Abstract
This chapter offers a new reading of the soul and body debate tradition from Old English verse to the works of a number of early modern authors, notably Andrew Marvell. The genre is strongly identified with the High Medieval period, and nearly always considered to be of little literary interest. In particular, its earliest extant example (the OE Soul & Body) is usually considered a simpleminded precursor, and the most famous seventeenth-century instance (Marvell’s ‘A Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body’) a proto-modern parody. By reading these two poems side by side, however, the argument is made here that in developing a poetics out of the vocabulary of Christian dualism each reveals the problems that inhere in that vocabulary.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Margaret Cavendish, Poems, and Fancies (London: 1653), sig. S4r.
- 2.
The poem begins at sig. I3v. On the soul and the mind in Cavendish see: Holly Faith Nelson, ‘“A Good Christian, and a Good Natural Philosopher”: Margaret Cavendish’s Theory of the Soul(s) in the Early Enlightenment’, Studies in Philology, 113 (2016), 947–68 (esp. p. 953); Jay Stevenson, ‘The Mechanist-Vitalist Soul of Margaret Cavendish’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 36 (1996), 527–43. It is also noteworthy, however, that even elsewhere in Poems, and Fancies Cavendish takes a less straightforwardly dualist approach: in ‘The Animall Parliament’, for instance, ‘the Soul call[s] a Parliament in his Animal Kingdom, which Parliament consisteth of three parts, the Soul, the Body, and the Thoughts; which are Will, Imaginations, and Passions’ (sig. Iir).
- 3.
Cavendish’s approach is idiosyncratic, as her work tends to be, and its particular concerns—unhappy introspection, physical danger, ambition—are quite different to those of the texts that will be our focus here; nevertheless, in its form and tone alike the poem does evoke those texts.
- 4.
Thomas L. Reed Jr., Middle English Debate Poetry and the Aesthetics of Irresolution (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), p. 1.
- 5.
Rosalie Osmond, Mutual Accusation: Seventeenth-Century Body and Soul Dialogues in Their Literary and Theological Context (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), p. 100.
- 6.
Osmond, Mutual Accusation; Neil Cartlidge, ‘In the Silence of a Midwinter Night: A Re-evaluation of the Visio Philiberti’, Medium Ævum, 75 (2006), 24–45; Reed, Middle English, esp. p. 157. Douglas Moffat remarks the ‘sparseness’ of commentary upon Soul & Body as compared to that upon later medieval dialogues: The Old English Soul and Body (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1990) pp. 36–38.
- 7.
For the medieval popularity of the form see: Cartlidge, ‘In the Silence’. Reed lists versions of the ‘inexhaustibly popular’ form in ‘Greek, French, Provencal-Catalan, Italian, Czech, White Russian, Polish, Armenian […] Syriac, Old Norwegian, Old Icelandic, Old Castilian, and Hungarian’ (Middle English, p. 1).
- 8.
Robert W. Ackerman, ‘The Debate of the Body and the Soul and Parochial Christianity’, Speculum, 37 (1962), 541–65 (pp. 542–43); Jacob Riyeff, ‘Dualism in Old English Literature: the Body-and-Soul Theme and Vercelli Homily IV’, Studies in Philology, 112 (2015), 453–68 (pp. 455–57).
- 9.
In 1890 J. D. Bruce made the categorical distinction between works ‘in which the soul addresses the body … [and] those in which the body replies and to which alone the title of dialogue is properly applicable’: ‘A Contribution to the Study of “The Body and the Soul”: Poems in English’, Modern Language Notes, 5 (1890), 193–201 (p. 193). It has largely held.
- 10.
C. L. Wrenn, A Study of Old English Literature (London: Harrap, 1967), p. 156; S. A. J. Bradley, ed., Anglo-Saxon Poetry (London: Dent, 1995), p. 359.
- 11.
