Confessing in Old English: The Life of Saint Mary of Egypt and the problem with penance
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Confessing in Old English: The Life of Saint Mar y of Egypt and the problem with penance
E r i c a We a v e r Department of English, University of California, Los Angeles, USA.
Abstract This essay theorizes early medieval confessional practices by exploring some of their risks, with particular attention to the Old English Life of Saint Mary of Egypt and the instructional note for a confessor, which begins ‘Man mot hine gebiddan swa swa he mæg ond can’ [‘One may pray just as he is able and knows how to’]. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2020) 11, 282–290. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00184-7
Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake and dress them in warm clothes again How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running until they forget that they are horses. – Richard Siken, ‘Scheherazade’ ‘Tell me’ makes for a slippery beginning. It conjures a teˆte-a`-teˆte, sure, but in Siken’s poem, any seeming tenderness disappears before the implicit violence signaled by the eponymous addressee: Scheherazade, who must wield her storytelling to ward off execution in the Islamic Golden Age frame-tale narrative now known as One Thousand and One Nights. This isn’t ordinary pillow talk, 2020 Springer Nature Limited. 2040-5960
postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies www.palgrave.com/journals
Vol. 11, 2-3, 282–290
Confessing in old English
then. Like Siken’s bodies and horses, the verb to tell is itself evocative and even risky. Telling, or not telling, can be dangerous. Think of telling a secret, telling someone off, or, riskier still, telling on someone else. And it is certainly true that nothing good ever follows from the warning, ‘I am going to tell you something.’ In both senses of the word (discrimination between possibilities and communication), it can be difficult to tell what’s going on. So, what can we do with telling, and especially with the act of telling about yourself to another person in pursuit of your own preservation – in short, in another word, with confession? How should we proceed when we can’t seem to induce a text to tell us much of anything at all? Or when the dangers of speaking become more overt both in the present and in the past, when even the act of telling risks obliterating rather than affirming the self? In the Old English Life of Saint Mary of Egypt, confession jeopardizes everything. Likely translated from Paul the Deacon’s Vita Sanctae Mariae Egyptiacae in the tenth century, the sometimes-salacious text centers on Mary’s voracious sexual appetite, conversion, and subsequent decision to take to the desert c. 373 CE, where she is later encountered, naked, by the elderly monk Zosimus, who chases her through the sands until she condescends to speak with him.1 Whereas Scheherazade’s speech stays death, however, Mary’s threatens annihilation. By her reckoning, she has spent 47 years in isolation and recounting her earlier exploits threatens to reawaken their accompanying desires. At several points, she tries to break off he
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