The Editorial and Translation History of the Afrisc Meowle

The second text in the Junius 11 manuscript, the Old English Exodus, like the entire Old English poetic corpus, uses an editorially provided title, since the manuscript does not provide one.Footnote ¹ Exodus, however, is something of a misnomer, because the poem presents a version of only part of the book of the Hebrew Bible and adds some engaging episodes and details to the biblical narrative. The poem narrates only chapters 12 to 15, from the deaths of the Egyptian firstborn to the celebration of the Hebrews after the crossing of the Red Sea. Exodus formed a crucial part of Nicholas Howe's analysis of the early medieval English people's creation of their own migration myth; in addition, scholars have discussed in detail the additions of the metaphoric “sail” that protects the Hebrews as they travel across the desert as well as the military imagery and diction that pervade the descriptions of the tribes as they progress into the parted waters of the Red Sea (Earl; Zacher).

With no contextualizing information and no parallel character in the biblical Exodus, the Afrisc meowle appears suddenly in line 580 at the very end of the poem, as the Hebrews celebrate their delivery from the Egyptian army and the wrath of Pharaoh. She is “eðfynde” (“easily found”) on the ocean's shore and adorned with gold:Footnote ²

Editors and translators have had problems with the Afrisc meowle throughout the modern history of the Old English Exodus; with no biblical precedent and no clear reason for her presence, they have struggled to make sense of the manuscript reading with emendations, effectively erasing her through dramatic textual changes. In 1931, G. P. Krapp emended the manuscript reading in his Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records edition to Afrisc neowle, a prostrate, and presumably dead, African, who was also assumed to be male since Krapp states that “there is no reason to suppose that the Egyptians had maidens with them in their army, and no reason for referring to them here if they had” (Krapp and Dobbie 1: 217). He thus eliminates her entirely from the poem by eliding her femaleness and emending her to simply one of the many Egyptian corpses drowned in the Red Sea (S. A. J. Bradley's 1982 translation follows this emendation). Edward Irving's 1953 edition emends her to a living and gold-adorned Ebrisc meowle, a Hebrew woman, erasing her African identity while keeping her femaleness. Irving's note on the line states that “[t]he MS reading afrisc is almost impossible to retain” (96).Footnote ⁵ His glossary translates meowle as “maiden.” J. R. R. Tolkien's translation follows Irving's emendation with “Hebrew maid” even as his edition of the Old English text defaults to the manuscript reading of Afrisc (with no discussion in the commentary of this discrepancy between the edition and the translation). Peter J. Lucas preserves the manuscript reading in his 1977 edition, calling the editorial emendations “unnecessary”; Lucas provides “Ethiopian” as a translation of Afrisc (147 [line 580n]). Twenty-first-century practices similarly tend to shy away from dramatic emendation, and Exodus's most recent editors and translators have adhered to the manuscript reading (Anlezark; Love).

Modern translation choices for meowle, with connotations and nuances perhaps unintended in the Old English, also affect understanding of the Afrisc meowle's position in the text. The Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary defines meowle as “maid, damsel, virgin, woman” (“Meówle”). I have translated meowle simply as “woman,” the most neutral term, since the first three options are ultimately unsuitable, with their associative meanings of youth and sexual innocence. The Dictionary of Old English (DOE) corpus provides thirteen examples of the use of meowle, and their referents are varied enough that “woman” is the only appropriate translation for the usage in Exodus (and indeed in the other examples as well). Meowle occurs only in glossaries (twice) and in poetry (eleven times); it is not preserved in prose. Glossary usages do tend to imply youth and sexual innocence (iuuencula, uirguncula), but usages in poetry refer to female figures at a variety of life stages and with a variety of sexual experiences. In poetry, meowle refers to a new bride (Genesis A), a holy widow (Judith), the Virgin Mary (Christ I and Judgment Day II), sexually active women (Precepts, Riddle 25, and Riddle 61), mourning women (The Fortunes of Men and Beowulf), and even a “slæpwerigne . . . meowle” (“sleep-weary woman”) in Riddle 4, whose condition is universal enough that she needs no further identifying characteristics of age or social class or sexual activity.Footnote ⁶ These other poetic uses of meowle, coupled with the Afrisc meowle usage in Exodus, clearly indicate that the best—indeed, the only—suitable translation is simply “woman.” Bosworth-Toller's “maid,” “damsel,” and “virgin” need to go into the nineteenth-century editorial dustbin (as indeed they might when the DOE reaches M).

