Paradise, Death and Doomsday in Anglo-Saxon Literature. By Ananya Jahanara Kabir. Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England, 32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xi + 210. $70.

One of this book's lesser objectives is to correct the misinformation perpetrated by Jacques Le Goff in his influential 1981 book La naissance du purgatoire, which unaccountably sidesteps the early Middle Ages and insists that Purgatory was invented in the twelfth century. Despite several counterblasts to Le Goff since his book came out, his thesis continues to be parroted as an established historical doctrine (e.g., by Anca Bratu-Minott, "From the Bosom of Abraham to the Beatific Vision: On Some Medieval Images of the Soul's Journey to Heaven," in Death and Dying in the Middle Ages, ed. Edelgard E. DuBruck and Barbara I. Gusick [New York: Peter Lang, 1999], pp. 189–217), so Kabir is justified in showcasing the many representations of an interim paradise separate from heaven in Anglo-Saxon homilies, saints' lives, apocrypha, visions, poetry, prayers, and benedictions. Her book is an intelligent and ambitious but flawed tour of Anglo-Saxon otherworlds rooted in a study of the Old English and Latin terms for otherworld abodes. Especially instructive is Kabir's examination in chapter 2 of the use and avoidance of the term paradisus by Anglo-Saxon authors, and her analysis of Ælfric's unresolved and at times deliberately evasive statements about multiple states in the afterlife comes close to sketching a psychological profile of this conflicted man. Kabir does an excellent job of sorting out the connections between the Marian Assumption apocrypha and the "Three Utterances" sermons, and her skillful readings of ideal landscapes in Old English poetry in chapter 6 reveal a keen sensitivity to imagery and sublexical ornamentation.


Thomas N. Hall
University of Illinois at Chicago