New Readings on Women and Early Medieval English Literature and Culture: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Honour of Helen Damico 9781641893329

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NEW READINGS ON WOMEN AND EARLY MEDIEVAL ENGLISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE

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CARMEN MONOGRAPHS AND STUDIES CARMEN Monographs and Studies seeks to explore the movements of people, ideas, religions and objects in the medieval period. It welcomes publications that deal with the migration of people and artefacts in the Middle Ages, the adoption of Christianity in northern, Baltic, and east-central Europe, and early Islam and its expansion through the Umayyad caliphate. CMS also encourages work that engages with the histories of the Global South and interdisciplinary approaches that explicitly incorporate material culture.

Editorial Board

Andrea Vanina Neyra, CONICET, Buenos Aires Jitske Jasperse, Humboldt-Universität, Berlin Kathleen Neal, Monash University, Melbourne Alice Sullivan, University of Michigan

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NEW READINGS ON WOMEN AND EARLY MEDIEVAL ENGLISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE CROSS-​DISCIPLINARY STUDIES IN HONOUR OF HELEN DAMICO Edited by

HELENE SCHECK and CHRISTINE E. KOZIKOWSKI

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. © 2019, Arc Humanities Press, Leeds

The authors assert their moral right to be identified as the authors of this work.

Permission to use brief excerpts from this work in scholarly and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is an exception or limitation covered by Article 5 of the European Union’s Copyright Directive (2001/29/EC) or would be determined to be “fair use” under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act September 2010 Page 2 or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Act (17 USC §108, as revised by P.L. 94—​553) does not require the Publisher’s permission.

ISBN (print): 9781641893305 eISBN (PDF): 9781641893329 www.arc-​humanities.org

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

List of Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . viii Note from the Editors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . viii Introduction: Feminism and Early English Studies Now STACY S. KLEIN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

PART ONE: LITERACY AND MATERIAL CULTURE

1. 2. 3. 4.

Anglo-​Saxon Women, Woman, and Womanhood GALE R. OWEN-​CROCKER. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Beyond Valkyries: Drinking Horns in Anglo-​Saxon Women’s Graves CAROL NEUMAN DE VEGVAR. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Embodied Literacy: Paraliturgical Performance in the Life of Saint Leoba LISA M. C. WESTON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Imagining the Lost Libraries of Anglo-​Saxon Double Monasteries VIRGINIA BLANTON. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

PART TWO: ENGENDERING MARRIAGE AND FAMILY

5.

6.

A Textbook Stance on Marriage: The Versus ad coniugem in Anglo-Saxon England JANET SCHRUNK ERICKSEN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97

The Circumcision and Weaning of Isaac: The Cuts that Bind CATHERINE E. KARKOV. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113

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Contents

7. Saintly Mothers and Mothers of Saints JOYCE HILL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 8. Playing with Memories: Emma of Normandy, Cnut, and the Spectacle of Ælfheah’s Corpus COLLEEN DUNN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141

PART THREE: WOMEN OF THE BEOWULF MANUSCRIPT

9. The Missing Women of the Beowulf Manuscript TERESA HOOPER. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161

10. Boundaries Embodied: An Ecofeminist Reading of the Old English Judith HEIDE ESTES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179 11. Listen to the Woman: Reading Wealhtheow as Stateswoman HELEN CONRAD O’BRIAIN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 12. Reading Grendel’s Mother JANE CHANCE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209

PART FOUR: WOMEN AND ANGLO-​SAXON STUDIES

13. Female Agency in Early Anglo-​Saxon Studies: The “Nuns of Tavistock” and Elizabeth Elstob TIMOTHY GRAHAM. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 14. The First Female Anglo-​Saxon Professors MARY DOCKRAY-​MILLER. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261 Select Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277 Index of Manuscripts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283 General Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures Figure 2.1 Diagrams of Graves (18) 17 and Graves 18 (17). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Figure 2.2 Copper-​alloy bindings of the besom(?). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 Figure 2.3 Horn tip and rim; bronze tube. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Figure 2.4 Grave 43, drinking horn mounts, headgear. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

Figure 6.1 Abraham sleeps with Hagar. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Figure 6.2 The birth of Isaac. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124 Figure 6.3 The birth of Ishmael. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 Figure 6.4 The weaning of Isaac. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 Figure 6.5 The burial of Sarah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 Figure 13.1 Opening of the Laws of King Æthelberht of Kent. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244 Figure 13.2 Elizabeth Elstob’s facsimile transcript, opening of the Laws of King Æthelberht. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245 Figure 13.3 Opening of the Rochester Cartulary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250 Figure 13.4 James Smith’s facsimile transcript, opening of the Rochester Cartulary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251

Figure 13.5 Elizabeth Elstob, transcript of Cambridge University Library MS Gg. 3. 28. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257 Figure 14.1 Map of US women’s colleges offering Anglo-​Saxon. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262 Figure 14.2 Ida Josephine Everett in her office at Wheaton College. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265 Figure 14.3 Portrait of Heloise Hersey, professor of Anglo-​Saxon at Smith College. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267

Tables

Table 4.1

Education of Anglo-​Saxon abbesses and their influence on others. . . . . 90

Table 8.1

Ælfheah in Anglo-​Saxon Liturgical Calendars. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156

Table 4.2 Table 8.2

Evidence of educational training and types of textual engagement . . . . 91

Ælfheah in Anglo-​Saxon Litanies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157

newgenprepdf

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

ASE ASPR BHL CCSL CSEL DOE EETS e.s. o.s. s.s. MGH PASE PL PMLA Sawyer

Anglo-​Saxon England Anglo-​Saxon Poetic Records Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina Corpus Christianorum Series Latina Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum Dictionary of Old English Early English Text Society Extra Series Original Series Supplementary Series Monumenta Germaniae Historica Prosopography of Anglo-​Saxon England database (www.pase.ac.uk) Jacques Paul Migne, ed. Patrologia cursus completus. Series Latina. Publications of the Modern Language Association Peter Sawyer’s Anglo-​Saxon Charters: An Annotated List and Bibliography, updated and revised as e-​Sawyer (http://​esawyer.org.uk)

NOTE FROM THE EDITORS During the production of this volume the discipline has confronted itself with the racial connotations that have attached to “Anglo-Saxon” even when denoting a period of history in a particular place. While it has been conventional to use “Anglo-Saxon England” to refer to the language, literature, and culture of England from the end of the Roman period to the Norman Conquest, the editors of the collection adopt the term “Early Medieval England” as reflected in the title of this volume to underscore the linguistic and cultural diversity of the people inhabiting the island at that time as well as to respect and nurture diversity within our field of study. Production had advanced sufficiently to prevent contributors from revising usage, so conventional usage stands within individual essays.

newgenprepdf

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

ASE ASPR BHL CCSL CSEL DOE EETS e.s. o.s. s.s. MGH PASE PL PMLA Sawyer

Anglo-​Saxon England Anglo-​Saxon Poetic Records Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina Corpus Christianorum Series Latina Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum Dictionary of Old English Early English Text Society Extra Series Original Series Supplementary Series Monumenta Germaniae Historica Prosopography of Anglo-​Saxon England database (www.pase.ac.uk) Jacques Paul Migne, ed. Patrologia cursus completus. Series Latina. Publications of the Modern Language Association Peter Sawyer’s Anglo-​Saxon Charters: An Annotated List and Bibliography, updated and revised as e-​Sawyer (http://​esawyer.org.uk)

NOTE FROM THE EDITORS During the production of this volume the discipline has confronted itself with the racial connotations that have attached to “Anglo-Saxon” even when denoting a period of history in a particular place. While it has been conventional to use “Anglo-Saxon England” to refer to the language, literature, and culture of England from the end of the Roman period to the Norman Conquest, the editors of the collection adopt the term “Early Medieval England” as reflected in the title of this volume to underscore the linguistic and cultural diversity of the people inhabiting the island at that time as well as to respect and nurture diversity within our field of study. Production had advanced sufficiently to prevent contributors from revising usage, so conventional usage stands within individual essays.

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INTRODUCTION: FEMINISM AND EARLY ENGLISH STUDIES NOW

STACY S. KLEIN* IN MAY 2014, a group of Anglo-​Saxonists gathered at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, Michigan, for a roundtable to develop plans for a “new” version of Helen Damico and Alexandra Hennessy Olsen’s pathbreaking volume, New Readings on Women in Old English Literature, which appeared nearly thirty years ago.1 Discussions concerning the shape and content of the proposed volume were lively, yet they produced, perhaps unsurprisingly, little consensus. Feminist scholars tend to resist univocal narratives; lack of consensus is thus a proud hallmark of feminist research. The attraction to debate and difference in feminist theory and praxis serves as an acknowledgement of how variables such as age, social status, race, ethnicity, nationality, and sexuality produce profoundly different social and psychological realities for women. Such differences help to explain the necessarily diversified and fractured nature of feminism’s aims and goals. The appeal of plurality and dissent also lies in their longstanding role as catalysts for feminist knowledge production, an enterprise that has, historically, thrived on self-​critique and on a willingness to think beyond its previously constructed borders. As Elizabeth Weed writes: “The critical advantage of the feminist project has been that when one area of feminism has settled on a truth, another has emerged to disrupt that truth, to keep at bay truths too easily produced by cultural and political formations.”2 Perhaps the most damaging of these “too easily produced truths,” and one that feminists during the past half century have sought to disrupt, is the idea of Woman as a unitary group. Women of colour and queer feminists, in particular, have made great strides in exposing the category of Woman as a fantasy of commonality, fabricated through the repression of individual women’s lived experiences, as well as a normativizing concept that naturalizes rigid sex-​gender systems based on strict polarities and categorical distinctions between men and women. Questions about thoughtful plurality, multiple perspectives, and differences among women figured centrally at the Kalamazoo roundtable in 2014. They also figured centrally in the early Middle Ages. The wide range of Old English terms for denoting women and female figures, such as wif (woman); wifmann *  Rutgers University. [email protected]

1  New Readings on Women in Old English Literature, ed. Helen Damico and Alexandra Hennessey Olsen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). 2  Elizabeth Weed, “Introduction: Terms of Reference,” in Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics, ed. Elizabeth Weed (London: Routledge, 1989), ix–​xxxi at xxxi.

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(woman-​person); fæmne (maid or virgin); ides (noble woman); hlæfdige (mistress [over servants] or lady); cwen (queen or female consort); cwene (female serf or prostitute); nunne (nun); meowle (maiden); mynecen (female monk); myltestre (prostitute); widuwe (widow); bryd (bride); mædencild (female child); mægð (maiden or virgin), indicates that the Anglo-​Saxons were highly attuned to differences among women—​differences that stemmed from such factors as social rank, marital status, sexual purity, religious affiliation, and age—​and, more broadly, that Woman was as much a fiction during this period as it is in modernity.3 Yet if Woman is a fictional category, it is nevertheless true—​as feminist activists and post-​structuralist thinkers have shown—​that fictions of gender serve a variety of functions, providing, for example, political platforms for elaborating social demands, or psychological structures for constituting lives of cultural legibility. Two other sessions at the 2014 Congress, designed specifically to honour Helen Damico, explored some of those gendered operations in the context of Anglo-Saxon England and addressed many of the desiderata produced at the initial roundtable discussion. It thus seemed fitting to the organizers and editors to gather this scholarship together under the rubric of a new New Readings volume. Alexandra Hennessey Olsen warmly endorsed the idea, remarking that she had greatly enjoyed collaborating with Helen on the original volume and welcomed a new one in Helen’s honour. The present volume takes the fictional concept of Woman as a heuristic device for exploring the social roles, gendered symbols, material structures, and cultural institutions available to female figures in Anglo-​Saxon literature and culture. By tracing the ways in which women as different as, say, landed queens, learned nuns, female monsters, mothers of saints, and martyred prostitutes are depicted in the Anglo-​Saxon literary, historical, and cultural imagination, individual essays uncover the many identities and forms of agency available to women during this period. Collectively, the essays reveal that differences among women, both modern and medieval, are rightly understood as the effect of subjects’ material placement within specific discursive networks and cultural practices, rather than as fixed or essential signs of identity grounded in biology. The editors and contributors thus present New Readings on Women and Early Medieval English Literature and Culture in honour of Helen Damico, whose life and work have significantly expanded our knowledge of the mythical, materialist, and social dimensions of women in the early medieval textual imagination. Individual essays focus almost exclusively on women. When men do appear, it is largely in relation to social roles traditionally coded as masculine (e.g., fatherhood), to symbols of masculinity coopted by 3  The nuances and subtle shades of meaning in these terms are difficult to capture. The definitions that I have provided are by no means exhaustive, but are intended merely to give a sense of the broad semantic range of “woman” in Anglo-​Saxon writings. For further discussion, see Christine Rauer, “Mann and Gender in Old English Prose: A Pilot Study,” Neophilologus 101 (2017): 139–​58; also useful is Anne Curzan, Gender Shifts in the History of English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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Introduction

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women (e.g., drinking horns), or to institutional structures, such as marriage or monasticism, that powerfully impacted Anglo-​Saxon women’s lives. The volume’s insistent focus on women and female figures is not intended to suggest that maleness and masculinity are rightly understood as “beyond question” or as self-​evident aspects of an unchanging human nature. Indeed, one of the most productive insights of second-​wave feminism has been the recognition that maleness and masculinity are social and discursive constructs whose boundaries must be constantly interrogated and re-​imagined so that men (as well as women) might be freed from restrictive gender norms and social transformation effected for all members of society. Yet this “return to women” as the primary subject of analysis enables the individual contributors to attend carefully to the multiple and complex forms of female identity in early medieval texts. The implications of these findings extend far beyond providing a fuller and more inclusive historical record. As Jean Howard reminds us, “representations of the past […] continue to authorize action in the present and to constitute the categories and assumptions through which contemporary subjects live their relations to the real.”4 By focusing their energies on differences among women rather than on oppositions between men and women, the essays presented here alert us to the deep pluralities of gender in Anglo-​Saxon literature and culture, putting to rest once and for all any sense of Anglo-​Saxon England as having bequeathed to us a rigid two-​sex system as part of our modern historical legacy. The essays at hand further encourage us to challenge modern relations of power and to envision alternative social relations for the future by revealing a past filled with surprisingly flexible gender roles, sex-​gender systems, and opportunities for both men and women. Indeed, when Judith Butler envisions a future marked by new forms of gender, she acknowledges that “the genders I have in mind have been existing for a long time.”5 The project before us, then, Butler contends, “is not a question merely of producing a new future for genders that do not yet exist […] It is a question of developing […] a new legitimating lexicon for the gender reality that we have always been living.”6 Some of the lexemes can be found in the Anglo-​Saxon past. The individual contributions to the present volume address a range of issues and topics, and emerge from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Yet they are united in their shared commitment to furthering a set of goals that have proven central for feminist scholars working in early historical periods:

(l) To produce new histories that include women in order to provide a more balanced, and thus more accurate, account of the past. (2) To rewrite the categories though which the past is constituted, asking questions that invite attention to women’s lives, thereby demonstrating that what counts as 4  Jean E. Howard, “Feminism and the Question of History: Resituating the Debate,” Women’s Studies 19 (1991): 149–​57 at 151. 5  Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 219. 6  Butler, Undoing Gender, 219.

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established “knowledge” is often shaped by research that takes men’s lives as an unquestioned standard and that overlooks or distorts women’s experiences. (3) To reassess received knowledge about women and gender roles in the past, thus revealing the variable and constructed nature of sex-​gender systems, social institutions, and gender roles that have become so entrenched that they often appear as transhistorical aspects of human nature. (4) To mobilize the past as grounds for envisioning alternative futures and for asking what it might mean to be free of gender altogether. (5) To undermine teleologically driven accounts of history that would draw a straight line from medieval oppression to modern freedom. (6) To use misogyny and other aspects of gender inequity as a lens for challenging all inequalities and forms of difference that affect women or intersect with gender.

Although many of the volume’s essays challenge established views of women in Anglo-​Saxon England, they are nevertheless marked by an evident respect for earlier scholarship. Collectively, the contributors seek to build on existing feminist research in Anglo-​Saxon studies rather than to supplant it. This stance toward prior scholarship takes its cue from feminist standpoint theory, which sought to question the masculinist underpinnings of critical methodologies rooted in the destruction and dismissal of other approaches, ideas, and scholars.7 This tone is also part of a broader shift in Literary Studies that has increasingly come to recognize the shortcomings of critique and to insist on the value of careful (and caring) reading and description, characterized by attention and concern for one’s primary materials.8 As Tolkien’s allegory of the great tower erected from old stones makes clear, new visions are often built on earlier foundations and by capitalizing on materials bequeathed to us from the past.9 Or, as one 7  For early work on feminist methodologies and scholarly approaches, see Sandra Harding, “Introduction: Is There a Feminist Method?,” in Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues, ed. Sandra Harding (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 1–​14; and also, in this same collection, Nancy C. M. Hartsock, “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism,” 157–​80. 8  For recent work on literary approaches that are driven by an ethics of care and reparation rather than destruction, see Heather Love, “Truth and Consequences: On Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” Criticism 52 (2010): 235–​41; as well as the essays in Critique and Postcritique, ed. Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), especially Love, “The Temptations: Donna Haraway, Feminist Objectivity, and the Problems of Critique,” 50–​72. Also useful is Robyn Wiegman, “The Times We’re In: Queer Feminist Criticism and the Reparative ‘Turn’,” Feminist Theory 15 (2014): 4–​25. 9  J. R. R. Tolkien, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture, Proceedings of the British Academy 22 (1936): 245–​95, with the tower allegory at 248–​49. For a reading of the masculinist underpinnings of Tolkien’s essay, see Clare A. Lees, “Men and Beowulf,” in Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Clare A. Lees (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 129–​48.

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contributor to the present volume puts it: “What I have hoped to accomplish here is to put a harmony on her [Helen Damico’s] song.”10 Given that the present volume aims to further a set of relatively well-​established goals in feminist studies and also to extend prior scholarship, one might be tempted to ask what, if anything, is so very new about it? The question is further problematized by the vexed status of newness itself within feminism. In her 1977 manifesto “Poetry is not a Luxury,” feminist writer and civil rights activist Audre Lorde cautioned against the danger of becoming overly invested in the possibility of newness, warning that “sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas […] But there are no new ideas still waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human [beings]. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves—​along with the renewed courage to try them out.”11 Lorde concludes her manifesto with the rejoinder that “there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.”12 By the end of the twentieth century, the status of newness within feminist studies had become even more problematic. In 1996, Judith Butler went on record “suggesting that feminist theory has no other work than in responding to the places where feminism is under challenge […] something like a submission to the demand for rearticulation.”13 Ten years later, PMLA featured a special Theories and Methodologies section entitled “Feminist Criticism Today: In Memory of Nellie Y. McKay,” that included essays such as “Feminist Deaths and Feminism Today” and “Notes on the Afterlife of Feminist Criticism,” which questioned whether academics might be experiencing exhaustion (or even boredom) with feminist approaches, and whether the success of feminist scholarship, as witnessed in part through its incorporation into the academy, might have contributed to its own demise by dulling the political edge from which it had historically drawn much of its energy.14 In light of these recent challenges to the vitality of feminist studies, a volume of essays devoted to women in Anglo-​Saxon literature and culture might seem to merit some justification. In response, I offer two. The first is to recognize that in practice the “demise of feminism” has proved much exaggerated. Feminist insights have indeed become

10  Carol Neuman de Vegvar, “Beyond Valkyries: Drinking Horns in Anglo-​Saxon Women’s Graves,” below, p. 43.

11  Audre Lorde, “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (Berkeley:  Crossing Press, 1984; repr. 2007), 36–​39 (2007) at 38. This essay first appeared in Chrysalis: A Magazine of Women’s Culture 3 (1977) under the title “Poems Are Not Luxuries.” 12  Lorde, “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” 39.

13  Judith Butler, “The End of Sexual Difference?,” in Feminist Consequences, Theory for the New Century, ed. Elizabeth Bronfen and Misha Kavka (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 414–​34 at 418. This essay was written in 1996 and appeared in shorter form, in both German and French, in 1997. 14  PMLA 121 (2006): 1678–​741.

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accepted within mainstream scholarship to the point that they are often simply incorporated into broadly conceived studies of history, knowledge, aesthetics, economics, and politics. But questions of gender are still present. As Sharon Marcus explains: “To define an object of study in terms other than gender does not eliminate gender from an analytic framework.”15 Conversely, scholars who focus on gender in tandem with race, sexuality, and nationality may seem to have abandoned “pure feminism,” when in fact feminism has been vitalized by the study of gender as one vector of difference inseparable from others. The second justification is that if we are indeed witnessing a “Feminist Death” within the academy, it has proven to be a very slow and protracted one, as well as a demise that has happily co-​existed for decades with a proliferation of remarkably vibrant feminist scholarship. The pioneering collection of essays, Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century (2001), opens with Misha Kavka’s assertion that “Feminism ain’t what it used to be,” a fact that, she contends, “threatens to mark our words on the subject with the anger, grief, denial, or resignation of those mourning at a graveside.”16 As Kavka predicts, many of the volume’s essays contain statements to this effect, such as Biddy Martin’s contention that “Women’s Studies has lost much of its critical and intellectual vigor”17 or Judith Butler’s claim that “I think for many of us it is a sad time for feminism, even a defeated time.”18 Similarly, the pathbreaking volume, Conflicts in Feminism (1990), concludes with a conversation between its two editors, Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller, in which Fox Keller laments that “Today, feminists are […] more fearful […] made more fearful by our own eagerness to devalue, censor, and dismiss,” and confesses open nostalgia for the “radical thrust [of seventies feminism] from which, we believed, feminists—​and women—​would generally gain some benefit.”19 Such claims, propelled by numerous factors, among them a recognition of the increasingly fractured nature of feminism, as well as the sombre aftermath of 1980s Reaganomics, illustrate that affects such as malaise, disenchantment, and disillusionment (painful as they may be) do not preclude the production of feminist knowledge. Feminism’s longstanding capacity for 15  Sharon Marcus, “Feminist Criticism: A Tale of Two Bodies,” PMLA 121 (2006): 1722–​28 at 1725. For a more field-​specific example of this kind of research, see Stacy S. Klein, Ruling Women: Queenship and Gender in Anglo-​Saxon Literature (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), which argues that Anglo-​Saxon writers drew on legendary queens and women of extreme social privilege to express their views on a wide range of non-​gender-​specific social issues, such as conversion, heroism, social hierarchy, counsel, idolatry, and lay spirituality—​all vital concerns in early medieval society. 16  Misha Kavka, “Introduction,” in Feminist Consequences, ed. Bronfen and Kavka, ix–​xxvi at ix and x. 17  Biddy Martin, “Success and Its Failures,” in Feminist Consequences, ed. Bronfen and Kavka, 353–​80 at 353. Martin’s essay first appeared in differences 9 (1997): 102–​31.

18  Butler, “The End of Sexual Difference?,” in Feminist Consequences, ed. Bronfen and Kavka, 414–​34 at 418.

19  “Conclusion:  Practicing Conflict in Feminist Theory,” in Conflicts in Feminism, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (New York: Routledge, 1990), 370–​85 at 384.

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generating new knowledge within difficult political climates is a sobering and yet potentially helpful example for our current age of “Trumpism.” One final reason that the present is a particularly opportune moment for producing a new New Readings volume is that changes in Anglo-​Saxon Studies over the past several decades have opened up myriad possibilities for research on women and gender. Two of these developments are indicated by the difference between the title of the 1990 volume, New Readings on Women in Old English Literature, and that of the present one, New Readings on Women and Early Medieval English Literature and Culture. The shift from “Old English” to “Early Medieval” points to an increasing recognition of Anglo-​ Saxon England’s linguistic diversity, and of the exchange of texts, forms, and ideas among English, Anglo-​Latin, Irish, Welsh, and Continental writers during this period.20 The shift from “Literature” to “Literature and Culture” signals an effort to analyze literature within the various social and cultural contexts in which it was produced and circulated, and, more broadly, to bring Literary Studies into conversation with fields such as Archaeology, History, and Religion.21 Such conversations can take many forms, as suggested by the proliferation of scholarly terms for describing methodologies that strive to cross, or to work at the intersections of, different disciplines. The present volume’s claims to present “cross-​” (rather than, say, multi-​, inter-​, or trans-​) disciplinary studies indicates its commitment to fostering knowledge production through dialogue and the exchange of ideas across disciplines as opposed to pursuing multi-​disciplinary models of accretion in which knowledge from a variety of disciplines is simply gathered together in an effort to produce a more comprehensive whole. The endorsement of cross-​disciplinary studies is also intended to underscore the increasing importance of scholarly inquiry that strives to move across disciplines, either individually or collectively, while respecting their particular epistemologies and methodologies, thus resisting any easy urge to transcend disciplinary boundaries or dissolve them altogether.22 20  In 2008, after serving for almost a decade as collaborative bibliographers for the “Old English” section of the Year’s Work in English Studies, Mary Swan and I proposed changing the name of this section from “Old English” to “Early Medieval,” in order to capture more accurately the numerous languages, including Old Irish, Welsh, Anglo-​Latin, and Anglo-​Norman, covered by Anglo-​Saxon scholarship. For a good example of comparative research in Anglo-​Saxon women’s and gender studies, see Helene Scheck, Reform and Resistance: Formations of Female Subjectivity in Early Medieval Ecclesiastical Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008). 21  In spite of its ostensible focus on “Old English literature,” the 1990 New Readings volume, in fact, spanned a remarkable range of disciplines and textual forms, from law to literature, from history to hagiography, and from place-​names to poetry, as well as a range of languages, including Old English, Anglo-​Latin, and Old Norse.

22  For an admirably clear overview of terms commonly used to describe different kinds of disciplinarity, see Marilyn Stember, “Advancing the Social Sciences Through the Interdisciplinary Enterprise,” The Social Science Journal 28 (1991):  1–​14. More recent reflections can be found in “Introduction: Doctrines, Disciplines, Discourses, Departments,” ed. James Chandler and Arnold I. Davidson, Special Issue of Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 729–​46.

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The present volume’s cultivation of more fluid and less “disciplined” thought styles, is particularly evident in its emphasis on analyzing literature in relation to the material contexts in which it was produced and circulated. Fred C. Robinson’s research helped sensitize Anglo-​Saxonists to the importance of situating Old English literature “in its most immediate context,” and several essays in the present volume pursue codicological approaches, broadly defined, attending to representations of women in Anglo-​Latin manuscripts (Ericksen), or in the Beowulf manuscript (Estes, Hooper), as well as to female figures who ought to appear in the Nowell Codex but are nevertheless missing (Hooper).23 Other essays shed light on the daily lives of Anglo-​Saxon women by studying grave goods, including cooking utensils, metal dress accessories, and drinking horns (Owen-​Crocker, Neuman de Vegvar), or by analyzing literary figures and gendered symbolism in relation to insights drawn from art history (Karkov), forensic archaeology (Owen-​Crocker), or cemetery archaeology (Neuman de Vegvar). The use of material culture to supplement textual records often works in reverse as well. Two of the volume’s essays demonstrate that scrutinizing hagiographical narratives for images of monastic libraries and women readers (Blanton) or for depictions of paraliturgical ritual performances (Weston) may shed valuable light on Anglo-​Saxon female patronage, women’s literacy, and their engagement with book culture—​aspects of history that may otherwise be lost to us due to gaps in the historical record. Joyce Hill’s essay uses Anglo-​Saxon hagiographical narratives in a similar manner, tracing how discussions of saintly mothers and pre-​natal signs of sanctity were used to legitimize and confirm the sanctity of men, and demonstrating, more broadly, that feminist research may greatly illuminate non-​gender-​specific topics. Collectively, these essays reveal the value of cross-​disciplinary conversations for Anglo-​Saxon Studies, as well as the limitations of trying to reconstruct the past on the basis of texts alone. Efforts to spark cross-​disciplinary conversations have been accompanied in recent years by a similar desire to cross long-​accepted temporal boundaries. The recognition that strict boundaries of historical periodization, particularly those constructed on the basis of watershed events, such as military conquests, regnal shifts, or large-​scale transformations of faith, might occlude a deeper understanding of the realities of women’s lives, was famously proposed in Joan Kelly-​Gadol’s ground-​breaking 1977 essay, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?”24 Subsequent research by scholars Mary Swan and Elaine Treharne has allowed the concept to gain traction in Anglo-​Saxon Studies. The idea of a “long Anglo-​Saxon period,” one that stretches far beyond the Norman Conquest of 1066 and acknowledges the afterlife of Anglo-​Saxon literary and cultural formations well into the eleventh and twelfth centuries, has created space for investigating possible continuities between pre-​and post-​Conquest literary cultures, and enabled new feminist research 23  Fred C. Robinson, “Old English Literature in Its Most Immediate Context,” in The Editing of Old English, ed. Fred C. Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 3–​24.

24  Joan Kelly-​Gadol, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?,” in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal, Claudia Koontz, and Susan Stuard (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977; repr. 1987), 137–​64 (1977) and 175–​201 (1987).

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in Anglo-​Saxon Studies.25 As Elizabeth Tyler has recently shown, women negotiated the eleventh-​century conquests of England, both Danish (1016) and Norman (1066), differently than men, participating in multi-​lingual, international networks, comprised of both lay women and female monastics, that allowed them to serve as bridges between Anglo-​Saxon and later European literary culture.26 Tyler’s analysis of the important role that Anglo-​ Saxon women played as ambassadors of Latin literary culture long after 1066 exemplifies newer, more flexible approaches to periodization that have effectively re-​oriented the study of early medieval women and gender. Early feminist scholars tended to investigate how monumental historical changes, such as the sixth-​century conversion of barbarian kings, the Norman Conquest of 1066, or the twelfth-​century Gregorian reforms, affected the general power and status of women, as well as the institutions that affected them most directly (e.g., double monasteries, marriage).27 More recent research, by contrast, has taken a skeptical stance toward these events and sought to show that the story is more complicated and the project of feminist history more diverse than tracing the decline of a “Golden Age” for Anglo-​Saxon women or identifying the precise events—​whether Christian conversion, the eradication of double monasteries, or the Fourth Lateran Council—​that marked its demise. Particularly striking in this regard has been the treatment of Anglo-​Saxon women and gender in relation to Christianity and its associated texts and genres, such as homilies and hagiographical narratives.28 Many of the watershed events used to demarcate strict chronological boundaries for the Anglo-​Saxon period tended to centre on Christianity (e.g., the Fall of Rome, conversion of England, clerical reforms). As a result, early studies of Anglo-​Saxon women and gender tended to focus on the opportunities and forms of power offered to women by Christianity, such as queens’ participation in Christian conversion or abbesses’ administrative control over double monasteries; 25  See Elaine Treharne, Living Through Conquest: The Politics of Early English, 1020–​ 1220 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); and also Treharne, “Categorization, Periodization: The Silence of (the) English in the Twelfth Century,” New Medieval Literatures 8 (2006): 247–​73. Other useful discussions are found in Mary Swan and E. M. Treharne, eds., Rewriting Old English in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 26  England in Europe: English Royal Women and Literary Patronage, c. 1000–​c. 1150 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017).

27  Important early feminist research that sought to trace the ways in which large-​scale historical transformations affected the general status of Anglo-​Saxon women and female literary figures includes Christine Fell, Cecily Clark, and Elizabeth Williams, Women in Anglo-​Saxon England and the Impact of 1066 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984); Stephanie Hollis, Anglo-​Saxon Women and the Church: Sharing a Common Fate (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1992); and Pat Belanoff, “The Fall (?) of the Old English Female Poetic Image,” PMLA 104 (1989): 822–​31.

28  For a thoughtful study of Anglo-​Saxon women and Christianity, with particular attention to the formation of the cultural record itself, and with women’s relation to its processes of production and reception, see Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing, Double Agents: Women and Clerical Culture in Anglo-​Saxon England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).

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or, conversely, to investigate how Christianity’s increasing codification in late Anglo-​ Saxon England, as witnessed, for example, in Benedictine reformers’ efforts to enforce priestly celibacy and enclosure for religious women, may have contributed to women’s presumed decline in status. Embracing a more fluid sense of periodization effectively took the focus off of monumental religious shifts, most notably Christian conversion and monastic reform, and paved the way for investigating the many local, and often informal, possibilities available for religious women in the midst of large-​scale institutional changes. Newer research, including that found in the present volume, has begun to reveal the diverse meanings that accrued to institutions powerfully underwritten by Christianity (e.g., marriage, monasticism, reform) over the duration of the early Middle Ages and in the hands of different writers (Ericksen); and, more broadly, to show that concepts that have, historically, played a central role in feminism, such as agency, the self, literacy, and power, may have meant something different then from what they mean now.29 The injunctions of modern feminist writers such as Lorde and Butler, among others, that looking backward and resurrecting old ideas might, paradoxically, help us to access new ones and, ultimately, provide the necessary perspective for creating a more viable future resonate strongly with Anglo-​Saxon understandings of newness and related concepts. For example, an Anglo-​Saxon poet’s skill was believed to reside less in his or her ability to compose wholly original verse than to use well-​known rhythms and familiar formulas as the basis for creating fresh combinations. Similarly, the enterprise of inventio (from which our modern term “invention” derives) referred to finding something that already existed rather than to discovering something completely new. These social attitudes, both modern and medieval, regarding the salutary effects of retrospection alert us to the highly contingent nature of ideas such as newness and invite sustained consideration of the 1990 New Readings volume, as well as its difference from the present one. The 1990 publication of New Readings on Women in Old English Literature marked an important milestone in the history of Anglo-​Saxon Studies. Although women such as Elizabeth Elstob, Dorothy Whitelock, and Rosemary Woolf had made significant contributions to the field of Anglo-​Saxon Studies, research on Anglo-​Saxon women, or on female characters and gender in Old English literature, was relatively scarce in the late twentieth century, and also sequestered in lesser-​known journals and thus difficult to access. Prominent male Anglo-​Saxonists had long elided female figures or marginalized questions of gender, a way of (not) seeing exemplified in Tolkien’s self-​proclaimed efforts to “confine myself mainly to the monsters—​Grendel and the Dragon”;30 or in Adrian Bonjour’s characterization of Beowulf’s fight with Grendel’s mother as simply 29  See, for example, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, Stealing Obedience: Narratives of Agency and Identity in Late Anglo-​Saxon England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), which expands modern understandings of human agency by showing that late Anglo-​Saxon monastic culture was founded on concepts of “agent action” rooted in, paradoxically, obedience to others. 30  Tolkien, “The Monsters and the Critics,” 246.

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a “transition between the two great crises.”31 The diminution of women and female characters often operated in subtle and seemingly harmless ways as, for example, in the nineteenth-​century German philologist Friedrich Klaeber’s monumental edition of Beowulf, which glosses terms such as milde, glaed, freondlaþu, liðe, and gedefe, as “kind” or “kindness,” thus transforming the powerful and accomplished Queen Wealhtheow into a sort of Victorian “angel in the house,” and, more broadly, the Anglo-​Saxon past into an historical period in which the categories male/​female and masculinity/​femininity map directly onto binaries such as active/​passive.32 The original New Readings volume made great strides in displacing oppressive androcentric narratives about Anglo-​Saxon England and in foregrounding women’s multiple and varied roles in the Anglo-​Saxon textual past. By focusing on the agential aspects of female mourning in Old English elegies, for example, or by charting women’s participation in Anglo-​Saxon legal and documentary culture, individual essays sought to disrupt simplistic, masculinist constructions of early medieval England as a warrior society dominated by men and their interests, with women relegated to peaceweaving and passive laments for slain warriors, whose deaths would be avenged only by their “brothers-​in-​arms.” In so doing the 1990 New Readings volume demonstrated not only the richness of the Anglo-​Saxon period for studying women and gender, but also that attention to women could broaden our knowledge of Anglo-​Saxon culture more generally. As Joan Scott and others have cogently argued, however, the goal of feminist scholarship is not simply to “add women” but rather to remake the categories through which the past is constituted.33 Or, as Elizabeth Weed hypothesizes, “if feminism’s special strength is the specificity of its politics, we must attend to structures of knowledge which will allow that specificity to be produced.”34 Indeed, the 1990 New Readings volume did far more than to place women and gender at the centre of literary and historical analysis. By structuring the volume’s essays under rubrics such as “The Historical Record,” “Sexuality and Folklore,” “Language and Difference in Characterization,” and “The Stereotype Deconstructed,” rather than by longstanding categories of analysis, such as, say, “Heroism,” “Kingship,” or “Pagan/​Christian Conflicts,” Damico and Olsen provided a fresh lens for investigating the past, while situating Anglo-​Saxon Studies in the midst of cutting-​edge theoretical approaches that were transforming Literary Studies in the 1980s and 1990s, such as New Historicism, Queer Studies, Semiotics, and Post-​structuralism. 31  Adrian Bonjour, “Grendel’s Dam and the Composition of Beowulf,” English Studies 30 (1949): 113–​24 at 117; quoted in Jane Chance, “The Structural Unity of Beowulf: The Problem of Grendel’s Mother,” in New Readings on Women in Old English Literature, ed. Damico and Olsen, 248–​61 at 248. For further discussion, see Chance’s essay, “The Problem of Grendel’s Mother,” in the present volume, 209–​225. 32  Josephine Bloomfield, “Diminished by Kindness: Frederick Klaeber’s Rewriting of Wealhtheow,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 93 (1994): 183–​203.

33  Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91 (1986):  1053–​75. 34  Weed, “Introduction,” in Coming to Terms, ed. Weed, xxxi.

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The knowledge structures that subtend the present volume derive organically from the material at hand. Rather than trying to imagine pre-​conceived categories that might contain or encapsulate female experience, or to use the collected essays for creating a master narrative about women in the Anglo-​Saxon literary and historical imagination, the editors of the volume sought to allow the arguments and findings contained in the various essays to dictate the categories, and, further, to imagine categories that might foster cross-​fertilization and conversation among the individual essays. In addition, each one of the four categories used to organize the volume—​Literacy and Material Culture, Marriage and Family, Women of the Beowulf Manuscript, and Women in Anglo-​Saxon Studies—​honours a major strand of Helen Damico’s research. The essays here (all commissioned and newly written for this volume) effectively fulfill Helen Damico and Alexandra Hennessey Olsen’s call to “pose ‘new questions’ to ‘very old records’ ” and to engage closely with overwhelmingly male-​authored writings in an effort to generate a more accurate reading of the primary texts, as well as to demonstrate the vitality and richness of Anglo-​Saxon literature for feminist thought.35 In keeping with feminist mandates for revision, championed by Damico, the newness of most of the essays resides less in their discovery of original materials than in their recovery of previously occluded aspects of Anglo-​Saxon culture, as well as in their ability to help us see familiar texts in a different light. The contributors’ relentless quest for knowledge, manifested in their openness to new questions and to approaches that cross linguistic and disciplinary boundaries, offers a fitting means of honouring Helen Damico, whose life and work exemplify these very qualities. One of the hallmarks of Helen Damico’s research is a sensitivity to the complex relationship between textual representations of women and material culture. In “Beowulf” ’s Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition (University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), for example, Damico traces the symbolic resonances associated with royal women in the Anglo-​Saxon and Old Norse literary imagination, particularly in their roles as agents for circulating cups at feasts and for distributing treasure. The first section of this volume, “Literacy and Material Culture,” honours the interdisciplinary nature of Damico’s research by focusing on the ways in which Anglo-​Saxon material culture may enrich our knowledge of the symbolic associations that accrued to female characters in early medieval literature, and, conversely, how depictions of female figures in Anglo-​Saxon hagiography and Anglo-​Latin texts may be used to supplement lost, or otherwise incomplete, historical records. Gale Owen-​Crocker opens the volume with a broad interdisciplinary survey of “Anglo-​Saxon Women, Woman, and Womanhood.” She moves from evidence of women acting as donors and witnesses in Anglo-​Saxon wills and land-​grant charters, to female names recorded in the Prosopography of Anglo-​Saxon England database (PASE), to representations of women in Old English poetry and hagiography, and concludes that 35  “Introduction,” in New Readings on Women, ed. Damico and Olsen, 3. Damico and Olsen are here citing Sheila C. Dietrich, “An Introduction to Women in Anglo-​Saxon Society (ca. 600–​1066),” in The Women of England from Anglo-​Saxon Times to the Present: Interpretive Bibliographic Essays, ed. Barbara Kanner (Hamden: Archon, 1979), 32–​56 at 33.

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textual evidence offers relatively limited information about the daily lives of women in Anglo-​ Saxon England. By contrast, Owen-​ Crocker argues, cemetery archaeology provides valuable evidence for understanding women’s social roles, as there are literally thousands of female Anglo-​Saxon inhumation graves dating from the fifth to the seventh centuries. Using grave goods, such as weaving swords, brooches, rings, metal clasps, beads, and vessels, Owen-​Crocker reconstructs Anglo-​Saxon women’s dress and engagement with textiles in daily life, while also charting other occupations in which women may have participated, such as baking, entertainment, and healing. Owen-​ Crocker contends that forensic archaeology offers important ways forward for understanding women and gender. Testing for the amount of collagen in bones, for example, indicates pregnancy or lactation, whereas DNA and isotope testing may allow scholars to reconstruct women’s ancestry and patterns of immigration. Owen-​Crocker closes her essay with the provocative claim that information gleaned from furnished cemeteries reveals more about Woman as a generic category than about the lives of individual women. Carol Neuman de Vegvar’s essay, “Beyond Valkyries: Drinking Horns in Anglo-​Saxon Women’s Graves,” likewise investigates material culture, with particular attention to the few exceptional examples in which ornamented drinking horns have been found in Anglo-​Saxon women’s graves. De Vegvar reminds us that such horns are typically found in elite men’s graves; when found in women’s graves, these objects hint at the range of (presumptively male) roles women may have played in early Anglo-​Saxon society. Grave goods found in Grave 17 at Wakerley, Northamptonshire, Grave 43 at Fonaby in North Lincolnshire, and Grave 124 at Castledyke South in Barton-​on-​Humber, North Lincolnshire, provide the central focus for the essay. As De Vegvar argues, the Anglian context of Grave 17 and Grave 43, along with the presence of wrist-​clasps in both burials (as well as in their respective cemeteries), suggest ancestral ties and possibly lingering personal connections to Scandinavia, in which the deposition of drinking horns in women’s graves was a more usual occurrence. De Vegvar points to the fact that metalwork-​fitted horns may be interpreted as a mark of social distinction, particularly aurochs horn, which must have been imported from the Continent and is associated with princely burials. She contends that the anomalous inclusion of metalwork-​fitted horns in Wakerley Grave 17 and Fonaby Grave 43 may indicate unusual social roles for the women with whom these horns were buried. The essay concludes by suggesting that Wakerley may have been a plague cemetery, thus explaining both the low numbers of male burials and the inhumation of a woman with a drinking horn at this site and potentially also at Fonaby. As De Vegvar writes: “If the men of Wakerley were absent fulfilling their military obligations to an overlord at the time of an outbreak of plague at home, it is very possible that they would have left the community, by intention temporarily, in the capable hands of a senior woman, probably from the family of the leader of the community, and consigned to her as well any symbol of authority that may have been associated with local leadership, such as the aurochs-​horn drinking horn.” Lisa M. C. Weston writes on “Embodied Literacy: Paraliturgical Performance in the Life of Saint Leoba,” with an eye toward identifying traces of Leoba as an author. Weston contends that one place in which we may glimpse Leoba’s literacy is in the paraliturgical rituals created and performed by Leoba and her community in response to various

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calamities and crises. Understanding these rituals properly, Weston argues, requires us to shift attention away from individual literacy and toward a “collaborative embodiment of textuality that promotes identification across bodies and time.” She shows that the collaborative, communal, and appropriative nature of literacy in these ritual performances is in keeping with the imitative style of Leoba’s writings, and particularly with their appropriation of Aldhelm’s words to mark her own identity and establish her membership within a textual community. Weston’s essay demonstrates the importance of community in creating literacy, as well as the central role that literacy plays in creating community. By revealing the extent to which Leoba’s prophetic dream and its interpretation, as much as her letter and prayer, are based in shared iconography, scriptural narrative, and exegesis, Weston illustrates the communally embodied nature of Leoba’s literacy, as well as the nature of literacy at Wimborne (the place where Leoba was educated), and at Bischofsheim (the community she founded). Virginia Blanton provides tools for “Imagining the Lost Libraries of Anglo-​Saxon Double Monasteries,” with the goal of deepening our understanding of the education, training, and textual resources that might have been available to religious women living in double monasteries during the seventh and early eighth centuries. Since libraries at women’s communities (Blanton focuses on Barking, Coldingham, Ely, Thanet, Whitby, and Wimborne) lack inventories and few of the extant manuscripts from this period have been associated with women’s houses, scholarly efforts to imagine women’s engagement with book culture have typically been curtailed. Blanton contends that we must look to new resources in order to understand Anglo-​Saxon women’s involvement with book culture and that the ritualistic practices of nuns, recounted in Anglo-​Saxon hagiography, including liturgical singing, processions, and prayer, provide valuable evidence for female patronage, learning, and engagement with texts. Helen Damico’s second monograph, Beowulf and the Grendel-​kin: Politics and Poetry in Eleventh-​Century England (West Virginia University Press, 2015), focuses on the politics of motherhood and royal kin relations, drawing parallels between literary mothers in Beowulf, such as Grendel’s mother and Wealhtheow, and, respectively, the eleventh-​ century noblewomen Ælfgifu of Northampton and Emma of Normandy. Beowulf and the Grendel-​kin exemplifies Damico’s significant contributions to our understanding of marriage and family in early medieval literature and culture. The second section of the present volume, “Engendering Marriage and Family,” extends Damico’s research on these topics by investigating the diverse ways in which Anglo-​Saxon writers imagined marriage and family, as well as how these institutions both opened up and limited opportunities for women. Janet Schrunk Ericksen’s essay, “A Textbook Stance on Marriage: The Versus ad coniugem in Anglo-​Saxon England,” focuses on a 122-​line Latin marriage poem that was probably composed by Prosper of Aquitaine in the first half of the fifth century and that formed a core part of monastic education in Anglo-​Saxon England. Ericksen contends that the poem “moderates the arguments for celibate marriage laid out by such powerful Anglo-​Saxon voices as those of Aldhelm and Ælfric,” thus providing an alternative (and far less restrictive) view of women and marital piety. By investigating the manuscript context for the Versus ad coniugem, Ericksen argues that the poem was designed to supply Latin-​learners a “more practical and accessible model of marital piety with

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which to view the world outside the cloister, as well as […] a more familiar, if less often lauded, outline of marital relationships.” Catherine E. Karkov sheds light on the symbolic dimensions of mother–​ child relations and infant care in “The Circumcision and Weaning of Isaac: The Cuts that Bind.” Karkov reminds us that “there are many historical studies of circumcision, but there are relatively few of weaning,” and offers a rich analysis of Ælfric’s version of the weaning of Isaac in the illustrated Old English Hexateuch. Drawing on her extensive knowledge of art history, Karkov demonstrates the numerous ways in which Sarah is visually distanced from her son Isaac, as, for example, in the artist’s use of an outline drawing technique that distinguishes her from Abraham and Isaac (whose garments have been filled in with ink wash), and causes her to fade into the crowd of anonymous figures behind her; or in the Hexateuch’s illustration of Isaac’s birth (folio 25r, Figure 6.2), in which Sarah remains enclosed in a separate space, visually cut off from the figures of the newborn Isaac and of Abraham, her halo-​like pillow effectively signifying that Isaac is a child born of divine promise as opposed to carnal lust. Karkov points to the deep theological associations between weaning and the acquisition of true spiritual knowledge. She argues that for early medieval writers such as Bede and Ælfric, the mother’s milk “represented the rudiments of the faith that were passed on to the faithful as they progressed toward weaning and true knowledge,” but that ultimately, “the mother’s milk and the mother tongue are things that, like the foreskin, must be discarded for the paternal bread and Latin of true religious knowledge and the patriarchy of church and kingdom.” Joyce Hill’s “Saintly Mothers and Mothers of Saints” illuminates the importance of mother figures and of pre-​natal imagery in the “literary canonization” of Anglo-​Saxon saints—​that is, the pattern of narrative by which the sanctity of an individual was demonstrated and confirmed. Hill traces the means by which holiness of life was demonstrated and acclaimed, and argues that “above all, what the literary canonization needed to convey, in a world not marked by the hostility characteristic of the early church, was divine approbation, supremely in the form of miracles.” Hill shows that mothers of saints are featured prominently in relation to miracles, for “just as the divinity of Christ is revealed before his birth, so, in many of the Anglo-​Saxon saints’ lives, the indwelling of the divine is often signalled by pre-​natal signs.” Hill’s analysis of these little-​studied hagiographical motifs reveals the rhetorical finesse required to assert the co-​existence of virginity and saintly maternity, and concludes by suggesting that the power of motifs associated with maternity may derive in part from their relationship to social reality. Colleen Dunn’s essay, “Playing with Memories: Emma of Normandy, Cnut, and the Spectacle of Ælfheah’s Corpus,” reflects on Emma’s efforts to shape memory and history in order to ensure central roles both for herself and for her youngest son Harthacnut in the midst of the political turmoil of early eleventh-​century England. Dunn begins with the brutal murder of Ælfheah, archbishop of Canterbury, in 1012, followed by his victorious return (now as a saint), when Cnut, Emma, and their only son, Harthacnut, led a great procession translating Ælfheah’s body from London to Canterbury in 1023. Dunn argues that Emma’s involvement in Ælfheah’s translation stemmed from her concern for Harthacnut, who at approximately age five, had been entrusted to Thurkill, a core leader of the highly trained and highly feared Jómsvíkings, and a man known for his shifting

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loyalties. Dunn contends that when Emma learned that her youngest son was about to be sent away, she took steps to promote the idea of the royal family as generous donors to the church, and, more specifically, of her son Harthacnut as England’s rightful king. The third section of the volume, “Women of the Beowulf Manuscript,” extends Damico’s significant contributions to Anglo-​Saxon literary studies by focusing attention on the manuscripts in which Anglo-​Saxon texts circulated. Teresa Hooper’s investigation of “The Missing Women of the Beowulf Manuscript” offers a “corrective codicological reading” of the second half of British Library, Cotton Vitellius A.xv. Hooper reminds us that the Nowell Codex has lost approximately one quire (out of sixteen) from the Passion of Saint Christopher, thus obscuring the stories of two female martyrs, the prostitute sisters Nicea and Aquilina, who use their sexual allure to deceive the pagan king Dagnus (so as to gain access to his temple), openly ridicule his gods, and desecrate their statues by pulling them down with Nicea’s girdle. By tracing the stories of the sisters’ martyrdom in several other extant manuscripts, Hooper reveals that the Nowell Codex “highlights a strong correlation between women, monsters, and places of pre-​Christian power,” and further, that the bodies of both women and monsters function throughout the Codex as signs of the Creator and as opportunities for practising the correct interpretation of signs. Heide Estes’s essay, “Boundaries Embodied: An Ecofeminist Reading of the Old English Judith,” focuses attention on the geographical terrain, physical and ontological boundaries, and environmental concerns embedded in the Old English verse Judith. Estes shows that “the text is suffused throughout with boundaries breached and violated—​ geographical, gendered, temporal, and religious divides, as well as divisions between humans, animals, and objects, drunk and sober, alive and dead.” She contends that in contrast to the biblical Judith, whose status as a pious widow is fairly straightforward, the Old English poem “pushes Judith to the margins of the geographical and social worlds of the poem, and associates her with darkness in ways that indicate discomfort with her status as a powerful woman and a Hebrew.” Estes shows how ecocritical approaches can add to our understanding of female figures in Old English poetry, particularly in instances where a woman’s status is unclear. Helen Conrad O’Briain’s essay, “Listen to the Woman: Reading Wealhtheow as Stateswoman,” offers a detailed analysis of Wealhtheow’s role in Beowulf, with particular attention to the ways in which prior scholarship may under-​represent her influence in the poem. Conrad O’Briain highlights the poem’s resonances with Augustinian categories of spiritual and ethical consciousness and suggests that Wealhtheow reflects the Beowulf poet’s expectation of an audience receptive to a woman’s voice struggling against, or even rising above, marginalization and victimization. She concludes that Wealhtheow’s importance in the poem “may suggest not only a culturally accorded power and field of action, but a poet creating a heroic narrative which, exploiting the possibilities offered by new sources in an increasingly hybrid culture, places her in a socially reconstructive role […] akin to figures such as Gudrun, Bruinhild, Olof, Yrse, and Skuld.” Jane Chance concludes this section by reflecting once again on “The Problem of Grendel’s Mother,” a title that resonates with her 1980 essay, “The Structural Unity of Beowulf: The Problem of Grendel’s Mother.” Chance aims to highlight new work on

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women and gender that has appeared in the (nearly four) decades between the two essays, as well as to investigate individual texts and reading techniques that might aid modern scholars in uncovering a past centred more squarely on Anglo-​Saxon women’s experiences. Chance traces a number of key publications from the late 1970s to the present day, including Dorothy Whitelock’s 1975 revision of Sweet’s Anglo-​Saxon Reader and Helen Damico’s Beowulf and the Grendel-​kin: Politics and Poetry in Eleventh-​Century England (2015), that have contributed to the decanonization of Anglo-​Saxon literary studies and contends that “reading as a woman” entails “acknowledging the importance of non-​European (western) cultures” in the formation of Anglo-​Saxon textual traditions. A final distinguishing aspect of Helen Damico’s career is her longstanding commitment to the formation and promotion of Anglo-​Saxon Studies as a discipline. In addition to her own ground-​breaking research, Damico edited the three volumes of Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline.36 By bringing together hundreds of biographical sketches of individuals such as The Brothers Grimm, Ernst Robert Curtius, and Erich Auerbach, Medieval Scholarship sheds valuable light on the personal and professional circumstances of scholars who, along with their published work, figured centrally in the building of a discipline. In her introductory remarks to the second volume of Medieval Scholarship, Damico notes that only three women are included in the volume: Elizabeth Elstob, the first known female scholar of Old English; Edith Rickert, co-​editor of the Canterbury Tales; and Rosemary Woolf, a literary critic of drama and religious lyric. Damico concludes that “this paucity of women scholars […] is illustrative of the late emergence of women as scholars of the medieval period.”37 The final section of the present volume, “Women in Anglo-​Saxon Studies,” responds to Damico’s reflections on gender representation by providing a more robust account of the many women, some late emerging and some simply lesser known, who ultimately contributed to the formation of Anglo-​Saxon Studies. Timothy Graham’s essay, “Female Agency in Early Anglo-​Saxon Studies: The ‘Nuns of Tavistock’ and Elizabeth Elstob,” investigates the grounds of a sixteenth-​century belief that the study of Old English was cultivated by nuns in the late Middle Ages and explores lesser-​known aspects of the early eighteenth-​century scholar Elizabeth Elstob. Graham argues that Matthew Parker’s (1504–​1575) assertion that nuns were responsible for teaching Old English at Tavistock on the eve of the Reformation is unfounded and that Elizabeth Elstob (1683–​1756) was, as she herself wrote, “the first Woman that has studied that Language [Old English] since it was spoke.” Graham’s detailed account of Elstob’s career, including her publication of An English-​Saxon Homily on the Birth-​Day of St. Gregory (1709) and The Rudiments of Grammar for the English-​Saxon Tongue, first Given in English: with an Apology for the Study of Northern Antiquities (1715), sheds light on her concern to highlight royal women’s involvement in promoting Christianity in 36  Helen Damico, ed., Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, 3 vols. (New York: Garland, 1995–​2000). 37  Helen Damico, ed. (with Donald Fennema and Karmen Lenz), Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, vol. 2: Literature and Philology (Garland, 1998; repr. New York: Routledge, 2013), x.

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England, as well as her commitment to writing in the vernacular in order to bring knowledge of Old English to a female readership. Mary Dockray-​Miller writes on “The First Female Anglo-​Saxon Professors,” bringing to light a host of women professors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century whose expertise in Old English language and literature proved to be a valuable credential for securing academic legitimacy and professional opportunities in United States colleges and universities. Dockray-​Miller notes that four of the earliest female professors of Anglo-​Saxon had no formal academic credentials at all; yet their expertise in the presumably scientific, empirical (and hence masculine-​coded) realm of Germanic philology more than compensated for their lack of academic pedigree. She traces the careers of the ten American women who earned the PhD in Anglo-​Saxon before 1900, showing how marriage and family life tended to derail their professional involvement in English studies, as in the case of Mary “Mamie” Gwinn, the first American woman to receive a PhD in Anglo-​Saxon (PhD, 1888, Bryn Mawr), who left academia after marrying fellow Bryn Mawr professor Alfred Hodder in 1904. The essays presented here in honour of Helen Damico offer, in short, new paths into an increasingly rich area of study. Their diversity and freshness, along with their archival and methodological range, reveal a robust commitment to feminist interdisciplinarity, while their refusal of any grand master narrative takes seriously the complexity of Anglo-​Saxon women’s lives, as well as the elusive relationship between history, literary symbols, textual representations, and social and cultural practices. To be sure, no single volume, regardless of how many voices it contains or disciplines it embraces, is positioned to offer a global perspective on feminist Anglo-​Saxon studies. Feminism has taught us that we cannot see everything; there is no single place or objective stance that might enable a kind of ur-​view of our field. The critiques of women of colour and “third world” women have made clear the importance of extending our gaze to encompass a more global Middle Ages, while post-​and transhumanist studies, in conjunction with fields such as Environmental Humanism, Maritime and Oceanic Studies, and New Materialisms, have urged us to move beyond limited notions of “personhood,” and to embrace new conceptions of agency and individuality in ways that are appropriate to relational ontologies. Future studies of Anglo-​Saxon women and gender will surely build upon the work begun in this volume and take up some of these challenges. Foremost among them will be the need to balance the apparently competing, but not necessarily mutually exclusive, turns within feminism toward rethinking subjects that reveal women’s traditional roles, such as marriage and family, along with the propulsion toward post-​gender theory and transhumanism, schools of thought that promise to liberate both men and women from debilitating gender norms even as they threaten to elide many women’s lived experiences. One of my favourite memories of Helen Damico is of a conversation we shared in June 2001, during a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar on “Anglo-​Saxon Manuscripts and Texts,” led by Timothy Graham and Paul Szarmach at the British Library, in London. When I asked Helen what she found most satisfying about being a professor of early medieval literature, she replied: “What I love most is helping students and other scholars improve their work—​to see something evolve, to witness the making

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of progress and to be a part of that progress.” The present volume is offered in the spirit of Helen’s remarks—​in the hopes of witnessing and participating in the ongoing project of recovering a fuller history of Anglo-​Saxon women and gender. It is a project that is marked by the constant critique, revision, and updating that defines feminist praxis and that has, in fact, been made possible by Damico’s own scholarship, which has provided the conceptual room and support for such new work. In this respect, the new New Readings volume marks an exciting moment in early medieval gender studies, as well as a salutary reminder of how much work remains to be done.

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Chapter 1

ANGLO-​SAXON WOMEN, WOMAN, AND WOMANHOOD

GALE R. OWEN-​CROCKER* WHEN HELEN DAMICO chaired the session in which Elizabeth Coatsworth and I presented a research report at the Stanford ISAS in 1995, she not only took care of us on that occasion, but throughout the whole conference, and has continued to take an interest in us and our work ever since. As a wonderful scholar, and also a warm, kind person, she has greatly enriched the community of Anglo-​Saxonists. I share with Helen an interest in women’s matters in relation to Anglo-​Saxon culture and for some years I taught an undergraduate course at the University of Manchester (UK) called “Anglo-​Saxon Woman.” I was both frustrated and amused to find how often in paperwork of both administrators and students my carefully worded title morphed into “Anglo-​Saxon Women.” This paper discusses these concepts and that of Womanhood.

Women

The Old English poem The Fortunes of Men begins:

   Ful oft þæt gegongeð,  mid godes meahtum, þætte wer ond wif  in woruld cennað bearn mid gebyrdum  ond mid bleom gyrwað tennaþ ond tætaþ,  oþþæt seo tid cymeð, gegæþ gearrimum,  þæt þa geongan leomu, liffæstan leoþu,  geloden weorþað. Fergað swa ond feþað  fæder ond modor, giefað ond gierwaþ.  God ana wat Hwæt him weaxendum  winter bringað!

It very often happens through God’s powers that man and woman bring forth a child by birth into the world, and clothe him in colours and curb him and teach him until the time comes and it happens with the passing of the years that the young and lively limbs and members are mature. Thus his father and mother lead him along and guide his footsteps and provide for him and clothe him—​but only God knows what the years will bring him as he grows up.1

*  Professor Emerita, University of Manchester. [email protected]

1  George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, The Exeter Book, ASPR vol. 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), 154, lines 1–​9. The translation is from “The Fortunes of Men,” in S. A. J. Bradley, Anglo-​Saxon Poetry, Everyman’s Library (London: Dent, 1982), 341.

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It comes as a welcome change to find an Old English poet acknowledging that a child is the product of a man and a woman to those of us steeped in heroic poetry in which men are regularly introduced as the sons of their fathers such as “afaran Eadwardes” (The Battle of Brunanburh),2 “Wulfstanes bearn” (The Battle of Maldon),3 or “Weoxstanes sunu” (Beowulf).4 Marriage is perhaps so taken for granted in the Anglo-​Saxon world that it does not have to be foregrounded. We do not have a surviving version of the Anglo-​Saxon marriage service, but hints in Old English poetry suggest it contained some of the phrases used in Christian marriage services today: Wulf and Eadwacer’s bitter “Þæt mon eaþe tosliteð þætte næfre gesomnad wæs” (That which never was joined together can easily be torn apart);5 The Wife’s Lament’s “ful oft wit beteodan /​ þæt unc ne gedælde nemne deað ana” (very often the two of us vowed that nothing should part us except death alone);6 also the opening metaphor in Soul and Body II that says that death divides kin (“sibbe”) who were once joined together, body and soul.7 All of these resonate with the idea of marriage.8 Cynewulf’s epilogue to Juliana describes the separation of soul and body at death as the separation of a married couple.9 Marriage was the norm. However, documentary evidence of husband and wife acting together is relatively uncommon. Brihtric and Ælfswith, his wife, left a joint will in the late tenth century;10 Ælfhelm and Affa, his wife, granted land to St. Benedict’s, Ramsey;11 Wiferd and his wife Alta, in a late eighth-​century charter, granted land to St. Peter’s, Worcester;12 and an inscription in the so-​called Golden Gospels records that the book was ransomed from the Vikings by a husband and wife, Ealdorman Alfred and Wærburg.13 Many a woman who was not wealthy enough to make substantial donations to the church no doubt lived comfortably enough as a housewife, with a roof over her head and enough food to spare 2  Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, The Anglo-​Saxon Minor Poems, ASPR vol. 6 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), 16, line 7. 3  ASPR vol. 6, 11, line 155.

4  Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, Beowulf and Judith, ASPR vol. 4 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953), 80, line 2602. 5  ASPR vol. 3, 180, line 18; my translation.

6  ASPR vol. 3, 210, lines 21–​22; my translation. 7  ASPR vol. 3, 174, lines 3–​5.

8  In the Anglican marriage service the couple make vows to one another including the words “I, N[ame], take you, N[ame], to be my wife/​husband, from this day forward […] till death us do part” and the minister says “Those whom God has joined together let no one put asunder.” http://​ churchofengland.org/​prayer-​worship/​worship/​texts/​pastoral/​marriage/​marriage.aspx. 9  ASPR vol. 3, 133, line 698.

10  Dorothy Whitelock, ed. and trans., Anglo-​Saxon Wills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), XI, 26–​29, www.esawyer.org.uk/​charter/​1511.html S 1511. 11  www.esawyer.org.uk/​charter/​1807.html S 1807. 12  www.esawyer.org.uk/​charter/​1185.html S 1185.

13  Stockholm, Kungliga Biblioteket, A. 135 (Codex Aureus), www.esawyer.org.uk/​charter/​ 1204a.html S 1204a.

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a poor traveller, like the anonymous kindly woman who offered it to Cuthbert when he was travelling, which the future saint ungraciously refused since he was fasting till the ninth hour (he was, of course, saved from hunger by a miracle later in the day).14 Food, clothes and furnishings, birth and mourning, were female matters. On the whole, matters of property were probably dealt with by fathers and husbands, and these were the matters that were documented. The result is an imbalance between the documentation of women in Anglo-​Saxon England and that of men. I think it is only the young among us who might be surprised at that. The freeing of women from male protection and authority is only very recent: when I received my first tax form there was an enclosure stating that if I was a married woman living with my husband I should hand this form to him and he should fill it in as if it was addressed to him. That was about 1971. The convention of asking the father’s permission to marry his daughter (and keeping her in the dark about that meeting) is still very much alive in England, though permission is not asked to sleep with her or live with her outside of marriage! It seems that in Anglo-​Saxon England it is only when the wives of rich men become widows that they move into the light where modern scholars can see them; from the wills of wealthy widows such as Wynflæd15 and Ælfgifu16 we get evidence of the numerous estates for which these women had responsibility, with their oxen, horses, swinelands; and their estate workers, both employees and slaves. The wills of women give us hints about the furnishings of great houses: they bequeath seat covers and hall hangings. They tell us of personal possessions that were cherished: books and horns and cups. They add loving detail about their clothes: my reddest cyrtel; my blue cyrtel without decoration at the bottom; my “twilibrocenan cyrtel,” whatever that may have meant;17 and “hire ealdan gewiredan preon” (her old wire pin—​or, more grandly, her antique filigree brooch—​ either translation is possible).18 Part of the difficulty of dealing with Anglo-​Saxon women is the alien nature of their names. When I taught the undergraduate module on Anglo-​Saxon Woman, after three months the students were still hesitant to say a woman’s name out loud in a seminar unless it was Hilda, Emma, or Edith. Æthelthryth, even when we Latinize her to Etheldreda, is too challenging, and Seaxburh, or Sexburga, is just too snigger-​making to be pronounced out loud by students who are trying to be seen to take the course seriously. It is undeniable that Anglo-​Saxon women’s names are difficult, not only in regard to their pronunciation but also in the fact that we cannot always be certain what gender a name refers to. Elisabeth Okasha has listed those which can be identified as women’s 14  “Bede’s Life of St Cuthbert,” in Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert: A Life by an Anonymous Monk of Lindisfarne and Bede’s Prose Life, ed. Bertram Colgrave (Cambridge: University Press, 1940, repr. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1968), 142–​307 at 168–​71. The woman is Anonymous 46 in the Prosopography of Anglo-​Saxon England database (PASE). 15  Whitelock, Wills, III, 10–​15, www.esawyer.org.uk/​charter/​1539.html S 1539.

16  Dorothy Whitelock, The Will of Æthelgifu (Oxford: Roxburghe Club, 1968), www.esawyer.org.uk/​ charter/​1497.html S 1497. 17  Gale R. Owen, “Wynflæd’s Wardrobe,” ASE 8 (1979): 195–​222 at 206–​11. 18  Owen, “Wynflæd’s Wardrobe,” 212–​14.

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names by context, but in other cases scholars have relied on the grammatical gender of the second part of a compound name to suggest whether it belonged to a male or female person, which is not always a dependable criterion; furthermore, some naming elements were evidently common to both male and females.19 The Prosopography of Anglo-​Saxon England database (PASE) enumerates all the documented people in Anglo-​Saxon England, both named and unnamed, giving all the facts known about them. Women, not surprisingly, are in the minority in PASE. It lists 17,196 males by name but only 978 females, of whom 302 are anonymous: anonymous wives, mothers, daughters, nurses, servants, females miraculously healed by saints, and above all nuns, those numerous unnamed sisters who constitute the essential chorus to the hagiographies of innovators like St. Hilda and St. Etheldreda. Without those unspecified nuns to occupy the buildings, there would be no convents. They prayed, they sang, they studied, they wrote, they illuminated, they embroidered, making contributions to the arts that are only now being recognized, and no doubt some of them also spun and wove and gardened and cooked, just as they would have done if they had remained in secular life. Sometimes references to anonymous women suggest stories of which we know tantalizingly little. There is an early eleventh-​century woman whose land was confiscated for adultery;20 another, named the “Peterborough Witch” by Andrew Rabin, was drowned for witchcraft at London Bridge, her crime apparently sticking iron pins into an effigy of someone.21 Some named women are known for one fact only, often that they were nuns—​their names are listed in Libri Vitae. Sometimes, however, we get glimpses of women’s potential participation in commercial enterprises: in the eleventh century Odelina and her sister Ælfgifu owned land, houses, and a wharf in London; presumably they had inherited them and their ownership is only documented because they gave them as gifts to St. Peter’s, Westminster. Whether the women ever operated a business themselves is unknown.22 The wife and daughters of Æthelstan Mannessune were bequeathed shares in a fishery in his will:  the wife received half, the daughters and their brother the other half. The younger daughter is named elsewhere in the will as Ælfwenna.23 Presumably the family business continued with them sharing the profits, but who operated it is unknown. Mildrith and Eadburg, eighth-​century abbesses of Minster-​in-​Thanet, are successively granted remission of tolls payable on a ship, an instance of commercial activity on behalf of a convent.24 19  Elisabeth Okasha, Women’s Names in Old English, Studies in Early Medieval Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 20  PASE Anonymous 927; www.esawyer.org.uk/​charter/​901.html S 901.

21  Andrew Rabin, “Anglo-​Saxon Women Before the Law: A Student Edition of Five Old English Lawsuits,” Old English Newsletter 41 (2008): 33–​ 56 at 43–​ 44; www.esawyer.org.uk/​charter/​ 1377.html S 1377. 22  PASE Odelina 1, Ælfgifu 24.

23  PASE Æthelstan Mannessune 1, Anonymous 1062 (the wife), Anonymous 1047 (the son) and daughters Anonymous 1045 and Ælfwenna 1, www.esawyer.org.uk/​charter/​1503a.html S 1503a. 24  PASE Mildrith 1, Eadburg 4.

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Some women had specialist skills. Beautiful embroidery is sometimes attributed to royal women, such as St. Etheldreda, who was said to have made with her own hands, for St. Cuthbert, a matching stole and maniple of goldwork and precious stones, though the source is a twelfth-​century text composed five hundred years after her death;25 and Queen Edith, who is said to have embroidered clothes for her husband, Edward the Confessor, again from a non-​contemporary source.26 It is quite likely that these royal women could indeed embroider: the craft would have been part of the education of girls from wealthy families; but their role in producing embroideries that were works of art is as likely to have been that of patron as maker. Such a patron was Queen Ælfflæd, who is named as donor in the inscriptions on the gold and silk stole and maniple preserved in St. Cuthbert’s coffin at Durham: ÆLFFLÆD FIERI PRECEPIT.27 We know of a few named embroiderers who were not of royal rank, particularly embroiderers in gold thread.28 Other female specialist workers are documented because they were slaves who were disposed of in bequests. Wynflæd’s will mentions “ane crencestran ⁊ ane sem[estra]n;”29 the latter probably means “seamstress.” Dorothy Whitelock translated crencestran as “weaver,” but that seems doubtful; the crencestran was evidently a woman who cranked, perhaps operating the crancstæf mentioned in an eleventh-​century list of textile tools,30 but quite what and how she cranked remains a mystery. Æthelgifu bequeathed a 25  First noted in A. G. I. Christie, English Medieval Embroidery (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), 9. Updated references, for which I thank Dr. Alexandra Lester-​Makin, may be found in Liber Eliensis, ed. and trans. E. O. Blake (London: Royal Historical Society, 1962), 24; translated in Janet Fairweather, Liber Eliensis: A History of the Isle of Ely from the Seventh Century to the Twelfth (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005), 30. 26  The Life of King Edward Who Rests at Westminster, ed. and trans. F. Barlow, Oxford Medieval Texts, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 24–​25; see discussion in Gale R. Owen-​Crocker, Dress in Anglo-​Saxon England: Revised and Enlarged Edition (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004), 233.

27  C. Hohler, “The Stole and Maniples: (b) The Iconography,” in The Relics of St Cuthbert, ed. C. F. Battiscombe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 396–​408; R. Freyhan, “The Stole and Maniples: (c) The Place of the Stole and Maniples in the Art of the Tenth Century,” in The Relics of St Cuthbert, 409–​32.

28  Christie, English Medieval Embroidery, 9. Updated references, again with thanks to Alexandra Lester-​Makin, refer to Aluuid (in Latin, translated as Aelfgeth) who was given land by Godric, the sheriff, to teach his daughter gold embroidery (Domesday Book 13 Buckinghamshire, ed. John Morris (Chichester: Phillimore, 1978), 149b); and Leofgeat (in Latin, translated as Leuiede) who “fecit ⁊ facit aurifrigiu[m]‌regis et reginae” (made and makes goldwork for the king and queen) (Domesday Book 6 Wiltshire, ed. and trans. Caroline Thorn and Frank Thorn (Chichester: Phillimore, 1979), 149b; my translation: Thorn and Thorn’s “gold fringe” is questionable; gold decorated borders, or edgings are more likely). See further Alexandra Mary Makin, “Embroidery and Its Context in the British Isles and Ireland During the Early Medieval Period (ad 450–​1100)” (PhD diss., University of Manchester, 2017) for the identification of other Anglo-​Saxon embroideresses and the nature of goldwork. 29  Whitelock, Wills, 10, line 30.

30  See crancstæf and crencestra in The Dictionary of Old English (DOE), University of Toronto.

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“dæge” (a baker),31 and another, named Leofgife, is mentioned in a manumission from Bath.32 A very different kind of female occupation is suggested by Domesday Book’s reference to a woman called Adelina who is described as a “joculatrix” (a female entertainer),33 which seems promising; but what did she do: sing, juggle, tumble, poke fun at people, have a special kind of freedom to roam her patron’s court and comment on matters? Male joculatores did all these things. Or was Adelina merely the wife of a jester, or daughter of a family in the entertainment business? Royal women may appear as signatories to charters, but they are usually the only women in the list. Non-​royal women also occasionally witness charters—​women, that is, about whom we know nothing else; this seems to be in cases where women are involved in the dispute or transaction, just as Queen Ælfthryth, King Edgar’s wife,34 appears to have acted as advocate on several occasions in lawsuits concerning women. In the same way that women making wills often leave things to daughters and granddaughters, there is some sense that women look after women. Some women we only know from objects bearing their names (often these inscriptions appear on the back, or secondary face of the artifact).35 A walrus ivory seal, now in the British Museum, depicts, on what appears to be the primary side, if we are to judge by the elaborately carved handle, a bearded man with a sword. The design is based on a coin of King Harthacnut (who ruled 1039–​1042) but is probably meant to represent the owner of the seal, who is identified in the inscription as Godwin the thegn. The secondary side depicts a figure in voluminous garments, with one hand raised and the other holding what looks like a book. The inscription identifies her as Godgytha, a nun given to God.36 The object invites many questions. Why, if Godgytha is a nun, is she not depicted with a veil, the signature garment of a nun? Why, if she is an ordinary nun, not an abbess, is she involved in the creation of important documents that require a seal? Is she the daughter or widow of Godwin who inherited a responsibility to his estates even though she was a nun? We do not know. A well-​known silver brooch from Sutton, Isle of Ely, bears an inscription on the back in Old English alliterating and rhyming poetry: “AEDVWEN ME AG AGE HYO DRIHTEN DRIHTEN HINE AWERIE ÐE ME HIRE ÆTFERIE BVTON HYO ME SELLE HIRE AGENES 31  PASE (Anonymous 997) lists this dæge as male but the DOE (dǣge) as female.

32  DOE (dǣge), citing John Earle, A Hand-​Book to the Land-​Charters and Other Saxonic Documents (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), 268–​71.

33  I am grateful to Dr. Ann Williams for this information and reference; Great Domesday Book, fol. 38v; Domesday Book 4 Hampshire, ed. Julian Munby, from a draft translation prepared by Janet Mothersill, Peter Osmund, and Joy Jenkyns (née Hubble) (Chichester: Phillimore, 1982). 34  PASE Ælfthryth 8.

35  Explored in Gale R. Owen-​Crocker, “Anglo-​Saxon Women: The Art of Concealment,” Leeds Studies in English 33 (2002): 31–​51.

36  Janet Backhouse, D. H. Turner, and Leslie Webster, The Golden Age of Anglo-​ Saxon Art (London: British Museum, 1984), 113–​14, no. 112.

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WILLES” (Ædvwen owns me. May the Lord own her. May the Lord curse him who takes me from her, unless she gives me of her own will).37 The ornament of the brooch, in Anglo-​Scandinavian Ringerike style, places it in the eleventh century; its size and silver metal tell us its owner was prosperous. The pronouns hyo and hire indicate the owner was female; the curse, that she was Christian. We would not otherwise have known that women wore round brooches in the eleventh century—​they do not normally do so in eleventh-​century art,38 whereas men often do. Therefore we learn plenty from the brooch, but almost nothing about Ædvwen herself. There is more potential in the matrix of a seal ring, a metal detector find from Postwick, Norfolk, believed to date to the second half of the seventh century. It is inscribed on one side with the name Baldehildis and a bust, probably female to judge from the flowing hair;39 and on the other two naked figures, one bearded, the other with flowing hair, obviously a man and woman, a motif found also on a Frankish betrothal ring.40 The Baldehildis seal matrix was originally thought to be of Frankish manufacture and to have reached England as a gift. We know of only one woman of this name. It would be nice if the seal matrix could be associated with this famous Balthild, but there is no certainty about that and the coincidence is rather stretched.41 Balthild, if tradition is accurate, was an Anglo-​Saxon woman, probably an East Anglian of royal connections, who was sold as a slave, but who married King Clovis II of the Franks, became queen regent and eventually retired to Chelles and became a saint. Some textile relics—​her clothing—​and her plait of hair, originally blonde, bound with silk ribbon, survive from Chelles.42 Of course Balthild spent most of her adult life, and made her impact on history, abroad. The same is true of Eadgyth, queen of the Saxons, and of missionary nuns such as Leoba, abbess of Bischofsheim, and Walburga, abbess of Heidenheim. The converse 37  R. Page, Appendix A to D. M. Wilson, Anglo-​Saxon Ornamental Metalwork 700–​1000 in the British Museum (London: British Museum, 1964), 86–​88. 38  See Owen-​Crocker, Dress, 212–​13.

39  For an alternative suggestion that this is “possibly a crude rendering of the triple pendants of a Byzantine-​style diadem” see Catherine E. Karkov, The Art of Anglo-​Saxon England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011), 123.

40  www.museums.norfolk.gov.uk/​Whats_​On/​Virtual_​Exhibitions/​Anglo_​Saxon_​and_​Viking_​Gallery_​ Trail/​Bathild_​Seal_​Matrix/​index.htm; http://​webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/​+/​http://​www. culture.gov.uk/​images/​publications/​treasurerep_​199899Pt3.pdf.

41  For a detailed discussion of the pros and cons that comes down on the negative side, see Paul Fouracre, “Balthild and ‘her’ Seal Ring, Text and Artefact,” in Entre Texte et Histoire. Etudes d’histoire medieval offertes au professeur Shoichi Sato, ed. Osamu Kano and Jean-​Loup Lemaitre (Paris: Diffusion de Boccard, 2015), 129–​41. This includes reference to the 2011 find of a gold seal ring in Essex, demonstrating that gold rings were being produced in eastern England in the seventh century (139–​40). 42  Jean-​Pierre Laporte and Raymond Boyer, Trésors de Chelles: Sépultures et Reliques de la Reine Bathilde († vers 680) et de l’Abbesse Bertille († vers 704) (Ville de Chelles: Societe Archaeologique et Historique Les Amis du Musee [sic], 1991).

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is true of many of the famous women who made an impact on Anglo-​Saxon history: for example, Bertha, Christian queen of Ethelbert of Kent; Judith, second wife of Æthelwulf of Wessex and influential stepmother to King Alfred; Judith, wife of Tostig Godwinesson; and Queen Ælfgifu/​Emma were all foreigners by birth. In order to discuss “Anglo-​Saxon women” we must accommodate these international travellers. The women whose biographies we can trace are mostly royal. Much of the early written material is heavily biased in favour of Christianity and specifically chastity. We thank Aldhelm for the names of the distinguished women mentioned in the dedication to his De Virginitate;43 Bede for Hilda, Ethelberga, and Etheldreda,44 whose cult was revived in the tenth century, producing a “portrait” in the style current 300 years after her existence.45 A Life of Queen Balthild is informative,46 and the Boniface letters47 together with the Life of Leoba by Rudolph of Fulda give us information about the role of women in the eighth-​century missions.48 Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, beloved of feminist scholars, is an exception since she was not a religious, though she was a generous patron of the church. As a secular ruler who was female in a male-​dominated era she naturally attracts attention, but the facts of her life, recorded in the Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle incorporating material from a short chronicle known as the Mercian Register, are relatively few.49 Queen Emma and Queen Edith ensured their fame by commissioning books, though the stories told in them are heavily biased. Both queens lived in turbulent and violent times, and there is a danger that a sort of novelistic fascination with their personal relationships can take over discussions of them. Considering the population of Anglo-​Saxon England, and the length of its era, the real women about whom we know something from textual evidence are very few, and the known details of their lives are relatively small. 43  De Virginitate, in Aldhelmi Opera, ed. R. Ehwald, MGH, Auctores Antiquissimi 15 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1919), 228–​29; Aldhelm: The Prose Works, trans. Michael Lapidge and Michael Herren (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1979), 59. 44  Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica, IV, 23; II, 9, 11, 20; IV, 19–​20; Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), Hild especially 404–​15; Ethelburga 162–​67, 172–​75, 204–​5; Etheldreda 390–​401.

45  The Benedictional of Æthelwold, London, British Library MS Additional 49598, fol. 90v; she also appears among the Chorus of Virgins, fol. 2r; www.bl.uk/​manuscripts/​FullDisplay.aspx?ref=add_​ ms_​49598. 46  Vita Sanctae Balthildis, ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH, Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum II (Hanover: Hahn, 1888), 482–​508. 47  S. Bonifatii et Lulli Epistolae, ed. M. Tangl, MGH, Epistolae 4, Epistolae Selectae, 1 (1916; repr. Munich: MGH, 1989); translated at https://​legacy.fordham.edu/​halsall/​basis/​boniface-​letters.asp: Abbess Bugga (4, 15); Leoba, nun and abbess (17, 41); Abbess Eadburga (18, 21). 48  Vita Leobae abbatissae Biscofesheimensis auctore Rudolfo Fuldensi, ed. Georg Waitz, MGH, Scriptores, 15.1 (Hannover: Hahn, 1887), 118–​31; translated at http://​legacy.fordham.edu/​halsall/​ basis/​leoba.asp. 49  Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle C, 912, 913, 916, 917; D 913; E 918.

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Woman

If, however, we look at the evidence of cemetery archaeology, we find riches. There are literally thousands of female Anglo-​Saxon inhumation graves dating from the fifth to the seventh centuries, excavated and published. Many of these burials included grave goods that indicate that women were buried in their clothing, which was secured by metal fasteners such as brooches, buckles, wrist-​clasps, and pins; and augmented by other jewellery, such as beads, pendants, and rings. In addition, objects carried on the person, usually attached to the belt, including keys, pouches, and tools, can be used as clues in the detective work that tell us something about the life of the woman, while articles laid in the grave, like weaving swords and vessels, give us some idea of how the mourners wished the woman to be perceived. Working largely from the positions of grave goods, we can describe with some confidence the dress that early Anglo-​Saxon women wore, at least between the shoulders and the shins—​we do not have much evidence for the head or the feet.50 However, there is far more evidence of female dress than there is of male. The characteristic garment of most regions in the fifth and sixth centuries is a tubular gown fastened at the shoulders by a pair of brooches (Kentish styles seem to have been a bit different, with an open-​fronted garment). The brooch type might vary from region to region, with Anglian women having a preference for cruciform or annular brooches, others for square-​headed or circular types. The tubular garment might have been adopted at puberty and there is some suggestion that it might have been discontinued once the fertile years were over, if a woman was lucky enough to live that long. Certainly it had advantages for breastfeeding. The metal clasps which secured the wrist bands of an undergarment were characteristically Anglian, and so was a third brooch, dissimilar to the shoulder brooches, usually worn centrally. A minority of women in all regions may have been buried wearing a cloak, fastened by a brooch worn centrally or at the right shoulder, and most seem to have worn a belt or girdle, though not all of them had a buckle. Some of them probably just knotted the girdle. The keys that hung from some women’s belts may have indicated status—​ownership of chests in which precious things were kept—​and tools, like a weaving sword laid in the grave, or a spindle whorl found at the belt, may testify to a woman’s occupation. While metal weaving swords are uncommon and were probably a sign of status—​such as ownership of a weaving shed—​the more common find of a spindle whorl near the waist probably represents a woman’s ongoing work being thrust into her belt as it was when she lived, the wooden spindle itself having rotted away in the grave. Metal dress accessories sometimes preserve scraps of garments, consistently spun linen and wool, woven sometimes in plain weave, often in twill, sometimes in beautiful and complex patterned weaves that testify to a skill and professionalism that, as far as we 50  For details of Anglo-​Saxon dress, see Gale R. Owen-​Crocker, Dress in Anglo-​Saxon England: Revised and Enlarged Edition (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004); also Penelope Walton Rogers, Cloth and Clothing in Early Anglo-​Saxon England, ad 450–​700, CBA Research Report 145 (York: Council for British Archaeology, 2007).

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know, was entirely women’s work at this time. Toilet articles remind us that these were real women who got dirt under their nails and wax in their ears. A pouch containing inexplicable objects that were perhaps amuletic may hint at some kind of role as healer or magic worker, while the inclusion of amber or crystal among a woman’s beads may have been prophylactic. The animal and bird shapes and occasional human faces on a woman’s metal jewellery may indicate some pagan belief that we cannot read; it is only when the cross begins to appear on jewellery that we can be certain that a woman wore her religion upon her person. The social rank of the corpse is clearly indicated by inclusion in a cemetery and the presence of grave goods. The deposition of gold, large quantities of artifacts, and the inclusion of unusual and prestigious objects like weaving beaters or glass vessels indicate very high status. Conversely, the absence of metal grave goods, or anything apart from a working tool, the knife, suggests lower status; but how low, we do not know. We do not know either if rank was inherited, or gained through marriage; or whether a woman could earn it for herself, by the work of her hands or the efficacy of her healing. The occasional custom of burying a high-​status man with a horse finds a startling equivalent in the unique, sixth-​century burial of a woman with a cow at Oakington, Cambridgeshire.51 The seventh-​century women who were wearing a new Byzantine style of dress including magnificent jewellery like the Desborough Necklace and the Kingston Brooch, both incorporating Christian crosses, were certainly of very high rank. A recent study has shown that the custom of burial with grave goods, having abruptly lessened about 570, survived, or was revived, for elite women about 625 to 630 after it was largely discontinued for men.52 The ascetic Etheldreda (ca. 636–​679), who developed a large tumour under the jaw before she died of the plague, blamed this affliction on the “needless vanity” of her youth when she wore an “unnecessary weight of necklaces”: “so instead of gold and pearls, a fiery red tumour now stands out upon my neck.”53 Although we have, so far, no parallel of this date for the pearls, her comparison of the red tumour to gold jewellery does suggest the gold and garnet bullae which are features of excavated seventh-​century jewellery. Although we have their bones and we have their teeth, the evidence about the lives of these women from pathology is very small. They were generally well nourished, with no dental decay and an adequate supply of protein in their diet; or at least the women who had sufficient status to be buried in the cemetery were. There are clearly fewer 51  R. Mortimer, D. Sayer, and R. Wiseman, “Anglo-​Saxon Oakington: A Central Place on the Edge of the Cambridgeshire Fen,” in Life on the Edge: Social, Political and Religious Frontiers in Early Medieval Europe, ed. S. Semple, C. Orsini, and S. Mui, Neue Studien zur Sachsenforschung 6 (Brunswick: Braunschweigisches Landesmuseum, 2017). I am grateful to Duncan Sayer for this reference. 52  J. Hines and A. Bayliss, ed., Anglo-​Saxon Graves and Grave Goods of the 6th and 7th Centuries ad: A Chronological Framework, Society for Medieval Archaeology Monograph 33 (Leeds: 2013), 476–​79 and 529–​43. 53  Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica, IV, 19; Bede, Ecclesiastical History, 396–​97.

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documented burials than there were Anglo-​Saxons and we do not know what happened to the results of deformity at birth, poverty, and starvation: tossed into the river, dumped in the wood? Life experience can leave its mark on the body, but so far the fruits of this kind of forensic archaeology are few in relation to Anglo-​Saxon women. There is nothing to compare with the elderly woman from the Viking Ship burial at Scar, in Orkney, Scotland, who was clearly presented for the grave as a textile worker, with a sickle, supposedly for harvesting flax, as well as shears and a comb that had perhaps been used in fibre preparation or weaving, whorls for spinning, a beater for weaving, needles and a needle case for sewing, and a whalebone plaque for pressing linen.54 In this case repeated spinning had affected the development of the ligaments of her right hand and she had habitually sat cross-​legged, presumably while spinning.55 We might ask why all Anglo-​ Saxon female skeletons do not have such a development of the spinning hand since they were all, according to received wisdom, spinsters. Perhaps the received wisdom should be questioned! Assuming we accept it, the difference may lie in the age of the Viking woman—​it takes a long time for occupational wear and tear to manifest itself on the bone; she may have devoted proportionately more of her time to spinning than most Anglo-​Saxon women did: they had other tasks to perform too. She may have had a characteristic action that other women did not share, or a natural predilection for her ligaments to deform; or her skeleton may simply have received more attention because she was interred in a ship burial and such a burial is unusual, high status, and therefore “interesting.” Duncan Sayer and Sam Dickinson have identified a woman at Oakington (Grave 57) whose hands and feet, particularly the hands, showed signs of repeated manual work, perhaps digging, though she was relatively young, aged twenty-​five to thirty at the time of her death, probably in childbirth, since a fetus lay transversely, in a low position across her pelvis. The teeth also showed signs of wear, perhaps from chewing leather.56 Despite such a hard-​working existence, she was no slave, being buried with three brooches, a sign of some material prosperity. Another childbirth casualty, a woman aged between eighteen and thirty, this time buried without dress accessories at Worthy Park, Hampshire (Grave 26), had wear to one foot, suggesting the carrying of heavy weights, digging, or plowing.57 We have evidence of women who had lived with disability: a woman at West Heslerton who had been paralyzed and who must, as Christina Lee has pointed out, have received some care to keep her alive with this affliction, though 54  O. Owen and M. Dalland, Scar: A Viking Boat Burial on Sanday, Orkney (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1999). The grave is tentatively dated to the late ninth-​to tenth-​century, but thought to be consciously retrospective. 55  D. H. Lorimer, “The Bodies: The Female Skeleton,” in Owen and Dalland, Scar, 56–​58.

56  Duncan Sayer and Sam D. Dickinson, “Reconsidering Obstetric Death and Female Fertility in Anglo-​Saxon England,” World Archaeology 45 (2013): 285–​97.

57  Sayer and Dickinson, “Reconsidering Obstetric Death,” citing C. Wells, “Other Pathology,” in The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Worthy Park, Kingsworthy, ed. S. Chadwick Hawkes and G. Granger (Oxford: Oxford University School of Archaeology, 2003), 165–​76 at 168.

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as Lee also points out, care need not mean kindness, and the circumstances of her death and burial, bound and prone, suggest it did not.58 The most frequently published information about female corpses is their age at death. The majority of women died between the ages of twenty and thirty, fertile years, which suggests that many of them died as a result of pregnancy and childbirth.59 The imported cowrie shells sometimes found in female graves, their shape suggestive of the female sex organs, are probably amulets connected with conception and birth, the great crises of a young woman’s life. Forensic archaeology offers important ways forward for Anglo-​ Saxon cultural studies. Testing for the amount of collagen in bones apparently indicates pregnancy or lactation. The assumption that 20s–​30s death rates were related to childbirth could be tested by these means. Isotope testing, such as has been carried out to dramatic effect in the case of Eadgyth (below), is only effective when there is sufficient geological difference between the areas under consideration. Currently there is not enough distinction between the west coast of Europe and the east coast of Britain to test, for example, whether the wealthy Kentish ladies with cloisonné jewellery, elite grave goods like crystal balls, silver spoons, and gold-​brocaded bands were actually Frankish immigrants, perhaps women who came to England in the train of Queen Bertha, or if they were of English birth wearing imported finery; but perhaps in the future it will be. DNA testing is already producing interesting results: a woman buried at Oakington with an Anglo-​Saxon cruciform brooch has been shown to have British (that is, Celtic) ancestry, showing that Germanic ethnicity was not necessary to appear as an Anglo-​Saxon woman. DNA and isotope testing have both suggested that new immigrants were materially poorer in cemeteries with furnished graves.60 Though we have the skeletal remains of individual female corpses, sometimes their dress accessories, and occasionally their tools, we do not know how far this gives a picture of the woman who lived. Grave goods accompanying the corpse might have been the possessions of the dead person, but equally likely is that they were the choice of the mourners, symbolic of the woman they wish to represent. We have no names for the women buried in these graves. Thus the information we gather from furnished cemeteries is more generic than individual, more about Woman than about Women. By the time the Christian church had established literacy, the custom of burial with grave goods was almost defunct; so although we have the names of some early Christian women whose graves have been excavated, we have no objects associated with them. At Hartlepool, a monastery founded by St. Hilda, skeletons were found in 1833, some of them accompanied by recumbent stones carved with female names such as Hildithryth, 58  Christina Lee, “Body and Soul: Disease and Impairment,” in The Material Culture of Daily Living in Anglo-​Saxon England, ed. Maren Clegg Hyer and Gale R. Owen-​Crocker (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2011), 293–​309 at 298 and 364n22. 59  Sayer and Dickinson, “Reconsidering Obstetric Death.”

