Structuring Spaces: Oral Poetics and Architecture in Early Medieval England

by Lori Ann Garner

In Structuring Oral Poetics and Architecture in Early Medieval England, Lori Ann Garner illuminates the idiomatic and traditional meanings invested in depictions of architecture within the vernacular verse of early medieval England, portrayals that consistently demonstrate a shared aesthetic between literary texts and physical buildings. Through systematic exploration of the period's verbal and material culture as complementary art forms, Garner argues that in Anglo-Saxon England the arts of poetry and building emerged from the same cultural matrix. Not only did Anglo-Saxon builders and poets draw demonstrably from many of the same traditionally encoded motifs and images, but so rhetorically powerful was the period's architectural poetics that its expressive force continued in literature and architecture produced long after the Norman Conquest. Far from conceiving this inherited tradition as monolithic in nature, Structuring Spaces foregrounds the complex interface of orality and literacy as a nexus of varied and multivalent cultural traditions that influenced the production of texts and buildings alike. After establishing a model of architectural poetics based on oral theory and vernacular architecture, Garner explores fictionalized buildings in such works as Beowulf and the Ruin , architectural representation in Old English adaptations of Greek and Latin works, uses of architectural metaphor, and themes of buildings in Anglo-Saxon maxims, riddles, elegies, hagiographies, and charms. Her book draws on scholarship from art history, archaeology, anthropology, and architecture, as well as the great wealth of studies addressing the literature itself.

416 pages, Paperback

First published May 15, 2011

Reviews

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an exploration of how the material culture of building in medieval England and the poetics of architecture in the literature of the period intertwine. Garner Focuses on the associative qualities of specific lexical representations of built space in Old English (and some post-Conquest writings as well). The book is useful for me in writing a dissertation on Anglo-Saxon conceptual metaphors involving space due to both its subject matter and its structure and scope (which reassure me that I can actually write something comparable). I recommend the book for any student of Old English who is interested in the currently popular scholarly topics of space, place, and landscape.

[Brackman1066 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Garner's book is a fascinating analysis of the valences of built spaces in early medieval literature. Many of the phrases about buildings and places that appear in these texts carry significance that most of us have missed. A wonderful study of literature and archaeology.