Chapter 4 - Imagination at the Edge of the World: Luxuriating Women in Vercelli Homily VII and a Resistant Audience

Summary

WHY BOTHER with sexist, hierarchical, doctrinally self-satisfied texts from the past? The recent discussions about the racist underpinnings of early medieval English studies perhaps provide a good moment to consider why to engage with material from that period that presents an ideological position abhorrent to those who study it. Homilies, which make up a good proportion of the surviving corpus of Old English writing, are a good subject for such inquiry since they often work to shore up existing order and reinforce repressive ideologies. And yet I want to suggest that there is a potential both for insight and for pleasure in unpacking those ideologies. In this essay, I will consider as a case study a small part of a single homily, Vercelli VII, which explicitly presents horrible misogyny. I will suggest that the misogynist diatribe reveals an underlying construction of gendered roles that sees gender as a construction of nurture in a way that might be surprising. The consequence of this construction points to the performative nature of identity and thereby makes resistance possible. That insight will encourage me to explore the evidence for practices of everyday life that can illuminate the exhortations of the homiletic voice. The resulting dissonance between the exhortations of the homiletic voice and the probable lived realities of those addressed will allow me to dramatize the construction of a resistant audience and, at the same time, to suggest the pleasures of interpretation through scholarship examining early medieval England.

Vercelli VII, a homily condemning the sins of softness and of gluttony, is of considerable interest to a modern audience not only for its unusual images and wealth of biblical allusions, not only because it incorporates explicit address to women as well as men, but also for its revelation of aspects of everyday life as the homilist spells out bodily practices of hygiene and care in surprising detail. The homily can open a window into the imaginative thought-world of an early English audience, even as it depicts a Mediterranean lifestyle rather than the ways of the English congregation to whom it was recited. Even though it is the homilist’s clear intention to condemn the indulgences he describes, I want to ponder whether audiences could have taken the chaff and ignored the fruit, namely resisted the moral of the exhortation against luxury and instead revelled in the description they were supposed to be repelled by.