60  Stephan Schiffels et al., “Iron Age and Anglo-​Saxon Genomes from East England Reveal British Migration History,” Nature Communications 7 (2016), DOI:10.1038/​ncomms10408 (n.p.). I am grateful to Duncan Sayer for this reference and for additional information.

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Hildigyth, and Beorhtgyd, and male and female names Vermund and Torhtsuid.61 As far as I know the skeletons have not remained associated with their name stones and are therefore beyond scientific examination: an opportunity missed. A complete skeleton of an eighth-​century woman aged between twenty-​five and thirty, discovered at Hartlepool and examined in 1999 by television’s Time Team, did not have a grave stone.62 As far as this author knows, the only Anglo-​Saxon woman for whom we have a name, a biography and (partial) skeleton is Eadgyth, daughter of King Edward the Elder and Queen Ælfflæd (patron of the Cuthbert embroideries), and hence half-​sister of King Athelstan. Details of her life are recorded in English and German sources. She was married, in 929, as one of Athelstan’s well-​documented dynastic alliances, to Otto I, king of Saxony, had two children and was a great patron of monasteries and a devotee of the cult of the Northumbrian St. Oswald. She died in 946 aged thirty-​six. Her body was translated several times, and the bones ended up in Magdeburg Cathedral. When the stone tomb was opened in 2008, inside it were found a lead coffin and an inscription identifying the remains as those of Eadgyth, queen of the Germans, the Anglo-​Saxon granddaughter of Alfred the Great, sister of Athelstan, the first king of a united England. The coffin contained part of the skeleton, including the upper jaw, of a woman aged between thirty and forty, wrapped in silk textile. Isotope testing of the teeth confirmed that the woman had been brought up on the chalk lands of Wessex in England. Variable strontium ratios in her teeth indicate that she had moved about a lot as a child, probably as her father journeyed round his kingdom, only settling in one place at the age of about nine, at which time she suffered some disease or eating disorder, perhaps coinciding with the divorce of her parents in 919 or perhaps when she was sent to a convent for education. The thigh bone indicated she had regularly ridden horses and enjoyed a diet rich in protein, particularly fish, both facts consistent with upper-​class existence.63

Womanhood

It comes as no surprise to discover that depictions of women in Anglo-​Saxon art are less common than those of men, women’s stories are rarer in the Old English Martyrology and Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, and female characters are in the minority in Old English poetry. Women tend to be polar opposites in Anglo-​Saxon hagiographic material: there are a few wicked women, like the prostitute Aphrodosia who attempts to pervert St. Agatha64 or the 61  Rosemary Cramp, The Corpus of Anglo-​Saxon Stone Sculpture, vol. 1: County Durham and Northumberland (Oxford: Oxford University Press for The British Academy, 1984), Hartlepool, Durham 1, 2, 6; 4 and, with rather less evidence, 5; pp. 98, 98–​99, 100–​101, 99–​100, 100, respectively. 62  www.tvmuse.com/​tv-​shows/​Time-​Team_​24721/​season_​7/​episode_​12/​.

63  www.uni-​mainz.de/​eng/​13671.php; www.bristol.ac.uk/​news/​2010/​7073.html.

64  Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, ed. Walter W. Skeat, 2 vols., EETS 76, 82, 94, 114 (London, 1881–​1900, repr. 1966), 1:194–​209; also translated in Leslie A. Donovan, Women Saints’ Lives in Old English Prose, The Library of Medieval Women (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), 37–​43.

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wealthy widow Melantia who tries to seduce the transvestite St. Eugenia;65 in contrast, the female protagonists of prose saints’ lives, and the poetic Juliana, are virgin martyrs. Christians were not persecuted in Anglo-​Saxon England and there were no martyrs there unless we count the assassinated young King Edward, and King Edmund and Archbishop Alphege who were killed by Vikings. Certainly there were no female Anglo-​ Saxon martyrs. The Anglo-​Saxons therefore acquired their female saints from historical women like Etheldreda, who had chosen an austere life for the sake of Christianity, and from foreign stories. There are all kinds of virgin saints’ stories, ranging from the “bring it on, torture my body” attitude of St. Agatha, to transvestites Eugenia and Euphrosyne. Rejection of marriage, usually a marriage that would have been seen as a good one in the eyes of the world, is often part of the choice of virginity, the heavenly bridegroom, and death. St. Cecelia is a married saint who persuades her husband to remain chaste. Virginity is an obsession in Anglo-​Saxon religious literature. An Old English poet subtly transforms Judith, an Old Testament figure originally a widow, into a saintly, virginal figure, calling her “eadigan mægð” (blessed maiden) and “scyppendes mægð” (maiden of the Lord).66 The narrations about virgin saints focus on their vulnerable bodies with almost titillating details of tortures: St. Agatha is beaten, racked, has one of her breasts cut off (which is divinely healed), and is rolled naked in burning embers and broken tiles.67 Yet, significantly, though their tender flesh may be violently penetrated by sharp objects, none of these female martyrs is raped. There is again a focus on that feminine essence, the breast, in the manner in which the transvestite St. Eugenia reveals herself to her father: “heo to-​tær hyre gewædu ./​ and æt-​æwde hyre breost. þam breman philippe” (she tore open her clothes and revealed her breasts to the famous Philippus).68 Conversely St. Agnes, stripped naked, is saved from prying eyes by a miraculous growth of her hair and a divine garment. However, virginity in Anglo-​Saxon England seems to have been a flexible matter, with Aldhelm promulgating, alongside virginitas (intact virginity), the concepts of iugalitas (marriage in which sex was confined to procreation), and castitas (a return to chastity for women who had been married, a useful concept in view of the widowed and divorced royal nuns who were his patrons).69 Accordingly we find celebrated the lives of St. Pelagia, who had been an actress (for which, read “prostitute”), who reinvents herself as a hermit;70 Mary Magdalene, who becomes a desert saint;71 and Mary of Egypt, the nymphomaniac saint who never took money for sex, but did it because she enjoyed 65  Ælfric’s Lives, 1:24–​51 at 32–​41; Donovan, Women Saints’ Lives, 68–​75 at 71–​73.

66  Judith, lines 35, 78; Elliott van Kirk Dobbie, Beowulf and Judith, ASPR vol. 4 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953), 100, 101; my translation. 67  Ælfric’s Lives, 1:194–​209; Donovan, Women Saints’ Lives, 38–​43.

68  Ælfric’s Lives, 1:38, lines 233–​34; translation from Donovan, Women Saints’ Lives, 73.

69  De Virginitate, XIX; Ehwald, Aldhelmi Opera, 248–​49; Lapidge and Herren, Aldhelm, 75–​76.

70  The Old English Martyrology, ed. and trans. Christine Rauer, Anglo-​Saxon Texts 10 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), 201–​3. 71  Old English Martyrology, 142–​43.

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it, who transforms into a penitent ascetic.72 These cannot have been literal role models for Anglo-​Saxons, but they did provide moral guidance toward sexual restraint and steadfast faith. The relatively few women who are prominent in Old English texts are feisty, speaking assertively, even to a point that could be judged as rudeness by today’s standards. Agnes rejects a wealthy young man whose only crime is to court her with gifts with the approval of his family, saying “Gewít ðu fram me synne ontendnys /​ leahtras foda. and deaðes bigleafa /​gewít fram me” (Leave me, you burning sin, fuel of vices and food of death! Depart from me!) even though she later admits to his father that her suitor “soþlice is man” (is a true man),73 and evidently a physically attractive one, since she acknowledges “his neb-​wlite.”74 St. Helena, the prominent figure in the central part of the triptych that is the poem Elene, castigates the Jews in a series of speeches that terrify, sadden, and bewilder them, and she confines Judas to a dry cistern in fetters to starve him into submission. All, however, is justified by the conversion of Judas and the promotion of Christianity.75 In literature and art there are two recurrent images of Womanhood: Mother and Mourner, often the two roles combined, from the Virgin Mary to the grieving Hildeburh in Beowulf and the unnamed speaker in Wulf and Eadwacer. In illustrations to the Old English prose and poetic versions of Genesis, women are pictured in immediately recognizable images after giving birth76 and in the Hexateuch, as bereaved. Arguably, images of the Virgin Mary are borrowed for the royal portraits of Queen Emma and Queen Edith. Queen Emma is twice depicted: with her second husband, Cnut, presenting a cross to the New Minster, Winchester,77 where the royal couple occupy the positions of the Virgin Mary and St. John in crucifixion miniatures, and secondly in the frontispiece to the book she commissioned, known as the Encomium Emmae Reginae, where she sits centrally on a throne, receiving the book from its author while her two sons, King Harthacnut and the future King Edward the Confessor, look on,78 the three male figures like the three Magi 72  Ælfric’s Lives, 2:2–​53; The Old English Life of St Mary of Egypt: An Edition of the Old English Text with Modern English Parallel-​text Translation, ed. and trans. Hugh Magennis (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002); Donovan, Women Saints’ Lives, 97–​120.

73  Ælfric’s Lives, 1:170, lines 25–​27, 176, lines 103, 104; translation from Donovan, Women Saints’ Lives, 47, 48.

74  Acknowledged in Skeat’s translation “the beauty of his countenance” (Ælfric’s Lives, 1:177) but not in Donovan’s “his face” (Women Saints’ Lives, 48). 75  ASPR vol. 2, 66–​102.

76  Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Junius 11, pp. 47, 62; Thomas H. Ohlgren, ed., Anglo-​Saxon Textual Illustration: Photographs of Sixteen Manuscripts with Descriptions and Index (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University Press, 1992) plates 16.24, 16.35; London, British Library MS Cotton Claudius B. iv, for example fols. 28r, 34r, 35r, www.bl.uk/​manuscripts/​FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Cotton_​MS_​ Claudius_​B_​IV.

77  London, British Library MS Stowe 944, fol. 6r, www.bl.uk/​manuscripts/​Viewer.aspx?ref=stowe_​ ms_​944_​f001r. 78  London, British Library MS Additional 33241, fol. 1v. See cover image.

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before the Virgin and Child. Queen Edith, weeping at the feet of her dying husband in the Bayeux Tapestry, echoes the weeping Virgin of Anglo-​Saxon crucifixion iconography, such as in the Ramsey Psalter,79 and the widows and female mourners depicted in the Old English illustrated Hexateuch who sometimes hold a hand to the face.80 These concepts of Mother and Mourner are central to the depiction of women in Beowulf: Hildeburh can do nothing to save her family; Wealhtheow and Hygd try diplomacy, fruitlessly, as it turns out, to stave off disaster for their sons. Grendel’s mother is the single parent, monster-​ mother who takes revenge into her own hands and dies as a result. The unnamed, female mourner at Beowulf’s funeral speaks the bereavement of a whole nation, and with the gift for foresight that Tacitus attributes to Germanic women, she predicts “humiliation and captivity for herself,”81 a delicate way of referring to the rape and slavery that were the consequences for women of the military defeat of their men: consequences that are still the norm in some parts of the world today. Anglo-​ Saxon culture’s depiction of womanhood is a sober one. We might wonder: does Anglo-​Saxon Woman ever lighten up? There are occasional hints of it through the writings of moralists. Bede reports that the nuns of Coldingham used their weaving skills to deck themselves out like brides or attract attention from strange men—​they were probably using the precious materials they should have reserved for ecclesiastical vestments. Of course their convent got burned down, Bede tells us—​just punishment for their worldliness!82 Aldhelm criticizes nuns who curled their hair, had nails like talons, and wore long, coloured veils down to the ground instead of more seemly grey or white ones.83 He also characterizes wanton secular women as wearing jewellery, artificially curling their hair, and reddening cheeks and lips with makeup.84 Lesbian sex is explicitly mentioned (“Si mulier cum muliere fornicans”) as well as sex between nuns by means of a device (“Si sanctaemoniales cum sanctaemoniale per machinam”) in a passage in a penitential attributed to Bede, the latter sin attracting a seven-​year penalty, the former, three.85 A woman pleasuring 79  London, British Library MS Harley 2904, fol. 3v, www.bl.uk/​manuscripts/​Viewer.aspx?ref= harley_​ms_​2904_​fs001r. 80  London, British Library MS Cotton Claudius B. iv, fols 10v, 11v, 12r, especially 11v where the woman wipes her face with her garment, www.bl.uk/​manuscripts/​FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Cotton_​ MS_​Claudius_​B_​IV. 81  “hyre […] hynðo ond h[æ]f[t]‌nyd,” Beowulf, lines 3153, 3155; Dobbie, ASPR vol. 4, 97. 82  Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica, IV, 25; Bede, Ecclesiastical History, 424–​27.

83  De Virginitate, LVIII; Ehwald, Aldhelmi Opera, 318; Lapidge and Herren, Aldhelm, 127–​28. 84  De Virginitate, XVII; Ehwald, Aldhelmi Opera, 246; Lapidge and Herren, Aldhelm, 73.

85  I am grateful to Dr. Christopher Monk for drawing my attention to this information, which derived from Allen J. Frantzen, Before the Closet: Same-​Sex Love from “Beowulf” to “Angels in America” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 177. The original source is The Penitential of Bede, in Bussordnungen der abendländischen Kirche, ed. F. W. H. Wasserschleben (Halle: C. Graeger, 1851), 223, paras 23, 24, respectively.

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herself has been suggested as the possible activity of the dark-​haired, drunken, Welsh slave-​girl in Riddle 12.86 Sex is not always characterized as wicked, however. Several “obscene” Anglo-​ Saxon riddles suggest a healthy enjoyment of heterosexual sex. Although they may be the product of a monastic scriptorium, they sometimes evoke lusty young women and, by association, the settings in which they live and work. The riddle of which the innocuous solution is “Onion” is located in the vegetable garden: “Neþeð hwilum /​ ful cyrtenu ceorles dohtor, /​ modwlonc meowle, þæt heo on mec gripeð” (Sometimes a countryman’s quite comely daughter will venture, bumptious girl, to get a grip on me);87 the two creatures innocently identified as “Cock and Hen” enjoy a sexual frolic “ute” (out of doors).88 “Dough” evokes the bakery89 and “Churn” the dairy.90 The female speaker in the enigmatic poem Wulf and Eadwacer admits that she found the embrace of her lover a joy, but not an unadulterated one: she also found it loathsome: “wæs me wyn to þon, wæs me hwæþre eac lað.”91 Did Anglo-​Saxon women ever have fun? The Prologue to Rudolph’s Life of Leoba records young nuns of Wimborne misbehaving on the grave of a dead nun who had been a strict disciplinarian; but this was more for revenge than enjoyment. The best-​ known Anglo-​Saxon images of women dancing known to this author are in illustrated manuscripts of Prudentius, where they represent the Vice Luxuria, lechery.92 Dancing was not necessarily always sinful, however. There is a dancing couple, one is a short tunic, the other in a longer garment who may be a woman, celebrating gratitude to God in a tiny miniature in the Harley Psalter, fol. 24v.93 A rare light moment is suggested by a twelfth-​century chronicler’s account of an exchange between husband and wife describing how, in her early married days, Queen Edith visited the monastery at Abingdon with her husband and mother-​in-​law and found the young boys were not getting enough food. She persuaded her husband to help the monastery financially and 86  Sarah L. Higley, “The Wanton Hand: Reading and Reaching into Grammars and Bodies in Old English Riddle 12,” in Naked Before God: Uncovering the Body in Anglo-​Saxon England, ed. Jonathan Wilcox and Benjamin C. Withers (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2003), 29–​59. 87  Riddle 25; ASPR vol. 3, 193, lines 5–​7; translation from Bradley, Anglo-​Saxon Poetry, 373. 88  Riddle 42; ASPR vol. 3, 203, line 2; Bradley, Anglo-​Saxon Poetry, 377. 89  Riddle 45; Bradley, Anglo-​Saxon Poetry, 379; ASPR vol. 3, 205. 90  Riddle 54, not included in Bradley; ASPR vol. 3, 207–​8. 91  ASPR vol. 3, 179–​80 at 180 line 12.

92  For example in British Library MS Additional 24199, fol. 18r, www.bl.uk/​manuscripts/​ Viewer.aspx?ref=add_​ms_​24199_​f002r; and Cotton Cleopatra C. viii, fol. 19v; Ohlgren, Textual Illustration, plate 15.28. It has to be said that in this version Luxuria’s dress, though long, is not female gendered, with a (typically masculine) shoulder brooch and without her usual headdress. 93  London, British Library MS Harley 603; Ohlgren, Textual Illustration, plate 2.42; I am grateful to Christopher Monk for directing my attention to this miniature and to his discussion of it at www.anglosaxonmonk.com/​blog/​dancing-​anglo-​saxon-​style.

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was able to provide the means for it from a village (Lewkner) she had just been given.94 There is also a hint of enjoyment in the account of pious rivalry between Edith and her husband as builders, she rebuilding the church at Wilton, Edward the church of St. Peter (Westminster Abbey), a race Edith won in terms of time, though she was not competing in terms of magnificence.95 It is ironic that I should find tangible human emotion in Edith because in the book she commissioned she is characterized as scholarly, with a serious personality, not given to shouts or laughter.96 Accomplished and educated beyond the norm of men as well as women, she is said to be a very Minerva in the arts of painting and needlework. Yet in her enjoyment of the little gold trinkets she had made to dangle from her husband’s horse harness and the elaborate dress and furnishings she made and commissioned, we find a woman with delight in pretty things and a canny appreciation of the fact that an appearance of royal splendour enhanced royal power.97 Yet text and art, dependent like all medieval creativity on following and developing models, turn Edith into a stereotype. As her marriage remained childless, it came to be regarded as a chaste union.98 Indeed she allegedly professed to be a virgin on her deathbed.99 Her biographer’s description of her fostering “with motherly love” children said to be of royal stock (and hence, potential heirs to the throne) subtly presents her as a virgin mother figure.100 Such a concept had long been applied to abbesses, who were virgin mothers of their flocks of nuns, but the foundation of the image lies in St. Mary. The Bayeux Tapestry captures the moment Edith becomes a widow, giving her the gesture of weeping into her garment, which is derived from biblical art, particularly the bereaved Virgin Mary. However, Edith’s real story gives her every reason to grieve, to lament reversals of fortunes as total as any of the protagonists in the Old English poem 94  The Abingdon Chronicle ad 1052; Chronicon Monasterii de Abingdon, ed. Joseph Stevenson, 2 vols., Rolls Series 2.1–​2 (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1858), 1:460–​61. 95  The Life of King Edward, 70–​71. 96  The Life of King Edward, 22–​23.

97  In this she anticipated political thought of the later Middle Ages (see Stephen Rigby, “Political Thought,” in Encyclopedia of Medieval Dress and Textiles of the British Isles, c. 450–​1450, ed. Gale R. Owen-​Crocker, Elizabeth Coatsworth, and Maria Hayward (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 422–​26); or perhaps the twelfth-​century writers whose accounts are incorporated into The Life of King Edward as we know it projected backwards the practices of their own time.

98  The Life of King Edward, 112–​13; also Orderic Vitalis Gesta vii 6(9); see The Gesta Normannorum Ducum of William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis and Robert of Torigni, ed. Elisabeth M. C. Van Houts, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992–1995), 2:108–​9; William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regvm Anglorvm, vol. 2: General Introduction and Commentary, ed. R. M. Thompson and M. Winterbottom (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), 197, 3; William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regvm Anglorvm, vol. 1: The History of the English Kings, ed. and trans. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson, and M. Winterbottom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 1352–​55. 99  William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regvm Anglorvm, ii. 197, 3; Mynors et al., William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regvm Anglorvm, 1:353–​52. 100  The Life of King Edward, 24–​25.

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Deor or any monarch on Fortune’s wheel: firstly, from acclaimed royal bride to banishment in a convent and threat of divorce, to reinstatement into a childless marriage with an aging husband who had shown his willingness to dispose of her. Later, as established queen with a family of successful brothers governing her husband’s country, Edith lost within the same year her husband King Edward the Confessor, who died after a rapid decline in health on January 5, 1066; her brother Tostig, formerly Earl of Northumbria, allegedly her favourite brother, killed on September 25 at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, by the army of her most successful brother King Harold II; and Harold himself, who with their two younger brothers, Leofwine and Gyrth, died at the Battle of Hastings on October 14. Yet Edith was a survivor. She lived another nine years. She did not flee into exile abroad like her mother and younger sister. She maintained dignified retirement at Winchester and Wilton, paying dues to King William when required; and he rewarded her with royal burial next to her husband. Interestingly Edith has been revived in recent years as a possible patron of, and even a possible contributor to, the Bayeux Tapestry,101 fulfilling another Anglo-​Saxon stereotype, woman as clothmaker, though it is doubtful that those aristocratic hands ever personally worked coarse wool and linen. The story of Anglo-​Saxon woman is self-​evidently much richer than the stereotype that supplants it; yet, clearly, contemporary and more recent generalizations about Anglo-​Saxon womanhood have some basis in fact and women themselves probably cultivated an idealized image of female behaviour, from anonymi preparing the corpse of a loved female relative with appropriate grave goods, to Queen Edith influencing her biographer towards a depiction of chaste maternity while indicating that her formidable intellect was restrained in a seemly way by her subordination to the king.

101  First suggested by Carola Hicks in her The Bayeux Tapestry: The Life Story of a Masterpiece (London: Chatto and Windus, 2006), 30–​39, and further argued in her “The Patronage of Queen Edith,” in The Bayeux Tapestry: New Approaches, ed. Michael J. Lewis, Gale R. Owen-​Crocker, and Dan Terkla (Oxford: Oxbow, 2011), 5–​9. Also see Patricia Stephenson, “Here a Cleric and Ælfgyva,” in Lewis et al., The Bayeux Tapestry: New Approaches, 71–​74.

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Chapter 2

BEYOND VALKYRIES: DRINKING HORNS IN ANGLO-​SAXON WOMEN’S  GRAVES

CAROL NEUMAN DE VEGVAR* IN HER MONUMENTAL 1984 volume, “Beowulf” ’s Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition, Helen Damico looked at the high-​prestige roles of women in a range of motifs in Anglo-​ Saxon and Norse literature and culture.1 The publication of this work opened the doors to new areas of scholarly inquiry not only for specialists on Old English texts, but also for archaeologists and art historians working on the material culture of Anglo-​Saxon England; Damico’s volume has been, to reuse the familiar paraphrase of Claude Lévi-​ Strauss, “good to think [with]” across the spectrum of Anglo-​Saxon studies.2 This article is offered not only in acknowledgement of the trail blazed by Helen in that volume, but also in gratitude for the support and encouragement that Helen has so generously extended to so many colleagues in the field of Anglo-​Saxon studies over the years. It is an often-​published truism that in Anglo-​Saxon burials, drinking horns with applied metalwork ornaments are generally found in elite men’s graves. I too have made this statement in print on several occasions. Yet there are a very few exceptional examples of such ornamented horns that have been found in women’s graves.3 These graves, and in some cases the cemeteries in which they are found, are anomalous in more than this one way, and are worthy of consideration in terms of what they may reveal about the range of roles women may have played in early Anglo-​Saxon society. As such, the examination of these objects in their find contexts seems a fitting subject with which to honour Helen Damico’s lifetime of contributions to our understanding of the roles of women in early medieval literature and life. Although the roles of women as cupbearers in elite Anglo-​Saxon society and its early medieval cognates on the Continent have been substantively explored by several writers, and significantly by the honouree of this volume, the subject of the burial of women with drinking horns, outside of Scandinavia, has not been explored. To the best of my knowledge, only two examples from Anglo-​Saxon England have been published, Grave 17 at Wakerley, Northamptonshire, and Grave 43 at Fonaby in North Lincolnshire. A third possible example is Grave 124 at Castledyke South in Barton-​on-​Humber, North Lincolnshire, although identification of the sex and gender of the deceased is problematic there. *  Ohio Wesleyan University. [email protected]

1  Helen Damico, “Beowulf” ’s Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984).

2  Claude Lévi-​Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 89. The original quote is “good to think,” frequently rephrased as “good to think with.” 3  My thanks are owed to Susan Youngs for bringing these examples to my attention.

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The Anglo-​Saxon cemetery at Wakerley was excavated by Dennis Jackson between 1968 and 1970 and published by Jackson and Brian Adams in 1988–​1989.4 The finds from the excavation are currently housed in the Central Museum in Northampton. The cemetery is generally dated to the late sixth and early seventh century.5 The orderly arrangement of the burials suggests that they may be close in date, possibly identifying Wakerley as a plague cemetery, a hypothesis also supported by the frequency of double, treble, and quadruple graves here. The grave furnishings show a variety of dates, sufficient to suggest deposition across more than one generation and spanning much of the sixth century.6 However, it is a norm of Anglo-​Saxon archaeology that the dates of deposition of objects in graves are often separated by considerable spans of time from the objects’ date of production, so the date range of the grave goods at Wakerley does not preclude identification as a plague cemetery, with a relatively brief span of deposition. The population of the cemetery may also suggest unusual circumstances at Wakerley. The adult burials in the cemetery, where age and sex can be determined, are all under the age of forty-​five and most under thirty-​five, in the prime of life. For graves where skeletal identification of the sex of the deceased is possible, the population of the deceased is predominantly female, with eighteen adult males and thirty-​one adult females.7 The implications of the population of the cemetery must be considered in any interpretation of unusual grave deposits here, notably the drinking horn in Grave 17. At Wakerley, Graves 17 and 18 together constitute a double grave, probably simultaneous, and are part of the latest group of graves in the core cemetery, dated to the last quarter of the sixth century (Figure 2.1).8 Found at the edge of a cluster of commonly east-​west-​aligned graves, Graves 17 and 18 were both adult inhumations, with the distribution of grave goods indicating that both individuals were buried reclining on their left sides, a position shared with four other graves in the site.9 The occupants of Graves 17 and 18 were identified as women based on the types of grave goods with which they were found; skeletal remains were insufficient to determine age or biological sex for either. Both were relatively rich graves, with brooches, beads, pins, knives, buckles, 4  Brian Adams and Dennis Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley, Northamptonshire; Excavations by Mr D Jackson, 1968–​9,” ed. Leslie Badenoch, with contributions by Justine Bayley, D. R. Brothwell, Elisabeth Crowfoot, Heinrich Härke, and Terry Pearson, Northamptonshire Archaeology 22 (1988–​89), 69–​178 and microfiche catalogue of burials, at 69. 5  Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” 173–​77. 6  Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” 173.

7  Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” 77, and Justine Bayley, “Report on Inhumations Examined at the Ancient Monuments Laboratory,” in Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​ Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” microfiche F2–​F8 at F8. In addition, there are three graves where the skeletal remains are male but the grave goods are culturally feminine; but there are no examples where the grave’s occupant is biologically female and culturally masculine in deposition (Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” microfiche F7–​F8, table 3). 8  Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” 156.

9  Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” 77 and microfiche A12.

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Figure 2.1 Brian Adams and Dennis Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley, Northamptonshire; Excavations by Mr. D. Jackson, 1968–​9,” ed. Leslie Badenoch, with contributions by Justine Bayley, D. R. Brothwell, Elisabeth Crowfoot, Heinrich Härke, and Terry Pearson, Northamptonshire Archaeology 22 (1988–​89), diagrams of graves (18) 17 and graves 18 (17) as provided on the large insert sheet at the end of the volume.

strap ends and keys, and pottery, albeit Grave 17 was significantly richer than Grave 18, suggesting that the two women were not of equal social standing. Grave 17 contained an opulent array of personal ornaments, distinguishing it as one of the richest graves at Wakerley.10 Clothing fasteners included two sets of decorated 10  Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” pp.  87–​91, figs. 15–​19, and microfiche A12–​B2.

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wrist-​clasps of a type frequently found in Anglian sites and widely considered to derive from Scandinavian prototypes and to have been part of Anglian tracht imported from the Continent at the time of emigration. One of the two pairs of wrist-​clasps in Grave 17 was unmatched, but the other pair was better produced than most examples at Wakerley, with a heavier plate and decorated with an openwork dot-​and-​circle motif, suggesting a slightly higher level of wealth or prestige.11 The occupant of Grave 17 also wore two silver pendants. One of these pendants, found on the chest, was scutiform with a raised central dot and stamped decorations.12 The second pendant, found to the right of the skull, displayed an off-​centre and truncated spiralling pattern, possibly a backward-​ looking bird, evidently cut down from a larger sheet of silver.13 The occupant of Grave 17 also wore two bronze annular brooches at her shoulders14 with a string of twenty-​ five beads probably suspended between them, of which twenty-​four were amber and one was a hemispherical shell bead with a central perforation.15 A cast bronze pin was centred between the annular brooches; textile residues indicate its role as a clothing fastener.16 Fragments of two iron buckles were found close to objects associated with a belt assemblage and may have served as belt fasteners.17 Alternatively the belt may have been fastened by a single pennannular brooch, flat in section, also found at the waist or 11  Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” p. 87, fig. 15.6, p. 88, fig. 16.7, pp. 154–​55 and microfiche A13, Grave 17, nos. 6–​7.

12  Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” find 17.5, p. 87, fig. 15.5, pp. 152–​ 53 and microfiche A13. The pendant was found at the shoulder. Parallels include examples from Wakerley Grave 80 and at Leighton Buzzard (Beds.), Irby (Lincs.), Market Overton (Rutland) and especially Grave 73 at Empingham II (Rutland; now Oakham Museum). 13  Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” find 17.11, p.  88, fig.  16.11, pp. 152–​53 and microfiche A14. The design parallels late sixth-​century saucer brooches.

14  Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” finds 17.2 and 17.3, p. 87, fig. 15.2, p. 149 and microfiche A12–​13. Annular brooches are widely found in Anglian sites. The brooches from Grave 17 have pins that seat into an inset pincatch, and display irregular groupings of ring-​ and-​dot stamping as well as inner and outer borders of outward-​opening half-​moon punching on the ring loop. 15  Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” finds 17.4a–​e, p.  87, fig 15.4, pp. 153–​54 and microfiche A13. Most beads found at Wakerley were amber, and were displayed in strings hung between brooches at shoulder level. The perforated shell bead in Grave 17 may have been in secondary usage here: the type suggests it may have originated as the setting for a central garnet on a disc brooch (suggestion by Vera Evison cited in Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” 154).

16  Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” find 17.1, p. 87, fig 15.1, p. 156 and microfiche A12. The pin has an elaborate head of five stacked knobs. Ten bronze and iron pins were found with women and juveniles at Wakerley, typically at shoulder level and serving as clothing fasteners. 17  Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” find 17.8 and 17.14, pp. 88–​89, figs. 16.8 and 17.14, p. 145 and microfiche A13–​14.

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upper thigh.18 A strap end, possibly part of the same belt, displayed grooved decoration of a type primarily associated with finds in Kent and unusual this far north, which may indicate a well-​connected family.19 One of the buckles was associated with fragments of an undecorated double-​sided bone comb, the only comb found at Wakerley.20 Together the buckle and comb were found overlaying a bone ring that may have been part of a bag assembly suspended from the belt.21 A cast bronze ring with knobbed decoration, found at the waist,22 probably served as a belt attachment for a pair of bronze girdle hangers23 and three iron keys.24 The number of keys suggests a woman from a household of substantial means. Grave 17 also contained a knife with a curved back and edge meeting at the tip; unspecified “organic traces” on the blade may indicate a lost wooden or bone handle.25 Eight sherds of pottery with a sandy fabric were placed at the feet, but these have been mislaid since excavation and the vessel type is indeterminable.26 18  Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” find 17.10, p. 88, fig. 16.10, p. 149 and microfiche A14. Penannular brooches are generally not an Anglo-​Saxon type, but there are three other examples at Wakerley, of which one, in Grave 71, was found in the waist or upper-​thigh area, but the other two, a pair in Grave 21, were worn at the shoulders. 19  Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” finds 17.8 and 17.23, p.  91, fig. 19.23, p. 145 and microfiche A13 and B1.

20  Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” find 17.13, p. 89, fig. 17.13, p. 158 and microfiche A14. 21  Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” find 17.22, p. 91, fig. 19.22, p. 158 and microfiche B1. Broken in three pieces, the ring was wedge-​shaped in section, with a widest circumference of 65 mm and was pierced with three sets of paired holes. 22  Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” find 17.15, p. 89, fig. 17.15, p. 149 and microfiche A14–​B1, alternatively identifiable as an annular brooch lacking its pin. 23  Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” finds 17.16 and 17.17, p.  90, fig. 18.16–​17, pp. 155–​56 and microfiche B1. At Wakerley, girdle hangers appear in only two graves (17 and 44), in both cases in pairs and placed at the left thigh of one of two female occupants of a double grave. The girdle hangers differ in type between the two sets; those in Grave 17 (nos. 16 and 17) are closed in form with two lateral round projections and are probably nonfunctional. Stamps applied to the Wakerley girdle hangers, in a thickened “v” shape, were also used on a silver necklet in Grave 40, on the swastika brooches in Grave 44, and on silver disc pendants in Grave 80, suggesting that all these objects were locally ornamented, although not necessarily local or contemporaneous in initial manufacture (Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” 159).

24  Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” finds 17.18–​20, p. 90, fig. 18.18–​20, p.  156 and microfiche B1. There were twelve (possibly thirteen) keys found at Wakerley, all in women’s graves, usually located as in Grave 17 between pelvis and thighs, and probably associated with a belt. Multiple keys are found at Wakerley only in double graves. The keys in Grave 17 have different wards, U-​shaped and square, so these are most probably keys to different objects (Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” 156).

25  Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” find 17.21, p. 91, fig. 19.21, p. 145 and microfiche B1.

26  Terry Pearson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Pottery,” in Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” pp. 160–​68; vessel no. 11: p. 161; table 6 on p. 164; table 9 on p. 166; and Adams

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In addition to being an unusually rich grave in the broader context of the Wakerley cemetery, Grave 17 also contained two objects that made it exceptional. To the left of the head was placed an enigmatic and archaeologically unique object, originally consisting of a bundle of alder, holly or birchwood twigs that were bound together with reused strips of bronze that were fashioned into seven rings fastened with hook-​and-​eye closures (Figure 2.2).27 Lindsay Badenoch suggests this object may have constituted the handle of either a small and possibly symbolic—​rather than functional—​twig broom or besom, or a brush of horsehair wrapped around a wooden core, possibly a daubing brush or flywhisk.28 The grave also contained the fragmentary remains of the metal fittings of a drinking horn (Figure 2.3).29 One fragment consisted of the tip of the horn, stained with bronze and pierced laterally with rivet holes at right angles, one still filled with an iron rivet or dowel. The position of the rivets suggests that they probably once held in place either a suspension ring, as Badenoch proposed in the site report,30 or the socket of a now-​lost ornamental bronze terminal, as suggested by the bronze staining on the horn fragment. A second fragment, found in the grave at an unrecorded position, is a bronze tube, tapered from 44 to 38 mm, which may have been mounted on the horn close to the tip, as Badenoch suggested, either as an additional decoration or as a repair. The final fragment from the horn consists of a tapered rim mount with two partially preserved van dykes, through the top ends of which large flat rivets attached the rim mount to the body of the horn. The rim band shows three bands of very basic and inconsistently applied stamped decoration: a line of dot-​and-​ring along the lip, a row of triskeles at the level of the rivets, and a fragmentarily preserved row of dot-​and-​ring along the lower edge; the van dykes are edged with unevenly spaced chevrons. The rim mount is also rather flimsily constructed; the Wakerley rim mount is also not nearly as substantial as the bucket fragments found elsewhere in the same cemetery. But the rim mount’s scale tells a different story: it was about 135 mm in diameter, which implies a horn larger then the largest of the horns in the princely burial at Taplow in Buckinghamshire (102 mm). The large scale suggests that the horn used for the Wakerley vessel was not from domestic and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” find 17.25, microfiche B2. Of the graves at Wakerley, forty-​one contained pottery, including several with relatively freshly broken sherd deposits. There were two instances of parts of vessels being placed in different graves, suggesting a connection between the buried individuals. Placed sherds in burials are rare in Anglian graves; parallels are found at Bergh Apton and Swaffham. There is no evidence at Wakerley that sherds in graves are stray detritus from an adjacent settlement (Pearson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Pottery,” 167–​68). 27  Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” finds 17.9a–​f, p.  88, fig.  16.9, microfiche A13–​A14. 28  Lindsay Badenoch, “The Bronze-​Ring Bound Object,” in Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” 159. 29  Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” finds 17.12 and 17.27, pp. 89 and 91, figs. 17.12, and 19.27 and microfiche A14–​B1. 30  Lindsay Badenoch, “The Drinking Horn,” in Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” 158.

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Figure 2.2 Brian Adams and Dennis Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley, Northamptonshire; Excavations by Mr. D. Jackson, 1968–​9,” ed. Leslie Badenoch, with contributions by Justine Bayley, D. R. Brothwell, Elisabeth Crowfoot, Heinrich Härke, and Terry Pearson, Northamptonshire Archaeology 22 (1988–​89), p. 88, fig. 16, finds 17.9a–​ f: copper-​alloy bindings of the besom(?).

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Figure 2.3 Brian Adams and Dennis Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley, Northamptonshire; Excavations by Mr. D. Jackson, 1968–​9,” ed. Leslie Badenoch, with contributions by Justine Bayley, D. R. Brothwell, Elisabeth Crowfoot, Heinrich Härke, and Terry Pearson, Northamptonshire Archaeology 22 (1988–​89), p. 89, fig. 17, find 17.12 (horn tip and rim), and p. 91, fig. 19, find 17.27 (possibly associated bronze tube).

cattle but rather from an aurochs and necessarily imported from the Continent, as the aurochs had been extinct in Britain since the Neolithic. In Anglo-​Saxon England, aurochs horns as drinking horns are found primarily in princely graves, as at Mound 1 at Sutton Hoo and Prittlewell, as well as at Taplow, and may be read as indices of princely status by dint of potential for hospitality offered to a large retinue.31 However, the metalwork on such princely horns is considerably better designed and more aesthetically upscale, with rim bands and van dykes embossed with animal ornament and elaborately crafted clips that overlap the rim and, once riveted in place, hold the ensemble together. The Wakerley rim mount lacks any trace of such fastenings. Further, fragments of van dykes from Holton le Moor (North Lincolnshire)32 and van dyke stamp matrices from Grimston

31  Carol Neuman de Vegvar, “The Sutton Hoo Horns as Regalia,” in Sutton Hoo: Fifty Years After, ed. Robert T. Farrell and Carol Neuman de Vegvar (Oxford, OH: American Early Medieval Studies II, 1992), 63–​74; Damico, “Beowulf” ’s Wealhtheow, 236n23.

32  Fragments of three gilt-​ silver van dykes; Angela Care Evans, “40: Holton le Moor Lincolnshire: Early Anglo-​Saxon silver-​gilt drinking horn mount fragments (2002 T237),” Treasure Annual Report 2002 (London: Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2004), 52–​53; now Scunthorpe, North Lincolnshire Museum NAMS: 2004.100.

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(Norfolk),33 Bowthorpe (Norfolk),34 and Fen Drayton (Cambridgeshire)35 show that more elegant design was not exclusive to the social milieu of the major princely graves found thus far, and such comparisons demonstrate that the decorations on the Wakerley rim mount and van dykes are rudimentary in design and unevenly and carelessly applied. The anomalous combination at Wakerley of upscale aurochs horn with such relatively downscale stamped ornament suggests that the horn alone may have been passed down the social chain from the princely household where it initially arrived in Britain, to be decorated later, perhaps for a retainer of less substantial means. Although part of a double grave with Grave 17, Grave 18 at Wakerley was considerably less opulent in deposition, although provisioned with typically Anglian women’s grave goods. The deceased in Grave 18 wore no wrist-​clasps and lacked the lavish belt assemblage seen in Grave 17, although an iron buckle36 and fragments of a bronze strap end37 suggest the presence of a belt per se, as did a single iron hook or key probably originally suspended from the belt at pelvis or thigh level.38 A string of fourteen beads,39 a pair of bronze annular brooches at the shoulders,40 a coil-​headed bronze pin,41 a knife,42 and four sherds of sandy pottery,43 along with traces of textiles,44 constitute the

33  Portable Antiquities Scheme NMS-​0D4FD3; http://​finds.org.uk/​database/​artefacts/​record/​id/​ 10227.

34  The Bowthorpe (Costessey) die is housed at the Norwich Castle Museum, accession number 1992.175. My thanks to Helen Geake and Tim Pestell for assistance in tracking this find.

35  Kevin Leahy, “Cambridgeshire: Fen Drayton,” in “Medieval Britain and Ireland in 2005: Portable Antiquities Scheme Report,” ed. Helen Geake, Medieval Archaeology 50 (2006): 279–​80.

36  Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” find 18.8, p. 92, fig. 20.8, p. 145 and microfiche B3. 37  Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” find 18.5, p. 92, fig. 20.5, p. 145 and microfiche B3.

38  Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” find 18.10, p. 92, fig. 20.10, p. 156 and microfiche B3.

39  Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” finds 18.4a–​g, p. 92, figs. 20.4a–​g and microfiche B2–​B3. Ten beads were amber, mostly small and roughly shaped, while four were glass. 40  Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” finds 18.1–​2, p. 91, fig. 19.1–​2, p. 149 and microfiche B2.

41  Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” find 18.3, p. 92, fig. 20.3, p. 156, microfiche B2.

42  Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” find 18.9, p. 92, fig. 20.9, p. 145 and microfiche B3. The knife is fragmentary but can nonetheless be classified as Böhner Type A; see Kurt Böhner, Die Fränkischen Altertümer des Trierer Landes, 2 vols., Germanischen Denkmäler der Völkerwanderungszeit ser. B (Berlin: Mann, 1958), 1:214–​15. 43  Pearson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Pottery,” in Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” p. 161, table 2, vessel no. 12 (find 18.6), sandy type; microfiche B3. These sherds have been mislaid and their original location in the grave is unknown.

44  Elisabeth Crowfoot, “The Textiles,” in Adams and Jackson, “The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley,” 168–​72 at 170 and table 10. Grave 18 contained mineralized traces of textiles; Grave 17 produced no textile traces.

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remainder of the finds from Grave 18. The distinctions between the more opulent Grave 17 and the more typical Grave 18 suggest a difference in social standing or roles between the two women in the double grave, whether within a family or an extended household or from the larger community, as the nature of their relationship is indeterminable. Equally possibly, their burial together may reflect a common date of death rather than a close relationship of any sort in life. Nonetheless, the juxtaposition of these two women in death brings the comparatively higher level of wealth and possibly prestige of the occupant of Grave 17 into clearer focus. The evidence from Grave 43 at Fonaby is less comprehensive than that from Wakerley, in large part due to the circumstances of excavation. The Anglian cemetery at Fonaby, in the parish of Caistor in Lincolnshire, was discovered in the opening of a sand pit in 1956. Local amateur archaeologists salvaged several grave groups before investigation came under the auspices of the Scunthorpe Museum, now the North Lincolnshire Museum. In 1958, Pamela Fraser Brunner compiled a list of the Fonaby finds at the museum.45 In 1958 Sonia Chadwick Hawkes took up responsibility for the Fonaby material and began the multi-​year preparation of an index of the finds, which later formed the basis for the site catalogue compiled and published by Alison M. Cook in 1981.46 The Fonaby cemetery reflects a prosperous community, with most finds dating to the sixth century.47 A mixed burial rite, with both burials and cremations in the same social context, is typical of this era in north Lincolnshire and south Humberside, and Fonaby is not unique in showing both rites in one cemetery at approximately the same period.48 The finds reflect forty-​nine inhumation graves and four cremations, plus a significant number of unstratified finds that permit an estimate of the total population at fifty-​four individuals. As at Wakerley, the gender ratio at Fonaby is anomalous.49 Only eight burials may be recognized as male depositions by accompanying grave goods, and another thirteen of the poorly furnished graves may also have had male occupants. By contrast, of the forty-​nine recognizable graves, thirty-​one have grave goods typically deposited with women, and the presence of a significantly higher number of women than men is also suggested by unstratified finds from the site. Cook notes that beads and copper-​alloy personal ornaments typically associated with women were normally salvaged from the site, whereas corroded ironwork reflecting men’s military gear was not systematically preserved. However, she also points out that very few diagnostically male graves were found in the area more scientifically investigated by the Scunthorpe Museum team, and that although it is possible that the cemetery was divided into gender-​specific areas and 45  Alison M. Cook, The Anglo-​ Saxon Cemetery at Fonaby Lincolnshire, Occasional Papers in Lincolnshire History and Archaeology 6 (Sleaford: Society for Lincolnshire History and Archaeology, 1981), 15. Cook notes that this list lacks detail and in the case of Grave 43 consists only of the labels accompanying the objects. 46  Cook, The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Fonaby, 15. 47  Cook, The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Fonaby, 8.

48  Cook, The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Fonaby, 10.

49  Cook, The Anglo-​Saxon-​Cemetery at Fonaby, 74–​75.

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Figure 2.4 Alison M. Cook, The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Fonaby Lincolnshire, Occasional Papers in Lincolnshire History and Archaeology 6 (Sleaford: Society for Lincolnshire History and Archaeology, 1981), Fig. 16. A, B, and C reproduce Colebrook’s drawings, based on Shacklock’s descriptions, respectively of Grave 43 as a whole, the drinking horn mounts and the headgear as originally configured.

that the men’s side was destroyed without record, such a divided cemetery would be without parallel in a pre-​conversion Anglo-​Saxon context. Children’s graves were also rare at Fonaby, but this may be a factor of preservation or absence of recording. Grave 43 at Fonaby was discovered in Spring 1957; the finds were passed on to the Scunthorpe Museum by a Caistor resident, a Mr. P.  Shacklock, possibly the finder, who also gave an oral account of the find to a Mr. Colebrook50 who produced a note and sketches from Shacklock’s report (Figure 2.4).51 The location of Grave 43 in relation to the rest of the cemetery was not recorded, and consequently does not appear on the site maps published by Cook. Colebrook’s note indicates that the burial was at a depth of six feet and the head of the decedent was oriented to the northwest.52 The orientation is anomalous for the cemetery but not uniquely so: for the other excavated graves in the site for which orientations are recorded, seventeen are oriented east–​west, thirteen with heads to the west, four with heads to the east and three with idiosyncratic alignments, although these may have been erroneously recorded53 and should not be taken as clear evidence for the duration of the cemetery’s use. 50  Probably the D.  N. Colebook whose collection of Mesolithic flints is recorded in the Historic Environment Record; www.lincstothepast.com/​searchResults.aspx?keywords=colebrook&cmd= addNav&val=CollectionName:Historic%20Environment%20Record. I thank Beryl George, Volunteer Researcher at the Society for Lincolnshire Archaeology and History, for her assistance with this identification. 51  Cook, The Anglo-​Saxon-​Cemetery at Fonaby, pp. 15 and 40–​42, figs. 15–​16. 52  Cook, The Anglo-​Saxon-​Cemetery at Fonaby, 74. 53  Cook, The Anglo-​Saxon-​Cemetery at Fonaby, 74.

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Grave 43 held the partial skeletal remains of a young adult, approximately seventeen to twenty-​five years old, identified as female by the grave furnishings, which also indicate a woman of considerable status. Like Grave 17 at Wakerley, Grave 43 at Fonaby included a substantial array of personal ornaments. The deceased had two flat narrow-​ band copper-​alloy annular brooches at her shoulders.54 At Fonaby, as at Wakerley, pairs of annular brooches were typically used to fasten an overgarment at the neck.55 The site produced a total of sixteen flat annular brooches, a sixth-​century type, with nine wide-​band and seven narrow-​band examples, all with a recessed pin emplacement. Most examples are in poor condition, with only six preserving simple ornamentation; the two from Grave 43 are without decoration.56 Probably originally associated with the annular brooches, the woman in Grave 43 also wore a string of forty-​eight beads, nineteen of glass and twenty-​nine of amber. As elsewhere at Fonaby, the sequencing of the beads in Grave 43 is not recorded. Like the metalwork, the number and variety of the beads at Fonaby indicate a rich community. All the beads at Fonaby are of types manufactured in the sixth century and none are specifically seventh-​century in production, but their date of deposition could be sixth or seventh century.57 The beads in Grave 43 include translucent dark blue rings, a popular and predominantly sixth-​century type.58 A more labour-​intensive type, translucent beads with metal foil, was found in Grave 43 as in only three other graves and two unstratified finds at Fonaby,59 possibly indicating a person or family of somewhat greater wealth in this otherwise well-​to-​do community. Amber beads occur in almost all the Fonaby grave assemblages. The amber used in beads at Fonaby has not been sourced and may be either local, from the Lincolnshire coast or the Humber estuary, or imported from the Baltic, but its widespread inclusion in beads at Fonaby indicates that their presence in Grave 43 reflects a community’s trade links rather than more exclusive personal or familial contacts. In addition, the woman in Fonaby Grave 43 may have been buried with one or two additional brooches. Two heavily corroded copper-​alloy cruciform brooches, both with textile remains, are associated with the finds from Grave 43 in the North Lincolnshire Museum. In Colebrook’s sketch of the grave and its contents, one of these brooches was found placed centrally on the lower chest; the other brooch does not appear in the sketch and an original location in the grave is unrecorded.60 The Fonaby cemetery site as a whole produced fourteen such brooches; most are individual finds and Grave 43 is 54  Cook, The Anglo-​Saxon-​Cemetery at Fonaby, 76.

55  Cook, The Anglo-​Saxon-​Cemetery at Fonaby, 75; and Elisabeth Crowfoot, “The Textiles,” in Cook, The Anglo-​Saxon-​Cemetery at Fonaby, 89–​100 at 99.

56  Cook, The Anglo-​Saxon-​Cemetery at Fonaby, 76. In addition the Fonaby cemetery produced five annular brooches with rings that were round or oval in section plus one that may be a ring or a buckle and one that has a ring that is partially triangular in section, paralleling a type of zoomorphic annular brooch. 57  Cook, The Anglo-​Saxon-​Cemetery at Fonaby, 81

58  Cook, The Anglo-​Saxon-​Cemetery at Fonaby, 40 and 81.

59  Cook, The Anglo-​Saxon-​Cemetery at Fonaby, 81; George C. Boon and Maria Dekówna, “Gold-​in-​ glass Beads from the Ancient World,” Britannia 8 (1977): 193–​207 at 201. 60  Cook, The Anglo-​Saxon-​Cemetery at Fonaby, p. 43, fig. 16A.

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the only burial that may have contained two. Following Toby Martin’s new classification, one of the examples from Grave 43 (find 43, 2) is Type 3.2.1 (“Londesborough”), with a damaged headplate with hemispheric terminal knob, fragmentary lappets below the bow, and a broken footplate with raised bosses forming the eyes of a horse-​head design.61 The other cruciform brooch currently associated with the same grave (find 43, 3) is a severely damaged example of a florid (or floreated) type, Martin’s Type 3.2.6 (“Louth”), with a fragmentary headplate preserving a projecting perforated lappet as part of a “devolved knob” to the left of the upper arm of the cruciform, a broken bow missing part of the bridge, and a partially preserved footplate with three bands of moulding at the base of the bow, raised-​boss horse-​head eyes and traces of incised interlace.62 That the two cruciform brooches are not alike would suggest that they were not made to be worn together as a pair, whatever their subsequent history. Colebrook’s sketch shows a more florid brooch, and Cook suggests that the sketch represents find 43, 3, while find 43, 2 may not belong to this grave’s finds, despite its inclusion with them in the museum.63 If this were the case, Grave 43 would have had only one such brooch, albeit an originally rather splendid example, perhaps fastening a cloak or shawl at waist level. Thus far, the parure of the woman in Fonaby Grave 43 reflects a slightly upscale version of customary Anglian women’s attire in the sixth century. However, additional details of her personal attire and ornament would have stood out rather strikingly. The grave contained two pairs of copper-​alloy sleeve-​or wrist-​clasps. Eight wrist-​ clasps were found overall at Fonaby, six from graves and two unstratified examples, all of a widespread type made from rectangular copper-​alloy sheets. However, the wrist-​ clasps in Grave 43 were not worn at the cuffs, as was normal practice, but, according to Shacklock’s description to Colebrook, were attached as ornaments to a band of “a leather-​like substance” across the front of the cranium.64 There are no parallels for this arrangement in Anglian contexts in England, or in Scandinavia whence the Anglian wrist-​ clasps originate. Cook points out that while it would be tempting to dismiss Colebrook’s transcription of Shacklock’s oral report as inaccurate, particularly as the grave contained no wrist-​clasps in their more conventional locations, a circular iron stain on the residual cranium may reflect another part of this headdress, although equally possibly another adjacent object.65 Cook suggests that the Fonaby headdress may relate to a contemporary Kentish fashion for metalwork bands worn on a veil or in the hair, a practice also echoed north of Kent in Grave 11 at Holywell Row, Suffolk. She also notes the reuse of a Roman bracelet as headgear in Burial 14 in the later seventh-​century cemetery at Wakerley.66 In 61  Cook, The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Fonaby, 40; Toby F. Martin, The Cruciform Brooch and Anglo-​ Saxon England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2015), p. 267, no. 672. 62  Cook, The Anglo-​Saxon-​Cemetery at Fonaby, 40; Martin, The Cruciform Brooch and Anglo-​Saxon England, p. 273, no. 806. 63  Cook, The Anglo-​Saxon-​Cemetery at Fonaby, 42.

64  Cook, The Anglo-​Saxon-​Cemetery at Fonaby, pp. 42–​43, figs. 16.C, 16.6 and 16.7. 65  Cook, The Anglo-​Saxon-​Cemetery at Fonaby, 84.

66  Cook, The Anglo-​Saxon-​Cemetery at Fonaby, 83–​84, Alison Cook, “Catalogue of the Anglo-​ Saxon Material,” in Jackson and Ambrose, “Excavations at Wakerley,” Burial 14, pp. 228–​34 at 232, fig. 65.11.

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Grave 43, the use of the wrist-​clasps out of their usual context, as ornaments to headgear, suggests at the least a woman of unusual tastes and the status to exercise them unhindered, at the most an awareness of fashions elsewhere not paralleled in other members of her community and the command of resources to have a local version created for her. The prestige associated with metalwork as women’s headgear is also suggested by the appearance of Wealhtheow under gyldum beage (Beowulf 1163) as she enters the hall to reward Beowulf for his victory over Grendel; the beag in question is usually translated as “crown” but can refer to a ring and an array of other types of metalwork, which the phrase suggests is to be understood as worn on the queen’s head.67 Given the general wealth of Grave 43, it is noteworthy that the occupant was buried without girdle hangers, keys, or buckles to indicate a belt assemblage of a type associated at Fonaby as elsewhere in Anglia with women of property. But Grave 43 did contain the remains of a horn, described and illustrated by Colebrook from Shacklock’s report but not preserved at the Scunthorpe (later the North Lincolnshire) Museum. Whether the horn was a drinking horn or a blast horn cannot be determined with certainty, as the tip of the horn was apparently not found. Colebrook’s sketch of the remains shows the mouth of the horn with a decorative rim mount, but the horn is shown as broken off a few inches below the rim, and Colebrook’s transcription of Shacklock’s description of the grave, as transmitted in Cook’s site report, includes no object that might be the metalwork terminal of a horn.68 However, a drinking horn with a rim mount but no terminal would have ample parallels elsewhere in Anglo-​Saxon England, so the absence of a terminal in Grave 43 is no indicator of its original function. The horn’s original location in the grave is also unknown. Cook suggests that the circular stain on the cranium by contact with an iron object may have come from an adjacent part of the horn, if not an additional now-​missing piece of metalwork from the headdress.69 However, the decorative mounts from Anglo-​Saxon horns as well as the surviving fragments of and attachments for their suspension chains or cords that have been found to date are all made of copper-​ alloy, sometimes with silver-​gilt overlay; there are no extant Anglo-​Saxon horn fittings made of iron. Consequently the iron stain on the cranium in Grave 43 is unlikely to have been caused by proximity to the horn and cannot help to reveal its placement. Indeed, Colebrook’s description reveals that the rim mount of the horn fragment was copper-​ alloy.70 His sketch of the rim mount shows a narrow-​band collar, with evenly spaced circular designs along the centre of the band, each with short lines radiating outward on the horizontal and vertical axes. Whether these are intended to represent embossed knobs rising from the surface of the band, attached bosses of some other material, or decorative 67  J. R. Clark Hall, A Concise Anglo-​Saxon Dictionary, with a supplement by Herbert D. Meritt, 4th ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press for the Medieval Academy of America, 1984), 34. 68  Cook, The Anglo-​Saxon-​Cemetery at Fonaby, pp.  42–​43, fig.  16B. Attempts by the author to obtain a copy of Colebrook’s original notes and drawings for Grave 43 from the North Lincolnshire Museum have proven unsuccessful. 69  Cook, The Anglo-​Saxon-​Cemetery at Fonaby, 42 and 84. 70  Cook, The Anglo-​Saxon-​Cemetery at Fonaby, 42.

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rivet heads, is not mentioned in Cook’s summary of Colebrook’s notes. Nor is any indication of the diameter of the horn rim provided in Cook’s synopsis, so it is not clear whether the Fonaby horn was typical in size for domestic cattle or whether, as at Wakerley, the horn was large enough to require its identification as the horn of an aurochs. Grave 124 in the Anglo-​Saxon inhumation cemetery of Castledyke South, at Barton-​ on-​Humber, was far simpler in its inclusions than either Grave 18 at Wakerley or Grave 43 at Fonaby.71 A rim mount for a horn vessel, found in three fragments at waist level in the grave, consisted of a simple unornamented copper-​alloy strip formed into a truncated cone that was fastened together with the same rivets that attached it to the horn, of which residual fragments were also recovered. The occupant of the grave was over forty-​ five years old, a senior member of the community, but the grave lacked sufficient skeletal evidence to identify the sex of the occupant and the few finds other than the horn vessel fittings were gender-​neutral, consisting of a single buckle and a knife with a horn handle, both also found at waist level. Twenty bones of a single domestic fowl, found in the grave to the right of the left knee suggested to the excavators that the decedent might have been female: elsewhere at Castledyke, domestic fowl are found in two identifiably female graves and no identifiably male graves, as well as in several other burials that were unidentifiable by skeletal or cultural evidence.72 However, these data seem insufficient to make statistically justified assertions identifying burials as female based on the presence of food offerings of domestic fowl, especially since offerings of geese are found in graves of both sexes, and as Christina Lee has pointed out, the deposition of fowl at Castledyke South had a male bias.73 Choices of food offerings may also have reflected other characteristics of the deceased such as social status, familial access to resources, or remembered personal food preferences. Thus, while the horn vessel fittings in Grave 124 at Castledyke may possibly constitute another example of a drinking horn in a woman’s grave, the identification of the deceased as a woman remains problematic. The foregoing analysis leaves only two probable examples of drinking horns from women’s graves in Anglo-​Saxon England: Grave 17 at Wakerley and Grave 43 at Fonaby. The Anglian context of both graves, along with the presence of wrist-​clasps in both burials and more broadly in their respective cemeteries, point to ancestral ties and possibly lingering personal connections to Scandinavia. Of the Insular horn fittings found in Viking-​ period burials in western Norway, a large number are deposited in women’s graves. This fact might be taken to suggest that the deposition of drinking horns in women’s graves at Wakerley and Fonaby, like the wrist-​clasps, reflect residual Scandinavian elements in

71  Gail Drinkall and Martin Forman, The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Castledyke South, Barton-​on-​ Humber, Sheffield Excavation Reports 6 (1998), pp. 70, 120, and 177, figs. 33 and 91; and Jacqui Watson, with a contribution by Gail Drinkall, “iii The Drinking Horn (Grave 124),” in Drinkall and Forman, The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Castledyke South, 296. 72  Rose Nicholson, “3.4: Animal Bone from the Graves,” in Drinkall and Forman, The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Castledyke South, 236–​39. 73  Christina Lee, “Þær wæs symbla cyst: Food in the Funerary Rites of the Early Anglo-​Saxons,” in At the Table; Metaphorical and Material Cultures of Food in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Timothy J. Tomasik and Juliann M. Vitullo (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 125–​44 at 139.

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Anglian material culture. However, there is a considerable chronological gap between the Anglian burials at Wakerley and Fonaby, probably both dating to the sixth century, and the burials in western Norway, which generally cluster in the ninth century, nor is there a widespread earlier Scandinavian practice of burial of metal-​ornamented horns in women’s graves to parallel or provide a source for the Wakerley and Fonaby depositions. Moreover, if the burial of metalwork-​ornamented drinking horns with women were part of the ancestral material culture brought by the Angles from a Scandinavian homeland, then why would there be only two examples of the practice discovered so far in the many excavations of Anglian cemeteries in Britain? Horn is made of hard keratin, the same material as human fingernails, and is generally fugitive in the ground. Given the ephemerality of the horn itself, very often all that remains of a drinking horn in a grave are the metalwork fittings, sometimes with traces of horn adhering to them. This suggests that more drinking horns were deposited in Anglo-​Saxon graves than can be discovered by excavation; horns without metal fittings are archaeologically invisible. It is also possible to ornament a horn without metal: the tip can be carved into a finial or pierced to allow the attachment of an equally perishable suspension cord of plant fibre or leather, and the walls of the horn may be incised with designs that may be enhanced with pigment; so it is unnecessary to assume that fugitive horns lacked ornament. One question that has been raised in this regard has to do with mineralized fragments of horn found near the waist in graves of both men and women: the common assumption has been that these traces reflect decayed knife handles, but as Jacqui Watson and Gail Drinkall have suggested, these may represent drinking horns without metalwork traces, possibly indicating that horns with metalwork are disproportionately preserved and perhaps represented a small minority of drinking horns in Anglo-​Saxon burials.74 While this may suggest that early Anglo-​ Saxon women were more commonly buried with drinking horns than archaeology can reveal, it does not undercut the observation that in the Anglo-​Saxon cultural context, as understood through archaeological work to date, horns with metalwork ornamentation are associated with predominantly elite or otherwise well-​furnished male graves and that the more elite the grave, the finer and more elaborate the metalwork on the horn. This distinction would seem to be related to social structures: the largest—​often aurochs horn—​and most finely decorated horns, as at Sutton Hoo Mound 1, Taplow, and Prittlewell, would seem to be related to the much-​celebrated ability of lords to offer hospitality to retainers and guests, while smaller horns—​from domestic cattle—​with simpler metalwork may relate to the prerogatives of particular members of the warrior elite to participate in the feasts offered by their lords. Indeed the metalwork-​decorated horn or cup with its gilded silver ornaments, and filled with golden ale or mead, circulated in a lord’s hall among his retainers, may have been construed to refer to the treasures such retainers might hope to receive in future for meritorious service.75 74  Watson and Drinkall, “iii The Drinking Horn (Grave 124),” 296.

75  In “Beowulf” ’s Wealhtheow (184n2), Helen Damico has argued that the sincfata shared out by Wealhtheow to Hrothgar’s warband, old and young alike, in Beowulf at lines 622–​23 is not the

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As metalwork on drinking horns may be read as a mark of social distinction, and is generally found only in men’s graves, so in itself the anomalous inclusion of metalwork-​ fitted horns in Wakerley Grave 17 and Fonaby Grave 43 is suggestive of unusual social roles for the women with whom these horns were buried. Both the women in Wakerley Grave 17 and Fonaby Grave 43 were among the wealthier and possibly more high-​status members of their respective communities, and presumably both were parts of high-​ status families within their communities. But metalwork-​ornamented drinking horns were not only signs of wealth and generalized prestige, otherwise more wealthy Anglo-​ Saxon women here and elsewhere would have been buried with them. In light of the anomalous placement of horns with two particular women at Fonaby and Wakerley, the use of aurochs horn for the Wakerley example is particularly telling, as aurochs horn is associated with princely burials and the horn itself must be imported from the Continent, possibly through diplomatic gift exchange, as previously noted. At Wakerley, the combination of the exotic horn and the rudimentary ornamentation of the metalwork suggests a secondary dispersal of the unornamented horn from a central place of power, possibly to a ranking retainer who took it home and had it decorated locally, for display as a sign both of his connection to his overlord and of local leadership. But the question still remains as to how two metal-​fitted horns came to be deposited in women’s graves at both Fonaby and Wakerley, and what social roles of these women may have played that would account for the horns being buried with them. With the Wakerley aurochs horn in particular, one may envision a scenario in which the woman in Grave 17 may have served as regent or guardian for an underage male heir to the leadership of the community, keeping the horn as a symbol of leadership until the heir came of age. But then why bury the horn with the regent instead of allowing it to pass on to the next man to assume local leadership? A similar question of succession might be raised if the woman in Wakerley Grave 17 served as a stand-​in in a leadership role for an incapacitated husband; eventually a male successor would likely have claimed the horn along with any other objects associated with leadership. The uneven ratios of the deceased in both cemeteries, with a preponderance of women in both sites, suggest a far more catastrophic set of circumstances that may explain the deposition of horns in women’s graves. The absence of men, off-​site in service to a lord or, more directly, dying in a war or a series of wars, would explain temporary discrepancies in the numbers of men and women consigned to local cemeteries, but if both Wakerley and Fonaby were multigenerational cemeteries spanning many decades, the ratios would be temporary and contents of a precious cup but a distribution of treasure per se. However, in the immediately preceding and succeeding moments, the queen is distributing drink from a richly ornamented cup, first to Hrothgar and later to Beowulf, and envisioning her as alternating between circulating a cup large enough for several drinkers and handing out valuables seems logistically awkward. The conundrum is resolved if both the ornamented cup and its golden contents are construed both as treasure in their own right and as a foretaste of the sharing out of wealth to Beowulf when he has proven himself against Grendel (lines 1192–​200). The envisioning of the cup as treasure (at line 623) would also fit well with an ecclesiastical context of composition, as richly ornamented and valuable chalices were readily visible treasures of ecclesiastical communities in the Insular world.

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affect at most a generation or two. However, the previously discussed hypothesis that Wakerley was a plague cemetery may offer a potential scenario as a resolution to both the low numbers of male burials and the inhumation of a woman with a drinking horn, at this site and potentially also at Fonaby. If the men of Wakerley were absent fulfilling their military obligations to an overlord at the time of an outbreak of plague at home, it is very possible that they would have left the community, by intention temporarily, in the capable hands of a senior woman, probably from the family of the leader of the community, and consigned to her as well any symbol of authority that may have been associated with local leadership, such as the aurochs-​horn drinking horn. When plague broke out and the community was decimated, the dead, including their female leader with her associated symbolic objects, were buried in a new cemetery opened to receive the suddenly larger numbers of the deceased. Perhaps by this time many of the men of the community had died elsewhere, either in battle or from the same or another plague. A later attempt to resettle Wakerley is perhaps indicated by an additional six graves excavated by Jackson in 1972–​1975; these graves date to the seventh century and are clustered about 200 m northeast of the main cemetery, apparently an appendix to the prior site.76 While the circumstances of the excavation and recording of the cemetery at Fonaby give an incomplete overview of the site and the orientation of its graves, the male-​to-​ female ratio of the cemetery’s population suggests circumstances similar to Wakerley, with a sudden large number of deaths among a predominantly female population in the absence of a considerable portion of the male population of the community. Here, the discovery of a metal-​decorated horn in Grave 43, along with its female occupant with her unusual crown-​like headgear, suggests a woman of considerable importance, perhaps in a leadership role, however temporary, in an ill-​fated community. In “Beowulf” ’s Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition, Helen Damico has given us an overview of the symbolic resonances associated with royal women in Anglo-​Saxon and Norse literary imagination, particularly in their roles in the circulation of cups at feasts and in the distribution of treasure. What I have hoped to accomplish here is to put a harmony on her song, by showing the ways in which some of these symbols may have been useful to real women who may have found themselves in leadership roles in what appear to have been extraordinarily difficult situations. I do not propose to present the women of Wakerley 17 and Fonaby 43 as indicative of a concealed social norm or of a widespread but lamentably now-​lost archaeological record. But it seems possible that the kinds of emblematical linkages of which Damico wrote may also have been deployed by particular women in situations where their leadership was required. In these as in so many other contexts, the material traces provided by archaeology complement but do not eclipse the glimpses that Old English literature provides of the interior world of symbolic associations that enriched the lives of the Anglo-​Saxons.

76  Jackson and Ambrose, “Excavations at Wakerley,” 115–​242.

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Chapter 3

EMBODIED LITERACY: PARALITURGICAL PERFORMANCE IN THE LIFE OF SAINT LEOBA

LISA M. C. WESTON* WHILE STILL A novice at Wimborne, the future saint Leoba (ca. 710–​782) dreams of drawing an immensely long purple thread from her throat: quod apprehensum manu cum extrahere conaretur, prolixius coepit extendi, et velut ex interioribus viscerum procederet, paulatim crescebat in maius et augmenta sui capiebat. Cum autem euberante material colligendo manum impleret et filum nihilominus ex ore dependeret, globum ex eo rotundo scemate volvendo formavit.1

(It seemed to her that when she took hold of it with her hand and tried to draw it out there was no end to it; and as if it were coming from her very bowels, it extended little by little until it was of enormous length. When her hand was full of thread and it still issued from her mouth she rolled it round and round and made a ball of it.)2

As an anonymous (but obviously communally important) “soror quaedam maturae aetatis, quae ex eventu rerum quas saepe praedixerat prophetiae spiritum habere noscebatur” (aged nun who was known to possess the spirit of prophecy) interprets it, that thread more explicitly signifies “doctrina sapientiae […] ex illius corde procedans” (the wise counsels she will speak from the heart).3 And “porro globus, qui volvendo conficitur et rotunditate sui volubilis est, mysterium exprimit verbi divini, quod per os actusque praedicantium volvitur et nunc per activam vitam in imis versatur, nunc per contemplativam in sublimia erigitur” (the ball which she made by rolling it round and round signifies the mystery of the divine teaching, which is set in motion by the words and deeds of those who give instruction and which turns earthward through active works

*  California State University, Fresno. [email protected].

1  An earlier version of this article was presented as “Leoba, Literacy, and Paraliturgy” at the 49th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, May 8–​11, 2014. Vita Leobae Abbatissae Biscofesheimensis auctore Rudolfo Fuldense, ed. G. Waitz, MGH, Scriptores, v. 15 (Hanover: Hahn, 1887), 125.11–​15.

2  Translation C. H. Talbot, “The Life of Saint Leoba,” in Soldiers of Christ: Saints and Saints’ Lives from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Thomas F. X. Noble and Thomas Head (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 255–​77 at 263. 3  Vita Leobae Abbatissae Biscofesheimensis, 125.18–​19, 28–​29; trans. “The Life of Saint Leoba,” 263, 264.

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and heavenward through contemplation).4 Both this dream and its interpretation—​as reported in her vita, written by Rudolf of Fulda (ca. 836) some fifty years or so after her death—​testify in multiple ways to the literacy and textual practices of Leoba and her fellow monastic women, both those among whom she was raised and (as importantly) those to whom, like the otherwise unknown Hadamout specifically addressed, this vita is offered as a model for behaviour and self-​construction. The purple thread may well recall contemporary imagery of the Annunciation: while later depictions in Western Christian art commonly represent the Virgin reading when greeted by the Angel, earlier versions, drawing upon the apocryphal Protoevangelion of James and the Gospel of Pseudo-​Matthew, portray the young Mary as a consecrated virgin, a proto-​nun, spinning purple thread for a new Temple veil. In those images the thread—​a multivalent symbol of the incarnation of the Word—​often appears to be drawn from the Virgin’s body.5 And indeed Leoba’s dream functions as an “annunciation” of sorts for the young saint herself: appropriately modest, she does not describe her vision herself directly, but rather through one of her fellow novices. It is the old prophetic nun who correctly identifies the dream as pertaining not to the informant but instead to “electae Dei dilectae, Leobam scilicet virginem cognominis suavitate significans” (the beloved chosen by God, signifying by this sweet name the virgin Leoba).6 As Rudolf has explained earlier in the vita, the Old English name Leoba translates the Latin dilecta, and thereby effectively designates her an embodiment of the Beloved, the Bride of the Song of Songs, and a type of the Virgin Mary.7 Spinning thread is, moreover, something nuns like the young Leoba would have done on a daily basis: monastic houses such as the Wimborne in which she was raised produced altar cloths and vestments (perhaps requiring precious purple threads) as well as more mundane textiles for daily use. As a personal “annunciation,” then, this 4  Vita Leobae Abbatissae Biscofesheimensis, 125.30–​32; trans. “The Life of Saint Leoba,” 264.

5  See, for example, Maria Evangelatou, “The Purple Thread of the Flesh: The Theological Connotations of a Narrative Iconographic Element in Byzantine Images of the Annunciation,” in Icon and Word: The Power of Images in Byzantium, ed. Antony Eastmond and Liz James (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 261–​75. On veneration of Mary, her representation as a proto-​nun, and images of the Annunciation in Anglo-​Saxon England, see Mary Clayton, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Anglo-​ Saxon England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), especially 42–​44 and 85–​87. 6  Vita Leobae Abbatissae Biscofesheimensis, 125.25–​ 26; translations, unless otherwise noted, are mine.

7  According to Rudolf, the saint’s given name was Thrutgeba—​although elsewhere her name is given as the more likely Leobgyth—​“cognomento Leoba, eo quod esset dilecta; hoc enim Latine cognominis huius interpretatio sonat” (Vita Leobae Abbatissae Biscofesheimensis, 124.38–​39) (surnamed Leoba because she was beloved, for this is what Leoba means; “The Life of Saint Leoba,” 262). Rudolf also refers to her (and other nuns) as a sponsa Christi, and Mary is invoked as her particular patroness. On medieval interpretations linking Mary and the Song of Songs, see, for example, Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990); and Ann Astell, The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).

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dream transforms a mundane and quintessentially female task into a metaphor of spiritual power and rhetorical eloquence. The young (but always already saintly) nun’s education—​the words of instruction she has received, the texts she has learned to read, explicate, and ruminate upon—​is here spun into wisdom enacted in shared spiritual practices and disciplines; her acquired literacy is thus defined as inherently embodied and performative within her monastic community. As such this dream may well have encouraged the student who would later herself become a teacher and the abbess of her own foundation, and whose career would be marked by prayers and rituals drawing both words and actions from Scripture. As described within the vita, these instances especially of paraliturgical ritual—​occasional ritual outside or additional to normal recitation of the monastic hours—​may thus reveal much about the shared corporate as well as individual nature of her literacy, that of the community in which she was educated, and that of the community she founded. As it happens, this dream appears in the vita as the culmination of her youth and education in southern England: in the subsequent chapter she is summoned by St. Boniface to missionary work and community leadership in Germany. At this point in her life Leoba may well already have been Boniface’s student for some time, and that by her own instigation. In a letter (neither included nor mentioned in the vita) from the young nun to the much older Boniface, Leoba rather boldly seeks his instruction and mentorship with a display of her literacy. She claims his friendship—​his spiritual kinship and the right to take him “in fratris locum” (in the place of a brother)—​on the basis of multiple existing relationships.8 Boniface is blood-​kin through her mother; he is also an old friend of her father’s. She notes that he is “mihi adfinitatis propinquitate conexo” (bound to me by ties of kinship) through “prioris amicitiae quam iam dudum cum patre meo copulasti” (the old friendship which joined [him] to [her] father), Dynne, as well as the “consanguinitatis nexibus copulatur” (ties of blood [which] join) him to her mother, Aebbe. Equally firm, however, are his links to Leoba through his affection for and past epistolary exchanges with her teacher, Eadburga. In extant letters Boniface requests books, and especially a manuscript of the Epistles of Saint Peter to be decorated in gold, to be produced in her scriptorium.9 Eadburga of Wimborne may also be the recipient of his narrative account of the vision of a monk at Much Wenlock abbey.10 Lull (Boniface’s student and successor 8  Die Briefe des Heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, ed. Michael Tangl, MGH, Epistolae Selectae, v. 1 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1955), no. 29, 52–​53 at 53.4.

9  Briefe des Heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, 52, lines 14 and 17–​18; 53, line 1. Boniface’s letters to Eadburga include Briefe des Heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, letter 35, the request for the manuscript of the Epistles of Saint Peter, and letter 65, a similar request for books to encourage and sustain his missionary endeavours.

10  Briefe des Heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, letter 10, his narrative account of the vision of a monk at Much Wenlock abbey. See P. Sims-​Williams, “An Unpublished Seventh-​or Eighth-​century Anglo-​ Saxon Letter in Boulogne-​sur-​Mer MS 74,” Medium Aevum 48 (1979): 1–​22, especially 22n19, for an identification of Eadburga as abbess of Wimborne rather than Minster-​in-​Thanet as previously noted by Tangl.

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as bishop of Mainz) also writes to Eadburga.11 Thus, although there are no extant letters from Eadburga herself, she must have figured as a prominent and influential member of the Boniface Circle. Leoba’s own letter and the attached prayer/​poem make up a “parvum munusculum” (a tiny gift) appropriately representative of her own “parvitatis” (littleness) as a student seeking his literary mentorship.12 The punning wordplay here (parvum/​parvitatis) reveals the self-​conscious literacy of her “tiny gift” and its ability to demonstrate her mastery of the Boniface Circle’s shared formula-​and image-​stock, a distinctive stylistic tradition that (as Andy Orchard has demonstrated) draws especially from the pedagogical and poetic works of the earlier Anglo-​Latin scholar and poet Aldhelm.13 When she hopes that, despite the “longa locorum intercapidine” (long distance between places) separating her from Boniface, “vere dilectionis ligature reliquum nodatur in aevum” (bonds of true affection be knit more closely for eternity) between them, her words echo Aldhelm’s request to Aldfrith (Acircius) in a passage similarly arguing the importance of textual exchange as a means of maintaining bonds over time and space.14 Further borrowings ornament her request to be protected by Boniface’s prayers from the dangers of this world, even as her desire that Boniface correct her verses, that he “rusticitatem huis epistolae digneris emendare” (deign to correct the roughness of this letter) echoes Aldhelm’s (probably less sincere) anxieties about his “epistolarem rusticitatem” (letters’ roughness).15 This sequence of indirect citations and formulae, all culled from Aldhelm’s introduction to his de Metris (included within the Epistola ad Acircium), serve as an appropriate prologue to her own verses in Aldhelmian hexameter. The significance of those verses, Leoba’s poem-​prayer, likewise lies not in the originality of their sentiment, nor in any uniqueness of imagery or diction, but rather consists exactly in their imitation and emulation, its conforming to shared, communal style. Her poem’s language is as formulaic as their invocation of the self-​sustaining power of the Triune God is orthodox: Arbiter omnipotens, solus qui cuncta creavit, In regno patris semper qui lumine fulget, Qua iugiter flagrans sic regnet Gloria Christi, Inlesum servet semper te iure perenni.16

11  Briefe des Heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, letter 70.

12  Briefe des Heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, 53, lines 6–​8.

13  Andy Orchard, “Old Sources, New Resources: Finding the Right Formula for Boniface,” ASE 30 (2001): 15–​38; and The Poetic Art Of Aldhelm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), especially 248–​53.

14  Briefe des Heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, 53, lines 8–​10. Compare Aldhelm’s longa locorum intercapidine and reliquum nodetur in aevum:  Aldhelmi Opera, ed. R. Ehwald, MGH, Auctorum Antiquissimorum, v. 15 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1919), 75. 15  Briefe des Heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, 53, lines 12–​13; compare Aldhelm, Opera, 74. 16  Briefe des Heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, 53, lines 22–​25.

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(May the omnipotent Ruler, Who alone created all things, and Who shines forever in splendor in the Father’s kingdom, and through Whose perpetual fire the glory of Christ reigns, preserve you forever according to perennial law.)

If Leoba indirectly cites Aldhelm in describing her verses as “secundum poeticae traditionis disciplinam” (according to the rules of poetic tradition), her lines of Aldhelmian hexameter begin with a line compounded of two phrases from Aldhelm’s poetical works.17 The first phrase in the initial line, “arbiter omnipotens,” replicates a formula found in one of the Carmina Ecclesiastica; the last phrase in that line, “qui cuncta creavit,” appears in one of the riddles collected in the Epistola ad Acircium as examples of hexameter.18 Together the phrases echo the lexis and structure also of the first line of Aldhelm’s poetic preface to his riddles, “arbiter aethero iugitur qui regmine sceptra”; it also echoes a similar line from his Carmen de Virginitate, “arbiter altithronas qui servet sceptra superna.”19 Aldhelm’s iugitur here appears in the third line of Leoba’s poem; his regmine and servet also echo more roughly in her repeated regno/​regnet in the second and third lines and in her servet in the fourth. The young Leoba’s poetic prayer is quite what we might expect from the emulative pedagogy of her education, as described in her vita. According to Rudolf, at Wimborne in England—​and later at her own foundation at Bischofsheim in Germany—​education is a matter of reading, committing to memory, and ultimately embodying Scripture, an embodiment constantly reinforced through performance of the liturgy. Leoba’s studies are, Rudolf tells us, based in “rudimentis grammatica et reliquis liberalium litterarum studiis” (the rudiments of grammar and the study of other liberal arts).20 He details how “veteris enim ac Novi Testamenti codices sagaci mente pelustrans, divina praecepta memoriae commendabat” (she read with attention all the books of the Old and New Testaments and learned by heart all the commandments of God) and added to these “dicta sanctorum patrum et decreta canonum totiusque aecclesiastici ordinis iura plenitudini” (the writings of the Church Fathers, the decrees of the councils and the whole of ecclesiastical law).21 We might compare this curriculum with that described more effusively and poetically by Aldhelm. Aldhelm praises the monastic women to whom he writes his Prosa de Virginitate —​the generation of Leoba’s teacher Eadburga—​as bees “per florulenta scripturarum arva late vagans” (roaming through the flowering fields of scripture), sampling “divina priscorum prophetarum oracula” (the divine oracles of the ancient prophets) and the laws laid down by Moses, exploring the Gospels through fourfold exegesis and “dicta misticis catholicorum partum commentariis exposita” (the mystical commentaries of the Catholic Fathers), “nunc priscas historiograforum fabulas et cronograforum seriam” (now rummaging through the old stories of the historians 17  Briefe des Heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, 53, line 6.

18  “In duodecum apostolorum aris” (“On the Altars of the Twelve Apostles”), I. 36 (Opera, 20); Enigmata 91.1 (Opera, 139). 19  Enigmata Praef.1 (Opera, 97); Carmen de Virginitate, Prol.7 (Opera, 350).

20  Vita Leobae Abbatissae Biscofesheimensis, 126.25; trans. “The Life of Saint Leoba,” 266.

21  Vita Leobae Abbatissae Biscofesheimensis, 126.27–​29; trans. “The Life of Saint Leoba,” 266.

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and the entries of the chroniclers) and “nunc grammaticorum regulas et ortograforum disciplinas tonis temporibus trutinatas” (now sagaciously inquiring into the rules of the grammarians and the teachings of experts on spelling and the rules of metrics).22 Yet if we read Rudolf’s account of Leoba’s education as preparing her strictly or even primarily as a writer of texts like her letter and prayer—​especially in the modern sense of an author with a unique and individual voice—​we do so to some extent against the emphasis of her hagiographer. The perfect student, and therefore the perfect model for the later students who read her vita, Leoba “ad legendum vel audiendum verbum Dei animum semper habebat intentum” (fixed her mind always on reading or hearing the Word of God), and “et audita vel lecta memoriae commendams, utilitatem praeceptorum vita et institutione servabat” (whatever she heard or read she committed to memory, and put all that she had learned into practice).23 She thus prayed continually, we are told, “sciens scriptum in apostolo, sine intermission fidelibus orandum esse” (knowing that in the Epistles the faithful are counselled to pray without ceasing).24 When she was not praying she worked with her hands, including practical tasks perhaps like winding thread (as in her prophetic dream). But she spent more time “lectioni tamen atque auditioni Sanctarum Scripturarum magis quam labori manum” (reading and listening to the Sacred Scriptures than she gave to manual labour), and “ne lecta vel audita ex eius animo laberentur, sed praecepta Domini custodiens, memoriam eorum in executione operum semper habere consuevit” (took great care not to forget what she had heard or read, observing the commandments of the Lord and putting into practice what she remembered of them).25 Her memory of Scripture is so complete that she can later even catch errors in the texts read to her as she sleeps, for “cum sponsa in Canticis canticorum dicere potuit Ego dormio, et cor meum vigilat” (she was able to say with the spouse in the Song of Songs: I sleep and my heart watcheth)26 (Song 5:2). In this description of her education, reading is repeatedly paired with listening—​literacy with aurality and orality—​and words fixed in memory for contemplation and (as in her dream) enacted physically and communally. Repeatedly emphasizing reception and incorporation of text, Rudolf defines the literacy of Leoba and the other monastic women as communal, and as much oral/​aural as written. In his history of the vita’s composition, written testimony, especially of earlier Fulda monks, provides a source, but only in so far as it transcribes the witness of the nuns who knew Leoba personally, experienced her miracles, and participated in the textual culture she fostered. It may be presumed that they learned from her at least some of the literary skills she exhibits in her letter to Boniface. Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing, 22  Aldhelmi Malmesbiriensis Prosa de Virginitate, ed. Scott Gwara (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), IV.25–​26, 26–​27, 37–​38, 41–​42 and 44–​45 (pp. 55–​61); translation by Michael Lapidge and Michael Herren, Aldhelm: The Prose Works (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2009), 61–​62. 23  Vita Leobae Abbatissae Biscofesheimensis, 124.44–​46; trans. “The Life of Saint Leoba,” 263. 24  Vita Leobae Abbatissae Biscofesheimensis, 125.2; trans. “The Life of Saint Leoba,” 263.

25  Vita Leobae Abbatissae Biscofesheimensis, 125.5–​6; trans. “The Life of Saint Leoba,” 263.

26  Vita Leobae Abbatissae Biscofesheimensis, 126.41–​42; trans. “The Life of Saint Leoba,” 267.

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and Virginia Blanton and Helene Scheck suggest that the women’s testimony may well have been written.27 Nevertheless, while within the vita women (including Leoba) can and do read, their reading and memory is policed by men like Rudolf himself, cloistered as closely as the women’s bodies, even as (in Rudolf’s account) the royal double monastery of Wimborne is rewritten as a single-​sex house.28 Despite Rudolf’s partial erasure of female literacy, however, we may yet find in the vita some traces of Leoba as an author as well as a reader. I have argued elsewhere, for example, that Leoba’s farewell “speech” to Queen Hildegard employs the themes and formulaic discourse of the Boniface Circle, and may well echo (at least) a lost letter.29 One other place in which traces of literacy appear, and in a way appear to be endorsed by Rudolf (however anxiously), is in the paraliturgical rituals created and performed by Leoba and her community in response to various calamities and crises. Reading these rituals requires us to shift attention from individual literacy to a shared, corporate embodiment of textuality, to a performative incorporation of text. It reveals a literacy, that is, that allows, even promotes, identification across bodies and across time as the sisters “become” the biblical figures whose words they appropriate and echo. As Anne Bagnall Yardley observes, the daily round of the monastic offices within the seasonal cycles of sacred history grounded the spirituality and shaped the subjectivity of medieval nuns, while the creation of hymns and prayers, the organization and management of special, occasional rituals and processions reflected the local literacy and spirituality of individual communities as well as the shared culture of the universal church.30 27  Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing, “Women and the Origins of English Literature,” in The History of British Women’s Writing, I: 700–​1500, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy and Diane Watt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 31–​40, especially 36; and Virginia Blanton and Helene Scheck, “Leoba and the Iconography of Learning in the Lives of Anglo-​Saxon Women Religious, 660–​780,” in Nun’s Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Kansas City Dialogue, ed. Virginia Blanton, Patricia Stoop, and Veronica M. O’Mara (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 3–​226, especially 23.

28  On Rudolf’s revisionism, see Stephanie Hollis, Anglo-​Saxon Women and the Church: Sharing a Common Fate (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1992), 271–​300; Barbara Yorke, “Rudolf of Fulda’s Vita S. Leobae: Hagiography and Historical Reality,” in Anglo-​Saxon England and the Continent, ed. H. Sauer and J. Story (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2011), 199–​216; and L. Weston, “Sanctimoniales cum Sanctimoniale: Particular Friendships and Female Community in Anglo-​Saxon England,” in Sex and Sexuality in Anglo-​Saxon England, ed. C. Pasternack and L. Weston (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2004), 35–​62, especially 50–​54. On the longer history and development of Wimborne, see also Patricia H. Coulstock, The Collegiate Church of Wimborne Minster (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1993), especially 5–​96. 29  Lisa M. C. Weston, “Where Textual Bodies Meet: Anglo-​Saxon Women’s Epistolary Friendships,” in Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age:  Explorations of a Fundamental Ethical Discourse, ed. Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandige (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), 231–​46, especially 244–​45. 30  Anne Bagnall Yardley, Performing Piety: Musical Culture in Medieval English Nunneries (New York: Palgrave, 2006). On medieval monastic soundscapes, including liturgical performance, as a background for monastic life, see R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World (New York: Knopf, 1977). For issues involving performance and medieval literacy, see also Bruce W. Holsinger,

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While Yardley’s analysis concerns later communities, performativity is increasingly recognized as intrinsic to even the earliest Anglo-​Saxon monastic practices, and influential on the structure and subject of both Anglo-​Latin and Old English Texts.31 Monika Otter, for instance, explores how prosopological exegesis of the psalms—​the identification of speakers as part of the reading process taught in medieval monastic schools—​ influences the way the readers consequently recite that psalm, the way they “enter the text” through appropriation of that speaking voice. If private study affects public performance, the reverse is also true. Otter’s analysis establishes the “semitheatrical ‘performance’ and choreography of the Divine Office” as fundamental to private reading and meditation practices.32 Otter points, for example, to readers’ identification with the Virgin in the recitation of the night office. We might well speculate that Leoba’s prophetic dream (and its interpretation) may have had its roots in iconography and texts read and ruminated upon individually, even as they were also shared and physically embodied as part of the communal performance of the Scriptures within the liturgy. For Rachel Fulton, similarly, “mimetic devotion” is central to the practices of ruminative lectio divina as well as the liturgical experience of texts and their (re)writing within monastic community: “If one accepts reading as a devotional activity, as an experience of intimacy with the divine, then the act of writing, of transforming experience of text into text and of “Analytical Survey 6: Medieval Literature and Cultures of Performance,” New Medieval Literatures 6 (2003): 271–​311; and Kathleen Ashley, C. Clifford Flanigan, and Pamela Sheingorn, “The Liturgy as Social Performance: Expanding the Definitions,” in The Liturgy of the Medieval Church, ed. Thomas J. Heffernan and E. Ann Matter (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2001), 695–​714. On processions especially, see Kathleen Ashley and Wim Hüsken, eds., Moving Subjects: Processional Performance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001).

31  On Anglo-​Saxon practices, see also M. Bedingford, The Dramatic Liturgy of Anglo-​Saxon England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2002); Thomas P. Campbell, “Liturgical Drama and Community Discourse,” in The Liturgy of the Medieval Church, ed. Thomas J. Heffernan and E. Ann Matter (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2001), 619–​44; C. R. Dodwell, Anglo-​Saxon Gestures and the Roman Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); E. Catherine Dunn, The Gallican Saint’s Life and the Late Roman Dramatic Tradition (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1989); David Dumville, “Liturgical Drama and Panegyric from the Eighth Century? A Re-​examination of the Origin and Contents of the Ninth-​Century Section of the Book of Cerne,” The Journal of Theological Studies, n.s., 23 (1972): 374–​406; Celia Sisam and Kenneth Sisam, The Salisbury Psalter Edited from Salisbury Cathedral Ms. 150, EETS, e.s., 242 (London: Oxford University Press, 1959); and Bernard James Muir, ed., A Pre-​Conquest English Prayer Book (BL MSS Cotton Galba A.xiv and Nero A.ii (ff. 3–​13), Henry Bradshaw Society (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1988). 32  Monika Otter, “Entrances and Exits: Performing the Psalms in Goscelin’s ‘Liber confortatorius’,” Speculum 83 (2008): 283–​302 at 285; on prosopological exegesis as an element of monastic education, 293–​96. See also Rebecca Hayward and Stephanie Hollis, “The Female Reader in the Liber Confortatorius,” in Writing the Wilton Women: Goscelin’s “Legend of Saint Edith” and “Liber confortatorius”, ed. Stephanie Hollis (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 385–​94, especially 391, for similar discussion of identification with the Virgin. For Anglo-​Saxon reading practices, see M.  B. Parkes, “Rædan, Areccan, Smeagan: How the Anglo-​Saxons Read,” ASE 26 (1997): 1–​22.

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concretizing understanding in verbal depiction, may also be interpreted as a devotional performance.”33 At issue is exactly the engagement of the senses, the integration of body with text. Two of Aldhelm’s Carmina Ecclesiastica, for example, tituli originally composed for display within churches as well as anthologized and circulated in manuscript form, inscribe descriptions of appropriately enacted prayer. “On a Church of Saint Mary Built by Bugga” refers to antiphonal singing of the psalms by male and female choirs within the shared church of a double monastery. “On the Church of Saint Mary the Perpetual Virgin” asks the Virgin Audi clementer populorum vota precantum, Marcida qui riguis umectant imbribus ora Ac genibus tundunt curvato poplite terram, Dum veniam fuso lacrimarum fonte merentur Et crebis precibus delent peccamina vitae.