Reading’s account of Soul & Body, to which we return, argues that the poem imagines ‘a more complicated relationship between soul and body than merely an antagonistic dualism’ and thus chimes with my own, but her focus is quite different: Reading the Anglo-Saxon Self Through the Vercelli Book (New York: Peter Lang, 2018), p. 14. J. Bosworth and T. N. Toller, eds., A Dictionary of Old English (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1882–1898), s.v. mód: ‘the inner man, the spiritual as opposed to the bodily part of man’; Angus Cameron et al., eds., Dictionary of Old English A-I (Toronto: University of Toronto, continually updated resource), s.v. hyge: ‘mind, thought, intention, determination, purpose’; DOE, s.v. ferhð: ‘mind, soul, spirit, heart’; B-T, s.v. sáwel: ‘life or animal life’. On Old English psychology see: Malcolm Godden, ‘Anglo-Saxons on the Mind’, in Michael Lapidge and Helmut Gneuss, eds., Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies Presented to Peter Clemoes on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 271–98; Leslie Lockett, Anglo-Saxon Psychologies in the Vernacular and Latin Traditions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), esp. pp. 41–42; Britt Mize, Traditional Subjectivities: The Old English Poetics of Mentality (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013). Michael Matto shares my sense that in the post-mortem setting of Soul & Body those concepts of self seem to recede: ‘True Confessions: The Seafarer and Technologies of the Sylf’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 103 (1998), 156–79 (p. 171). Certainly in early medieval England the association of soul and mind was at the very least familiar: King Alfred’s translation of Augustine’s Soliloquies maintains its sense of ‘soul’ as ‘mind’ throughout, for instance.
- 12.
Rosalie L. Colie, My Ecchoing Song: Andrew Marvell’s Poetry of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 57.
- 13.
Though Christopher Ricks, for example, is very good on the confounding effects of Marvell’s poem: ‘Its Own Resemblance’, in C. A. Patrides, ed., Approaches to Marvell: The York Tercentenary Lectures (London: Routledge, 1978), pp. 108–37 (pp. 113–15).
- 14.
J. B. Leishman, The Art of Marvell’s Poetry, 2nd ed. (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1968), pp. 209–19; Michael J. West, ‘The Internal Dialogue of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 146 ’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 25 (1974), 109–22.
- 15.
Osmond, Mutual, p. 51; Michel-André Bossy, ‘Medieval Debates of Body and Soul’, Comparative Literature, 28 (1976), 144–63. This is especially pronounced in the case of Soul & Body. Even where the poem’s literary value is not explicitly denigrated, it is broadly neglected in favour of interest in its doctrinal stance. Allen J. Frantzen’s account maintains such a focus: ‘The Body in “Soul and Body I”’, The Chaucer Review, 17 (1982), 76–88; Mary Heyward Ferguson too, despite stating her intention to rehabilitate Soul & Body as a work of literature, in the end focuses upon its doctrinal position: ‘The Structure of the “Soul’s Address to the Body” in Old English’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 69 (1970), 72–80. There are partial exceptions. T. A. Shippey briefly pays the poem the kind of literary attention it has rarely received, yet in the end downplays its poetic interest: Poems of Wisdom and Learning in Old English (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1976), pp. 29–31. Michelle Hoek does think about the poem’s problematic dualism with close attention to its language, but draws on Derrida and Foucault to read the poem primarily in terms of ideological theory: ‘Violence and Ideological Inversion in the Old English Soul’s Address to the Body’, Exemplaria, 10 (1998), 271–85. In Cognitive Approaches to Old English Poetry (Cambridger: D. S. Brewe, 2012), Antonina Harbus analyses the poem’s figurative language, but does so not in terms of their poetic effect but as part of a broader interest in Anglo-Saxon anthropology. The tendency to focus upon doctrinal problems or hortatory efficacy has continued in two other recent contributions: Danielle Yardy, ‘Tonal Complexity and Formal Conflicts in the Old English Soul and Body Poems’, STET, 2 (2012), 1–14; Riyeff, ‘Dualism’.
- 16.
Reed, Middle English, p. 1. Sebastian P. Brock, ‘The Dispute Between Soul and Body: An Example of a Long-Lived Mesopotamian Literary Genre’, Aram, 1 (1989), 53–64. See also: Claudia Di Sciacca, ‘The “Ubi Sunt” Motif and the Soul-and-Body Legend in Old English Homilies: Sources and Relationships’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 105 (2006), 365–87 (p. 366).
- 17.
Though some scholars adjust this lineage somewhat. See: Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 90–91.
- 18.
For more on the homily see: Osmond, Mutual, p. 57.
- 19.
