Feminist Approaches To Early Medieval English Studies PDF

KNOWLEDGE COMMUNITIES
Edited by Robin Norris, Rebecca Stephenson, and Renée R. Trilling
Feminist Approaches to
Early Medieval English Studies
Knowledge Communities
This series focuses on innovative scholarship in the areas of intellectual history

and the history of ideas, particularly as they relate to the communication of
knowledge within and among diverse scholarly, literary, religious, and social
communities across Western Europe. Interdisciplinary in nature, the series
especially encourages new methodological outlooks that draw on the disciplines
of philosophy, theology, musicology, anthropology, paleography, and codicology.
Knowledge Communities addresses the myriad ways in which knowledge was

expressed and inculcated, not only focusing upon scholarly texts from the
period but also emphasizing the importance of emotions, ritual, performance,
images, and gestures as modalities that communicate and acculturate ideas.
The series publishes cutting-edge work that explores the nexus between ideas,
communities, and individuals in medieval and early modern Europe.
Series Editor
Clare Monagle, Macquarie University
Editorial Board
Mette Bruun, University of Copenhagen
Babette Hellemans, University of Groningen
Severin Kitanov, Salem State University
Alex Novikoff, Fordham University
Willemien Otten, University of Chicago Divinity School
Edited by
Robin Norris,
Rebecca Stephenson, and
Renée R. Trilling
Amsterdam University Press

The publication of this book is made possible by a grant from the University College Dublin
Seed Funding.
Cover illustration: Detail from London, British Library MS Cotton Cleopatra c. viii, fol. 7v.
Faith crowns the Virtues in Prudentius’s Psychomachia.
Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden

Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout
isbn 978 94 6372 146 2

e-isbn 978 90 4855 431 7 (pdf)
doi 10.5117/9789463721462
nur 684
© All authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2023
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of
this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise)
without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.
Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations
reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is
advised to contact the publisher.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations 7
Introduction 9
Metacritical Considerations
1 The Lost Victorian Women of Old English Studies 27

M. J. Toswell
2 Embroidered Narratives 53
Christina Lee
3 Remembering the Lady of Mercia 83

Scott Thompson Smith
Affect Theory
4 Be a Man, Beowulf 117

Sentimental Masculinity and the Gentleness of Kings
E. J. Christie
5 Shame, Disgust and Ælfric’s Masculine Performance 143

Alice Jorgensen
Treatments of Virginity
6 The Ornament of Virginity 171

Aldhelm’s De uirginitate and the Virtuous Women of the Early
English Church
Emily V. Thornbury
7 Chaste Bodies and Untimely Virgins 197

Sexuality, Temporality, and Bede’s Æthelthryth
Lisa M. C. Weston
Medical Discourse
8 Monaðgecynd and flewsan 225

Wanted and Unwanted Monthly Courses in Old English Medical
Texts
Dana M. Oswald
9 Dangerous Voices, Erased Bodies 253

Reassessing the Old English Wifgemædla and Witches in
Leechbook III
Erin E. Sweany
10 Women and “Women’s Medicine” in Early Medieval England,

from Text to Practice 279
Christine Voth
Women’s Literacy
11 The Literate Memory of Hugeburc of Heidenheim 317

Aidan Conti
12 A Road Nearly Taken 343

An Eighth-Century Manuscript in a Woman’s Hand and Franco-
Saxon Nuns in Early Medieval English Intellectual History
Matthew T. Hussey
13 “Historical Accuracy,” Anonymity, and Women’s Authorship 377

The Case of the Case for Beowulf
Stephen M. Yeager
Index 401
List of Illustrations
Fig. 3.1 Cassell’s Illustrated History of England from the Roman

Invasion to the Wars of the Roses (London: Cassell and
Co., Limited, 1909), 45. 99
Fig. 3.2 The Æthelflæd statue at Tamworth Castle, designed
by H. C. Mitchell and sculpted by E. G. Bramwell. The
statue was raised in 1913. 102
Fig. 3.3 The Æthelflæd statue sculpted by Luke Perry and raised
in 2018. 103
Fig. 11.1 Hugeburc’s cipher. München, Bayerische Staatsbiblio-
thek, Clm. 1086, fol. 71v, lines 4-7. 321
Fig. 12.1 Detail from Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek
M.p.th.f.79, fol. 1v. 349
Fig. 12.2 Detail from Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Hatton 48,
fol. 1r. 350
Fig. 12.3 Detail from Boulogne-sur-Mer, Bibliothèque Municipale
74 (82), fol. 53r. 351
Fig. 12.4 Detail from Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale lat. 17177, fol. 8r. 352
Fig. 12.5 Detail from Boulogne-sur-Mer, Bibliothèque Municipale
74 (82), fol. 1r. 353
Introduction
In January 2016, the field of early medieval English studies was rocked

by the revelation that one of its most prominent emeritus scholars had
released a men’s rights manifesto on his website, arguing that feminism
had completely dominated academic discourse at the expense of men. In
the ensuing weeks, further allegations of misogyny and sexual harassment
among early medievalists multiplied, dovetailing with the cultural energy
of the #MeToo movement to launch an ongoing conversation about women’s
place in the field, both as scholars and as subjects of study. For many, these
developments seemed retrogressive after consistent progress throughout
the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. More women were earning PhDs and publishing
scholarship in the field, building formidable international reputations and
occupying prestigious positions in the highest reaches of academia. Even
feminist criticism seemed more or less mainstream; it was no longer radical
to suggest that a research project could incorporate or even focus exclusively
on early medieval women, and many books and articles were informed by
a feminist perspective, even if they weren’t explicitly feminist in nature.
Perhaps this is why the collective conversation caused such upheaval; it
seemed to reveal an undercurrent of misogyny within our field that should
have been impossible in the twenty-first century. How could a field in which
women scholars are so visible, and where a great deal of feminist work has
won critical acclaim, simultaneously harbor such retrograde thinking about
feminism and the academy?
In the aftermath of 2016, conversations about the state of the field—who
defines it, who it is for, who belongs, and who doesn’t—have proliferated
on social media, at conference panels and roundtables, and in blog posts
and journal special issues. The result is a long-overdue and much-needed
reconsideration of how early medievalists, and medieval studies more
broadly, demarcate both their objects of study and their methods of inquiry.
As these conversations have reminded us (again), our fields of study are
not ideologically neutral. Like sand in mortar, the values and beliefs of
those who def ined the discipline are inherent in its very foundations;
they underlie every aspect of our work. Some fear that the structure of the
Norris, R., Stephenson, R., & Trilling, R.R. (eds.), Feminist Approaches to Early Medieval English
Studies. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023
doi: 10.5117/9789463721462_intro
10 INTRODUC TION
field will disintegrate if its foundations are called into question, but those
values and beliefs are not consistent with the ones that inform twenty-first-
century scholarship because they emerge from a historical context that
was explicit about its commitments to a narrow definition of the Middle
Ages as coterminous—temporally, geographically, and ideologically—with
Western Christendom. The field now known as early medieval English
studies was born at the height of British imperialism, with the goal of
bolstering British claims to cultural (understood as racial) superiority over
its colonial subjects. During this period of European hegemonic expan-
sion, continental scholars looked to Old English language and literature
as evidence of the unity of a Germanic racial identity, and interest in Old
English in the early United States was similarly due to an investment in
the “Saxon myth.”1 The field grew in an environment where women, people
of color, and openly LGBTQ+ voices were almost entirely absent and lent
its historical authority to the restrictive definitions of “masculinity” and
“femininity” that undergird heteronormative structures of gender and desire
rooted in presumptive Whiteness. In both scholarship and curricula, early
medieval English materials supported claims to White, male, European
superiority.2 Like all institutional structures, academic disciplines are
designed to uphold the power of those who created them; as a result, the
traditional scholarly paradigms of early medieval English studies embody
the patriarchal and imperial values of their origins in White supremacy.
The goal of this volume is to assist in the vital project of rewriting those
paradigms.
In striving for this goal, we do not mean to suggest that feminism is the
only, or even the best, remedy for what ails early medieval English and
medieval studies. We see our theoretical and political commitments as one
strand of a multivalent effort to rethink the parameters of our discipline
and to create a scholarly community that is rigorous, inclusive, and diverse.
To help effect this change, we seek a return to the originary promise of
feminism as both a critical and a political practice. From its earliest days,
feminist theory laid out the project of recovering the voices of people who
had been silenced within the dominant paradigms of historical inquiry. By
the later twentieth century, when feminist theory reached its ascendency
1 Hans Sauer, “Anglo‐Saxon Studies in the Nineteenth Century: Germany, Austria, Switzerland,”
in A Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature, ed. Philip Pulsiano and Elaine Treharne (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2001), 455–71; Stanley R. Hauer, “Anglo-Saxon Language,” PMLA 98, no. 5 (October 1983):
879–898.
2 Mary Dockray-Miller, Public Medievalists, Racism, and Suffrage in the American Women’s
College (London: Palgrave, 2017).
Introduction 11
in the academy, it revealed an even more radical notion: that the structures
of inquiry themselves shaped the objects of our study, and that feminist
questions could never really be answered within patriarchal paradigms.
Feminist theory thus offered the promise of critiquing, pushing back, and
even dismantling those paradigms in favor of new forms of inquiry that
challenged the very foundations of most academic disciplines. As historian
Joan Wallach Scott put it, “I do not think we should quit the archives or
abandon the study of the past, but we do have to change some of the ways we
have gone about working, some of the questions we have asked. We need to
scrutinize our methods of analysis, clarify our operative assumptions, and
explain how we think change occurs. Instead of a search for single origins,
we have to conceive of processes so interconnected that they cannot be
disentangled.”3 Placing women and gender at the center of a critical analysis
fundamentally shifts its perspective and results in a literal refocusing of
the material. Traditional understanding and conventional wisdom recede
from view as new possibilities enter our frame of reference, changing what
we are able to see, say, and know about the objects we study. This means,
of course, that “our methods of analysis” and “our operative assumptions”
will have to change as well, to accommodate different perspectives and
the new forms of knowledge they reveal. Feminism, along with a variety
of other critical methodologies, proposed a wholesale reconfiguration of
epistemology, and the past forty years have witnessed dramatic shifts in
the baseline assumptions that underlie academic work in the humanities,
social sciences, and beyond.
The prospect of change has fueled no small amount of resistance to, and
resentment of, feminist intersectional praxis. Medieval studies has been
peculiarly resistant to the shifts that have taken place elsewhere in cultural
studies, and such conservatism has been a constitutive influence on early
medieval English studies over the past four decades. As a result, it is difficult
to quantify the impact of feminist theory on the field. Inaugurated in the
mid-1980s, early medieval English scholars’ feminist analysis began (as it
did in most fields of literary study) with the recovery of women’s voices
and women’s perspectives. These early studies, now landmarks of literary
criticism, worked to situate women in relation to the dominant modes of
understanding early medieval English culture. Helen Damico, Jane Chance,
and Helen Bennett placed women at the center of their analyses of traditional
heroic discourse in Old English literature, establishing a key role for women
3 Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” The American Historical
Review 91, no. 5 (December 1986), 1053–75, at 1066–67.
12 INTRODUC TION
in the field’s most prestigious texts. 4 Historian Christine Fell, meanwhile,

sought for traces of women’s lives and experiences in a historical record
that largely excludes them, enabling scholars to see women’s influence in
early medieval history and assert their presence and agency in the early
medieval English world.5 In 1990, Damico and Alexandra Hennessey Olsen
edited a collection of New Readings on Women in Old English Literature, in
the hope that “the presentation of an anthology might promote work in a
much neglected area of Anglo-Saxon studies.”6 Publications like these, along
with many others, went a long way toward legitimizing feminist criticism
as a viable approach to early medieval materials—despite the fact that
feminism in the academy was already on the decline within a decade of
Damico and Olsen’s watershed volume.7
The belatedness of feminist criticism in early medieval studies was keenly
felt by scholars in the early 1990s who saw this late acceptance as a missed
opportunity for a real critical overhaul of the field. At the same time that New
Readings sought to celebrate and stimulate work on women in Old English,
Bennett, along with Clare Lees and Gillian Overing, expressed frustration
at the field’s continued resistance to feminist criticism. They catalogue a
certain amount of acceptance for the recovery of women’s work and female
voices within the texts, but they criticize scholars’ reticence to embrace the
possibility of a true epistemological shift. Especially in fields with a narrow
focus and clearly defined critical approaches, such as language and literature,
they pointed out, scholars were unlikely to undertake explicitly feminist
work. In other words, work on women in early medieval English studies could
find a place in the field as long as it adhered to conventional methodologies
and did not threaten traditional scholarly paradigms. The impact of feminist
theory on the workings of the field, then, was minimal at best, in distinct
contrast to the state of other comparable fields of cultural studies.
Unfortunately, that is almost as true today as it was in 1990. In an effort to
compile a data set that would allow for a diachronic comparison of feminist
work in early medieval English studies since the early 1980s, we undertook
4 Helen Damico, Beowulf’s Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1984); Jane Chance, Woman as Hero in Old English Literature (Syracuse, NY:
Syracuse University Press, 1986); and Helen Bennett, “The Female Mourner at Beowulf’s Funeral:
Filling in the Blanks/Hearing the Spaces,” Exemplaria 4, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 35–50.
5 Christine Fell, Women in Anglo-Saxon England (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986).
6 Helen Damico and Alexandra Hennessey Olsen, eds., New Readings on Women in Old English
Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), vii.
7 Susan Gubar, “What Ails Feminist Criticism?” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 4 (Summer 1998):
878–902.
Introduction 13
to survey the proceedings of the biennial conference of the organization

then known as the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists (ISAS)8 since its
inaugural meeting in 1983, using these papers as a bellwether of trends and
currents in the field. Using the official reports of the meetings published in
the journal Anglo-Saxon England (1983–2015) and the conference websites
(2017–2019), we counted the number of speakers at each meeting, how many
of those speakers were women, and how many addressed women or gender
in their papers. We construed the critical category of “women or gender”
quite broadly, including in our count papers on female-centered texts like
Juliana or Wulf and Eadwacer, as well as texts associated with women, such
as the Gospels of Judith of Flanders and the Encomium Emmae Reginae, and
papers on masculinity and sexuality.
The results of this survey reveal some interesting and, from our perspec-
tive, surprising trends. It was both surprising (to us) and heartening to note
that women scholars have been central figures in early medieval English
studies for quite some time. At the first ISAS meeting in 1983, for example,
eight of the twenty-five speakers were women. By 1995, women accounted
for half the speakers at the conference, a ratio that has remained the same
or even grown since then. Over the last decade, more than half the confer-
ence presenters have been women, and in 2015, women accounted for fully
two-thirds of the speakers. Keynote lectures, which became a regular part
of these meetings in 1999, tell a similar story. At least one speaker, out of
two or three keynotes at each conference, has been a woman. These data
indicate that the field itself is not inimical to women scholars, whose work
finds audiences at the flagship conference as often as, and sometimes even
more often than, their male colleagues.
When we turn to analyze feminist work within the field, however, a
very different picture emerges. In that inaugural ISAS conference in 1983,
no papers dealt explicitly with women or gender. The first such paper was
offered (by a man) in 1985, with single papers also offered in 1991 and 1993.
The 1995 conference finally saw a paper on gender offered by a woman—the
same year that women finally made up half of the slate of presenters. Still,
only three of the thirty-five papers presented dealt with women or gender.
And even that number was high; papers on women or gender account for
between 3% and 5% of the conference program throughout the 1990s and
2000s. In 2017, when the ISAS conference expanded to include concurrent
sessions for the first time and offered a record sixty-seven papers, 12% of
8 The organization’s membership voted in 2019 to rename itself the International Society for
the Study of Early Medieval England.
14 INTRODUC TION
them concerned women or gender. (In the program for the 2019 meeting,
that number was back down to 8%.) The numbers for keynotes are equally
dismal; only two keynotes in the last twenty years have dealt with gender.
The data from the ISAS biannual conference, then, depict a field that is
approximately 50% female, but where feminist criticism (very broadly
construed) accounts for around 5% of the scholarship. While women are
well represented among scholars of early medieval England, scholarship
on women and gender is not.
The data of publications in the field’s flagship journal, the annual Anglo-
Saxon England, are even less encouraging. During the years 1983–2017, the
journal published 380 research articles; 134 were authored or co-authored
by women, for a ratio of approximately 35%. In that period, only sixteen
articles (4%) dealt with women or gender—primarily articles about woman-
focused or woman-owned texts. Only two, in thirty-five years, engage with
gender as an explicit critical category. In the flagship journal, then, as at the
flagship conference, women’s participation in scholarship is clearly visible,
but feminist scholarship is not. Even more distressing is the apparent fact
that feminist work was actually more prevalent in articles of the 1980s and
1990s than it has been since 2000.
The proceedings of the biennial meetings of ISAS and the publication
record of Anglo-Saxon England do not represent the entirety of the field,
of course, but we would submit that they offer a useful snapshot of what
could be considered the mainstream of early medieval English studies. It
would be illuminating, though beyond the scope of this brief Introduction,
to collect similar data for doctoral degrees and dissertations, as well as the
wider publication of books and journal articles.9 And it would be similarly
productive, though we suspect even more damning, to undertake a survey of
work by scholars of color and scholarship on race. Taken together, however,
these examples allow us to make some general observations about the place
of women and of feminist inquiry in early medieval English studies. First,
it is impossible to assert that feminist analysis has ever been mainstream,
let alone dominant, in in field. Despite the general acceptance of women
9 Christopher Abram has undertaken a comprehensive survey of women’s scholarship on

Beowulf, including dissertations, articles, monographs, edited collections, editions, and transla-
tions. He finds that (1) women are greatly underrepresented as critics, editors, and translators
of Beowulf, in comparison to their presence in the f ield and their work on other Old English
texts, and (2) feminist work still accounts for only a fraction of the published criticism on the
poem, as of 2018. Christopher Abram, “Does Beowulf Have a Gender Problem? (Spoiler: Yes),”
Roundtable presentation, 53rd International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan
University, May 2018.
Introduction 15
as full participants in scholarship, their presence has not reshaped the

fundamental paradigms, established centuries ago, that govern scholarly
engagement with early medieval England. The mere presence of women
does not guarantee a feminist revolution, of course. As recent work by Mary
Dockray-Miller has shown, women’s early involvement with early medieval
English studies in the women’s colleges of the nineteenth-century United
States functioned as an explicit denial or subversion of their femininity;
taking on the masculine discipline of the Old English language was a way
to demonstrate academic rigor despite their gender.10 It would be foolish
to assume that all, or even most, women scholars would or should want to
work on gender, but it seems equally foolish to assume that almost no one
does. Something is keeping scholars from engaging with gender in early
medieval English studies, despite relative gender parity in the field. Women
are welcome, so long as they do not make gender explicit.
Outside the admittedly narrow scope of the ISAS conference and the
flagship journal, feminism feels more prevalent in early medieval English
studies. Dockray-Miller offered a comprehensive overview of this kind of
work in 2008, while still noting (almost two decades after New Readings) that
such work was “new” and that the influence of feminist work on Old English
had yet to find its way into the scholarly mainstream or the undergraduate
curriculum.11 Readers will no doubt be able to rattle off a long litany of schol-
ars, in addition to those listed above, who have contributed excellent work
on women and gender to our collective knowledge of the period. Feminist
scholarship of early medieval England runs the gamut from traditional
philological analysis that just happens to be about women-centered texts to
radical reshapings of the period when viewed through a feminist lens. The
very fact that this work is not well-represented at the field’s most prestigious
conference or in its flagship journal indicates that feminist work has been
running parallel, rather than central, to the discipline’s primary concerns
for the past four decades. The field has allowed it to exist on the margins
and has occasionally acknowledged it as part of modern academia but has
never accepted it as central to the prestige structures of the discipline.
Bennett, Lees, and Overing traced the source of this reticence to the
overwhelmingly masculinist biases of the discipline, which cast themselves
as standards of “rigor” and “clarity”: “Much of what is not feminist about
recent criticism on/of women in the literature is not, or not only, that it is
10 Dockray-Miller, Public Medievalists, Racism, and Suffrage.

11 Mary Dockray-Miller, “Old English Literature and Feminist Theory: A State of the Field,”
Literature Compass 5 (2008), 1049–59, DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00581.x.
16 INTRODUC TION
not consciously employing this or that variety of feminist critical theory, but
that it does not more consciously acknowledge the masculinist (call them
binary, traditional, patriarchal, patristic) premises upon which it operates,
and that the potential for feminist hypotheses is closed down by the need
for ‘clarity’, definition, and a concept of structure that relies on the principle
of opposition.”12 Their words are just as applicable today as they were almost
thirty years ago. The same traditional methods and scholarly standards
continue to govern the production of knowledge—methods and standards
derived from the explicitly imperialist, implicitly racist, and predominantly
misogynist cultural paradigms of nineteenth-century Britain. In other words,
the very standards by which scholarship on the early medieval English
world—particularly its literature—was judged are predicated on a set of values
and expectations inimical to a feminist project that embraces multiplicity,
diversity, and ambiguity as positive epistemological and aesthetic values. Put
yet another way, the scaffolding of early medieval English studies was built by
men, for and about men; feminism had a hard time getting a foothold, and by
the time it did, much of its most radical cultural force had already been spent.
Feminism’s revolutionary critical potential, we suggest, is precisely what has
kept it sidelined within early medieval English studies for all these years.
Nearly three decades after Damico and Olsen’s volume and Bennett, Lees,
and Overing’s call for a more methodologically open and inclusive field,
then, early medieval English studies enjoys the fairly regular presence of
women’s voices, both in the source material and in the scholarship. Despite
an exponential increase in scholarly work by and about women, however,
the field has remained peculiarly resistant to the transformative potential of
feminist critique. In the meantime, feminist theory itself has undergone some
radical transformations. By the mid-2000s, critics seemed to reach a tentative
consensus that the feminism of the late twentieth century had lost its revo-
lutionary edge, overtaken by cultural changes that rendered it deradicalized
and politically impotent.13 In response, feminism reimagined itself, largely in
response to long-standing critiques by scholars of color, as one of the many axes
that intersect in projects of social justice and political change. In 2022, feminist
criticism cannot consider gender in isolation from other categories of identity
12 Helen T. Bennett, Clare A. Lees, and Gillian R. Overing, “Anglo-Saxon Studies: Gender and
Power: Feminism and Old English Studies,” Medieval Feminist Newsletter 10, no. 1 (Fall 1990),
15–24, at 18.
13 For an overview, see “Theories and Methodologies: Feminist Criticism Today,” PMLA 121,
no. 5 (October 2006): 1678–1741, featuring Shanna Greene Benjamin, Julie Crawford, Marianne
DeKoven, Jane Elliott, Susan Stanford Friedman, Susan Gubar, Astrid Henry, Sharon Marcus,
Sinead McDermott, and Toril Moi.
Introduction 17
or material existence; it is better conceptualized as one methodology among

many, along with sexuality and critical race studies, studies of Indigeneity,
decolonization, and social inequality, and environmental justice, that seek to
reframe assumptions about the production of knowledge and the potential for
political action. The recognition that gender intersects with other categories
of identity in local and specific ways adds urgency to the long-standing call
for forms of knowledge-making that recognize multiplicity and fluidity as
fundamental to the process of analysis. In other words, feminism may no
longer function as a self-contained field, but its commitment to its original
project of challenging the unacknowledged assumptions that underlie scholarly
discourse has gained a new and pressing impetus in the twenty-first century.
The transformation of feminist thought since 2000 does not render it
impotent or irrelevant. While gender, as an analytical category, cannot and
should not lay claim to the kind of universality it assumed in the 1970s and
1980s, it is still capable of providing some of the critical leverage necessary
to dismantle the prevailing paradigms of academic discourse, especially in
early medieval English studies. The events of 2016, in medieval studies and
beyond, demonstrate that the foundations of academic fields and institutions
remain steeped in colonial exploitation and show the continued need for
this kind of radical, revisionist potential. Excellent work by scholars such as
Dorothy Kim, Sierra Lomuto, Adam Miyashiro, Seeta Chaganti, Matthew X.
Vernon, M. Rambaran-Olm, and the scholarly organization Medievalists of
Color have helped us to see the layers of colonialism, White supremacy, and
ethnic and linguistic nationalism that form the foundations of medieval
studies and the extent to which every aspect of academic life, in scholarship
and in teaching, is compromised by those foundations.14 They have created
14 Dorothy Kim, “Teaching Medieval Studies in a Time of White Supremacy,” In the Middle
(28 August 2017), accessed April 19, 2019, http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2017/08/
teaching-medieval-studies-in-time-of.html; Sierra Lomuto, “White Nationalism and the Ethics
of Medieval Studies,” In the Middle (5 December 2016), accessed April 29, 2019, http://www.
inthemedievalmiddle.com/2016/12/white-nationalism-and-ethics-of.html; Adam Miyashiro,
“Decolonizing Anglo-Saxon Studies: A Response to ISAS in Honolulu,” In the Middle (29 July 2017),
accessed April 29, 2019, http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2017/07/decolonizing-anglo-saxon-
studies.html; Seeta Chaganti, “Confederate Monuments and the Cura pastoralis,” In the Middle
(27 February 2018), accessed January 13, 2021, https://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2018/02/
confederate-monuments-and-cura.html; Matthew X. Vernon, The Black Middle Ages: Race and
the Construction of the Middle Ages (London: Palgrave, 2018); M. Rambaran-Olm, “Anglo-Saxon
Studies, Academia and White Supremacy,” Medium (27 June 2018), accessed April 29, 2019,
https://medium.com/@mrambaranolm/anglo-saxon-studies-academia-and-white-supremacy-
17c87b360bf3; “On Race and Medieval Studies,” Medievalists of Color (1 August 2017), accessed
April 29, 2019, http://medievalistsofcolor.com/statements/on-race-and-medieval-studies/.
18 INTRODUC TION
an epistemic shift in how we can think, write, and talk about medieval
materials—even how we define what counts as “medieval” to begin with.
As a field, we now face the challenge of shifting our work to new founda-
tions—an exciting opportunity to rethink what we do, how we do it, and
why it matters. At the same time, we recognize that we do not all occupy a
level playing field. We began this project with a diverse slate of contributors
that gradually grew less so over the six years of its production. Too many
of our valued colleagues are drastically under-resourced, and they faced
challenges of ill health, family commitments, and competing work claims
that forced them to withdraw. The volume is poorer for the loss of their
contributions, and the situation highlights the urgency of restructuring our
scholarly institutions to better support vulnerable scholars.
This is one reason why we see renewed urgency for feminist criticism—
that is, criticism focused on women and gender, but also criticism that
challenges received wisdom and destabilizes longstanding assumptions,
celebrates multiplicity and fluidity as generators of meaning, and recognizes
difference, in many forms, as productive. We seek to build coalitions with
colleagues whose work in critical race studies, the politics of colonial-
ism and Indigeneity, the histories of sexuality and gender identity, and
environmental justice will allow us to reframe our field in terms that meet
the needs of twenty-first-century scholars. Such work will change how
we undertake scholarship of the early medieval period, but it also has the
potential to radically alter the construction of the field itself, as vast new
configurations of knowledge emerge from these changes in perspective. It
is in this spirit that we offer the essays collected here: to center women and
gender in our narrative of the early medieval English world, and to see how
that recentering shifts the paradigms that govern our inquiry and reshapes
the very foundations of our work. As Scott wrote more than thirty years
ago, we do not seek to abandon the archives or to compromise the rigor of
scholarly methodologies that are rooted in expert knowledge and historical
specificity. We do recognize, however, that the tools of our trade—philol-
ogy, historicism, paleography, codicology, archaeology, and even close
reading—are not ideologically neutral, so we attempt to deploy them with
deliberation, consciousness, and self-awareness. The work presented here
is willing to engage with the discipline’s most foundational assumptions
about early medieval England not as a priori principles but as products of
a particular time and place. By explicitly challenging earlier criticism and
systematically showing how its investments and ideologies have limited
the ways we think about our materials, the essays in this volume take up
the dual enterprise of both dismantling the critical apparatuses of previous
Introduction 19
generations of scholars and building new models informed by a broader

and more inclusive perspective. Taken together, they represent an attempt
to further the epistemological shift of medieval studies and to show what
becomes possible when scholars approach the Middle Ages with a desire
for diverse, inclusive, and potentially radical forms of knowledge.
Our volume opens with a metacritical consideration of how feminist
analysis changes approaches to the study of the early Middle Ages by altering
the lenses through it is viewed. The contributions of many women have been
claimed by men, as Jane Toswell presents in “The Lost Victorian Women of
Old English Studies.” These women had their contributions published by male
authors, such as W. W. Skeat and J. A. Giles, who claimed sole authorship. The
contribution of medieval women is often ignored as well, since they tend to
create textiles rather than large works of stone sculpture. Christina Lee in
“Embroidered Narratives” argues that textiles offer evidence for women’s
literacy and their power in political exchanges, when such items were given
as gifts. Even those medieval women who are vividly remembered, such as
Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, find their true history becomes overwritten
by the stories that each generation tells about them. In “Remembering the
Lady of Mercia,” Scott T. Smith catalogues the multifarious ways in which
many eras grappled with the intractable parts of this virago’s story. After
considering what lenses we have historically used to write and rewrite our
stories of the Middle Ages, our collection turns to four lenses of our own:
affect theory, virginity, medical discourse, and women’s literacy.
Displays of emotion are often connected to women’s expression, yet
this sequence of essays on affect asks readers to revise their connection
of emotional performance to displays of masculinity and femininity.
E. J. Christie turns his attention to masculinity in “Be a Man, Beowulf:
Sentimental Masculinity and the Gentleness of Kings.” Christie opens
by exploring the influence of Victorian attitudes toward manliness on
twentieth-century medievalists such as J. R. R. Tolkien. He then goes on to
examine Beowulf’s characterization as “manna mildust ond monðwærust”
as a Christian formula “relaying gentleness, meekness, and obedience,” vis-
à-vis its treatment by Victorian scholars who treated Beowulf as a paragon
of masculine energy, and later by Tolkien, for the poem is about not duty
and loyalty but grief and regret. Masculinity is likewise the focus of Alice
Jorgensen’s essay “Shame, Disgust, and Ælfric’s Masculine Performance.”
Jorgensen argues that whereas “[t]he ideal male body is contained, chaste,
ordered in its passions, orthodox in its beliefs,” Ælfric depicts the disgusting
male bodies of Herod and Arius as “a convulsive rejection of all that is
pagan, excessive, sinful, and mired in the body’s appetites, especially sex.”
20 INTRODUC TION
The essay “explores the conjunction between disgust and gender in Ælfric’s
writings, arguing that it is an important aspect of how Ælfric constructs
his masculine authority as a preacher.”
In many literary texts virginity remained the ideal for religious women.
Two essays interrogate how early, influential male authors tackle the problem
of virginity. In “The Ornament of Virginity: Aldhelm’s De uirginitate and the
Virtuous Women of the Early English Church,” Emily V. Thornbury argues
that a text written for a female audience, albeit by a man, can reflect the
intellectual lives of its addressees. Aldhelm diverged from his Mediterranean
sources by representing virginity as acquired ornament, but the metaphor
reflects both “the kind of martial imagery loved by Old English poets”
and “early medieval conceptions of an aesthetic practice often associated
with women: ornamentation.” In Thornbury’s analysis, “Aldhelm’s strik-
ing conceptualization of virginity as an ornament suggests he thought of
ornament itself in a way that was not derived from his literary sources,
but instead likely reflects cultural presuppositions that his addressees,
as fellow early medieval people, would have shared.” Thus, she concludes,
“Taken as a whole, Aldhelm’s De uirginitate shows that women could be
imagined—and perhaps imagined themselves—as warriors for virtue as
well as discerning readers, and as artisans fully engaged in the construc-
tion of their moral selves.” One of the most famous early medieval English
virgins is Æthelthryth of Ely, but rather than turning to Ælfric of Eynsham’s
account, as many scholars do, Lisa M. C. Weston returns to his source in
“Chaste Bodies and Untimely Virgins: Sexuality, Temporality, and Bede’s
Æthelthryth.” In Weston’s reading of Bede’s prose narrative and hymn, the
two texts “create a particularly telling epistemological and ontological
connection between sexuality and temporality.” By refusing reproduction
and disrupting dynastic succession, and by occupying both sacred time
and secular time, virgins entangle temporality, gender, and sexuality, and
thus “reveal contradictions that inherently problematize monastic identity
in early medieval England.”
Medical texts are the subject of the fourth cluster of essays. In “Monaðge-
cynd and flewsan: Wanted and Unwanted Monthly Courses in Old English
Medical Texts,” Dana M. Oswald focuses on a phenomenon specif ic to
the female body: “half of the adult population of early medieval England
menstruated.” “The treatments in the leechbooks specific to menstruation,
either provoking or preventing it,” she argues, “exhibit the male/textual desire
to exert control over women’s reproductive bodies, and, in the absence of
their voices but the presence of their textual bodies, the desire of women to
claim control of their actual bodies.” In “Dangerous Voices, Erased Bodies:
Introduction 21
Reassessing the Old English Wifgemædla and Witches in Leechbook III,”

Erin E. Sweany rereads one particular remedy traditionally interpreted
as a defense against a female witch. After a thorough assessment of the
evidence, Sweany argues that the remedy may actually serve a female patient
struggling with her mental or emotional health. “Ultimately,” she concludes,
“the dominant reading and history of scholarly treatment of this entry, when
context is considered, reveals more about our own emotions than those of
the people who compiled and used Leechbook III.” Finally, in “Women and
‘Women’s Medicine’ in Early Medieval England, from Text to Practice,”
Christine Voth explores not just medical texts but charms, prayers, homilies,
and penitentials, to identify and analyze the gender-specific corpus of early
medieval women’s medicine, specifically gynecological and obstetric care.
We finally see women’s own writing in our final cluster of three essays
on women’s literacy. Aidan Conti discusses the career of an early medieval
English nun who traveled to the continent in the late eighth century in
“The Literate Memory of Hugeburc of Heidenheim.” By writing the lives of
her kinsmen Willibald and Wynnebald, Hugeburc became the only known
female hagiographer of the period. Moreover, her work is one of the only
accounts of interactions with Islam in the Holy Land between the early
seventh century CE and the end of the eleventh century. Yet importantly,
Conti concludes, “If making Hugeburc, who remained anonymous for so long,
visible is a feminist act, so too is the unfurling of the concrete histories her
cultural work inscribes, work that serves Western Christendom’s imagined
claims to foreign holdings and its vision of a regulated social order.” Matthew
T. Hussey, in his essay “A Road Nearly Taken: An Eight-Century Manuscript
in a Woman’s Hand and Franco-Saxon Nuns in Early Medieval English
Intellectual History,” reevaluates a cluster of understudied late seventh- and
early eighth-century texts and manuscripts produced by female writers for
female readers, suggesting a scriptorium of nuns in Bath under the influence
of the Frankish church. Moreover, Hussey contests the pejorative assessment
of this work by past scholars. Both Hussey and Conti offer evidence of female
authors, scribes, and scholars working with and within the early medieval
English church. In light of this evidence, and cross-referenced with how
much we do not know about the scribe of Cotton Vitellius A.xv, Stephen
M. Yeager opens “a conversation about three possibilities: first, that the
Beowulf manuscript may have been intended for a readership of women;
second, that it may have been copied by women scribes; and third, that the
poem itself may be attributed to a woman poet.” Yeager’s essay “‘Historical
Accuracy’, Anonymity, and Women’s Authorship: The Case of the Case for
Beowulf ” offers an important reminder of how fundamental questions have
22 INTRODUC TION
been foreclosed by the assumptions, constraints, and blind spots we have

inherited from our scholarly predecessors.
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Introduction 23
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Metacritical Considerations
1 The Lost Victorian Women of Old
English Studies
M. J. Toswell
Abstract
The focus here is on some of the Victorian women scholars who very
significantly but without acknowledgment advanced the study of Old
English: the fierce philologist Anna Gurney, who prepared and quietly
published the first translation of the Old English Chronicle materials; the
widow Mary Conybeare, who assembled and developed the rest of the
material in John Josias Conybeare’s highly influential volume Illustrations
of Anglo-Saxon Poetry, the atelier of women who did most of the work in
the many editions of W.W. Skeat (his wife, his daughters, the translators
Miss Gunning and Miss Wilkinson, and even T.O. Cockayne); and Elise
Otté, who provided significant philological aid to her stepfather Benjamin
Thorpe in the preparation of his editions.
Keywords: Anna Gurney, Elise Otté, Mary Conybeare, W.W. Skeat atelier
Many women—mostly in England, and mostly in genteel but not affluent

households—accomplished a great deal for the field of Old English studies
that has gone largely unnoticed. When this project began, examples of women
scholars, acknowledged, more often under-acknowledged, and most often
unacknowledged, multiplied rapidly. Mabel Day did much of the work of
Israel Gollancz, with cursory thanks and occasional acknowledgments,
including the completion of his edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
a decade after his death.1 Ida Gordon, more obviously in the field of Old
1 Murray McGillivray reminded me of this point in conversation. This project has been par-
ticularly collaborative, and I am very grateful to the many scholars referenced here and to many
others who offered leads and advice. I gave versions of this paper to the Medieval Symposium of
the International Association of University Professors of English (IAUPE) conference at Poznan
doi: 10.5117/9789463721462_ch01
28 M. J. Toswell
English, produced her own excellent edition of the Old English poem The
Seafarer. She was closely involved with the Leeds group of medieval scholars,
including her husband, former teacher, and doctoral supervisor E. V. Gordon
and his close friend J. R. R. Tolkien. The former Ida Pickles published one
article based on her thesis in 1934, but after her husband’s death in 1938 she
completed his projects under his name, and went on to her own as well. To
support her young family she was a lecturer, and eventually a senior lecturer,
at the University of Manchester. Although she held a higher degree than her
husband had when he moved from Leeds to become the Smith Professor at
Manchester in 1931, it seems unlikely that Ida’s scholarly abilities were properly
acknowledged during or after her husband’s lifetime.2 Similarly, W. W. Skeat
points out in passing that Joseph Bosworth’s second wife, the former Anne
Margaret Elliot, did significant work collating manuscript readings for his
work on the Orosius.3 More such scholars no doubt exist, and more work
remains to be done on the scholars I have chosen to focus on here: Anna
Gurney, Mary Conybeare, the women of the Skeat atelier, and Elise C. Otté.
Some work has been done to identify women whose scholarship was
undervalued or ignored in the field of Middle English studies. There is, for
example, the famous case of Hope Emily Allen inviting Sanford Meech to
co-edit The Book of Margery Kempe, and his subsequent attempts to efface
her existence from the work. 4 Similarly, John M. Manly received much
in July 2018, and for the Oxford Medieval English Seminar on October 21, 2020, and received many
useful comments from scholars at both events. I have not been able to spend a lot of time with
nineteenth-century literary magazines and suspect a very great many learned women will be
found in those pages, though by initials or indirect references only. One Victorian medievalist
did explicitly comment on the accomplishments of various scholarly women in the f ield; as
Thijs Porck points out, Joseph Bosworth in his Essentials of Anglo-Saxon Grammar (London:
Longman etc., 1841) in a dedicatory note to Elizabeth Haigh mentions Elizabeth Elstob and
Anna Gurney by name, and animadverts to several other women: see Thijs Porck (@thijsporck)
“Rev. Dr. Joseph Bosworth (1788-1876) dedicated his ‘The Essentials of Anglo-Saxon Grammar’
(1841) to Elizabeth Charlotte Haigh (née Borrell),” Twitter, October 27, 2018, https://twitter.com/
thijsporck/status/1056256761332666370.
2 Ida Gordon’s one article published after her thesis on the sagas of the Vestfirðir was “The
Murder of Thorgrímr in Gíslasaga Súrssonar,” Medium Ævum 3 (1934): 79–94. She published several
articles on her own while also finishing her husband’s edition of Pearl (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1953), the edition of The Seafarer (London: Methuen, 1960) and a book on Troilus and Criseyde
in 1970 after her retirement in 1968. Her library is at St. Andrews University, and some letters,
including exchanges with Tolkien, are at Leeds University Library. Work remains to be done on
Ida Gordon.
3 “Introduction,” in A Student’s Pastime (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896), lxviii.
4 For some of these stories see the excellent Women Medievalists and the Academy, ed. Jane
Chance (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). The seventy-two entries in this work
do not include any of the women discussed here. For female scholars of early medieval English
The Lost Victorian Women of Old English Studies 29
acclaim and scholarly recognition for his work on Chaucer, especially on the
records of his life and the text of the Canterbury Tales, but his colleague at
the University of Chicago, and the co-editor of those works, Edith Rickert,
remains unknown and largely unacknowledged. Mary Haweis singlehand-
edly made Chaucer popular in the nineteenth century with her stories and
adaptations; and Caroline Spurgeon, an important Chaucer scholar in her
own right, had to fight to be appointed the first woman professor of English
in England, at the University of London.5
In the field of Old English studies, the groundwork has been laid. Several
excellent theses, by Julie Towell, Robyn Bray, and Helen Brookman, lead the
way.6 In the field of history of the language, there remains work to be done.
For the backgrounds of the Oxford English Dictionary, research has found the
male mental health patient who provided many citations, but not the many
women who did the same (perhaps with less interesting back stories).7 The
OED introduction points out that Lady Craigie, wife to the editor W. A. Craigie,
revised the arrangement of the entries for U in 1917–1918, but the details of her
work remain unheralded.8 Some women scholars of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries in the United Kingdom are maddeningly hard to identify
because they are subsumed under surnames and the supposedly honorific
“Miss” or “Mrs.” Here I hope only to give some hints about a few of their
stories, and to point the way towards how to uncover more of them. We may
perhaps in future references to the works they abetted or drafted offer their
studies in the United States, see Mary Dockray-Miller, Public Medievalists, Racism, and Suffrage
in the American Women’s College (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Pivot, 2017), especially “Appendix
2: American Women who Taught Anglo-Saxon at the Collegiate Level before WWI,” 84–96, and
Appendices 3 and 4 on Anna Robertson Brown and Mary Gwinn, 96–126.
5 See, for example, the essays by Margaret Connolly on Mary Haweis (1848–1898), William
Snell on Edith Rickert (1871–1938), and Juliette Dor on Caroline Spurgeon (1869–1942) in “Eminent
Chaucerians? Early Women Scholars and the History of Reading Chaucer,” ed. Richard Utz
and Peter Schneck, Philologie im Netz (Philology on the Net) Supplement 4 (2009), accessed
February 20, 2022, http://web.fu-berlin.de/phin/beiheft4/b4i.htm.
The early history of Middle English scholarship itself is best approached with David Matthews,
The Making of Middle English, 1765–1910 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
6 See Julie Ellen Towell, “The ‘rise and progress’ of Anglo-Saxonism and English national
identity: Old English literature in the nineteenth century” (PhD dissertation, Wayne State
University, 2003). I will refer to Bray and Brookman below.
7 See Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the
Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (London: HarperCollins, 2005).
8 For example, in addition to the work of Lady Craigie mentioned in the preface, the two
women who did most of the work on Skeat’s edition of Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, Miss Wilkinson and
Miss Gunning, appear prominently in the prefaces to the dictionary fascicles. Skeat presumably
recruited them to do work for the OED as well as for his own editing projects.
30 M. J. Toswell
names too, so that although they were effaced in the original publications,
we can restore them to their rightful places now, if we can winkle them out.
Anna Gurney (1795–1857)
In 1819, the first translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was published

in England, by someone identified on the title page simply as “A Lady in
the Country.” The soubriquet hid Anna Gurney, the younger half-sister of
Hudson Gurney, and youngest child of Richard Gurney and his second wife
Rachel. Hudson Gurney was a gentleman-scholar in Norfolk, based to the
north of Norwich, but very involved in the learned currents of his day as
the long-standing vice-president in charge of publications of the Society of
Antiquaries. He probably helped arrange publication for his young sister of a
couple of pieces in Archaeologica, and he must have overseen her first steps
in foreign and medieval languages, given that he was already a grown man
when their father died in 1811. Eight years later, she published her translation.
Gurney states in a brief preface that her work was well advanced when she
learned that a full collected edition, with translation and notes, was about
to be published. Her work had perforce depended on printed texts and not
manuscripts, but she went ahead with publication, but “for private circulation”
in a form which might be “convenient for reference.” The edition to which
she referred, by James Ingram, did indeed emerge several years later, in 1823.
However, it is worth noting that although Ingram said he was producing a
collective edition of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, his work has never garnered
many plaudits. It could even be argued that it wrongly overshadowed Gurney’s
forceful and solid translation. Eric Stanley, for example, states:
Among the very best translators from Old English is Anna Gurney, whose
life, as recorded by DNB, was impressively triumphant, and whose work has
received recognition from Norman Garmonsway in an excellent study.9
The “impressively triumphant” life to which Stanley refers is a genuinely

remarkable tale. Gurney was paralyzed when a toddler and had very limited
9 E. G. Stanley, “Translation from Old English: ‘The Garbaging War-Hawk’, or, The Literal
Materials from Which the Reader Can Re-create the Poem,” reprinted in A Collection of Papers
with Emphasis on Old English Literature (Toronto: Pontif ical Institute of Mediaeval Studies,
1987), 83–114, at 104. Stanley later points out that only the school of translators who look to Miss
Gurney as their model avoid the dangers of “poeticizing literalism” (108).
mobility, such that she spent her life in a wheelchair. She learned many
languages, established a school with her partner Sarah Buxton, accomplished
a significant amount of scholarly work, bought and learned to use a Manby
mortar to save sailors from a shipwreck, engaged in political and religious
disputes of the time both inside the influential Gurney family (two brothers
served as MPs) and outside as she strongly influenced parliamentary debate
on issues surrounding the abolition of slavery.10 The family was a Quaker
one, but Anna Gurney’s decisive and incisive mind shows an independence
of thinking even beyond the Quaker norms. Her cousin Elizabeth Gurney
Fry worked for prison reform; Anna worked hard on the emancipation of
slaves in the British Empire, but otherwise focused quietly in Norfolk on
learning and writing. Many scholars came to her at Northrepps Cottage
near Overstrand, or corresponded with her extensively. For example, Sir
Francis Palgrave and Gurney had a lively correspondence, and he writes
a dedicatory epistle to her in his History of England in the first volume,
focused on the early medieval period and published in 1831.11 He might
first have been introduced to Anna Gurney as the son-in-law of Dawson
Turner, a close friend of Hudson Gurney’s, but the letters they exchange
suggest they developed their own highly engaged scholarly and personal
relationship. Many letters to and from her survive in other archives; she
was clearly a treasured and indefatigable correspondent as well as a fine
and independent-minded scholar.12
Gurney’s papers in the Norwich County Archive demonstrate that she
intended to revise her translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, since they
10 For details see G. N. Garmonsway, “Anna Gurney: Learned Saxonist,” Essays and Studies 8
(1955): 40–57, and now M. J. Toswell, “Anna Gurney: The Unknown Victorian Medievalist,” in
“The Study of Old English in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” ed. Haruko Momma and M. J. Toswell,
special issue, Poetica 86 (2016): 69–86. Some excellent material and analysis, which deserves wider
recognition, is to be found in Helen Brookman, “From the Margins: Scholarly Women and the
Translation and Editing of Medieval English Literature in the Nineteenth Century” (Ph.D. Thesis,
University of Cambridge, 2011). Chapter 2 concerns Anna Gurney; other chapters investigate
Lucy Toulmin Smith and Jessie L. Weston. Brookman recently advanced her argument with
further research into some of Gurney’s letters; see her “Accessing the Medieval: Disability and
Distance in Anna Gurney’s Search for St Edmund,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural
studies 10 (2019): 357–75.
11 See Francis Palgrave, History of England Volume 1 (Anglo-Saxon Period) (London: Murray,
1831). Gurney was well known in English learned circles: an anonymous review republished in
The London and Paris Observer 303 (15 May 1831): 305–306 refers to his “dedicatory Epistle to
that distinguished Anglo-Saxon scholar, Miss Anna Gurney.”
12 The Gurney Archives are deposited with the Norfolk County Record Off ice in Norwich;
the catalogue is at http://nrocat.norfolk.gov.uk/, accessed July 3, 2015, and I am grateful to the
archivists for access to the collection.
32 M. J. Toswell
include an unbound copy sporting marbled end-papers and marked through-

out with her own relatively extensive notes in the margins. For example, she
underlines “Emperor” twice on page 2, and writes “Caesar” in the margin, but
later crosses out the note. Later on the same page for “overcome in a terrible
battle” she has a very wavy underline, and in the margin “griesly” (presumably
for “grisly”) and below that in pencil “grievous.” Most pages have similar
entries, correcting small points or offering translations with greater nuance.13
Gurney was a notable scholar, and it seems clear that she was contemplating
the publication of a revised translation. However, that is not what happened
to her translation. We have no evidence from her letters or notes as to what
transpired, but it would appear that she permitted John Allen Giles (1808–1884)
to use her work, with only the slightest hint of acknowledgment. J. A. Giles
has perhaps a claim to be an early journeyman scholar, willing to prepare
whatever work a press might want. He himself claimed in a trial in 1855 that
he had published 120 volumes, which is a substantial accomplishment for
someone not yet fifty. In the late 1840s he seems to have produced nearly ten
of these, one of which, in 1849, was a translation of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica
and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle produced for Bohn’s Antiquarian Library.14 In
the preface, Giles makes two illuminating remarks. First, he acknowledges that
Gurney provided the translation that he uses as the basis for his own work:
More than 120 years passed before this historical record [the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle] again attracted the notice of the public, or the labours of an
editor. It was then translated into English throughout from the text of
Gibson by a learned lady still living, Miss Gurney; to whom, both my
enterprising publisher and myself are largely indebted for her kindness
in facilitating the present edition, and to whom we gladly take this op-
portunity of acknowledging the debt.
Miss Gurney’s translation was printed for private circulation, and did
not receive the final polish of the fair translator, who was deterred from
bestowing further labour upon a work which was shortly to be undertaken
by one of our ablest antiquaries.15
Gurney’s translation is presented here by Giles as lacking polish, and

also presented as a document which facilitated this work. Giles kindly
13 See Norfolk Record Office, Gurney of Bawdeswell Collection, RQG 410.

14 J. A. Giles, ed. The Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of England and the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1849).
15 Giles, ed. The Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of England, xliii.
and patronizingly acknowledges the debt to Gurney. Giles’s implication,

of course, is that he has provided the polish, and taken the rough-hewn
work of Anna Gurney and made it into something worthy of publication.
Later in the introduction Giles adds a further annoying and illuminating
comment, as he admits that he used Petrie’s edition with its collations of
the six manuscripts, but that this edition only went to 1066:
But, as the edition of Mr. Petrie extends only to the year 1066, it has
been necessary to form a text for the latter portion of the Chronicle from
other sources. To effect this the translation of Miss Gurney, has, with the
consent of that amiable lady, been taken as a ground-work, and numerous
additions, variations, and notes, have been introduced by a collation of
her text with that of Dr. Ingram.16
In other words, Giles lightly revised Gurney’s translation by reference to

Petrie’s Latin edition collating six manuscripts while saying that he was
doing a new and idiomatic translation, but after the year 1066 he simply used
Gurney’s text, with some collation to the pre-existing edition of Ingram.
Once again, the patronizing tone is in evidence referring to Gurney as
“that amiable lady.” The correspondence between Gurney and Giles does
not survive, which is unfortunate. Gurney’s surviving letters do suggest a
woman of great generosity and goodness of soul, but there is an elegance
and scholarly precision to her writing that was wholly lacking in Giles. She
probably regretted letting him have access to her work.17
Anna Gurney only published a few pieces of scholarship, although it
is clear from the notes of her executors that they found large quantities
of translations and analyses in her f iles after death. It seems particu-
larly unfortunate that the forthcoming publication of an edition of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle by James Ingram, former Rawlinson Professor of
Anglo-Saxon at Oxford and about to become president of Trinity College,
Oxford in 1824, meant that she decided not to publish her translation but
simply to make it available in private circulation. Few copies survive, as a
result. And then, having been so carefully polite about not stepping on the
toes of James Ingram, it seems the more annoying that the prolific John
16 Giles, ed. The Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of England, xliv.

17 Work remains to be done on Gurney. At her death, Lucy Rushmore (one of her executors)
attempted a list of translations and analyses she had prepared and ready for publication. There
are over thirty, which seem all to have been lost (RQG 412), and there is a separate entry for a
translation of Snorri Sturleson’s Ynglinga Saga (COL 7/27).
34 M. J. Toswell
Allen Giles would “borrow” her translation and use it for his publication.
Since Ingram’s edition was a two-column one with Old English on the left
and a facing translation on the right, and presumably Giles had access to
this text since he used it for the Old English when Petrie’s edition ran out,
it seems striking that he chose rather to use Anna Gurney’s text. It was
the right call, as her translation is livelier and more accurate than that
of the former professor of Anglo-Saxon. Yet, since Giles essentially just
assembled the volume from an Old English text and Gurney’s translation,
it seems unfair that her work was not acknowledged as that of a translator,
on the title page.
Mary Conybeare (1790–1848)
Well-known is the story about how John Josias Conybeare (1779–1824) as-
sembled a wide array of poems in Old English, edited them, and translated
them, partly while he served as Rawlinson Professor of Anglo-Saxon at
Oxford between 1808 and 1812, and then Professor of Poetry from 1812–1821.
Similarly well-known is the fact that after his death in 1824 his brother
William, a geologist of some distinction, completed the work of his magnum
opus and in 1826 published the Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry, the first
real attempt in England to present and translate the surviving poetry of
the period.18 John Earle, a later Rawlinson chair, describes it in his book
as having “had a great effect in calling the attention of the educated,
and more than any other book in the present century has served as the
introduction to Saxon studies.”19 Conybeare’s was the book on the shelves
of the educated elite of the United Kingdom and North America, those
who were interested in literature and the origin stories of the English.
Longfellow had it, and so did William Morris. Robert Southey received his
copy as a gift from Mary Conybeare, but used it and referred to it, as did
the brothers Wilhelm and Jakob Grimm, and Sir Walter Scott. Conybeare’s
contribution to Old English scholarship has often been underrated or
dismissed, partly because Conybeare (like his brother William) was also
a well-known geologist, and furthermore a beloved vicar, first in Cowley
and later in Batheaston, publishing extensively in the f ield of theology
as well. He did not focus solely on early medieval English topics, writing
18 John Josias Conybeare, edited by his brother William Daniel Conybeare, Illustrations of
Anglo-Saxon Poetry (London: Harding and Lepard, 1826).
19 John Earle, Anglo-Saxon Literature (London: SPCK, 1884), 45.
also on early French poetry, and he was a scholar and antiquarian in

the tradition of the Society of Antiquaries (though he did not join the
Society, but merely published several times in Archaeologia). Conybeare was
genuinely engaged with Old English, unusually for a Rawlinson professor
at that time, but he was not solely interested in this field. However, at the
unexpected end of his life his focus was on completing the Illustrations,
which he had announced and set up a subscription list for nearly ten years
earlier. He had published a sequence of articles about Old English poetry
just after he left the Rawlinson chair in 1812 (all in 1813 and 1814), but in
1817 he sent out a letter to appear in The Gentleman’s List advertising the
future publication of Illustrations of the Early History of English and French
Poetry and inviting subscribers to the publication, for the express purpose
of building a school in Batheaston. The letter indicates that Conybeare
planned to put together some lecture notes, many of his publications on
Old English and early French poetry, and to assemble collations he had
completed, for example of Beowulf. He also planned to include a French
text he called Rout of Roncesvalles, now better known as the Chanson de
Roland.
My concern here is the role played by Mary Conybeare in f inishing
and publishing her husband’s already-subscribed Illustrations after his
unexpected death. Robyn Bray’s 2013 thesis about J. J. Conybeare is il-
luminating on this point, and is also the only scholarship on the topic. Bray
usefully also provides transcriptions of correspondence, notably letters
from William to Mary about the work, and has done much archival work
investigating the background and the significance of the Illustrations.20
At Conybeare’s death, about eighty pages had progressed past proofs,
and just over eighty more pages were typeset, as the preface of the book
indicates. He was, Bray points out, in London overseeing the progress of
the book when he died quite suddenly, apparently having an apoplectic
fit one day in June and dying the following day. The letters Bray provides
20 See Robyn Bray, “‘A Scholar, a Gentleman, and a Christian’: John Josias Conybeare (1779–1824)
and his ‘Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry’ (1826)” (PhD dissertation, University of Glasgow,
2013), available at http://theses.gla.ac.uk/4709/, accessed August 18, 2015. Bray’s thesis considers
the preparation and publication of the book in very great detail, as well as the biographies of
the two brothers and the reception history of Illustrations. She makes the argument about the
importance of Mary Conybeare in the publication of Illustrations, but does not go as far as I do
in wanting the widow to have publishing credit for the work. Partly, no doubt, that is because
we have only the letters written by William D. Conybeare to his sister-in-law and not hers to
him (as deposited in the Cheshire and Chester Archives and Local Studies Service and edited
by Bray). For all the information in this section I am deeply indebted to Bray’s thesis.
36 M. J. Toswell
make it clear both that Mary had Latin and that she was unhappy about
William’s choices with respect to the texts in the volume. Only William’s
half of the correspondence survives, edited by Bray, but he is clearly
answering very scholarly questions and responding to questions as well
on the content of the publication. The letters also reveal that Mary used
her own funds to pay what William considered to be a bill from the
printer that she should ignore since legally he was responsible for the
publication as the second author, and she, as the widow of the first author,
was not. Elsewhere William claims that he has added only a hundred
pages of the 382 that the book is being printed at, and that Mary should
underwrite any losses on the rest. This contradicts the statement in the
book’s preface that at Conybeare’s death only eighty pages were printed
and eighty more pages typeset. By William’s account, he added only a
hundred pages to the 160 the preface lists, which means that about 120
pages are unaccounted for.
The correspondence, even though only one side of it survives, reveals
that an extensive negotiation is taking place, and that Mary appears to
have her own set of materials, and possibly of proofs, so that both she and
William are entering corrections and additions to the material. They also
appear to have wrangled over the title page, with Mary wanting William’s
role to be saved for a page or so later in the volume. That is, she wanted
her deceased husband to be the sole author listed on the title page. Mary
lost that battle. Elsewhere in the correspondence, she does appear to have
prevailed in another battle, this one an issue of scholarship. The sources
of all the materials are carefully presented in the table of contents, and
several pieces from Archaeologia are reprinted exactly as they appeared
in publication, not revised as William wanted. The correspondence is
fascinating, and Mary’s input is clearly engaged and scholarly. That is,
although it clearly never occurred to her to put her own name on the
title page, Mary seems to have been very closely involved indeed in the
editing, proofreading, and publication. She was also solely responsible for
the distribution as she seems to have been the one who sent out copies
of her late husband’s volume to subscribers and to scholars in the field.
She may well have had the editing of the missing third of the volume in
her charge too, although the surviving documentation does not provide
enough information. Her name should have been on the title page. We
should, acknowledging the extent of her role as devoted widow and learned
spouse, well able to engage in debate and negotiation with her husband’s
brother, list her as co-author now.
The Skeat atelier
An atelier generally refers to a studio in which a master painter leads a

team of apprentices, assistants paid and unpaid, and other artists in the
creation and completion of many works of art. For some products of the
atelier, the leader will be obviously working hard, and for others the leader
will simply organize and coordinate the work of subordinates. Invariably,
an atelier is highly productive or it collapses, and it is always difficult to
discern where the master has placed a brush on the canvas, and where
not. W. W. Skeat (1835–1912) is perhaps more famous for his work in Middle
English, especially his editions of Piers Plowman and Chaucer’s Canterbury
Tales, or for his successful championing of the English Dialect Society
and its dictionary project, or for his involvement in the Oxford English
Dictionary. For scholars of Old English, however, he is best-known as the
editor of the one set of prose texts edited in the nineteenth century whose
edition has only just now been superseded: Ælfric’s Lives of Saints in two
volumes.21 I want to argue here first, that Skeat essentially ran an atelier
for this project, and second, that this project could well serve as a model
for how Skeat accomplished much of his scholarly publication. Moreover,
I want to argue that most of the members of Skeat’s atelier were women
and were not paid for their labor, but they should now be acknowledged
for their work.
Skeat himself states in the last paragraph of the “Preliminary Notice” to
volume one of the Lives of Saints:
The modern English version of the Homilies, though revised by myself,

is almost entirely the work of Miss Gunning, of Cambridge, and Miss
Wilkinson, formerly of Dorking, who with great perseverance have
translated not only most of the text as contained in this first part, but
nearly all of the remaining Lives belonging to the same series.22
21 I worked with the Skeat archive in King’s College London for three stints—an exploratory
visit in July 2016, during which I was helped by Adam Cox as Archives Assistant, then a week
in March 2018 and two individual days in May 2018, when I was helped by Katrina DiMuro,
Archives Assistant, and Lianne Smith, Archives Services Manager. I am very grateful for their
assistance. It should be noted for the record that Skeat did also publish a synoptic edition of
the vernacular gospels under his own name, which remained in use for over a century, but that
work was the completion of a project begun by John Mitchell Kemble.
22 Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, vol. 1, ed. Walter W. Skeat. EETS o.s. 94 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1890), vii. The volume was originally published in two parts, o.s. 76 in 1881 (up to 256),
and o.s. 82 in 1885 (to 553).
38 M. J. Toswell
At the end of the preface to the second volume of the same work, Skeat
makes a similar point:
Amongst these my chief thanks are due to Miss Gunning, of Cambridge,

and the late Miss Wilkinson, for the preparation of the greater part of the
English translation which accompanies the old text.23
Skeat further refers to their “great perseverance and care” and notes that
although he revised the whole text (including the six texts for which he
did his own translation or used other translations), “the alterations made
were, on the whole, inconsiderable.”24 Miss Gunning and Miss Wilkinson,
always a matched pair, also appear in the preliminary matter to several
other Skeat productions: for example, volume six of his Chaucer edition
has the following:
As regards the Glossary, I have much pleasure in recording my thanks

to Miss Gunning and Miss Wilkinson, of Cambridge, who prepared the
“slips” recording the references, and, in most cases, the meanings also,
throughout a large portion of the whole work, with praiseworthy careful-
ness and patience. My obligations to these two ladies began many years
ago, as they undertook most of the glossarial work of my smaller edition of
the Man of Law’s Tale (with others); work which is now incorporated with
the rest. It required some devotion to analyse the language of Boethius
and the Romaunt, of Melibeus and the Parson’s Tale, all of which they
successfully undertook.25
In other words, these “two ladies” prepared the glossary for Skeat’s six-volume
edition of Chaucer. They are also among those thanked for preliminary work
in the early fascicles of the Oxford English Dictionary, and they seem likely
to have been quite adept at the kind of detailed language work demanded
by Professor Skeat.
Today, of course, the translators of the Old English text into a readable
and readily comprehensible modern English version would be listed as
co-authors, and the historical linguists who prepare glossaries tend to get
23 Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, vol. 2, ed. Walter W. Skeat. EETS o.s. 114 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1900), liv. This volume was also originally published in two parts, with o.s. 94 to 224 in
1899, and o.s. 114 to 474 in 1900.
24 Skeat, ed., Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, vol. 2, lv.
25 See W. W. Skeat, Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, vol. 6, Introduction, Glossary and
Indexes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), xxii.
special recognition of their contributions. Special recognition does not,

in the twenty-first century, mean a few generous comments near the end
of the “General Introduction” of an edition with only one named editor.26
The Lives of the Saints was strikingly not an edition with a great deal of
paratext: the annotations are few and are focused largely on the manuscript
evidence for each homily, there are sparse textual notes indicating detailed
collation of the manuscripts for the texts in the collection, and there is no
glossary. In fact, the two volumes consist of a short introduction by Skeat,
the transcription, the translation, and a scant ten pages in each volume of
notes and references. Skeat says in his comments, as quoted above, that he
revised the translations produced by the Misses Gunning and Wilkinson,
but then he also indicates that those revisions involved “inconsiderable”
alterations. We can, therefore, conclude based on Skeat’s own comments
that Skeat is really not responsible for the translation. The Skeat Archive
frequently includes notes on the manuscripts of the saints’ lives, and Skeat
clearly did do considerable work in looking for these texts and seeing what
parts of particular lives appeared in other manuscripts and other contexts.
His introduction to volume 2 provides useful material on this, and sifts
through the available published material on Ælfric, particularly on his
corpus, by Dietrich and by Cockayne.
Then, however, we come to the question of the transcript. Kathryn
Maude in a recent article quotes Skeat’s own comments provided above
and concludes sarcastically that “[h]alf of the work in this edition, then, has
been done by Miss Gunning and Miss Wilkinson, whose translations of the
Lives run alongside the transcription made by Skeat.”27 My concern here is
with the other half of the volume, beginning with the transcription from the
manuscripts. Did Skeat do the transcription himself? It would appear not.
The Skeat archive includes transcriptions of many of the Ælfrician saints’
lives, but the hand is not Skeat’s, nor is the layout and formatting his. A point
worth pursuing is that Skeat seems to have served as literary executor for
his former King’s College School teacher, T. O. Cockayne, who died by pistol
shot in 1873.28 Early in his career Oswald Cockayne published on Greek and
Latin, but for the last fifteen years of his life his focus was Old and Middle
26 Kathryn Maude makes the same point that I make here, using exclusively the evidence
quoted here from a prefatory note to the Lives of Saints, in “Citation and Marginalisation: The
Ethics of Feminism in Medieval Studies,” Journal of Gender Studies 23 (2014): 247–61, at 254.
27 Maude, “Citation and Marginalisation,” 254.
28 See now Daniel F. Kenneally and Jane Roberts, “Oswald Cockayne (c. 808–1873): Clerk in
Orders, Schoolmaster, Scholar,” in Poetica 86 special issue The Study of Old English in Nineteenth-
Century Europe. Ed Haruko Momma and M.J. Toswell (2016): 107–37. Anne van Arsdall provides
40 M. J. Toswell
English, and he is particularly well-known for his three-volume Leechdoms.29

Some of his notebooks for this edition survive in the Skeat Archive; his hand
for transcription and annotation is particularly striking: crabbed, elegant,
using Old English letter forms for difficult letters, very upright, and quite
difficult to read. Precisely the same hand transcribes the manuscripts of
the Ælfric saints’ lives, and into very similar notebooks to those used for the
medical material.30 Moreover, Skeat acknowledges that he had Cockayne’s
transcriptions of these texts, and more, that he used them, in the preface
to volume 2. He explicitly describes them as having “two drawbacks,” the
first being the use of Old English characters and the second that marks of
contraction were disregarded (Cockayne, following the classical tradition,
probably silently expanded abbreviations). Skeat concludes, “Otherwise, it is
extremely correct; as might have been expected.”31 Earlier in this paragraph
Skeat notes that the transcription for this volume was lost in large part
and had been re-transcribed. He states explicitly: “in default of other help,
I made the transcript of sections 33–36 myself.” These sections are the last
four texts of the volume, the lives of Euphrosyne, Cecilia, Chrysanthus and
Daria, and Thomas. They account for ninety pages of the volume (forty-five
subtracting the translation), and Skeat considers it noteworthy that he
had to make the transcription himself for just about one-quarter of the
volume. The conclusion is relatively obvious. Skeat clearly did not ordinarily
transcribe the texts he published (since he clearly provides this information
here as something unusual in his experience), save where he explicitly says.
Maude asserts that Miss Gunning and Miss Wilkinson did half the work
of the publication with their translation and she implies that Skeat did the
other half. In this she appears to be wrong, though she would no doubt be
extensive information about Cockayne in the first two chapters of her Medieval Herbal Remedies:
the Old English Herbarium and Anglo-Saxon Medicine (London: Routledge, 2002).
29 T. O. Cockayne, Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England: Being a Collection
of Documents, for the Most Part Never before Printed, Illustrating the History of Science in this
Country before the Norman Conquest (London: Longman, Green, 1865).
30 The Skeat Archive includes many notes and notebooks which are by Oswald Cockayne,
and I suspect as many as three or four boxes in the archive were Cockayne materials that Skeat
did not feel comfortable jettisoning, while he happily got rid of his own preliminary notes and
drafts. Part of the transcription of the Ælfric lives of saints is at 4/2/1 and 4/2/2, in Cockayne’s
hand and with a pencil collation written in above, also in a very neat hand. 4/2/3 has some
translation from Ælfric, but the hand is small, neat, and pointed—not Cockayne, nor Skeat.
This box consists of many matching bound notebooks, also including transcriptions from the
Liber Scintillarum. There are also a number of looseleaf letters addressed to Cockayne here and
in some later boxes.
31 Skeat, ed., Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, vol. 2, liv.
irked to learn that in addition to not doing the translation, Skeat also did
not do nearly all the transcription. He had Cockayne’s superb work, and he
appears to have had other help as well.
Before returning briefly to Skeat’s translators and glossary-makers, I
want to discuss some of that other help that Skeat had. George Parker of
the Bodleian Library transcribed many manuscripts for Skeat, including
Piers Plowman, Joseph of Arimathea, various songs and ballads, and much
more.32 His wife, Frances Parker, seems also to have done some work; she
contributed a list of Oxfordshire words to the English Dialect Society, and
then produced a far longer supplement for an issue involving five different
reports on dialects in different areas of Britain, which then required a
glossary, prepared by her husband.33 Parker’s daughter also seems to have
done transcriptions, though possibly not for Skeat.34 In the archive, Skeat’s
own hand is rather large and a bit sloppy; he often used pencil, and marked
sections that he had already sent to press and had had returned with blue
pencil to avoid confusion. The archive in general has transcriptions and
notes in many hands. Often, fair copies of texts that Skeat published,
clearly being returned by a press after use, are definitely not written by
Skeat. Two more specific pieces of evidence also appear in the archive:
f irst, a set of British library tickets in the name E. Brock accompanies
some transcripts,35 and second, a letter to Skeat in 1890 appears from
someone he was attempting to recruit as a manuscript assistant.36 The
32 For example, Skeat Archive 4/9 includes a transcript from Bodleian Library MS 16 in an
envelope labelled from George Parker to Reverend Professor W. W. Skeat.
33 My thanks to Matthew Townend for pointing me in this direction. Skeat provides the
information in his “Introduction” to Series C. Original Glossaries, English Dialect Society (London:
Trübner, 1881).
34 According to the editor, Miss A. F. Parker transcribed the relevant manuscript in 1890 “under
the direction of her father, Mr. George Parker, senior assistant in the Bodleian Library. My sincere
thanks are due to her for the fidelity and skill with which she accomplished a difficult task”:
see John Bale’s Index of British and Other Writers, ed. Reginald Lane Poole with the help of Mary
Bateson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), xxvi.
35 Box 4.18. E. Brock seems likely to be Edmund Brock, who edited the “Alliterative Morte
d’Arthur” as Morte Arthur, or The Death of Arthur, EETS o.s. 8 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1871), and other texts as well. Andrew Breeze is investigating Brock’s work.
36 The letter is at 17/3, and the proposal appears to have been to collate a transcription with
four other manuscripts. The writer, in Vienna, provides Skeat with the hourly rate to be charged,
and an estimate of the time the job would take. One example of the other material in the archive
is a notebook with Q&A materials by four women (Miss M. Ellis, Miss C. Ellis, Miss Douglas
and Miss Thomas) on various medieval topics, each answer lasting a couple of pages, and then
notes by Skeat on the authorship of various medieval texts. The notebook is at Skeat Archive
17/9. The women seem to have been students.
42 M. J. Toswell
Skeat atelier, then, included a broad range of individuals who completed

the transcriptions for Skeat, after he had identified and taken notes on
the manuscripts.
Next, there is the participation of Skeat’s own family. The Skeat archive
includes a considerable number of envelopes addressed to Mrs. Skeat,
some from Oxford University Press with stamped indications that proofs
are included.37 It seems likely that Skeat’s wife organized, and probably
participated in, proofreading. Proofs went to her directly. Elsewhere, Skeat
thanks his daughter, Miss Clara L. Skeat, for preparing an index of words
for his The Science of Etymology.38 Several packages of proofs and other
materials in the archive are also addressed to “Dr. B. M. Skeat,” with the same
address in Cambridge as Skeat himself. This is Bertha Marian Skeat, Skeat’s
first child, born in 1861. She was a student at Cambridge in the mid-1880s
and completed her examinations in medieval and modern languages. She
was not, of course, permitted to take a degree or to enter for an advanced
degree at Cambridge. She appears to have obtained a teaching certificate
in Cambridge, and a doctorate in Zurich, and later co-founded a school
for girls, Baliol School, in Sedbergh. Her thesis at Zurich was an edition of
the Middle English The Lamentatyon of Mary Magdaleyne, so she was well
qualified as a medievalist.39 Proofs and other materials were also posted
to her in Sedbergh, and some materials were mailed by her from Sedbergh,
so she did some of the family work even while headmistress of a school.
She appears to have handled issues of images and permissions, for the
press addressed material along these lines specifically to her. In later life,
Bertha continued her work in the family business, even publishing some
work in the annals of the English Dialect Society. She never married and
was buried beside her parents.
Skeat was apparently very much opposed to allowing women to study at
Cambridge, stating that “[e]ven the B.A. degree would enable them to take 5
books at a time out of the University Library … I am entirely opposed to the
37 For example 2/3 has Skeat’s edition of Chaucer’s Astrolabe, addressed to Mrs. Skeat at 16
Normanton Road.
38 Skeat Archive 13/4 proofs of The Science of Etymology. A note on p. x reads, “For the Index of
Words, which I have carefully revised, I am indebted to my daughter, Clara L. Skeat.” The proofs
themselves have occasional evidence of the Skeat scrawl, but quite a lot of very neat copperplate
writing not only marking typographical errors but asking questions and probing the argument.
I suspect that Clara did a lot of work on this volume.
39 Bertha M. Skeat published the thesis as The Lamentatyon of Mary Magdaleyne (Cambridge:
Fabb & Tyler, 1897). She dedicates the work “to my Father and my Mother” and in the short account
of her life on the last page she lists “Professor the Rev. Dr. Skeat” first amongst the professors
and teachers under whom she has studied and to whom “my thanks are specially due” (64).
admission of women to ‘privileges’ of this character.”40 Skeat’s attitude to the

