In recent years, New Materialism has emerged as one of the most important trends in the humanities. The nomenclature is an umbrella term denoting a range of philosophical movements that share a rejection of what they call "correlationism"—the view that "being" exists as the correlate between the world and the human mind.¹ New Materialism critiques the human-world correlate as "selfishly anthropocentric," and rejects its relegation of inanimate matter to the status of passive "screens for the projection of human meanings and representations."² Instead, it espouses what has been described as "a non-anthropocentric realism grounded in a shift from epistemology to ontology and the recognition of matter's intrinsic activity."³ There exists a metaphysical reality that exceeds human consciousness, it argues, in which agency is dispersed across human and nonhuman objects alike, and phenomena represent the product of the active cooperation between a spectrum of animate and inanimate agents. "We live in a universe teaming with actants where we are actants among actants," New Materialist Levi Bryant emblematically writes, "not sovereigns organizing all the rest."⁴

New Materialism-inspired approaches have been enthusiastically received by medievalists. Kellie Robertson, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, and James Paz among many have productively applied different forms of New Materialism [End Page 48] to enquire into the agency of the nonhuman objects depicted in early medieval texts, as well as the nonhuman force of archaeological artifacts from the period.⁵ Surprisingly, in all this enthusiasm, there has been no consideration of the medieval text itself as a potentially agential object. While some Animal Studies scholars have begun to explore how the handling of parchment affects the reading experience of manuscript texts, there has not yet arisen from New Materialist scholarship an object-oriented palaeography that has thought about the agency possessed by manuscripts in the production of the texts within them.⁶ Yet manuscripts as material objects are absolutely central to our understanding of medieval literature. "Texts of Old English poems do not exist, only manuscripts," Roy Michael Liuzza rightly points out, and the ways in which these objects do or do not convey the texts within them therefore play a vital shaping force in how we perceive the literature.⁷

This paper begins to explore the potential of an object-oriented approach to medieval manuscripts by considering a range of textual "problems" in the Beowulf manuscript. The Nowell codex, Beowulf's only surviving witness, throws up many editorial headaches.⁸ It has become unreadable at points due to heavy material damage, and appears to have been copied by scribes who did not fully understand their exemplar and did not always agree about the poem's content. As a result, it does not consistently provide us with a clear singular work. Instead, it poses a series of what Allen Frantzen has termed editorial cruces: moments of surplus, lack, or ambiguity of text.⁹ Ever since Grímur Thorkelin's first printed edition of the poem in 1815, scholars of Beowulf have attempted to work around these cruces by deleting, supplementing or emending the text found in the manuscript.¹⁰ Although the question of how drastic these [End Page 49] interventions should be has been at the source of a polarized debate, the framing of the Nowell Codex as an essentially faulty copy obstructing our view of the "true" original Beowulf has largely gone unquestioned.¹¹ As Simon Thomson recently observed, most studies of Beowulf have been "uninterested in its representation [in the Nowell codex] other than to work past its errors towards an earlier incarnation."¹² Yet, as this paper demonstrates, there are a series of instances at which this fixation on a complete, singular text unwarrantedly reduces the manuscript poem's rich poetic ambiguity. By showing how embracing some of the difficulties generated by the codex can enrich rather than frustrate our reading of Beowulf, it advocates for an approach that attends to these difficulties as poetry, one which frames the manuscript not as a necessary evil, but as a distinct "object-voice" contributing to the creation of the poem.

Beowulf, and OE...