The translation “maiden” has appeared as recently as 1980, but in the plural form as “maidens” in Zacharias Thundy's “Afrisc Meowle and the Old English Exodus,” which argues for a reading of the “African maidens” as “[p]atristic topoi of spoliatio Aegyptiorum (despoiling of the Egyptians) and captiva gentilis (the beautiful gentile captive woman)” (304). Thundy is correct to reject the pre-1980 editorial emendations that ignore the clearly read and metrically correct wording in the manuscript; he is incorrect to see more than one woman. Meowle is a weak feminine noun; its plural is meowlan. Thundy's untenable reason for a plural reading rests on an inaccurate statement that the phrase þa wæs eðfynde is usually followed by a plural noun (the DOE records four uses of the phrase þa wæs eðfynde, each followed by a singular nounFootnote ⁷).

Exegetics and the Afrisc Meowle

Its grammatical shortcomings aside, Thundy's connection of the African woman to exegetical understandings of Egyptian and African identities is typical of published criticism and interpretation of the Afrisc meowle. All of those interpretations attempt to explain her noncanonical appearance at the end of the poem with reference to Augustinian theology. In 1970, James Earl referred to the “necessity for an exegetical approach” to the poem as a whole in order to make sense of it (544). Almost all of the available criticism of the Afrisc meowle focuses on potential connections to Augustinian interpretations of scripture (see Godden, “Biblical Literature,” for a representative overview). Bernard Huppé in 1959 argued that the phrase Afrisc meowle “is probably employed by the poet because of the African maiden of the Song of Songs, traditionally a symbol of the bride of Christ” (Doctrine and Poetry 223). Fred Robinson presents a different exegetical reading that sees the Afrisc meowle as a reference to Moses's Ethiopian wife (referenced in Numbers 12.1, not in Exodus), who for Augustine represents “the Church gathered out of the nations” (376). Following Robinson's exegesis, Lucas's edition equates her with “Moses's Ethiopian wife” (147), and Love's notes to his translation also refer to “Moses's wife, who is African” (638). Ellen E. Martin sees her as “a conflation of Moses’ wife and sister” (2), who then becomes an allegorical figure of both church and synagogue (11). Thundy's own analysis sees the Afrisc meowle as representative of “the conflict and compromise between pagan learning and Christian wisdom” (298), showing that “Christians might appropriate and use the various literary and artistic treasures of the pagans without prejudice in the service of the Christian religion” (300). Audrey Walton's argument similarly relies on the Augustinian concept of “Egyptian gold,” the “famous justification for the value of use of secular literature, which compared the Egyptians’ ‘ornaments of gold and silver and garments’ to the intellectual treasures of pagan philosophy” (2). In contrast to Thundy, Walton focuses on the ways the text forces the reader to be active in pursuit of that conclusion so that “[t]he Old English Exodus relies on rhetorical devices . . . to put the reader almost forcibly in the position of exegete” instead of providing that exegetical analysis for the reader (10); Walton does not directly address the figure of the Afrisc meowle in her analysis. I plan to problematize Walton's term “reader” below, in discussion of the poem's audience. This sort of scholarship tends not to differentiate between exegetical interpretations intended by the poet and exegetical interpretations understood by the audience; most traditional critics assume that these two are the same, and even Walton argues that the reader will actively come to the same exegetical conclusions intended by the poet.

