The intersectional anxiety of individual piety, communal salvation, and apocalypticism in millennial Anglo-Saxon England

In Anglo-Saxon England, the role of eschatological and apocalyptic concerns were more pervasive around the year 1000 than in continental Europe during the same period and it is crucial to understanding the prominence of eschatological and apocalyptic narratives found in English medieval literature and culture as a whole. I argue in this dissertation that we can examine the homilies and hagiography of early medieval ecclesiastical officials, particularly the works of the Blickling and Vercelli collections, Æflric’s homiletic and hagiographical works, and Wulfstan’s homilies, to determine the underlying religious anxiety underpinning these works, in which individual piety is continually interrogated against the idea of communal salvation. I argue that the issue anxiety surrounding the year 1000 is an intersection of anxiety about individual piety, communal salvation, and apocalypticism. I am defining a new form of religious intersectionality, wherein the parameters of personal piety influenced ideas of communal salvation and also creates an overarching feeling of anxiety and fear about proper religious behavior in order to achieve eternal salvation at the personal and communal level. Many of the homilies and hagiographies emphasize individual ideals of abstaining from sin and correcting one’s own behavior, both for the lay and clerical populations and keeps an emphasis on the salvation and spiritual health of the Anglo-Saxon community as a whole. An intersectional anxiety between the self and the community arose because of millennial concerns about the apocalypse and divine judgment that forced both the laity to examine their own devotional practices and ecclesiastical officials to refine their preaching and writing to account for the anxiety of communal salvation. ‘Communal salvation’ is a theological tenet that constructs a community and thus reinvents it through religious affiliation; salvation of the community is paramount to Anglo-Saxon communities, both through their identity as Christians and as a way to show culturally and politically that they are privileged. Intersectionality is how each individual in an Anglo-Saxon community looked at their own interior sin and religious practices as potentially damaging, not only to their own individual soul, but also to the spiritual salvation of the entire community.