About

Andrew Scheil is a professor in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota, specializing in Old English language and literature, as well as the literatures and cultures of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. His scholarly work encompasses medieval Latin literature, Celtic and Germanic languages and literatures, Middle English literature, and Early Modern/Renaissance literature. Scheil's research interests also include folklore and folktales, oral tradition, traditions of exegesis, historiography, and geography in the Middle Ages, as well as science-fiction, fantasy, and horror literature, along with media reception of classical and biblical literature. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Toronto, earned in 1996, and has received numerous awards including the McKnight Presidential Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and the Solmsen Residential Fellowship. Scheil has contributed to the understanding of Anglo-Saxon England, biblical and classical textuality, and medieval literature through his publications and teaching. His work includes a focus on the historiographic dimensions of Old English texts, the cultural and religious contexts of Anglo-Saxon England, and the reception of classical and biblical traditions in medieval and early modern periods.

Research topics

• Art
• Literature
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• History
• Philosophy
• Gender studies

Selected publications

• MS Junius 11 and its Poetry

  The Journal of English and Germanic Philology · 2025-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This excellent interdisciplinary book is a study of one of the few extant medieval manuscripts comprised entirely of Old English poetry; the manuscript in question is Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11. This manuscript is a cornerstone of the study of Old English poetry, containing several long poems. They are (in order): a partial adaptation of the book of Genesis (2936 lines), conventionally separated into two originally distinct poems: Genesis A (ll. 1–234, 852–2936) and an interpolation known as Genesis B (ll. 235–851), which is an Old English translation of an Old Saxon poem. The next poem in the manuscript is Exodus, a 590-line selective adaption of the Book of Exodus; followed by Daniel, a 764-line treatment of the book of Daniel. These three poems in sequence constitute a somewhat more closely aligned group than the fourth poem, a 729-line composition titled Christ and Satan, probably added a bit later to the manuscript, and also differing in subject matter and style from the Old Testament-based poems. The creation of the manuscript appears to have stretched over the last decades of the tenth century into the beginning of the eleventh, but further details about the circumstances of composition are all subject to scholarly debate.Although the individual poems were certainly composed at various places and times during the centuries of pre-Conquest England before arriving at our extant manuscript, they were brought together in Junius 11 as some kind of coherent sequence and partially illustrated. Thus, these poems have had a dual scholarly life: each has its own critical history as an individual poem; yet a substantial amount of scholarship has addressed questions provoked by the manuscript context: When, where and why was this manuscript created? What was the principle involved in bringing these disparate poems together? Is there a unity to the design of the manuscript and its sequence of poems, and if so, what is the nature of that unity (salvation history? the Easter vigil? something else?) How might this late tenth-century manuscript product speak to its cultural moment, even if the origins of the poetry copied into the manuscript reside in the past?Kears's monograph is an excellent comprehensive guide to all these issues. I would suggest that the book not only functions as a productive and original intervention into the ongoing scholarly discussion of Junius 11 and its poems (both individually and as a sequence), but it seems to me that this fine book would also serve as a robust introduction to the study of the manuscript for interested scholars and advanced students. The bibliographic coverage is excellent; the monograph is well-structured and very lucidly written. I think it would be an ideal companion for a course on Junius 11 or for anyone wishing to embark on a project about any of these poems.The scholarship on the individual poems in the manuscript is vast, but Kears's book joins a small group of essential book-length works that one needs to have at hand for any study of Junius 11: Paul Remley's densely-written, but important Old English Biblical Verse: Studies in Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel (1996); Catherine Karkov's Text and Picture in Anglo-Saxon England: Narrative Strategies in the Junius 11 Manuscript (2001); and more recently Janet Schrunk Ericksen's Reading Old English Biblical Poetry: The Book and the Poem in Junius 11 (2021). To these monographs must be added two essential essay collections: The Poems of MS Junius 11: Basic Readings, ed. R.M. Liuzza (2002); and Old English Literature and the Old Testament, ed. Michael Fox and Manish Sharma (2012). All serious academic libraries should place Kears's book next to these others on its shelves (physical or electronic).As a holistic and phenomenological study of one medieval manuscript—a synchronic reception history or reading history of how a medieval community or communities might read its full contents—the book joins predecessors with similar methodology such as Andy Orchard's Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf Manuscript (1995) or S.C. Thomson's Communal Creativity in the Making of the ‘Beowulf Manuscript’: Towards a History of Reception for the Nowell Codex (2018).To me it seems that Kears's essential innovation, as he examines the entire manuscript, is his method of literary analysis. He is not concerned with arguing for a strict unity of design across the full codex; he is not looking (as most others have) for an elusive key to “solve” the “problems” of the manuscript and answer its questions in some positivist sense. Rather, he engages in a recursive literary reading of the poems: he is interested in similar vocabulary, ideas, and themes that pop up throughout the manuscript; he models a reader who would not necessarily read these poems in a linear fashion, but in a recursive way—moving back and forth across the texts, as recurring words and ideas send a putative reader back across the manuscript in a diverse fashion. In his own words: “Each poem brings something important to the compilation, and each one is worthy of its own study, and yet the arrangement of the poems asks us to see them as part of a larger, poetic