Exegetical readings thus attempt to explain the presence of this woman at the end of this poem—but, as in Morrison's remarks about Grendel and imaginary Africa, the meowle resists explanation. An identification of her as a figure for a bride of Christ or the church gathered out of the nations is not sufficient to dispel the uneasiness created by her noncanonical introduction just as the text seems to be concluding. Even so, the Afrisc meowle has received surprisingly little critical attention other than these forays into exegetical interpretation. Neither second wave white feminists who made the first advances into feminist critique of medieval literature in the 1980s and 1990s, nor medievalists working more recently on critical race theory and decolonizing the profession, have investigated her enigmatic figure. Such an investigation reveals her to undermine the homogeneity and the totality of the Israelites’ jubilation after the crossing of the Red Sea. To return to Heng's definition, the Afrisc meowle's difference from the Hebrews—that is, her race—challenges the more usual reading of the end of the poem as glorious celebration.

The scholarly literature around the Old English Exodus and the Afrisc meowle has not remarked on the seemingly obvious point about her as visually distinct from the victorious Hebrews. The poet tells us that “þa wæs eðfynde Afrisc meowle”; presumably, she was easily found because of visual difference in her physical appearance. She may indeed represent the appropriation of pagan wisdom by Christian learning, but she also, and more importantly, represents a differentiated other, clearly and visually delineated from the other men and women celebrating around her. In that bodily rather than exegetical delineation, the poet's choice of Afrisc is crucial, entailing an examination of the connotations of “African” in the early English medieval cultural imaginary.

Geography and Groups of the Old English Exodus

To examine the early medieval meaning of “African” is to tread into the intertwined subjects of race and ethnicity as well as geography. Afrisc is a form of the adjective unique to Exodus and to poetry; all other words in Old English for “African” occur in prose and glosses (information throughout this paragraph is from the DOE). Most frequently, forms of Africa- in Old English are geographic references: for instance, the frequent usages in the Old English Orosius are to a journey to or from the continent of Africa. Similarly, references to Africa londe in the Old English Martyrology are exclusively geographic. Only two usages of forms of Old English Africa- in prose refer to people rather than to place. The first occurs at the end of the first book of the Old English Boethius, a reference to the Roman consul Regulus's military victories ofer þa Africanas in Carthage in the third century BCE. The second is a probably fictional proper name: Malcolm Godden glosses the reference to “Africanus” in Ælfric's Catholic Homilies as the “supposed translator of Abdias’ account of SS Simon and Jude” (675).

The Afrisc meowle is thus unique in the Old English corpus not just in her Afrisc appearance in a poetic text but also in the poem's presentation of her as a specifically African individualized figure, so that geographic and ethnic meanings of Afrisc combine in the reference to her. She is geographically from Africa, but she is also specifically distinguished from the Hebrews around her. Other figures are also on the shore: the African woman's distinctiveness from them is based on her racial and ethnic identity. The term Afrisc sets her apart as an other in this group of gold-adorned celebrants. Before she appears, the Israelite men and women sing complementary songs of victory (quoted above); immediately after:

At the poem's end, the Hebrews divide the spoils of the dead Egyptians that have washed up on the shore of the Red Sea, although there is no mention in the Hebrew Bible of this distribution of treasure. There is no narratival or imagistic necessity for lines 580 and 581, the appearance of the African woman, who provides the fulcrum on which the activity of the Hebrews turns: they sing, she is easily found, they divide the Egyptian treasures. Indeed, she may not be singing and then dividing treasure with them, because the singular verb form wæs separates her from the more generalized activities. Her difference extends even to the grammar of the text, isolating her from the others in the group. Her appearance in lines 580 and 581 effects the transition from song to treasure, but it is not clear exactly how or why. The end of the poem would flow more smoothly without her, would present activities of celebration in plural verbs that affirm the homogeneity of the group. She is, to use Heng's phrasing, demarcated by her difference.

