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Beowulf: Cultural Encounter and the Beginning of English Literature
28th October 2024: 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm GMT
The Old English poem Beowulf, dating from the late seventh or early eighth century, offers a textual encounter with the dynamic culture of early medieval England. Highlighting the theology of the early English church, the poem reveals a deep reverence of God as Creator and an acute awareness of God’s ongoing governance of creation through the unfolding of his will in daily life. The spiritual battle between good and evil is a paradigm through which the Beowulf-poet sees reality, and the Beowulfian imagination is evidently a thoroughly biblical one, given the poem’s many scriptural allusions and parallels. Textual analysis reveals that Beowulf is not the product of a primitive “Dark Ages,” but the sophisticated output of an intellectually advanced monastic milieu. Beowulf contributes to a wider corpus of early Old English religious poems which form the roots of English theological and literary tradition.
In this talk, Jasmine Jones will provide a close-reading analysis of Beowulf in the original Old English, illuminating the two main topics of cultural encounter in the poem: religion and Germanic-heroic culture.
This event is sponsored by the Future of the Humanities Project and Blackfriars Hall, Oxford. It is part of the year-long series, Cultural Encounters: Books that Have Made a Difference.
Online. Free and open to all. Registration is required.
Jasmine Jones is a college lecturer in English at Pembroke College, Oxford, and Stipendiary Lecturer in English (650–1550) at St. Peter’s College, Oxford. Jones is finishing her doctorate in English at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, where she has been a Clarendon Scholar and the Bruce Mitchell Scholar of Old and Middle English. Her research focuses on understanding the theology of the earliest writings which survive in the English language: Old English monastic poetry from around 650 to 850 CE.
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Dr Clare Broome Saunders
4pm, Mon, 11 Nov: On Middlemarch
Dr Neil Garrod
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Dr Anthony O’Mahony
4pm, Mon, 25 Nov: On The Sayings of the Desert Fathers
Contact:
Las Casas Institute with Georgetown University
lascasas@bfriars.ox.ac.uk