emancipation of women seems obvious here. But this view is contradicted by
his treatment of his own family. Skeat had two sons (including Walter Wil-
liam, a prominent anthropologist noted for his work on the Malay Peninsula),
and three daughters. All three of his daughters completed degree courses
at Newnham College. Bertha, as noted above, also completed a doctorate
at Zurich. The second daughter, Clara, is listed as a science teacher in 1901,
and she continued to live in the Skeat home at 2 Salisbury Villas (today
27 Station Street) in Cambridge into her late thirties. The third daughter,
Ethel Skeat, became a noted geologist, receiving a doctorate late in life from
Trinity College Dublin for her contributions in the field.41 Skeat was also a
founding member of a society pursuing the higher education of women at
Cambridge, and he taught students at the nascent Newnham College as a
member of its committee of management.42 Like his friend Henry Sidgwick,
the principal founder of Newnham, Skeat may not have been a feminist
and he certainly held contradictory views about the education of women,
but his daughters probably did have his financial and emotional support
in order to complete degree programs and work independently.
Michael Lapidge, in a fine study of Skeat, comments that his edition of
the saints’ lives has not been superseded, and notes that “[i]t is rumoured
that a large team of scholars is now contemplating the Herculean task which
Skeat undertook and brought to completion by himself.”43 Although in a
footnote Lapidge does refer to Miss Gunning and Miss Wilkinson, he has
significantly overstated Skeat’s accomplishment here. This edition was not
the product of one individual, but the work of the Skeat atelier. Skeat appears
to have requested the destruction of all his personal papers and letters after
40 Skeat made the comments in a letter to Henry Sidgwick in June 1887, now in the Newnham
College archives. I have not seen the letter, but it is much quoted (and the quotations vary
signif icantly): see, for example, Rita McWilliams-Tullberg, Women at Cambridge: A Men’s
University—Though of a Mixed Type (London: Victor Gollancz, 1975), 89.
41 See The Role of Women in the History of Geology, ed. C.V. Burek and B. Higgs (London: the
Geological Society, 2007); Ethel Skeat is referred to passim by her married name of Ethel Woods.
Evidence about the Skeat household in several censuses is provided at https://capturingcambridge.
org/hills-road-area/station-road/27-station-road-salisbury-villas/, accessed February 20, 2022.
42 See The Englishwoman’s Review of Social and Industrial Questions 17 (January 1874), 42 and
79. I did not find Skeat’s name in the lists of those permitting women to attend their lectures,
however. See also Mary Agnes Hamilton, Newnham: An Informal Biography (London: Faber,
1936), 91.
43 Michael Lapidge, “Walter W. Skeat,” in Interpreters of Early Medieval Britain, ed. Michael
Lapidge, The British Academy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 37–47, at 42.
44 M. J. Toswell
his death.44 There are scattered references to his sons ripping and tearing up
all his correspondence. No doubt the evidence identifying Miss Gunning and
Miss Wilkinson was there lost. One elegant handwritten translation of an Old
English sermon survives in the Skeat Archive, which looks to be a version of
Wulfstan’s sermon on the First Sunday in Lent, and could perhaps have been
completed by any member of the Skeat family, or by Miss Gunning or Miss
Wilkinson.45 Miss Gunning is always listed as being of Cambridge, but Miss
Wilkinson is initially of Cambridge and later of Dorking.46 They are given as
together contributing between 5,000 and 8,000 quotations for the first two
letters of the New English Dictionary, and elsewhere a Miss J. E. Wilkinson
and Miss Gunning of Cambridge are cited by J. A. H. Murray as reading books
for the dictionary and extracting 7,500 quotations (which may well be the
same accomplishment).47 The two women are unusual in almost always being
listed together, and they also always seem to have done a great deal of work.
Skeat was lucky to have them in his atelier, along with at least three women
from his own family, and an extended group of transcribers and helpers
he recruited through colleagues and friends. The surviving notebooks and
materials in his archive clarify that his notes on etymology, his etymological
dictionary, and his work on dialect all tend to be in his own hand. So also are
notes on manuscripts and on which texts appear in particular manuscripts;
it seems clear that he often did go through manuscripts in order basically
to catalogue them, to list their contents for transcription, but only rarely to
transcribe them himself. He found the materials, organized their transcription
and translation, wrote introductions, and wrote the separate books and
dictionaries about the English language that were his own genuine and
individual contribution. Somehow, in future references to these materials,
we will have to find a way to reference the Skeat atelier for works like the
saints’ lives and the Chaucer and Piers Plowman editions.
44 The archivists at King’s College told me that the family went through the archive and
eliminated a lot of material, fulfilling Skeat’s wishes. They did not provide a reason.
45 The document is item 16/1 in the archive.
46 I made some preliminary efforts to identify these women, and found some tantalizing
hints, but was really not successful. More research, given the stability of their locations, would
repay the effort. Daniel Thomas provided me with the evidence of an anonymous reviewer of
the edition of Ælfric’s Lives of Saints who never mentions Skeat but focuses entirely on the work
of Miss Gunning and Miss Wilkinson in the British Quarterly Review 75 (1882): 259.
47 “List of Readers and Works Read for the Society’s Dictionary 1879–1884,” in Thirteenth
Address of the President to the Philological Society, J. A. H. Murray (Oxford: Oxford University,
1884), 141; for the “Appendix to the Preface” to the OED by J. A. H. Murray, see http://public.oed.
com/wp-content/uploads/Volume-I-A-and-B.pdf, accessed February 20, 2022. The reference is
at xv.
Elise Charlotte Otté (1818–1903)
Elise Otté offers an entirely different paradigm for analysis: she was the
strong-minded half-Danish stepdaughter of Benjamin Thorpe. She appears
to have found her work of preparing his Old English scholarship for him
so annoying that in 1840 she left England for America to build a better life
for herself. Some years later she briefly returned to work for him, but she
then moved to St. Andrews in Scotland to work on scientific research, and
she established her own research agenda, writing books on the history and
culture of Scandinavia. For her, however, we have no archival materials to
explore, and only the evidence of her life and publications, and what others
said in print about her. Our principal source on her connection to Thorpe
is Edmund Gosse, the poet and art critic who had deep connections to
Scandinavian materials.48 His obituary of her, published in The Athenaeum
on 2 January 1904, is our only direct source for Elise Otté as doing significant
amounts of work on Thorpe’s publications in Old English. We have some
corroborating evidence that she heavily criticized her stepfather and found
his regime onerous, both in her sudden departure for America and in an
addendum to Gosse’s obituary published by a woman who knew both
Otté and Thorpe, E. S. Day. The story is an interesting one and will reward
investigation beyond that provided here.
Otté was the daughter of a Danish father and an English mother, so
she was bilingual from a young age. Her father died in Santa Cruz in the
Danish West Indies when she was very young, and her mother returned to
Denmark, where she met and married Benjamin Thorpe, who was there to
study Old English with Rasmus Rask. There is extensive corroboration for
Thorpe’s time in Denmark, which marked the beginning of his work in Old
English (previously the only evidence we have about him is that he was a
banker in Paris). He studied there for four years, and at the end of that time
he published his translation of Rasmus Rask’s Anglo-Saxon Grammar in
48 Gosse wrote an obituary: “Miss Otté,” The Athenæum (2 January 1904), 15. I have not yet found
other references to Elise Otté in Gosse’s very extensive publications; presumably he met her
through his many Scandinavian contacts, though I can find no direct reference in, for example,
Sir Edmund Gosse’s Correspondence with Scandinavian Writers, ed. Elias Bredsdorff (Gyldendal:
Scandinavian University Books, 1960). Gosse’s extreme statements about the way Benjamin
Thorpe oppressed and hounded his stepdaughter to do his work are somewhat refuted in some
additional notes to the obituary sent in by E. S. Day, and published two weeks later, also in The
Athenaeum (16 January 1904), 82–83. Gosse’s views are reflected in the very useful website on
Germanic Mythology at http://www.germanicmythology.com/scholarship/EliseCOtte.html,
accessed June 18, 2018. These views have recently been added to the Wikipedia entries for
Benjamin Thorpe and Elise Otté.
46 M. J. Toswell
1830. He also moved back to England with his new wife, the former Mary
Otté, and his new stepdaughter Elise. Given that we have little outside
information, it is perhaps worth noting that Elise Otté, aged twelve at the
time of the move back to England, did not take her stepfather’s surname.
According to Gosse, Thorpe required his stepdaughter to learn several
modern languages as well as Old English and Old Norse, and required that
she help him with his scholarship. Since she was born in 1818, Otté was
of an age to have been instrumental in Thorpe’s big publications in Old
English in the late 1830s and 1840s, although Gosse unfortunately does
not provide details. Thorpe published very heavily between 1830 and 1845,
and since Gosse describes Elise Otté as helping him in his work from a
“tender age,” it seems quite possible that she was involved in much of this
work. Thorpe published mostly editions, the Junius manuscript in 1832,
“Apollonius of Tyre” and his textbook for learning Old English in 1834, the
Paris Psalter both prose and verse in 1835, the laws and institutes in 1840,
gospels and also the Exeter Book in 1842, ten volumes of homilies from
1843–46, and so on. The workload is certainly a heavy one, made more
explicable if Otté were carrying a significant portion of it. In 1840, as Gosse
tells the story, she escaped, all the way to Boston. She studied physiology
at Harvard, and her interest in science marks the rest of her life. We do
have some independent corroboration of her activities at this point, from
two of her diaries deposited with the John Quincy Adams archive in the
Massachusetts Historical Society.49 In the materials with the archive she is
listed as a private tutor who travels to New York and Canada with Adams
and the Grinnell family in 1843. We have no authority other than Gosse for
her decision to return to England and to her work with Thorpe, apparently
in the mid-1840s, more specifically to help with the edition of the Old Norse
poetic Edda (eventually published by Thorpe in 1866, although Gosse says
1856). The edition of the Edda may well have been in part her project, given
her greater fluency in the relevant languages.
Gosse contends that about 1849 she escaped Thorpe again, this time to
work with the Welsh physician George Edward Day when he accepted the
Chandos Professorship of Anatomy at St. Andrews University in Scotland.
From this point, we have excellent outside corroborating evidence for Otté’s
independence and excellence as a scholar. She began publishing under her
own name, notably with concise grammars of Danish and Swedish, and two
49 The Massachusetts Historical Society online catalogue ABIGAIL describes this as two
volumes in a box, the “Elise Charlotte Otte Diary, 1843,” http://balthazaar.masshist.org/cgi-bin/
Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=local&PAGE=First, accessed February 20, 2022.
histories of Scandinavian countries. She also translated and published works

by several Scandinavian and German scientists, including Alexander von
Humboldt. One further corroborating piece of evidence is available in this
subject area as well: Benjamin Thorpe began work on a translation of part of
Johann Martin Lappenberg’s history of England in 1834, but did not complete
and publish the work until 1845, when Otté had returned.50 After his death
in 1870, Otté prepared a second edition of this work, and her prefatory “Note”
suggests very close knowledge of what Thorpe included and discarded; note
also her own inclusion of that discarded material, as well as revisions and
the creation of chapters. The new edition is described on the title page as
revised by E. C. Otté, and it was published in 1881.51 This volume is the only
one I can find of Thorpe’s extensive œuvre in which Otté’s name appears
anywhere; notably, it was published after his death, and could not have
been published without Otté’s revisions. Moreover, although she is careful
to be entirely calm and precise in her comments about materials left out
and put in the previous version, the very fact that Otté comfortably alters
the material in the translation suggests both her mastery of the material
and her disagreement with Thorpe about its presentation.
More work needs to be done on Otté and her career as a translator and
as unacknowledged assistant for her stepfather. There are problems with
Gosse’s obituary, given the very excessive and overblown nature of his claims,
and given his own career as a polemic poet and thinker.52 He seems to have
used only hyperbole to describe Thorpe’s “tyranny” and his “oppression”
of his stepdaughter, forcing her to aid in his work. After all, she did choose
to return to Thorpe’s home after she trained as a physiologist at Harvard,
and after she had earned her own living as a private tutor for some years.
Moreover, E. S. Day, the daughter of George Edward Day (Otté’s employer
for her scientific work for some decades), corrects many points in Gosse’s
rather tendentious obituary, including his misunderstanding about the
group of scientists that Otté worked with in Scotland, her parentage and
50 Johann Martin Lappenberg, A History of the Anglo-Saxon Kings, trans. Benjamin Thorpe
(London: John Murray, 1845). Thorpe’s “Translator’s Preface” provides the information about
when he started the work. It is certainly the case that when he started the work Elise Otté was in
his house, but 1844 would be early for her return to England even according to Gosse’s timeline.
51 J. M. Lappenberg, A History of England Under the Anglo-Saxon Kings, trans. Benjamin Thorpe,
rev. ed. E. C. Otté, 2 vols (London: George Bell, 1884).
52 The only other scholarly comment I can find on Otté is a few sentences in Rosemary Ann
Mitchell, “‘The Busy Daughters of Clio’: Women Writers of History from 1820 to 1880,” Women’s
History Review 7, no. 1 (1998): 107–34. Mitchell concludes that “Her vacillations between indepen
dence and discipleship shed light on the ambiguities of the father-daughter relationship” (111).
See https://doi.org/10.1080/09612029800200164, accessed February 20, 2022.
48 M. J. Toswell
age at the time of her death, and where she first lived in England as a young
child. Day states that Otté did not live with Thorpe when she emigrated to
London with him and with her mother (which seems unlikely on the face of
it since she was at best twelve), and she also argues against Gosse’s claims
with respect to the state of Otté’s health. On this point she states that Otté
did not suffer back injuries from nursing Day in his last years but rather
had a spinal curvature which developed decades previously. She finishes
with comments on Benjamin Thorpe, her “dear old friend”:
A bookworm and an oddity he certainly was, but he was much more

than that. I visited him and his charming wife from 1862 until the time
of his death; and whatever his stepdaughter found him, to me he was
the kindest of hosts, making me free of his library, and giving up many
hours in order both to interest and please me. It is not every old scholar
of over eighty who will take pains to make learning beautiful in the eyes
of a schoolgirl, as I then was.53
On Otté, therefore, some further research seems necessary to me. The

trustworthiness of Edmund Gosse is a point to pursue, since George Edward
Day’s daughter found so very many errors of fact and interpretation in
his obituary, which is our clearest evidence for Otté as helpmeet to her
stepfather. One or two other notices of Otté’s death look simply to have
been brief versions of Gosse’s comments, and are in no way original. The
DNB entry is also a Gosse effort, although with some further material in its
second iteration, especially on her Scandinavian knowledge. Certainly, later
in life Otté demonstrates considerable historical knowledge of Denmark,
Iceland, and Scandinavia more generally.
We do know from Elise Otté herself that she held strong views on suffrage,
and the evidence of her independence of mind and movement corroborates
her firm, if somewhat stilted stand. She published her comments in the
1879 volume Opinions of Women on Women’s Suffrage. Her highly logical
argument on the matter takes up the question of those women who do
not want suffrage and might see having the right to vote as “burdensome
and distasteful.” First, she points out that similar comments might apply
to men but “no one would for a moment pretend that any such individual
contingencies could be advanced as reasons why Englishmen should not
retain their constitutional right of having a voice in the election of those
who legislate upon the questions which most closely affect the interests of
53 E. S. Day, letter to The Athenæum dated January 7, 1904, published January 16, 1904 (83).
each individual member of the community.” She states that should women
suffer from this ignorance and indifference, then “it would seem the more
imperative that they should be made participants with men in the exercise
of those electoral duties and privileges to which Englishmen are wont to
point” to claim their enlightened and superior state.54 Women should get the
vote so that, like men, they can complain about the difficulty of exercising
it prudently and judicially. Elise Otté was a sharp and independent thinker,
listed in the suffrage volume as a figure from literature and the arts, and
the author of Scandinavian History “& c.”—evidence that she saw herself
as a serious academic.
On the question of whether Elise Otté should share in the publication
credits of her stepfather Benjamin Thorpe, a firm conclusion cannot as yet
be reached. She certainly had the languages and the historical knowledge,
and it would appear that she did not speak well of Thorpe and felt that he did
take advantage of her work. Certainly, for the first edition of the Lappenberg
translation she should be listed as co-editor, given the certainty with which
she produced the second edition and made her editorial decisions (although
the counter-argument that Thorpe prevailed and presented the translation
as he wanted it would certainly be available). But for some of Thorpe’s other
works, further evidence is necessary. I think that evidence can be found,
though not by me.
The business of scholarship involves sharing ideas and sometimes work
of various kinds; most of us entrust our work to others before we even
submit it for publication, in the hope that our more egregious errors will
be caught for us, and our awkward syntactic and lexicographical moments
highlighted. In revising this chapter, I was able to take advantage of two
very careful readers and their queries, before the paper ever went into
submission. We all have stories about situations in which insuff icient
credit was given for ideas and for words by one scholar to another whose
work was borrowed or read unoff icially. And perhaps we all recognize
that the strong can prey on the weak. Many universities now have explicit
policies about how graduate student work does not belong to the supervisor
and the details of attribution must be clearly laid out. Certainly, at the
beginning of the nineteenth century, where my f irst case study began
with Anna Gurney, her behavior in stepping back and offering only a
private circulation of her translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was
exemplary—perhaps too exemplary. Mary Conybeare was content to do
54 Opinions of Women on Women’s Suffrage (London: Central Committee of the National Society
for Women’s Suffrage, 1879), 25.
50 M. J. Toswell
a lot of work behind the scenes and as the devoted widow wanted only
J. J. Conybeare on the title page of her husband’s last work, also perhaps
too exemplary an approach. Elise Otté, made of sterner stuff, took her
opportunity to revise her stepfather’s work and to get her name on the title
page, although her only opportunity came after his death, and it seems
possible that she should have more credit for her accomplishments on
Benjamin Thorpe’s Old English editions. And Walter W. Skeat, the grand
Victorian patriarch, acknowledges the work of others on his productions,
but in prefaces and introductions and never on the title page. Were it not
for those acknowledgments, we would not have the names of the women
who did the lion’s share of the work for his publications—so at least he
recognized their contributions. But now, in the twenty-first century, we
can do better than that.
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2 Embroidered Narratives
Christina Lee
For Betty 1
Abstract
This essay discusses the significance of embroidery in the culture of Early
Medieval England. Largely the work of women, such objects have been un-
derstudied in the cultural, religious and economical history of the period.
The essay argues that this omission is partly based in gender stereotypes
which have favored some material culture over these remains. The essay
discusses some of the remaining artefacts, as well as the significance of
textiles as objects in gift-giving contexts.
Keywords: Women, embroidery, textiles, textile production, opus feminile,

gift giving
This essay will argue for the importance of embroidered textiles as artifacts
that provide a unique window to the participation of women in Early Medieval
England in the political, socio-economic, and intellectual life of the period.2
Textile gifts played a significant role in the creation of relations, but the study
1 This paper could not have been written without the seminal work of Elizabeth “Betty”
Coatsworth, to whom the essay is dedicated. I was her research assistant between 1998 and 2001
on the Manchester Medieval Textiles Project, which she co-directed with Gale Owen-Crocker,
and I am grateful that she opened my eyes to this important source. My sincere thanks go to
Rebecca, Renee and Robin who allowed me to participate in this project. I am grateful for their
work and friendship. A special thank you goes to Dr Alexandra Lester Makin who read a draft
of this paper and provided most generous feedback. I would also like to thank the anonymous
reviewer for helpful comments. All mistakes are mine.
2 Since writing this essay a seminal book on Early Medieval English embroidery was published
by Alexandra Lester Makin, The Lost Art of the Anglo-Saxon World: The Sacred and Secular Power
of Embroidery (Oxford: Oxbow Press, 2019).
doi: 10.5117/9789463721462_ch02
54 Christina Lee
of textiles remains a specialized (and mostly gendered) area of research.

This essay will consider the reason for such attitudes. While the surviving
textile evidence pales in comparison to what remains of other sources, it is
nevertheless a significant resource of female expression and agency.
Early medieval people were careful and snazzy dressers, if we can believe
the evidence we get from graves. Tablet-woven borders, embroidery, and
jewelry did not just enhance the beauty of costume but were also markers
of class and gender.3 Iconography shows changes in fashion (and artistic
style) from the rather rigid depictions in eighth-century Lichfield/St Chad
Gospel (Litchfield Cathedral, MS Lich. 1) to the billowing style of the eleventh
century, evident in depictions, such as Hope and Humility in the Cotton
version of the Psychomachia (London, British Library, Cotton Cleopatra
C. viii 17r), or the dress of Queen Emma in the manuscript of the New Minster
Liber Vitae (London, British Library, Stowe MS 944, fol. 6). All of these items
had to be made by a skillful textile worker. It is often assumed that textiles
were made in domestic environments by the women of the home, but even
there the production of enough clothing for the family and extended kin was
a time-consuming and highly skilled occupation. Cloth had to be made by
producing yarn from fiber in complex processes of retting (linen) or carding
(wool) and then spun into yarn of different thickness and strength. Textiles
were woven; at first on the warp-weighted horizontal loom, and from the
ninth-century onward on horizontal looms and then the treadle loom,
which was (re)introduced around the turn of the millennium. 4 Weavers
used patterning and colors to achieve interesting effects. Garments had
to be cut and sown and expensive garments were further adorned with,
for example, tablet-woven borders. Evidence from material culture and
iconography suggests that textile work was predominantly the domain
of women: as makers and commissioners, and as producers of wealth and
revenue.5 While the twelfth-century Liber Eliensis suggests that by the end
of the period men may have been involved in the making of textiles, they
3 For scholarship see, Gale Owen-Crocker, Dress in Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge: Boydell,
2004); Penelope Walton-Rodgers, Cloth and Clothing in Early Anglo-Saxon England, AD 450–700
(York: Council for British Archaeology, 2007), Kathrin Felder, “Networks of Meaning and the
Social Dynamics of Identity. An Example from Early Anglo-Saxon England,” Papers from the
Institute of Archaeology PIA 25, no. 1 (2015): 1–20.
4 Gale Owen-Crocker, “Dress and Identity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology,
ed. David Hinton, Sally Crawford, and Helena Hamerow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011),
91–116.
5 For an overview view see Laura Michelle Diener, “Sealed with a Stitch: Embroidery and
Gift-Giving among Anglo-Saxon Women,” Medieval Prosopography: History and Collective
Biography 29 (2015 for 2014): 1–22, at 4–6.
Embroidered Narratives 55
appear to have been the exception even then.6 Embroidery continued to be

a female sphere, even when textile production became a male-dominated
occupation in the medieval period.
The contribution that women made to the economies of their time as
producers or workers of fabric have often been overlooked, but there has
been a welcome reconsideration of opus feminile in recent years.7 This
revaluation has led to some consideration of the importance of women’s
labor by textile and art historians,8 but there is still a need to bring this
research to a wider attention within research into early medieval England
and to give it equal status to other material culture, such as sculpture and
metalwork which is regarded as the result of supposedly “masculine” work.
Textiles were not just garments to wear; the genre also includes tablecloths,
wall hangings, and other artifacts: items of prestige, given as gifts to kings
and saints. As such they are an important currency in the creation of political
ties, as well as networks of prayer and commemoration.9 A good example
is that of Bugga, an eighth-century nun, who seeks prayers of intercession
for her dead parents from Boniface (also known under his English name,
Wynfrið). In exchange she sends him a gift of an altar cloth and money:
“Et per eundem portitorem tibi transmitto nunc quinquaginta solidos et
pallium altaris” (and for their journey [lit. ferrying (to a heaven)] I send
you now fifty solidi and an altar cloth).10 Gift exchanges of this kind are
6 The 1134 inventory lists: “one cope of black purpura, well decorated and star-spangled all
over, which Wulfstan first, and later Guthmund worked upon, but Ralph completed….” This
is followed by an orphrey made by Prior Thembert; Janet Fairweather ed., Liber Eliensis: A
History of the Isle of Ely from the Seventh Century to the Twelfth, Compiled by a Monk of Ely in the
Twelfth Century; Translated from the Latin, with an Introduction, Notes, Appendices and Indices
(Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2005); Bk II, I, chap. 50, 358. I am grateful to a comment made
by Dr Lester Makin that perhaps the male contribution to the garment may not be the stitches
but the metalwork of the item.
7 Several major research projects in England and especially Scandinavia have delivered
important collections of research. Among them are the Lexis of Cloth and Clothing under the
direction of Gale Owen-Crocker, http://lexisproject.arts.manchester.ac.uk/, accessed February 24,
2022, and the ongoing work of the Copenhagen Centre for Textile Research. The centre has
done a significant revaluation of the Birka textiles in Sweden, https://ctr.hum.ku.dk/, accessed
February 24, 2022.
8 Among the very significant studies are the Relics of St. Cuthbert, which include significant
textile sources and which I discuss further on: C. F. Battiscombe ed., The Relics of St Cuthbert
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956).
9 Diener, “Sealed with a Stitch,” 2.
10 Letter 16 (AD 722), Reinhold Rau ed., Die Briefe des Bonifatius, Willibalds Leben des Bonifatius:
nebst einigen zeitgenössischen Dokumenten (Darmstadt: Wissenscahftliche Buchgesellschaft,
1968), 62.
56 Christina Lee
not unusual; Boniface himself liked to create networks with important

contemporaries through gifts, including textiles.11 Thus he sent Bishop
Pehthelm a donation of a white coat embroidered with dots (pallium albis
stigmatibus variatum) and a “shaggy” (villosam) cloth to dry the feet of his
fellow religious in the Maundy service.
Opus feminile: Woman’s Work and Economic Impact
The main focus of this essay is the use of textiles as objects of prestige
exchanges, but it should not be forgotten that they could also be paid as
taxation (same as food stuffs) and had an important role in medical care.12
Clearly the labor of spinning, weaving, and manufacture was an important
aspect of economy, which raises the question of whether there were specialist
workshops, run by women. For example, was the “clean cloth” required in
many medical recipes, made at home or by specialist weavers?13 We know
that wide-ranging trade connections in early medieval Europe created
access to all kinds of exotic items, but we are less aware if there was still
a need to finish raw materials, such as the silk thread which is used for a
surgical procedure described in Bald’s Leechbook to close a cleft lip?14 Our
scant knowledge of physicians in early medieval England, with few named
persons and even less evidence for surgeries, suggests that practitioners
were usually men, but it is possible that the specialized material for their
work is dependent on skilled women.15 While comparisons between dif-
11 Reinhard Rau, ed. and trans., Briefe Bonifatius, letter 32, 106.
12 For the use of textiles in medical applications see Christina Lee, “Threads and Needles: The
uses of Textiles for Medical Purposes,” in Textiles, Text, Intertexts, Festschrift for Gale Owen-Crocker,
eds. Maren Clegg Hyer and Jill Frederik (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2016), 103–17.
13 See Herbert J. de Vriend, ed., The Old English Herbarium and Medicina de Quadrupedibus,
EETS o.s. 286 (London: Oxford University Press, 1984), 58.
14 Oswald Cockayne, ed., Leechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcraft: Being a Collection of Docu-
ments, for the Most Part Never before Printed, Illustrating the History of Science before the Norman
Conquest, 3 vols, Rolls Series 35 (London: Longman, Green 1864–66), II:56.
15 The question of female healers is fraught with difficulty since there is not much evidence.
Named healers are male, but this does not mean that women did not participate in healing or
at least in the acquisition of the materia medica which were required. Many ingredients for
remedies are from the garden or farm, such as butter or leek, and there has been a suggestion
that the so-called “cunning women” had some association with healing. See Tania M. Dickinson,
“An Anglo-Saxon ‘Cunning Woman’ from Bidford-On-Avon,” in The Archaeology of Anglo-Saxon
England: Basic Readings, ed. Catherine. E. Karkov (New York: Garland, 1999), 359–74. Recently
scholars such as Emily Kesling and Christine Voth have pointed to female ownership of medi-
cal texts and healing associated with female saints; Emily Kesling, “The Royal Prayerbook’s
ferent medieval cultures should always be made with caution, we may

nevertheless take a careful look at early medieval Scandinavia. Here female
manufacturers produced fine twills and intricate expensive goods in urban
workshops which were then carried to all areas of the Viking world, including
the British Isles.16 It is also likely that in the wake of such trade skilled
textile workers migrated to other parts in order to start businesses, which
subsequently led to changes in the economy of these areas.17 In the Western
Isles of Scotland flax cultivation arrives with the Vikings—and we should
assume that this labor-intensive fiber was grown there because conditions
were ideal for it.18 Flax requires a high level of humidity and water for retting
and it is thus not inconceivable to consider that the Scandinavian women
of the Western Isles arrived not just as an appendage of male settlement,
but as entrepreneurs in their own right.19
One of the most difficult challenges for the study of textiles is that fact
that so little of it has survived, in particularly from the pre-Christian period.
While there is a fair amount of surviving textile evidence (albeit much of it
in fragments), and while many more textiles only survive as imprints, which
means that it is replaced by the metals on which the fiber decayed, examples
of embroidery are rare. Penelope Walton Rogers counts only three specimens
from early graves: two in women’s graves and one from a male burial.20 All
of them have a demonstrable “high end” context—and one of them is from
Blood-Staunching Charms and Early Insular Scribal Communities,” Early Medieval Europe 29,
no. 2 (2021): 181–200.
16 Michael Parker-Pearson et al., “Cille Phedair: the Life and Times of a Norse Period Farmstead,”
Land, Sea and Home: Proceedings of a Conference on Viking-Period Settlement, at Cardiff, July 2001,
ed. John Hines, Alan Lane, and Mark Redknapp (Leeds: Maney, 2004), 252.
17 In fact, Michelle Hayeur Smith claims that women across the North Atlantic Viking diaspora
gained stronger roles in households and regional economies: “Some of these more powerful roles
appear to have arisen not only from producing cloth, that was vital to the medieval economy but
from the very nature of textile work”; The Valkyries’ Loom: The Archaeology of Cloth Production
and Female Power across the North Atlantic (Gainsville: University of Florida Press, 2020), 23.
18 Eva Andersson Strand, “Tools and Textiles: Production and Organisation in Birka and
Hedeby,” in Viking Settlements and Viking Society: Papers from the Proceedings of the Sixteenth
Viking Congress, ed. S. Sigmundsson et al. (Reykjavík: University of Iceland Press, 2011), 13. In order
to fulfill the most basic needs for a medium Norse household of ten people, two women would
need to perform 325 days of labor each; see Hayeur Smith, Valkyries’ Loom, 101 and Table 5.5. Her
work is based on research by Tom McGovern. Even with recycling and a limited set of clothes,
this suggests that perhaps not all textiles were made on the farm.
19 Christina Lee, “Costumes and Contacts: Evidence for Scandinavian Women in the Irish
Sea Region,” in The Vikings in Ireland and Beyond: Before and after the Battle of Clontarf, ed. H.
Clarke and R. Johnson (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2015), 284–96.
20 Cloth and Clothing, 101.
58 Christina Lee
a so-called “relic box” at Kempston in Bedfordshire. The purpose of these

small, cylindrical containers, which are found in seventh-century high
status graves, has been much discussed. Ideas have ranged from work boxes
to containers for relics, but we tend to think now that these are associated
with some form of religious function.21 Prior to the availability of burial
in hallowed ground as part of a churchyard, relics may have been used to
create sanctified spaces in cemeteries.22 In the period of Conversion such
sites will have housed Christians and pagans alike, and while burial is often
complex and has many regional variations, there have been suggestions that
the so-called “founder graves” contained items which were representative for
their kingroup.23 The inclusion of textile “relics” in any such burials suggests
that women were seen as mediators of religious and fulfilled an important
function of creating links between the various generations of the kingroup.
Falling Through the Cracks: Disciplines and Discomfort
While the significance of textiles in the economic, political and religious life
of early medieval England should be evident from the examples above there
are reasons why research into them feature so little in the discussions around
culture and identity in early medieval England. Whereas most scholars can
comfortably distinguish an early hand from a later script, few would be able
to tell the difference between a woman’s costume from the sixth century
in contrast to that of the tenth century. At a time when discussions around
the “veil” are ubiquitous, we may wish to consider that the way in which
people dressed is not always a question of “frivolous” fashion or ethnic
21 Catherine Hills, “Work-Boxes or Reliquaries? Small Copper-Alloy Containers in Seventh

Century Anglo-Saxon Graves,” in Studies in Early Anglo-Saxon Art and Archaeology, Papers in
Honour of Martin Welch, ed. Stuart Brookes, Sue Harrington, and Andrew Reynolds (Oxford:
Archaeopress, 2011), 14–19; see also: Elizabeth Crowfoot, “Textile Fragments from ‘Relic Boxes’
in Anglo-Saxon England,” in Textiles in Northern Archaeology: NESAT III, ed. Penelope Walton
and John P. Wild (London: Archetype Publications, 1990), 47–56. In Scandinavia needle cases
were found in high status female graves, such as Birka grave 943. This burial of a woman also
contained weights which identify her as a potential trader; Eva Andersson Strand and Ulla
Mannering, “An exceptional woman from Birka,” in A Stitch in Time: Essays in Honour of Lise
Bender Jørgensen, eds. Sophie Bergerbrant and Sølvi Helene Fossøy (Gothenburg: Gothenburg
Archaeological Studies, 2014), 301–16, at 307.
22 Sally Crawford, “Votive Deposition, Religion and the Anglo-Saxon Furnished Burial Ritual,”
World Archaeology 36 (2004): 87–102.
23 Duncan Sayer, “Death and the Family: Developing Generational Chronology,” Journal of
Social Archaeology 26 (2010): 59–91.
identity, but of individual choice which may reflect personal belief. Textiles
do not normally feature in the syllabi of university courses or anthologies
on early medieval England. The neglect of this type of evidence occurs for
several reasons. To begin with, the study of textiles is a specialist subject and
requires expert knowledge, and therefore textile studies are discussed by
specialists in separate papers and journals which are not always apparent
to other scholars. Many of the practitioners, who are almost all women,
are located outside departments which traditionally study early medieval
England, such as English, History, or Archaeology, and in many cases they
are employed in research institutions outside universities, such as museums.
Additionally, many textile historians research as independent scholars,
which means that they may not be included in conference calls or invited
to participate in other forms of academic dissemination. I would also like
to argue that the omission of textile evidence also has a gender bias, since
other forms of material culture, such as metalwork or sculpture, which are
presumed to have been made by men, are included.24
While reconstructions of dress have played a signif icant role in the
discussion of migration and identity,25 the makers of such dress have not.
The textiles from burials have been studied in depth by textile historians,
such as mother and daughter Grace and Elizabeth Crowfoot, who have shown
that materials and techniques can show cultural connections with other
parts of the world as much as the gold and garnets of metalwork, but also
that there appear to be ways in which people learned their craft from others.
While many archaeological reports contain a report on textile remains, very
few include the outcomes in the general discussions unlike considerations
of dress accessories, such as brooches or buckles. If textile work is taught
by mothers to their daughters, then there will be visible differences in
techniques—which again can be used for the study of mobility. There is a
wholly untapped area of comparative research.
If spinning and weaving in early medieval England are mentioned at all
in scholarly discourse it is often in the context of literature. This is especially
evident in the case of the famous peaceweaver, freoðuwebbe, mentioned in
the poems Widsið, Beowulf, and Elene—a term that has been discussed much
in relation to gender, agency, and social position.26 While the freoðuwebbe
24 The sculpture of early medieval England, unlike in Scandinavia where we have named rune
carvers, was made by anonymous craftspeople.
25 For a recent critical study see James Harland, “Memories of Migration? The ‘Anglo-Saxon’
Burial Costume of the Fifth Century AD,” Antiquity 93, no. 370 (2019): 954–69.
26 To name but a few: Larry Sklute, “Freothuwebbe in Old English Poetry,” Neuphilologische
Mitteilungen 71 (1970): 534–40; Maren Clegg Hyer, “Textiles and Textile Imagery in the Exeter
60 Christina Lee
commands on interesting role in these texts, it is restricted to few women

who are shown in the context of male politics. Recently Megan Cavell has
shown that while weaving and binding are used as a metaphor in many
Old English texts, the evidence for “real” textiles is rare.27 So perhaps the
omission of textile work and materials in much of the scholarship of early
medieval England is justified by the paucity of mentions in literary works?
It is perhaps because textile production is primarily associated with
women that this kind of occupation conjures up uncomfortable connotations
of restriction and domesticity in some scholars (to which I will return below).
There may also be an assumption that this kind of work was done largely by
lay women who had leisure time, and was not an output of women who were
participants in cultural discourses, which may be a reason why so much
precedence is given to other forms of material culture. Since the 1980s a
significant rise in feminist studies of women in early medieval England has
produced some extremely fine work, encompassing literary depictions of
female characters, historical queens, and religious women. While there have
been many efforts to make women of the period visible, most examinations
are centered on the context of their place in heroic society, or in relation to
male power, male teaching, and exhortation. Studies of medieval women
are often done on the normative template of maleness—thus women can
only gain recognition on a scale which is dominated by male activities
(fighting, ruling, etc.), whereas uniquely female areas of activity, such as
child rearing or textile working, are overlooked and sometimes dismissed.28
It is worth considering that characteristics which we regard as relating
to femaleness or maleness may not the same as those of people in early
medieval England, and that it is important to see how gender identities were
constructed during this period. The binaries of woman versus man, and a
reductionist approach which sees one only in connection with the other, have
been queried by Clare Lees and Gillian Overing.29 While it now is generally
agreed that biological gender and gender identity are two different things,
Book,” in Medieval Clothing and Textiles I, ed. Robin Netherton and Gale R. Owen-Crocker
(Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005), 29–39; and most recently Megan Cavell, Weaving Words and
Binding Bodies: The Poetics of Human Experience in Old English Literature (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2016).
27 Weaving Words, 18.
28 While research has recently begun to query binary representations of the past, popular
culture such as the television series Vikings stresses the idea that a woman’s story is only interest-
ing if she adopts traditionally male roles, such as “warrior.”
29 “The Clerics and the Critics: Misogyny and the Social Symbolic in Anglo-Saxon England,”
in Gender in Debate from the Early Middle Ages to the Renaissance, ed. Clare A. Lees and Thelma
S. Fenster (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 18–39.
we may want to query what exactly was regarded as uniquely feminine in the
society of early medieval England.30 Lees and Overing remind us that, unlike
in later periods, there is no overarching concept of “woman”: “A woman
in this culture is a wife, or a queen, or a relative of a man or his family, a
lover, but she rarely is ‘woman’ in either the misogynist or existentialist
sense of the term.”31 Just as the period of early medieval England has been
constructed through differentiation, in terms such as “Pre-Conquest” and
the like, the classification of women through binaries such as “powerless/
powerful” limits our understanding.32
There may be a reason why researchers are so hesitant to consider
traditional forms of female work: as a type of labor which is undoubtedly
undertaken by women it became associated with their limitations, because
it is associated with domesticity and with it an idea that such work restricted
women’s movement outside the home or that it even constrained them to
subservient roles away from male halls of power. Evidence is drawn from
literary passages, such as Old English Maxims I: “Fæmne æt hyre bordan
gerisað, widgongel wif word gespringeð” (A woman should be at her em-
broidery, a roving woman arises talk; lines 63b–64a).33 These lines seem to
support the idea that textile work was not only reducing women’s ability
to move freely, but also limited them to enforced domesticity, especially
when we consider that the next lines declare that her looks will deteriorate
if she does not follow this advice (lines 64b–65). This seemingly misogynist
statement does, however, require some form of contextualization. We need
to be very careful not to mistake modern ideas associated with needlework
for medieval realities. The notion that embroidery restricts women’s develop-
ment and freedom can be traced as far back as the eighteenth-century when
30 The seminal work is Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,
10th Anniversary Edition (London: Routledge, 1999) and Toril Moi’s “What is a Woman?” in What
is a Woman and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 369–93. Butler’s ideas have
been influential in the way we think about gender identities in discussions of medieval burial
archaeology: see, for example, Roberta Gilchrist, Gender and Archaeology: Contesting the Past
(London: Routledge, 1999).
31 Lees and Overing, “Clerics,” 25. There are few texts that centre on the functions of the female
body; exceptions are medical texts (of which only few have survived), which focus mostly on
fecundity, and Bede’s inclusion of Gregory’s advice to Augustine in which he declares menstrua-
tion to be a disease; Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, eds. and trans, Bede’s Ecclesiastical
History of the English People (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), Bk I, 27, p. 92. I’d like to thank the
reviewer for pointing me to Bede.
32 Lees and Overing, “Clerics,” 25–26.
33 The Exeter Book, ed. George Philip Krapp and Elliott van Kirk Dobbie; The Anglo-Saxon
Poetic Records III, (London: Routledge, 1936), 159.
62 Christina Lee
writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft rejected needlework as confining the

faculties that women could otherwise employ. It should be remembered
that Wollenstonecraft wrote in response to ideas of the Enlightenment
expressed in works such as Emile by the influential author Jean-Jacques
Rousseau.34 However, the “frivolousness” of needlework only applied to
aristocratic women and those of the nascent bourgeoisie; for lower-class
women needlework remained as a useful industry which allowed them to
earn an independent income.35 Needlework thus attained a doubly negative
association: as a lower class occupation, and therefore not seeming for women
who did not need to earn an income, and at the same time as a frivolous
pastime which limits the intellectual potential. Thus participation in the
intellectual sphere and needlework are posed in opposition, but we need
to understand that this perception does not apply to the early Middle Ages.
Instead, embroidery is an occupation which is the privilege of powerful
women and the produce of this labor can bring about power and connections,
as well as one in which they can participate in intellectual discourses.
Connecting Threads
Returning to the passage from Maxims I, it should be noted that while the
term fæmne is usually translated as “women.” However, it predominantly
occurs in context of virginal women and the Virgin Mary.36 For example, it
glosses virgo/innupta “virgin, unmarried woman” in Aldhelm’s glosses37 and
is used for Eve in the Old English Genesis poem.38 Thus the line in Maxims
I seems to indicate a specific type of woman: unmarried or virginal. The
circle of women for whom this advice is intended is therefore restricted: it
could be intended for a royal nun, or an unmarried noble woman, or both.
34 Vindication for the Rights of Women, 75. Cited in C. Hivet, “Needlework and the Rights of
Women in England at the End of the Eighteenth Century,” in The Invisible Woman: Aspects of
Women’s Work in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Isabelle Baudino, Jacques Caree and Cecile
Revauger (London: Routledge, 2016), 37–46, at 39. Wollenstonecraft had herself experienced
the hardships of a life as a seamstress, Hivet, “Needlework and the Rights of Women,” 45.
35 “Needlework,” 42.
36 Dictionary of Old English A to I online, eds. Angus Cameron, Ashley Crandell Amos, Antonette
diPaolo Healey et al. (Toronto: Dictionary of Old English Project, 2018) accessed February 25,
2022, https://tapor-library-utoronto-ca.
37 Arthur S. Napier, ed., Old English Glosses: Chiefly Unpublished (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1900), 12.
38 A. N. Doane, ed., Genesis A: A New Edition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press: 1978 ),
l. 884, “freolucu fæmne.”
There is ample evidence for such women in historical sources, and a fair few
of them are involved in the making of embroideries. For example, according
to the eleventh century Liber Eliensis the eleventh-century noblewoman
Æðelswið retired to the monastery at Coveney, near Ely. Rather than getting
married, she spent her days producing gold embroidery and splendid tapestry
at her own expense with her puellulae (group of young girls).39 Jane Tibbetts
Schulenburg offers an impressive catalogue of royal ladies who are either
producers or commissioners of such works in early medieval Europe. 40
Such items were “acts of piety and devotion, … made as special gifts for
churchmen, favourite saints, and for the adornment of the ‘supreme spouse’,
along with the ‘hall and table of the Lord.’”41 From Aldhelm’s description of
Bucge, daughter of King Centwine of Wessex (679–685) we hear that she was
not just the founder of a church, but endowed it with all kinds of objects,
including gold-embroidered altar cloths. 42 It is interesting to note in this
context that the author of the Liber Eliensis feels compelled to tell us about
such splendid objects, which are usually neglected by other authors, such
as Bede, for example, who does not mention the splendid stole and maniple
that St. Æðelþryð (636–679), founder of the monastery at Ely, produces for
St. Cuthbert.43 These items need to be understood in the context of medieval
giftgiving, where the gift entitles the giver to a return. These textiles created
bonds of gratitude and obligation between the donor and the recipient,
and the most likely returns were intercession and commemoration. It also
placed these women at the heart of ceremonies which were traditionally
not a female domain, such as the altar. As donors they were “present” in
ceremonies normally hidden from sight, such as the preparation of the host
39 Fairweather, Liber Eliensis, Bk II, chap. 88, 187–88. See also Christine Fell, with Cecily Clark
and Elizabeth Williams, Women in Anglo-Saxon England and the Impact of 1066 by (London:
British Museum Publications, 1984), 41; Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, “Holy Women and Needle
Arts: Piety, Devotion, and Stitching the Sacred, ca 550–1150,” in Negotiating Community and
Difference in Medieval Europe: Gender, Power, Patronage and Authority in Latin Christendom ed.
Katherine Smith and Scott Wells (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 83–110, at 96.
40 Schulenburg, “Holy Women.”
41 Schulenburg, “Holy Women,” 84.
42 Fell, Anglo-Saxon Women, 119. For a more comprehensive list of church hangings from
various sources, see Alexandra Lester Makin, “Embroidery and its Early Medieval Audience: A
Case Study of Sensory Engagement,” World Archaeology 52, no. 2 (2020): 298–312.
43 Schulenburg, “Holy Women,” 90–91; Fairweather, Liber Eliensis, 30. It is unclear if the author
of the Liber Eliensis is referring to the St. Cuthbert relics here, which of course are much later.
The text claims that these objects were made from gold and precious stones and shown to people
quite frequently on request. The coffin was opened in 1104 and the twelfth-century Reginald of
Durham tells us that Cuthbert’s unruly hair was tended to regularly by a cleric named Alfred,
so it is possible that some confusion took place.
64 Christina Lee
and wine for the Eucharist. Schulenburg writes that the value of such gifts is
clear since they were recognized by the church as major donations and were
carefully recorded on inventories: “They became part of an ecclesiastical
memoria and thus provided these women artists and donors with certain
immortality.”44
These objects are in essence on par with inscriptions in liber vitae. They
have the same purpose: to create bonds between the living and dead by acts
of donation and memory recreation. In the same way as written records
fossilize the name and status of the donor (such as the king, duke, etc.), these
objects also retain memories of the status and power of the giver and allow
the makers a place in the economies of power. Schulenburg considers the
motivations for such donations: “As custodians of memory … [women] were
responsible for the well-being of their own souls and those of their family
and friends,” she writes, further underlining that such objects are in the
same as inscribed altar crosses, calendars which recovered the names of
the nobility to be remembered and prayed for. 45 These very personal gifts
create the bonds vital for the spiritual wellbeing of the family—as such
they are equal to donations, such as gold crosses which are bequeathed
to monasteries as items of piety and with the hope that the saint, who is
resident in the institutions through relics or the invocation of their name,
will reciprocate these gifts with intercession or healing. In the image of the
bequest of a gold cross to the New Minster at Winchester by Queen Emma
and Knut (BL Stowe MS 944, fol. 6) mentioned above, the cross is positioned
on what appears to be two altar cloths. It is very possible that these two,
although not listed among known lists of donations, were also a part of the
gift since Emma in particular, is known for her textile donations to Ely and
Winchester. 46 Emma’s handiwork of a pall of purpura decorated with gold
and precious gems is celebrated in the Liber Eliensis,47 and she was an astute
political mover who wielded significant power and influence in her time.
It is quite possible to read the advice for a woman to stay at her embroidery
as a reminder that such items have inherent power: as a royal woman, and
44 “Holy Women,” 84 and 105.

45 “Holy Women,” 105.
46 Catherine Karkov, “Emma: Image and Ideology,” in Early Medieval Studies in Memory
of Patrick Wormald, ed. Stephen Baxter, Catherine Karkov, Janet Nelson, and David Pelteret
(London: Routledge, 2009), 515–16.
47 Fairweather, Liber Eliensis, Bk II, chap. 79, 176. Purpura is the most precious silk cloth in
early medieval England, and it can be made in various colours. The Old English term is godweb;
Gale Owen-Crocker, Dress in Anglo-Saxon England, 2nd rev. ed (Woodbridge: Boydell Press,
2010), 211.
perhaps a veiled woman, she wields more influence through the creation
of precious gifts than she would in activities such as the king’s circuit or
pilgrimage. 48 The passage is framed by instructions for noble men: the earl
who must control his troops and the defamed man who must stay in the
shadows (lines 63–67), and appears in the context of royal obligation—gift-
giving, command, and being liberal. It is therefore possible that the widgongel
(wandering, roving) is not primarily about a woman’s agency and choice to
move freely, but centered around the ties that bind this society. 49
Textiles play a central role in the creation of ties between royal power and
spiritual care. They clothed priests and adorned altars and were a visible
reminder of the generosity that endowed these institutions. In return for
this largesse the donors could secure intercession for themselves and their
kin. In many cases, as I will show in some case studies below, these were
designed to be worn as close to the holiest as possible: on the body of an
archbishop or covering the bodies of saints and their tombs. While chronicles
and charters remained unseen for much of the time, these objects were made
to be visible at the center of power. In some cases they were embroidered
with the names of the donor. Just as some Ottonian princesses joined royal
monasteries to collect and write the deeds of their male kin,50 noblewomen
in Early Medieval England created memorable reminders of the power of
their families, and by extension their own memory.
Textiles and Female Literacy: Some Examples
As we have seen, embroidered textiles are quite rare in the period before
Christianization (with a caveat that this may be based on the conditions of
survival), this changes post-Conversion. Early embroideries, as far as we can
tell from the few extant examples, may have been imported, but the need to
furnish Christian ceremonies and buildings leads to creations made from
48 We may consider a letter from Boniface to Bugga in which he recommends that she should
defer her pilgrimage because of the considerable dangers ahead; he also thanks Bugga for the
gifts and vestments she had sent with her query; Rau, Briefe, 94–96.
49 This is not just restricted to early medieval England. Inscriptions on textiles are mentioned
in medieval continental courtly narratives; see Ludger Lieb, “Woven Words, Embroidered Stories:
Inscriptions on Textiles,” in Beyond Pen and Parchment: Inscribed Objects in Medieval European
Literature, ed. Ricarda Wagner, Christine Neufeld, and Ludger Lieb (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019),
209–20.
50 Gerd Althoff, “Gandersheim und Quedlingburg: Ottonische Frauenklöster als Herrschafts-
und Überlieferungszentren,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 25 (1991): 259–82.
66 Christina Lee
precious materials, such as silk and gold-covered thread. Inventories, such

as the already-mentioned Liber Eliensis, give an idea just how much of it
was produced and survived until the post-Conquest period.51 Most of these
have disappeared since even religious clothes are subject to fashions and it
is quite possible that theft, reuse, moths, and time were also not conducive
to preservation. It is also clear that, unlike in the case of manuscripts, there
seems not to have been much call for the collection of whatever may have
survived from the early medieval English period.
Among the surviving corpus there are a range of different types of
embroidery: (1) embroidered inscriptions, (2) embroidered images, or (3)
a mixture of both. I want to specifically consider objects that have some
form of inscription. One of the earliest inscriptions, albeit not from an
English context, is on a pillow which Alpheidis (born ca. 794), sister of the
Frankish king Charles the Bald and abbess of St. Stephen at Reims, made
for the translation of the remains of St. Remigius in 852. The embroidery
is gold thread on red Persian or Byzantine silk and has a Latin inscription
which tells us that the work was composed and executed by Alpheidis at
the request of Bishop Hincmar.52 The inscription around the borders of
the pillow would have framed the head of the saint and been visible at the
time of deposition. It includes a request for her prayers to be “carried beyond
the stars.”53 It is clear that when Alpheidis was commissioned with this
task she wanted to be remembered as not only the maker, but also in the
intercession of the saint as a donor of an expensive gift.54
Such inscriptions matter to our understanding of female literacy and are
a unique female voice from a period where relatively little other evidence
has survived.55 Betty Coatsworth in her seminal article remarks: “Textile
inscriptions associated with early medieval England have never been
looked at as a significant body of material in their own right, from the
point of paleography, language, grammar or punctuation, or their content
51 Schulenburg, “Holy Women,” 94.

52 Elizabeth Coatsworth, “Stitches in Time: Establishing a History of Anglo-Saxon Embroidery,”
in Medieval Clothing and Textiles I, ed. Robin Netherton and Gale R. Owen-Crocker (Woodbridge:
Boydell and Brewer, 2005), 1–28, at 8; Schulenburg, “Holy Women,” 92; the pillow.
53 Schulenburg, “Holy Women,” 92. In her note Schulenburg writes that while the embroidery
has greatly deteriorated it was included in an inventory of 1646.
54 Images of the embroidery (with detailed pictures) can be found on a page made by the
photographer Dr. Geneva Konbluth, http://www.kornbluthphoto.com/Coussin.html, accessed
August 13, 2018.
55 Other examples for female literacy are Aldhelm’s De Laude Virginitate, dedicated to the
nuns of Barking, and the so-called “Boniface Correspondence” in which the missionary asks
for texts to be made for him.
or relationship to the works from which they form a part, with perhaps the
exception of the Bayeux Tapestry. They are not included in lists or surveys
of inscriptions.”56
In the corpus of the surviving embroideries there is some discussion about
the origin and provenance of these portable objects, and for years there have
been arguments for or against an early medieval English origin for objects
such as the Bayeux Tapestry (which is in fact an embroidery—the images
on tapestries are woven in whereas here the images are stitched), are of an
English provenance or not. In the context of the lives of early medieval aristo-
cratic women such ethnic definitions may be a red herring: the involvement of
women in missionary activities, marriage policies, and the lively gift exchange
system means that there is a potentially wide range of items from different
geographical backgrounds which become incorporated in such works. This is
not the place but there has been a lot of emphasis on “ethnic identity markers”
in archaeology, especially burial archaeology, but many graves are assembly
casts with objects from many different areas. We can observe that there
are different dress styles, but whether the “Kentish veil” was a statement of
ethnic identity or simply a marker of rank, or even a fashion statement, needs
discussion.57 Textiles are generally assigned an origin by their technique
(where geographical comparisons can be assigned) and imagery. One such
example is the bursa of St. Willibrod (Utrecht, Netherlands), which is made
from a gold-brocaded tablet-woven band, patterned with a simple vine scroll
and possibly made in eighth- or ninth-century England.58
Since royal women were actively involved in the early English missionary
movement to the continent, there are a range of embroideries which have a
putative English origin. One of the most prominent is the so-called casula
of Saints Harlindis and Relindis, now in Maaseik, Belgium, which is dated
to the ninth century.59 These sisters were part of the missionary movement
to the continent. As an abbess, Harlind communicated with both Boniface
56 Elizabeth Coatsworth, “Inscriptions on Textiles Associated with Anglo-Saxon England,” in

Writing and Texts in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Alexander Rumble (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005),
71–95, at 71.
57 A number of high-status burials at Kentish sites such as Sarre were found to have had
gold-brocaded headbands, which were interpreted as fillets that held a head veil, and the remains
of a long scarf or veil which covered the upper body were found at Mill Hill, Deal in Kent; for
a list of references, see Elizabeth Coatsworth and Gale R. Owen-Crocker, Medieval Textiles of
the British Isles AD 450–100: An Annotated Bibliography, British Archaeological Reports British
Series 445 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2007), 21.
58 Coatsworth, “Stitches in Time,” 8.
59 The Maaseik embroideries were studied in detail by Mildred Budny and Dominic Tweddle,
in “The Maaseik Embroideries,” Anglo-Saxon England 13 (1984): 65–94, plus plates.
68 Christina Lee
and Willibrod, whereas Relindis was renowned for her embroidery skills and
copying of manuscripts.60 The Vita of the saints mentions that the sisters were
skilled in textile arts, but that the abbey they founded at Aldeneik also hosted
other works by their hands, including a richly decorated gospel book and a
psalter.61 It also mentions decorated textiles described as palliola which cor-
respond to the surviving embroidered casula and velamen. The casula contains
eight pieces of gold-and-silk embroidered strips, and the monograms may have
originated from an altar frontal.62 The connection with early medieval England
has been assigned on the basis of the decoration on the embroideries which
were stitched on top of the cloth and the decorative foliate ornaments which
are compatible with metalwork and stone carvings from southern England in
the early ninth century.63 The four corners of the H-shaped centerpiece carry
the letters A and O, alpha and omega.64 This is not the only inscription on this
item, as Coatsworth describes: “Fragments of red and beige silk tablet woven
braid, brocaded in gold thread, edge the strips of embroidery with arcades
and roundels, … and part of that braid carries letters.”65 The meaning of the
letters “IAVSV” remains unclear but it has been suggested that they are early
medieval English display capitals and their setting among arches is compared
by Budny and Tweddle to manuscript illustrations.66 The connection between
textile decoration and other media, such as stonework and manuscripts, shows
that the executors of such items were not just acquainted with contemporary
art, but used it for their own media. A ninth-century soumak braid or girdle
found in the tomb of an archbishop at Sant’Appollinare in Ravenna contains
fragmentary sections of Psalm 123.67 The letters have an insular appearance, so
they may have been made by a female artisan who was trained in the textual
culture of Early Medieval England.68
60 Elizabeth Coatsworth, “Humeral Veil (?) from Maaseik, Known as the Velamen of St Harlindis,”
in Clothing the Past: Surviving Garments from Early Medieval to Early Modern Western Europe,
ed. Elizabeth Coatsworth and Gale R. Owen-Crocker (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 341–43, at 341; for a
background see Steven Vanderputten, Dark Age Nunneries: The Ambiguous Identity of Female
Monasticism 800–1050 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), 54–56.
61 Budny and Tweddle, “Maaseik Embroideries,” 68.
62 Coatsworth, “Stitches,” 9.
63 Budny and Tweddle, “Maaseik Embroideries,” 66.
64 Coatsworth, “Inscriptions,” 76; Budny and Tweddle, “Maaseik Embroideies,” 75–76.
65 “Inscriptions,” 78.
66 Coatsworth, “Inscriptions,” 78, Budny and Tweddle, “Embroidery,” 81–82.
67 Coatsworth, “Inscriptions,” 74. Soumak is an early medieval weaving technique which
uses a technique of wrapping thread around the weft. It is suggested that it is an imitation of
Byzantine weaving; Coatsworth, “Inscriptions,” 74.
68 Coatsworth, “Inscriptions,” 74.
Even more interesting than the casula is the so-called velamen of St.
Harlindis at the same church. A velamen is a type of veil or scarf. This
contains the inscription:
Square I: HOC PARVuM Mu/NuS eRLVINuS SV

Square II: SORORE SUA [S]CO PETRO OFFE[R]/RECVRAuIT PRO/
ANIMELLIV[S]
transcription: Hoc parvum munus erluinus su Sorore sua [s](an)c(t)o
Petro offe[r]/re pro/ anime illiu[s]
(Erluinus at his own … this small gift … by [or with] his sister took care
to offer St. Peter for his [or her] soul.)69
We do not know who Erluinus is, nor his sister, but the inscription is
reminiscent of texts associated with other donations, such as Bugga’s altar
cloth given to Boniface, which she describes as “parva in speciae” (small
to look at).70
Coatsworth writes that the display capitals letters are early medieval
English or Frankish in a mixture of square capitals and uncials.71 While the
items may not be identified with certainty, the fact that they contain the
same type of inscription as known from other media, such as manuscripts
is a strong indicator of their origin. Additionally, the association with the
relics of a saint of early medieval England, underlines again the importance
of such gifts in the creation of ties across the English Channel. In the same
way as charters use the formula “for the benefit of my soul,” women used
such objects to have their names recorded, to connect themselves with
saints and churches on their own authority. The fact that noble women
create networks of their own volition alone should place textiles into the
center of studies around memory and memoria.
It appears that the “propaganda” value of such items was well understood
and applied in other areas as well. Not all of the splendid embroideries were
aimed to be used in a strictly religious context; we hear of queens who work
precious garments for their husbands and in at least one case, for the queen
herself. According to Goscelin, Edith, wife of Edward the Confessor, made
an alb containing a portrait of herself kissing Christ’s feet, a position usually

70 Rau, Briefe, 62.
71 “Inscriptions,” 80.
70 Christina Lee
assigned to Mary Magdalene.72 The image connects Edith with biblical nar-
rative, and while her depiction as the sinner Mary Magdalene may not seem
to be the most flattering comparison for a queen—especially one rumored
to have lived in enforced celibacy with her husband—it is the same kind
of performative humility which is expressed in written documents, such
as letters. It also shows that she is aware of the biblical narrative in which
Mary is a companion of Christ (Luke 8:2) and a witness to the resurrection
(Mark 16:1) and is thus elevating her own role in the process.
Hidden in Plain Sight?: The St. Cuthbert Textiles and Political

History
As mentioned above, written inventories, such as the Liber Eliensis record a

large quantity of embroidered textiles, and they are a testament to female
patronship and literacy. While many of these items seem to have been
carefully preserved and passed on, there are cases where changes in political
power and circumstances may have led to a re-appropriation of named
embroideries? One of the most significant embroideries from early medieval
England is the so-called “Stole of Cuthbert.” It is one of three textile objects
donated to the saint by King Athelstan on his visit to Chester-le-Street in
AD 934.73 Both of Cuthbert’s vitae talk about vestments and a head cloth,
which were buried with the saint when he died in AD 687 and which were
still intact (“unsoiled”) when the coffin was opened in AD 698.74 When St.
Cuthbert’s coffin was opened in 1827 and the relics were removed, they
found various textiles aside from the maniple and stole. These included silk
remains and some Egyptian tabby—by which we denote a type of weave—as
well as a soumak braid from the region of modern Uzbekistan, all dated to
AD 720–800, so the items must have been deposited after the first opening
of the coffin. Since there are no known openings between AD 698 and
72 Schulenburg, “Holy Women,” 103. See also Diener, “Sealed,” 4. Gregory the Great, in his Homily
33, fused Mary of Magdala with the unnamed woman who anoints Christ’s feet in Mark 14:3 and
Mary of Bethany. He also called her a prostitute, which becomes her predominant attribute; J.
M. B. Porter, “Prostitution and Monastic Reform,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 41 (1997), 72–79,
at 72.
73 Elizabeth Coatsworth, “The Embroideries from the Tomb of St Cuthbert,” in Edward the Elder
899–924, ed. Nick Higham and David Hill (London: Routledge, 2001), 292–307. The definitive
analysis of the artifacts from the burial is still C. E. Battiscombe’s edited volume of The Relics
of St Cuthbert.
74 Colgrave, Two Lives of St Cuthbert; Anonymous Life, Chapter XII, 131, and Bede’s Prose Life
XLII, p. 293.
the translation of the coffin to Chester-le-Street, we can assume that the

embroidered textiles known as “stole and maniple” may have been donations
by the King Athelstan when he visited the shrine at Chester-le-Street. As
previously shown, such donations created personal ties between the donor,
the maker and the recipient, but in this case the political history behind
these items raises some questions of why they were chosen to be included
in what clearly was a gift to an important saint.
The so-called “maniple” of St. Cuthbert,75 which depicts figures, such
as Peter the Deacon, St. John the Evangelist, and John the Baptist, has been
made or commissioned by Ælfflæd, second wife of Edward the Elder, which
is clear from the embroidered inscription: “ÆLFFLÆD FIERI PRECEPIT”
(Ælfflæd had this made). It was clearly intended as a high-status gift to
Bishop Friðestan of Winchester by the queen since it carries the inscription:
PIO EPISCOPO FRIĐESTANO (for the pious bishop Friðestan),76 but whether
the bishop, who was deposed in 931 CE, ever got this gift is debatable. When
Edward the Elder died in 924 two of his sons contended for the kingship:
Athelstan, son of his first wife Ecgwyn,77 and Ælfweard, his son by his second
wife Ælfflæd. By the time Edward the Elder died, Ælfflæd had been deposed
in favor of a Kentish noblewoman, Eadgifu, who also had a son and potential
contender with the king: Edmund, who would take the crown in 939 CE.
Both women may have speculated on the influential position of dowager
queen. Ælfweard died soon after being nominated king in Wessex in 924 and
relations between Athelstan and Bishop Friðestan may not have been the
most cordial, since he is not recorded as having attended the coronation of
Athelstan in 925. Relations between Ælfflæd and her stepson may not have
been the best either, since as the mother of the deceased King Ælfweard
she must have been supporting his case, but this remains speculation, since
we know little about her life at this point. Her second son Edwin may have
also been a contender for the throne, but we know very little about him.
Edwin drowned in 933, and spurious sources suggest he did so because he
rebelled against the king.78 It is clear that Athelstan’s claim to the throne
was supported in Mercia, where he had grown up and was known, but that
it took the witan of Wessex over half a year to accept his claim to kingship,
75 A maniple is a long strip of cloth worn over the arm of the priest during the celebration of
the Eucharist.
76 Coatsworth, “Embroideries from the Tomb of St Cuthbert,” 296.
77 There is some speculation that Ecgwyn was not a wife, but a concubine.
78 Sarah Foot, Æthelstan: the First King of England (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University
Press, 2011), 39–43.
72 Christina Lee
which may support the idea that there may have been some hesitation in
the choice of Athelstan as king.
The stole has survived in eight fragments and the embroidery shows a
range of prophets from the Old Testament, as well as inscriptions which name
the various figures. Once again Ælfflæd is named as the commissioner/maker
and Friðestan as the recipient.79 The embroideries are fashioned in various
colors on a background of a couched gold thread on what is presumed to be
silk. The iconography on all of the embroideries is interesting: firmly rooted
in the traditions of the tenth century, such as acanthus leaves and tendrils,
which are recognizable from manuscript illuminations of the period. The
choice of biblical figures where the stole depicts Old Testament prophets,
flanked by St. Thomas and St. James at either end, shows that the designers
who planned and outlined the iconography were literate in biblical narra-
tives and commentary and made choices about inclusion and exclusion of
prophets. The maniple, which is similar in style, is decorated with figures
from the New Testament and Church history, such as St. John the Baptist,
St. Gregory the Great, and Paul the Deacon. In the major examination of
the stole and maniple of St. Cuthbert it was observed that the iconography
is unique since it depicts Old Testament prophets on the stole, rather than
New Testament saints, as well as the choice of the inclusion of St. Thomas,
who was not a popular saint in England before St. Thomas Becket.80 In a
recent essay Alexandra Lester Makin has pointed out that such objects were
not just transmitting messages of theology, but were designed to enhance
the sensory experience of the congregation:
As the light touched each embroidered figure, it activated that image,

so each was spiritually present: the divine light making the invisible
visible. As the maniple and stole moved, causing light to flicker over the
embroidered faces, the eyes would appear to follow you, to directly engage
with you, creating a bond that was considered a form of touch; they were
blessing you and drawing you towards spiritual enlightenment. This is not
only a visual and metaphysically tactile experience; it is a kinaesthetic
one. The movement of the vestments brings the divine light reflected in

80 Elizabeth Plenderleith, Christopher Hohler, and R. Freyhan, “The Stole and Maniples,” in
The Relics of St Cuthbert, ed. C. F. Battiscombe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 375–96,
at 398–99. See also R. Freyhan in the same volume, who looks at the stylistic influences which
are traced back to Sassanian and Byzantine sources: “The Place of the Stole and Maniple in
Anglo-Saxon Art of the Tenth Century,” in The Relics of St Cuthbert, ed. Battiscombe, 375–96.
the gold to life, activates it, if you will; thus the witnessing clergy and
congregation also observed the divine through and in motion.81
The inclusion of the textiles in the tomb of St. Cuthbert leaves a range of
questions open which concern the position of the dowager queen in the
tenth century. Friðestan came into office in 909, and the deposed Queen
Ælfflæd may have tried to forge ties with this bishop to secure her position
as the future king’s mother. Coatsworth writes that the manufacture of the
pieces would have taken well over eight months,82 which leaves a fairly
small window for the dating, since the queen was deposed in 917 or 918. She
may have tried to use these items to continue her relations with the bishop
even after being put aside, but no longer than AD 924 when her stepson
ascended to the throne.
I have always wondered why Athelstan chose to include these items into
the coffin of St. Cuthbert—a saint whom he clearly venerated. Athelstan is
known as a great benefactor of religious institutions, and yet his bequests
were made with purpose. The king was no stranger to using his female
kin to suit his own political ambitions. More than any other king in early
medieval England Athelstan made use of his existing family relations by
marrying his half-sisters (by Ælfflæd) into every significant royal house in
Western Europe in an attempt to safeguard alliances.83 Given the prestige
of embroidered textiles we may consider that the king, who fought in a
brutal campaign against the Scots in 934, may have wished for spiritual
assistance from northern saints. However, why present the saint with a set
of secondhand clothes, albeit very costly ones? Would the monetary value
of these items supersede the value of intercession from a now deposed
bishop? We know very little about Athelstan’s relationship with Ælfflæd,
but was he really intending, as Gale Owen-Crocker suggests, to place the
queen close to one of England’s premier saints by proxy of the textiles?84 The
king grew up in the household of his aunt Æðelflæd, Lady of the Mercians,
and he was thus no stranger to influential women. It is quite possible that
81 “Embroidery and its Early Medieval Audience,” 308.

82 “Embroideries from the Tomb of St Cuthbert,” 296.
83 Sheila Sharp writes: “Of the countries facing the eastern seaboard of England, the central
three—Germany, Flanders and Francia—were all joined to England by marriage in a flurry of
dynastic bridal activity unequalled again until Queen Victoria’s time.” “England, Europe and
the Celtic World: King Athelstan’s foreign policy,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 79 (1997):
197–220, at 198.
84 “Anglo-Saxon Women: the Art of Concealment,” Leeds Studies in English 33 (2002): 32–33.
74 Christina Lee
by AD 934 Ælfflæd had died and that this deposition was undertaken on
behest of the queen, or part of a late reconciliation.
Stitching Histories
There is a further group of embroidered narratives that is an interesting

window into women’s participation in the production of text and histori-
ography. While gold embroideries were most likely produced to adorn the
vestments of clerics and the elites and embroideries were made to adorn
churches, tapestries are a form of narrated history, often commemorating
important events. Wall-hangings, such as the one bequeathed by Wulfwaru
to St. Peter’s in Bath,85 did not just add “considerable cheerfulness,”86 they are
texts in their own right. They narrate the deeds of their (male) kin and they
establish relationships to saints. A famous example is the embroidered or
woven hanging that Ælfflæd, widow of Byrhtnoth of the “Battle of Maldon”
fame, bequeathed to the monastery at Ely. Liber Eliensis narrates that this
hanging depicted her husband’s deeds.87 Tapestries may have once adorned
every nobleman’s hall, but in this case the donation of the tapestry was
connected to a large donation of land, as well as a golden torque.88 This gift
was clearly meant to elevate both her husband’s standing (who was already
a patron of Ely), as well as her own, and ensured that his deeds, whether on
the battlefield or as a benefactor, were remembered by the laity and clergy.
In this sense the tapestry is as much a “text” as any other biographical
writing. Sadly the object has not survived, unlike the poem of “The Battle
of Maldon,” since would be interesting to compare the two texts. What is
clear is that Ælfflæd used this donation to continue the memory of her
husband, and with it her own.
We do not know how many tapestries depicting secular events were
made in early medieval England, but we should consider that tapestries
were used as a form of historical document. Our best-known surviving
narrative examples is the Bayeux Tapestry, an embroidery which retells
the events around 1066 in two media: image and Latin text. Such mixed
narratives of text and image are not unusual in manuscripts, for example in
the Old English Hexateuch, a mid-eleventh century manuscript which also
85 Dorothy Whitelock, ed., Anglo-Saxon Wills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), 62.
86 Fell, Anglo-Saxon Women, 47.
87 Fairweather, Liber Eliensis, Bk II, chap. 63, 163. Diener, “Sealed,” 14–15.
88 Diener, “Sealed,” 14–15.
contains Ælfric’s preface to Æthelweard, or Cotton Junius 11, a tenth-century

manuscript with biblical poems. Unlike in manuscripts, the language in
the embroideries, including the Bayeux Tapestry, is always Latin. While the
choice of language does not necessarily mean that the female embroiderers
were Latinate,89 it is to be assumed that they at least understood what they
stitched, as the close correlation between the images and texts shows.
Further evidence that the female embroiderer knew about different text
types can be derived from the choice of stitches they made to perform their
task. The letters, as Coatsworth has pointed out, are made in stem, split, and
chain stitch, allowing for small stitches which produce a continuous line
that works well for lettering. She states that the letters on the embroidery
are majuscules, but are not like sections in manuscript texts, rather they
resemble inscriptions on metalwork and sculpture.90 It is quite possible that
these media not only share common features, but that they also actively
emulate them. Stone crosses, such as Bewcastle, Cumbria, have patterns not
unlike “tabby” weaves (a weave where the warp is alternately laid over and
under the weft threads), and others, such as Ireton, Cumbria, have decorated
borders—not unlike the borders in embroidered textiles.91
The Bayeux Tapestry arguably remains the most studied textile from
early medieval England, and there have been plenty of debates about its
origin. Most scholars accept that it was commissioned by the new Norman
overlords, possibly Bishop Odo, half-brother to William the Conqueror
sometime around 1068 CE, but that it was made in England, since the figures
resemble those of eleventh-century manuscript illuminations from southern
England.92 Readings of the Tapestry have veered between propaganda and
subtle subversion, but the dating of it is interesting as well: it falls into a
period that is either before or during what has been named “The Harrying
of the North,” a savage campaign to quell the rebellion of northern areas
against the new Norman overlords who retaliated with utmost brutality
by killing and destruction of crops which led to a devastating famine.
The Tapestry—which in its final, now lost section, shows the Conquest
and coronation of William—may have been seen as a suitable piece of
propaganda, made by complicit or forced English women.93
89 See note 6 above.

91 Betty Coatsworth, pers. comm. The sculptures are, of course, earlier than the Tapestry, but
there seems to be a similarity which continues in various media.
93 William’s wife, Mathilda was herself a commissioner and maker of embroideries; Schulenburg,
“Holy Women,” 99.
76 Christina Lee
Whoever made the Tapestry had a good understanding of how texts are
structured, since it is not dissimilar to those of manuscript illuminations
from the eleventh century, such as the Illustrated Hexateuch: the text and
the illustration form independent narratives, given depth to the central
story. Gestures and signs in the illustrations provide the syntax, whereas
the ornamentation gives the images semantic depth. What it shows is that
both illustrator and embroiderer have to be literate in the two media: text
and image. They may not have been made together and they may have been
designed at different points.94 The designer of the Tapestry was clearly
Latinate and was intimately familiar with the events leading up to the Nor-
man Conquest. The examples cited here allow us to see glimpses of possible
female literacy, and not just of religious women, but also of aristocratic lay
women who often commissioned and potentially also made these items.
Conclusion
While the gender of the designer(s) of the Bayeux Tapestry may never be
known, the fact that women such as Alpheidis and Ælfflæd named them-
selves on other textiles should indicate that textiles were seen as suitable
media for expression and networking on their own accord. The evidence
from letters, inventories of precious textiles which were subsequently lost,
and text sources that show queens and noblewomen creating and commis-
sioning precious items all show the importance of textiles as currencies of
a female economy. These objects afforded women agency and power. For
this reason alone, the study of textiles deserves to take center stage in a
feminist renaissance.
Women created texts in textile. Many of these are now lost, but the small
surviving corpus is an important addition to the study of what we know
about women in early medieval England: these objects can tell us about the
levels of knowledge of biblical and exegetical understanding by the choices
made, to the saints they endowed and the religious figures they chose to give
prominence to. They can tell us about literacy and networks of power. Textiles
give us an indication of the materials available to women, among which are
silks from the Far East and Byzantium,95 gold, and gems. Inventories and
wills show that these precious items were a currency in themselves; just as
94 Coatsworth, “Inscribed,” 88.

95 These items may have contained woven images and offered glimpses of places geographically
far removed from the world of the woman who was using them.
kings used rings and land to cement friendship, women used textiles to create
their own bonds—bonds of intercession, of political alliance and friendship
with high-ranking men, and (we should also assume) other women.
While some of the techniques of these objects have been studied, there
remains a need to examine other aspects of textiles: the language, imagery
and purpose, and provenance. Much of the evidence has decayed, partly
because the material is more perishable than metalwork, but also because
there was no Matthew Parker of embroideries. While there may have been
fewer examples of embroidered texts than manuscripts in the first place,
judging from inventories of the period, there still seems to have been a
substantial corpus. The fact that they were not collected and cared for in
the same way as manuscripts is significant and related to the perception
that these items, manufactured and commissioned by women, were not as
important as parchments. It would be interesting to have at least part of
the embroideries of Queen Emma, wife of two kings, Æthelræd and Cnut,
and commissioner of her own legacy in the Encomium Emmae. She seems to
have carefully chosen the altars of the saints she endowed (among which are
those dedicated to Æðelthryð and Bartholomew).96 The marriage between
Cnut and Emma was a match made in (political) heaven from which both
benef itted greatly. The queen was a shrewd operator in the union and
the object may give us an idea as to whether or not she chose to include
aspects of Scandinavian imagery in such important gifts. Cnut needed Emma
to support his reign, and the position of queen gave her opportunities to
establish her own legacy. Texts and textiles cemented her reputation. She is
still the only woman of her period with two portraits made in her lifetime,
a feat which most of her male contemporaries could not manage.
Not all of these textiles were necessarily made by queens or royal women
themselves; it is perfectly possible and likely that they oversaw the making
of precious embroidery in workshops. The existence of such workshops, as
for example, that of Æðelswið and her circle of young women, indicates that
monastic institutions were not just centers of manuscript production, but
also centers in which other forms of memory-creation were made.97 From
their workshops came important gifts which created and cemented relations
between rulers and religious, between secular and ecclesiastic power, and
96 Schulenburg, “Holy Women,” 98. Karkov suggests that Emma supported Ely because it was
also the burial place of the murdered ætheling Alfred, who is presented as a “saint-in-the making”
in the Encomium. It allowed the Queen to be the mother of a martyred son, and compare herself
with Mary, mother of Christ; “Emma: Image ad Ideology,” 516.
97 Fairweather, Liber Eliensis, 88.
78 Christina Lee
between the living and the dead. The surviving items also demonstrate that
those who made them were literate in script and scripture. There is a need
to include the relationship between this medium and other forms of text,
including art in any discussion of the culture of early medieval England.
In this essay I have argued that the reason why so much of the textile
evidence has been neglected is partly because it has fallen foul of modern
gender associations with an implication of domesticity, fatuity, and in-
fringement that has been attached to embroidery in the centuries after the
Conquest. The significance of such objects in the gift economy, but also, as
has been shown, in the innovation of design and assumption of techniques
from far outside early medieval England, has been grasped by only a few.
While textile work was a woman’s domain, perhaps stringent ideas about
biological sex and the gendering of such labor are red herrings. The idea that
some men were involved in the making of precious garments is a tantalizing
suggestion that instead of seeing such items through the lens of sex, they
should be seen through a lens of power: commissioned by women and men
who had the means to do so, made by women and perhaps men, who had
the intellectual training to create complex and multifaceted narratives in
this medium. Embroidered textiles distort some of the binaries we have
about women in the period: they demonstrate the role of royal and religious
women as partners in the propagation of cults and the narration of history
and act as important links between memory of their kin and spiritual aid.
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3 Remembering the Lady of Mercia
Scott Thompson Smith
Abstract
Æthelflæd, known to contemporaries as Lady of the Mercians, was a
significant political power in early medieval England. She worked closely
with her brother, King Edward the Elder, to secure and expand territorial
authority, most prominently through the construction and maintenance of
fortified boroughs. In later historical writing, however, Æthelflæd has been
figured as both an anomaly and casualty of history, one unjustly excluded
from official records. Since the early twelfth century, writers have issued
charged pleas to remember Æthelflæd, recirculating key primary and
secondary sources, and commenting and elaborating upon those materials.
Within this ongoing tradition of protest and commemoration, Æthelflæd
has long provided a flexible focal point for challenging assumptions and
categories of gender.
Keywords: Æthelflæd, chronicles, historiography, virago, medievalism
On June 12, 2018, BBC News published an online article with the provocative
lede, “How does a ruler defeat bloodthirsty invaders, secure a kingdom and
lay the foundations for England—and then almost get written out of history?
Be a woman, that’s how. Exactly 1,100 years after her death Aethelflaed,
Lady of the Mercians, is emerging from the shadows.”1 Written to observe
1 Grieg Watson, “Aethelflaed: The Warrior Queen Who Broke the Glass Ceiling,” accessed
January 15, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-44069889. Major commemorations
were held for Æthelflæd in Gloucester and Tamworth in the summer of 2018. Among the many
events at Gloucester was a mock funeral procession, complete with a Viking ship and a local
actress playing the part of the dead Æthelflæd as she was carried to St. Oswald’s Priory. See
“Gloucester Funeral Procession Honours Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians,” accessed January 15,
2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-44429911. Tamworth held its
AethelFest in July 2018, which included an academic conference dedicated to Æthelflæd, along
with several other events, such as a tasting of Aethelflaed Ale from the Tamworth Brewing
doi: 10.5117/9789463721462_ch03
84 Scott Thompson Smith
the 1,100-year anniversary of Æthelflæd’s death, the piece gives a succinct

overview of her political career in the early tenth century, along with a
short video clip that features street interviews with British citizens, most
of whom have no idea who this “warrior queen” was.2 The article exhibits
several hallmarks of recent coverage of Æthelflæd in popular media: she
was an singular woman of her time, exceptional for her achievements in a
world dominated by men; she was a successful warrior or war-leader in the
fight against the Vikings; she has been nearly forgotten by history; and she
is only now beginning to receive the attention she deserves. These ideas
are not new. Indeed, they have been recurrent motifs in representations of
Æthelflæd since at least the early twelfth century. Writers have long issued
pleas to remember Æthelflæd—through the recirculation of key primary
and secondary sources, the elaboration of those materials, and finally the
creation of new content that then feeds back into the system. This essay
surveys some of that process of reception and circulation as it has occurred
in historical writing (or in writing that presents itself as historical), with
attention to some ways in which Æthelflæd has provided a vehicle for
contesting past and present assumptions about gender.3
A Conspiracy of Silence
In an influential essay published in 1959, F. T. Wainwright surveyed the

historical evidence for Æthelflæd’s career, which is largely (but not exclu-
sively) contained in the section of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle known as the
Mercian Register. 4 Wainwright notably presented Æthelflæd as a woman
Co.; in May, the city unveiled a new statue of Æthelflæd in the roundabout outside its railway
station. For the Tamworth events, see “Aethelflaed,” accessed January 15, 2021, http://www.
visittamworth.co.uk/aethelflaed.
2 For Æthelflæd generally, see Marios Costambeys, “Æthelflæd,” in Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2004) 1:401–3; Mary Dockray-Miller, Motherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon England (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 43–76; Joanna Arman, The Warrior Queen: The Life and Legend of
Æthelflæd, Daughter of Alfred the Great (Stroud: Amberley, 2017); Tim Clarkson, Æthelflæd: The
Lady of the Mercians (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2018); and Margaret C. Jones, Founder, Fighter,
Saxon Queen: Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians (Barnsley: Pen and Sword History, 2018).
3 I have an essay in preparation on representations of Æthelflæd in drama, poetry, historical
fiction, and film.
4 F. T. Wainwright, “Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians,” in The Anglo-Saxons: Studies in Some
Aspects of their History and Culture Presented to Bruce Dickins, ed. Peter Clemoes (London: Bowes
and Bowes, 1959), 53–69.
Remembering the Lady of Mercia 85
wronged by history, contending that she had suffered from “a conspiracy

of silence among her West Saxon contemporaries” and that “the blanket
of official policy has kept her achievement out of the national record.”5
Wainwright’s article was later included in the 1990 anthology New Readings
on Women in Old English Literature, where his view of Æthelflæd became
more pronounced within the larger context of the book’s commitment to
feminist scholarship.6 Wainwright’s influential assessment has helped to
establish Æthelflæd in the modern imagination as a strong woman nearly
excluded from history by the machinations of patriarchy.7 This idea of an
enforced silence around Æthelflæd, in addition to the evocative gaps in the
historical record, has long motivated writers, popular and academic, to fill
this absence with their own additions and inventions.
Wainwright’s notion of a conspiracy of silence rests in part upon the
presentation of Æthelflæd (or lack thereof) in various versions of the Anglo-
Saxon Chronicle. The A-text notes only her death in 918, followed by the
full transference of her political authority to Edward, while Æthelweard’s
Chronicle in its obituary notice gives her the title regia soror (the king’s sister)
and records her burial at Gloucester.8 The B- and C-texts, however, contain
the Mercian Register, a fragmented series of annals that interrupts the
chronology of previous annals and ends in what appears to be an incomplete
sentence.9 These annals run from 896 to 924 and focus on Æthelflæd as
Myrcna hlæfdige, or Lady of the Mercians, mentioning Edward only in the
entries for 921 and 924. Indeed, as Pauline Stafford has noted, these annals
provide “the longest sustained treatment of a woman anywhere in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicles.”10 In both the B and C manuscripts, moreover, the
5 Wainwright, “Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians,” 53.