The only other words in the poem that function as markers of geography and origin are forms of Egypta (“Egyptian”; lines 50, 145, 452, 501, and 506), which all refer to Pharaoh and his followers, and Sigel-wara (“Ethiopians,” line 69). In addition to the exegetical interpretation of the “Egyptian gold” noted above, other critics have also pointed out the potential of the use of Afrisc as a way to differentiate with diction the Afrisc meowle from the Egypta people, men and possibly women as well, who drowned in the Red Sea (Thundy 303). No matter her “real” ethnicity, the Afrisc meowle is definitively not one the Egypta cyn defined throughout the poem as the enemy of the Israelites. The need to differentiate her from the other “Africans”—that is, enemy Egyptians—may have informed the poet's choice of diction in line 580. That differentiation, however, also isolates her from the Israelites as well, placing her in a liminal state where she is neither wholly included nor wholly excluded by the Israelites.

A similar differentiation occurs in the use of Sigel-wara, Ethiopians, at the beginning of the famous description of the sail that God provides to protect the Israelites from the sun two days after they leave Egypt. In Exodus, as in all medieval texts, words for “Ethiopian” refer to sub-Saharan Africa in general and not to the modern nation-state of Ethiopia (Bindman and Gates xiv). These lines referencing the Sigel-wara clarify the physiological difference between them and the Israelites: their susceptibility to the heat of the sun. The Israelites choose a northern route, since

Immediately after these lines, the poet describes this halgan nette as a segle (“sail”; line 81), ushering in the poem's famous metaphor of the Israelites as sailors on the desert (Zacher 67). As above, I want to move away from an exegetical or Augustinian reading and focus for a bit on the literal meaning of the text. Even though the Israelites have chosen not to travel to the south, they still need protection from the sun. To ask a logistical question: Why mention the Sigel-wara at all, since the Israelites choose not to take the southern route into their land? Drawing again on Heng's formulations, the unnecessary reference to the Sigel-wara differentiates the Israelites from the Ethiopians and privileges the Israelites. Even though the Hebrews choose not to take the southern route, the reference to Sigel-wara land affirms the Israelites’ difference from those sun dwellers (the literal translation of Sigel-wara). Martin Foys suggests a competing etymology of sigel-hyrwan, so that the Ethiopians are sun-oppressed or sun-vexed rather than sun dwellers (a point also cryptically noted by O. T. Williams [508]). Like the Egypta cyn, the phrase also provides another differentiation for the African woman, who is African but not Egyptian, African but not Ethiopian.

The Early Medieval Audience of Exodus

The African woman's destabilizing racial distinctiveness in Exodus thus prompts the question of audience reception: In what ways could an early medieval English audience have understood the meaning of Afrisc apart from or in addition to exegetical meanings that may have presented themselves? How would that audience have differentiated an Afrisc figure from Egypta or Sigel-wara figures? Part of an answer to these questions comes from exploring the presence of and references to Africans in early medieval English culture outside the Junius 11 manuscript.

The Junius 11 manuscript itself is dated to circa 960–1000 CE, but the date of the composition of Exodus is not as clear (Lockett, “Integrated Re-examination”). While not as fraught as the question of the dating of Beowulf, the origins of Exodus have received a range of potential dates. R. D. Fulk's metrical analysis places its composition in the earlier part of the period, most probably before circa 825 (391–92). Fulk's analysis does not venture into the various ways that the poem's audiences may have experienced the poem throughout the period from its composition to its recording in the Junius 11 manuscript and beyond. Those audiences may have listened to the poem read aloud from Junius 11 or from now-lost copies. They may have watched and heard a semiperformed reading in a monastic or aristocratic setting, much as modern performers of Arabic sira texts use a handwritten or printed text as a “reference point” for oral performance (Magidow 6). The audiences of Exodus may as well have engaged with text-free performances of the poem, perhaps accompanied by music, in a variety of settings, as demonstrated in Benjamin Bagby's modern re-creations of performances of Beowulf.

