.s. 8 (London, 1985), p. 48. The recipe is extant in three manuscripts, one MUP_McDonald_07_Ch6 143 11/18/03, 17:02 144 Nicola McDonald Anglo-Norman (British Library, MS Royal 12 C. xii, fol.12v (c. 1320–40)) and two English (British Library, MS Additional 46919, fol
tyrannical lordship (a phenomenon, to be sure, of the last decade of the century).54 However, that type of contextual reconstruction is bedevilled by the vagaries of dating. What is more of a constant in the later Middle Ages, and what arguably most needs to be restored to view not only in discussion of Sir Gowther but in discussions of many romance narratives, is the work that such romances do on behalf of the ideology of dynasty: their presentation and resolution of the pressures and anxieties and ‘demons’ besetting a dynastic society. Notes 1 British Library, MS Royal