Sex And Sexuality In Anglo-saxon England: Essays In Memory Of Daniel Gilmore Calder

by Daniel G. Calder (Editor), Carol Braun Pasternack (Editor), Lisa M. C. Weston (Editor)

Honouring a scholar who advised his students to explore topics in Old English literature that would interest the modern sensibility, this volume of eight essays is in three sections discussing same-sex desires, sexualities of the virgin, and sex, violence and the nation.

284 pages, Hardcover

First published February 28, 2005

About the author

Daniel Gillmore Calder

Reviews

[Rhiannon Grant · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lucky library find, this is a little outside my field (I don't have the Old English to follow all the linguistic arguments, for example) but was a good read. Kathy Lavezzo's chapter on the homoerotic production of whiteness in retellings of the story about Pope Gregory seeing English boys for sale (famously: "not Angles but Angels") is particularly good.

[Eve]

The papers in this collection are written by academics for academics of very specialized areas; I’m not remotely qualified to assess them. Although many of the topics interest me, I lacked the background knowledge to get more than maybe about 60% of the value they offer an informed reader.
I have to say, though, that in at least once paper the difficulty lay in part in the very dense writing that some academics use. Surely not every word in a long sentence need be multisyllabic?