How would those varied audiences have understood the term Afrisc? Much recent textual and archaeological work has focused on an ethnically heterogeneous early medieval England, exposing the ways that its multiethnic population has been literally whitewashed by nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship. This point is frequently reiterated by the members of the Medievalists of Color collaborative and numerous other medievalists on digital media, in the press, and in various academic venues (Rambaran-Olm; Miyashiro; Flaherty; Hsy and Orlemanski; Green, “Anglo-Saxons,” “Great Host,” and “Indo-Pacific Beads”). Despite modern assumptions of homogeneous whiteness in early medieval England (assumptions reinforced by the term Anglo-Saxon, still commonly used in modern English to describe this period), the early English audiences of Exodus often would have included people of African descent. Bioarchaeology provides evidence for the existence of different human phenotypes in multiethnic early English communities,Footnote ⁹ although we cannot know if these people were described in those communities as specifically Afrisc, Egypta, or Sigel-wara, or with other Old English terms lost to linguistic history.

Proceeding, for the moment, with Fulk's dating of the composition of Exodus as “fairly early,” from 670 onward the most important African figure in England was Hadrian, Abbot of SS. Peter and Paul in Canterbury. Bede refers to Hadrian as a vir natione Afir (“a man by nation of Africa”; 4.1; Rambaran-Olm 395).Footnote ¹⁰ Michael Lapidge and Bernard Bischoff localize Hadrian specifically in northeastern Africa, what is currently Egypt or Libya (84), although Erik Wade cautions against such a precise geography, following Mark Handley (297n38), to show that Greek speakers like Hadrian were prevalent throughout North Africa rather than concentrated in the east (4). Bede's designation of Hadrian as Afir indicates that Hadrian's geographic origin was relatively well known, both in that Bede knew it and in that Bede's work was widely circulated during and after his lifetime. That origin was a crucial part of Hadrian's identity, at least for Bede, who places it first in the list of descriptive characteristics at Hadrian's introduction in book 4, chapter 1 of Bede's Ecclesiastical History. Hadrian was without question the most prominent African in England from his arrival in 670 until his death in 709 (Hudson); Michael Wood has called Hadrian “the most important figure in the history of education in England” (“As”) and referred to Hadrian and Theodore (who was from Tarsus, in modern-day Turkey) as “the founders of the educational system of the West” (“African”). More specifically, Gillian Gower sees them as having brought England into “a multiracial, trans-European network of musicians,” internationalizing English understanding of devotional music and ritual (103). The pope had designated Theodore the archbishop of Canterbury and tasked Hadrian with escorting him to England. Bede emphasizes the extent of Theodore's and Hadrian's visitations “to every part of the island where the English peoples lived” (4.2). Many English congregants, both professed religious and secular, would then have interacted with or at least seen these prelates, one from Africa and one from Asia, thus providing with their English associates representatives from each of the three continents as understood in the early medieval schema described by Isidore of Seville and commonly referred to now as the T-O map (Vorholt).

Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Minors note that both Hadrian and Theodore would have brought “followers” to England with them (Bede 330n1), so it is likely that other Africans, as well as native Turks, settled and traveled in England with them; their descendants would have remained in their English communities after Theodore's and Hadrian's deaths. It is also worthwhile to think about whether Hadrian had children of his own with him in England, either born there or brought with him; the fact that Bede does not mention a wife or immediate family does not mean that they did not exist, as we know from his selective descriptions of widowed abbesses as quasi-virgins (Dockray-Miller 9–42; Watt).

A group of archaeologists echoes this point about followers of Hadrian and Theodore in their analysis of seventh- to ninth-century skeletons exhumed from a cemetery in Bamburgh, Northumberland. Isotopic analysis indicates that “a separate group of individuals was also identified with isotopic signatures that suggested origins in the southern Mediterranean or North Africa” (Groves et al. 473). In their hypotheses about how these individuals came to be in a cemetery in the far north of England, the team mentions Hadrian and Theodore, as well as the opportunities at Bamburgh for skilled craftsmen trained in the Mediterranean basin.