6 New Readings on Women in Old English Literature, ed. Helen Damico and Alexandra Hennessey
Olsen (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), 44–55.
7 One recent assessment, for example, describes Wainwright as “the first historian to consider
Æthelflæd seriously,” one “who single-handedly rescued Æthelflæd from obscurity”; see Jane
Wolfe, Æthelflæd: Royal Lady, War Lady (Chester: Fenris Press, 2001), 13 and 20.
8 Æthelweard says nothing, however, of Æthelflæd governing in Mercia after Æthelred’s death.
The Chronicle of Æthelweard, ed. A. Campbell (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1962), 53.
9 For the Mercian Register, see Paul E. Szarmach, “Æðelflæd of Mercia: Mise en page,” in
Words and Works: Studies in Medieval English Language and Literature in Honour of Fred C.
Robinson, ed. Peter S. Baker and Nicholas Howe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998),
105–26; Pauline Stafford, “‘The Annals of Æthelflæd’: Annals, History and Politics in Early
Tenth-Century England,” in Myth, Rulership, Church and Charters: Essays in Honour of Nicholas
Brooks, ed. Julia Barrow and Andrew Wareham (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008),
101–16; and Scott T. Smith, Land and Book: Literature and Land Tenure in Anglo-Saxon England
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 167–73.
10 Stafford, “Annals of Æthelflæd’,” 101.
Mercian Register appears as a discrete unit set off from the surrounding
annals by strings of barren annal numbers at its beginning and end. Paul
Szarmach, noting the similarities in the layout of B and C, has observed
that “[t]he layout and design of the Mercian Register as well as certain of its
internal features mark it as a separate text.”11 By framing the Mercian Register
with empty annal-numbers, “[t]he scribe acknowledges in visual terms the
integrity of this narrative section, its separateness, and by implication its
unique origin.”12 The B and C manuscripts accordingly set apart the political
career (and gender) of Æthelflæd, giving her a prominence in these inset
annals that is all the more remarkable when considered against her scant
mention in the A-text.
In terms of content, the Mercian Register has several provocative gaps that
call attention to the possibility of things left unsaid, or even suppressed. A
compelling sense of incompleteness and implication, for example, emerges
from the annal for 919: “Her eac wearð Æþeredes dohtar Myrcna hlafordes
ælces onwealdes on Myrcum benumen ⁊ on Westsexe alæded ðrim wucan ær
middum wintra; seo wæs haten Ælfwyn”13 (Here also the daughter of Æthel-
red, lord of the Mercians, was deprived of any authority among the Mercians
and taken among the West Saxons three weeks before midwinter; her name
was Ælfwynn). The grammar of the first clause suggests missing content.
The use of eac in the opening adverbial phrase, unique to this annal within
the Mercian Register, specifically looks to a syntactical precedent that is
absent. Also, the annal identifies Ælfwynn as the daughter of Æthelred, with
no mention of Æthelflæd; accordingly, the Mercian Register never names
Æthelflæd as a mother, perhaps distancing Ælfwynn from the West Saxon
patriarchal-dynastic line.14 Whatever the reason, Æthelflæd’s absence here is
striking, especially considering her prominence in the preceding annals. And
while Ælfwynn’s fate once taken into Wessex remains unknown, the annal’s
placement of Ælfwynn’s name in final position suggests something of a quiet
memorial. Indeed, some have read this entry as a terse acknowledgement
11 Szarmach, “Æðelflæd of Mercia,” 107.

12 Szarmach, “Æðelflæd of Mercia,” 108.
13 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, vol. 4, MS B, ed. Simon Taylor (Cambridge:
D. S. Brewer, 1983), 50. Ælfwynn appears only this once in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle but her
name does appear in three charters. She appears in the witness list of two Latin diplomas, S 367,
dated to 903 (where she appears without a title among the ealdormen [comes]), and S 225, dated
to 915 or 916 (where she appears in second position, after Æthelflæd, and where she is wrongly
titled episcopus); she is also named with Æthelred and Æthelflæd in a Worcester lease dated to
904 (S 1280). See Maggie Bailey, “Ælfwynn, Second Lady of the Mercians,” in Edward the Elder,
899–924, ed. N. J. Higham and D. H. Hill (London: Routledge, 2001), 112–27, at 117–22.
14 See Dockray-Miller, Motherhood and Mothering, 72–76.
of a violent West Saxon suppression of Mercian independence with Edward

cast in the role of belligerent aggressor.15 Wainwright, for example, observes
that “[t]he words of the annalist who wrote of the deposition of Ælfwynn
in the Mercian Register are heavy with resentment,” while F. M. Stenton
describes Edward’s move as “a violent act of power.”16 The annal does not
provide enough information to justify such interpretations fully, but its
impression of redacted content surely suggests enough to inspire them.
Additionally, the insertion of the Mercian Register within the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle raises important questions about possible source material for these
distinctive annals. Charles Plummer long ago suggested that “Elfledes Boc,” a
lost work listed in an early twelfth-century catalogue of books in the library at
Durham Cathedral, was “not impossibly the Mercian Register,” supposing an
independent northern version of that text as it existed before its integration
in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.17 The Mercian Register itself also includes some
15 For the political relationship between Wessex and Mercia, see Simon Keynes, “King Alfred
and the Mercians,” in Kings, Currency and Alliances: History and Coinage of Southern England in the
Ninth Century, ed. Mark A. S. Blackburn and David N. Dumville (Woodbridge, UK and Rochester,
NY: Boydell Press, 1998), 1–45; Pauline Stafford, “Political Women in Mercia, Eighth to Early Tenth
Centuries,” in Mercia: An Anglo-Saxon Kingdom in Europe, ed. Michelle P. Brown and Carol A. Farr
(London and New York: Leicester University Press, 2001), 35–49; Nicola Cumberledge, “Reading
Between the Lines: The Place of Mercia Within an Expanding Wessex,” Midland History 27 (2002):
1–15; and Charles Insley, “Collapse, Reconfiguration or Renegotiation? The Strange End of the
Mercian Kingdom, 850–924,” Reti Medievali Revista 17 (2016): 231–49. For numismatic evidence, see
Catherine E. Karkov, “Æðelflæd’s Exceptional Coinage?” Old English Newsletter 29, no. 1 (1995): 41.
16 Wainwright, “Lady of the Mercians,” 68; F. M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd ed. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1971), 330. Similarly, Ann Williams writes that the 919 annal “bitterly
records” the removal of Ælfwynn; see Kingship and Government in Pre-Conquest England, c.
500–1066 (London: Macmillan, 1999), 84.
17 Charles Plummer, Two of the Saxon Chronicles Parallel, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1892–99), 2:lxxii, note 1. The book-list appears in Durham, Cathedral Library B. IV. 24, fols. 1v–2r.
Elfledes Boc appears among those texts identified as being written in English (Libri Anglici). See
“Vetus catalogus librorum qui in armariolo Ecclesiae Cathedralis Dunelmensis olim habebantur,”
in Catalogues of the Library of Durham Cathedral at Various Periods, from the Conquest to the
Dissolution, ed. Beriah Botfield (London, 1838), 1–10, at 5.
R. M. Wilson proposed that the name Elfled here may refer to Ælfflæd, the second wife of Edward
of the Elder, named in an embroidery as the donor of a stole that was found in St. Cuthbert’s
tomb; see The Lost Literature of Medieval England (London: Methuen, 1970), 75–76. The stole was
originally intended as a gift to Frithestan, bishop of Winchester from 909 to 931, but it was later
included among the gifts from King Æthelstan to the shrine of St. Cuthbert, given most likely
in 934. Among those gifts were three gospel-books, one of which is British Library, Cotton Otho
B. ix, written in Latin on the continent in the late ninth or early tenth century and currently
surviving only in fragments after the Ashburnham fire of 1731; see Simon Keynes, “King Athelstan’s
Books,” in Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies Presented to Peter Clemoes,
ed. Michael Lapidge and Helmut Gneuss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 143–201,
content that suggests lost source material. One especially compelling instance
occurs in the annal for 917, when Æthelflæd loses four of her thegns in a fight for
the borough at Derby. The Chronicle here provides a rare mention of personal
emotion: “⁊ þær wæron eac ofslegene hire þegna feower ðe hire besorge wæron
binnan ðam gatum”18 (four of her thegns who were dear to her were also slain
there within the gates). The adjective besorg appears only eleven times in the
Old English corpus, with this annal being its only occurrence across the several
versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Based on the rarity of such expressions
of personal grief in the Chronicle, and on the presence of two dative absolutes
in the annals for 913 and 917, Paul Szarmach has suggested that the Mercian
Register bears the trace of a lost Latin source, perhaps one written in verse.19
While hypotheses like these are difficult to confirm, the very suggestion of lost
sources contributes to the enduring sense of something missing in Æthelflæd’s
story as it survives in contemporary English historical sources.
Mightier than Caesar
Later medieval writers would fill these gaps with their own additions and
embellishments, with two twelfth-century chroniclers, William of Malmes
bury and Henry of Huntingdon, being especially influential in shaping the
transmission of Æthelflæd’s story. William of Malmesbury includes an
account of a painful childbirth and Æthelflæd’s subsequent renunciation
of sexual relations with her husband:
Inter haec non pretermittatur soror regis Ethelfleda Etheredi relicta, non
mediocre momentum partium, fauor ciuium, pauor hostium, immodici
cordis femina, quae pro experta difficultate primi partus, uel potius
unius, perpetuo uiri complexum horruerit, protestans non conuenire
regis filiae ut illi se uoluptati innecteret quam tale incommodum post
at 170–79; and Sarah Foot, Æthelstan, The First King of the English (New Haven, CT and London:
Yale University Press, 2001), 121–24. Wilson suggests that the Elfledes Boc in the Durham book-list
was a gospel-book, written in English and perhaps bearing an inscription that identif ied it,
like the embroidered stole, as a gift of Ælfflæd. Wilson’s suggestion is inconclusive, but it does
call into question the certainty of identifying Elfledes Boc as a lost source text for the Mercian
Register. Simon Keynes has also observed recently that such an identification “is a pleasant but
entirely wishful thought”; see “Manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,” in The Cambridge
History of the Book in Britain, vol. 1, c. 400–1100, ed. Richard Gameson (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2012), 537–552, at 550.
18 Taylor, MS B, 50.
19 Szarmach, “Æðelflæd of Mercia,” 118–19.
tempus urgeret. Virago potentissima multum fratrem consiliis iuuare, in

urbibus extruendis non minus ualere; non discernas potiore fortuna an
uirtute ut mulier uiros domesticos protegeret, alienos terreret.
(At the same time we must not overlook the king’s sister Æthelflæd,
Æthelred’s widow, who carried no small weight in party strife, being
popular with the citizens and a terror to the enemy. She was a woman of
great determination who, after having difficulties with the birth of her
first, or rather her only, child, abhorred her husband’s embraces ever after,
declaring that it was beneath the dignity of a king’s daughter to involve
oneself in pleasures which would be followed in time by such ill effects.
She was a virago, a very powerful influence and help in her brother’s policy
and no less effective as a builder of cities; it would be hard to say whether
it was luck or character that made a woman such a tower of strength for
the men of her own side and such a terror to the rest.)20
William seems uncertain how to account for such power in a woman. Indeed,
her renunciation of marital sex and the maternal function notably removes
Æthelflæd from traditional female roles. William’s gendered language
presents her insistently as a woman—she is named a sister (soror), widow
(relicta), woman ( femina, mulier), mother, daughter ( filia), virago—and at
the same time, somehow, as something other than a woman. Indeed, the
word order in the passage’s final sentence establishes a gendered contrast
(mulier/uiros) even as it sets a singular woman within larger companies of
men. Much of this gender tension is manifest in the word uirago. Formed
through the addition of the feminine suffix -ago to the masculine noun
uir, the word conflates the masculine and feminine genders within a single
lexeme. Virago is glossed as ceorlstrang fæmne in the Antwerp-London
glossaries,21 working from Isidore’s Etymologiae, which defines uirago as
a woman who “acts like a man.”22 Similarly, Adam names Eve as uirago in
20 William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum: The History of the English Kings, ed. and
trans. R. A. B. Mynors, completed by R. M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom, 2 vols. Oxford
Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 1:198 and 199.
21 David W. Porter, ed., The Antwerp-London Glossaries: The Latin and Latin-Old English Vocabular-
ies from Antwerp, Museum Plantin-Moretus 16.2—London, British Library Add. 32246, vol. 1 (Toronto:
Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2011), 48. See also Helmut Gneuss and Michael Lapidge,
Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: A Bibliographical Handlist of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments
Written or Owned in England up to 1100 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), no. 775; and
David W. Porter, “On the Antwerp-London Glossaries,” JEGP 98 (1999): 170–92.
22 “Virago vocata, quia virum agit, hoc est opera virilia facit et masculini vigoris est. Antiqui
enim fortes feminas ita vocabant. Virgo autem non recte virago dicitur, si non viri off icio
Ælfric’s homily “De initio creaturae” because she was formed from Adam’s
rib: “heo is ban of minum banum. ⁊ flæsc of minum flæsce. beo hire nama
uirago. þæt is fæmne for ðan ðe heo is of hire were genumen” (she is bone
of my bone, and flesh of my flesh; let her name be uirago, that is, a maid
because she is taken from her man). 23 The word also appears in some
Anglo-Latin texts, where it generally describes transgressive women who
challenge masculine authority in some way. Frithegod of Canterbury (ca.
950), for example, calls Saint Æthelthryth famosa uirago in a positive sense,24
whereas the Vita S. Dunstani, composed in the very late tenth century, labels
Æthelgifu, who is also likened to Jezebel, as impudens uirago, in a clearly
negative sense.25 William of Malmesbury uses uirago approvingly in the
Gesta regum to describe secular women who wield political power. Kirsten
A. Fenton has argued that the word “implies that women could and did
become metaphorical men if they displayed manly qualities” and that for
William “such women were exceptional in their display of manly actions
and behavior.”26 In this view, powerful women become masculine as they
move out of traditional female roles into positions traditionally occupied
by men. William’s presentation of Æthelflæd was frequently incorporated
in later chronicles, while his idea of a woman warrior both formidable and
chaste would become an abiding component in subsequent depictions of
Æthelflæd.
fungitur. Mulier vero si virilia facit, recte virago dicitur, ut Amazona.” Isidore, Etymologiarum
sive originum libri XX, ed. W. M. Lindsay, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911), 2:34
(XI.22). “A ‘heroic maiden’ (virago) is so called because she ‘acts like a man’ (vir + agere), that
is, she engages in the activities of men and is full of male vigor. The ancients would call strong
women by that name. However, a virgin cannot be correctly called a heroic maiden unless she
performs a man’s task. But if a woman does manly deeds, then she is correctly called a heroic
maiden, like an Amazon.” The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. Stephen Barney et al.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 242.
23 Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, the First Series, ed. Peter Clemoes, EETS s.s. 17 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997), 182. Compare the Latin Vulgate, Gen. 2:23: “haec vocabitur virago quoniam
de viro sumpta est.” Biblia sacra iuxta Vulgatam versionem, ed. B. Fischer et al., 5th ed. (Stuttgart:
Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2007).
24 Frithegodi monachi Breuiloquium Vitae Beati Wilfridi, ed. A. Campell (Zürich: Thesaurus
Mundi, 1950), 26 (line 542). See also Virginia Blanton, Signs of Devotion: The Cult of St. Æthelthryth
in Medieval England, 695–1615 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007),
166–71.
25 This Æthelgifu was the mother of Ælfgifu, wife to King Eadwig (r. 955–959) until Archbishop
Oda ended the marriage in 958 due to consanguinity. See The Early Lives of St Dunstan, ed. and
trans. Michael Winterbottom and Michael Lapidge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012), 70.
26 Kirsten A. Fenton, Gender, Nation and Conquest in the Works of William of Malmesbury
(Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2008), 51–52.
Like William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon presents Æthelflæd

as a uirago, a woman exceptional for her masculine qualities. Indeed, Henry
was so impressed by Æthelflæd that he composed his own panegyric poem
for her, even if he does misidentify her as Æthelred’s daughter.27 Henry
introduces the verse with a celebration of Æthelflæd’s extraordinary prowess,
through which she would have surpassed all men in virtue—uiros uirtute,
in a nice bit of wordplay—had not she died too soon:
Hec igitur domina tante potentie fertur fuisse, ut a quibusdam non solum
domina uel regina, sed etiam rex uocaretur, ad laudem et excellentiam
mirificationis sue. Et ut estimatum et dictum est, nisi fati uelocitate prerepta
fuisset, uiros uirtute transisset uniuersos. Vnde ad tante probitatis memo-
riam camenam diuturnitatis largitricem uel pauca dicere compulimus:
O Eilfleda potens, O terror uirgo uirorum,
Victrix nature, nomine digna uiri.
Te, quo splendidior fieres, natura puellam,
Te probitas fecit nomen habere uiri.
Te mutare decet, sed solam, nomina sexus,
Tu regina potens rexque trophea parans.
Iam nec Cesarei tantum meruere triumphi,
Cesare splendidior, uirgo uirago uale.
(This lady is said to have been so powerful that in praise and exaltation of
her wonderful gifts, some call her not only lady, or queen, but even king.
And the view has been put forward that if fate had not snatched her away
so swiftly, she would have surpassed all men in valor. In memory of such
prowess I have forced the muse, granter of immortality, to say just a little:
O mighty Æthelflæd! O virgin, the dread of men, conqueror of nature,
worthy of a man’s name! Nature made you a girl, so you would be
more illustrious; your prowess made you acquire the name of man.
For you alone it is right to change the name of your sex: you were a
mighty queen and a king who won victories. Even Caesar’s triumphs
did not bring such great rewards. Virgin heroine, more illustrious
than Caesar, farewell.)28
27 Paul Szarmach has suggested that this verse, along with certain parallel and rhyming
phrases in William, may further indicate a lost Latin source for the Mercian Register (“Æðelflæd
of Mercia,” 121–22).
28 Henry, Archdeacon of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum: The History of the English People,
ed. and trans. Diana Greenway (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 308 and 309.
Henry’s poem is full of soaring praise and gender confusion. The repetition of
uirgo at the beginning and end of the poem emphasizes Æthelflæd’s chastity,
while the repeated u- words (aside from the final uale) call attention to
gender: uir (male) appears three times in some form, uirgo (female) twice,
and uictrix (female) and uirago (male-female) once each. Æthelflæd appears
as a uirago so powerful Henry that must call her a man, a rex mightier than
Caesar. Æthelflæd is so remarkable, it seems, that Henry cannot fit her within
a stable pattern of gender. William and Henry together established Æthelflæd
as a fearsome warrior and reluctant mother, two identity categories that
move her away from traditional gender roles. Indeed, Betty Bandel has
forcibly argued, with specific attention to Æthelflæd, that post-Conquest
chroniclers were often unable to account for prominent women without
describing them as displaying “manlike” virtues.29 William and Henry each
present Æthelflæd as a wondrous figure, a woman who performs across and
destabilizes gendered divisions.
Later medieval and early modern historians would largely work from
William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon as a foundation, often
repeating their content verbatim. Some writers might differ from William
and Henry on certain points, as when Gaimar claims that Æthelflæd could
not bear any children,30 a statement that erases her motherhood, but later
chroniclers would generally follow their example. Ranulph Higden, for
example, incorporates William’s account nearly wholesale, as well as Henry’s
poem, in his sprawling and influential Polychronicon (completed in the
mid-fourteenth century).31 In his English translation of the Polychronicon,
completed in 1387, John Trevisa maintains uirago rather than render it in
English (“Þues strong virago Elfleda”),32 marking the word’s debut into
29 Betty Bandel, “The English Chroniclers’ Attitude Toward Women,” Journal of the History of
Ideas 16 (1955): 113–18. See also Christine Fell, with Cecily Clark and Elizabeth Williams, Women
in Anglo-Saxon England and the Impact of 1066 (London: Colonnade Books, 1984), 92, which
makes much the same argument.
30 “Dis e huit anz quant out regné, / Merceneland resçut en fié; / Elflet sa sour l’en herita, /
sicum Edelret comanda; / pur ço k’enfanz ne pout aveir, / quant el morust, sin f ist son hair”
(lines 3493–98). (When he had been on the throne for eighteen years, he came to hold Mercia
in fee. His sister Æthelflæd had inherited it, as king Ethelred had ordered. As she could have
no children of her own, she made Edward her heir on her death.) Geffrei Gaimar, Estoire des
Engleis, History of the English, ed. and trans. Ian Short (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009),
190 and 191.
31 Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden monachi Cestrensis, ed. Churchill Babington and J. R. Lumby,
Rolls Series, 9 vols. (London: 1865–86), 1:411–22.
32 Ronald Waldron, ed., John Trevisa’s Translation of the Polychronicon of Ranulph Higden,
Book VI (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2004), 23.
the English language, at least according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Trevisa also preserves uirago in his translation of Henry’s verse, although
he omits the Henry’s prefatory note to the poem:
In preysyng of þues Elfleda, Henricus, libro quinto, made þys dyte:

O Elfled myȝty, O mayde mennene drede,
Vyctrys of kunde, wel worþy þe name of a manne,
and þe wel bryȝter, now kunde haþ ymaked a mayde.
Godnes haþ þe mad to habbe þe nam of a manne;
Kunde techeþ þe to chaynge nouȝt bote þe name.
Myȝty kyng & queene, vyctoryes to araye,
Cesar hys triumphes were noȝt so moche worþy.
Nobeler þan Cesar, mayde virago, vare well.33
Overall, Trevisa gives a close translation of Henry’s composition, faith-

fully matching the content of each line and twice maintaining original
vocabulary (uictrix and uirago). Line 5 shows a more substantial change,
which somewhat obscures the transformation of sex that is more directly
stated in Henry’s original line. Still, Trevisa’s Englishing of Henry’s encomium
effectively transmitted the idea of Æthelflæd as uirago into the vernacular,
helping to broadcast further the idea of Æthelflæd as a warrior-woman.
This martial image would remain available to later writers to embellish
and develop as they reworked the historical materials they inherited from
the medieval chroniclers. Robert Fabyan included his own version of the
Æthelflæd verses in his New Cronycles of Englande and of Fraunce, com-
pleted in 1504 and published in 1516. While Fabyan’s account of the painful
childbirth closely follows the wording of Trevisa, his more compressed
adaptation of the poem seems to be his own:
Cezers tryumphis were nat so moche to prayse,

As was of Elfleda, that sheldes so ofte dyd rayse.
Agayne her enemyes, this noble venqueresse
Virago and made, whose vertue can I nat expresse.34
Fabyan’s rhyming lines compress the content of the original verse but pre-
serve the core image of the chaste virago, along with the now conventional
33 Waldron, Trevisa’s Translation, 26.

34 Robert Fabyan, New Cronycles of Englande and of Fraunce, ed. Henry Ellis (London, 1811),
178.
comparison to Caesar. Fabyan adds new battle imagery with the lines “that
sheldes so ofte dyd rayse / Agayne her enemyes,” which can be read to mean
both Æthelflæd herself raising a shield and her commanding others to do
so (i.e., she appears as both combatant and commander). Finally, the final
phrase “whose vertue can I nat expresse” suggests more than a conventional
humility trope. Even though Fabyan omits the descriptions of Æthelflæd
changing her sex, his final line suggests that she still occupies a gender
position that escapes conclusive definition within conventional terms.
Virtues More than Female
For centuries, historians would explain Æthelflæd’s accomplishments

through statements that Æthelflæd was a woman with a masculine spirit.
Derived mainly from medieval chroniclers, celebrations of Æthelflæd’s
manlike qualities became something of a motif that endured in historical
writing into the early twentieth century.35 Part of the process involved
working with and recasting inherited materials to serve particular creative
and ideological purposes, and to fit Æthelflæd within recognizable categories
of gendered activity.
An early example of this process appears in John Milton’s The History
of Britain, first published in 1670, although Milton had been at work on
the project intermittently since the late 1640s. Milton consulted a range
of sources, including Abraham Wheelock’s edition of the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle (1643), which provided the Old English text alongside a Latin
translation.36 Wheelock had used British Library, Cotton Otho B.xi (MS G)
as his base text, which was itself a copy of British Library, Cambridge,
Corpus Christi College 173 (MS A); accordingly, the Chronicle as printed
by Wheelock contains no information on Æthelflæd aside from the notice
of her death in 922 (for 918). However, Milton also made discerning use of
35 Thomas Hodgkin, writing in the early twentieth century, for example, introduces Æthelflæd
as “Edward’s manlike sister”; see The History of England from the Earliest Times to the Norman
Conquest (New York: Longmans, Green, 1906), 321.
36 Abraham Wheelock, ed., Historiae ecclesiasticae gentis Anglorum (Cambridge, 1643). See
also Angelika Lutz, “The Study of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in the Seventeenth Century and
the Establishment of Old English Studies in the Universities,” in The Recovery of Old English:
Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. Timothy Graham (Kalamazoo,
MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), 1–82, at 34–40; and Patrick V. Day, “Rectifying a
Chronicle of Contradictions: The Political Context of Abraham Wheelock’s 1643 Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle,” Explorations of Renaissance Culture 43 (2017): 81–107.
other medieval sources, including William of Malmesbury and Henry of

Huntingdon. Milton clearly used Henry of Huntingdon, for example, as the
source for his economical description of Æthelflæd sending an army into
Wales, followed by her capture of Derby the following year.37 Still, Milton
does not include any of the other substantial information that Henry gives
for Æthelflæd’s activities between 911 and 918, while he titles her only as
“the Kings Sister,” disregarding Henry’s regular use of domina Merce (Lady
of Mercia). Likewise, Milton makes modest additions to the sparse notice of
Æthelflæd’s death in Wheelock, drawing upon the more expansive accounts
in William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon: “Elfled his Sister a
martial Woman, who after her Husbands Death would no more marry, but
gave her self to public affairs, repairing and fortifying many Towns, warring
sometimes, dy’d at Tamworth the Chief Seat of Mercia, wherof by gift of Alfred
her Father, she was Lady or Queen.”38 Milton’s phrase “a martial Woman” is
equivalent to uirago, while the end of the sentence belatedly acknowledges
Æthelflæd’s status as Lady of the Mercians, even if the preceding statement
that she received that rank as a gift from her father does make that status
subordinate to patriarchal authority. Moreover, Milton greatly compresses
the details of Æthelflæd’s fortifications and campaigns, and he omits entirely
the more sensational material that he found in both William and Henry (he
makes no mention of Henry’s poem, for example). As a result, Milton gives
Æthelflæd more space in his historical narrative than he found in Wheelock,
but that space remains circumscribed in comparison to the more expansive
treatments in the twelfth-century chroniclers. Still, Milton does present
Æthelflæd as an exceptional figure. When he reports that Æthelstan was
fostered in Mercia, he states: “He had his breeding in the Court of Elfled his
Aunt, of whose vertues more then female we have related.”39 Like William
and Henry, Milton imagines Æthelflæd as something other than woman,
assigning her a gender identity that approaches the masculine even as it
remains predicated on the feminine.
While Milton does not describe Æthelflæd directly as masculine, others
would make that dual gender category explicit. David Hume, for example,
in his History of England, frames Æthelflæd’s refusal of the marriage bed,
as given in William of Malmesbury, as one proof of her exceptional nature:
37 Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. French Fogle (New Haven, CT and London: Yale
University Press, 1971), vol. 5, part 1, 297. Milton says the fortress was taken “by a sharp assault,”
which likely renders Henry’s “castellum acerrime inuasit” (Historia Anglorum, 306).
38 Complete Prose Works 5.1, 300.
39 Complete Prose Works 5.1, 313.
“This princess, who had been reduced to extremity in child-bed, refused

afterwards all commerce with her husband; not from any weak superstition,
as was common in that age, but because she deemed all domestic occupa-
tions unworthy of her masculine and ambitious spirit.”40 Hume may have
been less than impressed with the early medieval English generally but his
Æthelflæd transcends the failings of her age, turning her talents to the public
good. Likewise, John Lingard, whose work was intended to break from the
historiography represented by Hume, 41 correlates a masculine nature with
success in warfare: “For a few years the government of Mercia, during the
frequent infirmities of Ethered, was intrusted to the hands of Ethelfleda,
a princess whose masculine virtues and martial exploits are celebrated in
the highest strains of panegyric by our ancient historians.”42 Such equations
have proved especially attractive to modern representations of Æthelflæd,
which often foreground her status as a woman warrior among men.
Æthelflæd’s “manlike” qualities were also seen as facilitating or reflective
of virtues other than martial prowess. Indeed, the motif of her “masculine
spirit” provided a versatile means for presenting and justifying a range of
extraordinary qualities. Sharon Turner, for example, in his monumental His-
tory of the Saxons (1799–1805), acclaims Æthelflæd primarily for her wisdom:
The most exquisite luxury which aged parents can enjoy, when the charms
of life and all the pleasures of sense are fast fading around them, is to see
their parental care rewarded by a dutiful, affectionate, and intelligent
offspring. Alfred enjoyed this happiness, which he had so well merited.
Æthelfleda, his eldest, became a woman of very superior mind: such were
its energies, that they even reached a masculine strength. She is extolled,
in the ancient chronicles, as the wisest lady in England. Her brother
Edward governed his life in its best actions by her counsels. After she
was married to Ethered, the governor of Mercia, she built several cities,
and upon all occasions displayed a statesman’s skill, and an Amazonian
activity. 43
40 David Hume, The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in
1688, 6 vols. (London, 1759–62), 1:71. The first volume, which covers the early medieval period,
was published last in the series. See also R. J. Smith, The Gothic Bequest: Medieval Institutions
in British Thought, 1688–1863 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 74–84.
41 John Vidmar, English Catholic Historians and the English Reformation, 1585–1954 (Brighton:
Sussex Academic Press, 2005), 52–74.
42 John Lingard, A History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans, 14 vols. (London:
J. Mawman, 1819–31), 1:204.
43 Sharon Turner, A History of the Anglo-Saxons, 3 vols., 3rd ed. (1799–1805; London, 1820), 2:270.
For Turner, Æthelflæd’s exceptional mind gives proof of “a masculine

strength” and “statesman’s skill,” which help qualify her as an Amazon
(equivalent to a uirago, as Turner observes in a footnote). 44 Moreover, this
sentimental portrait notably imagines Æthelflæd as a reward for her father
and a guide to her brother—Turner frames her worth in terms of the support
she offers the men in her family, thus affording her a gendered status that
is both exceptional and subordinate. Many assessments of Æthelflæd,
however, measure her positively against the men of her family, comparing
her favorably to her father Alfred,45 elevating her above her brother Edward,46
and/or eclipsing her husband Æthelred.47 In these cases, Æthelflæd is deemed
equal or superior, rather than subordinate, to her male peers.
A Suitable and Worthy Heroine
The one characteristic of Æthelflæd that seems to have fascinated most is her
reputation as a warrior. Many of the assessments that claimed a “masculine
44 See also Mrs. Matthew Hall, Lives of the Queens of England before the Norman Conquest
(Philadelphia: Blanchard and Lea, 1854), 343: “Ethelfleda, the first-born of Alfred’s children by
Queen Elswitha, was esteemed the most learned, as she was the most remarkable, woman of
her time, and singularly distinguished for masculine spirit and abilities.”
45 “After the death of her consort, Æthelflæd continued to conduct the government of Mercia,
in which she proved herself a daughter worthy of her illustrious sire” (J. M. Lappenberg, A History
of England Under the Anglo-Saxon Kings, trans. Benjamin Thorpe, 2 vols. [1845; London, George
Bell and Sons, 1884] 2:109); “In talent she more nearly resembled her glorious father than any of
his children; and equally to her mother was she indebted for those noble qualities which made
her illustrious” (Hall, Lives of Queens, 343).
46 “The loss of so active a coadjutrix was bitterly lamented by Edward, who, though a wise and
active king, does not seem to have possessed those military talents which were so pre-eminent
in his sister. It is, however, very probable that ‘the lady of the Mercians’ possessed like her father
more valuable qualities than mere warlike skill” (Hannah Lawrance, The History of Woman
in England and Her Influence on Society and Literature, vol. 1 [London, 1843], 135–36). See also
Rosemary Ann Mitchell, “‘The Busy Daughters of Clio’: Women Writers of History from 1820 to
1880,” Women’s History Review 7 (1998): 107–34; and Benjamin Dabby, “Hannah Lawrance and
the Claims of Woman’s History in Nineteenth-Century England,” The Historical Journal 53 (2010):
699–722.
47 “Ethelred died in 911, and his widow, Ethelfleda, succeeded and surpassed him. In those savage
times the emergence of a woman ruler was enough to betoken her possession of extraordinary
qualities” (Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, 4 vols. [London:
Cassell, 1956], 1:101); “Æthelflæd was a far superior ruler to her husband Æthelred, and made
Mercia a kingdom to be feared, repelling foes from her borders and bringing unruly neighbours
under her control” (Alex Burghart, “Æthelflæd: Iron Lady of Mercia,” BBC History Magazine,
August 2011: 60–63, at 61).
spirit” for Æthelflæd saw that spirit manifest in her success in battle, and
while no tenth-century sources indicate that Æthelflæd ever personally
engaged in combat, the warrior role has long been an essential feature of
her story in the modern imagination. Francis Palgrave, for example, framed
Æthelflæd as a famous female knight from epic romance: “The ‘lady,’ as
she was emphatically styled, possessed the sturdy valour ascribed to the
Bradamante of Ariosto; the whole character of the ‘bold virago,’ as the monk-
ish writers call her, resembles that of heroine of romance; and Ethelfleda’s
wisdom was not inferior to her valour.”48 While Palgrave fits Æthelflæd to
a fictional model, H. O. Arnold-Forster later imagined a more militaristic
Æthelflæd roaming the front lines: “Æthelfleda soon became a well-known
figure in the National War. Clad in armour, with a sword in her hand, and
mounted on a white horse, she herself led the Mercian troops into battle. She
was known to her people as ‘The Lady of the Mercians’ and she bore herself
as a worthy daughter of her father, King Alfred.”49 Such a fanciful description
would seem more at home in fiction than in history, but it illustrates how vivid
such depictions could become as writers embellished the sparse historical
record and built upon the suppositions of secondary sources. A comparable
example appears in Cassell’s Illustrated History of England, which provides
a brief description of Æthelflæd that bears a number of familiar elements:
“Edward was materially assisted in these struggles by his warlike sister
Ethelflæd, the widow of the Alderman of Mercia, who, despite her sex, appears
to have delighted in arms. Aided by her brother’s troops, she attacked the
Welsh, who had sided with the Danes, and obliged them to pay tribute to
her.”50 Again we see Æthelflæd as an oddity of gender, breaking stereotypes
through her love for combat, but fulfilling them in her dependence on her
brother’s support. What makes this presentation more remarkable, however,
is the full-page illustration that precedes the text, which shows Æthelflæd
on horseback, sword in hand and leading a charge against the Welsh.
This image, frequently reproduced online, visually realizes the running
desire to imagine Æthelflæd as a woman warrior in the thick of combat, still
a commander and strategist perhaps, but most clearly a hands-on fighter.51
48 Francis Palgrave, History of the Anglo-Saxons (1842; London, William Tegg, 1869), 163.
49 H. O. Arnold-Forster, A History of England from the Landing of Julius Cæsar to the Present
Day, 3rd ed. (London: Cassell, 1899), 66.
50 Cassell’s Illustrated History of England from the Roman Invasion to the Wars of the Roses
(London: Cassell, 1909), 46. An earlier eight-volume version (1870–74) does not contain the image
of Æthelflæd, although it does contain the same text.
51 There are no comparable images of Alfred, Edward, or Æthelstan in the book, in terms of
size or content.
Fig. 3.1
Cassell’s Illustrated History of England from the Roman Invasion to the Wars
of the Roses
London: Cassell and Co., Limited, 1909, 45. Public domain.
Depictions of Æthelflæd as a warrior, in combination with accounts of her

wisdom and chastity, encouraged associations with the profile of Judith in
the Old English poem bearing her name. In 1892, T. G. Foster first proposed
that the Old English Judith had been inspired by Æthelflæd. Foster saw
a clear parallel between Æthelflæd’s campaigns against the Danes and
Judith’s own leadership of the Bethulians to victory over the invading
Assyrians:
Æthelflæd then is Mercia’s Judith, for she by no ordinary strategy, we

are told, raised her kingdom and people to their old position. She, like
the Hebrew Judith, abandoned the older strategy of raid and battle, not
indeed to murder the Danish chief, but to build fortresses and beleaguer
her enemies. Æthelflæd is then a suitable and worthy heroine to have
stirred a contemporary poet to his theme.52
52 T. Gregory Foster, Judith: Studies in Metre, Language and Style (Strasbourg: Karl J. Trübner,
1892), 90. Consequently, Foster dates the composition of Judith to sometime between 915 and
918, with the claim that The Battle of Brunanburh was influenced by Judith.
Foster cites William of Malmesbury as confirmation for his thesis but offers
little substantial evidence to support his case.53 Accordingly, many scholars
have remained skeptical. B. J. Timmer dismissed Foster’s theory roundly in
his 1952 edition of Judith,54 while Mark Griffith said nothing about it at all
in his own 1997 edition.55 The uncertainty surrounding Foster’s argument,
however, has not deterred several writers from repeating it.56 Flora Spiegel
has revisited the question most recently, challenging many of Timmer’s
objections and concluding that some relationship between Æthelflæd and
the poem “should therefore be evaluated as a serious possibility, rather than
dismissed as a quaint joke at the expense of romantic Victorians such as
Foster.”57 Spiegel provides a valuable corrective to offhand dismissal, but in
terms of Æthelflæd’s modern reputation, her defense demonstrates the abid-
ing attraction of notions of Æthelflæd as a warrior.58 Indeed, Spiegel’s phrase
53 Still, Foster’s argument held some standing in the early twentieth century. The first edition
of The Cambridge History of English Literature, for example, draws connections between the
Mercian Register, the Elfledes boc from the Durham catalogue, and the Old English Judith,
positing a lost “book of Aethelflaed” as a common source. See John S. Westlake, “From Alfred
to the Conquest,” in The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. 1, ed. A. W. Ward and A. R.
Waller (Cambridge: cambridge University Press, 1907), 108–48, at 110 and 141–42.
54 B. J. Timmer, ed., Judith (London: Methuen, 1952). Ironically, on one occasion Timmer
confuses Judith and Æthelflæd as he refutes Foster: “The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle does not go
into raptures over Judith but simply calls her Myrcena hlæfdige, or merely Æðelflæd, and only
gives information about her deeds” (Timmer, ed., Judith, 7). The error was corrected in the second
edition, published in 1961.
55 Mark Griffith, ed., Judith (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997).
56 See Anne Echols and Marty Williams, An Annotated Index of Medieval Women (Oxford:
Berg Publishers, 1992), 11–12; Pauline Stafford, Queens, Concubines, and Dowagers: The King’s
Wife in the Early Middle Ages (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), 26; Antonia Fraser,
The Warrior Queens (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), 154; Henrietta Leyser, Medieval Women:
A Social History of Women in England, 450–1500 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 61 and 74;
The Longman Anthology of Old English, Old Icelandic and Anglo-Norman Literatures, ed. Richard
North, Joe Allard, and Patricia Gillies (Harlow: Pearson, 2011), 402; Bryan Weston Wyly, “Cædmon
the Cowherd and Old English Biblical Verse,” in Beowulf & Other Stories: A New Introduction to
Old English, Old Icelandic and Anglo-Norman Literatures, ed. Richard North and Joe Allard, 2nd
ed. (2007; Harlow: Pearson, 2012), at 214; and Arman, The Warrior Queen, 174–82.
57 Flora Spiegel, “The Heroic Biography of Æthelflæd of Mercia and the Old English Judith:
A Re-Examination,” Quaestio Insularis: Selected Proceedings of the Cambridge Colloquium in
Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic 5 (2004): 111–44, at 144.
58 Spiegel acknowledges (but does not fully engage) the cultivation of Æthelflæd in feminist
historiography of the late 1980s and 90s and its free use of legendary material. At the same time,
however, Mary Dockray-Miller still claimed “The feminist history movement has, by and large,
passed her [Æthelflæd] by” (Motherhood and Mothering, 62). Such notices of historical neglect
have been especially persistent in treatments of Æthelflæd.
“heroic biography” reminds us of the abiding influence that certain narrative

expectations have played in the ongoing construction of Æthelflæd’s story.59
The vision of Æthelflæd as a formidable woman warrior strong enough
to be a man has proven especially attractive in recent decades, especially in
the popular press and online. Uppity Women of Medieval Times, for example,
tells us that, “Aethelfled for one couldn’t get enough of the battlefield” until
she “finally caught the wrong end of a mace in a battle at Stratfordshire in
918.”60 The Encyclopedia of the Amazons likewise notes that Æthelflæd “fell
in battle in June 918 at Tamworth in Staffordshire.”61 This prevailing image of
Æthelflæd as a woman warrior fighting in a masculine world wary of strong
women has also made its way into online communities. One can find the
theory, for example, that Æthelflæd inspired J. R. R. Tolkien to create the
character Eowyn in Lord of the Rings:
While he got his inspiration from many sources (and did not welcome
speculation on such matters!), it is, however, hard to ignore certain simi-
larities between Middle Earth and Anglo Saxon England. For example
both had: just one woman to f ight on horseback; one woman to lead
men in battle; one woman to help rule her people when destiny called.
Taking everything into consideration, it is quite likely that the legends
of Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians, inspired Tolkien to create Eowyn,
Lady of the Rohan.62
The text appears next to an image of actress Miranda Otto in helmet and
armor, screaming a defiant battle-cry in the Peter Jackson film The Return
of the King (2003), a juxtaposition that implies Æthelflæd must have looked
somewhat the same when she fought the Vikings. Popular portrayals like
this one circulate freely and have become influential participants in the
diffuse networks of representation that determine the perception and
reception of Æthelflæd.
59 The word heroic (or some variation thereof) was a mainstay in descriptions of Æthelflæd
in historical writing, especially in (but not limited to) the nineteenth century. The examples
are too numerous to cite here.
60 Vicki León, Uppity Women of Medieval Times (Berkeley, CA: Conari Press, 1997), 30.
61 Jessica Amanda Salmonson, The Encyclopedia of Amazons: Women Warriors from Antiquity
to the Modern Era (New York: Paragon House, 1991), 3.
62 Brian S., “Aethelflaed: Daughter of Greatness,” posted August 28, 2005, accessed January 15,
2021, http://girlswithguns.org/aethelflaed-daughter-of-greatness/. Like so many others, the
article begins by protesting Æthelflæd’s undeserved obscurity.
Fig. 3.2 The Æthelflæd statue at Tamworth Castle, designed by H. C. Mitchell and

sculpted by E. G. Bramwell. The statue was raised in 1913
Photograph by the author.
Since the 1990s, these representations have increasingly favored the depiction
of Æthelflæd as a warrior. A comparison of public monuments in Tamworth
encapsulates this development quite clearly. The grounds at Tamworth
Castle today contain a statue of Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, raised
upon an ornately sculpted pedestal.63
63 The statue bears an inscription from its raising in 1913 “to commemorate the building of
the castle mound by Aethelfleda, the Lady of the Mercians.” A second inscription was added
Fig. 3.3 The Æthelflæd statue sculpted by Luke Perry and raised in 2018
Photograph reproduced by permission of Tamworth Arts & Events, Tamworth, UK.
Æthelflæd holds a bared sword in her right hand as she smiles down upon
an adoring child (likely Æthelstan) cradled within the shelter of her left
arm. The image captures the popular legend of Æthelflæd as it existed at
the time of statue’s creation in 1913: a nurturing woman warrior dedicated
to fostering the growth of the West Saxon dynasty and English nation.
For the 1,100-year anniversary of Æthelflæd’s death, however, Tamworth
commissioned a new statue, which was installed on May 20, 2018.
The contrast between this metal statue, which stands six meters high,
and the older stone statue at Tamworth Castle demonstrates an escalating
investment in the image of Æthelflæd as a warrior. The Æthelflæd of 2018,
wearing armor with a shield strapped across her back, looks boldly forward,
a spear extended in her left hand as her right hand rests on the pommel of
a massive sword that also serves as pedestal and base for the statue. This
angular and imposing effigy is all fighter, with no cherubic child at her skirts.
Indeed, the creator artist Luke Perry describes Æthelflæd in an interview
in 2013, on the “Anniversary of the re-fortification of the burh of Tamworth, ancient capital of
Mercia.”
as “a bad-ass warrior queen who should not have been forgotten by history.”
Perry describes the older Tamworth statue as “the Victorian image of her,
which was motherly, maternal and submissive. That’s totally wrong, she was
a warrior.”64 The new Tamworth statue represents a dramatic revision of
Æthelflæd’s local image, one which aggressively broadcasts a warrior identity.
More Valuable Qualities than Mere Warlike Skill
Past writers have looked to other qualities in Æthelflæd other than success
in warfare, however. Historians like Sharon Turner praised Æthelflæd for her
intelligence and wisdom, while others have similarly valued other virtues,
often through creative embellishment of the historical record.
One remarkable depiction of Æthelflæd’s compassion appears in antiquar-
ian John Throsby’s Memoirs of the Town and County of Leicester, published
in 1777. Throsby dedicates several pages to Æthelflæd, the first few being
somewhat standard in content and style, repeating William of Malmesbury’s
story of “disliking the severe pangs of child-bearing,” followed by a short
description of her admirable martial abilities. Following this, however,
Throsby turns his attention to Æthelflæd’s presence at Leicester, with an
account that depicts her compassion in a most dramatic fashion:
She relieved, in many places, the distresses of mankind, where the horrors
of war had made miserable. The city of Leicester, she beheld with the
tenderest compassion which had been honoured by a royal Residence; but
whose beauty and strength had fallen to decay by the annihilating power
of war.—Its miserable inhabitants she succoured. Its wasted dwellings
she bid to rise from their ruinous heaps, in pleasing order. Propagation
under her kind influence poured forth her multiplying increase to supply
the devastations of a vindictive foe.65
This would seem to be a local tradition independent of the written sources.

The Mercian Register states that Æthelflæd gained control (“begeat on hire
64 Smith, Adam, “Giant Sculpture of ‘Bad-Ass Warrior Queen’ Who Fought Vikings Unveiled
in Tamworth,” Metro, May 22, 2018, accessed January 15, 2021, https://metro.co.uk/2018/05/22/
giant-sculpture-of-bad-ass-warrior-queen-who-fought-vikings-unveiled-in-tamworth-7567508/.
The event was supported by a social media campaign that encouraged citizens to post pictures
of themselves imitating the new statue’s stance and attitude, with the hashtag #dotheaethel.
65 John Throsby, Memoirs of the Town and County of Leicester (London, 1777), 119–20. Hall quotes
this description in Lives of Queens, 348, crediting the author incorrectly as “Thoresby.”
geweald”) of Leicester in 918, doing so without a fight (“gesimbsumlice”).66

Throsby’s more elaborate account presents Æthelflæd as a redeemer,
directing attention to her restoration of Leicester and its people; in his
florid description, she brings alleviation from war, rather than war itself.
This presentation also demonstrates, again, how Æthelflæd frequently
inspired writers to creative addition and embellishment. Throsby ends his
vignette with the standard plea that Æthelflæd not be forgotten: “may her
name adorn the page of history to the remotest time, inspiring princes with
her exalted sentiments of munificence.”67 For Throsby, Æthelflæd’s most
important virtue was a kindness that inspired her to productive action for
the benefit of place and community.
In a more extensive case of creative license, J. Llewelyn Prichard’s The
Heroines of Welsh History reimagines the story of Æthelflæd in ways that
are frequently flamboyant and often ahistorical. Prichard’s unconventional
mélange of apocryphal legend and pure invention with the citation and
evaluation of historical sources creates a sensational narrative that shows
Æthelflæd (unsurprisingly) breaking away from established gender roles.
In doing so, Prichard both amplifies and modifies the conceit of Æthelflæd
as a masculine woman:
If a woman, under any circumstances, can stand excused before the judg-
ment seat of man, for subduing those attractive graces which make her
lovely in his eye, her soft demeanour, retiring gentleness, and yielding
flexibility of character, to trespass over the sexual boundary with which
nature has fenced his prerogatives—to put on the stern characteristics of
manhood—not the masquerading foolery of the helmet and war-boots of
Mars upon the shrinking frame of Venus—but the dire, fateful earnestness
of the life or death hazards of the day of battle—then surely Elfleda is not
only uncensurable, but feelingly commendable for the subsequent part she
took in repelling personally the aggression of ambitious neighbours and
every description of marauders or assailants. The unenviable functions
which she embraced, glowing as the results of her daring appear in the
dubious lustre imposed by success, was not a matter of choice, but literally
enforced upon her by the merciless necessity which environed her position.68
66 Taylor, MS B, 50.
67 Throsby, Memories of the Town and County of Leicester, 120. One might note that Throsby
imagines Æthelflæd as an inspiration for royal men here, not for royal women.
68 T. J. Llewelyn Prichard, The Heroines of Welsh History: Comprising Memoirs and Biographical
Notices of the Celebrated Women of Wales (London, W. & F. G. Cash, 1854), 232–33.
In a muddle of gender stereotypes, Prichard exonerates Æthelflæd from

transgressing the “sexual boundary” to enter the masculine realm of
war—her assumption of that mantle was forced upon her by necessity, he
argues, framing it as a regrettable course but freeing Æthelflæd from blame.
There is a sense of embarrassment here, even as Prichard invests Æthelflæd
as a reluctant warrior who “personally” defeats all aggressors and enemies,
as if she were an army of one. In this schema, she is exemplary despite her
shifting gender, while most writers have presented her masculine nature
as a sign or outcome of her general excellence. Moreover, Prichard presents
Æthelflæd’s decision to assume manly virtues as a heroic act, in the form
of a dramatic monologue in which she stirs herself to action:
Deprived of the natural support of the dependent state, her womanly

condition unprotected by the powerful arm and daring heart of man, she
said to her soul in the extremity of her helplessness, “my husband is in
the grave, my father’s sleep is dreamless of my woes,—my brother—let
me not think of him!—no, I have none to help me—then I will be a man
myself—in far as in me lies, I will emulate his virtues, and nerve my
woman’s heart with manly resolution.”69
Facing a lack of “natural support” from the men in her family—Prichard

presents Edward as something of a villain—Æthelflæd must step away from
masculine company even as she becomes a man herself. Accordingly, she is
figured as both passive and active, while her resolve for independence is both
daring and tragic. Despite its conservative gender politics, Prichard’s revision
reconfigures the longstanding trope of the mannish woman—one that
seems to make him somewhat uncomfortable—by providing a justification
that both frees Æthelflæd of censure and makes her even more exceptional
in the bargain.
A more recent book steps far away from the convention of Æthelflæd as
a uirago, the woman who acts like a man. In his The Lady Who Fought the
Vikings, Don Stansbury insistently presents Æthelflæd as a woman who did
not emulate masculine traits. “Ethelfled was not a woman who succeeded
in a man’s world by turning herself into a man,” he bluntly states.70 As
a woman, Stansbury claims, she provided an alternative to the cyclical
violence perpetuated by men, yet her story has remained untold: “History
69 Prichard, Heroines of Welsh History, 233.

70 Don Stansbury, The Lady Who Fought the Vikings (South Brent: Imogen Books, 1993), 201.
has ignored Ethelfled. It has consigned her to the footnotes.”71 Stanbury

combines the examination of primary and secondary sources with imagina-
tive reconstruction, scholarly analysis with melodramatic polemic, as he
constructs his own vision of Æthelflæd. For Stansbury, Æthelflæd offered
a better style of leadership, one that valued peace over violence:
It is important to know that one of the people who stood against this
rising tide of violence eleven centuries ago and proved that it was possible
for the civilised way to survive was a woman. She showed that there was
another way. It was a woman’s way. She did not try to succeed in a male
dominated world by copying the men, by being even more fierce and
aggressive and bloodthirsty than they were. There was quite enough of
that without her adding to it. Violence was the problem not the solution.
Her way was different and it was what people needed.72
For Stansbury, the essentialist concept of the “woman’s way” provides an

unrealized solution to the violence that has plagued both past and present.
Even when describing her military actions, Stansbury presents Æthelflæd
as a force for peace. When describing the winning of Derby, for example,
Stansbury explains that the 917 annal from the Mercian Register, which
describes Æthelflæd’s sorrow at the loss of her four thegns, “contains a
very unusual element. It expresses love and a sadness at the waste of life.
In her moment of greatest triumph, Ethelfled was thinking and feeling as
a woman would feel. She loved her men and they doubtless loved her and
they won the battle for her. In the midst of so much hatred and so much
fear, love was proving itself to be more powerful.”73 Despite the title of his
book, Stansbury’s Æthelflæd is not a warrior-woman defined foremost by
her success in combat; instead, he presents her as a force for peace within a
“world that men had dominated and made dangerous.”74 The gender binarism
is starkly clear—Æthelflæd was great because as a woman she remained
free of toxic masculinity. With passionate investment, Stansbury claims
Æthelflæd as an occasion for making a larger argument about womanhood
as a corrective counterpoint to masculine violence. He ends with a vehement
indictment of Æthelstan as a warmonger, and with a closing claim that
Æthelflæd would have chosen a higher path. “History needs to show how
71 Stansbury, The Lady Who Fought the Vikings, 218.

72 Stansbury, The Lady Who Fought the Vikings, 1–2.
people have tried to limit violence and construct a better way,” he writes.
“We have needed to know about Ethelfled.”75
May Her Name Adorn the Page of History
The motif of an imperiled Æthelflæd on the verge of being forgotten has

long provided an occasion for reinterpretation and reinvention as means
of remembering. From William of Malmesbury’s plea that we not overlook
Æthelflæd (non praetermittatur), to online projects to “resurrect knowledge
of the First Lady of the Mercians,”76 the impulse to memorialize Æthelflæd
has been steady and insistent. Indeed, the supposed conspiracy of silence
that Wainwright saw among Æthelflæd’s contemporaries has become for
subsequent generations an imperative to speak. The provocative blanks
in the historical record have provided a generative space for writers to
construct their own Æthelflæd, often as a transgressive challenge to—or
confirmation of—different gender hierarchies and assumptions. Æthel-
flæd’s long reception history shows how she has provided a flexible site for
expressing and contesting different constructions of gender, identity, and
history. As a result, Æthelflæd has remained both a remarkable historical
agent in her own right, and a compelling figure through which later eras
could articulate their own desires and anxieties about the intersections
of past and present.77
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Affect Theory
4 Be a Man, Beowulf
Sentimental Masculinity and the Gentleness of Kings
E. J. Christie
Abstract
While early critics of Beowulf, almost exclusively male, projected their
gender expectations onto the poem and found their protagonist “manly,”
it was not until the mid-twentieth century that the gentleness ascribed
to early medieval English kings attracted close consideration. This essay
makes a small contribution to the feminist recovery of the diversity of
ways to be male by examining the Old English discourse of gentleness, and
rereading in the context of a crisis of masculinity. Yet, while Old English
didactic texts distinguished between meekness and anger, duty and
“slackness,” all such ideas about courage became emphatically gendered
only in their reception. It is clear, in other words, that though Beowulf
was always male – criticism made him “a man.”
Keywords: Masculinity, Gender, Kingship, Historiography, Romanticism, War
Tolkien’s “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” has been celebrated as the
origin of modern criticism of the poem, making a convincing case for its
aesthetic unity and, furthermore, depicting the poet as “a brooding intel-
lectual, poised between a dying pagan world and a nascent Christian one.”1
Though it is less often the focus of contemplation than some of Tolkien’s
other observations, this idea of the poet is a central aspect of Tolkien’s wider
view of the poem as a “tale of men dying.”2 The “brooding intellectual”
and the courageous man of action are opposed masculine types and the
1 Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles. A Beowulf Handbook (Lincoln: University of Nebraska,
1997), 5.
2 Gillian R. Overing, Language, Sign, and Gender in Beowulf (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1990), 70.
doi: 10.5117/9789463721462_ch04
118 E. J. Christie
interplay between them is evident in the history of Beowulf criticism.

Considered against contemporary discourses of masculinity, Tolkien’s essay
can be understood not so much as a point of origin for modern criticism
but, to echo John Niles’s observation, as a “mid-life crisis” in the reception of
the poem.3 It is the culmination of a tradition of Romantic historiography
that posits a specifically masculine historical agency. Tolkien’s emphasis on
mood and feeling in reading Beowulf, in particular, evokes Romanticism’s
“sentimental masculinity” which, among other things, opposed the “morbid
antiquary” with the “vital man of feeling,” positing the latter as the ideal
historical authority. 4 While early critics of Beowulf, almost exclusively
male, projected their own gender expectations onto the poem and thus
found their protagonist “manly,” it was not until the mid-twentieth century
that the gentleness ascribed to early medieval English kings attracted
close consideration. By examining the discourse of gentleness revealed
in Old English literature, and reading Tolkien’s essay in the context of a
well-documented crisis of masculinity provoked by the clash of Victorian
gender scripts with the horrors of mechanized war, this essay makes a small
contribution to the feminist recovery of the diversity of ways to be male.5
In particular, the moralizing accusation of “slackness” that characterized
inertia, fear, and failure of duty in World War I soldiers offers a potential
continuity with the Old English discourse of moral character. Yet it is clear
that while Old English didactic texts distinguished between meekness
and anger, duty and “slackness,” all such ideas about courage became
emphatically gendered only in their reception. It is clear, in other words,
that though Beowulf was always male—criticism made him “a man.”
To the extent that critics of the nineteenth century evaluated Beowulf’s
character, it was only in so far as he was, like his story, “a picture of a whole
civilization,” as a manifestation, for example, of “English national character”
or of “the Anglo-Saxon” construed as a continuous and implicitly masculine
historical agent.6 If a vision of masculinity was to be found in their idea of
3 Bjork and Niles, A Beowulf Handbook, 5.

4 Mike Goode, Sentimental Masculinity and the Rise of History, 1790–1890 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009), 17–19. The terms “morbid antiquary” and “vital men of feeling” are from
the title of Goode’s fourth chapter. A summary of Romantic historicism, including the connection
of masculinity, feeling, and historical authority, can be found at the end of his introduction.
5 See Clare A. Lees, ed., Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Age (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1994), xv–xvi, and “Men and Beowulf ” in Medieval Masculinities,
129–48.
6 Archibald Strong’s claim that Beowulf is a “picture of a whole civilization” is quoted from J.
R. R. Tolkien, “The Monsters and the Critics” in An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism, ed. Lewis E.
Nicholson (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963), 53.
Be a Man, Beowulf 119
the poem, it is one that cannot be separated from ideologies of nation and
race. As early as Sharon Turner’s History of the Anglo-Saxons (1799-1805),
Beowulf was perceived as a masculine type. Between Turner’s Romantic
historiography and Tolkien’s celebrated essay, a specifically English concept
masculinity passed through Victorian and Edwardian iterations, both of
which reciprocally sustained and were sustained by wider rationalizations
of British Imperialism.
Sharon Turner writes in The History of the Anglo-Saxons, a work that had
“a powerful influence on historical thought for the succeeding half-century,”7
that Beowulf “as picture of the manners, and an exhibition of the feelings
and notions of those days … is as valuable as it is ancient.”8 His work outlines
the story of Beowulf by translating select passages. In Turner’s reading,
Beowulf’s character is epitomized in his response to Hrothgar when they
meet in Heorot (an exchange that constitutes Fitt VI). Having just boasted
that he will meet Grendel on equal terms by forgoing weapons and armor,
Beowulf is nevertheless mindful of potential failure and concludes with
a contemplation of his own demise that Turner calls a “manly speech.”9
Na þu minne þearft

Hafalan hydan, ac hē mē habban wile
D[r]ēore fāhne, gif mec dēað nimeð:
Byreð blōdig wæl, byrgean þenceð,
Eteð āngena unmurnlīce,
Mearcað mōrhopu— nō ðu ymb mīnes ne þearft
Līces feorme leng sorgian.
Onsend Higelace, gif mec hild nime,
Beaduscrūda betst, þæt mīne breost wereð,
Hrægla sēlest; þæt is Hrǣdlan lāf,
Wēlandes geweorc. Gǣð ā wyrd swā hīo scel.10
7 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, s.v. “Turner, Sharon (1768–1847),” by H. R.

Loyn, accessed July 8, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/27866.
8 Sharon Turner, The History of the Anglo-Saxons: Comprising the History of England from the
Earliest Period to the Norman Conquest, 4th ed. 3 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Reese, Orme,
and Brown, 1823), 280–81. Turner’s History was first published in four volumes between 1799 and
1805. It went into six more editions before the seventh and final, posthumous edition, published
in 1852. I cite throughout from the three-volume fourth edition of 1823.
9 Turner, The History of the Anglo-Saxons, 291.
10 Lines 445b–455b. R. D. Fulk, Robert Bjork, and John D. Niles, Klaeber’s Beowulf, 4th ed.
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 17–18. All quotations of Beowulf are from this work.
120 E. J. Christie
(You will not need to bury my head, but he will have me as a grim trophy
if death takes me: he will take my bloody corpse, intending to defile it,
eat it alone without remorse, smatter the moorlands—you will not need
to grieve long about my body’s sustenance. If the battle takes me, send
to Hygelac that best of battle-shirts, the glorious garment that guards
my breast. That is Hrethel’s treasure, Weland’s work. Wyrd goes ever as
it must.)
(Turner’s Translation of lines 445b–451b:
If death should take me away,

Bear me from the bloody slaughter;
Eat over the solitary wanderer unmourningly.
Mark my hillock with the simple flower;
Nor do thou about the fate of my body long sorrow.)
Though the general picture of Beowulf contemplating his own defeat and
demise as well as his wish to return his armor to Hygelac are clear in
Turner’s translation, the central, horrifying detail of that death—that he
imagines Grendel will eat him—is entirely mistranslated. Turner renders
the verbs of this passage, byreð, þenceð, eteð, and mearcað (449a) as impera-
tives addressed to Beowulf’s audience rather than third-person present
indicatives (implying the future) describing the action of Grendel. He
thus imagines the whole progression as Beowulf’s stoic prearrangement of
his own funeral. Where Grendel means to eat Beowulf’s corpse (byrgean
þenceð), Turner sees Beowulf reminding Hrothgar to have him buried;
where the poem describes Grendel smattering (mearcian) the higher, dry
lands enclosed by moor (morhopu) with Beowulf’s guts, Turner has Beowulf
asking his survivors to “mark my hillock with the simple flower.” In Turner’s
defense, some confusion persists about the meaning of lines 447a and
448b–451b. In 447a, editors usually emend the manuscript deore (adj.
fierce, formidable) to dreore (n. dripping blood) in order to make sense of
it. Byrgean (448b) could be one of two verbs meaning to feast or to bury
respectively.11 Nevertheless, what is apparently manly about this speech is
precisely the unflinching contemplation of one’s own death, culminating
in the famous, gnomic acceptance of fate. Despite the lack of a possessive,
morhopu might reasonably be translated “hillock,” but “the simple flower”
11 Dictionary of Old English: A to I online, ed. Angus Cameron, Ashley Crandell Amos, Antonette
diPaolo Healey et al. (Toronto: Dictionary of Old English Project, 2018), s.v. “Byrgan1”, “Byrgan2.”
is pure interpolation and, moreover, a detail that marks Turner’s own

sentimental historiographical outlook, a “predilection for romance” that
was criticized in his own time.12
Elsewhere in The History of the Anglo-Saxons, Turner documents the
character of historical Anglo-Saxon Kings. He writes of his Saxon ancestors
“manly intellect” derived from their prehistoric nomadic condition, in which
the harshness of life formed “manly virtues” into “pleasing habits”; he seeks
the childhood origins of King Alfred’s “manly character”; and finally, he
laments that while King Edmund of East Anglia was praised for such “milder
virtues” as “affability, gentleness, and humility” that he was nevertheless
“deficient in those manly energies” that might have saved his kingdom
from Vikings.13 It is plain that, to Turner, Anglo-Saxon kings were above all
“manly” and, furthermore, that this manliness was energetic, forged in harsh-
ness, a combination of strength in both body and mind. Finally, however
praiseworthy gentleness might be, it was not manly. Turner’s description
thus expresses an ancient set of gender stereotypes characterizing maleness
as energetic, vigorous, and active, such that contemplation, introspection,
and passivity had to be explained and defended.
Turner’s first volume was published in 1799, at the end of the same decade
begun by Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Though its
successive revision and republication throughout the nineteenth century
made it a popular Victorian vision of the national past, bearing this moment
of origin in mind foregrounds Turner’s essentially Romantic historiography.
Mike Goode traces a Romantic model of historical authority resting in “manly
feeling” to Burke’s reflections, arguing that Burke “remade the well-known
eighteenth-century character type of the man of feeling, a sentimental and
sexual type whose manliness and sociality were already open to dispute” into
a man of “historical feeling” by “ground[ing] competence to know the past in
male feeling.”14 As Goode demonstrates, this version of historical competence
persisted and competed with the rising Victorian attempt to remake history as
a science, and thus to characterize the professional historian as dispassionate.
The nineteenth century balanced two visions of history with two concomitant
visions of masculinity competent to encounter and interpret the past. When
I turn to Tolkien’s interpretation of Beowulf, below, it will be apparent that his
critique of the “mining” of Beowulf for historical facts and his perception of
Beowulf, the Beowulf-poet, and himself as “men in history” reaches back to
12 Loyn, “Turner, Sharon (1768–1847).”

13 Turner, A History of the Anglo-Saxons, 1:212, 18, 489, 513, 514 respectively.
14 Goode, Sentimental Masculinity and the Rise of History, 50.
122 E. J. Christie
this Burkean model of historical knowledge grounded in masculine sensibility.

Before arriving in the twentieth century, however, it is instructive to dwell
on just how hyperbolic the reading of masculinity in Beowulf could become.
A century after the first publication of The History of the Anglo-Saxons,
Henry Shattuck Verrill would, like Turner, perceive stoicism in the face of
death, a “grit to face the facts of existence” as the defining trait of Beowulf,15
who he also sees as the prototype of the modern “Anglo-Saxon.” Though a
figure of little significance in the history of early medieval English stud-
ies, Verrill’s views epitomize a transatlantic vision of “English manhood”
that echoes in American racial discourse throughout the late nineteenth
century.16 In 1899 Verrill, Harvard Graduate, Chair of English Literature
at Park College, Missouri and associate editor of its literary magazine, the
Park Review, published in the pages of that magazine a discourse on “The
Anglo-Saxondom of Beowulf” which he had previously read before the
historical club of Park College.17 It is a polemic on the superiority of the
“Anglo-Saxon race” that attempts to explain the “industry and valor” that
mark the English and American greater than his European competitors
as a historical and racial characteristic.18 Specifically, in the character of
Beowulf he finds the archetype of the modern Anglo-Saxon man, for Beowulf
is “above all a muscular fellow,”19 the “prototype of the college athlete” who
arrives on the shores of Denmark with a “manly bearing.”20 His heroic tale is
nevertheless “not father to our present low desire for prize-fighting, springing
rather from that healthier love of muscle which has always had a part in
the English ideal of manhood.”21 He represents “the fortitude which stand
English and American in good stead on the field of battle” and the “sense
of duty” that calls men to put their nation before themselves.22 He might be
likened to Dewey or Nelson, as he is indeed, “our first naval hero.”23 Above
all, the “Anglo-Saxon” possesses, like Beowulf, “the grit to face the facts of
existence.”24 Modern critics are quick to point out, of course, that neither
Beowulf nor any character in his poem is an Anglo-Saxon. Nevertheless,
15 Henry Shattuck Verrill, “The Anglo-Saxondom of Beowulf,” The Park Review 1 (1899): 7.
16 Verrill, “The Anglo-Saxondom of Beowulf,” 4, 15.
17 Park College, Missouri, founded in 1875, is now Park University. See https://www.park.edu/,
accessed July 12, 2020.
18 Verrill, “The Anglo-Saxondom of Beowulf,” 2.
22 Verrill, “The Anglo-Saxondom of Beowulf,” 4–5.
this courage in the face of existential challenge is the very characteristic

that Tolkien will identify as the “Northern theory of Courage.”
Verrill’s essay is a mélange of muscular Christianity, social Darwinism,
White Anglo-Saxon Protestant self-satisfaction, and by his own admission
“sophomoric enthusiasm.”25 Connecting British commercial success and
dominance in war to supposed racial characteristics, and ostensibly describing
an antecedent that would explain his modern masculinity, Verrill in fact
projects a vision of idealized nineteenth-century masculinity into the past.
It is a vision intermingled with nation, race, and history and with Verrill’s
own consciousness of himself as a cerebral rather than physical man, whose
effort in historical research is metaphorized as physical labor “with pick and
shovel.” The reason for “Anglo-Saxon” domination in the nineteenth-century
world of industry and civilization, the mysterious racial matrix of success,
he reasons, must be found by “thinking men” rather than “men of action”
because “the explanation, not lying on the surface, can be obtained only
with a pick and shovel.”26 He explains further that, since only the old can
explain the new, in Beowulf “the historian looks for the germs of modern
Anglo-Saxon life.”27 Verrill thus imagines for himself a vigor not slackened
by bookishness, a muscular intellectualism that connects him in ethnic and
historical continuity with the Anglo-Saxons. He is, like Tolkien’s Beowulf poet,
a “brooding intellectual” with the special task of translating history for his
race. Most remarkable among the many remarkable assumptions of Verrill’s
essay is the default masculinity of the racial past: in seeking an “Anglo-Saxon”
in which to discover the characteristics of his imagined race, to explain their
historical ascendancy, Verrill reaches automatically and unquestioningly for a
vision of masculinity. In his imagination, “Anglo-Saxondom” appears indeed to
be a form of masculinity. Perhaps Verrill was taken by and Anglo-Saxon spirit
when he joined a group of “westward excursionists” in 1901 and, struck by a
fever, died a few months shy of his twenty-ninth birthday. He would certainly
have been satisfied to be lamented by his obituarist in the Hamilton Literary
Magazine as representing “the highest type of noble Christian manhood.”28
It would not be long before the ideals so blithely expressed at the end of
the nineteenth century would come under threat. The advent of industrial-
ized warfare in the early twentieth century is conventionally seen as a

28 Verrill graduated Hamilton College in 1892 with a master’s degree, before pursuing the same
degree at Harvard. See “Necrology: Class of 1892,” Hamilton Literary Magazine 36, no. 1 (1901): 88.
124 E. J. Christie
crisis for the stoic vision of “manliness” that was the norm in preceding
eras. Medical discourses that emerged to explain psychological traumas
engendered by World War I increasingly clarified that such traumas were
rational and human responses, rather than a failures of duty, discipline,
or character.29 The War Office Committee of Enquiry into “Shell Shock”
issued f indings in 1922 in which a new, psychoanalytic understanding
of fear confronted Edwardian visions of “manliness” with new expecta-
tions of masculinity.30 A consensus, generally following Eve Sedgwick’s
work, that Victorian manliness was overthrown in this moment has more
recently been questioned in the face of some evidence that it persisted
beyond the end of the war and continued to inform, for example, the
reflections of veterans decades later.31 While this gender script may not
have been shattered, however, scholars suggest that it was undermined
and confronted by new expectations of men formed, for example, by the
mid-century reformulation of Britishness in the wake of World War II.32
In the militarized culture required by the Great War the standard of male
behavior was idealized in figure of the soldier and the contrast between
contemplative and active men became one between soldiers and civil-
ians: men whose social roles entailed “reserved” occupations by necessity
felt their masculinity questioned, as did even some soldiers stationed on
peripheral fronts.33
For some of Beowulf ’s earliest and most prominent twentieth-century
critics, a fixation with epic heroism and medieval militancy was thus a
projection of very contemporary concerns. Interwar critics debated the
merits of Shakespearean protagonists in terms opposing masculine action
and inaction: in What Happens in Hamlet? (1935), published in the same
year he became Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English at the University
29 See Michael Roper, “Between Manliness and Masculinity: The ‘War Generation’ and the
Psychology of Fear in Britain, 1914–1950,” Journal of British Studies 44, no. 2 (2005): 343–62;
Anthony Fletcher, “Patriotism, the Great War and the Decline of Victorian Manliness,” History 99,
no. 334, (January 2014): 40–72; Praseeda Gopinath, Scarecrows of Chivalry: English Masculinities
after Empire (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013).
30 Roper, “Between Manliness and Masculinity,” 334; cf. Fletcher, “Patriotism, the Great War,
and the Decline of Victorian Manliness,” 50–52.
31 Roper, “Between Manliness and Masculinity,” 345.
32 Gopinath, Scarecrows of Chivalry, 22–40.
33 See Juliette Pattinson, “‘Shirkers’, ‘Scrimjacks’ and ‘Scrimshanks’?: British Civilian Masculinity
and Reserved Occupations, 1914–45,” Gender & History 28, no. 3 (November 2016): 709–27 and
Justin Fantauzzo and Robert L. Nelson, “A Most Unmanly War: British Military Masculinity in
Macedonia, Mesopotamia and Palestine, 1914–18,” Gender & History 28, no. 3 (November 2016):
587–603.
of Edinburgh, and just one year before Tolkien’s essay, John Dover Wilson
characterized Hamlet as a study of the conflict between two masculine
types, the “procrastinator” and the “vigorous man of action.”34 As Linda
Georgianna suggests, Beowulf critics of the mid-twentieth century were
tempted by the analogy to Shakespeare’s military aristocrats to understand
Beowulf’s cliff-top monologue before confronting the dragon as a soliloquy.35
Following Edward Irving’s reading of the poem’s structure as one which
moves from action to discourse about action, Georgianna sees Beowulf’s
meditation upon heroism as staging the tension between the desire to act
and “immobilizing sorrow.”
Tolkien himself, a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers, deferred
enlistment until after graduation and records in his letters the disapproba-
tion that dogged him as a result. In a letter to Christopher Tolkien, who was
at the time serving in World War II, Tolkien describes his own enlistment
in terms of the active/contemplative binary:
In those days chaps joined up, or were scorned publicly. It was a nasty
cleft to be in, especially for a young man with too much imagination and
little physical courage. … I endured the obloquy, and hints becoming
outspoken from relatives, stayed up, and produced a First in Finals in
1915. Bolted into the army: July 1915 … May [1916] found me crossing the
Channel … for the carnage of the Somme.36
Tolkien’s self-assessment, “too much imagination and little physical cour-

age” mirrors the conventional opposition of contemplation and action
that defined masculine character. Tolkien suffered “trench fever” after the
Battle of the Somme and was sent home after less than a year in France,
never to return to the war. Though trench fever is not in the first instance a
psychological disorder, its enduring stress on the body includes debilitating
symptoms often including “neurasthenia”—nervous exhaustion indicated
by symptoms like fatigue, anxiety, and depression. Soldiers sent home for
cases of neurasthenia accounted for forty percent of casualties that same
34 Quoted in E. G. Berry “Hamlet and Suetonius,” Phoenix 2.3, Supplement to Volume 2 (1948),
74; on Wilson’s academic career see Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Wilson,
John Dover (1881–1969),” by Harold Jenkins, accessed January 3, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1093/
ref:odnb/36964.
35 Linda Georgianna, “King Hrethel’s Sorrow and the Limits of Heroic Action in Beowulf,”
Speculum 62, no. 4 (1987): 833.
36 Humphrey Carpenter, ed., The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien: A Selection (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
2000), 53.
126 E. J. Christie
year.37 In a letter to Geoffrey Smith of August 1916, little more than a month

after the battle of the Somme, Tolkien records his feelings on the death of his
friend Rob Gilson: “Still I feel a mere individual at present,” he writes,” with
intense feelings more than ideas but very powerless.”38 Tolkien’s experience
was typical of men of his generation, “young officers socialized by their
public school education in the stoic ideal,” who found their stoicism unequal
to the horror of modern war.39 It is in this context of wartime discourses of
masculinity, where action is opposed with emotion and immobility, that
we should understand Tolkien’s claims about Beowulf.
If Anglo-Saxon “manliness” is a discursive construct of the nineteenth
century, one of its apparent opposites, “slackness” suggests a potential
continuity in gender script between the early Middle Ages and the early
twentieth century: from Beowulf to the letters of Tolkien’s contemporaries,
young soldiers of World War I, “slackness” names a failure of courage and duty.
The adjective form—“slack”—meaning “lacking in energy or diligence,
inclined to be lazy or remiss, lax in regard to one’s duties” (Oxford English
Dictionary s.v. “slack”) has been continuously in use since the Old English
period. Beowulf himself is described as slēac when the poem recounts his
unpromising beginnings:
Swyðe wendon, þæt he sleac wære,