(Listen mercifully to the petitions of these people praying, who moisten their withered faces with streams of tears and, on bended knees, seeing that they deserve forgiveness from the flowing fountain of their tears and obliterate the sins of their life with their continual prayers.)34

But this request also foregrounds and indeed explicitly instructs its human readers how to pray, especially in response to their memory—​prompted in the remaining lines of the poem—​and contemplation of the Annunciation, the Song of Songs, and Old Testament prophecies of the Incarnation. As Lara Farina argues in regard to Old English paraliturgical poems, especially in a context of communal rather than individual affectivity and subjectivity, texts derived from the liturgy constitute effective “stratagems of the soul” and foster “programmatic use of the body to construct religious desire.”35 In keeping with the emulative pedagogy of Rudolf’s vita, Leoba’s rituals follow the model of her teachers at Wimborne. There, for example, the students of a particularly strict novice mistress (though surely not Leoba herself) celebrate her death by stamping—​dancing—​on her grave. The abbess reprimands them, of course. But when the earth of the grave subsides well below the surrounding ground, stronger action is required. She orders three days of fasting, vigil, and prayer. At the end of the third day “cum omni congregatione virginum basilicam intravit, et illis letanias facientibus et nomen Salvatoris sanctorumque eius suffragia invocantibus, ipsa cum lacrimis ante altare pro anima defunctae sororis rogatura prosternitur” (she went with all the nuns

33  Rachel Fulton, “Mimetic Devotion, Marian Exegesis, and the Historical Sense of the Song of Songs,” Viator 27 (1996): 85–​116 at 88. Fulton explores particularly the development, through liturgical identification, of a Marian exegesis of the Song of Songs, with the Virgin as a type of the Bride/​Beloved.

34  Opera, Carmina Ecclesiastica II.8–​12 (p. 13); Aldhelm: The Poetic Works, trans. Michael Lapidge and James Rosier (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2009), 47.

35  Lara Farina, “Before Affection: Christ I and the Social Erotic,” Exemplaria 13 (2001): 469–​96 at 482.

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into the church, singing litanies and invoking the Lord and the saints; and after she had prostrated herself before the altar she prayed for the soul of the deceased sister).36 And in response to the shared, public penitence the grave miraculously returns to the level of the surrounding cemetery. In contrast with other more domestic miracles—​healings or the recovery of lost keys—​accomplished through (and because of) Leoba’s embodiment of the Scriptures, three miracles in Leoba’s later career feature public performance of similar ritual and prayer. More theatrical, and significantly performed before a lay audience as well as the monastic community, all three concern the stability and maintenance, and the essential integrity of the community; all three counter threats to Leoba’s foundation and establishment of its reputation for spiritual power and purity. One is quite simple and eminently practical: when a fire breaks out, Leoba organizes a bucket brigade. Reinforcing the sensibly mundane with ritual, however, she also sprinkles salt blessed by St. Boniface on a bucket of water and returns it upstream, performing an exorcism of sorts. Calming an imagistically quasi-​apocalyptic storm requires more theatricality. Dark clouds turn day into night, thunder rumbles, and lightening splits the sky. Saintly intervention is obviously required. Lying prostrate at the foot of the altar, Leoba remains calm and still amid the turmoil; her piety contrasts starkly with the terror and confusion of the congregation. As the storm continues unabated, however, the performance becomes more elaborate. One of her nuns—​Thecla, a kinswoman and student of Leoba and eventually one of Rudolf’s sources—​speaks for the fearful crowd. “O dilecte Dilecta” (beloved Beloved), she implores her, once more invoking the Scriptural parallel identifying Leoba with both the Bride of the Song of Songs and the Virgin. Thecla begs her to pray to Mary, her patroness, for them. Leoba’s response is markedly dramatic: she goes into combat with the storm. She stands “quasi ad colluctationem vocaretur” (as if she had been challenged to a contest), throws off her cloak, and flings open the church door.37 As Thomas Campbell notes in regard to Anglo-​Saxon liturgical drama, such “as if” tags constitute “ostensions” or “showings,” theatrical gestures that provoke fragmentary intertextual allusions: “iconographical representations of its subject, ostensive actions demonstrate meaning” that is inherently communal in so far as they require a textual community to interpret and contextualize them correctly.38 The agon here, the contest at the heart of this dramatic prayer performance, calls to mind, perhaps, the contests of the saints who follow Mary’s model most literally (and spectacularly) by embracing the struggles of virgin martyrdom: the original Thecla bravely heading into the arena against savage beasts, perhaps, or less literally the Eugenia who, educated in the liberal arts and philosophy, as Aldhelm describes her in his Prosa de Virginitate, takes service in a “coenubialis militiae tirocinium” of “militionum Christi” (monastic army […] Christ’s army).39 Perhaps, too, it may also remind readers like Leoba of Aldhelm’s metaphor of 36  Vita Leobae Abbatissae Biscofesheimensis, 123.51–​124.2; trans. “The Life of Saint Leoba,” 261.

37  Vita Leobae Abbatissae Biscofesheimensis, 128.20 and 22; trans. “The Life of Saint Leoba,” 279. 38  Campbell, “Liturgical Drama and Community Discourse,” 628.

39  Prosa, XLIV.13–​14 (p. 623); Lapidge and Herren, Aldhelm, 110.

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the monastic classroom, in which students compete as gladiators in Virgilian games. Leoba’s struggle is more symbolic: making the sign of the cross, Leoba assumes a prayer stance and thrice invokes the mercy of Christ through the intercession of Holy Mary, the Virgin. And (of course) the storm is calmed. Both these miracle-​working performances occur before a lay community already convinced of Leoba’s spiritual power. Her most elaborate ritual comes in response to the danger not of a natural disaster, but rather of a slander that threatens the reputation of her virginal house and requires her to dramatize and thus (re)establish its spiritual integrity before a dubious and critical “audience.” Prompted by the devil’s envy of the nuns’ purity and spiritual power, the vita tells us, a crippled lay woman who receives alms from Leoba and her sisters commits fornication and compounds her sin by drowning her infant in the river that runs by the monastic site. Scandal ensues: the nuns are blamed, and suspicion falls particularly on one of them, Agatha, who happens to be away visiting her parents (for Rudolf, who reimagines and idealizes Wimborne somewhat anachronistically as a bastion of strict active enclosure, even such a sanctioned absence from the cloister represents a danger). The event prompts an extended and theatrical agon of imperilled virginity ultimately justified. The voice of the calumniated community, Agatha—​like Thecla eventually one of Rudolf’s witnesses, and like Thecla taking her name from an earlier, exemplary virgin martyr—​protests her innocence. She falls to her knees and prays: Deus omnipotens, qui Omnia nosti antequam fiant, et quem nullum latet secretum, quique Susannam in te confidentem de falso crimine liberasti, ostende misericordiam tuam super hanc congregationem in tuo nomine collectam, et ne patiaris eam propter peccata mea foedo rumore maculari, sed illam quaecumque hoc nefas commisit ad laudem et gloriam magni nominis tui dignare detegere et publicare.

(Almighty God, who knows all things before they come to pass, from whom nothing is hid and who has delivered Susanna from false accusations when she trusted in You, show Your mercy to the community gathered together in Your Name and let it not be sullied by filthy rumors on account of my sins; but may You deign to unmask and make known for the praise and glory of Your Name the person who has committed this misdeed.)40

In the event the latter day Susanna does not require a Daniel to detect the real sinner. That is accomplished, rather, through Leoba’s ritual. The saint orders the congregation to stand “extensis in cruces modum brachiis” (with their arms extended in the form of a cross) while they sing the whole Psalter.41 Then three times, at terce, sext, and nones, they process around the monastery “vexillo cruces elato, cum laetaniis monasterium circuire et pro purgation sua divinam misericordiam invocare” (with the crucifix at their head, calling upon God to free them, in his mercy, from this accusation).42 They (re)construct a wall of prayer, as it were, physically 40  Vita Leobae Abbatissae Biscofesheimensis, 127.26–​30; trans. “The Life of Saint Leoba,” 268. 41  Vita Leobae Abbatissae Biscofesheimensis, 127.31; trans. “The Life of Saint Leoba,” 268.

42  Vita Leobae Abbatissae Biscofesheimensis, 127.33–​34; trans. “The Life of Saint Leoba,” 268.

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reinforcing the boundaries of the community. Having begun with a single individual’s prayer (Agatha’s), and continuing with a corporate performance, the ritual ends with a return to individual prayer (Leoba’s). At nones, as the third procession is about to begin, Leoba goes to the altar, stands before the cross, and stretches her hands to heaven. Amid tears and groans she implores Domine Ihesu Christe, rex virginum, integritatis amator, invictissime Deus, ostende virtutem tuam et libera nos ab hac infamia, quia improperia improperantium tibi ceciderunt super nos.

(O Lord Jesus Christ, King of virgins, Lover of chastity, unconquerable God, manifest Your power and deliver us from this charge because the reproaches of those who reproached You have fallen upon us.)43

Granted, neither Leoba’s nor Agatha’s prayer is in the verse form of the prayer a younger Leoba wrote and sent to Boniface. Nevertheless there are some rhetorical similarities. Like the prayer/​poem of her letter, the address to God is three-​fold—​so indeed is the construction of the ritual as a whole. There is similar punning wordplay: improperia improperantium plays the reproach falling upon the community with that suffered by Christ at the Crucifixion. There is alliteration and soundplay:  the vi-​ of virginum and invictissime, the in-​ of invictissime and integritatis. Leoba also echoes Agatha’s ostende. Together the two prayers of the ritual enact the exegetical connection—​noted by, among others, Aldhelm, in his discussion of Melantia’s slandering of Eugenia—​of Susanna as a specifically female type of the guiltlessly persecuted Christ. As Aldhelm explains, Susannam cum fabricators falsitatum potius quam presbiteri populorum, quos adulterinae titulationis calcar incesti crimine cruentabat, dissona sermonum procacitate fallaciter insimulare machinarentur, densis dirisque lapidum imbribus obruti crudele mortis spectaculum praebuerunt, ut merito psalmigrafi sententia de utrarumque prosperis vitae successibus historialiter quadrare et congruere videatur, quamvis de redemptore secundum anogeg vaticinatum credatur insurrexerunt in me testes iniqui et mentita est iniquitas sibi et quasi pro hac calumniarum contumelia, quam insontes a fallacibus tolerant, apta vicissitude sequatur psalmist ita promulgante: credo videre bona Domini in terra viventium. (When those fabricators of lies—​rather than elders of the people—​whom the spur of adulterous desire had bloodied with the sin of sexuality, conspired falsely to incriminate Susanna with the discrepant impudence of their words, they were buried with dense and terrible showers of stones, and so presented a cruel spectacle of death: so the sentence of the Psalmist may, on the historical level of interpretation, be seen to square and to agree with the happy outcome of the lives of both (Eugenia and Susanna)—​even though it is to be believed on the anagogical level to be a prophecy concerning the Redeemer: “For unjust witnesses have risen up against me, and iniquity hath lied to itself” (Psalm XXVI.12); and as if because of this abuse of calumny, which the innocent tolerate from 43  Vita Leobae Abbatissae Biscofesheimensis, 127.37–​39; trans. “The Life of Saint Leoba,” 269.

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The individual bodies of Agatha, Leoba, and the other nuns become, in effect, a corporate body with that of Susanna—​and with that of Eugenia and of other falsely accused and persecuted virgins—​a body whose chastity and integrity, physical and social, is opposed to the crippled body of the sinful beggar. Implicitly and proleptically outcast from her first appearance, the guilty woman is suddenly engulfed in flames and subsequently confesses to her guilt. Reading these paraliturgical rituals as evidence of Anglo-​Saxon monastic women’s literacy, as intertextually rich, embodied, and performative “texts,” is, of course, somewhat speculative. For one thing, the rituals described in the vita may be, at least in revision, substantially as much Rudolf’s creations as Leoba’s: they may speak as much to his immersion in a somewhat later literary culture as well as to the saint’s incorporation of images and tropes in dramatic (or proto-​dramatic) ritual spectacles. Yet in so far as the vita would have been received by Leoba’s community, so far would it also have been subject to comparison with local memories and (perhaps) contemporary practices. Even if not exact and authentic, the paraliturgical fragments within the vita are at least possible and verisimilar, the believable creations of an abbess like Leoba as her spiritual daughters remembered her. But the involvement of the nuns Agatha and Thecla as both informants and active participants in the rituals they remember and report—​whether orally or in texts of their own composition—​suggests authenticity. Further, the collaborative, communal, and (above all) appropriative nature of literacy in these ritual performances is in line with the imitative style of Leoba’s letter and prayer/​poem, with their appropriation of Aldhelm’s words to mark her identity and establish her membership within a tightly defined textual community. The formulaic nature of the Boniface Circle’s correspondence speaks, like the communal paraliturgy Leoba directs, to the importance of community rather than merely individual literacy—​ and, vice versa, to the role of literacy in creating, underwriting, and manifesting community. So, for that matter, do Leoba’s prophetic dream and its interpretation, both based in shared iconography and Scriptural narrative and exegesis. Both paraliturgical performance and dream, then, as much as her letter and prayer illustrate the communally embodied nature of Leoba’s literacy, that of the Wimborne in which she was educated, and that of the Bischofsheim she founded.

44  Prosa, XLIV. 42–​54 (pp. 629, 631); Lapidge and Herren, Aldhelm, 111.

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Chapter 4

IMAGINING THE LOST LIBRARIES OF ANGLO-​SAXON DOUBLE MONASTERIES

VIRGINIA BLANTON* IN RECONSTRUCTING THE lost libraries of Anglo-​Saxon England, Michael Lapidge relies on three means by which he establishes the imagined contents of what were once significant collections:  inventories of books, extant manuscripts, and citations within authors’ works. He draws on ninth-​, tenth-​, and eleventh-​century inventories; extant manuscripts dating from as early as the mid-​eighth century; and citations of what he calls the principal writers, including Aldhelm, Bede, Alcuin, Wulfstan, and Ælfric. As a result, Lapidge’s methodology illustrates that we can have some confidence about the general shape of monastic libraries in the later Anglo-​Saxon period. We are faced with a number of problems, however, when trying to identify those that existed in the seventh and eighth centuries. There are no inventories from this period and few manuscripts of the type Lapidge defines as library material:  that is, those “books acquired and arranged for the purposes of study and the pursuit of knowledge.”1 It is only because Bede was such a prolific writer and because his works were eagerly copied and used by Continental missionaries that his oeuvre is well-​documented, and the library at his community of Monkwearmouth-​Jarrow can be broadly sketched.2 It is a harder task to do so for Alcuin’s library at York but there is some indication, based on the books he cites in his letters and in two works, De laude Dei and Versus de patribus, regibus et sanctis Euboricensis ecclesiae, and on the work he effected in the Carolingian school at Aachen.3 Little, however, is known about the books available to Aldhelm, whose library at Malmesbury is assessed almost entirely by his citations of others.4 Lapidge’s conclusions are compelling, especially about the range of pre-​Christian and Christian materials circulating in Anglo-​Saxon England, but we are limited by the reception of textual materials when determining the types of library books available. Simultaneous in date to Lapidge’s investigation of Anglo-​Saxon libraries and similar in approach is Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr.’s study of the transfer of knowledge as part of the Anglo-​ Saxon missions.5 In focusing on the Christian missions in Germania, Bremmer enhances *  University of Missouri–Kansas City. [email protected]

1  Michael Lapidge, The Anglo-​Saxon Library (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1. 2  Lapidge, The Anglo-​Saxon Library, 191–​228.

3  Lapidge, The Anglo-​Saxon Library, 228–​33. See also Alcuin, Bishops, Kings, and Saints of York, ed. and trans. Peter Godman, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), lines 1540–​46. 4  Lapidge, The Anglo-​Saxon Library, 178–​91.

5  Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr. “The Anglo-​Saxon Continental Mission and the Transfer of Encyclopaedic Knowledge,” in Foundations of Learning: The Transfer of Encyclopaedic Knowledge in the Early Middle

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Lapidge’s discussion of library books by also considering liturgical and other devotional materials. Bremmer’s study focuses on fragmentary manuscript survivals at Werden (before 809) and a book list of a clericus who had likely studied at the minster school in Utrecht (ca. 828). He finds in both sources a range of texts, such as biblical commentaries, patristic works, and hagiography. Important is Bremmer’s assertion that the majority of the books that were brought by Augustine for the Roman mission to Kent were “for the proper conduct of church services, and they will therefore have been predominantly liturgical books, such as psalters, gospel books, and massbooks.”6 The Christian conversion of England required such service books, and Lapidge himself remarks that he intentionally excluded “the collections of liturgical books which every Anglo-​Saxon church may be assumed to have owned.”7 Liturgical books tended to be the most used, as well as the most revised and recycled texts, so we need not be surprised that their survival from the early period is limited to fragments found in book bindings and a few extant manuscripts.8 In thinking through the materials amassed by Lapidge and Bremmer and about their assurance of the types of liturgical books that would have been common across the Anglo-​Saxon kingdoms, I wondered: what can we extrapolate about double houses where, thanks to documentary references or archaeological evidence, we know monastic schools existed? I am thinking here of the major communities of monks and nuns governed by royal abbesses during the seventh-​century development of monasticism, such as Barking, Coldingham, Ely, Thanet, Whitby, and Wimborne. In directing our attention in this way, I am asking a larger question about the education and training of women religious in the seventh and early eighth centuries, as well as their engagement with and promulgation of book culture.9 If we attempt to imagine what textual resources were available to these women, how can we do so with some degree of confidence, given Ages, ed. Rolf H. Bremmer and Kees Dekker, Storehouses of Wholesome Learning 1 (Leuven: Peeters, 2007), 19–​50. 6  Bremmer, “The Anglo-​Saxon Continental Mission,” 19. 7  Lapidge, The Anglo-​Saxon Library, 1.

8  Helmut Gneuss has spent a large part of his career cataloguing the various books and fragments, a life’s work culminating in Anglo-​Saxon Manuscripts: Bibliographical Handlist of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England Up to 1100 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014). This most recent publication lists a wealth of fragments, flyleaves, and bookbinding scraps, as well as extant books. Within them, there is a tiny bit of evidence about service books from the seventh and eighth centuries, some of which is drawn from an earlier article, “Liturgical Books in Anglo-​Saxon England and their Old English Terminology,” in Learning and Literature in Anglo-​Saxon England: Studies Presented to Peter Clemoes on the Occasion of his Sixty-​Fifth Birthday, ed. Michael Lapidge and Helmut Gneuss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 91–​141. For another discussion of service books, see Richard W. Pfaff, ed., The Liturgical Books of Anglo-​ Saxon England, Old English Newsletter Subsidia 23 (1995), as well as Richard W. Pfaff, The Liturgy of Medieval England: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). The standard discussion of medieval liturgy is Andrew Hughes, Medieval Manuscripts for Mass and Office: A Guide to their Organization and Terminology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982). 9  Stephanie Hollis has usefully provided an initial investigation of the monastic school at Barking: “Barking’s Monastic School, Late Seventh to Twelfth Century: History, Saint-​Making and

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that libraries at these communities lack inventories and that the few extant manuscripts from the period have not been assigned to these communities? We are, of course, stymied by the lack of written materials attesting to the authorship, ownership, or patronage of early Anglo-​Saxon women. In only one case has an extant book been connected with an early nun, a manuscript containing Jerome’s Commentary on Ecclesiastes inscribed with the name of a seventh-​ century abbess, Cuthswith, of Inkberrow: “Cuthsuuithae. boec. Thaerae abbatissan” (a book of Cuthswith, the abbess).10 Patrick Sims-​Williams has shown the manuscript to have been in England before ending up in Würzburg as part of the Anglo-​Saxon missions. Despite a lack of clear evidence of women’s ownership or authorship, Sims-​Williams is optimistic that, given the surviving manuscript evidence in Francia, there existed a “virtual parity of English monks and nuns in grammatical and literary studies, in scribal activity, and in the formation of libraries” during the early Anglo-​Saxon period.11 As he rightly argues, it would have been impossible for the Anglo-​Saxon women who established and governed these Continental houses to do so without education, training in reading and writing Latin, and in the production of books.12 This essay, therefore, is a speculative consideration about the types of books that Anglo-​ Saxon nuns would have had in their hands and how their liturgical training, in particular, would have necessitated their engagement with book culture. Indeed, I want to highlight the types of service books that would have been necessary, even as I consider the range of written materials available to women religious in their daily work. The last forty years has seen an increase in scholarship about Anglo-​Saxon women religious, focusing more attention on women’s education and training, their status as patrons or dedicatees of texts, and their leadership of Anglo-​Saxon and Continental communities.13 Letters between Boniface and women, as well as a book dedication Literary Culture,” in Barking Abbey and Medieval Literary Culture: Authorship and Authority in a Female Community, ed. Jennifer N. Brown and Donna Alfano Bussell (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2012), 33–​55.

10  Patrick Sims-​Williams, “Cuthswith, a Seventh-​Century Abbess of Inkberrow, near Worcester, and the Würzburg Manuscript of Jerome on Ecclesiastes,” ASE 5 (1976): 1–​23.

11  Patrick Sims-​Williams, “An Anglo-​Latin Letter in Boulogne-​sur-​Mer,” in Sims-​Williams, Britain and Early Christian Europe: Studies in Early Medieval History and Culture, Variorum Collected Studies Series, CS 514 (Farnham: Variorum, 1995), VIII.1–​22 at 1.

12  Hollis indicates that there were “at least a dozen monastic schools taught by abbesses at the forty or so double monasteries known to have been founded before 735.” See “Barking’s Monastic School,” 35. 13  Surveys of the feminist investigations of Anglo-​Saxon women are available in Helen T. Bennett, “From Peace Weaver to Text Weaver: Feminist Approaches to Old English Literature,” in Twenty Years of the Year’s Work in Old English Studies, ed. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, Old English Newsletter, Subsidia 15 (1989): 23–​42; Helen T. Bennett, Clare A. Lees, and Gillian R. Overing, “Gender and Power: Feminism and Old English Studies,” Medieval Feminist Newsletter 10 (1990): 15–​23; Clare A. Lees, “At a Crossroads: Old English and Feminist Criticism,” in Reading Old English Texts, ed. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 146–​69; Katherine

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by Aldhelm, illustrate that women religious were involved in the intellectual work of reading, writing, and copying books, as well as in the transmission of books among O’Brien O’Keeffe, “Keeping the Conversation Going: Critical Strategies and Old English Texts,” in Thirty Years More of the Year’s Work in Old English Studies, ed. Joseph B. Trahern, Jr. Old English Newsletter, Subsidia 27 (1999): 15–​27; and Mary Dockray-​Miller, “Old English Literature and Feminist Theory: A State of the Field,” Literature Compass 5/​6 (2008): 1049–​59. The following is representative sample of work on Anglo-​Saxon and Carolingian women religious, but not exhaustive by any means: Suzanne Fonay Wemple, Women in Frankish Society: Marriage and the Cloister, 500 to 900, Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981); Christine Fell, with Cecily Clark and Elizabeth Williams, Women in Anglo-​Saxon England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); Peter Hunter Blair, “Whitby as a Centre of Learning in the Seventh Century,” in Learning and Literature in Anglo-​Saxon England, ed. Michael Lapidge and Helmut Gneuss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 3–​32; Janemarie Luecke, “The Unique Experience of Anglo-​Saxon Nuns,” in Medieval Religious Women II: Peaceweavers, ed. Lillian Thomas Shank and John A. Nichols, Cistercian Studies Series 72 (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1987), 55–​65; Susan J. Ridyard, The Royal Saints of Anglo-​Saxon England: A Study of West Saxon and East Anglian Cults, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, 4th series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Helen Damico and Alexandra Hennessey Olsen, eds. New Readings on Women in Old English Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Patrick Sims-​Williams, Religion and Literature in Western England, 600–​800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Stephanie Hollis, Anglo-​Saxon Women and the Church: Sharing a Common Fate (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1992); Bernard Bischoff, “Manuscripts in the Age of Charlemagne,” in Bernard Bischoff, Manuscripts and Libraries in the Age of Charlemagne, ed. and trans. by Michael Gorman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 20–​55; Rosamund McKitterick, “Women and Literacy in the Early Middle Ages,” Books, Scribes and Learning in the Frankish Kingdoms, 6th–​9th Centuries, Variorum Collected Studies Series 452 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1994), 1–​43; Rosamund McKitterick, “Nuns’ Scriptoria in England and Francia in the Eighth Century,” Books, Scribes and Learning in the Frankish Kingdoms, 6th–​9th Centuries, Variorum Collected Studies Series 452 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1994), 1–​35; J. L. Nelson, The Frankish World, 750–​900 (London: Hambledon, 1996); Carol Neuman de Vegvar, “Saints and Companions to Saints: Anglo-​Saxon Royal Women Monastics in Context,” in Holy Men and Holy Women: Old English Prose Saints’ Lives and Their Contexts, ed. Paul E. Szarmach (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 51–​93; Carol A. Farr, “Worthy Women on the Ruthwell Cross: Women as Sign in Early Anglo-​Saxon Monasticism,” in The Insular Tradition, ed. Catherine E. Karkov, Michael Ryan, and Robert T. Farrell (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 45–​61; Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, Forgetful of their Sex: Female Sanctity and Society, ca. 500–​1100 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Julie Ann Smith, “Sacred Journeying: Women’s Correspondence and Pilgrimage in the Fourth and Eighth Centuries,” in Pilgrimage Explored, ed. J. Stopford (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 1999), 41–​56; Sarah Foot, Veiled Women, 2 vols. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000); Michelle Brown, “Female Book Ownership and Production in Anglo-​Saxon England: The Evidence of the Ninth-​Century Prayerbooks,” in Lexis and Texts in Early English: Studies Presented to Jane Roberts, ed. Christian J. Kay and Louise M. Sylvester (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), 45–​67; Shari Horner, The Discourse of Enclosure: Representing Women in Old English Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001); Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing, Double Agents: Women and Clerical Culture in Anglo-​Saxon England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Elisabeth Okasha, “Anglo-​Saxon Women: The Evidence of Inscriptions,” in Roman, Runes and

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monastic communities.14 Such forms of exchange are one means by which we know there was an active school, a library collection, and skilled readers and copyists. Evidence from extant letters indicates that the women were actively engaged in reading and studying books that were prepared for their erudition, such as Aldhelm’s De virginitate, which he addresses to Abbess Hildelith of Barking (and other women who may well have been abbesses), thanking her for her exemplary Latin correspondence.15 From this evidence, we know that women religious were conducting their correspondence in Latin and composing Latin verse, such as the letter Ælfflæd of Whitby sent to a Continental abbess to ensure the safe pilgrimage of a Whitby nun16 or the Ogham: Medieval Inscriptions in the Insular World and on the Continent, ed. John Higgitt, Katherine Forsyth, and David Parsons (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2001), 79–​88; Gale R. Owen-​Crocker, “Anglo-​ Saxon Women: The Art of Concealment,” Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 33 (2002): 31–​51; Sally Crawford, “Anglo-​Saxon Women, Furnished Burial and the Church,” in Women and Religion in Medieval England, ed. Diana Wood (Oxford: Oxbow, 2003), 1–​12; Barbara Yorke, Nunneries and the Anglo-​Saxon Royal Houses: Women, Power and Politics (London: Continuum Books, 2003); Virginia Blanton, Signs of Devotion: The Cult of St. Æthelthryth in Medieval England, 695–​1615 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007); Jayne Carroll and Christina Lee, “Women in Anglo-​ Saxon England and the Impact of Christine Fell,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 51 (2007): 201–​5; Pauline A. Stafford, “Reading Women in Annals: Eadburg, Cuthburg, Cwenburg and the Anglo-​ Saxon Chronicles,” in Agire de donna, Modelli e pratiche di rappresentazione (secoli VI–​X): Atti del convego (Padova, 18–​19 febbraio 2005), ed. Christina La Rocca (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 269–​89; Kelley M. Wickham-​Crowley, “Buried Truths: Shrouds, Cults and Female Production in Anglo-​Saxon England,” in Aedificia nova: Studies in Honor of Rosemary Cramp, ed. Catherine E. Karkov and Helen Damico (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2008), 300–​24; Helene Scheck, Reform and Resistance: Formations of Female Subjectivity in Early Ecclesiastical Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008); Lisa M. C. Weston, “Conceiving the Word(s): Habits of Literacy among Earlier Anglo-​Saxon Monastic Women,” Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Hull Dialogue, ed. Virginia Blanton, Veronica O’Mara, and Patricia Stoop (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 149–​67; Felice Lifshitz, Religious Women in Early Carolingian Francia: A Study of Manuscript Transmission and Monastic Culture, Fordham Series in Medieval Studies (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014); and Michèle Gaillard, “Female Monasteries of the Early Middle Ages (Seventh to Ninth Century) in Northern Gaul: Between Monastic Ideals and Aristocratic Powers,” in Women in the Medieval Monastic World, ed. Janet Burton and Karen Stöber, Medieval Monastic Studies 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 75–​96. 14  The brief survey of women’s engagement that follows is drawn from work collectively gathered for two co-​authored essays: one on the Life of Hild and published as Helene Scheck and Virginia Blanton, “Women,” in A Handbook of Anglo-​Saxon Studies, ed. Jacqueline Stodnick and Renée R. Trilling (Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2012), 265–​79; the other on the Life of Leoba and published as Virginia Blanton and Helene Scheck, “Leoba and the Iconography of Learning in the Lives of Anglo-​ Saxon Women Religious, 660–​780,” in Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Kansas City Dialogue, ed. Virginia Blanton, Veronica O’Mara, and Patricia Stoop, Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts 27 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 3–​26. 15  Blanton and Scheck, “Leoba and the Iconography of Learning,” 8–​12.

16  Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, ed. M. Tangl, MGH, Epistolae Selectae in Usuam Scholarum 1 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1916; repr., 1978), ep. 8.

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letter of Leoba, who, when writing to Boniface to remind him of their kinship, sent him a Latin verse in Aldhelmian style.17 Further, we have evidence from letters of collaboration, such as when Boniface asked Eadburh (of Wimborne?) to produce a copy of the Epistles of Peter in gold for use in the Germanic missions18 and or when Lul, Denehard, and Burchard wrote to Cyneburh, abbess of an unknown house, asking her to maintain communication with them by sending letters; they close by asking her to correct their letter, which they claim is unlearned.19 In developing expertise in Latin, nuns were then not at a disadvantage when taking up patristic texts, Biblical commentaries, and theology. Aldhelm indicates the abbesses’ educational program should include the gospels, patristic commentaries, chronicles, grammar, and metrics, a list that far exceeds the standard expectation that women simply memorize the psalms and learn to sing the office.20 The Life of Boniface is suggestive about how such education would be enacted. This famed teacher at the Anglo-​Saxon community of Nursling taught both men and women: Tantaque in eo affabilitatis erga fratres et caelestis doctrinae succrevit magnitudo, ut, rumore sanctae exortationis eius crebrescente, fama eius multis per monasteria tam virorum quam etiam virginum Christi apertissime claruit: quorum quidem quam plurimi, virili sexus robore confortati et lectionis instantia incitati, ad eum confluxere et, saluberrimum scientiae fontem potantes, numerosa scripturarum volumnia legendo recensere. Quibus ergo sexus infirmioris inbecillitatis inerat et adsidua pergendi abnegabatur facultas, tantae sibi sapientiae virum, divini inflatae spiritu amoris, praesentari fecerunt, paginarumque seriem transcurrentes, celesti instanter scrutinio inhesere et sacramentorum archana mysteriorumque abdita iugiter meditantur.

(His kindliness toward the brethren and the extent of his learning increased to such a degree that his fame as a teacher spread far and wide among monasteries both of men and women. Of their inmates great numbers of men, attracted by a desire for learning, flocked to hear him and under his guidance studied the whole extent of the Scriptures; but the nuns, who were unable continually to come to his lectures, stimulated by his vast wisdom and his spirit of divine love, applied themselves with diligence to the study of the sacred texts, scanning page after page as they meditated on the sacred and hidden mysteries.)21 17  Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, ep. 29. 18  Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, ep. 35. 19  Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, ep. 49.

20  Blanton and Scheck, “Leoba and the Iconography of Learning,” 11–​12.

21  Vita Bonifatii auctore Willibaldo, ed. Wilhelm Levison, MGH, Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum in Usum Scholarum 7 (Hannover: Hahn, 1905), 1–​58 at 10–11. The translation is “The Life of Saint Boniface,” trans. C. H. Talbot in Soldiers of Christ: Saints and Saints’ Lives from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Thomas F. X. Noble and Thomas Head (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 107–​40 at 114. Talbot’s translation uses the word “nuns” but it is clear that the women could also be laywomen, who are working together with Boniface to develop their learning. On this point, see Barbara Yorke, who discussed a letter from Ecgburg to Boniface

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This description of studious women, even if the author attributes intellectual inferiority, seems to suggest two contrary points: either the women studied with Boniface face to face less frequently than the men were able to do, or they were not allowed to travel to Nursling so were given direction via correspondence in their own communities. Either possibility intrigues, as it would be worth considering when and where Anglo-​Saxon monks and nuns trained together or how Anglo-​Saxon monks like Boniface were actively directing the instruction of religious women within their communities. The foregoing examples point to a significant engagement with books and in intellectual exchange. The appendix, though not exhaustive, draws together the results of a wealth of scholarship to detail the kinds of training Anglo-​Saxon religious women experienced and to consider the range of textual materials that must have been at their disposal. This evidence is, admittedly, somewhat limited, but it is also quite broad in scope. It illustrates nuns and monks in collaboration, as well as nuns training other nuns. Likewise, it demonstrates cross-​cultural exchange between Francia and England, England and Germania. Further, there are hints at the types of library books that were exchanged, as well as biblical and hagiographical accounts, letters, and poetry. Finally, it provides a list, for those unfamiliar with service books, of the types of books that would have been essential for religious communities, as well as the ancillary documents and types of library books that were particularly useful.22 In bringing together this evidence, I aim to get us thinking again about the nature of book culture and what daily life would have been like in these double houses, governed by high-​status abbesses. This evidence, which has so usefully laid the groundwork for an investigation into early book culture, indicates the need for continued codicological investigation—​a process that requires some revisiting of past scholarship. We need, I contend, to examine again the monumental work done by Neil Ker, whose Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries remains the standard resource.23 As copious as it is, this resource includes only those manuscripts for which a provenance can be affirmed. In the intervening years since its publication, we have learned much about the manuscripts he includes and those he does not, but we need to continue to revisit his assertions and consider, when appropriate, if some of these books may have come from the libraries of double houses—​and if there is any connection to the women in in which she calls herself “the lowliest of your male and female pupils” in “The Bonifacian Mission and Female Religious in Wessex,” Early Medieval Europe 7 (1998): 145–​72 at 152. On learning more generally, see Patrizia Lendinara, “The World of Anglo-​Saxon Learning,” in Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, ed. Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 264–​81, especially 270, where Lendinara asserts “nuns apparently followed the same curriculum as monks. The parity of the sexes in this regard is reflected in the pair of OE words rædere and rædistre (‘male reader’ and ‘female reader’, respectively).” 22  The list of service books is somewhat speculative, since we know the shape of service books shifted over time. 23  N. R. Ker, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969–​83).

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these houses in particular.24 Also, anonymous works are usually imagined by default to be by a male writer and, as many have asserted, we need to revisit this assumption. For example, it has been suggested that the anonymous Life of Gregory the Great, which was known to have come from Hild’s community at Whitby, could have been authored by a nun at Whitby just as easily as by a monk.25 Finally, fragments are rarely listed in Ker’s compendium or in Helmut Gneuss’s Handlist of Anglo-​Saxon Manuscripts, a lacuna addressed over the years by Gneuss culminating in his and Lapidge’s revised compendium, Anglo-​Saxon Manuscripts. I am greatly encouraged by the information about manuscript fragments and flyleaves that Gneuss and Lapidge have made available to us, for these survivals provide a significant area of study. Even as I acknowledge that assigning provenance continues to be a vexed process, it might serve us well to consider fragments as a means to think about identifiable scripts. Where we have a sense of a Lindisfarne or Wearmouth-​Jarrow hand, we do not know what a Whitby hand or a Hartlepool hand may be, much less a Wimborne hand or Barking hand, because we have no securely identified manuscripts from these locales.26 Anyone reviewing the handlist of Gneuss and Lapidge, which is a monumental work that draws on very substantive scholarship by codicologists and paleographers, will notice how often the provenance of books is attributed to those locales from which manuscripts survive (and these are almost always male houses where book production has been proven). In continuing to assign manuscripts—​ and therefore fragments—​to communities with extant materials, we persist in a circular pattern, assuming male communities of status such as Monkwearmouth-​Jarrow or Christ Church, Canterbury, are the sites of production. This might be true in many cases but the evidence from Boniface’s letters about female copyists suggests we might need to consider other communities in Kent or Dorset when suggesting provenance for a given manuscript or fragment. We should, moreover, be thinking about how manuscripts may have been copied, passed to, and shared among double houses, as Michelle Brown has suggested for the later Anglo-​Saxon period.27 Undoubtedly the library at Whitby was a significant one, based on what Bede tells us about the training of five future bishops and on the recovery of styli in archaeological investigations, but rarely is a text assigned even tentatively to that community. Would it not be fair to suggest that Whitby, which was established by Hild, who trained under Aidan, would have had a similar hand to 24  See, as but one example of such an exercise, Mary Dockray-​Miller, “Female Devotion in the Vercelli Book,” Philological Quarterly 83 (2004): 337–​54.

25  Hollis, Anglo-​Saxon Women and the Church, 125–​26. See also Andrew Breeze, “Did a Woman Write the Whitby Life of St Gregory?,” Northern History 49 (2012): 345–​50, who recounts that H. M. Mayr-​Harting first suggested the possibility of a female author in 1973 but that no one had taken up this issue in any depth until his essay. 26  Michelle P. Brown has begun such work in “Mercian Manuscripts? The ‘Tiberius’ Group and Its Historical Context,” in Mercia: An Anglo-​Saxon Kingdom in Europe, ed. by Michelle P. Brown and Carol A. Farr (London: Leicester University Press, 2001), 281–​91. 27  Brown, “Female Book Ownership and Production in Anglo-Saxon England,” 45–​67.

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the script used at Lindisfarne?28 It behooves us to consider how/​where a given manuscript or fragment might have a connection with Anglo-​Saxon women’s communities. And we need to remember that provenance is not static, as Gneuss and Lapidge demonstrate so well: where a book may have originated and the multiple places it may have travelled could be complex, as the example of Durham Cathedral Library A.II.16 (the Durham Gospels) illustrates. Gneuss and Lapidge indicate this gospel book was written in Northumbria (probably at Lindisfarne) and travelled first to Chester-​le-​Street (perhaps as part of the transfer of Cuthbert’s relics?) and later to Durham. We need to remember this example when considering how manuscripts or fragments moved more than once. And we need to think about gospels and sacramentaries that could have originated in or passed to places like Whitby, copied by either a monk or a nun, or those that were produced at Whitby and were subsequently passed to other locales. Comparing hands across fragments and manuscripts is key, and the acceleration of digitization of manuscripts and fragments lays the ground work for the crowd-​sourcing necessary to revisit a range of early Anglo-​Saxon hands. Such a project would also allow us to reassess the provenance of extant manuscripts, either confirming or questioning earlier ascriptions. This felt need, moreover, reminds us of the necessity of introducing such projects into our paleography and codicology courses. Pending the reassessment of extant manuscripts and fragments and the possible attribution of provenance to Anglo-​Saxon religious women’s communities, if not to the women themselves—​all of which will take the energies of many working collectively—​I would like to suggest here how one genre, hagiographical writing, might be valuable in considering the kinds of training, indeed the kinds of books, that Anglo-​Saxon women used. As is often necessary when documenting the lives of women, we have to look beyond the frameworks that provide information about male communities, which are so much better documented. I propose, then, an additional source by which we might detail further the training of Anglo-​Saxon women religious and by extension some general holdings of these communities: the examination of liturgical rites in early hagiographical texts, including the lives of Æthelthryth, Ælflæd, Bertille, Boniface, Cuthbert, Hild, Leoba, Wilfrid, among others. I contend that the evidence of women’s participation in liturgical rites offers us rich details on educational practice and quite possibly on the types of service and library books used in double houses. Toward this end, the remainder of this essay will consider some evidence of liturgical practice, as presented in saints’ lives written before and after ad 700. Members of religious communities, both female and male, were responsible for participation in singing the liturgy, as well as engaging in processions and other rites such as

28  Rosemary Cramp, “A Reconsideration of the Monastic Site of Whitby,” in The Age of Migrating Ideas: Early Medieval Art in Northern Britain and Ireland (Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland, 1993), 64–​73. She indicates, moreover, that finds indicative of a scriptorium at Flixborough are more numerous than at Whitby or at Monk Wearmouth-​Jarrow (at 67).

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the burial of the dead.29 Some of these activities, if not the specific hymns, processional songs, or responses, are often documented in saints’ lives. For example, when the uncorrupted corpse of Æthelthryth was elevated from her first burial site in the cemetery at Ely, Bede tells us that “et extento desuper papilione omnis congregatio, hinc fratrum inde sororum, psallens circumstaret” (the whole congregation stood round singing, the brothers on one side and the sisters on the other).30 While the men and women stand separately, as though arranged in two choirs, it is clear that they are participating in the ritual together, suggesting that the women in the community were trained as the men were and that the choirs may have regularly engaged in ritualistic singing together. Bede’s emphasis on the staging is significant, moreover, in light of what is known about practices in Italian and Middle Eastern communities. Where we might imagine the two choirs were singing antiphonally, or alternate verses, Joseph Dyer indicates that there were standard practices of singing at the bedside of the dying, at funerals, and ostensibly, as here, at the elevation of corpses.31 As Dyer shows, early rules governing monastic communities, (the Rule of Benedict; its source, the Rule of the Master; the Rule of Caesarius of Arles; and the Rule of Columba), emphasized the importance of memorizing the psalms. Patristic writings, moreover, stressed that even laity should learn to sing the psalms as the vowed religious do, but of course, we have no way of knowing how readily this directive was accomplished.32 Dyer’s investigation of these early texts shows that “every monk was expected to know the entire psalter from memory” and “those who did not know the psalms [were to] be guided by the deans of the monastery in daily memorization exercises.”33 Further, he indicates that most often a monastic community “participated in the psalmody by singing antiphons and by making responses to the responsorial psalms” while a cantor would be the principal soloist.34 29  Two excellent resources, one an edition of the Psalms in Old English and the other a study of the psalter in Anglo-​Saxon England, are now available: Old English Psalms, ed. and trans. Patrick P. O’Neill, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 42 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), and M. J. Toswell, The Anglo-​Saxon Psalter, Medieval Church Studies 10 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014). Toswell provides an engaging discussion of early psalter manuscripts and early Anglo-​Saxons’ understanding of the psalter in their daily practice. In describing a fragment copied at Monkwearmouth-​ Jarrow, which is now Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.5.27, she argues, at 180, that while there was a strong tradition of Roman psalters, there is also evidence that “psalters of unusual format, probably Gallican, were being copied in Northumbria in the early stages of Anglo-​Saxon learning.” 30  Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) iv.19.394–​95.

31  Joseph Dyer, “Monastic Psalmody of the Middle Ages,” Revue Bénédictine 99 (1989): 41–​74. See also Joseph Dyer, “The Singing of Psalms in the Early-​Medieval Office,” Speculum 64 (1989): 535–​78. 32  Dyer, “The Singing of Psalms,” 536.

33  Dyer, “Monastic Psalmody of the Middle Ages,” 60. For a discussion of how memorization worked, see Anna Maria Busse Berger, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 34  Dyer, “Monastic Psalmody of the Middle Ages,” 60.

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Returning to the elevation scene of Æthelthryth’s corpse, we can draw on Dyer’s expertise about singing in hora mortis and at burial services. He indicates, citing the death of Augustine’s mother Monica in his Confessions and the deathbed scenes in Gregory’s Dialogues, that by the fourth century, hymns were being replaced by psalmody.35 Of course, Dyer’s evidence might indicate that Anglo-​Saxon hagiographers were simply repeating liturgical practice based on those they had read about in Augustine and Gregory, but if such practices were not common in seventh-​and early eighth-​century England, why would they be repeated in later hagiography? Especially by writers like Bede who were very concerned with orthodoxy? Bede’s presentation of communal singing at the elevation of their founder’s body is an indication that the monks and nuns at Ely were trained singers and were, most likely, singing the psalms. An objection might be raised that Bede finishes his historia ca. 731, well after this event in 695, but as Wallace-​Hadrill supposes, Bede had to have been working from a life of Æthelthryth written at Ely, in which this dramatic scene was included, loaded with such exacting details as the name of Æthelthryth’s physician. That communal singing was still in practice a quarter of a century later when Bede was writing need not surprise us, especially when we have evidence from other contemporary lives. Stephen of Ripon indicates that Wilfrid, even before he was tonsured at Lindisfarne “omnem psalmorum seriem memoraliter et aliquantos libros didicit” (learned the whole Psalter by heart as well as several [other] books) and when he went to Rome, it was to learn ecclesiasticae disciplinae (the rules of ecclesiastical discipline).36 Later after being usurped as bishop of York, Wilfrid became transient, establishing monasteries wherever he went. When he returned, he brought with him the singers Aedde and Aeona and introduced the Rule of Benedict.37 And like the depictions of the ritual in hora mortis, Stephen recounts the monks of Hexham chanting at Wilfrid’s bedside during a first life-​ threatening illness and later chanting psalms at his deathbed.38 Wilfrid himself boasted ca. 665–​669 that he had made many improvements in the northern monasteries and churches by bringing Roman custom, including observing the Roman date of Easter, the Roman tonsure, the Benedictine Rule, and “ritum primitivae ecclesiae assono vocis modulamine, binis adstantibus choris, persultare responsoriis antiphonisque reciprocis instruerem” (the rite of the primitive Church to make use of a double choir singing in harmony, with reciprocal responsions and antiphons).39 I raise the example of Wilfrid here not because his communities were double houses, but because he was instrumental 35  Dyer, “Monastic Psalmody of the Middle Ages,” 64–​65.

36  The Life of Bishop Wilfrid by Eddius Stephanus, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927), 6–​7 and 10–​11. 37  The Life of Bishop Wilfrid, 30–​31.

38  The Life of Bishop Wilfrid, 134–​35 and 140–​41. Other examples include Bede’s description of the Lindisfarne brothers who spend the night in prayer and singing at the death of Cuthbert: Bertram Colgrave, Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert: A Life by an Anonymous Monk of Lindisfarne and Bede’s Prose Life (New York: Greenwood, 1969), 284–​87. 39  The Life of Bishop Wilfrid, 98–​99.

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in securing Æthelthryth’s separation from King Ecgfrith and her removal to the double house at Coldingham, where Ecgfrith’s aunt Æbbe was abbess. Coldingham had a dubious reputation: Bede tells us that the Irishman Adamnan found the community not to be following a rule. Adamnan directed that the monks and nuns fast, sing psalms, and pray to remedy their sin.40 His injunction is clearly about the need for a ritualized behaviour, including observing the daily offices. He reminds them further that their cells were built for prayer and reading.41 After only a year at Coldingham—​presumably a year in which Æthelthryth was trained in ecclesiastical discipline and liturgical singing and would then have been ready to assume a leadership role—​she returned to her native Ely to establish a double house. Wilfrid’s continued influence may well have been the reason, and he is described as having been at the elevation of her corpse when the choir of monks and nuns were singing.42 We might then be able to assert that Wilfrid was instrumental in the education of the monks and nuns at Ely. Further, Wilfrid was a builder of churches and monasteries, including at Hexham, which had been Æthelthryth’s gift to him.43 His building plans for the churches, ornamentation of the altars, gifts of books, relics, vessels, and estates are well attested by Stephen.44 It is not unreasonable to assume that Wilfrid would have contributed in many ways to Æthelthryth’s foundation at Ely, providing models for emulation and no doubt teachers who supported the training of the monks and nuns in liturgical practice. No doubt such mentoring, exchange, and collaboration occurred in other communities, such as Barking, where the nuns, who were likely trained by Æthelburh and Hildelith, are described as singing psalms at matins in the oratory and also chanting outside when visiting the tombs of the brothers to determine a place for the burial of plague victims.45 It has been suggested that Hildelith of Barking came from Francia to educate Æthelburh of Barking and her nuns, just as Bertha and Folcburg, abbess and decana of Bath, were probably from a group of Frankish monasteries in the Paris region.46 Such transmissions of knowledge show that in this early period monastic women were coming from the Continent to help establish monastic communities. How did they do this? 40  Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, iv.25.422–​25. 41  Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, iv.25.424–​25. 42  Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, iv.19.394–​95. 43  The Life of Bishop Wilfrid, 44–​45. 44  The Life of Bishop Wilfrid, 33–​37.

45  Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, iv.7.356–​57. There is a suggestion that the oratory is shared by the nuns and monks at Barking.

46  Hollis, “Barking’s Monastic School,” 38–​40. For a discussion of the community at Bath, see Patrick Sims-​Williams, “Continental Influence at Bath Monastery in the Seventh Century,” in Britain and Early Christian Europe: Studies in Early Medieval History and Culture, Variorum Collected Studies (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995), 1–​10.

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Calvin Kendall has indicated that, before the ninth century, a choirmaster “would instruct the novices in the melodies of the chant, which had to be committed to memory since no system of musical notation had yet been invented.”47 Bede tells us that Theodore and Hadrian brought John the Cantor to Kent to train singers in the method used at St. Peter’s in Rome and that John was drawn throughout England to teach chant, including at Monkwearmouth-​Jarrow: Egitque abba Iohannes ut iussionem acceperat pontificis, et ordinem uidelicet ritumque canendi ac legendi uiua uoce praefati monasterii cantores edocendo, et ea quae totius anni circulus in celebratione dierum festorum poscebat etiam litteris mandando, quae hactenus in eodem monasterio seruata et a multis iam sunt circumquaque transcripta. Non solum autem idem Iohannes ipsius monasterii fratres docebat, uerum de omnibus pene eiusdem prouinciae monasteriis ad audiendum eum, qui cantandi erant periti, confluebant. Sed et ipsum per loca in quibus doceret multi inuitare curabant. (Abbot John carried out the pope’s instructions and taught the cantors of the monastery the order and manner of singing and reading aloud and also committed to writing all things necessary for the celebration of festal days throughout the whole year; these writings have been preserved to this day in the monastery and copies have now been made by many others elsewhere. Not only did John instruct the brothers in this monastery, but all who had any skill in singing flocked in from almost all the monasteries in the kingdom to hear him, and he had many invitations to teach elsewhere.)48

We can well imagine that there were monks from many monasteries who learned from John the Cantor and then passed on this oral training to others in their communities, including the nuns in double houses. Would it have been possible too for nuns to have been trained by John the Cantor? that he may have visited communities like Whitby to train both monks and nuns who were then directed to teach their respective choirs? that the nuns would also have been involved in copying service books to celebrate the liturgical year? There is no reason not to expect that female choirs would have been trained, for in the Life of Hild, Bede describes a certain Frigyth calling the nuns of Hackness “in ecclesiam conuocatas orationibus ac psalmis pro anima matris operam dare monuit” (to church and ordered them to devote themselves to prayer and psalm-​singing on behalf of the soul of their mother) after Begu had had a vision of Hild’s soul being transported to heaven at her death.49 The same ritual, a chorus of psalm-​singing, is enacted when a nun dies at 47  Calvin B. Kendall, “Bede and Education,” The Cambridge Companion to Bede, ed. Scott DeGregorio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 106. 48  Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, iv.18.388–​89.

49  Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, iv.23.412–​13. Of particular interest to the practices regarding the Whitby nuns’ novitiate, at Hild’s death a nun at Whitby saw her soul being taken to heaven. This nun was at a remote location in the compound, with some other probationary women. The reason given for their separation is that they had to first be instructed before joining the community. See Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, iv.23.414–​15.

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Jouarre, according to the Life of Bertille.50 This detail is significant, given that Bertille, once she was appointed abbess at Chelles by Queen Bathhild (who was probably Anglo-​ Saxon herself), was responsible for sending nuns and monks, as well as books, to England to help establish monastic communities, at the request of Anglo-​Saxon kings who wanted help in building convents for women and men.51 That these female-​led communities became centres of learning is without dispute. Leoba, who left Wimborne to join Boniface in the Germanic missions, describes her training at the hands of Tetta (perhaps Eadburh of Wimborne). The results of that training are evident not only in Leoba’s leadership at Tauberbischofsheim, where she was appointed abbess, but also in the descriptions of a number of pre-​mortem miracles inserted in her vita. Of particular interest, the punishment, as recounted by Leoba, given to the nuns at Wimborne who had desecrated the grave of their detested prioress was severe. The abbess “indixit eis triduanum ieiunium, monens unamquamque psalmodiis et vigiliis ac precibus sanctis pro ea studiosius insistere” (ordered them to fast for three days and to give themselves earnestly to watching, prayer, and the recitation of psalms for the repose of her soul).52 The nuns at Wimborne engage in an additional ritual, when after three days of fasting, they process into the church “letanias facientibus et nomen Salvatoris sanctorumque eius suffragia invocantibus” (singing litanies and invoking the Lord and His saints).53 In a different event recorded at Tauberbischofshiem, when a nun was accused of fornication and deception mater venerabilis de eius puritate iam secura, praecepit omnibus oratorium ingredi, et extensis in crucis modum brachiis stare, quoadusque singulae psalter­ium totum ex ordine psallendo complerent; et deinde per tres vices in die, hoc est hora tertia, sexta et nona, vexillo crucis elato, cum laetaniis monasterium circuire et pro purgatione sua divinam misericordiam invocare.

(the venerable superior, being assured of her innocence, ordered them all to go to the chapel and to stand with their arms extended in the form of a cross until each one of them had sung through the whole psalter, then three times each day, at tierce, sext, and none, 50  Vita Bertilae abbatissae Calensis, ed. Wilhelm Levison, MGH, Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum 4 (Hannover: Hahn, 1913), 95–​109 at 103. The translation is “Bertilla, Abbess of Chelles,” ed. and trans. Jo Ann McNamara and John E. Halborg, with E. Gordon Whatley, in Sainted Women of the Dark Ages (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), 279–​88 at 283. 51  Vita Bertilae abbatissae Calensis, 106–​7; “Bertilla, Abbess of Chelles,” 286. See Rosamund McKitterick’s discussion of Balthild’s promotion of connections between Francia and England in “The Diffusion of Insular Culture in Neustria between 650 and 850: The Implications of the Manuscript Evidence,” in Books, Scribes and Learning in the Frankish Kingdoms, 6th–​9th Centuries, Variorum Collected Studies Series 452 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1994), 395–​432.

52  Vita Leobae Abbatissae Biscofesheimensis auctore Rudolfo Fuldensi, ed. Georg Waitz, MGH, Scriptores 15.1 (Hannover: Hahn, 1887), 118–​31 at 123. The translation is “The Life of Saint Leoba,” trans. C. H. Talbot in Soldiers of Christ: Saints and Saints’ Lives from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Thomas F. X. Noble and Thomas Head (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 255–​77 at 261. 53  Vita Leobae, 124, and “The Life of Saint Leoba,” 261.

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to go round the monastic buildings in procession with the crucifix at their head, calling upon God to free them, in His mercy, from this accusation.)54

To be sure, we might read these examples of the ritualistic behaviour of early Anglo-​ Saxon nuns as reflecting practices current in the Frankish church. They may well be derivative but the detail in which they are presented and the different circumstances in which psalm-​singing and processions were enacted, suggest some veracity. Further, we often take such activities among male houses as evidence of historical behaviour; we ought to do the same with regard to female houses. Given that we have such a rich vein of material in which to examine the practices of women religious in early Anglo-​Saxon England, it seems important to consider how this training was effected, how it was passed on, and how it was documented. What we suspect is that there were rituals, and these rituals required books, training, and engagement with texts across communities. In the early seventh century, Isidore, the archbishop of Seville, wrote De ecclesiasticis officiis, a source on liturgical practice and church offices. As one of the four most popular writers attested in early Anglo-​Saxon writings, Isidore had some influence on the early Anglo-​Saxon monastic tradition.55 Copies of this work, which include his descriptions of choirs (men and women singing separately), canticles (utilized to encourage compunction), and antiphons (two choirs singing alternately together), are known at Monkwearmouth-​Jarrow and Canterbury, and it seems likely that such a work would be available more widely. I think we can safely imagine that not only were there schools available to women religious in the early age of Anglo-​Saxon monasticism but that these nuns were actively engaged intellectually: reading, composing, copying, singing, and educating. Their education, at the hands of Saxon, Irish, and Frankish churchmen and -​women, is without question. We know that Hild studied with Aidan and Æthelthryth with Wilfrid, and that Anglo-​Saxon women crossed to Francia for education at Chelles, Brie, and other centres of learning. In developing a more cohesive picture of exchanges between England and the Continent, where there are more extant books associated with women, we have yet another avenue by which we can imagine the long-​lost libraries of the Anglo-​Saxon double houses. This is all to suggest that there is a means by which we might consider some of the texts that Anglo-​Saxon nuns and monks had available in their communities, both service and office books, as well as library books. If we niggle and tease at the resources we do have, such as saints’ lives, we might be in a better position to make firmer associations with individual communities.

54  Vita Leobae, 127, and “The Life of Saint Leoba,” 268.

55  Isidore was influenced by a number of early writings on monasticism, including Cassian, whose Institutes were cited by Aldhelm and Theodore/​Hadrian. See Lapidge, The Anglo-​Saxon Library, 296. See Thomas L. Knoebel, trans., Isidore of Seville: De ecclesiasticis officis, Ancient Christian Writers, The Works of the Fathers in Translation 61 (New York: Newman Press, 2008), and Boniface Ramsey, O.P., trans., John Cassian: The Institutes, Ancient Christian Writers, The Works of the Fathers in Translation 58 (New York: Newman Press, 2000).

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Appendix: Intellectual and Educational Engagement of Anglo-​Saxon Religious Women This appendix provides a quick sketch of the intellectual and educational engagement of Anglo-​Saxon religious women in the seventh and early eighth centuries. Their access to books and their participation in reproducing and exchanging them is evident from various sources. Even if we cannot positively identify individual books that women used, we can imagine the range of possibilities, based on their known activities. Then we can consider the evidence we have for the libraries of Aldhelm and Bede to make an educated guess about the types and variety of books that such libraries would have included, as well as the service books that were held in the churches of monasteries housing both nuns and monks, governed by an abbess. Table 4.1 Education of Anglo-​Saxon abbesses and their influence on others. Monastery

Abbess(es)

Teacher(s)

Influence/​Legacy

Barking

Æthelburh Hildelith (Francia, Chelles?)

Aldhelm

nuns at Barking school for children, boys and girls

Bath

Coldingham

Ely

Hartlepool

Beorngyth

Æbbe

Æthelthryth

Heiu Hild

Inkberrow

Cuthswith

Whitby

Hild

Wimborne

Eadburh Tetta

Repton Thanet

?, Wessex ?, Wessex

Wærburh Mildrith

Bugge

Cyneburh

Berta (Francia)

Adamnan? (Ireland)

Wilfrid Æbbe

Burginda? nuns of Bath

Æthelthryth nuns of Coldingham

nuns at Ely

Aidan (Ireland)

Hild’s followers, both male and female, including Oftfor

nuns of Chelles (Francia)

nuns of Thanet

Aidan (Ireland) others

Ætla, Bosa, John of Beverley, Oftfor, Wilfrid II, Cædmon, Ælfflæd

Leoba Hygeburc? Walburga

Lul, Denehard, & Burchard

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Table 4.1 (Cont.) Monastery

Abbess(es)

Brie, Francia

Eorcongota

Sæthryth and Æthelburh of Ely

Tauberbischofsheim, Germania

Leoba of Wimborne

nuns at Tauberbischofsheim Charlemagne’s wife, Hiltigard

Chelles, Francia

Teacher(s)

Influence/​Legacy

Mildrith of Kent, Hereswith (of Northumbria by way of Ely), Queen Balthild of Neustria, as well as other, unknown women who were missionaries to England

Table 4.2 Evidence of educational training and types of textual engagement. Study and Reading

 Barking—​Aldhelm’s De virginitate, as well as his description of their schooling  Thanet—​Mildrith’s schooling at Chelles

 Wimborne—​Leoba’s schooling under Tetta/​Eadburh, her training under Boniface Composition

 Barking—​chronicle used by Bede (written by Hildelith?), letters (Hildelith and others), visionary accounts (Hildelith), vitae of Æthelburh, Hildelith  Bath?—​poetry (Burginda)  Ely—​vita of Æthelthryth  Thanet—​vita of Mildrith

 Whitby—​Life of Gregory the Great (nun?), vita of Hild

 Wimborne—​letters & poetry (Leoba), vita of Eadburh, and perhaps other vitae (Hygeburh, who may have been trained at Wimborne, wrote the lives of Willibrord and Winnebald at Heidenheim)  ?, Wessex—​letters (Bugge) Scribal Activity

 Bath—​Latin poetry

 Inkberrow—​ownership inscription in Old English  Wimborne—​Latin epistles, letters, poetry

(continued)

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Table 4.2 (Cont.)

Liturgical Training  Barking  Ely

 Hackness

 Wimborne

Books Exchanged  Barking—​Aldhelm’s De virginitate

 Bath?–​books from Bertille at Chelles (who was trained by Theudechild/​followers   of Columbanus at Jouarre)  Inkberrow—​Jerome’s Commentary on Ecclesiastes: Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek, M. p. th. q. 2

 Whitby—​Life of Gregory the Great, a ninth-​century copy survives: St Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 567

 Wimborne—​Epistles of Peter to Boniface, other books for which Boniface thanks Eadburh Textual Culture  documents  charters  letters  wills

 service books  epistolaries  gospels

 graduals

 lectionaries  litanies

 missals/​sacramentaries  office books

 antiphoners  collectars  homilies

 hymnals (at times containing canticles)  lectionaries

 legendaries/​martyrologies  prayerbooks

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Table 4.2 (Cont.)  psalters

 rules of Benedict, Caesarius, and others  library books

 canons of the church

 commentaries on the Scriptures

 liturgical calendars/​computistical tables  patristic thought  theology

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Chapter 5

A TEXTBOOK STANCE ON MARRIAGE: THE VERSUS AD CONIUGEM IN ANGLO-​SAXON ENGLAND

JANET SCHRUNK ERICKSEN* THE FINAL LINES of a 122-​line late Latin poem include this warm and personal plea from the speaker to his “fida comes”: Tu modo, fida comes, mecum isti accingere pugnae, quam Deus infirmo praebuit auxilium. Sollicita luctum cohibe, solare dolentem: exemplum vitae simus uterque piae. Custos esto tui custodis, mutua redde.1

(Now you, faithful companion, with me prepare yourself for battle, [you] whom God has provided as a help for the weak. Console me, worried and mourning: let us each be an example of the pious life. Be guardian of your guardian, mutually restoring [or, give back what you receive].)

In distinctly companionate terms here and elsewhere in the poem, the speaker asks his audience to join him in adopting an “exemplum vitae,” although the argument includes expression of the speaker’s own weaknesses and his need for his companion’s support. The poem is both intimate and external in its interests as it contrasts personal harmony with public disruptions, and while the speaker advocates celibacy, he does so from the perspective of one familiar with—​and not entirely rejecting now—​the power of physical comfort. Such features make the poem, despite its emphasis on celibacy and more generally on Augustinian ideals, seem a somewhat odd inclusion as a core part of monastic education in Anglo-​Saxon England, a context in which its view of marriage enriches and moderates the arguments for celibate marriage laid out by such powerful Anglo-​Saxon voices as those of Aldhelm and Ælfric. The poem, known by various titles including Carmen ad uxorem and Versus ad coniugem, was probably composed by Prosper of Aquitaine in the first half of the fifth century. The attribution to Prosper has long been debated and was most recently rejected by Alexander Hwang in 2009, for whom the strongest ground regarding the attribution is comparative and highlights the emotional power of the poem. Hwang, after surveying the evidence for authorship, concludes that “such a deeply personal poem is completely uncharacteristic of Prosper.”2 Stefania Santelia, however, in her recent edition of the poem *  University of Minnesota, Morris. [email protected]

1  This and all subsequent quotations of the Versus ad coniugem are taken from Stefania Santelia’s edition:  Prospero d’Aquitania: Ad coniugem suam. Studi latini 68 (Naples: Loffredo, 2009). Translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own. 2  Alexander Hwang, Intrepid Love of Perfect Grace: The Life and Thought of Prosper of Aquitaine (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 27.

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(also 2009), strongly reasserts Prosper’s authorship, and her view has been supported by Jérémy Delmulle’s subsequent study focused on “Establishing an Authentic List of Prosper’s Works.”3 Whoever its author, certainly since at least the late sixth or early seventh century, the Versus ad coniugem has been linked codicologically to Prosper, basically functioning as the conclusion to his widely disseminated Liber epigrammatum. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France Latin 11326 (Sup. Lat. 699), a manuscript to which E. A. Lowe assigns an Italian origin and which Albert Horstung lists as late sixth or early seventh century, provides the earliest known surviving manuscript of Prosper’s epigrams.4 Like so many subsequent manuscripts, BnF lat. 11326 includes the Versus ad coniugem at the end of the epigrams, introduced in the lower half of a page with a heading—​here, “exhortatio ad uxorem”—​that visually continues the pattern of headings established in the preceding epigrams. Indeed, the last line of the marriage poem, not the epigrams, is followed by “explicit epigrammatorum sancti Prosperii” (here end the epigrams of St. Prosper (although “Prosperii” is now in a later hand)).5 Horstung’s tentative stemma suggests no direct descendants of this particular presentation, but of the forty-​three manuscripts that Horstung utilizes in his edition, all of which are pre-​eleventh century, twenty-​two append Versus ad coniugem to Prosper’s Liber epigrammatum (and some of the forty-​three are only fragments, so determining companion texts and relationships has difficulties). Something of the medieval status of the Liber epigrammatum, with or without the ensuing marriage poem, is attested by the fact that it survives in “no fewer than one hundred and eighty manuscripts ranging in date from the sixth or seventh century to the sixteenth century,” and “a study of the medieval library catalogues makes it clear that this number is certainly no more than a sizable fraction of all the copies written before the advent of printing. The libraries of Freising, Lorsch, Murbach, and York, among others, had copies of the Liber epigrammatum written at least by the ninth century, which are now lost.”6 Given its frequency in the surviving manuscripts, the Versus ad coniugem seems likely to have been included immediately after the last epigram in a substantial portion of that substantial number of books that once existed. Four surviving Anglo-​Saxon manuscripts plus a fragment of a fifth preserve Prosper’s Liber epigrammatum: London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A.vii, fols. 165–​66 (ix3/​4), Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 448 (fols. 1–​86, s. x1 or x med.), 3  Other titles used for the poem include Uxorem hortatur ut se totam Deo dedicet, Poema coniugis ad uxorem, and Ad coniugem suam (Prospero d’Aquitania: Ad coniugem suam, 51). On the basis of Santelia’s work, Jérémy Delmulle asserts that the poem “must henceforth be excluded from the dubia and be joined to the list of the certa” (“Establishing an Authentic List of Prosper’s Works,” Studia Patristica 49 (2013): 213–​32 at 226–​27). 4  Codices Latini antiquiores, ed. E. A. Lowe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–​72), 5:609. This is Horstung’s manuscript P1 (36–​37):  Prosper Aquitanus: Liber epigrammatum, ed. Albertus G. A. Horstung, CSEL 100 (Salzburg: De Gruyter, 2016).

5  Horstung provides an excellent account of the manuscript tradition for the epigrams (see Prosper Aquitanus: Liber epigrammatum, especially 36–​37), and this early manuscript is among those digitized and freely available online through the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s Gallica site. 6  Prosper Aquitanus: Liber epigrammatum, 22.

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London, British Library, Harley 110 (s. x. ex.), Cambridge, Trinity College, O.2.31 (s. x/​ xi), and Cambridge, University Library, Gg.5.35 (s. xi med.).7 All five of these survivals include the Versus ad coniugem immediately following the epigrams, and each of the four full-text copies belongs to a category generally referred to as schoolbooks; the fragment, especially given its running Old English gloss, probably came from such a book as well. While the term “schoolbook” implies a consistency in content and application that may not actually have existed, much of what we know about Anglo-​Saxon education suggests that several texts were familiar tools and that their schoolroom use contributed to them some authoritative status in literary culture. The two works attributed to Prosper seem to have been an early and enduring inclusion for educated reading: Prosper “is mentioned and recommended in Notker’s catalogue of authors in the ninth century and in Conrad of Hirsau’s in the first half of the twelfth century,” as Horstung points out, and Conrad, moreover, “wrote an Accessus for Prosper in which he mentions only the epigrams and the Poema coniugis ad uxorem, which so often accompanies them.”8 Michael Lapidge, in his 1982 article on “The Study of Latin Texts in Late Anglo-​Saxon England,” identified a set of “authors whom we know were studied in Anglo-​Saxon schools [and] who are also well represented by surviving Anglo-​Saxon manuscripts.” These are chiefly “the anonymous Late Latin Disticha Catonis, Prosper of Aquitaine’s Epigrammata, Juvencus’s Libri Evangeliorum Quattuor, Caelius Sedulius’s Carmen Paschale, and Arator’s De Actibus Apostolorum”9 (a complete list might also include works by Prudentius, Boethius, Isidore, and others). Lapidge asserts that “every literate Anglo-​Saxon appears to have studied Prosper’s epigrams,” and the companion texts to the Epigrammata point to shared educational function: CUL Gg.5.35 is an enormous compendium that includes the Juvencus, Sedulius, and Arator texts as well as others; Trinity O.2.31 includes the Disticha Catonis, and while CCCC 448 does not include anything else from Lapidge’s list of five, it, like Harley 110, does put the Epigrammata with Isidore’s Synonyma, a text that elsewhere is part of what seem to be schoolbooks.10 What also does not appear in Lapidge’s list of texts but is nevertheless very much part of them is the Versus ad coniugem. If, as the codicological context suggests and as Horstung, among others, claims, “the epigrams had an extraordinary influence, because they were the first books a student would ever read,” then the marriage poem too must have made some mark on its medieval readers. They seem more than likely to have noticed, at the least, that the poem distinctly differed from the preceding epigrams in layout, style, and content. 7  All of these dates are from Helmut Gneuss and Michael Lapidge, Anglo-​Saxon Manuscripts: A Bibliographical Handlist of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England up to 1100 (Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2014). 8  Prosper Aquitanus: Liber epigrammatum, 23.

9  Michael Lapidge, “The Study of Latin Texts in Late Anglo-​Saxon England,” in Latin and the Vernacular Languages in Early Medieval Britain, ed. Nicholas Brooks (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982), 99–​140, reprinted in Anglo-​Latin Literature 600–​899 (London: Hambledon Press, 1996), 459. 10  See, for instance, the Bobbio manuscript Milano, Biblioteca Ambrosiana C 74 sup.

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Prosper’s epigrams range in length, in Horstung’s edition, from four to twenty-​four lines of poetry, with the most frequent length being six to ten lines, usually coming after a prose sentence to which the epigram corresponds. That prose derives from another collection of Augustinian wisdom by Prosper, the Liber sententiarum.11 In the manuscripts, this generally means that each page of text presents a series of units delineated by rubricated headings—​in other words, short passages that might seem manageable to a new student of Latin. In the preface to the epigrams, as Horstung explains, “Prosper tells his readers to expect discrete poems (disinctis … versiculis) on particular themes (proprias … causas), each one accompanied by a title describing its content (pars quaeque suo congrueret titulo).”12 Their length and structure contribute substantially to the educational role of the epigrams as, in Carolinne White’s words, “a convenient means for students of learning moral lessons and elements of Augustinian doctrine. It is to these epigrams that Alcuin, for example, refers in his poem on the bishops, kings, and saints at York, as existing in the library at York in the eighth century.”13 In each of the four surviving Anglo-​Saxon manuscripts, the move from the epigrams to the marriage poem is visually defined in two ways. In Trinity 0.2.31 and CUL Gg.5.35, the poem is introduced by title, “Versus Prosperii ad coniugem suam” and “Tironis Prosperi. Exortatio ad Vxorem” respectively; Harley 110, CCCC 448, and Cotton Tiberius A.vii provide both an explicit to the epigrams and a title for the poem. For a student, a more significant marker of distinction would, however, lie in the absence of subsequent headings and in seeing instead whole pages of unbroken text for the 122 lines of the poem. Harley 110 and CUL Gg.5.35 both call attention to one likely educational role of the poem in addition to its Latin-​learning possibilities, as in both the poem’s metre is initially marked—​but only initially, as if students were given a little guidance then asked to struggle on with the metre on their own. The poem actually employs two metrical forms: it opens with sixteen Anacreontic lines (“an anapest, two iambs, and a final syllable”), followed by elegiac couplets.14 It also begins with direct address, and while the epigrams do employ first-​ and second-​ person in addition to their dominant third-​person voice, the poem’s opening address to “mearum comes” (my companion, 2) quickly sets it apart from the kind of second-​ person address found, for instance, at the beginning of epigram 65, “Item de eodem,” with its opening use of “negas” (you deny), and epigram 68, “De labore fallentium,” 11  Prosper’s Liber sententiarum, as Horstung describes the work, are organized by the order in which Prosper read various works by and Augustine, writing down passages of interest as he read. As such, they provide “a privileged window into the mind and habits of one late-​ancient reader of Augustine. Prosper is motivated by his interest in quotations relevant to ascetical and spiritual practice […] [and] also seems motivated by more purely rhetorical and formal concerns” (6). 12  Prosper Aquitanus: Liber epigrammatum, 7; see also 6–​8 on the relationship between the sententia and the epigrams. 13  Carolinne White, Early Christian Latin Poets (New York: Routledge, 2000), 113–​14.

14  Ralph W. Mathiesson, People, Personal Expression, and Social Relations in Late Antiquity, vol. 2: Selected Latin Texts from Gaul and Western Europe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2003), 84.

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where Prosper concludes by addressing readers directly “with the injunction to scale the path of light upon the steps of virtue.”15 Indeed, such a shift in voice frequently functions as a directive conclusion in the epigrams.16 In the Versus ad coniugem, intimate rather than general second-​person address instead frames the entire poem, and while it, like the epigrams, echoes Augustinian thinking, it does so within a more temporal and personal framework. The marriage poem sets out its persuasive purpose and context in its opening lines: Age, iam precor, mearum comes inremota rerum, trepidam brevemque vitam domini Deo dicemus. Celeri vides rotatu rapidos dies meare fragilisque membra mundi minui perire labi.17 (1–​8)

(Come now, I pray, faithful partner in my affairs, our anxious and brief life let us dedicate to the Lord God. You see how, in swift rotation, the rapid days pass and the elements of the fragile world diminish, perish, collapse.)18

The preface to the epigrams sets a contrasting rather distanced and more overtly didactic tone: Dum sacris mentem placet exercere loquelis caelistique animum pascere pane iuvat, quosdam ceu prato libuit decerpere flores distinctisque ipsos texere versiculis, ut proprias canerent epigrammata singula causas, et pars quaeque suo congrueret titulo. (1–​6)

(While it is pleasing for a mind to be occupied with holy speaking, and while it is helpful for the mind to feed on heavenly bread, just so it is pleasant to pluck certain flowers in the field and to compose them into distinct little verses, so that single epigrams might sing their own causes and so that each part fits its title.)

The ensuing epigrams, like the sententiae, emphasize Augustine’s understanding of grace, although Prosper also “includes Augustine’s expression on foreknowledge,

15  Prosper Aquitanus: Liber epigrammatum, 18. Here and throughout, I have used the epigram numbers in Horstung’s edition.

16  Horstung identifies a shift from third-​person to first-​person in epigrams 32, 38, 45, 74, and 100, and a shift from third-​person to second-​person in epigrams 8, 66, 75, 102, and 103 (Prosper Aquitanus: Liber epigrammatum, 18n31). 17  Prospero d’Aquitania: Ad coniugem suam, 56.

18  R. Chiappiniello, “The Carmen ad Uxorem and the Genre of the Epithalamium,” in Poetry and Exegesis in Premodern Latin Christianity, ed. Willemien Otten and Karla Pollmann (Boston: Brill, 2007), 115–​38 at 125.

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perseverance, and the priority of grace to good works” and writes with a more patient, gentler voice than what Hwang calls “the characteristic polemical tone of [Augustine’s] expressions on grace.”19 In promoting chaste marriage, the Versus ad coniugem likewise echoes but does not simply reproduce Augustinian thought. In De bono coniugali, for instance, Augustine advocates marriage in which the couple “overcome” what he terms “the rule of concupiscence,” “so that either by mutual consent they ascend to a higher grade of sanctity or, if both are not of this mind, he who is such will not be the one who demands the carnal debt but renders it, observing in all things a chaste and religious harmony.”20 While Prosper’s poem also advocates changing the status of a couple’s marriage into one in which both partners dedicate themselves more fully to God, including by becoming chaste, its argument is delivered as a direct address from a husband to his wife and seeks to persuade by appealing to the wife’s intellect as well as to the couple’s shared experiences. The speaker explicitly addresses his companion only at the poem’s beginning and end, framing an explanatory persuasion that focuses on the transitory and discordant world around the couple. That emphasis has led most of the poem’s modern scholars to read the text as a “response to the barbarian invasions of the beginning of the fifth century,” but Roberto Chiappiniello argues that the poet, who shows “remarkable knowledge of pagan and Christian poetry,” also is responding to more spiritual concerns: “The subject matter of this poem—​that is the devotion of the couple to Christian precepts and their renunciation of worldly matters—​can be regarded as an emulation of the growing social phenomena of marital Christian conversion and ascetic detachment” among the Roman elite during the fourth and fifth centuries. Chiappiniello suggests Paulinus as a “model for this new and radical way of living which also entailed a complete rejection of wealth, the sale of all property and strict observance of Christian teaching.” More interestingly for an Anglo-​Saxon context and in particular set against the models of chaste marriage that Ælfric supplies, Chiappiniello argues that the “fact that this conversion was a joint venture by husband and wife indicates the growing importance of women in the household of late antiquity and this social phenomenon surely influenced the decision of the author of the Carmen ad uxorem to write a poem inspired by the themes of the epithalamium, a genre which celebrates the couple as equals, neither exalting one nor depreciating the other.”21 The speaker of the poem, in addition to addressing his immediate audience in familiar and persuasive terms and appealing both to her spiritual interests and to her 19  Hwang, Intrepid Love of Perfect Grace, 204.

20  St. Augustine: Treatises on Marriage and Other Subjects, trans. Charles T. Wilcox, M. M., et al., The Fathers of the Church 27 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1955, repr. 1999), ­chapter 13 (15), 28–​29. 21  Chiappiniello, “The Carmen ad Uxorem and the Genre of the Epithalamium,” 118. The promotion of chaste marriage as part of a response to turbulent social and political events might have made the poem even more appealing in the context of the Norse attacks on England at the end of the tenth century.

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intellect, makes evident the regard he holds for their years of past companionship as well as his desire to continue connection to her, if under new and more pious constraints. He addresses her as “comes inremota rerum” and “fida comes” (his faithful companion in affairs), someone “quam Deus infirmo praebuit auxilium” (whom God offers as a help to the weak). And while the central section of the poem turns away from such intimacy, it does so in order to explain fully the speaker’s motivations in proposing this change in the couple’s life. He addresses, first, the disruptions in the world and its trials, which Chiappiniello summarizes as follows: “A dramatic disturbance of social order (17–​22), the madness of war that has caused famine and death (25ff.) and the fear of persecution (91ff.)”22: in sum, “ultima quaeque vides” (30), or what you see is the end. This view serves as a springboard for arguing that the time the couple has left to live should be devoted to God: Parcus, vera loquens, et mente et corpore castus, insontem vitam pacis amator agat. De proprio cunctis quos cernit egere benignus; non sua non cupiat, quae sua sunt tribuat. Quid, rogo, mandatis durum censetur in istis? (55–​59)

(Sparing, speaking truth, pure in mind and body, a lover of peace, let him lead a guiltless life. Let him be generous of his wealth to those whom he sees in need; let him not desire what is not his own, let him divide up what is his. What, I ask, in these commands is deemed harsh?)

Marriage is itself not directly discussed in the poem, but the speaker argues extensively that the world and physical experience in general are in decline, “pax abiit terres” (peace has departed from the earth, 30). The speaker, without any disdain, places part of marriage, or at least lust—​presumably what he means by “effera corda” (untamed hearts, 46)—​among those ephemeral, earthly things and advocates instead a higher path: “Tota mente Deus, tota vi cordis amari /​praecipitur; vigeat cura secunda hominis” (It is taught to love God with our entire mind, the entire strength of our heart; let favourable care for our fellow humans flourish, 49–​50).23 While most of the central portion of the poem focuses far more on the husband than on the wife or their relationship—​first-​ person pronouns abound as the speaker lays out his relationship to Christ—​the speaker finishes his plea with an even more intimate and compelling address to his companion than that with which he began. The husband speaks to his wife throughout the poem as someone capable of understanding and abiding by virtue in the same ways as he does himself. Despite the titles sometimes given the poem (such as Exortatio ad uxorem in CUL Gg.5.35), the more explicitly gendered term uxor does not actually appear in the poem itself. The speaker refers to his partner only as “comes” (companion), and Santelia argues that particularly at the end of the poem the poet also reverses common topoi associated with women: she 22  Chiappiniello, “The Carmen ad Uxorem and the Genre of the Epithalamium,” 117.

23  Chiappiniello’s translation, “The Carmen ad Uxorem and the Genre of the Epithalamium,” 132.

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is, for instance, fida, faithful, rather than unfaithful; she rather than her husband is a divine help (auxilium); infirmitas more often elsewhere refers to women but the husband here defines himself as such. The husband, too, uses the more intimate “tu” for both Christ and his wife in close succession.24 The poem’s last eight lines in particular cast the relationship in terms of valued interdependency: Tu modo, fida comes, mecum isti accingere pugnae, quam Deus infirmo praebuit auxilium. Sollicita elatum cohibe, solare dolentem: exemplum vitae simus uterque piae. Custos esto tui custodis, mutua redde; erige labentem, surge levantis ope, ut caro non eadem tantum, sed mens quoque nobis una sit atque duos spiritus unus alat. (115–​22)

(Now you, faithful companion, gird yourself with me for this struggle, you whom God has given as help to a weak man. Heedful restrain me in pride, comfort me in sorrow! Let the two of us be an example of a pious life. Be guardian of your guardian, give back what you receive! Raise me when I slip, rise up with the aid of me raising you, so that we might be not only one flesh but also one mind and single spirit nourish both of us.)25

The wife is to be “with me,” says the husband, and she has her own significant role, one of support but also of power. Although he argues for a more ascetic life, the husband does not reject his wife’s companionship; instead, he reframes it with a proposal: “let us each be an example of the pious life,” he says, and assist each other in being so (my emphasis). Any gendered hierarchy in the marriage is, at least here, played down. The distinctive language in these lines leads Santelia to conclude that the poem delineates its auditor not just without traditionally feminine weaknesses but with traditionally masculine strengths: “A questa compagna fedele, pronta ad affrontare la sua medesima ‘battaglia’ (v. 115, mecum isti accingere pugnae) miles Christi anch’ella dunque, Prospero guarda riconoscendo una serie di virtù tradizionalmente ascritte agli uomini: intelligenza, forza, coraggio” (Prospero looks at this loyal companion, who is ready to face the same battle and who is thus also a soldier for Jesus, recognizing in her virtues traditionally ascribed to men: intelligence, strength, courage).26 The marriage outlined in the poem is one of “total communion between spouses,” a view, as Santelia stresses, distinctly different from that found in the writings of many of the Church Fathers (“l’unione ideale di Prospero, si direbbe, è quella che si realizza nella totale comunione tra i coniugi. Siamo indubbiamente molto distanti dai toni misogini di molti Padri della Chiesa”).27 The concluding “ut” clause offers perhaps even more interesting phrasing, for despite the poem’s prior references to being “mente et corpore castus” (pure in mind and body, 55), 24  Prospero d’Aquitania: Ad coniugem suam, 30–​31.

25  Chiappiniello, “The Carmen ad Uxorem and the Genre of the Epithalamium,” 136.

26  Prospero d’Aquitania: Ad coniugem suam, 31. My sincere gratitude to my colleague Pieranna Garavaso for her generous assistance with the Italian here and throughout Santelia’s book. 27  Prospero d’Aquitania: Ad coniugem suam, 31.

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the speaker ultimately does not directly reject physical connection to his wife. Instead, he employs phrasing—​“ut caro non eadem tantum” (so that we might be not only one flesh)—​that sets up this new life as an addition to rather than a replacement in their relationship, even if they are in fact giving up sexual relations. The same penultimate line in the poem receives a mark of extra attention for some readers in later Anglo-​Saxon England. The tenth-​or eleventh-​century Trinity O.2.31 version of the Versus ad coniugem includes light glossing in Latin, perhaps from the mid 11th century, which supplies, “i[d est] similit[er]” above that line’s “quoque.” Given the emphasis on virginity in so many other Anglo-​Saxon texts, it is tempting to consider this gloss as editorial rather than simply lexical, with “similiter” a lightening of quoque, as if “also” or “too” seemed just too close to endorsing a continued physical relationship and the glossator was more comfortable with instead seeing a similarly close but more clearly fully chaste relationship. If the Trinity glossator came to the Versus ad coniugem with the views of chaste marriage articulated by Ælfric in the late tenth or early eleventh century, such discomfort seems especially plausible and suggests that the poem ventures into territory that would have been distinctive in a pre-Conquest monastic school. Chaste marriage was, as Robert Upchurch has demonstrated, “one of Ælfric’s favorite themes,” and Ælfric’s voice is one of the most powerful, if also distinctive, in Anglo-​Saxon England on the subject.28 Repeatedly in Ælfric’s Old English Lives of Saints, chaste marriage helps to define the saintly, with only fleeting glimpses of the kind of intimacy evident in the Versus ad coniugem. Julian “ungewæmmede heold his bryde” Basilissa “mid soðre clænnysse” (unpolluted held his bride [Basilissa], with true chastity, IV.75–​76). Cecilia calls her new husband Valerian “min leofa man” even as she also asks and he agrees that he not “gewemman” her (defile her, XXXIV.31, 33). Chrysanthus and Daria likewise “gehealdenre clænnysse” (maintain chastity, XXXV.123), and Chrysanthus does so despite the five beautiful young women sent to him as physical enticements by his father and despite, then, his subsequent marriage to the marvellous Daria, who is “swilce sun-​beam” (like a sunbeam, XXXV.90). The couple “wunodon ætgædere /​ gehiwodum synscipe and gehaeldenre clænnysse” (lived together /​ in the appearance of marriage, their chastity being preserved, XXXV.122–​33).29 Closer to home, Æthelthryth is introduced as “þam engliscan mædene /​þe waes mid twam werum and swa-​ðeah wunode maeden” (the English maiden who lived with two men and nevertheless remained a virgin, XX.3–​4).30 And at the end of the life of Æthelthryth, Ælfric 28  Robert K. Upchurch, “For Pastoral Care and Political Gain: Ælfric of Eynsham’s Preaching on Marital Celibacy,” Traditio 59 (2004): 39–​78 at 43 and 40.

29  Ælfric’s Lives, 1:94–​95; 2:358–​59; 2:382–​85; these and all subsequent quotations of Ælfric’s saints’ lives are taken from Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, Being a Set of Sermons of Saints’ Days Formerly Observed by the English Church, ed. and trans. Walter W. Skeat, EETS, o.s., 76, 82, 94, 114 (London, 1881–​1900), repr. in 2 vols., 1966.

30  Ælfric’s Lives, 1:432–​33; see also Alison Gulley, “ ‘Seo faemne þa laerde swa lange þone cniht oðþaet he ge-​lyfde on þone lifigendan god’:  The Christian Wife as Converter and Ælfric’s Anglo-​ Saxon Audience,” Parergon 19 (2002): 39–​51 at 50.

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even more directly and extensively endorses chaste marriage, this time with reiterated reference to the authority of other books. Three times in quick succession here, Ælfric refers to books that tell us that “woruld-​menn” (laymen, XX.120) have often had chaste marriages (“clænnysse on synscipe,” XX.121), and instead of adding one more example of virginity preserved after marriage, he cites an example of a marriage to which abstinence came late: We secgað swa-​ðeah be sumum ðegne se wæs þryttig geara mid his wife on clænnysse þry suna he gestrynde and hi siððan buta ðrittig geara wæron wunigende butan hæmede and fela ælmyssan worhton oð þæt se wer ferde to munuclicere drohtnunge and drihtnes englas comon eft on his forð-​siðe and feredon his sawle mid sange to heofonum swa swa us secgað bec. (XX.123–​30) (However, we will tell you of a certain thane, who lived thirty years with his wife in continence; he begat three sons, and thenceforward they both lived for thirty years without cohabitation, giving much alms, until the husband entered the monastic life, and God’s angels came just at his death, and carried his soul with song to heaven, as books tell us.)31

Ælfric stresses here the availability of heavenly bliss even to those who do not initially choose chaste marriage, although the monastic life plays at least as much a role in this exemplary thane’s latter-​life holiness as do the chaste years of his marriage, and Ælfric leaves aside any mention of the wife’s spiritual role or gains. For women in particular, virginity is, in Ælfric’s writings, the far more standard and preferred status, with the implication that chaste living after a sexual life may not quite be sufficient for saintly elevation. Indeed, the example of the life of Æthelthryth as a whole further diminishes marriage by barely mentioning the wife, favouring instead an emphasis only on chastity, a topic to which Ælfric repeatedly returns, often employing the term clænnysse to do so. Drawing on Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, Catherine Cubitt characterizes Ælfric’s views on chaste marriage within a “sexual hierarchy” that he wished the whole of English society to adopt: On the Day of Judgment, mankind will be judged according to its sexual record: the married laity who have observed self-​control and enjoyed sexual relations only at the correct times and for procreation will receive the thirty-​fold reward. Those who have remained chaste after sexual experience—​usually equated with widows or those in orders—​are rewarded sixty-​fold. But the highest place is occupied by those who have maintained their virginity throughout their lives and for these the hundred-​fold reward

31  Ælfric’s Lives, 1:440–​41.

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is reserved. Such is their merit that the virgins will not be judged but will rather take their place judging alongside Christ.32

Articulating this framework of understanding, Ælfric mentions chaste marriage in at least nineteen sermons, and the view he puts forward is considerably more demanding of marriage, and more distanced from it, than is the depiction of marriage in the Versus ad coniugem.33 While Ælfric urges couples to observe calendrical abstention and other restrictions, Cubitt’s evidence shows that “he does so in such a way that privileges chastity above other virtues”: for instance, “for ði læsse pleoh. bið þam cristenum menn þæt he flæsces bruce, þonne he on ðisre halgan tide wifes bruce” (because there is less risk to a Christian man that he enjoy meat than he enjoy his wife at this holy time).34 The strength of Ælfric’s position on the subject of chaste marriage is perhaps most vividly evident in one of the Shrove Sunday sermons included in the Lives of Saints, where Ælfric tells a story of an “ungerad” (foolish man), who not only refuses to attend Ash Wednesday mass but also defiantly boasts “þæt he wolde his wifes brucan on þam unalyfedum timan” (that he intended to enjoy his wife at the unpermitted time).35 As Upchurch notes, “Ælfric’s irony is rarely so sardonic or sexually suggestive” as it is in the outcome of this particular story, where “the man’s violent impaling on his own shaft comes from his refusal to abstain from intercourse […] [and] the man’s flagrant rejection of Lenten restrictions on sex becomes a visible marker of the depth of his most serious error: the rejection of the ashes and the humility, contrition, penitence, and forgiveness they symbolize.”36 Ælfric’s views on temporarily chaste marriage are supplemented by arguments favouring chaste marriage as a permanent state, especially but not exclusively after the wife reaches menopause. On this point, Ælfric is most adamant, and “by mandating abstinence after menopause, he might have surprised a church father such as Augustine who, even though he idealizes marriages in which intercourse is solely procreative, never fixes so absolute a limit past which sex is forbidden. Three of Ælfric’s sermons record this teaching: Second Series homilies for Sexagesima Sunday and Rogation Monday, and On Apostolic Doctrine.”37 Ælfric seems more than likely to have been among the educated Anglo-​Saxons who read the Versus ad coniugem, but his “monkish” view of marriage, to use Upchurch’s descriptor, significantly distances him from the Latin poem’s emphasis on companionship, even though Ælfric seems to have been aware of and in favour of both husband and wife reaching agreement to observe chaste marriage: “An aside in Ælfric’s Lfe of St. Thomas the Apostle indicates that he was also aware of canones (canons) stipulating that separation must be mutually agreed upon,” such as that in “a seventh-​century 32  Catherine Cubitt, “Virginity and Misogyny in Tenth-​and Eleventh-​Century England,” Gender & History 12 (2000): 1–​32 at 5. 33  Upchurch, “For Pastoral Care and Political Gain,” 43.

34  Upchurch, “For Pastoral Care and Political Gain,” 45–​46. 35  XII.41, 49–​50, Ælfric’s Lives, 1:264–​65.

36  Upchurch, “For Pastoral Care and Political Gain,” 47. 37  Upchurch, “For Pastoral Care and Political Gain,” 49.

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canon recorded in the eleventh-​century collection of decrees, traditionally known as the Pseudo-​Egbert Excerptiones.”38 While Ælfric almost certainly read the Versus ad coniugem, he may well also have been familiar with another prominent Anglo-​Saxon’s advocacy of chaste marriage more than two hundred years earlier.39 Aldhelm’s interest in poetic metre underscores the likelihood of his own familiarity with the Versus ad coniugem, although he never names the text. Aldhelm, at one point, however, introduces Prosper “as a ‘poet and rhetor,’ and nam[es] his book of verse the Epigrammata.” Overall, by Andy Orchard’s count, “Aldhelm cites Prosper no less than fifteen times in the course of his metrical treatises, and four further times in his prose De virginitate.”40 Like Ælfric, Aldhelm presents chaste marriage as a goal for and an improvement of marriage: chastity, “ ‘having been assigned to marital contracts, has scorned the commerce of matrimony for the sake of the heavenly kingdom.’ ” Even chaste marriage, however, he considers a “decidedly lesser” state than is virginity.41 Carol Braun Pasternack neatly summarizes the language of Adhelm’s De virginitate that emphasizes the less-​than-​fulsome praise he presents for marriage: chastity in marriage “is ‘silver,’ ‘an average income,’ ‘ransom,’ ‘a lamp,’ and a person ‘half-​alive.’ And conjugality, the state ‘which for propagating the progeny of posterity and for the sake of procreating children, is bound by the legal ties of marriage,’ is ‘bronze,’ ‘poverty,’ ‘captivity,’ ‘darkness,’ and ‘the lifeless body.’ ”42 While Aldhelm, then, does not reject the value of marriage, neither does he exactly encourage it, and Upchurch calls attention to the fact that also in De virginitate, Aldhelm amplifies and extends the place of chastity in relation to marriage by “substitut[ing] castitas (charity) for widowhood as the second of the three traditional states of virginity.”43 In other words, any married person, not just widows, can seek the spiritual elevation that accompanies chastity, and all should do so if virginity is no longer an option. In such a view, Aldhelm seems to agree more with the Versus ad coniugem than does Ælfric, although Aldhelm’s writings on the whole devote less attention to the subject of chaste marriage than do Ælfric’s. Neither Aldhelm nor Ælfric directly references the Versus ad coniugem in surviving work, yet the evidence still favours the idea that the poem was widely known in Anglo-​ Saxon England.44 The manuscripts themselves provide the clearest evidence for this, but

38  Upchurch, “For Pastoral Care and Political Gain,” 48, 56–​57.

39  On Ælfric’s relationship to Aldhelm, including De virginitate, see for instance Thomas A. Bredehoft, Authors, Audiences, and Old English Verse (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 127 and 165–​66.