As a native of northern Africa, Hadrian, like any followers who came with him and like the Afrisc meowle of Exodus, would have been phenotypically different from those around him. They broke up any ethnic and linguistic homogeneity presumed in the English church and in English culture at large from the late seventh century onward—and that presumption is one of modern scholarship, not one of primary sources. If Exodus was indeed composed during this early period, Hadrian and his followers and their descendants would have been the closest Afrisc reference for its audience: visually distinct, enormously learned, and religiously and culturally powerful in their positions of leadership and authority.

In a move away from Fulk's “early” dating of the composition of the poem to a focus instead on the date of the manuscript, some similar archaeological evidence presents itself in trying to formulate an understanding of “African” in England circa 1000 CE. As in the earlier Bamburgh cemetery, archaeology provides evidence of African presence in the later part of the pre-Conquest period. Archaeological excavations from 1967 to 1972 in a tenth- and eleventh-century East Anglian cemetery in North Elmham, Norfolk, revealed a female African skeleton (Wells and Cayton). Although the 1980 publication of the findings is riddled with racism and sexism (as discussed by Florence H. R. Scott), I received confirmation in 2018 that the core conclusion is scientifically sound: the skeleton in question would still be categorized as African.Footnote ¹¹ The authors of the 1980 report assume that this African woman would have been a slave (Wells and Cayton 259). Their discussion refers to the “flourishing trade in black slaves” throughout Europe and the Mediterranean basin in the early medieval period and connects English trade networks to Italy, Spain, and North Africa (259). They do not consider any other possible explanation for her presence, a stance that is more informative of their own prejudices than of this African woman's presence in the East Anglian cemetery. She may have been enslaved—or she may have been a wife or daughter of one of the English merchants who traveled on the networks (and thus a free member of the community); she may have been part of a trading group stopping in East Anglia (and died suddenly there); she may have migrated voluntarily as part of an artisanal or ethnic group seeking economic opportunity (Green, “Indo-Pacific Beads” and “Anglo-Saxons”). Her burial in the churchyard indicates that she was an accepted member of the religious community (Hyland). Whatever the reason for her presence in East Anglia, her skeleton is proof that this secular community in tenth-century England had immediate experience with a female African presence and thus some kind of a visual reference for what an Afrisc meowle could have looked like. Similarly, in 2013 a skeleton was found in the Fairford River, determined to be “‘a woman, aged between 18 and 24, from Sub-Saharan Africa’, with radiocarbon analysis indicating that she very probably died at some point between AD 896 and 1025” (Green, “Great Host”).

As well, excavations and subsequent osteological analysis of a tenth- or eleventh-century cemetery in York revealed that “one of the mature adult males may have been of African or mixed ancestry and may have migrated to York or descended from those that did” (Keefe and Holst iv). Like the North Elmham woman, York Skeleton 3379 was interred in the churchyard; the man was a member of the local religious community, not an outsider (Ramírez 940–41; Scott). York Archaeological Trust analyzed only seven of the approximately one hundred skeletons found in the excavation, so there may actually be more than one such skeleton in the larger sample; numerous descendants of the multiethnic population of late Roman York may still have composed a substantial portion of the population hundreds of years later (“Celebrating”). However, like the African women of East Anglia and the Fairford River, the male skeleton in York indicates that the community there included at least one person of African descent. These skeletons confirm that there were people of African descent in the communities that made up the various audiences of Exodus and other Old English literature, people whose existence has been largely whitewashed out of modern scholarship and popular history.