æðeling unfrom. Edwenden cwom
tireadigum menn torna gehwylces. 40
(They believed certainly that he was feckless,

an unchiefly prince. A reversal came
to that glorious man for each of his troubles.)
Slēac, meaning slothful or lazy, may be distinct from slæc, careless or

remiss—the ancestor of modern English “slack.”41 If these words are in
37 Shepherd qtd in Fletcher, “Patriotism, the Great War, and the Decline of Victorian Manliness,”
52.
38 Carpenter, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 10.
39 Roper, “Between Manliness and Masculinity,” 343–44.
40 Lines 2187–89, Fulk et al., Klaeber’s Beowulf, 7.
41 I accept the authority of The Oxford English Dictionary (s.v. “slack” adj.), which treats sleac
and slæc (> PDE “slack”) as variants of the same word; OED Online, accessed December 4, 2019,
https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/181226?rskey=kWA9Ta&result=4&isAdvanced=false.
Compare Bosworth Toller’s Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online, s.v. “sleac,” “slæc,” ed. T. Northcote
Toller et al., comp. Sean Christ and Ondřej Tichy (Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague,
2014), accessed August 18, 2018, https://bosworthtoller.com/. Erik Björkman argues that though
fact etymologically distinct, they overlap semantically such that the moral
disapprobation attached to dereliction is nevertheless applied also to sloth,
and the apposition of slēac with unfrom creates a clear picture of an unheroic
figure in accord with the failure of character that is evident wherever either
of these forms appears. An æðeling is a member of a princely family, one of
the appropriate line and status to rise to rulership. 42 Unfrom, derived from
the adjective fram, is usually translated as “weak”; that is, as a negation of the
simplest sense of fram: strong, courageous, brave. In this case however—in
apposition with sleac—it seems most likely to indicate a failure of character
than of strength. The word implies that Beowulf is feckless and lethargic,
the very opposite of the energetic and aggressive prince who should become
king. A further clue to the depth of meaning in this adjective can be gleaned
from its use as a gloss in the Regius Psalter (British Library Manuscript Royal
2.B.v) where the genitive form fromra glosses principum. 43 In this sense,
fram means princely, or “becoming of a chief.” In line 2188a, then, his people
see the young Beowulf as an etymological contradiction, an “unprincely
prince,” and a social problem: someone technically eligible for a role that
they are nevertheless unfit to perform. This is the sense, I think, in which to
understand fram: as an analogue of Latin virtus, “the sum of all the corporeal
or mental excellences of man, strength, vigour; bravery, courage; aptness,
capacity; worth, excellence, virtue.”44 Though virtus obviously “struck the
ear of the ancient Roman much as ‘manliness’ does the English speaker”
it is nevertheless layered with such abstract meaning such that it can be
sensibly applied to not only to animals and abstractions, but also to women.45
The moral but not necessarily gendered dimensions of slackness are also
apparent in Bede. In his Ecclesiastical History, Bede records that he himself
knew a monk who, though a skilled smith, would more often “sit or lie day
these words are commonly treated as variant spellings, the alternation of the pure vowel and
diphthong cannot be explained in this environment; see “Zur Engliscan Wortkunde,” Anglia
39 (1915): 359–71. Citing Björkman, Klaeber’s glossary treats the ascription of “slackness” to
Beowulf as an accusation of laziness distinct from a remissness or lack of diligence; see Fulk et
al., Klaeber’s Beowulf, 435.
42 Frederick M. Biggs, “The Politics of Succession in ‘Beowulf’ and Anglo-Saxon England,”
Speculum 80, no. 3 (2005): 725.
43 Dictionary of Old English: A to I online, ed. Angus Cameron, Ashley Crandell Amos, Antonette
diPaolo Healey et al. (Toronto: Dictionary of Old English Project, 2018), s.v. “fram.”
44 Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary: Founded on Andrews’ Edition of
Freund’s Latin Dictionary. Revised, Enlarged, and in Great Part Rewritten (Oxford: Clarendon,
1879), s.v. “virtus.”
45 Myles Anthony McDonnell, Roman Manliness: Virtus and the Roman Republic (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), 4n13, 24.
128 E. J. Christie
and night in his smithy, than join in song and prayer at church” (“he ma
gewunade in his smiðþan dæges & nihtæs sittan & licgan, þonne he wolde
on cirican syngan & gebiddan”) and was “very much devoted to drunkenness
and the many other excesses of a slack life” (“Ðiode he swiðe druncennisse
& mongum oðrum unalefednessum ðæs slæcran lifes”). 46 The Old English
translation “mongum oðrum unalefednessum ðæs slæcran lifes” renders
quite closely Bede’s Latin “et ceteris uitae remissioris inlecebris” (and all the
other allurements of a more remiss life). Notably, remissus can also mean
mild, relaxed, lenient—resonating with the mildheortness lauded in Alfred’s
translation of Gregory’s Cura Pastoralis, which proposes a teacher should be
a “father and a ruler in teaching” but a “mother in compassion, so that he is
neither too strict in instruction, nor too lacking [slæc] in humanity” (“ðæt
he sie hiera fæder & reccere on lare, & hiera modur on mildheortnesse, ðæt
he huru ne sie to stræc on ðære lare, ne to slæc on ðære mildheortnesse”). 47
If Alfred perceived these terms as gendered then they entail a curious
paradox: a failure to be masculine in the deployment of a feminine trait.
Where these Old English texts seem primarily to understand “slackness”
as a term of moral disapprobation—a failure to remain active with regard
to the spiritual or heroic life—it is clear that the early twentieth century
conflated this failure far more emphatically with gender. Just as Turner had
opposed “manly energy” with the gentleness of King Edmund, the founder
of the Boy Scouts movement, Sir Robert Baden-Powell (1857–1941), in an
article on teaching patriotism published in 1915, insisted that young men
should not be “wishy-washy slackers without any go.”48 Young soldiers writing
home during World War I expressed their anxiety about remaining stoic in
just these terms. For them, being “slack” was the failure of the energetic and
athletic demeanor that defined British masculinity and defended British
Empire. Enlisted officer Reggie Trench wrote to his girlfriend in 1912 that
Sir Henry Newbolt’s patriotic poem “The Vigil,” published in The Times on
the first day of the war, made him “feel rather a slacker.” After years at war,
John Rappaport wrote to his fiancée from the Front just ten days before he
was killed, describing his threatened resolve: “I do so want to remain keen
and good, but it’s awfully hard,” he protests, “one is apt to get so slack.”49
46 Thomas Miller, The Old English Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People,
vol. 2, EETS o.s. 95, 96 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1890), 442.
47 Henry Sweet, (ed.), King Alfred’s West-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care, EETS o.s.
45, 50 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 123–24.
48 Fletcher, “Patriotism, the Great War and the Decline of Victorian Manliness,” 44.
49 Laurence Housman, ed., War Letters of Fallen Englishmen (Philadelphia: Pine Street Books,
2002), 221–25; qtd in Fletcher, “Patriotism, the Great War and the Decline of Victorian Manliness,”
It is in precisely these terms that Lionel Jane understands the character

of King Alfred. In the introduction to his translation of Asser’s Life of Alfred
(1908), Jane describes Alfred’s character—as he believes Asser’s life shows
it—in a starkly Edwardian idiom. For Jane, “Alfred stands out first of all as
the strong man struggling with adversity and gaining hard-won triumph …
he does not despair even in the darkest hour, for he believes in the justice
of his cause and is supported by the conviction that, come what may, he
must still do his duty.”50 Alfred, Jane goes on, “believes in the active life: he is
an accomplished hunter and excels in manly sports, despite his ill-health;
he lives laborious days … while he is no bookworm, he is fully alive to the
importance of training the mind,” and furthermore, he promotes education
so that he may repair the “moral damage” caused by Danish invasion through
the “promotion of civilization.” Alfred triumphs, finally, as the result of an
“indomitable will” through which he overcame all obstacles, including the
“slackness of his subjects.”51 Jane’s image of a man promoting civilization
through his indomitable will is the hallmark of Edwardian masculinity,
just as the opposition of duty and slackness, manliness with the potential
inertia of the intellectual “bookworm,” form its attendant anxieties.
Jane’s introduction paraphrases his translation of Asser in a chapter Jane
calls “Alfred’s Troubles,” which documents the interruption and resistance
Alfred encountered to both his defense of Wessex and his intellectual reform.
Asser writes that sometimes his commands were not obeyed quickly enough
because of the laziness—“slackness” in Jane’s translation—of the people
(propter pigritiam populi) but sometimes simply because projects were
started too late and left his kingdom susceptible to attack.52 Jane also offers
“slackness” for Latin otiose where Asser describes the education of Alfred’s
children, Edward the Elder, who reigned after his father (899–924) and
Ælfthryth, his youngest child and later Countess of Flanders. Asser’s account
of their upbringing poses interesting questions about vigor, education, and
the perception of gender at Alfred’s cosmopolitan court. Both Edward, the
eldest male and future king, and Ælfthryth, the youngest daughter, are
described in the same breath, apparently exposed to the same education
and expectations. Both are given training in the liberal arts, as Asser writes
“even before they had the capacity for gentle skills, hunting, that is to say,
and similar crafts appropriate to nobility, they were seen to be studious
46.
50 Lionel Jane, trans. Asser’s Life of King Alfred (London: Chatto & Windus, 1908), xli.
51 Jane, trans., Asser’s Life of King Alfred, xliii.
52 Jane, trans., Asser’s Life of King Alfred, 78.
130 E. J. Christie
and clever in the liberal arts” (“Ut antequam aptas humanis artibus vires
haberent, venatoriae scilicet et ceteris artibus, quae nobilibus conveniunt, in
liberalibus artibus studiosi et ingeniosi viderentur”).53 At court in their adult-
hood, they exhibit laudable qualities of humility, kindness, and mildness
to strangers as to countrymen (humilitas, affabilitas, lenitas). Despite their
pursuit of a noble—and therefore presumably active—life, they are never
“allowed to live idly and carelessly” (otiose et incuriose vivere permittuntur)
but persist in reading and the “frequent use of books” ( frequentissime libris
utuntur).54 Perhaps swayed by Asser’s noun vires, Jane supplies “manly” for
humanis.55 There is, however, little precedent for giving that adjective this
meaning. The Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources defines
humanus, “human,”—as distinct from animal, divine, or diabolic—and
it takes a fourth sense “humane, kindly, or decent.”56 In the sense that it is
distinct from divine, perhaps Asser means to designate arts like hunting as
“noble” or “secular.” While Asser’s text seems to be most alert to the moral
associations of activity and idleness with class rather than gender, Jane sees
“manliness” in accord with the gendered expectations that contrast duty
and slackness in his own times.
We should thus consider Tolkien’s assessment of Beowulf and the
Beowulf-poet against this accumulated history of perceiving “Anglo-Saxon”
masculinity—from Turner’s assessment of Beowulf’s “manly” speech and
the “manly” intellect of the Anglo-Saxons as a race, to Verrill’s conflation
of race and masculinity in the figure of Beowulf and his desire to include
his own intellectual pursuits as similarly essential, vigorous contribution to
an “Anglo-Saxon” history he perceives to extend into his own day, to Lionel
Jane’s characteristic Edwardian contrast of Alfred’s energetic, epoch-making
genius with the “slackness” of his people. If nineteenth-century readers
53 W. H. Stevenson, ed., Asser’s Life of King Alfred, Together with the Annals of Saint Neots
Erroneously Ascribed to Asser (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), 58.
54 Stevenson, ed., Asser’s Life of King Alfred, 59.
55 As do Turner (The History of the Anglo-Saxons, 3:13) before him and Lapidge and Keynes after
him. Asser’s text modifies verbs with viriliter several times, each case specifically describing
military confrontations: for example, Alfred’s audaciously setting up camp directly before the
gates of the Viking-held city of Eddington in 878 before his historic defeat of the “Great Heathen
Army” (Stevenson, Asser’s Life of King Alfred, 56) or the citizen’s bold defence of their city at the
Siege of Paris in 885 (Stevenson, Asser’s Life of King Alfred, 69).
56 The same is true in classical Latin where humanis quite clearly indicates civilization,
kindness, and human affairs as opposed to the superhuman. “Manly” briefly took this meaning,
too, during the fourteenth century. See Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Manly, adj.,” accessed
December 4, 2019, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/113558?rskey=mPbVIh&result=1&isAdva
nced=false.
saw in Beowulf a national or racialized “manliness,” Tolkien’s experiences

at war encouraged him to emphasize a more individual and yet a more
universal character: a “man” in history. “Beowulf is not, then, the hero of
an heroic lay, precisely,” writes Tolkien in his celebrated essay, “[h]e has no
enmeshed loyalties, nor hapless love. He is a man and that for him and many
is sufficient tragedy.”57 What does Tolkien mean in this last, italic line? That
the tragedy of being human is tragedy enough for Beowulf and, therefore,
tragedy enough for critics to believe in value of his tale? Or does he mean,
as I think he does, that the tragedy of existence as man is also sufficient
tragedy for men generally speaking?
It might be objected that Tolkien’s statement is uncertain ground on
which to found an argument about the perception of Beowulf’s masculinity,
since Tolkien quite possibly, or even quite certainly, means that Beowulf
is “a man” in only the general, non-gendered sense. Even conceding that
Tolkien meant not to gender Beowulf in this statement, I’d suggest, as many
feminist scholars have, that the apparent non-gendered use of “man” can-
not truly be neutral: it inevitably connotes masculinity and, furthermore,
implies maleness to be the default gender of humanity.58 If Tolkien’s literary
criticism eschews the instrumentalism of the philologists he criticized,
it is nevertheless traditional in the sense that “[m]odern historiography
inscribes the stories of the few—the hegemonic males—as generic, human
history.”59 However, the immediate context of Tolkien’s essay as well as the
specific cultural context of interwar Europe, suggest profoundly that Tolkien
perceived Beowulf’s condition as a specifically masculine one: the nature
of courage as the confrontation of evil with unbending will was a theme
resonating through both academic and public discourse about masculinity
at the time.60 For Tolkien, the implied masculinity of the historical agent is
an essential element of the poem’s meaning creation.
57 Tolkien, “The Monsters and the Critics,” 68, original emphasis.

58 See Janice Moulton, “The Myth of the Neutral ‘Man’” in Sexist Language: A Modern Philosophi-
cal Analysis, ed. Mary Vetterling-Braggin, 100–15 (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981),
esp. 101–2.
59 Fenster, “Preface” in Lees, Medieval Masculinities, x.
60 See J. A. Mangan, “Duty unto Death: English Masculinity and Militarism in the Age of the
New Imperialism,” The International Journal of the History of Sport 27, nos. 1–2 (January/Febru-
ary 2010): 124–49, as well as: Fletcher, “Patriotism, the Great War and the Decline of Victorian
Manliness”; Pattinson, “‘Shirkers’, ‘Scrimjacks’ and ‘Scrimshanks’?”; Fantauzzo and Nelson, “A
Most Unmanly War: British Military Masculinity”; Roper, “Between Manliness and Masculinity”;
Gopinath, Scarecrows of Chivalry. For the specific effects of World War I on academic culture
see Marie-Eve Chagnon and Tomás Irish, eds., The Academic World in the Era of the Great War
(New York: Palgrave, 2017).
132 E. J. Christie
Tolkien’s Beowulf is to some extent an epic hero of the ancient mold—

symbolizing the confrontation of his culture with national threats—but a
hero nevertheless personally and tragically realigned with the grand curve
of history. In Tolkien’s view, he becomes an existential hero, “a man at war
with the hostile world,”61 whose confrontations with physical threats force
him, and us, to confront more fundamentally his helplessness against the
inevitability of time: the martial courage of the epic hero, in Tolkien’s eyes,
is underwritten by existential courage. “Northern literature,” he surmises,
bequeaths the modern world this specific “theory of courage” as “unyielding
will” in the face of the “deadly and ineluctable” threat of mortality;62 Beowulf
is thus “[s]omething more significant than a standard hero, a man faced
with a foe more evil than any human enemy of house or realm.”63
Tolkien’s appreciation of the poem turns on his perception of both the
poet, his central character, and modern readers like himself as “men in
history.” Though he champions “criticism” by contrast not only with histo-
riography but also with comparative folklore, it is remarkable how often
Tolkien engages with problems of historical perspective: the guiding motif
of Tolkien’s essay, both in its characterization of the poet and of the problem
in historical criticism, is the “mood” of a man gazing back into history on
the cusp of a paradigm shift.64 For him an appreciation of the “history”
in the poem stems from an interest not in history qua history but in that
antiquarian perspective itself. The poem is “a fusion that has occurred at
a given point of contact between old and new, a product of deep thought
and emotion.”65 He concludes, for example, on the now widely recognized
point that Beowulf “when new was already antiquarian” and thus relates
events of a fictionalized past “weighted with regret, and he expended his
art in making keen that touch upon the heart which sorrows have which
are both poignant and remote.”66 He consistently emphasizes, in other
words, that the art of the poem is linked to feeling, mood, emotion evoked
particularly in looking back, in the act of reflection on loss. This emphasis on
feeling as the key to historical understanding links Tolkien to the Romantic
historiography which, during the nineteenth century, competed with the
rising self-conception of professional historians as scientists. It also connects
61 Tolkien, “The Monsters and the Critics,” 67

62 Tolkien, “The Monsters and the Critics,” 70, 68.
63 Tolkien, “The Monsters and the Critics,” 66 (emphasis added).
64 Tolkien, “The Monsters and the Critics,” 70.
him with contemporary discourses about masculinity evolving in response

to modern war.
To Tolkien, it seems, the actual hero of Beowulf is the poet himself: the
bookish, introspective writer weighing his own meaning as a witness to
the irrevocable retreat of the past and the inevitable limit of his own life.
Tolkien’s letters reveal him, in the wake of World War I, wrestling with the
same isolating and “immobilizing sorrow” that Georgianna identifies in
Beowulf’s speech before the dragon fight; he sees Beowulf, as Lionel Jane saw
Alfred, as one who must “do his duty” even in the darkest hour. Yet, unlike
Jane, who is at pains to distinguish Alfred’s life of the mind from that of the
“bookworm,” Tolkien expresses more sympathy for passive emotional life
of the observer, rather than the actor. Recognizing his young self as a man
with “too much imagination and little physical courage,”67 he shifts the
emphasis in his depiction of men in Beowulf from the man of action to the
man of feeling. His definition of Beowulf’s heroism seems thus to rest not
so much in the dutiful response, but in the existential situation: heroism
is simply to be in the world.
Does the “northern theory of courage” make room for gentleness? What
in Old English literature accounts for the “manliness” perceived by readers
of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Looking back through the
normative lens of post-medieval gender scripts, the gentleness ascribed
to Beowulf (line 3181a) is problematic: gentleness might be perceived to
feminize a character who as a warrior and a leader must, in the minds of
nineteenth- and twentieth-century readers as we have seen, epitomize mas-
culinity. This line describes Beowulf as “manna mildust ond monðwǣrust”
(the mildest of men and most gentle) and the effect of this description
on our perception of the character has been the center of some debate.68
Pursuing Klaeber’s suggestion that the phrase milde ond monðwære is a
religious formula, Mary Richards examines its parallels to conclude that
this final eulogy does not blend pagan and Christian ideals as the poem is
often taken to do, but offers a definitive assertion of Beowulf’s Christian
excellence.69 For Charles Wright, however, the appellation manna mildost
reflects a pregnant overlap in pagan Germanic and Christian expecta-
tions, since the world milde (Lat. mitis) represents both the generosity
67 Carpenter, ed., The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 53.

68 To add the uncertainty (monðwær)ust is an editorial intervention. The manuscript is damaged
so that only the superlative suffix is clear.
69 Mary Richards, “A Re-Examination of Beowulf ll. 3180–3182,” English Language Notes 10
(1973): 167.
134 E. J. Christie
and patience that was a traditional virtue in Germanic kings even as it

evokes the meekness celebrated by Christian scripture.70 Reconsidering the
potential direction of influence between Germanic ideals of kingship and
Christian morality, and expressing skepticism about Wright’s argument,
Gernot Wieland argues that “since all our sources about Germanic Kingship
are Christian … we cannot be certain that the concept of ‘mildness’ was
not introduced by Christians.”71 The subtext of Wieland’s critique is that
Wright’s explanation effects a Germanic rescue of Beowulf’s character
from feminizing Christianity. While Wright focuses on the potential of
milde to mean “generous” (a characteristic of kings suitable in “modern
judgement,” as Tolkien might have observed), Wieland suggests that we
must understand its reference in Beowulf to its more common pre-Christian
meaning, “affable.”
The Dictionary of Old English Corpus reveals many more examples of the
paired adjectives milde and manþwære, amplifying Richard’s case for the
emphatically Christian sense of mildness conveyed by this line in Beowulf.
Outside of Beowulf, this collocation is found only in religious texts (with the
possible exception of Elene, which substitutes “milde and bliþe,” the latter
another Germanic translation of the theological vocabulary of Latin and
Greek).72 Milde and manþwære occur in collocation frequently in a variety
of spiritual contexts from glosses on scripture to homiletic and confessional
texts. Whereas OE mild translates Latin mitis, in glosses on scripture mild-
heortness renders misericordia and monþwærnyss characteristically glosses
mansuetus (gentleness, meekness). In the fragmentary “Descent into Hell”
the angel Gabriel is “milde on gemyndig and monþwære”; the glossator of
the Paris Psalter inserts the collocation (“milde mode and manþwære he
onfehð fægere”) in Psalm 146:6 to render the simple adjective of the Vulgate’s
suscipiens mansuetos Dominus, “the Lord Lifts up the meek.”73 The Blickling
Homily for Palm Sunday recounts the Gospel passage in which Jesus sends
Peter and John to say to the daughters of Sion “þæt heora cining cymeþ, milde
70 Charles Wright, “Moses, Manna Mildost (Exodus, 550a),” Notes and Queries 31, no. 4 (1984):
440–43.
71 Gernot Wieland, “Manna Mildost: Moses and Beowulf,” Pacific Coast Philology 23, nos. 1–2,
(1988): 87.
72 Wulfilla’s Gothic translation of Galatians 5:23, for example, likewise renders Gk. ἀγαθωσύνη0
(goodness) with Go. Bleiþei. See Gerhard H. Balg, The First Germanic Bible Translated from the
Greek by the Gothic Bishop Wulfilla in the Fourth Century (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1891), 157.
73 George Philip Krapp, ed., The Paris Psalter and the Meters of Boethius (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1932), 146; Roger Gryson, ed., Biblia Sacra: Iuxta Vulgatam versionem, 4th edition
(Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2007), 150.
and monþwære…”,74 while an anonymous Rogationtide homily attributes these

qualities to God Himself: “God ælmihtig is swyðe mildheort and manþwære.”75
A further anonymous homily adjures its audience to be gentle (“uton beon
earmum mannum milde and manþwære”) in language that closely reflects the
penitential Scriftboc.76 In its instructions to the confessor, this text stipulates
that a penitent should come fearfully and humbly to confess, after which he
should be instructed, among other things, to “beo earmum mannum milde
and manþwære.” Finally, according to the Benedictine Rule “if brothers are
appointed to do impossible things” they should nevertheless undertake
to obey “mid ealre manþwærnesse & gehirsumnesse.”77 These examples
confirm still more firmly than Mary Richards suggested that, in the tenth
century of the Beowulf manuscript, milde and monþwære is a Christian
formula—meeting the alliterative needs of Beowulf’s meter—but relaying
gentleness, meekness, and obedience of the sort scripturally affirmed and
expected of Christians and, still more specifically, of monks.78
The virtue of gentleness was explored by at least two authoritative early
English texts: King Alfred’s version of the Cura Pastoralis and Alcuin of
York’s De Virtutibus et Vitiis. Alcuin’s De Virtutibus et Vitiis—produced
expressly as a speculum for military aristocrats like Count Wido of the
Breton March, suggests an opposition between proneness to anger on the
one hand and accidia or idleness on the other.79 Gregory’s text makes this
74 Richard Morris, ed., The Blickling Homilies, EETS o.s. 58, 63, 73 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1967), 71. Morris’s edition renders plural what in scripture is singular: “Tell ye the daughter
of Sion, Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt the foal
of an ass” (Matthew 21:5, KJV). Although I consulted print editions cited here, most of these
examples were initially discovered by searching the Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus.
75 Joyce Bazire and James E. Cross, Eleven Old English Rogationtide Homilies (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1982), 142.
76 Previously known as the Confessional of Pseudo-Egbert, this text survives in three eleventh-
century manuscripts: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 190, Bodleian Library MS Junius
121, and Laud Misc. 482.
77 H. Logemann, ed., The Rule of S. Benet. Latin and Anglo-Saxon Interlinear Version, EETS o.s.
90 (London: Trübner, 1888), 114.
78 An authoritative summary of such qualities can be found in Galatians (5:22–23), in which
Paul proclaims that the “fruit of the spirit is charity, joy, peace, patience, benignity, goodness,
longanimity, mildness, faith, modesty, continency, chastity” (“Fructus autem Spiritus est caritas,
gaudium, pax, patientia, benignitas, bonitas, longanimitas, mansuetudo, f ides, modestia,
continentia, castitas”): see Gryson, ed., Biblia Sacra, 1807.
79 See Rachel Stone, Morality and Masculinity in the Carolingian Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011) and “Translation of Alcuin’s De Virtutibus et Vitiis Liber,” The Heroic Age:
A Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe 16 (2015), https://www.heroicage.org/issues/16/
stone.php.
136 E. J. Christie
opposition explicit when he advises that an aggressive personality and a mild

personality must each be encouraged to grow, but in different ways. While an
angry personality is apt to mistake a lack of self-control for zeal, gentleness
is prone to timidity because “forðæm sio bieldo & sio monnðwærnes bioð
swiðe anlice” (gentleness and timidity are very alike).80 Thus, he goes on,
“Oft eac ða manðwæran weorðað swa besolcne and swa wlace and swa slawe
for hiora manðwærness ðæt hie ne anhagað nane with nytwierðes don”
(Often likewise the gentle become so inactive and so mild and so slothful
because of their gentleness that they cannot achieve anything profitable).81
Finally, Gregory suggests, “Oft, eac sio godnes ðære monnðwærnesse bið
diegellice gemenged wið sleacnesse” (Often, moreover, the good quality of
gentleness is inwardly confused with slackness) thus placing monðwærness
on a continuum with sleacness.82 For Gregory, gentleness itself is a positive
trait, though often confused with moral failings like sloth, idleness, and
timidity.
Gregory’s discourse does not explicitly or even implicitly gender these
traits. Henry Sweet’s translation (1871) of these lines in the Pastoral Care,
by contrast, renders wlacu “effeminate,” supplying a connection between
“mildness” and gender that is not evident in the original text. 83 Hugh
Williams’s translation of Gildas’s De Excidio Britanniae (1899), similarly
genders an accusation of inactivity where the Latin text is far less explicitly
gendered. According to Gildas, when the Romans refuse to send legions
back to defend Romanized Britons, they adjure them to defend themselves
from “nations in no way stronger than themselves, unless they became
effeminate through indolence and listlessness” (“gentibus nequaquam sibi
fortioribus, nisi segnitia et torpore dissolveretur”). 84 But dissolvere, the
verb Williams translates “became effeminate,” means literally to loosen
or disunite, and by figurative extension, to be lax, remiss, or licentious.
Stereotypes certainly exist in Latin connecting softness, suppleness, and
their metaphorical moral connotations, with the feminine. It’s possible
that Gildas is indeed accusing the Britons of losing their erections, their
stiff upper lips, of being both physically and constitutionally “soft.” Wil-
liams direct translation, however, takes a possible connotation of this
description and makes it the explicit meaning. There is less evidence
80 Sweet, ed., King Alfred’s West-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care, 287.
84 Hugh Williams, ed., Gildas, De excidio Britanniae, fragmenta, liber de paenitentia, accedit
et Lorica Gildae (London: David Nutt, 1899), 37.
that the Old English word wlacu includes such connotations in the first
place. Wlacu, which I have translated “mild,” glosses tepidus and its literal
sense, “lukewarm,” is used f iguratively several times in Old English. 85
Elsewhere in Pastoral Care, for example, this word functions as part of an
extended metaphor about heat and cold derived from Revelation 3:16.86 In
Alfred’s version of the Pastoral Care, in other words, gentleness could be
confused with, or lead to, excessive inactivity, but in itself could be equated
with neither blameworthy indolence nor femininity. Later, influential
interpreters of Old English literature like Henry Sweet, however, were
apt to see mildness as effeminate and to convey this gendered judgement
in their translations.
Old English literature describes actions as “manly” using the adverbs
manlic, werlic, and þegnlic. Both werlic and þegnlic, for example, gloss viriliter
in the scripture. “Expect the Lord, do manfully, and let your heart take
courage, and wait for the Lord,” proclaims Psalm 26:14 and most Old English
glosses, like the Eadwine Psalter (Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.17.1), offer
doð werlice for the Latin viriliter age here and in similar lines in Psalm 30
and Joshua 1:18.87 The anonymous translator of the Old English Heptateuch
(BL MS Cotton Claudius B. iv) prefers ðegenlice for a parallel sentiment in
Joshua 1:18, “beo ðu huru gehyrt & hicg ðegenlice” (“confortare, et viriliter
age”; take courage and do manfully).88 But Old English leaves no record of
an abstract noun *werlicnyss equivalent to virilitas. A possible contender,
menniscness, is used clearly to indicate humanity opposed to godcundnyss,
rather than masculinity opposed to femininity. These three adverbs, with
one exception, do not occur in heroic poetry. Beowulf describes Hrothgar’s
85 Bosworth Toller’s Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online, s.v. “wlacu,” https://bosworthtoller.

com/36326, accessed August 18, 2018.
86 Sweet, ed., King Alfred’s West-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care, 445–47.
87 “Therefore,” says Augustine in his commentary on this text, “whoever loses his vigour, loses
endurance, has become effeminate,” yet “in one man are both male and female, such a one in
Christ is neither male nor female” (“Ergo qui perdidit sustinentiam, effeminatus est, perdidit
vigorem. Hoc viri, hoc feminae audiant, quia in uno viro vir et femina. Talis in Christo nec
masculus nec femina est”). See Jacques-Paul Migne, ed., Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series
Latina, vol. 36, col. 211. Several manuscripts including whole or part of Augustine’s Enarrationes
in Psalmos survive from early medieval England: see Helmut Gneuss, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: A
Bibliographical Handlist of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England
up to 1100 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), § 170 and 171. Both Bede and Ælfric appear
to have been familiar with this work. On Augustine’s intermittent theological struggle with
gender see Margaret Cotter-Lynch, Saint Perpetua across the Middle Ages: Mother, Gladiator,
Saint (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 63–86.
88 Compare, for example, the use of ðegenlice in such martial contexts as Ælfric’s Lives of the
Saints (e.g., Maccabees, The Forty Soldiers) and The Battle of Maldon.
138 E. J. Christie
magnanimity (line 1046) as manlic when he rewards Beowulf with “wicga

ond wæpna” (line 1046) for his service. In the context, the assessment of
Hrothgar as a king for his generosity, the adverb must be taken to describe
nobility. It is possible that gender and nobility are so fully conflated in this
word that nobility is especially perceived as a masculine trait.89 It seems just
as likely that the adverb functions as an assessment of human characteristics
that Asser’s Life of Alfred attributes to Alfred’s noble children male and
female alike: humane, obliging, commodious.
In Old English literature, we can see a clear moral discourse opposing
vigorousness and slackness, primarily with regard to the spiritual life. To
some degree, it seems evident, masculinity was conflated with virtue in Old
English much as it was in Latin—as words for “manly,” having the qualities of
men, suggest simultaneous identifications of class and quality: nobility and
generosity for example. Beowulf never describes its hero as manly or reflects on
the qualities that make him a male as opposed to female. In most situations,
Old English texts promote gentleness as a humane rather than masculine or
feminine sensibility—one that Turner sees profoundly at odds with “manly
energies” required for war. The ideal of “Anglo-Saxon” manliness represented
in works like those of Sharon Turner, and by the end of the nineteenth-century
amplified in a racial discourse exemplified by Henry Shattuck Verrill, thus
make fictional kings like Beowulf and historical kings like Alfred into paragons
of vital masculine energy even as they identify their own, contemporary
masculinity as originating in innate racial properties demonstrated in the
history of northern European cultures. Teachers and translators like Jane,
Hugh, and Sweet supply gendered versions of Old English history. By contrast,
and under the influence of his own experiences of loss and regret as well as
evolving gender expectations in and around the World Wars, Tolkien shifts
the emphasis on men in Beowulf. While still ascribing to a “northern theory
of courage,” he focuses on the historical perspective of the poet summoning
a martial hero as a symbol of existential courage. The central feelings of the
poem are for him not duty or loyalty so much as grief and regret. Throughout
all these engagements with “Anglo-Saxon” masculinity, the opposition of
the contemplative and the active persists. Verrill insists that as a “thinking
man” it must fall to him to reconstruct the history even as he metaphorizes
historical research as physical labor. Jane describes the education of Alfred
and his children as an energetic pursuit that must be distinguished from the
activities of the “bookworm.” Tolkien understands himself as imaginative
rather than physical; but the story of the man of action becomes meaningful
89 See Scott Thompson Smith, “Remembering the Lady of Mercia” in this volume, pp. 000–000.
only as it is told by the poet, and interpreted by himself, both “men of feeling.”
Despite his famous rejection of earlier historical readings of Beowulf, Tolkien’s
interpretation of the poem illustrates the persistence of a tradition of reading
Old English literature as evidence of an historical-masculine subject.
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5 Shame, Disgust and Ælfric’s Masculine
Performance
Alice Jorgensen
Abstract
In the “Letter to Brother Edward” Ælfric expresses disgust at reports of
women who eat and drink on the privy during beer parties. Misogynistic
disgust at the leaky bodies of women is widespread in western literature,
but when Ælfric depicts disgusting bodies they are usually male bodies,
reflecting anxieties about masculine authority. Ælfric idealizes a male
body that is sealed, chaste and pure, a site from which disgust can be
expressed rather than inspiring it. Ælfric’s signals of disgust are part of
his construction of an authoritative preaching voice. However, he is not
free of misogynistic disgust, and the anomalously extreme emotion of
the “Letter to Brother Edward” suggests an authority under threat from
the uncontrolled, messy bodies of women.
Keywords: disgust, masculinity, Ælfric of Eynsham, women
In the third and final section of the “Letter to Brother Edward”, a short text of
the late tenth or early eleventh century now convincingly ascribed to Ælfric,
the homilist allows himself an unusually vehement expression of emotion.
Ic bidde eac þe, broðor, forþam ðe þu byst uppan lande mid wimmannum
oftor þonne ic beo, þæt þu him an þing secge, gif ðu for sceame swaþeah
hit him secgan mæge; me sceamað þearle þæt ic hit secge ðe. Ic hit gehyrde
oft secgan, and hit is yfel soð, þæt þas uplendiscan wif wyllað oft drincan
and furþon etan fullice on gangsetlum æt heora gebeorscipum, ac hit is
bysmorlic dæd and mycel higeleast and huxlic bysmor þæt ænig man
æfre swa unþeawfast beon sceole þæt he þone muð ufan mid mettum
afylle and on oðerne ende him gange þæt meox ut fram and drince þonne
doi: 10.5117/9789463721462_ch05
144 Alice Jorgensen
ægðer ge þæt ealu ge þone stencg, þæt he huru swa afylle his fracodan
gyfernysse. Ic ne mæg for sceame þa sceandlican dæde, þæt ænig mann
sceole etan on gange, swa fullice secgan swa hit fullic is, ac þæt næfre ne
deð nan ðæra manna ðe deah.1
(I ask you also, brother, because you are up the country with women
more often than I am, that you say one thing to them, if however you are
able to say it to them for shame; I am greatly ashamed to say it to you. I
have often heard it said, and it is an evil truth, that these country women
will often drink and even eat foully on privies at their beer-parties, but
it is a shameful deed and a great folly and a disgraceful shame that any
one should ever be so disorderly that he fill the mouth above with food
while at the other end the excretions go out of him and that he drink then
both the ale and the stench, so that he indeed satisfy his base gluttony
in this way. I cannot for shame speak about the scandalous deed—that
anyone should eat on the privy—as foully as it is foul, but no-one who
is virtuous ever does it.)
This text is recurrently concerned with boundaries, pollution and the dis-
gusting.2 The first section deals with clean and unclean food, specifically
the biblical prohibition on eating blood. In the second, Ælfric rebukes Edward
for adopting Danish dress, “ða sceandlican tyslung” (this shameful dress),
in a manner that “his agen cynn unwurþað” (dishonors his own kindred).
Here Ælfric shows a concern for the management of male bodies and how
they display nationality, kindred, and honor. It is the section already quoted,
however, that contains the most spectacular outpouring of disgust, directed,
1 Mary Clayton, “An Edition of Ælfric’s Letter to Brother Edward,” in Early Medieval English
Texts and Interpretations: Studies Presented to Donald G. Scragg, ed. Elaine Treharne and Susan
Rosser (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002), 263–83, at 282,
lines 6–17 (my translation). On Ælfric’s authorship see 264–69; the letter was first ascribed to
Ælfric by John Pope, Homilies of Ælfric: A Supplementary Collection, EETS o.s. 259–60 (London,
1967–68), 1:56–57. The major editions of Ælfric are cited and abbreviated as follows: Pope = Pope,
Homilies of Ælfric; CH I = Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies. The First Series: Text, ed. Peter Clemoes, EETS
s.s.17 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); CH II = Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies. The Second Series:
Text, ed. Malcolm Godden, EETS s.s. 5 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); LS = Ælfric’s Lives
of Saints, ed. Walter W. Skeat, 2 vols in 4 parts, EETS o.s. 76, 82, 94, 114 (London: Kegan Paul,
1881–1900); Fehr = Die Hirtenbriefe Ælfrics in altenglischer und lateinischer Fassung, ed. Bernhard
Fehr (Hamburg: Henri Grand, 1914); Assmann = Angelsächsische Homilien und Heiligenleben,
ed. Bruno Assmann (Kassel: Georg H. Wigand, 1889).
2 This feature of the text was first briefly explored by Nigel Barley, “The Letter to Brother
Edward,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 79, no. 1 (1978): 23–24.
Shame, Disgust and Ælfric’s Masculine Performance 145
as Carolyne Larrington observes, at women eating and drinking to excess

right by the facilities they need for purging their over-consumption.3 Mary
Clayton points out that the practice may actually have been both a male
and a female one: the pronouns for much of the passage are masculine. Yet,
“Ælfric … focuses his disgust on women.”4
The present chapter explores the conjunction between disgust and
gender in Ælfric’s writings, arguing that it is an important aspect of
how Ælfric constructs his masculine authority as a preacher. In rela-
tion to the burgeoning f ield of emotions history, it builds on previous
work on Ælfric’s uses of shame.5 It also enters a continuing conversation
about gender in the tenth-century Benedictine Reform, a movement in
which Ælfric is a major (though in some ways idiosyncratic) f igure. It
responds to the view of scholars such as Pauline Stafford, who argues
that, although the Reform saw the regulation and founding of women’s
as well as men’s houses, “[the Reformers’] concern with sexual purity
readily aligned ‘woman’ with … impurity … ‘Woman’ was impure body.”6
To examine disgust is to ask questions about attitudes to the body. In
Ælfric’s writings the body frequently disappears into spiritual meanings:
he instructs his audience to understand not “lichamlice” (bodily), but
“gastlice” (spiritually).7 In the lives of the martyrs, bodily mutilation
cannot mar spiritual truth, and thus, for example, when St. Agatha has
her breast cut off she aff irms that her breast is still whole “on minre
sawle” (in my soul). 8 However, Agatha’s female body is here asserted
even as it is transcended; the body has a habit of reappearing. Ælfric
wields disgust as part of an effort to control the gendered body, both
represented and real—and, I will argue, it is often the male, not the
female, body that is in question.
3 Carolyne Larrington, “Diet, Defecation and the Devil: Disgust and the Pagan Past,” in Medieval
Obscenities, ed. Nicola MacDonald (York: York Medieval Press, 2006), 138–55, at 146–47.
4 Clayton, “An Edition of Ælfric’s Letter to Brother Edward,” 274.
5 Specifically, this chapter is an extension of my own previous studies: “Historicizing Emotion:
The Shame-Rage Spiral in Ælfric’s Life of St Agatha,” English Studies 93, no. 5 (August 2012): 529–38
and “‘It Shames Me to Say It’: Ælfric and the Concept and Vocabulary of Shame,” Anglo-Saxon
England 41 (2013 for 2012): 249–76.
6 Pauline Stafford, “Queens, Nunneries and Reforming Churchmen: Gender, Religious Status
and Reform in Tenth- and Eleventh-Century England,” Past & Present 163 (1999): 3–35, at 9.
7 See, e.g., CH II.39, “In Natale Sanctorum Virginum,” line 87, cited and discussed by Shari
Horner, “The Violence of Exegesis: Reading the Bodies of Ælfric’s Female Saints,” in Violence
Against Women in Medieval Texts, ed. Anna Roberts (Gainsville: University Press of Florida,
1998), 22–43, at 23–26.
8 LS “Agatha,” line 126; Horner, “Violence of Exegesis,” 31.
146 Alice Jorgensen
Disgust
Some initial attention needs to be given to the contours of disgust. Some

form of disgust seems to be a human universal and can be viewed as a
product of evolution. The substances foregrounded in the “Letter to Brother
Edward”—blood, food, and excrement—are typical elicitors of what Paul
Rozin, in a series of publications with various collaborators, has called “core
disgust.” For Rozin, disgust “is best described as a guardian of the mouth
against potential contaminants,”9 and core disgust is directed at animals
such as cockroaches, prohibited foods, and products of the body such as
shit, semen, and blood.10 Avoidance of such substances has adaptive value
in protecting against pathogens.
However, the domain of disgust in most cultures is far broader than this
biologically adaptive core, extending to such diverse objects as taboo sexual
acts, death, abnormal bodies, social or racial outgroups (“interpersonal”
disgust), and certain kinds of moral violation (“sociomoral” disgust).11
A consistent feature of disgust is the fear of pollution or contamination
by contact, which can only to a certain extent be explained in terms of
hygiene. For Susan B. Miller, disgust is “the gatekeeper emotion,” primarily a
psychological device for protecting the integrity of the self.12 Other theorists,
such as Martha Nussbaum, argue that disgust polices the divide between
human and animal: disgust hedges around those things that remind us of
our animal nature—eating, defecating, sex, body products such as mucus
and blood, the squelchy, meaty interior of the body, and everything that
relates to our most terrible weakness, mortality.13 This rejection of the
mortal and the animal is often misogynistically projected onto women. As
9 Paul Rozin, Laura Lowery, Sumio Imada, and Jonathan Haidt, “The CAD Trial Hypothesis:
A Mapping Between Three Moral Emotions (Contempt, Anger, Disgust) and Three Moral Codes
(Community, Autonomy, Divinity),” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 76, no. 4 (1999):
574–86, at 575.
10 Paul Rozin, Jonathan Haidt, and Clark R. McCauley, “Disgust: The Body and Soul Emotion,”
in Handbook of Cognition and Emotion, ed. Tim Dalgliesh and Mick Power (Chichester: Wiley,
1999), 429–45, at 431–44; also Paul Rozin, Jonathan Haidt, and Clark R. McCauley, “Disgust,” in
Handbook of Emotions, ed. Michael Lewis and Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones, 2nd ed. (New York:
Guilford, 2000), 637–53, at 639–41.
11 Rozin et al., “Disgust” (1999), 435–36; “Disgust” (2000), 642–44 (in this article the term “moral”
is used rather than “sociomoral”). Larrington, “Diet, Defecation,” 143–44, offers an overview of
how Rozin has wrestled with the extension of “core” disgust into the moral domain.
12 Susan B. Miller, Disgust: The Gatekeeper Emotion (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 2013), Chapter 1
(eBook, unpaginated).
13 Rozin et al., “Disgust” (1999), 434–35; “Disgust” (2000), 641–42; Martha Nussbaum, Hiding
from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000),
Nussbaum explains it, “Women give birth, and are thus closely linked to the
continuity of animal life and the mortality of the body. Women also receive
semen … In connection with these facts, women have often been imagined
as soft, sticky, fluid, smelly, their bodies as filthy zones of pollution.”14 Julia
Kristeva’s account of the abject, which powerfully invokes disgust, associates
it strongly with the maternal and sees abjection of the maternal—rejec-
tion of that intimate, boundary-troubling, sticky connection of blood and
milk—as core to achieving psychic integrity; her theoretical paradigm has
been criticized for potentially naturalizing misogyny.15 Whether natural or
not, misogynistic disgust is widespread and has a long history in literature.
Winfried Menninghaus, focusing largely on German-language aesthetics
and philosophy, finds that “With the single exception of Winckelmann, the
disgusting has the attributes of female sex and old age with all the writers
treated here.”16 In classical Latin, examples of misogynistic disgust include
Juvenal’s sixth satire, with its images of Messalina carrying the smell of
the brothel back to the imperial bed and of women pissing on the altar
of chastity, and Ovid’s Remedia Amoris, which imagines a lover losing all
passion when he sees a woman’s genitals or becomes aware of her menstrual
blood.17 In medieval literature disgust is part of the arsenal of antifeminist
texts such as Boccaccio’s Il Corbaccio, which invites the addressee to consider
childbearing and “the horrible instruments they employ to take away their
superfluous humours” in demonstration of the contention that “[n]o other
creature is less clean than woman.”18
In early medieval culture, however, the domain of disgust was fairly
restricted. Writing on the Icelandic sagas, William Ian Miller remarks that
“disgust is there, but … [has] no real idiom separate from shame”: 19 in a
87–98. See also William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1991), xiv.
14 Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity, 111, drawing on Miller, Anatomy of Disgust, 101–5 and
passim.
15 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1982); Imogen Tyler, “Against Abjection,” Feminist Theory 10 (2009):
77–98.
16 Winfried Menninghaus, Disgust: The Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, trans. Howard
Eiland and Joel Golb (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 7.
17 Juvenal and Persius, trans. Susanna Morton Braund, Loeb Classical Library 91 (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 244–45 and 260–61; Ovid, The Art of Love, and Other Poems,
trans. J. H. Mozley, Loeb Classical Library 232 (London: Heinemann, 1929), 206–7.
18 Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts, ed. Alcuin Blamires
with Karen Pratt and C. W. Marx (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 167.
19 Miller, Anatomy of Disgust, 147.
148 Alice Jorgensen
world of low privacy and living standards, the scope for fastidiousness was
limited. In Old English, there is no specific noun or verb for disgust. The only
reference to disgust in the Thesaurus of Old English appears in an entry for
“Weariness, Tedium, Disgust”, which lists one term, æmelnes;20 this word
sometimes glosses the Latin fastidium (as stated in the Dictionary of Old
English, sense 1a), though in Ælfric it consistently means “sloth.”21 It is hard
to think of examples of disgust in Old English heroic poetry. However, in
religious literature, with its prominent concern for purity, disgust plays a
more visible role.
In Ælfric’s case, disgust is manifested rhetorically in three main ways.
One is through reference to shame, which can be used to express avoidance
and fear of contamination, as it does in the “Letter to Brother Edward.” One
is through the use of the language of dirt and pollution, represented in the
“Letter” in the forms fullic and fullice.22 Tracing this language (specifically,
the adjective ful) reveals a pattern similar to his use of shame adjectives
such as bysmorful:23 while Ælfric does label as ful substances like excrement
and blood, he most frequently uses this term in “sociomoral” domains, above
all to signal disgust towards pagan gods and practices24 and to condemn
wantonness, lust, and sexual immorality.25 In lives of female virgin martyrs,
clusters of shame and dirt language attend the struggles of the saints to resist
paganism by preserving their clænnes, their “purity,” “chastity,” or “virginity”:
for example, St. Agnes is threatened with being “fullice gebysmrod” (foully
20 A Thesaurus of Old English, s.v., “11.06|02 (n.) Disinclination to act, listlessness: Weariness,
tedium, disgust,” http://oldenglishthesaurus.arts.gla.ac.uk/category/?id=16212, accessed April 20,
2018.
21 Dictionary of Old English: A to H online, ed. Angus Cameron, Ashley Crandell Amos, Antonette
diPaolo Healey et al. (Toronto, 2016), https://tapor.library.utoronto.ca/doe/, accessed April 20,
2018. See also Malcolm Godden, Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: Introduction, Commentary and
Glossary, EETS s.s. 18 (Oxford, 2000), 682 (glossary entry for ǣmelnyss).
22 Other terms include, among others, the adjectives ful, unclæne, geblanden, gefyled, and
gewidlod, the nouns besmitenes, unclænnes, and fylþ, and the verbs afylan, besmitan, besylian,
(ge)unclænsian, and (ge)widlian: see Thesaurus of Old English s.v. “04.06.02.01 (adj.) Dirty, unclean”
and subcategories, and “04.06.02.02 (adj.) Foul, filthy, squalid” and subcategories, consulted
26 April 2018.
23 See Jorgensen, “‘It Shames Me to Say It,’” 268–72.
24 In a corpus search for ful in Ælfric conducted in May 2017 I found 107 occurrences, of which
I counted 20 as attached to pagans, pagan gods, pagan rites and paganism. Dictionary of Old
English Web Corpus, compiled by Antonette diPaolo Healey with John Price Wilkin and Xin Xiang
(Toronto: Dictionary of Old English Project 2009) https://tapor.library.utoronto.ca/doecorpus/.
25 By my count, 22 of 107 occurrences: Galnes “wantonness” 10x, forliger “fornication” 6x,
sinscipe “intercourse” 2x, besmitennes “sexual defilement” 1x, lust “desire” 1x. One might also
add myltestre “prostitute” 2x.
shamed/foully raped).26 The third manifestation of disgust is in descriptive

passages that seem designed to inspire revulsion. The “Letter to Brother
Edward” aside, however, such passages in Ælfric do not obviously belong to
the paradigm of misogynistic disgust: they mostly feature not female bodies
but male ones. In these descriptions, concerns over bodily and religious purity
become bound up with anxieties about masculine authority and power.
The Disgusting Male Body
As Gabriella Corona observes, Ælfric’s early works show a “preoccupation

with inadequate secular leadership.”27 A stock character in the Catholic
Homilies and Lives of Saints is the wicked male authority figure, usually a
king or judge, who persecutes the righteous. These figures are portrayed
as excessive in every way, prone to extreme anger, lust and violence. This is
sometimes made revoltingly concrete in the disintegration of their bodies.
So, for example, the wicked judge Martianus in the “Passion of Julian and
Basilissa” dies crawling with worms, as does King Antiochus in Ælfric’s ver-
sion of Maccabees.28 A more extended example is Herod, in the sermon on the
Holy Innocents. The following is a short extract from a lengthy description.
Hine gelæhte unasecgendlic adl. his lichama barn wiðutan mid langsumre
hætan: ⁊ he eall innan samod forswæled wæs ⁊ toborsten. Him wæs
metes micel lust. ac swa þeah mid nanum ætum his gifernysse gefyllan
ne mihte … Wæterseocnys hine ofereode beneoþon þam gyrdle. to þam
swiðe þæt his gesceapu maðan weollon. ⁊ stincende attor singallice of
þam toswollenum fotum fleow. …
(There seized him an unspeakable disease: his body burned on the out-
side with protracted heat, and on the inside at the same time he was all
consumed and broken apart. He had a great desire for food, but however
26 LS “Agnes,” line 120. Shari Horner discusses besmitan, gewæmman (both “to defile, pollute”)
and bysmorian (to shame/disgrace) as rape terms: “The Language of Rape in Old English Literature
and Law: Views from the Anglo-Saxon(ist)s,” in Sex and Sexuality in Anglo-Saxon England:
Essays in Memory of Daniel Gillmore Calder, ed. Carol Braun Pasternack and Lisa M. C. Weston
(Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2004), 149–81, at 166–72; see also
Jorgensen, “‘It Shames Me to Say It,’” 266–67.
27 Gabriella Corona, “Ælfric’s Schemes and Tropes: Amplificatio and the Portrayal of Persecutors,”
in A Companion to Ælfric, ed. Hugh Magennis and Mary Swan (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 297–320, at 316.
28 LS “Julian and Basilissa,” line 430; “The Maccabees,” lines 544–58.
150 Alice Jorgensen
his greed could not be satisfied with any meat … Dropsy afflicted him
beneath the belt, so much that his genitals seethed with maggots, and a
stinking poison perpetually flowed from his bloated feet …)29
Ælfric has compiled this description from material in Rufinus’s Historia

Ecclesiastica and Haymo’s Homily 12,30 and he takes from Rufinus his explicit
interpretation of Herod’s sufferings: they are God’s vengeance upon him and
foreshadow the tortures he will experience in Hell.31 They also dramatize
the evil of his soul. As the enemy of Christ, Herod is an example of Ælfric’s
association of the ful with the pagan. Moreover, his afflictions relate specifi-
cally to his faults as a ruler.
Herod’s is a predatory kingship. He kills those he should protect—the Holy
Innocents, most obviously, but also his own sons and the Jewish elders;32
appropriately, his body encroaches, exceeds its bounds, and threatens to
consume what is around it. It is also hollow, lacking in integrity, a concrete
image of the lies on which his power is built, for he is a usurper who gained
the kingdom “mid syrewungum ⁊ swicdome” (by plotting and deceit).33 Most
strikingly, Herod’s bodily disintegration represents the hypertrophe of the
appetites of the secular ruler. The conventional feasting of the lord34 becomes
an insatiable hunger or gifernes (greed/gluttony). There are also overtones
of sexual excess in the prominence of Herod’s genitals in the description,
the more intriguing because this is not the Herod who adulterously married
Herodias but another member of that confusing family. The implication of
lust is of a piece with the explicit stress on gluttony; according to Isidore,
Alcuin, and others, gluttony leads to lust.35 The monstrous Herod recalls
Holofernes in the Old English Judith, another destructive, consuming ruler,
who leads his men into a drunkenness close to death and seeks to defile
the virtuous Judith, but who instead is ignominiously killed by her. Karma
Lochrie has written on how Holofernes’s drinking, lust, and violence exist
not as an aberration but as an extreme of warrior masculinity.36 Herod too
29 CH I.5, “Natale innocentium infantum,” lines 127–30 and 132–34.

30 Godden, Catholic Homilies: Introduction, Commentary and Glossary, 43–44.
31 CH I.5, lines 124–27.
32 CH I.5, lines 149–62.
33 CH I.5, lines 63–64.
34 See Hugh Magennis, Anglo-Saxon Appetites: Food and Drink and their Consumption in Old
English and Related Literature (Dublin: Four Courts, 1999).
35 Magennis, Anglo-Saxon Appetites, 94–96.
36 Karma Lochrie, “Gender, Sexual Violence, and the Politics of War in the Old English Judith,”
in Class and Gender in Early English Literature: Intersections, ed. Britten J. Harwood and Gillian
R. Overing (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 1–20, at 5–9.
represents powerful secular masculinity pushed to its ruinous conclusion.

The overwhelming disgust he invites is acted out in the passage through
the figures of his doctors, who are unable to approach him because of the
“stincende steam” (stinking miasma) that comes from his mouth.37
The figure whose bodily disintegration seems to be most significant for
Ælfric is tied not to secular but to ecclesiastical authority. This is the heretic
Arius, whose death voiding his own guts on the privy Ælfric recounts no
fewer than six times. The six passages occur in the sermon “De fide Catholica”
from the first series of Catholic Homilies,38 Pope’s homily X for Pentecost,39 the
homily for the feast of a confessor edited by Assmann,40 the pastoral letter
for Wulfsige, 41 and the English and Latin versions of the first pastoral letter
for Wulfstan.42 In several of these passages Ælfric comments that Arius dies
“swa æmtig on innoðe swa swa his geleafa wæs” (as empty in his entrails
as his belief was). 43 There is thus a transparent symbolism to his horrid
end—bodily emptiness is spiritual emptiness—but in context the Arius
story also resonates with concerns about the authority of the church and
the special status of the clergy. As Paul Antony Hayward points out, Arius
is condemned at the synod of Nicaea and his opponent is a bishop, so the
story uses his death to underscore the authority of synods and bishops to
defend orthodoxy.44 In the pastoral letters the topic of ecclesiastical authority
and the condemnation of heresy is closely associated with injunctions to
clerical celibacy. Thus the filthy death of Arius becomes a counterpoint to
the clænnes that priests ought to espouse. In the “Letter to Wulfsige” the
Arius story is immediately followed by the statement that the same synod
forbade men in orders to have any woman in their house, apart from their
mother, sister, or aunt. 45 Ælfric explains that under the Old Law priests
37 CH I.5, line 136.

38 CH I.20, “Feria III De fide catholica,” lines 213–31.
39 Pope X, “Dominica Pentecosten,” lines 159–69.
40 Assmann IV.195–202. Here Arius appears in a list of sinners, mostly blasphemers and heretics,
who are punished by God.
41 Fehr Brief I.9–11.
42 Fehr Brief 2.47–55, and Brief II.50–58.
43 Pope X, line 167; see also Fehr Brief 2.55, and Brief II.58.
44 Paul Antony Hayward, “Before the Coming of Popular Heresy: The Rhetoric of Heresy in
English Historiography, c. 700–1154,” in Heresy in Transition: Transforming Ideas of Heresy in
Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Ian Hunter, John Christian Laursen, and Cary J. Nederman
(Aldershot: Routledge, 2005), 9–27, at 15–16.
45 Fehr Brief I.13, pp. 3–4: “Hy gecwædon þa ealle mid anrædum geþance, þæt naðer ne bisceop
ne mæsse-preost, ne diacon, ne nan riht canonicus, næbbe on his huse nænne wifman, buton
hit sy his modor, oððe his swustur, faðu, oððe modrige, and se-þe elles do, þolige his hades.”
(Then they all said with resolute opinion that neither a bishop nor a mass-priest, nor a deacon,
152 Alice Jorgensen
were permitted to marry, but they offered animal sacrifices; the purity of
the Christian sacraments requires celibacy.46 Bodily purity, orthodox belief,
and priestly authority are intertwined, with Arius as their abject opposite.
In the figures of Herod and Arius, Ælfric presents cases of the abuse and
corruption of masculine power, secular and ecclesiastical, and prompts
revulsion towards heresy, paganism, tyranny, and sin, all of which are
associated with filth and excess of the body. He also marshals disgust in
the service of an ambitious standard of clerical purity. He perhaps needs
the visceral power of disgust to argue his point, because in opposing clerical
marriage and concubinage he was condemning a large number of the priests
in early medieval England.47 For Ælfric and for other writers of the Reform,
celibacy is a key distinction between religious and laity, and highlighting the
failure of the secular clergy to stay celibate contributes to the construction
of a Benedictine monastic identity. 48 Ælfric’s use of disgust is thus aimed at
both the disciplining of real bodies and the policing of social and symbolic
boundaries.
Two questions arise. First, though chastity marks the boundary of holy
and unholy, religious and lay, it rejects the sexual and reproductive roles
associated with men and women. Does the chaste religious man remain
masculine? Second, given that his spectacular descriptions of the disgusting
body foreground the male body, is Ælfric free of misogynistic disgust?
nor any true canon, should have any woman in his house, unless it be his mother, or his sister,
or his paternal or maternal aunt, and whoever does otherwise, let him lose his order.) See also
Brief II.82, pp. 102–3, which has almost identical wording but is separated from the Arius story.
46 Brief I.21–22, p. 6: “Hy mihton þa wel habban wif on þam dagum. Forþam þe hy næfre ne
mæssedon, ne menn ne husledon; ac offrodon nytenu on þa ealdan wisan.” (They could well
have wives in those days. Because they never celebrated mass or administered the sacrament
to people, but they offered animals in the old way.)
47 Julia Barrow argues that this was more common among the lower clergy: see The Clergy in
the Medieval World: Secular Clerics, their Families and Careers in North-Western Europe, c. 800–c.
1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), Chapter 2; for comment, Conrad Leyser,
“Review Article: Church reform—Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing?” Early Medieval
Europe 24 (2016): 478–99, at 488–91. See also Catherine Cubitt, “Images of St Peter: The Clergy and
the Religious Life in Anglo-Saxon England,” in The Christian Tradition in Anglo-Saxon England:
Approaches to Current Scholarship and Teaching, ed. Paul Cavill (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004),
41–54, at 48–53.
48 See Stafford, “Queens, Nunneries,” 7–8; Cubitt, “Images of St Peter,” 48–50; Robert K.
Upchurch, “For Pastoral Care and Political Gain: Ælfric of Eynsham’s Preaching on Marital
Celibacy,” Traditio 59 (2004): 39–78, at 71–78; and for a broader and deeper investigation of
Benedictine identity, Rebecca Stephenson, The Politics of Language: Byrhtferth, Ælfric, and the
Multilingual Identity of the Benedictine Reform (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015).
Clænnes and masculinity
In Vern Bullough’s much-quoted phrase, masculinity has tended to rest

on “impregnating women, protecting dependents, and serving as provider
to one’s family.”49 Yet, as Robert Upchurch shows, Ælfric not only enjoins
clerical celibacy, he presents various grades of celibacy as desirable for
laymen.50 Moreover, female saints can be models of chastity for men to
follow: Ælfric’s version of the Life of St. Æthelthryth, which concludes
with the story of the chaste marriage of a layman, is a much-discussed
example.51 Medieval Christianity placed a high value on virginity, to
the extent that one might argue Bullough is wrong to regard sexual
activity as consistently central to masculinity. Isabel Davis, in a study of
masculinity in later medieval writers, argues that Langland “negotiates a
more privileged position for marriage and fatherhood within his theologi-
cal poetics” but does so with “hesitation:” this is a “new set of ethics.”52
It has also been argued that saints and holy people could represent a
49 Vern L. Bullough, “On Being A Male in the Middle Ages,” in Medieval Masculinities: Regarding
Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Clare A. Lees, Thelma Fenster, and JoAnn McNamara (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 31–45, at 34; quoted, for example, by Jennifer D. Thibodeaux,
“Introduction: Rethinking the Medieval Clergy and Masculinity,” in Negotiating Clerical Identities:
Priests, Monks and Masculinity in the Middle Ages (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 1–15,
at 3. Thibodeaux notes that the requirement of celibacy must have had a different impact on men
entering religion in adulthood, having already absorbed secular standards of masculinity, as
opposed to oblated monks brought up in the monastery (5). Ælfric himself may not have been an
oblate: see Christopher A. Jones, “Ælfric and the Limits of ‘Benedictine Reform,’” in Companion
to Ælfric, ed. Magennis and Swan, 67–108, at 104–7. Rebecca Stephenson takes issue with Jones’s
argument that Ælfric’s plain Latin may reflect his deficient early education, but this addresses
only part of the case for Ælfric having been a later entrant to Winchester: “Ælfric of Eynsham
and Hermeneutic Latin: Meatim sed et rustica reconsidered,” Journal of Medieval Latin 16 (2006):
111–41.
50 Ælfric’s Lives of the Virgin Spouses, ed. Robert K. Upchurch (Exeter: University of Exeter
Press, 2007), 19–26; Upchurch, “For Pastoral Care and Political Gain,” 39–60. Upchurch points
out that Ælfric goes further than his source, Augustine, in requiring couples to be abstinent
after the woman’s menopause: “For Pastoral Care,” 49–54.
51 Some readings include: Gwen Griffiths, “Reading Ælfric’s Saint Æthelthryth as a Woman,”
Parergon 10 (1992): 35–49; Peter Jackson, “Ælfric and the Purpose of Christian Marriage: A
Reconsideration of the Life of St Æthelthryth, lines 120–30,” Anglo-Saxon England 29 (2000): 235–60;
Paul E. Szarmach, “Ælfric and the Problem of Women,” in Essays on Anglo-Saxon and Related
Themes in Memory of Lynne Grundy, ed. Jane Roberts and Janet Nelson (King’s College London:
Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, 2000), 571–90, at 579–80; Winter Suzanne Elliott,
“Sex and the Single Saint: Physicality in Anglo-Saxon Female Saints’ Lives” (PhD dissertation,
University of Georgia, 2004), 63–66.
52 Isabel Davis, Writing Masculinity in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007), 14.
154 Alice Jorgensen
“third gender,” transcending ordinary gender roles, and this idea has
been applied to Ælfric’s writings.53 However, to create the space for a
third gender or to promote virginity demanded a constant rhetorical
effort in a society where political and social power in the secular sphere
were exercised and transmitted through patriarchal biological families.54
Despite the dominance of the surviving written texts by Christian and
indeed monastic ideology, Christian standards of purity could be troubling
for medieval men. Janet Nelson has argued that the male aristocrats
Gerald of Aurillac, Charles the son of Louis the German, and King Alfred
all experienced deep religious anxiety over sexuality, and also over that
other lynchpin of early medieval (non-servile) masculinity, the bearing
of weapons.55
Considering Ælfric’s approach to arms-bearing helps to illuminate how he
negotiates the relationship between clænnes and masculinity. Arms-bearing
was of enormous importance to early medieval English secular masculin-
ity and is far more prominent than sexuality in literary representations;
the Old English term for “man” as opposed to “woman” is wæpnedman.56
Nonetheless, warfare was, like sex, an activity those in religious life were
supposed to renounce (they did not always do so, as is suggested by the
deaths of Bishop Eadnoth of Dorchester and Abbot Wulfsige of Ramsey in
the Battle of Ashingdon in 1016).57 As Ælfric puts it in the discussion of the
Three Orders of Society appended to his homily on Maccabees (“Qui sunt
oratores, bellatores, laboratores”), again employing the language of dirt
and disgust, “Næs nan halig godes þeowa æfter þæs hælendes þrowunga.
þe æfre on gefeohte his handa wolde afylan” (There was no holy servant
of God after the Savior’s passion that would ever defile his hands with
53 Rhonda L. McDaniel, The Third Gender and Ælfric’s “Lives of Saints” (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval
Institute Publications, 2018).
54 The centrality of the family and reproduction to politics in this era is brought out in
Pauline Stafford’s work on queenship, e.g., Queen Emma and Edith: Queenship and Women’s
Power in Eleventh-Century England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997) and “Emma: The Powers of the
Queen in the Eleventh Century,” in Queens and Queenship in Medieval Europe. Proceedings of a
Conference Held at King’s College London, April 1995, ed. Anne J. Duggan (Woodbridge: Boydell,
1997), 3–23.
55 J. L. Nelson, “Monks, Secular Men and Masculinity, c. 900,” in Masculinity in Medieval Europe,
ed. D. M. Hadley (Harlow: Longman, 1999), 121–42.
56 See Stacy S. Klein, “Gender,” in A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Studies, ed. Jacqueline Stodnick
and Renée R. Trilling (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 39–54, at 41–43.
57 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Revised Translation, ed. Dorothy Whitelock with David C.
Douglas and Susie I. Tucker, second (corrected) impression (London: Eyre and Spottiswood,
1965), s.a. 1016 CDE, with Eadnoth’s see and Wulfsige’s abbey named in the footnotes.
fighting).58 However, Ælfric draws on the common trope of spiritual warfare

to represent the religious life, and chastity specifically, as a transformed
version of secular militancy.
In “Qui sunt oratores,” the religious life is presented as an analogous but
higher calling to the literal warfare of the aristocracy:
and se woruld-cempa sceall winnan wið ure fynd

and se godes þeowa sceall symle for us gebiddan.
and feohtan gastlice. wið se ungesewenlican fynd.
Is nu for-þy mare þæra muneca gewinn.59
(and the worldly warrior must fight against our enemies, and the servants
of God must always pray for us and fight spiritually against the unseen
enemies. Therefore the combat of the monks is greater.)
Clænnes itself is achieved through toughness, force and self-control, as

indicated for example in these comments on the ascetic life of John the
Baptist:
Hu mæig beon buton strece ⁊ neadunge. þæt gehwa mid clænnysse þæt
gale gecynd þurh godes gife gewylde; Oððe hwa gestilð hatheortnysse
his modes mid geþylde. buton earfoðnysse?
(How can it be without force and compulsion that someone with chastity
controls wanton nature through God’s grace? Or who calms the irascibility
of his heart with patience without difficulty?)60
The psychomachia of chastity and the spiritual fight are scarcely to be

distinguished. In the introduction to the “Admonitio ad filium spiritualem”
the reader is told:
Heo gebyrað to munecum and eac to mynecenum þe regollice libbað for

hyra Drihtnes lufe under gastlicum ealdrum Gode þeowiende gehealdenre
clænnysse swa swa Cristes þegenas campiende wið deoflu dæges and nihtes.
58 LS, “Qui sunt oratores, bellatores, laboratores”, lines 857–58.

59 “Qui sunt oratores, bellatores, laboratores,” lines 820–23.
60 CH I.25, “Nativitas Sancti Iohannis Baptistae,” lines 161–63. Godden, Catholic Homilies:
Introduction, Commentary and Glossary, 207, gives the source passage from Pseudo-Augustine:
Ælfric has changed the order to place chastity at the head of the passage.
156 Alice Jorgensen
(It [this tract] pertains to monks and also nuns who live according to the
rule, for the love of their Lord, under their spiritual superiors, serving
with steadfast chastity, just like Christ’s servants, fighting against the
devil day and night.)61
As this passage indicates, women also can live chastely. However, I can find
no examples of Ælfric calling female saints godes cempan (soldiers of God), a
phrase he uses of male saints including Paul, Martin, Sebastian, George, Alban,
and Denis.62 Martial language remains overwhelmingly masculine. The trope
of spiritual warfare, therefore, allows Ælfric to deploy the high value placed on
warrior masculinity in early medieval English culture for the benefit of monks
and priests. This strategy was consistent through Ælfric’s career even while
his attitude to literal warfare shifted; as he produced works for aristocrats
such as Æthelweard, Æthelmær, and Sigeweard, and as the renewed Danish
threat became more pressing, he became more willing to depict the violence
of secular men in a positive light where its ends justified it.63
The negotiation between religious and secular modes of masculinity in
relation to violence, sex, and purity comes into focus in the “Passion of St.
Edmund,” an example that makes striking use of the rhetoric of disgust. The
“Passion of St. Edmund” is among Ælfric’s earlier works and, following the
Latin vita by Abbo, it portrays Edmund, who in fact probably died in battle,
as a martyr shot to death for refusing to submit to heathen overlordship.64
Edmund is at once an exemplary king, who shows care for the Christian souls
of his people and a willingness to fight on their behalf, and a holy figure,
pure of both sex and bloodshed. His sexual purity is demonstrated in the
61 “Admonitio ad filium spiritualem” in The Anglo-Saxon Version of the Hexameron of St. Basil
… and the Anglo-Saxon Remains of St. Basil’s Admonitio ad filium spiritualem, ed. H. W. Norman,
2nd ed. (London: John Russell Smith, 1849), 32–56, at 32.
62 CH I.27, “Natale Sancti Pauli,” line 46; CH II.34, “Depositio Sancti Martini,” line 7 and LS
“St. Martin” line 106; LS “Sebastian” line 454; LS “George” lines 60 and 152; LS “Alban” line 61; LS
“Denis” line 133—here “cristes cempa” (soldier of Christ) rather than “godes cempa.”
63 John Edward Damon, Soldier Saints and Holy Warriors: Warfare and Sanctity in the Literature
of Early England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 192–246; Malcolm Godden, “Apocalypse and Invasion
in Late Anglo-Saxon England,” in From Anglo-Saxon to Early Middle English: Studies Presented
to E.G. Stanley, ed. Malcolm Godden, Douglas Gray and Terry Hoad (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1994), 130–62.
64 Abbo, Life of St Edmund, in Three Lives of English Saints, ed. Michael Winterbottom (Toronto:
Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1972), 65–87. See Antonia Gransden, “Abbo of Fleury’s Passio
Sancti Eadmundi,” Revue Bénédictine 105 (1995): 20–78, at 31–40 on Abbo’s hagiographic models. Abbo
wrote around 985. Clemoes reads the preface to “St. Edmund” to mean Ælfric’s translation followed
only a few years later: “The Chronology of Ælfric’s Works,” in Old English Prose: Basic Readings, ed.
Paul E. Szarmach with Deborah A. Oosterhouse (London: Routledge, 2000), 29–72, at 39.
wholeness of his body: at translation not only is his corpse found incorrupt
but his severed head has joined itself back on, a demonstration, in Ælfric’s
words, that he “buton forligre … leofode and mid clænum life to criste siþode”
(lived without fornication and journeyed to Christ with a chaste life).65
The balancing act between military kingship and the suffering heroism of
martyrdom is worked out in the scene between Edmund, his bishop and the
Danish messenger.66 Edmund declares that “me nu leofre wære þæt ic on
feohte feolle wið þam þe min folc moste heora eardes brucan” (I would prefer
to fall in battle provided that my people might enjoy their territory)67 but the
bishop points out he does not have the forces to fight. Edmund responds that it
was never his custom to flee and defies the messenger, using a stark antithesis
of dirt and purity to express his revulsion: “Witodlice þu wære wyrðe sleges
nu. ac ic nelle afylan on þinum fulum blode mine clænan handa” (Indeed you
would deserve to be killed now, but I don’t wish to defile my clean hands with
your foul blood).68 In this compressed, emotive speech multiple implications
are skillfully layered: Edmund is a king who is entitled to pass judgement
of death; he is a warrior who could kill the messenger himself; but at the
same time he rejects, as a holy saint should, the pollutions of paganism and
violence (it is left artfully unclear to what extent it is the body of the pagan,
and to what extent bloodshed itself, that defiles). What I wish to emphasize
here is the efficacy of a staging of disgust—derived from the source-text,
but selected, simplified and sharpened by Ælfric—in positioning Edmund
as both a warrior king and a virgin martyr. In addition, his performance of
disgust is a performance of authority: while Herod’s and Arius’s bodies are
objects of disgust that express the hollowness of their authority, Edmund’s
clean, whole body is a site from which disgust can be expressed, and his
fastidiousness, his wholeness and his authority reinforce each other.
Disgust, Authority, and the Female Body
I have argued that Ælfric’s deployment of disgusting male bodies such as

Herod and Arius enacts a convulsive rejection of all that is pagan, excessive,
65 LS “St. Edmund,” lines 187–88.

66 On how Ælfric’s St. Edmund departs from Germanic models of heroism see Hugh Magennis,
“Ælfric and Heroic Literature,” in The Power of Words: Anglo-Saxon Studies Presented to Donald
G. Scragg on his Seventieth Birthday, ed. Hugh Magennis and Jonathan Wilcox (Morgantown:
West Virginia University Press, 2006), 31–60, at 44–45.
67 “St. Edmund,” lines 65–67.
68 “St. Edmund,” lines 85–86.
158 Alice Jorgensen
sinful, and mired in the body’s appetites, especially sex; and that it is bound
up with ideas about authority and power. The ideal male body is contained,
chaste, ordered in its passions, orthodox in its beliefs, and, if clerical, cor-
rectly celebrates the rites of the church and pursues the spiritual fight;
if non-clerical, it carefully negotiates the potential pollution of warfare.
However, it remains a masculine body, even though it strikingly reorders
secular masculinity. What, then, of female bodies?
There are various ways of reading the comparative invisibility of the
female body in Ælfric’s works. One is, with Alison Gulley, to argue that the
body is ultimately not that important in comparison to spiritual meaning.69
Another is to conclude that both represented and real female bodies need to
be especially carefully controlled. This is the line taken by Clare Lees and
Gillian Overing, who argue that “[Ælfric’s] saints remain resolutely female,
however much they invite cross-gendered identification” and that their
depiction betrays “a certain nervousness about the power of the gaze.”70 More
recently Andrew Rabin has argued that Ælfric’s Life of St. Eugenia and the
treatment of St. Æthelthryth in the Old English version of the Ely Foundation
Charter express the need both to protect and to control the female body
in light of “the law’s vulnerability to unregulated or unconstrained female
sexuality.”71 Katy Cubitt refers to Ælfric’s “fear of women and sex” and picks
out, among other passages, the insistence in his homily for the Passion of John
the Baptist that no wild beast is worse than an evil woman.72 She also stresses
that Ælfric’s projected audience is largely male.73 Elaine Treharne offers a
further dimension, showing how Ælfric tends to diminish women’s roles
and focus his attention largely on men. Where he does address women, he
expects them to be obedient and submissive: the widow Anna, for example,
is praised for the negative virtues of eschewing luxury and chatter and not
wandering abroad.74 The examples adduced by these scholars suggest that
Ælfric’s attitude to the female body is suspicious, cautious, and repressive;
69 Alison Gulley, The Displacement of the Body in Ælfric’s Virgin Martyr Lives (Farnham: Ashgate,
2014), 2 and passim. For evaluation, see Renée Trilling’s review in JEGP 116 (2017): 225–28.
70 Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing, Double Agents: Women and Clerical Culture in Anglo-
Saxon England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 130 and 131.
71 Andrew Rabin, “Holy Bodies, Legal Matters: Reaction and Reform in Ælfric’s Eugenia and
the Ely Privilege,” Studies in Philology 110 (2013): 220–65, quotation at 261.
72 Catherine Cubitt, “Virginity and Misogyny in Tenth- and Eleventh-Century England,”
Gender and History 12 (2000): 1–32, at 23 and 16; CH I.32, “Decollatio Sancti Iohannis Baptistae,”
lines 172–89.
73 Cubitt, “Virginity and Misogyny,” 17.
74 Elaine Treharne, “The Invisible Woman: Ælfric and his Subject Female,” Leeds Studies in
English n.s. 37 (2006): 191–208, esp. at 198–200.
the disgusting female body must fall within the realm of those topics he
avoids because they are too dangerous or unedifying for his audience.75
In addition, as we have seen, Ælfric’s uses of disgust are frequently bound
up with concerns about authority; and he explicitly genders authority as
male. In the sermon on the Day of Judgement edited by Pope, there is a
sequence of pairs of people, one of whom will be taken and one of whom
will be left on that day of wrath. The second pair, the two women at the
grindstone, are interpreted, following Bede’s commentary on Luke 17.35,
as those immersed in the cares of worldly life. Ælfric expands Bede’s brief
statement that they are presented as women because “consiliis… peritorum
regi eis expedit” (it suits them to be guided by the counsels of the more
experienced):76
Be þysum he cwæð twa, and nolde cweðan twegen,

for þam þe hi soðlice ne beoð on swylcere fullfremednysse
þæt hi sylfe magon hy[m] sylfum wissian,
ac hy sceolan lybban be heora lareowa wissunge,
bisceopa and mæssepreosta, and heora misdæda betan
be heora scrifta tæcinge, and of heora tilunge
don symle ælmyssan; ac hi ne magon swaþeah
þam beon geefenlæhte þe ealle þing forleton
for þæs Hælendes lufon, and hym æfre þeowodon.
(About these he said “two women,” and wouldn’t say “two men,” because
they truly are not in such perfection that they may guide themselves, but
they must live according to the guidance of their teachers, bishops and
mass-priests, and atone for their misdeeds according to the instruction
of their confessors, and always give alms from their labors; but however
they cannot be the equal of those who leave everything for the love of
the Savior and always serve him.)77
Similarly, when the transvestite saint Eugenia is chosen abbot of the mon-
astery where she is hiding, “Ða wearð þæt mæden mycclum hohful. hu heo
75 On Ælfric’s avoidance of certain kinds of material, see Joyce Hill, “Ælfric, Gelasius, and St
George,” Mediaevalia 11 (1985): 1–17; E. Gordon Whatley, “Pearls before Swine: Ælfric, Vernacular
Hagiography, and the Lay Reader,” in Via Crucis: Essays on Early Medieval Sources and Ideas in
Memory of J. E. Cross, ed. Thomas N. Hall with Thomas D. Hill and Charles D. Wright (Morgantown:
West Virginia University Press, 2002), 158–84.
76 Pope II, 595.
77 Pope XVIII, “Sermo de die iudicii”, lines 119–27.
160 Alice Jorgensen
æfre wæras wissian sceolde” (then became the maiden extremely anxious
[about] however she was to direct men).78
Finally, although there is no female description to compare to Herod or
Arius (the closest is perhaps Jezebel being consumed “þurh fule hundas” (by
foul dogs)),79 there are a number of passages that suggest human messiness
and weakness are associated with the female, especially through the role of
the mother in bringing forth the mortal body. The virgin motherhood of Mary
is, of course, celebrated, sometimes even in aspects that today can be targets
for disgust, such as lactation. In Pope’s homily IV Ælfric tells how a woman
calls out to Christ “Eadig is se innoð þe ðe to mannum gebær, and gesælige
syndon þa breost þe þu gesuce” (Blessed is the womb that brought you forth as
a human being, and blessed are the breasts that you sucked),80 explaining that
this affirms the true humanity, the “menniscnysse,” of Christ against heretics
who would deny it.81 It is central to orthodoxy that Christ is fully human as
well as fully God, and this humanity is derived from the body of the mother.
But the mother also transmits the stain of original sin, and, while this does not
occur in Jesus’s case, the mother is thus the vessel of everything that is dirty and
corrupt in humanity. This is clear from the Christmas homily edited by Pope:
Gyf seo sunne scinð, swa swa we geseoð oft,

on fulum adela(n & heo be)fyled ne bið,
micele swiðor mihte se ælmihtiga Godes Sunu
butan eallum fyl(ðum) beon of hyre acenned,
⁊ heo mihte beon micclum geclænsod
þurh his halg(an mihte) ⁊ he næs befyled
⁊ hyre mægðhad is ansund, þonne heo butan hæmede (bær).82
(If, as we often see, the sun shines on a foul place of filth and it is not
defiled, much more could the Almighty Son of God be born from her
78 LS, “Saint Eugenia, Virgin,” lines 121–22.

