Masculinity and Conversion in Old English Guthlac A

The article turns to Judith Butler’s writings on abjection to elucidate the Christian subjectivity that emerges from the Old English poetic life of Guthlac of Crowland, known as Guthlac A. The abject is defined as the other within the subject who is in the process of conversion from secular values and the Germanic past. Guthlac’s conversion from his secular and ancestral values informs a notion of masculinity nascent in his subjectivity, masculinity that results from the abjection of ancestral secular identity by transposing it onto the demonic other, the destruction of which transforms and sanitizes ancestral landscape.