40  Andy Orchard, The Poetic Art of Aldhelm, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-​ Saxon England 8 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 184. 41  Quoted and translated in Upchurch, “For Pastoral Care and Political Gain,” 56.

42  Carol Braun Pasternack, “Sexual Practices of Virginity and Chastity in Aldhelm’s De virginitate,” in Sex and Sexuality in Anglo-​Saxon England, ed. Carol Braun Pasternack and Lisa M. C. Weston (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2004), 93–​120 at 108. 43  Upchurch, “For Pastoral Care and Political Gain,” 56. 44  See Orchard, Poetic Art, 185.

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for the early period, Bede also provides some evidence.45 In De arte metrica Bede quotes from the opening of Versus ad coniugem as an example of Anacreontic metre (Byrhtferth in his life of St. Oswald cites one of these same lines, but probably copied from Bede rather than directly from ad coniugem).46 A passage from the Versus ad coniugem also shows up in the Latin poem known as De die iudicii, where its use suggests an interest more in the middle section of the poem than in its frame or larger argument. De die iudicii is repeatedly attributed to Bede in Anglo-​Saxon manuscripts, including at the beginning of its Old English version, Judgement Day II, and in the same Cambridge, Trinity College manuscript, O.2.31, that contains the Versus ad coniugem. The Judgement Day poem, however, “enjoyed a large circulation both in England and on the Continent,” a history that provides little assistance in identifying the intellectual context in which it originated (as Patrizia Lendinara puts it, “such a wide diffusion weighs negatively on the possibility to ascertain the name of the author and the country of origin of the poem”).47 Given the widespread dissemination of the Versus ad coniugem, almost any reader of Latin could have borrowed a line. The Cotton Domitian A.i version, for instance, reads, “Quid, rogo, quid durum saeclo censetur in isto,” closely echoing—​even if changing the time frame of the reference from past to future—​a line in the marriage poem, “Quid, rogo, mandatis durum censetur in istis?”48 (What, I ask, is considered hard in these commands?, 59). In the Old English “Judgement Day II” adaptation of the Latin poem, the same line becomes, “Hwæt mag beon heardes her on life?” (302). The Doomsday context erases all reference to the framing address of husband to wife, indeed all reference to marriage; the Judgement Day poet instead attends only to the chaotic apocalyptic part of the husband’s argument, as if that part of the poem fit more neatly into certain immediate interests than did the depiction of marital equality. All five surviving Anglo-​Saxon manuscripts that include the marriage poem date from the ninth to early eleventh centuries, that is, “to the period of the Benedictine Reform and after,” which, as Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe notes, “suggest[s]‌the continuing appeal of the Epigrammata in later Anglo-​Saxon England” and, by extension, of the Versus ad coniugem.49 Cubitt labels virginity “the banner of the reform movement”: “Virginity and sexual abstinence were not only fundamental to the reformer’s beliefs but were also ideological tools of extreme utility which could be used to invalidate the old order which they were seeking to replace.”50 The emphasis on chaste marriage in the Versus ad coniugem might suggest that it would have been an appealing and useful text in the Benedictine reform, but it seems to be little referenced by Anglo-​Saxon writers, perhaps 45  Michael Lapidge, The Anglo-​Saxon Library (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 327 and 231–​33. 46  Michael Lapidge, “Byrhtferth and Oswald,” in St. Oswald of Worcester:  Life and Influence, ed. Nicholas Brooks and Catherine Cubitt (New York: Leicester University Press, 1996), 69.

47  Patrizia Lendinara, “Translating Doomsday: De die iudicii and its Old English Translation (Judgement Day II),” in Beowulf and Beyond, ed. Hans Sauer and Renate Bauer (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2007), 17–​67 at 17. 48  Graham Caie, The Old English Poem Judgement Day II (Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 1999), 133.

49  Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, Stealing Obedience: Narratives of Agency and Identity in Later Anglo-​ Saxon England (Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 129. 50  Cubitt, “Virginity and Misogyny in Tenth-​and Eleventh-​Century England,” 3.

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because its content was not fully understood by those who studied it while learning Latin, or perhaps because its content did not quite fit the church’s stance. Certainly, the poem’s relatively equitable treatment of its female auditor and its connection between the joys of being one flesh and those of being of one mind sharply contrasts what Cubitt as well as other scholars have identified in Ælfric’s works: “Ælfric is not […] ignorant of female religious and their potential for sexual celibacy, but he gives it a very limited and guarded place in his writings. He seems to have viewed virginal and chaste women with grave suspicion,” and his writings reveal a “negative and indeed fearful view of women’s sexuality with regard to the female religious.”51 Indeed, we might consider the strength of his interest in and views on chaste marriage as a response to a more generous widespread view gained from familiarity with the Versus ad coniugem. What most of the schoolroom readers, or, at least, the Latin-​learning readers, of the Versus ad coniugem would have made of its content remains difficult to gauge. The lack of reference to the poem by Aldhelm and Ælfric as well as the sequences in the surviving manuscripts suggest—​especially if the books were used sequentially—​that the poem’s primary role in Anglo-​Saxon England related to its form and language. Both the distichs and the epigrams are tidy consumables, ways to work on Latin grammar without having to struggle through too many lines of syntactically complex poetry and with the chance of absorbing moral instruction along the way. O’Keeffe describes the marriage poem’s companion text in terms that stress how it might have served to teach both the Latin language and Christian morals: the “Epigrammata pairs each prose extract with its verse elaboration, effectively offering readers a simple prose epitome of the topic before it tackles the verse. More advanced than the Disticha Catonis both in terms of grammar and sentiments, its added value as early schoolroom exercises lay in transmitting simplified and easily memorizable ideas gleaned from the great works of Augustine.”52 As the final step in the Prosper section of schoolbook collections, the marriage poem diverges from the compact pedagogical units of the epigrams, but all five Anglo-​Saxon examples of the two texts show some continuity in glossing, although only Harley 110 and the Cotton Tiberius A.vii fragment show very extensive glossing. The nature of the glossing varies, although it is mostly lexical and mostly quite basic, suggesting a continuation of the same function that the Epigrammata appears to have had as a tool for learning Latin. Only the Cotton Tiberius fragment has a nearly continuous Old English gloss along with occasional Latin glosses, both of which would have made the Latin text accessible to those with even less understanding of the language. The strength of the tradition of these texts for learning Latin is further suggested by some twelfth century evidence: Tony Hunt identifies a “hand of the early twelfth century [that] has added a number of [lexical] glosses” to the Trinity College manuscript (O.2.31), including to the Versus ad coniguem.53 While the glosses in the Anglo-​Saxon manuscripts of the poem 51  See Cubitt, “Virginity and Misogyny in Tenth-​and Eleventh-​Century England,” 13, 15. 52  O’Keeffe, Stealing Obedience, 129.

53  Tony Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin in Thirteenth-​century England, vol. 1 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991), 19.

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may not reflect independent work of Anglo-​Saxon readers, neither do the glosses on the whole correspond, and the glossing of the last section of the marriage poem varies enough to suggest at least different exemplars and, in turn, at least somewhat critical readers. Glossing cannot, of course, be equated with understanding (as anyone who regularly teaches Old English knows from students who thoroughly gloss a work but cannot say what the text is actually about), nor would understanding the epigrams necessarily mean that readers also understood the marriage poem. If we accept, however, that Prosper’s Liber Epigrammatum was widely read in Anglo-​Saxon England, we should also accept that the Versus ad coniugem was widely read. The role of Prosper’s Epigrammata is generally understood as foundational in education. O’Keeffe, for instance, asserts that the epigrams “equipped the boys with life scripts, ready packets of wisdom, and conventional tropes of interpretation […] In short the learning of the monastic classroom was designed to initiate the boys into the community’s vision of the world and incorporate them into that vision.”54 The manuscript evidence strongly implies that Versus ad coniugem must to some extent have shared in that role, and in doing so it would have provided a counter—​however unendorsed in other literature—​to the more sexually and intellectually restrictive views of women and marriage such as Ælfric articulates. If indeed Prosper’s epigrams were foundational learning, the marriage poem was, too, and as such it supplied Latin-​learners a more practical and accessible model of marital piety with which to view the world outside the cloister, as well as what we can hope was a more familiar, if less often lauded, outline of marital relationships.

54  O’Keeffe, Stealing Obedience, 125.

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Chapter 6

THE CIRCUMCISION AND WEANING OF ISAAC: THE CUTS THAT BIND

CATHERINE E. KARKOV* THE WEANING OF Isaac is a subject that has received very little scholarly attention, and certainly nowhere near as much interest as the circumcision of Isaac, to which it is intimately related ritually, theoretically, and within the narrative context of Genesis. That said, it is precisely because they are so intimately linked that neither event can really be considered in isolation; the two must be studied together for a number of reasons. Firstly, weaning, like circumcision, is an act of cutting or rupture, and so the act of cutting is crucial to any analysis of either or both events. There is the cut of circumcision, the literal cut that figuratively binds father and son together, and the cut of weaning, the cut that conversely forever separates the body of the son from that of the mother. Secondly, in the story of Abraham and Isaac, both cuts are also related to the cut of exile, the cutting off of one part of the family from another, of one people and one church from another. However, exile is a state that is also shared by Abraham and both his wives and sons, again, a cutting off that simultaneously binds together. Thirdly, there is the cut of inscription. Physical circumcision is an inscription on the body, the sign of the name of God written into the flesh. The same is true of spiritual circumcision. Kathleen Biddick has argued persuasively that in his epistle to the Romans (2:28–​29), in the moment at which Paul “transformed the cut of circumcision to an inscription in the heart,” he created the cutting of the foreskin as a type for both Christian inscription and graphic technologies.1 The body is the book into which the word is written, but the foreskin is also a text, itself inscribed through erasure, through its excision from what has been written. And finally, there is the cut of translation. The Vulgate Latin story retold by the Anglo-​Saxons in their mother tongue, Old English, is changed demonstrably and markedly in the retelling, cut apart from the language out of which it was translated, yet still bound to it through the story that is told. Language then, the mother tongue and the language of the mother that is silenced at weaning, figures prominently in this story.

The Cut that Binds

The cut is central to the story of Abraham and Isaac. The cut of circumcision, perhaps the ultimate act of cutting as both separation and union that precedes Isaac’s birth, is *  University of Leeds. [email protected]

1  Kathleen Biddick, The Typological Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology, History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 12.

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balanced by the deflected cut of the sacrifice of Isaac that seals Abrahamic faith and God’s covenant with his chosen people. There are other cuts with which we must deal in the story of Sarah and Hagar, Isaac, Ishmael, and Abraham. But the cut of circumcision comes first, initiating, as it were, those cuts to follow. Circumcision was a problematic topic for the Anglo-​Saxons who saw themselves as the chosen people, and who based much of their image of sovereignty on that of the Old Testament kings. Anglo-​Saxon kings traced their genealogies back through the Old Testament patriarchs to Christ, who was always present in the beginning as the Word, while the consecration of the king in the second ordo used in the coronation of Anglo-​Saxon kings from the ninth century onward both invoked Abraham and other Old Testament kings, and adopted something of the language of God’s covenant with Abraham. Omnipotens sempiterne deus. creator ac gubernator cęli et terre. conditor et dispositor angelorum et hominum. rex regum. et dominus dominorum. qui abraham fidelem famulum tuum de hostibus triumphare fecisti. […] respice propitius ad preces nostrę humilitatis. et super hunc famulum tuum. N. quem supplice deuotione in regnum anglorum. uel saxonum pariter eligimus. benedictionum tuarum dona multiplica; Hunc dextera tuę potentię semper ubique circumda. quatinus predicti abrahę fidelitate firmatus. (O Almighty and everlasting God, Creator and Governor of heaven and earth, Maker and Ruler of angels and men, King of kings and Lord of lords, who didst cause thy faithful servant Abraham to triumph over his enemies […] give ear to our humble prayers and multiply thy blessings upon thy servant N., whom in lowly devotion we do elect to the kingdom of the Angles or of the Saxons, and ever cover him with thy powerful hand, that he [may be] strengthened with the faith of Abraham.)2

But physical circumcision itself was unknown in Anglo-​Saxon England, and how to describe or depict it was a dangerous and murky area. Ælfric, who provided perhaps the most extensive program of translation and paraphrase of Old Testament material that survives, was especially concerned, not only about circumcision but also about the problem of understanding and interpretation that was posed by Old Testament material in general. It is somewhat surprising then that, as Samantha Zacher has pointed out, it was Ælfric who developed something of a phallic vocabulary focused around the Old English words for circumcision (ymbceorfan, to cut or carve around; or ymbsniðan, to snip around; or gesceapu forceorfan, literally to cut down, cut off, or divide the genitalia, and which could thus also mean castration), and the word for foreskin, fylmen, which significantly could also mean film, veil, membrane, skin, and parchment. All four recorded examples of the use of the word fylmen to refer to the foreskin occur either in Ælfric’s Homily on the Octave and the Circumcision of our Lord, or in the Old English Hexateuch (London, British Library, Cotton Claudius B.iv).3 It is true, as Rebecca Barnhouse has 2  Leopold G. Wickham Legg, English Coronation Records (Westminster: A. Constable 1901), 16 (Latin text), 24 (English translation, slightly modified).

3  Samantha Zacher, “Circumscribing the Text: Views on Circumcision in Old English Literature,” in Old English Literature and the Old Testament, ed. Michael Fox and Manish Sharma (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 89–​118.

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shown,4 that episodes of circumcision are themselves cut from the Hexateuch translation; however, the institution of the covenant in Genesis 17 and the circumcision of Isaac are retained in the text—​though of course they are not depicted in the accompanying miniatures. The Genesis poem in the roughly contemporary Junius 11 manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11), by way of contrast, says somewhat demurely about the latter only that Abraham placed a sign (“beacen,” line 2769) on Isaac with his own hand. While Ælfric is also cautious about the matter, he does not refrain from tackling it head on. He stresses to his audience, both in the Hexateuch text of Genesis 17 and in his homilies, that it is not right for any Christian man to practice circumcision today.5 In the homilies, which presumably enjoyed a wider circulation than the Hexateuch, he felt called upon to explain to those of his audience who might be unfamiliar with the act that “God bebead abrahame, þæt he sceolde ⁊ his ofspring his wed healdan þæt sum tacen wære on heora lichaman to geswutelunge þæt hi on god belyfdon: ⁊ het ðæt he name scearpecgedne flint. ⁊ forcurfe sumne dæl þæs felles ætforeweardan his gesceape” (God commanded Abraham that he and his offspring should hold his covenant, that some sign might be on their bodies to show that they believed in God, and he commanded him that he take a sharp-​edge flint and cut a certain portion of the skin at the top of his genitals).6 He went on to explain that although Christian men were no longer permitted to be circumcised, the cutting off from lust and sin that the sign betokened was now achieved through spiritual circumcision, through the water of baptism and the true love of Christ. Circumcision, like baptism, was a sign of rebirth: “Se eahteoþa dæg, þe ðæt cild on ymbsniden wæs. getacnode þa eahteoþan ylde þyssere worulde:  on þære we arisað of deaþe ascyrede fram ælcere brosnunge ⁊ gewemmednysse ures lichaman” (The eighth day, on which the child was circumcised, was a sign of the eighth age of the world, in which we will arise from death cut off from every corruption and defilement of our body).7 Circumcision, then, whether physical or spiritual and no matter how problematic, still represented rebirth, the cutting off of an old way of life and inclusion in (or exclusion from) a new and clearly defined community. Anglo-​Saxon concerns about circumcision, Ælfric’s in particular, are no doubt the reason for its absence from the pictorial program of the Hexateuch, written and illuminated at an unknown location, possibly Canterbury, in the early eleventh century. The text of the institution of the circumcision is included on folio 28v, one of the few pages 4  Rebecca Barnhouse, “Shaping the Hexateuch for an Old English Audience,” in The Old English Hexateuch: Aspects and Approaches, ed. Rebecca Barnhouse and Benjamin C. Withers (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), 91–​109 at 103.

5  The Old English Version of the Heptateuch, Ælfric’s Treatise on the Old and New Testament and his Preface to Genesis, ed. S. J. Crawford, EETS, o.s., 160 (London: Oxford University Press, 1922), 126–​27 (“Nu secge we betwux þisum þæt nan Cristen man ne mot nu swa don”); Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The First Series, ed. Peter Clemoes, EETS, s.s., 17 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 224–​31. 6  Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, 225. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. 7  Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, 228.

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of Genesis that is devoted exclusively to text with no miniatures and follows the Latin Vulgate relatively closely. 9. to Abrahame: And þu healtst min wed ⁊ ðin ofsprinc æfter ðe on heora mægðum. 10. Þis ys ðæt wed, ðe ge healdan sceolon betwux me ⁊ eow ⁊ ðin ofsprincg, þæt ælc hysecild betwux eow beo emsniden.

11. ⁊  emsniðað þæt flæsc eowres fylmenes; þæt beo tacn mines weddes betwux me ⁊ eow.

12. Ælc hysecild betwux eow beo ymsniden on þam eahteoðan dæge hys acennednysse, ⁊ ælc werhades man on eowrum mægþum ⁊ inbyrdlineg ⁊ geboht þeowa beo ymsniden, þeah he ne beo eowres cynnes. 13. ⁊ beo min wed on eowrum flæsce on ecum wedde.

14. Se werhades man þe ne byð emsniden on þam flæsce hys fylmenes, hys sawul byð adylegod of hys folce, for þan þe he aidlode min wed. 15. God cwæð eac to Abrahame:  ðin wif Sarai, ne hat ðu hi heononforð Sarai, ac hat hi Sarra.

16. Ic hi gebletsige, ⁊ of hyre ic ðe forgyfe sunu, ðonne ic wylle bletsian; he byð on þeodum ⁊ folca cyningas cumað of him.

(9. to Abraham:  And you will keep my covenant and your offspring after you and their generations. 10. This is that covenant that you shall keep between me and you and your offspring, that each male child amongst you be circumcised. 11. And you shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin; that will be a sign between me and you. 12. Each male child amongst you will be circumcised on the eighth day, after his birth, and each man’s penis (werhades) of your people and each slave born in a master’s house and each bought servant will be circumcised, although he be not of your kin. 13. And my covenant shall be on your flesh as a perpetual covenant. 14. That man whose penis (werhades) shall not be circumcised on the flesh of his foreskin, his soul shall be destroyed out of his people. 15. God said again to Abraham, your wife Sarai you will henceforth not call Sarai, but you will call her Sarah. 16. I will bless her and of her I will give you a son, whom I will bless; and he shall become nations and the kings of people will come from him.)8

This account is followed by a miniature showing God on a ladder surrounded by angels and Abraham prostrate on the ground before him. It is placed after verse 22, the verse in which God departs from Abraham. What we see then is God arriving and departing—​ or perhaps just departing. And is Abraham bowing down before God, rising up as he leaves, or perhaps both? Abraham goes on in the text to circumcise Ishmael and the men of his people, but the next miniature shows God appearing to Abraham in the Valley 8  The Old English Version of the Heptateuch, 125–​26.

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of Mambre (Genesis 18). The only other text-​only pages in the Hexateuch Genesis not followed by an illustration of the events described are the stories of Joseph interpreting Pharaoh’s dream on folio 59v (Genesis 41), which is followed by a miniature depicting Joseph brought before Pharaoh and his departure from him, and Joseph disguising himself in Genesis 44 (folio 64v), which is followed by a depiction of him revealing his identity on folio 65r. Clearly the illustrator believed that in these cases that which was hidden should remain hidden. Circumcision remains hidden, like a dream, or like a masquerade, though it is of course neither. The Hexateuch does, however, effect an undepictable change. In the cut between text and image, what is seen and what is said, Abraham is reborn. He casts off the name Abram (chief or father) and becomes Abraham (chief or father of nations). In the Junius 11 Genesis poem, on the other hand, there is no renaming, no rebirth because Abraham is always already Abraham of the new order and the chosen people, perhaps reflecting that manuscript’s general emphasis on the leadership or kingship of all the patriarchs as well, for the most part, as the nobility of their wives.9 Isaac’s nobility, for example, is emphasized at this moment in the poem to a much greater degree than it is in the Hexateuch narrative, and there is much less focus on the actual act of circumcision. þu scealt halgian  hired þinne, sete sigores tacn  soð on gehwilcne wæpnedcynnes  gif þu wille on me hlaford habban  oððe holdne freond þinum fromcynne.  ic þæs folces beo hyrde and healdend  gif ge hyrað me breostgehygdum  and bebodu willað min fullian.  sceal monna gehwilc þære cneornisse  cildisc wesan wæpnedcynnes  þæs þe on woruld cymð ymb seofon niht  sigores tacne geagnod me  oððe of eorðan þurh feondscipe  feor adæled, adrifan from duguðum.  doð swa ic hate. Ic eow treowige  gif ge þæt tacen gegaþ soðgeleafan.  þu scealt sunu agan, bearn be bryde þinre  þone sculon burhsittende ealle isaac hatan.  ne þearf þe þæs eaforan sceomigan ac ic þam magorince  mine sylle godcunde gife  gastes mihtum,

9  Catherine E. Karkov, “The Anglo-​Saxon Genesis: Text, Illustration and Audience,” in The Old English Hexateuch: Aspects and Approaches, ed. Benjamin Withers and Rebecca Barnhouse (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), 201–​37; Catherine E. Karkov, Text and Picture in Anglo-​Saxon England: Narrative Strategies in the Junius 11 Manuscript (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 81–​89.

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(You shall hallow your household, set the sign of victory on each one of the male sex, if you will have me as your lord or true friend to your descendants. I will be the shepherd and guardian of the people if you obey me in your heartfelt thoughts, fulfill my commands. Each man who is a child of this people, of the men who came into this world, as a child after seven nights shall be marked with the sign of victory to me, or on earth through hatred be separated far, driven from prosperity. Do as I command. I promise that if you observe that sign in true belief you shall have a son, a child by your wife, whom the people will call Isaac. There will be no need for you to be ashamed of that son but I will give that warrior my divine gift, strength of spirit, many friends. He shall receive my favour and my blessing, love and mercy. From that patriarch a great nation will come, many princes will arise from him, guardians of the kingdom, world kings widely famous.)10

If the act of circumcision is downplayed, the shift in emphasis amplifies its significance. Abraham’s primal paternity of both sons and nations, as well as the ensuing cut between peoples, is thus sealed with the blood of the circumcision. The circumcision of Isaac has also been cut from the pictorial narrative of the Hexateuch, even though it was represented prominently in a separate miniature beneath that showing the birth of Isaac in the fifth-​century manuscript London, British Library, Cotton MS Otho B.vi, fol. 32r, the manuscript believed to have been the source for all early medieval illustrated Genesis cycles, including those of the Hexateuch and the Junius 11 manuscript.11 In the Hexateuch the circumcision remains veiled beneath the textual narrative, the inscription of which can be read as re-​enacting the cut of the circumcision on the skin (fylmen) of the manuscript. The foreskin itself was also a type of veil, traditionally cut off and buried, perhaps following the reference in Joshua 5:3 to the “hill of foreskins” on which Joshua circumcised the children of Israel.12 In many traditions

10  Genesis A: A New Edition, ed. A. N. Doane (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 191–​93. 11  On the Cotton Genesis, and for reproduction of its miniatures see Kurt Weitzmann and Herbert L. Kessler, The Cotton Genesis: British Library, Codex Cotton Otho B VI (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). 12  The Old English Version of the Heptateuch, 383: “Iosue ða dyde swa swa Drihten him bebead, ⁊ Israhela bearn ealle ymbsnað uppan ðam beorge ðe is gehaten ‘Preputiorum’ ” (Joshua then did just as the Lord commanded him, and circumsized all the sons of Israel on that hill that is called the hill of foreskins). On veiling and circumcision I am inspired especially by Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).

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the foreskin was both shrouded (veiled) and buried.13 In the case of the Hexateuch one might say that the foreskins of Abraham, his sons, and his men are twice buried (veiled or shrouded), once beneath the written words of the text and again through the absence of circumcision from the images. Ælfric’s concerns about lay understanding of the Old Testament would have ensured that so unfamiliar and spiritually taboo an image should not be depicted; nevertheless, it does continue to haunt the manuscript through the cut skin of the folios on which the story is inscribed in the written text as well as through Ælfric’s own phallic vocabulary. Circumcision is a cut that binds men together, a mark of the sons of Abraham. Circumcision is also the cut that initiates one of the great episodes of translation, the renaming/​translation of Abram and Sarai into Abraham and Sarah. It is also therefore a cut that binds Ælfric to the story he translates. The Hexateuch is very self-​ consciously a translation, and one that hinged directly on the story of Abraham and Isaac. Ælfric writes in his Preface to Genesis that he need only translate as far as Isaac, Abraham’s son, as Æthelweard, for whom the translation was made, already possessed a translation from the story of Isaac to the end.14 Ælfric was, then, as cautious about the cut of translation as he was about the act of circumcision. Both left room for misunderstanding. In his prefaces to his translation of Genesis and to his translation of the Old and New Testaments he confronted the fact that he was translating from Latin for those who either could not read the Latin language or understood it only poorly. The Old Testament was particularly perilous even in the Latin as it was too easy to read only the surface meaning of the letter and not gain the deeper typological meaning of the text. In the Preface to Genesis he wrote to Æthelweard about his fears that careless or ignorant readers or listeners might believe that they could live just as the Old Testament patriarchs had lived under the law of Moses. His fears were echoed in his warning after Abraham circumcises himself and the men of his household that circumcision was now forbidden and must not be practised by Christian men. But the Old and New Testaments were like the human body. God had given humankind two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, two lips, two hands, two feet, and one should not be cut away from the other: “God gesceop us twa eagen ⁊ twa earan, twa nosðyrlu, twegen weleras, twa handa ⁊ twegen fet, ⁊ he wolde eac habban twa gecyðnyssa on ðisre worulde gesett, ða ealdan ⁊ ða niwan” (God made for us two eyes and two ears, two nostrils, two lips, two hands and two feet, and he also wanted to have two testaments set down in this world, the old and the new.)15 The Old Testament then was not to be cut off and buried like 13  See further Biddick, The Typological Imaginary. The texts and images Biddick discusses are all later, but the origins of the practice are biblical.

14  The Old English Version of the Heptateuch, 76: “þu cwæde þa þæt ic ne þorfte na mare awendan þære bec buton to Isaace, Abrahames suna, for þam þe sum oðer man þe hæfde awend fram Isaace þa boc oþ ende” (You said then that I need not translate more than to Isaac, Abraham’s son, because you had a translation someone else had made from Isaac to the end of the book). 15  The Old English Version of the Heptateuch, 80.

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the foreskin that it contained. Towards the end of his Preface to Genesis he implores Æthelweard that he not ask him to translate any more books into English because he neither dares nor wishes to do it: “Ic cweðe nu ðæt ic ne dearr ne ic nelle nane boc æfter ðisre of Ledene on Englisc awendan; ⁊ ic bidde ðe, leof ealdormann, ðæt ðu me ðæs na leng ne bidde” (Now I say that I neither dare nor wish to translate any more books from Latin into English; and I ask, dear sir, that you not request it of me again).16 He also says of the text that he translated that, “we ne durron na mare awritan on Englisc þonne ðæt Leden hæfð, ne ða endebyrdnysse awendan, buton ðam anum, ðæt ðæt Leden ⁊ ðæt Englisc nabbað na ane wisan on ðære spræce fandunge” (We do not dare to write any more in English than the Latin has, nor change the order, except for one thing alone, that Latin and English do not have a common way in the ordering of language).17 But here Ælfric is neither accurate nor truthful. He has written more in some places and less in others than were written in the Latin from which he was translating. Translation for Ælfric is demonstrably a cut akin to circumcision in that it is a snipping off of or around material. It is an act that cuts Ælfric apart from Abraham and that which is excised from the narrative, but one that also unites him to the story through translation and that portion of the text that remains. For Ælfric the mother tongue of Old English can be a dangerous and deceptive thing because of the very fact that it reveals to the unlearned that which should best remain concealed. It works like circumcision itself to remove a veil from before the eyes.

The Cut that Severs

The cut is akin to erasure in that it both removes and keeps that which is removed ever present as trace, spectre, or haunting. The repeated cuts, each so different and each so much the same, of the story of Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac drive this point home again and again. The second cut in their story is the cut of weaning, a cut that is also an erasure in that it goes all but unspoken in the scholarship. There are many historical studies of circumcision, but there are relatively few of weaning, and none that include Anglo-​Saxon material. Ælfric’s version of the weaning of Isaac in the Hexateuch reads: 4. ⁊ on þam eahteðan dæge hyne eac ymsnað, swa swa God him bebead. 5. And he self wæs ða hundwintre. 6. Sarra cwæð þa ofwundrod: God me worhte hlehter; sylf hwa swa hyt geaxað he hlyð mid me. ⁊. Hwa wolde gelyfan þæt Sarra lecgan sceolde cild to hyre breoste to gesoce on ylde. þæt ðe heo Abrahame on hys ylde acende? 8. Þæt cild soðlice weox ⁊ wearð gewened, ⁊ Abraham worhte, swa swa heora gewuna wæs, micelne gebeorscipe to blisse his mannum on þone dæg, þe man þæt cild fram gesoce ateah.

(4. And on the eighth day he circumcised (ymsnað) him, just as God had commanded him. 5. And he himself was 100 years old. 6. Sarah then said in astonishment: God has made me laugh, just as whoever shall hear of it will laugh with me. 7. Who would believe 16  The Old English Version of the Heptateuch, 80. 17  The Old English Version of the Heptateuch, 79.

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that Sarah in her old age should lay a child at her breast to suck, he whom she bore to Abraham in his old age? 8. And truly that child grew and was weaned, and when he was weaned Abraham made a great feast for his people on that day that the child was taken from suck.)18

Ælfric’s translation remains relatively close to the text of the Latin Vulgate, adding or omitting only minor details, until he gets to the weaning of Isaac in verse 8, where he repeats, once at the beginning and once at the end of the verse that Isaac was removed from Sarah’s breast: “The child grew and he was weaned” … “the child was taken from suck.” The verse is followed in the Hexateuch by an illustration of the feast Abraham had made to celebrate the weaning (Figure 6.4), effectively giving us yet a third commemoration of the event. In the Junius 11 Genesis poem the weaning is all but glossed over, the poet saying only that Sarah and Abraham were sitting at a feast of celebration when Sarah saw Ishmael playing with Isaac (lines 2778–​83a). þa seo wyrd gewearð  þæt þæt wif geseah for abrahame  Ismael plegan ðær hie æt swæsendum  sæton bu tu, halig on hige  and heora hiwan eall druncon and drymdon.

(Then it happened that the wife saw Ismael playing before Abraham where they sat both together at a meal, holy in mind, and all their household drank and rejoiced.)

The act of weaning represents a cutting off of the mother from the child. No longer dependent on the body of the mother, the child now enters fully (socially as well as symbolically) into the phallic economy of the father. In the Genesis narrative it is one of the series of cuts through which the chosen son Isaac is united with his father Abraham as a founder of nations by the cutting away of something or someone—​the circumcision, the weaning, the cutting off through exile of Hagar and Ishmael from Abraham, Sarah and Isaac, and so forth. With each of these cuts something is discarded: the foreskin in the case of the circumcision, the mother in the case of the weaning, the rejected family in the case of Hagar and Ismael. And the one is very much a consequence of the other. As many feminist scholars have noted, God’s covenant with Abraham is the moment at which productivity is cut from the female and attached to the male.19 Sarah’s name, like Abraham’s, is changed, in her case from Sarai (my princess) to Sarah (princess), a name that is indicative of her blessed status to be sure, but one that places her in an odd relationship to husband, son, and the multiplication of peoples. Sarah is no longer Abraham’s, no longer “my” princess, she becomes a distanced other to her husband, and she has no acknowledged role in the creation of the political state, the nation that will spring from him. She is also now other to Isaac even at the moment that sees the promise of his birth, a 18  The Old English Version of the Heptateuch, 137–​38.

19  See, for example, Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 189–​90.

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state that is confirmed in the act of weaning. According to Lacan, the mother is always (m)Other and never united to the child. The breast belongs to the infant that it nourishes and is simply “stuck onto the mother.” The mother has no role in weaning the child, “he weans himself.”20 While the Anglo-​Saxons were certainly no Lacanians, the depiction of the weaning in the Hexateuch does accord well with Lacan’s analysis of weaning in general, as we shall see. Like the foreskin, the breast is a part of Isaac that is cast off. It is a veil that Sarah wears, and she is cast off with it. Sarah herself is veiled, as are most of the women depicted in the manuscript, but Sarah remains veiled by her veils in a way that the other women do not. In the depiction of Abraham sleeping with Hagar on folio 27v, for example, the veils of the bed curtain are used to contrast Sarah’s concealed and chaste body with Hagar’s more visible and accessible body at the moment of Ishmael’s conception, the moment at which one of Hagar’s veils, the veil of virginity, is torn asunder (Figure 6.1). This is again a radical departure from the illustrated cycle of the Cotton Genesis in which Sarah, Hagar, and Abraham are shown standing in a doorway, Abraham leading Hagar away by the hand on folio 23v. In the Hexateuch’s illustration of Isaac’s birth (folio 35r, Figure 6.2), Sarah remains enclosed in a separate space, visually cut off from the figure of the newborn Isaac and that of Abraham, with her halo-​like pillow helping to signify that Isaac is a child born of the promise and not of the lust of the flesh—​this is a virgin birth, procreativity springing from Abraham alone. Hagar, by contrast, shares a space with Ishmael and his midwives, turning in her bed to reach out to her child on folio 28r (Figure 6.3). Directly above the image of the birth of Isaac is the account of the circumcision and Sarah’s words of wonder at Isaac’s birth: “Who would believe that Sarah in her old age should lay a child at her breast to suck, he whom she bore to Abraham in his old age?” The arrangement of text and image draws our attention to the cutting away of Sarah, who speaks here of nursing Isaac but who in the very next sentence will be removed from her son. The breast and the weaning, like the foreskin and the circumcision, are not depicted. They too are beyond representation, cut off from our eyes in the act of cutting off the mother. The weaning’s having happened, its casting into the past, its death and burial, is commemorated in the image of the celebratory feast held by Abraham at the top of the next page (folio 35v, Figure 6.4). Directly above the miniature, in fact extending down into its border, are the words “þæt cild fram gesoce ateah” (the child was taken from suck). Sarah apparently has no role in this as the sentence is both impersonal and in the past. Isaac was weaned, was taken from suck, as opposed to the active voice of the circumcision: “⁊ on þam eahteðan dæge hyne eac ymsnað” (and on the eighth day he circumcised him). The sentence opens itself to a Lacanian reading: Isaac discarded the breast; he weaned himself. Bede says of Isaac’s weaning that his nourishment by the milk of the mother represented the reception by the faithful of the “rudiments of the faith.” Those who are not yet weaned are unable to “investigate the deepest mysteries of the divine.” At his weaning, however, Isaac moves on to the eating of bread, a Eucharistic image that 20  Jacques Lacan, Anxiety: Book 10: The Seminars of Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-​Alain Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 313, 327.

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Figure 6.1 Abraham sleeps with Hagar (London, British Library, Cotton MS Claudius B.iv, fol. 27v). © The British Library Board.

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Figure 6.2 The birth of Isaac (London, British Library, Cotton MS Claudius B.iv, fol. 35r). © The British Library Board.

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Figure 6.3 The birth of Ishmael (London, British Library, Cotton MS Claudius B.iv, fol. 28r). © The British Library Board.

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for Bede signified the progression of the faithful into true wisdom, the understanding of the mystery of the incarnation and crucifixion, and reiterates the opening of the Gospel of John, that “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”21 With this understanding Isaac now passed fully into the world of language, of text, and of the father. In the Hexateuch miniature, the figure of Abraham now separates Sarah from Isaac, the food produced by the father here replacing the nourishment provided by the milk of the mother’s body. While Bede connected the eating of bread after weaning with the progression from rudimentary understanding to full knowledge, the emphasis in the Hexateuch is on drinking rather than eating. This is a gebeorscipe, as was the feast from which Cædmon withdrew in the Old English version of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica.22 On one level this is a typological reference: the mother’s milk is replaced by the father’s wine, the blood of the son. In the Jewish tradition circumcision is associated with wine, a symbol of the blood of the paschal lamb,23 and hence for Christians a symbol of the Lamb of God. In this miniature the cup replaces the breast, the cup, the enabler of language and of Isaac’s passing into language. As a sign of this Sarah holds her cup at her breast, her other hand placed directly over her womb, while Isaac reaches up to the cup held by his father.24 In addition to the cup, there is the knife. The knife prominent on the table in front of Sarah, along with the knife held in the fingers of Abraham’s left hand, roughly mark out Sarah’s place at the table. They are signs simultaneously of the cut of circumcision and the cut that removes Sarah from text and language. The outline drawing technique used to depict Sarah enacts this second cut by distancing her from Abraham and Isaac, whose garments have been filled in with ink wash, and causing her to begin to fade into the crowd of anonymous figures behind her. In the Hexateuch and the Junius 11 Genesis, as in the Vulgate, the weaning is combined with the scene of Ishmael playing with Isaac and thus with the cutting off of Ishmael and Hagar, a topic which I have dealt with elsewhere.25 But Sarah, the veiled woman, is doubly cast aside, once through circumcision, and a second time through weaning. Not only is she cut off from Isaac, but the next we see or read of Sarah is at her death and burial, the third and final cut that divides her from Isaac and Abraham. The illustration of this scene in the Hexateuch is confined to one miniature in which Sarah appears completely veiled 21  Bede, On Genesis, trans. Calvin B. Kendall (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 317.

22  Cædmon, another chosen son separated in Bede’s text from Hild, the spiritual mother who nourished him. On Cædmon and Hild see especially Clare A.  Lees and Gillian R.  Overing, Double Agents: Women and Clerical Culture in Anglo-​Saxon England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), chap. 1. 23  David L. Gollaher, Circumcision: A History of the World’s Most Controversial Surgery (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 18, 26.

24  The corresponding miniature in the Cotton Genesis (fol. 32v) is far too damaged to make out any details of what was originally depicted.

25  Catherine E. Karkov, “Hagar and Ishmael: The Uncanny and the Exile,” in Imagining the Jew: Jewishness in Anglo-​Saxon Literature and Culture, ed. Samantha Zacher (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2016), 197–​218.

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Figure 6.4 The weaning of Isaac (London, British Library, Cotton MS Claudius B.iv, fol. 35v). © The British Library Board.

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within her shroud (Figure 6.5). The same blue-​green colour has been used for the shroud as was used for the bed-​curtains that veiled her body at the moment of the conception of Ishmael and the veiling garments in which she appears from the birth of Isaac onward. Her giving birth is balanced by her return to the womb of the earth. The seed scattered by Abraham that will give birth to nations, the blood that falls to the ground at circumcision, is followed by the burial of the now superfluous mother, the feminine excess. The text of the Hexateuch greatly abbreviates the Vulgate account of Sarah’s death and burial in Genesis 23, as well as the visual program of the Cotton Genesis in which it extends over multiple miniatures. Genesis 23:2 is almost completely omitted, the text stating only that Sarah lived for 127 years, and after that she died.26 There is no mention in the main text of the Hexateuch of where she died, nor of Abraham’s weeping or mourning for her. He is depicted mourning her on folio 41r of the Cotton Genesis. Abraham’s insistence on paying for a place in which to bury Sarah, along with the repeated insistence of his hosts that they do not want his money and are happy to give him a burial plot are also greatly abbreviated. In the Hexateuch, the sons of Heth refuse Abraham’s money, he requests that they intercede for him with Ephron, Ephron offers him the land, he buys it for forty shillings, and he buries Sarah, there, in a cave in a field, facing towards Mambre, which will one day serve as a tomb for himself as well.27 The tomb in which Sarah is the first to be laid to rest looks towards Mambre, the site at which God’s promise that Sarah would give birth was first announced, as well as the site of Sarah’s laugh. A later hand has ensured that Sarah is also buried once again beneath the text from which she will now disappear by enshrouding her in letters. Buried, like the foreskin, in the language of the father into which Isaac entered at weaning. The later Latin gloss that bears down on her within the miniature includes the final words of Genesis 22:24 (“And his concubine named Roma bore Tabee and Gaham and Tahas and Maccha”), along with a repetition of the information that the tomb was facing towards Mambre, that Sarah was 127 years old when she died (adding that she died at Hebron), and that Abraham purchased the tomb from Ephron for 400 shekels of silver. 26  The Old English Version of the Heptateuch, 143: “1. Sarra leofode hundeontig gear ⁊ seofon ⁊ twentig geara. 2. ⁊ heo syððan forðferde, ⁊ Abraham hi bestod on þa ealdan wisan” (Sarah lived for 127 years and after that she died, and Abraham performed funeral rights for her in the old manner).

27  The Old English Version of the Heptateuch, 143–​44: “3. ⁊ wolde bicgan hyre byrgene æt þam mannum, ðe he mid wunode; þæt wæron Ethes suna. 5–​6. Þa noldon he nanes wurðes onfon, ac forgeafon him ða byrgene hysge mæccean on to bebyrgenne. 7–​8. Abraham hi ða eadmodlice bæd, þæt he bædon Efrom, Soares sunu, 9. Þæt he him sealde wið feo þæt twyfealde scræf ðe he hæfde on hys lande on heora gewitnysse him sylfum to byrgelse. 10. Þa cwæð Effron, 11–​13. Þæt he him wolde lustlice þone æcer forgyfan mid þam scræfe” (3. and [Abraham] wished to buy her burial place from the people with whom he dwelt, that is the children of Heth. 5–​6 They would not accept any payment, but would give him a sepulcher in which to bury his wife. 7–​8. Abraham then humbly entreated that they ask Ephron, Seor’s son. 9. That he might give him for money before them the double cave that he had on his land for a burial place. 10. Then Ephron said. 11–​13. That he would gladly give him the land with the cave).

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Figure 6.5 The burial of Sarah (London, British Library, Cotton MS Claudius B.iv, fol. 38v). © The British Library Board.

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Like circumcision, weaning is a cut that also inscribes in its very act of erasure, in the removal of Sarah and the breast from what is written. The oral, the spoken word of the mother, Sarah’s laugh that gives name to Isaac is inscribed in the cuts of both circumcision and weaning and re-​inscribed in her own return to the womb of the earth, from which place she may look back eternally to her voice, her laugh, her moment of inscription. Her laugh echoes from beneath her veil, her shroud, her tomb, and her silence. But Sarah’s laugh also echoes through Ælfric’s text. Like circumcision and weaning, translation is an act of veiling. Derrida states that “veils of all sorts belong forevermore to the inheritors of a single tongue,”28 like ealdorman Æthelweard, who inherited this veiled and veiling text. Such people are only ever able to receive partial knowledge, even as they may struggle after larger truths. For Bede, the mother’s milk that nourished Isaac before his weaning represented the rudiments of the faith that were passed on to the faithful as they progressed toward weaning and true knowledge.29 Perhaps this is one of the reasons that Ælfric emphasized, twice with words and once in an image, that Isaac was weaned, that Isaac was taken from suck. Ælfric’s translation of Genesis into English, his mother tongue (in which the mother—​be she Hild or Osburh, King Alfred’s mother—​ is repeatedly interred), was only partial, providing, in places such as the burial of Sarah, only basic or rudimentary knowledge. The mother’s milk and the mother tongue are things that, like the foreskin, must be discarded for the paternal bread and Latin of true religious knowledge and the patriarchy of church and kingdom.

28  Cixous and Derrida, Veils, 55. 29  Note 21 above.

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Chapter 7

SAINTLY MOTHERS AND MOTHERS OF SAINTS

JOYCE HILL* WHEN AUGUSTINE AND his companions landed in Kent in 597, ready to embark on the conversion of the English, their initial contact was with the local ruler, King Æthelberht. At first he ordered them to remain on the Isle of Thanet, but not long afterwards he granted them land in Canterbury, the capital of his kingdom, and allowed them to preach the new faith. His own conversion followed soon after, and from then onwards the mission began to flourish. Although there was no coercion by the ruler, this was a process of conversion sponsored by the king’s social leadership; it was thus one of acceptance, not of confrontation—​at least as narrated by Bede, whatever might have been the reality at a more individual level. The first attempt at the conversion of Northumbria was likewise royally sponsored when Paulinus accompanied Æthelburg, daughter of Æthelberht, on her journey to Northumbria to marry King Edwin, then pagan, but baptized in 627. It is clear that, once again, the mission enjoyed royal support, as it was to do more emphatically when Oswald took power in 634 and almost immediately invited the monastery of Iona to send someone who would be able to bring his people to the faith to which he had been converted in exile. The resulting mission, led by St. Aidan, was generously supported by the king in many practical ways: by the grant of Lindisfarne as the monastic centre of the mission—​appropriately isolated in being cut off by the tides twice a day, but yet within sight and reach of the king’s power-​centre at Bamburgh; by generous alms; and, in the early stages, by the king acting as Aidan’s interpreter. We know far less about Birinus’s mission from Rome to Wessex at around the same time (ca. 634), but again the conversion of King Cynegils was evidently a key factor: King Oswald was present, stood sponsor at his baptism, and the two kings together granted Birinus the old Roman city of Dorchester-​on-​Thames as the place where he could establish his episcopal see. This simple sketch of the nature of the Anglo-​Saxon conversion as told by Bede may seem to be rather tangential to a study of saintly mothers and mothers of saints. But in fact it is centrally important, since it reminds us that the introduction of Christianity in England, eliciting as it did the support of the aristocratic elite, with resulting top-​down social support within the local hierarchy, was not a context in which martyrs were created. The early church had produced many saints through martyrdom when those committed to the new faith found themselves in conflict with the powerful and well-​established religious and social systems of imperial Rome. These martyrs, men and women, were much celebrated as Christianity spread, and they figured prominently in the liturgical *  Professor Emerita, University of Leeds. [email protected]

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calendars of all the early medieval churches, including those of Anglo-​Saxon England. But their model of sanctity, though familiar through liturgical celebrations, calendars, martyrologies, and sermons, was not one that could be the dominant touchstone for the making of saints in Anglo-​Saxon England, even in the early years, and certainly not later, when Christianity was the norm.1 The “literary canonisation”2 of Anglo-​Saxon saints—​ that is, the pattern of narrative by which the sanctity of an individual was demonstrated and confirmed—​had to follow other models and meet other criteria. Of course, holiness of life needed to be demonstrated and acclaimed, manifested through some form of dedicated commitment, asceticism, learning, wisdom, ecclesiastical leadership, or some combination of these; and there are recurrent motifs within hagiographies which served to confirm that the saint was distinguished by being in some way a person apart. But above all, what the literary canonization needed to convey, in a world not marked by the hostility characteristic of the early church, was divine approbation, supremely in the form of miracles. It is here that the mother figure has a distinctive role, for just as the divinity of Christ is revealed before his birth, so, in many of the Anglo-​Saxon saints’ lives, the indwelling of the divine is often signalled by pre-​natal signs. The Vita Wilfridi, written by Stephen of Ripon only a few years after Wilfrid’s death, exploits this motif in ­chapter 1.3 He describes how, when Wilfrid’s pious mother, exhausted from her labour, was lying within her house, surrounded by the women who were attending her, the men standing outside saw that the house appeared to be on fire, with the flames rising to the heavens. They and others coming on the scene rushed forward to put out the fire and rescue those inside, but the women attendants appeared, telling them to wait and announcing that a baby had been born. It was then that those 1  The exceptions were brought about by the Viking conflicts, in which King Edmund of East Anglia (d. 869)  and Archbishop Ælfheah (d. 1012)  were considered to be martyrs, a view that, in the case of Ælfheah, was certainly challenged by Lanfranc, until he was evidently persuaded otherwise by Anselm: see S. J. Ridyard’s discussion of this exchange, “Condigna Veneratio:  Post-​Conquest Attitudes to the Saints of the Anglo-​Saxons,” in Proceedings of the Battle Conference 1986, ed. R. Allen Brown, Anglo-​Norman Studies 9 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1987), 200–​201. The deaths of various shadowy princes, for whom there are no developed hagiographies and often precious little documentary record at all, can be discounted. Their murders in the course of royal power struggles tell us more about politics than faith: D. W. Rollason, “The Cults of Murdered Royal Saints in Anglo-​ Saxon England,” ASE 11 (1983): 1–​22. 2  The term is used by Donald A. Bullough, “The Missions to the English and the Picts and their Heritage (to c.800),” in Die Iren und Europa im früheren Mittelalter, ed. Heinz Löwe, 2  vols. (Stuttgart: Klett-​Cotta, 1982), 1:94.

3  The Life of Bishop Wilfrid by Eddius Stephanus, ed. Bertram Colgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927), 4. David Kirby has since demonstrated that the attribution of this work to Eddius Stephanus is mistaken. The author identifies himself in the preface as “Stephen the priest” and so is now referred to as Stephen of Ripon. See D. P. Kirby, “Bede, Eddius Stephanus and the ‘Life of Wilfrid’,” English Historical Review 98 (1983): 101–​14. For the dating of this work to ca. 713, soon after Wilfrid’s death, which she dates to 710, see Clare Stancliffe, “Dating Wilfrid’s Death and Stephen’s Life,” in Wilfrid: Abbot, Bishop, Saint. Papers from the 1300th Anniversary Conferences, ed. N. J. Higham (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2013), 17–​26.

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outside realized that the fire was miraculous:  just as the flames did not consume the burning bush (as recorded in Exodus 3), so this fire was not consuming the house in which the child had just been born. The message, as Stephen spells out, is that, as in the scene with Moses, this was a manifestation from God, and that the flames pointed to the coming of the Holy Spirit, which often appeared as fire because “Deus ignis est, consumens,”4 a fire that consumes sinners and enlightens the righteous. Continuing with this imagery of light, Stephen concludes the episode with the words: quod lumen non sub modio sed super candelabrum Dominus poni iussit. Et hoc per beatum pontificem nostrum omnibus paene Brittaniae eclesiis palam effulsit, sicut praesagia futurorum prodiderunt et rei eventus postmodum probavit. (Which light the Lord commanded to be set, not under a bushel, but on a candlestick. And through our blessed bishop it has shone openly upon almost all the churches of Britain, just as the portents of the future revealed and the outcome of events subsequently proved.)5

Stephen knew Wilfrid well, and modern scholars recognize that his narrative, for all its hagiographic bias, is increasingly biographical when the events being described come closer to the period of Stephen’s first-​hand knowledge. By contrast, the presentation of Wilfrid’s earlier life is more motif-​driven, with the inclusion of this miracle at the point of birth setting the scene for the whole of the literary canonization that is to come. Wilfrid is shown to be born of a devout Christian family, a point established by reference to the piety of his mother; his (and her) high social status is clearly implied through reference to the house and the attendant women; and the miracle of the flames that do not consume the house demonstrates that Wilfrid is and will be inspired by the Holy Spirit to enlighten the churches of the nation. It was a message that served Stephen’s purpose well: he was writing for the Wilfridian communities of Northumbria and Mercia in order to sustain their morale after the death of their powerful founder, and to justify Wilfrid’s rather problematic career.6 To this end, Stephen needed to establish at the outset that Wilfrid was chosen by God from—​or even before—​birth. Two quotations at the opening of the chapter make this intention very clear. The first is from the Epistle to the Romans 8:29, 30, that the Lord had foreknown, predestined, called, justified, and glorified him. The second is from Jeremiah 1:5: Priusquam te formarem in uetero, novi te; et antequam exires de vulva sanctificavi te; prophetamque in gentibus posui te.

(Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; and before you came out of the womb I sanctified you, and I ordained you as a prophet among the nations.) 4  The phrase is drawn from the Epistle to the Hebrews 12:29.

5  The allusion is to Christ’s saying in the synoptic gospels: Matthew 5:15; Mark 4:21; Luke 11:33. The translation here and elsewhere is my own.

6  Stephen’s agenda and the particular circumstances he was addressing in writing the vita are examined by Alan Thacker, “Wilfrid, his Cult and his Biogapher,” in Wilfrid: Abbot, Bishop, Saint, ed. N. J. Higham, 1–​16.

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Of course, the focus is on Wilfrid, not on his mother, who remains unnamed. She was to die while he was still young, and it was apparently in order to escape from a harsh and cruel stepmother that Wilfrid left home in at the age of fourteen to go to the royal court, where he was well connected.7 But it is the mother who becomes the agency for the confirmation of sanctity at the start of Wilfrid’s life, just as, in rather more negative terms, it is his stepmother who has agency in his move away from home at the age of fourteen when, according to the Isidorean schema, he had left boyhood (pueritia) behind him and had entered upon adolescentia.8 Felix’s Vita Guthlaci uses a similar motif, although in this case Guthlac’s mother is named as Tette and is explicitly stated as being of suitable social status to marry Guthlac’s father, Penwalh, a man described as being rich in possessions and of such distinguished Mercian stock that it is claimed he could trace his lineage through the line of kings to Icel, the founder of the kingdom.9 In this account the miraculous portent is again associated with the moment of labour and is also seen by those already standing near and others who run to witness it. But its form varies from that of Wilfrid’s vita in that a human hand, shining with red-​gold splendour, is seen to reach down from the heavens as far as a cross which stands in front of the house where Guthlac’s holy mother is giving birth. The hand marks the door of the house, withdraws to the heavens, and disappears, leaving the onlookers to wonder in amazement. At this point, a woman appears from the house and announces the birth of a boy destined for future glory. Some onlookers interpret this as glory in secular terms, but wiser heads recognize it for what it is: a sign of divine approbation, presaging the child’s future enjoyment of everlasting bliss. The miracle made such an impact that, according to Felix, news of it had spread almost to the farthest corners of the kingdom of the Middle Angles before the end of the day. Guthlac was baptized eight days later and, following the stereotypical patterns of hagiography, lived a preternaturally good childhood, ever obedient to his parents, before embarking at first on the life of a warrior, and then choosing the solitary life of an ascetic in the fastness of the fens. We hear no more about Tette. But we can see in this motif, so similar in its overall shape to that in the Vita Wilfridi, how the piety of the saint’s mother begins to build the religious credentials of her son, here reinforced by the detail of the cross outside the house; how references to the mother’s circumstances contribute to the sense of the saint’s social standing; and how, as she gives birth, the future spiritual glory of Guthlac is foretold. Felix does not use biblical quotations, unlike Stephen, but the message is the same: Guthlac is chosen of God even in the womb. Later in the period, Wulfstan of Winchester uses the motif of pre-​natal signs to establish the divine approbation of Æthelwold and the extent of his influence as an episcopal 7  The Life of Bishop Wilfrid, 6.

8  On Isidore’s schema (Etymologiae, bk. 11, chap. 2) and how it shapes the hagiographies of Anglo-​ Saxon England, particularly in relation to the male saints, see Joyce Hill, “Childhood in the Lives of Anglo-​Saxon Saints,” in Childhood and Adolescence in Anglo-​Saxon Literary Culture, ed. Susan Irvine and Winfried Rudolf (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 139–​61. 9  Felix’s Life of Saint Guthlac, ed. Bertram Colgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 72–​76.

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leader and founder of monasteries. As Lapidge and Winterbottom have pointed out, the promotion of Æthelwold’s cult, following his death in 984, was a personal achievement of Wulfstan, quite possibly in fulfilment of a promise made to his abbot and bishop during his lifetime.10 The liturgical celebration of his memory was something that Wulfstan, as precentor, was well placed to develop, and the creation of a suitable vita to confirm his sanctity is likely to have been timed to coincide with the translation of Æthelwold’s body in 996.11 The most elaborate of the pre-​natal episodes is the sequence of dreams experienced by Æthelwold’s noble and pious mother when pregnant.12 In the first of her dreams, she sees herself sitting outside her house in Winchester, with a banner before her, whose top seems to touch heaven. It lowers itself to the ground, veils her in its fringes, and then, after returning to it former position, withdraws to the sky. The pregnant woman awakes, but immediately falls asleep again and sees what looks like an eagle of gold leap from her mouth and fly away. It is so wondrously large that its gilded wings shade all the buildings in the city. Then it rises high in the air and disappears. Æthelwold’s mother seeks the advice of a certain Æthelthryth, a woman of mature years who, it is implied by Wulfstan, was abbess of Nunnaminster—​although there are problems with this identification.13 Wulfstan then provides a detailed account of the accepted interpretation: that the banner showed that Æthelwold was to be a standard-​bearer in the army of God; and that the eagle testified to Æthelwold’s sharp-​eyed acumen, his constant contemplation of the heavenly, and his fatherly protection of the church, all of which, as Wulfstan indicates, was to be fulfilled by Æthelwold’s life, as the narrative goes on to show. There then follows a chapter which tells of how Æthelwold’s mother felt the soul of her unborn son enter her womb when, on one occasion, she was standing in a crowd in the church waiting to take part in the celebration of the mass.14 This is taken to indicate that Æthelwold was one of God’s elect, even before his birth. The author’s purpose, supported by an echo of biblical phraseology,15 is a commonplace of hagiography, but the detail of the quickening seems to have been told to Wulfstan by Æthelwold in order to provide him with materials for use in an eventual vita. As Lapidge and Winterbottom note, “the subject is a matter of some intimacy, not of public boasting,”16 and it points to a family tradition handed down by the mother. 10  Wulfstan of Winchester: The Life of St Æthelwold, ed. Michael Lapidge and Michael Winterbottom (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1991), xcix–​ci. 11  Wulfstan of Winchester, xv–​xvi. 12  Wulfstan of Winchester, 4–​6.

13  Wulfstan of Winchester, 4–​5n3. 14  Wulfstan of Winchester, 6–​8.

15  The editors point out that “Deo electum” (elect of [by] God) is a common biblical expression, found in Jeremiah 1:5, Luke 23:35, Colossians 3:12, and I Peter 2:4. Given the narrative context provided by the motif, it is probable that Wulfstan had in mind the passage in Jeremiah 1:5, which underlies these recurrent demonstrations in hagiographies of divine approbation when the child is still in the womb. 16  Wulfstan of Winchester, c–​ci.

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It is telling that Ælfric sees the need to retain both of these episodes even though his Vita Æthelwoldi considerably abbreviates Wulfstan’s text overall:17 he clearly saw it as important to show divine approbation through the agency of the mother, through whom, even in his shortened account, high social standing and a context of piety and good works are also confirmed as the saint’s family background. But in Ælfric’s account there is yet another miracle when, on an unspecified feast day, the mother is at home, with the baby on her lap, having been prevented from going to church by a great storm of rain.18 She weeps because she cannot fulfil her pious vows, and she prays to God for mercy, whereupon, without experiencing any of the discomfort of the storm, she finds herself in church, with the baby still on her lap, and with the priest celebrating the mass. Ælfric, making no comment, leaves us to appreciate the significance of this as another instance of divine approbation. But in Wulfstan’s fuller account19 the meaning is explained: just as the prophet (Habbakuk) was miraculously caught up and carried to provide food in Chaldea (i.e. to feed Daniel in the lions’ den), so, in due time, Æthelwold would feed thousands in the faith of the church. In this account, however, the female figure is not the mother (mater), as in Ælfric, but the nurse (nutrix). Ælfric’s simplification in his shortened version, in not introducing another female figure, reinforces the sense of close familial piety into which Æthelwold was born and in which he was nurtured, before leaving home in adolescence to serve at court. Important though these episodes clearly were in the vitae by Wulfstan and Ælfric, they do not figure in the liturgical materials that were drawn up to celebrate Æthelwold’s cult.20 The reverse is true for his contemporary Dunstan. In his case the pre-​natal miracle experienced by his mother is found not in the Vita Dunstani, written by “B” in the late 990s,21 but in the Lections for the Deposition of St Dunstan, written by Adelard of Ghent at some point between 1006 and 1012 with the express purpose of promoting Dunstan’s cult.22 The commission seems to have come from Ælfheah, archbishop of Canterbury, and it was probably Ælfheah himself, drawing upon Canterbury tradition, who provided Adelard with material to supplement the vita by “B,” which served as Adelard’s main source. The first lection is one such supplementation.23 Adelard establishes the holiness of Dunstan’s parents by stating that, when they died, the saint was rewarded by seeing them among the choirs of angels, and he then describes a scene involving Dunstan’s mother, which occurred on the Feast of the Presentation (February 2), while she was 17  Wulfstan of Winchester, 71–​72. 18  Wulfstan of Winchester, 72. 19  Wulfstan of Winchester, 8.

20  For these, see Wulfstan of Winchester, cxii–​cxliii.

21  The Early Lives of St Dunstan, ed. Michael Winterbottom and Michael Lapidge (Oxford: Claren­ don Press, 2012), 1–​109. This is the earliest of the lives of Dunstan and was written by someone who knew him from before he became Archbishop of Canterbury. However, he identifies himself in the manuscript only by the letter “B,” presumably the first letter of his name. 22  The Early Lives of St Dunstan, 111–​45. For the circumstances of production, see cxxv–​cxxvii. 23  The Early Lives of St Dunstan, 114.

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pregnant. She was standing with other Christian folk in the church, each one holding tapers and lamps, as is customary for this feast, when suddenly, at God’s command, all the lights were extinguished. This extraordinary event, seen as miraculous, shocked the congregation. But then a second miracle occurred, through which God conveyed the particular meaning, for Dunstan’s mother’s taper alone blazed up as before, and from this all of the other lights were able to be relit, thus flooding the church with radiant splendour. As Adelard explains, God prefigured by this means that a son was to be born to her, who had already been elected by God in the womb, and who would become a minister of eternal light. There is an allusion here to the words of Jeremiah, quoted by Stephen of Ripon in an analogous episode, as noted above,24 while the imagery of light that will be brought into the world by the newborn, also commonly found in these pre-​natal scenes, echoes the words of Simeon when he received the Christ-​child in the Temple. The liturgy of the day, known more commonly as the Purificatio Sanctae Mariae, has the Presentation in the Temple as its primary lection, with the words of Simeon, “lumen ad revelationem gentium et gloriam plebis tuae Israhel” (a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of your people Israel, Luke 2:32), being given life in one of the most dramatic instances that the liturgy offered of participatory celebration by the people: a church in the darkness of winter being exceptionally filled with light as everyone present held aloft their tapers and candles, and took them to the altar, still lit, as an offering. The miracle described by Adelard will thus have had great imaginative appeal for anyone hearing it.25 In the context of the early eleventh century, when the Benedictine reform had lost some of its momentum, its inclusion here, as an episode supplementing what was provided by “B,” serves to strengthen the sense that Dunstan was chosen by God and thus, by implication, that the Reform had been God’s work. All that “B” offers, by contrast, are the names of Dunstan’s parents, Heorstan and Cynethryth, indications of their status within the secular world, passing comment on their standing as devout believers, and their encouragement and support in giving Dunstan the freedom to study and in prompting him to become a monk.26 But twenty or so years later, when something more polemical was required in the context of the promotion of his cult, Adelard exploited the established motif of the miracle experienced by the saint’s mother to demonstrate divine approbation at the outset. The lives of Anglo-​Saxon female saints have a different paradigm, foregrounding virginity and the monastic life. Since, however, the women saints of Anglo-​Saxon England 24  See above, 133 and also note 15.

25  It was the striking effect of this annual liturgical celebration that gave the Purificatio Sanctae Mariae its popular vernacular name of Candlemas (Old English Candelmæsse, Candelmæssedæg). See further, Joyce Hill, “Naming the Liturgical Year: Reflections on Vernacular Practice,” in Phases of the History of English: Selection of Papers Read at SHELL 2012, ed. Michio Hosaka, Michiko Ogura, Hinori Suzuki, and Akinobu Tani (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2013), 25–​45.

26  The Early Lives of St Dunstan, 10–​16. On the possible exaggeration of the social status of Dunstan’s family, the better to fit him into a particular hagiographic paradigm, see Nicholas Brooks, “The Career of St Dunstan,” in St Dunstan, His Life, Times and Cult, ed. Nigel Ramsay, Margaret Sparks, and Tim Tatton-​Brown (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1992), 1–​23 at 5–​7.

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are, like the men, of high social status, there are counter-​cultural norms to be established within the narrative, since the social role of such women was above all to marry and produce heirs, a norm that stands in opposition to St Paul’s statement in 1 Corinthians 7 that virginity is to be preferred above marriage, and that it is preferable for widows to live out their lives in chastity. As Stephanie Hollis has pointed out, this was clearly a personal statement on his part,27 but the descending hierarchy of virginity, chaste widowhood and marriage shaped Christian thinking for centuries. Its impact is clearly to be seen in the lives of the Anglo-​Saxon women saints, and resulted in Goscelin of St. Bertin, writing on the saints of Ely in the second half of the eleventh century, having to exercise a good deal of rhetorical finesse in order to assert the devotion to virginity of female saints who were mothers. The purity of Seaxburh,28 daughter of King Anna of the East Angles, is firmly indicated when Goscelin tells us that her parents, for all their high status, kept her hidden out of reverence for her chaste modesty, while the young girl herself, setting the standards by which she would live in the world in later life, was humble in spirit and paid little attention to wealth and status. Even so, acceding to the social norms, rather than to her personal preference for the monastic life, she duly married and bore children. As wife and mother she lived a life that was virtuous in every way, using her power, with her husband, to complete the conversion of the kingdom, and influencing her children to live like her—​a life that was in the world, but in so many ways not of it, as Goscelin makes clear. When her husband Eorcenberht died she at first ruled alone as queen, but then, when her son was able to assume responsibility, she entered the monastery of Ely as a chaste widow, where she became the abbess. The withdrawal from the world is thus seen to be a natural step, given her distinctive relationship with the world as described up to that point. The narrative patterns for Eormenhild, Seaxburh’s saintly daughter, and for Wærburh, her saintly granddaughter, are similar. For Eormenhild,29 Goscelin acknowledges this at the outset, devoting the whole of his first chapter to comparisons with Seaxburh, stressing her devotion to Christ amid the wealth and power of the earthly kingdom to which she belonged, her similarity to her mother in outward appearance as well as inner virtue, her taking after her father for honour and her mother for modesty, and the emulation of her mother in dutifulness, compassion, kindness to all, love for Christ, and desire for the things of heaven. These qualities are further described in ­chapter 2, which, however, in accordance with the accepted social requirements, sees her make a dynastic marriage to Wulfhere, king of the Mercians, which brings about the union of the two kingdoms. Again following the example of her mother, she, along with her husband, furthers the conversion of her kingdom, and she bears a daughter, Wærburh. Throughout all of this, however, Goscelin stresses her inner detachment from 27  Stephanie Hollis, Anglo-​Saxon Women and the Church: Sharing a Common Fate (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1992), 107–​8. 28  Goscelin of Saint-​Bertin: The Hagiography of the Female Saints of Ely, ed. Rosalind C. Love (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 1–​9 for the Lectiones in Festivitate Sancte Sexburge. 29  Goscelin of Saint-​Bertin, 11–​23 for the Lectiones in Natale Sancte Eormenhilde.

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the world and her desire to live a life dedicated to God, so that, when Wulfhere’s death comes, it is seen to be a release from the ties of the world and an entry into the liberty of life as a chaste widow in the monastery of Ely, where her daughter Wærburh was already settled, and where her mother Seaxburh was already abbess. As Goselin stresses, the freedom she found in the death of her husband was not so much release from him (with whom, as the narrative makes clear, she had worked harmoniously in a true marriage union), but a freedom to serve God more fully. He draws out the same themes for Wærburh,30 although here without the complication of marriage and childbirth since she moves directly to the monastic life, much encouraged and guided by her mother. In preparation for this, Goscelin goes to great lengths to stress her detachment from the allure of power and wealth at the royal court. There are hints in these hagiographies that mothers had a special role in fostering the religious life of their daughters, whose sanctity in turn enhances that of the mother: Seaxburh is a model for Eormenhild (even though she recognizes the place of honour in her life, a secular virtue that she learns from her father), and Wærburh is likewise closely guided by her mother. Other instances of the special role of the mother are to be found in the vitae of Eadburh and Eadgyth (Edith) respectively. Eadburh, at the age of three, is presented on the one hand with the richest royal finery, representing the secular world, and on the other with representations of the religious world in the form of a nun’s veil, a patten and a psalter.31 Unhesitatingly, she chooses the religious group, foreshadowing her later dedication to the monastic life. But in what may be a revealing social detail, it is her father who prepares the secular group, and her mother the religious items. The same motif is found in Goscelin’s Vita Edithe. Eadgyth, born to King Edgar’s concubine Wulfthryth32—​who, despite this, is herself recognized as a saint by virtue of her subsequent life—​is taken by her mother to the nunnery of Wilton as a small infant. There, at the age of two, she is visited by her father, the king, who places before her objects associated with the dignity of royalty and the finery of ladies of high status: golden coronets, cloaks woven with gold, jewelled robes, bracelets, rings, necklaces, and various other resplendent objects. At the same time her mother lays out a nun’s black veil, a chalice, a patten, and a psalter.33 Goscelin has embellished the scene here: on the one hand he particularizes the secular objects in a long list, conjuring up an array of the most attractive of adornments shining with gold and jewels, while on the other hand the religious objects are few in number, with no evocative adjectives, apart from the black of the nun’s veil. It emphasizes the extent of Eadgyth’s renunciation when, true to the motif, she chooses the religious group. But, stereotypical though the scene is, the division of responsibility between the two parents, as with Eadburh, is likely to have 30  Goscelin of Saint-​Bertin, 25–​51 for the Vita Sancte Werburge Virginis.

31  Susan J. Ridyard, The Royal Saints of Anglo-​Saxon England: A Study of West Saxon and East Anglian Cults (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 265.

32  On the problems of Wulfthryth’s status, see Ridyard, The Royal Saints of Anglo-​Saxon England, 42–​43.

33  A. Wilmart, “La Légende de Ste Édith en prose et vers par le moine Goscelin,” Analecta Bollandiana 56 (1938), 44–​45.

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some relationship to social reality in the upper echelons of society, since it would not otherwise function effectively as a powerful motif. Quite how much saints’ lives tell us about the circumstances of contemporary daily life is of course a vexed question. But if they are to make their impact, they certainly have to resonate with the social expectation of the world for which they were created, and the clear indication is that by the time Goscelin was writing in the second half of the eleventh century, there was a firm expectation that it was the mother who fostered the religious development of her daughters. It is notable, however, that this maternal role is not present in the lives of male Anglo-Saxon saints. There, as we have seen, the mothers have agency in the initial sequence of saintly confirmation. But beyond that, the saints follow their own course, of asceticism (as in the case of Guthlac), or of formal study for entry to the church (as in the case of Wilfrid and later episcopal figures). Yet there is a hint, even in these contexts, of the potential influence of the mother, which would have been important in the early years of the saints’ upbringing, for she is generally shown to have been devout and to have been rewarded in receiving divine approbation through the miracles and visions associated with her. In addition, of course, hagiographers clearly present the mother as being able to provide, along with her husband, the social capital that the male saint would often go on to use in his religious career. In these narratives there is no tension between the social and the religious: women quickly fade into the background as members of secular society. But for Goscelin, confronted with narratives where the demands of the secular and the religious were at odds, careful rhetoric was required to present saints who had, for the most part, also met their high-status secular obligations as mothers: despite the force of society’s secular demands—which certainly comes across in these narratives—the overriding requirement for the hagiographer was to conform as far as possible to the requirements of a genre where a life of virginity ranked higher than that of marriage and motherhood. Hagiographers, as Ridyard has noted, are “concerned […] with the interpretation of sanctity.”34 In this, as we have seen, saintly mothers and mothers of saints have a clear role to play. The interpretation of the role of women in the literature that has come to us from Anglo-​Saxon England has been one of Helen’s enduring interests. Although the present subject, in its ecclesiastical orientation, deals with a different range of texts from those that have been her central focus, the essay is offered here in recognition of that interest and in appreciation of all that she has brought to the study of Anglo-​Saxon literature.

34  Ridyard, The Royal Saints of Anglo-​Saxon England, 14.

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Chapter 8

PLAYING WITH MEMORIES: EMMA OF NORMANDY, CNUT, AND THE SPECTACLE OF ÆLFHEAH’S CORPUS

COLLEEN DUNN* ENGLAND WITNESSED ITS fair share of atrocities during the Second Viking Age, notably including both the mass slaughter of Danish settlers during the St. Brice’s Day Massacre of 1002 and the 1014 mutilation of Anglo-​Saxon hostages on the beaches of Sandwich by Cnut and his men. The milieu created by this extended period of invasion was one defined by betrayal, broken promises, and brutality. It is within this context that one of the most notorious atrocities of the entire Anglo-​Saxon period can be found: the murder of Ælfheah, archbishop of Canterbury, in 1012. In recording these events, various texts of the Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle describe how the Danish army had captured Ælfheah in September of 1011 through the betrayal of Ælmær, an Anglo-​Saxon who had once been saved by the archbishop. The Danes then brought the leader of the Anglo-​Saxon church as a prisoner to Greenwich in southeast London. Angered by his unremitting refusal to ask for any ransom on his behalf,1 they quickly became drunk and on Sunday of the Easter Octave (19 April), “bysmorlice acwylmdon, oftorfedon mid banum ond mid hryþera heafdum” (shamefully murdered [him], [and] stoned him with bones and heads of cattle).2 The gruesome scene continued until a certain Dane finally took pity upon him, dispatching the archbishop with a single axe blow to the skull.3 Rather than effectively “hiding the evidence,” which is perhaps what should have been expected, since Ælfheah could have easily served as the symbol of defiance around which Anglo-​Saxons might rally, his body was transferred into London the very next day for a proper burial at St. Paul’s Cathedral, which is where it would remain for the next eleven years. It is not until 1023 that the narrative of this murdered archbishop picks up again, when his story takes an unexpected turn. At this point, the Danish Cnut had been on the Anglo-​Saxon throne for seven years and was now married to Emma, the Norman widow *  Independent Scholar. [email protected]

1  Alexander Rumble discusses the possibility that Ælfheah’s early success in negotiating a treaty between the Vikings and Anglo-​Saxons in 994 caused the archbishop to become overconfident when he was captured in 1011. Alexander R. Rumble, “From Winchester to Canterbury: Ælfheah and Stigand—​Bishops, Archbishops, and Victims,” in Leaders of the Anglo-​Saxon Church: From Bede to Stigand, ed. Alexander R. Rumble (Rochester, NY: Boydell, 2012), 165–​82 at 167–​71. 2  The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, vol. 5: MS C, ed. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), 97. All translations are my own, except for those from the Encomium Emmae Reginae and the Translatio Sancti Ælfegi.

3  The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle: MS C, 97; The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, vol. 6: MS D, ed. G. P. Cubbin (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996), 57; and The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, vol. 7: MS E, ed. Susan Irvine (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), 69.

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of the Anglo-​Saxon king whom he had defeated. The memory of his compatriots’ brutal murder of the recently sainted Ælfheah would certainly still have been fresh in peoples’ minds; nonetheless, it was in this year that Cnut, Emma, and their son, Harthacanute, led a great procession translating the saint’s body from St. Paul’s in London to Christ Church Cathedral in Canterbury. Although this event served as the victorious return of the archbishop to his original see, it is still reasonable to expect that this move would have angered a number of Anglo-​Saxons, since it was being led by the same person who had been in charge of those responsible for the archbishop’s death. Defying expectations, this affair was from all accounts well received by most of the native populace. The exception was, not surprisingly, the Londoners; not only were they now losing the relics of their revered archbishop, many of them had also been present in the city during the time of his murder, and would have had vivid memories of the Danes attacking their city. While at first glance the motivation for this move should be clear—​in essence, it served as a mea culpa through which Cnut and, by extension, his wife (neither of whom were native Anglo-​Saxons) hoped to appease the people now under their rule—​this cannot be the entire story. Not only was the motivation far more complex, so, too, were the circumstances that allowed for this move to be lauded in the first place. The precise timing and nature of this public spectacle were carefully chosen both to cement Emma’s role as the queen of and for the Anglo-​Saxons, and to publicize the fact that Harthacanute was the intended heir. Emma’s public identity as an Anglo-​Saxon queen was not, as it might reasonably be assumed, a foregone conclusion. Much of her early reign was spent struggling to secure herself a place in the Anglo-​Saxon court. Born in Normandy, her marriage in 1002 to Æthelræd Unræd made for “the first foreign marriage [of Anglo-​Saxon royalty] in seventy years or more, and the arrival of the first foreign queen in a century and a half.”4 In an era of native Anglo-​Saxon queens, Emma arrived with the identity of “other.” Compounding this issue was the fact that her marriage failed to achieve its original goal. As with the majority of royal marriages in the eleventh century, this one was meant to secure a political alliance. Many of the Vikings who had been involved in the attacks that had begun in 991 turned to Normandy for safe harbour and for markets in which to sell their newly acquired loot. Anglo-​Saxon hopes that the marriage of Emma and Æthelræd would end Norman aid were soon proved false. Emma’s initial place as an outsider among the Anglo-​Saxons would have been even more pronounced by two additional ties that she shared with these invaders. Firstly, she was the daughter of Gunnor, a Dane, and it is entirely possible that when she arrived in England, she was able to speak Danish, but not Old English.5 Secondly, her reeve, Hugh, was blamed for the Danish sacking of Exeter in 1003.6 4  Pauline Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith: Queenship and Women’s Power in Eleventh-​ Century England (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 217. 5  Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith, 214.

6  Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith, 220–​24.

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Emma’s need to legitimate her place in the Anglo-​Saxon court was further complicated by issues of succession. Although the births of her sons helped to secure her role as a queen, she was not the first wife of Æthelræd. His first marriage to Ælfgifu of York, an Anglo-​Saxon noblewomen, resulted in many sons, including Edmund Ironside and Eadwig Ætheling—​both of whom had strong claims as heirs to the throne. Emma, however, understood the power of names. “She [Emma] was given the name Ælfgifu, a saintly ancestress, and one who lay beside Edward the Martyr at Shaftesbury. And her first son was named Edward, after the son of Alfred, victor against Danish settlers, and after his great-​grandson, the martyr king.”7 In this same vein, her second son was named Alfred. As shall be shown with her third son, Harthacanute, Emma regularly used naming as a political tool, and consistently named her sons for the types of leaders England needed and wanted at the time of their births. The queen’s early efforts to distance herself from her Norman and Danish origins inform the events of 1023, as will be shown. Seven years into Emma’s reign, another major event leading up to the translation of Ælfheah took place; in 1009, a certain band of Vikings—​called “Ðurkilles here” (Thurkill’s army)8—​arrived in Sandwich and began raiding Anglo-​Saxon settlements. Part of the highly trained and highly feared Jómsvíkings, Thurkill and his men could regularly be found at the centre of the Danish battles against the Anglo-​Saxons. Of the five central leaders of the famed Jómsvíkings, Thurkill alone “is not mentioned by the sources connected with the tradition of the Danish court.”9 Unlike his fellow leaders, Thurkill chose to leave Denmark, instead making his fortune (and his legacy) in England. Swein and Cnut capitalized on the strength and eagerness of Thurkill’s forces, and his band of warriors continued their onslaught until 1012, when he suddenly switched sides, and began fighting for the Anglo-​Saxon king, Æthelræd Unræd. Thurkill’s initial duplicity proved prosperous for himself and his men, as is evidenced by Æthelræd’s payment of 21,000 pounds to Thurkill’s army in 1014, following the death of Cnut’s father, Swein Forkbeard.10 As should be expected, however, there is yet another layer to Thurkill’s fluctuating loyalties. It seems to be no coincidence that in 1012—​the same year that Ælfheah was martyred—​he found himself leaving Swein’s force. Thurkill most likely witnessed this grisly murder, as it was his own men who were responsible.11 Writing about the murder at Greenwich, Thietmar of Merseburg describes how Thurkill was horrified by the 7  Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith, 220. 8  The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle: MS C, 93.

9  Jakub Morawiec, Vikings Among the Slavs: Jomsborg and the Jomsvikings in Old Norse Tradition, Studia Medievalia Septentrionalia 17 (Vienna: Fassbaender, 2009), 103.

10  Eric John, “The Encomium Emmae Reginae: A Riddle and a Solution,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 63 (1980): 58–​94 at 72.

11  While the Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle does not name the specific Danes involved in the murder, it is clear from the other narratives about Ælfheah’s death—​particularly Thietmar of Merseburg’s—​ that Thurkill’s involvement was commonly accepted. Further, the entry for 1013 in the C-​text of the Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle clearly states that Thurkill’s men were at Greenwich. The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle: MS C, 97–​98.

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actions of his men, and tried in vain to stop them, offering them everything he owned, save his ship, yet it was not enough to stop the fervour aroused by their drunkenness. Ultimately, Thietmar claims, it was this event that led to his renunciation of the Danish cause.12 Thietmar was writing between 1012 and 1018 in Saxony, making his account the most contemporary to the time of the actual events. Further, if it was in this moment that Thurkill defected, it would explain the events of the following morning. There is some confusion about how the body even reached St. Paul’s; both the C-​and D-​texts of the Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle vaguely state that “mon þone lichaman on mergen ferode to Lundene, ond þa bisceopas Eadnoþ ond Ælfhun ond seo buruhwaru hine underfengon” (in the morning, one brought the body to London, and the Bishops Eadnoth and Ælfhun, and the people of the city received him),13 with no explanation of who was bringing the body, nor how they could peaceably confiscate it from a drunken, angry, and highly trained force. The E-​text deviates slightly from this, saying that Eadnoth, Ælfhun, and the Londoners received the body and brought it to London,14 yet this still does not explain how they could have retrieved the body without a fight.15 The ambiguous silence here may very well be the chroniclers’ own biases against Thurkill. As Eric John points out, “the Chronicle is hostile to Thorkell and his Danes even when they were in Æthelred’s service.”16 Nevertheless, Thurkill’s change of heart would certainly help to fill in the gaps.17 As with most events, the reality could well be somewhere between the two theories—​Thurkill might have recognized the advantages of working with the Anglo-​Saxons much earlier, and the murder of Ælfheah served as the final nudge pushing him to change sides. Just as Thurkill is at the centre of the events in 1012, so, too, is he at the centre of what transpired in 1023. Those eleven years of his career are critical to understanding the culminating event of Ælfheah’s translation. By all accounts, Thurkill served Æthelræd faithfully for a couple of years, even helping him to defend London against Swein’s attacks 12  Thietmar of Merseburg, Thietmar von Merseburg. Chronik, 8th ed., trans. Werner Trillmich, Ausgewählte Quellen zur Deutschen Geschichte des Mittelalters 9 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1957; repr. 2002), 400; John, “The Encomium Emmae Reginae,” 69; and Encomium Emmae Reginae, ed. and trans. Alistair Campbell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1949; repr. 1998), 74. 13  The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle: MS C, 97. The D-​text follows this verbatim, with slight variations in spelling. The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle: MS D, 57. 14  The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle: MS E, 69.

15  A late eleventh-​century translatio about Ælfheah expresses a similar ambiguity about the order of events at this point: “Cuius uenerabile corpus siue gratia seu precio a fideli populo receptum” (His venerable body, having been obtained by faithful people either freely or for a price). “Translatio Sancti Ælfegi Cantuariensis archiepiscopi et martyris” (BHL 2519), ed. and trans. Alexander R. Rumble and Rosemary Morris, cited in The Reign of Cnut: King of England, Denmark and Norway, ed. Alexander R. Rumble (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1994), 283–​315 at 294. 16  John, “The Encomium Emmae Reginae,” 72–​73.

17  It is possible that Thurkill is the one who allowed the Anglo-​Saxons to retrieve the saint’s body safely.

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in 1013.18 Nonetheless, as was typical for this time, Thurkill’s loyalty was short-​lived. It appears that when Cnut returned to England in 1015, Thurkill returned to his original position, siding with the Danes. There is some conjecture on this, since Thurkill’s exact movements disappear from almost all records for 1015 and 1016. The only surviving source to speak about his actions during this time is the Encomium Emmae Reginae. Writing 1041–​104219 in support of Emma—​who, by the time of its composition, was the widow of both Æthelræd and Cnut—​the author claims that Thurkill’s loyalties shifted following Swein’s death in 1014, yet he feared that Cnut would not accept him, and thus remained silent until leading the Danes to a decisive victory at the battle of Sherston.20 Despite the silence of the sources, the events that followed Cnut’s ascension to the English throne in 1016 would make very little sense if Thurkill had indeed remained loyal to the Anglo-​Saxons until Æthelræd’s death in 1016.21 What particularly informs this reconstructed timeline is the fact that by 1017, Cnut had made Thurkill one of the four original earls when he split the kingdom into more manageable sections. It would be difficult to imagine, as Eric John rightly argues,22 that Cnut would have made this decision had Thurkill not proven himself loyal for the last few years. As Thurkill’s fortunes rose once more, Emma’s—​at least at first—​seemed to fall. During the final years of the Danish invasions, Emma saw her own position change, as she, along with her husband and sons, fled to Normandy for their safety. Nevertheless, Swein’s death in 1014 allowed the Anglo-​Saxon royal family to return within a year. This triumph was short lived. By the end of 1016, her husband and stepsons were dead, her own sons were once again in Normandy, and she was probably a prisoner of Cnut’s in London.23 Cnut’s awareness of the advantage to be gained through marriage turned Emma from prisoner to prospective wife. Once more, Emma found herself the second wife of a man who already had a son. Like Æthelræd, Cnut had previously married an Anglo-​Saxon noblewoman, Ælfgifu of Northampton, and had a son, Harold Harefoot, by 18  Encomium, 74; The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle: MS C, 70; The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle: MS D, 58; and The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle: MS E, 70.

19  Simon Keynes, “Encomium Emmae Reginae,” in The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-​Saxon England, ed. Michael Lapidge, John Blair, Simon Keynes, and Donald Scragg (Malden: Blackwell, 2001), 169–​70 at 169. 20  Encomium, 21. As Eric John points out, however, this battle did not occur until after Æthelræd’s death; nonetheless, it is still probable that by 1015 Thurkill had once again switched sides. John, “The Encomium Emmae Reginae,” 74.

21  It is possible that Thurkill’s army made up part of the forty ships that Eadric Streona, an infamous Anglo-​Saxon traitor, offered in service to Cnut in 1015. The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle: MS C, 100; The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle: MS D, 60; The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle: MS E, 72; and Simon Keynes, “Cnut’s Earls,” in The Reign of Cnut: King of England, Denmark and Norway, ed. Alexander R. Rumble (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1994), 43–​88 at 55.

22  John suggests the possibility that Thurkill had switched back to the Danish side in 1015, and proved his loyalty during the last two years of Cnut’s campaign. John, “The Encomium Emmae Reginae,” 73. 23  Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith, 226.

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her. In this case, however, the first wife was still alive, and Emma would spend much of her second reign discrediting the woman she called a concubine.24 Whereas Emma went to great lengths to distance herself from her Danish background during her first marriage, in her second marriage, she proudly owned this lineage. The Encomium Emmae Reginae explains that Cnut partially chose Emma for his bride: “pro hoc præcipue quod erat oriunda ex uictrici gente, quæ sibi partem Galliæ uendicauerat inuitis Francigenis et eorum príncipe” (especially because she derived her origin from a victorious people, who had appropriated for themselves part of Gaul, in despite of the French and their prince).25 Once more, Emma ensured that her son would have a kingly name. Unlike her first sons, who had been named for Anglo-​Saxon kings who had defeated the Vikings, her youngest son would be named after her husband Cnut, who had quickly become popular with the Anglo-​Saxons. “Uocatur siquidem Hardocnuto, nomen patris referens cum additamento, cuius si ethimologia Theutonice perquiratur, profecto quis quantusue fuerit dinoscitur” (For indeed he was called Hörthaknútr, which reproduced his father’s name with an addition, and if the etymology of this is investigated in Germanic, one truly discerns his identity and greatness).26 As Emma worked for a second time to secure places for both herself and her son, Thurkill, now earl of East Anglia, also appears to have been securing his own place. He regained favour partly due to his own mea culpa: when Bury was refounded in 1020, Thurkill was one of the main benefactors.27 As the new earl of East Anglia, it would make sense for Thurkill to support one of the area’s major ecclesiastical sites. Moreover, Bury also housed the relics of St. Edmund, an East Anglian king who had been martyred by the Vikings in 869. His act of apology and reconciliation seems to have been a carefully crafted one, and one that—​for a time—​proved successful. Between 1018 and 1021, Thurkill served as Cnut’s most favoured of the four earls, as is evidenced by the fact that he not only attested to all the surviving charters issued by Cnut during this period,28 but also that he was listed first among all the earls on these charters.29 More to the point, when Cnut visited Denmark in 1019–​1020, it was Thurkill whom he left in charge of England during his absence. In his letter to the people of England, Cnut very clearly stipulated that: Gif hwa swa dyrstig sy, gehadod oððe læwede, Denisc oððe Englisc, þæt ongean Godes lage ga and ongean mine cynescype oððe ongean woroldriht, and nelle betan and

24  The author claims that Harold was in fact the son of a servant, who was secretly taken by Ælfgifu, who was one of Cnut’s concubines. Encomium, 40–​41. 25  Encomium, 32–​33. 26  Encomium, 34–​35.

27  Nicole Marafioti, The King’s Body: Burial and Succession in Late Anglo-​ Saxon England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 223. 28  Seven charters survive from 1018–​1019, while none survive from 1020–​1021. Keynes, “Cnut’s Earls,” 53. 29  Keynes, “Cnut’s Earls,” 56.

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geswican æfter minra biscopa tæcinge, þonne bidde ic Þurcyl eorl and eac beode, þæt he ðæne unrihtwisan to rihte gebige, gyf he mæge. Gyf he ne mæge, þonne wille ic, mid uncer begra cræfte þæt he hine on earde adwæsce oððe ut of earde adræfe, sy he betera sy he wyrsa.30

(If anyone, ordained or layman, Dane or Englishman, may be so presumptuous that he goes against the law of God and against my kingly power or against secular law, and he will not make amends and cease according to the teaching of my bishops, then I ask, and also command Earl Thurkill to turn the unjust to just, if he can. If he cannot, then I wish that, with the might of us both, he shall destroy him in the land or drive him out of the land, whether he may be better or worse.)

The limits placed on Thurkill’s practical exercise of power seem almost non-​existent at this point. Predictably, however, Thurkill fell out of favour with Cnut for a second time. From 1021 to 1023—​the year of Ælfheah’s translation to Canterbury—​the earl managed to be outlawed, move to Denmark, create enough havoc to force Cnut to visit Denmark, and, finally, reconcile with the king for a second time. Needless to say, it was a very busy few years for him. It is unclear how exactly the trouble began, though there is some speculation about whether or not he was outlawed because of his wife. The early twelfth-​ century chronicle by Florence of Worcester states that his wife, Eadgyth, was outlawed along with Thurkill.31 This corresponds to a juridical case found in the early thirteenth-​ century Chronicle of Ramsey Abbey, in which a certain wife of “Turkillus” was accused of witchcraft and poisoning her stepson.32 While this is perhaps the work of a vivid imagination, the entry for 1021 in the C-​, D-​, and E-​texts of the Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle clearly states that Cnut had outlawed Thurkill,33 and from the cartulary evidence it appears that by 1023 Godwine had effectively replaced Thurkill as Cnut’s favoured earl.34 Hints about what happened can also be found in Archbishop Wulfstan’s Institutes of Polity, which was composed during this time.35 Meant to serve as a guide detailing the duties and responsibilities of every class,36 the section entitled “Concerning Earls” is brief, but to the point: 30  Felix Liebermann, ed., “Cnut: Erlass von 1020,” in Die Gesetze Der Angelsachsen, vol. 1, ed. Felix Liebermann (Clark Lawbook Exchange, 2007), 273–​75 at 274. 31  Encomium, 76.

32  Chronicon Abbatiæ Rameseiensis, A Sæculo X usque ad Anno Circiter 1200: In Quatuor Partibus, ed. W. D. Macray (London: Longman & Co., 1886), 129–​34. 33  The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle: MS C, 104; The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle: MS D, 63; and The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle: MS E, 75. 34  Keynes, “Cnut’s Earls,” 73.

35  Revisions on this work continued to be made up to the time of Wulfstan’s death in 1023. Michael Swanton, ed. and trans., Anglo-​Saxon Prose (London: Dent, 1975), 125.

36  The Institutes is preserved in three manuscripts: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 201; London, British Library, Cotton Nero A. i; and Oxford, Bodleian, Junius 121. When considering the structure

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Eorlas and heretogan and ðas worulddeman and eac swa gerefan agan nydþearfe, þæt hi riht lufian for Gode and for worulde, and nahwar þurh undom for féo ne for freondscype forgyman heora wisdom.37

(Earls and military leaders and those secular judges and reeves should have by necessity, that they love justice on account of God and the world, and nowhere neglect their wisdom through unjust judgement, neither for money, nor for friendship.)