The Visio Pauli is available in translation in: Philip Schaffe, ed. and trans., Ante-Nicene Fathers, electronic reprint ed., 10 vols. (Grand Rapids: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 2001), IX. On the text see: Jan N. Bremmer and István Czachesz, eds., The Visio Pauli and the Gnostic Apocalypse of Paul (Leuven: Peeters, 2007). For more detail on the transmission of such apocryphal texts in the Middle Ages see: Malcolm Godden, ‘Aelfric & the Vernacular Prose Tradition’, in Paul E. Szarmach and Bernard Felix Huppe, eds., Old English Homily and Its Background (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1978), pp. 99–118 (p. 101); Frederick M. Biggs, ed., Sources of Anglo-Saxon Culture: The Apocrypha (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007).
- 20.
Conlee, Middle English, p. xi. Ackerman, ‘The Debate’, pp. 542–43.
- 21.
Though she does not make precisely this point, for Osmond the ability to imagine abstract things as vividly personified underwrites the medieval appeal of the soul and body genre: ‘Body and Soul Dialogues in the Seventeenth Century’, English Literary Renaissance, 4 (1974), 364–403 (p. 371).
- 22.
Bruce, ‘A Contribution’, p. 193.
- 23.
On The Grave see: Louise Dudley, ‘The Grave’, Modern Philology, 11 (1914), 429–42. Jenny Rebecca Rytting translates and comments upon ‘A Disputacioun’ in: ‘A Disputacioun Betwyx þe Body and Wormes: A Translation’, Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 31 (2000), 1–16.
- 24.
Though the dialogue form comes to dominate, Reed notes that Soul & Body spawns some imitators of its own (Middle English, p. 157).
- 25.
Eleanor Kellogg Heningham translates and analyses the Royal Debate in: An Early Latin Debate of the Body and Soul, Preserved in MS Royal 7 A III in the British Museum (New York: Published by the author, 1939). The Visio is examined in depth below.
- 26.
This poem can be found alongside a translation in: Susanna Greer Fein et al., ed. and trans., The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, 3 vols. (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2014), II.
- 27.
On the prominence of the Visio in the manuscript record see: Neil Cartlidge, ‘In the Silence of a Midwinter Night: A Re-evaluation of the Visio Philiberti’, Medium Aevum, 75 (2006), 24–45 (pp. 24–25). The poem is most readily available in Thomas Wright’s 1841 edition The Latin Poems Commonly Attributed to Walter Mapes (London: The Camden Society, 1841), which prints a 312-line version based on the thirteenth-century BL MS Harley 978, as Cartlidge agrees ‘certainly one of the oldest extant manuscripts containing the poem’ (Cartlidge, p. 27).
- 28.
As Cartlidge points out, in fact, the poem has been ‘equally unreliably attributed to Robert Grosseteste and St Bernard as well as to Mapes’ (p. 27), and indeed the Harley manuscript does not include either the Philibert or Bernard incipits. Wright titles the poem ‘Dialogus inter Corpus et Animam’ and gives the ‘Philiberti’ tag only by way of a note quoting T. G. von Karajan’s 1839 edition Frühlingsgabe für Freunde älterer Literatur, which includes a Viennese manuscript’s version of the work that does feature Philibert (the Visio Philiberti appellation is Karajan’s taxonomic invention).
- 29.
I quote Clark Sutherland Northup’s prose translation of the Visio: ‘Dialogus Inter Corpus et Animam: A Fragment and a Translation’, PMLA, 16 (1901), 503–25 (p. 516). Northup translates a slightly different version than that printed by Wright, but does so with constant reference to Wright’s. Further references to the translation are given parenthetically.
- 30.
The manuscript Northup translates continues with a final section, as he notes almost certainly an extraneous later addition, mourning the decline of the world as a whole.
- 31.
Saint BERNARD’S Vision. (A brief Discourse Dialogue-wise) between the Soul and body of a Damned Man newly Deceased, laying the faults one upon other: With a Speech of the Devils in Hell (London: c. 1640); William Crashaw, The Complaint or Dialogue, Betwixt The Soule and the Bodie of a Damned Man. Each Laying the Fault Upon the Other (London: 1622). (Crashaw’s full title in fact attributes it as ‘Supposed to be written by S. Bernard from a nightly vision of his, and now published out of an ancient Manuscript Copie’.) Tessa Watt argues that the ballad constitutes ‘a powerful argument for the continuity of a medieval religious outlook well into the early modern period’: Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 111.
- 32.
For a fuller account of the genre in the seventeenth century see Osmond, Mutual, pp. 84–107.
- 33.