79 LS, “Book of Kings,” line 354.
80 Pope IV, “Dominica III in quadrigesima,” lines 52–53.
81 Pope IV, lines 276–81: “Eac þæra gedwolmanna þe dwelodon embe Crist, and sædon þæt
he nære on soðre menniscnysse, ealle heo oferswiðde mid soðum geleafan, for ðan ðe se innoð
wæs eadig soðlice þe Godes Sunu abær, and ða breost þe he seac on his cildhade wæron gesælige,
swa swa heo sæde.” (Also with respect to those heretics who erred concerning Christ and said
that he was not truly man, she overcame them all with her true faith, because that womb was
truly blessed that bore God’s Son, and the breasts that he sucked in his infancy were fortunate,
as she said.)
82 Pope I, “Nativitas Domini,” lines 420–26. Lacunae in the text are filled following the sug-
gestions in Pope’s apparatus and are presented in parentheses.
without any filth, and she could be cleansed through his holy power
and he was not defiled and her virginity is whole, when she bore a child
without sexual intercourse.)
It is startling to see, even under erasure, an analogy between Mary’s body and
“adela,” “filth” or “a place of filth.”83 It suggests that, while Ælfric is no Juvenal,
and while he is prepared to celebrate the purity and sanctity of an Æthelthryth
or an Agatha, deep down he does view women as fundamentally dirty.
Preacherly Authority and the Performance of Disgust
This chapter has explored crossing-points of disgust, authority, and gender

in how Ælfric represents certain male and female bodies and advocates
chastity and orthodoxy. In conclusion, I want to relate this back to his own
performance as a preacher, which is also a performance of both authority and
masculinity. To focus on performance is to place the body of the preacher
center-stage, and this is by definition a male body since the priestly role
was exclusively a male one.
I noted at the start that the kind of overt expression of feeling found in
the “Letter to Brother Edward” is atypical. Much more often, Ælfric engages
with emotion not by mentioning his own, but by prompting or cuing audience
responses through the use of narrative detail and affective language, especially
adjectives such as bysmorful and ful. In his use of such language, Ælfric as-
sumes the position of an arbitrator, who can pronounce on what is and is not
acceptable and direct the feelings of others. This use of adjectives is also to a
certain extent detached: it connects the feeling to the object rather than the
subject. Ælfric is well-known for a generally cool tone, in contrast (especially)
to the more exciting and excitable Wulfstan. Clare Lees has written beautifully
on how central to his work is the exposition of doctrine, the setting out of the
foundations of belief, rather than more heated exhortation.84 Mary Swan has
shown how, in comparison to the homilists of Blickling III and Bodley Homily
V, Ælfric makes relatively little use of the first person, but when he does it is
part of a careful construction of the authoritative voice of the teacher.85 The
83 The source identified by Pope is from Pseudo-Augustine, “Contra quinque hæreses.”

84 Clare A. Lees, Tradition and Belief: Religious Writing in Late Anglo-Saxon England (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), Chapter 2.
85 Mary Swan, “Constructing Preacher and Audience in Old English Homilies,” in Constructing
the Medieval Sermon, ed. Roger Andersson, Sermo: Studies on Patristic, Medieval, and Reformation
Sermons and Preaching 6 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 177–88, at 184–86 and 188.
162 Alice Jorgensen
effect of all this is to minimize the presence of Ælfric’s own body and feelings
in his texts. Its precise impact would depend on the mode of reception. Where
the texts were used for private reading, the body of the preacher must have
all but disappeared into the body of the book, as a textual and yet still male
voice—speaking from the tradition of the Fathers—of moral and doctrinal
truth.86 Where the sermons were delivered orally—and Jonathan Wilcox
argues that the Catholic Homilies were widely circulated and preached87—they
scripted a performance of the kind of controlled, emotionally and physically
continent masculine authority Ælfric associates with figures like John the
Baptist and Edmund, and opposes to hideous parodies like Herod or Arius.
What, then, of moments when Ælfric deliberately draws attention to his
own disgust or shame? There are a number of passages in which Ælfric in
various ways expresses discomfort or anxiety over a subject, though only
three where he directly says he is ashamed. The first is the “Letter to Brother
Edward.” The second is in the sermon on Auguries: “Us sceamað to secgenne
ealle ða sceandlican wiglunga þe ge dwæs-menn drifað” (It shames us to tell
all the shameful sorceries which you foolish men practice).88 This statement,
couched in the preacherly first person plural, advertises the need to retain
control over a subject potentially corrupting or disturbing to his audience,
but in which he must fulfil his obligation to deliver moral teaching. The third,
however, signals shame and discomfort while suppressing significant details,
and this is the account of the Sodomites in Ælfric’s translation of Genesis:
Se leodscipe wæs swa bysmorfull þæt hig woldon fullice ongean gecynd
heora galnysse gefyllan, na mid wimmannum ac swa fullice þæt us
sceamað hyt openlice to secgenne.89
(This people was so disgraceful that they wished to fulfill their lust foully,
against nature, not with women but so foully that it shames us to say it openly.)
86 Ælfric clearly envisages the Catholic Homilies will be read as well as preached: Godden, Catholic
Homilies: Introduction, Commentary and Glossary, xxii–xxiii. The Lives of Saints seems designed first
and foremost as a reading collection, and yet it includes homiletic as well as narrative pieces; for a list
of public and private occasions on which it was probably used, see Jonathan Wilcox, “The Audience
of Ælfric’s Lives of Saints and the Face of Cotton Caligula A. xiv, fols. 93–130,” in Beatus Vir: Studies
in Early English and Norse Manuscripts in Memory of Phillip Pulsiano, ed. A. N. Doane and Kirsten
Wolf (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006), 219–63, at 258–59.
87 Jonathan Wilcox, “Ælfric in Dorset and the Landscape of Pastoral Care,” in Pastoral Care in
Late Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Francesca Tinti (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005), 52–62.
88 LS “On Auguries,” lines 100–101.
89 The Old English Heptateuch and Ælfric’s Libellus de Veteri Testamento et Novo, ed. Richard
Marsden, volume 1, EETS o.s. 330 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 42.
Similarly in Pope XVIII he mentions the “sceamlicum” (shameful) deeds of

the “fulan” (foul) Sodomites, but does not reveal exactly what they are.90 Here
we see Ælfric exercising a kind of rhetorical hygiene; fastidious expressions of
shame and disgust, coupled to studied vagueness, indicate his stewardship of
a learning that he cannot always share—perhaps all the more obviously since
his audience might well need no reminding what the Sodomites were up to.
Again, performing shame and disgust mean performing as an authoritative
teacher, controlling unsuitable leaks of shocking information just as he seeks
to control the messy urges of the body. Moreover, the careful avoidance
of contamination by even the naming of such dreadful sexual sins stages
the personal purity of the preacher, whose authority and office rest on his
clænnes of body, tongue, and mind.
This leads the discussion back to the anomalous emotionality of the “Letter
to Brother Edward.” To some extent this must be because it is a different
kind of performance to the others under examination here: it is apparently
a private letter, written in Ælfric’s personal voice and in the first person
singular, and directed not to the women he wants to admonish but to his
intermediary, Edward. However, it is also produced at the limits of Ælfric’s
ability to control bodies and behaviors and beyond the reach of his personal
intervention. The women on their privies are out of place and out of control,
enacting in a nightmarishly literal way the association of appetite and filth
that haunts Ælfric’s language of the ful and the clæne; and as women they
are especially offensive because they should be under authority, and because
they are inherently dirtier than men. They force themselves into Ælfric’s
language, demanding a response that ruptures his usual calm and discretion
in a manner that is evidently distressing to him. Disgust is a tool of authority
for Ælfric; but it is also, on occasion, a symptom of authority under threat.
Bibliography
Abbo. Life of St Edmund. In Three Lives of English Saints, edited by Michael Winter-
bottom, 65–87. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1972.
Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies. The First Series: Text. Edited by Peter Clemoes. Early
English Text Society s.s. 17. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
90 Pope XVIII, lines 69 and 74. See Malcolm Godden, “The Trouble With Sodom: Literary
Responses to Biblical Sexuality,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester
77 (1995): 97–119, at 103; also my own earlier discussion in “‘It Shames Me to Say It,’” 275, which
I recap and slightly modify here.
164 Alice Jorgensen
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Treatments of Virginity
6 The Ornament of Virginity
Aldhelm’s De uirginitate and the Virtuous Women of the
Early English Church
Emily V. Thornbury
Abstract
Though the female addressees of Aldhelm’s late seventh-century Opus de
uirginitate are known to us only by name, the contents of this sprawling
twin work of prose and verse suggest that he composed it with an aware-
ness of these women’s prior reading and knowledge. Aldhelm’s startling
characterization of virginity as an ornament acquired through labor thus
likely reflects a shared cultural conception of ornament as something not
frivolous or dispensable, but constitutive of the value of an artwork. Such
a view of ornament may in turn explain a major divergence between the
prose De uirginitate and its somewhat later verse companion, in which
a psychomachia with Virginity as martial heroine has been substituted
for a polemic against women’s elaborate attire.
Keywords: Virginity; reading; Aldhelm; ornament; theology; aesthetics
Premodern women are most often known to us, not through their own
words, but as the subjects or addressees of works written by men. Even
when the recipients of such texts were demonstrably real people, the
works themselves do not always provide much insight into those women’s
views: often, as many scholars have shown, female patrons or dedicatees
were primarily ideal abstractions or intellectual stalking-horses for the
texts’ male authors.1 Yet this does not mean that texts written by men for
1 See, for instance, Elizabeth A. Clark, “The Lady Vanishes: Dilemmas of a Feminist Historian
after the ‘Linguistic Turn’,” Church History 67 (1998): 1–31, whose reading of Gregory of Nyssa’s
life of St. Macrina shows the degree to which Gregory’s narrative transforms his own sister
into an avatar of his theological concerns. This epistemological pessimism is not universal, as
doi: 10.5117/9789463721462_ch06
172 Emily V. Thornbury
women are necessarily useless for understanding women’s intellectual

lives. In some instances, such works demonstrate that their male authors
did know about, and were responding to, the particular interests of their
patrons or addressees. And, more broadly and commonly, the form and
intellectual presuppositions of such texts reveal structures of thought
and cultural values shared across a society.2 It is not altogether quixotic,
then, to argue that Aldhelm’s De uirginitate—a sprawling, elaborate
opus geminatum that represents the f irst great work of Anglo-Latin
literature—contains, among much else, recoverable traces of the thought
of its female addressees.3
The chronologically prior prose section opens with an extended address
to these women by name, and attributes the impetus for the work itself
to the prompting of their letters. In the course of the text, Aldhelm refers
repeatedly to the women’s reading in specific terms, noting particular
books he knows them to have read as well as praising their knowledge in
general. More broadly, Aldhelm presents earlier treatises on virginity as
monuments to, and records of, the women to whom they were dedicated,
and indicates that his own treatise is meant to act in the same way: as a
monument through which its addressees will be known to posterity. So
while the reality of an intellectual dialogue between Aldhelm and a number
of professed religious women can (barring the recovery of their letters) no
longer be verified, the idea of such a dialogue is an inseparable part of the
text. Through the moments that the De uirginitate specifically represents
as shaped by its addressees’ thought, we can—at the very least—perceive
the learning that was imaginable for educated Englishwomen of the late
seventh century.
demonstrated by 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.
2 The same, indeed, might be said of other cases between authors and addressees of radically
different backgrounds—clergy and laymen, for instance, or commoners and upper nobility.
3 In an opus geminatum, identical or nearly identical material is presented in prose and
verse (this differentiates it from a prosimetrum like Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, which
alternates sequentially between verse and prose). Though the verse and prose portions of an
opus geminatum could, and often did, circulate separately, its author usually conceived of the
two as part of a single, unified work. The form was popular in early medieval England, especially
during the earlier period: see Peter Godman, “The Anglo-Latin Opus Geminatum: From Aldhelm
to Alcuin,” Medium Ævum 50 (1981): 215–29, and Gernot Wieland, “Geminus Stilus: Studies in
Anglo-Latin Hagiography,” in Insular Latin Studies, ed. Michael Herren (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1981), 113–33. Though there is not space to discuss it here, the pairing of prose
and verse to form a whole lends itself to metaphors of gender complementarity, which Aldhelm
explores in his Carmen de uirginitate.
The Ornament of Virginit y 173
Moreover, Aldhelm’s reshaping of his late antique source texts, and of his
own prose text in his creation of a verse “twin,” help us to better understand
early medieval English conceptions of an aesthetic practice often associ-
ated with women: ornamentation. Aldhelm’s striking conceptualization of
virginity as an ornament suggests he thought of ornament itself in a way that
was not derived from his literary sources, but instead likely reflects cultural
presuppositions that his addressees, as fellow early medieval Europeans
would have shared. This idea of the ornament of virginity seems to have
prompted the greatest single divergence in content between the prose
and verse parts of the work. Though mirroring each other in their earlier
sections, the Prosa concludes with several chapters warning women against
elaborate attire before returning to more general admonitions to virginity
and a final direct address. Based primarily on Cyprian’s De habitu uirginum,
these chapters wrestle with, and ultimately fail to reconcile, conflicting
ideas about nature and the moral valence of visible artistic labor.4 The verse,
however—which is explicitly presented as a complement to the prose and
fulfillment of the whole—cuts this discussion entirely and replaces it with
a Battle of the Virtues and Vices in which Virginity is a conquering military
leader. This revision presents us with glimpses into the intellectual world of
early medieval England that—whether or not they responded to the thoughts
of actual women—touch on women’s outward self-construction and on the
imaginative possibilities afforded by female warriors and thus help us better
understand the imagination of women in early medieval English culture.
De uirginitate and the Female Readers of the Early Medieval

English Church
Women’s absent presence prompted his treatise on virginity, Aldhelm writes

in the first chapter of his Prosa de uirginitate:
Iamdudum ad pontificale profiscens conciliabulum fraternis sodalium

catervis comitatus almitatis vestrae scripta meae mediocritati allata
satis libenter suscipiens erectis ad aethera palmis immensas Christo pro
sospitate vestra gratulatabundus impendere grates curavi; quo stilo non
solum ecclesiastica promissorum votorum foedera, quae fida pollicitatione
4 Aldhelm cites Cyprian by name; Rudolf Ehwald identifies the precise source passages in his
edition: Aldhelmi Opera, MGH Auct. Anti. 15 (Berlin, 1919), 315–16. For Cyprian’s text, see Laetitia
Ciccolini, ed., Sancti Cypriani Episcopi De habitu uirginum, CCSL 3F (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016).
spopondistis, ubertim claruerunt, verum etiam melliflua divinarum

studia scripturarum sagacissima sermonum serie patuerunt.5
(Some time ago, when, accompanied by throngs of fellow-monks, I was

on my way to a public assembly called by the bishop, your kind letters
were brought to me; and as I very gladly received them, I took care to give
extensive thanks to Christ, with hands raised to the skies, rejoicing for your
good health. In this composition not only were the ecclesiastical compacts
of sworn vows, which you had pledged with a faithful promise, abundantly
evident, but likewise the mellifluous studies of divine scriptures were
clear in the exceedingly well-considered arrangement of your words.)
Three things about his correspondents “shine forth,” as Aldhelm himself

might put it, from this quasi-epistolary beginning. First, the women them-
selves are not attending this synod: it is left unstated whether this is because
they are women (though the gender of the “fraternal throngs,” fraternis …
catervis, might suggest this) or because they reside outside this diocese.
And yet through their letters, two qualities of these women nonetheless
manifest themselves to Aldhelm, their reader: their vows, and their learning.
The whole of the ensuing treatise is centered on these two characteristics:
praise of them, exhortations to them, and embodiments of them.
The De uirginitate belongs, then, to a specific subset of treatises on virgin-
ity; it is imagined as praise of a quality its addressees already possess (or
rather, as we shall see, are in the process of developing), instead of persuasion
to a decision not yet made. In this, it resembles Ambrose’s De uirginibus ad
Marcellinam, composed for a sister already vowed to virginity, more closely
than it does treatises written for women still considering such a vow, such
as the letters of Jerome and Pelagius to Demetrias.6 But like all of these
patristic works, Aldhelm’s was addressed to individual women, whom he
names in an elaborate salutation:
Reverentissimis Christi virginibus omnique devotae germanitatis affectu

venerandis et non solum corporalis pudicitiae praeconio celebrandis,
5 Prosa de uirginitate I, in Ehwald, ed., Aldhelmi Opera, 229. All translations from the Latin
are my own unless otherwise noted; but—like, I expect, all contemporary Anglophone readers
of Aldhelm—I have benefited greatly from the translations and commentaries found in Michael
Lapidge and Michael Herren, Aldhelm: The Prose Works (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2009), and
Michael Lapidge and James Rosier, Aldhelm: The Poetic Works (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2009). (I
cite the updated paperback reprints; the original editions appeared in 1979 and 1985 respectively.)
6 On the latter, see below, pp. 179–80.
quod plurimorum est, verum etiam spiritalis castimoniae gratia

glorificandis, quod paucorum est, Hildilithae, regularis disciplinae et
monasticae conversationis magistrae, simulque Iustinae ac Cuthburgae
nec non Osburgae, contribulibus necessitudinum nexibus conglutinatae,
Aldgithae ac Scolasticae, Hidburgae et Berngithae, Eulaliae ac Teclae,
rumore sanctitatis concorditer Ecclesiam ornantibus, Aldhelmus, segnis
Christi Crucicola et supplex Ecclesiae bernaculus, optabilem perpetuae
prosperitatis salutem.7
(To the most reverend virgins of Christ, to be venerated in every sensation

of devout kinship, and to be celebrated not only for the praiseworthy
quality of physical chastity (which belongs to many) but especially to
be glorified for the grace of spiritual chastity (which belongs to few): to
Hildelith, teacher of the discipline of the rule and of monastic life; likewise
to Justina and Cuthburh and also Osburh (joined closely in associative
bonds of relationships); to Aldgith and Scolastica, Hidburh and Berngith,
Eulalia and Tecla, in unity ornamenting the Church with a reputation
of sanctity: Aldhelm, sluggish servant of the Cross of Christ and humble
slave of the Church, sends his desire for their perpetual well-being.)
This list’s specificity has long intrigued scholars. The twelfth-century histo-
rian William of Malmesbury identified Hildelith as the abbess of Barking;
he and most readers since have taken the following names to be women in
the same community.8 Scott Gwara, however, has recently gathered some
charter evidence to argue that the women named were abbesses of double
monasteries throughout England.9 But whether these women were part
of a single house (as I still tend to believe) or dispersed, the list of names
indicates that Aldhelm wishes to recognize them as individuals as well as
sharers in avowed religious status. Although they may or may not have been
7 Prosa de uirginitate (hereafter PdV), salutation, in Aldhelmi Opera, ed. Ehwald, 228–29.
8 William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum Anglorum, ed. and trans. M. Winterbottom
(Oxford: Clarendon, 2007), II.73.13 (228). On the addressees more generally see Lapidge and
Herren, Aldhelm: The Prose Works, 51–52.
9 Scott Gwara, Aldhelmi Malmesbiriensis Prosa de Virginitate cum Glosa Latina atque An-
glosaxonica. Praefatio et Indices. CCSL 124 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), 47–55. The primary reason
I find this argument unpersuasive is Aldhelm’s use of the singular for “magistra” in addressing
Hildelith: elsewhere he is careful to use the plural for qualities that apply to all of his addressees,
and to use a salutation proper to an abbess for only one of the women named would hardly be
respectful to the others. Gwara’s work, however, well demonstrates William of Malmesbury’s
ingenious use of historical documents.
known to him in person,10 Aldhelm’s salutation suggests that his treatise

is directed not to an amorphous group of nuns, but to each of these named
women, who were known to him as having certain qualities in common.
Learning—skill as readers and writers—was one of those qualities,
highlighted in the first chapter as manifest in the women’s letters, and
returned to throughout the Prosa de uirginitate. In Chapters IV–VI, Aldhelm
uses the metaphor of the bee to represent such learning as inseparable from
monasticism. The bee is a perfect allegory for the regular life, he contends,
because of its perfect obedience, its virginity, and its unwearying diligence
in gathering nectar, which is an analogue of reading:
Nam quemadmodum examen arta fenestrarum foramina et angusta

alvearii vestibula certatim per turmas egressum amoena arvorum prata
populatur, eodem modo vestrum, ni fallor, memoriale mentis ingenium
per florulenta scripturarum arva late vagans bibula curiositate decurrit.11
(For just as the swarm, with a struggle leaving the narrow holes of its
combs and the cramped threshold of the beehive in squadrons, plunders
the pleasant expanses of the meadows, in the same way your retentive wit
of mind (unless I’m mistaken), ranging widely through the blossoming
fields of the scriptures, hastens with thirsty curiosity.)
The sentence continues, enumerating as the nectar of these “bees” not

only the whole of scripture, but also patristic commentary, secular history,
grammar, music, and poetic meter. With vestrum (your, plural) and ni fallor
(unless I’m mistaken) it also returns attention to the rhetorical situation,
reminding its readership that the speaker, the “I” of the text, has reason
to believe that they have already read and absorbed an extensive range of
texts.12
While the bee metaphor might be read as a general encomium, the text
at several points enters into a more specific and individual dialogue with
its readers as readers, reaching outward to other texts they might know.
The citations of sources scattered throughout the prose treatise frequently
seem to serve as suggestions for further reading as well as authorizing
10 Michael Lapidge argues that the unusual participle conglutinata indicates that Osburh was
Aldhelm’s sister: “The Career of Aldhelm,” Anglo-Saxon England 36 (2007): 15–69, at 19.
11 PdV IV, in Aldhelmi Opera, ed. Ehwald, 232.
12 On the strong emphasis on intellectual culture in the bee metaphor, see further Augustine
Casiday, “St Aldhelm’s Bees (De uirginitate prosa cc. IV–VI): Some Observations on a Literary
Tradition,” Anglo-Saxon England 33 (2004): 1–22.
gestures. In Chapter XIII of the Prosa, this suggestion is made explicit, as

Aldhelm extricates himself from a full discussion of the virtues and vices
by advising that
haec, inquam, si vestra curiosae sollicitudinis solertia plenius animadverti

maluerit, non modo .X. collationes patrum a Cassiano, Massiliensis par-
rochiae archimandrita peculiariter dictandi facundia praedito, digestae
patenter propalabunt, verum etiam Gregorius, sedis apostolicae praesul, a
quo rudimenta fidei et baptismi sacramenta suscepimus, libro moralium
XXXI per allegoriam luce clarius elimavit.13
(if, I say, your shrewdness of scholarly zeal wishes to attend to these

things more fully, not only will the ten Collations of the Fathers composed
by Cassian—an abbot of Marseilles, who was especially endowed with
eloquence in composition—explain them clearly, but also Gregory, bishop
of the apostolic see, from whom we received the foundations of faith and
the sacraments of baptism, allegorically explained them clearer than
light in his Moralia in Job.)
Here Aldhelm recommends the texts as appealing reading as well as reli-

able sources, highlighting the Collations’ elegant style and the particular
relevance of Gregory to readers whom he identifies as fellow-English through
the first-person plural of suscepimus (we received).
Expectations of his readers’ prior reading may have shaped the text in
more subtle ways. For instance, the Virgin Mary is given surprisingly little
space in Aldhelm’s text; she is mentioned briefly in Chapter XXXIX, as
the text turns from men to women, and takes up only a few sentences in
the next chapter, which she shares with St. Cecelia. However, this brevity
would be less startling if the audience could be assumed to know one or
more of the earlier discussions of Mary’s virginity. Ambrose’s De uirginibus
ad Marcellinam, for instance, devotes a long chapter in Book II to her life
and virtues.14 If Aldhelm knew that his addressees had already read his
13 PdV XIII, in Aldhelmi Opera, ed. Ehwald, 242.

14 Peter Dückers, ed., Ambrosius: De uirginibus/Über die Jungfrauen, Fontes Christiani 81
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 212–36. See Dabney Anderson Bankert, Jessica Wegmann, and Charles
D. Wright, Ambrose in Anglo-Saxon England, with Pseudo-Ambrose and Ambrosiaster, Old English
Newsletter Subsidia 25 (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1997), 36–38, for a conspectus of
early medieval English manuscripts and attestations. While Bede seems to have had access to
De uirginibus, it is not clear whether the treatise was known in southern England in the seventh
century: see Michael Lapidge, The Anglo-Saxon Library (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006),
main sources on Mary, extensive treatment of her life could—as with the
virtues and vices—be omitted as redundant.
While this explanation of the Virgin Mary’s relatively brief discussion
might be speculative, an expectation of earlier reading explicitly shapes the
discussion of Eustochium in Chapter XLIX, which Aldhelm cuts short with:
Sed et residua canonicarum commentariola scripturarum, quae praefatus

divinae legis interpres et matris solertia et virginis compulsus industria
desudavit, universa singillatim commemorare pertensum est, quae
vestrae sagacitatis f ilosof iam per patentes librorum campos curiose
cursitantem nequaquam delitescere reor; cui etiam exortatorium de
virginitate servanda insigniter edidit opusculum.15
(But as for the rest of the commentaries on the canonical scriptures—

which the aforementioned translator of the divine law labored over,
prompted by the intellect of the mother and devotion of the maiden
daughter—it would be tiresome to describe them individually: I believe
the zeal for wisdom of your intellect, ranging eagerly across the open fields
of books, by no means allows them to lie hidden; for her [=Eustochium]
likewise he notably prepared a little admonitory treatise about the
preservation of virginity.)
The readers are imagined as familiar with Jerome’s biblical commentaries

and perhaps also with some of his letters, especially that to Eustochium
instructing her on the life of a virgin, to which Aldhelm alludes in the
final clause of this sentence.16 Moreover, the literary relationship between
Jerome, Eustochium, and Paula (her mother, mentioned earlier in Chapter
XLIX) evokes that between Aldhelm and his female correspondents. The
similarity is verbal as well as situational. The uncommon term solertia
(intellect; wit), for instance, is attributed in this chapter to both Paula and
(earlier) to Eustochium: in the quote from Chapter XIII above, it is the
279, although Lapidge proposes it as a structural model for Aldhelm’s prose treatise (Prose Works,
56): more work in this area is needed.
15 PdV XLIX, in Aldhelmi Opera, ed. Ehwald, 303–4. (Following several of the glosses, I have
rendered pertensum as pertaesum.)
16 Epistle XXII ad Eustochium, in S. Eusebii Hieronymi Epistulae. Pars I: I–LXX, ed. Isidore
Hilberg, CSEL 54 (Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1910), 143–211. On the letter’s reception, and on Jerome’s
relation to the intellectual lives of his patrons, see Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men,
Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press,
2008), 367–71.
property of the addressees, as it also is in Chapter III (and, in Chapter IV,

of the bees to which they are compared). Jerome, meanwhile, desudavit
(sweated over) his composition, as Aldhelm described himself doing over
the Prosa in its conclusion (Chapter LX). This, too, is a relatively rare word:
Aldhelm uses it only six times in his entire surviving corpus, and in four of
those instances it signifies strenuous intellectual labor.17 The discussion of
Eustochium in Chapter XLIX thus flatters both author and audience. It does
so not merely by invoking a likeness between the early medieval English and
the great age of patristic writing through subtle verbal correspondences,
but by offering an appealing model for what patristic treatises were and
did. In this vision, the finished text is as much a mirror of the talents of
the women who inspired it—who “compelled” its production through their
active intellectual virtues—as of the man who wrote it. Through it, the
women are immortalized, knowable to posterity.
The means by which this feat is achieved is suggested in the second half
of Chapter XLIX. This section describes Demetrias, who was an heiress of
the gens Anicii, the daughter and granddaughter of consuls and—more
importantly—of actively pious Christian women who were major patrons
of the late fourth- and early fifth-century Church.18 Although Augustine
of Hippo as well as Jerome wrote hortatory letters to Demetrias via her
mother and grandmother as she considered taking a vow of virginity,
Aldhelm appears to know of her primarily—perhaps solely—through
a letter of Pelagius.19 It seems unlikely that Aldhelm knew the author of
this treatise on virginity had been one of Augustine’s theological bêtes
noirs, who had been condemned as a heretic in 417.20 Certainly he leaves
17 Besides these two instances, desudo appears as a metrical example in the De pedum regulis
(Aldhelmi Opera, ed. Ehwald, 172), and John of Egypt is described as desudans in his eremitic
practice in Chapter XXIX of the Prosa (267). But in the conclusion to De pedum regulis Aldhelm
also describes himself as the first English-speaker to have desudasse over Latin quantitative
meter (202), and in Chapter II of the Prosa he compares his addressees’ studies to an athete
desudans over exercises (230).
18 Patrick Laurence, “Proba, Juliana et Démétrias: Le christianisme des femmes de la gens
Anicia dans la première moitié du Ve siècle,” Revue des Études Augustiniennes 48 (2002): 131–63;
and Anne Kurdock, “Demetrias ancilla dei: Anicia Demetrias and the Problem of the Missing
Patron,” in Religion, Dynasty, and Patronage in Early Christian Rome, 300–900, ed. Kate Cooper
and Julia Hillner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 190–224, which also provides
a valuable account of Demetrias’s later life as a patroness of Christian works.
19 On Demetrias’s role in the three texts written to her, see Andrew S. Jacobs, “Writing
Demetrias: Ascetic Logic in Ancient Christianity,” Church History 69 (2000): 719–48.
20 In the early Middle Ages, the letter circulated—ironically enough—as part of collections
of Jerome’s letters, although readers like Bede (and, it would seem, Aldhelm), doubted the
attribution to Jerome: see Ali Bonner, “The Manuscript Transmission of Pelagius’ Ad Demetriadem:
the treatise’s author nameless, even as he effusively praises its language:

it is, he says, “volumen prolixa et lepida sermonum serie digestum” (a
volume composed with a flowing and lovely arrangement of words), its
points made “eleganter” (elegantly). 21 Most of the paragraph consists
of verbatim quotes from the treatise, beginning with descriptions of
Demetrias herself. The literary merit of the treatise is thus represented as
embodying and perpetuating the memory of a particular woman as well
as the ideal life to which she was dedicated. Through a reflexive analogy
(of a sort prompted by the verbal correspondences between Aldhelm’s
work and Jerome’s), the chapter on Demetrias and Eustochium presents
the addressees of Aldhelm’s De uirginitate with an earthly, literary futurity
through the treatise itself, alongside the promise of heavenly immortality.
Thus while Hildelith, Cuthburh, Osburh, and the other women to whom
the De uirginitate was addressed might not have been physically present
to Aldhelm, his work insists on their presence nonetheless. Though their
letters are not (so far as we can tell) directly quoted, the knowledge
manifested in those letters is represented as shaping Aldhelm’s treatise
in several particular instances, and likewise as the generative principle
that brought into being the text through which they will be known to
future readers.
The Ornament of Virginity
The female recipients of Aldhelm’s De uirginitate are thus imagined as an

active presence within the work, their reading informing its contents even as
the book itself becomes, in some sense, their avatar. The theory of virginity
expounded by the text can thus be plausibly seen as in dialogue with what
Aldhelm understood or assumed to be the beliefs held by his audience.
Several scholars have argued that the treatise’s theology of virginity has been
tailored to reflect the cultural standards of these early medieval English
nuns. I would go further and suggest that the De uirginitate’s conception of
virginity as an ornament represents a daring work of cultural translation,
one intended to make the virtue coherent with early medieval English
habits of thought.
The Evidence of Some Manuscript Witnesses,” Studia Patristica LXX: Papers Presented at the
Sixteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies, Held in Oxford 2011, vol. 18, St. Augustine
and His Opponents, ed. Markus Vinzent (Leuven: Peeters, 2013), 619–30, esp. at 623–24.
21 Aldhelmi Opera, ed. Ehwald, 304.
The assumptions underlying Aldhelm’s work are intriguing and important

because they represent a blend of values. Documents surviving from the
sixth and seventh centuries show that importing Christianity to early
medieval England required a long campaign of cultural translation in order
to make a Mediterranean religion comprehensible as well as desirable to the
inhabitants of an island in the North Sea. From Pope Gregory’s suggestion
that Jewish ritual might help missionaries reimagine pagan festivals in
acceptably Christian terms,22 to Theodore and Hadrian’s patient descriptions
of polenta, cucumbers, and other mysterious features of Near Eastern life,23
people with pastoral responsibility worked to bridge overt gaps between
the early medieval English and Christian teachings.
Aldhelm was undoubtedly part of that work: from his treatise on Latin
meter to his pastoral letter to the Cornish king on the celebration of Easter,
he seems to have been deeply engaged in the project of integrating not
simply the Roman church, but Latinity itself, into Britain. This, as many
have shown, involved adjustments large and small to the needs of an early
medieval English audience. To take an example close to the present discus-
sion, Michael Lapidge has pointed out that the tripartite hierarchy of sexual
continence that appears in many writers as uirginitas, uiduitas, coniugium
(virginity, widowhood, marriage) is, in Aldhelm’s treatise, represented as
uirginitas, castitas, iugalitas (virginity, chastity, marriage), potentially
opening the middle rank to those who had extricated themselves from
marriages to living partners. Lapidge thus suggests that castitas was thus
a “newly devised category” that “allowed Aldhelm to praise by implication
those Barking nuns such as Cuthburg who had spurned their marriages.”24
While women who had renounced living partners to enter the religious life
were not unique to early medieval England, Aldhelm indeed seems to have
taken initiative in creating a theoretical space for them. Even Venantius
Fortunatus—a sixth-century Italian poet who spent some years effectively
22 Flora Spiegel, “The tabernacula of Gregory the Great and the Conversion of Anglo-Saxon
England,” Anglo-Saxon England 36 (2007): 1–13.
23 See Bernhard Bischoff and Michael Lapidge, eds., Biblical Commentaries from the Canterbury
School of Theodore and Hadrian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), esp. 35, 370,
and 374.
24 Lapidge, “Introduction to Aldhelm’s Prose De Virginitate,” in Prose Works, ed. Lapidge and
Herren, 53–7, at 56; for further discussion see Sinéad O’Sullivan, “Aldhelm’s De virginitate:
Patristic Pastiche or Innovative Exposition?” Peritia 12 (1998): 271–95, at 281–84. Although G.
T. Dempsey disagrees that Aldhelm allows a positive space for the formerly married, he does
argue that the martial imagery of the treatise is an adaptation to the values of a warrior culture:
Dempsey, Aldhelm of Malmesbury and the Ending of Late Antiquity (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015),
esp. 65–142.
in service to Radegund, a Thuringian princess who renounced marriage

to the Frankish king in order to become an abbess—did not reconfigure
inherited categories in the ways Aldhelm did, although he wrote an extended
poetic encomium to virginity.25 Fortunatus’s outsider status in Merovingian
society may have something to do with this difference.
It seems plausible, then, that Aldhelm’s substitution of castitas for uiduitas
represents a form of cultural accommodation. But some of the deeper differ-
ences required a more complex effort to reconcile, in part because—built
as they were upon some of the most fundamental assumptions of each
culture—they were more difficult to recognize. The whole of Aldhelm’s
De uirginitate was part of this labor of cultural translation. Drawing
extensively upon patristic theology, it presented early medieval English
readers with many examples of orthodox thought on what had become a
distinctive cultural practice within Christianity,26 but refracted through
a quite different cultural prism. By describing virginity as an ornament,
Aldhelm conceptually alters it in ways that most likely reflect the cultural
presuppositions he shared with his early medieval English addressees.
Virginity is imagined as physical adornment taken up by holy people
throughout both the prose and verse parts of De uirginitate. In the Carmen,
for instance, the shift from male to female saints is described thus:
Tempus adest sacras metris vulgare puellas,

Qualiter integritas virtutum culmen adeptis
Virginibus dederit nitidas gestare coronas.27
(The time has now come to make known in verse the holy girls: how
Integrity, summit of the virtues, will have given shining crowns to wear
to the virgins who have taken it up.)
In this interestingly reflexive formulation, the virgin saints are both agents
and recipients: their “shining crowns” are granted them by virginity, and
yet they themselves have “acquired” or “achieved” the virtue by which they
25 On Fortunatus’s De uirginitate (Poem 8.3) and his intellectual relations with Radegund
more generally, see Brian Brennan, “Deathless Marriage and Spiritual Fecundity in Venantius
Fortunatus’ De virginitate,” Traditio 51 (1996): 73–97.
26 Sinéad O’Sullivan provides an overview of Aldhelm’s principal influences in “Patristic
Pastiche.” For the development of Christian thought on virginity and celibacy more generally,
see Brown, Body and Society, and Susanna Elm, Virgins of God: The Making of Asceticism in Late
Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996).
27 Carmen de uirginitate (hereafter CdV), lines 1660–62, in Aldhelmi Opera, ed. Ehwald, 422.
are visibly adorned (adepta is the past participle of adipiscor, to achieve

by effort). Likewise, Justina is described as adorned when she is martyred
along with her virgin spouse:
Sic geminis felix ornatur virgo triumphis:

Martira cum roseis rubuit veneranda coronis,
Candida virgineis florebat femina sertis;
Cum qua martirii meruit vexilla cruenti
Crudus athleta Dei Cyprianus fuso cruore
Sicque poli pariter scandebant sidera sancti,
Ut praedira necis pariter tormenta tulerunt.28
(Thus the fortunate virgin is adorned with twin triumphal honors:

while the revered martyr grew red with a rosy crown, the white maiden
blossomed with virginal wreaths; with her, Cyprian, the new-recruited
athlete of God, earned the banner of bloodstained martyrdom through
his outpoured blood, and so together they ascended to the stars of holy
heaven, since together they bore the appalling torments of death.)
Here, the boundaries between woman and ornament dissolve as Justina

takes on the colors of the crowns associated with her saintly status: she,
not the red roses she is imagined wearing, rubuit (grew red), just as Justina
and not her (lily) wreath of virginity is candida (bright white) and florebat
(flourished; blossomed). Her ornaments transfigure her, visually as well
as spiritually. To pass over these descriptions as verbal flourishes is to
misunderstand them—and, indeed, to misunderstand Aldhelm’s style and
his conception of ornament. For him, as for most early medieval people,
to adorn something was not to overlay it with something extraneous, but
to transform it through a perceptible manifestation of effort. Virginity,
conceived as an ornament, is thus the end result of lifelong endeavor, rather
than an innate quality preserved by withdrawing from the world. This idea
is expressed most clearly in the Prosa’s chapter on Martin of Tours, who
quique pro adepta integritatis corona et fausta virginitatis infula, quas

velut regale diadema ac gemmatas crepundiorum lunulas indefessis
viribus meta tenus servare satagebat, miris virtutum signis effulsisse
memoratur.29
28 CdV, lines 1876–82, in Aldhelmi Opera, ed. Ehwald, 430.

29 Chapter XXVI in Aldhelmi Opera, ed. Ehwald, 261.
(likewise because of the acquired crown of chastity and the blessed fillet
of virginity, which up to the end he labored with unfailing efforts to
preserve like a royal diadem and jeweled ornaments of amulets, is said
to have shone forth with miraculous signs of virtue.)
This version of virginity is not precisely purity, in the sense of an unstained,

inborn state of being which must be defended from the incursions of the
world. Instead, it is imagined as something acquired through one’s own striv-
ing: so Martin’s crown is adepta (taken up, won), and must be maintained
indefessis uiribus (with unfailing efforts). But when it has been gained,
the crown of virginity has a transfiguring effect, enabling its possessor to
perform miracles.
Because it is the external, visible sign of continuous labor, this sort of
ornament is also easily imaginable as a trophy: Aldhelm’s pervasive descrip-
tions of virginity as the crown or banner gained in an athletic contest thus
blend into—and flow from—his depiction of it as an ornament. Thus, the
Carmen introduces the sisters Chione, Irene, and Agape as winners of a
contest in which Virginity and Martyrdom are simultaneously judges and
prizes:
Tempore quo rigidos saevi tormenta tyranni

Anthletas Christi cogebant ferre cruenta,
Tres simul illustres sumpserunt forte sorores
Splendida purpureis plectentes serta coronis,
Dum simul integritas candens et passio rubra
Virginibus Christi cumulabant praemia dupla;30
(During the era in which the torments of a savage tyrant were trying
the stern athletes of Christ with bloody sword, it happened that three
illustrious sisters together put on splendid wreaths intertwined with
purple crowns, when shining-white Integrity and red Martyrdom awarded
a twofold prize to the virgins of Christ.)
Like the other martyrs of the Diocletian persecution, the sisters are anthletas
Christi who, notably, are described as having actively “put on” (sumpserunt)
triumphal crowns in the colors of the virtues who go on to award them these
“prizes” (praemia). Their virtues are imagined as the visible result of their
successful efforts—the sign of their triumph, rather than its precondition.
30 CdV lines 2194–99, in Aldhelmi Opera, ed. Ehwald, 443.

In Aldhelm’s depiction of it, then, virginity is the beautiful, desirable,

transfiguring reward for a strenuously active life. But such a conception
proved to be more difficult to reconcile with his patristic sources than
perhaps he first realized.
The Look of a Virgin
To imagine virginity as an ornament was to bring it into a complicated

relationship with biblical and late antique discourses on the subject of
women’s appearance. Women’s fine clothing, elaborate hairstyles, and
jewelry were condemned in the Epistles.31 Patristic commentators continued
this discourse and directed it toward virgins with special intensity. To make
such views palatable to their audiences, they generally used one or both
of two strategies: characterizing adornment as a burden, or reimagining it
as spiritual.
Building on Paul’s words in I Corinthians,32 writers often characterized
virginity as a liberation from men’s gaze and from the necessity of effort to
conform oneself to it, as Ambrose does in De uirginibus:
Vos vero, beatae virgines, quae talia tormenta potius quam ornamenta
nescitis, quibus pudor sanctus verecunda suffusus ora et bona castitas est
decori, non humanis addictae oculis alieno errore merita vestra pensatis.
… Solus formae arbiter petitur deus, qui etiam in corpore minus pulchro
diligat animas pulchriores.33
(But you, fortunate virgins—who are unfamiliar with such torments in

the guise of ornaments, whose modest faces are suffused by a holy shame
and for whom proper chastity serves as beauty—you may contemplate
your merits not as slaves to human eyes, subject to the error of another.
… Only God is required as a judge of beauty, who indeed esteems bodily
beauty less than he does more beautiful souls.)
31 The key biblical texts on this topic are I Timothy 2:9–15 (especially v. 9) and I Peter 3:1–6.
32 I Cor 7:34: “et mulier innupta et virgo cogitat quae Domini sunt, ut sit sancta et corpore
et spiritu; quae autem nupta est cogitat quae sunt mundi, quomodo placeat uiro” (a woman
unmarried and a virgin thinks of the things pertaining to the Lord, that she might be holy in
body and spirit; but she who is married thinks of the things pertaining to the world, whereby
she might please her husband).
33 De uirginibus I.30, ed. Dückers, 150.
Augustine and Pelagius also pursued this line of thought.34 Yet at the same
time, virginity itself was imagined as an outwardly recognizable state, one
that, as Ambrose wrote, shaped the entirety of its possessor’s demeanor:
Virginem mihi prius gravitas sua nuntiat pudore obvio, gradu sobrio,
vultu modesto, et praenuntia integritatis anteeant signa virtutis. Non
satis probabilis virgo est, quae requiritur, quam videtur.35
(Her dignity first announces a virgin to me with ready modesty, sober

step, modest countenance: and the standards of virtue must precede her
as heralds of integrity. She who must be discovered to be a virgin is not
as commendable as she who can be seen to be one.)
The blurring of inward qualities with the outward signs of wealth and
power (here, a procession complete with heralds and standard-bearers)
is characteristic of the second strand of discourse on ornament, in which
women were encouraged to imagine virtues allegorically, as concrete adorn-
ments. So, for example, Pelagius writes that
Optima ornamenta sint aurium verba Dei, ad quae sola paratus esse
debet auditus virginis eaque pretiosissimis lapidis anteferre. Omnia
prorsus membra decorentur operibus sanctitatis totaque virginalis animae
pulchritudo, gemmati monilis instar, vario virtutum fulgore resplendeat.36
(The best ornaments for the ears are the words of God, for which alone
the hearing of a virgin ought to be prepared, and which she should prefer
to the most precious of stones. All the limbs, indeed, should be decorated
with holy deeds, and the entire beauty of the virginal soul, like a jeweled
necklace, should shine with the variegated gleam of virtues.)
Aldhelm took up both elements of this rhetoric; in Chapter XVII of the

Prosa, he integrates them into an elaborate mirror-image contrast between
the married woman burdened by physical adornments, and the virgin
elevated by spiritual ones. Though the virgin may outwardly appear “inculta
34 Augustine, De bono coniugali and De sancta uirginitate, ed. and trans. P. G. Walsh (Oxford:
Clarendon, 2001), 76 (De sancta uirginitate § 11); Pelagius, Epistula ad Demetriadem/Brief an
Demetrias, ed. and trans. Gisbert Greshake (Freiburg: Herder, 2015), 146 (§ 24).
35 De uirginibus III.13, ed. Dückers, 294.
36 Pelagius, Ad Demetriadem § 24, ed. Greshake, 146–48.
criniculorum caesarie et neglegenter squalente capillatura” (with uncombed

mane of curls and carelessly unwashed hair), nonetheless she “cum palma
virginitatis coronam gloriae in capite praefert” (bears, along with the palm
of virginity, a crown of glory upon her head).37 In Aldhelm’s version of this
patristic topos, the virgin is more truly and permanently adorned than an
ordinary woman of the world.
Toward the end of the Prosa, however, Aldhelm returns to the problem of
women’s attire, and from a different angle. No longer apologetic, but polemic,
Chapters LV–LVIII attack the very idea of adornment as fundamentally
immoral. As usual, Aldhelm draws on a wide range of sources, but the
bulk of his material in these chapters is taken from the De habitu virginum
of Cyprian, whom he cites by name and quotes verbatim. Inverting, at the
beginning of Chapter LVI, the appeal to the audience in Chapter XVII,
Aldhelm quotes Cyprian’s condemnation of adorned virgins as, at best,
seeking men’s attention, and at worst, prostitutes resembling the Whore
of Babylon.38
In the second half of Chapter LVI, he takes up Cyprian’s theological
argument that adornment is misdirected labor: a useless, even blasphemous
defacement of an originally perfect Creation. Such rejection of human
artifice is characteristic of an important strain in Classical and Christian
thought; but it fundamentally conflicts with the conception of virginity
as an acquired ornament which has been developed in the course of the
Prosa de uirginitate. Aldhelm mitigates this conflict rather than confronting
or working through it, as he fixates on the example Cyprian gives—the
Technicolor sheep God chose not to make—in a way that unbalances the
original argument’s fundamental premises:
Numquid ille conditor et creator omnium Deus hirsutas bidentum

lanas et setosa vervecum vellera non potuit rubro conquilii sanguine
aut cruento bacciniorum fuco inficere seu certe purpureis tincturae
muricibus naturaliter colorare, si hoc nostris usibus commodum et
utilitati profuturum solerti praescientia providisset … Et quid ille, de
quo dictum est: qui vivit in aeternum, creavit omnia simul, cum conderet
orbem, originaliter creare nequiverit, {quod} nunc mortalium industria
stolidis et superfluis adinventionum argumentis addere et amplificare
contendit? Unde inclitus idem Cyprianus, Punicorum pontifex, infit:
37 Chapter XVII in Aldhelmi Opera, ed. Ehwald, 246.

38 Chapter LVI in Aldhelmi Opera, ed. Ehwald, 315.
Neque enim Deus coccineas aut purpureas oves fecit aut herbarum sucis
et conquiliis tingere et colorare lanas docuit.39
(Could God, that founder and creator of all things, have not imbued
the hairy wool of sheep and the bristly fleeces of wethers with the red
blood of shellfish or the bloody dye of berries, or indeed certainly have
naturally colored them with the purple dye-whelk, had he with his expert
prescience foreseen it would be suitable to our needs and to our advantage
… ? And was he, of whom it is said “He who lives eternally, created all
things likewise” (Ecclesiasticus 18:1), unable to originally create that
which now the industry of mortals strives to augment and enlarge upon
with stupid and superfluous schemes of ingenuity? Whence that same
renowned Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, said: “God did not make scarlet
or purple sheep, or teach them to dye and color their wool with the juice
of plants or with shellfish.”)
Although the sheep seem to prompt him toward his usual style, Aldhelm
reins in his paragraph with a quotation that simply restates his opening
premise, emphasizing that here, even his imagery is based upon authority.
Curiously, though, he repeatedly allows the focus to drift from the Christian
world to the pagan one. In the part of the passage omitted here, he supple-
ments his fantasia on sheep with a quotation from Virgil’s Eclogues (IV.42–5)
describing the earthly paradise to come, and concludes the chapter with two
lines from the Aeneid (IX.614 and 616) ridiculing elaborate dress. Aldhelm
introduces this final quotation with the remark:
Sed quid mirum, si apostolorum oracula et iurisperitorum scita praefatas

fribulorum naenias abominetur, cum etiam gentiles gentilibus et paganis
pagani quasi ridiculosum subsannantis gannaturae opprobrium legantur
improperasse hoc modo cum infami proverbiorum elogio cachinnantes
ac cavillantes?40
(But what wonder is it if the oracles of the apostles and the decrees of
those learned in law abominate the aforementioned trifles of frivolity,
when even the gentiles are read to have reproached the gentiles, and
39 Aldhelmi Opera, ed. Ehwald, 316. Cyprian’s example is derived in its turn from Tertullian:
see De cultu feminarum I.viii, in F. Oehler, ed., Tertulliani quae supersunt omnia (Leipzig: Weigel,
1853), 1:710, who is quite explicit that such artifice is diabolical.
40 Aldhelmi Opera, ed. Ehwald, 316.
the pagans the pagans, as with some absurd scorn of laughing mockery,
guffawing and making fun with a scornful proverbial maxim in this way?)
With his Virgilian quotations, Aldhelm diffuses the import of Cyprian’s

remarks and alters their direction. Instead of dwelling on the blasphemy of
attempting to rival the Creator, he emphasizes its superfluity and absurdity.
From a mortal sin and danger, fine dress has become a joke: a joke, moreover,
directed finally against the “gentilibus et paganis” (gentiles and pagans).
Though evidently believing the issue was important enough to require an
extended discussion, Aldhelm complicates his rhetoric about artifice to an
extraordinary degree. Through his extensive reliance on Cyprian’s direct
words, he blurs his own authorial ethos in a way that suggests an inability
or unwillingness to claim responsibility for the words himself; and his use of
Virgilian quotations entangles the matter further by adding pagan speakers
and audiences to the mix and lightening the tone.
Ultimately, Aldhelm allows his account of the problem of women’s adorn-
ment to remain self-contradictory. He does not concede the wrongness,
uselessness, or futility of artifice in general, as is made clear by a comparison
he makes in his final chapter, LX:
Hactenus interea formosae virginitatis speciem et venustum pudicitiae

vultum componens diversis virtutum coloribus quasi fucorum floribus
depinxi, quemammodum solent nobilium artifices imaginum et regalium
personarum pictores deauratis petalis toracidas ornare et pulcherrima
membrorum liniamenta fabrefactis cultibus decorare. 41
(So, thus far I have depicted the beauty of lovely virginity and the fair
countenance of chastity, blending the varied colors of virtues like the tints
of flowers, just as artificers of the images of noblemen and painters of royal
personages are accustomed to adorn busts with gold leaf and to decorate
the outstandingly beautiful lineaments of forms with skillful care.)
At no point does he deprecate the skill or purpose of the artists of his

simile (although, with an elaborate flourish of humility, he does go on to
describe the artists themselves as far less beautiful than their subjects).
Nor, in fact, does he concede the futility of adorning the body. The central
biblical exemplum of the chapters on women’s attire is Judith, described in
Chapter LVII: Aldhelm connects her success in killing the Assyrian general
41 Aldhelmi Opera, ed. Ehwald, 321–22.

to her adornment of herself. In his account, ornaments give the body a power
it would otherwise lack, a power that can be used destructively. While
Judith’s example coheres with his overall vision of virginity as an acquired
ornament, the conflict with Cyprian’s total rejection of adornment quoted
in the preceding chapter is allowed to remain unresolved.
Virginity as Weapon
We cannot, of course, know how Aldhelm’s addressees reacted to the

discourse on adornment presented in Chapters LV–LVIII of the Prosa—or
whether such reactions had anything to do with Aldhelm’s total excision of
this material when he composed the companion Carmen de uirginitate. All
that can be said is that he did not versify these chapters, but instead ended
his poem with a newly composed allegorical war between Virginity and the
eight Vices, somewhat on the model of Prudentius’s Psychomachia. 42 The
replacement of a polemic on women’s attire with a series of battle scenes
seems, at first glance, wholly arbitrary; but some of Aldhelm’s reading may
have helped him (and perhaps his audience) associate the two. Pelagius, in
particular, concludes his discussion of spiritualized adornment with this
connection:
Et haec tibi ornamenta, quae dixi, etiam munimenta sunt maxima. Ipsa te
ornare Domino et contra diabolum armare possunt qui per leve interdum
quodcumque vitium ad animam ingreditur, et si virtutum propugnacula
non resistant, nostro nos pellit loco et continuo de hoste fit dominus. 43
(And these ornaments which I have described are for you likewise the
greatest fortifications. These very things can adorn you for the Lord and
arm you against the Devil, who occasionally makes a sortie against the
soul through some small vice, and if the garrison of virtues does not
resist, expels us from our own stronghold and instead of a continual
enemy becomes a master.)
Whether inspired by earlier treatises like Pelagius’s or not, the conclusion

of Aldhelm’s Carmen de uirginitate represents a major departure from the
42 On Aldhelm’s knowledge of Prudentius’s poem, see Andy Orchard, The Poetic Art of Aldhelm
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 171–8.
43 Ad Demetriadem, ed. Greshake, § 24, 148.
conclusion to the Prosa. This perhaps appears most clearly in the treatment
of the biblical Judith. As mentioned above, she appeared in Chapter LVII of
the Prosa as an example of the peril an adorned woman presented to men,
even when she is guided by God. But in the Carmen, Judith represents the
triumph of chastity over lust:
Quid referam Iudith generosa stirpe creatam

Prostibulum regis temnentem corpore puro
Et stuprum sceleris calcantem corde profanum?
Civibus idcirco mortis discrimina passis
Casta cruentatum gestavit bulga tropeum
Servans integrum devota mente pudorem. 44
(What shall I say of Judith, born to a noble lineage, with a pure body
scorning a king’s whoredom, and trampling in her heart the profane
fornication of sin? For which reason the chaste woman brought back a
bloody trophy in a bag to citizens in mortal peril, preserving unimpaired
modesty in her devout mind.)
The emphasis on Judith’s nobility, and the power of a chastity that is

destructive to her enemies and protective of her and her fellow-citizens,
aligns her with the virgin martyrs rather than the more ambiguous Old
Testament figure in the latter chapters of the Prosa. 45 She also serves to
balance the immediately preceding example of Joseph, who preserved
his chastity against the advances of Potiphar’s wife. The conclusion to the
Carmen, indeed, seems scrupulously gender-balanced in its discussion of
resistance to vice, oscillating between feminine-gendered terms for its
imagined addressees (e.g., virgo, 2586), masculine-gendered (e.g., bellator
and miles, 2648 and 2654), and those like animae or mentes which imply
no biological sex (e.g., 2641–2). Unlike the f inal chapters of the Prosa,
the Carmen’s psychomachia does not imply that women are uniquely
vulnerable to particular sins. Rather, through examples like Judith as well
as its vision of Virginity as an armed woman, this new passage sustains
the athletic and martial imagery developed throughout the text’s hagi-
ographical narratives.
44 CdV lines 2560–65, in Aldhelmi Opera, ed. Ehwald, 457.

45 As a chaste widow, Judith would also represent a good example of Aldhelm’s reconfigured
middle category of castitas (discussed above, p. 181–82), which seems to have encompassed all
chaste women who were no longer physically virgins.
The f inal image of warfare in the Carmen is not precisely spiritual,

however, but literary. In the course of a request for intercessory prayers,
the addressees are exhorted to defend the De uirginitate against critics:
Sed vos, virgineis comit quas infula sertis,

Hoc opus adversus querulos defendite scurras. 46
(But you, O women whom the fillet adorns with virginal garlands, defend
this work against carping slanders.)
The image of adornment returns as part of this call to arms to an emphati-

cally feminine audience (vos … quas), who—especially following the psy-
chomachia episode—could be presumed to understand that the virgineae …
sertae (virginal wreaths) were not merely the insignia, but the constituents,
of their martial power. After imagining the various grammatical criticisms
that could be levelled against the work (and against which the addressees
would presumably need to protect it by commentary or correction) the
passage develops into an allegory of the writer-warrior:
Talia sed timidus dictator tela pavescat,

Qui propriis numquam confidit belliger armis
Cassida nec capiti discit praetendere metri
Nec spinam lorica noscit defendere prosae;
Armet sed dextram capulus ceu parma sinistram
Cruraque non careant ocreis nec femina ferro
Neu timeat scriptor terrentis ludicra linguae!47
(But the fearful author fears such missiles [of criticism], who never trusts
in his own weapons as a warrior, nor learns to cover his head with the
helm of meter or to defend his back with the mail-shirt of prose; but let the
hilt arm the right hand, and the shield the left, and let not the shins lack
for greaves or the thighs a sword, nor let the writer fear the foolishness
of a scathing tongue!)
Here, as verbal skill is envisioned as armaments for the physical body, the
text presents a startling convergence in line 2854. The Latin for “thigh,” femur,
has two possible plural forms ( femora and femina): Aldhelm has chosen
46 Aldhelmi Opera, ed. Ehwald, lines 2832–33, 468.

47 Aldhelmi Opera, ed. Ehwald, lines 2849–55, 469.
the less-common one, which is identical to the Latin word for “woman.”
The ambiguity opens up space for the female addressees to be imagined
as co-warriors—and fellow-authors. If the chapter on Eustochium and
Demetrias in the Prosa had promised them immortality through a treatise
dedicated to them, this final passage hints that they might also create a
war memorial of their own.
The substantial changes in content that we see in the final portion of
the Carmen de uirginitate, then, solve a problem that the Prosa had created
for itself by adapting Cyprian’s polemic against adornment. In the verse,
the concept of virginity as an ornament acquired by active labor is never
in conflict with the text; rather, the recurrent imagery of the virtue as a
jewel, wreath, or trophy is extended naturally into the weapon with which
virginity wins and is won. Nor are women’s bodies envisioned as a danger
or impediment to such a life of virtue.
Was the excision of the discourse on women’s clothing, and the replace-
ment of it with a battle scene, a response to the reactions of the addressees
whose knowledge and reading practices formed so important a part of Ald-
helm’s treatise? Or was it perhaps a recognition of the intellectual problem
that he had created for himself in the later chapters of the Prosa? We can
continue to hope for the discovery of a letter or two to settle such questions.
In the meantime, however, the De uirginitate as it survives does give us some
glimpses into the thought of educated early medieval English women of
the late seventh century. As we have seen, the De uirginitate displays some
clear expectations of how, as well as what, Aldhelm’s addressees would
have read. It also demonstrates a striking conception of virginity as an
acquired ornament that conflicted, in part, with late antique thought from
the Mediterranean, but which proved more compatible with the kind of
martial imagery loved by Old English poets as well as early Christian Latin
writers. 48 Taken as a whole, Aldhelm’s De uirginitate shows that women
could be imagined—and perhaps imagined themselves—as warriors for
virtue as well as discerning readers, and as artisans fully engaged in the
construction of their moral selves.
48 The appeal of this idea was not limited to women—Aldhelm’s opus geminatum was popular
with early medieval English men as well, and indeed may have helped his male readers work
through ideas about gender adapted to their lives as early medieval Christians. For a discussion
of Judith in CdV as a role-model for tenth-century English clerics, see Rebecca Stephenson,
“Judith as Spiritual Warrior.” (My thanks to Dr Stephenson for letting me read her article prior
to publication.)
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7 Chaste Bodies and Untimely Virgins
Sexuality, Temporality, and Bede’s Æthelthryth
Lisa M. C. Weston
Abstract
Bede’s double inscription of Aethelthryth in both narrative and hymn inter-
rupts the temporal linearity of his Historia Ecclesiastica just as her adamant
refusal of dynastic reproduction disrupts and threatens the futurity of the
Northumbrian royal line. Her militant choice of virginity over marriage and of
eternity over worldly time provides a female model for the male community
to whom and for whom Bede writes. Bede dismantles binary gender as time-
bound, but he does so by appropriating women’s lived experience and literary
expression. As both historical subject and devotional object, Aethelthryth thus
constitutes a pivotal but problematic figure in Bede’s theoretical engagement
with the entanglement of temporality, sexuality, and gender that underwrites
monastic identity, male and female, in early medieval England.
Keywords: Bede; Aethelthryth; Sexuality; Virginity; and Temporality
Æthelthryth of Ely ranks among the most well-known saints of early medi-
eval England. Yet more often than not modern interrogation of her sanctity
focuses on her story as retold by Ælfric rather than as presented in its first
extant textualization—and Ælfric’s source—the Historica Ecclesiastica
Gentis Anglorum of the Venerable Bede. As Catherine Cubitt notes, Ælfric’s
Life of Æthelthryth (alongside his lives of other earlier virgin martyrs like
Agatha and Lucy) serves the purposes of the Monastic Reform movement,
offering a homiletic model for male readers far different from the original
female congregation that first commemorated her.1 Bede’s Æthelthryth, while
1 Catherine Cubitt, “Virginity and Misogyny in Tenth- and Eleventh-Century England,” Gender
and History 12 (2000):1–32. See also Clare A. Lees, Tradition and Belief: Religious Writing in Late
doi: 10.5117/9789463721462_ch07
198 Lisa M. C. Weston
equally appropriated by a male monastic reader/writer and rewritten to suit

his ideological and textual ambitions, has received less critical attention.2
It is the purpose of this essay, therefore, to focus attention on Bede’s
(re)writing of Æthelthryth into the history of Northumbria—and indeed
into the regnal history of a king with particular connections to Bede’s home
monastery of Wearmouth/Jarrow—Book IV, Chapter 19 of the Historia.
It will seek to interrogate the Æthelthryth who appears in the Historia
not only as historical subject—in both secular dynastic and monastic
historical narrative—but also, indeed particularly, as a devotional object
in Bede’s hymn in her honor. That interpolated text, comprising the whole
of Chapter 20, situates her in an alternative (and markedly female) spiritual
lineage descending from the Virgin Mary and the Roman virgin martyrs.
This double rewriting makes Æthelthryth a pivotal figure in Bede’s text,
a figure who speaks (back) to as well as for Bede’s own identity as monk, as
historian and exegete, and as a poet within monastic community. Her story
and the accompanying hymn in her honor together constitute, indeed, Bede’s
most extended and explicit discussion of virginity, inherently engaging
with the nature of (human) dynastic history and its conflicted relation-
ship with (divine) eternity. Together the prose narrative and the hymn
radically problematize both virginity and history, and create a particularly
telling epistemological and ontological connection between sexuality and
temporality. Granted, the works of the Venerable Bede may not immediately
suggest themselves as a site for the exploration and interrogation of ques-
tions about the entanglement of temporality with gender and sexuality,
especially as raised by feminist and queer theorists like Elizabeth Grosz,
Elizabeth Freeman, Lee Edelman, and Victoria Browne.3 As this essay will
argue, however, in Bede’s writings, time and its inscription in history are
intricately and intimately tied to bodies, especially the chaste bodies of
monastic subjects like Æthelthryth—as well as Bede himself.
Anglo-Saxon England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), esp. 133–53; Clare A.

Lees and Gillian R. Overing, Double Agents: Women and Clerical Culture in Anglo-Saxon England
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), esp. 125–32; and Virginia Blanton, Signs
of Devotion: The Cult of St. Æthelthryth in Medieval England (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2007), esp. 65–129.
2 But see, significantly, Blanton, Signs of Devotion, 19–63.
3 See especially Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham, NC
and London: Duke University Press, 2004) and A. J. Kabir, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power
(Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2005); Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities
and Queer Histories (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010); Edelman, No Future:
Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2004); and
Browne, Feminism, Time and Nonlinear History (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014).
Chaste Bodies and Untimely Virgins 199
Theorizing Virginal Time
In Bede’s writings, and most especially in the double Life of Æthelthryth, the
entanglement of temporality, gender, and sexuality reveals contradictions
that inherently problematize monastic identity in early medieval England.
By rejecting earthly propagation monastic men and women potentially
disrupt hegemonic discourses of futurity and dynastic succession. By living
simultaneously in both secular and sacred time, they are simultaneously
part of and removed from history and time.
Bede’s interest in temporality—in the reckoning of time, in history, and
in the end of time and its eternal aftermath—is explicit throughout his
writings. His De temporibus, along with the associated De natura rerum, and
the Expositio Apocalypseos likely represent some of his earliest compositions
(all circa 708). 4 Both the De temporibus and the later, more thorough and
detailed De temporum ratione conclude with extensive world-historical
chronicles extending from Adam to the “present day” and looking forward
to the ultimate end of time and history. The Chronica minora appended
to the De temporibus provides a very brief summary of events in biblical,
Roman, and Church history through the year 705. The First Age extends
from Adam through Noah and is measured in life spans and lineages. The
Second takes the line of Noah up to the time of Abraham, and the Third
from Abraham to David. At this point, gentile as well as Hebrew rulers
and historical events begin to constitute the matter of history. The Fourth
Age takes the Hebrew people from David to the Babylonian Captivity, and
the Fifth from then until the Incarnation. The on-going Sixth—annus
Domini—and its history is dominated by Roman and Church history, by
the succession of emperors and popes. Bede’s refutation of a popular belief
that the “present” age would end around the year 800 resulted in his being
accused of heresy—charges he was at pains to deny and against which he
defended himself in his Epistola ad Pleguiniam.5 And as Faith Wallis argues,
4 Peter Darby and Faith Wallis, “Introduction: The Many Futures of Bede,” in Peter Darby and
Faith Wallis, eds., Bede and the Future (Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2014), 1–21, see 7 for chronology.
For Bede’s engagement with temporalities throughout his writings, see Máirin MacCarron, Bede
and Time: Computus, Theology and History in the Early Medieval World (London and New York:
Routledge, 2020).
5 The 800 date is based on a reading of each age as lasting exactly 1,000 years. Bede’s ages vary
in length, being determined and defined by significant scriptural “turning point” rather than
precise duration. See Peter Darby, Bede and the End of Time (Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT:
Ashgate, 2012). As Alan Thacker argues (“Why did Heresy Matter to Bede? Present and Future
Contexts” in Bede and the Future, 47–66) this accusation would continue to color Bede’s future
exegetical and historical works.
Bede’s first work of exegesis, his commentary on the Book of Revelations

was similarly directed toward both proving his orthodoxy and the acuity
and accuracy of his temporal reckoning.6 Bede revisits the framework of
history in the updated and more expansive Chronica majora appended to
the later De temporum ratione. Exposition in that work extends to discussion
of future times: it critiques predictions and beliefs about the remainder of
the Sixth Age and the Second Coming and adds entries on the overcoming
of heresies to its list of world-historical events. It also comments on the
“eternal Sabbath” of the Seventh Age, into which each soul enters upon
earthly death, and defines an Eighth “Age” beyond the created, earthly
world, and therefore inherently beyond secular time.
More local narrative historical accounts, the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis
Anglorum, the Historia Abbatum Monasterii in Wiremutha et Gyruum, and
other hagiographical texts, similarly witness Bede’s interest in temporality.
Nor was this by any means merely an abstract or theoretical issue. The
extensive discussion of the Easter Controversy and the Synod of Whitby
in the former details especially the differences between Roman and Celtic
computistical formulas, thereby revealing time and its measurement to be
an important component of contemporary monastic culture.7 The marking
and correct celebration of liturgical seasons and feasts were essential to the
practices that disciplined and defined life in foundations like Wearmouth/
Jarrow. As Roy Liuzza has noted, for Bede and his fellow monks time as both
experienced and measured “was emphatically connected to one’s physical
situation in a particular place”—and “temporality depended on corporality.”8
More generally, as Bede explains in the De temporam ratione, the nature of
the seasons aligns with the elements and humors of the human body: winter,
for example, is cold and wet, as is water, and as are the phlegmatic humors.9
Bede’s engagement in his writings with gender and sexuality is less direct
and consequently perhaps less immediately apparent. Certainly, a concern
with sexuality as lived out in his contemporary England—and especially
its regulation—motivates his inclusion in the Historia Ecclesiastica of Pope
6 Faith Wallis, “Why did Bede Write a Commentary on Revelation?” in Bede and the Future,
23–45, at 23.
7 Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), hereafter abbreviated EH, III.5.
8 R. M. Liuzza, “The Sense of Time in Anglo-Saxon England,” Bulletin of the John Rylands
University Library 89, no. 2 (2012–13): 131–53, here 134.
9 De temporum ratione, Chapter 35. See also Liuzza, 135–36. One may perhaps wonder, too,
whether Bede’s easier acceptance of the different lengths of world-historical ages is at all based
in his experience of the more widely variant lengths of summer and winter days.
Gregory’s answers to Augustine of Canterbury’s enquiries on lawful marriage

and bodily purity. Inclusion of these questions, as Clare Lees argues, “reminds
us that Christianity brings a religion not only of the book but also of the
body” and that “that body is sexually differentiated and gendered.”10 And if
regulation of the gendered body, especially in regard to sexual behaviors, is
fundamental to early medieval Christianity, the subsequent development
and conversion of the English kingdoms is facilitated by marriages and
alliances. Thus, however seemingly under-theorized sexuality may be in
Bede’s works (especially in comparison with his detailed computistical
texts), one specific aspect of sexuality—heterosexuality within legitimate
marriage—does recur throughout the Historia. So, too, references to the
chastity and/or virginity of saintly models of faith and life reveal that aspect
of sexuality to be integral to monastic life in particular, and to the spiritual
and cultural capital of Christian English kingdoms more generally. While it
is equally a requirement of monks and nuns—the oblation of elite children
(including Bede himself) implies male as well as female virginity—chas-
tity nevertheless arises as an issue more directly and explicitly when the
monastic subject in question is female.
Not that marital status does not enter into discussion of male piety. The
East Saxon Sebbi, for instance, abdicates and retires to a monastery only
after obtaining his wife’s consent and well after producing and raising two
sons, Sighard and Swefred, to take his place.11 Yet when King Sigebert of East
Anglia abandons his earthly rule for life in a monastery, his conversion
is problematic because he refuses to bear arms against Penda of Mercia’s
invading pagan army, not because of his marital status or need to produce
an heir.12 No male oblates are explicitly named in the Historia: no male model
is thus cited for Bede’s own experience of being raised in male monastic
community at Wearmouth/Jarrow. On the other hand, numerous royal
women—Earcongota, daughter of Earconbert of Kent, for example, and
Ethelburga and Saethryd, daughter and step-daughter of Anna of East
Anglia, all sent to Gaulish convents, as well as Aelffled, daughter of Oswy
of Northumbria, vowed from birth to Whitby—are singled out for having
been dedicated as children to monasteries and raised in virginity.13 Bede
10 EH I.27. Lees, Tradition and Belief, 138.