Poignantly, the archbishop ends with the bold claim, “Ac to lyt is þara þe þæt understanda, swa swa man sceolde”38 (But there are too few of those who understand that as one should).39 Thurkill, as ever, did not sit idly by during the aftermath of his expulsion from England; instead he created enough trouble that Cnut was forced to return to Denmark in 1022–​1023.40 The trip seems to have been a success, as the C-​text of the Anglo-​ Saxon Chronicle states that in 1023 the king and his former earl had reconciled.41 Although neither the D-​nor E-​text mentions this reconciliation, it is clear from later events that a truce had been reached. Indeed, it is in the details of this compromise that Emma’s own role in the 1023 translation of Ælfheah begins to surface. This C-​text entry42 continues by stating that Cnut “betæhte Þurcille Denemearcan ond his sunu to healdenne, ond se cyning nam Þurciles sunu mid him to Engla lande” (entrusted his son to Thurkill in Denmark for watching over, and the king took Thurkill’s son of the text, it is important to note that the different classes of people are listed in descending order, with the heavenly king being listed first, and the earthly king second. Significantly, one of the major differences among the manuscripts is whether bishops or earls are listed first. CCCC 201 lists bishops first; Nero A. i, which was annotated in Wulfstan’s own hand, completely deletes the section on bishops; and the Junius manuscript, which is considered a final draft, places the bishops before the earls. This inconsistency reveals the very real tension that had existed between bishops and earls in the eleventh century, with a distrust of some of the earls, such as Thurkill, ever-​growing. Renée R. Trilling, “Sovereignty and Social Order: Archbishop Wulfstan and the Institutes of Polity,” in The Bishop Reformed: Studies of Episcopal Power and Culture in the Central Middle Ages, ed. John S. Ott and Anna Trumbore Jones (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 58–​85 at 73–​74.

37  Wulfstan, Die “Institutes of Polity, Civil and Ecclesiastical”: Ein Werk Erzbischof Wulfstans von York, ed. Karl Jost, Schweitzer anglistische Arbeiten/​Swiss Studies in English 47 (Bern: A. Francke, 1959), 78. 38  Wulfstan, Die “Institutes of Polity,” 80.

39  The possibility that this section is a veiled criticism of Thurkill is supported by the fact that Wulfstan had become archbishop of York in 1002. Consequently, after archbishop Ælfheah was martyred, Wulfstan would have been the only archbishop left in England at the time. 40  Keynes, “Cnut’s Earls,” 56 and 84.

41  The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle: MS C, 104.

42  This entry is the last reliable record of Thurkill, though it appears that at some point—​perhaps because of Thurkill’s death—​a new guardian took over for Harthacanute: Ulf Thorgilsson. John, “The Encomium Emmae Reginae,” 72n4.

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with him to England).43 The son of Cnut referred to here is Harthacanute—​the only son of Cnut and Emma, and the heir apparent. The fostering of royal sons was not an unheard-​of practice; another of Emma’s sons, Edward the Confessor, had been fostered in Ely by Leofrun, and received a monastic education. By 1016, both the eleven-​ year-​old Edward and his three-​year-​old brother, Alfred, had been sent to be fostered in Normandy for their safety.44 Unlike his older half-​brothers, however, Harthacanute was not being sent for the purposes of education or safety; instead, the choice of an untrustworthy foster-​father seems to have put him deliberately in harm’s way. No records definitively state when Harthacanute was sent to Denmark, though his presence at the translation of Ælfheah reveals that he was not sent immediately, and the Danish coinage minted in Harthacanute’s name suggests that he arrived somewhere between 1026 and 1028.45 This gap of a few years is essential. Emma would have known about the agreement between Cnut and Thurkill, and would have recognized the need to make the most of the limited amount of time she had with her son. One of Emma’s greatest concerns upon marrying Cnut was making sure any son she bore him would become king upon her husband’s death. In one famous line from the Encomium Emmae Reginae, Emma tells Cnut that she would refuse to marry him “nisi illi iusiurando affirmaret, quod numquam alterius coniugis filium post se regnare faceret nisi eius” (unless he would affirm to her by oath, that he would never set up the son of any wife other than herself to rule after him).46 She was right to worry, as Harthacanute’s future was far from guaranteed; all three of his half-​brothers—​Edward the Confessor, Alfred Ætheling, and Harold Harefoot—​were still alive and older than him. As her youngest son, he was most probably born around 1018,47 and therefore only five when the deal with Thurkill was made. This decision would have left him in an extraordinarily vulnerable position,48 not only practically—​it cannot be stressed enough that he was between eight and ten years old when he was sent to live abroad with a man known for the fleeting nature of his loyalty—​but also legally, since he was well under the age of majority, which, according to Cnut’s own laws (II Cnut 20–​21), was twelve.49 43  The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle: MS C, 104. 44  Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith, 223. 45  Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith, 234. 46  Encomium, 32–​33.

47  I base this on the fact that Cnut and Emma were married in 1017. Pauline Stafford, “Emma of Normandy,” in The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-​Saxon England, 168–​69 at 168.

48  Campbell claims that Cnut made Thurkill “governor of that country [Denmark] and a guardian of the king’s son,” (Encomium, 75), but this seems to be a rather optimistic reading of the situation. The reality is probably more along the lines of how Eric John describes it: that while Harthacanute would undoubtedly become a sub-​king of the Danes, he “was perhaps brought up by him [Thurkill] as a kind of hostage” (“The Encomium Emmae Reginae,” 71). 49  II Cnut 21 claims, “And we will, that every man above twelve years make oath that he will neither be a thief, nor cognizant of theft” (“Laws of Cnut,” in Medieval England, 1000–​1500: A Reader,

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Bearing all this in mind, Emma’s reaction to the news in early 1023 can be reasonably reconstructed: having heard that her youngest son—​the one over whom she had the most control—​was about to be sent away, the queen began to enact her own political agenda. It is at this point that the motivating factors behind the decision to translate Ælfheah begin to take shape. He was not just a beloved, local saint, but one whom many still living in Canterbury had actually known while he was alive. His translation would therefore draw a large audience, including figures such as the archbishop of Canterbury—​the person typically responsible for crowning Anglo-​Saxon kings. It is important to recognize that Ælfheah was a not just a spiritual figure, but also a political one. From ca. 963–​984, he served first as a monk, and later as an abbot of Bath,50 which means that he had probably attended (and perhaps played a minor role in) Edgar’s coronation at Bath in 973.51 Immediately following his time at Bath, he became bishop of Winchester.52 Like his connection to Bath, the connection to Winchester is also crucial to the story due to its strong royal ties. Since the time of Alfred the Great, Winchester had been linked directly to the royal house. In the latter part of his reign, Alfred began to make this city a centre for royal administration.53 More significant to Winchester’s legacy, however, was the foundation of the New Minster by Alfred’s son, Edward, and his subsequent use of it as the burial place for the royal family.54 Ælfheah’s importance would have extended beyond the religious capital of Canterbury into the political capital of Winchester. Ælfheah’s translation and the subsequent promotion of his cult would have represented more than just a mea culpa from a Danish king and his half-​Danish wife—​it would have also helped Cnut and Emma to win the favour of the people of Winchester. Indeed, Winchester would ultimately serve as the capital during Cnut’s rule.55 Ælfheah’s subsequent legacy, therefore, became a symbol not only for righteous resistance, but also for the throne. The religious and political importance of the martyred archbishop is crucial, as the throne is central to the way his translation to Canterbury unfolded. With her son’s departure looming on the horizon, Emma needed to ensure that Harthacanute, despite his young age, was seen acting like a king; in other words, he needed to be seen publicly performing the duties associated with regnal authority—​in this case, the patronage ed. and trans. Emilie Amt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 20–​28, at 23). Similarly, II Cnut 20 specifies that one is not entitled to join a hundred, or to a wergild, until he is twelve years of age. Felix Liebermann, ed., “II Cnut,” in Die Gesetze Der Angelsachsen, vol. 1, ed. Felix Liebermann (Clark Lawbook Exchange, 2007), 308–​71 at 322. 50  David Knowles, C. N. L. Brooke, and Vera C. M. London, eds., The Heads of Religious Houses: England & Wales, I. 940–​1216, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 28. 51  Rumble, “From Winchester to Canterbury,” 166.

52  Simon Keynes, “Ælfheah,” in The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-​Saxon England, 7.

53  Barbara Yorke, “The Bishops of Winchester, the Kings of Wessex and the Development of Winchester in the Ninth and Early Tenth Centuries,” Proceedings of the Hampshire Field Club and Archaeological Society 40 (1984): 61–​70 at 66. 54  Alfred, Ealhswith, Edward the Elder, and many others were buried at the New Minster. Yorke, “The Bishops of Winchester,” 67. 55  D. H. Farmer, Oxford Dictionary of Saints, 5th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 18.

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of a church. Undertakings such as these were closely linked to Cnut and Emma, who had become well-​known patrons of the church.56 The translation of Ælfheah’s body to Canterbury, therefore, cannot be viewed as a single, isolated event. Instead, it must be viewed as part of the much larger strategy on the part of Cnut and Emma to promote the image of the royalty as the generous donors to the church. As the only son of both the reigning king and queen, it makes sense that intention was to reinforce the perception in the public’s mind that Harthacanute was to be their future king.57 One of the most efficient ways to do this was to show that he, too, was a generous patron of the church. Thus, the church chosen could not be just any church; the stage had to be set for a grandiose spectacle—​one not limited to a single time and space. And there could be no greater stage there than Canterbury, and no spectacle more grandiose than the martyred archbishop’s victorious return to his former see. So it was that Emma and Harthacanute found themselves at the Episcopal see of Rochester, joining the entourage that had begun in London, and, from there, enduring the journey to Canterbury: “on þam þryddan dæge com Imma seo hlæfdie mid hire cynelican bearne Hardacnute, ond hi þa ealle mid mycclan þrymme ond blisse ond lofsange þone halgan arcebiscop into Cantwarebyri feredon” (on the third day, the lady Emma came with her royal son, Harthacanute, and then they all carried the holy archbishop into Canterbury with a great host, joy, and songs of praise).58 The most complete Anglo-​Saxon record of this event is the one found in the D-​text of the Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle.59 The chronicler lists those present at the beginning of the translation in London, including Cnut, Archbishop Æthelnoth, Bishop Bryhtwine, all the servants of God, the bishops, the earls (which would notably include Godwine, and exclude Thurkill at this point), and many clerics and laymen. Because of the strength of the community’s living memory, Cnut and Emma had to be careful when selecting the cast and setting for this procession. Particularly revealing is the inclusion of Bryhtwine, who at this time was bishop of Sherborne. By the end of 1023, it is very probable that Bryhtwine was ejected as bishop and replaced by Ælfmær,60 so it is worth questioning why this change would not happen 56  In 1019, for example, the relics of St. Wigstan were taken from the royal monastery at Repton and given to Evesham Abbey, upon a request from the abbot, Ælfweard. Farmer, Oxford Dictionary of Saints, 546.

57  Although both Emma and Cnut already had sons, Emma’s were still in exile in Normandy, and Cnut’s son was by a woman not recognized as queen. 58  The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle: MS D, 64.

59  The C-​, D-​, and E-​texts of the Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle provide some of the greatest insight into these events. Although the content of these three versions for 1011–​1012 is often similar, there are differences for 1023 that should be taken into account. In an analysis of the D-​text, Cubbin notes that, “The annals 1016–​1052 were contributed essentially by the later and innovative Scribe Three” (The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle: MS D, xlviii). This corresponds to O’Brien O’Keeffe’s assertion that the D-​text was written substantially later than the C-​text, which itself appears to have been composed before 1043. The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle: MS C, lxix.

60  Bryhtwine is listed as a bishop in charters from 1023 (S 959 and S 960), while Ælfmær is listed as a bishop in the charters in 1024 (S 961). The Electronic Sawyer, King’s College, London, 2014, www.esawyer.org.uk/​charter/​959.html.

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until after the translation. The answer lies with the man who would replace him: Ælfmær. Formerly the abbot of St. Augustine’s, Ælfmær was the only ecclesiastic named in the Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle who had been captured alongside the archbishop, but released by the Vikings.61 His suspected duplicity would have made him an inappropriate participant in the very public translation of Ælfheah; nonetheless, in the months immediately following the translation, he was promoted to bishop of Sherborne, “so it looks as if he was being rewarded for his assistance, and placed in a position where he could continue most effectively to represent the Scandinavian interest.”62 This promotion was no doubt an overextension of Cnut’s royal power,63 yet it quietly elevated one of the Anglo-​Saxons loyal to Cnut before his coronation.64 Also present in London at the beginning of the translation was Æthelnoth, who had become the archbishop of Canterbury in 1020. Joining the cast of key players in this drama, the new archbishop was elected from Christ Church’s own ranks, making him “the first archbishop of Canterbury since Plegmund in 890 who had not been translated from another see.”65 Under Æthelnoth’s episcopacy, Christ Church became the recipient of some of the most generous royal donations, and in return the archbishop would later become one of Harthacanute’s greatest supporters. After this retinue retrieved the saint’s body from St. Paul’s, they travelled on ships down the Thames to Southwark; from there, the archbishop and his companions delivered him to Rochester, where Emma and her son would meet them.66 Rochester was not only the most ecclesiastically important stop between London and Canterbury, it was also the see of Bishop Godwine, one of the people captured alongside Ælfheah in 1011.67 These details affirm that Harthacanute’s participation in this spectacle would have been witnessed by many, and, importantly, would have been seen by Æthelnoth, and other leaders of the Anglo-​Saxon church. Æthelnoth had much to gain from this 61  The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle: MS C, 96; The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle: MS D, 57; and The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle: MS E, 68.

62  Simon Keynes, “Wulfsige, Monk of Glastonbury, Abbot of Westminster (c 990–​3), and Bishop of Sherborne (c 993–​1002),” in St. Wulfsige and Sherborne: Essays to Celebrate the Millenium of the Benedictine Abbey, 998–​1998, ed. Katherine Barker, David A. Hinton, and Alan Hunt, Bournemouth University School of Conservational Sciences Occasional Paper 8 (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2005), 53–​94 at 74. 63  M. K. Lawson, Cnut: The Danes in England in the Early Eleventh Century (London: Longman, 1995), 150.

64  Ultimately, Bryhtwine would be restored to his bishopric after Ælfmær temporarily went blind as a divine punishment for trying to take another monk’s estate to lease to one of Cnut’s followers, and was forced to return to Canterbury. Keynes, “Wulfsige, Monk of Glastonbury,” 74. 65  Nicholas Brooks, The Early History of the Church of Canterbury: Christ Church from 597 to 1066 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1984), 291.

66  The C-​text of the Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle simply says that Cnut caused translation to happen, and the E-​text gives the agency to Æthelnoth instead, making no mention of Cnut. The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle: MS C, 104; and The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle: MS E, 75.

67  Unlike Ælfmær, Godwine was not released by the Vikings. The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle: MS C, 96; The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle: MS D, 57; and The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle: MS E, 68.

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affair, and one can imagine that Emma might have also hoped that this particular act of patronage would encourage the archbishop to return the favour should she require his support down the road.68 If this episode was indeed a result of Emma’s desire to ensure both her and her son’s places in the future, her long-​term vision was remarkably accurate. Not only did her play for Æthelnoth’s loyalty prove to be well advised, as by all accounts he was one of Harthacanute’s strongest supporters following Cnut’s death,69 but so, too, did her greatest fears prove to be well grounded in reality, as it was Harold Harefoot, not Harthacanute, who would serve as Cnut’s immediate successor. With the contest for the throne raging on, the primary sources paint a vivid picture of the two camps; leading Harthacanute’s claim were Emma, Earl Godwine (at least initially), and Æthelnoth, who had reportedly refused to consecrate Harold as king, even when Emma’s favoured son failed to return to England.70 Likewise, both the C-​and E-​texts of the Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle—​the latter of which is considered a Godwinist text—​deny that Harold was actually Cnut’s son.71 Ensuring Harthacanute’s claim to the throne was but one of the contributing factors to the 1023 translation. Much more readily apparent was the desire of Cnut to repair his reputation that had been sullied from the violence enacted by the Vikings from 1009 to 1016. Indeed, it was also in 1023 that Cnut apparently sought to ameliorate another violent Viking attack, and one in which he played a more active role. Following the death of his father, Swein Forkbeard, in 1014, Cnut and his men took his father’s hostages to a beach in Sandwich, and proceeded to cut off their hands, ears, and noses—​a legal punishment typically reserved for only the most heinous crimes. Influenced by earlier Anglo-​Saxon laws, Cnut’s own law code would specify that once someone has failed a trial by ordeal, “þonne do man ut his eagan, and ceorfan of his nósn and his earan and þa uferan lippan oððon hine hættian” (then one may put out his eyes, and cut off his nose and his ears, and then the upper lip, or scalp him).72 Any post-​1014 dealings that Cnut had with Sandwich therefore take on a new form. As Nicholas Brooks has argued, “much the most important of Cnut’s gifts to the church of Canterbury in 1023 (if we could trust the evidence for it) was […] his grant of the port of Sandwich to Christ Church.”73 By gifting Sandwich to Christ Church, Cnut was paving the way for Sandwich to be known for something other than being the site of a major Viking atrocity. While some doubt can be shed on this charter—​all surviving copies are post-​conquest and written in 68  Likewise, it is perhaps not surprising that Cnut allowed the move to be disadvantageous to London, as the 1016 entry in the C-​text of The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle states that the Londoners had been among those who chose Edmund Ironside as king following the death of Æthelræd. Edmund was king from April 1016 to his death in November of the same year. John, “The Encomium Emmae Reginae,” 75–​76; and Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith, 244.

69  Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith, 239. The archbishop’s support is perhaps reflected in the southeastern mints that the struck coins in Harthacanute’s name. Likewise, the Encomium (38–​41) states that Æthelnoth refused to crown Harold Harefoot. 70  Marafioti, The King’s Body, 105.

71  John, “The Encomium Emmae Reginae,” 82. 72  Liebermann, ed., “II Cnut 30.5,” 332–​34.

73  Brooks, The Early History of the Church of Canterbury, 292.

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post-​conquest language—​it is probable that the gift of Sandwich to Christ Church did in fact happen, though it was perhaps not as extensive as later charters suggest.74 This charter, along with the translation of Ælfheah’s body, suggests that in 1023 Cnut was especially concerned with the status of his legacy and reputation. Although Cnut was not himself involved in the murder of Ælfheah, he, like Thurkill, was implicated by association; it was the drunken Danes who were responsible for the martyrdom of the head of the Anglo-​Saxon church. The first step to this sanitization of history was the calculated erosion of St. Paul’s growing status as a centre of resistance against the Vikings. From 1009 to 1012, St. Paul’s housed the relics of the martyr St. Edmund while the church at Bury, the official resting place for his relics, was under threat from the invaders.75 The ninth-​century Edmund was, as mentioned earlier, one of the foremost symbols of Anglo-​Saxon resistance to the Vikings. Thus, the same year Edmund’s relics were returned to Bury, St. Paul’s gained the relics of the new symbol of resistance: Ælfheah. This, in combination with Æthelred Unræd’s burial at St. Paul’s in 1016, laid the groundwork for a very real ideological threat against Cnut’s new rule.76 When Edmund Ironside, the son of Æthelred Unræd, died in 1016 after only seven months of rule, Cnut very carefully arranged for the short-​lived king’s body to be taken far away to Glastonbury, rather than to St. Paul’s to be buried alongside his father.77 The ultimate removal of Ælfheah from St. Paul’s thus served a dual purpose:  not only did it prevent the cathedral from developing a centre of anti-​Cnut fervour, it also was a subtle attack against the city that had time and again resisted Cnut’s attacks.78 Given its importance, there are attacks on London recorded for the years 994, 999, 1009, and 1012.79 Cnut’s wary attitude towards Londoners was apparent in other actions as well; in the years immediately following his ascension to the throne, London was not only subjected to heavy taxes and a heavily maintained garrison,80 but also witnessed the royally ordered execution of Anglo-​Saxon nobles in 1017.81 The Encomium Emmae Reginae makes Cnut’s distrust explicit; following the death of Edmund Ironside, Cnut “Londonienses non sibi adhuc esse fideles credidit” (did not believe that the Londoners were yet true to him).82 74  Brooks, The Early History of the Church of Canterbury, 293–​94. 75  Marafioti, The King’s Body, 93.

76  Marafioti, The King’s Body, 93–​94, 195. 77  Marafioti, The King’s Body, 96.

78  As Alan Thacker notes, St. Paul’s did hold onto some of Ælfheah’s relics post-​1023, such as his blood-​stained cowl and a chasuble that he was said to have owned. Alan Thacker, “The Cult of Saints and the Liturgy,” in St. Paul’s Cathedral Church of London, 604–​2004, ed. Derek Keene, Arthur Burns, and Andrew Saint (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 113–​21 at 115. 79  The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle, ed. and trans. G. N. Garmonsway (London: J. M. Dent, 1990), 126–​27, 131, 139, 143. 80  Lawson, Cnut: The Danes in England, 140. 81  Marafioti, The King’s Body, 227. 82  Encomium, 22–​23.

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Finally, it is essential that the date of the translation itself be considered. The significance of the timing extends far beyond waiting for Thurkill to be permanently removed from the country. The entire procession began on “vi. idus Iunii” (June 8); the retinue arrived in Canterbury on “iii. idus Iunii” (June 11), and the ceremony and actual re-​burial occurred on “xvii. kalendas Iulii” (July 16).83 As M. K. Lawson has noted, this process began roughly seven weeks after Ælfheah’s April 19 martyrdom, suggesting that the translation could well have been Cnut’s response to any “degree of hostility to the Danes in London [on] the anniversary of Ælfheah’s death.”84 Equally significant (and closer to June 8, 1023), was the passing of Wulfstan, archbishop of York, on May 28, 1023. Since he was a remarkably influential individual, news of Wulfstan’s death would have quickly spread far, and he would have been mourned by many. It is possible that Cnut and Emma had recognized this emotional moment as an ideal time to honour the memory of another great archbishop. Even though eleven years had transpired since his death, the veneration of Ælfheah as saint was almost immediate; he was certainly recognized as such during Cnut’s reign. Evidence for this veneration includes his appearance in eleven Anglo-​Saxon liturgical calendars under the entry for April 19, one of which was copied before the 1023 translation (see Table 8.1). Similarly, veneration of Ælfheah is attested in thirteen Anglo-​Saxon litanies, one of which pre-​dates his translation (see Table 8.2). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the majority of the calendars and litanies were copied either in Canterbury, or in Cnut’s capital of Winchester. Notably missing from the list is the city that has lost the saint’s relics: London. Of particular note are the Canterbury Benedictional, which was copied ca. 1030 at Christ Church and contains special blessings for the feast day of Ælfheah’s translation,85 and British Library (hereafter, BL), Cotton Galba A.xiv, which contains a collect for the feast of the birth of Ælfheah. This collect, which was copied in either Winchester or Shaftesbury ca. 1025–​1050, identifies the saint as both a confessor and a martyr.86 In all of these records, it is only the Cotton Galba A.xiv manuscript that refers to the archbishop as a confessor87—​all the other records refer to him as a martyr. In particular, Ælfheah’s inclusion in the calendars and litanies tell a story of the continuous veneration of him from the moment of his death to beyond the Norman Conquest. Because of this extensive tradition, it is appropriate to conclude by briefly looking to the post-​Conquest versions of this narrative. For all that Ælfheah’s story continued to be 83  The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle: MS D, 64. 84  Lawson, Cnut: The Danes in England, 141. Lawson adheres to Osbern’s dating of the procession (June 1–​8); I have chosen instead to follow the dates outlined in the D-​text of the Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle.

85  Richard Pfaff, The Liturgy in Medieval England: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 92. 86  Helmut Gneuss, Handlist of Anglo-​Saxon Manuscripts: A List of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England up to 1100, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 241 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001), 64; and Bernard James Muir, ed., A Pre-​Conquest English Prayer-​Book (BL MSS Cotton Galba A.xiv and Nero A.ii), Henry Bradshaw Society 103 (London: Boydell, 1988), 93. 87  This is true in both the collect and in the litany.

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Table 8.1 Ælfheah in Anglo-​Saxon Liturgical Calendars.a Manuscript

Date

Place of Origin

BL, Arundel MS 155

ca. 1012–​1023

Christ Church, Canterbury

Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.15.32

ca. 1025–​1027

New Minster, Winchester (at St. Augustine’s Canterbury by s. 11ex)

CCCC 9

ca. 1025–​1050c

BL, Cotton Titus D.xxvii

Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Cod. Reginensis Lat. 12

Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 296

ca. 1023–​1035 ca. 1025–​1050

ca. 1025–​1050b

BL, Cotton Vitellius E.xviii

s. xi

BL, Cotton Vitellius A.xviii

ca. 1061–​1088

CCCC 422 CCCC 391

Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 113

med

ca. 1061 ca. 1065

e

ca. 1064–​1083

New Minster, Winchester

Christ Church, Canterbury (for use at Bury St. Edmunds)

Crowland

Worcester

New Minster, Winchester

Winchester (perhaps for use at Sherborne)d Wells

St. Mary’s Cathedral Priory, Worcester Worcester

a Unless otherwise noted, the saint’s appearances in the calendars are found in Francis Wormald, English Kalendars before A. D. 1100, Henry Bradshaw Society 72 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1988), and the dates and places of origin are found in Gneuss, Handlist of Anglo-​Saxon Manuscripts. b Michael Lapidge, Anglo-​Saxon Litanies of the Saints, Henry Bradshaw Society 106 (London: Boydell, 1991), 78. c This manuscript may have been copied in or soon after 1032, since the Easter tables cover 1032–​1094. Mildred Budny, Insular, Anglo-​Saxon, and Early Anglo-​Norman Manuscript Art at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge: An Illustrated Catalogue (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), 611–​13. d Timothy Graham, “The Old English Liturgical Directions in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 422,” Anglia 111 (1993): 439–​46 at 439. e Lapidge, Anglo-​Saxon Litanies, 65.

popular after the Anglo-​Saxon era, his legacy was almost cut short in the years immediately following the Conquest. When Archbishop Lanfranc (r. 1070–​1089) was purging a massive number of saints venerated in England, one saint who came under suspicion was Ælfheah, whom, Lanfranc argued, died for an unpaid ransom, rather than for his faith. Lanfranc was challenged by other ecclesiastics, however, and soon had to retract his initial stance.88 The 88  Rumble, “Winchester to Canterbury,” 172.

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Table 8.2 Ælfheah in Anglo-​Saxon Litanies.a Line Numbers

Manuscript

Date

Place of Origin

45

BL, Arundel MS 155

ca. 1012–​1023

Christ Church, Canterbury

84 and 292

BL, Cotton Galba A.xiv

ca. 1025–​1050

Winchester or Shaftesbury

71

21, 25, and 28 65 64 65

159

BL, Cotton Titus D.xxvi CCCC 44

Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 296 BL, Additional MS 28188 BL, Cotton Vitellius A.vii BL, Harley 863

40

BL, Cotton Tiberius A.iii

55

CCCC 422

38 51

23

Oxford, Bodleian, Laud misc. 482 CCCC 391

BL, Cotton Claudius A.iii

ca. 1023–​1031 ca. 1025–​1050 ca. 1025–​1050 ca. 1050–​1075 ca. 1030–​1046 ca. 1046–​1072 s. xi

med

s. ximed

157

New Minster, Winchester

Canterbury (prov. Ely) Crowland Exeter

Ramsey (prov. Exeter, 1046–​72) Exeter

Christ Church, Canterbury Worcester

ca. 1061

Winchester (perhaps for use at Sherborne)b

ca. 1050–​1100

Christ Church, Canterbury

ca. 1065c

St. Mary’s Cathedral Priory, Worcester

a Unless otherwise noted, the saint’s appearances in the litanies are found in Lapidge, Anglo-​ Saxon Litanies, and the dates and places of origin are found in Gneuss, Handlist of Anglo-​Saxon Manuscripts. b Graham, “The Old English Liturgical Directions,” 439. c Lapidge, Anglo-​Saxon Litanies, 65.

survival of Ælfheah’s legacy in the Anglo-​Norman world resulted in new versions of his death being recounted. In the twelfth century, for example, William of Malmesbury would vilify Thurkill by claiming that not only had he been present at the martyrdom, he had also been the one to order it.89 The most famous of the post-​Conquest texts, however, is Osbern’s Life of Alphege, written around 1080.90 Osbern was careful to add an explicit layer of divine justice: “Sed 89  Rumble, “Winchester to Canterbury,” 171.

90  For a facing page translation of this account, see “Translatio Sancti Ælfegi,” 294–​315.

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illos qui mortis ipsius auctores extiterant, non sine terribili uindicta uindex Dei ira transpire sinebat” (But the Avenger did not allow those who were responsible for his [Ælfheah’s] death to escape without the terrible avenging wrath of God).91 Among those punished were the Danish leaders (notably exempting Cnut from this collective blame) and priests at St. Paul’s who had stolen the saint’s relics. In this version, Thurkill is among those punished, and is killed immediately upon his return to Denmark in 1021, as the Danes no longer trust him.92 Moreover, Cnut takes a greater role in the story of the translation. As Osbern tells it, Cnut had to steal the relics from the Londoners, who were unwilling to part with them. In an audacious move, the king stole into St. Paul’s in middle of the night, miraculously moved the heavy stone covering the body, and proceeded to make a quick exit with his newly acquired relics. The spectacle becomes even greater as he bears them away on a longship with a golden dragon prow.93 Despite her active role in supporting and furthering Cnut’s legitimacy and ensuring the succession of her own son, Emma becomes a stationary figure. Rather than travelling with the retinue from Rochester, she meets Cnut in Canterbury, and her role is reduced to the presentation of precious offerings in gratitude.94 Emma’s original goals were utterly foiled, her efforts and her failure forgotten in just over fifty years, with Harthacanute removed from both story and memory.

91  “Translatio Sancti Ælfegi,” 296–​97.

92  “Translatio Sancti Ælfegi,” 298–​99. Other, more reliable sources track his activity at that time, as we have seen, though his fate following 1023 is completely unknown. 93  “Translatio Sancti Ælfegi,” 304–​9.

94  “Translatio Sancti Ælfegi,” 312–​13.

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Chapter 9

THE MISSING WOMEN OF THE BEOWULF MANUSCRIPT1

TERESA HOOPER* IN THEIR INTRODUCTION to New Readings on Women in Old English Literature, Helen Damico and Alexandra Hennessey Olsen called for a corrective turn towards scholarship “centered on women’s concerns, in the hopes of generating a more accurate reading of the texts involved and of promoting a more enlightened understanding of the position, role, and function of women in Anglo-​Saxon culture and of the meaning of their experience.”2 They illustrated this problem with the two-​part and tripartite readings of Beowulf typified by J.  R. R.  Tolkien, which largely obscured important moments of women’s presence in the poem.3 Among the scholars answering that call was Jane Chance, whose article revising the tripartite model of Beowulf in light of its women was a part of their original collection.4 In the decades since the publication of Olsen and Damico’s volume, many other scholars have answered their call, and a good number of studies now look to women’s presence and concerns in Beowulf. Nevertheless, a corrective codicological reading of the entire manuscript, the second part of British Library, Cotton Vitellius A.xv,5 has yet to arrive among them. As it currently stands, this manuscript, also known as the Beowulf manuscript or the Nowell Codex, contains five texts: The Passion of Saint Christopher, Wonders of the East, The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, Beowulf, and the biblical epic poem Judith. In their attempt to find a common thematic reading across the five texts, scholars ranging from Kenneth Sisam to Andy Orchard have focused on the central three texts—​Wonders, the Letter, and Beowulf—​which form a more obvious unit of texts with a clear focus on monsters. This scholarship offers thematic readings ranging from the monsters and *  University of Tennessee, Knoxville. [email protected]

1  Various portions of this chapter were originally presented at the 2013 meeting of the Southeastern Medieval Association and at a special session in honour of Dr. Helen Damico at the 2014 International Medieval Conference, Kalamazoo.

2  Helen Damico and Alexandra Hennessey Olsen, introduction to New Readings on Women in Old English Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 3. 3  Damico and Olsen, introduction to New Readings, 2.

4  Jane Chance, “The Structural Unity of Beowulf: The Problem of Grendel’s Mother,” in New Readings on Women in Old English Literature, 248–​61.

5  Helmut Gneuss and Michael Lapidge, Anglo-​Saxon Manuscripts: A Bibliographic Handlist of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England up to 1100 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), item 399; Neil F. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-​Saxon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 281–​83.

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pride of Andy Orchard to a preoccupation with kingship in Kathryn Powell’s work.6 The unintended consequence, however, is that important women in the manuscript tend to be overlooked. One should blame the ravages of time rather than scholarly neglect in this case, as the physical state of the evidence is a major impediment. Our only copy of Judith is incomplete, and every manuscript of the full Christopher legend from Anglo-​Saxon England is badly damaged. In particular, the Vitellius manuscript has lost about one quire of sixteen leaves from the Passion of Saint Christopher; the losses to Judith are not so easily measured.7 These lacunae obscure three important women: Judith, naturally, is the first and best known, but the manuscript also lacks the story of two martyrs named Nicea and Aquilina from the Passion of St. Christopher. Since there is no way to accurately measure the missing portions of Judith or even guess at its contents, a corrective reading must turn to Christopher and its now-​missing women martyrs instead. The questions I wish to propose here are, at their heart, more an act of feminist codicology than a unified thematic reading of the manuscript: what interpretive benefits, if any, can scholars reap by carefully re-​introducing these martyrs’ stories into the gaps of the Beowulf manuscript? Secondly, can this reconstruction provide “a more accurate reading of the texts involved” as Damico and Olsen had envisioned? As the following analysis will show, recognizing Nicea and Aquilina’s rightful place among the texts of Vitellius A.xv transforms how scholars should discuss issues of monstrosity, gender, and faith in the manuscript, and it likewise reveals that thematic studies of the Beowulf manuscript will be incomplete without a consideration of what these women have to offer.8 To give some background, the Acta Sanctorum traces Nicea and Aquilina back to the earliest versions of the Greek Christopher legend, which travelled to Western Europe 6  Kenneth Sisam, “The Compilation of the Beowulf Manuscript,” in Sisam, Studies in the History of Old English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 65–​96; Andy Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the “Beowulf” Manuscript (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 2–​5; Kathryn Powell, “Meditating on Men and Monsters: A Reconsideration of the Thematic Unity of the Beowulf Manuscript,” Review of English Studies 57 (2006): 1–​15. 7  Estimates on the missing text in Judith range from three full quires to less than a page. See Martina Häcker, “The Original Length of the Old English Judith: More Doubt(s) on the ‘Missing Text,’ ” Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 27 (1996): 1–​18; Peter Lucas, “The Place of Judith in the Beowulf Manuscript,” Review of English Studies 41 (1990): 463–​78.

8  No thematic reading of the entire Beowulf manuscript makes sense unless it was constructed as a single unit of five texts. For the purposes of this analysis, I have opted to use Kemp Malone’s reconstruction of the quires, which I have modified by moving the thirteenth quire containing Judith to the front as suggested by Ker, Clement, and Lucas: (14)8+(X)8+(1)10+(2)6+(4)8+(3)8+(5)8+(6)8+(7)8 +(8)8+(9)8+(10)8+(11)8+(12)10+(13)10. In this arrangement, the final lines of Judith appear on the recto of the first folio in Quire X, and Christopher begins on the verso. See: The Nowell Codex: British Museum Cotton Vitellius A. xv, Second MS, ed. Kemp Malone, Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile 12 (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1963), 14–​16; Ker, Catalogue, 281–​83; Richard W. Clement, “Codicological Consideration in the Beowulf Manuscript,” Essays in Medieval Studies 1 (1984): 13–​27; Lucas, “The Place of Judith in the Beowulf-​Manuscript,” 463–​78.

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from the Byzantine empire as early as the sixth century.9 In the ninth-​century Latin versions of the legend,10 a pagan king named Dagnus of Samos imprisons Christopher and coerces two prostitutes named Nicea and Aquilina to tempt the dog-​headed saint into idolatry.11 The king locks them into Christopher’s prison cell, but they are so terrified of his appearance that they cower on the ground. At Christopher’s encouragement, they confess their sins, convert, and vow to suffer martyrdom with him. When Dagnus learns of their conversion, he threatens Nicea and Aquilina with disfigurement and death if they refuse to sacrifice to his gods, but they deceive him long enough to gain access to his temple, openly ridicule his gods, and pull down their statues with Nicea’s girdle. Both suffer a worthy martyrdom in return for their rebellion: Aquilina dies by dismemberment and Nicea by immolation and decapitation, and the miracles displayed during their execution turn Dagnus’s kingdom against him. Christopher’s more passive struggle against Dagnus takes its cues from Nicea’s martyrdom, whose blazing pyre bursts into falling roses in front of an awestruck crowd. Christopher’s face, at one point described as appearing full of flames as he prays, also becomes swylca rosan blostma (like a rose blossom) in the torturing flames.12 The sisters’ death marks an important episode in the Christopher story: their subplot covers about 30 percent of the Latin version, which is only marginally shorter than the entire Christopher fragment in the Nowell Codex.13 9  The earliest references in the Latin West are a Mozarabic liturgy and foundations in the Frankish kingdoms by the end of the sixth century and a Spanish list of relics from the mid-​seventh. See: Acta Sanctorum, vol. 32 (Paris: Victor Palmé, 1868), 492–​94; Ángel Fábrega-​Grau, Passionario Hispánico (siglos VII-​XI) (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1953), 212; Venetia Newall, “The Dog-​Headed St. Christopher,” in Folklore on Two Continents: Essays in Honor of Linda Dégh, ed. Nikolai Burlakoff and Carl Lindahl (Bloomington: Trickster Press, 1980), 244–​45; Hans-​Friedrich Rosenfeld, Der hl. Christophorus, seine Verehrung und seine Legende (Åbo: Åbo Akademi, 1937), 57, 71–​75.

10  Using the system set up by the Bollandists, this includes BHL 1764–​75. Most scholars link the OE Christopher to BHL 1768. For a collated edition of three 1766–​68 texts, see Hans-​Friedrich Rosenfeld, Der hl. Christophorus, 520–​29. Rosenfeld’s MS “T” has been edited separately in Monique Goullet and Sandra Isetta, Le légendier de Turin: MS D. V. 3 de la Bibliothèque Nationale Universitaire (Florence: SISMEL-​Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2014), 229–​43. 11  Scholars disagree on whether the Vitellius version is cynocephalic. This is a problem of recensions: BHL 1766–​67 repeatedly call him a “dog-​man” (Canineus) while most versions of BHL 1768-​ff omit references to his head and call him a “Cananite” (Cananeus). The effective difference comes down to a single vowel. Ian Wood, however, proves that the Christopher legend existed alongside a body of material that conflated “Cananites” with dog-​headed “Caninites,” so I see little reason why the audience would have been aware of the distinction. See Ian Wood, “Categorizing the Cynocephali,” in Ego Trouble: Authors and Their Identities in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Richard Corradini et al. (Vienna: Verlag der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2010), 132–​33. 12  Three Old English Prose Texts in MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv, ed. Stanley Rypins, EETS, o.s., 161 (Oxford: EETS, 1924), 69, line 17. 13  Lucas estimates that the surviving folios in the Vitellius manuscript represent only 36.7 percent of the original. See Lucas, “The Place of Judith,” 471–​72.

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Although these two martyrs first show up in Greek memorials by the sixth century, they were celebrated in Latin calendars and martyrologies on the Continent from as early as the late eighth century. In the Latin tradition, Nicea and Aquilina are honoured on July 24 (the day before Christopher) in the martyrologies of Lyon and Florus by at least 806, and Usuard’s martyrology disseminated their memorial more widely thereafter.14 In contrast, the sisters’ English textual footprint is relatively small: they do not appear in the so-​called Bedan Martyrology, the Martyrology of Willibrord, or any English-​made calendar surviving from Anglo-​Saxon England. Even the summary of Saint Christopher’s passion in the Old English Martyrology edits out Nicea and Aquilina entirely.15 They eventually have some recognition in martyrologies via Usuard, but most manuscript evidence is late; Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 57, in fact, is the only contemporary martyrology to record their name.16 English interest in Christopher’s co-​martyrs, it seems, did not originally extend to official recognition in the calendars. Nicea and Aquilina do survive in three English manuscripts of the Christopher legend, however, but damage to every copy has erased most of their existence. Parts of two English translations have barely survived into the modern period. One, obviously, is the material preserved in London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius A.xv, part 2; Wanley’s catalogue entry and Laurence Nowell’s ex libris on the top of fol. 94r suggest that the missing material was already gone by the Early Modern period. Based on the closest Latin analogues, the surviving folios in the Nowell Codex miss Nicea and Aquilina’s exit by just four sentences.17 What does survive is a rather close translation of its Latin exemplar, however, and based on that fact, Peter Lucas estimated that the Vitellius manuscript version lacks exactly three hundred lines, or a single quire of eight folios, minus one page for the last lines of Judith.18 The second English translation is found in the remains of London, British Library Cotton Otho B.x, an early eleventh-​century homiliary of mostly Ælfrican material.19 This manuscript was largely destroyed in the Ashburnam House fire of 1731, and parts of fifty-​three folios, less than a third of the original, survived the conflagration. All that now remains of Christopher is a heavily burned scrap of the beginning (fol. 69) and an incipit/​ explicit recorded by Humfrey Wanley.20 The original length of the Otho text recorded in 14  Jacques Dubois and Genevieve Reynaud, Edition pratique des martyrologes de Béde de l’anonyme Lyonnais et de Florus (Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1976), 135–​36. 15  Christine Rauer, The Old English Martyrology (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), 90–​91.

16  s. x/​xi, prov. Abingdon. Nicea and Aquilina’s memorial appears on fols. 69v–​70r. Gneuss and Lapidge, Anglo-​Saxon Manuscripts, item 41. 17  Ker, Catalogue 281–​83; John Drayton Pickles, “Studies in the Prose Texts of the Beowulf Manuscript” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 1971), 15–​33.

18  Lucas, “The Place of Judith,” 471–​72. The folio containing the last six lines of the poem is now missing and were later added to the lower margin of fol. 209v by what appears to be an Early Modern hand.

19  Dated xi1, origin unknown. See Gneuss and Lapidge, Anglo-​Saxon Manuscripts, item 355; Ker, Catalogue, 224–​29. See also Pickles, “Studies in the Prose Texts of the Beowulf Manuscript,” 22–​25 (hereafter cited as “Studies”). 20  See: Ker, Catalogue, 224–​29.

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the catalogue, however, suggests that it was likely a complete copy prior to its destruction. John Drayton Pickles analyzed the available material of both the Otho and Vitellius copies and concluded that they were, at some point, descended from the same exemplar and once roughly the same length.21 The third, a Latin version, is Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale Lat. 5574, a collection of saints’ lives better known for the Latin Life of St. Margaret. The manuscript was most likely written in Mercia in the early tenth century, with French provenance by the twelfth.22 Christopher is the first text in the manuscript, and although the first folio and its large, ornate initial have survived, the microfilm shows evidence of at least one and perhaps more folios ripped from the binding. The text now leaves off at Christopher’s first sermon to the Samians and picks up in the middle of Nicea and Aquilina’s desecration of the temple.23 Even though this is the most complete version of the Christopher legend in Anglo-​Saxon England, the now-​missing material leaves a considerable hole in Nicea and Aquilina’s story. Moreover, the text is idiosyncratic, and a comparison to the surviving English material disqualifies it as the source for the English translation. Without a complete text of the Christopher legend from England, the search for a close Latin analogue must head to the Continent. No direct source for the English translation has been identified, and there is no comprehensive edition of the legend; in fact, the only collated edition, by Hans-​Friedrich Rosenfeld, contains just three manuscripts.24 John Pickles compared readings across Rosenfeld’s three manuscripts plus one more from St. Emmeram.25 He concluded that the OE Christopher had mixed descent, but he also conceded that the differences between the manuscripts were “not vitally important, for they indicate no essential changes in the story itself.”26 21  To summarize the history of this argument, Kemp Malone incorrectly thought that the Otho version was only three hundred lines long. John Pickles re-​calculated Malone’s numbers using the correct number of lines per page from Otho and found a gap of only about ninety lines. If one uses Peter Lucas’s more accurate estimate of the text length, however, the difference shrinks down to about forty lines, or an 8 percent difference. My visual observation of one of the folios from Otho (Oxford, Bodleian Library Rawlinson Q. e. 20 [15606]) reveals a much more compressed aspect than Vitellius. When differences in size for the text block and text compression are calculated in, I find that the difference between the two versions is likely negligible. See Malone, The Nowell Codex, 114; Pickles, “Studies,” 24–​25; Ker, Catalogue, 224–​25. 22  François Avril and Patricia Danz Stirnemann, Manuscrits enluminés d’origine insulaire VIIe–​XXe siècle (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1987): 10–​11. 23  Microfilm of Paris lat. 5574 clearly shows at least one torn stub between fols. 1–​2.

24  Rosenfeld, Der hl. Christophorus, 520–​29. In contrast, I have counted at least a dozen Latin versions just prior to 1100. Of these, Pickles’s evidence strongly indicates either a BHL 1768 text with sporadic corrections from a 1766 text or a manuscript recension older than any texts he had on hand. Pickles, “Studies,” 19–​20.

25  These include: Würzburg, UB Mp. Th. F. 28, southern Germany, s. ix3/​4; London, BL Additional 11880, St. Emmeram dated s. ix1; Turin, BN D. V. 3, Soissons, s. ixin; and the lost “Fulda” manuscript collected in Acta Sanctorum. The Paris MS was unknown to Pickles. Pickles, “Studies,” 18. 26  Pickles, “Studies,” 21.

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Based on the available evidence, Turin, Biblioteca Nazionale D. V. 3, a late ninth-​ century legendary from Soissons, is the closest match out of these four and the Paris manuscript.27 Of the twenty-​four textual variations catalogued by Pickles, the Turin manuscript agrees with the Old English versions seventeen times; two more ambiguous readings may also match Turin as well. Nine of those shared readings are unique to the Turin manuscript, and only this manuscript is a near-​perfect match for both the incipit and explicit of the Otho version.28 The Vitellius likewise closely tracks the stylistic idiosyncrasies of the Turin manuscript, down to an odd infinitive construction repeated throughout the second half of the English text. Provided that it is cautiously applied, this manuscript can therefore serve as a rough but largely accurate account of the events missing from the Nowell Codex. Now that their presence in the Beowulf manuscript is more firmly established, I would like to show how Niceta and Aquilina’s story reinforces some themes already discussed by scholars and highlights others that have gone unnoticed. For one, the sisters’ martyrdom sheds light upon a strong correlation between women, monsters, and places of pre-​Christian power across all five texts. In four of these (Christopher, Wonders of the East, Letter of Alexander, and Beowulf), encounters with monsters are punctuated with scenes at pagan altars or temples; in Judith, that encounter occurs over Holofernes’s bed, and the ensuing political and spiritual struggle is painted in graphic and sexual terms. In two texts (Christopher and Beowulf), a monster with a Judeo-​Christian backstory walks into the centre of a palace or hall to wreak havoc on a well-​ordered pagan society. That number increases to three depending on one’s tolerance for thinking of Judith as a “monster,” a point which will be considered later. In these same three texts, a woman or women also sneak into the physical centre of the enemy’s power, and, finding their enemy incapacitated, they decapitate them. All three invasions are facilitated by feminine traits highlighted in the texts—​sensuality, maternity, or beauty—​and in two of these texts, the women abscond with the head. Monsters and women are tied to these pagan centres of power because all of these texts engage with monstrous and/​or female bodies as signs. A host of subtle, interesting readings have investigated how monsters “mean” across the manuscript, but what they mean evades understanding.29 As Dana Oswald notes regarding the Wonders of the East,

27  Goullet and Isetta, Le légendier de Turin, 91.

28  As per Pickles’s own analysis. I have located two more correspondences, both of which are also unique to Turin. Pickles, “Studies,” 21–22.

29  See Venetia Newall, “The Dog-​Headed St. Christopher,” 242–​49; Susan Kim, “Monstrous and Bloody Signs: The Beowulf Manuscript” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1996), 17–​48; Susan Kim, “Bloody Signs: Circumcision and Pregnancy in the Old English Judith,” Exemplaria 11 (1999): 285–​307; Dana Oswald, Monsters, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), 27–​65; Asa Simon Mittman and Susan Kim, Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2013), 135–​36.

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“it is difficult to resist the urge to totalize the experience of the text, and so constitute it in some unifying structure, but the text itself resists this impulse.”30 Similarly, Susan Kim and Asa Simon Mittman claim that “these images, and the texts with which they are partnered not only encourage contemplation but also insistently evade and deny resolution.”31 One can read Alexander the Great, for instance, as a victim of this impulse. In both Wonders and The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, the conqueror spends an inordinate amount of time searching out different kinds of monstrosity, avoiding some and killing others, but he never comprehends them any further than as a part of their environment. Beowulf and King Dagnus also treat monsters as an irruption into their well-​ ordered societies, which, in Dagnus’s words, must be “abolished from memory and from life.”32 Both try to turn the bodies of their enemies into a competing bysen or sign of their own: a bloody arm in Beowulf, an arrow-​riddled body in Christopher. To borrow Susan Kim’s reading of Judith, monsters can also highlight an Augustinian “failure to understand how to read, and inability to discern what to read” across the manuscript as a whole.33 Male characters like Dagnus, Alexander, and Beowulf only demonstrate two real options in the face of monstrosity:  fight or flight. Only the women in The Passion of Saint Christopher offer us an alternative. Monsters should be read rather than merely responded to, not because they necessarily carry any immediately accessible meaning, but because they indicate the existence of a Creator who wields them as signs of His will. In the beginning of the Passion of Saint Christopher, for instance, an anonymous woman arrives on the edge of the city to worship her idols and sees Christopher praying; according to the text, she looks at his presumably monstrous face and runs back into the city saying, “Come and see marvels which up to this point nobody has been able to see!”34 All five of the early Latin manuscripts call Christopher a mirabilia: his monstrosity is a marvel, and it prompts this woman to leave her idols behind and gather the townspeople to see him. The crowd then witnesses Christopher’s first miracle, the flowering of his wooden staff, and he baptizes the masses with his own hand.35 Nicea and Aquilina follow suit. When Dagnus locks them in Christopher’s cell to tempt him, they first react to his monstrous, flaming face.36 After they cower for hours 30  Oswald, Monsters, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature, 33. 31  Mittman and Kim, Inconceivable Beasts, 135.

32  “Þin nama of þys gemynde ⁊ of þyssum life adilgod.” Rypins, Three Old English Prose Texts, 70, lines 16–​17. 33  Kim, “Bloody Signs,” 293.

34  Goullet and Isetta, Le légendier de Turin, 234. Traces of this episode can still be read on the verso side of the Otho fragment. See Pickles, “Studies,” 23. 35  Goullet and Isetta, Le légendier de Turin, 234–35.

36  Christopher’s fiery face may be endemic to his species, as the Wonders of the East states that the Cynocephali (called Conopenas) have “breath like a flame of fire.” Goullet and Isetta, Le légendier de Turin, 236; Rypins, Three Old English Prose Texts, 54, lines 14–​15.

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while he prays, Christopher puts them at ease; after a short conversation, they explain that they are prostitutes (though very charitable ones) and ask, “Pray for us, servant of God, that He would forgive our sins.”37 Like the unnamed woman, Nicea and Aquilina also gather the townspeople together, ostensibly to watch them sacrifice to the gods, and they convert thousands more through their own miracles. This pattern repeats itself in the Christopher legend, with both women and men: the vision of a monster leads to confusion, revelation, and conversion. These women, however, are the ones who make that pattern clear. Identifying monsters as signs of the Creator is a common enough trope in medieval thought. When Isidore of Seville introduces the monstrous races, he defines them not as merely prodigious bodies but as statements that must be interpreted: “Monstra,” he tells us, “derive their name from admonition (monitus), because in giving a sign they indicate something, or else because they instantly show what may appear.”38 Echoing Augustine, he likewise claims that “they are not contrary to nature, because they are created by divine will. […] A portent is therefore not created contrary to nature, but contrary to what is known nature.”39 Susan Kim notes that Isidore’s definition of monsters as signs is woefully incomplete: “Although Isidore quite explicitly equates monsters with a certain kind of sign, he never provides a method for reading them as such […] Isidore’s failure to map out an interpretive guide for the portents which he catalogues underlines the problem of locating meanings for these monster-​signs as his chapter progresses.”40 St. Augustine, however, places the interpretive burden for monsters on the people who read them. As he explains in The City of God: Qualis autem ratio redditur de monstrosis apud nos hominum partibus, talis de monstrosis quibusdam gentibus reddi potest. Deus enim creator est omnium, qui ubi et quando creari quid oporteat uel oportuerit, ipse nouit, sciens uniuersitatis pulchritudinem quarum partium uel similitudine uel diuersitate contexat. Sed qui totum inspicere non potest, tamquam deformitate partis offenditur, quoniam cui congruat, et quo referatur ignorat. (Moreover, the explanation which is given of monstrous human births among us can also be given in the case of some of these monstrous races. For God is the Creator of all things: He Himself knows where and when anything should be, or should have been, 37  Goullet and Isetta, Le légendier de Turin, 237.

38  “Monstra vero a monitu dicta, quod aliquid significando demonstrent, sive quod statim monstrent quid appareat.” Isidore, Isidori Hispalensis etymologiarum sive originum libri XX, ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), XI.III.3; translation from Stephen Barney et al., The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 244.

39  “[Portenta] non sunt contra naturam, quia divina voluntate fiunt […]. Portentum ergo fit non contra naturam, sed contra quam est nota natura.” Isidore, Etymologiarum, XI.III.31–​2; trans. Barney et al., Etymologies, 244. 40  Kim, “Monstrous and Bloody Signs,” 28.

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created; and He knows how to weave the beauty of the whole out of the similarity and diversity of its parts. The man who cannot view the whole is offended by what he takes to be the deformity of a part; but this is because he does not know how it is adapted or related to the whole.)41

Augustine’s argument has interesting implications for those who are not Christians or, because of accidence of birth, lived before the Incarnation: without a full revelation of God, they cannot “view the whole” of creation and thus cannot see monsters as meaningful. They only see the “deformity of the part,” a sign without any locatable meaning. Without the bridging knowledge of revelation, monsters are messages without meaning, and this makes their bodies, the carriers of that sign, dangerous and threatening.42 The women of the Christopher legend demonstrate an alternative response to the monstrous not demonstrated by King Dagnus, Alexander the Great, or even Beowulf. Since monsters are contrary only to known nature, their bodies can also signal to the beholder that their view of nature, and by extension, the God of Nature, is insufficient; they need a more complete grammar of revelation, provided here by Christopher’s sermonizing, to make the leap from the sign to its Creator. At the challenge of the monster’s body, Nicea and Aquilina’s fear signals where the problem lies—​not with the monster, but with their means of comprehending it. Christopher’s body operates as a semantic arrow: it points to either destruction or to a Creator whose knowledge can make sense of its bizarre form. This is therefore the point of Christopher’s monstrosity: he is not a sign of danger so much as one whose signifier cannot be understood on the far side of divine revelation. Identifying God as Creator is thus necessary for proper understanding of the monster; consequently, monsters like Christopher also serve as the catalyst for the process of Christian conversion. As Bede explains in his exegesis of Paul’s sermon to the Athenians and “the unknown God,” qua ita apud gentiles tractatus seriem format ut primo unum deum auctorem mundi omniumque esse doceat […] ut non solum propter munera lucis et vitae, verum etiam propter cognationem quandam generis diligendum ostendat; deinde […] quod totius mundi conditor et dominus templis non possit includi saxeis, quod omnis beneficii largitor sanguine non egeat victimarum, quod hominum denique creator et gubernator omnium non possit hominis manu creari.

(Among gentiles the treatment of [Paul’s] subject takes the form of a series of steps. First, he teaches that the one God is the originator of the world and of all things […] Thus he demonstrates that God is to be loved not only because of his gifts of light and life, but also because of a certain affinity of kind. Next […] [he argues] that the founder and Lord of the entire world cannot be enclosed in temples of stone, that the granter of all favors has no 41  Augustine of Hippo, De civitate Dei, edited by B. Dombart and A. Kalb, CCSL 47–​48 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1955): XVI.8.29–​36; trans. R. W. Dyson, The City of God Against the Pagans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 708. 42  Cf. Kim, “Monstrous and Bloody Signs,” 28–​29.

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Christopher follows nearly the same pattern in the conversion of his own “gentiles.” He tells Dagnus at their first meeting, “Dii autem qui non fecerunt caelum et terram. pereant. et ipsi qui adorant eos […] utinam audires me et adoraris deum qui fecit caelum et terram quia in potestatem habet liberare te de igne et demittere peccata tua” (May the gods who did not make heaven and earth perish, and the very ones who worship them, too […] If only you would hear me and worship the god who made heaven and earth, because He has it in his power to free you from the fire and absolve your sins!).44 From Dagnus’s limited perspective, Christopher can only portend disaster to his kingdom, so he violently contains the threat; for this reason, in the very first lines of the Vitellius fragment, Christopher calls him “dysig” and “unsnotor” (crazy and foolish) because he does not know the “Dryhten se ys ealra þinga Scyppend” (the Lord, who is the Creator of all things).45 Through the destruction of the idols, Nicea and Aquilina also demonstrate to Dagnus that this same Creator “cannot be enclosed in temples of stone” or “created by the hand of man.”46 There are important parallels in Judith and Beowulf as well. One of the most common epithets for the Christian God in the Anglo-​Saxon canon, Scyppend or “Creator,” only appears in Judith once, when the narrator proclaims her “scyppendes mægð” (the Creator’s maiden).47 This is also why, after their victory over the Assyrians and the “heathen hound” Holofernes, the poem ends with an invocation of God as the one “þe gesceop wind ond lyfte,/​roderas ⁊ rume grundas” (He who created wind and air, the heavens and far-​spread foundations).48 Mary Flavia Godfrey notes that the words of this invocation serve both as a glorification of God and “also an occasion to enumerate the parts of creation” in terms familiar in both an explicitly Christian and a more obliquely mythological context.49 The poet of Judith thus introduces the grammar of creation from a universal standpoint and links it explicitly to the Christian conception of God. One sees a similar distinction in Beowulf. “Scyppend” is only used once, in the story of Cain’s curse, in the first 150 lines.50 As Fred Robinson explains concerning the Beowulf poet’s epithets for God, 43  Bede, Bedae Venerabilis Expositio Actuum Apostolorum et retractio, ed. M. L. W. Laistner (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1939), 17.24. Translated by Lawrence T. Martin in Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1989) 142–43. 44  Goullet and Isetta, Le légendier de Turin, 235– 36.

45  Rypins, Three Old English Prose Texts, 68, lines 1–​3. 46  See footnote 43.

47  Judith, ed. Mark Griffith (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997), line 78. 48  Judith, lines 347b–​348a.

49  Mary Flavia Godfrey, “Beowulf and Judith: Thematizing Decapitation in Old English Poetry,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 35 (1993): 1–​43 at 13.

50  “fifelcynnes eard /​ wonsæli wer weardode hwile, /​ siþðan him scyppen forscrifen hæfde /​ in Caines cynne” (this miserable man lived for a time in the land of giants, after the Creator had

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The ambiguity of words like ælmihtig, alwalda, dryhten, god, and metod, which have a pre-​ Cædmonian meaning coexisting with a postconversion Christian meaning, was, I believe, seized upon by the Beowulf poet […] By restricting his names for the higher being(s) to words which have two possible referents […] he has solved […] the problem of what to call the supernatural forces to which the characters in the poem appeal.51

Tellingly, the word Scyppend is not a part of that list of terms because it has a single, specific referent in a Christianized English society: God the Creator. The characters of Beowulf seem “capable of sensing the existence […] and of directing their piety toward this dimly perceived Creator,” just as one sees during the scop’s song about creation.52 God is praised as Ælmihtiga (Almighty) during the song, but the limitations of a pre-​ revelation understanding of creation make this an imperfect act of sincere devotion. When faced with an Old Testament horror like Grendel, Hrothgar and his people turn to idols for help because they cannot give that creator-​god the proper name. They can praise God vaguely as Ælmihtiga and Metod (Judge), but not as Scyppend—​the Maker. Beowulf can defeat Grendel, but he does not also learn of the Scyppend who cursed Grendel’s kind. The Mother’s death leads Beowulf to an ancient hilt inscribed with the Judeo-​Christian story of the Flood, but the text never indicates whether or not Hrothgar can comprehend what he is holding in his hands.53 Turning to other examples, the conqueror-​philosopher Alexander is a classic example of a pious and knowledgeable heathen who “cannot see the whole” and is “offended by the deformity of the part.” As he tells his teacher Aristotle, The earth is a source of wonder (to wundrienne) first for the good things that she brings forth, and then for the evil, through which she is revealed to observers. She is the producer of […] wondrous creatures (wunderlice wyhta), all those things which are difficult to comprehend for those who look and observe because of the variety of their forms.54

condemned him among Cain’s race; 104b–​106a). The verb scyppan is used of God’s work once in the song of Creation (lines 90–​98) and twice in the damaged portion regarding the dragon, though the context is no longer discernible. See Klaeber’s Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, 4th ed., edited by R. D. Fulk, Robert Bjork, and John D. Niles (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). Translation from R. M. Liuzza, Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2000).

51  Fred Robinson, Beowulf and the Appositive Style (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 39–​40. 52  Robinson, Beowulf and the Appositive Style, 35.

53  “Hroðgar maðelode; hylt sceawode, /​ealde lafe. On ðæm wæs or writen /​fyrngewinnes; syðþan flod ofsloh” (Hrothgar spoke—​he studied the hilt of the old heirloom, where was written the origin of ancient strife, when the flood slew), Klaeber’s Beowulf, lines 1687–​89; trans. Liuzza, Beowulf. The text says Hrothgar sceawode the hilt rather than reading it—​he can see but not interpret. Michael Near gives a excellent reading of this scene in light of Hrothgar’s inability: “Anticipating Alienation: Beowulf and the Intrusion of Literacy,” PMLA 108 (1993): 320–​32, esp. 323–​24.

54  “Seo eorðe is to wundrienne hwæt heo ærest oþþe godra þinga cenne, oððe eft þara yfelra, þe heo þæm sceawigendum is æteowed. Hio is cennende þa fulcuþan […] wunderlice wyhta, þa þing eall þæm monnum þe hit geseoð ⁊ sceawigað wæron uneþe to gewitanne for þære missenlicnisse þara hiowa.” Orchard, Pride and Prodigies, 226–​27. Translations are also Orchard’s.

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Like the unnamed woman who meets Christopher, Alexander sees these wunderlice wyhta as a marvel, but without a full grammar of creation he can only go as far as pondering the nature of the earth itself. That knowledge can get him as far as a “prime mover” of sorts deduced from the stars, but he cannot follow these monsters all the way to contemplating the Scyppend. Since he can only see “the deformity of the part,” Alexander destroys the ox-​tailed women in the Wonders of the East because of their “disgusting and unworthy bodies.”55 And, since Alexander’s quest of eradication and violence is punctuated by religious devotion, his distaste for the monstrous overlaps with the spiritual. Dagnus and, by extension, Beowulf, Hrothgar, and Alexander are all prior to either the Incarnation or their cultural knowledge of it, so they can only comprehend the totality of creation up to a certain point. They cannot read beyond the monster to the God who made it, and only Nicea and Aquilina give us an idea of the proper response. Observing how Nicea and Aquilina react to a dog-​headed saint gives us an idea how readers could approach the same creatures in the Wonders of the East. Heide Estes, Katherine Powell, and Greta Austin have all noted that the Wonders of the East is filled with references to an unnamed viewer looking upon or trying to touch or approach the creatures, and they regard this observer as important as the creatures themselves.56 If Nicea and Aquilina are meant to guide the reader, then the correct response is to look upon the monstrous as a revelation of the limits of human understanding. That is, the readers can either decide to reject the cynocephalus like Alexander or Dagnus, or, like Nicea and Aquilina, they can allow it to challenge their limited perception of the world. If one looks through Nicea and Aquilina’s eyes, however, that also means one must consider whether that viewer or the objects of her gaze are female. All three manuscripts of the Wonders of the East have three illustrations of female marvels in common: the bearded huntresses, the ox-​tailed women, and the generous hosts who give their guests a wife.57 Alexander serves as observer for two of these marvels, rejecting the ox-​tailed women while marvelling at the wife-​givers. The Vitellius version, however, adds two female observers into the existing illustrations. One of the Ethiopians (called sigelwara) on fol. 106v is a woman looking out from the margins of the page: she is much smaller than her male counterpart, literally excluded from the boundaries of his bordered frame, and she reaches inside the frame towards his shoulder. The victim of the donestre on fol. 103v is also a woman, lured into striking distance by an unambiguously male donestre who appears to hold her severed left leg as she stares out from the page in horror. 55  “hy syndon æwisce on lichoman ⁊ unweorþe.” Rypins, Three Old English Prose Texts, 66, lines 2–​3. 56  Greta Austin, “Marvelous Peoples or Marvelous Races?,” in Marvels, Monsters, and Miracles: Studies in the Medieval and Early Modern Imaginations, ed. Timothy S. Jones and David A. Sprunger (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2002), 25–​51; Heidi Estes, “Wonders and Wisdom: Anglo-​Saxons and the East,” English Studies 91 (2010): 360–​73 at 363; Kathryn Powell, “The Anglo-​Saxon Imaginary of the East: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Image of the East in Old English Literature” (PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 2002), 102–​4. 57  Depicted on fols. 105v and 106v respectively.

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In both instances, women view the East either from the inside or outside of that culture, and in the case of the female traveller, getting too close to the margins leads to decapitation, consumption, and the donestre’s tears. It is difficult not to contrast the donestre episode with the two marginalized women of the Christopher legend, as they also approach a powerful male figure and suffer dismemberment and decapitation. Instead of the donestre weeping over their heads, however, Nicea and Aquilina become martyrs, and Christopher asks for blessing on all who read his passion (and view his own dismembered body) mid terum—​that is, “with tears.”58 The women of the Passion of Saint Christopher therefore teach that monsters betray the limits of human, pre-​Incarnational understanding. Nicea, Aquilina, and Judith are more than sign readers, however: they also make signs from the corporeal fragments of their adversaries and interpret them. First, all three women perform acts of decapitation upon important (and masculine) centres of power, and they submit to physical control of their bodies just long enough to gain the upper hand. Just as Judith submits to being taken to Holofernes’s tent where he intends to defile her, Nicea and Aquilina likewise submit to their removal to the temple where, Dagnus hopes, they will defile themselves with pagan rites. When the sisters enter the temple of Jove and Apollo, however, they instead ridicule his gods by demanding that they speak to them. When the gods give no response, they repeat their call in front of their titillated audience, “just in case the gods had fallen asleep”: Then Nicea took off her girdle and placed it around Jove’s neck, and they both dragged it down, and they threw it down onto its face, and they destroyed it. They did likewise with Apollo and said, “If you are gods, lift yourselves up and save yourselves.” But the king, upon hearing that Nicea and Aquilina had destroyed his idols said to them, “I asked you to sacrifice to my gods, not destroy them.” The two women responded, saying: “Fool, we have toppled stones; your gods are such that they are ruined by women.”59

Through these stone bodies broken at the necks, Nicea and Aquilina declare that Dagnus’s gods, and Dagnus himself, are impotent and have no authority to rule. It seems appropriate to detect a trace of the Vulgate Judith here: “One Hebrew woman hath made confusion in the house of king Nebuchadnezzer, for behold: Holofernes lieth upon the ground, and his head is not upon him.”60 58  “Cwæð drihten min god syle gode mede þam þe mine þrowunga awrite ⁊ þa ecean edlean þam þe hie mid tearum ræde.” Rypins, Three Old English Prose Texts, 76, lines 14–​17.

59  “Tunc nicia soluit cinctum suum. et posuit in collo iouis. et traxerunt ambas. et iactauerunt eum in faciem et conteruerunt. Similiter et apollene ficerunt. et dixerunt. Si dei estis. leuate et adiuuate uos. Audiens autem rex quod Nicia et Aquilina deos suos conteruerunt dixit ad illas. ego uos rogaueram ut sacrificaretis deis meis non ut conlederetis. Responderunt illas dicentes. Stulte nos lapides conlisemus. Talis sunt dei tui. ut a mulieribus conlidantur.” Goullet and Isetta, Le légendier de Turin, 238. 60  “et dixit una mulier hebraea fecit confusionem in domo regis Nabuchodonosor ecce enim Holofernis iacet in terra et caput ipsius non est in illo” (Judith 14:16). Biblia Sacra Vulgata editio

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The parallels across these two texts are far too rich to be adequately investigated here. For one, Nicea and Aquilina steal into Dagnus’s temple not unlike how Judith gains access to the Assyrian camp. All three of them are forced to enter male-​dominated spaces, which then initiates an attack inside. Both Dagnus and Holofernes plan to dominate these women in those spaces, but their would-​be victims find their adversaries surprisingly incapacitated—​both “asleep,” in fact.61 They attack their oppressors at the neck and employ those broken bodies as signs of God’s power and omens of defeat to their oppressors. Furthermore, these attacks bear the marks of sexual insult and assault. Both Godfrey and Kim have explored how Holofernes’s assassination carries specific overtones of castration and bodily shaming, and the Nicea and Aquilina episodes play with the same ideas.62 As already discussed, the sisters openly mock Dagnus’s gods and play up their impotency. One could describe what follows as either an overtly sexual symbolic act or an overtly symbolic sexual act: after insulting the gods, Nicea suggestively strips off her girdle and wraps it around the gods’ necks like a lasso.63 The moment is clearly a reprisal of what Dagnus hoped they would do to Christopher: overwhelm and sexually desecrate his body with their own. Dagnus first tries to silence Nicea’s mocking by knocking out her teeth, but when that fails, he orders that her body be burned. She calls for a miracle from God to humiliate the king.64 The desecrating fires burst into a cascade of roses, and her wish is granted. Enraged, Dagnus orders her decapitated, but her death confirms her power as a martyr of God rather than his own power as king. In each of these instances, women’s gender initiates their role in the violence. In the Vulgate version, Judith’s unearthly beauty brings her into Holofernes’s camp and motivates his attempted rape. The Old English fragment likewise plays up Judith’s beauty and her purity before God in contrast to the drunken revelry around her. In the context of Holofernes’s party and the aftermath, this normally “wise young woman” is called “ides aelfscinu” (elf-​bright woman) and “wundenlocc” (with braided hair) by the narrator, as if seeing Judith in these moments through Holofernes’s eyes.65 Before their martyrdoms, quinta, ed. Robert Weber and Roger Gryson (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994), Douay-​ Rheims translation.

61  “Ingresse sunt in templum. et clamabant idolis dei paganorum. audite nos. et non erat vox in illis. et dicebat iterum. ne forte somnium ceperint et non audiunt” (They entered the temple and shouted to the idols, “Gods of the pagans, hear us!” And there was no voice in them. and they said it again, lest they had fallen asleep and they did not hear). Goullet and Isetta, Le légendier de Turin, 238. 62  Godfrey, “Beowulf and Judith,” 22–​23; Kim, “Bloody Signs,” 292–93.

63  “Tunc nicia soluit cinctum suum. et posuit in collo iouis. et traxerunt ambas. et iactauerunt eum in faciem et conteruerunt. Similiter et apollene ficerunt” (Then Nicea loosened her belt and put it on Jove’s neck, and they both dragged it and hurled it on its face and destroyed it. And they did likewise to Apollo). Goullet and Isetta, Le légendier de Turin, 238. 64  “Et mihi mittas angelum tuum et liberit me de igne isto ut erubiscat tyrannus cum ira sua” (Both send your angel and let him free me from this fire, so the tyrant with his rage be shamed). Goullet and Isetta, Le légendier de Turin, 239. 65  Cf. Griffith, Judith, lines 14, 55, 103, 125.

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Dagnus co-​opts Nicea and Aquilina’s bodies as a weapon against Christopher, hoping they will incite him to lust; when they refuse, Dagnus tells them to “think upon their beauty” before he punishes them with disfigurement.66 These male figures respond to these women with their eyes rather than their intellects, and later, with violence. Thus, they fail to understand what powers these women control.67 Women and monsters, it seems, each tread with one foot in the same semiotic space. Each text draws attention to the female body during the act of decapitation just as it draws attention to the monstrous body in Christopher and Beowulf. Once the bodies are dismembered, these women can manipulate male bodies as signs, or in the case of Nicea’s miracles, make signs of themselves. Even so, women are not monsters, and understanding this distinction requires careful thought. Dana Oswald rightly insists that monstrosity is not purely behavioural. “In order to be a monster,” she specifies, “one must possess a monstrous body, largely because actions are temporary and can be changed.”68 As Heidi Estes has explained, however, Jerome’s standard for the “normative” human body is male, and so women’s bodies, ever changeable, given over to sex and fertility, fall short of that standard; they are both normative and deviant. So are monstrous bodies, in fact: not only are they less than human, but by Jerome’s standard, they are somehow less than fully “male.” Furthermore, Estes likens women’s status to how Jeffrey Jerome Cohen describes giants: they are simultaneously “origin and enemy.”69 In Christopher, Wonders of the East, Judith, and Beowulf, women’s bodies are already the symbolic currency of power between powerful men: they are passed to each other as intended temptresses, gifts of goodwill, or peace-​weavers.70 When those bodies step outside of their given semantic places by defying their sexual roles, those physical differences become glaringly 66  “Respondit rex et dixit […] ‘cogitate pulchritudinem uestram et sacrificate diis. si autem nolueritis. male faciam uos perire a faciae terrae’ ” (The king responded and said […] “think upon your beauty and sacrifice to the gods; if you are unwilling, however, I will make you perish wretchedly from the face of the earth”). Goullet and Isetta, Le légendier de Turin, 236.

67  The third man to suffer this failure is Alexander the Great. In Augustine and Isidore, curiositas is an intrinsic species of lust which gratifies the desires of the senses. Alexander views monstrous bodies with the eyes rather than the intellect and, as stated before, gains knowledge without any wisdom. Cf: Augustine, Sancti Augustini: Confessionum Libri XIII CC SL 27 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1990), II.6.55–​58; See also: Edward Peters, “Libertas Inquirendi and the Vitium Curiositatis in Medieval Thought,” in La notion de liberté au Moyen Âge: Islam, Byzance, Occident, ed. George Makdisi and Dominique Sourdel, Penn-​Paris-​Dumbarton Oaks Colloquia (Paris: Les belles lettres, 1988), 89–​98; Richard Newhauser, “Towards a History of Human Curiosity: A Prolegomenon to Its Medieval Phase,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistegeschichte 56 (1982): 568–​69.

68  Dana Oswald, Monsters, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), 7. 69  Estes, “Wonders and Wisdom,” 365–​66.

70  For more on women as a symbolic exchange between men, see Estes, “Wonders and Wisdom,” 365–​66.

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apparent; their “deformity of the part” is now offensive and a threat. Though not truly monsters, women’s changeable bodies are nevertheless capable of slipping out of the symbolic exchange between men and openly challenging masculine power—​and those men’s bodies, once fragmented and made into signs, now point to God’s power rather than confirming their own.71 The limitation to this reading is that these women have no autonomy, regardless of their power to fragment male bodies and make them into symbols. Women can slip out of the symbolic exchange between men only by offering up their bodies in an exchange with the Creator. Nicea and Aquilina may refuse their cultural role as prostitutes and instead reduce Jove and Apollo to rubble, but, like Christopher, that power leads to dismemberment. Judith likewise offers herself as a sign of God’s wrath against Holofernes, but her sexual purity affords her a privilege denied to Nicea and Aquilina: survival. She and her handmaiden substitute Holofernes’s head for their own bodies, and they interpret its meaning to the Bethulians. Granted, many scholars have already traced out the decapitation narratives in Judith and Beowulf, but let us consider one more female decapitator: Grendel’s mother, herself a fusion of the monstrous and female body. Not to push the parallels too far, but she too steals into a hall after a victory-​party, attacks a sleeping man, and absconds with his head.72 Her grief as a mother, rather than beauty or purity, drives her to Heorot, and rather than slipping out of a masculine exchange of female bodies, she forces herself into a masculine exchange of corpses during a blood-​feud.73 The first fragmented and subdued body is not hers but Grendel’s, for his arm hangs like a trophy over the door-​post. Grendel’s mother takes that sign of victory and leaves a sign of her own: Æschere’s head, discarded like a bloody signpost at the edge of the mere. As the kin of Cain, she has no interest in using her body in a symbolic exchange with God. Rather, her body is a sign of God’s ire against Cain, and in a sense her rejection of that role to avenge her son moves her from one kind of omen into another one entirely. Much like Nicea and Aquilina, the mother’s revenge prompts a vicious response—​not in martyrdom like the sisters, but in her destruction nevertheless. Beowulf and Dagnus each try to co-​opt these women’s bodies by destroying them. Dagnus dismembers Aquilina with heavy stones like the ones she destroyed; Grendel’s mother is also decapitated, just as she had done with Æschere, but her venomous head is left at the mere. Beowulf takes Grendel’s head back to Heorot instead of hers, however, because 71  I envision the turning of the male body into a sign in Karma Lochrie’s terms. As she explains of Holofernes’s head, “The sexual violence of Judith’s beheading takes the form of Holofernes’ bodily inscription, which the text then proceeds to read. This inscription in effect, renders Holofernes’ body into a text, thereby feminizing it.” Karma Lochrie, “Sexual Violence and the Politics of War in the Old English Judith,” in Class and Gender in Early English Literature: Intersections, ed. Britton J. Harwood and Gillian R. Overing (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 12 (emphasis mine). 72  Fulk, Bjork, and Niles, Klaeber’s Beowulf, lines 1279–​1306, 1417–​24.

73  “[O]‌nd his modor þa gyt /​ gifre on galgmod gegan wolde /​ sorhfulne sið, sunu deoð wrecan” (But his mother still greedy, grim-​minded, wanted to go on her sorrowful journey to avenge her son’s death). Klaeber’s Beowulf, 1276b–​78; trans. Liuzza, Beowulf.

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he must complete the exchange of male bodies required by the blood-​feud instead of claiming hers. And so, to return to the initial question: does restoring these missing women of the Nowell Codex have interpretive benefits? The answer seems to be a resounding “yes.” Nicea, Aquilina, and their nameless counterpart highlight moments of interpreting bodies: monsters’ and women’s bodies, often in a spiritual context. Not unimportantly, it is the presence of women that makes the signifier beyond the sign apparent—​not just the warrior Judith, but the martyrs Nicea and Aquilina, and, though only briefly mentioned here, Grendel’s mother. Something lurks behind these women’s bodies that makes them both like, and very unlike, the monstrous bodies around them. Though this brief analysis cannot consider all of the implications or engage all of the relevant scholarship, by way of conclusion I would like to point out some broader implications of recognizing Nicea and Aquilina in the other English manuscripts. First, the Paris manuscript of the Christopher legend contains Latin materials important to three female saints popular in England: Helen, who found the true cross, Margaret, and Juliana. Recognizing that Nicea and Aquilina belong in this list means that the entire manuscript now reflects upon the deeds of holy women. Secondly, the now-​destroyed Cotton Otho B.x, which contained mostly Ælfrician texts, also had an appreciable number of women saints and may have included, like the Paris manuscript, St. Margaret.74 Third, Kenneth Sisam believed that veneration of Christopher especially found a home in female communities at Shaftesbury and Nunnaminster, based on the calendars found in two manuscripts that had been associated with those communities.75 Half of all the surviving calendars mentioning Christopher, in fact, come from nearby in the areas of Winchester, Somerset, and Dorset.76 These are mostly places where his relics were placed, naturally, but they are also places with prominent women’s communities, and Nicea and Aquilina give those women’s communities an extra tie to the Christopher legend not previously recognized. 74  Ker notes that the manuscript could consist of up to three separate codices depending on how one interprets Wanley’s catalogue. Margaret originally comprised the entirety of Ker’s “Part C.” No leaves of Margaret survived the fire, however, and so this must remain a mystery. Ker, Catalogue, 228.

75  Sisam rests his case on two manuscripts: London, BL Cotton Galba A.xiv/​Nero A. ii, and Salisbury, Cathedral Library MS 150. Although the Galba/​Nero book is clearly from a women’s foundation, likely Nunnaminster, later editors have backed off of assigning Salisbury 150 specifically to Shaftesbury. Daphne Stroud extended possibilities to Sherbourne, Wilton, and Amesbury, all of which had women’s communities, but she prefers Wilton. A single feminine form extant in the MS strengthens the connection to a women’s community. Sisam, “The Compilation of the Beowulf Manuscript,” 71–​72; The Salisbury Psalter, ed. Celia Sisam and Kenneth Sisam, EETS, o.s., 242 (London, 1959); Daphne Stroud, “The Provenance of the Salisbury Psalter,” The Library 6 (1979), 12; 225–​35 at 226. 76  The calendars in question are Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 422, from Sherbourne, Dorset; Cambridge, Trinity College R. 15. 32, from Nunnaminster; Cotton Titus D. xxvii, from Nunnaminster; London, BL Arundel 60, from Winchester; BL Cotton Vitellius A. xviii, from Wells, Somerset; BL Cotton Vitellius E. xviii, from Hyde Abbey, Winchester. The other six surviving calendars come from Canterbury, Worchester, Bury St. Edmunds, and Lincoln. These calendars, along with Francis Wormald’s commentary, are available in F. Wormald, ed., English Kalendars before AD 1100, Henry Bradshaw Society 72 (London: Harrison and Sons, 1934).

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Turning to the larger textual context of Judith, the story’s presence in England is entirely in texts which address the character or virtue of women. Aldhelm of Malmesbury, for instance, dedicates his prose De laudibus virginitate to the women of Barking abbey; in the chapter on Judith, in fact, he seems a little uncomfortable with Judith’s weaponized beauty: “See, the adornment of women is called the plunder of men, not by our own affirmations but by the support of Scripture!”77 Ælfric of Eynsham, near the end of his homily on Judith, likewise admonishes women and for much the same reason: “I also wish to say, my sisters, that virginity and modesty have great power, just as we read everywhere in the passions of the martyrs and the Lives of the Fathers.”78 This Judith material, like the Christopher legend, is likewise associated with gender and geographic region—​to women’s concerns and communities, and to south-​central/​ southwestern England.79 The Beowulf manuscript, in short, is a major source for two legendary accounts of women whose analogues are closely tied to female audiences; those two accounts comprise 40 percent of the titles in the manuscript; and, if we take Peter Lucas’s reconstruction of the manuscript seriously, Judith may well have had pride of place over Beowulf in the full manuscript, followed by Christopher. The larger manuscript and historical data tie these stories to Wessex and southern Mercia, in the same general region where many scholars put the genesis of the Beowulf legend.80 If scholars allow Nicea and Aquilina a place back in the Beowulf manuscript, then it must also open scholars to the possibility that more than men may have taken part in the use, or even in the creation, of Cotton Vitellius A.xv part 2.

77  “En, non nostris assertionibus sed scripturae astipulationibus ornatus feminarum rapina uirorum uocatur!” Aldhelmi Malmesbiriensis Prosa de virginitate, ed. Scott Gwara and Rudolph Ehwald, CC Ser. Lat. 124a (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), LVII.17–​24.

78  “Ic wylle eac secgan, min swustor, þæt mægðhad ⁊ clænnys mycele mihte habbað, swa swa we gehwær rædað on martira þrowungum ⁊ on Vitas Patrum.” Ælfric of Eynsham, Angelsächsische homilien und heiligenleben, ed. Bruno Assmann (Kassel: G. H. Wigand, 1889), 115, lines 442–​45.

79  One more manuscript deserves brief attention here despite its Continental origin: Arras, Bibliothèque Municipale, 764 (739), fols. 1–​93, a late ninth-​century copy of Raban Maur’s commentaries on Judith and Esther. The manuscript has French origin but an English provenance by the tenth century, generally ascribed to Bath. This provenance puts the manuscript a mere 30 miles from Malmesbury. See Gneuss and Lapidge, Anglo-​Saxon Manuscripts, item 779. Like Aldhelm, Raban dedicated his commentary to a woman as an exemplum of chastity—​in his case, Judith of Bavaria: “Accipite ergo Judith homonymam vestram, castitatis exemplar, et triumphali laude perpetuis eam praeconiis declarate.” Patrologia Latina cursus completus, ed. J. P. Migne, vol. 109 (Paris: Migne, 1864), col. 540d.

80  Many scholars have given Beowulf a home in the west of England. Among these are Felix Liebermann (1920), Alois Brandl (1936), George Bond (1943), Dorothy Whitelock (1951), Michael Lapidge (1982), Karl Schneider (1986), R. D. Fulk (1992), and John D. Niles (1993). For elaboration and a full bibliography, see Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles, A Beowulf Handbook (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 13–​17.

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Chapter 10

BOUNDARIES EMBODIED: AN ECOFEMINIST READING OF THE OLD ENGLISH JUDITH

HEIDE ESTES* AN ECOFEMINIST READING of the Old English adaptation of the biblical Book of Judith yields new insights into the poem. The narrative seems an unlikely site for attention to environmental issues, as it concerns a city and an enemy encampment, with little description of landscape of any kind, urban or rural. As a victorious leader for her people, Judith seems an improbable subject for the kind of ecofeminist analysis done by Val Plumwood, who notes a consistent identification of the feminine with the natural world in opposition to the presumed norms of masculine rationality. But the text is suffused throughout with boundaries breached and violated—​geographical, gendered, temporal, and religious divides, as well as divisions between humans, animals, and objects, drunk and sober, alive and dead. Judith crosses geographical boundaries and exists in a liminal space at the margins of gender and religion, a nuanced figure whose heroic stature engenders slippage in the terms of the narrative.

Geographical Boundaries

The biblical Book of Judith describes the terrain around the Hebrew city of Bethulia as a mountainous wilderness, with the city itself located high in the hills; the Assyrians must traverse remote and threatening mountain passes in order to reach the city (see in particular ­chapters 5, 6, 7, and 13). The Old English poetic rendition, as it survives in the Beowulf manuscript, opens in mid-​sentence with material corresponding to ­chapter 13 of the biblical book, with an unknown quantity of the poem now lost. Scholars have argued that the poem is almost complete as it stands and, conversely, that the entire biblical text was once represented in Old English verse and only a fragment remains; Peter Lucas has surveyed the arguments on both sides.1 Within portions of the biblical text that correspond to what survives of the poem, there are several references to hilly terrain that are not represented in the poem. After Judith and her servant leave the Assyrian camp to return to the city, for instance, the Vulgate has “gyrantes vallem venerunt ad portam civitatis” (went around the valley to the gate of the city, 13.12). In the corresponding passage in the poem, Judith and her servant leave the Assyrian camp to walk to the city, but there is no descriptive characterization of the terrain: “Hie ða beahhreodene /​ feðelaste forð onettan, /​ oð hie glædmode gegan hæfdon /​ to ðam wealgate” (Ring-​adorned, they then hastened forth along the track until, cheerful in *  Monmouth University. [email protected]

1  See Peter J. Lucas, “The Place of Judith in the Beowulf-​Manuscript,” Review of English Studies 41 (1990):  463–​78.

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mood, they had reached the gate in the [city] wall, 138b–​141a).2 The representation of hillside is reduced to a simple track that the two women can follow from one place to another. Rather than being characterized as wilderness, it is already marked by human activity. Our perceptions of the natural world are always mediated by culture, and even what we think of as “nature” has been constructed by human activity across decades, centuries, millennia. Alex Loftus argues that “the nature we experience on a daily basis is actively constituted through non-​natural processes.”3 We can see this constitution today in the establishment of national parks or other preserves set aside as “wilderness,” rather arbitrarily separated from farmland or other human uses, as well as in the traces of human habitation—​house foundations, non-​native plants, remnants of roads or rails—​that often dot such terrain. The natural world surrounding the city of Bethulia and the Assyrian army camp is in the biblical text a mountainous wilderness, but in the Old English versification mediated by translation and English cultural context it becomes an undifferentiated plain. Yet the city of Bethulia relies on its hinterlands for food and, especially, water, as is made clear when the Assyrians block the water supply and precipitate crisis within the city. As William Howarth argues, “although we cast nature and culture as opposites, in fact they constantly mingle, like water and soil in a flowing stream.”4 The relationships between urban and non-​urban are complex, culturally mediated, and potentially fragile. The oppositions between nature and culture, between untouched wilderness and polluted urban environments, collapse in William Cronon’s analysis of how wilderness is always constructed by humans, whether in figural opposition to the urban or whether by literally removing farmers or indigenous peoples to create an apparently pristine terrain for privileged consumption.5 The construction of wilderness in both senses—​through opposition to the urban, and through the literal or textual removal of evidence of prior human habitation—​is not confined to post-​industrial societies but can be found in Anglo-​Saxon cultural constructions as well.6 Discussing contemporary ecological problems, Howarth points out: “The dogma that culture will always master nature has long directed Western progress, inspiring the wars, invasions, and other forms of conquest that have crowded the earth and strained its carrying capacity.”7 But this is not simply a modern problem: Holofernes seeks to master nature by blocking 2  Judith, ed. Mark Griffith (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997). All references to Judith are from this edition.

3  Alex Loftus, Everyday Environmentalism: Creating an Urban Political Ecology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 1.

4  William Howarth, “Some Principles of Ecocriticism,” in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 69–​91 at 69. 5  See William Cronon, Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: Norton, 1995), 69–90. 6  See Heide Estes, Anglo-​Saxon Literary Landscapes: Ecotheory and the Environmental Imagination (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017), chap. 4. 7  Howarth, “Some Principles of Ecocriticism,” 77.

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the flow of water into the city, and within a few days the Bethulians are ready to surrender. Deprived of access to farmlands around the city, they would in any case starve to death. The Bethulians’ attempt to master nature by barricading themselves into a mountain stronghold backfires because they become disconnected from nature. Yet though the space between the Assyrian camp and the Bethulian city is not clearly described as wilderness, it is still demarcated as a boundary between the two settlements. It forms a geographical and social boundary, a place of difference, unsettled and, while travelled enough to have a path, not under direct human control. In the biblical text, Judith tells the Assyrian soldiers she must leave the encampment each evening at dusk and pray, occupying the liminal space between city and camp. This detail does not appear in the surviving portion of the Old English poem, but after Judith has killed Holofernes, it is somehow established that she is able to leave the camp, suggesting that perhaps the biblical text was known to the original audience, a supposition strengthened by the existence of an Ælfrician translation as well as Aldhelm’s references to the Judith narrative in De Virginitate. The distance between the Assyrian camp and the Bethulian city is suggested by the detail that after Judith and her servant leave the camp, “geseon mihtan /​ þære wlitegan byrig weallas blican” (could see the beautiful city’s walls flickering, 136b–​137). The word “blican,” with its suggestion of sparkling or shining, suggests torches in the distance. That the city and the camp are at some remove from one another is also suggested by the passage describing the Hebrew warriors’ journey the following morning toward the Assyrian stronghold. Words referring to the warriors’ forward movement—​“stopon” (marched, 200, 212, 227), “foron” (went, 202), “gegan” (gone, 219), “nealæhte” (neared, 261)—​are sustained across sixty lines of verse, suggesting that some length of time is required to traverse the distance between the two settlements, and also pointing to a lengthy progress of slaughter through a large encampment to Holofernes’s centrally located tent. Within Holofernes’s own quarters, an “eallgylden /​ fleohnet” (golden/​gilded flynet, 46–​47) hung around his bed enables him to see those who approach while others cannot see in. The boundary of the flynet, through which Holofernes can see out of his tent but others cannot see in, has engendered significant critical commentary and not a little confusion. That boundary, central to the action of the poem, becomes legible to the poem’s thematic concerns when it is read with attention to ideas of ecology and gender, and their intersections. Eallgylden has been translated as “golden” (Bradley, Hostetter), “pure gold” (Cook), and “entirely made of gold thread” (Griffith), following the biblical description of “conopeo quod erat ex purpura et auro et zmaragdo et lapidibus pretiosis intextum” (a canopy which was embroidered with purple and gold and emeralds and precious stones, 10:19).8 In the Exeter Book Riddles and the archaeological record, gold adorns items of value and cultural importance such as swords, books of scripture, and ritual church objects.

8  See Aaron K. Hostetter, “Judith.” Anglo-​Saxon Narrative Poetry Project, 2007–​2017, https://​ anglosaxonpoetry.camden.rutgers.edu/​; Judith, An Old English Epic Fragment, ed. and trans. Albert S.  Cook (Boston:  D. C.  Heath, 1904); Mark Griffith, ed., Judith (University of Exeter Press, 1997); S. A. J. Bradley, ed. and trans., Anglo-Saxon Poetry: An Anthology of Old English Poems in Prose Translation (Everyman, 1995).

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Within Judith, the heroine is described as “golde gefrætewod” (decorated with gold, 171); later in the text, the Bethulian warriors recover gold-​adorned weapons and armour from the corpses of the slain Assyrians. The “gylden” net, however, may be understood as “gold-​coloured” rather than “made out of gold.” As a gilded rather than golden object, it simulates value without possessing it, suggesting with some irony the use of a precious metal ordinarily associated with church ritual objects, or with the decoration of high-​ status weapons and armour, used instead to mark the boundary between the profane space of a bad man and the more neutral space outside. The gilded quality of the net is echoed by the blican of the walls of Bethulia as Judith sees them on her return home, which must be from torches rather than from gold, such that the net forms in microcosm another of many boundaries that characterize the poem as a whole. The flynet establishes a boundary between the monstrous Holofernes and the rest of the Assyrian soldiers and functions as a potent metaphor for Judith’s movement across boundaries throughout the poem. The net screens Holofernes’s view from those outside; Judith alone can breach that final boundary into the inmost reaches of his private quarters. Judith is able to exercise the power to slaughter Holofernes within that narrowly circumscribed territory behind the flynet. Holofernes renders himself illegible to outsiders, would-​be “readers,” by placing himself behind the net. Once he is dead, the net renders Holofernes unintelligible to the warriors waiting outside, who do not realize that only a headless corpse remains.

