Female Elegiac Characters in the Exeter Book: A critical edition, with a critical history and a variorum commentary of 'Wulf and Eadwacer', 'The Wife's Lament' and 'The Husband's Message'

Among the variety of genres and themes found in the Exeter Book – Exeter Cathedral Library MS. 3501, Exeter – Wulf and Eadwacer (fols. 100v-101r), The Wife’s Lament (fols. 115r-115v) and The Husband’s Message (fols. 123r-123v) stand out for their similarity in content and form, all of them being poetical laments dealing with the separation of lovers. What makes these texts peculiar, however, is their having women as protagonists, and, in the case of Wulf and Eadwacer and The Wife’s Lament, their being spoken by those female protagonists. Since Benjamin Thorpe’s editio princeps of the MS. in 1842, the above-mentioned poems have been edited and largely commented upon in editions of the whole Exeter Book and in single studies, but never in the combination proposed in the present work. The aim of this thesis is to provide a critical edition taking into account all the readings proposed up to now – both in editions and in critical studies –, and a comprehensive history of the criticism on the texts in the form of a systematic classification of all the commentaries on the poems. The latter is completed by a variorum commentary, in which different interpretations and translations of crucial words and phrases are given in detail. This kind of work on the three poems in question has never been carried out, and it is needed for two reasons. Firstly, many scholars from the 1960s onwards have faced the poems without taking into account early editions and commentaries, with the result that a number of interpretations have been presented as original although they were not. Secondly, the criticism on these texts has accumulated so much that it has become necessary to operate a clear distinction between what the poems actually tell, and what critics tell about them or want them to tell.

Nella varietà di temi e generi che caratterizzano l’Exeter Book – Exeter Cathedral Library MS. 3501, Exeter – Wulf and Eadwacer (fol. 100v-101r), The Wife’s Lament (fol. 115r-115v) and The Husband’s Message (fol. 123r-123v) si distinguono in quanto poesie elegiache le cui protagoniste sono figure femminili che soffrono per la lontananza dei rispettivi amati. Nel caso di Wulf and Eadwacer e The Wife’s Lament, le voci narranti appartengono alle protagoniste stesse. A causa di queste peculiarità, i testi in questione sono stati oggetto di innumerevoli edizioni e studi critici, singolarmente o in combinazione con altre elegie antico-inglesi, fin dai tempi dell’editio princeps del manoscritto, pubblicata da Benjamin Thorpe nel 1842. Questa tesi propone un’edizione critica che raccoglie le tre poesie assieme per la prima volta, e che tiene conto, nell’apparato critico, degli emendamenti proposti dai precedenti editori (dal 1842 fino ad oggi). Presenta, inoltre, una storia della critica e dell’interpretazione dei testi in oggetto, nella quale si riassumono le letture che di essi sono state date e le loro possibili relazioni con altri testi e generi letterari. Questo lavoro ha lo scopo di fare chiarezza nella complessa storia editoriale e interpretativa delle poesie, che è necessaria per separare ciò che i testi in questione realmente dicono da ciò che editori e studiosi vedono in essi – a volte intervenendo su parole o versi anche pesantemente pur di dimostrare la validità delle loro teorie.