11 EH IV.11.
12 EH III.18. This contradiction between martial masculinity and Christian abstention from
arms may also play out in a particularly marked form in the conversion story of the pagan priest
Coifi, EH II.14.
13 EH III.8. On the variant strategies by which elite families allied themselves with God and
His Church in the conversion period, see Clare Stancliffe, “Kings Who Opted Out,” Ideal and
names the women of Barking Abbey generically virginum Deo dedicatrum

and consecratis Christo virginibus (virgins devoted to God and consecrated to
Christ) as well as famularum Christi (Christ’s female servants) and ancellis Dei
(handmaids of God) in ways that attribute a significant gendered difference
to female monasticism.”14
Chastity—if not virginity in its most narrow form—is equally a defining
characteristic of many if not most of the powerful and influential abbesses
who figure in the Historia—women who converted to monastic life as
adults and became religious “mothers” after a career as secular mothers
(or at least wives), exemplified by Hild of Whitby. And the communities
these women, whether early oblates or later converts, ruled were likely
similarly diverse. Further, the paradoxical distinction and elision of differ-
ence between virginity and chastity foregrounds the sexuality of women.
That foregrounding (as Clare Lees and Gillian Overing argue in regard to
Aldhelm’s problematic inclusion of widows and divorced wives as virgins
in his De Virginitate) troubles early medieval English religious discourse
and its inscription of women’s bodies and subjectivities. For Aldhelm, in his
Prosa and the Carmen de Virginitate, virginity and the associated rejection
of sexual reproduction radically redefines natural and unnatural sexuality.
Subsequently, consequently, the collision of secular and sacred sexualities
results—especially in the case of the female virgins he catalogues—in
gruesome and extravagant martyrdoms. As Lees and Overing observe,
this violence toward female bodies profoundly troubles a text ostensibly
directed to a female audience, the women of Hildilith’s Barking, who would
have read his words in very physical, sexed, and gendered bodies of their
own. Aldhelm attempts to (re)construct his model readers in the text,
exposing and allegorizing the sexualized and brutalized bodies of his
martyrs—and virgin bodies more generally—into signs that transform
them into symbolic commodities.15 Much less theoretical (as well as less
extensive) than Aldhelm’s exploration of the topic, the Historia enacts a
similar shift in the meaning of genealogy, dynasty, and (re)production.
But with a difference: for Bede, virginity forces engagement with eternity
as beyond linear, secular time and human history.
Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society: Studies presented to J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, ed. Patrick
Wormald, Donald A. Bullough, and Roger Collins (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 154–76.
14 EH IV.7–9.
15 Lees and Overing, Double Agents, 110–24. See also Carol Braun Pasternack, “The Sexual
Practices of Virginity and Chastity in Aldhelm’s De virginitate,” Sex and Sexuality in Anglo-Saxon
England: Essays in Memory of Daniel Gillmore Calder, ed. Carol Braun Pasternack and Lisa M. C.
Weston (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2004), 93–120.
Æthelthryth’s Virginity and Disruption of Dynastic Temporality
In Book Four, Chapter 19 of Bede’s Historia we read that King Ecgfrith of

Northumbria “accepit … coniugem nomine Aedilthrydam, filiam Anna regis
Orientalium Anglorum … quam et alter ante illum vir habuerat uxorem,
princeps uidilicit Australium Gyruiorum uocabulo Tondberct. Sed illo post
modi cum temporis, ex quo eam accepit, defuncto, data est redi praefato”
(married a wife named Aedilthryda (Æthelthryth), the daughter of Anna,
king of the East Angles. … [S]he had previously been married to an ealdor-
man of the South Gyrwe, named Tondberht. But he died shortly after the
marriage and on his death she was given to King Ecgfrith).16 Such a marital
career seems typical enough for an elite English woman of the late seventh
century, even a future abbess like her sister Seaxburh, wife to Eorcenbert
of Kent and mother to virgin oblate Earcongota. Æthelthryth’s identity is
initially as Anna’s daughter, and then as first Tondberct’s and later Ecgfrith’s
wife. Her body constitutes a commodity traded among nascent kingdoms
in order to facilitate diplomatic alliances and (potentially) to ensure the
continuity of dynastic lines. Indeed, the grammar of the passage renders
Æthelthryth the object of others’ actions: Ecgfrith acceptit her as coniugum
just as Tondberht habuerat her as uxorem. Even as a grammatical subject
she is initially paired with the passive: data est. Only when she ultimately
disrupts any expectation of silent, passive compliance with secular roles
does she become the active grammatical subject of her own narrative.
Despite two marriages (we are told) she “perpetua tamen mansit virginitais
integritate gloriosa” (still preserved the glory of perfect virginity)—the first
time she figures in the active voice—and after twelve years her union with
Ecgfrith remained unconsummated despite the king’s promising Bishop
Wilfrid estates and money if the churchman could persuade the reluctant
bride to sleep with her husband.
Bede’s Æthelthryth thus disrupts history—and the Historia—by resist-
ing the trade on which the culture depends for its temporal and political
continuity.17 Her exemplary, ideal virginity, that is, like that of all sanctified
16 Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, eds. and trans, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the
English People (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), Bk 4, 19, p. 390.
17 Use of the metaphoric “trade” here draws, of course, upon Gayle Rubin’s “The Traff ic in
Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed.
Raya R. Reitor (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157–210; and Karen Newman’s “Directing
Traffic: Subjects, Objects, and the Politics of Exchange,” Differences 2 (1990): 41–54. For the role
of elite early English women as peaceweavers and guarantors of dynastic succession, see Pauline
Stafford, Queens, Concubines, and Dowagers: The King’s Wife in the Early Middle Ages (Athens:
virgins, male and female, threatens the end of history by denying procrea-
tion.18 And nothing signals the anxiety this produces in the culture and
in the text so much as Bede’s attempts discursively to “save” virginity for
Northumbrian as well as Christian hegemony.
In a classic virgin martyr narrative—one set in the days of the early
Church, like those that constitute many of Aldhelm’s stories and those on
which Æthelthryth may well have modeled her stalwart virginity—her story
of resistance to (hetero)sexuality would take a violent turn. But these events
happened within Bede’s lifetime (albeit his early childhood) and their occur-
rence, let alone their retelling, recontextualization, and re-historicization, in
a Christian Northumbria requires a different narrative trajectory. Moreover,
Ecgfrith appears frequently in Bede’s Historia as a supporter and sponsor
of the Northumbrian Church. His reign sees the ecclesiastical councils of
Hertford and Hatfield and the Synod of Twyford. He was a strong supporter
and ally of both Saint Cuthbert and Benedict Biscop—and he was, perhaps
even more significantly, a donor and patron of the latter’s foundation and
consequent expansion of Wearmouth/Jarrow.
In line with such a narrative back story, therefore, Ecgfrith eventually
allows Æthelthryth to follow her desire “ut saeculi curas relinquere atque
in monasterio tantum uero regi Christo seruire” (to relinquish the affairs
of this world and to serve Christ, the only True King, in a monastery).
Preserving something of secular kinship, he sends her to be trained under
his aunt Æbbe at Coldingham (in Northumbria). A year later, however, she
returns to her ancestral East Anglia to build her own monastery at Ely and
to become, “uirginum Deo deuotarum perplurium mater virgo et exemplis
uitae caelestis esse coepit et monitis” (by the example of her heavenly
life and teaching, the virgin mother of many virgins dedicated to God), a
situation that both repudiates and fulfills the demands of secular dynastic
University of Georgia Press, 1983). For the way these roles could be translated into the foundation
and rule of monastic houses, see Barbara Yorke, Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses
(London and New York: Continuum, 2003).
18 Compare Lee Edelson’s rejection in No Future of “reproductive futurity” and modern
heteronormative culture’s glorification of the child as a guarantor of what José Esteban Muñoz
in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press,
2009) terms “straight time” in his argument for a creative and contrary, queer appropriation of the
past to imagine and incite a desired future. Neither Edelman nor Muñoz addresses medieval texts.
Nevertheless, their theoretical perspectives offer usefully provocative readings of phenomena
like virginity. Aldhelm’s female virgins, for example, by spurning earthly sexuality rhetorically
naturalize what is initially def ined as (in earthly terms) unnatural. For a similar reading of
Aelfric’s virgin saints, including Æthelthryth, see Rhonda L. McDaniel, The Third Gender and
Aelfric’s Lives of Saints (Kalamazoo MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2018), esp. 193–99.
futurity and simultaneously creates a powerful model of a different kind

of cultural (re)production.
After seven years as abbess Æthelthryth dies. In fact, she dies twice—or
at least in Bede’s narrative two somewhat disparate accounts of her death
and its meaning coalesce in one deathbed scene. In the first she explicitly
dies of the plague—a secondary wave of the Justinian Plague—that swept
through England in the last years of the seventh century, decimating many
monasteries including Bede’s own Wearmouth/Jarrow. According to refer-
ences elsewhere in the Historia, this plague first appeared in Kent during the
summer of 664, soon after the May 1 solar eclipse. Sometime between 666 and
675 it struck Barking in Essex. Moving slowly but inexorably northwards in
recurrent waves over the next two decades, it probably reached Ely sometime
in 679 or 680.19 In 686 it struck Wearmouth and Jarrow, where it dispatched
all the choir monks except Abbot Ceolfrith and a small boy. Even if Bede
was not himself this boy (as subsequent legend would have it) he would, as
a novice of some thirteen to fifteen years old, have experienced the trauma
of Abbot Eosterwine’s death at Wearmouth in March. That the plague
continued to spread actively over winter suggests that what originally arrived
in Britain as the bubonic plague and was transmitted via fleas probably
became, as it spread, pneumonic plague, passed from human victim to
human victim through the air and intimate contact. If so, the scene of the
dying Eosterwine giving each of his Wearmouth brethren the kiss of peace
takes on a chilling, lethal irony.20
In any event, the plague represents a calamity that Æthelthryth may
have prophesied: “sunt etiam qui decant, quia per prophetiae spiritum et
pestilentiam, qua ipsa esset moritura, praedixerit, et numerum quoque
eorum qui de suo monasterio hac essent de mundo rapiendi palam cunctis
praesentibus intimauerit” (some say that she possessed the spirit of prophecy,
and that in the presence of all the community, she not only foretold the
plague that was to cause her death, but also the number who would die of
it in the convent).21 In Aldhelm’s catalogue of virgins, visions are especially
associated with Daniel and other (male) Old Testament prophets, and (of
course) with John the Evangelist as the author of the Book of Revelations.
Indeed, for his male virgins prophecy is at least as much a characteristic
19 EH III.27 and IV.708

20 Historia Abbatum in Venerabilis Baedae Opera Historica, vol. 4, ed. Charles Plummer (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1956), 364–87, here 371–72. On the course and nature of the plague, see J. R. Maddicott,
“Plague in Seventh-Century England,” Past & Present 156 (1997): 7–54.
21 EH IV.19
(and consequence) of virginity as the gruesome and often sexualized

martyrdoms suffered by his female saints. In Bede’s Historia both male
and female monastics enjoy the gifts of prophecy and visions. And perhaps
because virginity, in its rejection of dynastic reproduction and secular
futurity, is associated with non-linear, unnatural temporality, the visions
Bede recounts most often mark the transcendence of earthly, natural life
and time. A miraculous light identifies the site in which the plague-stricken
nuns should be buried, for example, and thereby establishes the sanctity of
Ethelburga’s Barking. Both Ethelburga’s death and that of Hild of Whitby
are announced in the visionary experiences of their “daughters”. In East
Anglia the Irish pilgrim monk Fursey also enjoyed the gift of prophecy and
experienced a noteworthy vision of Heaven and Hell. The Northumbrian
Dryhthelm’s similar vision prompts his conversion and entrance into the
community at Melrose.22
In the second account of Æthelthryth’s death, however, the one more
explicitly foregrounded in Bede’s narrative, mortality results from a tumor
on her neck—perhaps literally a plague bubo23—interpreted more allegori-
cally. Its punitive reminder (and rebuke) of earlier vanity and the necklaces
she once wore as an earthly queen constitutes a fitting conclusion to her
presentation as a model of asceticism and bodily privation. The scar of that
literal and metaphorical “tumor” marks both her body and her consequent
legend. Sixteen years later (in 692 or 693) her sister and successor as abbess
Seaxburh—a widowed wife and mother who, unlike her sister, did fulfill
her royal dynastic duties before retiring to a monastery—has Æthelthryth’s
body disinterred and translated into a new tomb. At this time “corpus
sacrae uirginis ac sponsae Christi” (the body of the holy virgin and bride of
Christ) is found “incorruptum inuentum est, ac si eodem die fuisset defuncta
siue humo condita” (as uncorrupt as if she had died and been buried that
very day). The only difference, a doctor named Cynefrith testifies, is that
what had been a gaping wound in her throat (the mark of his evidently
less than completely successful excision of the tumor) has healed to only
the slightest of scars. Refocusing on the saint’s corporality, on her physical
remains, this narrative replaces, idealizes, and generalizes the earlier story
of the living woman—and renders her (or her body) once more an object of
cultural capital. As in all translation accounts, as that body-become-relic
is transferred into a new tomb-shrine, the saint’s charisma becomes that
22 For the importance of visions in early medieval England, see A. J. Kabir, Paradise, Death
and Doomsday in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
23 Maddicott, “Plague in Seventh-Century England,” 21.
of her surviving community. Narrative focus is thus shared between the

miraculous body and those who experience such miracle(s) of sanctity.
Bridging the generational divide, this account reinforces the continuity of the
community, the succession of this virgin mother of many virgin daughters.
Æthelthryth’s body did not guarantee the Northumbrian secular dynasty,
then, but it does ultimately support the monastic dynasty of Ely—and
perhaps also those of Northumbrian houses like Wearmouth/Jarrow and
early medieval English Christianity more generally.
But this double death, especially in conjunction with Æthelthryth’s
interruption of Northumbrian history, also foregrounds the role gender plays
in Bede’s compilation and overwriting of stories like hers. The chronicles that
accompany the De temporibus and De temporum ratione are drawn from the
very similar (and similarly systematic) chronicle that makes up part of Book
V of Isidore’s Etymologies, chronologically neat lists of lineages and rulers
synthesized from biblical, Roman and Christian sources. By contrast, in
writing his Historia, Bede gathered together source texts of a wide variety of
genres acquired from an extensive network of contemporary correspondents
as well as derived from previous historians and literary models. In the
Historia’s prologue he cites and thanks especially Albinus, Nothelm, Daniel,
Esi, Cynibert, and the monks of Lastingham and Lindisfarne.24 He does not,
it should be noted, acknowledge any women among his informants, even
when he chronicles communities ruled by abbesses—and even when he
includes in his narrative texts that probably originated in those communities.
Yet although he rarely notes the literacy, let alone the literary production,
of these women explicitly, Bede was well aware that monastic women (as
well as men) read and even wrote. And he engaged with these women. His
Expositio of the Canticle of Habbakuk, for example, is explicitly directed
to an anonymous nun of an unnamed Northumbrian house. As Benedicta
Ward notes, it is significant that Bede expects her to be able to read and
understand the complexities and subtleties of his argument.25 In the Historia,
24 On Bede’s network of correspondents and the effect and influence of such networks on
his development as a poet, see Emily Thornbury, Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), esp. 183–97.
25 “‘To My Dearest Sister’: Bede and the Educated Woman,” in Women, The Book and the
Godly: Selected Proceedings of the St, Hilda’s Conference, ed. Lesley Smith and Jane H. M. Taylor
(Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995), 105–11. For more generalized studies of women’s literacy during
this period, see also Joan Nicholson, “Feminae Gloriosae: Women in the Age of Bede, Medieval
Women, ed. Derek Baker (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), 15–29; Stephanie Hollis, Anglo-Saxon Women
and the Church: Sharing a Common Fate (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1992); Clare A. Lees and Gillian
R. Overing, “Women and the Origins of English Literature,” History of British Women’s Writing
700–1500, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy and Diane Watt (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), 31–40; and
his account of Hild—and possibly Caedmon and the Synod of Whitby—may

have come from that community, even as his version of the Life of Saint
Gregory, too, seems to owe much to an extant anonymous Whitby vita.26 He
does explicitly cite a particular libellus (most likely from Hildilith’s Barking)
as the source for his lives of the East Saxon Ethelburga and King Sebbi.27
With the exception of that Barking libellus, however, the archive of collected
and interpolated texts that is the Historia rarely admits what it owes to
female sources. As for Æthelthryth specifically, Virginia Blanton and Diane
Watt have argued, Bede’s most likely source of information would have been
the women of Ely, perhaps in the form of a no longer extant saint’s life.28 Yet
if the Historia does appropriate such a text—as it appropriates texts from
other women’s communities—it does so by overwriting it, by excluding
or diminishing female agency and experience, and by foregrounding the
evidence and agency of singular, named and significantly male witnesses
like Cynifrith and Wilfrid over the plural and communal witness of the
corporate female community.29
Thus, for example, Æthelthryth’s prophetic gift is diminished in Bede’s
version: the vagueness of “many say” casts doubt even as it introduces the
Diane Watt, “The Earliest Women’s Writing? Anglo-Saxon Literary Cultures and Communities,”
Women’s Writing 20 (2013): 537–54, and “Literature in Pieces: Female Sanctity and the Relics of
Women’s Writing,” Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature, ed. Clare A. Lees
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 357–80.
26 Peter Hunter Blair, “Whitby as a Centre of Learning in the Seventh Century,” 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), 3–32; Hollis, Anglo-Saxon Women, 253–58 and 261–70; and J. E. Cross, “A Lost Life of Hilda
of Whitby: the Evidence of the Old English Martyrology,” Early Middle Ages Acta 6 (1979): 21–43.
27 On literary culture at Barking, most famously the community to which Aldhelm directed
his De Virginitate, see Diane Watt, “Lost Books: Abbess Hildelith and the Literary Culture of
Barking Abbey,” Philological Quarterly 91 (2012): 1–21; Stephanie Hollis, “Barking’s Monastic
School, Late Seventh to Twelfth Century: History, Saint-Making and Literary Culture,” 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/Boydell and
Brewer, 2012), 33–55; and Lisa M. C. Weston “The Saint-Maker and the Saint: Hildelith Creates
Ethelburga,” Barking Abbey and Medieval Literary Culture, 56–72.
28 Virginia Blanton, Signs of devotion: The Cult of St. Æthelthryth in Medieval England 695–1615
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), esp. 31–56; and Diane Watt, “The
Earliest Women’s Writing?” 540–42.
29 On overwriting of women’s narratives, see Diane Watt, “Lost Books”; Lisa M. C. Weston,
“Sanctimoniales cum Sanctimoniale: Particular Friendships and Female Community in Anglo-
Saxon England,” in Sex and Sexuality, 35–62; and Lees and Overing, Double Agents, esp. 111–24,
and “Birthing Bishops and Fathering Poets: Bede, Hild, and the Relations of Cultural Production,”
Exemplaria 6 (1994): 35–65.
possibility. No other visions—indeed no miracles other than the incorrupt

body—mark her sanctity. As Diane Watt observes, this distinguishes Æthel-
thryth’s life from those of Hild or Ethelburga, both of which are rich in visions
and miracles.30 While the saint’s deathbed address to her congregation may
be taken verbatim from a longer extant Ely vita, as Blanton suggests, few if
any other direct inclusions—and few female witnesses—appear in Bede’s
redaction.31 Seaxburh’s likely role as instigator of the vita as well as of the
saint’s translation—and the one may well be linked to the other—goes
unmentioned; nor does Bede have much to say about kinship connections
linking Ely to other women’s communities. Rather, in his narrative, as Watt
argues, “Bede overwrites Æthelthryth’s life in order to make it fit his ideal
of virginity.”32
Bede’s transformation of Æthelthryth’s body into spiritual and cultural
capital is not, however, without attendant anxiety. It remains a scar of sorts
in history and the Historia. Her stalwart virginity temporarily displaces
the dynastic and military history of Northumbria. That story—Ecgfrith’s
story—resumes in Chapter 21. Backing up to a time at least a year before
Æthelthryth’s death, and long before her translation, to the ninth year of
Ecgfrith’s reign (i.e., 679), the text tells of a great battle between Northumbria
and Mercia—a battle waged, as it happens, despite attempts to weave peace
through the marriage of the Northumbrian Ostryth to the Mercian king
Aethelred. Peace is, in fact, achieved not through marital politics but by the
intervention of Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury: once again, it seems,
the secular dynastic economy, enacted in the trade of female bodies, cedes
to the charisma of the sacred. Yet Northumbrian dynasty and history do
continue. Ecgfrith remarries—a Kentish princess, Eormenburg, who reifies
an arguably even more powerful alliance than that through Æthelthryth
to East Anglia—and fathers a son to continue the Northumbrian royal line
beyond Ecgfrith’s death in battle in 685.
Æthelthryth’s physical and narrative bodies both provoke anxieties
revealed in Bede’s need to provide multiple named and (signif icantly)
male witnesses—Cynefrith as well as Wilfrid et multi alii, “and many
others”—to substantiate the truth of so unlikely a sequence of events. But
if readers find her stalwart virginity difficult to believe, Bede argues, “nec
30 Watt, “Earliest Women’s Writing?” 5.

31 EH IV.19. Blanton, Signs of Devotion, 49.
32 Watt, “Earliest Women’s Writing?” 3. Clare Lees and Gillian Overing make a similar point
in respect to Aelfric’s version of Bede’s Aethelthyrth: Double Agents, 17, and “Before History,
Before Difference: Bodies, Metaphor, and the Church in Anglo-Saxon England,” Yale Journal of
Criticism 11 (1998): 315–31.
diffendaum est nostra etiam aetate fieri potuisse, quod aevo praecedente
aliquoties factum fideles historiae narrant, donante uno eodemque Domino,
qui se nobiscum usque in finem saeculi manere pollicetur” (we need not
doubt that this which often happened in days gone by, as we learn from
trustworthy accounts, could happen in our time too through the help
of the Lord, who has promised to be with us even to the end of the age).
Virginal, incorrupt, untimely, and uncanny in its sacred, alien, queer
integrity, that is, Æthelthryth’s sanctified body witnesses the power of
the Divine to overlap with and transcend even as it seems to disrupt the
lived, secular time of human beings. Æthelthryth’s physical incorrup-
tion provides both bystanders at Ely and Bede’s readers a clear sign of
her miraculous integrity and sanctity, even if the concurrent violation of
the natural process of decay nevertheless also marks her body as outside
of time. It troubles the distinction between past and present even more
certainly (and tangibly) than her previous ability to prophesy witnesses
an overlapping of present and future during her virginal life. As Cynthia
Turner Camp argues, the spectacle of “untimeliness” on display in such
translation accounts is excessive, and “becomes a historiographic problem
as well as an ontological one. The undecayed body appears to freeze time”
and “the temporal folding of excess past into the present … has a natural
affect: discomfort and disruption.”33 Such encounters with bodies out of
time—bodies “unnaturally” preserved—force witnesses to engage with
a dead but still resonant and haunting deep past, and thereby enchant
or sanctify a site, marking it as temporally numinous.34 Æthelthryth’s
untimeliness as much as her integrity and sanctity becomes that of the
community of her chaste “daughters” at Ely.
Bede’s Virgin Poetics and the Hymn to Æthelthryth
While the scar of Æthelthryth’s story does not by any means represent
the only instance of a woman’s life—a narrative of monastic foundation
connected with a powerful abbess—appropriated, overwritten, and as-
similated in the Historia, it is unique in one regard. Æthelthryth’s life
33 Cynthia Turner Camp, “The Temporal Excesses of Dead Flesh,” postmedieval 4 (2013): 416–26,
at 418.
34 On this topic see, for example, Christina Fredengren, “Unexpected Encounters with Deep
Time Enchantment: Bog Bodies, Crannogs and ‘Otherworldly’ Sites. The Materializing Powers
of Disjunctures in Time,” World Archaeology 48 (2016): 482–99.
is the only one celebrated in verse as well as prose, a fact that further
establishes it as Bede’s most explicit and extended engagement with female
sanctity and an idealized monastic virginity. This celebration constitutes,
moreover, an unusually extensive authorial interjection: Bede’s further
interruption of what is already a (prose) disruption of dynastic and political
history takes the form of a hymn on the subject of virginity, a “hymnum
uirginitatis … praeconium eiusdem reginae ac sponsae Christi, et ideo
ueraciter reginae quia sponsae Christo” (a hymn on virginity … in honor
of this queen and bride of Christ, and therefore truly a queen because
the bride of Christ).35 He does so, he explains, “morem sacrae scriptura,
cuius historiae carmina plurima indita” (according to the method of holy
scripture in which many songs are inserted into the history). That this
hymn is, moreover, one that Bede himself composed some years earlier,
most likely for original performance at Wearmouth/Jarrow, suggests that
it—and Æthelthryth’s life—may have had a particular resonance for Bede
and his community.
In joining Chapter 20’s hymn to Chapter 19’s vita, in retelling and recon-
textualizing Æthelthryth’s story in both prose and poetry, the Historia’s
shift into prosimetrum situates this double treatment as an example of an
opus geminatum.36 Developed out of Classical rhetorical practice and the
genre of Christian scriptural paraphrase—the retelling of biblical narra-
tives in classical Virgilian epic language in the style of Sedulius’s Carmen
Paschale—opera geminata on hagiographical themes became prominent
in the burgeoning Anglo-Latin literary tradition. Early in his career Bede
wrote a prose version of Paulinus of Nola’s metrical vita of Saint Felix; he
subsequently revised the earlier anonymous Lindisfarne Life of Cuthbert
first into verse and then into prose. The most well-known example of the
genre, however, is Aldhelm’s Prosa and Carmen de Virginitate, and it is
tempting to read Bede’s double celebration of Æthelthryth as (in part, at
least) an homage and response to Aldhelm’s theorizing of virginity. In his
Historia Bede praises Aldhelm as a poet, and specifically cites his writing
of “de virginitate librum eximium, quem in exemplum Sedulii geminato
opera et versibus exametris et prosa” (a most excellent book on virginity
35 EH IV.20
36 On this genre, see Bill Friesen, “The Opus Geminatum and Anglo-Saxon Literature,” Neophilo-
logus 95 (2011): 123–44; Gernot Wieland, “Geminus Stilus: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Hagiography,”
Insular Latin Studies: Papers on Latin Texts and Manuscripts of the British Isles, 550–1066, ed.
Michael Herren (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1981), 113–33; and Catherine
A. M. Clarke, Writing Power in Anglo-Saxon England: Texts, Hierarchies, Economies (Cambridge:
D. S. Brewer, 2012), esp. 145–70.
both in hexameter verse and in prose, producing a twofold work after the
example of Sedulius).37
Echoing in part Aldhelm’s catalogues of exemplary lives, Bede’s hymn
situates Æthelthryth within a world-historical choir of virgins:
Alma Deus Trinitas, quae saecula cuncta gubernas,

adnue iam coeptis, alma Deus Trinitas.
Bella Maro resonet; nos pacis dona canamus,
munera nos Christi; bella Maro resonet.
Carmina casta mihi, fedae non raptus Helenae;
luxus erit lubricis, carmina casta mihi.
Dona superna loquar, miserae non proelia Troiae;
terra quibus gaudet, dona superna loquar.
En Deus altus adit venerandae Virginis aluum,
liberet ut homines, en Deus altus adit.
Femina virgo parit mundi devota parentem,
porta Maria Dei fémina virgo parit.
Gaudet amica cohors de Virgine matre Tonantis;
virginitate micans gaudet amica cohors.
Huis honor genuit casto de germine plures,
virgineos flores huius honor genuit:
Ignibus usta feris virgo non cessit Agathe,
Eulalia et perfert ignibus usta feris,
Kasta feras superat mentis pro culmine Tecla,
Eufemia sacras kasta feras superat,
Laeta ridet gladios ferro robustior Agnes,
Cecelia infestos laeta ridet gladios.
Multus in orbe uiget per sobria corda triumphus,
sobrietatis amor multus in orbe uiget.
Nostra quoque egregia iam tempora virgo beauit;
Aedilthryda nitet nostra quoque egregia.
Orta patre eximio, regali et stemmate clara,
nobilior Domino est, orta patre eximio.
Percipit inde decus reginae et sceptra sub astris;
plus super astra manens percipit inde decus.
Quid petis, alma, virum, sponso iam dedita summo?
sponsus adest Christus; quid petis, alma, virum?
Regis ut aetherei matrem iam, credo, sequaris,
37 EH V. 18.
tu quoque sis mater regis aetherei.

Sponsa dicata Deo bis sex regnaverat annis,
inque monasterio est sponsa dicata Deo,
Tota sacrata polo celsis ubi floruit actis
reddidit atque animam tota sacrata polo.
Virginis alma caro est tumulata bis octo Novembres,
nec putet in túmulo virginis alma caro.
Xre, tui est operis quia vestis et ipsa sepulchro
inviolata nitet; Xre, tui esto operis.
Ydros et ater abit sacrae pro vestis honore;
morbi diffugiunt, ydros et ater abit.
Zelus in hoste furit, quondam qui vicerat Evam;
virgo triumphat ovans, zelus in hoste furit.
Aspice, nupta Deo, quae sit tibi Gloria terris;
quae maneat caelis aspice, nupta Deo.
Munera laeta capis, festivis fulgida taedis;
ecce venit sponsus, munera laeta capis.
Et nova dulcísono modularis carmina plectro,
sponsa hymno exultas et nova dulcísono.
Nullus ab altithroni comitatu segregat Agni,
quam affectu tulerat nullus ab altithroni.
(All-bounteous Three in One, Lord of all time,

Bless mine emprise, all-bounteous Three in One.
Battle be Maro’s theme, sweet peace be mine;
Christ’s gifts for me, battle be Maro’s theme.
Chaste is my song, not wanton Helen’s rape.
Leave lewdness to the lewd! Chaste is my song.
Divine the gifts I tell, not Troy’s sad siege;
Source of earth’s joys, divine gifts I tell.
Eternal God comes down to Virgin’s womb;
To set men free eternal God comes down.
From Virgin-mother springs (God’s wicket gate)
The Sire of all, from Virgin-mother springs.
Glad the bright virgin-choir to know God born
Of Virgin’s womb, glad the bright virgin-choir.
Her glory made it grow, that holy plant;
Those virgin flowers, her glory made them grow.
In furnace fierce stood virgin Agatha,
Eulalia stands firm in furnace fierce.
Keen lions yield to Thecla’s spirit high,

To chaste Euphemia keen lions yield.
Laughs at the sword (of finer temper she)
Agnes, and Cecily laughs at the sword.
Many the laurels won by holy hearts
O’er the wide world many laurels won.
Nor lacks our age its Æthelthryth as well;
Its virgin wonderful nor lacks our age.
Of royal blood she sprang, but nobler far
God’s service found than pride of royal blood.
Proud is she, queening it on earthly throne;
In heaven established far more proud is she.
Queen, wherefore seek a mate, with Christ thy groom?
To Him betrothed, queen, wherefore seek a mate?
Royal Mother of Heaven’s King your leader now;
You, too, maybe, a mother of Heaven’s King.
She, pledged to God her spouse, twelve years had reigned,
When in the cloister she was pledged to God.
To heaven devoted, there she won new fame,
And breathed her last, to heaven devoted there.
Veiled in the tomb sixteen Novembers lay,
Nor rots her virgin flesh veiled in the tomb.
XT, Thine the power! Even in the sepulcher
Her vesture gleams. XT, Thine the power!
Yields to those holy weeds each frightful plague;
Disease aghast yields to those holy weeds.
Zeal frenzied tears the foe that conquered Eve;
Triumphs the saint, zeal frenzied tears the foe.
Affianced to the Lamb, now famed on earth!
Soon famed in heaven, affianced to the Lamb!
Many thy wedding gifts while torches blaze,
The Bridegroom come; many thy wedding gifts.
Ever on sweetest harp thou sing’st new songs,
Hymning thy Spouse ever on sweetest harp;
Ne’er parted from the Lamb’s high company,
Whom earthly love ne’er parted from the Lamb.)38
38 EH IV.20. The fullest and most detailed explication of this poem is that offered by Stephen J.
Harris in his Bede and Æthelthryth: An Introduction to Christian Latin Poetics (Morgantown: West
Virginia University Press, 2016). Harris frames his reading as an example of the literary practices
At the same time, and also like Aldhelm’s text, Bede’s hymn on virginity
inherently speaks to his own construction as a monastic subject. In this
remarkably and tellingly personal addition to the vita incorporated into
the Historia, that is, Bede appropriates Æthelthryth as a figure speaking
to and defining his own identity as poet and as monastic virgin—vowed
since childhood as an oblate—in his own right.
Although he is today most commonly remembered and read as a historian,
Bede was also a poet and the author of treatises on grammar and metrics: his
De arte metrica became a standard medieval school text. The list of his works
appended to his Historia mentions both “librum hymnorum diverso metro
sive rhythmo” (a book of hymns in diverse meters and rhythms) and “librum
epigrammatum heroic metro sive elegiac” (a book of epigrams in heroic and
elegiac meter), neither of which have survived in their original forms.39 But
individual examples of Bede’s poetry are extant. His De die iudicii, a 163-line
poem in dactylic hexameters, circulated widely and saw later translation
into Old English verse. Its theme—Judgement Day—ties it explicitly to his
interests in temporality and eschatology. A number of his hymns became
part of the canon of later medieval liturgical performance: beside the hymn
on Æthelthryth, there are songs to celebrate feasts of the Holy Innocents, the
Ascension and Pentecost, the Nativity and Decollation of St. John the Baptist,
the Nativity of the Virgin Mary, two hymns in honor of St. Andrew, and one
each for St. Agnes and SS. Peter and Paul, the patron saints of Wearmouth/
Jarrow. As supplements to the inherited repertoire of Ambrosian hymns, each
finds a place in the monastic calendar and liturgy, and, often composed in an
even number of stanzas, seem designed particularly for communal antiphonal
performance. The hymns thus celebrate and constitute community as voices
unite in the choir, and earthly singers are joined with the saints they praise.40
This is especially true of his hymn to Æthelthryth. Like her body, Bede’s
hymn is multiply closed and virginally intact. Imitating earlier alphabetic
works, including ultimately Psalm 118 and Proverbs 31, the poem is composed
in twenty-seven couplets, each beginning sequentially with the letters of the
alphabet (minus J) and then those of the word amen. Each chiasmic couplet
Aldhelm attributes to his female audience at Barking. However speculative, this reading usefully
and intriguingly interrogates the ways in which early medieval English women—at Barking or
Ely or elsewhere—may have received and responded to Bede’s (and Aldhelm’s) appropriation,
overwriting, and idealization of their lives and experiences.
39 EH V.24.
40 Michael Lapidge, “Bede the Poet” (Jarrow Lecture 1993), reprinted in Anglo-Latin Literature
600–899 (London: Hambledon Press, 1996), 313–38; and Bede’s Latin Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2019), esp. 112–53.
is composed of four half-lines with the first duplicated in the fourth so as

to create an envelope for the second and third. Thus, the first line—Alma
Deus Trinitas, quae saecula cuncta gubernas (Bounteous triune God, you
who governs all times)—is completed by the second—adnue iam coeptis,
alma Deus Trinitas (bless now this undertaking, bounteous triune God).
The initial couplet’s enclosed half-lines explicitly connect divinity with
the ordering of time, and both divinity and temporality with poetry. There
is also an intriguing mix of genders in the first couplet’s frame, alma Deus
trinitas: trinitas is grammatically feminine, Deus masculine. 41
Within the second couplet of this closed virginal body of a poem, Bede
references Virgil and epic poetry—and epic’s themes of dynastic struggle and
conquest—while distinguishing his own song as renewing and reconceiving
as it reuses Virgilian formulae and diction. His adnue iam coeptis to the Lord
of time in the first couplet, for example, echoes Virgil’s address to Jupiter
adnui coeptis in Aeneid IX.622. As Stephen Harris notes, the poem is “built
from allusion” and the medieval literary practice of compilatio, the collection
and redeployment of poetic formulae and rhetorical “flowers” from earlier
poets.42 This reuse is in service, however, of radically different themes. “Bella
Maro resonet” (let Virgil sing of war), Bede’s song will be of peace and Christ’s
gifts. Let Virgil sing of Helen’s rape and of the siege and destruction of Troy;
as for Bede, “carmina casta mihi” (a chaste song is mine). “Dona superna”
(divine gifts) are his to tell rather than the “miserae proelia Troiae” (the
spoils of miserable Troy). Virgil (and history) may extol a masculine, warrior
narrative of conquest and empire, but the “dynastic” descent Bede sings is not
the creation of empire. Nor is it even the patrilineal descent of the Hebrew
patriarchs or the succession of Greek and Roman emperors and later popes
that characterizes of the chronicles that accompany his De temporibus and
the De temporum ratione. The matter of history (as well as epic) is the subject
of the first six ages; the prose Historia details similar secular and imperial
lines. Bede’s poem celebrates instead a counter-history of the end of history,
of entry into the Seventh Age upon earthly death and eventually the Eighth
of heavenly eternity, revealed in a monastic line matrilineal in its descent
from Mary and thus to be distinguished from patrilineal secular dynasties.
Indeed, temporality and its transcendence are intrinsic to this matrilineal
line, from the first couplet in which God is he “who governs all times” to
the last invocation of post-historical Apocalypse, as this poem sings instead
41 The formula alma trinitas also appears in Aldhelm’s De Virginitate, line 58.
42 See Harris, Bede and Æthelthryth, 88–125 on Bede’s appropriation and reuse of earlier poets’
diction and formulae.
the spiritual engendering of virgins. The second four couplets link the
Incarnation, beginning the Sixth Age, to the virgin choir of Revelations
that will transcend it. This section begins with the temporal paradox of the
Eternal God descending to the Virgin Mary’s human womb, the Created
giving birth to the Creator, the divine Parent. And though the matrilineal
line could be said to be bracketed by divine masculine figures, Mary is the
physical progenitor. 43 Just as the feminine alma trinitas encloses Deus, so
the Virgin’s womb contains the Divine.
Thereafter Mary’s glory manifests in a line of virgin flowers (virgineos
flores): Agatha and Eulalia, Thecla and Euphemia, Agnes and Cecilia, who
in the subsequent four couplets are paired according to iconic martyrdoms
by fire, beasts, and sword—traditional virgin martyrs all, numbered, for
example, in Aldhelm’s compilation catalogue in the De Virginitate. Bede’s
catalogue culminates in the English Æthelthryth, whom he praises in a final
fifteen couplets replete with imagery of the virgin as Bride betrothed not to
an earthly but to the Heavenly King. His praise ends with her translation
and its witness to her virginity’s power to overcome plague and death. Like
Mary, Æthelthryth overcomes the consequences of Eve’s fall: if Eve’s sin
resulted in the “curse” of childbirth that characterizes the secular descent
and history, the virginal generation of more virgins by Mary and Æthelthryth
constitute a contrary and untimely end of history.
The very last few couplets, spelling “amen” to the hymn, focus apocalypti-
cally on the coming of the Bridegroom at the end of history. Bede concludes
his hymn, in fact, by describing the hymns sung by Æthelthryth and the virgin
choir of Brides. “Et nova dulcisono modularis carmina plectro” (ever new
songs you—i.e., Æthelthryth—play on a sweet-sounding harp), he proclaims,
“sponsa hymno exultas et nova dulcisono” (as a new bride you exult with sweet-
sounding hymns). The echo of nova carmina and nova sponsa is particularly
telling in its identification of poetry with virginity. In effect, the hymn begins
and ends with the making of hymns by virgin poets inside and outside of time.
43 Harris draws attention to Marian devotion at Wearmouth, and to Bede’s composition of both
a hymn to Mary and a sermon on the Feast of the Purification: Bede and Æthelthryth, 140. See also
Éamonn Ó Carragáin, “The Wearmouth Icon of the Virgin (A. D. 679): Christological, Liturgical,
and Iconographic Contexts,” in Poetry, Place, and Gender: Studies in Honor of Helen Damico, ed.
Catherine E. Karkov (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Press, 2009), 13–37; and on Marian
devotion in early medieval England more generally, Mary Clayton, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in
Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Interestingly, the chapel at
Barking to which Hildilith translated the bones of both monks and nuns from earlier cemeteries
was dedicated to Mary. The immediate source of Bede’s tonantis, a Virgilian by-name for Jupiter,
is probably Aldhelm’s repeated use in his Carmen de Virginitate (at lines 10 and 86, for example)
And appropriately so, perhaps: in most virgin martyr narratives, the

saint’s sufferings convert the audience within the texts—even as the texts
themselves convert or strengthen the conversions of their readers. Virginity
is ideologically viral, and literarily so as well. It spawns communities—like
Æthelthryth’s Ely and (of course) Bede’s own Wearmouth/Jarrow. It also
generates texts—like the vita on which Bede’s account is based, his own
overwriting of it, and the excessive, digressionary hymn he adds to it—by
providing both subject matter and the verbal formulae in which virgins and
virginity are commemorated and praised.44 Æthelthryth, singing ever new
songs in veneration of the Lamb of the Book of Revelations, ultimately becomes
a figure for the poet, for Bede himself, as the voice of a virginal community
both male and female and perhaps beyond gender as much as beyond time.45
But this ultimate inclusion of Bede within a putatively female virgin
choir of sponsae of the Sponsus/Lamb is by no means unproblematic. Does
it represent yet another appropriation of female voice, a final overwriting
of Æthelthryth and of the Ely women’s memory and celebration of their
“mother”? Or does the logic of what one might call virgin poetics require that
gender be (at least theoretically) abandoned as time-bound? Allegorically any
(or, rather, every) human soul, including Bede’s, could be figured as Anima,
as at least grammatically feminine. And there is, after all, neither male nor
female with God—except, of course, in so far as the bridal metaphor’s power
differential designates Christ as the Bridegroom (Sponsus) and human souls
(male or female) as Brides (Sponsae). However it may be read, this final turn
remains a queer moment in the text. If virginity disrupts temporality by
subverting history and genealogy, as Æthelthryth’s story suggests, perhaps
temporality (or, more exactly, transcendence of temporality at the end of
time and history) troubles gender and sexuality as well by blurring gender
difference in transcendental, eternal monastic virginity.
44 Thornbury, Becoming a Poet, terms “spectral communities” those networks of literary

influence from which poets derive their vocabulary and on whom they model their style. On
a similar construct of literary aff inity as a form of artif icial kinship, see Lisa M. C. Weston,
“Where Textual Bodies Meet: Anglo-Saxon Women’s Epistolary Friendships,” in Friendship in
the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age, ed. Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandidge (Berlin and
New York: De Gruyter, 2010) 231–46; “Conceiving the Word(s): Habits of Literacy among Earlier
Anglo-Saxon Monastic Women,” in Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Hull Dialogues,
ed. Virginia Blanton, Veronica O’Mara, and Patricia Stoop (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 149–67;
and “Saintly Lives: Friendship, Kinship, Gender and Sexuality,” in Cambridge History of Early
Medieval English Literature, 381–405.
45 Something similar happens in Bede’s poem De die iudicii, in which the speaker’s elegiac
voice traces a transition between exile in this world/time to virgin community in eternity.
Significantly here, too, the figures of flowers mark that transition.
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Watt, Diane. “Literature in Pieces: Female Sanctity and the Relics of Women’s
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Medical Discourse
8 Monaðgecynd and flewsan
Wanted and Unwanted Monthly Courses in Old English
Medical Texts
Dana M. Oswald
Abstract
This essay discusses the Old English remedies for menstruation, placing
early medieval texts in conversation with contemporary controls exerted
over women’s reproductive bodies by both politics and medicine. By
examining not only the presences that contribute to our understanding
of early medieval women’s bodies in the medical tradition, but also the
absences, this essay considers the potential experience of ordinary and not
extraordinary women, who grappled with the dangers of reproduction and
a medical tradition that could offer little practical help for gynecological
concerns. While the medical texts themselves are a part of the dominant
patriarchal textual tradition, the medical needs invoked by the remedies
offer a pinhole view into the lives and experiences of women.
Keywords: medicine, remedies, menstruation, reproduction, Old English,

women
The title Our Bodies, Ourselves, published by the Doctor’s Group in 1970, was
meant to “emphasize women taking full ownership of their bodies.”1 The
1 Note: I am indebted to the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of
Wisconsin, for the time its fellowship program granted me to begin research on this project, and
to my colleagues within the Institute for their generous intellectual support and community,
and my own department and college for supporting my research. I am grateful to the Society
for Feminist Scholarship in the Middle Ages, and particularly to my writing group sponsored
by this organization, including Kathryn Maude, Claire Jones, and Roberta Magnani. I am also
grateful to Christine Voth, who graciously shared both her forthcoming editions and inspiring
conversation, and to Robin Norris, Robyn Malo, and Dana Roders, who assisted my research.
Our Bodies Ourselves, History, accessed June 15, 2017, http://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/history/.
doi: 10.5117/9789463721462_ch08
226 Dana M. Oswald
book itself grew from women’s negative experiences with male physicians,
as executive director Judy Norsigian notes: “Part of why (the booklet) got off
the ground is because women wanted to change this kind of environment
in which what women had to say, where what women reported about their
own experiences, could be so readily discarded….”2 Our Bodies, Ourselves
openly discussed taboo topics, including menstruation, birth control, and
abortion. Indeed, the ideology of the book is encapsulated by its 1973 Preface,
which states:
When we first started talking to each other about this, we found that old
expectations had nudged most of us into a fairly rigid role of wife-and-
motherhood from the moment we were born female. Even in 1969, when
we first started the work that led to this book, we found that many of us
were still getting pregnant when we didn’t want to. It was not until we
researched carefully and learned more about our reproductive systems,
about birth control methods and abortion, about laws governing birth
control and abortion, and not until we put all this information together
with what it meant to us to be female, that we began to feel we could truly
set out to control whether and when we would have babies.3
Our Bodies, Ourselves was a revolutionary book whose aim was to give women
access to knowledge about their bodies and the systems that regulated them,
attempting to leave aside shame and taboo, and to advocate for personal
control over reproduction and thus control over the shape of one’s own life,
as well as one’s own body.
Our Bodies, Ourselves attempted to give back to women the control over
their reproductive bodies that perhaps they held, to at least some degree,
before men became the primary medical caregivers (and not just the produc-
ers of medical texts) for women’s reproductive health. It is a text that gives
women access to knowledge about their own bodies, wishing to demystify
natural but often culturally abjected processes. Our Bodies, Ourselves was a
work that attempted to reshape the gynecological medical system, a system
controlled and dominated by men from at least the fourteenth century
in England, when midwives were replaced by surgeons. Although female
2 Jackie Wilson, “From Filthy Trash to Iconic Resource: Our Bodies Ourselves at 40,” CNN,
October 5, 2011, accessed June 15, 2017, http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/05/health/our-bodies-
ourselves-40th-anniversary/index.html.
3 http://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/history/preface-to-the-1973-edition-of-our-bodies-
ourselves/, accessed June 15, 2017.
MONAÐGECYND AND FLEWSAN 227
midwifery persisted and evolved, the division between learned men and
experienced women both preceded and succeeded the shift from midwife
to surgeon.4 Women’s expertise in questions of gynecology and fertility was
being subsumed and controverted in England long before the fourteenth
century.5 Although they were likely the primary facilitators of childbirth
in early medieval England, midwives are absent in the medical texts, the
Lacnunga and the leechbooks. We might think of Our Bodies, Ourselves as
the successor of the unwritten book early medieval midwives might have
produced, had they perpetuated knowledge through textual means. Such
a book might not have offered efficacious practices, any more than other
medical texts of the time, but it would likely have offered a clearer view of
the practical concerns of women and the means by which these concerns
were addressed.
Medical texts like the Lacnunga and the leechbooks present women’s
bodies only in extremis and exclude almost entirely the experience of
childbirth, suggesting its provenance in the world of women practitioners.6
Simultaneously, though, these texts show us a subset of women’s desires
in regard to their leaky bodies: their desires to stop potentially excessive
menstrual periods, and their desires to stimulate missing menstruation.
These desires, invested as they are in questions of fertility and reproduction,
4 See Monica Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in
Pre-Modern Gynaecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) and Peregrine Horden. “What’s
Wrong with Early Medieval Medicine?” Social History of Medicine 24, no. 1 (2009): 5–25. Christine
Voth, in this volume, also discusses the rise of women’s medicine beginning in the thirteenth
to fourteenth centuries.
5 Kontoyannis and Katsetos suggest that women are the primary practitioners of women’s
medicine until the move in the Enlightenment to turn midwifery from “a ‘mystery’ to a ‘science’”;
Maria Kontoyannis and Christos Katsetos, “Midwives in Early Modern Europe (1400–1800),” Health
Science Journal 5, no. 1 (2011), 32–36, 32. However, Jane Sharp’s 1671 The Midwives Book suggests
the shift was well underway prior to 1690. See also Adrian Wilson, The Making of Man-Midwifery:
Childbirth in England 1660–1770 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Lisa M. C.
Weston, “Women’s Medicine, Women’s Magic,” Modern Philology 92, no. 3 (1995), 279–93; and
Karen Jolly, “Medieval Magic: Definitions, Beliefs, and Practices,” in Witchcraft and Magic in
Europe, ed. Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2002). See also Erin Sweany, in this volume.
6 Medieval people, like contemporary ones, did not experience gender as this simple male/
female binary, but rather existed in the world in a range of ways, and in bodies that may or may
not have fit neatly into binaries or social and even medical expectations. The medical texts,
however, rely on a system that groups all bodies into a single gender category, mon, or specifically
indicates that certain remedies, rarely, are meant for female bodies. In this chapter, I use the
language employed by the medical texts, which relies on a gender binary of male/female and
man/woman. The texts use this language, but I do not wish to suggest that this binary is either
real or universal.
228 Dana M. Oswald
also reflect men’s desires for women’s bodies. Such systems of written,
learned expertise made men experts on women’s bodies and consequently
constructed women as either ignorant inhabitants of their own reproductive
bodies or dangerous practitioners of folk medicine (at best) and witchcraft
(at worst), while simultaneously requiring them to manage the regular, but
also textually invisible, care of women’s bodies. Therefore, this is an essay
about absence—about both presence in absence, and absence in presence.
In a literal way, this essay is concerned with the nature of presence and
absence in the same sense as medieval women and practitioners were; it is
concerned with what to do when a menstrual period is present—in some
cases, far too present—but also with what to do when a period is absent,
along with all the attendant concerns over causes and consequences of
the absence of menstruation. This is an essay concerned with the silencing
of women, with the diminishment of their voices and practices, and with
the domination of their bodies and desires (for origin and otherwise). The
treatments in the leechbooks specific to menstruation, either provoking or
preventing it, exhibit the male/textual desire to exert control over women’s
reproductive bodies, and, in the absence of their voices but the presence of
their textual bodies, the desire of women to claim control of their actual
bodies.
A primary absence in the tradition of medical writing is indeed the
absence of the figure of the midwife, whether the role merits consideration
as professional, or merely by local practice, expertise, or reputation. There
must, we presume, have been midwives. M. L. Cameron addresses this
problem explicitly, saying:
I have described the physician as “he,” because there is no evidence that

women practiced medicine. Yet it is most unlikely that Anglo-Saxon
society differed in this respect from most others and that there were
no women practicing some form of medicine. Surely there were women
midwives and village women gatherers of herbs and wise in their use
and women learned in charms and amulets. But there is not a shred of
evidence for their existence.7
7 M. L. Cameron, Anglo-Saxon Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 22.

Audrey Meaney reframes the category and identifies these women instead as “cunning women,”
affiliating them with magic and setting them in opposition to the dominant religious tradition,
in Anglo-Saxon Amulets and Curing Stones, British Archaeological Reports 96 (Oxford: BAR,
1981), 249. Monica Green, too, argues against the presence of women in the field of gynecology,
marking their attendance upon women as separate from this learned medical approach; see
Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine. She has critiqued the bifurcated idea of the birthing
We have no early medieval English descriptions of a midwife’s work; no

stories of birthing queens assisted by women called midwives; no lawsuits,
even, against midwives. Despite the deficit of women healers in the medical
tradition, we have one small indication of their presence: they have a name
whose rarity indicates both an acknowledgment of their function and also
the desire to overwrite or exclude it in describing most medical reproductive
practices. The Old English word for midwife, byrþþinen or beorþorþinen,
female servant for birthing, appears in only three places in the corpus of
Old English writing, and only one of these is in the medical tradition.8 We
might then think that the word for “midwife,” like the word for “womb,” is
one that is either erased or ignored as irrelevant to the learned and liter-
ate world.9 However, the fact that it appears at all—and specifically in a
chamber as a women’s space invaded by men, and suggests of medieval medicine more generally
that “Female medical practitioners can be shown to exist, but they were almost always practising
alongside or in competition with males”; see “Gendering the History of Women’s Healthcare,”
Gender & History 20, no. 3. (2008), 487–518, 495.
8 This word occurs once in the Old English Herbarium (OEH), once in The Old English Prudentius
Glosses, as an equivalent to the Latin word obstetrix, and in Genesis, according to the Dictionary
of Old English Web Corpus, compiled by Antonette diPaolo Healey with John Price Wilkin and
Xin Xiang (Toronto: Dictionary of Old English Project 2009), accessed January 5, 2018, https://
tapor.library.utoronto.ca/doe/. OEH offers a remedy for genital itching and pain with a specific
emendation to women, suggesting that the common practice of poultice application should be
“do hyre man fram hyre byrþþinene” (made for her by her midwife), in Hubert Jan de Vriend,
ed. The Old English Herbarium and Medicina de Quadrupedibus, EETS o.s. 286 (Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 1984), 123.2. In this remedy, nothing of the recipe itself is changed. The only
variation is who makes and offers the compound and treatment. There is nothing notable or
out of the regular scope of treatment in this recipe; many other remedies call for the laying on
of poultices to the genitals, with no specification that a midwife should perform this action. Of
note in the Genesis occurrence is the potential female authorship of the Junius 11 manuscript,
suggested by Mary Dockray-Miller: “This sort of accurate depiction of babies and mother in
the Junius 11 maternity illustrations implies an illustrator intimately familiar with babies and
their needs … I would like to suggest in addition that the manuscript may have been produced
by as well as for women,” and further, “The drawings of mothers and babies do not show that
the illustrator of Junius 11 was a woman; they do force us to question the scholarly community’s
unthinking assumption of the maleness of the creators of the manuscripts.” See Dockray-Miller,
“Breasts and Babies: The Maternal Body of Eve in the Junius 11 Genesis,” Naked Before God, ed.
Benjamin Withers and Jonathan Wilcox, (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2003),
250, 251.
9 The absence of this language is discussed in greater depth in my book in progress, Old English
Maternal Bodies. Wilfrid Bonser notes some linguistic alternatives as well: “The Anglo-Saxon word
for childbirth, beorþer, also means a foetus. It occurs in such phrases as beorþor-cwelm, meaning
maidservant or midwife. The phrase cild-hama, meaning child-covering, or the womb, occurs
occasionally in glossaries”; Bonser, The Medical Background of Anglo-Saxon England (London:
Publications of the Wellcome Historical Library, 1963), 264. However, I have found only two
occurrences of “beorþor” or any variant spelling, and found that the phrase “beorthor-cwelm”
230 Dana M. Oswald
medical text—suggests that midwives were likely a part of the medical

tradition in early medieval England, whether or not the role was “professed
and acknowledged.”10 This division, between the learned physician and
the midwife, marks a division, too, for women; under the guidance of the
first, the woman is depicted as obediently subject to a system of authority
and shockingly ignorant of the processes of her own body, whereas with
the potential of the invisible alternative, the midwife, a woman might be
part of a system of knowing through experience, wherein, just as with Our
Bodies, Ourselves, she might be able to manifest some control over her own
reproductive experience, destiny, and practices.11
The textual tradition offers us a presence for understanding medieval
medicine—it is, after all, all that we have—but it, too, is a presence consti-
tuted by absence. Our understanding of early medieval English medicine
comes primarily from manuscripts London, British Library, Harley 585 and
London, British Library, Royal 12. D. xvii, which, respectively, contain the
Old English Herbarium (OEH), the Medicina de Quadrupedibus (OEM), the
only appears once, and only in the Oliphaunt Old English glossaries, according to the online
corpus (intriguing, as Bosworth-Toller defines cwelm as “destruction, death” and beorþorcwelm as
“a dead birth, a miscarriage, an abortion”; see Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online, ed.
T. Northcote Toller et al., comp. Sean Christ and Ondřej Tichy (Faculty of Arts, Charles University
in Prague, 2014), accessed January 5, 2018, https://bosworthtoller.com/.) Cildhama, at least, does
seem to mean womb, but occurs only eight times and only in glossaries.
10 Michael Wright, “Anglo-Saxon Midwives,” ANQ 11, no. 1 (1998), 3–5, 4. Wright here examines
the linguistic evidence in light of its source material, noting that while it seems unlikely that
women were not attended by other women during birth, we do not have enough linguistic
evidence to argue for a professional class of midwives: “It is reasonable to assume that Anglo-Saxon
women giving birth were attended by other women. What is not clear is whether this attendance
was given on an informal basis, or whether there was a group of professed and acknowledged
midwives … Linguistic evidence cannot resolve this uncertainty, but it certainly does not seem
to point to the existence of a group of professed midwives” (4). In this volume, Voth offers a
strong possibility for female physicians and practitioners.
11 I am aware of the dangers of this kind of dichotomy and posit it here as part of a system of
presence, which we have access to, as opposed to absence of evidence with regards to alternative
medical practices. As Green suggests of medieval women’s medicine, “it is neither a story of
women’s unfettered control over knowledge of their bodies nor of deliberate male attempts to
eradicate that control”; “Gendering,” 493. She convincingly argues here for the division of spheres
in thinking about the roles of facilitators and the notion of women’s control over reproduction:
“I argue for the need to set the history of women’s healthcare into a larger nexus of analyses:
the history of midwifery needs to be part of the history of both medical professionalisation and
women’s healthcare generally, not treated as an isolated topic, while the history of contraceptives
and abortifacients needs to be set into larger questions of demographic history—whatever
emotions or motives we would like to see at play in any individual woman’s decision to limit or
disrupt her fertility, her decisions also had an impact on society as a whole”; “Gendering,” 488.
Lacnunga, Bald’s Leechbook (BLB), and Leechbook III (LBIII).12 These texts
include a range of remedies and medical information that derive largely,
although not exclusively from ancient sources, and which are universally
acknowledged to be “bad medicine,” as David Wootton has argued.13 Peregrine
Horden adds that “most techniques were transmitted orally and through
clinical experience. The role of texts was limited and oblique, even in the
most literate settings.”14 So the texts that we have, that tell us everything
we know of early medieval medicine, are not only inefficacious at best
and dangerous at worst, but also likely far removed from actual practices
of care, not only in terms of who practiced medicine, but also how they
practiced it. The remedies we read are a cipher; that is, they reveal something
about medieval medicine and bodies and practices, but what is it that they
12 Quotations from the OEH and OEM are from de Vriend, ed. The Old English Herbarium, EETS
o.s. 286. Unless otherwise noted, translations of OEH are from Ann Van Arsdall, ed. Medieval
Herbal Remedies: The Old English Herbarium and Anglo-Saxon Medicine (New York, Routledge,
2002); translations of OEM are from Maria D’Aronco and John P. Niles, Anglo-Saxon Medical
Texts, Volume I: The Old English Herbal, Lacnunga, and Other Texts, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval
Library (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, forthcoming). Texts and translations, unless
otherwise noted, of LBIII are from Debby Banham and Christine Voth, eds. and trans., Old
English Medicine in British Library, Royal D. xvii, Anglo-Saxon Medical Texts, vol. 2, Dumbarton
Oaks Medieval Library (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, forthcoming). Other edi-
tions and translations consulted include Thomas Oswald Cockayne, Leechdoms, Wortcunning,
and Starcraft of Early England: Being a Collection of Documents, for the Most Part Never before
Printed, Illustrating the History of Science in this Country before the Norman Conquest (London,
Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1864); J. H. G. Grattan, Anglo-Saxon Magic and
Medicine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952); Edward Thomas Pettit, A Critical Edition of the
Anglo-Saxon Lacnunga of BL MS Harley 585 (unpublished dissertation, King’s College London,
1996). For an excellent overview of these texts and their manuscript contexts, see Cameron,
Anglo-Saxon Medicine. Cameron suggests that not all medical practitioners would have been
religious; laymen also seem to have practiced medicine, and this might explain why so many
texts were translated from Latin to Old English: “If laymen were physicians, they must have been
reasonably well educated, as surviving medical documents draw generously on Latin medical
texts and give ample evidence that they were intended to be manuals for practicing physicians
and that they were so used. Perhaps it was because lay physicians could not be expected to be
proficient in Latin that there was so much translation from Latin medical works into English. But
there is equally good evidence that physicians were members of religious orders” (19). Certainly
some religious women, like the nuns of Whitby in the late seventh century, were involved in
medical care as well.
13 David Wootton, Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2007). Horden writes: “Let us concede that early medieval medicine did not
work,” suggesting that we are better served by not only consider biomedical efficacy, but also
“therapeutic success,” focusing on a patient’s beliefs regarding treatment, and allowing for
more complexity beyond whether a treatment works or not (most commonly not). See Horden,
“What’s Wrong,” 20.
14 Horden, “What’s Wrong,” 18.
232 Dana M. Oswald
reveal, if not how medicine was practiced on actual medieval bodies? They
reveal beliefs about bodies, beliefs informed by earlier traditions and by
the religious status of the scribes and compilers of such manuscripts; about
practices that might or might not be taking place in monasteries serving as
infirmaries; about cultural practices of exclusion and abjection.15 They are
a record of some forms of belief about women’s bodies, providing at once
evidence of men’s beliefs about women’s bodies and evidence of women’s
bodies. That is, they offer representations of actual, and not exceptional,
early medieval women, in the sense that we normally understand women
present in the tradition to be exceptional. The concerns of the women as
reflected by remedies are both ordinary, in their implied ubiquity, and
extraordinary, in what they reveal about the possible control by women
over their own bodies.
The majority of remedies are for ordinary ailments—headaches, stom-
achaches, earaches, toothaches. Despite the imminent danger presented by
childbirth, the most common subject of remedies in relation to women’s
bodies is menstruation. Indeed, menstruation is enormously important; it
is indicative of the health of a woman, of her status in regard to conception
and childbearing, and of her safety after birth. Menstruation is of concern
both in its presence and its absence, as well as in its quality and duration.
The textual focus on menstruation instead of childbirth reveals a concern
with the reproductive viability of women, leaving the actual processes of
childbirth up to (textually absent) midwives. The primary medical concern
with women’s bodies is about controlling and harnessing their flow in
service of fertility. It is a cultural benefit for women to be able to produce
children; indeed, ensuring regular menses is a basic component of treatment
for infertility. And yet, embedded in the language of “provoking flow” is a
notion of control over reproductive potential; such a remedy might be used
to hamper as well as to promote fertility. These medical texts, written and
read by men, offer knowledge to promote fertility and attempt to regulate
and dominate women’s bodies and that which they produce. But even as such
learned texts silence the voices of women by overwriting actual practices
and bodies with textual ones, they cannot fully efface the desires of women,
which are not always consistent with the desires of the patriarchal systems
they inhabit. Through their attempts to promote and harness women’s
15 R. A. Buck suggests a male author for the leechbooks: “There are a number of linguistic clues
throughout the Anglo-Saxon Leechbooks that identify men, rather than women, as the writers
and compilers of the medical treatises.” See “Woman’s Milk in Anglo-Saxon and Later Medieval
Medical Texts,” Neophilologus 96, no. 3, 467–85, 469.
fertility by controlling menstruation, the medical texts also, paradoxically,

indicate the potential for women to regulate their own menses and fertility
according to their own desires.
Menstrual Terminology in Medical and Penitential Texts
Despite the fact that half of the adult population of early medieval Eng-
land menstruated, the language for this function appears, for the most
part, only in two genres: the medical texts and the penitentials, with rare
appearances in other religious texts. That such a mundane occurrence
appears so rarely demonstrates the taboos with which it is associated, as
well as the narrow worldview of authors. Menstrual taboos, unsurprising
though they may be, and dangerous to the lives of women today in many
parts of the world, account for much of this occlusion. In a surprising way,
however, menstruation allows more space for women in the Old English
literary tradition, rather than less.16 In a textual tradition that rarely features
women at all, menstruation specifically allows women to appear in both
the medical texts and penitentials, rather than being subsumed under the
general category of man.17 Their menstruation is what separates their bodies
from men’s bodies and requires thoughtful consideration of regulation of
space and access. While the medical texts figure all bodies as the generic
male body in most remedies, remedies for menstruation, by their very
nature, can only be about women.18 So, too, are rules regulating behavior
of menstruating women in penitentials specific to only this category of
person. Within both genres, almost all of the language used to describe
menstruation applies also to blood flow in more general terms: this is not a
question of what menstruation is called, but rather if it has its own discrete
name. Despite women’s ownership of this biological function, the language
for the function is tucked tidily inside the language for general bleeding:
there is no name that differentiates menstruation from any other kind
of bleeding. Therefore, menstruation functions as a present absence in
16 Research focused explicitly on the subject, however, is extremely limited. While menstruation
appears in discussion for both genres, little scholarship takes it as a primary subject. One of the
only pieces to do so is Charles T. Wood, “The Doctors’ Dilemma: Sin, Salvation, and the Menstrual
Cycle in Medieval Thought,” Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies 56, no. 4 (1981): 710–27.
17 Indeed, even the longest poem in Old English, Beowulf, which features several female
characters, only includes the speech of a single named woman.
18 The standard male body as the medical body is still a problem in contemporary medicine
and one which continues to endanger the lives of women.
234 Dana M. Oswald
these texts; it is named, but does not merit its own unique name. It can be
discussed, but primarily through the framework of the familiar category
of bleeding that might happen to any body.
The medical texts compress the category of menstruation, both through
its organizational annexing as a subset of general blood flow, and the narrow
range of language for menstruation. They most often deploy the terms
monaðgecynd and flewsan. Monaðgecynd occurs thrice in the corpus of Old
English literature.19 Flewsan, a broader term meaning a discharge from any
part of the body,20 occurs thirty-five times, most frequently in the OEH. An
alternate spelling, fleusa, is exclusive to the Vindicta Salvatoris, and refers
to Christ’s healing of the bleeding Veronica.21 Veronica’s troubles are never
19 This term occurs only in LBIII and is defined only by its Latin referent, menstruum, in the
Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, suggesting an authorial discomfort, perhaps typical
of its nineteenth-century origin, with the term and also the function it describes. As we work
to de-colonize the field of Old English studies, as well as to make a space for studies of women
and gender, it is important to note the origin of many of the tools that have served the f ield
since the nineteenth century. Bosworth-Toller is an indispensable research tool for scholars, but
like many of the volumes in the Early English Texts Society (EETS) and editors and translators
like Cockayne, it is complicit in the nationalistic, white supremacist, patriarchal rhetoric of its
time. Thanks to Adam Miyashiro for contextualizing the colonial history of EETS in his talk
“Race, White Supremacy, and the Middle Ages,” International Congress on Medieval Studies,
Western Michigan University, May 13, 2018. These tools actively efface and misrepresent certain
elements of texts, as with my examples in this section, which demonstrate a squeamishness
about women’s bodies that in some cases make it difficult to determine the actual nature of a
text or manuscript. We must use these tools with awareness, and replace them when they no
longer serve us. The new Dumbarton Oaks series on medical texts is a prime example of this
much-needed action. The DOE’s ongoing work will also continue to promote these important
changes.
20 According to the Dictionary of Old English Online Corpus, the term occurs approximately
35 times. The DOE offers six definitions: 1. General flow/eye maladies; 2. “Excessive discharge of
semen”; 3. “In women, excessive flow of blood or other discharge from the reproductive organs”;
4. Flux from the belly/diarrhoea/dysentery; 5. “Referring to the woman diseased … for twelve
years”; 6. Lust. Most of these definitions cite a single occurrence; only the definitions specific
to menstruation (5 occurrences listed from 2 texts) and flux from the belly (3 occurrences listed
from 2 texts) offer multiple occurrences, suggesting that though the term itself is a general one,
it is used most frequently in reference to menstruation. See Dictionary of Old English: A to H
Online, ed. Angus Cameron, Ashley Crandell Amos, Antonette diPaolo Healey et al. (Toronto:
Dictionary of Old English Project, 2016).
21 There is a fascinating connection between Veronica’s own bleeding, and the tradition of
her veil, upon which Christ’s face becomes imprinted through its own production of fluids.
Mary Swan notes that Veronica is cured of a “haemorrhage”; see “Remembering Veronica in
Anglo-Saxon England,” in Writing Gender and Genre in Medieval Literature, edited by Elaine
Treharne (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002), 19–40, 23. Two of the three occurrences in the text
emphasize that this bleeding has taken place for twelve years, connecting her to the biblical
story of Jesus’s healing the bleeding woman; J. E. Cross, Two Old English Apocrypha and Their
spelled out precisely, although her particular malady (twelve years of flewsan)
affiliates her with a perpetual state of uncleanness, thus making her touching
of Jesus and consequent healing especially remarkable. Veronica is the only
named woman in the Old English corpus whose menstruation is explicitly
mentioned, and for her, it appears only because it is a fundamental part
of religious narrative that precedes the early English text.22 The emphatic
phrase, blodryne, or “blood-coursing,” occurs only once in the medical texts in
reference to menstruation, in the OEM, referring elsewhere to nosebleeds.23
Of all these terms, only monaðgecynd is specific to menstruation, and its
occurrences are both rare, and limited to a single text (LBIII).
Despite the limited language for menstruation in medical texts, they
represent menstruation as a natural process and are concerned with its cor-
rect functioning; penitential texts, however, use language that emphasizes
the taboo nature of menstruation. Language for menstruation appears
in the penitentials to delimit the spaces women can occupy when they
menstruate. Specifically, menstruation disallows women in the penitentials,
particularly those of Theodore, from communion.24 The Old English word
for menstruation in this more penitential/confessional context is monaðadl,
and it appears four times. Bosworth-Toller effaces the referent of the term,
generalizing it to mean “a disease that occurs at intervals of a month,”
implying that any person might experience such a disease, while all of the
Manuscript Source: The ‘Gospel of Nichodemus’ and ‘The Avenging of the Saviour,’ with contributions
by Denis Brearley, Julia Crick, Thomas Hall, and Andy Orchard, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon
England 19 (1996), 249–93. Voth offers a brief but compelling reading of the Veronica tradition
in her essay in the present volume.
22 And, as Swan notes, she is removed from one of the three extant versions of this text
altogether; “Remembering Veronica,” 34.
23 De Vriend, OEM, 2.3. OEM uses the term “blodryne” five times, with the other four occur-
rences referring to general bleeding, or, most commonly, nosebleeds. It seems to also occur
in the gospels, referring to the story of Veronica. It occurs a total of 21 times in searches of
the corpus of the Dictionary of Old English. Cockayne refuses to translate this phrase, and
instead uncharacteristically chooses to use Latin in his translation of the Old English, saying
“ut menstrua fluant” instead; Leechdoms, 333. Indeed, when this phrase appears in reference
to nosebleeds, he has no compunction about translating it into English as “blood running”;
Leechdoms, 347, 349 (twice in the same passage), and 353. A Thesaurus of Old English suggests
monaðseoc as an alternative term for menstruation, but the idea of moon-sickness, though perhaps
originally grounded in the connection between monthly cycles and emotional instability, is not
fundamentally connected to menstruation, nor is it experienced solely by women. Animals and
humans are treated for it in the remedies. See Thesaurus of Old English, accessed January 9, 2018,
http://oldenglishthesaurus.arts.gla.ac.uk/category/?type=search&qsearch=menses&word=me
nses&page=1#id=1846. It does not appear in any medical texts as referring to menstruation.
24 Stefan Jurasinski, The Old English Penitentials and Anglo-Saxon Law (Cambridge: Cambridge
236 Dana M. Oswald
occurrences of it are explicitly specific to menstruation. Of these terms

for menstruation, only monaðadl implies a disorder, connecting the idea
of monthly with adl, meaning “a disease, pain, a languishing sickness,
consumption, morbus, languor.”25 In the penitentials¸ menstruation is
configured as an illness in need of treatment, a disease that only women can
experience. Women’s monthly ejections from confession and communion
result not from a regular biological function, the language suggests, but
rather from a defect, a disease.26 Alternatively, medical texts are usually
treating menstrual disorders, but the language they use to identify and
respond to such disorders does not qualify regular menses as inherently
disordered.
Compared to the penitential texts, the medical texts seem positively
egalitarian; they do not condemn women for the functions of their bodies,
despite the limitations of the language they employ. While it is useful to
read these medical texts in tandem, it is important to reiterate their differ-
ences, and the ideological problem of assuming that because they use the
same or similar language, they universally refer to the same processes or
problems. Like the language they use for the treatment of women’s bodies,
the texts that include these remedies are not uniform in their content, style,
or origins. Lacnunga is known for its local and superstitious remedies.27
Alternatively, the remedies of the OEH and the OEM are often formal and
formulaic, although OEM seems to be less fussy about women’s bodily func-
tions, as it offers several remedies for menstrual problems, using variations
in language for women’s conditions and offering remedies not present in
the other manuscripts for afflictions having to do with conception, sexual
pleasure, and virility. The remedies in LBIII are often, perhaps mistakenly,
25 Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online, s.v. “monaðadl.” Accessed January 5, 2018.

26 Heide Estes discusses menstruation as a disability in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, noting,
“Menstruation, like hunger and fever, is the result of original sin but is not sinful in itself. Yet
the text’s repetition that menstruation constitutes ‘untrymness’ creates a special category of
infirmity particular to women, beyond the general states of hunger, etc. The characterization
of menstruating women as ‘untrym’ suggests that the way later medieval as well as modern
societies structurally disable women is also operative in Bede’s account of menstruating women.”
(“Untrym” means weakness or illness.) See Estes, “Menstruation, Inf irmity, and Religious
Observance from Ecclesiastical History, in Medieval Disability Sourcebook: Western Europe, ed.
Cameron Hunt McNabb (Santa Barbara, CA: punctum books, 2020), 342.
27 Pettit calls Lacnunga “the foremost extant repository of Anglo-Saxon medical folklore,”
and notes that despite its reputation as superstitious, its contents would have offered at least
some benefit to those who used it: “by my conservative reckoning at least ten percent of the
herbal remedies prescribed may have been of some physiologically therapeutic effect for minor
afflictions.” See Critical Edition, 140.
affiliated with magic and paganism.28 The most mysterious are the remedies
from BLB, because only the chapter headings for this subsection of the text
remain.29 These texts may or may not represent the same ailments in their
varying deployments of language in reference to menstruation. The semantic
grounds of these phrases often overlap and contradict, making it difficult
to decipher, in some cases, whether the remedy is meant to soothe pain,
to provoke a menstrual period, to purge a miscarried fetus or placenta, to
prevent conception, or to provoke an abortion.
It is important to acknowledge and value the indeterminacy of these texts
and the complications of their language rather than to seek absolute answers;
to do otherwise is to ignore our situatedness in our historical moment, and to
violate the conditions of the texts themselves. Although each of the medical
texts offers a similar set of remedies responding to women’s ailments, each
manuscript works according to its own logic and range: for example what one
genre, or even one text understands as “unclean” might have little to do with
another genre’s or text’s use of the same word. This makes collating remedies
and being certain that they address the same symptoms difficult, even when
they do use the same language. In the following sections, I have grouped
remedies according to basic functions of stopping or starting menstruation;
the texts in which they exist do not necessarily conceive of their remedies as
participating in these particular and discrete categories. They do, however,
use formulaic language that indicates these as the desired results. However,
within each of these two categories, a variety of complications or conditions
informs the need for the result: a woman might wish to stop or start her flow
for a variety of reasons, and so remedies that suggest the same result do not
necessarily treat the same condition. Just as the language for menstruation
is varied and often vague, we must understand the categories for treating it
as similarly pliable. By tracking patterns across texts and by leaving these
categories broad enough for flexibility and variation, we can witness not
only what these texts choose to represent, but also what they choose to leave
out. Their patterns of absence and presence, of naming and not naming,
allow us unprecedented access to early medieval English understandings
of the bodies of women.
28 Voth’s work in progress, “The West Saxon Leechbook,” will suggest a more complex interpreta-
tion of the material found in this text.
29 H. M. Cayton notes that BLB is particularly important in that it is an “English compilation,”
which does not derive from a single Latin source; particularly crushing is the loss of the “long
section of forty-one ‘crafts’ concerning gynaecology” that remain, tantalizingly, only in the
chapter headings, in Anglo-Saxon Medicine with its Social Context (PhD dissertation, Durham
University, 1977), 40.
238 Dana M. Oswald
Remedies for Stopping Flow
The story of Veronica, who bled for twelve years, offers some insight into
what a woman might be seeking in the remedies aimed to stop flow, often
identifiable through the formulaic phrase wið wifa flewsan (for a woman’s
flow). However, these remedies seem to treat only the symptom, bleeding,
without articulating or identifying the cause of such bleeding in many
instances. Without addressing a cause, these remedies cannot have been
successful, and might indeed in a number of cases caused harm. What causes
might a woman have for such bleeding? A likely culprit is menorrhagia
(heavy menstrual bleeding), a condition that affects approximately thirty
percent of the current population of women of reproductive age and is
linked to a number of resulting and underlying conditions from anemia to
polycystic ovaries.30 The persistence of such conditions across time means
that medieval women may have been affected at a similar rate, although
Harlow and Campbell note that
[h]istorically menstruation was a relatively infrequent event in a woman’s

life as a considerable proportion of reproductive life was spent in preg-
nancy or lactational amenorrhoea. As societies move from high fertility
to low fertility, women spend a greater and greater proportion of their
reproductive lives menstruating.31
While the remedies are not precise about the kinds of bleeding that require
cessation, they do specifically address the need to staunch blood flow after
childbirth. Never mentioned in remedies for stopping flow, however, is
miscarriage, despite the likelihood of its high frequency.32
General remedies for stopping flow operate on the principal of a drying-up
poultice, which of course would do little to address any of the potential
causes for excessive or unwanted flow. For instance, one remedy from the
OEH suggests that sitting on a boiled plant will dry up the liquid with vapor,
30 Siobán D. Harlow and Oona M. R. Campbell. “Menstrual Dysfunction: A Missed Opportunity

for Improving Reproductive Health in Developing Countries,” Reproductive Health Matters 8,
no. 15 (May 2000), 144.
31 Harlow and Campbell, “Menstrual Dysfunction,” 143.
32 See Cameron, Anglo-Saxon Medicine, on the difficulties of early medieval pregnancy: 5, 17,
182. Sally Crawford notes the likelihood of prolonged breastfeeding as a response to the high
infant mortality rate, which would in turn have an impact on a woman’s fertility and ability to
produce multiple children, in Childhood in Anglo-Saxon England (Stroud: Sutton Publishing,
1999), 74.
“æþme heo gewrið,”33 while another calls for use of pounded nettle mixed
with honey spread onto wet wool: a practitioner should “smyre ðonne þa
geweald mid þam læcedom ond syþþan hyne þam wife gesyle, þat heo hyne
hyre under gelecge, þy sylfan dæge hyt þone flewsan beluceð” (smear the
genitals with the medication. Then give it to the woman, so that she can
lay it under her. That same day, it will stop the bleeding).34 Both remedies
employ the same kind of metaphor for the desired outcome: the former
claims to bind up or even wrap around (gewrið) the “moisture,” by means
of a hot vapor, whereas the latter proposes to “lock up” (beluceð) the flow as
quickly as possible. While the outcome of the remedies here is clear: binding
up or locking up the flow, it is only the symptom, the flewsa, that they treat,
rather than any clear cause. These remedies therefore articulate and confirm
notions about women’s leaky bodies as vessels in need of locking or binding
up by external forces, those provided by men as authors of these texts, who
will find the means of “locking” and “binding,” an apt metaphor for their
treatment of women’s lives as well as their bodies. Through this kind of
linguistic mastery, women’s bodies, overflowing with liquids, are set up as
out of control and in need of authoritative male intervention. It is only by
means of this figure of knowledge and authority that such an unruly body
can be constricted and made to behave.
Like the vapor that locks up a leaky body, smoke, too, can be applied to
a body exhibiting an excessive flow of blood. This remedy in LBIII is meant
to resolve the problem of a flow that is to swiþe (too strong) by applying
smoke to the genitals (performed while the patient is clothed) with coal-
heated horse dung: “Gif wife to swiþe offlowe sio monað gecynd genim
niwe horses tord, lege on hate gleda, læt reocan swiþe betweoh þa þeoh
up under þæt hrægl þæt se mon swæte swiþe” (If a woman’s menstruation
flows out too much: Take fresh horse manure, put on hot embers, let it
smoke profusely between the thighs up under the clothing, so that the
person sweats heavily).35 As in the previous example, the focus remains on
the symptoms rather than the cause. What is unclear is whether the smoke
is meant to dry up the liquid, like the vapor discussed previously, or, via a
connection with the humors, the sweating of the person being treated is
meant to reconfigure the balance of the body as a whole. Here, only the
33 De Vriend, OEH, 175.2. Van Arsdall translates this as “It takes away all the smell of the fluid
from her,” whereas I read “æþme heo gewrið” to indicate binding up/drying up by means of a
vapor, particularly in relation to the similar remedy for nettle, and a lack of concern here with
smell, and more with staunching blood flow, although the two might well be related.
34 De Vriend, OEH, 178.6. Translation by Van Arsdall.
35 Banham and Voth, LBIII, 3.38.3.
240 Dana M. Oswald
problem—too much blood—is stated, while both the cause and the solution
remain absent in the remedy. In other words, the remedy offers a remedy
without a clear sense of the desired resolution, and focuses only on the
problem and the method. Further, this treatment is clearly both unpleasant
and unproductive, marking a woman’s body as thoroughly abject and foul.
Such a treatment serves to reiterate and perhaps even exacerbate the abject
nature of the reproductive female body.
In contrast to this smoking treatment, the medical tradition’s response to
postpartum bleeding is quite different, indicating a distinction in treatment
relative to cause, and suggesting that the previous treatments would not
have been used universally to stop all kinds of gynecological blood flow.
After all, in a practical sense, it might be difficult but also dangerous to
treat the genitals of a woman who has just given birth with smoking horse
dung. Instead, this postpartum remedy calls for the eating and drinking
of herbs, and in both texts, again, uses the same language: “Gif blede to
swiþe æfter þam beorþre nioþowearde clatan wyl on meolce sele etan and
supan þæt wos” (If [she] bleeds too much after the birth: Boil the lower
part of goosegrass in milk, give to eat and sip the liquid).36 Notably, this
remedy responds to complications from childbirth—a topic that is barely
addressed in the medical texts, despite high rates of death for women in
childbirth at the time.37 Its language parallels that of the previous remedy,
with the bleeding being to swiðe, and like the previous remedy, it offers
no clear articulation of the expected result. Will the bleeding stop? Slow?
Lighten? Will this remedy offer pain relief or somehow staunch a hemor-
rhage? This remedy responds to a frequent problem but offers frustratingly
little information about the results it might produce to help a woman in
urgent need. The entire category of the dangers of childbirth is reduced to a
single remedy, and one that is nondescript about the causes of postpartum
bleeding. The presence of this single and brief remedy indicates the absence
of any sort of detail regarding what happens in and after childbirth in the
medical texts at large. Its presence articulates an awareness of the dangers
presented by the process of giving birth, but its brevity indicates the absence
of the myriad solutions we must assume were attempted during many actual
births during this time period.
36 Banham and Voth, LBIII, 3.37.6.