Porous Boundaries: Human, Animal, Object

As Susan Sontag writes, “violence turns anybody subjected to it into a thing.”9 Holofernes treats Judith as the object of his desire, but instead she turns him into an object, two objects in fact, transcending the assumption that the human is superior to all else, breaching the presumed boundary not only between human and all else but between living and non-​living. Holofernes is reduced on the one hand to a bloody head, which Judith’s companion carries away from the Assyrian camp back to Bethulia “on ðam fætelse þe hyre foregenga, /​blachleor ides, hyra begea nest, /​ðeawum geðungen, þyder on lædde” (in that bag in which her servant, pale-​cheeked woman excellent in virtue, had brought their food there, 127–​29). The head takes on a valence unsuspected while it was part of his living body, becoming a battle-​standard, a gory object designed to rally the Israelite troops and strike fear into the Assyrian ones. Food for the body becomes food for the mind, buoying the spirits of the Bethulian people and inspiring the soldiers to martial potency. Eventually one of the Assyrian soldiers will poke his head into Holofernes’s tent and discover the object that his body has become. Attempting to wake their leader, the Assyrians are speechless, clearing their throats and coughing; after discovering his death 9  Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Penguin, 2004), 10.

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they become witless, the body an object that now symbolizes their defeat. Unable to rally in his absence, they turn in flight but are struck down by the Hebrew soldiers. As the narrative ends, these Assyrians are also reduced to objects, corpses on which the wolf and the raven feast, and from which the Bethulian soldiers spend a full month stripping armour and goods. The permeability of humans and objects, and Judith’s ability to persuade the Assyrian soldiers that she must leave human surroundings, illuminate Judith’s status as an anomalous female figure in the poem. As Holofernes lies half-​dead under Judith’s attack, about to be split into two objects, he is described as “þone hæðenan hund” (that heathen dog 110), hinting at a breach within the poem between human and animal. Holofernes is often taken as monstrous, and his representation as “heathen dog” supports this interpretation by emphasizing his sub-​human behaviour (and in the process, insulting dogs around the world). But the Hebrew warriors are also linked metaphorically with animals, suggesting a broader slipperiness in the identity of humans with respect to others. Within the poem, passages describing the “beasts of battle” with no analogue in the biblical texts intertwine with the narrative of human actions. The metaphorical connections among animals and warriors, carrion-​eaters and corpse-​looters, suggests a porosity of borders between human and animal. The passage describing the Hebrew warriors and the beasts of battle weaves back and forth from human to animal and back to human:       Stopon cynerofe secgas ond gesiðas,  bæron sigeþufas, foron to gefeohte  forð on gerihte, hæleð under helmum,  of ðære haligan byrig on ðæt dægred sylf.  Dynedan scildas, hlude hlummon.  þæs se hlanca gefeah wulf in walde,  ond se wanna hrefn, wælgifre fugel:  wistan begen þæt him ða þeodguman  þohton tilian fylle on fægum;  ac him fleah on last earn ætes georn,  urigfeðera, salowigpada  sang hildeleoð, hyrnednebba.  Stopon heaðorincas, beornas to beadowe,vbordum beðeahte, hwealfum lindum. (200b–​214a)

(The brave ones, warriors and fighters, heroes under helmets, marched bearing banners of victory, went forth directly to the fight from that holy city in the very same dawn. Shields dinned, resounded loudly. The gaunt ones rejoiced at that, wolf in the wood and the dark raven, gore-​greedy fowl: they both knew that the warriors thought to provide them a feast on the doomed ones; but then the eagle greedy for food, dewy-​feathered, flew in their track, the sallow-​feathered one, horned of beak, sang a battle-​song. The warriors marched, men to battle, protected by boards, curved lime-​wood.)

The “banners of victory” evoke the head of Holofernes, which Judith has ordered displayed above the walls of Bethulia, obscuring the line between human and object.

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Humans and animals alike prepare for battle and for death. The connection between warriors and wolves is made once again when the Hebrews kill the Assyrians while they attempt to flee:      Him mon feaht on last, mægeneacen folc,  oð se mæsta dæl þæs heriges læg  hilde gesæged on ðam sigewonge,  sweordum geheawen, wulfum to willan  ond eac wælgifrum fuglum to frofre. (291b–​296a)

(The vigorous people fought them in their tracks, until the greatest part of that army lay destroyed in battle on that field of victory, hewn with swords, to the joy of wolves and also to the consolation of slaughter-​greedy birds.)

Much as wolf, raven, and eagle consume the flesh of the dead soldiers, the Hebrew warriors will search the corpses for “heolfrig herereaf” (bloodied treasure; 316). The repeated linkage between warriors and beasts of battle challenges any easy assumption that humans are distinct from animals; warriors and wolves alike take joy in the carnage.

Temporal Boundaries

The opposition between the desert where Holofernes has parked his army and the city in which Judith and her people live is created by human actions and decisions to make one the location of culture while leaving the other in a state of “nature.” In this case, the Bethulians have, the biblical text suggests, chosen mountain fortifications as more defensible from military attack. As dwellings, the two places are distinct in their temporal solidity. Greg Garrard has argued that “ ‘[d]‌welling’ is not a transient state; rather, it implies the long-​term imbrication of humans in a landscape of memory, ancestry and death, of ritual, life and work.”10 Bethulia is a walled stronghold, a building designed for long-​term dwelling and fortification. The Assyrian encampment is temporary, a tent city built to expedite attack on the Hebrews and subsequent occupation of their city. But the temporal distinctions between the two collapse in the martial encounter. While the Assyrians do not breach the city walls, they cut the people inside off from food and, more urgently, from water. Judith and her servant enter the Assyrian camp and leave the leader of the army dead, with head and body rendered two inert objects. The passage aptly demonstrates problems with any idea of landscape as fixed or static, anticipating modern ecological recognition that the earth is a living organism, in constant flux, not an inert space that humans can traverse without impact. The narrative is presented more or less chronologically within the poem, but with frequent foreshadowing of the deaths of Holofernes and the Assyrians. Near the start of 10  Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism: The New Critical Idiom, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2012), 117.

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the text as it survives, Holofernes brings his men together for a great feast and continually serves out more and more wine, eventually encouraging his men to drink so much that they appear to be dead: Swa se inwidda  ofer ealne dæg dryhtguman sine  drencte mid wine, swiðmod sinces brytta,  oðþæt hie on swiman lagon, oferdrencte his duguðe ealle,  swylce hie wæron deaðe geslegene, agotene goda gehwylces. (28–​32b)

(So the evil one, arrogant dispenser of treasure, drenched his retainers with wine throughout the whole day until they lay in a swoon, got his best warriors completely drunk, until they were as if slain to the death, deprived of any good.)

Similarly, Holofernes’s death is referenced before Judith actually cuts off his head. The scene narrating his death is expanded from nine biblical verses (13:2–​10) to ninety-​ eight lines of verse (lines 34–​132). As soon as Holofernes and Judith have been left alone in Holofernes’s bed-​chamber, the poem forecasts Holofernes’s death: “þær he sceolde his blæd forleosan” (he would lose his life there; 63). He then collapses into bed so drunk his mind is without any wisdom (“he nyste ræda nanne /​on gewitlocan”; 68b–​69a), and the narrator comments laconically that his retainers had just led the “traitor” to bed “for the last time” (“þone wærlogan […] læddon to bedde /​ nehstan siðe”; 71–​73). Likewise, as the Hebrew warriors approach the Assyrian army, their death is foreshadowed before the actual conflict is narrated. Foreshadowing of doom is a time-​honoured literary device, but the references to the death of Holofernes and the Assyrians are so frequent that rather than simply suggesting their doom, they have the effect of violating the chronological sequence of the narrative as well as suggesting that the boundary between life and death is more porous than the living usually acknowledge. Time is fragmented, the boundaries between past and future and between life and death crossed and re-​crossed. Holofernes’s soul departs to hell, and the poem is emphatic that his spirit will remain there forever: Læg se fula leap gesne beæftan,  gæst ellor hwearf under neowelne næs  ond ðær genyðerad wæs, susle gesæled  syððan æfre, wyrmum bewunden,  witum gebunden, hearde gehæfted  in hellebryne æfter hinsiðe.  Ne ðearf he hopian no, þystrum forðylmed,  þæt he ðonan mote of ðam wyrmsele,  ac ðær wunian sceal awa to aldre  butan ende forð in ðam heolstran ham,  hyhtwynna leas. (111b–​122)

(The foul trunk lay dead behind; the spirit departed elsewhere under the abysmal cliffs, and was brought low there, fettered in torments forever after, surrounded by serpents,

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186 Heide Estes bound in torments, fettered fast after death in the fires of hell. He could have not hope, wrapped in shadows, that he could come out of that worm-​hall, but shall live there forever and ever, forth without end, joyless in that dark home.)

The passage is insistent and repetitive about the idea that Holofernes’s soul will be confined to hell for all eternity, “awa to aldre, butan ende.” The permanence of this state is in stark contrast to the transient nature of human affairs, in a dramatization of Christian doctrine. The temporary encampment will, analogously, become a permanent grave for the Assyrian soldiers, their expectation of occupying Bethulia thwarted and their attempts to flee interrupted as they are massacred by the Hebrew soldiers. In a meditation on war, Susan Sontag argues, “to be sure, the cityscape is not made of flesh.”11 But the Assyrian encampment will be reduced from a mobile assemblage of humans and armour and tents to a realm of dead flesh, to be picked over by carrion-​eaters as well as by Hebrews searching for weapons, armour, and anything else of value. The reference to the darkness of hell (“ðam heolstran ham”) echoes interestingly with oppositions between light and darkness elsewhere in the poem. Helen Damico has observed that “lucency […] is a vital feature of Judith.”12 Judith is twice referred to as “beorht mæg” (bright maiden, 58, 254) and is also called “ælfscienu” (elf-​bright, 14), a word which otherwise survives only in the Old English poetic adaptation of Genesis in reference to Sarah, at the point when Pharaoh has noticed her and her beauty has thus became a danger to herself and to Abraham, much as Judith’s beauty enables her dangerous interactions with Holofernes. Light itself is part of God’s creation, while darkness belongs to the original chaos and emptiness of earth; it is so important it is created twice, light in general on the first day, and the sun and the moon and the stars on the fourth day. In Ælfric’s translation of Genesis: “Se eorðe soðlice wæs idel & æmti, & þeostra wæron ofer ðære nywelnysse bradnysse; & Godes gast wæs geferod ofer wæteru. God cwæð ða: Gewurðe leoht, & leoht wæarð geworht” (The earth truly was idle and empty, and shadows were over the deeps and the breadths, and God’s spirit travelled over the waters. God said then, let light be, and light was created, 189–​91). Judith tells the Hebrew warriors to set off and fight the Assyrians as soon as God has sent the light of dawn. Darkness marks a temporal boundary between one day and the next, between activities that bear being seen in the light of day and those that must, or should, be hidden. As Ritzke-​Rutherford points out, dark is in Maxims II associated with evil, death, and old age: God sceal wið yfele,  geogoð sceal wið yldo, lif sceal wið deaþe,  leoht sceal wið þystrum, fyrd wið fyrde,  feond wið oðrum, lað wið laþe  ymb land sacan. (50–​53)

11  Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 6.

12  Helen Damico, “The Valkyrie Reflex in Old English Literature,” Allegorica 5 (1980): 149–​67. Reprinted in New Readings on Women in Old English Literature, ed. Damico and Alexandra Hennessey Olsen (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1990).

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(Good shall against evil, youth shall against age, life shall against death, light shall against shadows, army against army, enemy against another, evil against evil, fight throughout the land.)

In this context, the fact that Judith is associated with the darkness of night takes on potential ambiguity. In the biblical text, Judith leaves the military camp each night to go out and pray. The poem follows the Bible in that Judith kills Holofernes at night and then crosses the terrain between the Assyrian military camp and the city of Bethulia in the darkness. In Beowulf, monsters kill in the dark—​Grendel, Grendel’s mother and the dragon emerge from their lairs at night to wreak havoc. As Ritzke-​Rutherford notes, the poetic Judith alliterates “niht” and “nið” (night and evil, 34).13 Moreover, the poem contrasts (legitimate?) warfare with Judith’s secret actions in the dark: The Bethulian soldiers advance on the Assyrian encampment “on þæt dægred sylfe” (in that same dawn, 204). The battle is further referred to as “ðæm dægweorc” (the work of daytime, 266), emphasizing the contrast between warfare and Judith’s night-​time slaughter of Holofernes. As Ritzke-​Rutherford has argued, light is associated with divinity and Christianity across Old English poetry and prose. But the “eallgylden /​fleahnet” (golden/​gilded flynet, 46–​47) surrounding Holofernes’s bed also suggests brightness, a somewhat blinding reflectiveness that makes it possible for Holofernes to see out but not for others to see in. This detail gives nuance to the idea that brightness and light have positive associations in the poem. Much as the “fleohnet” is ominous, hiding “rune” (secret conversations, 54) behind it, Judith’s brightness is a costume, a performance in Judith Butler’s sense, which she adopts to mask her lethal intentions.14 In a major shift between the biblical text and the poem, as I have argued in greater detail elsewhere, Judith prays in a Christian, not a Jewish, idiom.15 In the biblical Book of Judith, she prays, before beheading Holofernes, to “domine deus israel” (13:7, 13:9). In the Old English poem, this becomes a prayer to a trinitarian, and thus explicitly Christian, God:  “Ic ðe, frymða god ond frofre gæst, /​ bearn alwaldan, biddan wylle /​ miltse þinre me þearfendre, /​ðrynesse ðrym” (God of creation and spirit of comfort, son of the omnipotent God, majestic trinity, I ask you to give mercy to me, needy one, 83–​ 86a). The ascription of this Christian prayer to a Jewish heroine breaches long passages of time and locates Judith in a liminal space, neither Jewish nor Christian, according to a “Christological” interpretation of Hebrew scripture.16 Christian appropriation of Hebrew text functions in conjunction with Judith’s transgression of multiple other boundaries to render her a problematic figure, a character who lingers in liminal spaces due to the multiple boundaries she crosses rather than belonging unambiguously to any one identity. 13  Jean Ritzke-​Rutherford, Light and Darkness in Anglo-​Saxon Thought and Writing (Frankfurt: Lang, 1979), 187.

14  See Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993). 15  See Heide Estes, “Feasting with Holofernes: Digesting Judith in Anglo-​ Saxon England,” Exemplaria 15 (2003): 325–​50.

16  Rosemary Radford Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-​ Semitism (Minneapolis: Seabury Press, 1974).

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Chronological sequences are disordered in the repetitive foreshadowing of death for Holofernes and the Assyrians as well as in the identification of Judith as a (proto) Christian heroine, temporally dislocated from the Hebrew community.

Intersectional Feminisms

Judith has often been read as a triumphal female figure, a feminist forebear who challenges constrained roles for women. In this paper, I have been arguing that her characterization in the Old English poem is rather more nuanced than that, and that she provokes anxiety in the author(s) and/​or scribe(s) who adapted the narrative in and for an English Christian context. As Sontag writes, “the killing machine has a gender, and it is male.”17 Helen Damico has noticed the martial, masculine resonances of Judith’s jewellery, donned as a kind of armour before her journey to the enemy camp.18 She is, thus, marginalized as a woman in being unlike other women, able to speak to the Bethulian men (her servant is silent), able to travel across the boundary into the enemy camp and to return victorious. As a Jew, she is likewise marginalized in respect to other Jews in being presented, alone among her people, as proto-​Christian in her prayer to the Trinity. It is usually Holofernes, who wishes to pollute Judith with sexual violence and whose soul is whisked immediately away to eternal damnation, who is seen as literally or figuratively monstrous. However, Judith’s association with darkness locates her in problematic terrain. She crosses and re-​crosses boundaries in the poem and occupies liminal spaces, both literal and figurative, between social and geographical and temporal domains. The land between the Assyrians’ temporary encampment and the walled city of Bethulia is not only boundary but also, at times, a liminal space that provides a ground and metaphor for Judith’s status as liminal character: both Hebrew and Christian, masculine and feminine, human and potentially monstrous. Judith plays multiple roles in the encounter between her people and the enemy: political leader ordering the Bethulian elders to wait for her return; seductress; killer; martial leader exhorting the Hebrew soldiers to valour in battle. She is heroic, yet the slippage in language and metaphor suggests that, like Beowulf, named along with the dragon as “aglæca” (monster/​hero), she occupies a figurative landscape so far outside of human norms that she becomes somewhat monstrous in her singularity. In killing in the dark, Judith echoes the night-​time predations of Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon.19 Rodney Giblett argues that Grendel’s mother is strongly identified with the marginal marshland precisely because she is female; Judith seems similarly associated with the marginal territory between the two dwellings.20 She and her servant follow a track 17  Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 5. 18  See Damico, “The Valkyrie Reflex.”

19  See Herbert Wright, “Good and Evil; Light and Darkness; Joy and Sorrow in Beowulf,” Review of English Studies 8 (1957): 1–​11.

20  See Rodney James Giblett, Postmodern Wetlands: Culture, History, Ecology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996).

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through the wilderness between the Assyrian encampment and the city of Bethulia, whose walls, or perhaps torches, glitter in the distance, emphasizing the darkness. She succeeds in transcending the Assyrian siege of her city by decorating herself in alluring clothing and jewels, misrepresenting her intentions and her abilities, flying under the male radar and avoiding detection as a potential threat. Notably, while Judith speaks at length to the Bethulians, in the poem—​in contrast to the biblical text—she is ​not given any speech while in the Assyrian camp, aside from the very private prayer she makes while alone with the dead-​drunk Holofernes. This prayer is addressed not to any human, but to God, when Holofernes is already incapacitated from drinking to excess. In the biblical narrative, she gives several long speeches to the Hebrews; the early speeches are lost or eliminated from the poetic adaptation but she speaks twice at length on her return to Bethulia, addressing “eallum þam folce” (the entire people, 176). Notably, none of the male Hebrew elders speak in the Old English adaptation, unlike in the biblical narrative, suggesting their lower status, from a Christological point of view, as Hebrews in contrast to the proto-​ Christian Judith. The Assyrians, for their part, can only make animal-​like noises of incoherence while trying to wake their already dead leader:       Hi ða somod ealle ongunnon cohhetan,  cirman hlude ond gristbitian,  gode orfeorme, mid toðon torn þoligende. (269b–​272)

(They then all together began to cough, to cry out loudly, to gnash their teeth, alienated from God, suffering grief.)

Speech, associated with reason, differentiates humans from animals, and their inability to speak coherently at this point in their anxiety suggests that the Assyrians, like the Hebrews as discussed above, exist on a continuum with animals rather than as distinct from them. Holofernes, “hæðenan hund” (100), is also speechless; during the feast of excessive drinking, he can only make incoherent noises: “hloh and hlyddede, hlynede ond dynede […] styrmede ond gylede /​monig ond medugal” (laughed and shouted, roared and dinned […] stormed and yelled, arrogant and mead-​drunk, 23, 25b–​ 26a). The only coherent instance of speech in the poem comes from an Assyrian warrior who, on discovering Holofernes’s dead headless corpse, falls to the ground, tears his clothing, and announces the Assyrians’ imminent defeat. The unnamed Assyrian soldier’s failure to act like a warrior is in marked contrast to Judith’s courageous and decisive slaughter of Holofernes. It might be argued that, in death, Holofernes’s body is feminized by its bloody leakiness. Judith hands the head to her maiden “swa heolfrig” (so gory, 130), and when she has returned with it to Bethulia asks her servant to get it out of the bag and put it on “blodig ætywan” (bloody display, 174). As Rodney Giblett notes in his discussion of Grendel’s mother’s connection with the stinking decomposition of the swamp, cultures going back millennia have considered women’s bodies other, inferior, dangerous, and disgusting on the basis of uncontrolled

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seepage of menstrual blood and breast milk.21 Before his death, Holofernes could not control his consumption of alcohol or his bodily disposition when he collapsed in a stupor on his bed; after his death, he cannot control the leakage of blood and gore from his head and body.

Conclusion

Karla Armbruster argues that an ecofeminist reading should recognize “the human subject as socially and discursively constructed, multiply organized, and constantly shifting” and should challenge “dualisms and hierarchical notions of difference.”22 An ecofeminist reading of the Old English poem clarifies Judith’s status within the poem as one who crosses and re-​crosses boundaries, but ultimately is associated with liminal geographical and communal territories rather than fitting easily into any social category. The poem pushes Judith to the margins of the geographical and social worlds of the poem, and associates her with darkness, in ways that indicate discomfort with her status as a powerful woman and a Hebrew. Judith’s status in the biblical book is unambiguous. She is a widow who is honoured because she puts on her most beautiful clothing and jewellery to dress for her incursion into the Assyrian camp. She returns and is honoured for her deeds. In the poem, the language and the narrative details repeatedly undercut that unambiguous position. If there is a monster in the poem, we expect it to be the prideful, drunken, rape-​planning Holofernes. But much as Beowulf is described along with the dragon as aglaeca in a slippage of his identification as heroic, Judith is also in some way monstrous in her violation of feminine roles.

21  See Giblett, Postmodern Wetlands.

22  Karla Armbruster, “ ‘Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight’: A Call for Boundary-​Crossing in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism,” in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy, ed. Greta Gaard and Patrick Murphy (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 97–​122 at 106.

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Chapter 11

LISTEN TO THE WOMAN: READING WEALHTHEOW AS STATESWOMAN

HELEN CONRAD O’BRIAIN* There is also the possibility that she [Wealhtheow] is creating a new possibility; as she scrambles the circuits of language she may be speaking herself, “against the other and against men’s grammar”1

EVEN AS OLD English scholarship has turned its attention increasingly to the women of the poem we call Beowulf, and more particularly to Wealhtheow, the only woman in it given direct speech,2 its gaze has often emphasized (for want of a better word) the “emasculation” of female discourse. Alain Renoir, reading pathos into Wealhtheow’s impressive series of imperatives, in 1975 wrote “one may surely be excused for detecting the hint of a pathetic ring in her attempt at clinching her request [to Beowulf] with the assertion that the warriors in the hall always do her bidding.”3 Fifteen years later Gillian R. Overing would write: “Wealhtheow’s speeches offer a demonstration of the Lacanian assumption that language is our inscription into patriarchy.”4 But Overing, engaging with Wealhtheow’s words as few except Helen Damico have done,5 is still uncomfortable with Damico’s reading of a possibly privileged discourse, one whose power was not entirely dependent on the male, if only because Damico’s approach seems to deny the ambiguities valorized by modern criticism.6 *  Trinity College Dublin. [email protected]

1  Gillian R. Overing, Language, Sign, and Gender in Beowulf (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 91–​92. Overing’s quotation is from Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 95. 2  Although Hygd’s reported intervention in the succession (2369–​72) is at least as politically important. All references and quotations are from Klaeber’s Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, ed. R. D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles, with a foreword by Helen Damico. 4th ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). 3  Alain Renoir, “A Reading Context for The Wife’s Lament,” in Anglo-​Saxon Poetry: Essays in Appreciation for John C. McGalliard, ed. Lewis E. Nicholson and Dolores Warwick Frese (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1975), 224–​41 at 230. 4  Overing, Language, Sign, and Gender, 91.

5  Helen Damico, “Beowulf” ’s Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 123–​32 and, latterly, Helen Damico, Beowulf and the Grendel-​kin: Politics and Poetry in Eleventh-​Century England (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2015), 256–​65. 6  Overing, Language, Sign, and Gender, 99.

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Scholarly approaches to Wealhtheow can focus on a systematic muffling of her thought and performance through an imposition of patriarchal ideals and language by audience and poet, “the poetic tradition as passive, suffering victims,”7 or even her lonely position as the one, or nearly the only one, “powerful plot driving” woman in a “poem of single-​minded masculinism.”8 These all may in different ways and from different perspectives under-​read her and under-​represent her influence in the poem and on the poem, concentrating too much on woman as victim rather than on woman as significant player, with influence beyond her admittedly brief appearances. Overing, Jane Chance,9 and Damico present, albeit in relatively different ways, a Wealhtheow who may, at least, struggle with the biases of the discourse and of the attitudes of the audience given her within the text. We should ask ourselves if we should engage, if only experimentally and tentatively, with Wealhtheow’s presence as a possible reflection of the poet’s expectation of an audience receptive to a woman’s voice struggling against, or even rising above, the marginal and the victimized. As Rosemary Hunter wrote of another, but tellingly analogous, context, the modern legal profession, “the roles of both honorary men and outsiders have the potential to disrupt the codes of hegemonic masculinity.”10 Wealhtheow, whether read as honorary male or as outsider, can challenge our assumptions of a clear divergence of male and female roles, virtues, and competencies in Beowulf, at least.11 Her place, at a high-​water mark of Germanic heroic literature, may suggest not only a culturally accorded power and field of action, but a poet creating a heroic narrative which, exploiting the possibilities offered by new sources in an increasingly hybrid culture, places her in a socially reconstructive role in contradistinction to the men of the narrative as well as James Earl’s examples of Gudrun, Bruinhild, Olof, Yrse, and Skuld.12 This, I hasten to add, should not automatically be read as a particularly Christian empowerment of the female, least of all at the expense of the old heroic female. I shall suggest, however, the poet calls Augustinian categories of spiritual and ethical consciousness into play to leverage her intervention with both her internal and external audiences. Whatever may happen after, at those moments the audience encounters her, Wealhtheow’s circumstances are distinctly different from Earl’s heroines. She is not faced with sexual abuse and personal betrayal as woman. She is not, at least yet, trapped 7  Overing, Language, Sign, and Gender, 99.

8  James W. Earl, “The Forbidden Beowulf: Haunted by Incest,” PMLA 125 (2010): 289–​305 at 291.

9  Jane Chance, Woman as Hero in Old English Literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986).

10  Rosemary Hunter, “Women Barristers and Gender Differences in Australia,” in Women in the World’s Legal Professions, ed. Ulrike Schultz and Sisela Shaw (Oxford: Hart Publishers, 2003), 103–​20 at 120.

11  This admission of a possible alternate focus of action may produce at least some of the implications suggested in Robert Morey, “Beowulf’s Androgynous Heroism,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 95 (1996): 486–​96. 12  Earl, “The Forbidden Beowulf,” 291.

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or betrayed into a tragic situation from which there is no escape from a spiral of increasingly vicious acts of vengeance, except the flames of her home or her pyre—​as is the case of Bruinhild and Signy. To some purpose, Overing questions “the truth value of her intervention” asking, “is she representing what she believes to be the truth?”13 Whatever we, participating in the poet’s audience across time, may know from the text’s narrative voice (or think we know from later texts) of the future, she is within a narrative; the narrator’s past and ours is still her future and that of her audience in Heorot. Fred Robinson may write that she should know what is bound to happen,14 but for Wealhtheow those events are not inevitable. She approaches interventions boldly, much more so than Bathsheba in 3 Kings 1 or Esther,15 intending and believing she can seize the moment and with it an alternative to our assumed inevitable outcome. Violence in pursuit of power is there and then an open potentiality, not inevitability. When we see her, Wealhtheow has freedom of movement and power. The inevitable is not yet inevitable if she can persuade. She is still free from the inexorable tyranny of vengeance, if not from the fallen nature of her—​and all human—​society. She is consciously using all her considerable powers in words and gesture in the expectation she can shape the future of the Scyldings, much as Beowulf will attempt in his dying words to shape the future of the Geats. And her interventions are, as they occur, neither rejected outright, nor are they without effect. The poet develops her as such a woman who can and will do what she believes is right and necessary, whose sense of what is right or necessary is large-​ minded, and whose search for amity is not a sign of womanly weakness, but of that ethical sense. Her decisions in presenting what she decides she has merely heard, “Mē man sæġd” (someone told me, 1175a), and what she announces she knows “Iċ mīnne can /​ glædne Hroþulf” (I know my gracious Hrothulf, 1180b–​81a), control the hall at least for her time being. This is not the Wealhtheow of Lawrence Sklute and Bernice Kliman, who “may not fully realize the implications of her admonitions”16 in a discourse of “disjointed statements unconnected to any request or demand of her own” leaving “the connections to be made by her husband.”17 This is not to deny Beowulf’s original audience some knowledge of the inevitable tragedy of Wealhtheow’s situation (if the narrative had already taken that turn by the date of our text), nor does it avoid the limitations of her position as a woman. The poet’s presentation and placement of Hildeburh in the lines just before Wealhtheow’s final entry into the hall could not be more pointed. That narrative does not 13  Overing, Language, Sign, and Gender, 98.

14  Fred C. Robinson, “Teaching the Backgrounds: History, Religion, Culture,” in Approaches to Teaching Beowulf, ed. Jess B. Bessinger and Robert E. Yeager (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1984), 107–​22 at 109.

15  All biblical references are to Biblia sacra iuxta vulgatam versionem, 4th ed., ed. Robert Weber (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994).

16  Larry M. Sklute, “Freođuwebbe in Old English Poetry,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 71 (1970): 534–​41 at 540; quoted in Overing, Language, Sign, and Gender, 99.

17  Bernice W. Kliman, “Women in Early English Literature, Beowulf to the Ancrene Wisse,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 21 (1977): 32–​49 at 34; quoted in Overing, Language, Sign, and Gender, 99.

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necessarily render Wealhtheow’s gestures and words pathetic or futile to her internal audience at that moment in the poem (although it may add a frisson of urgency). As the poem follows his career, it becomes clear that Beowulf does not think so. We must place Wealhtheow in context. While she faces the possibility of personal loss and treachery within the kindred as strongly hinted in the text—​“nalles fācenstafas /​þēod-​ Scyldingas þenden fremedon” (the Scylding people did not then act treacherously; 1018b–​ 19); “þā ġyt wæs hiera sib ætgædere, /​ ǣghwylċ oðrum trȳwe” (then yet was their family feeling mutual, each to the other true; 1164b–​65a)—​she does so in a work whose first half is punctuated by grieving mothers, but whose second half is so by grieving and equally helpless fathers. The poet suggests across the whole of the text that intention and agency, as well as their inevitable frustration, are characteristic of both women and men in the world. Though culturally they may be experienced and expressed as differently as the male and female poetics of grief in the encomium of the “æþelinga bearn” (sons of princes) in contradistinction to the planctus of the “g(ēo)mēowle” (old woman) the Beowulf poet will juxtapose at the end of the poem, grief and loss transcend gender.18 This collapse of male/​ female performances of experience into one experience prepares the audience to entertain the possibility that the queen’s ideals and choices move as well across gender boundaries arguably to affect Beowulf, who consistently behaves in a manner unparalleled in those texts so often compared to the poem that contains him: Volsungssaga and Hrólfssaga kraka, particularly in reference to succession.19 Scholarship, at least to some extent, has moved from explicating Wealhtheow purely in terms of maternal instinct, as embedded in (but by no means entirely due to) Klaeber’s crucially influential glossary in which, as Bloomfield alerted us, “Wealhtheow’s motivations [were] regulated and her role transformed from peace weaver and power broker to tender maternal care-​giver: her messages lose political significance.”20 Nevertheless, 18  Carol J. Clover, “Regardless of Sex, Men, and Power in Early Northern Europe,” Representations 44 (1993): 1–​28. I would like to thank Mr. Kyle Hughes for drawing my attention to this article and the concept as it appears in the saga literature. Several of Clover’s points are made or adumbrated in Alexandra Hennessey Olsen, “Cynewulf’s Autonomous Women,” in New Readings on Women in Old English Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 222–​33. The poet’s emphasis in mirroring the loss of women (mothers) and old men (fathers), may reflect something of the categories of Icelandic saga society, discussed by Clover, based on a normative competency that woman may attain and men may lose, particularly through age. Note that Hildeburh can at least control the body of her son in death (Beowulf, 1114–​24), something the old man of the Hrethel/​ Herebealde passage cannot (Beowulf, 2444–​62a). It is apposite to note in “The Fortunes of Men,” “reoteð meowle, /​seo hyre bearn gesihð brondas þeccan” (the woman weeps who sees her child covered in glowing coals; 46b–​47); George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobie, The Exeter Book, ASPR 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), 154–​56 at 155. 19  Although his career in this may be modelled on that of Theodosius in De civitate dei, 5.25: Augustine, De civitate dei 5.12.54–​56, ed. Bernard Dombart and Alphonsus Kalb, CCSL 47 (Turnholt: Brepols, 1955), 161; for another view of Beowulf’s reaction to succession, see Michael D. C. Drout, “Bloody Deeds: The Inheritance Systems in Beowulf,” Studies in Philology 104 (2007):  199–​226. 20  Josephine Bloomfield, “Diminished by Kindness: Frederick Klaeber’s Rewriting of Wealhtheow,” JEGP 93 (1994): 183–​203 at 184.

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the queen’s words and actions still too often call up, almost subconsciously, essentialist readings of an apparently politically short-​sighted maternal instinct.21 But mothers, as mōdor, lurk in the darkness or are identified (like Beowulf’s mother) in an almost riddling fashion in the text (1700–​1703). Mōdor itself, except for the Swedish queen who is “Onelan mōdor and Ōhþeres” (2932), is only used of Grendel’s mother.22 Other women have sons and daughters, but they are first and foremost ides/​cwen or the daughters of kings. Beowulf’s mother is Hrethel’s daughter (372–​76a); Wealhtheow is “frēolic wīf” (noble woman, 615a), “folccwen” (people’s queen, 641a), “ides Helminga” (great lady of the Helmings, 621a), “ides Scyldinga” (great lady of the Scyldings, 1168b), and, in Beowulf’s implication-​rich reference, “friðusibb folca” (bond of peace and family of the peoples, 2017a). Bloomfield has identified Wealhtheow as the nexus of much of our research on, and resultant construct of, Anglo-​Saxon aristocratic women,23 work continued in Helen Damico’s latest study and a recent article by Nathan Breen.24 Scholarship has laboured to recover Wealhtheow’s role by establishing the possible sources of her power, but has not entirely acknowledged the full implications of what she does with it. It is not clear that we fully appreciate the poet’s shaping of her character in relation to belief, purpose, and power in her use of words, gestures, and gifts. Returning to the maternal impulse in various guises, readings underestimate the implications inherent in separating the effect on her internal audience, living in her present, from that on her external audience (of whom we are merely the latest) living in the future of the imagined past that contains her. Such a double vision does fully allow the existence “of dramatic or tragic irony”25 running beside and dependent upon the unambiguous, the authoritative, and the literal of the characters’ present.26 That the poet regularly uses audience perception of double temporal perspective is demonstrable both from narratorial forward allusion in the “healsbēaga mǣst” (greatest neck-​ring, 1195b–​1214) passage and character use in the Frēawaru/​Ingeld passage (2024b–​69a), to mention only two.27 The external audience is drawn into the poem to be both of the narrative moment and of the narrative future, to experience all the emotions of the narrative moment as well as experiencing, through the narrative, the constant reminder of their own futurity. This audience perspective, 21  Damico, in her identification of Wealhtheow with Emma of Normandy in Beowulf and the Grendel-​kin, fully appreciates her political acumen and power, but the identification may place too much on the maternal in the reading of her relationship with Hrothulf, which has been carried over from her reading of the queen in “Beowulf”’s Wealhtheow. Earl, while acknowledging Wealhtheow’s support of Hrothulf, leaves open whether it as king or as regent for her son and suggests readers would find her intervention “crazy”: Earl, “The Forbidden Beowulf,” 297. 22  At Beowulf 1258, 1276, 1282, 1538, 1683, 2118, 2139. 23  Bloomfield, “Diminished by Kindness,” 184.

24  Nathan A. Breen, “The King’s Closest Counselor: The Legal Basis of Wealhtheow’s Comments to Hrothgar, Beowulf 1169–​87,” The Heroic Age 14 (2010), www.heroicage.org/​issues/​14/​breen.php. 25  Overing, Language, Sign, and Gender, 99.

26  See Overing’s characterization of Damico’s understanding of Wealhtheow’s speech: Language, Sign, and Gender, 99.

27  Such a usage may prepare the audience to accept the outcome of the Geats’s despair as inevitable.

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where all action and all words have proved futile, collapses to some extent the male/​ female binary in that futility.28 Even without an Augustinian worldview of a fallen society whose institutions are founded and perpetuated on pride—​“Sed cum esset adepta libertas, tanta cupido gloriae incesserat, ut parum esset solas libertas, nisi et domination quaeretur” (But when it [Rome] gained [its] liberty, so great a passion for glory assailed [them] that liberty was not enough unless dominion was sought)29—​all is lǣne (transitory), and the gendering of power can in the end become merely one more irrelevancy. Beowulf is a triptych at whose centre is a hero identifying and identified with the female line, a triptych whose wings are filled with portraits of thwarted policy and helpless bereavement, men as well as women: Wealhtheow and Hrothgar, Hildeburh and Hrethel, the last survivor and the Geatish woman at the pyre. Such studies of the poet and her/​his audience’s world which predisposed them to certain usages and expectations, remind the reader both of what we know or can reasonably extrapolate and what we do not and, perhaps, never can. We assume from her intervention Wealhtheow has agency and power.30 No one attempts to stop her or to contradict her.31 The exact sources of that power, although clearly backed up by strength of personality and a powerful control of rhetoric, are conveyed by implications we can no longer wholly follow. What nuances are we missing? Scholars look outside of Beowulf itself not simply to history, but to other poetic texts, texts we might describe as reflecting the more mundane quotidian embodiment of the ideals and concerns we find played out in the grand manner and heroic gestures of the text Wealhtheow inhabits. What exactly did “leohtmod wesan” (lit: to be light-​hearted; Maxims 1.85b) mean?32 What were the sources and limits of a queen’s participation in patronage, “bu sceolon ærest geofum god wesan?” (both must first be good with gifts; Maxims 1.82b–​83a)? Have we overlooked that if, as Chance reminds us, “Cyning sceal mid ceape cwene gebicgan /​bunum ond beagum” in Maxims 1 (A king must buy a queen with cups and rings; 81–​82b),33 so too in Beowulf champions are “weorðe ġecȳpan” (to be bought with treasure, 2496b)? Can a clear community of purpose then be expected and here recognized by the glint of gold on queen and warrior?34 28  Chance writes that “the efforts of the peacemaker, while valuable in worldly and social terms, ultimately must fail because of the nature of this world. True peace exists not in woman’s but in God’s embrace” (fæðm, 188). Chance, Woman as Hero, 106–​7. This seems to me over-​gendered in the context of the poem. Hrothgar is attempting to make peace with the use of his daughter—​and has presented himself as a peacemaker in his second passage of direct speech at 459–​72. 29  Augustine, De civitate dei 5.12.54–​56,143. This same movement from liberty to empire may be tracked in the opening seventeen lines of Beowulf. All translations are my own. 30  Which are reduced to sex and childbirth in Drout, “Bloody Deeds,” 222–​23.

31  Damico stresses this in her latest study, although I am not entirely in agreement with the sources she adduces for this power, Beowulf and the Grendel-​kin, 248. 32  All quotations from Maxims 1 are from Krapp and Dobbie, The Exeter Book, 156–​63.

33  Do the next two half-​lines suggest an exchange of gifts? It is telling that these lines are so important to us as modern readers.

34  This is obliquely suggested by Chance, Woman as Hero, 5–​6. Hrothgar gives Beowulf “fēower mādmas /​golde gegyrede” (four treasures adorned with gold, 1027b–​1028a); Finn distributes gifts

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In a society, either recorded or imagined—​if we accept, with the editors of Klaeber’s Beowulf, the emendation of Beowulf, 2253: “oððe f(orþ bere) fǣted wǣġe” (or carry forth the ornamented cup)—​the female is as inextricably embedded in kindred as the male. The noble life transcends gender, even if it valorizes the male. Would the original audience have nodded wisely when the queen ends her masterful intervention with “druncen dryhtguman dōð swa iċ bidde?” (retainers full of drink do as I  bid; Beowulf, 1231)? We know very little, for example, of the constitution of East Anglia, where Raedwald’s unnamed queen recalled her husband to honour and saved Edwin of Northumbria’s life, although Raedwald “reginae in secreto reuelauit” (secretly revealed to the queen) a treacherous plan against which she dissuaded him.35 Still, it is suggestive in reference to Wealhtheow’s intervention. Similarly suggestive is Wilfrid’s commending himself to Oswiu’s queen, Eanfled, “per nobiles viros” (through noble men).36 Were the byre37 the particular concern of a queen at some courts or even generally? Perhaps to understand the success or failure of queens a sidelong glance at the varying success or failure of the aristocratic abbesses of Whitby and Coldingham might be telling.38 For both queen and abbess strength of mind, purpose, and discipline in oversight and formation of their familia were as important as any initial grant of power and possessions to their success or failure. Wealhtheow is an exceptional woman within this genre, if we can accept for the sake of argument such a genre exists.39 The obvious comparison should be with Elene, but while Wealhtheow can shape even her imperatives to persuasion and mentions the warriors in the hall who “dōð swa iċ bidde” obliquely and only at the end of her speech, Elene is “þriste on geþance” (bold in thought, of “fættan goldes” (of ornamented gold, 1093a); Hildeburh places “icge gold” (ancient? her own? Gold, 1107b) on her son’s and brother’s pyre; Wealhtheow herself gives Beowulf “wundengold” (twisted gold, 1193b); the Geats’s helmets when they arrive in Denmark shine “gehroden golde” (decorated gold, 304b); Beowulf’s chain mail is “golde gegyrwed” (ornamented with gold, 553a); see also the discussion in Damico, “Beowulf”’s Wealhtheow, 29.

35  Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), bk. 2, chap. 12, 180–​81; see also her part in Raedwald’s apostasy, Bede, Ecclesiastical History, 190. It may be apposite to remember here Attila’s queen Ospirin’s, intervention in the Waltharius, lines 123–​41. While it has exactly the opposite effect, it is a politic gesture offered to and accepted by the king as a matter of course. Waltharius, ed. Karl Strecker, trans. Peter Vossen (Berlin: Weidmannsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1947), 30. 36  Eddius Stephanus, The Life of Bishop Wilfrid by Eddius Stephanus, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 6. 37  Beowulf, 2018.

38  See Chance, Woman as Hero, 60; on Coldingham versus Whitby see Bede, Ecclesiastical History 4.25, 421–​27 and 4.23 and 24, 410–​21. 39  Ivan Herbison, “The idea of the ‘Christian epic’: Towards a History of an Old English Poetic Genre,” in Studies in English Language and Literature: “Doubt wisely” Papers in Honour of E. G. Stanley, ed. M. J. Tosewell and E. M. Tyler (London: Routledge, 1996), 342–​61.

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267b),40 but arguably only achieves real wisdom at lines 1170b–​1171.41 Elene, however, is immediately confrontational.42 There is no persuasion, only coercion. This is, however, a result of the poet’s presentation and Elene’s perception of the Jews of Jerusalem as almost irrationally obstinate and uncooperative.43 Wealhtheow’s manner of intervention is predicated on her expectation of the necessity of persuasion and reassurance.44 Her power is not of a legion, but the knowledge of the circumstances of the court and cast of characters and the belief her audience will cede power to her because of the wisdom of her words.45 As Damico writes: “No one in the poem disparages her political acuity, as, for example, Hrothgar’s political wisdom regarding Freawaru’s marriage to Ingeld is questioned by Beowulf (2026–​31), or Unferth’s blundering by the narrator (1465–​ 71)”46—​or, indeed, the early behaviour of Offa’s queen (1940b–​43). Wealhtheow first appears at lines 611b–​641 entering our field of vision, if not the hall, after the Beowulf/​Unferth flyting. The hall has returned to good-​natured fellowship: “hæleða hleahtor […], /​word wæron wynsume” (laughter of men […] words were convivial; 611–​12a). She is the first woman to enter the poem unless we count the contentious mention of Hrothgar’s sister in line 6247 and Hrothgar’s allusion to Beowulf’s mother (374b–​375a). “Ēode Wealhþeow forð” (Wealhtheow went forth, 611b) at least suggests the queen has been present throughout the flyting. If she has been, her judgement of Beowulf is based on what she has herself seen and heard, not simply on hearsay. Her initial appearance conforms to (or creates) an ideal of a migration age queen, one maintained in her second appearance and reflected again in Beowulf’s relatio on his return to his uncle’s court. “Goldhroden,” which she shares with her daughter (“ġeong goldhroden” (young, gold adorned, 2025a)) and Offa’s wife (1948a)48 begins and 40  Elene, in The Vercelli Book, ed. George Philip Krapp, ASPR 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), 66–​102 at 73.

41  Elene, 98; see Alexandra Ramsden, “Elene’s Spiritual Journey: Beo gefylled wres wisdomes gife,” (MPhil diss., Trinity College Dublin, 2003).

42  See Alexandra Hennesey Olsen, “Cynewulf’s Autonomous Women,” in New Readings, ed. Damico and Olsen, 222–​33 at 225–​26. 43  See Elene, 565–​68.

44  Damico, “Beowulf”’s Wealhtheow, 26–​31.

45  It might be apposite to consider the possible influence of the patristic exegesis on Deborah in Judges which stresses her right to speak through her divine gift of wisdom and prophecy, which, it is suggested, should inspire other women. See for example Ambrose, De viduis, 8.50, PL 16.263; Theodoret of Cyr, Quaestiones in Judices, 12, PG 80.497C; Verecundus of Junica, Super cantica ecclesiastica 9.2, CCL 93, 173.

46  Damico, Beowulf and the Grendel-​kin, 256. My reading of Wealhtheow’s second speech has much in common with that of Helen Damico’s in her Beowulf and the Grendel-​kin, which came into my hands as I began the final revisions of this study.

47  Earl offers a judicious introduction to the scholarship surrounding this line in “The Forbidden Beowulf.” 48  It is also used of the generous Eahlhild in Widsith 97–​102, Krapp and Dobbie, Exeter Book, 149–​53 at 152. On recent thinking on verbal repetition within texts and across the corpus, see Elizabeth M. Tyler, “How Deliberate is Verbal Repetition,” in Studies in English Language and

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ends the scene (614a and 640b) while twelve lines into the passage she is “beaghroden” (ring/​necklace adorned) at 623b. This connection with ornament, particularly specified as gold, signals esteem, and status equivalent to the gold-​ornamented swords, helmets, and armour we have come to take seriously after Sutton Hoo, Prittlewell, and, even more spectacularly, the Staffordshire finds.49 Each mention of physical ornament here is accompanied by reference to her character:  “cynna ġemyndiġ” (mindful of family and courtesy (I suggest the poet wishes both concepts to be acknowledged here), 614b); “frēoliċ wīf” (excellent woman, 615a); “mode geþungen” (with a well conditioned mind, 624a); “frēolicu folcwen” (excellent queen of the people, 641a). Goldhroden is associated with frēolic. Although the word is used only of Wealhtheow in Beowulf and more specifically in this passage, it is used in Genesis four times at lines 895 (Eve), 998 (Eve), 1053 (Cain’s wife), and 2228 (Hagar).50 Before one becomes too uncomfortable concerning the character and careers of these women, the superlative “frēolicust” is used of Mary in Christ (72).51 “Cynna gemyndig” begins her ceremonial movement through the company, but the more pointed “mode geþungen” precedes her first reported words almost midway in the scene to Beowulf: “Gode þancode /​ wisfæst wordum” (thanked God with words full of wisdom, 625b–​626a).52 Only Wealhtheow attracts the word “wisfæst” and only here in Beowulf.53 Damico suggests that Wealhtheow’s second speech connects her to the text of Genesis A.54 Without entering into any question of relative or absolute dating between Genesis A and Beowulf, the correspondence of poetic vocabulary must carry with it some implications concerning the writing or the reading of Wealhtheow. She is something peculiar to our poet and crucial to our understanding, a monotheist extra

Literature, 508–​30, and Elizabeth M. Tyler, Old English Poetics: The Aesthetics of the Familiar in Anglo-​Saxon Poetry (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2006), 123–​56.

49  Although gold is most often associated with the last survivor’s hoard from the later part of the poem, the Geatish helmets are “gehroden golde” (ornamented with gold, 304b); Beowulf’s “līcsyrce […] on brēostum læg/​golde gegyrwed” (body armor lay on [his] breast/​ ornamented with gold, 553a); he is promised “wunden golde” (twisted gold) by Hrothgar (1382a) and given it by Wealhtheow (1193b); Beowulf himself “þæm bātwearde bunden golde /​swurd gesealde” (gave to the guardian of the ship a sword bund with gold, 1900–​1901a). Discovery of the Pritwell burial and the Staffordshire treasure apparently confirm the reality of the social significance of gold and highly sophisticated metal work. Neither has yet been fully published; see Sue Hirst, The Prittlewell Prince (London: Museum of London Archaeology Service, 2004); Gareth Williams, “Wealth and Warfare: Interpreting the Contents of the Staffordshire hoard,” http://​screencast.com/​users/​ simongilmour/​folders/​Society%20Lectures/​media/​67e95639-​5806-​4f60-​98bb-​5c3050ae0e60. 50  All references to Genesis A are to Genesis A: A New Edition, ed. A. N. Doane (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). 51  Krapp and Dobbie, Exeter Book, 5.

52  Note the positioning of “þone God sende” in the poem’s praefatio (line 13).

53  Note, however, that wisfæst occurs eighteen times in the corpus if we include the adverbial form wisfæstlic in Psalm 106.19. 54  Damico, Beowulf and the Grendel-​kin, 257–​66.

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ecclesia.55 This places her in a select band of characters (Hrothgar, Beowulf, the Danish coastguard), all of whom are both monotheist in utterance and characterized as wise. While scholarly consensus has largely dismissed as anachronistic and theologically suspect a reading that actively engages with the monotheist language of the characters, it is nevertheless present in the poem and well integrated into the character and behaviour of those characters who use it.56 Gernot Wieland is content to conclude that “we can see Beowulf change from a Germanic hero to the equivalent of an Old Testament figure.”57 Charles Donahue, over sixty years ago, suggested in a footnote the possibility of a “third” city: “That the bare text of Augustine would have suggested any thing of the sort to an eighth century barbarian is, in my opinion, very improbable.” A little earlier in the same note, however, he writes: Augustine teaches that the grace necessary for salvation is given to some outside the Judeo-​Christian tradition. Such was certainly the case with Job, and it may be, Augustine adds that we are providentially informed of Job so that we may know that among other peoples there could have been (esse potuisse) men who belonged to the Spiritual Jerusalem (De civ.dei 18.47).58

To suggest that such a salvation was at least a possibility to the original audience on the basis that “an eighth-​century barbarian would not have had the theological sophistication” has an obvious answer—​the poet was not a barbarian, the poet does not have to concoct a third city, and Augustine has more than one category of monotheist, and those categories are clear. Although she goes no further, Horowitz wrote (again in a footnote): “Everything Augustine says of the Romans may be said of the Danes and the Geats in Beowulf.”59 It would not take an Eriugenean theological subtlety or ingenuity to develop, whether from a general monotheism observed among some Greeks or Romans or from the salvific belief of Job, characters that would fall into one or other of those categories. If we accept Frederick Biggs’s suggestion that the poet was consciously playing with historicity and fictionality in the poem—​with the expectation the audience or at least part of the audience would be able to follow the narrative’s meaning through such shifting reference to the real/​historical,60 the projection of the possibility of characters 55  For a sustained reading of the monotheism in Beowulf, see Helen Conrad-​O’Briain, “Beowulf and the Uses of History” (PhD diss., Trinity College Dublin, 1990), 134–​38.

56  Perhaps the most suggestive studies have been Thomas Hill, “ ‘The Variegated Obit’ as an Historiographic Motif in Old English Poetry and Anglo-​Latin Literature,” Traditio 44 (1988): 101–​24; Sylvia Huntley Horowitz, “Beowulf, Samson, David and Christ,” Studies in Medieval Culture 12 (1978), 17–​23; and Gernot Wieland, “Manna mildost: Moses and Beowulf,” Pacific Coast Philology 23 (1988), 86–​93. 57  Wieland, “Manna Mildost,” 91.

58  Charles Donahue, “Beowulf, Ireland, and the Natural Good,” Traditio 7 (1949–​51): 263–​77 at 265n20. 59  Horowitz, “Beowulf, Samson, David, and Christ,” 23n19.

60  Frederick M. Biggs, “The Politics of Succession in Beowulf and Anglo-​Saxon England,” Speculum 80 (2005): 709–​41 at 738–​41. At least some among the original audience may have encountered a

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in the north whose reality was historically attested in the Graeco-​Roman and biblical world is not as theologically daring as we have allowed ourselves to assume. It is certainly not Pelagian.61 Quite the contrary—​the poem’s insistence on will, intention, and the intervention of God to allow a human will to carry out a willed action is solidly Augustinian and requires only a limited Augustinian library—​De civitate Dei provides exactly this material in passages like Book 2, ­chapter 7,62 and Book 4, ­chapters 29 and 3.63 If we, for a moment, accept the poet may be manipulating such possibilities to invent such characters, then presenting them as such directs the audience to listen carefully to a woman who in speaking so before the historical conversion suggests one of those gifted souls among the nations, “ubicumque gratia divina digni occultissimo atque iustissimo dei iudicio” (wherever worthy by divine grace through the most hidden, most just judgement of God).64 Her actions may here be formally those of the ides with the cup,65 but those actions have been integrated into a re-​imagining of the north not unlike the Irish re-​imagining of their history in passages related to the Brehon Laws.66 If we consider Chance’s presentation of Hild,67 we might see Wealhtheow as a pre-​conversion manifestation of just such a woman: “Tantae autem erat ipsa prudentiae, ut non solum mediocres quique in necessitatibus suis, sed etiam reges ac principes nonnumquam ab ea consilium quaererent, et inuenirent” (So great was her prudence that not only commoners in their troubles and uncertainties, but kings and princes, sought from her council, and they received it).68 If Wealhtheow’s wisfæst word have made an impression, when Wealhtheow reappears after the Finnsburg lay in the sombre grandeur of six hypermetric lines the audience is prepared not only to give the queen a hearing because she is a queen, but because her speech will contain wisdom commensurate not only with her station but with her spiritual insight.69 They will find her a woman who is a queen first, the mother of a larger family, transcending her immediate maternal instincts for the good government and security of the Danes. The deep-​seated problem of succession in all the societies the poet knew involving the concurrent breakdown of sib within the royal clan, the endemic wars worse than civil, was not, as is sometimes facilely represented, the work of bloodthirsty men with an audience of weeping women. Queens, particularly discussion of such a manipulation of history and fiction in the Servian commentaries’ discussion of the historical versus the Vergilian Dido. See Ralph Hexter, “Sidonian Dido,” in Daniel L. Selden and Ralph Hexter, Innovations of Antiquity (New York: Routledge, 1992), 332–​90 at 348. 61  Helen Conrad-​O’Briain, “Grace and Election in Adomnán’s Vita S. Columbæ,” Hermathena 172 (2002):  25–​38. 62  Augustune, De civitate dei, 47, 39–​40.

63  Augustune, De civitate dei, 47, 123, 125–​26. 64  Augustune, De civitate dei, 3.1, 47, 65–​66.

65  Damico, “Beowulf” ’s Wealhtheow, 154–​57.

66  Conrad-​O’Briain, “Beowulf and the Uses of History,” 147–​49. 67  Chance, Woman as Hero, 60.

68  Bede, Ecclesiastical History, 4.22.

69  This may have some bearing on the particular correspondences Damico finds between her speeches and those, particularly, of God in Genesis A: Damico, Beowulf and the Grendel-​kin, 257–​64.

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second wives, had a part in their inception and progress in their attempt to maintain status and patronage power through royal sons. As Michael Drout bluntly put it: “The queen’s interest, therefore, lies in the maintenance of the system from which she derives her personal value, power, and identity.”70 Wealhtheow does otherwise. Wealhtheow recalls Hrothgar to the potentially dangerous expectations embedded in patriarchy. She moves before the husband and nephew in a manner comparable to another officer of the court, Wulfgar (like the queen herself no Dane), who “for eaxlum gestōd /​ Deniga frean; cūþe hē duguðe þēaw” (stood straight before the prince of the Danes; he knew the behaviour of a warrior, 358b–​59). In her second appearance at lines 1162b–​ 231, Wealhtheow’s internal audience is possibly the most fragmented of any in the text. At the same time, it is possible she is being offered her best chance of understanding with her nephew and the court by a crisis point of neither her making nor her sons’. She has a moment, not merely to publicly support her nephew by marriage, but through the rhetoric of support to present an ethic of succession. Her speech of opposition to Beowulf’s adoption is adjusted to address the delicate balance of power and esteem of husband, nephew, sons, and guest within the community of the Danes and the even wider west Baltic intertribal community. It is, in an age where individuals and families embodied the institutions of state in more than a figurative sense, a political discourse performed within a vocabulary based on the familial. That she speaks after the singing of the tragedy of Hildeburh and Finn may alert the external audience to the tragic irony of her attempt, but to the internal audience the narrative gives her speech an intensity and immediacy of purpose that does not necessarily presuppose failure. First Wealhtheow addresses Hrothgar as “freodrihten” (dear/​noble lord) to do as a man should and as he has done (“swa sceal man don […] thu nu hafast,” 1171b, 1174b), a title that recalls the adjective freolic used in the poem only of Wealhtheow herself and only once again in the poem when Wiglaf will come, perhaps more obviously, to the aid of his lord and in a context that combines gender expectations. Wiglaf will wield a sword, and both he and the narrator explain his actions as a kinsman and a warrior, but there remains in his actions much that recalls the woman in his counsel and encouragement and in his attempts to revive the dying king and ease his suffering. Thinking along Damico’s lines, we might say he attempts to be the Valkyrie who is not there. Wealhtheow clearly knows what Hrothgar has done, and acknowledging her knowledge she approves of his actions in terms of a traditional social understanding of the justly appropriate; “swa sceal man don” is crucial to the opening of her speech. Praise before censure is a good rhetorical tactic. With this foundation in place she moves on to the heart of her intervention. Klaeber’s and others’ objections to the anti-​realism of the use of a type of gefrægn (I have heard) formula here seem unnecessarily obtuse, even if Hrothgar has approached the hall “his cwen mid him” (his queen with him, 923). For Wealhtheow to open this section with “Me man sægde” (A man told me, 1175a) makes perfect diplomatic and rhetorical sense.71 She does not confront Hrothgar, but like Beowulf’s own 70  Drout, “Blood and Deeds,” 223.

71  It may even be the poet would have us imagine the majority of those in the hall were not actually present at lines 946b–​49a.

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rhetorical tactics with the Scylding coast guard at lines 272b–​77a, she treats his action as a possibility or rumour. She can now, with this fiction in place, speak to advise her husband (as any good retainer would) rather than oppose him. Supposition, misinterpretation of a possibility, whatever we might call the manner in which she projects his actions, her form of words allows all involved a space to manoeuvre with dignity. Heorot is gefælsod (purified); Hrothgar can show his generosity in his hall without a rival—​ even as he now has—​“ond þinum magum læf /​folc on rice” (and leave the people in the kingdom to your kin, 1178b–​79a). The participle may cast other meanings: the hall has been rid of the demon who had haunted it, it has been restored to its intended state, it should not be subjected to a worse defilement. It is crucial, I believe, Wealhtheow speaks not alone of rice (kingdom), but of folc and places folc not merely at the head of the line, but as the alliterating stressed syllable. Earlier in the text we are told Hrothgar intended his generosity in the newly built Heorot to exclude “folcscare ond feorum gumena” (the people’s part and the lives of men, 73). Wealhtheow is effectively recalling this to him in the context of the hall renewed. The people, not merely his family’s power, are affected by such a decision. Without saying so, the rest of her audience might be expected to breathe a collective sigh of relief. Although the succession, and therefore the future, is more precarious and complicated than the Scydings have experienced for four generations, assuming all of Hrothgar’s brothers pre-​deceased him, it is still less so than the possible results of this unheard-​of novelty of an adoption that would thrust a hero into an otherwise average pool of possible successors. Wealhtheow is both generally acknowledging this more open succession and reassuring Hrothulf when she uses not mago, sons, but magum, kinsmen, either of which might have served in the line. Hrōþgar must consider more than his own desires in his handling of the succession, just as she herself does.72 Wealhtheow insists up to this point in speaking of the kindred and the folk, not of individuals, for individuals must above all see themselves as members of these fundamental social units without which there is neither a source of power nor the exercise of power. Into an essentially general statement of kingly propriety vis-​à-​vis the pool of their possible successors, Wealhtheow now introduces Hrothulf by name (1181a). She is altruistic, but she is also pragmatic and she avoids mention of violence. At least at this moment in time, she is supporting her nephew less against her sons than against Beowulf. Pointedly associated with his uncle in the hall in the hypermetric lines in which Wealhtheow enters the episode and the hall (1163b–​65a), Hrothulf had been notable only by his absence up to line 1017a. He makes his appearance sitting beside his uncle only after Hrothgar’s adoption of Beowulf (946b–​949a) and this must be significant.73 72  Might it be the original audience were expected to suspect Hrothgar’s response was so emotionally charged he did not recognize its implications for the succession—​implications Wealhtheow by her speech and Hrothulf by his appearance beside his uncle certainly do recognize? Hrothgar’s leave-​taking of Beowulf has been characterized by intense emotion in the literature. Although the author argues for a reading written before Clover brought the Old Norse material properly in to play, suggesting something of a toning down of emotion, see Thomas L. Wright, “Hrothgar’s Tears,” Modern Philology 65 (1967): 39–​44. 73  At line 500 “Unferth æt fotum sæt frean Scyldinga” (Unferth sat at the feet of the prince of the Scyidings).

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Her support of her nephew is couched in language that simultaneously recalls his physical position in the court, which ought to mark him out in his own and others’ eyes as the natural heir while outlining how succession should be handled within a royal kindred. “[M]‌inne […] glædne Hrōþulf” (my gracious Hrothulf, 1181b–​1182a), she knows, can recall how he was, “umborwesende” (in childhood, 1187a), incorporated into his uncle’s court—​treated with honour, and now associated in Heorot with that uncle, a man now past his prime, yet who once was “heresped gyfen” (given success in battle, 64a) when Hrothulf himself could only have been a child. Now Hrothulf has every reason to expect his time will come, is coming, for in the normal order of things her sons are so much younger that he rather than they are sitting at their father’s side. They have their place in the hall, but their place is not at their father’s side.74 They would not be an immediate choice if Hrothgar rather than Æschere had been killed in the coming night, but the adopted Beowulf might prove a popular alternative. The future Wealhtheow counsels is one in which succession will be unaccompanied by kin-​strife while deeply aware of the precariousness of human life, particularly of the aristocratic/​princely life, introduced within three lines of the end of her intervention: “Wyrd ne cuþon /​ geosceaft grimme” (They did not know what would be, the grim long past determined, 1233b–​34a) followed by Æschere’s death, Beowulf’s near death, and Hrothgar’s sermon. The poet, to be sure, does not even wait until the end of the episode to introduce the theme. It forces itself into the audience’s consciousness in the Hygelac digression (1202–​14). In time, unless “adl oððe ecg […] fyres fang” (age or edge … the fire’s grasp) or any other of those dangers Hrothgar catalogues in lines 1763–​67a intervene, Hrothulf will be king and if he will remember the good policy of his uncle and aunt, treating their sons accordingly, honourably maintained at his court, they will be not a danger, but a bulwark. Associating Hrethric with him as his nearest kinsman in blood and age, continuing her policy, he will place the good of the people above any single man or woman’s ambition. Wealhtheow interposes in this vision of good sib and polity “gyf þu ær þonne he /​ wine Scildinga worold, oflætest” (if you before he, prince and friend of the Scyldings, first leave the world; 1182b–​83) not merely to distance this discussion from its inevitable cause, Hrothgar’s death, but to remind Hrothulf and others that too few princes can be as dangerous as too many.75 It is never clear either in the world of the poem or in the world of the poem’s audience who will outlive whom. Wealhtheow’s words are not simply for the narrative moment. They will shape actions beyond her own family and court and look forward to the second half of the poem, where the old too often die to leave none behind them. They will speak outside of the poem to the audience surrounding it. Then what is her purpose and method in her speech and gifts to Beowulf? They are twofold. First, she must take the sting out of her rejection of her husband’s plans for both Hrothgar and her guest. Second, she will simultaneously honour Beowulf while distancing him from the Danish succession. If Beowulf acquiesces, it will create a space 74  And it is there Beowulf will sit—​as we see him (1188–​91) and as he reports to his uncle (2014). 75  Biggs, “The Politics of Succession,” 709–​41.

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for her nephews and sons to pursue and maintain their heroic and martial roles. Her performance of this policy will include both action and words. She does not speak of fame (1221–​24a) until she has actually rewarded Beowulf and commanded him “ond þyssum cnyhtum wes /​lara liðe” (and to these boys be kind in counsel, 1219b–​20). She has in so many words more than questioned the wisdom of his adoption by Hrothgar, she has condemned it, but her gifts and request suggest another response. Despite her criticism of her husband’s impulsive adoption, she speaks to Beowulf and gives him gifts that of themselves and of the manner they are given arguably send the message she nevertheless will accept him as a kinsman, a son in all but name. It can be argued she is, whatever she has said before, acting out the maternal towards Beowulf. Before she makes any request of Beowulf she rewards him, directing his attention to the use of those gifts: “bruc” (use/​enjoy; 1216a), “neot” (use/​enjoy; 1217b). She calls him “leofa” (dear, 1216b) and “hyse” (youth/​young man, 1217a), presenting him with that most intimate of gifts, a shirt (“hrægl”; 1216b), and a necklace, which suggests a mother’s gift to her son to be passed on to a betrothed. Wealhtheow commends her sons to Beowulf, blurring the line between family/​not family and blunting her warning to him through her warning to her husband and moving him (should he accept) into her orbit. Her request is made, indeed ordered, twice, the second involving a telling play on his name: “beo þu suna minum” (be you to my sons, 1226b). This commendation contains with it a certain amount of flattery since “lara liðe” and “dædum gedefe dreamhealdende” (happy, kind and considerate in actions, 1227) carries an implicit acknowledgement of his wisdom and his influence both with Hrothgar and Hygelac. While she opposes an adoption that would complicate the Scylding succession, she nevertheless co-​opts him into her plans for her menfolk. With a friend in Beowulf at the Geatish court, the brothers may remove themselves from the Scylding court with at least the fiction they are sharpening one’s wits abroad, as Havamal: The Sayings of the High One advises, without appearing to form an alternative focus of Danish loyalty. Her wording suggests Beowulf is to save the brothers as much from themselves as from Hrothulf, for her sons as well as he must accept her settlement for it to work. Wealhtheow’s approach to Beowulf is successful, even though her sons do not figure at his uncle’s court or his own in the text. Beowulf responds to Wealhtheow, although neither immediately nor to her personally. In Beowulf’s last speech to Hrothgar his offer of troops may be a reflection of the result he foresees for Freawaru’s marriage to Ingeld, but the last four lines of his speech are a direct response to the queen’s speech to him two days earlier, even though he will not mention her by name or even allude to her until he is back at his uncle’s court: Gif him þonne Hreþric  to hofum Geata Geþingeð þonne þeodnes bearn, he mæg þær fela Freonda findan;   feorcyðe beoð Selran gesohte  þæm þe him selfa deah. (1836–​39)

(If then Hrethric, determines for himself to visit the Geatish court/​the son of the good man, he will be able to find there many friends; far countries are better sought by those who are themselves accomplished.)

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As earlier because of Beowulf “hire se willa gelamp” (her desire was fulfilled, 626b). This is an answer to be taken back to Wealhtheow, whose speech he could no more answer publicly than Hrothgar could. Beowulf expresses his offer in language reflecting Wealhtheow’s careful avoidance of any mention of conflict. To Hrothgar he promises warriors, to the queen he offers her eldest son a welcome to Hygelac’s court that has something of the grand tour about it. Exile is unmentioned. While the audience might have expected—​if not known—​that her statecraft acted out between the helplessness of Hildeburh and the thwarted violence of Grendel’s mother would fail, it could not but have appreciated the finesse of the attempt and may recall it when it bears fruit at another court. And this attempt, even if it failed in the immediate sphere of her husband’s court, has its influence. Beowulf’s last words to Hrothgar are not to the king, but to the queen, promising her all she had asked in the most diplomatic of terms. In the relatio he will give at his uncle’s court Beowulf will speak of the queen in terms that may appear superficially stereotypical, but that have been suggested to be in contradistinction to his references to Hrothgar’s plans for his daughter and Ingeld. She is the “mæru cwēn, friðusibb folca” (famous/​glorious queen, bond of peace and family of the peoples, 2016b–​17b), the generous encourager of the young (2018–​19a). Beowulf will use “snotra fengel” (wise prince) at 2156a, but in a context where it could refer to Hrothgar or be a vocative referring to Hygelāc. [F]riðusibb folca, the personified compact of peace among peoples, suggests, in that plural, a woman whose words and actions transcend the individual moment (Matthew 5:9) and who is a child of that God she “þancode /​ wisfæst wordum” (thanked with words firm in wisdom; 625b–​626a). Where the narrator has foreshadowed, but arguably only foreshadowed, the kin-​strife of the Danish court, the amity of the Geatish court is stated unequivocally and identified as right conduct, and is immediately performed by Beowulf on his return:           […] Swā sceal mæg dōn, nealles inwīnet  ōðrum bregdon dyrnum cræfte,  dēað rēn(ian), hondgesteallan.  Hygelace wæs nīða heardum   nefa swyðe hold, ond gehwæðer ōðrum hrōðra gemyndig. (2166b–​71)

(As must a kinsman do/​they did not at all weave treacherous nets for the other with dark craft to prepare death for a comrade. The nephew was very loyal to Hygelac, firm in battles, and each mindful of the other’s happiness.)

The penultimate word of this narratorial aside, “hrōðor” (joy or benefit), recalls ironically the first element of both Hrothgar’s and Hrothulf’s names. As such it returns us to the Danish court at Heorot. Whether or not this is the poet’s conscious intention, embedding in the description of the behaviour of Beowulf and Hygelac, a veiled reference to another uncle and another nephew, may be open to argument both for and against, but the narrator is clearly returning to Wealhtheow’s concerns in the context of the court in which the rest of the poem will be based. And her words will bear fruit there, among the Hrethlings, if not among the Scyldings. The audience will hear the dying Beowulf

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speaking in just such terms of rule and family, suggesting not only the rightness of Biggs’s reading of the importance of succession and the tensions of succession in the poem, but the equal importance of Wealhtheow’s intervention in an attempt to establish an ethics of succession. The narrator is out of the characters’ hearing, but Wealhtheow is not. In retrospect she must be considered the source of an ethics of kin, court succession, and court, for her intervention is specifically about the interaction of king and possible successors, where her husband’s so-​called sermon is a more general mirror of princes. She it is whose words are heard to be remembered, forgotten, or ignored by them. If she does not speak as bluntly as the narrator does, she nevertheless speaks to the same point. Beowulf will avoid supplanting even a child at the offer of that child’s mother (2369–​78a)76 and take comfort in having lived Wealhtheow’s ideal as he lays dying, apparently in expectation of a personal judgement:           […] Ic ðæs ealles mæg ferhbennum sēoc     gefēan habban; forðām mē witan ne ðearf  Waldend fīra morðorbealo māga,    þone mīn sceaceð līf of lice.         (2739b-​43a)

(I, sick with mortal wounds, can have of this all joy; because the Ruler of men has not reason to lay to my charge the murder of kinsmen when my life departs the body.)

Her specific counsel of keeping peace within the royal kindred through respect of relative position and individual expectations in the context of the larger res publica is lived out in the one member of her audience, Beowulf, who is consistently the most ethically aware of the hyrse to whom she had spoken in her husband’s hall.77 It is he who thinks and speaks in terms of kin, kingship, and people in his last hours as he goes fearlessly to face the dragon, death, and the glory or judgement of those firm in truth: sōðfæstra dōm.

76  Drout, “Blood and Deeds,” 210–​12.

77  On this point see in particular John Hill, The Cultural World of Beowulf (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 63.

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Chapter 12

READING GRENDEL’S MOTHER1

JANE CHANCE* IN A GRADUATE seminar on Beowulf, I was astonished to read in J. R. R. Tolkien’s canonical (and iconoclastic) 1936 lecture on the Old English epic, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” that the monsters—​so essential to what he describes as the “underlying ideas of the poem”—​are only basically two, Grendel and the Dragon.2 He counts them as two because they relate to the two halves of the poem that balance the youth and old age of the protagonist Beowulf, akin to the balance of the Anglo-​Saxon line, “an opposition between two halves of roughly equivalent weight, and significant content.”3 In fact, his most famous description of the whole epic characterizes it as essentially a balance, an opposition of ends and beginnings. In its simplest terms it is a contrasted description of two moments in a great life, rising and setting; an elaboration of the ancient and intensely moving contrast between youth and age, first achievement and final death. It is divided in consequence into two opposed portions, different in matter, manner, and length: A from 1 to 2199 (including an exordium of 52 lines); B from 2200 to 3182 (the end).4

Tolkien, of course, was countering W. P. Ker’s criticism of the poem in The Dark Ages (1904), one that claimed “The fault of Beowulf is that there is nothing much in the story.”5 While Ker’s criticism may seem astounding to us now, the distinguished professor explains that: The hero is occupied in killing monsters, like Hercules or Theseus. But there are other things in the lives of Hercules and Theseus besides the killing of the Hydra or of

*  Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor Emerita, Rice University. [email protected]

1  This article originated in an invited paper, “The Decanonization of Old English Literature: Taking the Gold Back to Egypt,” delivered at the University of California-​Berkeley symposium on “Sex and Gender in Early English Literature,” in a session on “Women, Men, and the Canon,” March 4, 1991. An updated version was delivered as “The Problem of Grendel’s Mother: Decanonizing Anglo-​ Saxon Literature” at the Medievalist Foremothers’ Symposium in Honor of Helen Damico, 49th International Congress on the Middle Ages, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, May 10, 2014. I am grateful to the various readers and editors of my essay for their suggestions and emendations. 2  J. R. R. Tolkien, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” Proceedings of the British Academy 22 (1937): 245–​95; repr. most recently in Beowulf: A Verse Translation, trans. Seamus Heaney and ed. Daniel Donoghue (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 103–​29. 3  Tolkien, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” 30. 4  Tolkien, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” 28.

5  Tolkien, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” 10, citing Walter P. Ker, The Dark Ages (London: Blackwood, 1904), 252–​53.

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Procrustes. Beowulf has nothing else to do, when he has killed Grendel and Grendel’s mother in Denmark: he goes home to his own Gautland, until at last the rolling years bring the Fire-​drake and his last adventure. It is too simple […] Yet with this radical defect, a disproportion […] puts the irrelevances in the centre and the serious things on the outer edges.6 These fights may have seemed simple and irrelevant to Ker—​but not to Tolkien. For him, Beowulf is “at war with the hostile world,” a man who must, at the end of his life, confront the final “dragon”—​death—​a battle that Tolkien hardly regarded as peripheral.7

As much as I agreed essentially with Tolkien’s position, I thought Ker’s opinion of the monsters perceptive. Ker sees the three conflicts with monsters as each differing in nature, “well diversified: […] there is a change of temper between the wrestling with Grendel in the night at Heorot and the descent under water to encounter Grendel’s Mother; while the sentiment of the Dragon is different again.”8 Tolkien, instead, regards Grendel’s Mother as appended in kind to Grendel, both conceived of as “deofla” (devils, 1680).9 He mentions her briefly in the Appendix to the article under “Grendel’s Titles” in one parenthetical paragraph because the poet describes her in “precisely similar terms” to Grendel.10 That is, she is an “āglǣcwīf” (wretch of a woman [in Klaeber’s gloss], 1259), or inhuman; a “merewīf” (woman of the mere, 1519); a “brimwylf” (1506, 1599), Klaeber’s she-​wolf of the sea, or “grundwyrgen” (1518)—​meaning, he indicates, an accursed (female) monster of the deep.11 And, in fact, she is unlike Grendel: she is female, not male, and she is described as a woman, or lady, a “wīf” (1284), or “ides” (1259), terms that would not make her resemble her son unless used ironically. It is strange that Tolkien never explains why he barely mentions her, at least as a single and unique entity, in his much reprinted article. This seeming flaw in Tolkien’s argument led to my seminar paper for Jackson J. Campbell in 1970—​publishable, he shrewdly anticipated—​in which I argue that all three monsters differ as antitypes of the three most important social roles in the Anglo-​ Saxon comitatus. The warrior, or þēgn, offers his valour in battle and his loyalty to his king; the þēoden, or gold-​lord, recognizes both by distributing treasure to his warriors; and the freoðuwebb, or peaceweaver, the cupbearer during hall-​ceremonies, weaves the warriors together in peace as she moves from the most important to the least. She is

6  Tolkien, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,”10, citing Ker, The Dark Ages, 252–​53. 7  Tolkien, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,”18.

8  Tolkien, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,”10, citing Ker, The Dark Ages, 252–​53.

9  Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, ed. Fr[iederich] Klaeber, 3rd ed. (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1950, repr. 1968). All references to Beowulf come from this edition, which Tolkien might have used; he certainly had access to an earlier edition from his days teaching at the University of Leeds. All translations from Old English are my own unless otherwise noted. 10  Tolkien, Appendix, in “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” 34–​36. 11  Tolkien, Appendix, in “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” 36.

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the friðusibb, the peace-​pledge, who by marriage attempts to unite two different (often warring) tribes through progeny. Only after I had finished my PhD dissertation (on a different subject) in 1971, taken up my first teaching position in Canada, followed by my second, back in the US, in 1973, and begun revising the dissertation into a book, did I begin delivering this essay at several conferences and submitting it to journals. I began with PMLA, for which Edward (Ted) Irving read it and recommended it be accepted—​if I could just insert a contextual introduction to women in Anglo-​Saxon society at the beginning. It sounded so easy—​ yet I discovered little or nothing had been written about Anglo-​Saxon women in literature and society. I embarked on rather more research than I had thought necessary and succeeded in adding not just a contextual paragraph or two but a whopping ten pages to the beginning of the twenty-​five-​page article, plus additional notes. Unfortunately this extra effort imbalanced the argument and Ted rejected it as being not what he had in mind.12 So I continued submitting it, revising it dutifully each time, post-​rejection (and often in a draconian manner, cutting, reorganizing), until I took out everything but a much-​reduced introductory paragraph on the topic of Anglo-​Saxon women (as Ted had in fact suggested I do). When I sent it to Texas Studies in Literature and Language at the University of Texas in Austin, Tom Cable read it and recommended acceptance; it was finally published in 1980.13 Why did it take so long for my Beowulf essay to be accepted? One reason was the topic itself: Anglo-​Saxon women, either in literature or history, were a hard sell despite several articles in hard-​to-​find journals by Elaine Hansen (1976) and Anne Klinck (1979) and in a British collection on the more general subject of medieval religious women by Joan Nicolson (1978), along with articles on women in individual Anglo-​ Saxon poems.14 Ironically, it was also because the subject matter was relatively new in the 1970s, I suspect—​the study of Anglo-​Saxon women representing a “paradigm-​shift,” 12  Ted later expressed his regrets for having turned the article down, when I came to know him better while I was at the Humanities Center at the University of Utah. But of course the essay really did benefit from a cultural context.

13  See Jane Chance [Nitzsche], “The Structural Unity of Beowulf: The Problem of Grendel’s Mother,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 22 (1980): 282–​303; repr. in New Readings on Women in Old English Literature, ed. Helen Damico and Alexandra Hennessy Olsen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 248–​61.

14  See Elaine Tuttle Hansen, “Women in Old English Poetry Reconsidered,” Michigan Academician 9 (1976): 109–​17; Anne Lingard Klinck, “Female Characterization in Old English Poetry and the Growth of Psychological Realism: Genesis B and Christ I,” Neophilologus 63 (1979): 597–​610; and Joan Nicholson, “Feminae Gloriosae: Women in the Age of Bede,” in Medieval Women, ed. Derek Baker, Studies in Church History, Subsidia 1 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978). For women in individual poems, see, for example, other early articles, by Lee Ann Johnson, “The Narrative Structure of ‘The Wife’s Lament’,” English Studies 52 (1971): 497–​501; Earl R. Anderson, “Mary’s Role as Eiron in Christ I,” JEGP 70 (1971): 230–​40; Deborah Ellis, “The Wife’s Lament in the Context of Early English Literature: The Paralysis of Desertion,” Journal of Women’s Studies in Literature 1 (1979): 22–​32; and Emily Ruth Jensen, “Narrative Voice in the Old English Wulf,” Chaucer Review 13 (1979): 373–​83.

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in literary criticism and scholarship, to use Thomas Kuhn’s term15—​which the Anglo-​ Saxon specialists who protected the norm (as reviewers are wont to do) had difficulty with. There were certainly very few Anglo-​Saxon women specialists at the time and reviewers generally kept their identity secret (except at PMLA). Certainly other critics (namely, H. L. Rogers, John Gardner, and Kathryn Hume among them) had viewed the structure of Beowulf as tripartite, as W. P. Ker had, in support of the differing nature of the three monsters.16 But no scholar before had examined the role of Grendel’s Mother alone in an entire article devoted, however superficially, to Anglo-​Saxon society and culture.17 Or perhaps it seemed obvious—​and impertinent—​that a woman was writing such an indelicate article. What many reviewers found objectionable was my description of the mere of Grendel’s Mother and of Beowulf’s battle with her as sexualized by the poet. Her mere, with its winding passageways and sea-​monsters hiding in the stirred-​up and bloody waters, all hidden from view, I suggested, “projects the mystery and danger of female sexuality run rampant.”18 And the details of her battle with Beowulf seemed distinctly different from those he had with the other two adversaries. When Beowulf first sees the “merewīf” he swings his sword so mightily it rings out a “battle-​song” on her head, only then discovering his sword can no longer “bite”—​it fails him, for the first time ever (1519–​28). Furious, he hurls it to the ground and trusts to his “mundgripe mægenes” (hand-​grip of might, 1534). The “merewīf,” serving as a mock-​queen to Grendel’s “selegyst” (hall-​guest), protects her “battle-​hall” from Beowulf like the mock-​ king Dragon later on—​but only as a female monster might, for the poet describes her as “embracing” him, “grimman grāpum,” with “grim grips” (1542). Yet there is no doubt in how they grapple—​a much more physical and intimate struggle than Beowulf’s other two battles (the first, involving his arm, and the third, his sword), and impossibly clumsy and nonheroic, ending in her straddling him.19 15  Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

16  For discussions dependent on a tripartite organization in the epic, see H. L. Rogers, “Beowulf’s Three Great Fights,” Review of English Studies, n.s., 6 (1955): 339–​55; repr. in An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism, ed. Lewis E. Nicholson (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1963), 233–​56; John Gardner, “Fulgentius’s Expositio Vergiliana Continentia and the Plan of Beowulf: Another Approach to the Poem’s Style and Structure,” Papers on Language and Literature 6 (1970): 227–​62; and Kathryn Hume, “The Theme and Structure of Beowulf,” Studies in Philology 72 (1975): 1–​27.

17  Martin Puhvel published an article on “The Might of Grendel’s Mother,” in Folklore 80 (1969): 81–​88, which examines chiefly Celtic parallels.

18  Jane Chance, “The Structural Unity of Beowulf: The Problem of Grendel’s Mother,” in New Readings, ed. Damico and Olsen, 254. 19  The passage reads:

Gefēng þā be eaxle  -​-​nalas ymb his līf cearað. Gūð-​Gēata lēod  Grendles mōdor; brægd þā beadwa heard,  þā hēgebolgen wæs,

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At this point, when the closely-​knit hauberk protects Beowulf’s life, the swordless hero sees among the armour a giant sword and appropriates it in order to break the bone-​rings of her neck. As angry as he is, the “bile al ðurhwōd /​fǣgne flǣschoman” (the sword entirely penetrated the doomed-​to-​die body, 1567–​68), and he finds, after she falls to the floor, that his “sword wæs swātig, secg weorce gefeh” (the sword was sweaty [bloody], the man-​sword rejoiced in the work, 1569). After Beowulf cuts off Grendel’s head as a trophy to take back, the giant sword melts like ice because of Grendel’s blood and he is left only with the hilt: “Þā þæt sweord ongan /​æfter heaþoswāte hildegicelum, /​ wīgbil wanian; þæt wæs wundra sum, /​ þæt hit eal gemealt īse gelīcost” (Then the sword began, /​on account of battle-​sweat, /​blood-​shed-​in-​battle, /​the battle-​sword to diminish; /​that was one of the wonders, /​that it all melted most like ice, 1605–​9). Perhaps I did go overboard in my close reading of the passage. My general battle description acknowledges what seemed to me the poet’s clever emphasis on the details of sexual intercourse disguised as a fight to convey the inversion of the feminine ideal as queen or hall-​ruler suggested in the behaviour of Grendel’s Mother. There is plentiful clutching, grasping, and embracing between the two figures; the goal seems to be the domination of one atop the other; fingers, knife, and sword are used to penetrate clothing or the body, the sword especially phallus-​like and intended for decapitation (or castration).20 Indeed, Beowulf suffers from a type of impotence, as Grendel’s Mother suffers from a kind of penis-​envy: she is literally “sword-​greedy” (“heoro-​gīfre,” 1498) and collects the swords of giants. And after Beowulf’s borrowed sword penetrates her body and decapitates her son, the sword melts, dissolving like ice into water. So what happened after this overly “psychoanalytic” and “feminist” reading (as some reviewers darkly described it), appeared in print? First things first: surely you want to feorhgenīðlan,  þæt hēo on flet gebēah. Hēo him eft hraþe  andlēan forgeald grimman grāpum  ond him tōgēanes fēng; oferwearp þā wērigmōd  wigena strengest, fēþecempa,  þæt hē on fylle wearð. Ofsæt þā þone selegyst,  ond hyre seax getēah brād [ond] brūnecg;  wolde hire bearn wrecan, āngan eaferan. (1537–​47) (Grasped then by the shoulder  —​not at all about life does he care, the prince of the Battle-​Geats —​  Grendel’s mother; flung then the one hard in battle  because he was enraged, the life-​enemy  so that she fell to the floor. She him then quickly  reward repaid with grim grips  and clutched at him. Stumbled then weary-​minded  the strongest of warriors, of foot-​warriors,  so that he fell. She sat on the hall-​guest  and drew her knife broad and bright-​edged;  she wished to avenge her child, only offspring.)

20  Chance, “The Structural Unity of Beowulf,” 253.

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know what happened to the ten-​page introductory section on Anglo-​Saxon women I had to delete. I revised it into a paper titled “The Anglo-​Saxon Woman as Hero: The Chaste Queen and the Masculine Woman Saint,” and delivered it in the 1980 Modern Language Association special session on “Feminine Themes in Old English Literature” organized by the MLA Division on Old English Language and Literature and chaired by the ever-​ supportive Tom Cable. In the session Helen Damico also offered her “Valkyrie Figures in Old English and Old Norse,” an abbreviation of her 1980 dissertation on the Old English Wealhtheow and the Danish queen’s Old Norse counterparts.21 Allegorica published both of our MLA papers in 1980, with abstracts appearing in the Old English Newsletter.22 Also contributing to the MLA session were Alexandra Hennessey Olsen, who gave a paper on “The Rape of Holofernes: Judith as a Political Poem,”23 and Alain Renoir, who offered “Eve’s I.Q. Rating: Two Sexist Views of Genesis B.”24 There is more to be said about the fertility of our MLA panel in engendering new directions for research on Anglo-​Saxon women. Three of these MLA papers were reprinted in a 1990 collection titled New Readings on Women in Old English Literature, co-​edited by Helen Damico and Alexandra Hennessey Olsen. The book was introduced as the “first and only [volume of essays] of its kind” intended to promote “critical studies on women in Old English literature.”25 Although Christine Fell’s book Women in Anglo-​ Saxon England had appeared in 1984 in England, it focused more on history than on literature and provided a strong context for the study of women of the period, one that I had struggled to construct briefly in my early, overly long Grendel’s Mother article.26 The collection covered a broad spectrum of important topics, peppered with a little postmodern theory and feminism, in four sections: “The Historical Record,” “Sexuality 21  See Helen Damico, “The Old English Wealhtheow and Her Old English Icelandic Counterparts: Legend and Art in the Construction of a Beowulfian Character,” Dissertation Abstracts International 41 (1980): 2594–​95A (University of Wisconsin).

22  See Jane Chance, “The Anglo-​Saxon Woman as Hero: The Chaste Queen and the Masculine Woman Saint,” Allegorica 5 (1980): 139–​48; and Helen Damico, “The Valkyrie Reflex in Old English Literature,” Allegorica 5 (1980): 149–​67. Abstracts appeared in The Old English Newsletter 14 (Spring 1981).

23  I believe that Alexandra Hennessey Olsen’s MLA paper, with revised title, was later published as “Inversion and Political Purpose in the Old English Judith,” English Studies 63 (1982): 289–​93.

24  Renoir had for some time before this 1980 MLA session published various articles on poems involving women characters—​one of the few male Anglo-​Saxonists to do so. See, for example, Alain Renoir, “Judith and the Limits of Poetry,” English Studies 43 (1962): 145–​55; “Wulf and Eadwacer: A Non-​Interpretation,” in Franciplegius: Medieval and Linguistic Studies in Honor of Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr., ed. Jess B. Bessinger, Jr., and Robert P. Creed (New York: New York University Press, 1965), 147–​63; “The Self-​Deception of Temptation: Boethian Psychology in Genesis B,” in Old English Poetry: Fifteen Essays, ed. Robert P. Creed (Providence: Brown University Press, 1967), 47–​67. 25  Damico and Olsen, eds. New Readings, 1.

26  Christine E. Fell, Women in Anglo-​Saxon England and the Impact of 1066 (London: British Museum Publications, 1984; repr. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986).

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and Folklore,” “Language and Difference in Characterization,” and “The Deconstructed Stereotype.”27 Thereafter, Helen published her dissertation as a book, “Beowulf” ’s Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition, in 1984. My Grendel’s Mother article, along with this MLA paper on types of women in Old English literature (much expanded), became the core of my book Woman as Hero in Old English Literature (1986).28 A difficult book to market, I found, again, because of its paradigm-​shifting, it finally appeared both in hardback and in paper after several years of rejection. Despite the emphasis on the sexualized battle in “The Structural Unity of Beowulf,” my article in various forms went on to be reprinted in four other anthologies just on Beowulf.29 27  “The Historical Record” includes essays by Christine Fell on the Boniface correspondence; F. T. Wainwright on Æthelflæd; Pauline Stafford on the “King’s Wife in Essex”; Frank M. Stenton on women and place-​name studies; Mary P. Richards and Jane Stanfield on Anglo-​Saxon women and the law; and Carol J. Clover on the sex ratio in early Scandinavia. “Sexuality and Folklore” begins with Edith Whitehurst Williams’s discussion of women and sexuality in the riddles, followed by Paul E. Szarmach, “Ælfric’s woman saint Eugenia”; Audrey L. Meaney, “The Ides of the Cotton Gnomic Poem,” and Damico, “The Valkyrie Reflex in Old English Literature.” In “Language and Difference in Characterization,” Patricia A. Belanoff examines the female voice in “Wulf and Eadwacer” and “The Wife’s Lament”; L. John Sklute analyzes the freoðuwebbe in poetry; Paul Beekman Taylor the poetic vocabulary of beauty; and Olsen studies Cynewulf’s Elene and Juliana as autonomous women. Finally, “The Deconstructed Stereotype” presents Renoir’s essay and my own, along with Joyce Hill’s discussion of the female stereotype in the “geomuru ides” and Dolores Frese on the adulterous woman in “Wulf and Eadwacer.” Anita R. Riedinger closes with a focus on the woman Arcestrate in Apollonius of Tyre. 28  My paper “The Anglo-​Saxon Woman as Hero” served as a road-​map for my book, Woman as Hero in Old English Literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986; repr. Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2005). The book is specifically divided into chapters on the queen as peace-​weaver or peace pledge; on Mary in Christ I; on Judith, Juliana, and Elene, in those poems of the same name, as allegorical types; Eve in Genesis B; woman as scop in “Wulf and Eadwacer” and “The Wife’s Lament”; and women in Beowulf (in relation to Grendel’s Mother). To fit the book’s argument, I revised my original article as “Grendel’s Mother as Epic Anti-​Type of the Virgin and Queen,” for ­chapter 7 (Syracuse: University Press, 1986), 95–​111. This alternate version was reprinted in Interpretations of Beowulf: A Critical Anthology, ed. R. D. Fulk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 251–​63.