James Howell, The Vision, Or, A Dialog Between the Soul and the Bodie. Fancied in a Morning-Dream (London: 1651); Francis Davison, A Poetical Rapsody (London: 1602), sig. I12r; Humphrey Mill, Poems occasioned by a melancholy vision (London: 1639), sig. I5v-r; William Prynne, Mount-Orgueil: or Divine and profitable meditations (London: 1641), sig. Z4r-Aa4v. Sonnet 146 is analysed in considerable detail in Chapter 4.
- 34.
Osmond, Mutual, pp. 69, 70, 83. Cathy Shrank was kind enough to point me towards the anonymous text mentioned in the next sentence: ‘Here begynneth a lytell treatyse of the dyenge creature’ (London: 1507).
- 35.
Howell, A Vision, sig. A5v–A6v. Further references appear parenthetically.
- 36.
The early modern appetite for literary debate was nearly as great as the medieval: see Joan Faust, Andrew Marvell’s Liminal Lyrics: The Space Between (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2012), p. 191. Cf. J. K. Wilson, Incomplete Fictions: The Formation of English Renaissance Dialogue (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1985).
- 37.
Andrew Marvell, ‘A Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body’ (24), in Hugh MacDonald, ed., The Poems of Andrew Marvell (London: Routledge, 1952), pp. 15–16. All further references to the poem are given parenthetically.
- 38.
Davison, Poetical, sig. I12r.
- 39.
For an account of the conventional Aristotelian divisions of the soul see: Vidal, Sciences, pp. 32–33.
- 40.
See Waddington, ‘All in All’.
- 41.
Osmond, Mutual, p. 69. The irresolution is not absolutely constant: ‘In a thestri’ and Cavendish’s dialogue, for instance, appear to detect nothing problematic in the soul-body division at all, merely running through their respective arguments vis-à-vis which is responsible for their mutual unhappiness.
- 42.
Reading, Anglo-Saxon Self, p. 19.
- 43.
For more details of the differences and for why the Exeter’s Soul & Body II is considered marginally superior to the Vercelli’s Soul & Body I, see: The Old English Soul and Body, ed. by Douglas Moffat (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1990), pp. 10, 36–38. John D. Niles gives an authoritative account of the Exeter Book as a whole in: God’s Exiles and English Verse: On the Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2019).
- 44.
Throughout I refer to Moffat’s rendering of Soul & Body II, edited with reference to I, and to his modern English translation (except when I cite other translations or the major Old English dictionaries), omitting in-text editorial marks unless they have implications for the sense of the poem.
- 45.
The parenthetical query is Moffat’s; I return to it below. Ferguson, I should note, would argue against any sense of abruptness: a cornerstone of her argument is the structural integrity of the poem (‘The Structure’, pp. 73–74, 78).
- 46.
Wrenn, A Study, p. 156.
- 47.
Bradley, Anglo-Saxon, p. 359.
- 48.
Plato, Phaedo , 87c–d, in: Euthyphro: Apology; Crito; Phaedo; Phaedrus, trans. by Harold North Fowler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). For more on the image of the soul dressed in the body see: Rosalie Osmond, Imagining the Soul: A History (Thrupp: Sutton Publishing, 2003), pp. 146–47.
- 49.
Benjamin Putnam Kurtz et al. give a comprehensive account of the figure of Gifer: Gifer the Worm: An Essay Toward the History of an Idea, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1929). The capitalisation of the name is not universal across different texts (though it is capitalised in Exeter’s Soul & Body II), and so the degree to which Gifer is a properly allegorical figure is by no means clear.
- 50.
Reading, Anglo-Saxon Self, p. 46.
- 51.
‘Anatomy’, of course, is an anachronism here. Nevertheless, that post-mortem mutilation of criminals was almost certainly an early English practice is interesting given that the body is referred to in this poem as ‘werga’, or ‘criminal’. See: Sam Lucy, The Anglo-Saxon Way of Death (Thrupp: Sutton Publishing, 2000), p. 75. Hoek’s ‘Ideological Inversion’ develops a Foucauldian reading of the body’s criminalisation in Soul & Body.
- 52.
Crashaw’s translation of the Visio puts even more of an accent here, the soul reminding the body of its erstwhile ‘change[s] of rayment’ and ‘many coloured vesture’ (The Complaint, sig. A9r).
- 53.
As Moffat notes, it is not quite certain that ‘he’ refers to the soul in these lines; Shippey gives ‘man’, for instance.
- 54.
DOE, s.v. ‘firen’.