Exegetical Critique and the Audience of the Poem

Part of that whitewashing has come at the hands of the school of exegetical criticism, also known as “Robertsonianism” after its founder, D. W. Robertson, whose 1962 Preface to Chaucer doubled as both a critique of Chaucer and a manifesto of exegetical technique. Robertson's insistent connection of Chaucerian texts, and indeed all medieval literature, to Augustinian theology sparked both imitators and critics throughout the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first (Betherum; Newman; Patterson). In 2013, Barbara Newman stated that Lee Patterson's 1987 Negotiating the Past ended medieval studies’ penchant for exegetical criticism (2), but the subfield of Old English studies still relies substantially on connecting Old English texts to the Christian church fathers, especially Augustine. Patterson's and Newman's critiques of Robertsonian exegesis focus on its totalizing methodologies—that all medieval literary texts ultimately “should be subjected to diligent scrutiny until an interpretation contributing to the reign of charity is produced” (Robertson qtd. in Patterson 32). For the exegetical critic, any part of any medieval text must ultimately lead back to Augustine. Robertson's methodologies are echoed throughout the work of numerous Old English critics. For example, Huppé's analysis of Beowulf relies on the “poet's inescapable Augustinian frame of reference” (Hero ix). Similarly, Margaret Goldsmith analyzes Beowulf's battle with the dragon as a figure for “the hero's interior battle with the Devil” of pride and selfishness; she reads the end of the poem as an allegory of the fall from paradise, in which Beowulf is ultimately defeated by “the legacy of Adam's sin” (67).

To draw from and build on Patterson's and others’ critiques of exegetical reading, I want to point out two crucial assumptions that it makes about both author and audience. It assumes that the author was familiar enough with Augustinian thinking to be placing in the text what in the most extreme cases amount to De doctrina Christiana Easter eggs—for example, that the Wife of Bath's deafness represents her “rampant femininity or carnality” (to use one of Patterson's examples from Robertson [Patterson 6n6]). Exegesis also assumes that the audience of the text is drawing on exactly the same set of hierarchized cultural references—that the audience knew as well that the Wife's deafness represented her rampant femininity (rather than the misogyny inherent in patriarchal culture). Leslie Lockett has discussed the deeply problematic nature of these claims, which she terms “the medievalist bias,” in her analysis of the availability of Augustine's works in early medieval England. As Lockett states, “These claims would be defensible if we had any reason to think that the typical Anglo-Saxon poet or homilist or hagiographer had access to a patristic library of the caliber of Bede's or Ælfric's, but every available form of evidence points in quite the opposite direction” (Anglo-Saxon Psychologies 181). Lockett shows that even among literate English communities, access to and extensive knowledge of Augustinian texts cannot be assumed, thus dismantling one of the foundational concepts of exegetical criticism of Old English texts.

Lockett's reference to Bede's and Ælfric's high-caliber libraries exposes yet another flaw in exegetical methodology: its elitism. Robertson and his disciples were reenacting in their own critical practices their vision of medieval literary culture—a closed, exclusive set of hypereducated men in superselective institutions talking only to each other about dense and challenging texts in multiple languages. Even today, the practice of exegetical criticism requires access to expensive print editions, translations, and concordances of theological texts (often held by research libraries in noncirculating collections) as well as access to searchable digital collections of those texts held behind subscription-based paywalls. The exegetical critic also needs a substantial working knowledge of classical and medieval Latin. Robertsonianism thus excludes from “correct” engagement with an Old English text any reader without this onerous apparatus—any reader without access to R1 libraries and graduate training.

Despite Robertsonianism's methods, we can never fully be sure of the authorial intention of purported Augustinian references in Beowulf or Exodus or anything else. However, I want to move the critical focus from the author to the audience, challenging as well the assumption of the exegetical knowledge and interpretive methodologies of the audience. If the “meaning” of a poetic phrase or an image were exclusively exegetical, then we could be sure that the audience of the text was an exegetically trained audience, a literate audience of monks and nuns and priests and the occasional highly educated secular aristocrat, who all understood the literary text in the same way. Patterson and others have critiqued the closed system of interpretation afforded by exegetics, which allows for tidy connected dots rather than the challenges of deliberate ambiguity and nuance that poetry presents. Robertson explicitly rejects ambiguity as an attribute of medieval literature, including “ambiguities” in his list of literary “tensions” desired by modern readers but of which “the medieval world was innocent” (51). For Robertson, the critical goal is to eradicate readings inflected by modern sensibilities, or indeed any sensibilities that do not conform to his preconceived notions of medieval textual culture informed by exegetics.