29  After “The Structural Unity of Beowulf: The Problem of Grendel’s Mother” appeared in Texas Studies in Literature and Language in 1980, it was reprinted six times, in most instances, in the form in which it appeared in the initial journal publication and with the same title: see Damico and Olsen, eds., New Readings; Beowulf: A Verse Translation, 152–​67; and online through Gale at Literature Resource Center, http://​go.galegroup.com/​ps/​i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1420025025&v= 2.1&u=epfl&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w. The original article was redacted, with a different title substituted, “Grendel’s Mother and the Women in Beowulf,” in Readings on Beowulf, ed. Stephen P. Thomas, Greenhaven Literary Companion to British Literature (San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1998), 107–​11; and under the original title, “The Structural Unity of Beowulf: The Problem of Grendel’s Mother,” in Poetry Criticism: Excerpts from Criticism of the Works of the Most Significant and Widely Studied Poets of World Literature, ed. Carol T. Gaffke, Anna J. Sheets, and Laura A. Wisner-​Broyles

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These publications from the late 1970s through the mid-​1980s and into the 1990s helped redirect Old English studies in a specifically focused new way—​and in the process they decanonized the study of Old English literature. “Canon,” from the Latin and Greek for “rule,” denotes, as you likely already know, according to the OED and its related fourteen meanings, first, a law or decree of the church; or ecclesiastical laws based on decrees of popes and council-​statures; second, a standard of judgement, or fundamental principle; third, books of the Bible regarded by the Church as authentic; fourth, that portion of the Mass between the Preface and Our Father; and fifth, a chief epoch or era; a list of saints acknowledged by the church, and so forth. Certainly there had previously existed a “canon” for the study of Anglo-​Saxon literature—​but for a scholar examining gender and women in literature, that canon loomed as doubly or triply “canonical.” Literacy in Anglo-​Saxon England usually meant “Latin” rather than vernacular. Even in King Alfred’s era the vernacular was only newly non-​marginalized and historically very early, relative to the advent of other European vernaculars. Further, education, reading, and certainly writing were generally patri­ archal and ecclesiastical and generally written in Latin.30 Most importantly, the relative paucity of Anglo-​Saxon scholars interested in the subject of women and gender in the seventies and eighties—​much less, senior women scholars, of whom I recall there being very few, even at a time when feminism was taking hold in modern culture. Anglo-​Saxon scholarship, in the context of these other canonical parameters, had to dramatically shift to accommodate the idea of feminist, gender, and, eventually, queer and postcolonial theory as subjects of discourse. The conventional feminist resistance to the problem of the canon in periods of literary history as posited by Lillian Robinson some years ago in The New Feminist Criticism in an article titled “Treason Our Text: Feminist Challenges to the Literary Canon” was, first, to simply admit women writers to the canon, an action not really so feasible for Anglo-​Saxonists, given the apparent lack of women writers, and secondly, to “emphasize alternate readings of the tradition, readings that reinterpret women’s character, motivations, and actions and that identify and challenge sexist ideology.”31 In regard to the second strategy, the canon in Anglo-​Saxon scholarship—​as defined by classroom anthologies in the vernacular rarely included any female historical or literary figures. Newer texts have sought to open the canon up, albeit slowly. Pope’s Seven (Detroit: Gale Research, 1999), 22:25–​30. The latest reprint is the Norton Beowulf anthology of 2002, along with the Seamus Heaney translation, immediately following Tolkien’s famous essay.

30  See especially Joan M. Ferrante, “The Education of Women in the Middle Ages in Theory, Fact, and Fantasy,” in Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past, ed. Patricia H. LaBalme (New York: New York University Press, 1980), 9–​42, and Jane Chance, ed., Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), esp. 2–​21. See also Laurie J. Churchill, Phyllis R. Brown, and Jane E. Jeffrey, eds., Women Writing Latin: From Roman Antiquity to Early Modern Europe, 3 vols. (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis, 2002).

31  Lillian Robinson, “Treason Our Text: Feminist Challenges to the Literary Canon,” in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 105–​22 at 107.

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Old English Poems, which provides the Old English original and an excellent glossary for each text, includes “Caedmon’s Hymn,” “The Battle of Brunanburh,” “The Dream of the Rood,” “The Battle of Maldon,” “The Wanderer,” “The Seafarer,” and “Deor,” with “The Wife’s Lament” only added in 2001 in R. D. Fulk’s revised third edition (now titled Eight Old English Poems).32 Bruce Mitchell and Fred Robinson’s Guide to Old English now includes, since its seventh edition (2007), portions of Judith, “The Wife’s Lament,” and “Wulf and Eadwacer.”33 Interestingly, Dorothy Whitelock’s revision of Sweet’s Anglo-​Saxon Reader in its fifteenth edition (1975)—​my favourite as an anthology in teaching Old English—​accentuates texts that do reveal some female experience and characterization: the metres in Alfred’s Boethius on “Ulysses and Circe,” and “Orpheus and Eurydice”; some Charms; the first eighty-​four lines of The Phoenix (“The Happy Land”), Judith, and, of course, Beowulf, notably with the hero’s second battle, with Grendel’s Mother.34 Whitelock does not, however, update the explicitly biblical and canonical material as she might have. Left out of the selection of texts dealing with explicitly biblical and canonical material are Cynewulf’s Juliana and Elene (only the Cynewulfian epilogue is included), Christ I (the Advent Lyrics), which devotes space to Mary; and elegiac, learned, and secular poems such as “Wulf and Eadwacer,” the erotic riddles, and “The Wife’s Lament.” Whitelock does offer a few pages of Genesis B (with Adam and Eve, briefly) and, among the prose selections, Bede’s account of the poet Caedmon at Hilda’s Whitby; one of Ine’s Laws relating to the buying of a woman; and of the charters, one for Ēadgifu (King Edward the Elder’s third wife), one concerning Lēofflǣde in Herefordshire (during Cnut’s reign), and in a Suffolk charter, the will of Æthelflǣd (second wife of King Edmund). However few these may seem, there is, in my opinion, an advance in the inclusion of texts mentioning women. How do these more female-​centred texts differ from those reflective of a masculine warrior-​priest culture? And what kind of power do they proscribe, if not entirely the patriarchal? And how might the use of these texts in the classroom open up the Anglo-​ Saxon past to new, non-​masculinist readings? In the vernacular program of King Alfred, non-​Christian and non-​western European (non-​Graeco-​Roman) myths and sources are evident in the Boethian metres Alfred himself may have translated (although couched in a patriarchal and scholastic essentializing exegesis). Two notable female Greek mythological figures appear:  Circe, in book 4, metre 3, originally from Colchis, a province in Asia east of the Black Sea, although she fled to Latium, now known as Italy; and in book 3, metre 12, Eurydice (daughter of Danaus, according to Hyginus’s Fabulae, the 32  See John C. Pope, ed. Seven Old English Poems (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981); rev. ed. by R. D. Fulk, Eight Old English Poems, with Commentary and Glossary by John C. Pope, 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 2001). 33  Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson, eds. A Guide to Old English (London: Blackwell, 2007); the 8th ed. retains the same selection of texts. 34  Dorothy Whitelock, ed. Sweet’s Anglo-​Saxon Reader in Prose and Verse, 15th ed., 2nd corrected impression (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).

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son of Belus who fled his brother Aegyptus in Egypt for Argos).35 Eurydice later married Orpheus, the Thracian poet who descended into the underworld to attempt to retrieve her after her death. Also pertinent, in Alfred’s translation of Orosius, are the historical passages dealing with the Amazons (who lived on the river Thermodon in Scythia, the region north of Europe and Asia beyond the Black Sea—​present-​day Romania).36 Here also can be found evidence of female power and of “Egypt,” by synecdoche. Such a reading demands that we read myth backwards—​not allegorically, as was conventional in the Middle Ages, but literally or historically. To read authority and tradition by means of reader-​response theory, dependent as it is on the gender of the reader—​nowadays not so much used by scholars, except in queer theory—​is to resist and subvert it. This practice was aurally exhibited by Geoffrey Chaucer’s character the Wife of Bath, who revised what she heard in accord with her desires, a “survival skill that does not come easily to the literate reader burdened by the immobile written records of the past,” according to Susan Schibanoff, in her seminal article “Taking the Gold Out of Egypt: The Art of Reading as a Woman.”37 Such a model was provided long before the Anglo-​Saxon period in the way early Christians rationalized sacred texts such as the Old Testament. St. Augustine insisted on hermeneutics (or exegesis) as a means of recovering the gold from non-​Christian cultures: “Just as the Egyptians had not only idols and grave burdens which the people of Israel detested and avoided, so also they had vases and ornaments of gold and silver which the Israelites took with them secretly when they fled, as if to put them to a better use […] When the Christian separates himself in spirit from their miserable society, he should take this treasure with him for the just use of teaching the gospel.”38 In emulation of the patristic exegete, according to Schibanoff, a woman (re)reads using the authority of her own experience and the ability to deconstruct that text, to insist on the recreation of a text in the reader’s own image.39 Just as the allegorical female personification Dame Raison teaches persona Christine de Pizan in Le Livre de la Cité des Dames (1404–​1405) to read the text “by opposites” (per antiphrasim) in the way of medieval allegorists, argues Schibanoff, so whatever is presented about women negatively should be turned upside-​down. To suggest how women might read Anglo-​Saxon texts per antiphrasim, I would like to use several examples of resisting the canon, for the most part citing examples from Dorothy Whitelock’s subtly feminized and subversive edition of Sweet’s Anglo-​Saxon Reader. The Circe episode in Boethius, which Alfred (or his translator) translates into Old English, renders her name “Circe” as “Kirke,” a word in Old English that refers to this 35  Whitelock, Sweet’s Anglo-​Saxon Reader, 11–​13 and 13–​15. 36  Whitelock, Sweet’s Anglo-​Saxon Reader, 23–​26.

37  Susan Schibanoff, “Taking the Gold Out of Egypt: The Art of Reading as a Woman,” in Gender and Readings: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts, ed. Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 83–​106 at 89. 38  St. Augustine, De doctrina christiana 2:40, in On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-​Merrill, 1958), 75. 39  Schibanoff, “Taking the Gold Out of Egypt,” 96–​98.

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female mythological figure but also to the church (Ecclesia, Kirke in Greece also). Can we imagine the male translator viewing powerful Circe and her sorcery (drýcræfte) as a type of Medusa who turns men to stone, leads them to death and the abyss—​that is, as having the character of a feminized church, a female spirituality and power different from, and threatening to, the canon? To deprive men of their identity, their sense of themselves as male, is to strip them of their rationality, turn them into animals. So Alfred includes the gloss, “be swylcum þū miht ongitan þæt se cræft þæs līchoman bið on þām mōde” (by such examples you can perceive that the power (cræft) of the body is lodged, remains, in the mind).40 Despite the danger of Circe (a feminized Kirke), they retain their masculine (rational) identities. Who is “þū,” if not a masculine scholastic or clerical audience? Reading as a woman (or from the margins), as feminist criticism taught us in the 1990s, rather than as a man, as in the work of Peggy Kamuf, “Writing like a Woman,”41 might privilege the power of magic and the irrational rather than condemning either. Christine de Pizan, for example, in Cité des Dames converts the Boethian story of Circe, her “gold from Egypt,” into a queen who rules her country wisely and administers her knowledge of magical arts in support of it. Her Circe, proficient in the arts of enchantment, is a prudent queen who rules a country on the sea close to the entrance to Italy. Wary of the returning Greek seafarer Ulysses not having asked her permission to land during a storm and sending in his men instead to see if she would be pleased to allow them to embark there, she fears they may be enemies and turns them into swine, only changing them back when Ulysses comes to her himself.42 The same technique may be applied when women read Old English texts—​they subvert and upend them, reading them literally and historically, with an eye to female experience. Appropriately, then, reading with attention to gender issues demands the deconstruction of the ecclesiastical agenda and its hermeneutical misogyny, as women Anglo-​ Saxonists have now been doing for more than twenty-​five years. For example, when we compare Alfred’s translation of Orosius on the Amazons with his Latin original, we find this misogynistic comment added to the text by the translator (whether Alfred or another) in reference to the Amazons: “Hū wēne ge hwelce sibbe þā weras hæfden ǣr þǣm crīstendome, þonne heora wīf swā monigfeald yfel donde wǣron on þiosan middangearde?” (Can you imagine what kind of peace men might have had before Christendom, when their women performed such manifold harms on this Middle Earth?).43 The aside, expressed to “ge,” and propelled by clerical anxiety and wonderment, clearly implies the necessity for restraint in regard to any ideas their women might have had about empowerment—​and it also suggests what a subversive text this excerpt about warrior women might have been for women rulers or ecclesiasts to read, if read it they did. 40  Whitelock, Sweet’s Anglo-​Saxon Reader, 13.

41  Peggy Kamuf, “Writing like a Woman,” in Woman and Language in Literature and Society, ed. S. McConnell-​Ginet, Ruth Borker, and Nelly Furman (New York: Praeger, 1980), 284–​99. 42  Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York: Persea, 1982; rev. ed. 1998), 70 (1.32.2). 43  Whitelock, Sweet’s Anglo-​Saxon Reader, 26.

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In reading about female spirituality—​for example, in the apocryphal book of Judith in Old English—​we are introduced to a marginalized Old Testament female hero, just as, in poems of feminized Christianity, we follow Elene in finding the true cross and do not fix solely on the crucifixion, or else on the education and conversion of the Jews by a woman rather than on the passive heroism of the cross in supporting Christ, as in Dream of the Rood.44 And in Juliana, in which a feminized definition of spirituality appears outside warlike behaviour, it is predicated on the power of the non-​canonical female protagonist’s semiotical language (typical of a female persona in Old English poetry, according to Patricia Belanoff),45 and her wisdom, strategy, and fortitude. Reading Old English literature as a woman also means acknowledging the importance of non-​European (Western) cultures: we must take gold literally back to Egypt. For example, the Old English Phoenix, while indebted to a Latin original by the north African Lactantius, is also indebted to Middle Eastern and African myths, according to Carol Falvo Heffernan, which include the Middle Eastern myth of the phoenix, the Egyptian myth of the benu bird in the Book of the Dead, and, possibly, South African female puberty rites. Expanding traditional source studies, Heffernan puts the body back into the study of Old English.46 Such a feminized reading will not necessarily valorize valour and public power—​the usual valence of the masculine—​and might instead lead back to the human body and sexuality. A similar dynamic may be achieved by re-​reading the marginalized mundane. Some Old English riddles not included in Sweet’s Anglo-​Saxon Reader, for example, describe female desire as embedded in images of domestic pursuits such as kneading dough, bearing heavy keys (the office of the lady as seneschal), cutting onions, and the like. While these riddles may prompt a masculinist guffaw at the expense of the desiring female body, they may also be read otherwise. These images expose the erotic at the intersection of desire with the homely and quotidian, and signal the ephemeral, the momentary, as opposed to the eternal. And when we read legal and historical works (laws, charters, wills, writs), we must decanonize once more, by reading without rule, or reading irregularly—​reading the silences between the lines. In the Laws of Ine (ca. 688–​694), for example, number thirty-​ one states the penalty if a man “buys” a wife and the marriage does not take place: “Gif man wīf gebycgge, ond sīo gyft forð ne cume, āgife þæt feoh, ond forgielde, ond gebēte 44  In addition to other feminist readings of the marginalized biblical hero, Judith, for example, see my chapter on Judith in Woman as Hero in Old English Literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986); Heide Estes’s eco-​critical reading of Judith in this volume, pp. 179–​90; and Teresa Hooper’s reading of Judith in the context of the lost women of the Beowulf manuscript, also in this volume, pp. 161–​78.

45  See, for example, Patricia A. Belanoff, in relation to two lyrics voiced by women speakers in Anglo-​Saxon, “Women’s Songs, Women’s Language: Wulf and Eadwacer and The Wife’s Lament,” in New Readings, ed. Damico and Olsen, 193–​203.

46  See Carol Falvo Heffernan, The Phoenix at the Fountain: Images of Women and Eternity in Lactantius’s Carmen de Ave Phoenice and the Old English Phoenix (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988).

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þām byrgean, swā his borgbryce sīe” (If one buys a woman and the [marriage] gift does not come forth, give back that property and pay compensation for surety, whatever his breach of surety may be).47 Such a breach of contract must have occurred frequently enough for such a law to exist. And how much choice did any woman have, even if noble and a queen? Eadgifu of Kent (ca. 903–​ca. 966), third and last wife of King Edward the Elder, offers an interesting case study on the question of women’s status and agency. Her donation charter to Christ Church, Canterbury, details a series of disputes over lands she inherited from her father that a certain Goda held as surety for a loan he says her father never paid back. Eadgifu insisted that her father had repaid Goda and because her father bestowed this land upon her after he died, she should have received it back, to do with as she chose (“swā swā hēo wolde”), but Goda refused. In the end, King Edward dispossessed him of all of his lands and “þā bēc” (deeds) and gave them to Eadgifu. When they were given to her, she explains in the charter, “hēo ne dorste for Gode him swā lēanian swā hē hire tō geearnud hæfde” (she dared not requite Goda as he deserved from her, for fear of God). She returned most of the his own lands to him but “nolde þā bēc āgifan ǣr hēo wyste hū getrīwlīce hē hī aet landum healdan wolde” (she did not want to return the books [deeds] before she knew how loyally he would [behave with respect to] her lands).48 Later on, through Athelstan’s influence, Goda did receive the deeds (for his lands—​not hers), too. After the death of her son Eadred, Eadgifu lost all of her property and Goda’s sons laid claim once again to Cooling and Osterland. She did not get them back until her grandson Eadgar took the throne. Reading as a woman may also direct us to Northern culture and matriarchal roots in mythology and magic prior to patriarchal and Christological power, involving the homely natural wisdom associated with herbs or magical remedies of uneducated wise women. Consider the Old English charms “Wiþ ymbe” (Against Bees) and “Wið fǣrstice” (Against a Sudden Pain, Stitch): “Sitte gē, sigewif” is a half-​line that appears in the first of these, an appeal to the bees as “victorious women, to settle down,” recited while earth is thrown under the right foot with the right hand and suggestive of homeopathic magic. “Against a Sudden Stitch” instructs the sufferer to boil “feferfūge,” the herb feverfew, and “sēo rēade netele,” the red nettle, which grows around the house, along with plaintain, or “wegbrade.” Such is the weapon offered against “ða mihtigan wīf” who sends spears against you to cause a stitch, evil spirits that originated in the “otr ēsa” (the æsir, the gods, in Old Norse plural). Here, as in Helen Damico’s research on the Norse Valkyries, non-​Christian and non-​ecclesiastical cultures have value in understanding perceptions of female power in Anglo-​Saxon culture deriving from non-​Christian, non-​Roman roots. 47  Listed as ­chapter 75, in Whitelock, Sweet’s Anglo-​Saxon Reader, 53.

48  Whitelock, Sweet’s Anglo-​Saxon Reader, 56. The charter is Sawyer 1211 (with a corresponding Latin version, S 1212), available in the Electronic Sawyer, based on Peter Sawyer’s Anglo-​Saxon Charters: An Annotated List and Bibliography (Royal Historical Society, 1968), revised, updated, and edited by Susan Kelly, Rebecca Rushworth, et al.: http://​esawyer.org.uk/​charter/​1211.html and http://​esawyer.org.uk/​charter/​1212.html., S 1211.

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In relation to the Old English Beowulf, another means of explaining the actions of Grendel’s Mother (or any similarly negative portrayal of an Anglo-​Saxon woman) is to clarify the difficulty of her situation from her point of view. For example, Susan Signe Morrison retells the story of Grendel’s Mother in her book Grendel’s Mother: The Story of the Wyrd-​Wife; so also J. R. R.Tolkien treats the monster more sympathetically—​as a spouseless mother who has lost her only son and while in mourning is forced into revenge by necessity—​in his teaching translation of Beowulf and his lay on Grendel and Beowulf.49 Damico follows a similar strategy in her recent book, Beowulf and the Grendel-​kin, which deals with Beowulf as political allegory in relation to the Danish invasion by Cnut and its aftermath.50 Interestingly, Damico’s thesis is not far removed from that of Alexandra Hennessy Olsen’s article warning against the rapacious Danes in the Old English Judith (a work that appears in the same manuscript as Beowulf, British Library Cotton Vitellius a.xv), much like Wulfstan’s sermon to the English in 1014, Sermo Lupi ad Anglos.51 The dates for Beowulf in Damico—​she believes the first two-​thirds of the unique manuscript transcribed by Scribe A were likely written in the eleventh century—​ accord with Dorothy Whitelock’s dates for the Wulfstan sermon between Christmas 1013 and Æthelred’s exile in Normandy, and Cnut’s accession to the throne in 1016.52 Damico’s argument in the new book is significant for feminist Anglo-​Saxon historio­ graphy here, in extension of research about Anglo-​Saxon historical and literary women that germinated from the same era in the 1980s when we all happened to be working on similar materials, especially Beowulf. But it is also important for lending weight to a much later date of composition for the epic, given that generally contentious issue, which over time has ranged from the 700s to the 1000s,53 in recentring Beowulf as a document of political and cultural history and, simultaneously, unifying many different approaches, paleographical, literary, historical. 49  See Susan Signe Morrison, Grendel’s Mother: The Story of the Wyrd-​Wife (Winchester: Top Hat Books, 2015); also J. R. R. Tolkien, “The Lay of Beowulf, II: Beowulf and the Monsters,” in Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, Together with Sellic Spell, ed. Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), 420–​25. See also the argument in my book, Tolkien, Self and Other: “This Queer Creature,” New Middle Ages Series (New York: Springer Nature Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), in chapter 7, “ ‘Usually Slighted’: Gudrún, Other Medieval Women, and The Lord of the Rings, Book 3 (1925–​1943),” 177–​214. 50  Helen Damico, Beowulf and the Grendel-​kin: Politics and Poetry in Eleventh-​Century England (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2015).

51  About the Danes, see Olen’s article cited in footnote 23; and Wulfstan, Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, ed. Dorothy Whitelock, 3rd ed. (London: Methuen, 1963). See also The Homilies of Wulfstan, trans. Dorothy Bethurum (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 266–​75. 52  Damico, Beowulf and the Grendel-​kin, 103n. See Wulfstan, Sermo, 6.

53  See, for example, Kevin S. Kiernan, Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1981; rev. ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992); Kevin S. Kiernan, “The Eleventh-​Century Origin of Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript,” in The Dating of Beowulf, ed. Colin Chase, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 9–​21; repr. in Anglo-​ Saxon Manuscripts: Basic Readings, ed. Mary P. Richards (New York: Garland, 1994), 277–​99; Roy Michael Liuzza, “On the Dating of Beowulf,” in Beowulf: Basic Readings, ed. Peter S. Baker (New York:

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Because of the conquest of England by the Danish king Cnut (in 1016), Damico plausibly argues, history thinly veils the goings-​on of contemporary Wessex in eleventh-​ century Anglo-​Danish England as recorded in the Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle, the Encomium Emmae Reginae, and other historical (Latin and Norse) texts—​and is reflected significantly in narrative portions of the first two-​thirds of Beowulf. Damico specifically offers Beowulf as veiled political allegory in support of a Wealhtheow-​figure who might represent Emma of Normandy and Wessex, wife of Æthelred of Wessex and, after his death, of the Danish Cnut; Emma ruled a single year as femme sole after Cnut’s death in 1035. Additionally, Damico suggests that Harold Harefoot—​Cnut’s bastard son with the Mercian concubine lady Ælfgifu of Northampton—​is transformed into Grendel as a Cain-​like killer in the Anglo-​Saxon epic. Damico further suggests that Ælfgifu, “tyrant” queen mother in Norway (1030–​1035) who seized the throne from Emma in 1036 and from Cnut’s designated heir, Harthacnut, and then blinded and killed Emma’s sons Alfred and Edward by her previous husband, Æthelred, is “an allegorical rendering of Grendel’s Mother.”54 Damico points to their alien natures in the phrases Beowulf uses to describe them both: “twēgen /​ micle mearcstapan mōras healdan, /​ ellorgǣstas” (two mighty mark-​steppers guard the moors, alien spirits) (my trans., 1345–​46)—​meaning, as Mercians, they inhabit the lands south of the Humber.55 Female Anglo-​Saxonists have already succeeded beyond our modest expectations in reading as women not only Beowulf but also other poems that include female characters (or that depend upon cultural origins less patriarchal than those both Christian and masculine). One final example I would like to offer is what may be a more contemporary reception of my Grendel’s Mother article that incorporates what so offended some of the elder statesmen in Anglo-​Saxon studies early on, in the 1970s and 1980s. Following the 2007 Robert Zemeckis Beowulf film, one anonymous online bloggist termed the appearance of Angelina Jolie as a sexualized Grendel’s Mother “Joliewulf.”56 This film treatment of Grendel’s Mother may reflect the familiarity of the screenwriters (Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary) with my interpretation of her symbolic significance for the poet in her battle with Beowulf. How the Beowulf poem describes that battle between the woman and our hero surely involves a parody of human sexuality but taken, of course, to a violent extreme. But in the film human sexuality takes centre stage (not just in this scene) and Grendel’s Mother is not overtly a monster—​she is apparently naked, covered in shiny gold skin, and bears a reptilian tail that should immediately signal her as demonic. As Jolie approaches our hero, twitching and writhing on spiky high heels before him, she takes the measure of the man named Beowulf. She strokes his knife, in a nod to the scene Garland, 1995), 281–​302; and Roberta Frank, “A Scandal in Toronto: the Dating of ‘Beowulf’ a Quarter Century On,” Speculum 82 (2007): 843–​64.

54  See Damico, Beowulf and the Grendel-​kin, 109. For the chapter on the Grendel-​kin, see 152–​203. 55  Damico, Beowulf and the Grendel-​kin, 108–​9.

56  www.chronicle.com/​forums/​index.php?topic=44038.30;imode. For the appearance of Angelina Jolie as Grendel’s Mother, see scene 8, 57:45, placed exactly in the middle of the film. Robert Zemeckis, Dir., Beowulf: Director’s Cut, DVD, Paramount Studios, 2007, 114 mins.

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in the poem in which his sword will melt like ice from contact with one or both of the monsters’ fluids, or, at least, in emphasis on swords in general—​the initial failure of his sword in penetrating Grendel’s Mother in their first encounter, or his later appropriation of her giant sword that will down her. Beowulf cannot help but be attracted to her seductions, at least at first. An alternate explanation of Zemeckis’s visualization of Grendel’s Mother, one less optimistic, especially from a female perspective, is that there will always be a cultural essentialization of women as monstrous. What we encounter in this popular culture image, therefore, may be only another version of a masculinized reading of a woman’s work/​body as her most important attribute, sexualized, desirable, and invariably dangerous. To counter this conventional misogyny, women scholars such as Helen Damico and others like her have been able to recuperate a cultural, historical, or political context to explain the origins of a seemingly dangerous or monstrous female figure who appears in a work of literature such as Beowulf. So Damico, as discussed above, speculates in her latest book about Mercian Ælfgifu, a queen possibly politicized allegorically as Grendel’s Mother, a “monster” able to be controlled and conquered in combat by the protagonist (with the help of God). This form of fantasy-​projection is understood by contemporary women in high-​ranking positions today in business who have to fend off male colleagues envious of their success. As far as the Beowulf film is concerned, our own cultural context invites women viewers to perceive and celebrate Angelina Jolie vamped up as Grendel’s Mother not just as a sexy woman—​which, of course, she is—​but also as a role model who steers her own life and career brilliantly. She is an award-​winning movie and television actress (Academy, Screen Actors Guild, Golden Globe, Emmy, and BAFTA awards, many times over);57 a filmmaker on several levels—​production (nine credits), direction (five credits), and screenwriting (three credits)—​for In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011), Unbroken (2015), and By the Sea (2015); a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (2001) and then a Special Envoy to High Commissioner António Guterres (2012);58 a savvy business woman;59 and a mother of six children 57  Among Angelina Jolie’s many films (forty-​six credits) are:  Hackers (1995), George Wallace (1998), Gia (1998), Girl, Interrupted (1999), Pushing Tin (1999), Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005), Beowulf (2007), A Mighty Heart (2007), Wanted (2008), The Changeling (2008), The Tourist (2010), Salt (2010), and Maleficent (2014). She has been nominated for awards ninety-​six times and won forty seven awards, but only one Oscar. See the entry at www.imdb.com/​ name/​nm0001401/​. 58  While filming one of her Lara Croft movies in Cambodia, Jolie became interested in helping third-​world children and began adopting several of her own. She travels to various countries on their behalf and on behalf of women suffering from violence and poverty and she devotes 30 percent of her income to charity. She has travelled on more than forty missions, among them, war zones. Her humanitarian work has led to changes in legislation, the launching of various global health and education projects, and resulted in various humanitarian awards for her contributions. See Wikipedia on Angelina Jolie Pitt, https://​en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Angelina_​Jolie. 59  Jolie’s salary from Maleficent amounted to US$15 million.

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(three adopted, three biological), who underwent a double mastectomy to prevent the development of family-​related breast cancer. To sexualize a woman by emphasizing her (female) body and her beauty is a means of controlling her and limiting her power because it reduces her to a common denominator, the ordinary and fleshly. But the beautiful Grendel’s Mother in the Zemeckis film is not vanquished by Beowulf; on the contrary, she vanquishes him and then simply vanishes, as if by magic. This contemporary fantasy allows all viewers to perceive her as more than human, extraordinary, like the actual Jolie. And yet, the problem of Grendel’s Mother is a problem women today still face, as masculinist perspectives pervade our culture and our selves. Even the iconic Jolie has confessed, “Oh God, I struggle with low self-​esteem all the time! I think everyone does. I have so much wrong with me, it’s unbelievable!”60 In the film, it is the tail that gives her away—​the problem once more in reading Grendel’s Mother.

60  See www.imdb.com/​name/​nm0001401/​bio?ref_​_​nm_​ov_​bio_​sm.

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Chapter 13

FEMALE AGENCY IN  EARLY ANGLO-​SAXON STUDIES: THE “NUNS OF TAVISTOCK” AND ELIZABETH ELSTOB

TIMOTHY GRAHAM* HELEN DAMICO, WHOSE career as scholar and teacher this volume honours, has made fundamental contributions to the study of Old English literature, especially through her work on Beowulf, embodied in her books “Beowulf” ’s Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition and the recently published Beowulf and the Grendel-​kin.1 Her dynamic pedagogy inspired students at the University of New Mexico from the time she took up her appointment there in 1981 until her retirement. She is a distinguished member of a line of female teachers of Old English who began to grace the universities of the Anglophone world from the 1930s; over the decades their number has included such luminaries as Dorothy Whitelock, Rosemary Woolf, Barbara Raw, Janet Bately, Christine Fell, Joyce Hill, Jane Roberts, Mary Clayton, Roberta Frank, and Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe. Helen Damico has also shaped our knowledge of the history of the study of the Middle Ages through her leading editorial role on the three volumes published as Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, in which she sought to ensure that female scholars were appropriately represented.2 The present essay aims to celebrate her multiple accomplishments by considering the beginnings of female involvement in Anglo-​Saxon studies. It investigates the grounds of a sixteenth-​century belief that the study of Old English was cultivated by nuns in the late Middle Ages and explores lesser-​known aspects of the work of the early eighteenth-​century scholar Elizabeth Elstob, rightly reckoned a true foremother of Anglo-​Saxon studies. *  University of New Mexico. [email protected]

1  Helen Damico, “Beowulf” ’s Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984); Helen Damico, Beowulf and the Grendel-​kin: Politics and Poetry in Eleventh-​Century England, Medieval European Studies 16 (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2015). 2  Helen Damico and Joseph B. Zavadil, eds., Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, vol. 1: History, Garland Reference Library of the Humanities 1350 (New York: Garland, 1995); Helen Damico with Donald Fennema and Karmen Lenz, eds., Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, vol. 2: Literature and Philology, Garland Reference Library of the Humanities 2071 (New York: Garland, 1998); Helen Damico with Donald Fennema and Karmen Lenz, eds., Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, vol. 3: Philosophy and the Arts, Garland Reference Library of the Humanities 2110 (New York: Garland, 2000).

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Old English at Tavistock? Toward the end of the preface to his 1574 edition of Asser’s Life of King Alfred, Matthew Parker (1504–​1575)—​whose efforts to collect and scrutinize manuscripts did so much to launch the Early Modern trajectory of Anglo-​Saxon studies—​made an arresting claim that has caught the attention of subsequent scholars while also being strikingly misrepresented by them. After noting the utility of a familiarity with Old English for anyone who wishes to understand important ancient documents written in the vernacular, Parker continues:3 To this end, in former centuries certain colleges of nuns were established by our forebears in which there would be women who would both be imbued with the knowledge of that language and, by communicating with others, would pass on that knowledge to posterity. This indeed was undertaken within our memory in the community of nuns at Tavistock in the county of Devon, and in many other convents—​I believe, lest skill in that tongue would entirely fade away through the unfamiliarity of the language.

Parker’s claim is unequivocal: that within living memory, nuns in various convents, among which he specifically names that of Tavistock, had been entrusted with the task of preserving the knowledge of the language of the Anglo-​Saxons. The term monialis was, like its synonym monacha, commonly used to mean “nun” throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modern era; that Parker indeed had women in mind is confirmed by his use within this passage of the female relative pronoun quæ. Yet scholarly discussion of Parker’s statement has wilfully altered his meaning. In her important study Old English Scholarship in England from 1566–​1800, Eleanor N. Adams wrote that “Parker […] says that the language [Old English] was taught in certain abbeys, in order to preserve to the monks the knowledge of their early charters”; in quoting the passage, she silently amends Parker’s female quæ to the male equivalent, qui.4 Michael Murphy’s translation of Parker’s words again unwarrantedly attributes to monks, not nuns, the agency in preserving the knowledge of Old English: “For this purpose certain colleges of monks were established by our ancestors in earlier times. In these colleges were men who were instructed in knowledge of this language. […] This practice was continued […] at the monastery of Tavistock in Devonshire, and in many other monasteries.”5

3  Ælfredi regis res gestæ [ed. Matthew Parker] (London: John Day, 1574), sig. ¶.ir: “Quem in finem superioribus sæculis a maioribus nostris monialium quædam Collegia instituta sunt, in quibus essent quæ & huius linguæ scientia imbuerentur, & eandem (cum aliis communicando) ad posteros transmitterent. Quod quidem in Cœnobio monialium Tauestokensi in comitatu Deuoniæ, & multis aliis conuenticulis (nostra memoria) receptum fuit, credo, ne eius sermonis peritia, ob linguæ insolentiam penitus obsolesceret.”

4  Eleanor N. Adams, Old English Scholarship in England from 1566–​1800, Yale Studies in English 55 (1917; repr. Hamden: Archon Books, 1970), 21 and 21n3. 5  Michael Murphy, “Anglo-​Saxon at Tavistock Abbey,” Duquesne Review 11 (1966): 119–​24 at 122.

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These scholars’ reasons for changing Parker’s meaning are unknown. There is, however, a problem implicit in Parker’s words: no community of nuns is known to have existed at Tavistock. The sole monastic institution recorded there throughout the Middle Ages is a community of Benedictine monks whose abbey was dedicated to the Virgin Mary and St. Rumon, a local saint.6 The foundation of that community dated back to Anglo-​Saxon times. A monastery seems first to have been established around the year 961 either by Ordgar—​ealdorman of Devon and father of Ælfthryth, who became the wife of King Edgar (959–​975) and was the mother of King Æthelred (978–​1016)—​or by Ordgar’s son Ordulf. No document relating to the original foundation survives, but in 981 Æthelred issued a charter to Ordulf (Æthelred’s uncle) in which he authorized Ordulf to endow the monastery at Tavistock and populate it with monks of regular Benedictine observance.7 The charter notes that Ordulf’s mother and brother (Æthelred’s grandmother and uncle) lie buried in the monastery and that some years previously there had been an attempt to overthrow it, presumably as part of the anti-​monastic reaction that followed the death of King Edgar.8 Æthelred’s charter includes instructions for the election of a new abbot upon the demise of the current abbot and grants the abbey freedom from secular service apart from the support of military expeditions and the upkeep of bridges and fortifications. The monastery suffered during the Danish attack on southwestern England in 997, when, according to manuscripts C, D, and E of the Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle, the Viking army that sailed into the mouth of the Tamar River advanced inland and “burnt down Ordulf’s monastery at Tavistock and took with them to their ships indescribable booty.”9 But the abbey was restored soon after this; it persisted throughout the Middle Ages and was dissolved in March 1539, when it was populated by an abbot and twenty monks and was one of the richest monasteries in the southwest of 6  See David Knowles and R. Neville Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses: England and Wales (London: Longman, 1971), 57, 77, and 555.

7  The charter of 981 survives in copies of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Its text is printed in H. P. R. Finberg, Tavistock Abbey: A Study in the Social and Economic History of Devon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), 278–​83. The authenticity of the charter has sometimes been challenged but it is now reckoned largely genuine; it is no. 838 in P. H. Sawyer, Anglo-​ Saxon Charters: An Annotated List and Bibliography, Royal Historical Society Guides and Handbooks 8 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1968). On the foundation and early history of Tavistock, see also H. P. R. Finberg, “The House of Ordgar and the Foundation of Tavistock Abbey,” English Historical Review 58 (1943): 190–​201, and Christopher Holdsworth, “Tavistock Abbey in Its Late Tenth Century Context,” Report and Transactions of the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science 135 (2003): 31–​58. 8  The anti-​monastic reaction is described in the Life of St. Oswald by Byrhtferth of Ramsey. See Byrhtferth of Ramsey, The Lives of St Oswald and St Ecgwine, ed. and trans. Michael Lapidge, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009), 122–​30. See also D. J. V. Fisher, “The Anti-​Monastic Reaction in the Reign of Edward the Martyr,” Cambridge Historical Journal 10 (1950–​52): 254–​70.

9  “Ordulfes mynster Tæfingstoc forbærndon and unasecgendlice herehyðe mid him to scypon brohton”: see The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, vol. 5: MS C, ed. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), 88 (s.a. 997).

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England, with possessions that in 1535 had been valued at £902 5s 7d.10 Upon its dissolution the abbey and its estates were granted to John Russell (later elevated as the first earl of Bedford) and his heirs; Russell was one of the crown’s principal representatives in the region. Given Parker’s enigmatic reference to a non-​existent community of nuns at Tavistock, it is noteworthy that the great antiquary William Camden (1551–​1623) seems to have been uncertain whether Tavistock was originally founded as a nunnery or a monastery. In the first edition of Britannia, his magnificent region-​by-​region historical survey of Britain, published in 1586, Tavistock receives a prominent mention near the beginning of the section on Devonshire. Camden attributes the foundation of the religious house there to Ealdorman Ordgar, notes that it was originally established for females, and mentions Tavistock’s later role in preserving the knowledge of the Anglo-​Saxon language. Camden observes:11 Lower down, the Tamar receives the Tavy, a little river, upon which flourishes Tavystoke, commonly Tavistock, formerly famous for the monastery that Ordgar, earl of Devon and the father-​in-​law of King Edgar, a man of incomparable strength of mind and body, built for holy virgins in the year 961 […] but scarcely thirty-​three years after its foundation, it burned down after being set on fire by the hostility of the Danes. Yet it flourished again, and through a praiseworthy institution, lectures in our ancestral tongue—​I mean the Saxon, which has now passed into disuse—​were held here within the memory of our fathers, lest the knowledge of this language might perish, as has now happened.

This text remained the same in the expanded editions of Britannia published in 1587, 1590, and 1594.12 But Camden introduced some significant changes to the opening of the passage in the 1600 edition, in which the foundation is now attributed to Ordgar’s son Ordulf and the reference to “holy virgins” is dropped. Ordulf is said to have been inspired by a divine vision:13 10  Knowles and Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses, 77; Finberg, Tavistock Abbey, 28.

11  William Camden, Britannia, sive florentissimorum regnorum Angliæ, Scotiæ, Hiberniæ, et adiacentium insularum ex intima antiquitate chorographica descriptio (London: Ralph Newbery, 1586), 80: “Inferius Teauum fluuiolum recipit Tamara, ad quem Teauistoke, vulgo Tavistoke floret, cœnobio quondam celebre, quod Ottgarus Deuoniæ Comes Edgari regis socer, vir incomparabili tum animi, tum corporis fortudine, virginibus sacris anno Christi 961. extruxit […] sed tricessimus tertius ab hoc condito vix agebatur annus, cum Danica incensum tempestate deflagrarit; refloruit tamen, laudabilique instituto, auitæ nostræ linguæ, Saxonicam dico, quæ iam in desuetudinem abiit, lectiones in hoc vsque ad patrum memoriam habebantur, ne quod nunc euenit, huius linguæ cognitio intercideret.” 12  The 1594 edition names the founder as “Ottgarus siue Odogarus” (132).

13  Camden, Britannia (London:  George Bishop, 1600), 161:  “Inferius Teauum fluuiolum recipit Tamara, ad quem Teauistoke, vulgo Tauistoke floret, cœnobio quondam celebre, quod Ordulphus filius Ordgari Comitis Deuoniæ cælesti visione admonitus circa annum seruatoris Christi 961. extruxit.” In the 1607 edition, the last published during Camden’s lifetime (London: George Bishop

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Lower down, the Tamar receives the Tavy, a little river, upon which flourishes Tavistock, formerly famous for the monastery that Ordulf, son of Ordgar the earl of Devon, built around the year of Christ the Savior 961 under admonition from a heavenly vision.

Apparently Camden, like Parker, had initially been under the impression that Tavistock was home to a nunnery, but by 1600 had obtained new information to change his view. The reference to the lectures in the Anglo-​Saxon language established at Tavistock, included in Camden’s first edition, remained unchanged in all subsequent editions of his work. The reference recalls Parker’s comment on Tavistock and may have been influenced by it. But Parker’s contention that nuns were responsible for instruction in Old English (at Tavistock and elsewhere) is silently dropped in all later references to the pre-​dissolution teaching of Old English. Thus Abraham Wheelock, holder of the first university lectureship in Anglo-​Saxon studies, established at Cambridge in the late 1630s, alludes to the former existence of Anglo-​Saxon lectures at Tavistock when discussing his own lectureship in the preface of his 1643 edition of the Latin and Old English texts of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History; but he associates the Tavistock lectures with monks:14 Within the memory of our grandfathers there were not lacking cenobites at Tavistock in the territory of Devon who, lest the Saxon language might decay through corruption by the Normans who had come hither, established Saxon lectures in the monastery so that

& John Norton), Camden made a small but significant change toward the end of the passage: in his comment on the disappearance of the knowledge of Old English, “ne quod nunc euenit” (as has now happened) becomes “ne quod nunc fere euenit” (as has now almost happened).

14  Abraham Wheelock, ed., Historiæ ecclesiasticæ gentis Anglorum libri V. a venerabili Beda presbytero scripti (Cambridge: Roger Daniel, 1653), sig. B.1v: “non deerant in avorum nostrorum memoria, cœnobitæ in agro Devoniensi Tavistokienses, qui, (ne Saxonica lingua, Normannis qui huc venerant illam corrumpentibus, exolesceret,) prælectiones in monasterio Saxonicas instituerunt: ne (quod evenit, inquit Cl. Camdenus) hujus linguæ cognitio intercideret.” While the term cœnobitæ is gender non-​specific, Wheelock’s use of the male relative pronoun qui establishes that he is referring to monks. Wheelock’s words echo those of his patron Henry Spelman (who endowed the Cambridge Anglo-​Saxon lectureship) in his Concilia, decreta, leges, constitutiones, in re ecclesiarum orbis Britannici (London: R. Badger, 1639), preface to the reader, sig. [*]‌2r: “Tanti etiam apud Majores nostros post subactos Anglosaxones [Saxonica lingua], ut ad retinendam eam atque propagandam, prælectiones quasdam instituerint inter Cœnobitas Tavistokiæ in agro Devoniensi, quæ ad avorum nostrorum memoriam floruisse dicuntur, & cum ipsis Monasteriis videntur expirasse” ([The Saxon language was] also of such moment among our forebears after the subjection of the Anglo-​Saxons that for the purpose of retaining and promoting it they established certain lectures among the cenobites of Tavistock in the territory of Devon. These lectures are said to have flourished within the memory of our grandfathers and to have died out with the monasteries themselves). The notion that knowledge of Old English was kept alive through lectures also occurs in the preface of William L’Isle’s A Saxon Treatise Concerning the Old and New Testament (London: H. Seile, 1623), though L’Isle does not specify where such lectures took place: “Thankes be to God that he that conquered the Land could not so conquer the Language; but that in memory of our fathers it hath beene preserued with common lectures” (sig. f.1 v).

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234 Timothy Graham the knowledge of that language might not perish (as has happened, says the illustrious Camden).

The claim that Old English was studied in the monastery at the close of the Middle Ages perhaps had some foundation. Tavistock is known to have owned at least some Anglo-​Saxon manuscripts at the time of the dissolution. Late in 1567, Francis Russell, second earl of Bedford, who had inherited the Tavistock estates upon his father’s death in 1555, presented Matthew Parker with a manuscript of Old English homilies by Ælfric and others, now Cambridge University Library MS Ii. 4. 6.15 A note in Parker’s hand at the front of the manuscript (fol. 1r) records that this manuscript and another just like it had been found by Russell’s agent, Robert Farrar or Ferrers, within the former monastery in 1566.16 A further note entered in formal italic hand by a member of Parker’s circle on the book’s last original leaf (fol. 308v) records that Russell made his gift to Parker in Star Chamber, the prerogative court located within the royal palace at Westminster, on December 29, 1567.17 Yet another note, written in Secretary hand by a member of Parker’s circle on a leaf added at the time of the Parkerian binding (fol. 311v), is worded identically to Parker’s note at the beginning, except that it reads “in domo quondam cenobio monacharum de Tavestocke” (in a house, formerly the community of nuns of Tavistock) where Parker’s note omits the word monacharum. This version of the note provides a further witness to the misapprehension within Parker’s circle that Tavistock had been home to a convent of nuns.18 The second manuscript that Ferrers discovered at Tavistock is believed to be another Ælfrician homiliary, now London, British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius C. v.19 Both manuscripts include some late medieval annotations; in particular, Latin annotations of the thirteenth or fourteenth century in margins of MS Ii. 4. 6 comment on the Old English text and show that it was read with understanding, thereby possibly attesting to a tradition of cultivating the knowledge of Old English at Tavistock.20 15  For a description of this manuscript, see N. R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-​ Saxon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), no. 21.

16  Parker’s note reads: “Hunc codicem cum altero consimili: reperit R. Ferror seruus comitis Bedfordie in Domo quondam cenobio de Tavestocke in devinshire, ao 1566.” The note is entered at the top of the verso of a leaf added to the manuscript when Parker had it bound (the added leaves are listed by Ker, Catalogue, 34). Robert Ferrers, the discoverer of the manuscript, went on to become Member of Parliament for Tavistock in the early 1570s.

17  The note, which follows Russell’s own signature (“Franciscus Comes Bedfordię/​ 1566”), reads: “Dedit Matthæo Cantuariensi 29o Decembris Anno 1567o: in camera stellata.”

18  Finberg, Tavistock Abbey, 223, believed that the inscription on fol. 311v was in the hand of Robert Ferrers and that it was this note that led Parker to believe that Tavistock had been a nunnery. The note is, however, in a Parkerian hand that recurs in other manuscripts in Parker’s collection and is on a leaf added when Parker had the manuscript bound. 19  The identification was first suggested by Humfrey Wanley, Librorum veterum septentrionalium […] catalogus historico-​criticus (Oxford: E Theatro Sheldoniano, 1705), 208; see also Ker, Catalogue, 291. 20  On the annotations in the two manuscripts, see Ker, Catalogue, 31 and 286.

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Tradition even identified a particular building within the Tavistock monastic precincts as having been assigned to the teaching of Old English, though the only references to such a building come well after the dissolution. According to the account of Tavistock in Browne Willis’s An History of the Mitred Parliamentary Abbies, and Conventual Cathedral Churches, published in 1718, among the several buildings of the monastery that were still standing in the early eighteenth century but that had been adapted to new purposes was “the Saxon-​School,” now “employed to hold Corn, Hay, &c.” Willis comments that before the dissolution, the abbey was renowned for this school: “But what this Convent was chiefly celebrated for, was the laudable Institution of a Saxon-​School, erected for the teaching the Saxon Language, that the Antiquities, Laws and Histories, written in that Tongue by our Ancestors, might be preserved from oblivion.”21 The location on which the school stood can still be identified:  the nineteenth-​century antiquary Alfred John Kempe recorded that the building known as the Saxon School was finally knocked down in 1736, to make way for a residence for the duke of Bedford’s steward, later replaced by the Bedford Arms Inn.22 The Bedford Arms Inn survives as the current Bedford Hotel, built in 1822 on the west side of the Tavy. At some point, a second element became associated with the claim that Tavistock Abbey had preserved a tradition of instruction in Old English: the notion arose that the abbey’s monks had printed Old English texts and possessed a set of Anglo-​Saxon types for the purpose. This idea perhaps originated in the fact that during the first century of printing Tavistock possessed the only press in the southwest of England; none of the few works known to have issued from it, however, included any Old English.23 The Tavistock press’s first operator was Thomas Richard, who had been a monk at the abbey since at least 1502 and had studied at Oxford. In 1525 Richard, commissioned by one Robert Langdon, issued John Walton’s early fifteenth-​century translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy under the title The Boke of Comfort Called in Laten Boecius de Consolatione Philosophiæ. Only two other publications from the press are known: a Latin grammar called The Long Accidence, by John Stanbridge, and the confirmation of a charter issued to the tin miners of Devon.24 The Boethius edition attracted the attention of several early modern scholars. In a letter written to the London bookseller John 21  Browne Willis, An History of the Mitred Parliamentary Abbies, and Conventual Churches, 2 vols. (London: W. Bowyer, 1718), 1:171.

22  A. J. K[empe], “Notices of Tavistock and the Abbey,” The Gentleman’s Magazine 100 (1830): 113–​18 and 216–​21 at 218: “The chapter-​house and Saxon school […] were pulled down in 1736, in order to construct a residence for the Duke of Bedford’s steward on that site; this was called the Abbey-​house, and is now replaced by the Bedford Arms Inn.” Kempe’s familiarity with Tavistock came through his sister, the novelist Anna Eliza Bray, who was married to the vicar of Tavistock. See the online Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, entries for “Kempe, Alfred John,” and “Bray, Anna Eliza.” 23  See Ian Maxted, “Impressorie Art: The Impact of Printing in Exeter and Devon,” in Print Culture and Peripheries in Early Modern Europe: A Contribution to the History of Printing and the Book Trade in Small European and Spanish Cities, ed. Benito Rial Costas (Boston: Brill, 2013), 127–​46 at 131–​32. 24  Maxted, “Impressorie Art,” 133.

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Bagford in December 1708, the Oxford antiquary Thomas Hearne (1678–​1735), who had been sent a copy of the Boethius by Bagford and was aware of the tradition that the teaching of Old English had flourished at Tavistock, speculated that the translation could have been useful for learning Old English, given similarities between Walton’s fifteenth-​ century language and “the Saxon”:25 I am of opinion, that Robert Langdon mov’d him [Thomas Richard] to print this Book, not only out of a pious Design, but also for the advancing the Saxon Tongue, which was taught in this Abbey (as well as in some other Places of this Kingdom) with Success; and there were Lectures read in it constantly here, which continu’d some time after the Reformation. Now this Translation of Boëtius having Variety of Words agreeing with the Saxon, it might be reckon’d by Mr. Langdon a very proper Book for attaining to the Knowledge of the Saxon Language, especially if compar’d with the Translation made by King Alfred; and for that reason, if for none else, the Printer might be induc’d to set it forth.

A dozen or so years before Hearne wrote this letter, the first reference to the printing of Old English at Tavistock had occurred among the additions to Camden’s Britannia that Edmund Gibson (1669–​1748)—​one of the circle of Anglo-​Saxonists that flourished at Oxford in the late seventeenth century—​incorporated into his English translation of the work, published in 1695. Gibson’s claim, however, is not that Tavistock was printing Old English before the abbey’s dissolution, but that a “Saxon grammar” was published there early in the English Civil War of the mid-​seventeenth century:26 “Farther down the river is Tavistoke, where the school in which the Saxon tongue was taught, is still in being; and (as I have heard) there was also in the beginning of the late Civil wars, a Saxon-​ Grammar printed, in Tavistoke.” This grammar has never been identified and may never have existed; Gibson may simply have been misinformed. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, Richard Gough (1735–​1809), in his own expanded edition of Britannia, cast doubt upon Gibson’s statement, noting that the unsettled Civil War period was an unlikely time for such a publication:27 The anecdote of a Saxon grammar being printed here in the beginning of the Civil wars (a very unlikely period) rests on the single authority of Bishop Gibson, or Dr. Musgrave, who sent him many particulars relating to Devonshire. Such a memorial of the typographic art among us, one would think, would have been preserved to the present age as well as Walton’s translation of Boethius de Consolatione.

25  The letter is quoted in full in Robert of Gloucester’s Chronicle Transcrib’d, and Now First Publish’d, from a MS in the Harleyan Library, ed. Thomas Hearne, 2 vols. (Oxford: At the Theater, 1724), 2:712. 26  Edmund Gibson, Camden’s Britannia, Newly Translated into English: With Large Additions and Improvements (London: F. Collins, 1695), 38.

27  William Camden, Britannia: or, a Chorographical Description of the Flourishing Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the Isles Adjacent; from the Earliest Antiquity, trans. and enlarged by Richard Gough, 3 vols. (London: John Nichols, 1789), 1:33.

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Notwithstanding Gibson’s specific observation that the Old English grammar he knew from hearsay was a seventeenth-​century publication, it was most likely his comment that led to a mistaken nineteenth-​century belief that the pre-​dissolution monks of Tavistock had not only preserved the knowledge of Old English through their teaching but also printed books in Old English for which they created their own font. In An Historical Sketch of the Progress and Present State of Anglo-​Saxon Literature in England, published in 1840, the antiquary John Petheram (1807–​1858) referred to a “prevailing opinion that the monks of Tavistock Abbey cut a font of Saxon type, and with it printed a Saxon grammar and other Saxon works.”28 Four years before this, the budding Anglo-​Saxonist Thomas Wright (1810–​1877), in an essay published in French in the first of two books on Anglo-​Saxon studies issued by Philippe de la Renaudière and Francisque Michel, had offered the observation that he had read “somewhere” (his false recollection of Gibson’s comment?) that the monks of Tavistock wrote and printed a Saxon grammar,29 a remark that was quoted in the September 1839 issue of The Gentleman’s Magazine among some observations on the study of Old English by an author who identified himself only as “Pedridan.”30 In 1837, however, J. M. Kemble (1807–​1857), Wright’s instructor in Old English, observed in a lengthy letter on the history of Anglo-​Saxon studies, printed in De la Renaudière and Michel’s second volume, that no actual evidence survived for the pre-​ dissolution printing of Old English at Tavistock:31 It is said that the monks of Tavistock, before the dissolution of their monastery, not only revived the study of Saxon, but possessed a font of Anglo-​Saxon type and printed Saxon books. I cannot give any information on this point: assuredly of any Saxon which they did print (if ever they printed any) there is nothing remaining in any library in Europe.

Nearly fifty years later, the German Anglo-​Saxonist Richard Wülker (1845–​1910) felt compelled to deny any connection between Tavistock and the teaching and printing of 28  John Petheram, An Historical Sketch of the Progress and Present State of Anglo-​Saxon Literature in England (London: Edward Lumley, 1840), 24.

29  Thomas Wright, “De la langue et de la poésie anglo-​saxonne,” in Coup-​d’œil sur les progrès et sur l’état actuel de la littérature anglo-​saxonne en Angleterre, trans. Philippe de la Renaudière, Anglo-​ Saxonica 1 (Paris: Silvestre, 1836), 2: “Nous avons lu quelque part que les moines de Tavistock composèrent et même imprimèrent une grammaire saxonne” (We have read somewhere that the monks of Tavistock composed and even printed a Saxon grammar). Compare Wright’s comment in his An Essay on the State of Literature and Learning under the Anglo-​Saxons; Introductory to the First Section of the Biographica Britannica Literaria of the Royal Society of Literature (London: Charles Knight, 1839), 109n: “It has been said, that so early as the fifteenth century, the monks of Tavistock applied themselves to the study of the Anglo-​Saxon language, and that they even printed a grammar. No traces, however, of such a book can now be found; and it may have been a mere error arising from the indefinite manner in which some people formerly applied the term Anglo-​Saxon.” 30  The Gentleman’s Magazine, n.s., 12 (1839): 238–​40 at 239.

31  John M. Kemble, “Letter to M. Francisque Michel,” in Francisque Michel, Bibliothèque anglo-​ saxonne, Anglo-​Saxonica 2 (Paris: Silvestre, 1837), 1–​63 at 2n1.

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Old English in his Grundriss zur Geschichte der angelsächsischen Litteratur (1885).32 Yet notwithstanding the complete lack of evidence that the Tavistock monks ever printed Old English texts, statements to that effect have been persistent: as recently as 2009, the catalogue of an exhibition of printed Old English could repeat the unjustified claim that “the monks of Tavistock even possessed a font of Anglo-​Saxon type and printed Old English texts.”33 What is most arresting about the statement by Parker with which we began this discussion is his outright assertion that it was nuns who were responsible for teaching Old English at Tavistock on the eve of the Reformation. It is especially puzzling that Parker, primate of the reformed English church, with access to a comprehensive range of ecclesiastical records, should have erroneously assumed the existence of a convent at Tavistock when the town’s only known religious institution throughout the Middle Ages was one of the richest houses of monks in the southwest of England. While Parker’s error is hard to explain, we should not overlook the broader claim that he makes—​though it has gone undiscussed in subsequent scholarship: that in former centuries there had been a plurality of nunneries (“monialium quædam Collegia”) in which the knowledge of Old English was preserved and transmitted. In the absence of supporting evidence, this claim must go unsubstantiated. For example, of the relatively few Anglo-​Saxon vernacular manuscripts that have annotations and additions of the late Middle Ages indicating that they were then read with some degree of understanding, none is known to have been owned by a nunnery.34 Yet Parker, writing close to the end of his life, when he had been involved in the publication of Old English texts for approaching a decade, may 32  Richard Wülker, Grundriss zur Geschichte der angelsächsischen Litteratur. Mit einer Übersicht der angelsächsischen Sprachwissenschaft (Leipzig: von Veit, 1885), 3: “Unbegründet ist die Behauptung, welche sich in verschiedenen englischen Werken findet, im Kloster Tavistock in Devon habe man bis in das 16. Jahrhundert hinein das Angelsächsische gepflegt, teils durch Vorlesungen über diese Sprache und Litteratur, teils durch Abschreiben von Handschriften und später durch Drucken von angelsächsischen Werken” (There is no basis for the assertion found in various English works that Anglo-​Saxon was cultivated in the monastery at Tavistock in Devon up to the sixteenth century, partly through lectures on this language and its literature, partly through the copying of manuscripts, and later through the printing of Anglo-​Saxon works).

33  Patrick D. Olson, Collating Cædmon: Editing Old English Texts and the Evolution of Anglo-​Saxon in Print (Champaign: University of Illinois Rare Book & Manuscript Library, 2009), 3. John Bromwich, in “The First Book Printed in Anglo-​Saxon Types,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 3 (1962): 265–​91 at 270n2, suggested that the idea that the monks of Tavistock printed Old English arose from the coincidence that Cambridge University Library MS Ii. 4. 6, the homiliary from Tavistock presented to Matthew Parker in December 1567, has bound into it four leaves of A Testimonie of Antiquitie, an edition of one of Ælfric’s homilies and other Old English texts issued by Parker probably in 1566 (the original contents of MS Ii. 4. 6 include a copy of the homily printed in A Testimonie and it was the Parker circle that bound the printed leaves into the manuscript). Despite my admiration for what Bromwich accomplishes in his article, I am not persuaded by this suggestion. None of those who claim that the monks of Tavistock printed Old English alludes to these printed leaves; the evidence indicates instead that the claim stems from Gibson’s reference to the Old English grammar printed at Tavistock and later confusion over the date of this putative publication. 34  See the listing and discussion of these manuscripts in Ker, Catalogue, xlix–​l.

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have had some reason for suggesting that nunneries had played an active role in keeping alive the knowledge of Old English. One is left lamenting that he provided no additional information in support of his assertion and that he confused the issue through his mistaken belief that Tavistock had been home to a community of nuns. A further corollary of Parker’s error is that the first female whose engagement with Anglo-​Saxon studies can be incontrovertibly documented is Elizabeth Elstob.

Elizabeth Elstob and Her Transcripts of Old English Materials

On her own reckoning, Elizabeth Elstob (1683–​1756) was “the first Woman that has studied that Language [Old English] since it was spoke.”35 She initially developed an interest in Old English at the age of sixteen, in 1699, when her brother William (1674–​ 1715), then a fellow of University College, Oxford, and one of the circle of “Oxford Saxonists,” showed her a specimen of the edition of the Old English translation of Paulus Orosius’s Historiarum adversum paganos libri septem—​then believed to be the work of King Alfred—​that he planned to publish at the university press. She immediately detected similarities between the ancient language and its modern counterpart and determined to pursue her new-​found interest further by studying Anglo-​Saxon books. As she recollected some ten years later:36 Having accidentally met with a Specimen of K. Alfred’s Version of Orosius into Saxon, design’d to be publish’d by a near Relation and Friend, I was very desirous to understand it, and having gain’d the Alphabet, I found it so easy, and in it so much of the grounds of our present Language […] as drew me in to be more inquisitive after Books written in that Language.

When William was appointed rector of the parish of St. Swithin and St. Mary Bothaw, London, in 1702, Elizabeth accompanied him to London and lived with him at his residence in Bush Lane, within sight of St. Paul’s Cathedral, then undergoing reconstruction to Sir Christopher Wren’s design. The two dedicated themselves to scholarly endeavours in the field of Anglo-​Saxon studies, working both separately and in collaboration. Whereas William was not able to bring his own major projects on Old English to publication within his lifetime, Elizabeth published two significant works in the field.37 Both works demonstrated her concern to bring knowledge of the language of the Anglo-​ Saxons to a female readership. 35  Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ballard 43, fol. 5r. Elizabeth makes this comment in a letter she wrote to the antiquary George Ballard on August 29, 1735; the letter accompanied a transcript of the Old English text of Psalm 100 that she sent to Ballard. See Kathryn Sutherland, “Elizabeth Elstob (1683–​1756),” in Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, vol. 2: Literature and Philology, ed. Helen Damico with Donald Fennema and Karmen Lenz (New York: Garland, 1998), 63. 36  Elizabeth Elstob, An English-​Saxon Homily on the Birth-​Day of St. Gregory (London: William Bowyer, 1709), vi–​vii.

37  William’s transcript of the Old English Orosius served as the basis for the edition published by Daines Barrington in 1773. The materials for his proposed edition of the Anglo-​Saxon laws

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In 1709 appeared her An English-​Saxon Homily on the Birth-​Day of St. Gregory, the publication of which was funded by some 268 subscribers, of whom a high proportion (117, representing almost 44 percent of the total) were women.38 The centrepiece of the book is Elizabeth’s edition of Ælfric’s homily for the feast day of Pope Gregory the Great, which focuses on Gregory’s dispatch of the mission to convert the Anglo-​Saxons. This was the first critical edition of a homily of Ælfric accompanied by a textual apparatus and a Modern English translation. Within the volume, the edition is preceded by Elizabeth’s epistle dedicatory to Queen Anne, in which she highlights the role played by royal women in promoting the Christian religion in England, and by a lengthy preface which she begins with a vigorous defence of learning among women before offering a justification for the study of Old English, a description of the path that led to her own interest in the language, and a discussion of the doctrines and practices of the Anglo-​ Saxon church and their correspondence with contemporary Anglican practice. The edition is followed by William Elstob’s Latin translation of the homily, aimed at male scholarly readers; William prefaces his translation with an address to his sister in which he notes that “while you were engaged in preparing for gentlewomen an English translation of the Saxon homily about the conversion of our race, it chanced that some of our friends, both university men and others, requested a Latin version for educated men.”39 The book concludes with an appendix of materials that throw further light on the mission to convert the Anglo-​Saxons and with the list of subscribers. It is adorned throughout with a set of illustrations and historiated initials designed by the French engraver Simon Gribelin (1661–​1733); these include a representation of Elizabeth Elstob herself, depicted within the initial G that begins the Modern English translation of Ælfric’s homily on page 1. Elizabeth’s other significant publication in the field of Anglo-​Saxon studies was her The Rudiments of Grammar for the English-​Saxon Tongue, first Given in English: with an remained in manuscript; on this project, see Timothy Graham, “William Elstob’s Planned Edition of the Anglo-​Saxon Laws: A Remnant in the Takamiya Collection,” in Middle English Texts in Transition: A Festschrift Dedicated to Toshiyuki Takamiya on His 70th Birthday, ed. Simon Horobin and Linne R. Mooney (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2014), 268–​96.

38  The high proportion of female subscribers led Elstob to comment in the preface (lviii), “I am very glad to find so many of the Ladies, and those, several of them, of the best Rank: favouring these Endeavours of a Beginner, and one of their Sex.” There is in fact some variation in the number of subscribers listed in different copies of the English-​Saxon Homily; the longest list includes 282 names, of whom 122 (just over 43 percent) are women. See Yumi Hanashima, “Web of Support: Elizabeth Elstob and the Subscription List of Her English-​Saxon Homily” (MA thesis, Keio University, 2001), 67, 124–​38, and 151–​52. I am grateful to Professor Toshiyuki Takamiya for providing me with a copy of this thesis. 39  “Dum tu, soror mea dilectissima, Homiliæ Saxonicæ, de gentis nostræ Conversione paras versionem Anglicam fæminis liberalibus: nonnulli forte ex amicis nostris, tum Academicis tum aliis, Latinam postulant hominibus eruditis” (sig. G4r). In a letter to the Leeds antiquary Ralph Thoresby (1658–​1725) of March 22, 1709, Elizabeth herself linked the Latin translation to the desire to appeal to a learned male readership: “I design a Latin translation, which, I hope, will not make it

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Apology for the Study of Northern Antiquities, which appeared in 1715. The book is of historic significance as the first grammar of the Anglo-​Saxon language to be written in Modern English (as opposed to Latin). It also uses a font of Anglo-​Saxon characters produced to Elizabeth’s design at the commission of her printer, William Bowyer.40 Elizabeth wrote in the vernacular with the specific goal of encouraging women to undertake the study of the Anglo-​Saxon language. In her preface, addressed to George Hickes, the doyen of the Oxford Saxonists, she describes how, following the publication of the English-​ Saxon Homily, while visiting Canterbury, she was approached by a young woman who manifested a desire to learn Old English under Elizabeth’s tutelage: I was more particularly gratified, with the new Friendship and Conversation, of a young Lady, whose Ingenuity and Love of Learning, is well known and esteem’d, not only in that Place, but by your self: and which so far indear’d itself to me, by her promise that she wou’d learn the Saxon Tongue, and do me the Honour to be my Scholar, as to make me think of composing an English Grammar of that Language for her use. (ii)

The identity of the young woman is unknown, and Elizabeth proceeds to note that she lost touch with her after she moved far away. Elizabeth was, however, inspired to undertake work on the grammar for the sake of others of her sex: considering the Pleasure I my self had reaped from the Knowledge I have gained from this Original of our Mother Tongue, and that others of my own Sex, might be capable of the same Satisfaction: I resolv’d to give them the Rudiments of that Language in an English Dress. (ii)

The grammar itself is modelled upon that published by Hickes in his Linguarum veterum septentrionalium thesaurus grammatico-​criticus et archæologicus (1703), which had also appeared in a form abridged by Edward Thwaites in the Conspectus brevis of Hickes’s work published under the name of William Wotton in 1708. In several respects, however, Elizabeth sharpened the presentation. And she introduced the innovation of using the vernacular grammatical terms that had first been coined by Ælfric in his Grammar, as she explains in the preface:

[the English-​Saxon Homily] less acceptable to the learned.” See Letters of Eminent Men, Addressed to Ralph Thoresby, F.R.S. vol. 2 (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1832), 148. Thoresby played an important role in securing subscribers for Elizabeth’s book in the north of England; on October 14, 1709, William Elstob wrote to him that “My sister has sent you your just number of subscriptions, and one over, bound, which she desires you to accept as an acknowledgment of your great readiness to promote her work” (Letters of Eminent Men, 199).

40  See the discussion of the font in Sarah Huff Collins, “Elizabeth Elstob: A Biography” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1970), 156–​61. Whereas the design of the types has often been attributed to Humfrey Wanley, Collins demonstrates convincingly that Bowyer adopted Elizabeth’s designs. A notable characteristic of the types is that “the bodies of the letters vary in thickness in imitation of the changing direction of the pen” (Collins, “Elizabeth Elstob,” 160). These types were not used for any subsequent publication.

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242 Timothy Graham There is one Addition to what your self and Mr. Thwaites have done on this Subject, for which you will, I imagine, readily pardon me: I have given most, if not all the Grammatical Terms in true old Saxon, from Ælfrick’s Translation of Priscian, to shew the polite Men of our Age, that the Language of their Forefathers is neither so barren nor barbarous as they affirm, with equal Ignorance and Boldness. (iii)

The greater part of the preface, which extends to some thirty-​five pages in all, offers the most vigorous defence of the study of Old English and the other ancient Germanic languages that had yet appeared, targeted at such critics as Jonathan Swift who, in his A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue (1712), had dismissively branded those who studied Old English as “laborious Men of low Genius.”41 Elizabeth’s brother died in March 1715, a month or two before the appearance of Rudiments.42 Elizabeth was burdened by the assumption of his debts and within a few years was obliged to leave London and make a living as best she could. She disappeared from notice for a considerable stretch of time, but in 1735 she was discovered by the antiquary George Ballard running an elementary school in Evesham, Worcestershire; she subsequently secured employment as governess of the children of Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, duchess of Portland, who was the granddaughter of the great manuscript collector Sir Robert Harley, who had shown interest in Elizabeth’s and her brother’s work when he was building up his collection during the first two decades of the eighteenth century. But Elizabeth never resumed her work on Anglo-​Saxon studies; indeed, on quitting London she had left her own and her brother’s papers in the care of a neighbour who subsequently left England unexpectedly, and she never recovered them.43 During her last years as an active Anglo-​Saxonist, between 1709 and 1715, Elizabeth devoted herself to two major projects that never saw the light of day, although the materials she prepared in connection with these projects reveal much about the meticulous quality of her work. She gave considerable assistance to her brother as he tried to bring his planned new edition of the Anglo-​Saxon laws to the light of day. And she dedicated herself to the production of a critical edition and translation of the two series of Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies. She prepared a set of transcripts in connection with both projects. Those transcripts have not received the attention they deserve in published assessments of Elstob’s achievement.44 Elizabeth Elstob and the Textus Roffensis

William Elstob’s goal was to publish an edition of the Anglo-​Saxon laws that would surpass that first published by William Lambarde in 1568 and reissued, with the incorporation 41  Jonathan Swift, A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue, 2nd ed. (London: For Benjamin Tooke, 1712), 40. 42  Collins, “Elizabeth Elstob,” 156, notes that Rudiments appeared in late April or early May.

43  On the fate of her papers, see Graham, “William Elstob’s Planned Edition of the Anglo-​Saxon Laws,” 293–​96. 44  The fullest account to date is in Collins’s unpublished dissertation, “Elizabeth Elstob: A Biography.”

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of some additional material, by Abraham Wheelock in 1644.45 While ground-​breaking in many respects, Lambarde’s edition had several shortcomings, the most significant of which was that it did not include the earliest Anglo-​Saxon laws, those of the seventh-​ and early eighth-​century Kentish kings Æthelberht, Hlothhere, Eadric, and Wihtred. Those laws were contained—​along with others—​in a single manuscript compiled in the early twelfth century, the Textus Roffensis, held at Rochester Cathedral and unknown to Lambarde when he published Archaionomia, though he subsequently became familiar with it.46 The Kentish laws were not among the texts that Wheelock added in his reissue of Lambarde. If William Elstob had succeeded in bringing his edition to publication, it would have been the first to include these laws. The Textus Roffensis played a key role in William’s work on the laws. Records of Rochester Cathedral indicate that he requested the loan of the manuscript in December 1708 and that the Dean and Chapter demanded its return in June 1712.47 While the manuscript was in their hands, William and Elizabeth studied it in multiple ways. In the case of those laws that were contained both in the Textus Roffensis and in Lambarde’s Archaionomia, they collated its text with that printed by Wheelock in 1644, with William compiling lists of the variant readings of the Textus Roffensis on paper leaves that he combined into a workbook that is now Tokyo, Takamiya Collection, MS 129.48 They also made multiple transcriptions from the Textus Roffensis. Transcriptions by William are contained in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. lang. c. 10, which includes a broad set of materials he produced in connection with the preparation of his projected edition.49 Transcriptions by Elizabeth are in two manuscripts in the Harleian collection in the British Library, MSS Harley 1866 and Harley 6523. These two transcripts differ somewhat in their content. Harley 1866 includes only the early Kentish laws that occur on fols. 1r–​6v of the Textus Roffensis and the Latin charter of King Æthelberht for Rochester Cathedral that is on fol. 119rv, where it is the first item in the manuscript’s Rochester cartulary. Harley 6523, by contrast, is a complete transcript of all the material on fols. 1r–​56r of the Textus Roffensis, breaking off mid-​sentence at the bottom of a page, within a text describing the ordeal by dry bread and cheese.50 Both transcripts are made on parchment leaves. They have the same 45  William Lambarde, Archaionomia, sive de priscis Anglorum legibus libri (London: John Day, 1568); Abraham Wheelock, ed., Historiæ ecclesiasticæ gentis Anglorum libri V. a venerabili Beda presbytero scripti (Cambridge: Roger Daniel), first published in 1643 and reissued in 1644 with the addition of the augmented Archaionomia. 46  The Textus Roffensis is now housed at Strood, Rochester, Medway Archives and Local Studies Centre, where it has the shelfmark DRc/​R1. 47  See Graham, “William Elstob’s Planned Edition of the Anglo-​Saxon Laws,” 273n15.

48  Along with other manuscripts in the Takamiya Collection, the workbook is currently deposited at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 49  Graham, “William Elstob’s Planned Edition,” 292.

50  This is followed in Harley 6523 by a section of smaller leaves containing a transcript of the Old English Interrogationes Sigewulfi apparently made from the copy in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 115 (Ker, Catalogue, no. 332, item 32).

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Figure 13.1 Strood, Medway Archives and Local Studies Centre, MS DRc/​R1 (the Textus Roffensis), fol. 1r. Opening of the Laws of King Æthelberht of Kent. Reproduced by kind permission of Rochester Cathedral.

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Figure 13.2 London, British Library, MS Harley 1866, fol. 2r. Elizabeth Elstob’s facsimile transcript of the opening page of the Laws of King Æthelberht. By permission of the British Library Board.

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number of lines per page as the Textus Roffensis itself, and—​with some exceptions in the case of the first leaves of Harley 6523—​they replicate the line-​by-​line layout of the text of the original manuscript. They also replicate its script and decorative features. In other words, these transcripts are handmade facsimiles that seek to preserve as close a record of the original manuscript as possible. Harley 1866, while a relatively slim volume, is especially handsome. Elizabeth prepared it for presentation to Sir Robert Harley, and its high quality was recognized by Harley’s librarian, Humfrey Wanley, whose description of it is preserved in the catalogue of the Harleian manuscripts: “A thin Velum-​book in large Quarto, written by the hand of Mrs. Elizabeth Elstob, and by her given to this Library. […] In these Transcripts, Mrs. Elstob hath finely imitated the Hand-​writing of the […] Textus Roffensis.”51 Elizabeth begins the volume with a title page written in capitals of four different colours; the page describes the content of the greater part of the volume: “Judicia Æthilbirhti Hlotharii Eadrici & Wihtrædi regum Cantianorum e celeberrimo textu Roffensi descripta” (The laws of Æthelberht, Hlothhere, Eadric, and Wihtred, Kings of Kent, copied from the most celebrated Textus Roffensis). A second title, using the same four colours, appears on fol. 8r, preceding the transcript of King Æthelberht’s charter for Rochester: “Specimen partis alterius Roffensis textus in qua Chartæ & Privilegia ecclesiæ Roffensis continentur” (Specimen of the second part of the Textus Roffensis, in which the charters and privileges of the church of Rochester are contained). Elizabeth’s transcript of the text of the charter begins on fol. 9r with a large historiated initial that shows a haloed, long-​haired male figure standing before a church tower and surrounded on three sides by three dragons, one of which has a human head. The initial replicates very closely that on fol. 119r of the Textus Roffensis and is perhaps based upon a tracing. A comparison of the opening of the first item in the volume, the laws of King Æthelberht, with the page of the Textus Roffensis on which it is based demonstrates the level of Elizabeth’s skill in imitating the original (Figures 13.1 and 13.2). She uses bright red pigment to reproduce the two-​line rubricated title at the top of the page. She uses the same red for the large initial G that begins the text of the laws, outlining the letter with a brownish yellow pigment resembling that used for the same purpose in the original. Her initial includes a decorated vegetal terminal surrounded by a spray of brownish yellow dots imitating the original, though she increases the number of dots and she does not replicate the round red bead that adorns the horizontal arm of the original letter.52 She writes the first line of the text of the laws in square capitals, as in the original. She highlights the interiors of these capitals with the same two pigments used for the large initial, arranging the two colours just as they are in line 3 of the Textus Roffensis page. She uses the red pigment to highlight the interiors of the capital letters that begin sentences throughout her page, placing the pigment in the same area of the interiors as in the original. From beginning to end of the page, her script 51  A Catalogue of the Harleian Manuscripts in the British Museum, 4 vols. (London: By Command of His Majesty King George III, 1808–​12), 2:272. 52  The coloured initial G in Harley 6523 does, however, include the bead.

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closely imitates the letter forms of the scribe of the Textus Roffensis. An unusual feature of his script is the use of a high-​set form of Insular f and s, to be seen, for example, in the phrases Biscopes feoh and Preostes feoh in lines 4 and 5, or in scillingas. Cyninges fedesl in line 23;53 Elizabeth reproduces this feature. The original scribe occasionally uses round s within words; the form appears in lines 14, 15, and 17 (ofslea, ofsleahþ, and ofslehð), and Elizabeth reproduces this form in each case. The horizontal upper left portion of the Tironian abbreviation for and is curved rather than straight in the original, while the vertical stroke descends below the baseline and ends with a hairline curve toward the left; Elizabeth preserves these features. She replicates relatively faithfully the serifs at the tops of vertical strokes, which are variously wedge-​shaped or split in the original. She leaves the letter i undotted but places a dot over y, following the general Anglo-​Saxon practice; on subsequent pages, though not on this opening page, she also uses a second, undotted and more sinuous form of y that is occasionally employed by the scribe of the Textus Roffensis.54 In line 8, some letters have been erased following the initial M that begins the sentence in the Textus Roffensis; Elizabeth leaves a space of approximately the same size in her transcript.55 In line 17, a hole in the parchment has removed a few letters after ofslehð; she again leaves a space in the equivalent place and lightly outlines the shape of the hole.56 Her transcript meticulously records the precise features of the original page. The high quality of Elizabeth’s work in this transcript elicited the admiration of George Hickes, though he chided her for her failure to present it formally to Harley and thereby draw his attention to it; Hickes no doubt believed that Harley, who now occupied the position of Lord High Treasurer and was the most important politician in the country, was in a position to assist Elizabeth financially. Hickes recalls the episode in a letter to the lawyer and author Charlwood Lawton of January 11, 1714:57 53  As Ker points out (Catalogue, 447), the scribe has been influenced by the positioning of Caroline minuscule f and s (which the scribe uses when writing Latin).

54  This form first occurs on fol. 2v9 of Harley 1866 (yfel), corresponding with its second occurrence (on fol. 1v9) in the Textus Roffensis; Elstob transcribed the Textus’s first occurrence of this form, on fol. 1r9 (again at the beginning of the word yfel), as the more normal straight-​limbed and dotted y.

55  Modern editors have reconstructed the original reading as M[æþl]frith. See F. Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, 3 vols. (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1903–​16), 1:3. 56  The original reading has been reconstructed as [med]uman; Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, 1:3.

57  The letter is printed in Report of the Manuscripts of His Grace the Duke of Portland, Preserved at Welbeck Abbey, vol. 5 (Norwich: Printed for Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1899), 379–​80. In theory Hickes’s comments could apply to either Harley 1866 or Harley 6523, as both ended up in Harley’s collection and both include materials transcribed from the Textus Roffensis. But Harley 1866, with its two title pages, has more of the appearance of a presentation copy and is complete, whereas Harley 6523 has no title page, breaks off mid-​sentence within its transcription of a portion of the Textus Roffensis, and also includes an additional transcript (of the Old English Interrogationes Sigewulfi) based upon another manuscript. In October 1719 Elizabeth finally received five guineas from Harley for her transcripts from the Textus Roffensis: see The Diary of

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248 Timothy Graham My Saxon mistress, as I call Mrs. Elstob, was with me about a fortnight since. I then asked her what was become of her curious copy of the Textus Roffensis, which she intended to present to my Lord Treasurer; she said it was in his Lordship’s library. I asked her then what my Lord said, when she presented it to him; she replied that she was ashamed to present it to him, but put it in his library, without presenting it to him or desiring Mr. Wanley to shew it to him. At this answer I was much troubled, and chid her for her sheepish modesty, because I knew my Lord would have been pleased with the admirable transcript, which is as like to the original as ever any copy of a picture was to its original, and I daresay there is not one erratum so much as of a letter in it, and that it may be depended upon, as much as the Textus itself. Perhaps my Lord hath not seen it or heard of it, and therefore I pray you to ask his Lordship if he hath seen it, when you have an opportunity. It is one of the finest curiosities of its kind in his noble library.

In her efforts to imitate Anglo-​Saxon script Elizabeth was very likely inspired in part by Humfrey Wanley (1672–​1726), who first began to develop skill in reproducing ancient hands while working as a draper’s apprentice in Coventry (1687–​ 1694). Moving to Oxford in 1695, he took up an appointment at the Bodleian Library where he had much broader access to manuscripts. His prowess became such that in 1701 George Hickes wrote that Wanley had “the best skill in ancient hands and MSS. of any man not only of this, but, I believe, of any former age.”58 In the late 1690s Wanley compiled a “Book of Specimens” in which he meticulously reproduced pages of manuscripts written in Latin, Greek, and Old English.59 Wanley wrote that he was inspired to make these facsimiles by a series of conversations he had with William Elstob early in 1697 (the two men were of approximately the same age, and both were affiliated at the time with University College, Oxford);60 Elizabeth was surely aware of his project. Earlier, while still in Coventry, Wanley had transcribed from a manuscript there a late medieval vernacular treatise on how to prepare colours for making decorated initials and pictures in books. In August 1710—​during the time the Textus Roffensis was in the Elstobs’ hands—​Elizabeth made her own copy of

Humfrey Wanley 1715–​1726, ed. C. E. Wright and Ruth C. Wright, 2 vols. (London: Bibliographical Society, 1966), 2:447.

58  Letter to Harley of April 23, 1701; Richard L. Harris, ed., A Chorus of Grammars: The Corre­ spondence of George Hickes and His Collaborators on the “Thesaurus linguarum septentrionalium,” Publications of the Dictionary of Old English 4 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1992), 349, no. 190.

59  Wanley’s “Book of Specimens” is Longleat House MS 345, within the collection of the marquess of Bath. Long believed to have been lost or destroyed, it was located in the late 1990s by Simon Keynes, who provides an account of it in his article “The Reconstruction of a Burnt Cottonian Manuscript: The Case of Cotton MS. Otho A. I,” British Library Journal 22 (1996): 113–​60 at 126–​35. 60  Keynes, “The Reconstruction of a Burnt Cottonian Manuscript,” 127 and 127n88; P. L. Heyworth (ed.), Letters of Humfrey Wanley, Palaeographer, Anglo-​Saxonist, Librarian, 1672–​1726 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 67n1.

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this treatise from Wanley’s transcript.61 The treatise provides instructions on how to mix various pigments with an appropriate liquid medium, how to blend colours, how to apply, and then burnish, gold and silver, how to prepare a suitable powder to sprinkle on the parchment page before beginning to write, and so on. It is possible that both Wanley and Elizabeth drew on the recipes in this treatise when making their facsimiles. There is one further notable, but curious, aspect of the Elstobs’ work with the Textus Roffensis: they allowed their ten-​year-​old serving-​boy, James Smith, access to the manuscript and had him transcribe a portion of it. Ralph Thoresby alludes to this in his account of a visit to the Elstobs’ London home on July 8, 1712,62 when he notes that Elizabeth showed me […] a delicate copy of the Textus Roffensis, wrote by a poor boy she keeps, most of it before he was quite ten years of age; his name is _​_​_​_​_​Smith. I saw the boy, who has imitated the Saxon, and other antique hands, to a wonder; what Latin and Saxon he has was from her reading him the grammar.

James Smith’s transcript survives as London, British Library, MS Stowe 940. It contains copies of the Textus Roffensis’s regnal lists and cartulary, though not of its laws. There are title pages on fols. 3r and 21r. The second of these names the creator of the transcript as “Iacobus Faber tiro, puer decennis” (James Smith, novice, a ten-​year-​old boy), notes that he completed the transcript within three months, and says that William and Elizabeth Elstob carefully examined it in the year 1712.63 James’s copy of the opening of the charter of King Æthelberht gives an impression of the general quality of his work (see Figures 13.3 and 13.4). While he has reproduced the text of the original page accurately—​including the note by William Lambarde in the upper margin—​he departs from the line-​by-​line layout of the rubricated title in lines 2–​5, and in line16 he combines two lines of the original into a single line. The large initial R is a close replica of the original (like Elizabeth’s in Harley 1866, it may be based upon a tracing), but the script of the page as a whole is ungainly and only partially successful in capturing the specific letter forms and ductus of the original. Nevertheless, it is a remarkable effort for one so young. The Planned Edition of Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies

The second major uncompleted project on which Elizabeth worked was her planned edition of the two series of Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, which she seems first to have 61  Elizabeth’s copy is in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ballard 67, fols. 29r–​38v. Titled “To make such Coloured, and Gilded Letters, as are to be seen frequently in old MSS.,” the copy is dated “Aug: 9th 1710.” 62  The Diary of Ralph Thoresby, F.R.S., Author of “The Topography of Leeds”, ed. Joseph Hunter, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1830), 2:131.

63  “Altera pars codicis celeberrimi textus Roffensis in qua Chartæ & Privilegia Ecclesiæ Roffensi a Regibus Antiquis, aliisque concessa, quam plurima continentur, &c. Ex ipso codice pretiosissimo, intra tres menses descripsit Iacobus Faber tiro, puer decennis. Apographon autem hoc examinaverunt diligentissime Gulielmus Elstobus et Elizabetha soror Anno Domini MDCCXII.”

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Figure 13.3 Strood, Medway Archives and Local Studies Centre, MS DRc/​R1 (the Textus Roffensis), fol. 119r. Opening of the Rochester Cartulary. Reproduced by kind permission of Rochester Cathedral.

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Figure 13.4 London, British Library, MS Stowe 940, fol. 22r. James Smith’s facsimile transcript of the opening page of the Rochester Cartulary. By permission of the British Library Board.

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conceived as An English-​Saxon Homily on the Birth-​Day of St. Gregory was issuing from the press in the fall of 1709. On 10 October she wrote to Ralph Thoresby:64 I have some thoughts of publishing a set of Saxon homilies, if I can get encouragement, which I believe will be very useful; the doctrine for the most part being very orthodox; and where any errors have crept in, it may not be amiss to give some account of them.

She had begun work on the project by February 1710, when she told Thoresby that she had succeeded in borrowing two manuscripts from the Cotton library to assist in the preparation of the edition: “I am beginning to prepare a volume of Saxon Homilies, of which I at present have by me two very ancient manuscripts from the Cottonian Library.”65 The manuscripts are believed to have been MS Cotton Vitellius C. v, which contained a complete text of Ælfric’s First Series apart from the preface, accompanied by a few homilies of the Second Series; and either MS Vitellius D. xvii or MS Vespasian D. xiv, which both contain several homilies from both series in addition to other texts.66 While it was not unusual for early modern scholars who were working on editions to secure the loan of manuscripts from the major repositories, Elizabeth was probably the first woman to whom this privilege was extended. By 1712 the project had advanced significantly, and in recording his visit to the Elstobs’ home on July 8—​the same visit on which he was shown the boy James Smith’s work on the Textus Roffensis—​Thoresby notes that Elizabeth “showed me a large volume of Saxon Homilies, borrowed from the public library at Cambridge, being an ancient and noble manuscript upon parchment, which she is now transcribing in a curious character for the press, with her translation from the Latin and Saxon.”67 The manuscript was Cambridge University Library MS Gg. 3. 28, which contains both sets of Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, including the only surviving complete text of the Second Series; it was the source for Elizabeth’s transcriptions of the latter (see Figure 13.5). Elizabeth’s materials for the proposed edition are contained in six manuscripts: London, British Library, MSS Lansdowne 370–​374 and Egerton 838, which collectively comprise transcriptions of Ælfric’s First and Second Series accompanied by translations of a number of the homilies.68 The work of transcription was apparently completed on 64  Letters of Eminent Men, Addressed to Ralph Thoresby, 2:198–​99. 65  Letters of Eminent Men, 226–​27.

66  Collins, “Elizabeth Elstob,” 137–​38.

67  The Diary of Ralph Thoresby, 2:131. 68  The correct order of the manuscripts is Lansdowne 373, Egerton 838, Lansdowne 370–​372 (these five volumes contain the First Series), and Lansdowne 374 (which contains the Second Series). See Collins, “Elizabeth Elstob,” 138–​ 42, where Collins provides a description of the contents of each of the six volumes. See also Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The First Series. Text, ed. Peter Clemoes, EETS, s.s., 17 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 19–​20, although Clemoes restricts his observations about Elizabeth’s transcripts to the five Lansdowne manuscripts as he was unaware of MS Egerton 838.

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November 28, 1712, the date she entered alongside the opening of her copy of Ælfric’s concluding prayer of the Second Series in MS Lansdowne 374 (fol. 109v). Prospects for publication at first seemed strong. By the end of 1712 Elizabeth had brought her manuscripts to the university press at Oxford. Writing to Arthur Charlett, Master of University College and a driving force of the press’s activities, on December 23, George Hickes encouraged publication and praised the quality of Elizabeth’s work:69 I suppose you may have seen Mrs. Elstob, sister to Mr. Elstob formerly fellow of your Coll, and the MSS. she hath brought to be printed at your presse. The University hath acquired much reputation and honour at home, and abroad by the Saxon books printed there, as well as by those printed in Latin, and Greek, and the publication of the MSS. she hath brought (the most correct I ever saw or read) will be of great advantage to the Church of England against the Papists. […] I desire you to recommend her, and her great undertakeing to others, for she, and it are both very worthy to be encouraged, and were I at Oxford, I should be a great sollicitour for her.

William and Elizabeth were back in Oxford in late February 1713, and on February 24 Hickes again wrote to Charlett, encouraging him to solicit subscriptions of the kind that had enabled him to secure the funding to publish his Thesaurus: “I renew my hearty request to you to promote subscriptions to her most useful book […] the reputation of the Oxford subscriptions will procure many here [London] and in Cambrige. And that was the method I took of getting subscriptions to my own book.”70 Later in the year, probably with the goal of securing subscriptions, Elizabeth issued a pamphlet that assembled favourable opinions concerning Ælfric and his homilies. The pamphlet was published by William Bowyer, the printer of the 1709 English-​Saxon Homily, as Some Testimonies of Learned Men, in Favour of the Intended Edition of the Saxon Homilies, Concerning the Learning of the Author of those Homilies; and the Advantages to be Hoped for from an Edition of Them. The publication takes the form of a letter from Elizabeth to her uncle Charles Elstob, a prebendary of Canterbury Cathedral, dated St. Swithin’s Day (July 15) 1713. On August 13 Elizabeth sent the proposals along with a specimen of the projected edition to Sir Robert Harley, who since 1711 had been Lord High Treasurer and effectively Queen Anne’s chief minister of state. She made a direct appeal to him to support her endeavour:71 Your Lordship having been an encourager of the first Saxon Homily I ventured to make public; and being since that, by her Majesty’s wisdom, deservedly placed in such a station as gives you a capacity of encouraging Learning æquall to your generous inclination, who

69  Quoted in Harris, Chorus of Grammars, 111.

70  Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ballard 12, fol. 204r, quoted in part in Collins, “Elizabeth Elstob,” 146, and Harris, Chorus of Grammars, 111.

71  John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century; Comprizing Biographical Memoirs of William Bowyer, Printer, F.S.A., and Many of His Learned Friends, vol. 4 (London: Nichols, Son, & Bentley, 1832), 125–​26.

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254 Timothy Graham are acknowledged by all to be the most learned person, as well as the greatest promoter and patron of Learning in this nation; makes me hope that your Lordship will not refuse to take some favourable notice of this specimen of a new and larger undertaking, as also of the book of Testimonies that comes with it; which, might it receive the additional testimony of your Lordship’s favour, would be highly improved and adorned. Your Lordship will easily discern by the specimen, that the work itself will be very expensive; and you are very sensible how backward the men who deal in books are to undertakings of this nature; so that not only the work itself, but the expence in great measure must be mine, without the assistance of noble and generous persons.

Elizabeth adds that she hopes for a royal bounty to “give life and expedition to the work.” She apparently did not hear back from Harley, for on March 16, 1714 she wrote again to remind him of her request.72 On this occasion her appeal was evidently successful, for in an undated letter of 1714 she writes:73 Your Lordship having done me the honour to obtain for me her Majesty’s royal bounty towards printing the Saxon Homilies, which is an example worthy to engage our Nobility and Gentry to become also encouragers; I could not but justly think it my duty to return my thanks to your Lordship for so great a favour.

But reversals quickly followed. Harley fell from power in July 1714 and was impeached and imprisoned the following year. Queen Anne died in August 1714 before the bounty for Elizabeth was forthcoming. William Elstob died in March 1715 and George Hickes, Elizabeth’s great supporter and promoter, in December. Although the university press at Oxford announced publication of the homilies for Michaelmas (late September) 1715, nothing was issued beyond a set of thirty-​six pages of proofs, comprising Ælfric’s Latin and Old English prefaces to the First Series followed by the first four homilies and the beginning of the fifth, with the original text and Elizabeth’s Modern English translation laid out in parallel columns.74 The six manuscripts containing Elizabeth’s materials for the proposed edition document how far she had advanced with the project and the overall quality of her work. It would seem that more remained to be done than was implicit in the university press’s 72  Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, 126. 73  Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, 127.