37 See Duncan Sayer and Sam D. Dickinson, “Reconsidering Obstetric Death and Female
Fertility in Anglo-Saxon England,” World Archaeology 45, no. 2 (2013), 285–97. I do not wish to
suggest that early medieval English communities were not deeply concerned about the deaths
of women in childbirth, but rather that the remedies do not offer a response to this clearly
widespread social and medical problem.
Taken as a whole, these remedies to stop flow, in essence, wish to make

absent the all-too-troubling presence of unwanted and excessive bleeding.
They respond to situations that might well have been life-threatening for the
women experiencing them, and yet they are outnumbered in the medical
texts, by far, by more daily maladies like nosebleeds and upset stomachs.
The ubiquity of such mundane ailments explains the variety and range of
treatments for them. While there is only one remedy that offers care for
a woman bleeding excessively after giving birth, there are no fewer than
four remedies in just OEM aimed specifically at “arousing” sexual desire in
men.38 Women were dying at high rates in childbirth, likely as a result of
postpartum bleeding; that the medical texts address the problem so rarely
and so inadequately demonstrates not only a textual absence of learned
knowledge to care for women, but also a rhetorical centering of the needs
of the male body above those of the female. While their care may have
fallen to unnamed midwives, the problem of death in childbirth extended
beyond the female sphere and impacted the social body at large, and so its
absence in the medical texts, texts which are rarely efficacious at any rate,
is notable. Men’s bodies, desires, selves are fully present in the medical texts,
and women’s, with a few exceptions, are absent.
Remedies for Provoking Flow
If the reasons a woman might wish to stop a flow are obvious, the reasons
for starting one become more complicated. We, perhaps correctly, might
assume that a woman who seeks to provoke menstruation does so because
she wishes to regulate and promote her fertility by restoring a missing or
irregular cycle. Certainly a woman’s fertility contributes to her value in
early medieval England, a value that is further fetishized by the context
of nutritional deficiency and disease in this time and place.39 However, it
would be wrong to suggest that all menstrual remedies ultimately support
patriarchal systems by means of ensuring fertility; some suggest a more
radical function. Pregnancy is not always welcome, and the desire to provoke
38 De Vriend, OEM, 1.10, 3.13, 4.10, and 12.14. This is a clear predecessor for the current investment
in men’s virility and the lack of medical coverage for women’s health in America.
39 Women’s wergild is based on their age and thus their capacity to marry and bear children.
Cameron, in Anglo-Saxon Medicine, argues that the lack of dietary iron would have affected
childbearing women most of all, as they require twice as much iron as men (17), and notes the
ubiquity of Malaria and also of rickets, which would have contributed to anaemia and negatively
impacted fertility (10).
242 Dana M. Oswald
a flow might have as much to do with avoiding pregnancy as with enabling

one. Although the remedies are rarely explicit about the reason for provoking
a flow, their patterns of language may help distinguish the problems they
are meant to address. In the remedies, the menses may be stirred, 40 or
gecigde, called forth or summoned, or they may be identified as absent,
forstanden. 41 Remedies that do not identify a symptom may be just doing
their due diligence in offering some remedies for women, but that absence
might be more revolutionary. Intentionally or otherwise, remedies that offer
women a means of provoking a flow of blood, or that suggest that such a thing
can be done, disclose a truth about women’s lives. Even if such a remedy
might not be efficacious, it shows that a woman might desire to determine
for herself not only when she menstruates, but also, as a direct result, when
or if she reproduces. It is the coded language—the very vagueness—of these
remedies that allows them to exist in texts authored by religious men and
supported by the fundamental symbol of the patriarchy, the church. Such
remedies leave space for the presence of a class of women operating some
control over their own fertility, stirring or summoning not just a regular
cycle, but perhaps preventing or dislodging conception.
In this way, textual occlusion and absence might serve to promote or
depict women’s desires. By leaving out details, remedies do not, and do not
need to, specify why a woman might wish to summon her menstrual cycle.
Indeed, most remedies provide little detail, serving as part of a long list of
potential uses for herbs, particularly in OEH, as is the case for Bishop’s weed:
“eac hyt ða monoðlican forð gecigeþ” (also it summons forth menses). 42
Similarly, OEH proposes the use of shepherd’s purse, St. John’s wort, and
German iris to “stir up” menses, with iris treating even long-term amenor-
rhea: “hit þæra wifa monoliðlican astyreð þeah hy (ær) langæ forlætene
wæron” (it stirs the women’s menses, even though they might have been
absent for a long time). 43 The vagueness of this final phrase might be an
attempt to treat a wide range of women, from those with nutritional deficits,
to those who might have been nursing one, or even a series of children
over a number of years thus suppressing menstruation, even to those,
the remedy seems to suggest, past menopause. If we read this remedy as
indicative of the category of “stirring” as a whole, it suggests an affiliation
40 De Vriend, OEH, uses variations of the phrase wið wifa monaðlican astyrigenne (for the
stirring of a woman’s monthly [discharge]) at 150.1, 152.1, 158.2, 164.1, 165.4, and 173.1.
41 This word appears only twice in the corpus, both in LBIII in reference to the same remedy.
DOE defines this word, specific only to these occurrences, as meaning “to stop, cease.”
42 De Vriend, OEH, 164.1, translation mine.
43 De Vriend, OEH, 158.2.
with promoting or restoring fertility. Alternatively, it would be unorthodox,

although not impossible, to infer that menses forlætan (absent) might be
those missing due to an unwanted pregnancy, particularly given the wide
semantic range of the word, which here suggests interruption of a natural
flow, but elsewhere means “to allow,” “to release,” or even “to abandon.”44
Therefore, forlætan is a word that can be its own opposite (both allowing
and abandoning), and so it expresses rather poetically the problem of the
present-absence of a menstrual cycle, one that a woman either might wish
returned so that it might soon be absent, or one that a woman might just
wish returned. The absence of expressed motive leaves space for a range
of possibilities that may or may not have been understood by the men
writing these texts.
The language in the OEM remedy, which calls for a more elaborate ritual,
implies even more strongly a contraceptive impulse, informed further
by its rhetorical placement following a remedy using similar methods to
“cleanse” or purge a woman. 45 Whereas previous remedies invoke stirring
of the menses by compounds, this one sounds more like a command for a
rush of blood, and it relies on the woman herself to perform these ablutions
proactively and independently:
Eft gif heo wylle þæt ðæt hyre blodryne cyme to, cembe eft hyre heafod
under morbeame, and þæt feax þe on þam cambe cleofige, somnige and
do on anne telgran ðe sy adune gecyrred, and gesamnige eft; þæt hyre
byþ læcedom.
(Again, if she wants to have her flow back: let her comb again her head
under the mulberry tree, and gather the hair that sticks to the comb and
place it on a twig that is turned downwards, and afterwards gather it;
this will be her remedy.)46
44 DOE, “forlætan,” where “to let, allow” is the f irst def inition. This remedy is listed under
def inition 17, “to leave off, cease, stop; break off, interrupt.” Most other remedies from the
leechbooks appear under definition 19: “to cease to contain, let escape, release (confined fluid);
to let, shed (blood); release, discharge (bodily fluid acc.); 19.a. to unleash, let flow (bloodshed
acc., upon the earth, to and dat.).” These other remedies clearly invoke the flowing of blood,
rather than restraining it, as the DOE suggests for three remedies including 72.1 in BLB, and OEH
26.3. 15. “to abandon, renounce.”
45 DOE def ines this use of the verb as “to cleanse or purge of bodily impurity,” and the use
of geclænsode in the same remedy as to be “purged of bodily impurity, of menstrual blood, or
afterbirth.” As a comparison, a person may also be similarly “cleansed” of demonic possession.
46 De Vriend, OEM, 2.03. This remedy also appears to be referenced in the chapter headings
for BLB.
244 Dana M. Oswald
It is the woman who must locate the tree, and must comb, gather, and place
her own hair. Her remedy is entirely contained in her own body and action,
in contrast with most other remedies that seem to be compounded for or
enacted upon women. The terminology here and in BLB, blodryne and
blodsihtan respectively, suggests something rather more gushing than a
simple return to a regular cycle, suggesting if not cleansing, then something
like it: something like abortion. 47 These remedies that wish to provoke
menstruation, then, may be more complex than just attempting to assist
and facilitate conception. They may be, in part, about forestalling it.
While these remedies leave open the potential for reproductive control
by what they do not say, only one remedy explicitly comments on what
might be expelled from a woman’s body with a returned menstrual cycle,
establishing its function as an abortifacient.48 The OEH lists a second function
for bishop’s wort, beyond its use to “call forth” menses; by means of pounding
the bishop’s wort with wine or honey, and consuming it or applying it to
the genitals, it will both “stir” the menses, and lead out tudder, offspring:
“Wyþ ða monoðlican to astyrigenne … hyt þa monoðlican astyreþ ond þæt
tudder of þam cwiðan gelædeþ” (For the stirring of menstruation … It stirs
menstruation and brings out the fetus from the womb). 49 This remedy is
explicitly NOT about helping with a difficult labor, or expelling a deadboren,
stillborn, child. It declares its purpose not once, but twice: to stir up menses.
While giving birth (to either a living or dead child) leads to bleeding, it does
not lead to bleeding of the monaþlican, monthly sort. Rather, if a tudder is
being brought out from the womb in the service of reviving a monthly flow,
it might well be as a result of either circumventing conception or causing
abortion.50 This remedy demonstrates the potential of remedies, particularly
47 DOE Online def ines both as “flow of blood, bleeding, haemorrhage,” with ryne meaning
“running,” and sihtan meaning “draining”; Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online,
s.v. “sihtan.” Accessed January 5, 2018. The desire for cleansing might well be motivated by
patriarchal notions of cleanness, but a woman might also seek a different kind of cleansing.
Voth also discusses remedies for abortion in this volume.
48 There is a specif ic category of remedy to help women purge or cleanse themselves of
“deadboren” or stillborn children. I address this category in my book in progress, as it is not
explicitly connected with menstruation.
49 De Vriend, OEH, 165.4. Translation mine.
50 Conception at this time was believed to be an extended process, culminating at forty
days when the fetus was “ensouled.” I discuss this at greater length in my work in progress.
Perhaps John M. Riddle refers to this remedy when he writes, “Anonymous recipe manuscripts
written and copied at monastic scriptoria contain abortifacients (as menstrual regulators) and
contraceptives. A ninth- or tenth-century manuscript has a prescription for cleaning the belly
of a woman who cannot purge herself,” in Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World
to the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 104.
those provoking flow, to serve women in ways that might be contrary to

the desires of the patriarchy at large, hidden in plain sight and resting on
the abject nature of menstruation.51
All of the medical manuscripts offer remedies that might be understood
to be abortifacients, but the coded language offers just enough doubt, just
enough absence to adhere to religious and legal prohibitions against abortion.
OEH’s previous remedy may clarify the desired effect of a remedy contained
in LBIII. Like this remedy, the remedy in LBIII suggests a return to menstrua-
tion connected to the prevention of conception or pregnancy: here, the
woman’s flow is depicted as having been “obstructed” by something—“Wiþ
þon þe wifum sie forstanden hira monaþgecynd…” (In case a woman’s
menstruation is obstructed…)52—perhaps by a tumor, but also perhaps
by a fetus. The indeterminacy serves to open rather than foreclose the
possibility. This elaborate remedy calls for boiling, drinking, bathing, and
then bathing while drinking, but all of this must take place in alignment
with the woman’s expected menstrual period: “Þu scealt simle þam wife
bæþ wyrcean and drenc sellan on þa ilcan tid. Þe hire sio gecynd æt wære
ahsa þæs æt þam wife” (You must always make the bath for the woman and
give her the drink at the same time as [her] menstrual period might be. You
must ask this time of the woman).53 This remedy requires a great deal of
51 I do not suggest that the men using or writing this book fully understood or even recognized
the potential of this remedy. Rather, I suggest that it demonstrates the possibility of reproductive
control for women, couched in language just vague enough and just uncomfortable enough to
occlude its potential from those who might see it as abject.
52 Banham and Voth, LBIII, 3.38.1. In its entirety: “Wiþ þon þe wifum sie forstanden hira
monaþgecynd wyl on ealað hleomoc and twa curmeallan sele drincan and beþe þæt wif on hatum
baþe and drince þone drenc on þam baþe hafa þe ær geworht clam of beor dræstan and of grenre
mucgwyrte and merce. And of berene melwe meng ealle to somne gehrer on pannan clæm on
þæt gecynde lim and on þone cwið nioþoweardne þonne hio of þam baðe gæþ and drenc scenc
fulne þæs ilcan scences wearmes and bewreoh þæt wif wel and læt beon swa beclæmed lange
tide þæs dæges do swa tuwa swa þriwa swæþer þu scyle.” (In case a woman’s menstruation is
obstructed: Boil in beer brooklime and two centauries, give to drink, and bathe the woman in
a hot bath, and drink the drink in the bath. Have already made for you a poultice of beor dregs
and of green mugwort and celery and of barley flour, mix all together, stir in a pan, apply to the
genitals and below on the vagina when she gets out of the bath, and drink a cupful of the same
cup, warm, and wrap the woman up well, and let her be poulticed like that for a long time of
the day. Do this twice or three times, whichever you need to.)
53 Banham and Voth, LBIII, 3.38.2, translation mine. Banham and Voth, in their work in progress,
translate it: “You must always make the woman the bath and give her the drink at the same
time, so that the nature/birth æt ware ahsa of it to the woman,” indicating the difficulty of the
passage that they are working to untangle. Pollington renders this last part thus: “at the same
time as would be normal for her [menstruation] ask this [time] of the woman,” in Leechcraft,
394. Marijane Osborn notes, in reference to a different remedy, that “only the emmenagogue
246 Dana M. Oswald
labor, and very specific elements that must occur in a particular order and
for an extended duration. A woman cannot undertake this on her own; she
requires an expert to assist her, but she must also be a participant, obedient
to the terms of the remedy.
However, the remedy relies on the woman’s knowledge of her own body.
She has to know and provide specific information in order for the timing
to be correct and the remedy to succeed. Put simply, the physician needs
to know the timing of the woman’s cycle, so that he can try to provoke her
cycle at the correct time—not too early, and, most importantly, not too late.
If a woman is missing a period (and she knows when it ought to arrive), then
it seems likely that she would be pregnant. If her periods are irregular or
missing, then she would be unlikely to know when her period should begin.
Logically, then, this specific provocation of menses seems to be about ending
or preventing a potential or progressing pregnancy, rather than repairing
an irregular cycle. It also suggests a woman’s knowledge of her own body.
These remedies—few of which would have been safe or expedient—exist
in a medical tradition that fundamentally excluded women from its practice.
Likely, they were never really used to treat women, since the vast majority of
women would have turned to other women for such knowledge and healing
practices. Instead, these remedies reflect beliefs and ideas about women’s
bodies and reproduction, some of which derive from classical tradition,
some from local practices, and all framed by the people in institutions
that produced such texts. They participate in the textual construction of
women’s bodies, but they are so incomplete, so strange, that, even in the
fiction of the bodies they seek to treat, they cannot and do not circumscribe
women’s agency over their own unruly bodies. Even so, some of the practical
concerns and requirements for and of women’s reproductive bodies exist
within these pages, pushing both transcriber and translator to interact with
unfamiliar body parts, distasteful effluvia, and taboo procedures. Medical
texts include information meant to regulate not only menses but potentially
also reproduction. Whether or not the men who transcribed and used
these texts understood this language, and whether or not these texts were
ever used in England to treat women, the texts both set forth and conceal
the potential for women to control their own reproduction. The trick of
remedies is that they are not individual; they exist to serve not one person,
brooklime would have effect on expelling the placenta,” suggesting its known efficacy for this
function; Osborn, “Anglo-Saxon Ethnobotany: Women’s Reproductive Medicine in Leech Book
III,” in Health and Healing from the Medieval Garden, ed. Peter Dendle and Alaine Touwaide
(London: Boydell, 2008), 151.
but to serve a class united by similar suffering; they respond to the needs
of women at large and turn individual maladies into a community bound
by common physical experience. These remedies give us a small window
into the experience of a woman attempting to regulate her reproductive
potential in a textual culture that rarely acknowledges women and that
depicts their bodies even more rarely.
Manipulating Maternity via Menstruation
Because of the dangers of giving birth in the early Middle Ages, attested to
by the disproportionate number of young women in graveyards, it is strange
that so few remedies related to childbirth exist. We know the likelihood of
maternal loss from the remaining cemeteries;54 motherhood did not come
easily or safely to many women in this period. Indeed, Sayer and Dickinson
suggest that “Everyone would have known someone who had, or would, die
in childbirth.”55 Maternal mortality, then, was rampant, and dangers to both
mother and child were significant, and yet there are few remedies for help
in childbirth. The only remedy in the tradition with attention to difficulty
in labor is difficult to comprehend, suggesting a woman bathe herself in
parsnip emulsion prepared for her by a practitioner.56 This remedy captures
the relationship between physician and laboring woman, demonstrating
the remarkable disconnect between the world of childbirth and the world
of written and learned medicine.57 The physician boils this plant, and then
turns everything over to the woman, with no real instructions, except an
indication that doing as she is told will allow her to “be healed.”
What this remedy reveals is that in childbirth and delivery, while women
likely were not going it alone, they were not attended by the men who wrote
54 Andy Boddington notes “another notable feature, common in many archaeological popula-
tions, is higher female mortality during early adulthood; this no doubt associated with the high
infant mortality and together they represent the strains and hazards of pregnancy, childbirth
and childrearing;”; “Raunds, Northhamptonshire: Analysis of a Country Churchyard,” World
Archaeology 18, no. 3 (February 1987), 417.
55 Sayer and Dickinson, “Reconsidering Obstetric Death,” 293.
56 De Vriend, OEH, 82.1: “Feldmoru/pastinaca siluatica: Wið þæt wifmen earfuðlice (earfoþlice)
cennen genim þas wyrte þe we pastinacam siluaticam nemdun, seoð on wætere, syle þonne þæt
se man hyne þær mid beðige, he bið gehæled.” (Wild carrot or parsnip: If a woman has difficulty
in giving birth, take the plant we call pastinaca siluatica, simmer it in water, and give it so that
she can bathe herself with it, she will be healed.)
57 As Voth notes in this volume, there are no medical texts for a typical pregnancy, suggesting
the reliance of women on other women during childbirth, rather than on physicians (see pp. 000).
248 Dana M. Oswald
the manuscripts, as the manuscripts have little to offer by way of knowledge

about typical births.58 While those men participated in dialogue about the
maintenance of monaðgecynd and flewsan, they had very little of use to offer
women. They wrote about women’s bodies in vague and general terms, using
men’s bodies as the default in the medical texts as a whole, and, on the part
of both authors and early translators, revealing an unsurprising Kristevan
abjection of women’s leaky bodies. Yet these texts offer us access to some
kind of middle ground with regards to the “real” lives of early medieval
English women. They are not graveyards, which give us actual bodies to be
interpreted using their locations, placements, and surroundings. They are
not literary texts, which give us specific characters who function primarily
in relation to their narrative or rhetorical purposes (which is not to say that
medical texts do not operate by means of their own rhetorical purposes).
Medical texts seek to reveal truths about kinds of symptoms, and therefore
about the kinds of bodies that experience those ailments. While the truths
about these bodies and their disorders are framed by the worldviews of the
texts’ authors, editors, and scribes—a penumbra that is useful and valuable
under its own terms—the bodies they describe are bodies like our own. They
are bodies that bleed, or don’t bleed; bodies that conceive, or cannot; bodies
that give birth, or die trying. There is a truth in the nature of the bodies, even
as they are mediated by the limitations of the text, and there is a truth in the
pattern of solutions presented by these texts. The truth is that all bodies, not
just women’s, are unruly, but that the rules of the social order decide which
problems merit attention, whether or not the solutions they provide work.
These texts leave midwives and childbirth absent; they invoke but never
name abortion; they give methods for starting or stopping menstrual periods
but use vague language to do so. They allow us to see what women might
want for their bodies, but they leave the motives frustratingly absent. But
in that absence is possibility, a place where women, through absence, might
constitute their own desires and regulate their own reproductive destinies.
In a culture wherein women’s bodies are mediated at every turn by men’s
legislation, mores, and judgment—today’s culture, that is; a culture wherein
600 people line up around a North Carolina women’s clinic to say that
abortion is a “man’s issue,”59 and wherein black women in the United States
58 See Voth, in this volume.

59 “Christian Group Protests Outside North Carolina Clinic, Calls Abortion ‘a Man’s Issue’,”
Women in the World, New York Times Live, June 13, 2017, accessed June 15, 2017, http://nytlive.
nytimes.com/womenintheworld/2017/06/13/christian-group-protests-outside-north-carolina-
clinic-calls-abortion-a-mans-issue/.
are dying in childbirth at higher rates than twenty-five years ago60—as much
as yesteryear’s—can we say that women’s medicine is or has ever been about
women’s bodies? In other words, were women better off before women’s
health was part of patriarchal systems of medicine? Does representation
matter, or does existence inside the record fundamentally turn women into
objects to be read to, as well as read by, the men who dictate the rules of
culture at the expense of women’s agency? Perhaps it is better to be covert,
to fly below the radar and to escape the policing of and diminishment
by patriarchal culture. Or perhaps it is time to insist on embracing the
knowledge and experience of women, even when we must find presence
in absence. This essay and indeed this volume seek to inject and exalt what
has been abjected, and to amplify the voices and experiences of women,
both historical and at present.
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9 Dangerous Voices, Erased Bodies
Reassessing the Old English Wifgemædla and Witches in
Leechbook III1
Erin E. Sweany
Abstract
Entry 57 of Leechbook III is a brief, vague remedy that is ambiguous but has
a long history of being interpreted as a reference to witchcraft. This essay
assesses how potential female voices and bodies in the Old English medical
corpus have been interpreted as agents of harm by modern scholars, based
on thin philological evidence. This essay relies on a combination of lexis,
syntax, and context to interpret a thinly attested Old English illness label
and propose a previously overlooked female patient in Leechbook III. The
case of wif gemædla serves as a reminder that scholarship of early medieval
English medicine continues to rely heavily on nineteenth-century transla-
tions and editions, which has left us with a legacy of outdated editorial
and cultural assumptions that now require updating.
Keywords: medicine, charms, women’s bodies, women’s voices, mental

health, Leechbook III
1 Versions of this research have been presented at Seafaring: An Early Medieval Conference
on the Islands of the North Atlantic (University of Denver, 2016) and the Medieval Academy of
America Meeting (University of Toronto, 2017), where I received much valuable feedback. Thanks
go to the Mellon Foundation and Vassar College for jointly funding the postdoctoral fellowship
which allowed me to finish this article; and also to the editors of this volume who provided
invaluable editorial assistance. I would also like to thank Grant L. Simpson for consulting with
me and allowing me to review unpublished research about the history of Bosworth-Toller. This
assistance allowed me to identify the dictionary editions needed for significant parts of this
essay. I would further like to thank my research assistant Amanda Herring for her careful help
in proofreading and bibliography review. Finally, great thanks are due to colleagues Emily
Houlik-Ritchey, A. Arwen Taylor, and Cynthia A. Rogers for their tireless feedback on many
drafts of this article.
doi: 10.5117/9789463721462_ch09
254 Erin E. Sweany
It seems hardly wise therefore to argue backwards from sixteenth-century

conditions beyond this date … The chain does not seem strong enough, and we
should be at fault in breathing life over it from the anecdotes of post-conquest
writers, those men who, looking back over the past, wove into history from their
own experience and knowledge many legends of evil women and demonical arts,
until at last mediæval historians were themselves unable to disentangle fact
from fantasy, and hitherto innocent men and women of earlier generations were
condemned for dabbling in black arts which they cannot have known.
Jane Crawford, 1963 (114–116)
Wiþ wif g[e]mædlan g[e]berge o[n] neahtnestig rædices moran þy dæge ne mæg þe
se gemædla sceþþan (Against/in the case of wif gemædlan, partake of a radish
root at night-fasting, [on] that day the gemædla will not be able to injure you).2
Leechbook III, c. 875–900 (Entry 57)3
Entry 57 of Leechbook III, above, is a brief, vague remedy recommending

that someone (it is not clear who) consume a radish to remedy something (it
is not clear what). The source of the ambiguity stems from the challenges
of assessing how the affliction that the charm claims to remedy—wif
gemædla—should be best understood. Wif (woman) is clear enough, of
course, in purely philological terms, but its semantic relationship to gemædla
is not. And we do not have a clear sense of what gemædla means, occur-
ring as it does only twice in the Old English corpus (in this remedy and in
the table of contents of Leechbook III, pointing to this entry). 4 It has most
often been speculatively understood as a kind of speech. Combined with
wif, the affliction has been interpreted over the centuries as a harmful
vocal performance made by a woman, often even referred to as witchcraft.
Considering the philological murkiness of wif gemædla and the anti-feminist
nineteenth-century environment in which it was initially defined, it is past
time for a reassessment of Entry 57.
2 Transcribed from C. E. Wright, ed., Bald’s Leechbook: British Museum Royal Manuscript 12
D. Xvii, Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile 5 (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1955).
Bracketed letters indicate the expansion of a manuscript abbreviation. Translations are my own
unless otherwise indicated.
3 The manuscript text includes regular numbering of the chapters and my labeling of this
entry as Entry 57 coincides with the manuscript numbering. The numbering is contemporary
with the text, and the body of the text is preceded by a numbered table of contents.
4 The word is nearly a hapax legomenon and only is not by the technicality of it appearing in the
table of contents that copies the opening phrase of the chapter to which it points. Its morphology
indicates that it is the object of the prepositional phrase that begins the remedy and thus is the most
likely affliction label, meaning that it is a key part of understanding Entry 57 as a medical remedy.
Dangerous Voices, Erased Bodies 255
This article reviews the history of translation of (wif)gemædla and the

cultural and textual contexts of Entry 57, assessing how potential female
voices and bodies have been interpreted by both the Old English medical
corpus itself and by nineteenth-, twentieth-, and even twenty-first-century
scholars. A considerable number of translators have clung to the figure of a
hostile woman based on thin philological evidence. To read wif as the agent
of harm in this remedy necessitates that we understand the radish compo-
nent as an edible preventative against, or treatment for, a human causing
harm to another human. This would be unprecedented in the Old English
medical corpus. The closest analogous texts ask for protection against
(mostly cattle) theft. Even those charms do not claim to prevent harm but
are primarily asking for the thief to not be able to hide their actions, making
the charm potentially restorative rather than preventative. Rejecting the
wif as the agent of harm on these contextual grounds, I therefore make a
joint philological, historicist, and contextual case for understanding the
wif of Entry 57 instead as the patient. The case of wif gemædla serves as a
potent reminder that the lexical evidence informing philological inquiry
is always imbricated in cultural values and interpretations. Scholarship of
early medieval English medicine continues to rely heavily on nineteenth-
century translations and editions, which (as in the case of wif gemædla’s
long interpretation as a woman’s harmful or malicious speech) has left
us with a legacy of outdated editorial and cultural assumptions that now
require painstaking updating.
The Many Ambiguities of Entry 57
Let us begin with the relationship between wif and gemædla, which (as I
indicated above) is murky. Syntax and morphology suggest that the words
form a compound, since it is common for a modif ier in an Old English
compound (wif, in this case) to be uninflected. If wif were not a modifier in
a compound but rather a stand-alone reference, its syntactic placement in
the remedy—coming just after a preposition and before that preposition’s
object—would be odd. It is thus more likely that wif is a modifier. Past
scholars have usually treated wif as such, but that has contributed to the
interpretation of wif as an agent of affliction (and thus an agential force of
the gemædla).
This view of wif as an aspect of the affliction that Entry 57 is supposed
to treat or prevent has been reinforced by the consistent interpretation
of the þe as necessarily distinct from wif. The þe is read as the patient/
256 Erin E. Sweany
victim who needs to eat a radish to protect themselves from the adversarial
wif(gemædla).5 I contend that these interpretations overlook the possibility
that wif gemædla refers to an affliction of women. Thus, the wif (woman) of
the compound would be a sufferer of gemædla and the þe (you) of the second
independent clause could refer to her. Entry 57 would then be instructing
the wif who is a victim (or at risk) of gemædla to eat a radish, and not a
woman performing some kind of dangerous speech against someone else.
The crux of the mystery of Entry 57 is thus an issue of how wif is semantically
related to gemædla. Grammatically wif could be either the agent or victim
of affliction, however, I argue that culturally it is more likely that she is
the patient.
There are no compelling clues about the nature of wif gemædla elsewhere
in the entry, which has few components. The use of radishes as a cure is
not especially informative. Though radishes are a medicinal food in Old
English, they are not associated with any particular kind of affliction.6 They
are materia medica (the “stuff/materials of medicine”) in cures for various
common aches and pains, damaging bodily humors, vague disorders of the
heart and lungs, worms, and health issues manifesting on the skin (wens
and thick eyelids, for example). Radishes are ingredients in salves and other
medicinal mixtures, and some remedies direct that they be consumed
whole (sometimes with a bit of salt). One remedy against worms calls for
ground radish seed to be consumed in wine.7 Finally, radish is one of nearly
sixty ingredients in a halig sealf (holy salve) that is used in an elaborate
Christian performance to expel the devil from all of a person’s body parts
5 Some editors (such as Felix Grendon, see below) treat the reference as one word (wifgemædla)
and some print two separate words (wif gemædla). There is a notable amount of space between the
words in the manuscript, but as discussed above, syntax and morphology suggest a compound.
However, given the murkiness of the sensical relationship between wif and gemædla (which I will
further discuss below), and the importance of this murkiness in the scholarly history of Entry
57’s interpretations, I will retain the manuscript reading of wif gemædla, not to challenge the
likeliness of the reference as a compound but rather to call attention to the uncertain conceptual
relationship between the compound components. Exceptions to this are made when quoting
editors and translators who have treated the reference as one word.
6 Outside of five glossaries, the only Old English references to radishes (OE rædic, hrædic,
redic) occur in the medical corpus. There are forty-two total references to radishes in the Old
English medical corpus (twenty in Bald’s Leechbook, fifteen in Lacnunga, six in Leechbook III,
and one in the Omont Fragment).
7 Entry 46, by Cockayne’s numbering, in the first book of Bald’s Leechbook. T. O. Cockayne,
Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England: Being a Collection of Documents, for
the Most Part Never before Printed, Illustrating the History of Science in this Country before the
Norman Conquest (London: Longman, Green, 1865), II:114.
and restore the person to health.8 In sum, there is little consistency among
its varied uses to suggest a specific affliction referenced by Entry 57, but it
is equally apparent that there are no clear associations between radishes
and women or between radishes and threatening verbal performances. Yet
despite the semantic ambiguity of the affliction referred to and the rather
all-purpose medical utility of radishes, Entry 57 is consistently interpreted
as instructions for a radish to be consumed against some sort of threatening
verbal performance by a woman—that is, the wif is understood to be an
agent of harm. After reviewing in greater detail the (mis)translation history
of Entry 57, I will offer cultural evidence that supports the understanding
of wif as a patient in need of aid rather than as an affliction.
The Translation History of Entry 57 as Witchcraft
Between 1864 and 1866, T. O. Cockayne published the first editions and
translations of Old English medical manuscripts as part of his three-volume
collection Leechdoms, Wortcraft, and Starcunning of Early England. Within
this work, appended to Bald’s Leechbook, is Leechbook III, which contains
the remedy Wiþ wif gemædlan (Entry 57). Cockayne translates this entry as
“Against a womans [sic] chatter; taste at night fasting a root of radish, that
day the chatter cannot harm thee.”9 While gemædla may or may not refer
to an utterance (a topic I address below), the implications of Cockayne’s
tone must be addressed. Cockayne is consistently dismissive of women’s
speech in his interpretation of Wiþ wif gemædlan, as can be seen in his word
choice of “chatter” (above) and his translation of the table of contents entry
as “against womens [sic] prating.”10 These translations confidently interpret
8 Entry 63 in J. H. G. Grattan and C. Singer, Anglo-Saxon Magic and Medicine (London: Oxford
University Press, 1952).
9 Cockayne, Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England, II:342–43.
10 Cockayne’s edition, the first full edition of Bald’s Leechbook with Leechbook III, is still the
most current, complete published edition with a Modern English translation. There are two
unpublished editions that I am aware of: the 1984 University of Denver dissertation of B. M. Olds
and the digital edition compiled by Brooke Bullock in 2014 as an undergraduate senior thesis.
See B. M. Olds, “Leechbook III: A Critical Edition and Translation” (PhD dissertation, University
of Denver, 1984) and Brooke Bullock, ed., “Leechbook III: A New Digital Edition,” May 2014,
accessed December 30, 2016, http://leechbookiii.github.io/. There is further a forthcoming
edition by Debby Banham and Christine Voth for the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library:
Anglo-Saxon Medical Texts, Volume II: Bald’s Leechbook and Leechbook III: Old English Medicine
in British Library, Royal 12. D. xvii. Wright’s 1955 edition is a facsimile edition and contains no
transcription or translation.
258 Erin E. Sweany
gemædla not only as an utterance but moreover one that achieves nothing of
worth, while simultaneously attempting to effect harm. These two dubious
implications have, in powerful ways, set the tone for the treatment of Entry
57 for over a century.
Cockayne’s misogynistic treatment of women’s voices easily morphed
in later scholarship into an interpretation of the remedy as protection
against witchcraft—which meant that women’s voices in Entry 57 became
understood as a medium for witchcraft. Felix Grendon’s 1909 translation,
like Cockayne’s, relies on an uncertain reading of gemædla as a reference
to a verbal performance, but adds a presumption of superstition. Grendon,
in his 1909 compilation of Old English texts that he classifies as charms, is
the first to explicitly suggest that wif gemædla is a reference to witchcraft.11
Grendon notes that, in regard to wifgemædla, “something like ‘bewitchment’
or ‘spell’ is meant.’” He further titles the entry “Against a Witch’s Spell.”12
This attribution of malicious agency to women, and particularly women’s
voices, that can be circumvented through materia medica represents women
as dangerous, yet controllable with the right kind of knowledge. Certainly
these implications are distasteful to a twenty-first-century reader, but
there is also very little textual evidence to recommend them as accurate.
Grendon’s translation is problematic because it compensates for scant lexical
evidence with which to translate wif gemædla by leaning on an extremely
speculative and misogynistic history of translation of the entry as well as
on faulty context. Grendon’s edition extracts texts from their manuscript
contexts in order to present a catalogue of Old English magical texts, but
this extracting and cataloguing resulted in a reception of each entry in the
edition that is significantly different from how they would have been received
by their contemporary audiences. Without its medical context, Entry 57 is
semantically adrift, and subsequent translations have relied overly much on
anachronistic ideas of early medieval English women, magic, and medicine.
The seductive speculation about women’s malicious voices is relied on
through the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries. C. E. Wright, in
his 1955 facsimile edition of Bald’s Leechbook and Leechbook III, preserves
Grendon’s categorization of Entry 57 as a charm and Grendon’s titling of the
entry (“Against a Witch’s Spell”). Audrey Meaney, in a 1989 article, classifies
11 Grendon classifies Entry 57 as a “charm remedy,” a label which has little to do with form or
performance but rather is applied to remedies “in which superstition is either the most important
or the sole element.” There is no verse or verbal performance elements to the treatment in Entry
57 and so I do not align with Grendon in his labeling of the remedy as a charm. Felix Grendon,
“The Anglo-Saxon Charms,” The Journal of American Folklore 22, no. 84 (1909): 136, 213.
12 Grendon, “The Anglo-Saxon Charms,” 236.
the entry as one of two examples of “black magic” in the medical corpus and
offers a translation of “malicious gossip or backbiting”— a translation quite
like Cockayne’s mid-nineteenth century translation in its acceptance of the
idea that early medieval people were dismissive of, and hostile to, women’s
speech.13 This interpretation of gemædla as an utterance by dangerous,
injurious women, persists. R. A. Buck, in a 2000 article, claims that the
presence of this word in Entry 57 “provides a link to the well-documented
historical tradition of desired silencing of women and the persistent attitude
that women’s talk is idle, complaining, excessive, and bothersome [and even]
pushes the notion a bit further, suggesting the belief of physical harm to the
man as a consequence [of women’s talk].”14 Because scholars like Meaney
and Buck are uncritically relying upon these early translations, they do
not interrogate the accuracy of this stereotype in early medieval English
cultural and medical contexts. While certainly the Christian compilers and
audience of Leechbook III would have been familiar with biblical warnings
about life with contentious women being unpleasant,15 there is no Old
English tradition of verbally contentious women.
The Role of Utterances in Medicine
To further evaluate the likelihood of gemædla signifying an utterance, let

us turn to the role of utterances in the context of Old English medical texts.
Utterances are not represented as dangerous in the medical corpus. The voice
is a powerful tool throughout the corpus as a means of performing charming
and praying to petition for protection and good health.16 Throughout the
medical corpus, voices are presented as performing benevolent formulae,
such as the appeal to powerful plants in the Nine Herbs Charm.17 In this
13 Audrey L. Meaney, “Women, Witchcraft and Magic in Anglo-Saxon England,” in Superstition

and Popular Medicine in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. D. G. Scragg, Audrey L. Meaney, Anthony
Davies, Peter Kitson, and S. J. Parker (Manchester: Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies,
1989), 41–56.
14 R. A. Buck, “Women and Language in the Anglo-Saxon Leechbooks,” Women and Language
23, no. 2 (2000): 49.
15 Proverbs 21:9 and 21:19. The Bible, Douay-Rheims version.
16 Distinctions between charming and praying are quite artif icial. Karen Jolly, “Medieval
Magic: Definitions, Beliefs, Practices,” in Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Middle Ages, ed.
Karen Jolly, Catharina Raudvere, and Edward Peters (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2002), 1–71.
17 Edward Pettit, in the introduction to his edition of another Old English medical text (Lac-
nunga), makes a similar point, remarking that in terms of pagan beliefs and practices, Bald’s
260 Erin E. Sweany
charm, a speaker asks specific herbs for their help because they have power
against many agents of health affliction.18 The verbal formula that expounds
on the herbs’ powers and effectiveness is to be sung over the herbs as they
are gathered, as well as sung over and even into the body of the ill person.
And while certainly utterances are employed in remedies that seem to recall
a pagan Germanic past (the Nine Herbs Charm references Woden), there
are far more Christian than pagan utterances in the medical corpus.19 For
example, one of several entries just in Leechbook III that proscribe Christian
verbal performances is Entry 62, which lists three specific masses that are
to be sung over the materia medica for which the entry calls. The resulting
mixture is then to further be treated to a performance of a litany, a creed,
and the Pater noster.
Gender is a significant aspect of textually conveyed voices in the medical
corpus. While most are either unmarked or male,20 the Old English medical
corpus is also an important source for the powerful voices of women, as
we have seen from work done on the Old English childbirth charms by
Audrey Meaney and Lisa M. C. Weston, who have made particularly valu-
able contributions to the representations of mothering women in the Old
English medical corpus.21 These charms (primarily Lacnunga 161–63) are
remedial and focused on the reproductive functions of a female body and
female-gendered social roles; they are to be performed by women for the
purpose of conception, birth, and childcare.22 They are for se wifman se hire
Leechbook, Leechbook III, and Lacnunga “bear direct testimony only to the benevolent remedial
aspects of this obscure world.” See Pettit, Anglo-Saxon Remedies, Charms, and Prayers from
British Library MS Harley 585: The Lacnunga: Introduction, Text, Translation, and Appendices, 2
vols (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001), I:li.
18 For a discussion of the Old English representation of illness as a collection of foreign, attacking
agents see Erin E. Sweany, “The Anglo-Saxon Medical Imagination: Invasion, Conglomeration,
and Autonomy” (PhD dissertation, Indiana University, 2017), Chapter 1.
19 Pettit reminds readers that “it is difficult to discern ‘purely heathen paragraphs’—there
are (unsurprisingly) many remedies that make no reference to religion, but equally those that
do are either ostensibly entirely Christian … or, where pagan elements may well be present …
they are combined with Christian elements.” Pettit, Anglo-Saxon Remedies, Charms, and Prayers
from British Library MS Harley 585, I:xxxvii.
20 See the discussions of gendered words in the Old English medical corpus in: Buck, “Women
and Language in the Anglo-Saxon Leechbooks,” 44–47; Weston, “Women’s Medicine, Women’s
Magic,” 280.
21 Meaney, “Women, Witchcraft and Magic in Anglo-Saxon England”; Lisa M. C. Weston,
“Women’s Medicine, Women’s Magic: The Old English Metrical Childbirth Charms,” Modern
Philology 92, no. 3 (February 1, 1995): 279–93.
22 For further discussion of women’s medicine in the Old English medical corpus, see Christine
Voth’s and Dana Oswald’s essays in the present volume.
bearn/cild afedan ne mæg (the woman who is not able to nourish her child).
Entry 161 seems to refer to nourishment in the womb and thus is a charm to
prevent miscarriage, whereas 163 may refer to the inadequate production
of breastmilk.23 Weston points out that these charms “turn [the speaker’s]
magical force not outward, as in other charms, but back upon herself.”24
For example, Entry 161 instructs the performer to, among other things, step
over a grave while uttering “Ðis me to bote þære laþan lætbyrde, / þis me
to bote þære swæran swærbyrde, / þis me to bote þære laðan lambyrde”
(This to me [is] a remedy for the painful slow birth, this to me [is] a remedy
for the laborious oppressive birth, this to me [is] a remedy for the grievous
debilitating birth). This is thus unlike the prevailing interpretation of Entry
57 of a woman directing her speech for the harm of others.
The utterances in the childbirth charms, indeed all the utterances refer-
enced by the Old English medical corpus, are protective and curative. And
in fact, Pettit notes that “[h]uman agency [all agency, not just verbal agency]
as the cause of affliction appears rarely in [Old English] medical texts.”25 My
consideration of Entry 57 within its medical context demonstrates that if
it were a medical remedy against a harmful human utterance directed at
another human, as is suggested by the prevailing translations of it, then it
attains a dubious and singular distinction in the corpus, standing alone as
a unique remedy against a unique affliction.26 Our interpretations, it turns
out, have been hampered by a history of labeling powerful women’s voices
as witchcraft. Furthermore, while feminist scholarship of the medical
corpus has focused on the reproductive body, a woman who is presented
as other than actively reproductive is as deserving of empathetic scholarly
treatment and reading as the reproductive female body.
23 Weston, “Women’s Medicine, Women’s Magic,” 288–91.

24 Weston, “Women’s Medicine, Women’s Magic,” 288.
25 Pettit, Anglo-Saxon Remedies, Charms, and Prayers from British Library MS Harley 585,
I:xxxiv.
26 The only possible parallel would be the charm for unfruitful land recorded at the conclusion
of the Old Saxon Heliand in British Library Cotton MS Caligula A.VII This charm is stated to be
a bot (remedy) for land that does not wel wexan (grow well) or has been harmed by dry (magic/a
magician) or lyblac (poison/witchcraft/sorcery). This charm involves the collection and blessing
of sod from a field accompanied by verbal performances. There is a reference to women’s voices
as powerful and potentially dangerous at the conclusion of this charm, but that danger is not
only from women. Rather, the charm concludes with the injunction that the charm be not
overcome by cwidol wif (witty woman) or cræftig man (wise man). It is notable that while cwidol
glosses Latin dicax (eloquent, witty) in three of its four occurrences in the OE corpus, the first
translation offered by the Dictionary of Old English for its other occurrence, in the charm under
discussion, is “jabbering.” Also, this charm is quite elaborate, requiring much more in terms of
performance and ingredients than radish consumption.
262 Erin E. Sweany
Witchcraft in Early Medieval England
Around the year 948, a widow was accused of harming a man and was
drowned in retaliation. An account of an Ailsworth land transfer recounts
that the land had come into the hands of the family of Wulfstan Uccea due
to this accusation and execution.27 While Anthony Davies considers this
to be the only record of an historical witch in early medieval England, it is
a parallel case to wif gemædla in that when you dig further into the record,
its interpretation as witchcraft becomes dubious.28 The recorded facts of
the matter are that a woman, a widow, is drowned after she and her son are
accused of causing harm to a man (Wulfstan’s father) with iron stakes: “hi
drifon [i]serne stacan on Ælsie Wulfstanes feder” (they drove iron stakes into
Ælsie, Wulfstan’s father). Davies interprets this accusation of piercing with
stacan as an accusation of image magic: driving pins into an effigy of a person
to cause harm through the representation of harm.29 Andrew Rabin, in his
edition of the text, repeats Davies’s claim about image magic;30 however,
the Old English does not indicate that there was an effigy involved, only
that there was some evidence as to guilt in the form of a morð (death; that
which causes death; murder) dragged from hire inclifan (her inner chamber).31
Like Entry 57, there is no explicit mention of witchcraft in this record, and
yet it is so easily assumed to be a record of a witchcraft accusation.32 The
27 The source of this charter is the mid-twelfth century London, Society of Antiquaries, MS
60, fols. 54v–55r. The Old English is from the edition in Rabin, “Anglo-Saxon Women Before
the Law: A Student Edition of Five Old English Lawsuits,” Old English Newsletter 41, no. 3 (n.d.):
33–56. Translations are my own.
28 Davies concludes that the other accounts are “little more than literary constructs” motivated
by Anglo-Norman politics. Davies, “Witches in Anglo-Saxon England: Five Case Histories,” in
Scragg et al., Superstition and Popular Medicine in Anglo-Saxon England, 41.
29 Davies, “Witches in Anglo-Saxon England,” 49–50.
30 Rabin also expresses doubt that the widow was genuinely believed to be practicing witchcraft
and wasn’t rather the victim of a land-grab by those more powerful than her. Rabin, “Anglo-Saxon
Women Before the Law,” 43.
31 Rabin implies that there may be a link between the widow and wild beasts when he notes
that “The word inclifan (nom. incleofa) is also that used to describe a lion’s den.” “Anglo-Saxon
Women Before the Law,” 43n6.
32 Davies connects the accusation against the widow and her son to a prohibition in the Old
English Penitential against anyone driving stacan on ænige man (stakes into any man/person);
see “Witches in Anglo-Saxon England,” 50 (Old English qtd from Davies n. 71, which is IV.13
from Raith’s Die Altenenglischen Version des Halitgarschen Bussbuches). The penitential record
presents the strongest case that the widow was accused of witchcraft since the prohibition, while
not mentioning witchcraft or effigies, is, in some penitential records, grouped with entries that
do clearly mention witchcraft. Davies further offers that the drowning of the woman may have
been justice via the “cold water ordeal” wherein an accused person is innocent if they sink in
vagueness of morð invites interpretation and the prevailing interpretations

suggest that the appeal of finding witches has resulted in witches. Carole
Hough, however, sees no barrier to understanding this as an account of
entirely non-magical physical violence perpetrated by a woman.33
Furthermore, if this is a record of a witchcraft accusation, it is important
that this case is not gendered; both the woman and her son are accused of the
violence. The son escapes into outlawry and thus is not necessarily spared
by his accusers. The following review of witchcraft in Old English records
stresses that more care needs to be taken when considering whether an
Old English record might be referring to witches or witchcraft—and, if so,
what these things might have actually looked like to early medieval people.
Witches, witchcraft, and magic are present in Old English texts, but Karen
Jolly warns us against drawing too many conclusions about any actual early
medieval practices since cultural concepts concerning witchcraft and magic
only begin to be systematized post-1100.34 The Old English medical texts
are a product of the period that Jolly terms the conversion period: a time
of intense intermingling of traditions. Ecclesiastical texts collapsed non-
Christian religious practices and pre-medieval magical practices together
as a way of discouraging any non-Christian belief systems.35 Thus it is not
surprising that most of the clear references to witches and witchcraft in
a body of water while bound in ropes and guilty if they float. Davies’s research shows that the
Ailsworth incident took place over a decade before the cold water ordeal is recorded as a form
of trial for any crime, and several decades before it is recorded as a form of trial for practicing
magic. Davies ultimately concludes that “It is possible … that the widow of Ailsworth underwent
the cold water ordeal … It is more likely that she was simply drowned as the charter says” (50).
Since the record states that the widow was taken by a man and drowned at London bridge (rather
than undergoing a trial), Davies considers this case to be more likely a miscarriage of justice,
since the proscribed penalty for witchcraft at the time was far lighter than death.
33 Carole Hough, “Two Kentish Laws Concerning Women: A New Reading of Æthelberht 73
and 74,” Anglia 119, no. 4 (January 2002): 565–66.
34 “Pagan magic, Germanic or classical in origin, merged in condemnatory lists. In all of these
cases, the Christian cosmology is asserted as obliterating, demonizing, or demoting pre-Christian
cosmological structures, while particular folk practices, such as blessing herbs, were adjusted
to fit that Christian cosmology. This paradigm shift resulting from the conversion phase colors
everything we read about popular practice in the early Middle Ages and suggests caution in
making assertions about the actual practice of magic in this period … The post-twelfth-century
world, a period of rapid intellectual change … began to define magic in new ways and to make
distinctions between different kinds of magic (high and low, white and black), definitions that
had far-reaching implications.” Jolly, “Medieval Magic: Definitions, Beliefs, Practices,” 20.
35 See Jolly, “Medieval Magic: Definitions, Beliefs, Practices,” 15; Peters, “The Medieval Church
and State on Superstition, Magic, and Witchcraft: From Augustine to the Sixteenth Century”,”
in Jolly et al., Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, 184.
264 Erin E. Sweany
Old English texts occur in religious texts: primarily, the writings of Ælfric
and the penitential record.
Given that prohibitions against witchcraft were a way of discourag-
ing non-Christian practices, both malicious and benevolent actions get
lumped into this category in religious literature. One section of the Old
English Penitential contains penances for those who use witchcraft to kill, to
encourage someone to love them, or attempt to cure their own children. The
prohibition against a woman curing her child “mid ænigu[m] wiccecræfte.
oððe æt wega gelætan þurh eorðan tyhð” (by means of any witchcraft or
causes [the child] to be drawn through the earth at [cross] roads)36 links
women with medicine and witchcraft, but besides the additional prohibition
that women not cure their children by placing them on the tops of ovens,
the remaining penances have nothing to do with medicine. Christine Voth,
in her essay in the present volume, points out that designating the remedial
practices of women in the penitentials may have been a matter of asserting
social power by the church as the designation “discredited them and their
practices within the eyes of the church, and perhaps their communities.”
Outside of the penitentials, witchcraft and medicine are linked by Ælfric
in a few sermons and homilies.37 In the sermon Passio Sancti Bartholomei,
Ælfric explains that seeking health “æt unalyfedum tilungum oððe æt
awyrigedum galdrum oððe æt ænigum wiccecræfte” (by means of disal-
lowed treatments or by means of cursed incantations or by means of any
witchcraft) is “þam hæðenum mannum gelic” (like those heathen men). By
following this injunction that ill people should only seek their health “æt
his drihtne” (from his Lord), Ælfric confines all other practices, including
myriad practices offered in the extensive Old English medical corpus, to the
realm of heathenism—which is, as we see in Old English penitentials and
the writings of Ælfric, the realm of wiccecræft. However, Ælfric does concede,
in the same sermon, that the use of herbs for healing is acceptable, as they
are allowed by Augustine: “Se wisa agustinus cwæð þæt unpleolic sy þeah
hwa læcewyrte þicge” (The wise Augustine said that consuming medicinal
plants is, however, not dangerous).38 Thus, while some of the practices in the
36 Allen J. Frantzen, “Anglo-Saxon Penitentials: A Cultural Database,” accessed April 25, 2019,

http://www.anglo-saxon.net/penance/index.php.
37 These instances are collected and reviewed in Audrey L. Meaney, “Æfric and Idolatry,”
Journal of Religious History 13, no. 2 (1984): 119–135.
38 Ælfric does warn, immediately following this concession, that we should recall that the
plants have healing power because they were created thus by God and so we should not collect
herbs in any way that acknowledges that the healing power is any but that of God (such as
singing any galdor [“poem, verse, charm, spell, incantation”] over the plant). He thus allows
Old English medical corpus (such as the Nine Herbs Charm) may have been
disallowed in Ælfrician terms, by those same terms not all secular, material
medical practices were disallowed to Christians. Most importantly of all, in
the few instances where medicine and witchcraft are linked, the witchcraft
aims to achieve curative, benevolent goals rather than harmful, malicious
goals. Indeed, Meaney remarks that Ælfric “seemingly deliberately omitted
the possibility of hurtful magic” in his preaching.39
Only a few penitential entries explicitly prohibit verbal performances of
any kind by wifas (women). For example, Entry 28 (Text A) of the Old English
Canons of Theodore warns that “hwylc wif wiccunga bega and þa deoflican
galdorsangas, blinne and fæste an ger and þa [þreo] æfæstenu” (whichever
woman undertakes witching and those devilish incantations, cease [these
practices] and fast for one year and then [undertake] three quadragesimal
fasts). 40 The majority of actions that the penitential entries forbid women
to perform are not verbal. 41 As is the case with witchcraft and medicine in
penitential literature, then, there is not an especially strong link between
witchcraft and verbal performances in Old English sources.
Finally, we should beware a default gendering of witchcraft as feminine
in our interpretations of these sources. While the above penitential example
genders wiccung as a female activity, the prohibitions against wiccung,
wiccecræft, ættorcræft, lyblac, galdorsang, galdorcræft, halsung, and drycræft
are generally not gendered in the Old English corpus but rather are actions
prohibited from the ambiguous, indefinite relative hwa (whoever) or the
universal man (person). No one, not just women, should engage in activi-
ties that seek power, change, or information from non-Christian sources,
that some medical herbal use does not contradict his imperative to seek health only from God.
There is another instance of Ælfric distinguishing acceptable methods of healing in De auguriis,
a sermon that deals quite a lot with the relationship between magic and its relationship to
the devil. In De auguriis, Ælfric seems to distinguish medicine from magic when, after a list
of prohibitions, two of which are seeking information about health from a witch and redress
from illness or misfortune from a witch, he reminds the listener to appeal only to God for such
assistance and that “læcedom is alyfed fram lichamena tyddernysse” (medicine is allowed for
bodily weakness). Ælfric of Eynsham and Peter Clemoes, ed., Aelfric’s Catholic Homilies: Text. The
First Series, EETS s.s. 17 (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 449–50; Ælfric
of Eynsham, Aelfric’s Lives of Saints, Being a Set of Sermons on Saints’ Days Formerly Observed
by the English Church, ed. Walter W. Skeat, trans. Gunning (Miss.) and Wilkinson (Miss.). EETS
o.s. 76. (London: N. Trübner, 1881), 378.
39 Meaney, “Æfric and Idolatry,” 135.
40 R. D. Fulk and Stefan Jurasinski, eds., The Canons of Theodore, EETS s.s. 25 (London: Oxford
41 Some of these prohibited activities involve vocal performances (galdorsang and halsung),
as in Entry 28, but most do not.
266 Erin E. Sweany
and everyone, not just women, might be tempted by these activities.42 An

oft-overlooked article, “Evidence for Witchcraft in Anglo-Saxon England,”
by Jane Crawford (quoted in the epigraph) acknowledges the relatively
ungendered nature of Old English witchcraft: “No particular attention is
directed to the cwidol wif any more than to the cræftig man, suggesting that
as yet the Anglo-Saxons were without the concept of especially evil women
magicians.”43 And Crawford further points out that wiccan and wiccige
do not make genders clear, and that we do not get the clearly feminine
wicce until Ælfric. 44 Old English also makes available a masculine form of
the word: wicca (though it is, admittedly, used considerably less than the
feminine wicce). Additionally, there are other male-gendered words for those
practicing magic besides cræftig man such as dryman and wiglere. Allen
Frantzen concedes that women are not the exclusive targets of witchcraft
prohibitions in penitential literature but ultimately dismisses Crawford’s
claims, asserting that “there is no doubt that in the penitentials women and
not men were expected to have performed these evil acts.”45 I do not agree
with the strength of the latter statement given the rarity of the gendered
specification wif and the clear references to male clerics in sections on love
magic. The manipulative and selfish, although not inherently malicious,
act of gaining someone’s love by means of food, drink, or incantations
is clearly labeled as witchcraft in the Old English Penitential and is also
either ungendered or ascribed to men—the most severe punishments for
concocting love potions are levied on clerical figures (clerics, deacons, and
mass priests), which would have been exclusively male positions.46 While it
42 Anne Lawrence-Mathers and Richard Raiswell and Peter Dendle claim that early medieval
English witchcraft is gendered female. Both claims rely too much seemingly on the authors’ own
sense of what counts as magic rather than any clear early medieval labels of such and both claims
ignore the prohibitions against men in their analyses. See Lawrence-Mathers, “The Problem
of Magic in Early Anglo-Saxon England,” Reading Medieval Studies 33 (2007): 87–104; Raiswell
and Dendle, “Demon Possession in Anglo-Saxon and Early Modern England: Continuity and
Evolution in Social Context,” The Journal of British Studies 47, no. 4 (2008): 738–767.
43 Cwidol wif and cræftig man are from the charm for unproductive farmland, briefly discussed
above.
44 Jane Crawford, “Evidences for Witchcraft in Anglo-Saxon England,” Medium Ævum 32, no. 2
(1963): 106.
45 Frantzen, The Literature of Penance in Anglo-Saxon England (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
46 “Gif hwa wiccige ymbe æniges mannes lufe…gif hit læwede man do. Fæste he healf ger.
Wodnesdagum [ond] frigedagum … Gif hit bið cleric fæste an ger twegan dagas on wican …
Gif he beo diacon. Fæste .iii. ger twegan dagas on wican.” (If anyone use witchcraft in regard to
another’s desire … if a layman does it, he is to fast half a year on Wednesdays and Fridays … If
it is a cleric, he is to fast 1 year for 2 days [each week] … If it is a deacon, he is to fast 3 years for
certainly is the case that Ælfric wrote more disparagingly of women than
men in regards to witchcraft, even he did not confine those practices to
women;47 furthermore, Jolly reminds us that ideas about magic, which are
mainly pejorative, survive in a corpus that preserves primarily the voices of
the literate, clerical elite and that the medical roles of women are “relatively
invisible.”48 Thus, I contend that it is shortsighted to treat witchcraft in Old
English and early medieval texts as predominantly gendered female. 49
The Alternative Translation History of Wif gemædla
Existing alongside the reading of gemædla as an utterance is a persistent,

but far less prominent, reading of the word as an emotion word or word
for non-normative mental state, usually translated as “fury” or “madness.”
Furthermore, there is an earlier and now almost unknown translation
2 days each week.) Text and translation Frantzen’s. See Frantzen, “Anglo-Saxon Penitentials: A
Cultural Database,” Y44.14.01-04, accessed April 25, 2019.
47 Women and witchcraft are, of course, intertwined in biblical texts and this is reflected in
some of Ælfric’s writings, but even he does not associate only women with nefarious magical
practices. In some text added to De auguriis in two manuscripts a compiler has appended two
Ælfrician-authored texts warning about the falseness of magic (as it is warned to be just an
illusion cast by the devil). The first text warns against the male-gendered dryman who caused a
woman’s community to think she had been turned into a horse (“Macarius and the Magicians”).
The second text is about the female-gendered wicce that Saul called on to raise Samuel from
the dead (“Saul and the Witch of Endor”). It is notable that a compiler appended two warnings
against magic and its nature as a devilish illusion to De auguriis, one for a magic practitioner
of each gender. Furthermore, John C. Pope believes Ælfric intended these two short pieces to
go together (Pope, 1:788). Even in De auguriis, where Ælfric uses the feminine pronoun heo in
several of his explicit references to witches and magic, he does not make magic the exclusive
domain of women as he also refers to drymen and more often uses the (likely gender-neutral in
this instance) he and man. See Ælfric of Eynsham, Homilies of Ælfric: A Supplementary Collection,
ed. John C. Pope, 2 vols. EETS o.s. 59, 260, (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 1:786–98;
Ælfric of Eynsham, Aelfric’s Lives of Saints, 365–83.
48 Jolly, “Medieval Magic: Definitions, Beliefs, Practices,” 6–7, 31.
49 Frantzen, whose editions and scholarship on the Old English penitentials are currently
inescapable when discussing these texts, demonstrates a readiness to adopt an anti-feminist
position in this 1983 argument that is, in retrospect, unsurprising given his vehement rejec-
tion of feminism in his 2015 blogpost “How to Fight Your Way Out of the Feminist Fog” (since
removed from his blog but expanded into a self-published book). Frantzen’s positions and use
of rhetoric from the notoriously misogynist men’s rights movement should call into question
his prior assertions on gender, women, and feminist criticism. For elaboration on Frantzen’s
positions, see the introduction to this volume, or J. J. Cohen’s rejection of Frantzen’s position in
“On Calling Out Misogyny,” In the Middle, 16 January 2016, accessed September 23, 2021, https://
www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2016/01/on-calling-out-misogyny.html.
268 Erin E. Sweany
of gemædla as a reference to menstruation. These translations survive

primarily in the lexicographic history of the word, which has seemingly
not been adequately attended to in scholarship of Leechbook III Entry 57.
Wifgemædla as a reference to menstruation dates back at least to Joseph
Bosworth’s 1838 A Dictionary of the Anglo-Saxon Language. Curiously, in
this first edition of Bosworth’s dictionary, mædlan is recorded as a variant
of maðelian with the translation “to speak” while wifgemædla is translated
as mulierum menstrua (no English translation is provided, as was common
for references to menstruation in the nineteenth century).50 In Bosworth’s
1868 abridged version of his 1838 dictionary (A Compendious Anglo-Saxon
and English Dictionary), wifgemædla is still translated as mulierum menstrua
but the entry “gemædla ‘menstrua’” is added (mædlan is slightly modified
to mǣdlan and retains the translation “to speak”).51 By the 1882 Bosworth-
Toller, gemædla is translated as “talk” and wifgemǣdla as “a woman’s fury.”
Both of these translations cite as examples Leechbook III Entry 57 even though
they may have quite distinct connotations: the first associated with speech
and the second with emotion/mental state. In Thomas Northcote Toller’s
1921 supplement to Bosworth’s dictionary, Toller abandons the association
of gemædla with speech and instead suggests “fury” or “madness” in place
of an utterance.52 However, these translation options are only available if
one checks the supplements to Bosworth-Toller; within the main volume
gemædla retains its translation as “talk.” J. R. Clark Hall’s 1894 A Concise
Anglo-Saxon Dictionary translates ±mædla as ‘chatter’ and wifgemædla
50 Bosworth records the source of the translation mulierum menstrua as the Liber medicinalis,
which is a curious Latin medical treatise written in verse and thought to date back to the second
century CE. A thorough comparison of Late Antique references to menstruation and modern
uses of those references is beyond the scope of this essay, but I do think it is worth noting that
an initial examination of the one verse about menstruation in the extant portions of the Liber
medicinalis does not provide a clear explanation as to why Bosworth associates wifgemædla
with menstruation.
51 In this version of his dictionary Bosworth attributes the translation of gemædla as menstrua
to Edward Lye’s 1772 Dictionarium Saxonica et Gothico-Latinum and William Somner’s 1659
Dictionarium Saxonico-Latino-Anglicum, both of whom refer back to the Liber medicinalis. In
this paragraph I have included macrons where they appear in the cited dictionaries.
52 Toller, in his 1921 supplement to Bosworth-Toller, further advises that gemǣdla (fury, madness)
should be substituted for gemædla (chatter), but the only place that the translation “chatter”
appears in the history of Bosworth-Toller or Bosworth’s dictionaries, that I have found, is in the
translation of Entry 57, as offered as an example of word usage, and not in the main definition
list. It is notable that the translation of “chatter” seems only to appear in the lexicographic
history after Cockayne publishes his edition of the Old English medical corpus that contains
this same translation, and the 1898 edition of Bosworth-Toller cites Cockayne’s edition in the
entries for gemædla and wifgemædla.
as “woman’s talk ?” but by 1931 has suggested translations that reflect a

stronger understanding of gemædla as an emotion/mental state word:
±mǣdla “madness”; wifgemǣdla “woman’s fury.” This translation persists
most recently in M. L. Cameron’s 1993 book Anglo-Saxon Medicine as “mad
behavior” but is otherwise not prominent in scholarship that addresses
Entry 57.53
My essay thus far has set out that: in the case of Leechbook III Entry
57, witchcraft does not convincingly fit a medical or more generally early
medieval English context; and furthermore, even the understanding of
gemædla as an utterance is tenuous. In what remains of my essay I will
argue that there is more contextual support for gemædla as a reference
to a mental or emotional experience or capacity (suggested by the seldom
chosen translation options of “fury” and “madness”), occurring as it does
in a medical text and in an entry with no clear performative elements.
The translation of gemædla as “fury” or “madness” also necessarily carries
with it the implication of a woman as a patient—a sufferer of an afflic-
tion rather than an agent of someone else’s affliction. This option is both
grammatically and conceptually reasonable but has not, to my knowledge,
been put forward.54 What is necessary to support this option is both the
willingness to read the suggested female body in Entry 57 sympathetically
(rather than pejoratively and with hostility) and an acceptance of lexical
ambiguity that brings contextual clues into better focus. Entry 57, for all of its
brevity (consisting of barely over a dozen words), provides a tangled history
of translations wound round by unexamined post-medieval emotional
responses to women that are obscuring a potential record of early medieval
English female affect, health, and accompanying contemporary cultural
responses. All of these layers are valuable as long as we attend to their
precise temporal and cultural contexts.
With an alternative to gemædla as an utterance available, what rationale
have scholars and editors given for sticking to this translation? Cockayne
discusses very few of his translation choices at all, let alone in detail, but
in his glossary he does write that gemædla is a noun meaning “speech”
derived from the verb mædla [sic] meaning “to speak.”55 Meaney elaborates
on Cockayne’s choices by suggesting that gemædla derives from maðelian
53 M. L. Cameron, Anglo-Saxon Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 40.

54 With the related exception of the earliest edition of Bosworth’s dictionary that, by under-
standing wifgemædla as a reference to menstruation, was also understanding the woman in
Entry 57 to be a patient.
55 Cockayne, Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England, II:387.
270 Erin E. Sweany
(to speak, make a speech, or to harangue with speech). I suspect that there is
comfort in the dominant trend of tracing gemædla back to maðelian because
it provides a decent data set with which to work. But the justifications for
this relationship are lacking, minimal, or suspect. Considering the usual
uses of maðelian, it seems unlikely that it would even appear in a medical
manuscript referring to doing harm. After all, translators do not consider the
speech of Beowulf, Byrhtnoð, or even Elene to be “idle chatter” or “haranguing
speech,” or even dangerous speech in and of itself, and these characters of Old
English literature all deliver speeches that are described with some form of
maðelian. And, to return to the topic of derivation, the formation of gemædla
from maðelian is not clearly more likely than the formation of gemædla from
the adjective gemad (foolish, senseless, mad; Toller’s suggestion) or from the
related verb gemædan (to make insane or foolish; with, perhaps, an intrusive
l).56 Unfortunately, there is no clear lexical evidence, on its own, that directs
us in choosing between the possible readings of gemædla. In its medical,
manuscript, and linguistic contexts, wif gemædla requires us to accept that
there may not be a lexical data set that will help us to establish a translation.
As the lexical evidence alone cannot resolve the matter, we must look to
context for further interpretive clues. I propose that we begin by considering
the wif as the patient in Entry 57. The explicit references to women’s bodies
that are present in the rest of Leechbook III are exclusively references to
women as patients (and most, perhaps unsurprisingly, are references to
reproduction and mothering).57 Buck catalogues the entries as follows:
“We find drinking potions and amulets for women who are not able to
have children; bathing potions to get rid of afterbirth, drinking potions
for expelling a dead fetus, eating and drinking remedies to stop bleeding
after childbirth, and wise instructions for prenatal care.”58 As Leechbook III
only otherwise includes women’s bodies as vitally generative and in need
of medical help,59 it would be an aberration for women suddenly to be cast
as dangerous—as agents of someone else’s affliction.
56 Buck rejects this derivation due to vowel length. She notes the macrons over the vowels in
the dictionary entries of gemǣd/gemād. However, there is no way to establish the vowel length
of the æ in Entry 57’s gemædlan. The vanishingly few instances of it are not of the declensions
that might indicate such information, and the prose nature of these instances does not allow
metrical stress to offer up a hint.
57 There are also indirect references to women’s bodies in the form of materia medica in
Leechbook III: breastmilk is called for as an ingredient in entries ii.6, iii, and xlvii.
58 Buck, “Women and Language in the Anglo-Saxon Leechbooks,” 47.
59 The exceptions are Entry 6 and Entry 47, both of which reference women in regard to their
curative products. Entry 6 calls for, as materia medica, a woman’s spinning whorl; and Entry 47
calls for the breastmilk of a woman who has born a male child. Buck also regards the entry for
Syntactically, Entry 57 follows two very common structures in the Old

English medical corpus. Both structures are of the form wiþ x [affliction],
where the preposition wiþ (for, against) frames the treatment as a thing or
practice that is in opposition to the harm a body is experiencing and x is
a variable that can be either an adversarial source of the affliction or that
which is afflicted. Entries in Leechbook III that illustrate x as adversary
include the following examples: wiþ hundes slite (in case of/against the bite
of a dog), wiþ feondes costunge (in case of/against temptation of a fiend),
and wiþ ælfadle (in case of/against elf-disease).60 In the case of the second
structure, x is a body part/ability affected by the affliction that appears
immediately following x; this structure does not insist that x be an adversary.
This formula is found throughout the medical corpus but is easily observed
within Leechbook III itself in the entries: wiþ ear wærce (for ear pain), wiþ
toþ ece (for toothache), and wið ceoc adle (for cheek disease).61 In these
cases, the ear, tooth, and cheek are not adversarial but rather the suffering,
afflicted body part. The wærce, ece, and adle are those things against which
the remedy will contend, and the things which afflict the ear, toþ, and ceoc.
Wiþ wif gemædlan could be reflecting either one of the reviewed formulae
above, and it is important that our interpretation follow what contextual
clues we do have. And, based only on syntax, wiþ wif gemædlan need not be
understood as something like “in the case of/against [the damaging actions/
experiences of a woman],” where wif is an adversarial, body-threatening
agent. It is equally plausible to understand the phrase as meaning something
like “in the case of/against the gemædla that afflicts a woman,” where wif
is a suffering subject.
And indeed, when considering gemædla’s potential derivation from
gemad, Latin–Old English glossaries also support a reading of the wif in wif
gemædla as a sufferer of some kind of non-normative mental or emotional
state. The glossaries associate gemad with Latin amens and vecors and these
words generally convey a kind of intellectual lack or some other variety of
cognitive non-normativity, including a sense that one is not in control of
the intensity of one’s own emotions. Lewis and Short offers for amens the
“þæm mannum þe deofol mid hæmð” (Entry 61) as a reference to women; but, since the universal
mann is used rather than a clear reference to women, I contend that more work is needed on the
references to sexual deviance in the medical corpus (work that is beyond the scope of this essay).
60 Respectively entries 34, 58, and 62 as found in Cockayne, Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and
Starcraft of Early England. As entries 36 and 44 demonstrate, sometimes an affliction is presented
without a source: wiþ cancre (in case of/against cancer); wiþ lusum (in case of/against lice).
61 Respectively entries 3, 4, and 6 in Leechbook III (according to Cockayne’s numbering); and
there are many more examples of the same structure just within Leechbook III.
272 Erin E. Sweany
translation options “out of one’s senses, beside one’s self, senseless, mad,
insane, frantic, distracted” and for vecors “destitute of reason; senseless, silly,
foolish; mad, insane.”62 Furthermore, the Old Saxon and Old High German
cognates, provided by Bosworth-Toller from Toller’s 1921 supplement, are
gimed (OS) and gemeit (OHG) and are linked to the Latin stultus “foolish,
simple, silly, fatuous,” bardus “stupid, dull of apprehension,” and stolidus
“dull, senseless, slow of mind, obtuse, stupid, stolid” (sense II).63 Thus, Old
English–Latin translations and Germanic cognates demonstrate that gemad
likely indicates a non-normative mental state or perceived intellectual lack.
If we accept the possibility of the derivation of gemædla from gemad, then
even the “fury” option of gemædla as present in Bosworth-Toller’s translation
of wifgemædlan as “a woman’s fury” and Toller’s supplemental emendation
of gemædla as “fury, madness” is questionable. It is striking that this choice
of “fury,” being a synonym of Modern English “mad,” works unquestionably
as an emotion word and also preserves wif as a dangerous agent projecting
some kind of force, all the while avoiding a connection with the idea of
an utterance. “Fury” as a translation poses the problem that in Modern
English it operates as an emotion word but also often suggests that one
person’s emotional state is threatening to someone else. This choice of a
translation that preserves the wif as threatening likely reflects post-medieval
associations with women more than it does early medieval associations.
I therefore find it more likely that Entry 57 asks us to attend to the unwell
body or mind of a wif, and this reading is further strengthened by the presence
of radishes as edible remedies to the gemædla. Because Entry 57 recommends
that the radish be eaten, it is significant that edible preventatives are not used
as protection against other humans in the rest of the Old English medical
corpus. This is in addition to radishes having no special associations with any
particular affliction, as reviewed above. In early medieval English medicine,
patients consume materia medica primarily as cures for an afflicted body
rather than as a preventative or treatment against malicious harm by a
human.64 And if the woman is the patient, gemædla is then much more likely
to be a mental or affective state (that she is suffering) rather than a verbal
62 Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, Harper’s Latin Dictionary: A New Latin Dictionary.
Founded on the Translation of Freund’s Latin-German Lexicon Edited by E.A. Andrews, LL.D. (New
York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1880).
63 Translation options of the Latin are from Lewis and Short.
64 While malicious human agents do not seem to be a danger that early medieval English
medicine can be a treatment for, the Old English medical corpus is rife with nonhuman malicious
actors, as I argue in my dissertation: Sweany, “The Anglo-Saxon Medical Imagination: Invasion,
Conglomeration, and Autonomy.”
utterance (that she or another is making) to effect harm. It is more reasonable

to read in Entry 57 a woman who is the victim of some sort of emotion and/
or mental state regarded and experienced as non-normative, rather than
a woman who is a projector of the madness (that is, to regard gemædla as
a weapon of the wif ). This interpretation would rely on the derivation of
gemædla from gemad, which we see in Toller’s definitions of gemædla as “fury”
or “madness,” as reviewed above. And here might be another reason why the
dominant reading of gemædla has persisted. In light of the choices: the image
of a woman either as a figure who might be capable of assault—whether by
voice or feeling—or a figure who must be cured of her emotional or mental
state for her own good, the attraction to the witch (the assaulting, powerful
woman) in our modern moment makes a certain kind of sense. A dangerous
woman wielding her speech intentionally might be a more appealing way
to read Entry 57 to late twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars than
a woman who is a danger to herself—and still, perhaps, others—due to
uncontrollable emotion or non-normative emotional capacity.
Is gemædla an emotion word or an indication of intellectual ability or
normativity? Or is it an utterance? Is the wif a patient or an agent of harm?
The corpus does not provide the evidence needed to answer this ques-
tion definitively, but “witch” is certainly not a descriptive enough label to
encompass its possibilities and has attendant with it a covey of dubious
interpretations based on negative assumptions about women. What we
can tell definitively is that wif gemædla was understood to be curable and,
indeed, curable by radish ingestion. Beyond this, we must grapple with the
relationship between possibilities of lexis, syntax, and context. There are
many Old English terms for illness throughout medical corpus for which
there is no straight line to Modern English disease terminology. Accepting
some lexical ambiguity of illness words in the Old English medical corpus
and exploring the experiences associated with those words to understand
their function in the witnesses we have of them, is a necessity for attending
to, as the medical humanities asks, the lived experience of embodied afflic-
tion rather than just arriving at a standardized label for it. This might also
give scholars more pathways to exploring the experiences of occluded bodies
(such as women’s bodies and the bodies of disabled people). If wif gemædla
refers to a mental or emotional affliction of women then the specification
of wif in Entry 57 may hint that women’s and men’s emotions were regarded
differently from one another.65 This is just one topic among many to which
65 Beyond the scope of this paper is a comparison of entries with suggestions of emotions or
cognition/behavior/intellect that use the (rather ambiguous) Old English mon (man).
274 Erin E. Sweany
a more rigorous and sympathetic reading of wif gemædla might contribute.

Furthermore, accepting lexical ambiguity when it is genuinely present allows
for informative contextual frames to come into better focus, opening up the
possibilities of the questions we can ask about the term as a reference to an
experience that the dearth of lexical evidence would otherwise foreclose.
And while context may be an obvious resource to appeal to for thinly attested
words, the practice of scholarship will assure that we always have new
understandings of early medieval English context. Thus, reminders about
the value of context and reconsiderations of translations will continue to be
important practices to ensure that textual interpretations are not relying
on outdated assumptions.
I have attempted to allow contextual frames to inform my understanding
of the hapax legomenon (wif)gemædla, thus opening up the reference from
one of simplistic violence directed by a woman towards someone else to a
set of possibilities of embodied, gendered cognition and affect. And while
I cannot definitively say that gemædla refers to the experience or state of
a woman rather than to an utterance by a woman, I do assert that reading
Entry 57 definitively as dangerous speech, as has been done for most of its
scholarly history, occludes the woman’s body in favor of a threatened (if
implied) male body and misses the opportunity of exploring the sick body of
an early medieval English woman in a non-maternal context. There is work
to be done in identifying female patients and the words used to describe
them—some of which may be (mis)interpreted in ways that emphasize certain
kinds of (primarily malicious) femininity. The bodies of patients are quite
vague in nature in Old English medical texts—passive and indistinct66—and
the bodies of women are rendered even more invisible due to the scarcity of
entries that refer explicitly to women and a fixation on reproductive capacity
when women are referred to.67 We could debate whether there is an early
medieval English moral judgement of women’s experiences being made with
the ascription of gemædla to women; but that debate will be more productive
if we recognize and reject anachronistic readings of early medieval English
women. Ultimately, the dominant reading and history of scholarly treatment of
this entry, when context is considered, reveals more about our own emotions
than those of the people who compiled and used Leechbook III.
66 See Chapters 1 and 3 in Sweany, “The Anglo-Saxon Medical Imagination.”

67 Bosworth’s earliest dictionaries (1838, 1868) demonstrate, in the translation of wifgemædla
as a menstruation reference, that this fixation is durable. And while Bosworth does cite earlier
sources in support of this reference, the logic of these citations, upon examination of those
earlier sources, remains opaque (see above).
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10 Women and “Women’s Medicine” in
Early Medieval England, from Text to
Practice
Christine Voth
Abstract
Despite the belief that that the menstrual cycle was predictable and
therefore treatable, many of the extant charms to prevent excessive
menstrual bleeding, miscarriage, stillbirth, or neonatal death suggest
that medical intervention was either unavailable or unsuccessful. The
textual evidence for remedies for women’s medicine assumes the care
and cure by an educated medical practitioner. However, the actualities
of care for women who were not part of the privileged elite is less easy
to deduce. Through an examination of extant penitentials and homilies,
this chapter demonstrates the men of the church were aware of – and
condemned – the treatment, prevention, and prognostication involved
in “women’s medicine” by those not sanctioned by the church: midwives
and others.
Keywords: medicine, charms, Bald’s Leechbook, Lacnunga, women’s bodies,

reproduction
The majority of Old English medical remedies are gender-neutral, providing

possible cures for illnesses and ailments that affected both women and men.
This is demonstrated either by a focus on the remedy and its component
parts, or through the use of OE mann, the semantics of which is “human
being” rather than the masculine noun “man.”1 As many vernacular medi-
1 Christine Rauer, “Mann and Gender in Old English Prose: A Pilot Study,” Neophilologus 101
(2017), 139–58.
doi: 10.5117/9789463721462_ch10
280 Christine Voth
cal remedies are translations, OE mann may be the preferred translation

for gender-neutral Latin homo, a pattern noted by Christine Rauer in the
translations of the OE Martyrology.2 Janet Nelson and Alice Rio also noted
that Latin law codes throughout Medieval Europe use gender-neutral si quis
(if anyone) or homo (a person), only employing female nouns or pronouns
when the laws apply specifically to women.3 When OE medical remedies
differentiate between the sexes in diagnosis and treatment, women are
specified by wif or wifmann and men by the use of wer or wæpned/man(n) or
man(n). Almost all of these instances are in relation to obstetric concerns,
including conception. Of the nine occasions in which a remedy specifies
the sex, wif is paired with wæpned in four, two of which are in relation to
the conception of a child of the desired sex, and a third which specifies
the practitioner use the milk of a woman nursing a male child. 4 Similarly,
wif is paired with wer twice: once in a remedy for conceiving a child of the
desired sex, the other in a remedy warning that failure to follow through with
the directions of the remedy will result in conceiving a child of no gender
(androginem … naþer ne wer ne wif ).5 Finally, wif is paired with man(n)/
mon(n)/men in three remedies, one of which references sexual intercourse.6
Not counted in these instances are two remedies in which man(n)/mon(n)
2 Rauer, “Mann and Gender,” 144–49.