An Audience without Exegetics

However, our understanding of that textual culture and its medieval audience—and I do mean “audience” here, and not Walton's “reader”—must be broad enough to include people who do not have the exegetical and theological contextual knowledge assumed by Robertson and his followers. Thus, our thinking about early English medieval poetic reception must move away from hard evidence of manuscripts and archaeology into the realms of the probable or possible. Such a change in focus requires a level of speculation, since we have no certain, recorded information about the ways that readers and listeners reacted intellectually, emotionally, or psychologically to specific Old English poetic texts. Our understanding of that audience must include those who were not readers—who did not engage with the text inscribed in a manuscript, but who heard it recited or saw it performed. Such a critique refuses to understand the Afrisc meowle of Exodus exclusively as the church gathered out of the nations, or as the appropriation of pagan wisdom by Christian theology. Critique that minimizes such exegetical interpretation forces us to think much more broadly about her liminal, differentiated, destabilizing presence at the end of the poem. Such thinking forces a modern audience to engage with our own erroneous assumptions about whiteness in the English medieval period, assumptions that have led narrowly to exclusively exegetical understandings of the Afrisc meowle.

The modern audience of the Old English Exodus must exit the Ivy League library and push aside exegesis, thinking instead of this African woman in her odd solitude as she literally splits the celebration of the Hebrews at the shore of the Red Sea. Her difference—her race, in Heng's terms—functions as a solitary, liminal reprimand to their homogeneity in the midst of their victory, their song, their treasure. She is the “imaginary Africa” who confounds our understanding of her appearance at the end of the poem. She is not Egyptian, not Ethiopian, not Hebrew, and her singular verb accentuates her separation from the Hebrews, complicating the general celebration as we move toward the final, gruesome image of the poem, the reminder that the victory celebration takes place on deað-stede, in the death place, gold in the midst of drowned bodies: the Hebrews plunder bloated corpses of the Egyptian army and collect its riches. This revolting image complicates the more usual reading of the end of this poem as a glorious celebration of the Hebrews as God's chosen people, as the sympathetic characters in the narrative. The poem thus ends in tension between the affirmation of group identity and the exposure of the horror; her difference reveals the multilayered and complex outcomes of war and migration. While this tension does not “solve” her, it brings the Afrisc meowle out from the shadows of exegetical analysis and forces us to acknowledge the way she destabilizes the audience's understanding of the end of the poem as an unmitigated triumph.

A return to the issue of the medieval audience of Exodus leaves us with questions and speculation once we have discarded the idea of an audience focused more on Augustinian theology than on Old English poetry. Critical tools designed by and for a homogeneous, white, patriarchal community reinforce modern assumptions about the purported whiteness of the premodern English past; those assumptions do not allow us to imagine a broader and more historically accurate audience for Exodus and for all of Old English poetry. Ideas about such an audience will necessarily rely on speculation, but speculation informed by new research on ethnic diversity in early medieval England. Leaving Augustinian theology behind, this inclusive and polyvalent literary criticism allows and even encourages varied interpretations of Old English texts, a range of understandings in both the medieval and modern periods. Close examination of the Afrisc meowle produces just such an approach to that ultimately unknowable—perhaps even “imponderable”—audience of people in early medieval England, listening to a performance of Exodus, perhaps in the yard in front of the parish church, perhaps drinking some ale and watching the sunset light change the nuances of the intricate wooden carvings on the church doors. Perhaps there's a woman there, the great-granddaughter of one of Hadrian's North African bodyguards, with skin a darker brown than that of the woman standing next to her. She hears the lines about the Afrisc meowle, gold-adorned on the shore, and she nods her head, smiling slightly, as the poem concludes.