Body and soul poems in Old and Middle English
Siebert, Eve E.. Saint Louis University, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2008. 3351871.
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This dissertation examines addresses by souls to their bodies and dialogues and debates between bodies and souls in Old and Middle English literature. All the poems share motifs, and all but the Old English Soul and Body share verbal parallels. There have been comprehensive studies of the body and soul tradition, most of which have focus on a large number of tangentially related works in many languages as well as English. The primary focus of such works is to establish connections between the works and trace a pattern of indebtedness in an attempt to discover an ultimate source for the entire genre, as well as for individual works. Consequently any unusual qualities of specific works tend to be regarded as anomalous characteristics which distract from the clear relations between works rather than as what defines each work as unique. There are also studies of individual poems or groups of poems, but they rarely consider the poem or poems within the larger context of Old and Middle English body and soul poems. This dissertation will explore the major medieval body and soul poems in English and look at the elements they have in common, but also consider them as individual poems. While motifs and phrases recur repeatedly throughout the poems, and none of the works can be considered wholly original, each arranges unoriginal material in a way that is unique.