A sensual philology for Anglo-Saxon England

What forgotten forms can philology assume anew? Reassessing how early medieval writers loved words differently than we do reveals significant gaps between past and presence senses of the physical phenomena words can index. In the early medieval language of Old English texts there remains a largely uncharted capacity for less linguistically driven aspects of expression, formed through a network of words, sounds, bodies and media: how the mute sound of a bell and the crook of a silent finger come together in medieval sign language, or how the Old English word for ring becomes a weeping, poetic gasp within a heaving breast. Such early medieval moments of communication survive because of language and in spite of language, and qualify the visualist framework through which we predictably reconstitute the medieval past, calling, /sotto voce/, for more than lovely words