- 55.
It has been suggested that the final couplet in fact belongs to the soul, but the possibility seems remote given the grammar. It is also worth pointing out the textual issues that make any final judgement about the final lines especially difficult. As Leishman indicates (Art, p. 216), despite attempts over the years to assign a ‘win’ in the poem to the body on the grounds that it speaks last and is given four extra lines to do so, the oddity of the stanzaic departure, alongside annotations on some early copies of Marvell’s works, have suggested to some scholars that the exchange should continue at indeterminate length in lines that either were never written or have been lost. Here, that is, textual history has intervened to impose a further level of inconclusiveness upon the fundamentally inconclusive soul and body tradition.
- 56.
For two recent examples see: Faust, Liminal, pp. 183–204 (esp. pp. 191–98), where the focus is upon the poem as informed by Marvell’s Cambridge education in rhetoric and debate; and A. D. Cousins, Andrew Marvell: Loss and Aspiration, Home and Homeland in Miscellaneous Poems (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), pp. 128–31.
- 57.
Howell, Vision, sig. B3r.
- 58.
The sense is common, but for an example we can turn once more to Sir John Davies, who in Nosce Teipsum refers to the ‘sinews’ as ‘a net all ore the bodie spred’ that gives it its ‘Feeling power’ (1057–60).
- 59.
Unless otherwise noted, in discussions of Donne’s poetry I refer throughout to John Donne: The Major Works, ed. by John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
- 60.
Samuel Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrim (London: 1619), sig. H3r; Kitty Scoular Datta, ‘New Light on Marvell’s “A Dialogue Between the Soul and Body”’, Renaissance Quarterly, 22 (1969), 242–55 (p. 243).
- 61.
The image of the double heart is an early modern commonplace for deceitfulness, following Psalm 12. 2: ‘they speak vanity every one with his neighbour; with flattering lips and with a double heart do they speak’.
- 62.
Bright, A Treatise, sig. *iiiiiiijv.
- 63.
Anonymous, A Breefe collection, sig. C2v. Unlike the conflation of soul and ghostly eye, this is not an early modern addition: the fourteenth-century original too shifts between ghostly eye and heart in this way.
- 64.
Davison, Poetical, sig. I1v−r.
- 65.
For a brief discussion of these ideas in an apposite context see: Thomas J. Farrell, ‘Introduction: Bakhtin, Liminality, and Medieval Literature’, in Farrell, ed., Bakhtin and Medieval Voices (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995), pp. 1–14 (pp. 3–6). Nil Korkut has also considered dialogue as a structuring feature of medieval parody: Kinds of Parody from the Medieval to the Postmodern (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2009), 32–33. It is worth noting that the application of Bakhtinian theory to the medieval period has been resisted on grounds of oversimplification by scholars including Martha Bayless in: Parody in the Middle Ages: The Latin Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).
- 66.
Stephen Greenblatt introduces the model in the chapter ‘Invisible Bullets’ in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 21–65.
- 67.
Donald J. Millus, ‘Andrew Marvell, Andreas Vesalius, and a Medieval Tradition’, Yale University Library Gazette, 47 (1973), 216–23 (p. 216).
- 68.
Andreas Vesalius, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Basel: 1543), for example sigs. Q4r, Q6v.
- 69.
Ruth Wallerstein, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Poetic (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1950), p. 162.
- 70.
Datta, ‘New Light’, p. 243.
- 71.
Cousins, Loss, p. 130; Data, ‘New Light’, p. 246.
- 72.
Shippey, Poems, p. 35.
- 73.
Ferguson, ‘The Structure’, p. 79.
- 74.
DOE, s.v. ‘forþon’. Both Bradley (Anglo-Saxon, p. 358) and Thomson (Dying, pp. 141–42) note the body’s decomposition in this regard, but do not elaborate.
- 75.
B-T, s.v. ‘horsclíce’.
- 76.
B-T, s.v. ‘wítan’, II: ‘to lay to a person’s charge, lay the blame of something on a person or thing, impute’. Christopher A. Jones gives ‘reproach’ in his Old English Shorter Poems (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Shippey as well as Moffat gives ‘blame’ (Poems of Wisdom, p. 139).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Davies, A. (2021). The Poetics of Soul and Body from the Exeter Book to Andrew Marvell: Dualism and Its Discontents. In: Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature . Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66333-9_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66333-9_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-66332-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-66333-9
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)