Mind, Body, Soul, and Self in the Alfredian Translations

This dissertation examines how the texts associated with the translation program of King Alfred the Great of Wessex (d. 899) engaged with the interrelationship of mind, body, soul, and selfhood. While the authenticity and composition of the Alfredian corpus is currently under contention, these translations share an approach that I call 'Alfredian'; that is, regardless of who authored or authorized them, they possess common ways of describing mental and interior spaces and their relationship to the individual. I argue that, whether or not they emerged from Alfred's court, these translations demonstrate a shared scholarly preoccupation, a school of understanding evident in the texts' elaboration of vocabularies and metaphors of interiority and epistemology. This language articulates relationships between mind, soul, and body that have ramifications for our own understanding of the constitution of different forms of identity and a developing notion of a 'self'; the language and metaphors employed by the translators allow us access to the various methods by which the Anglo-Saxons conceptualized a complex set of interactions that were not always described or thought of in specific, unchangeable ways. Rather, the self was understood not as a stable, fully-knowable entity, but rather one that was in a constant state of flux and negotiation, and through the process of self-scrutiny or examination refiguring its relationships between itself, the physical world, and the divine. The first two chapters set out the intellectual background of the translations. The last three chapters set out discussions of the Alfredian texts that read them as texts concerned with the fashioning of a form of selfhood. Chapter Three focuses on the role the body plays in the translations of the Boethius and Soliloquies, with reference to the complicated relationship that obtains between it and the mind that is supposed to harness its desires. In Chapter Four, I explore how two terms, inge̡anc and inneweard mod, associate the mind with interior space, and how the metaphor MIND AS HOUSE articulates the construction of that interiority. The fifth chapter turns to a consideration of self-governance and the relationship between bodily states, the social individual, and the private self.