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Early medieval English manuscripts (c. 700-1100) contain a notable number of remedies, personal prayers, incantations, and instructions for ritual acts designed to protect, heal, and make meaningful changes in the reality of their users, from restoring stolen cattle to curing fevers. Of these paraliturgical "charms", 12 contain portions of spoken Old English verse — and detailed narratives of conflict, aggression, and incursion, centered on the vulnerable human body or human community. Engaging this year's Medieval Colloquium theme of “Religious Textuality,” this paper uses the verse charms to explore the postlapsarian landscape of early medieval England, a world viewed as inherently hostile to humanity due to Adam and Eve’s exile from Paradise, but also as potentially bursting with harnessable power for human use. The paper proposes that the verse charms restore boundaries between human spaces and a dangerous wilderness teeming with disease agents by turning ambivalent and monstrous forces against one another, directing their violence away from the patient’s body. In so doing, the charms locate their users and audiences within salvation history, asserting that bodily vulnerability is a temporary state for the faithful — a long, dark stretch between Paradise and Judgment Day, but one that ends with victory for humanity and the Christian God over forces inimical to them.
Caroline (Caz) Batten is assistant professor of medieval English literature and core faculty in the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies. A scholar of Old English and Old Norse language and literature, their research interests include gender and sexuality, sickness and health, the history of medicine, and somatic emotions in medieval texts. Their monograph in progress, “Vulnerable Bodies: Verse Charms and the Old English Poetics of Integrity,” explores the verse, content, and rich cultural context of twelve protective magical incantations copied in English medical and religious manuscripts in the tenth and eleventh centuries. They are also the author of Health and the Body in Early Medieval England (Cambridge Elements, CUP, forthcoming 2024), an introduction to early medieval English medical practice and conceptions of the body.
Their research has appeared in Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Review of English Studies, Medium Ævum, Scandinavian Studies, Emotions: History, Culture, Society, and Viking and Medieval Scandinavia, among others, and in edited collections including, most recently, Early Medieval Life Courses: Cultural-Historical Perspectives (Brill, 2022) and Tradition and Innovation in Old English Metre (AUP, 2022). They are currently an editor of the journal New Medieval Literatures, and coeditor, with Gareth Lloyd Evans, of a special issue of English Studies, 'Deconstructing Masculinities in Old English Literature' (104:5, forthcoming 2024).
They received their B.A. from Swarthmore College and their M.Phil and D.Phil from the University of Oxford. Prior to joining Penn English, they were a RANNÍS Icelandic Research Fund Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Iceland and stipendiary lecturer in Medieval English Literature at the University of Oxford.