Satan bound: The devil and the imagery of physical constraint in early medieval England

Fear of the devil was central to the prevailing mentality of Anglo-Saxon England. Anxiety about the extent of Satan's influence finds expression in the literature of the period primarily through an association of the devil with the language and imagery of binding. In Satan Bound, I argue that Anglo-Saxon homilists, poets, scribes, and illustrators deployed this binding motif to depict Satan in order to delineate both his dangerous potency and the limits restricting his power, thereby potentially undermining his ability to tempt mankind a mission that they believed to be integral to the ongoing cosmological struggle between God and Satan.;Chapter One investigates Anglo-Saxon legal codes in order to demonstrate how traditional social practices and Christian teachings about sin and the devil reinforced one another by means of the language, imagery, and social reality of binding and imprisonment. Chapter Two discusses the semantic range of the language of binding in devotional prose written in the vernacular, in which the motif of binding reflects the conflict over authority that is inherent in Christian theodicy. Chapter Three examines evidence presented by Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11, an illustrated, late tenth-century manuscript that contains four Old English poems on subjects in Christian history, two of which include "Satan bound' as a main antagonist. Chapter Four considers the connections between the figure of the devil and the Old English elegiac mode and argues that when depicting solitary exile-figures, Anglo-Saxon poets evoked Satan's status as the original exile in order to remind their audiences of both the penalties for disobeying God and the redemptive power of the Savior. Chapter Five analyzes several depictions of the devil in Middle English literature and concludes that as the character of Satan became more highly individualized in later medieval portrayals, the usefulness of binding imagery as a method of figuratively constraining him began to wane.;By integrating Christian teachings, social and legal history, art history, and the study of imaginative literature, Satan Bound thus demonstrate the cultural significance of the theme of binding, and its association with Satan as arch-criminal, in the earliest English context.