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IMAGES OF COMMUNITY IN OLD ENGLISH POETRY. By Hugh Magennis. (Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England, 18.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. ix + 212. $54.95.
Each term in the title of Hugh Magennis's book should be taken quite literally. His study concerns the ways in which that most basic, if most elusive of social forms-community-is represented in Old English poems. He makes some general attempt in his opening chapter to historicize the matter of community in Anglo-Saxon England, but he does not deal widely throughout the remainder of his book with images of community from such genres as chronicles, homilies, sermons, prose saints' lives, laws, or works of social theory (such as Wulfstan's Institutes of Polity) . Magennis's book is, to put it simply, very much a formalist literary study (pp. 3-4). In its methodological assumptions and practices it resembles a work such as E. B. Irving's A Reading of Beowulf ( 968), and in its larger cultural assumptions about the monastic audience for Old English poetry one such as B. E Huppe's The Web of Words ( 970). Magennis notes and sometimes relies on the works of more theoretically-inclined Anglo-Saxonists, including J. XV. Earl, J. P. Hermann, and S. Lerer, but he rarely interrogates or otherwise complicates his main terms.
As the title of his second chapter indicates, Magennis offers a sense of community and its manifestations that will seem unexceptionable to most Anglo-Saxonists: "Hall and city, feasting and drinking: images of communal life." The general bundle of cultural behaviors that Anglo-Saxonists have traditionally labeled as the comitatus, whether in a strict or loose construction of that term, is for Magennis the essence of community as represented in Old English poetry. His book could have had as its subtitle "the comitatus at work and play" If one reads the corpus of Old English poetry with Magennis-as made up of such works as Beowulf,Judith, Juliana, Genesis A, The Seafarer Maxims I & II-it is not hard to accept his argument that the comitatus can be read as the basis for structures of communal life represented in these poems. The benefits of his approach are evident, as are its limits, and each can be considered in turn.
As seems only right, this book about poetic...