version of history where distinctions between the works of individual poets may be less significant than the accumulation of concerns produced across the book that houses them” (p. 5).The book's overall focus is the presence of key themes or topics that derive from two Old English words rich with meaning: ræd (“counsel, advice”) and unræd (“evil counsel, ill-advised course, bad plan, folly”). Each chapter of the book tracks not only the use of these two words in each poem but also concepts closely related to the terms in some way, such as obedience and disobedience, governance and rebellion, law, interpretation and understanding: “Examining such thematic language in conjunction with the subject matter of these poems draws us to a consistent interest across the Junius poetry in the application of good counsel and in warning readers about the perils of ill-counsel and misinterpretation” (p. 4).After a comprehensive “Introduction” (pp. 1–33) that lays out all the basic known facts about the manuscript and its critical history, five chapters each concentrate on a poem in the manuscript, seriatim. Each chapter follows a similar structure: first a close reading of the poem with attention to how it treats themes related to ræd and unræd, all the while conditioning those close readings with attention to manuscript details (e.g., illustrations, layout, capital letters, etc.), and then broadening that close reading by adducing external texts (many of them “non-literary,” such as charters, law codes, treatises of various kinds) in order to suggest the resonance of the close readings of ræd and unræd with the political atmosphere of the moment of the manuscript's composition. Again, the author in his own words: “As I have discussed, the poetry of Junius 11 consistently returns to those political matters of counsel, rightful compensation, rule and kingship, and offers audiences the opportunity to trace these across the codex by providing them with different scenarios of poetic drama in which they play out for good or ill. Accumulating a variety of perspectives on and contexts for the significant role of good counsel, manuscript audiences may themselves gather a multifaceted sense of what has constituted good ræd through time, putting such knowledge to work in their own epoch” (p. 136).Chapter 1, “Foundation and Refoundation in Genesis A” (pp. 34–66), argues for the importance of the distinctive original 111-line prologue of Genesis A, which begins the manuscript and narrates the fall of the rebel angels in heaven and God's creation of hell as a place of torment for the rebels. The prologue is not just a curious deviation from the Biblical Genesis, Kears argues, but rather reorients the whole poem (and to some extent the whole manuscript) to an opposition between ræd and unræd. He analyzes the political themes foregrounded in this prologue that then structure several episodes in the poem; he relates those themes to analogous political issues of the late 10th and early 11th centuries: e.g., “These opening passages of Genesis A also provide specific reasons for why a high-ranking subject within the heavenly kingdom may have betrayed his lord. As such, the prologue also reflects the kinds of political disasters that threatened rulers throughout the early medieval period” (p. 60).In chapter 2, “Satan's Vengeance and Genesis B” (pp. 67–101), Kears argues that the in situ effect of Genesis B as an interpolation (which fits a bit awkwardly into the narrative sequence established by Genesis A) in fact revisits and deepens the manuscript's themes of punishment, ill-counsel, rule and rebellion as Genesis B returns to the scene of primal rebellion in Genesis A's prologue, but revisits that rebellion with a very different perspective and set of poetic resources: “The poetry of Genesis B allows manuscript audiences to re-examine the drama of Genesis A's prologue and its prominent themes of counsel and creativity, outlining from a different poetic perspective, and through Satan's own words, the way these qualities can be misused or misunderstood” (pp. 69–70).Chapter 3, “Reading, Misreading and the Red Sea: the Journey to Ræd in Exodus” (pp. 102–135) also examines ræd and unræd, but extends to issues of reading, understanding, and interpretation—all important for ræd and unræd and also a particular focus of Exodus: “Exodus is concerned with the path to rightful interpretation and with the perils of misreading and misunderstanding. In addition, the poem itself challenges us to uncover its veiled Christian meanings through re-reading. . . . this chapter seeks to locate where in the poem representations of good and bad ræd—and, on a related note, good and bad readers—are to be found” (p. 105).Chapter 4, “Rise and Fall Again in the Old English Daniel” (pp. 135–162), examines how poor rule and advice can create disaster for a kingdom or polity, “focusing as [Daniel] does on the need for good counsel for those in positions of prosperity, and on the need for kings and kingdoms to rightfully interpret divine messages through wisdom” (p. 135). Chapter 5 (pp. 163–196) takes up Christ and Satan, the final poem in the manuscript, as the poetic sequence takes a different turn: “Those working on ‘Liber II’ [i.e., Christ and Satan] thought it was very important that the manuscript had this kind of final section, one that looks back through the other poetry from a more explicitly Christological perspective. As piecemeal and broken as the poetry of Christ and Satan can be, it demands recall and re-reading of the other poems, demands a re-circling through much of the history already accounted, in the last, but largest and most forceful, exhortation concerning good ræd and rightful interpretation in the codex” (p. 162). So once again, Kears's method is a kind of recursive, nonlinear reading of the manuscript; and in fact, the first readers who work in this fashion are the Christ and Satan scribes, whose poem seems to go back and comment on the themes of ræd and unræd in the previous poems: “as Christ and Satan became part of Junius 11, it altered the way other poems in the manuscript could be re-read. Its inclusion created the potential for an audience to read backwards through the codex from the perspective of another poem that offers explicit instructions, encourages penance, and has concerns about the approaching end of time” (p. 165).This monograph, the author's first, has many strengths: it is impressively interdisciplinary, especially for a first book; it deploys historical context in a deft and winning fashion; it provides a model for similar studies of other manuscripts: i.e., how to read disparate poems and their interactions in a codex; it advances our understand of Junius 11, both as a whole and in terms of its individual poems; it is well-researched; and the writing is graceful and accessible.

