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SELIM. Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature. 28 (2023): 111–112. 
ISSN: 1132-631X 
DOI: 10.17811/selim.28.2023.111-112 

© Ediuno. Ediciones de la Universidad de Oviedo.  
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 
International License. 

 
 
Fay, Jacqueline. 2022. Materializing Englishness in Early 
Medieval Texts. Oxford Textual Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford 
University Press. Pp. 224. ISBN 9780198757566. 

 
Reviewed by Mercedes Salvador Bello  

University of Seville 
 
 
In this monograph, Jacqueline Fay sets out with a very ambitious aim in mind: to 
reconstruct the materiality of Englishness through the study of texts from the early 
medieval period. The book thus offers an investigation of the conceptualization of 
English identity as expressed via “lively material interactions” (4) between human 
beings, artifacts made by them, and elements from the natural landscape (soil, water, 
plants, metals, and stones). To this end, Fay applies New Materialism or Thing Theory, 
engaging in a fruitful discussion of many passages from works through which the notion 
of Englishness transpires. Building on this theoretical approach, she extracts from a 
series of texts, which are aptly selected, the so-called “fundamental components” (2) of 
Englishness that are not always easily discernible or not openly manifest in the works of 
this period.  
 In doing so, the monograph provides thought-provoking analyses of excerpts 
covering a wide range of medieval genres, including hagiography, history, heroic poetry, 
as well as medical and scientific texts. As expressed by the author, the book aims at 
demonstrating that Englishness reveals itself as “an embodied identity emergent at the 
frontier of material and textual interactions that serve productively to occlude history, 
religion, and geography” (4). The approach is undoubtedly novel and brings a fresh look 
that discloses new perspectives with which early medieval texts can be competently 
assessed. The book shows a masterly command of primary and secondary sources on the 
literature of the medieval period, as well as an eminently interdisciplinary approach, as 
the author makes use of cutting-edge research in other fields such as history, 
archaeology, paleography, pedology (the scientific study of soil), and parasitology.  
 This monograph comprises four chapters, the first two of which deal with texts 
ranging from the 8th to the 10th century, while the other two focus primarily on the 11th 
century. The first chapter examines the concept of soil in early medieval hagiography, as 
illustrated in works by prominent authors such as Bede or in anonymous compilations 
like the Old English Martyrology. In this part of the book, the author focuses on the idea 
of the saint’s corpse being absorbed by the earth and the ways the worshippers variously 
interact with holy remains and sacred ground. The second chapter centers on stone as a 
means through which ideas can be perceived through mortuary inscriptions, giving rise 
to an analysis of the interplay between the materiality of the dead body, the obituary 
written records, and burial places. Among various works used in this section, the Anglo-
Saxon Chronicle stands out with its necrological references through which Englishness 
often emerges. The third chapter of the book primarily centers on allusions to plants in 
eleventh-century texts in a way that helps visualize the construction of national identity 

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in the complex period of the Scandinavian invasions and subsequent occupation of 
England. A final fourth chapter shifts the focal point to Beowulf, which proves to be an 
excellent means to investigate ethnicity as perceived in the early eleventh century when 
this poem was included in the manuscript London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius A. 
xv. The author also uses this work, whose setting actually is 6th-century Scandinavia, to 
associate references to bodies and bodily parts, such as Grendel’s torn arm (lines 833–
836), with the fragmentariness of English national identity, as well as with cultural and 
political concerns in the context of Æthelred II’s period. Taken as a whole, the book is 
very learned, well-written, and full of thoughtful analyses of texts through which the 
author shows the ways in which the conceptualization of Englishness materialized in the 
early medieval period. 
 
 
(Received 20/06/2023)