Professor Renée Trilling will deliver the first lecture in the 2014-2015 CMRS Lecture Series.
Abstract: In texts like the Lacnunga and the Leechbooks, Anglo-Saxon healers struggle to merge two extremely powerful and largely incommensurate ideologies, with the result that detailed herbal remedies, charms written on communion wafers, and magical incantations of broken Latin and Irish find themselves on equal footing. Rather than focusing on whether or not these remedies are scientifically valid, then, I want to explore how the dissemination of medical knowledge in Anglo-Saxon England can offer evidence of a culture working out its own solutions to problems of embodiment amid the conflicting discourses of pre-Christian medicine and salvation theology.
Bio: Renée R. Trilling is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of The Aesthetics of Nostalgia: Historical Representation in Old English Verse (Toronto, 2009) and co-editor of A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Studies (Blackwell, 2012). She has published articles on Beowulf, Wulfstan the Homilist, Ælfric¹s hagiography, and Anglo-Saxon historiography. Her current work draws on recent trends in neuroscience and related fields to explore the role of materiality in Anglo-Saxon notions of subjectivity.