74  London, British Library, Department of Printed Books, 695.l.8. The middle term of the shelfmark is a lower-​case l; the shelfmark is cited wrongly by Collins, “Elizabeth Elstob,” 154 (“695.18”) and in Mechthild Gretsch’s entry for Elstob in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (“695.1.8”). The Latin preface is on pp. 1–​2, the Old English preface on pp. 3–​6, and the homilies on pp. 7–​36. Spaces eleven lines high and occupying about two thirds of the width of the column are left for an initial to open each text. The apparatus criticus at the foot of pages includes just a few notes, mostly citing printed sources; a single note, on p. 16, refers to a variant reading within the manuscripts. The sources of Ælfric’s scriptural quotations are noted in the outer margin. A very few handwritten proof corrections have been entered, on pp. 3 and 12. The proofs are briefly mentioned in Clemoes, First Series, 19. British Library, Department of Printed Books, 224.e.17, identified by Gretsch in her ODNB

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promise of publication for Michaelmas 1715. In MS Lansdowne 370, for example, which contains Elizabeth’s transcripts of homilies VII–​XVIII75 of the First Series made from Cambridge University Library MS Gg. 3. 28, only about three-​quarters of the first homily has its facing-​page translation; for the remainder of the volume, the Old English of the left-​hand pages faces a set of blank right-​hand pages. The transcription of each individual homily in Lansdowne 370 is generally followed by a pair of blank pages preceding the beginning of the next homily; Elizabeth may have intended to fill these pages with notes on the homily just ended, but no such notes appear in the volume. Again, MSS Lansdowne 371 and 372, containing the transcriptions of homilies XIX–​XL, lack their Modern English versions, though the right-​hand pages stand ready to receive translations throughout both volumes. Elizabeth’s work on the Second Series is contained in MS Lansdowne 374. She opens the volume (fol. 2r) with two Latin notes on Ælfric that she has excerpted from William Cave’s Scriptorum ecclesiasticorum historia literaria a Christo nato usque ad sæculum XIV (1688).76 The passages comment on Ælfric’s learning, his reputation among his contemporaries, and the orthodoxy of his homilies; she provided translations of these same passages among the Testimonies of Learned Men that she published in 1713 to drum up interest in the proposed edition.77 On the same page of Lansdowne 374 she transcribes from Cambridge University Library MS Ii. 4. 6 the Parkerian note about Robert Ferrers’s discovery of that manuscript and a similar one in the former house of nuns at Tavistock; the (as we now know, erroneous) reference to nuns owning Anglo-​ Saxon manuscripts may have appealed to her. The rest of the volume comprises her transcriptions of the entire Second Series from MS Gg. 3. 28 and of most of the materials that follow the Second Series in that manuscript, including Ælfric’s De temporibus anni, Old English versions of the Lord’s Prayer, various other prayers, two versions of the Creed, and Ælfric’s admonition on penance, but not his Pastoral Letter for Bishop Wulfsige of Sherborne that is the final item in MS Gg. 3. 28. After several blank pages, Lansdowne 374 ends with a copy of the Parkerian contents list of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 162, a major homiliary that draws its materials from Ælfric’s First and Second Series and other Ælfrician and non-​Ælfrician sources; the list is headed by Elizabeth’s title, “A Catalogue of the Saxon Tracts in the first Volume of Saxon Homilies belonging to Bennet College Library.”78 entry as another copy of the proofs, is in fact a copy of Some Testimonies of Learned Men, in Favour of the Intended Edition of the Saxon Homilies (1713), mentioned above. I am most grateful to Dr. Karmen Lenz of Middle Georgia State University for checking the two British Library items on my behalf. 75  I follow the numbering of the homilies adopted in Clemoes, First Series.

76  The two notes appear on p. 589 and on p. 321 of the appendix of Cave’s work. 77  Elstob, Some Testimonies of Learned Men, 10–​11.

78  Bennet, or Benet, College was an alternative name for Corpus Christi College commonly used in the Early Modern period. The Parker circle numbered CCCC 162 as the first among the several volumes of Anglo-​Saxon homilies collected by Matthew Parker.

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Elizabeth enters dates alongside the opening of most of the items in Lansdowne 374. These are presumably the dates on which she made her transcriptions. They reveal that she conducted her work over a period of some nine and a half months, from February 12, 1712—​the date entered next to Ælfric’s Latin preface to the Second Series (fol. 3r)—​ to November 28, 1712—​her final date, entered alongside Ælfric’s concluding oratio for the Second Series (fol. 109v). The work began fitfully: a single session in February, followed by a gap of some six weeks, then three sessions in April, one in June, and two in August. During these months she was perhaps more focused on assisting her brother with his proposed edition of the Anglo-​Saxon laws; comments by Ralph Thoresby in his diary indicate that work on that project was proceeding apace when he visited the Elstobs three times in the summer of 1712.79 From the beginning of September, however, Elizabeth applied herself diligently to the completion of the project, with sessions every few days, including eight in September, fourteen in October, and thirteen in November. All her transcriptions are made in a hand carefully modelled on Anglo-​Saxon minuscule, though Elizabeth does not try to replicate the specific features of the somewhat idiosyncratic forward-​leaning script of MS Gg. 3. 28. She does, however, reproduce the shape and the relatively simple decoration of the initials that begin the homilies. She also follows the original by providing infillings of red pigment for the initials that begin sentences, and she adopts the capitalization practices of the manuscript. She retains the original forms of punctuation, consisting of the simple punctus placed at mid-​letter height within sentences and the punctus versus or punctus interrogativus at sentence endings. She assiduously transcribes the accents found in the original. She consistently retains the abbreviation for þæt and uses the Tironian abbreviation for and, including in cases where that sequence of letters occurs at the beginning of a longer word. Other than this, however, she silently expands the relatively few abbreviations to be found in the original. Her copying is for the most part accurate, but occasionally she transposes letters or words; when she noticed such errors, she entered arabic numerals above the line to establish the right order.80 Sometimes she misread individual letters, leading her to write erroneous forms.81 Rarely, she omitted a line or more of text; in such cases, having detected the error, she wrote the missing text in the lower margin, entering one caret mark at the beginning of the omitted text and another at the point in the text where it should be inserted.82 Figure 13.5, showing fol. 62r of Lansdowne 374, offers a specimen of her work. The greater part of the page carries the opening portion of her transcription of Ælfric’s homily for the feast of the Invention of the Cross (May 3), which describes Constantine’s 79  Graham, “William Elstob’s Planned Edition of the Anglo-​Saxon Laws,” 274–​75.

80  For example, on fol. 3v, within Ælfric’s Latin preface for the Second Series, she first wrote intrepretationem, then placed the numerals 2 and 1 above the r and e to indicate the correct order of the letters; on fol. 10v7 she wrote ne mæg forsuwian where Gg. 3. 28 has forsuwian ne mæg, then indicated the correct order by entering 2, 3, and 1 above the three words. 81  There is occasional confusion between the letters f, r, and s: for example, ymbhwyrst for ymbhwyrft (fol. 14v11) and fyses for fyres (fol. 14v23). 82  Examples occur on fols. 78v and 100v.

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Figure 13.5 London, British Library, MS Lansdowne 374, fol. 62r. Elizabeth Elstob’s transcript of the end of Ælfric’s homily for the feast of the apostles Philip and James and the opening of his homily for the feast of the Invention of the Cross, made from Cambridge University Library MS Gg. 3. 28. By permission of the British Library Board.

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vision of the cross before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge and his mother Helen’s subsequent discovery of the cross in Jerusalem.83 Entered alongside the beginning of the homily is the date “Octo: 1st 1712.” Elizabeth’s rubricated title for the homily reproduces the rustic capitals of the original page and mimics such features as the tall I and S beginning the words inuentio and sanctae, as well as the sinuous shape of the two abbreviation marks. Her initial M for the first word of the homily copies that in MS Gg. 3. 28 (fol. 194r), although the middle V-​shaped portion of the letter descends lower in her version. She outlines the initial in ink and fills the bottom of its left stem and its broad left diagonal and right stem with red pigment, as in the original. The two round beads decorating the diagonals are executed in ink in Gg. 3. 28; Elizabeth renders them in red pigment and places the right bead lower than in the original, so that its position balances that of the left bead. In the body of the homily, she does not follow the line-​by-​line layout of Gg. 3. 28, but she does reproduce other specific features of the original, such as accents, the red infilling of the initial letters of sentences, and (in line 16 of the page) the correction of ðrowade to ðrowode by the placement of o above a—​although Elizabeth does not place an expunctuating dot under the a. She normalizes word separation by dividing words that are run together in the original. She silently expands to -​um sixteen instances where the final m is replaced by a macron over the u in Gg. 3. 28 (lines 17, 21, 22, 23, 26, 30, 33, 35, 36, 38, 40, and the lower margin of Elstob’s page); and she likewise supplies the letters er at the end of æfter (line 39), replaced by a macron over the t in the original. She made nine transcription errors in this portion of the homily, but corrected six of them. In lines 17–​18, she originally wrote Hierusale, apparently noticing the error before writing the final m, then corrected the last part of the word so that it read Hieronimus, expanding the suspended -​us of the original page. She twice wrote a punctus versus where Gg. 3. 28 has a punctus, then corrected the mark by striking through its lower part: after heretoga in line 23 and after scipum in line 36. In lines 26–​27 she originally wrote scinendon east dæl for scinendan east dæle, then corrected the penultimate letter of the present participle by over-​writing and supplied the last letter of dæle by entering it interlineally, with a caret mark below. Further on in line 27, she omitted thirteen words after scinan, but supplied the omission in the lower margin, with paired caret marks and crosses linking the supplied passage to the place of its insertion. In this area of the original page, a smudged blob of ink has partially covered a single word in each of three consecutive lines, obscuring some letters of each word. Elizabeth has transcribed two of the words correctly, but comon, the third word of the supplied passage in the lower margin of Elstob’s page, is an error for cwædon, which can just about be made out in Gg. 3. 28 and is the reading of all other manuscripts.84 Her final corrected error on this page of Lansdowne 374 occurs in lines 33–​34, where she originally wrote æcere but corrected it to ælcere by over-​writing. Her 83  For the text of the homily, see Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The Second Series. Text, ed. Malcolm Godden, EETS, s.s., 5 (London: Oxford University Press, 1979), 174–​76, no. XVIII.

84  Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, 174, line 13. In MS Gg. 3. 28, it is surely Elizabeth who underlined the three obscured words and wrote in the outer margin what she believed them to be (comon, ðine, sige).

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uncorrected transcription errors include siððan for syððan in line 36, becumun for becuman (line 37), and the omission of ða for between gemunde and ðam in line 40 (an error perhaps caused by eyeskip from ða to ðam). Elizabeth’s work on the Second Series, then, consists of a generally accurate transcription of a single manuscript—​admittedly the most important manuscript and the only one to contain the full series. She has not attempted to prepare a critical edition that records variant readings among the manuscripts.85 Nor has she provided a translation: her transcriptions are entered on both sides of each leaf, with no accommodation for facing-​page translations as in the five manuscripts containing her work on the First Series. She leaves no space between homilies for any notes. Yet she surely planned to accompany her edition with a translation and notes. The surviving thirty-​six pages of proofs of the edition, covering the opening items of the First Series, have Old English and Modern English in parallel columns, with notes at the foot of the page and with the sources of biblical quotations identified by entries in the outer margin.86 Unless she made translations of the Second Series that are no longer extant, a good deal of work remained to be done before her project would have been fully ready for publication. It is certainly possible that she had made draft translations that do not survive, for drafts of some of her First Series translations exist: MS Lansdowne 373, which includes her transcription and facing-​page translation of the opening items of the First Series (the Latin and Old English prefaces and the first two homilies), has a set of smaller leaves tipped into the manuscript that contain drafts of her translations of homilies II–​VIII of the First Series.87 Notwithstanding the incompleteness of the surviving materials, Elizabeth’s proposed edition of Ælfric’s homilies was a massive undertaking which, had it appeared, would have been a landmark contribution and the largest edition of a set of Old English texts yet printed. Only in the 1840s did Benjamin Thorpe finally succeed in publishing a comprehensive edition of the Catholic Homilies.88 In combination with her two publications on Old English and her contributions to her brother’s project on the Anglo-​Saxon laws—​ including her immaculate transcripts of sections of the Textus Roffensis—​Elizabeth’s painstaking labours on the homilies confirm her status as a leading figure in the early modern history of Anglo-​Saxon studies. The lone female known to have studied, copied, and published Old English before the twentieth-​century expansion of scholarship, her corpus of work richly repays the attention it demands.

85  On a single page of Lansdowne 374 (fol. 55r), within the Sermo de sacrificio in die Pascae (Godden, Second Series, no. XV), she records in the margin two variant readings from a manuscript she identifies as “MS B.” 86  Collins, “Elizabeth Elstob,” 154.

87  Collins, “Elizabeth Elstob,” 139, 140.

88  The Homilies of the Anglo-​Saxon Church: The First Part, Consisting of the Sermones Catholici, or Homilies of Ælfric, ed. Benjamin Thorpe, 2 vols. (London: Ælfric Society, 1844–​46).

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Chapter 14

THE FIRST FEMALE ANGLO-​SAXON PROFESSORS

MARY DOCKRAY-​MILLER* HELEN DAMICO HAS been rightly honoured for her status as foremother and pioneer in Anglo-​Saxon studies. Her 1984 “Beowulf” ’s Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition broke through the masculinist normativity of the field to claim a legitimate academic space for discussion of female characters and feminine agency in Old English literature. It is an honour to be included in this tribute volume; I offer here some history of Helen Damico’s foremothers, the first women who taught Anglo-​Saxon in United States colleges and who broke through different stereotypes to assert their rightful places in the academy. In the summer of 1895, two Mount Holyoke College alumnae travelled to Oakland, California, to assume professorships in English at Mills College and Seminary. Mills was expanding its curriculum as part of its effort to drop the “seminary” part of its identity and become a full-​fledged college. Ida Josephine Everett and Bertha Estelle Holbrook had been hired as part of that effort, and Everett was specifically appointed to teach Anglo-​Saxon in the English language and literature curriculum. The inclusion of Anglo-​ Saxon in a women’s college curriculum served throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as an indicator of academic respectability in the United States. Mills was one of many institutions that offered Anglo-​Saxon to establish its identity as a legitimate college rather than a finishing school, an academy, or a vocational school (all of which could use the term “college” in the days before accreditation and external academic oversight). As undergraduate women learned Anglo-​Saxon, some of them pursued graduate study and then became English and Anglo-​ Saxon professors themselves. Everett’s and Holbrook’s transcontinental journey is thus emblematic of the way that expertise in Anglo-​Saxon created unprecedented opportunities for women serving in the first generations of female faculty and administrators at United States colleges and universities. The history of Anglo-​Saxon in nineteenth-​century women’s colleges is a history of academic legitimacy and professional opportunity for women. This trend holds true not just in the elite Seven Sisters colleges of the northeast, the more usual focus of a women’s higher educational history project,1 but also in a myriad of institutions with a variety of student populations, missions, and geographical locations (see Figure 14.1). *  Lesley University. [email protected]

1  For example, see Louisa Schutz Boas, Woman’s Education Begins: The Rise of the Women’s Colleges (New York: Arno Press, 1935, repr. 1971); Elaine Kendall, Peculiar Institutions: An Informal History of the Seven Sisters Colleges (New  York:  G. P.  Putnam, 1975); Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women’s Colleges from their Nineteenth-​Century Beginnings to the 1930s (New York: Knopf, 1985).

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Figure 14.1 Map of United States women’s colleges offering Anglo-​Saxon in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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Anglo-​Saxon as part of the American collegiate curriculum in the second half of the nineteenth century was characteristic of a national trend towards emulation of the European-​style research university. Johns Hopkins University, founded in Baltimore in 1874, imported the model of the German research university into the United States, a model focused on “graduate education and faculty research.”2 In the late nineteenth century, “research” largely meant “scientific research,” and American professors of English language and literature emulated their German colleagues in pursuing what they termed “the historical scientific study of the language,” philology.3 Since philology was ostensibly quantitative rather than qualitative, the study of the structures and origins of the English language constituted the primary research subject of the English faculty at the developing United States universities. Hopkins was thus at the forefront of the late nineteenth-​century academic wave defining English as a scientific, empirical subject. Graff and Elizabeth Renker have each discussed the Hopkins English department’s focus on Germanic philology as a suitable subject of professorial research (as opposed to a more belletristic, appreciative critique of literary texts).4 Renker notes that the Hopkins faculty did not include American literature at all in their curriculum, as it was not considered a rigorous “knowledge product” and it might bring on the “Woman Peril”—​the fear of feminization of the subject and thus its practitioners.5 As such, Anglo-​Saxon was valued as a subject of inquiry in the burgeoning research universities of the later nineteenth century, the institutions that trained the faculty of the growing number of undergraduate colleges, some of which accepted women. As the female faculty at the women’s colleges became more professionalized throughout the nineteenth century, they also became more insistent on formal academic credentials, but especially in the earliest years of the colleges’ foundations, expertise was more important than degrees. Indeed, for someone like Wellesley’s founder Henry Fowle Durant, who wanted to hire only women to teach at Wellesley, one of the challenges of staffing the early college was finding enough women who were qualified to serve as faculty.6 Noted Vassar astronomy professor Maria Mitchell had no college degree, although her discovery of a comet and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences ensured her capability.7 2  Roger L. Geiger, The History of American Higher Education: Learning and Culture from the Founding to World War II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 325.

3  H. C.  G. Brandt, “How Far Should Our Teaching and Text-​Books Have a Scientific Basis?,” PMLA 1 (1884–​85): 57–​63 at 61, quoted in Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 73. 4  Graff, Professing Literature, 65 and passim; Elizabeth Renker, The Origins of American Literature Studies: An Institutional History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 13–​36. 5  Renker, Origins of American Literature Studies, 32–​34.

6  Patricia Ann Palmieri, In Adamless Eden: The Community of Women Faculty at Wellesley (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 3–​17.

7  “Maria Mitchell,” Vassar Encyclopedia (Poughkeepsie: Vassar College, 2005–​ 2013), http://​ vcencyclopedia.vassar.edu/​faculty/​original-​faculty/​maria-​mitchell/​.

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Similarly, four of the earliest female professors of Anglo-​Saxon had no formal academic credentials at all; their expertise overshadowed their lack of academic pedigree. All four of them started their careers as the very first English professors at their schools. Jennie C. Nixon, who became Sophie Newcomb’s first English professor in 1886, was a widow who had hired tutors to provide the skills she needed as a professor.8 M. L. McKinney, the inaugural English professor at Agnes Scott, taught the first class in Anglo-​Saxon there in 18969; McKinney did take an entire year to study at Cornell in 1899, where she took graduate courses for professional development despite not having a bachelor’s degree.10 Also a widow, Irene Tisinger (carefully noted in the early catalogues as “Mrs. Irene Tisinger” to indicate her widowhood and thus her respectability) was the sole English faculty as the Georgia Female Seminary became Brenau College. Like Nixon and McKinney, Tisinger had no bachelor’s degree; she did non-​matriculated graduate study at Columbia and the University of Chicago.11 At Judson College, Anne Kirtley taught the inaugural course in Anglo-​Saxon as the seminary became a college. She completed coursework but no degree at the University of Michigan and in 1909 was on leave from Judson to study at Oxford in the UK.12 “Miss Kirtley” was a foundational figure at the college, and her ghost is said to haunt various parts of the campus, including the building named after her.13 Despite their lack of professional credentials, McKinney, Tisinger, Nixon, and Kirtley all had extended and successful careers that included regularly offering coursework in Anglo-​Saxon language and literature. Likewise, expertise in Anglo-​Saxon broadened a college graduate’s professional opportunity. The experience of Ida Josephine Everett, noted above, is an excellent example of these circumstances (see Figure 14.2). Everett was the first professor of Anglo-​Saxon at two colleges, Mills (where she taught 1893–​1901) and Wheaton (where she taught 1905–​1934).14 She began her teaching career before she even attended college, as the 1880 United States Census lists her as a twenty-​three-​year-​old school teacher, living with her parents in Walpole, Massachusetts.15 She graduated from Mount Holyoke in 1893, and so was definitely 8  Susan Tucker and Beth Willinger, eds., Newcomb College, 1886–​2006: Higher Education for Women in New Orleans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012), 4.

9  Agnes Scott Institute, Announcement (Atlanta: Franklin Printing, 1896–​ 1900), libguides. agnesscott.edu.

10  For an analysis of the uneasy place of women in Cornell’s history, see Charlotte Conable, Women at Cornell: The Myth of Equal Education (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977). 11  Josiah Carter, “A Day at Brenau,” Atlanta Constitution, July 31, 1904, sec. C, p. 4. 12  Judson Female College, Catalogue (Birmingham, AL: Roberts, 1903–​1909).

13  Matt Cuthbert, “Judson College Professor’s Ghost is Big on Campus,” Alabama Local News, October 17, 2008.

14  Mills Female College, Catalogue (Oakland: The College, 1893–​1901); Wheaton College, College History: Ida Josephine Everett, n.d., http://​wheatoncollege.edu/​college-​history/​1920s/​ida-​ josephine-​everett-​2/​. 15  Tenth Population Census of the United States: Massachusetts (Reel 0547: Enumeration District: 504; Image: 0497), Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29, National Archives, Washington, DC 1880.

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Figure 14.2 Ida Josephine Everett in her office at Wheaton College, Norton MA. Courtesy of the Gebbie Archives and Special Collections, Wallace Library, Wheaton College.

what today would be termed a “non-​traditional student” who was more than ten years older than most of her classmates. Her collegiate credentials, including her knowledge of Anglo-​Saxon, exponentially enlarged her opportunities. Her first professorship at Mills College allowed regular cross country travel; she did graduate study at Yale in the summers from 1895 to 1904 and probably combined this professional development with visits to east coast family and friends.16 In addition, she travelled to the UK for graduate work at Oxford. While she never earned a postgraduate degree, she did receive an honorary master’s from Bowdoin College in 1911. Everett Hall at Wheaton is named for her.17 Her ability to teach Anglo-​Saxon was a crucial part of both her college teaching positions, and thus a crucial part of her life full of study, teaching, and travel. While it now seems outlandish that a professor could have only a bachelor’s degree, Everett was typical not just of English professors (or Anglo-​Saxon professors) in particular, but of women’s college faculty in general throughout the nineteenth century. A standard résumé for the female professor of Anglo-​Saxon or anything else was a bachelor’s degree with some summer graduate-​level coursework. Hadgie Booker Davies, 16  Yale University, Catalogue of the Officers and Graduates of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, 1701–​1904 (New Haven: Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor, 1905), 601. 17  Wheaton College, College History.

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who taught the first course in Anglo-​Saxon offered at Mary Baldwin Seminary, is also representative of this group of faculty. She supplemented her BA from the University of Arkansas with some graduate work at both Harvard and the University of Chicago.18 Everett’s and Davies’s pursuit of non-​matriculated graduate study was typical for women who were hired without a master’s or doctoral degree. Summer terms at Columbia and Chicago were full of women who taught full time (from elementary to collegiate level) during the regular school year.19 Vassar College did not have a female professor of Anglo-​Saxon until 1897, when Vassar alumna Edith Rickert taught there before moving to the University of Chicago.20 However, Vassar produced a critical mass of the first generation of female Anglo-​Saxon professors, contributing more women to the field than any other undergraduate institution in the nineteenth century. Heloise Hersey, Mary Augusta Jordan, and Mary Augusta Scott, the first three Anglo-​Saxon faculty at Smith College, were all Vassar class of 1876. Mary Botsford, who taught Anglo-​Saxon at both Rockford College and Wilson College, graduated from Vassar in 1878. Sallie Negley, the first female professor of Anglo-​Saxon at Pennsylvania Female College, was Vassar class of 1879; Marguerite Sweet, whose career is discussed in more detail below, was class of 1887; Edith Rickert was class of 1891. Notably, Hersey was probably the first female professor of Anglo-​Saxon in the entire world; her appointment to the faculty at Smith College began in 1878, and the 1879 Smith Circular lists her as faculty for “English and Anglo-​Saxon” (see Figure 14.3).21 Almost all of these women pursued graduate study as well, but the foundation of their expertise in Anglo-​Saxon was laid during their undergraduate years at Vassar. Oddly enough, the Vassar Catalogues of the 1870s do not include any references to Anglo-​Saxon as part of the formal curriculum, but all of these women definitely learned the language there. The annual English department reports of the 1870s reveal a critical mass of students who consistently agitated for Anglo-​Saxon outside the regular course of instruction. For example, at the end of the 1875/​76 academic year, English professor Truman Backus refers to his “attempt, by the organization of an Old English Club, to meet the demands of students in advanced classes who have asked for special instruction in 18  Arkansas Department of Public Instruction, Biennial Report of the State Superintendent (Little Rock: Department of Public Instruction, 1902), 111; John Hugh Reynolds and David Yancey Thomas, History of the University of Arkansas (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1910), 454–​55. 19  Rosalind Rosenberg, Changing the Subject: How the Women of Columbia Shaped the Way We Think About Sex and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 69–​70 and passim.

20  Elizabeth Scala, “ ‘Miss Rickert of Vassar’ and Edith Rickert at the University of Chicago (1871–​1938),” in Women Medievalists and the Academy, ed. Jane Chance (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 127–​45 at 131.

21  Smith College, Official Circular (Northampton, MA: The College, 1874–​ 1879), http://​ clio.fivecolleges.edu/​smith/​catalogs/​. Hersey also published educational advice and was awarded honorary masters degrees from Tufts and Bowdoin; see Shirley Nelson Kersey, “Heloise Edwina Hersey,” Classics in the Education of Girls and Women (New York: Scarecrow Press, 1981), 314, as well as Heloise Edwina Hersey, To Girls: A Budget of Letters (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1901).

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Figure 14.3 Portrait of Heloise Hersey, Professor of Anglo-​Saxon at Smith College. Courtesy of Smith College Archives.

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Anglo-​Saxon.”22 Those students obviously understood the necessity of Anglo-​Saxon to any plans they had for future study and employment in the field. Like Vassar at the undergraduate level, Yale’s graduate school produced a startling number of the first generation of female professors who taught Anglo-​Saxon.23 Yale conferred more doctorates on women than any other American institution in the nineteenth century.24 Many of the English PhDs were directed by A. S. Cook, whose enlightened attitude toward female graduate students deserves feminist recognition.25 A number of Cook’s students who taught Anglo-​Saxon after they finished graduate school actually wrote dissertations on literature of other periods. Mary Augusta Scott, Vassar class of 1876 as noted above, wrote her 1894 Yale dissertation on Elizabethan poetry (and was the most prolific female contributor to PMLA in the 1890s). Elizabeth Deering Hanscom, also an 1894 Yale PhD, wrote on Piers Plowman before entering the English department at Smith. Laura Lockwood, Yale PhD 1898, wrote on Milton but was remembered by her students at Wellesley primarily as a professor of Anglo-​Saxon. A tribute to “Miss Lockwood” in the 1929 Wellesley Alumnae Magazine states that, “In her Old English courses, which she conducted for two decades, the conquest of a hard old tongue was made a delightful adventure, the more triumphant because the obstacles had to be fairly met and conquered. It seemed impossible to master Old English grammar in six seminary meetings, but Miss Lockwood said it must be done, and done it was.”26 Beyond Yale, other women also earned the PhD with dissertations on literature of other periods but then taught Anglo-​Saxon during their academic careers. M. Carey Thomas, the first dean and English professor at Bryn Mawr College, wrote her doctoral dissertation on the Middle English and the literary milieu of the Gawain-​Poet for the University of Zurich.27 Sister Mary Vincent Hillman, first Anglo-​Saxon professor at the College of St. Elizabeth, produced a facing-​page edition and translation of Pearl as her 1942 dissertation from Fordham University, almost forty years after she earned her undergraduate degree.28 Martha Warren Beckwith, the first professor of Anglo-​Saxon at Elmira College in 1896, left the field of English entirely, earned her PhD in anthropology at Columbia, and became a professor of folklore and comparative literature at 22  Vassar College Department of English, “Annual Report, 1875–​1876,” Folder 2.42. MS Vassar College Archives Files, Archives and Special Collections Library, Vassar College Libraries.

23  Margaret Trumbull Corwin, ed., Alumnæ, Graduate School, Yale University, 1894–​1920 (New Haven: Yale University, 1920), 26–​39.

24  Walter Crosby Eells, “Earned Doctorates for Women in the Nineteenth Century,” AAUP Bulletin: Quarterly Publication of the American Association of University Professors 42 (1956): 644–​51. 25  Michael D. C. Drout, “The Cynewulf of Albert S. Cook: Philology and English Studies in America,” English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature 92 (2011): 237–​58 at 243.

26  Katherine Balderston, “Laura Emma Lockwood,” The Wellesley Alumnae Magazine 13 (1929):  288–​90. 27  Discussed in Horowitz, The Power and the Passion, 143–​65, especially 152–​53.

28  Mary Vincent Hillman, The Pearl: Mediaeval Text and Translation (New York: College of Saint Elizabeth Press, 1961).

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Vassar (she also spent substantial amounts of time in Hawaii, where she researched her Hawaiian Mythology, a classic in the field).29 Like the Yale PhDs, these women used their knowledge of Anglo-​Saxon as a necessary professional skill, even as it was not the academic focus of their dissertations or later careers. Ten American women earned the PhD in Anglo-​Saxon before 1900, and the variety of their experiences attests to both the opportunities and limitations for women who pursued graduate education at the end of the nineteenth century.30 Four earned their PhDs at Bryn Mawr, while two were at Yale with A. S. Cook. Those who married left the field, testimony to the era’s unwavering cultural position that a marriage and a profession were incompatible for women. For the remainder, the PhD in English with a dissertation on Anglo-​Saxon provided the academic legitimacy needed for a variety of careers in education. Mary Gwinn, known in much of the literature by her nickname “Mamie,” was the first American woman to receive a PhD in Anglo-​Saxon. The only typical part of her career in English studies is that she left it when she married in 1904. Her 1888 Bryn Mawr PhD is so unconventional that it represents the unfixed, emergent nature of the doctoral degree in United States in general and for women in particular in the second half of the nineteenth century. Bryn Mawr, founded in 1885, had no graduate-​level academic policies or procedures in place in 1888 when the college conferred Gwinn’s doctorate. The handwritten “Minutes of Faculty Meetings” in the Bryn Mawr archives records the vote on May 10, 1888 to recommend Gwinn’s doctorate to the trustees, the same day as a discussion about formalizing the practices for graduate examinations.31 M. Carey Thomas, the dean and the only English professor at Bryn Mawr in 1888, was the only member of the faculty qualified to evaluate a doctoral dissertation in English; Thomas was also Gwinn’s lifelong friend and companion. The exact nature of their relationship has been discussed in a number of venues; they were definitely deeply committed to one another emotionally and intellectually.32 Horowitz has proved that Gwinn wrote Thomas’s master’s thesis on Swinburne while they were in Europe as Thomas worked on her PhD; Gwinn also wrote Thomas’s lecture notes for Bryn Mawr’s English literature survey course.33 The inappropriateness of Thomas as Gwinn’s dissertation director seems not to have been 29  Martha Warren Beckwith, Hawaiian Mythology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940; repr. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1970).

30  Nine are listed in J. R. Hall’s appendix to “Nineteenth-​Century America and the Study of the Anglo-​Saxon Language: An Introduction,” in The Preservation and Transmission of Anglo-​Saxon Culture: Selected Papers from the 1991 Meeting of the International Society of Anglo-​Saxonists, ed. Paul E. Szarmach and Joel T. Rosenthal (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), 37–​71. Hall does not include Alma Blount in his list. 31  Bryn Mawr College Faculty, Minutes of Faculty Meetings, 1888, 26, Bryn Mawr College Archives.

32  Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas, Women in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 168–​72; Micaela di Leonardo, “Warrior Virgins and Boston Marriages: Spinsterhood in History and Culture,” Feminist Issues 5 (1985): 47–​68; repr. in Que(e)rying Religion: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gary David Comstock and Susan E. Henking (New York: Continuum, 1997), 138–​55 at 140–​44. 33  Horowitz, Power and Passion, 149–​51, 299–​301.

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formally acknowledged in the Bryn Mawr archives (where, indeed, Gwinn seems not to have had an official dissertation director). The self-​educated Gwinn had no other academic degrees; much of her academic expertise came from her relationship with Thomas as Thomas ascended the academic hierarchy. Like some of the early English professors discussed above, Gwinn certainly had the skills and knowledge needed to teach English at the collegiate level even though she had no bachelor’s degree. Gwinn’s dissertation, unpublished but preserved in the archives at Bryn Mawr, is the first dissertation by an American woman on an Anglo-​Saxon topic; it is an unusual academic document, even by the fluid standards of the time. Titled “The First Part of Beowulf,” it is typed but includes many handwritten additions and cross-​outs (in contrast, Bryn Mawr by 1892 required all dissertations to be professionally printed, as were those of the men’s and co-​educational universities). Gwinn worked for much of her life on a translation of Beowulf, drafts of which are stored in the archives at Princeton with her husband’s papers, but “The First Part of Beowulf” contains no indication that she could read Anglo-​Saxon with any facility, and her analysis seems to rely on and quote only from translation (although not hers).34 Her topic is not philological at all; her analysis of the folkloric and epic elements of Beowulf argues for “a purely literary enjoyment and appreciation” of the poem and focuses on the poem’s use of imagery.35 The extant copy of the Gwinn dissertation contains no bibliography and no formal citations, although there are many references to contemporary philological scholarship throughout the text. In short, it lacks many of the formal elements expected in a dissertation in the late nineteenth century. Before and after she was awarded this very unconventional doctorate, Gwinn taught in the Bryn Mawr English department. In 1904, she eloped with fellow English professor Alfred Hodder, ending her relationship of more than twenty-​five years with Thomas as well as her professional career.36 Hodder died only three years later, but Gwinn never returned to academia. Gwinn’s unorthodox dissertation process provided her with academic credentialing for a satisfying career that necessarily ended when she married. Two other early PhDs in Anglo-​Saxon chose marriage over an academic career. Kathryne Janette Wilson earned her PhD from Stanford in 1896 with a now-​lost dissertation on Beowulf; she married in February of that year, however, and never held any kind of academic position.37 Alice Dudek Halley did some part-​time teaching at the Brooklyn Institute in 1897 (when she was still Alice Dudek) but she was married before she finished her 1898 New York University dissertation on “The Sources of the National Epic, Beowulf” and she never worked in academia with her doctorate.38 34  Mary Gwinn, “The First Part of Beowulf” (PhD diss., Bryn Mawr College, 1888); for example, see Gwinn’s textual discussion at 16. 35  Gwinn, “First Part of Beowulf,” 8.

36  Horowitz, Power and Passion, 355–​68.

37  Philip Pulsiano, An Annotated Bibliography of North American Doctoral Dissertations on Old English Language and Literature (East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1988), 136; Stanford University, Alumni Directory and Ten-​Year Book, vol. 3: 1891–​1920 (Stanford: The University, 1921). 38  The Brooklyn Standard, February 1, 1897: 1.

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The remaining seven American women who earned English PhDs with Anglo-​Saxon dissertation topics before 1900 used their degrees to establish a variety of academic careers. In all these cases, it is unclear whether they consciously chose not to marry or if they never had the opportunity to do so. As a group, their dissertations were much more formalized and substantial than Mary Gwinn’s; the five that were printed indicate their academic rigour and significance. In the four years between Gwinn’s 1888 PhD and Marguerite Sweet’s 1892 degree, Bryn Mawr had instituted regular policies about examinations and dissertations for doctoral students. The college had also hired more faculty in a number of fields, so that in addition to Thomas and Gwinn, Sweet had access to James Douglas Bruce, “Associate in Anglo-​Saxon,” who had studied in Europe and at Johns Hopkins.39 Sweet’s dissertation, titled “The Third Class of Weak Verbs in Primitive Teutonic, with special reference to its development in Anglo-​Saxon,” is evidence of the ascendance of the “science” of Germanic philology in the late nineteenth-​century American English department, as discussed above. Sweet’s dissertation is full of linguistically technical and philologically detailed analysis, complete with extensive vocabulary lists; in her introduction, she asks, “What is the significance for Primitive Teutonic of this mixture of forms, and which, Gothic or Anglo-​Saxon, is nearer the primitive condition?”40 Sweet’s Germanic (and, for modern readers, absolutely stultifying) dissertation led her to teaching positions at Vassar and Mount Holyoke. She was an “instructor in English” at Vassar (her alma mater) 1892–​1897, although it seems that she never taught Anglo-​Saxon there; she left Vassar to become a professor at Mount Holyoke, where she stayed for only two years.41 Renker uses Sweet as an example of the trend toward the professionalization of literary studies in the American college; while Mount Holyoke admired Sweet’s PhD, the faculty was hostile to her and the changes she represented. Renker states that: Sweet […] brought to Mount Holyoke along with her Ph.D. and her Teutonic dissertation a new definition of what a serious college curriculum in English should look like […] given the momentous shift she represented as well as the hostility with which the other faculty treated her, Sweet remained on the faculty for only two years. We have no record of why she left, whether voluntarily or involuntarily.42

Sweet ended her career as an English teacher and then headmistress at a series of private schools for girls in New York City, including the Misses Ely’s School, the Hawthorne School, 39  Bryn Mawr College, Program (Philadelphia: Sherman, 1892), 8, http://​libguides.brynmawr. edu/​bmcdigitalcollections. 40  Marguerite Sweet, The Third Class of Weak Verbs in Primitive Teutonic: With Special References to Its Development in Anglo-​Saxon (Baltimore: Press of the Friedenwald Co., 1893), 3.

41  Vassar College, Annual Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Vassar College (New York: John Gray and Green Printers, 1892–​97); Mount Holyoke College, Annual (South Hadley: The College, 1897–​99), http://​clio.fivecolleges.edu/​mhc/​catalogs/​. 42  Elizabeth Renker, The Origins of American Literature Studies: An Institutional History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 57.

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and the Veltin School. We have no way of knowing exactly what curriculum she taught, or whether she enjoyed her younger pupils and more cosmopolitan address.43 One of the girls’ schools prominently displayed Sweet’s PhD credential in a 1913 advertisement, indicating that the degree was professionally useful even if she was no longer teaching her students about Anglo-​Saxon verb forms.44 Another successful high school educator was Constance Pessels, who earned her doctorate at Johns Hopkins in 1894 with a dissertation on “The Present and Past Periphrastic Tenses in Anglo-​Saxon.” Like Sweet’s, Pessels’s dissertation is unflaggingly philological, with lists of verb forms from a variety of textual examples, sorted by verbal mood. She even includes a number of tables providing qualitative data on periphrastic tense usages in Anglo-​Saxon texts translated from Latin.45 Pessels had done her undergraduate and master’s work at the University of Texas; she returned to the Lone Star state to become the English department head at San Antonio High School, where she was “prominent in civil life.”46 Like Sweet, Pessels used her doctorate in Anglo-​Saxon for professional status and advancement rather than for regular classroom material. Helen Bartlett, Alma Blount, Martha Anstice Harris, Caroline Louisa White, and Ida Wood all earned doctorates in Anglo-​Saxon in the 1890s and experienced later success in collegiate teaching and administration. Wood’s 1891 degree from Bryn Mawr led to a position as dean of women at the University of Pennsylvania; she then became the “secretary” (as the head of the school was termed) at the Bryn Mawr School for girls in Baltimore.47 While Wood’s dissertation presented a translation of Widsith and an argument about its unity, her post-​doctoral positions were purely administrative. Helen Bartlett’s 1896 Bryn Mawr PhD similarly led to administrative work, as she became Dean of Women at Bradley Polytechnic Institute in Peoria, Illinois, in 1897. Bartlett’s dissertation on “The Metrical Division of the Paris Psalter” provides a detailed philological examination of the psalter’s diction and metrical form to argue for a mid-​tenth-​century 43  Bryn Mawr College, Register of Alumnae and Former Students (Philadelphia: Winston 1920), 16. 44  “Schools and Colleges,” Advertisement section (unpaginated), Harper’s Magazine 126 (1913).

45  Constance Pessels, The Present and Past Periphrastic Tenses in Anglo-​Saxon (Strassburg: K. J. Trübner, 1896), 51–​53.

46  “San Antonio,” The Jewish Encyclopedia: A Descriptive Record of the History, Religion, Literature, and Customs of the Jewish People from the Earliest Times to the Present Day, ed. Isidore Singer and Cyrus Adler (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1901).

47  Mark Frazier Lloyd, Women at Penn: Timeline of Pioneers and Achievements (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Archives and Records Center, 2001), www.archives.upenn.edu/​histy/ ​features/​women/​chronbeg.html; Gail Batts, “Facts and Traditions of the Bryn Mawr School: Headmistresses,” Bryn Mawr School Archives, http://​facultyweb.brynmawrschool.org/​BMS Archives/​facts.html. Wood’s dissertation is listed as 1899 in Pulsiano’s An Annotated Bibliography of North American Doctoral Dissertations on Old English Language and Literature, but the information in the Bryn Mawr archives, including the dissertation itself, dates her degree to 1891. The dissertation is available in PDF form from the Bryn Mawr website (although the link is mistakenly labeled 1889) at http://​repository.brynmawr.edu/​dissertations/​.

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date for the Psalter.48 After graduate school, her professional focus was no longer Anglo-​ Saxon or even English. In addition to her administrative work at Bradley, she was the head of the department of Modern Languages; Bradley’s status as an academy with a two-​year college ensured that Bartlett did not teach Anglo-​Saxon there, although she taught German alongside her administrative work.49 Like Bartlett, Caroline Louisa White did not teach Anglo-​Saxon after she earned her PhD. Throughout her adult life, White alternated teaching positions with opportunities to further her own education, probably due to financial constraints. She graduated from Mount Holyoke Seminary in 1871 and then taught at her alma mater until 1878, when she became the head of the Ladies’ Department at Washburn College in Topeka, Kansas. In 1883, she enrolled at what was then known as the Harvard Annex (later Radcliffe) and taught at Bradford Academy in Haverhill, Massachusetts. White returned to Washburn as an English professor in 1889, even though she still did not have a bachelor’s degree. In 1894, she graduated from Mount Holyoke again, this time with an undergraduate degree, and began her doctoral study at Yale. She earned her PhD and published her 1898 Yale dissertation, Ælfric: A New Study of his Life and Writings, when she was forty-​nine years old.50 Her last professional position was the English professorship at the French-​American College in Springfield, Massachusetts (now American International College); from 1901 to 1903, she taught both the college and the academy students (most of whom were descendants of French Canadians who used English as a second language).51 The curriculum there included rhetoric, grammar, and a wide variety of literary texts, but no courses focused on Anglo-​ Saxon.52 Like others in her cohort, White used her doctorate as an academic credential rather than a part of her daily academic work. Alma Blount is the only American women who earned a PhD in Anglo-​Saxon before 1900 and also taught Anglo-​Saxon throughout her career. Blount never became an administrator, remaining a teacher and prolific scholar until her retirement in 1935.53 Her 1896 Cornell dissertation, “The Phonetic and Grammatical Peculiarities of the Old English Poem Andreas,” is now lost, although a number of early twentieth-​century publications cite it (it was never printed); its title indicates its philological focus.54 48  Helen Bartlett, The Metrical Division of the Paris Psalter: A Dissertation (Baltimore: Friedenwald, 1896), 48. 49  Bryn Mawr College, Register of Alumnae and Former Students (Philadelphia: Winston, 1920).

50  Caroline Louisa White, Ælfric: A New Study of His Life and Writings, Yale Studies in English (Boston: Lamson, Wolffe, 1898). 51  “Alumnae Notes,” The Mount Holyoke 14 (1905): 350–​51; Margaret Trumbull Corwin, ed., Alumnæ, Graduate School, Yale University, 1894–​1920 (New Haven: Yale University, 1920).

52  French-​American College and Academy, Announcement of the French-​American College and Academy with Register of Students (Springfield: French-​American College, 1900–​1905). 53  David Malone, “Wheaton History A-​Z: Alma Blount,” Wheaton College Archives and Special Collections, 2010, http://​a2z.my.wheaton.edu/​faculty/​alma-​blount.

54  George Philip Krapp, ed., The Vercelli Book, ASPR vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press 1932), lxxxix.

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Blount taught at Wheaton College in Illinois and Lawrence University in Wisconsin before accepting a position at Michigan State Normal College (now Eastern Michigan University). In Michigan, Blount taught a variety of courses, including Anglo-​Saxon. The “normal college” was very specifically a teacher training school and the Anglo-​Saxon course description makes an interesting connection between knowledge of linguistic history and high school teaching skills: The course is an elementary study of linguistic principles from a historical point of view, with special reference to the application of such a method to forms, constructions, and idioms of the English language. The course is especially recommended to students who expect to teach English grammar in high schools.55

Blount thus made the study of a thousand-​year-​old language relevant to the professional aspirations of her students and connected the subject matter to their future employment. She may have been aware that she was following the exhortation of an Anglo-​Saxonist of the previous generation, Francis March, who is styled “The First Professor of English” by his biographers. In 1876, March’s “The Study of Anglo-​Saxon” advocated instruction in Anglo-​ Saxon for all normal school students so that all K-​12 teachers would have intimate knowledge of the language.56 Like Blount, Martha Anstice Harris taught Anglo-​Saxon in the undergraduate classroom; Harris, however, eventually gave up teaching altogether as her administrative career took precedence. Harris earned her PhD from Yale in 1896, and so was in a medieval studies cohort of Cook’s female students that included White, Scott, Hanscom, and Lockwood—​a formidable assemblage (Harris thanks Hanscom for assistance with the proof-​sheets in the preface to her printed dissertation). Harris’s dissertation was actually a Latin/​Anglo-​Saxon dictionary, entitled A Glossary of the West Saxon Gospels: Latin-​ West Saxon and West Saxon-​Latin; the brief preface notes that “English lexicography has not been sufficiently studied from the point of view of semasiology.”57 Harris became the dean at Rockford College in 1896, and then dean and professor of English at Elmira College in 1901.58 At Elmira, she taught the Anglo-​Saxon course in 1901 and for some years afterward, although (as an alumnae magazine tribute put it): 55  Michigan State Normal College, Seventieth Annual Catalog (Ypsilanti: Michigan State Normal College, 1923), 15.

56  Francis March, “The Study of Anglo-​Saxon,” The Report of the Commissioner of Education (Washington, DC: US Bureau of Education 1876), 475–​79; reprinted in Selected Writings of the First Professor of English, ed. Paul Schlueter and June Schlueter (Easton: Friends of Skillman Library, Lafayette College, 2005), 231–​39.

57  Martha Anstice Harris, A Glossary of the West Saxon Gospels: Latin-​West Saxon and West Saxon-​ Latin, Yale Studies in English (Boston: Lamson, Wolffe, 1899). 58  William Charles Barber, Elmira College, the First Hundred Years (New York: McGraw-​Hill, 1955), 145–​47.

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As the administrative work in connection with the duties of Dean has become more and more arduous, Dean Harris has had to relinquish much of her teaching. She has done this with regret as teaching is the field which she particularly enjoys and for which she prepared herself during her undergraduate days and later by graduate work at Yale University.59

Like Blount’s, many of Harris’s students were studying to become teachers, and Harris worked to connect her classroom subject matter to her students’ professional goals. She even published a sample high-​school curriculum focused on Scott’s Ivanhoe, complete with medieval contextualization.60 Like many of the other women whose careers are sketched here, Harris successfully combined teaching, administration, and publishing. She is unique in at least one way: she also raised children. Cultural norms made it impossible for a married woman to pursue an academic career, and Harris, like her female colleagues, did not marry. However, she very unusually adopted two girls and raised her daughters in the Elmira community; the alumnae tribute also notes that Harris “retires with the expectation of devoting herself to the education of the two children whom she adopted some years ago, Gertrude, now a Sophomore in High School, and Doris, in the fifth grade. Both girls plan to be Elmira College students some day.” Harris left her entire estate, less some minor charitable bequests, to her daughters, who were both married at the time of her death.61 Her professional success in academia allowed her to provide financial security for her family. Harris and her female colleagues all used their expertise in Anglo-​Saxon to advance their professional careers. Whether or not they actually taught Anglo-​Saxon at the college level, it provided them with academic legitimacy in a male-​dominated world that was inherently suspicious of unmarried, educated women. Because of its focus on philology and grammar, Anglo-​Saxon was an excellent choice of academic subject for a woman interested in establishing herself in the university, either as a faculty member or an administrator. Research in Anglo-​Saxon philology allowed women to avoid accusations of feminine emotion because of its largely empirical nature. Marguerite Sweet’s lists of third-​class weak verbs and Martha Anstice Harris’s Latin/​Anglo-​Saxon glossary were objective rather than subjective; their philology protected their work from sexist dismissal in a way that discussion of (for example) Keats’s Odes could not have. By providing philological data in their dissertations, these women proved to the academic establishment that they were not engaging in mere literary appreciation, a “feminine” pastime more suited to the parlour than the library.62 When most co-​educational 59  “Dean Harris Tenders Resignation,” Elmira College Bulletin: Alumnae News 20 (1929): 2.

60  Martha Anstice Harris, High School Program for the Study of Ivanhoe and for the Accompanying Composition and Rhetoric Lessons (Elmira: Elmira College, 1907). 61  Elmira College Archives, File DE:11:7—​Harris, compiled in the Archives in 1956/​1957.

62  Mary Dockray-​Miller, “Feminine Preoccupations: English at the Seven Sisters,” Modern Language Studies 27 (1997): 139–​55 at 146.

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universities would not hire female faculty outside of a designated “ladies department,” the early female Anglo-​Saxonists were contributing substantially and unequivocally to an academic body of knowledge, thus proving their legitimacy to the academic world at large. All twentieth-​century Anglo-​Saxonists, male and female, have benefited from their pioneering work.

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SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, Brian, and Dennis Jackson. “The Anglo-​ Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley, Northamptonshire; Excavations by Mr D Jackson, 1968–​ 9.” Northamptonshire Archaeology 22 (1988–​89): 69–​178. Adams, Eleanor N. Old English Scholarship in England from 1566–​1800. Yale Studies in English 55. Hamden: Archon Books, 1970. Barnhouse, Rebecca. “Shaping the Hexateuch for an Old English Audience.” In The Old English Hexateuch: Aspects and Approaches, edited by Rebecca Barnhouse and Benjamin C. Withers, 91–​109. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000. Biddick, Kathleen The Typological Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology, History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Blanton, Virginia, and Helene Scheck. “Leoba and the Iconography of Learning in the Lives of Anglo-​Saxon Women Religious, 660–​780.” In Nun’s Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Kansas City Dialogue, edited by Virginia Blanton, Veronica O’Mara, and Patricia Stoop, Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts, no. 27, 3–​226. Turnhout: Brepols, 2015. Boas, Louisa Schutz. Woman’s Education Begins: The Rise of the Women’s Colleges. New York: Arno Press, 1935. Reprint, 1971. Breeze, Andrew. “Did a Woman Write the Whitby Life of St Gregory?” Northern History 49 (2012): 345–​50. Brown, Michelle P. “Female Book Ownership and Production in Anglo-​Saxon England: The Evidence of the Ninth-​Century Prayerbooks.” In Lexis and Texts in Early English: Studies Presented to Jane Roberts, edited by C. J. Kay and L. M. Sylvester, 45–​67. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001. Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. Chance, Jane. “The Structural Unity of Beowulf: The Problem of Grendel’s Mother.” In New Readings on Women in Old English Literature, edited by Helen Damico and Alexandra Hennessey Olsen, 248–​61. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. —​—​. Woman as Hero in Old English Literature. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986. Chiappiniello, R. “The Carmen ad Uxorem and the Genre of the Epithalamium.” In Poetry and Exegesis in Premodern Latin Christianity, edited by Willemien Otten and Karla Pollmann, 115–​38. Boston: Brill, 2007. Collins, Sarah Huff. “Elizabeth Elstob: A Biography.” PhD diss., Indiana University, 1970. Cook, Alison M. The Anglo-​Saxon Cemetery at Fonaby Lincolnshire, Occasional Papers in Lincolnshire History and Archaeology 6. Sleaford: Society for Lincolnshire History and Archaeology, 1981. Cramp, Rosemary. The Corpus of Anglo-​Saxon Stone Sculpture, vol. 1: County Durham and Northumberland. Oxford: Oxford University Press for The British Academy, 1984. Damico, Helen. Beowulf and the Grendel-​kin: Politics and Poetry in Eleventh-​Century England, Medieval European Studies 16. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2015. —​—​. “Beowulf” ’s Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.

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—​—​. “The Valkyrie Reflex in Old English Literature.” Allegorica 5 (1980): 149–​67. Damico, Helen, and Alexandra Hennessey Olsen, eds. New Readings on Women in Old English Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Damico, Helen, Joseph B. Zavadil, Donald Fennema, and Karmen Lenz, eds. Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, 3 vols. Garland Reference Library of the Humanities. New York: Garland, 2000. Dockray-​Miller, Mary. “Female Devotion in the Vercelli Book.” Philological Quarterly 83 (2004):  337–​54. Drout, Michael D. C. “Bloody Deeds: The Inheritance Systems in Beowulf.” Studies in Philology 104 (2007): 199–​226. Earl, James W. “The Forbidden Beowulf: Haunted by Incest.” PMLA 125 (2010): 289–​305. Elstob, Elizabeth. An English-​Saxon Homily on the Birth-​Day of St. Gregory. London: William Bowyer, 1709. Encomium Emmae Reginae. Edited and translated by Alistair Campbell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1949. Reprint, 1998. Estes, Heide. Anglo-​ Saxon Literary Landscapes: Ecotheory and the Environmental Imagination. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017. —​ —​ . “Wonders and Wisdom: Anglo-​ Saxons and the East.” English Studies 91 (2010):  365–​66. Fell, Christine E. Women in Anglo-​Saxon England and the Impact of 1066. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Reprint, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Geiger, Roger L. The History of American Higher Education: Learning and Culture from the Founding to World War II. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. Gneuss, Helmut, and Michael Lapidge. Anglo-​ Saxon Manuscripts: A Bibliographical Handlist of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England up to 1100. Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2014. Graham, Timothy. “William Elstob’s Planned Edition of the Anglo-​Saxon Laws: A Remnant in the Takamiya Collection.” In Middle English Texts in Transition: A Festschrift Dedicated to Toshiyuki Takamiya on His 70th Birthday, edited by Simon Horobin and Linne R. Mooney, 268–​96. Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2014. Hollis, Stephanie. Anglo-​ Saxon Women and the Church: Sharing a Common Fate. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1992. Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz. Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women’s Colleges from their Nineteenth-​Century Beginnings to the 1930s. New York: Knopf, 1985. Horowitz, Sylvia Huntley. “Beowulf, Samson, David and Christ.” Studies in Medieval Culture 12 (1978): 17–​23. Howard, Jean E. “Feminism and the Question of History: Resituating the Debate.” Women’s Studies 19 (1991): 149–​57. Howarth, William. “Some Principles of Ecocriticism.” In The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, 69–​91. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. John, Eric. “The Encomium Emmae Reginae: A Riddle and A Solution.” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 63 (1980): 58–​94

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Karkov, Catherine E. “The Anglo-​Saxon Genesis: Text, Illustration and Audience.” In The Old English Hexateuch: Aspects and Approaches, edited by Benjamin Withers and Rebecca Barnhouse, 201–​37. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000. Karkov, Catherine E. The Art of Anglo-​Saxon England. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011. —​—​. Text and Picture in Anglo-​Saxon England: Narrative Strategies in the Junius 11 Manuscript. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Kendall, Elaine. Peculiar Institutions: An Informal History of the Seven Sisters Colleges. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1975. Ker, N. R. Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969–​83. Ker, Neil F. Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-​ Saxon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957. Kim, Susan. “Bloody Signs: Circumcision and Pregnancy in the Old English Judith.” Exemplaria 11 (1999): 285–​307. Krapp, George Philip, and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie. The Exeter Book, ASPR vol. 3. New York: Columbia University Press, 1936. Lapidge, Michael. The Anglo-​Saxon Library. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Lawson, M. K. Cnut: The Danes in England in the Early Eleventh Century. London: Longman, 1995. Lee, Christina. “Þær wæs symbla cyst:  Food in the Funerary Rites of the Early Anglo-​ Saxons.” In At the Table; Metaphorical and Material Cultures of Food in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, edited by Timothy J. Tomasik and Juliann M. Vitullo, 125–​44. Turnhout: Brepols, 2007. Lees, Clare A., and Gillian R. Overing. Double Agents: Women and Clerical Culture in Anglo-​ Saxon England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. —​—​. “Women and the Origins of English Literature.” In The History of British Women’s Writing, I: 700–​ 1500, edited by Liz Herbert McAvoy and Diane Watt, 31–​ 40. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Lévi-​Strauss, Claude. Totemism. Translated by Rodney Needham. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963. Lucas, Peter. “The Place of Judith in the Beowulf Manuscript.” Review of English Studies 41 (1990): 463–​78. Marafioti, Nicole. The King’s Body: Burial and Succession in Late Anglo-​Saxon England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. Murphy, Michael. “Anglo-​ Saxon at Tavistock Abbey.” Duquesne Review 11 (1966): 119–​24. Nichols, John. Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century; Comprizing Biographical Memoirs of William Bowyer, Printer, F.S.A., and Many of His Learned Friends, vol. 4. London: Nichols, Son, & Bentley, 1832. O’Brien O’Keeffe, Katherine. Stealing Obedience: Narratives of Agency and Identity in Later Anglo-​Saxon England. Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2012. O’Brien O’Keeffe, Katherine, ed. The Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, vol. 5: MS. C. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001.

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282

283

INDEX OF MANUSCRIPTS

Arras, Bibliothèque Municipale 764 (739), 178n79

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 9, 156 Corpus Christi College 44, 157 Corpus Christi College 57, 164 Corpus Christi College 162, 255 Corpus Christi College 201, 147n36 Corpus Christi College 391, 156, 157 Corpus Christi College 422, 156, 157, 177n76 Corpus Christi College 98, 448, 99, 100 Trinity College, O.2.31, 99, 109, 110 Trinity College, R.15.32, 156, 177n76 University Library, Gg. 3.28, 252, 253, 255–58 University Library, Gg.5.35, 99 University Library, Ii. 4. 6, 234, 238, 255

London, British Library, Additional 11880, 165 BL, Additional 24199, 39n92 BL, Additional 28188, 157 BL, Arundel 60, 177n76 BL, Arundel 155, 156, 157 BL, Cotton Claudius A.iii, 157 BL, Cotton Claudius B.iv (OE Hexateuch), 37n76, 38, 114, Figs. 6.1-​5 BL, Cotton Cleopatra C.viii, 39n92 BL, Cotton Domitian A.i, 109 BL, Cotton Galba A.xiv/​Nero A. ii, 68n31, 155, 157, 177 BL, Cotton Nero A.i, 147n36 BL, Cotton Nero A. ii, 155, 177 BL, Cotton Tiberius A.vii, fols. 98, 100, 110 BL, Cotton Otho B.vi (Cotton Genesis), 118, 122, 126n24, 128

BL, Cotton Otho B.x, 164–​65, 177 BL, Cotton Tiberius A.iii, 157 BL, Cotton Tiberius A.vii, 98, 100, 110 BL, Cotton Titus D.xxvi, 157 BL, Cotton Titus D.xxvii, 156, 177n76 BL, Cotton Vespasian D. xiv, 252 BL, Cotton Vitellius A.xv part 2 (Nowell Codex), 16, 161–​78, 222 BL, Cotton Vitellius A.xvii, 157 BL, Cotton Vitellius A.xviii, 156, 177n76 BL, Cotton Vitellius C. v, 234, 252 BL, Cotton Vitellius D. xvii, 252 BL, Cotton Vitellius E.xviii, 156, 177n76 BL, Egerton 838, 252 BL, Harley 99, 110, 99, 100, 110 BL, Harley 603 (Harley Psalter), 39 BL, Harley 863, 157 BL, Harley 1866, 243–​48, 249, fig. 13.2 BL, Harley 2904 (Ramsey Psalter), 38 BL, Harley 6523, 243–​44, 247n56 BL, Lansdowne, 370, 252, 255 BL, Lansdowne, 371, 252, 255 BL, Lansdowne, 372, 252, 255 BL, Lansdowne, 373, 252, 259 BL, Lansdowne, 374, 252, 253, 255–​59 fig. 13.5 BL, Stowe 940, 249 fig. 13.4, 249

Longleat House (Warminster, Wiltshire), MS 345, 248

Oxford Bodleian Library, Ballard 12, 253 Bodleian Library, Ballard 67, 249 Bodleian Library, Douce 296, 156, 157 Bodleian Library, Eng. lang. c. 10, 243 Bodleian Library, Hatton 113, 156

284

284

Index of Manuscripts

Bodleian Library, Hatton 115, 243 Bodleian Library, Junius 11, 115, 117, 118, 121, 126 Bodleian Library, Junius 121, 147n36 Bodleian Library, Laud Misc. 482, 157

Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Latin 5574, 165, 177 Bibliothèque Nationale, Latin 11326 (Sup Lat.), 98 Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Cod. Reginensis, Lat. 12, 156

Salisbury, Cathedral Library MS 150, 177

Stockholm, Kungliga Biblioteket, A. 135 (Codex Aureus, Golden Gospels), 24 Strood, Rochester, Medway Archives and Local Studies Centre, MS DRc/​R1 (Textus Roffensis), 243–​49, 259, figs. 13.1, 13.3

Tokyo, Takamiya Collection, MS 129, 243

Turin, Biblioteca Nazionale, D. V. 5, 165, 166 Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek, Mp. Th. F. 28, 165

285

GENERAL INDEX

Abingdon, monastery, 39, 40 Abraham, 15, 13–​130, 186 Ædvwen, owner of Sutton Brooch, 28–​29 Ælfflæd, queen, 27, 35 Ælfgifu of Northampton, 14, 145–​46, 223–​24 Ælfgifu, property owner, 25–​26 Ælfgifu, queen see Emma Ælfheah, saint, archbishop of Canterbury, 15, 132, 136, 141–​58 Ælfric, 75, 97, 105–​10 Grammar, 241–​42 Homily on Judith, 178 Homily on the Octave and Circumcision of our Lord, 114 homilies of, 106–​7, 114, 115, 178, 234, 238, 240, 242, 249–​59 fig. 13.5 Lives of Saints, 35, 105, 107 Preface to Genesis, 119–​20 Vita Æthelwoldi, 136 Ælfthryth, 28 mother of King Æthelred, 231 Ælfwenna, part-​owner of fishery, 26 Æthelflæd, lady of the Mercians, 30, 215, 217 Æthelnoth, archbishop of Canterbury, 152–​53 Æthelred, king, 142–​45, 153, 154, 200, 223, 231 Æthelstan, king, 35, 221, 231 Æthelstan Mannessune, testator, 26 Æthelthryth see Etheldreda Æthelweard, ealdorman, 119–​20, 130 Æthelwold, bishop, saint, 30n45, 134–​35, 136 Æthelwulf, king of Wessex, 30 Adams, Brian, 44, 45, 49–​50, 60 Adams, Eleanor N., 230 Adelard of Ghent, 136 Adelina, joculatrix, 28 Agatha, saint, 35–​36

Agnes, saint, 36–​37 Aldhelm of Malmesbury, 14, 64–​65, 68, 70, 72, 73, 75, 78, 89, 90, 92, 108, 110 de virginitate, 91, 92, 178, 181 Alexander the Great, 167, 169, 171–​72, 175 see also Letter of Alexander to Aristotle Alfred and Wærburg, ransomers of Golden Gospels, 24 Alfred, king, 30, 35, 143, 150, 216–​19, 239 Alfred’s Boethius, 217, 218, 235, 236 Alfred’s Translation of Orosius, 218–​19 Alphege, archbishop of Canterbury, 36, 157 Aluuid (Aelfgeth), embroidery teacher, 27 Amazons, 218 Anglo-​Saxon cemeteries, 8, 13 Bergh Apton (Norfolk), 48 Bowthorpe (Costessey, Norfolk), 51 Castledyke South (Barton on Humber, North Lincs.), 13, 43, 57 Empingham II (Rutland), 46 Fen Drayton (Cambs.), 51 Fonaby (Caistor, North Lincs.), 52–​60 Grimston (Norfolk), 50 Holton le Moor (North Lincolnshire), 50 Irby (Lincs.), 46 Leighton Buzzard (Beds.), 46 Market Overton (Rutland), 46 Oakington (Cambridges.), 32, 33, 34 Prittlewell (Essex), 50, 58, 199 Sutton Hoo (Suffolk), 50, 58, 199 Swaffham (Norfolk), 47–​48 Taplow (Bucks.), 48, 50 Wakerley (Northants.), 43–​60 West Heslerton (North Yorks.), 33 Worthy Park (Hamps) 33

286

286

General Index

Anglo-​Saxon Chronicle, 30, 141, 143, 144, 147, 148, 151–​53, 155, 223, 231 Anglo-​Saxon Studies as academic subject, 263 as credential, 261, 263, 269, 271–​72 and women, 209–​25, 229–​59, 261–​76 Anne, queen of England, 240, 253, 254 Anonymous, 15, 25–​28, 37–​38, 41, 61, 82, 126 Aphrodosia, prostitute, 35 Aquilina, saint, 16, 162–​70, 172–​78 Archaeology, 7, 8, 13, 31, 33–​34, 44, 58, 60 Armbruster, Karla, 190 Assyrian, 174, 179–​89 Augustine of Canterbury, 76, 131, 156 Augustine of Hippo, saint, 100–​102, 107, 110, 175, 218, 223 Confessions, 85 De civitate dei, 168–​69, 194, 200–​201 Avary, Roger, 223

Backus, Truman, 266 Badenoch, Lindsay, 44, 48, figs. 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 Bagford, John, 235–​36 Baldehildis seal matrix, 29 Ballard, George, 239n35, 242 Balthild, queen, saint, 29–​30, 88, 91 Barnhouse, Rebecca, 114–​15, 117 Bartlett, Helen, 272–​73 Bately, Janet, 229 Bath, 28, 86, 90, 91, 92, 150, 178 Battle of Brunanburh, The, 24, 217 Battle of Maldon, The, 24, 217 Bayeux Tapestry, 38, 40–​41 Beckwith, Martha Warren, 268–​69 Bede, 15, 25, 75, 82, 84, 87, 90, 91, 108, 122, 130, 131, 132, 141, 169–​70, 211, 217 Historia Ecclesiastica, 30, 38, 85, 126, 197, 233 Belanoff, Patricia A., 9, 215, 220 Bentinck, Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Portland, 242 Beorhtgyd, female name on grave stone, 34–​35

Beowulf, 38, 166–​67, 170, 171, 175–​76, 187, 191–​207, 209–​25, 229, 270 Beowulf, 56, 58–​59, 167, 169, 171–​72, 176, 188, 190, 191, 193–​200, 202–​7, 209, 213 Dragon, 10, 170–​71, 187–​90, 207, 209–​10, 212 Freawaru, 195, 198, 205 Grendel, 56, 59, 89, 171, 176–​77, 187, 209–​10, 212–​13, 222 Grendel’s mother, 10, 14, 16, 38, 89, 161, 187, 176–​77, 195, 206, 212–​15, 217, 221, 223–​25 Hildeburh, 37, 38, 193, 194, 196–​97, 202, 206 Hrothgar, 58–​59, 171–​72, 196, 198 Hrothulf, 193, 195, 200, 202–​4, 206 Hygd, 38, 191 Ingeld, 195, 198, 205, 206 poet, 171, 194 Wealhtheow, 11, 14, 16, 38, 56, 58–​59, 191–​207, 214, 223 Beowulf-​Manuscript (see also London, BL Cotton Vitellius A.xv, part 2), 8, 12, 16, 161–​62, 166, 178, 179, 220, 222 Bertha, Queen, 30, 34, 86 Bethulia, 179–​80, 182–​84, 186–​89 Bible, 187, 216 Hebrew scripture, Christian appropriation of, 187–​88, 221 Latin Vulgate, 113, 116, 121, 126, 128, 173–​74, 179–​80 Old English Hexateuch (see also London, BL Cotton Claudius B.iv), 15, 37–​38, 113–​30, 162, 166, 174, 176–​77 Old Testament, 36, 69, 114, 119, 171, 200, 218, 220 Biddick, Kathleen, 113, 119 Bischofsheim (also Tauberbischofsheim), 14, 29, 65, 70–​73, 88, 91 Blount, Alma, 269, 272–​75 Boethius, 99, 217, 218, 235, 236 Consolation of Philosophy, John Walton’s translation of, 235–​36 see also Alfred

287



Boniface, archbishop of Mainz, letters, 30, 63–​64, 66–​67, 70–​81, 83, 88, 91, 215 Botsford, Mary, 266 Boundaries, 3, 7–​9, 12, 16, 72, 179–​90, 194 Bowyer, William, 241, 253 Bradley, S. A. J., 23, 181 Brihtric and Ælfswith, testators, 24 Bromwich, John, 238 Bruinhild, 16, 192–​93 Brunner, Pamela Fraser, 52 Burial rites, 32–​34, 41, 43, 48, 52, 57–​58 (see also Anglo-​Saxon cemeteries) children, 53 cremations, 52 gender, 43, 52, 57 inhumations, 13, 31, 52, 57, 60 orientation, 53, 60 scandinavian women’s graves, 46, 57–​58 Bury (Bury St Edmunds), 146, 156 Butler, Judith, 3, 5–​6, 10, 187

Cable, Tom, 211, 214 Cædmon, 90, 126 Hymn, 170, 217 Calendars, 93, 131, 155–​56, 164, 177 Camden, William, 232, 234 Britannia, 232–​33, 236 Campbell, Jackson J., 210 Cecelia, saint, 36 Celibacy, 10, 14, 97, 105, 110 Chance, Jane, 11, 16–​17, 161, 192, 196, 201 Charlett, Arthur, 253 Charms, Old English, 217, 221 Chelles, abbey, 29, 88–​89, 90, 91, 92 Christ Church, Canterbury, 82, 142, 152–​55, 156, 157 Christianity, 9–​10, 17, 30, 36, 37, 131–​32, 187, 220 creation story, 168–​71, 186 epithets for God, 170–​71 revelation, 137, 168–​72 Christopher, saint, 161–​67 (see also Passion of St. Christopher) Circe, 217–​19

General Index

287

Circumcision, 15, 113–​30, 166 rite of, 126 City, 131, 135, 142, 144, 154, 155, 167, 179–​81, 184 as boundary, 186–​88 Cixous, Hélène, 118–​19n12 Clayton, Mary, 229 Cnut, king, 15, 37, 141–​58, 222–​23 Coatsworth, Elizabeth, 23, 40 Codicological analysis, 8, 16, 81, 99, 161 as feminist intervention, 83, 162 Colebrook, D.N., 53–​57 Cook, Alison M., 52–​57 Cook, Albert S., 181, 268–​69, 274 Coronation ordo, 114 Cronon, William, 180 Culture, 16, 17, 173, 180, 184, 189, 192, 216, 218–​20, 221, 225 Anglo-​Saxon, 12, 23, 38, 161, 212, 221 book, 14, 76–​77, 81 documentary, 11 literary, 8–​9, 73, 99 and literature, 2, 3, 5, 7, 43 masculine, 217 material, 8, 12–​13, 43, 58–​59 Northern, 221 popular, 224 religious, 67 Cuthbert, saint, 25, 27, 35, 83, 85 Cynethryth, mother of Dunstan, 137 Cynewulf, poet, 24, 217

Dagnus of Samos, 163, 167, 170, 172–​75 Damico, Helen, 1–​19, 23, 186, 188, 191–​92, 195, 202, 209, 214, 229, 261 Beowulf and the Grendel-​kin, 14, 17, 195, 198–​99, 222–​23 New Readings on Women in Old English Literature, 1–​2, 11, 161–​62 Medieval Scholarship, 17 Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition, 43, 58, 60, 191, 261 Davies, Hadgie Booker, 265–​66 De die iudicii, 109 Decapitation, 163, 166, 173–​76, 190, 213 of Holofernes, 176, 182–​85, 189–​90 Derrida, Jacques, 118–​19n12, 130 Dickinson, Sam, 33–​34

288

288

General Index

Difference, 1–​4, 6–​7, 10, 11, 33, 52, 148, 151, 163, 165, 175, 181, 190, 215 Dream of the Rood, The, 217, 220 Drinkall, Gail, 57–​58 Domesday Book, 27–​28 Drinking horns, 43–​60 Aurochs horn, 13, 50–​51, 57, 58, 59 Durant, Henry Fowle, 263 Durham, cathedral, 27, 83

Eadburg (Eadburh), abbess of Minster-​in-​Thanet, 26, 30 Eadburga (Eadburh) of Wimborne, 63–​ 65, 80, 88, 90, 91, 92 Eadburga (Eadburh) of Winchester, saint, 139 Eadgifu, of Kent, 221 Eadgyth (Edith), daughter of Edward the Elder, queen (Saxony), 29, 34–​35 Eadgyth (Edith), queen, wife of Edward the Confessor, 39–​41 Eadgyth (Edith) of Wilton, saint, daughter of Edgar, 139–​40 Eadgyth (Edith), wife of Thurkill, 147 Edgar, king of England, 28, 139, 150, 231, 232 Edith see Eadgyth Edmund, king, 36, 132, 217 saint, 146, 154 the Elder, 221 Education, early medieval England, 14, 24, 35, 63–​68, 75–​93, 97–​111, 216, 220 19th/​20th-​c. United States, 261–​76 Edward “the Confessor,” King, 27, 37, 40–​41, 149–​50 Edward “the martyr,” King, 36, 143, 223, 231 Edward the Elder, King, 35, 217, 221 Elene, 37, 197–​98, 215, 217, 220 Elstob, Charles, 253 Elstob, Elizabeth, 229, 239–​59 An English-​Saxon Homily on the Birth-​ Day of St. Gregory, 17–​18, 240, 252 female readership, publications directed at, 240, 241

font, Anglo-​Saxon, designed by, 241 The Rudiments of Grammar for the English-​Saxon Tongue, 240–​41 transcripts of Catholic Homilies I and II, 249–​59 transcripts of Textus Roffensis, 243–​48 Elstob, William, 239, 240, 242, 243, 248, 249, 253, 254, 256 Ely, Monastery of, 27, 138 Emma, of Normandy, queen to Æthelred II and Cnut, 223 Encampment, 179, 181, 184, 186–​89 Encomium Emmae Reginae, 37, 145–​49, 153–​54, 223 see also Emma Environmental issues, 16, 18, 179, 180 Estes, Heide, 8, 16, 172, 175, 179–​90, 220 Ethelbert, King of Kent, 30 Etheldreda, queen, abbess, saint, 25–​27, 30, 32, 36 Eormenhild, 138–​39 Eugenia, saint, 36, 70, 72–​73, 215 Euphrosyne, saint, 36 Eurydice, 217–​18 Everett, Ida Josephine, 261, 264–​66 Exile, 41, 113, 121, 131, 151, 206, 222 Farmland, 180–​81 Farrar, Robert see Ferrers, Robert Feasts/​hospitality, 12, 50, 58, 60 see also Nicea and Aquilina, Saints Felix, Vita Guthlaci, 134 Fell, Christine, 9, 214, 215, 229 Female professors of Anglo-​Saxon, 18, 261, 263, 264–​68, 275 Female PhDs with dissertations focused on Anglo-​Saxon, 18, 268–​74 Feminisms, 1–​12, 18–​19, 30, 77, 121, 162, 188–​90, 213, 214, 216, 219–​20, 222, 268 Ferrers, Robert, 234, 255 Fortification, 184, 231 Frank, Roberta, 229 Freawaru see Beowulf Freoðuwebb, 193, 210, 215 Freolic, 202

289



Friðusibb, 211 Fulk, R. D., 217

Gaiman, Neil, 223 Gardner, John, 212 Garrard, Greg, 184 Gender, 1–​11, 13, 16–​19, 25–​26, 39n92, 43, 52, 57, 103–​4, 162, 174–​75, 178, 179, 181, 188, 193, 194, 196–​97, 202, 216, 218–​19 Geographical boundary/​region, 16, 178, 179, 181, 188, 190, 261 Giblett, Rodney, 188–​89 Gibson, Edmund, 236, 237, 238 Gilded (gylden), 182, 187 Godgytha, nun, 28 Godric, sheriff, 27 Godwin, thegn, 28 Godwine, earl of Wessex, 147, 151, 153 Gold, symbolic value of, 58, 134, 135, 139, 158, 181–​82, 196–​99, 218–​20, 223 ornamentation, 27, 32, 40, 58, 63, 248–​49 Goscelin, 68, 138–​39 Vita Edithe, 139 Gough, Richard, 236 Grave see Burial Rites, Cemeteries Grave goods bag assembly, 47 belt assembly, 47 beads, 13, 31, 32, 44, 46, 51, 52, 54 belts, 31, 46, 47, 51, 56 brooches, 13, 31, 33, 44, 46, 47, 51, 54, 55 broom, 48 brush, 48 buckets, 48 buckles, 31, 44, 46, 47, 56 combs, 33, 47 flywhisk, 48 food depositions, 57 girdle hangers, 31, 47 headdress, 55, 56 horns, 8, 13, 43, 44, 48, 50–​51, 53, 56–​60 keys, 31, 45, 47, 51, 56

General Index

knives, 44, 47, 51, 57, 58 necklets, 47 pottery, 47–​48, 45, 51 rings, 47, 48, 54, 56 roman materials, 55 strap ends, 44–​45, 47, 51 textiles, 13, 35, 46, 51, 54 wrist clasps, 55 Grendel see Beowulf Grendel’s mother see Beowulf Gribelin, Simon, 240 Griffith, Mark, 170, 180 Guthlac, saint, 134 Gwinn, Mary, 269–​71

289

Hagar, 114, 121, 122–​23, 126, 199 Halley, Alice Dudek, 270 Hanscom, Elizabeth Deering, 274, 268 Hansen, Elaine, 211 Harley, Sir Robert, 242, 246, 247–​48, 253–​54 Harold II, Godwinesson, King, 41 Harold Harefoot, 145, 149, 153, 223 Harris, Martha Anstice, 272, 274–​75 Harthacanute, King, 142–​43, 148, 149–​51, 153, 158, 223 Hartlepool, monastery, 34–​35, 82, 90 Hawkes, Sonia Chadwick, 33, 52 Hearne, Thomas, 236 Hebrew, 16, 173, 179, 181, 182–​90 Heffernan, Carol Falvo, 220 Helena, saint, in Old English poem Elene, 37 Hell, 185–​86 Hersey, Heloise, 266–​67 Hickes, George, 241, 247–​48, 253, 254 Hild (Hilda), saint, 25, 26, 30, 34, 79, 82–​83, 87, 89, 90, 91, 126, 130, 201, 217 Hildigyth, female name on grave stone, 34–​35 Hildithryth, female name on grave stone, 34–​35 Hill, Joyce, 8, 15, 131–​41, 215, 229 Hillman, Mary Vincent, Sr., 268 Holbrook, Bertha Estelle, 261 Hodder, Alfred, 18, 270

290

290

General Index

Holofernes, 170, 173–​74, 176, 180–​90, 214 Homily on Judith, 178 Hostetter, Aaron K., 181 Howarth, William, 180 Human, 5, 16, 32, 40, 103, 119, 134, 168, 175, 179–​84, 186, 188–​90, 193, 201, 204, 210, 220, 224–​25 Hume, Kathryn, 212

Ingeld see Beowulf Institutions of Higher Education Agnes Scott Institute, 264 American International College (French-​American College), 273 Bradley Polytechnic Institute, 272–​73 Brenau College (Georgia Female Seminary), 264 Brooklyn Institute, 270 Bryn Mawr College, 18, 268–​72 Chatham University (Pennsylvania Female College), 266 College of St. Elizabeth, 268 Cornell University, 264, 273 Eastern Michigan University (Michigan State Normal College), 274 Elmira College, 268, 274–​75 Fordham University, 268 Harvard, 266 Johns Hopkins University, 263, 271, 272 Judson College, 264 Lawrence University, 274 Mills College, 264 Mary Baldwin College, 265–​66 Mills College, 264–​65, 261 Mount Holyoke College, 261, 264, 271, 273 New York University, 270 Radcliffe College, 273 Rockford College, 266, 274 Smith College, 266, fig. 14.3 Stanford University, 270 Tulane University (Sophie Newcomb College), 264 University of Arkansas, 266

University of California-​Berkeley, 209 University of Chicago, 264, 266 University of Leeds, 210 University of Pennsylvania, 272 University of Manchester, 23 University of Zurich, 268 Vassar College, 263, 266, 268–​69, 271 Washburn College, 273 Wheaton College, Illinois, 274 Wheaton College, Massachusetts, 264, fig. 14.2, 265 Wilson College, 266 Yale University, 268, 275 Irving, Edward, 211 Isaac, 15, 113–​30 Ishmael, 114, 117, 121, 122, 125, 126, 128 Isidore of Seville, saint, 89, 99, 175 Etymologies, 168 Jackson, Dennis, 44, 45, 49–​50, 60 Jerome, Saint, 77, 92, 175 Jews, perceptions of, 37, 188, 197–​98, 220 Jewellery, 31–​32, 34, 38, 139, 188, 189, 190 “Baldehildis” seal matrix, 29 Desborough Necklace, 32 Kingston Brooch, 32 Jolie, Angelina, 223–​25 “Joliewulf,” 223 Jordan, Mary Augusta, 266 Judgement Day II, 109 Judith, biblical heroine, 173–​74, 177, 178, 179 Judith, biblical book of, 179, 187, 190 Ælfric, homily on, 178 Commentaries on, 178n79 Judith, Old English poem/​adaptation, 16, 36, 161, 162, 164, 166, 167, 170, 173–​75, 176, 179–​90, 214, 217, 220, 222 Judith, eponymous heroine of Old English poem, 36, 166, 176, 177 Judith, second wife of Æthelwulf of Wessex, 30

291



Judith, wife of Tostig Godwinesson, 30 Juliana, 24, 36, 217, 220

Kamuf, Peggy, 219 Kempe, Alfred John, 235 Keller, Evelyn Fox, 6 Kemble, J. M., 237 Kirtley, Anne, 264 Kuhn, Thomas, 212

Lacan, Jacques, 122 Lactantius, 220 Landscape, 171, 179–​80, 184, 188 Lambarde, William, 243, 249 Langdon, Robert, 235, 236 laws, Anglo-​Saxon, 220, 239–​40, 242, 243, 246, 256, 259 Cnut, 15, 149 Ine, 217, 220–​21 Lawton, Charlwood, 247 Lections for the Deposition of St Dunstan, 136 Lee, Christina, 33–​34, 57 Leoba, abbess of Bischofsheim, 13–​14, 29, 61–​73, 79, 83, 88, 90, 91 see also Rudolph of Fulda, Life of Leoba Leofflæde, 217 Leofgeat, goldwork maker, 27 Leofgife, baker, 28 Leofwine Godwinesson, 41 Lesbian eroticism, 38 Lester-​Makin, Alexandra, 27 Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, 161, 166–​67, 171–​72 Lévi-​Strauss, Claude, 43 Lewkner (village), 40 L’Isle, William, 233 Liber Epigrammatum, 98–​101 Libri Vitae, 26 Light, 133, 137, 169, 186–​87 Liminality, 179, 181, 187, 188, 190 Litanies, 70, 88, 92, 155, 156, 157 Literary canon, 15, 132–​33 Lockwood, Laura, 268, 274 Loftus, Alex, 180

General Index

London Bridge, 26 Loot see Treasure Lorde, Audre, 5 Lucas, Peter J., 162, 163, 164, 165, 178, 179 Luxuria, allegorical vice, 39

291

Magdeburg, Germany, cathedral, 35 Magi, 37–​38 Manuscript illumination, 26, 115 Manuscripts, 75, 93, 98 March, Francis, 274 Marcus, Sharon, 6 Marriage, 14, 24–​25, 36, 138–​39 Chaste, 100, 102, 105–​9, 138 law, 18, 220–​21, 269–​70 peace-​weaving, 198, 205, 211 royal, 142–​43, 145, 146 and sanctity, 138–​39, 211 Versus ad coniugem, 97–​111 women Anglo-​Saxonists, 269–​70 Martin, Biddy, 6 Martin, Toby, 55 Martyrologies, 35, 92, 131, 162–​64 Mary Magdalene, saint, 36 Mary of Egypt, saint, 36–​37 Mary, Virgin, saint, 37, 40, 62, 69, 70–​71, 231 Masculinity, 3, 11, 18, 104, 173, 176, 179, 188, 192, 214, 217, 219, 220, 223 Material culture see culture Maxims I, 196 Maxims II, 186 Melantia, widow, 35–​36, 72 Men, 1–​3, 8–​9, 11, 18, 24, 25, 29, 32, 35, 38, 40, 52, 58, 59, 60, 67, 80–​81, 84, 88, 89, 104, 114, 115, 117, 119, 131, 138, 168, 169–​70, 175–​76, 178, 192, 194, 219, 230, 240, 242 Mercian Register, 30 McKinney, M. L., 264 Mildrith, abbess of Minster-​in-​Thanet, 26, 90, 91 Minerva, Roman goddess, 40 Mitchell, Bruce, and Fred Robinson, 217 Mitchell, Maria, 263

292

292

General Index

Monsters, 2, 166–​67, 187–​90 Beowulf manuscript (Nowell Codex), 16, 161–​62, 166 Beowulf poem, 10, 187–​90, 209–​25 Grendel’s mother, 10, 38, 171, 176–​77, 188–​89, 206, 209–​25 as signs, 166, 168–​72, 177 and violence, 167, 170, 172 and women, 166, 175–​77, 188–​90 Monstrosity, 162, 167, 168–​69, 172, 175 Morrison, Susan Signe, 222 Mother/​modor, 2, 8, 14, 15, 26, 37–​38, 40, 113, 121–​22, 126, 128, 130, 131–​40, 194–​95, 198, 201, 205–​7, 223, 224 Mountains, 179, 180, 181, 184 Murphy, Michael, 230

Name studies, 7, 25–​27, 28, 30, 34 Nature, 180–​81, 184 Negley, Sallie, 266 New Minster, Winchester, 37, 150, 156, 157 Nicea, and Aquilina, Saints, 16, 162–​70, 172–​77 Nicolson, Joan, 211 Nixon, Jennie C., 264 Norman Conquest, 8–​9, 155–​56, 223 Nowell Codex see London, British Library Cotton Vitellius A. xv, part 2 nuns, as teachers of Old English, 229, 230, 232, 233, 238–​39

O’Brien O’Keeffe, Katherine, 109, 151, 229 Object, 13, 16, 28, 31, 34, 36, 44, 46, 48, 56, 59–​60, 139, 179, 181–​84 Odelina, property owner, 26 Okasha, Elisabeth, 25–​26 Old English Martyrology, 35–​36, 164 Old Testament —​see Bible, Hebrew Olsen, Alexandra Hennessey, 1–​2, 11, 12, 161, 162, 214, 215, 222 Ordgar, ealdorman, 231, 232, 233 Ordulf, thane, 231, 232, 233

Orosius, Historiarum adversum paganos libri septem, Old English translation of, 239 Osbern, Life of Alphege, 218, 219 Osburh, 130 Oswald, saint, 35, 109, 131 Oxford Saxonists, 236, 239 Parker, Matthew, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 238–​39 Petheram, John, 237 Passion of Saint Christopher, The Latin version, 163, 165, 173–​74 Manuscripts, 164–​65 Old English version, 16, 161–​62, 164–​65, 170 veneration, 163–​64, 177 and women’s communities, 177 Patriarchy, patriarchal, 15, 130, 191–​92, 202, 216, 217, 221, 223 Pelagia, saint, 36 Pessels, Constance, 272 Peterborough Witch, 26 Philology, 263, 271, 275 “Phoenix,” 217, 220 Pope, John, C., 216–​17 Prosper of Aquitaine, 14, 97–​105, 108, 110–​11 Prudentius, Psychomachia, 99, 139 Puhvel, Martin, 212 Queenship, 2, 9, 196–​97, 201, 213, 220–​21

Rabin, Andrew, 26 Raw, Barbara, 229 Raven, 183–​84 Religion, 7, 179, 240 Richard, Thomas, monk of Tavistock, printer, 235, 236 Rickert, Edith, 17, 266 Riddles, 39, 181, 215n27, 220 erotic, 39, 220 Ritzke-​Rutherford, Jean, 186–​87 Roberts, Jane, 229 Robinson, Lillian, 216

293



Rogers, H. L., 212 Rudolph of Fulda, Life of Leoba, 30, 39, 62, 65–​73 Ruether, Rosemary Radford, 187 Russell, Francis, second earl of Bedford, 234 Russell, John, first earl of Bedford, 232

Sarah (Genesis), 15, 114, 116, 119–​22, 126, 128, fig. 6.5, 130, 186 Sayer, Duncan, 32–​34 Seaxburh/​Sexburga, queen, abbess, saint, 25, 138–​39 Scar, Orkney, Scotland, ship burial, 33 Scott, Mary Augusta, 266, 268 Shacklock, P., fig. 2.4, 53, 55–​56 Signy, 193 Sklute, L. John, 193, 215 Smith, James, serving-​boy, 249, 252, fig. 13.4 Sontag, Susan, 182, 186, 188 Soul and Body II, Old English poem, 24 Spelman, Henry, 233 St. Benedict’s, Ramsey, 24 St. Paul’s Cathedral, 141–​42, 144, 152, 154, 158, 239 St. Peter’s, Westminster (Westminster Abbey), 26 St. Peter’s, Worcester, 24 St. Peter’s, Rome, 87 Stamford Bridge, Battle of, 41 Stanbridge, John, Latin grammar by, 235 Stephen of Ripon, 85–​86, 132–​34, 137 Vita Wilfridi, 132, 134 Sutton, Isle of Ely, brooch, 28–​29 Sweet, Marguerite, 271, 275 Sweet’s Anglo-​Saxon Reader, 217, 218, 220 Swift, Jonathan, 242 Szarmach, Paul E., 18, 215 Tamar, river, 231, 232, 233 Tavistock, abbey at, 230–​9 nuns at, false tradition concerning, 230–​3, 238–​39, 255

General Index

293

printing of Old English at, false tradition concerning, 235–​8 Saxon School (building), 235, 236 teaching of Old English at, 230–​39 Tavy, river, 232, 233, 235 Taylor, Paul Beekmam, 215 Tette, mother of Guthlac, 134 Textus Roffensis see manuscripts, Strood, Rochester, Medway Archives and Local Studies Centre, MS DRc/​R1 Thomas, M. Carey, 268, 269 Thoresby, Ralph, 240, 249, 252, 256 Thorpe, Benjamin, 259 Thurkill, earl of East Anglia, 15, 143–​49, 151, 154–​55, 158–​59 Tisinger, Irene, 264 Tolkien, J. R. R., 209–​25 “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” 4, 10, 161, 209 Torhtsuid, female name on grave stone, 35 Tostig Godwinesson, Earl of Northumbria, 30, 41 Treasure, 12, 58–​59, 60, 184, 185, 196, 199, 210, 218

Valkyries, 202, 214, 221 Veil/​veiling, 28, 38, 55, 62, 114, 118–​19, 120, 122, 126, 128, 130, 135, 139 Vermund, male name on grave stone, 35 Versus ad coniugem, 14, 97–​112 Violence, 153, 172, 174, 175, 178, 188, 193, 203, 206, 224 Virginity, 15, 36, 71, 105–​10, 122, 137–​38, 178 Vita Dunstani, anonymous, 136 Wærburh, saint, 90, 138–​39 Wainwright, F. T., 205 Walburga, saint, abbess of Heidenheim, 29 Wall, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 188, 189 Wanley, Humfrey, 164, 177, 234, 246, 248, 249 Water, 70, 84, 115, 180–​81, 210, 213

294

294

General Index

Watson, Jacqui, 57 Wealhtheow see Beowulf Weaning, 15, 113–​30 Weed, Elizabeth, 1, 11 Wheelock, Abraham, 233, 243 White, Caroline Louisa, 272–​74 Whitelock, Dorothy, 10, 17, 27, 217–​18, 222, 229 “Wife’s Lament,” 24, 217, 218 Wiferd and Alta, donors, 24 Wilfrid, bishop, 83, 85–​86, 89, 90, 132–​34, 197 William I, King, 41 Williams, Ann, 28 Williams, Edith Whitehurst, 215 Willis, Browne, 235 Wilson, Kathryne Janette, 270 Wilton, nunnery, 40, 41, 139, 177 Wimborne, abbey, 14, 39, 61, 62, 63, 65, 67, 69, 71, 73, 76, 80, 82, 88, 90, 91, 92 Wisfæst, 199, 201, 206 Woman, as concept, 1–​2, 12–​13, 23, 31–​35, 40–​41

Women (see also Anglo-​Saxon studies, Education) Anglo-​Saxon, 23–​41, 43, 210–​12, 215–​16 bodies and physicality, 167, 174–​77 as interpreters, 173, 176–​77 and monsters, 166–​69, 175–​77 and violence, 173–​74 Wonders of the East, 161, 166–​67, 172–​73, 175 Wood, Ida, 272 Woolf, Rosemary, 10, 17, 229 Wright, Herbert, 188 Wright, Thomas, 237 “Wulf and Eadwacer,” 24, 37, 39, 215, 217 Wulfstan, bishop of Winchester, 134–​36 Wulfstan, archbishop of York, 75, 147–​48, 155 Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, 222 Wülker, Richard, 237–​38 Wynflæd, testatrix, 25, 27 Zacher, Samantha, 114 Zemeckis, Robert, 223–​25