“Babylon and Anglo-Saxon England”
Andrew Scheil

Babylon has many well-known associations in the Middle Ages: it stands for the City of Man as opposed to Jerusalem, the City of God.  Medieval thought also associated Babylon with the Tower of Babel; popular etymology thus interpreted Babylon as “confusio,” in contrast to Jerusalem, the “visio pacis.”  However, the varied uses of Babylon go beyond this dichotomy.

Babylon serves as a reference point, a boundary marker both temporal and geographical, in diverse mental “maps” of the Middle Ages—Babylon marks beginnings and endings.  Babylon is the great elder empire of the world, the first manifestation of its power seen in the glory of Babel, brought down to destruction on the plain of Shinar.  In the medieval tradition the later mature power of Babylon also marks the beginning of the “fourth age” of the world, when the Jews were led into captivity to lament their fate “By the waters of Babylon.”  And at the end of time Babylon is the place where the Antichrist will be born; Babylon stands at both the alpha and the omega of human civilization.  Medieval thought tended to blur together the elder civilizations of the Fertile Crescent—the Tower of Babel, the plain of Shinar, Ur of the Chaldeans, Assyria and Nineveh, Babylon and Babylonia—into one great constant shadow of the prior world; the name “Babylon” endures throughout the Middle Ages as the signature of a poetics of empire and the terrible majesty of a dark adversary.

This study will explore the resonance of the glory of Babylon in Anglo-Saxon England, the ambiguous poetics of this “noblest and most glorious of all cities,” as an Old English homily puts it.  One recurring aspect of Babylon is its function as a representative of the East in various texts and traditions found in Anglo-Saxon England.  In what ways does the city embody the ambiguities of the East and its seductive powers?  Evidence from “geographical” texts allows us to ask what is the importance of place in the apprehension of Babylon and its images?  Likewise, evidence from historiography demonstrates how Babylon serves as a reference point in the fluctuating history of empires.  In literary texts such as the Old English Daniel, Babylon performs a number of different functions: elegiac trope, a meditation upon the epic fortunes of empire, and variations on the rhythm of exile and return.