  PublisherDOI

• B

  2023-06-19

  other1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter provides descriptive information about people, places, things, and concepts in Chaucer's works and Chaucer's influence on generations of writers after him, and also an overview of topics of particular significance to Chaucer scholarship. It contains entries that start with the letter "B", and the subsequent chapters of this book are alphabetized accordingly. This book thus provides a comprehensive overview of the life, times, works, sources/analogues, and influence of Geoffrey Chaucer for a new millennium of general readers, students, and scholars. The entries contain the headword, the name and institutional affiliation of the author of the entry, the body of the entry, often a "see also" section with cross-references to related entries in the encyclopedia, and finally in most cases a list of references, with complete bibliography, that are mentioned as in-text citations in the entry.

  PublisherDOI

• Beowulf—A Poem

  2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Literature
  • Art
  PublisherDOI

• Beowulf—A Poem

  2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Literature
  • Art

  <JATS1:p>Why should anyone, aside from specialist historians and philologists, read Beowulf? This book presents a passionate literary argument for Beowulf as a searching and subtle exploration of the human presence. Seamus Heaney praised Beowulf as “a work of the greatest imaginative vitality“: how is that true? The poem's current scholarly obsessions and its popular reception have obscured the fact that this untitled and anonymous 3182-line poem from Anglo-Saxon England is a powerful and enduring work of world literature. Beowulf is an early medieval exercise in humanism: it dramatizes, in varied and complex ways, the conflict between human autonomy and the “mind-forg'd manacles” of the world. The poem is as relevant and moving to any reader today as it was during the early Middle Ages. This book serves both as an invitation and introduction to the poem as well as an intervention in its current scholarly context.</JATS1:p>

  PublisherDOI

• Beowulf—A Poem

  Amsterdam University Press eBooks · 2022-01-27

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Why should anyone, aside from specialist historians and philologists, read Beowulf? This book presents a passionate literary argument for Beowulf as a searching and subtle exploration of the human presence. Seamus Heaney praised Beowulf as "a work of the greatest imaginative vitality": how is that true? The poem's current scholarly obsessions and its popular reception have obscured the fact that this untitled and anonymous 3182-line poem from Anglo-Saxon England is a powerful and enduring work of world literature. Beowulf is an early medieval exercise in humanism: it dramatizes, in varied and complex ways, the conflict between human autonomy and the "mind-forg'd manacles" of the world. The poem is as relevant and moving to any reader today as it was during the early Middle Ages. This book serves both as an invitation and introduction to the poem as well as an intervention in its current scholarly context

  PublisherDOI

• Beowulf—A Poem

  2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Literature
  • Art
  PublisherDOI

• Tristan Major, <i>Undoing Babel: The Tower of Babel in Anglo-Saxon Literature</i>. (Toronto Anglo-Saxon Series 25.) Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2018. Pp. xiii, 289. $70. ISBN: 978-1-4875-0054-2.

  Speculum · 2019-09-18

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Chapter One. The Political Image Of Babylon In Antiquity

  University of Toronto Press eBooks · 2016-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Chapter Three. Political Babylon From The Great Schism To The Present

  University of Toronto Press eBooks · 2016-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Index

  University of Toronto Press eBooks · 2016-12-31

  paratext1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Aaron Kleist

  10 shared

• Nicole Guenther Discenza

  University of South Florida

  10 shared

• Elaine Treharne

  1 shared

• Phillip Pulsiano

  1 shared

• Jonathan Wilcox

  University of Iowa

  1 shared

• Peter Dendle

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• McKnight Presidential Fellow (2007 - 2010)
• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2007 - 200…
• Donald V. Hawkins Professorship, Department of English, Univ…
• Solmsen Residential Fellowship, Institute for Research in th…
• John Nicholas Brown Prize (2008) of the Medieval Academy of…