Speaking Two Languages

Allen J. Frantzen is Professor of English at Loyola University of Chicago. He is the author of The Literature of Penance in Anglo-Saxon England; King Alfred; and The Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition.

"Speaking Two Languages offers a provocative collection of new work on the relationship of traditional medieval studies and contemporary critical practice. The goal of the collection is not simply to look at texts through theory but to refract mutually the one through the other. The simultaneity of the historical and the theoretical, the philological and the interpretive, presents a set of essays widely divergent in method and tone, and part of the experience of reading the collection is to be, by turns, seduced, cajoled, annoyed, and stimulated into a healthy conversation with them all." — Seth Lerer, Princeton University"It's not only in what they say but in how they have said it that these eight authors have helped Anglo-Saxon and medieval studies join the dialogues of late twentieth-century literary theory." — R.A. Shoaf, University of Florida

• Acknowledgments Preface 1. Prologue: Documents and Monuments: Difference and Inter-disciplinarity in the Study of Medieval CultureAllen J. Frantzen 2. On Reading Eve: Genesis B and the Readers' DesireGillian R. Overing 3. Beowulf and the Origins of CivilizationJames W Earl 4. The Plot of Piers Plowman and the Contradictions of FeudalismBritton J. Harwood 5. The Language of Transgression: Body, Flesh, and Word in Mystical DiscourseKarma Lochrie 6. Texts That Speak to Readers Who Hear: Old English Poetry and the Languages of Oral TraditionJohn Miles Foley 7. Working with Patristic Sources: Language and Context in Old English HomiliesClare A. Lees 8. Medieval Textuality and the Archaeology of Textual CultureMartin Irvine 9. Epilogue: De Scientia Interpretandi: Oral Tradition and the Place of Other Theories in the Graduate CurriculumAdam Brooke Davis Notes Contributors Index