3 Janet Nelson and Alice Rio, “Women and Laws in Early Medieval Europe,” in The Oxford
Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe, ed. Judith Bennett and Ruth Karras (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013), 103–14, at 104.
4 Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus, compiled by Antonette diPaolo Healey with John
Price Wilkin and Xin Xiang (Toronto, Dictionary of Old English Project, 2009). Boolean and
proximity searches for [fragment] wif + wæpned + Cameron number B21. The fourth instance is
quoted below.
5 Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus, Boolean and proximity searches for [fragment] wif +
wer + Cameron number B21. Only instances referring to human beings were counted (wif and
wer are commonly used to differentiate types of the same plant).
Medicina de Quadrupedibus, Chapter 5.12: “To þan þæt wif cenne wæpned cild: haran hrif
gedryged & gesceafen oððe gegniden on drinc drincen butu. Gif þæt wif ana hyt drinceþ, ðonne
cenð heo androginem, ne byþ þæt to nahte, naþer ne wer ne wif.” (So a woman can conceive a
male child: let them both drink hare’s womb, dried and scraped or crushed, in a drink. If only
the woman drinks it, she will generate an androgynous child; that is nothing, neither male nor
female.) Text of the OE Medicina de Quadrupedibus is taken from Hubert Jan de Vriend, The Old
English Herbarium and Medicina de Quadrupedibus, EETS o.s. 286 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1984); translations of the OE Medicina from Maria D’Aronco and John P. Niles, Medical
Texts from Early Medieval England, Volume I: The Old English Herbal, Lacnunga, and Other Texts,
Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, forthcoming).
6 Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus, Boolean and proximity searches for [fragment] wif +
man/mon/men + Cameron number B21. I did not count instances in which man/n had wif as an
antecedent (see n. 8 below).
WOMEN AND “WOMEN’S MEDICINE” IN EARLY MEDIEVAL ENGL AND 281
have wif as an antecedent, providing succinct examples of the gender-neutral

OE man(n) whether as a translation for Latin homo or as a semantic choice
by the compiler.7
These rare textual examples do not preclude the reality that the medieval
practitioner or their late antique predecessors envisioned a male body as the
norm8 and the female body only when necessary, such as when a remedy
specifies gender. A remedy from the medical compendia known colloquially
as Bald’s Leechbook,9 reminds the practitioner that the body of a man differs
from that of a woman or a child, and each should be treated accordingly:
Do þu ða læcedomas swilce þu þa lichomon gesie, forðon ðe micel gedal

is on wæpnedes ond wifes ond cildes lichomon, ond þam mægene þær
dæghwamlican wyhtan ond þæs idlan, þæs ealdan ond þæs gongan, ond
þæs þe sie gewin þrowungum ond þæs þe sie ungewuna swelcum þingum.
(Do those treatments for the body you behold, because there is a great
difference in the body of the man and a woman and a child, and in the
strength of the daily laborer and the idle, and the old and the young, and
he who is battle-wounded and he who is untroubled by such things.)10
Despite this caveat, few remedies outside of those in which reproductive

organs are involved make this differentiation.
As noted above, the majority of medical remedies that specify gender can
be found in the treatments presented for those conditions unique to women:
menstruation, fertility, childbearing, childbirth, lactation, and menopause.11
7 The first is found in the table of contents for a chapter dedicated to the treatment of women’s
diseases (Chapter 60) in the second book of London, British Library, Royal 12. D. xvii: “Oþþe gif
men cwið sie forweaxen, oþþe gif man semninga swigie…” (Or if the womb is distended in one,
or if one suddenly goes quiet…). Another example from the third book in the same manuscript
in a gynecological remedy: “Gif wife to swiþe of flowe sio monaðgecynde genim niwe horses
tord, lege on hate gleda, læt reocan swiþe betweoh þa þeoh up under þæt hrægl þæt se mon
swæte swiþe.” (If a woman’s menstruation flows out too much: take fresh horse manure, put
on hot embers, let it smoke profusely between the thighs up under the clothing, so that the
person sweats heavily.) All translations from Bald’s Leechbook and Leechbook III are taken
from Debby Banham and Christine Voth, Medical Texts from Early Medieval England, Volume
II: Bald’s Leechbook and Leechbook III: Old English Medicine in British Library, Royal 12. D. xvii,
Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, forthcoming).
8 Little has changed from medieval to modern medicine in this regard.
9 London, British Library, Royal 12. D. xvii.
10 Bald’s Leechbook, Book 1, Chapter 35.10, Banham and Voth, Medical Texts II.
11 DOE Web Corpus search turns up 125 instances in which medical remedies make specific
references to women. Not all of these are gynecological in nature.
282 Christine Voth
Hippocrates believed that the regularity of a woman’s menstrual cycle was

the center of her physical well-being, and disruptions of this rhythm for
any reason other than pregnancy could be resolved by returning a woman
to her natural cycle.12 Medieval thinking connecting a woman’s physical
well-being to her menstrual cycle is certainly apparent in the medical corpus,
much of which has been passed down from the classical and late antique
periods. The menstrual cycle was predictable and therefore presented
something treatable.
By comparison with the late Middle Ages, the surviving corpus of
women’s medicine through the twelfth century is small, and there are some
manuscripts that make no mention of these concerns at all. This is because
gynecology and obstetrics was not a prominent area of medical study until
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which saw the combined emergence
of Islamic medicine in the West and the advent of medical treatises focusing
on women and their unique medical concerns.13 This includes the tripartite
medical compendia compiled in the twelfth century and attributed to a
woman physician, Trota of Salerno, the Latin manuscripts of which were
circulating in England by the early thirteenth century.14 That is not to say
that the early medieval corpus of English medicine doesn’t have plenty to
offer. A study of the available evidence relates the shared experiences of a
portion of the populace marginalized in written works from England ca.
800 to ca. 1200.15 Even the women who chose a chaste, religious life, and who
are perhaps the most represented females in Old English and Anglo-Latin
literature, were not exempt from gynecological concerns.
12 Helen King, “Female Fluids in the Hippocratic Corpus: How Solid was the Humoral Body?”
in The Body in Balance: Humoral Medicines in Practice, ed. Peregrine Horden and Elisabeth Hsu
(New York: Berghann Books, 2013), 25–52, at 38.
13 Monica H. Green, “From ‘Diseases of Women’ to ‘Secrets of Women’: The Transformation of
Gynecological Literature in the Later Middle Ages,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies
30, no. 1 (2000), 5–39. Gynecological and obstetric remedies may not have been of consequence
to the male compilers of some of the medical corpus, especially if those medical compendia
were intended to be used in male monasteries. For more on the absence of women in the medical
corpus, see Dana Oswald’s contribution in this volume, “Monaðgecynd and flewsan: Wanted and
Unwanted Monthly Courses in Old English Medical Texts.”
14 Monica H. Green, The Trotula: An English Translation of the Medieval Compendium of
Women’s Medicine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). Monica H. Green, “A
Handlist of the Latin and Vernacular Manuscripts of the So-Called Trotula Texts. Part I: The
Latin Manuscripts,” Scriptorium 50 (1996), 137–75.
15 The oldest fragment of Old English medicine (Louvain, Université Catholique de Louvain,
Centre Général de Documentation, Fragmenta H. Omont 3[2]) dates to the ninth century, and
the latest to the late twelfth century (London, British Library, Harley 6258 B).
In this chapter, I examine the medical care of women in early medieval

England through a variety of contemporary sources to explore how women’s
conditions were treated and by whom, and how the treatment of women’s
medicine may have differed based on the social standing of the woman in
question. Women’s medicine in early medieval England is deserving of its
own feminist renaissance, primarily because it has not been the dominant
subject of study in over twenty years.16 The research presented here has
its foundation in that earlier scholarship and will examine the biologi-
cal functions of the female reproductive and life cycles both as medical
practitioners recognized them and in practice. The first part of this chapter
will introduce and analyze the written evidence for women’s medicine, both
within and without the medical corpus, with an eye toward understanding
the potential scope of gynecological and obstetric care for women in early
medieval England. The second part will explore the actualities of caring
for women during pregnancy, miscarriage, or stillbirth. In this section, I
will examine aid given to those seeking birth control or help with fertility
and conception. I have pieced together evidence for this kind of medical
attention from charms and prayers in the margins of manuscripts, and
through contemporary homilies and penitentials that called out women
for practices unsanctioned by the church.
The Corpus
The corpus of texts and manuscripts examined for this chapter is wide-
ranging, comprising both medical and non-medical sources. Medical sources
provide insight into the breadth of gynecological and obstetric conditions as
16 Audrey L. Meaney, “Women, Witchcraft and Magic in Anglo-Saxon England,” in Superstition

and Popular Medicine in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Donald Scragg (Manchester: University
of Manchester, 1989), 9–39; Marilyn Deegan, “Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Anglo-Saxon
Medical Texts: A Preliminary Survey,” in Medicine in Early Medieval England, Four Papers, ed.
Donald Scragg (Manchester: University of Manchester, 1989), 17–26; M. L. Cameron, “Gynaecology
and Obstetrics,” in his Anglo-Saxon Medicine, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 7
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 174–84. Lisa M. C. Weston, “Women’s Medicine,
Women’s Magic: The Old English Metrical Childbirth Charms,” Modern Philology 92, no. 3 (1995),
279–93; Christine Fell, Women in Anglo-Saxon England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1984), 56–73.
More recent studies have addressed women’s medicine under the topic of magic or folklore:
Anne Lawrence-Mathers, “Magic in Early Anglo-Saxon England,” Reading Medieval Studies
33 (2007), 87–104; Karen L. Jolly, Popular Religion in Late Anglo-Saxon England: Elf Charms in
Context (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
284 Christine Voth
well as the types of treatments available to practitioners in early medieval

England. Remedies found in medical manuscripts may have been restricted
to certain members in society, which is why it is necessary to look beyond
medical texts in order to ascertain the realities of gynecological and obstetric
care.
My focus in the medical corpus is on those manuscripts in the vernacular
as they comprise the majority of the extant English medical texts. The
surviving vernacular sources exist not merely as rote translations from Latin
sources, but as conscious constructions intended to facilitate understanding
of each herb’s medical use.17 The Old English Herbarium was a particularly
prolific text in early medieval England with four surviving manuscripts.18
The book of animal-based medical remedies, the Old English Medicina de
Quadrupedibus, appears to have been translated at the same time as the
OE Herbarium and is appended to the Herbarium in all the vernacular
manuscripts.19
Of the original medical compilations, the earliest is the mid-tenth-century
manuscript London, British Library, Royal 12. D. xvii. The Royal manuscript
contains three books, the first two of which were compiled together, separat-
ing out disorders into external (Book I) and internal (Book II); both are
organized from head-to-foot (a capite ad calcum) in the classical manner.
Together these books are known as Bald’s Leechbook due to a colophon at
the end of Book II naming a certain Bald as the patron and owner of the
book of remedies. Based on linguistic analysis, the third book in the same
manuscript, Leechbook III, appears to have been compiled in the early
tenth century as a companion to Bald’s Leechbook.20 Royal 12. D. xvii is a
mid-tenth-century copy of these medical compilations and shows many
layers of additions and emendation to its translations and adaptations of
17 Manuscripts of the OE Herbarium and OE Medicina include: London, British Library, Harley
585 (s. x/xi); London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius C. iii (s. xi); Oxford, Bodleian Library,
Hatton 75 (s. xi); London, British Library Harley 6258B (s. xii2).
18 Linda E. Voigts, “Anglo-Saxon Plant Remedies and the Anglo-Saxons,” ISIS: The History of
Science Society 70 (1979), 250–68. An early Latin manuscript (no longer surviving) of the Herbarium
Pseudo-Apulei was used as a source for several remedies in Bald’s Leechbook: Audrey L. Meaney,
“Variant Versions of Old English Medical Remedies and the Compilation of Bald’s Leechbook,”
Anglo-Saxon England 13 (1984), 235–68. Conan T. Doyle, “Anglo-Saxon Medicine and Disease:
A Semantic Approach” (PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2017).
19 De Vriend, Herbarium and Medicina, xi–lv; Voigts, “Anglo-Saxon Plant Remedies,” 250–51.
Translations of the OE Herbarium from Anne Van Arsdall, ed. Medieval Herbal Remedies: The
Old English Herbarium and Anglo-Saxon Medicine (New York: Routledge, 2002).
20 Christine Voth, “An Analysis of the Anglo-Saxon Medical Manuscript London, British
Library, Royal 12. D. xvii” (PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2015).
classical and late antique medicine, suggesting it was a working medical

manual.
Another medical compilation that is part of this corpus is London, British
Library, Harley 585, which includes a miscellaneous collection of remedies
and charms known as the Lacnunga. This manuscript was brought together
some time in the early eleventh century.21 It also contains an incomplete
translation of the OE Herbarium and the OE Medicina. The Lacnunga collec-
tion represents a wide range of practical and social medicine practiced in a
less formal setting than Bald’s Leechbook and Leechbook III.22 The collection
is thematically important as it appears to have been made with a focus on
writing down remedies that had previously been part of oral tradition.23
In order to understand how treatment for gynecological and obstetric
concerns may have been treated on a practical level, I have examined a
number of sources outside of the medical corpus, including contemporary
penitentials and homilies. Penitential texts and sermons shed light on
how the church viewed certain societal practices and may offer insight
on the practice of medicine in medieval English communities. For both
the penitential texts and the homilies, I have once again focused on the
vernacular collections, which stem from earlier Latin sources.24 The surviving
corpus of vernacular penitentials and homilies also do not represent simple
translations from Latin originals. Some collections of OE penitentials dem-
onstrate evidence of having undergone emendation and revision in order to
fit actual confessional situations.25 These collections were frequently copied
into the same manuscripts, include the Scriftboc, the OE Penitential, and
21 Edward Pettit, ed., Anglo-Saxon Remedies, Charms, and Prayers from British Library MS
Harley 585: The Lacnunga, Mellen Critical Editions and Translations 6A–6B, 2 vols. (London,
Edwin Mellen Press, 2001)
22 Jolly, Popular Religion, 107.
23 Julia Bolotina, “Medicine and Society in Anglo-Saxon England: The Social and Practical
Context of Bald’s Leechbook and the Lacnunga” (PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2016).
Pettit, The Lacnunga, I:i–xxxiv. Emily Kesling provides an excellent analysis of the Lacnunga
and its association with the Latin liturgy in her book Medical Texts in Anglo-Saxon Literary
Culture (Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2020), 95–129.
24 John T. McNeill and Helena M. Gamer, Medieval Handbooks of Penance: A Translation of
the Principal libri poenitentiales and Selections from Related Documents (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1990). Allen J. Frantzen, The Literature of Penance in Anglo-Saxon England
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983).
25 Franzen, Literature of Penance, 133. The names of the different penitential collections
are taken from Allen J. Frantzen, “Anglo-Saxon Penitentials: A Cultural Database,” accessed
February 27, 2018, www.anglo-saxon.net/penance.
286 Christine Voth
the OE Handbook, often with accompanying material, including homilies.26

Vernacular homilies are a variable and changing collection, showing ample
evidence of innovation and borrowing. Sermons were delivered to both lay
and clerical audiences.27 Those homilies intended for the public demonstrate
a desire on behalf of those preaching to meet the particular spiritual needs
of their flock. Although often organized to follow the liturgical calendar,
sermons presented opportunities to address contemporary ecclesiastical
concerns.28 Among the homilies examined for this chapter are those penned
by Ælfric of Eynsham, including his Catholic Homilies29 and his Lives of
Saints.30 I have also consulted the collection of anonymous vernacular
homilies in the Vercelli Book as these were compiled and copied together
at the end of the tenth century, and are therefore contemporary with much
of the medical corpus.31
Finally, I have looked at a variety of other non-medical sources in order
to uncover how women’s medical conditions were treated. One that is of
particular importance is a ninth-century Mercian prayerbook known as the
Royal Prayerbook (London, British Library, Royal 2. A. xx). This manuscript
contains a number of charms against excessive bleeding among its varied
contents. Michelle Brown and Jennifer Morrish have both suggested this
manuscript may have belonged to a female physician;32 I will examine that
claim below. The Royal Prayerbook is not the only non-medical source to
include charms against bleeding or for a difficult childbirth. Many of these
26 Brussels, Bibliothéque Royale 8558-63 contains the OE Handbook and the OE Penitential;
Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 190 includes the Scriftboc and the OE Penitential; Cambridge,
Corpus Christi College 201 and 265 and London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iii include the
OE Handbook; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 121 includes the OE Penitential, the OE Handbook
and the Scriftboc; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Misc. 482 includes the OE Penitential, the OE
Handbook and the Scriftboc.
27 Mary Clayton, “Homiliaries and Preaching in Anglo-Saxon England,” Peritia 4 (1985), 207–42.
28 One example would be Archbishop Wulfstan’s Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, written after the
invasion of King Swein Forkbeard.
29 Malcolm Godden, ed., Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, EETS s.s. 18 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000), 439–50.
30 Walter W. Skeat, ed. and trans., Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, 2 vols in 4 parts, EETS o.s. 76, 82, 94,
114 (London: Kegan Paul, 1881–1900).
31 Vercelli, Biblioteca Capitolare, CXVII; Donald Scragg, Vercelli Homilies, EETS o.s. 300 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1992).
32 Michelle Brown, “Female Book Ownership and Production in Anglo-Saxon England: the
Evidence of the Ninth-Century Prayerbooks,” in Mercia, an Anglo-Saxon Kingdom in Europe, ed.
Michelle Brown and Carol A. Farr (London: Leicester University Press, 2001), 57; Jennifer Morrish,
“An Examination of Literature and Learning in the Ninth Century” (Dphil. Dissertation, Oxford
University, 1982).
charms can be found in manuscripts frequently associated with priests or

bishops, and I will address one charm in particular that was included in a
late vernacular homiliary (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 85).
In an era in which no birth records survive, and medical sources do
not provide details of patient care, it is important to look throughout the
surviving corpus for evidence of the treatment of women’s medicine. In the
following sections, I will analyze the available textual evidence in order to
provide a more complete view of the types of gynecological and obstetric
practices that may have been available in early medieval England.
“Women’s Medicine” in the Medical Texts
With few exceptions, medieval women were subject to the advent of

menarche between the ages of thirteen and f ifteen, although Roberta
Gilchrist noted that adverse dietary conditions could result in delayed
onset of puberty.33 Reaching menopause sometime around the age of fifty
was also contingent upon a number of factors, not least diet and access to
medical care.34 Regular gynecological concerns could range from minor
pain to life-threatening hemorrhage. Childbirth in particular was one of the
most dangerous experiences of a medieval woman’s life, as the Old English
prognostic on the development of a fetus notes:
On þam teoþan monþe þæt wif hit ne gedigð hyre feore, gif þæt bearn
accenned ne biþ, forþam þe hit in þam magan wyrð hire to feorhadle.
(In the tenth month, the woman will not escape with her life if the child
is not born, because it turns into a deadly disease in her belly.)35
We know that the fetus does not become a disease ( feorhadle) after forty
weeks of pregnancy, but a post-term woman would be at significant risk
for stillbirth and death if she could not go into labor naturally. Childbirth
was precarious, and possibly one of the leading causes of death amongst
33 Roberta Gilchrist, Medieval Life: Archaeology and the Life Course (Woodbridge: Boydell and
Brewer, 2012), 41–42.
34 Vern Bullough and Cameron Campbell, “Female Longevity and Diet in the Middle Ages,”
Speculum 55, no. 2 (1980), 317–25.
35 Roy M. Liuzza, ed. Anglo-Saxon Prognostics: An Edition and Translation from London, British
Library, MS Cotton Tiberius A. III (Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2011), 200–201.
288 Christine Voth
women between the ages of sixteen and forty.36 Knowledge of this may have
been a motivating factor for some women in pursuing religious orders.37
Medical remedies specific to women outside of the field of gynecological
and obstetric concerns are rare, thus medical practitioners may have defined
“women’s medicine” as that pertaining specifically to reproduction in one
form or another. Chapter 60 in Book II of Bald’s Leechbook boasted the largest
collection of remedies pertaining to women, with the table of contents entry
indicating there were forty-one in all:
Læcedomas wiþ wifa gecyndum forsetenum ond eallum wifa tydernessum:

gif wif bearn ne mæge geberan, oþþe gif bearn weorþe dead on wifes
innoþe, oððe gif hio cennan ne mæg, do on hire gyrdels þas gebedo swa
on þisum læcebocum segþ. Ond manigfeald tacn þæt mon mæg ongitan
hwæþer hit hy se cild þe mæden cild beon wille. Ond wiþ wifa adle. Ond
gif wif migan ne mæge. Ond gif wif ne mæge raðe beon geclænsod. Ond
wiþ wifa blodsihtan. Ond gif wif of gemyndum sie. Ond gif þu wille þæt
wif cild hæbbe oþþe tife hwelp. Oþþe gif men cwið sie forweaxen, oþþe
gif man semninga swigie, an ond feowertig cræfta.
(Remedies for obstructed genitals of women and all infirmities of women:

if a woman may not bear a child, or if a child becomes dead in the belly of
a woman, or if she may not give birth, put the prayer on her girdle just as
this medical book says. And the many signs that one may know whether
it will be a boy child or a girl child. And for the disease of women. And
if a woman cannot urinate. And if a woman cannot be purified quickly.
And for haemorrhage of women. And if a woman is out of her mind. And
if you desire that a woman have a child, or a bitch [have] a pup. Or if the
womb is distended in one, or if one [the womb?] suddenly goes quiet.
Forty-one remedies.)38
Unfortunately, this chapter is part of a larger gathering that is missing from

the manuscript, and the table of contents entry is all that remains. This
monumental chapter would have provided various herbal-based remedies
and charms for conception, stillbirth, and problems with labor and delivery.
36 Duncan Sayer and Sam D. Dickinson, “Reconsidering Obstetric Death and Female Fertility
in Anglo-Saxon England,” World Archaeology 45, no. 2 (2013), 285–97.
37 Dyan Elliott, “Gender and the Christian Tradition,” in The Oxford Handbook of Women and
Gender in Medieval Europe, eds. Judith Bennett and Ruth Karras (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2013), 21–32, at 22.
38 Banham and Voth, Medical Texts II.
After delivery, there were remedies for if a woman begins to hemorrhage

or if she cannot pass the afterbirth, or if she has difficulty with urinat-
ing. Despite the loss of the forty-one Bald’s Leechbook remedies, fifty-one
remedies for gynecological and obstetric concerns survive in other extant
medical texts from the period in addition to the fetal development prognostic
mentioned above, and another prognostic on pregnancy omens in the same
manuscript.39 Using the above table of contents as a guide, 40 it is possible to
examine both the types of conditions and the kinds of treatments presented.
Gynecological issues that are addressed in the other medical texts include
remedies for abnormally heavy or prolonged menstruation (“wið wifes
flewsan”), known medically as mennorhagia. The OE Herbarium also includes
two remedies for womb pain (“wiþ cwiþan sare”) that does not specify if
the symptoms are related to pregnancy. The OE Medicina has two for what
it classifies as “women’s troubles,” or “the disease the Greeks call hystem
cepnizam.”41 The Latin term is hysterica pnix, or “hysterical strangulation,”
a condition in which the womb is believed to have moved up into the chest
seeking out blood or moisture.42 The resulting symptoms include loss of voice,
fainting, difficulty or obstructed breathing, “a seizure of the senses, clenching
of the teeth … convulsive contraction of the extremities, upper abdominal
distention.”43 These manifestations of hysterica pnix bring to mind the disease
addressed in BLB II.60.TOC that is described as when a woman is “out of her
mind” (“gif wif of gemyndum sie”), and explains why that particular remedy
is found in the chapter on gynecology and obstetrics. The term ungemynd
(confusion, loss of mind) is also found in Leechbook III in a chapter including
remedies for attack by the devil and his temptations.44 Similarly, remedies
in book one of Bald’s Leechbook for those who suffer from “falling sickness”
39 Cotton Tiberius A. iii, fols. 42v–43r; Liuzza, Anglo-Saxon Prognostics, 212–23.

40 Hereafter referred to as BLB II.60.TOC.
41 OE Medicina, Chapter 3.7: “Wið wifa earfodnyssum, þas uncyste Grecas hatað hystem
cepnizam: heortes hornes þæs smælestan dustes bruce þry dagas on wines drince, gif he feforig
sy drince þonne on wearmum wætere; þæt bið god læcecræft.” (For women’s troubles, the disease
the Greeks call hystem cepnizam: use the thinnest powder of deer’s antler and give it to drink in
wine for three days, if she has a fever give it to drink in warm water; this is a very good remedy.)
De Vriend, Herbarium and Medicina, 240; D’Aronco and Niles, Medical Texts I.
42 Helen King, “Once upon a Text: Hysteria from Hippocrates,” in Hysteria Beyond Freud, ed.
Sander Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter, G. S. Rousseau, Elaine Showalter (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1993), 3–90, at 14.
43 Owsei Temkin, trans. Soranus’ Gynecology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 1956), 149.
44 Leechbook III.64.TOC: “Wið deofle liþe drenc, ond ungemynde, ond wiþ deofles costunga”
(Against the devil, a light drink, and for loss of mind, and against the temptations of the devil).
Banham and Voth, Medical Texts II.
290 Christine Voth
(bræcseoc) such as seizures or epilepsy, are classified under the heading of

“feondseocum men” (demoniacs), as their symptoms presented as if they were
under attack by an invisible source.45 The inclusion of “loss of mind” with
those who are “fiend-sick,” likely arises from the similarity in symptoms,
including “strange and violent fits: (those affected) would tear at themselves
and collapse to the ground, often wallowing or foaming at the mouth.”46
Unsurprisingly, a large number of gynecological treatments in the medical
corpus includes remedies to bring on a woman’s menses (“wiþ ða monoðlican
to astyrigenne”). This is consistent with the classical theory that regulation of
the menstrual cycle was important to treating women’s conditions, mentioned
above. Interruption of a woman’s menses can be caused by malnutrition,
anaemia, hormonal imbalance, early onset menopause, or even pregnancy.
Even though no remedy refers specifically to the cause of the disrupted or
failed menstrual cycle, presumably the person preparing the remedy to
bring on the menses would know that the particular herbal ingredients also
had abortifacient qualities as stated in this remedy from the OE Herbarium:
Wyþ ða monoðlican to astyrigenne genim þysse ylcan wyrte sædes tyn

penega gewihte on wine gecnucud ond gedruncen oððe mid hunige
gecnucud ond to ðam gecyndelican lime geled, hyt þa monoðlican astyreþ
ond þæt tudder of þam cwiðan gelædeþ.
(To stimulate menstruation, take ten pennies’ weight of the seeds of this
plant [Uiola/Wallflower], either pounded and drunk in wine, or mixed
with honey and put on the sexual organ. It brings about menstruation
and takes the fetus from the womb.)47
This last is the sole medical reference to abortion in the corpus, although it
is likely that many emmenagogic remedies also had abortifacient properties,
they may not necessarily have been used for that purpose. 48
45 Audrey L. Meaney, “The Anglo-Saxon View of the Causes of Disease,” in Health, Disease and
Healing in Medieval Culture, ed. Sheila Campbell, Bert Hall, and David Klausner (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1992), 12–33.
46 Richard Raiswell and Peter Dendle, “Demon Possession in Anglo-Saxon and Early Modern
England: Continuity and Evolution in Social Context,” Journal of British Studies 47, no. 4 (2008),
738–67.
47 OE Herbarium, Chapter 165.4. De Vriend, Herbarium and Medicina, 210; Van Arsdall, Medieval
Herbal Remedies, 221.
48 Monica H. Green, “Gendering the History of Women’s Healthcare,” Gender & History 20,
no. 3 (2008), 487–518, at 499. John Riddle claims that statements of abortifacient qualities of
certain herbs are missing from the OE Herbarium, even though they are recorded in the Latin
Obstetric concerns make up the greatest number of women’s medical

remedies in all the extant medical texts, focusing on when pregnancies go
wrong, such as when the mother fails to go into labor, labor does not progress,
or in cases of a stillbirth. Post-delivery problems are also addressed, such
as cases of hemorrhage (“wiþ wifa blodsihtan”), if a woman cannot urinate
after giving birth (“gif wif migan ne mæge”), or she needs to be “purified”
(“gif wif ne mæge raðe beon geclænsod”). Post-birth “purification” in the
sense of a woman being given ecclesiastical approval to return to church
seems an unlikely reading for the verb geclænsod in BLB II.60.TOC, even
though the same verb (clænsian) is used in the penitentials. 49 Of all the
available remedies, only OE Medicina uses the same verb in a remedy to
aid in conception of a male child:
Eft, to þam ylcan: haran sceallan wife, æfter hyre clænsunge, syle on wine
drincan; þonne cenð heo wæpned cild.
(Again, for the same: give the woman, after cleansing/purging, hare’s
testicles to drink in wine; she will give birth to a male child.)50
The phrase “after her cleansing” here seems to suggest that the patient
would have been given something to bring on menstruation. The remedy
in Leechbook III suggests “cleansing” is a means of helping a woman pass
the afterbirth, described as “what is natural [that] will not come away from
the woman” (“gif of wife nelle gan æfter þam beorþre þæt gecyndelic sie”).51
tradition of Pseudo-Dioscorides and Pseudo-Apuleus, the works that form the herbal tradition in
Anglo-Saxon England; see Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 103–4. In the above article, Monica Green
demonstrates many areas in which Riddle’s work on abortion and contraception are built on
faulty principles, especially at 499–502.
49 From the Scriftboc: “Wif þæt ðe gæð in cyrcan ærðon heo clæne sy hire blode, fæste xl nihta”
(A woman who enters the church before she has been cleansed of her (menstrual) blood is to
fast 40 nights). Frantzen, “Penitentials Database.” For more on the topic of post-natal women
and the church, see Becky R. Lee, “The Purification of Women after Childbirth: A Window onto
Medieval Perceptions of Women,” Florilegium 14 (1995), 43–55.
50 OE Medicina, Chapter 5.13. De Vriend, Herbarium and Medicina, 250; D’Aronco and Niles,
Medical Texts I.
51 Leechbook III, Chapter 37.3: “Gif of wife nelle gan æfter þam beorþre þæt gecyndelic sie:
Seoþa eald spic on wætre beþe mid þone cwiþ oððe hleomoc oþþe hocces leaf wyl on ealoþ sele
drincan hit hat.” (If after the birth, what is natural will not come away from a woman: simmer
old lard in water, bathe the genitals with it, or brooklime or mallow leaf, boil in beer, give it to
drink hot.) Banham and Voth, Medical Texts II.
292 Christine Voth
Additionally, the OE Herbarium includes remedies for “a woman’s cleansing”

or “purifying the womb”:
Wið wifa afeormungæ genim þas ylcan wyrte pastinacam, seoð on wætere,
ond þonne heo gesoden beo mengc hy wel ond syle drincan, hy beoð
afeormude.
(For a woman’s cleansing, take the same plant, simmer it in water, and
when it is soft, mix it well and give it to drink. She will be cleansed.)52
Þeos wyrt conize on wætere gedoden ond sittendum wife under [geled],
heo ðone cwiþan afeormaþ.
(This plant, fleabane, simmered in water and laid under a seated woman,
purifies the womb.)53
Neither of these remedies mentions childbirth but both read as if they are
intended to help dispel excess blood: one is given in a drink; the other is
used externally. Neither appears to make specific reference to hemorrhage
(blodsiht/flewsa). Therefore, the sense of cleansing or purification that is
being portrayed by OE geclænsod in BLB II.60.TOC would appear to be
emmenagogic, in which the uterus is stimulated either to expel the afterbirth
after delivery or to bring on menses before they would normally be expected,
the result being both a return to a normal cycle and an increase in chances
for conception.54
Difficulties with conception (“gif wif ne mæge geberan”), stillbirth (“gif
bearn weorþe dead on wifes innoþe”), and delivery (“gif hio cennan ne
mæg”), were not only female-specific medical concerns, but they present
some of the most varied approaches in the medical texts. Similar to the
treatment of other gynecological and obstetric concerns, there are a
number of herbal-based remedies for bringing on labor in the case of a
stillborn baby, or to encourage labor to progress in case it has stalled.55 But
there are also a number of alternative remedies for these situations. BLB
54 Green, “History of Women’s Healthcare,” 501.
55 Leechbook III, Chapter 37; OE Herbarium, Chapters 63.1, 82.1, 94.6, 104.2, 143.3; OE Medicina,
Chapters 5, 10.
II.60.TOC recommends a prayer be placed in the pregnant woman’s girdle

for one or all of the above-mentioned conditions (“do on hire gyrdels þas
gebedo”). This is the earliest reference to a girdle prayer in England, and
the missing text may have a textual antecedent in the Royal Prayerbook’s
apocryphal letter from Jesus to King Abgar of Jerusalem (fol. 12r/v), also
known as the Epistola salvatoris. The bearer of the letter in the Royal
Prayerbook was guaranteed divine protection against all enemies and
natural disasters.56 Although the letter in the Royal Prayerbook does
not specif ically mention pregnancy, later witnesses of these amuletic
letters frequently included prayers for the safe delivery of a child and were
popular in the late Middle Ages as a ward against miscarriage, stillbirth,
and difficulties in labor.57
Similarly, the Lacnunga presents prayers and charms as alternatives to
herbal remedies in the case of stillbirth and miscarriage and the inability
to breastfeed.58 The following charms that appear in a single chapter
in the manuscript have been thought by some to be one larger charm
against “delayed birth,” and performed over a period of time.59 The use of
the same verb phrase “afedan … ne mæge” in each introductory sentence
may have signaled a single origin to the early translators. However,
afedan has multiple meanings—“rear, nourish, support, raise”60 —and
each charm focuses on a slightly different meaning; therefore, I think
it is important to treat each as a separate entity. The f irst charm is
a sequence of actions and verbal incantations for a woman passing
through the necessary boundaries toward having a healthy child,61 and
it would be performed after a miscarriage or loss of a child, or even as
a preventative measure:
56 The Royal Prayerbook’s letter is the earliest witness to the Epistola salvatoris in England.
Christopher Cain, “Sacred Words, Anglo-Saxon Piety, and the Origins of the Epistola salvatoris
in London, British Library, Royal 2. A. xx,” JEGP 108, no. 2 (2009), 168–89.
57 Don C. Skemer, “Amulet Rolls and Female Devotion in the Late Middle Ages,” Scriptorium
55, no. 2 (2001) 197–227.
58 Harley 585, fol. 185r/v.
59 Godfrid Storms, Anglo-Saxon Magic (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1948); E. V. K. Dobbie, The
Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942); J. H. G. Grattan and
C. Singer, Anglo-Saxon Magic and Medicine (London: Oxford University Press, 1952); Meaney,
“Women, Witchcraft and Magic,” 23–25.
60 Bosworth Toller’s Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online, s.v. “afedan,” ed. T. Northcote Toller et
al., comp. Sean Christ and Ondřej Tichy (Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague, 2014),
accessed January 10, 2018, https://bosworthtoller.com/.
61 Weston, “Women’s Medicine, Women’s Magic,” 287.
294 Christine Voth
Se wifman se hire cild afedan ne mæg: gange to gewitenes mannes

birgenne ond stæppe þonne þriwa ofer þa byrgenne, ond cweþe þonne
þriwa þas word:
“Þis to me bote, þære laþan lætbyrde;
þis to me bote, þære swæran swærtbyrde,
þis to me bote, þære laðan lambyrde.”
Ond þonne þæt wif seo mid bearne ond heo to hyre hlaforde on reste ga,
þonne cweþe heo:
“Up ic gonge, ofer þe stæppe, mid cwican cild, nalæs mid cwelendum,
mid fulborenum, nalæs mid fægan.”
Ond þonne seo modor gefele þæt þæt bearn si cwic, ga þonne to cyrican,
ond þonne heo toforan þan weofude cume cweþe þonne:
“Criste, ic sæde, þis gecyþed.”
(The woman who cannot rear her child: let her go to a dead man’s grave
and then step thrice over the grave, and then say these words thrice:
“This is my remedy for the loathsome slow birth. This is my remedy
for the grievous black birth. This is my remedy for the loathsome,
misformed birth.”
And when the woman is with child and goes to her husband in his rest,
then let her say:
“Up I go, over you I step with a living child, not with a dying one,
with a child brought to full-term, not with a doomed one.”
And when the mother feels that the child is alive, then let her go to church,
and when she comes before the alter, let her say,
“To Christ, I have said, this is made manifest.”)62
The charm requires the woman to perform in three stages: stepping over a dead
man’s grave to ward off the death of her future children due to delayed labor
(lætbyrde), stillbirth (swærtbyrde), or deformities (lambyrde); stepping over her
sleeping husband to assure her pregnancy sustains to term (fulborenum); and
finally, going to a church upon feeling the fetus move, to declare her desire
to keep her child. This final oral recitation is truncated in comparison with
the earlier two, and may represent a later adaptation of the charm to include
Christian elements, as seen in other charms with Germanic origins.63 Sarah
62 All translations from the Lacnunga are my own. Weston provides a more detailed analysis of this
and the other two charms from the Lacnunga in her article “Women’s Medicine, Women’s Magic.”
63 Karen Jolly, “Anglo-Saxon Charms in the Context of a Christian World View,” Journal of
Medieval History 11 (1985) 279–93, at 279, 284, and 286.
Larratt Keefer proposed that this part of the recitation may once have been
longer, perhaps patterned after the Magnificat, but she also suggests that the
obvious variation from the earlier formula appears to be the result of monastic
interference.64 Meaney offers an alternative interpretation that this final
part of the charm demonstrates the mother’s intention to baptize the child.65
The second, shorter charm in the Lacnunga is for a woman who has lost
a child either very late in birth or early after delivery as a grave is once
again involved:
Se wifmon se hyre bearn afedan ne mæge: genime heo sylf hyre agenes
cildes gebyrgenne dæl, wry æfter þonne on blace wulle ond bebicge to
cepemannum ond cweþe þonne:
“Ic hit bebicge, ge hit bebicgan þas sweartan wulle, ond þysse sorge
corn.”
(The woman who cannot rear her child, let her take part of her own child’s
grave, then wrap it in black wool and sell it to traders and then say:
“I sell it; you sell it; this black wool and seeds of this sorrow.”)
In this case, the woman is to sell some of the earth of her deceased child’s
grave, wrapped in black wool in “an inverted reference to the white clothes
of baptism.”66 In the black earth of the grave are the figurative “seeds of
sorrow,” dug up and exchanged in order to assure a healthy child in the
future.
Finally, the third charm appears to be a remedy for a woman having
difficulty breastfeeding as it focuses on the ability of a woman to provide
nourishment, not only to her child, but to herself:
Se man se ne mæge bearn afedan: nime þonne anes bleos cu meoluc

on hyre handæ ond gesupe þonne mid hyre muþe, ond gange þonne to
yrnendum wætere ond spiwe þærin þa meolc, ond hlade þonne mid þære
ylcan hand þæs wæteres muð fulne ond forswelge; cweþe þonne þas word:
“Gehwer ferde ic me þone mæran maga þihtan. Mid þysse mæran
mete þihtan. Þonne ic me wille habban ond ham gan.”
64 Sarah L. Keefer, “A Monastic Echo in an Old English Charm,” Leeds Studies in English 21
(1990), 71–80.
65 Meaney, “Women and Witchcraft,” 24.
66 Victoria Thompson, Dying and Death in Anglo-Saxon England, Anglo-Saxon Studies 4
(Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004), 96.
296 Christine Voth
Þonne heo to þan broce ga, þonne ne beseo heo no, ne eft þonne heo
þanan ga; ond þonne ga heo in oþer hus oþer heo ut ofeode, ond þær
gebyrge metes.
(The one who cannot feed her child, let her take milk of a cow of one color
in her hand and then sip it with her mouth, and then go to running water
and spit the milk therein, and then scoop up a mouthful of the water with
the same hand and swallow it; then let her say these words:
“Everywhere I have carried the glorious strong son by means of this
glorious, strong food. I will keep him and go home.”
When she goes to the brook, let her not look back, nor again when she
goes from there, and then let her go into a house other than that from
which she went out, and there let her eat food.)
In this ritual, the taking-in of nourishment in various forms is acted out:

the woman must milk a cow and then hold the milk in her mouth. Spitting
the milk into running water symbolizes her desire for her own breast milk
to flow. After reciting the charm, she then goes to a friend’s home and eats;
keeping herself healthy will aid her ability to feed her child. Finally, the
change of physical location is symbolic of a new life.
What stands out about the above three charms from the Lacnunga is
that not only are they thoroughly performative acts, requiring a woman to
traverse to rivers, graveyards, and churches, but that they are to be carried
out by the woman herself, without an intermediary. With the exception
of the final lines of the first charm, they contain no prayers or blessings
or appeals for heavenly intervention. Instead, these charms focus on the
physical manifestations of death (a grave) or nourishment (milk). Within
the textual tradition of medicine, these three charms are a glimpse of more
traditional, or “folk,” medicine that does not require physician’s supervision
or priestly blessing and may represent the types of remedies available to
women whose financial means did not allow for them to seek expert medi-
cal care. Furthermore, these charms epitomize the alterity of infertility,
representing a barrier between the woman afflicted with infertility or the
loss of her child and society as a whole. They also place a heavy burden on
the woman as the one responsible for the pregnancy or neonatal loss and
the inability of her body to provide nourishment either through her breasts
or her womb.
The textual evidence provides a disparate range of remedies for gyneco-
logical and obstetric concerns, from drinks and ointments to charms and
amulets. They address medical conditions that are universal to women and
present today even with modern medical advances. The efficacy of these
medieval remedies is debatable, but many of the herbs have emmenagogic
properties recognized today, and the prayers and hopes of today’s infertile
woman who cannot afford expensive treatments are little different from
medieval charms and amulets. I will come back to the topic of folk medicine
and care for women, but for now, I turn to sources of women’s medicine that
are not overtly part of the medical corpus.
“Women’s Medicine” in a Non-Medical Context
The only non-medical book to focus on women’s medicine is the Royal

Prayerbook: one of four extant small-sized books produced in Mercia in the
early ninth century, including the Book of Cerne, the Book of Nunnaminster,
and the Harley Prayerbook.67 As I mentioned when introducing my corpus,
it has been proposed that perhaps this manuscript was made for, or was
once the property of, a female physician. However, it bears no resemblance
in content to the extant vernacular medical corpus from the early medieval
England. The Royal Prayerbook is a Latin manuscript with a contemplative
focus on healing through Christ’s miracles. It contains no medical remedies,
but the two groups of prayers or charms for the cessation of bleeding (fols.
16v, 49r/v), focus on a specific kind of blood flow: menstrual. These charms,
as I will refer to them hereafter, present as prayers, but according to Lea
Olsan, a charm is a “performative speech act” that may be found in both
medical and religious contexts.68 Charms may contain actual prayers, but
they also contain an incantation of some sort and may require the actors to
perform in some other way, such as seen with the Lacnunga charms above.69
The manuscript opens with excerpts from the Gospels, but with an
unusual twist: the four evangelists’ accounts are changed from their biblical
order, with Matthew’s accounts of Christ’s healing miracles being presented
last, just before a series of hymns and prayers. Within the selections from the
Gospel of Matthew are four miracles in which women were healed, including
the “Veronica,” or the “Haemorrhoissa,” account of the woman who touches
67 Cambridge, University Library, Ll. 1. 10; London, British Library, Harley 2965; London,
British Library, Harley 7653. Michelle Brown, “Mercian Manuscripts? The ‘Tiberius’ Group and
its Historical Context,” in Mercia: An Anglo-Saxon Kingdom in Europe, ed. Michelle Brown and
Carol Farr (London: Leicester University Press, 2001), 281–91.
68 Lea Olsan, “The Inscription of Charms in Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts,” Oral Tradition 14, no. 2
(1999), 401–29, at 402.
69 Olsan, “Inscription of Charms,” 403–4.
298 Christine Voth
Christ’s hem and is healed of her bleeding after twelve long years.70 This
account features again in two charms against bleeding that begin with an
excerpt taken from A Solis Ortus Cardine, a Latin poem by the fifth-century
poet Sedulius in which the life of Christ is narrated in twenty-three stanzas:
Rivos cruoris torridi

Contacta vestis obstruit:
Fletu rigante supplicis
Arent fluent sanguinis.71
(Streams of blood dried up.

Blood ceased with the touch of the garment,
by the suppliant’s flowing tears;
the streams of blood dry up.)72
Citing the miracle of the Veronica, the suppliant requests that her own flow
of blood ceases, just as for the woman who touched Christ’s robes. The first
of these charms comes at the end of the second quire of the manuscript on
fol. 16v, after the apocryphal letter from Christ to King Abgar mentioned
above. It is repeated (with some textual differences) on fol. 49 r/v. The second
charm is significantly longer, beginning with a short Latin benediction,
and both begin with signum crucis drawn in the left margin. The charm
against bleeding then continues onto 49v, where the reader is once again
instructed to make the sign of the cross before reading a charm that contains
instructions to write out and carry an amuletic prayer in (corrupt) Greek
that includes the name Veronica.73 The final part of the charm, marked by
a fourth signum crucis repeats the Rivos cruoris torridi formula, adding a
plea for Veronica to intervene on the suppliant’s behalf to “free me from
70 The biblical account of the veil of Veronica and the Haemorrhoissa were conflated sometime
in the early Middle Ages in the transmission of Eusebius of Caesarea’s Church History. The name
Veronica would come to be associated equally with the woman who touched Christ’s hem and
the account of the woman who used her veil to wipe Christ’s bloody face. Emma Sidgwick, “At
Once Limit and Threshold: How the Early Christian Touch of a Hem (Luke 8.44; Matthew 9.20)
Constituted the Medieval Veronica,” Viator 45, no. 1 (2014), 1–24.
71 Peter G. Walsh and Christopher Husch, eds. and trans. One Hundred Latin Hymns: Ambrose
to Aquinus, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012),
90–91.
72 Translation is my own.
73 “COMAPTA OCOΓMA CTY ΓONTOEMA EKTYTOΠO +Beronice. Libera me de sanguinibus,
Deus, Deus, salutis me, CACINCACO YCAPTERE per Dominum Ihesum Christum.” (NB: Beronice
is the Latinate version of the Greek Veronica: Βερενικη.)
the blood,” followed by more corrupt Greek.74 In keeping with this pattern,
the manuscript closes with A Solis Ortus Cardine in its entirety (fol. 51r/v).
These charms are not for generic blood flow cessation as suggested by
Godfrid Storms when he truncated them,75 but charms involving prayers and
invocations to Christ and saints to cease the excessive flow of blood unique
to women, with the performative ritual focused on the sign of the cross and
oral performance, as suggested by the repetition of the Rivos cruoris torridi
formula.76 The type of abnormal menstrual bleeding addressed by these
charms would leave the patient anemic and sick and potentially infertile.
Infertility as a comorbidity of irregular and heavy menstrual bleeding may
also explain why there is a focus in the Gospel excerpts on the parents of
John the Baptist: Zechariah and Elizabeth, a couple who suffered life-long
infertility, and who were given the miracle of a child in their old age.
It is important to note that even regular menstruation was viewed
outside of any medical context in early medieval England as a disease
rather than a biological function. The Old English term in medical context
is flewsa (flux). References to menstruation only appear in two other
contexts in this period: homilies and penitentials. In both, the term used is
monaðadl, or “monthly disease.” Heide Estes notes that in the Old English
translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, the process of menstruation
itself is referred to as “illness/sickness” (untrymnes). “[T]he text’s repetition
that menstruation constitutes ‘untrymness’ creates a special category of
infirmity particular to women.”77 The penitentials and homilies in which
menstruation is addressed focus on the unclean nature of the cycle itself: if
a man and a woman participate in intercourse during her menstrual cycle,
the man is required to pay penance for twenty to forty days.78 Although
Bede writes that women should not be restricted from attending church
during their menstrual period, the Old English penitentials say otherwise:
any woman who attends church or partakes of the Eucharist is to fast for
twenty days.79 Menstruation was an “unclean” disease, and conception
74 “Beronice libera me de sanguinibus. Deus, Deus, Salutis me. AMICO CAPDINOPO ΦIΦIPON
IΔPACACIMO.”
75 Storms, Anglo-Saxon Magic, 196–200.
76 P. M. Jones and Lea T. Olsan, “Performative Rituals for Conception and Childbirth in England,
900–1500,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 89 (2015) 406–33, at 410–11.
77 Heide Estes, “Menstruation, Infirmity, and Religious Observance from Ecclesiastical History,
in Medieval Disability Sourcebook: Western Europe, ed. Cameron Hunt McNabb (Santa Barbara,
CA, punctum books, 2020), 341–44.
78 Scriftboc, Frantzen, “Penitential Database.”
79 Scriftboc, Frantzen, “Penitential Database.” These restrictions applied to women religious
as well.
300 Christine Voth
that may occur during menstruation was thought to result in a child born
with physical impairments or a sinful nature, which was to be avoided.80
The disease of menstruation may have prevented women in early medieval
England from attending church once a month, but what would it have
meant for a woman with excessive menstrual bleeding, already physi-
cally impaired by a disease that may have restricted her from marriage,
childbirth, or other activities most often associated with “womanhood”?
Unfortunately, the attitude of the church that menstruation was an unclean
infirmity suggest she also may have experienced marginalization through
social restrictions due to her condition. Returning to the question of the
purpose of this manuscript, it is important to point out how it differs from
the extant medical corpus. The Royal Prayerbook was created as a Latin
manuscript; vernacular glosses were added to several of the prayers by a
subsequent owner, sometime in the late tenth or early eleventh century.
The prayerbook had no original vernacular texts in it, whereas the other
medical books are primarily vernacular creations or translations. I am
reluctant to make a judgement that a woman physician’s “leechbook” would
differ so significantly from a man’s: in Latin instead of the vernacular and
with focus on prayers, hymns, and gospel excerpts over actual remedies.
As a medical manual, the Royal Prayerbook would have provided a very
limited range of healing for a woman physician, if that was, indeed, its
purpose. While the evidence is overwhelming that this manuscript was
created for a woman, I do not believe it was intended for one who was
interested in healing others, but one who was focused on healing herself.
A woman whose life had been ravaged by prolonged menstrual problems
and subsequent infertility could contemplate, pray, and perform the various
charms with the hope of healing and perhaps the miracle of childbirth
late in life through the texts in this manuscript. 81 The Greek amuletic
charm the suppliant is instructed to copy may have been paired with the
amuletic charm at the end of the apocryphal letter from Jesus to King
Abgar, providing the reader with dual talismans promoting good health
and warding off excessive bleeding.
The conscious compilation of this manuscript demonstrates that it
must have been very difficult for medical practitioners in this premodern
80 Irene Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking about Impairment during the High
Middle Ages, c. 1100–1400 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 86–88.
81 It is possible that this book may have belonged to a female monastery. However, the focus
on the miracle of the conception and birth of John the Baptist presents a level of hope for future
fertility that is inconsistent with a monastic environment.
society to cure ongoing, debilitating illnesses.82 Had the original owner of

this manuscript gone through repeated, failed medical treatments before
turning to contemplative material, prayers, and charms that focus on
spiritual intervention? Although the vernacular medical corpus lists several
treatments for gynecological and obstetric concerns, there is no evidence
available to indicate their overall efficacy. Of course, women seeking help
for fertility and/or gynecological concerns likely took advantage of every
available means of help: performing charms, seeking spiritual guidance and
contemplative material, and pursuing medical attention in order to elicit a
cure. The importance of the Royal Prayerbook to this study is that it is one
of the few sources in which we see medical treatment from the patient’s
perspective. Like the women who sought out fertility aids such as the charms
written down in the Lacnunga, the owner of the Royal Prayerbook must have
used the combination of texts found within the book to help cope with a
gynecological illness that may have prevented her from having a normal life.
The Treatment of “Women’s Medicine”
The actualities of healthcare for women in early medieval England are,

to be blunt, complicated. The vernacular medical manuscript collection
and the Royal Prayerbook mostly likely served a limited audience; that
is, the textual evidence for remedies for women’s medicine, particularly
herbal-based remedies, assumes the care and cure by a medical practitioner,
particularly one who was educated enough to read and well enough placed
to have access to a medical manuscript.83 This same physician may have
served in a specific environment such as a monastery, and was of service to
a select few with access to or the financial means to pay for medical care.
Similarly, the original owner of the Royal Prayerbook must have been from
a wealthy or noble family. She was either well-educated and able to read
Latin, or she had regular access to a priest who could read to her. Moreover,
she was either financially capable of commissioning the manuscript or
in position to receive one as a lavish gift. But noble women and those of
82 We can read the same frustrations in the medical community in Bishop Asser’s late ninth-
century accounts of the suffering of King Alfred. While his work has strong hagiographic
overtones, it may not have exaggerated King Alfred’s medical condition, the number of doctors
who attempted a diagnosis, and its untreatable nature. William H. Stevenson, Asser’s Life of
King Alfred together with the Annals of St Neot Erroneously Ascribed to Asser (Oxford: Oxford
83 Jolly, Popular Religion, 104–5.
302 Christine Voth
means were not the only ones who suffered from gynecological problems
or needed care during childbirth.
The corpus of women’s medicine noticeably focuses on when pregnan-
cies and labor go wrong. Apart from a single entry in Leechbook III on
prenatal care,84 and the injunction against certain foods in a pregnancy
prognostic,85 no medical treatises exist on what one should anticipate
in a typical pregnancy and delivery in early medieval England. 86 This
information was likely spread through oral tradition, rather than textual,
from woman to woman. Pregnancy and childbirth progressing normally, as
well as other women’s medical issues, were probably attended to by other
women.87 Historical evidence does not survive to tell us whether these
women were recognized medical specialists or mothers and grandmothers
sharing empirical knowledge. The vernacular translation for a midwife is
byrþþinenu, but it only occurs twice in the corpus of Old English, both times
84 Leechbook III.37.5: “Georne is to wyrnanne bearneacnum wife þæt hio aht sealtes ete oððe
swetes oþþe beor drince. Ne swines flæsc ete ne naht fætes. Ne druncen gedrince ne on weg ne
fere. Ne on hors to swiðe ride þy læs hio þæt bearn of hire sie ær riht tide.” (A pregnant woman
must be warned vigorously against eating anything salt or sweet, or drinking beor, and not eat
pork or anything fatty, nor drink so that she gets drunk, nor travel on the road, nor ride on a
horse too much, so that the child does not come out before the right time.) Banham and Voth,
Medical Texts II.
The injunction against horseback riding is repeated in the homily De Infantibus non Baptizandis
that John Pope attributes to Ælfric of Eynsham, Homilies of Ælfric: A Supplemental Collection,
Volume I, EETS s.s. 259 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1967), 56 and 69. See also Winfried Rudolf,
“Anglo-Saxon Preaching on Children,” in Childhood and Adolescence in Anglo-Saxon Literary
Culture, ed. Susan Irvine and Winfried Rudolf (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 48–70.
85 “[G]if wif biþ bearn eacen feower monoð oþþe fife and heo þonne gelome eteð hnyte oþþe
æceran oþþe ænige niwe bleda þonne gelimpeð hit hwilum þurh þæt/þonne þæt þæt cild bið
disig. Eft, is oþer wife beþon gef eceð fearres flæsc oððe rammes oþþe buccan oþþe bæres oþþe
hanan oþþe ganran oþþe æniges þara neata þe strynan mæg þonne gelimpeð hit hwilum þurh
þæt/þonne þæt þæt cild bið hoforode and healede.” (If the woman is four or five months pregnant
and frequently eats nuts or acorns or fresh fruits, then it sometimes turns out that because of
that the child will be foolish. Again, there is another way for that: if she eats the flesh of bulls
or rams, or bucks or boars, or cocks or ganders, or of any animal that can engender, then it
sometimes happens that because of that, the child will be hunchbacked and deformed.) Liuzza,
Anglo-Saxon Prognostics, 212–13.
86 This may not be overly surprising. Even though classical and Late Antique authors, including
Hippocrates, were interested in conception, fetal development, and obstetrics, and books of
gynecology were written by physicals like Soranus of Ephesius, their works were not transmitted
as a whole in early medieval England; extracts of their works may have comprised some of this
lost chapter, but with all authority removed. Green notes that the Salernitian compilation of
women’s medicine attributed to the woman Trota does not include information regarding normal
pregnancy and delivery issues; “History of Women’s Healthcare,” 495.
87 Weston, “Women’s Medicine, Women’s Magic,” 281; Jolly, Popular Religion, 103.
as a Latin translation for obstetrix.88 The low frequency of this term does
not necessarily predicate its popularity in everyday use but may indicate
that either byrþþinenu was not a recognized professional term or else there
may have been little reason (for men) to document the term.89
Gleaning evidence for the practice of women’s medicine in medieval towns
and villages is difficult at best as no sources survive to detail this facet of
women’s life. It may be possible to infer from vernacular penitentials and
homilies that the men of the church were aware of—and in many cases,
condemned—the treatment, prevention, and prognostication involved in
women’s medicine by those not sanctioned by the church.90 The OE Penitential
and OE Handbook for the Confessor both identify the means by which a
woman might bring about an abortion “with drink or with other diverse
things”:
Gif wif hire cild amyrð innan hire mid drence oððe mid oðrum mislicum
þingum oððe formyrþred syððan hit forð cymð, fæste x ger, þa iii on hlafe
ond on wætere, ond þa vii swa hire scrift hire mildheortlice tæcean wylle.
(If a woman murders her child while it is inside her, or after it comes
out, with drink or with diverse other things, she is to fast for 10 years, 3 on
bread and water, and 7 as her confessor mercifully prescribes for her, and
repent it ever after.)91
The highlighted phrase is missing in the older, vernacular penitential

collection known as the Scriftboc and the Latin original, suggesting it
was added later, perhaps as priests became aware of the ways and means
women might be exercising their options to birth control. The wording
of this addition to the penitential echoes that of many of the medical
remedies that call for herbal drinks to bring on menses or labor in the
case of a stillbirth. In his homily “On Auguries,” Ælfric notes that “some
88 DOE Web Corpus; OE Herbarium, Chapter 123.2; Herbert D. Meritt, The Old English Prudentius
Glosses at Boulogne-sur-Mer, Stanford Studies in Language and Literature 16 (Stanford: Stanford
89 My gratitude to Dr Debby Banham for consulting with me on the use of this term, and
for pointing out that documented Old English is not necessarily consistent with popular use
of the language. The documentation that survives from this era was produced in a heavily
male-dominated field, so this may be another reason for the low frequency of this and other
terms relating to women.
90 Meaney, “Women and Witchcraft,” 18–22; Lawrence-Mathers, “The Problem of Magic,”
90–98.
91 OE Penitential, Frantzen, “Penitential Database.”
304 Christine Voth
[women] kill their children before they are born, or after”92 in order to
hide their infidelity. Although abortifacient herbs typically prescribed as
emmenagogues may have been available and known to local practitioners
or midwives, Monica Green noted that this does not necessarily mean
they were widely used for the purpose of abortion.93 Infanticide, which is
referenced both in the penitential text and the homilies, may have proved
less perilous to the mother.
In the vernacular penitentials, women are the ones accused of witchcraft
(drycræft), the performance of incantations (galdorcræft) and other sorcery
(unlibban wyrce),94 and in Ælfric’s homily, they are accused of the crea-
tion of love philtres and other forms of love magic.95 The OE Penitential
specifies penance for all who “practice auguries or omens” (hyltas oððe
hwatunga), but adds a harsher penalty for women who cure their children
through witchcraft (wiccecræft) or by dragging them through the earth at a
crossroads.96 Ælfric must have been familiar with this particular penitential
text since he mentions it almost verbatim in his homily “On Auguries,”
calling the women gewitlease (witless) for their actions.97 Although this is
not an example of “women’s medicine” as it has previously been defined, I
note it here for two important reasons: these texts show women as agents
of family or folk medicine, and the practice of folk medicine was classified
by the church as heathen practices or witchcraft.
Designating these women as witches discredited them and their practices
within the eyes of the church, and perhaps their communities: “magic is
most often a label used to identify ideas or persons who fall outside the
norms of society and are thereby marked as special or non-normative, either
for the purpose of exclusion or to heighten a sense of mysterious power
92 “Sume hi acwellað heora cild ærðam þe hi acennede beon, oððe æfter acennednysse þæt hi
cuðe ne beon ne heora manifulla forligr ameldod ne wurðe ac heora yfel is egeslic and endeleaslic
morð.” Skeat, Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, 374–75.
93 Green, “History of Women’s Healthcare,” 499–505.
94 Scriftboc: “Gyf wif drycræft ond galdorcræft ond unlibban wyrce ond swylce bega fæste xii
monað oððe þreo æfesteno, oððe xl nihta gewite hu micelu seo fyren seo.” (If a woman practices
magic and incantations and sorcery and the like, she is to fast twelve months or the three forty-day
fasting periods or forty days; ascertain how great the sin is.) Frantzen, “Penitential Database.”
95 “Sume hi wyrcað heora wogerum drencas oððe sumne wawan þæt hi hi to wife habbon”
(Some of them devise drinks for their wooers, or some mischief, that they may have them in
marriage). Skeat, Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, 374–75.
96 OE Penitential: “gif heo tilað hire cilde mid ænigum wiccecræfte, oððe æt wege gelætan þurh
eorðan tyhð forðam hit is mycel hæðenscipe” (for that if she cures her child with any witchcraft,
or at a crossroads lets it be drawn through the earth, for that is a very heathen practice). Frantzen,
“Penitential Database.”
97 Skeat, Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, 374–75.
inherent in their status.”98 Even though the practice of witchcraft or sorcery

is condemned in other homilies and in law codes,99 Ælfric’s homily and the
penitentials are unique in focusing on women as practitioners of magic.100
The contemporary collection of sermons in the Vercelli Book includes the
practice of witchcraft and sorcery in a list of sins, but without any reference
to the gender of the sinner.101 The comparison here suggests that the Vercelli
homilies were offering generic moral teachings often seen in homiletic
texts, thus allowing them to be amended as the situation necessitated. Thus,
Ælfric and the men who documented and emended the late penitential
collections were addressing a contemporary societal concern as they saw
it: these churchmen objected to the disruption of the female social sphere
(as they defined it) by women acting as healers.
Drawing a sick child through the earth at a crossroads represents an
attempt to elicit a cure based on sympathetic medicine.102 Sympathetic
medicine is a form of symbolic transference, either as a means of tak-
ing away something bad or the application of something good through
contact or actions, and is a common feature of charms. 103 Crossroads
were common meeting places, but they were also places of illicit burials
(suicides),104 thus the mother may have hoped to transfer the child’s illness
onto a passing stranger or into a grave of one already damned. It is also
possible that the symbolism of the crossroads is simply a cross, and thus
the worried mother’s actions symbolized an act of transferring her child’s
suffering onto Christ. If this possibility were considered by Ælfric and the
confessors, then the punishment was meted out not because a woman was
performing a heathen action, but because she was performing a Christian
one. Nevertheless, in order for this to have been brought to the attention
of Ælfric and to warrant emendation in the vernacular penitentials, it
must have been practiced by more than one woman. This example is
also an analogue to the Lacnunga charms for a healthy pregnancy in
98 Karen Jolly, “Medieval Magic: Definitions of Magic,” in Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, vol. 3,
The Middle Ages, ed. Karen Jolly, Catharina Raudvere, and Edward Peters (London: Athlone
Press, 2002), 6–12, at 6.
99 Meaney, “Women and Witchcraft,” 17–21; Jolly, Popular Religion, 102; Felix Liebermann, ed.,
Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, 3 vols. (Halle: Niermeyer, 1906–16).
100 Meaney, “Women and Witchcraft,” 18: “whenever Ælfric uses a pronoun for a witch it is
always feminine.”
101 Vercelli Homily IV; Scragg, Vercelli Homilies, 95.
103 Jolly, Popular Religion, 109–10.
104 Helen F. Forbes, Heaven and Earth in Anglo-Saxon England: Theology and Society in an Age
of Faith, Studies in Early Medieval Britain (London: Routledge, 2013), 301.
306 Christine Voth
which the woman traverses a grave in a means of transferring death to

death in order to assure the life of her unborn child. The action of taking
soil from a grave or stepping over one to transfer “death to the dead”105
must have been seen by the church as desecration, even if that grave
belonged to one’s child. Sympathetic or transference healing crossed
into the arena of heathen practices, such as nature worship, and Ælfric
condemns practices that seek healing without a focus on the spiritual
realm: 106 “It is not allowed to any Christian person to fetch his health
from any stone, nor from any tree.”107 The Lacnunga charms for a healthy
pregnancy include only a single Christian element, and the performance
of charms that do not include Christian invocations or without a priestly
intervention would be anathema to someone like Ælfric. This alone would
warrant the condemnation of female healers as performers of magic and
witchcraft.108
Some, if not most, of the instances in which a woman was called out for
heathen practices and witchcraft were times when women were performing
as agents of medicine, either for themselves or for others.109 This might
include creating amuletic charms for pregnant and parturient women, or
even concocting a fertility drink. In the cases of women performing magic,
incantations, and sorcery, the Scriftboc recommends that the confessor “as-
certain how great the sin is,” and in the cases of abortion, the OE Penitential
allows the confessor to be merciful in his judgement.110 While it is up to
the confessor to prescribe whatever penalty he sees fit, these emendations
suggest he could assess situations in which perceived witchcraft was in fact

107 “Se cristena mann ðe on ænigre þissere gelicnysse bið gebrocod, and he ðonne his hælðe secan
wyle æt unalyfedum tilungum, oððe æt wyrigedum galdrum, oþþe æt ænigum wiccecræftr …
Nis nanum cristenum men alyfed þæt he his hæle gefecce æt nanum stane, ne æt nanum treowe,
buton his sy halig rode-tacen, ne æt nanre stowe, buton hit sy halig Godes hus; se ðe ells deð, he
begæð untwylice hæðengild.” (The Christian person, who in any of this like is afflicted, and he
then seek his health with unallowed practices, or with cursing charms, or with any witchcraft
… It is not allowed to any Christian person to fetch his health from any stone, nor from any tree,
unless it be the holy sign of the cross, nor from any place, unless it be the holy house of God,
he who does otherwise, undoubtable commits idolatry.) “The Passion of St Bartholomew,” in
Godden, Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, 449–50; Benjamin Thorpe, ed. The Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon
Church, vol. 1, Sermones Catholici: in the Original Anglo-Saxon, with an English Version (London:
Ælfric Society, 1844), 24.
110 Scriftboc: “gewite hu micelu seo fyren seo” (one should ascertain how great the sin is);
Frantzen, “Penitential Database.”
women taking their own or their family’s physical well-being into their own
hands, and thereby offer a mitigated penance.
One final source may expand our understanding of what role the church
played in women’s medicine. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 85 is a mid-
eleventh-century copy of an anonymous vernacular homiliary. In it, the main
scribe includes four Latin charms with Old English rubrics and directions,
copied between two homilies on folio 17r/v. The last of these is a charm Wið
wif bearneacnu (for a pregnant woman) that was to be written on “virgin wax”
(“wexe ðe næfre ne com to nanen wyrce”) and then bound to the right foot
of the laboring mother.111 The location of this charm in a book of sermons
suggests it fell upon the priest to recite and write it down when charged to
pray and encourage a woman during a difficult labor. This charm, calling
upon Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist and Mary, mother of Christ to
come to the aid of the woman in labor is the earliest recitation of the “Holy
Mothers” sequence frequently used in later medieval pregnancy amulets
and charms.112 A priest being summoned when labor has gone wrong was
another form of medical intervention available to a woman in this era,
although the frequency of this occurring is impossible to determine.113 The
priest’s role would not be clinical, but to act as healer of the soul, and as
such he could write out this (or other) charms, pray for the safe delivery of
the child, and be available to administer last rites.
Eddius Stephanus’s account of the grieving mother who attempts to have her
deceased infant baptized by Wilfrid only to have him brought back from the
dead suggests another reason why a priest might be present at a difficult birth.114
If a newborn could not survive until his or her mother was able to bring him to
111 “Wið wif bearneacnu: ‘Maria virgo peperit Christam elizabet sterelis peperit iohannem
baptistam; Adiuro te infans sies masculus an femina per patram et filium et spiritum sanctum,
ut exeas et recedas et ultra ei non noceas neque insipientiam illi facias amen; Videns dominus
flentes sorores lazari ad monumentum lacrimatus est coram iudeis et clamabat. lazare ueni foras
et prodiit ligatis manibus et pedibus qui fuerat quatriduanus mortuus.’ Writ ðis on wexe ðe næfre
ne com to nanen wyrce ond bind under hire swiðran fot.” (For the pregnant woman: “Maria,
virgin, bore Christ. Elizabeth, sterile, bore John the Baptist. I beseech you, infant, whether you
be masculine or feminine, by the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, that you come forth
quickly and depart, and no longer do harm nor (make) foolishness. Amen. The Lord, seeing the
sisters of Lazarus weeping at the tomb, wept in the presence of the Jews and cried out: Lazarus,
come forward!, and he came forth, bound hand and foot, who had been dead four days.” Write
this on wax that has not once come to be used and bind under her right foot.) Translation is my
own.
112 Jones and Olsan, “Performative Rituals,” 415–16.
113 Thompson, Dying and Death, 45–46.
114 “Eddius Stephanus: Life of St Wilfrid,” in The Age of Bede, trans. J. F. Webb (London: Penguin
Books, 1965), 106–84, at 126–27.
308 Christine Voth
church to be baptized, priests may have been able to intervene at delivery in

the cases of weak, dying, or stillborn infants. The Scriftboc puts to responsibility
for the death of an unbaptized or “heathen” child on the parents, prescribing
three years penance.115 However, in the later OE Handbook, the responsibility
falls on the priest.116 This provides motivation for the church in England to
intercede in the delivery of medical care to or by women, particularly when
the situation may result in the death of the mother and/or child.117
As I have shown here, there appear to have been multiple approaches
to the care and treatment of women’s medicine in early medieval England,
although no single means of treatment guaranteed success. Prayers, con-
templative material, and charms are evidence of self-care: women taking
their medical conditions into their own hands, particularly when the charms
have very little religious context, like those found in the Lacnunga. Another
layer of women’s medicine is that undertaken by doctors or priests whose
intervention was likely limited to very specific circumstances, such as
the financial capabilities of the patient or an emergency during delivery.
However, as the Royal Prayerbook’s collection suggests, medical intervention
itself may not have been fruitful, thus compelling women to turn to self-care.
Finally, the evidence of women acting as agents of medicine for their own
families suggests care being provided from woman to woman in the cases
of labor and delivery, and perhaps even in relation to birth control and
fertility concerns.
115 Scriftboc: “Cild gif hit hæðen swelte, fæste his fæder ond his modor ðreo winter” (If a child
dies a heathen, his father and mother are to fast three years). Frantzen, “Penitential Database.”
116 “Gif untrum cild hæþen gewite ond hit on preoste gelang sig þolie his hades ond bête hit
georne ond gif hit þurh freonda gymeleaste wurðe fæstan, þreo ger on hlafe ond wætere, ond
þa ii ger iii dagas on wucan, ond behreowsian hit æfre.” (If an unhealthy child dies a heathen,
responsibility for that belongs to the priest. He is to forfeit his rank and repent it earnestly;
and if it came through the negligence of friends, they are to fast for three years on bread and
water, and for two years, three days in the week and repent it ever after.) Frantzen, “Penitential
Database.”
117 The mid-twelfth century penitential manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud
Misc 482), which may have been compiled for the instruction of parish priests includes a
passage alluding to post-birth baptism. It is an adaptation from the New Testament book
James 5:14–16 and reads: “forþam hit is awriten, þæt ælc þæra manna þe þas gerihto hæfð,
þæt his sawl bið gelice clæne æfter his forðsiðe ealswa ðæt cild bið þe æfter fulwihte sona
gewit” (because it is written that every man who has these rites, his soul will be as clean
after his death as that of the child who dies immediately after the baptism). This passage
is repeated twice in the manual, suggesting its importance. Thompson, Dying and Death,
70–73.
Conclusion
Gynecological and obstetric remedies make up a small proportion of the

vernacular medical corpus that survives from early medieval England, but
they provide insight into the medical and social conditions women may
have faced when confronted with diseases unique to their bodies and the
treatments available to them. Many treatments incorporate the Hippocratic
model that calls for returning a woman to her natural menstrual cycle, but
others demonstrate the limitations of early medieval (and sadly, modern)
medicine, such as in the cases of miscarriage and stillbirth.
Much of women’s medicine survives through male channels, but it is
possible to find the female voice in the textual evidence. The Lacnunga
charms, in their oral, performative nature, show women as agents of their
own care, moving into the realms of natural and sympathetic magic in
their attempts to cure issues such as lactation problems, miscarriage, and
conception after stillbirth and infant death. These actions and attempts
at cures may have put women in direct conflict with the church, and they
were censured for it. Female agents of medicine may also have included the
local wise woman who offered advice and herbal curatives, or the patient
herself, placing her hope in charms and recitations. The Royal Prayerbook
offers alternative means of female healing agency through meditative
material focusing on spiritual well-being as well as the performance of
charms. Evidence of female agency in medicine and healthcare suggests
that even when medical treatment was readily available, many female
reproductive conditions were beyond the capabilities of early medieval
physicians. Undoubtedly, women were at the heart of “women’s medicine”
in England. Whether they were helping themselves or others, their reliance
upon male agents, either doctors or priests, was secondary to their own
desires and abilities.
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Women’s Literacy
11 The Literate Memory of Hugeburc of
Heidenheim
Aidan Conti
Abstract
The English nun Hugeburc of Heidenheim wrote lives of two kinsmen,
Willibald and Wynnebald, and became the only female hagiographer
of the Carolingian period. Hugeburc’s work represents an important
milestone for the construction of institutional memory in a region
undergoing Christianization. While writing hagiography can be seen as
a feminist act, the power structures and world views inscribed in these
works conform to dominant ideologies in the Christianization process. To
assess the cultural work these texts perform, this chapter looks beyond
the quality of Hugeburc’s Latin to better understand the hierarchies that
the texts construct, revealing that while Hugeburc’s activities challenge
a discursive arena that is almost exclusively male, her writings uphold a
patriarchal and Christian world view.
Keywords: Hugeburc of Heidenheim, Christianization, nuns, cultural

memory, cultural work
For a medieval studies that increasingly sees itself as feminist, postcolonial,

and global, the life and work of Hugeburc (or Hygeburg) of Heidenheim
(fl. 780s) offer a wealth of material.1 An English nun who migrated to
1 For recent overviews of Hugeburc’s works, see Rodney Aist, The Christian Topography of
Early Islamic Jerusalem: The Evidence of Willibald of Eichstätt (700–787 CE), Studia Traditionis
Theologiae 2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009); James Palmer, Anglo-Saxons in a Frankish World, 690–900
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2009); Walter Berschin, Biographie und epochenstil im lateinischen Mittelalter
III, Quellen und Untersuchungen zur lateinischen philologie des mittelalters X (Stuttgart:
Hiersemann, 1991), 18–26. Overviews of Hugeburc’s life are less prominent, but Pauline Head’s
“Who Is the Nun from Heidenheim? A Study of Hugeburg’s Vita Willibaldi,” Medium Ævum 51
doi: 10.5117/9789463721462_ch11
318 Aidan Conti
Bavaria in the wake of missionary activity on the edges of Frankish rule,

Hugeburc sparks the modern imagination because both her life and work
overturn conventional notions and broaden our conceptual understanding
of the Carolingian age. The only known female hagiographer of the period,
Hugeburc wrote the lives of two of her kinsmen, both of whom travelled
widely and both of whom were instrumental in the development of ec-
clesiastical institutions in Bavaria: namely, Willibald (d. ca. 787), bishop of
Eichstätt and founder of the double abbey at Heidenheim, and Wynnebald
(d. 760 or 761), the f irst abbot of the monastery at Heidenheim.2 These
lives, which go under the title Vita germanuum Wynnibaldi et Willibaldi,3
preserve the remarkable story of Willibald’s travels in the early part of
the eighth century to not only Rome (720–723), but also present-day Syria,
Jerusalem and environs (724–726), as well as Constantinople (727–729)
before his return to Italy, and ten years at Monte Cassino (729–739) after
which he was called to Bavaria and became bishop of Eichstätt (740).
Consequently, Hugeburc’s writing offers the only extant narrative account
from Western Christendom of interactions with Islam in the Holy Land
during the eighth century; it also represents one of a handful of accounts
from the period after Persian and then Islamic societies governed the
region and before the Crusades, in other words from the early seventh
century CE until the very end of the eleventh. 4 While Hugeburc’s account
of Wynnebald’s life is less studied, he is also remarkable for his travels
(chiefly to Rome) as well as his role in the establishment of Christian
(2002), 29–46, centers Hugeburc’s life. Shorter entries can be found in Michael Lapidge, John Blair,
Simon Keynes, and Donald Scragg, eds., The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England
(Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), s.v. “Hygeburg,” and the introduction to the translation
of part of her work in T. F. X. Noble and T. Head, Soldiers of Christ: Saints and Saints’ Lives from
Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1994), 141–64, at 141–43.
2 Berschin, Biographie und epochenstil, provides the dates 760 for the death of Wynnebald
and ca. 787 for Willibald. Palmer, Anglo-Saxons in a Frankish World, 761 and 787 respectively.
3 Oswald Holder-Egger, Vitae Willibaldi et Wynnebaldi auctore sanctimoniali Heidenheimensi,
MGH, SS 15.1 (Hannover, 1887), 80–117; translated by C. Talbot with revisions by Thomas Head
in Soldiers of Christ. The title comes from München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 1086, 44v;
on the composition of the works (with particular reference to Willibald’s travels), see Palmer,
Anglo-Saxons in a Frankish World, 253–55. When referring to the work as a whole I will use
Vita germanuum; when referring to individual lives as they are now edited, VWill for the Vita
Willibaldi and VWynn for the Vita Wynnebaldi.
4 In addition to Hugeburc’s retelling of Willibald’s travels in the eighth century, we can
note Bede’s treatment of Arculf’s travels in the seventh century, and the account of Bernard of
Mont-St-Michel in the ninth. These are included in John Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrims before
the Crusades, 2nd rev. ed. (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 2002).
The Literate Memory of Hugeburc of Heidenheim 319
institutions in Bavaria. Given the extraordinary contents of the Vita

germanuum, especially Willibald’s voyage to the Holy Land, it is not
surprising that much academic attention has focused on the travels found
in Hugeburc’s work.
In this essay, I consider approaches to Hugeburc that have elided her role
in the cultural work of hagiography in a frontier. Arguing that Hugeburc
acts as an important figure for the construction of institutional and cultural
memory in a region undergoing Christianization, I then examine her texts
to analyze the particular worldview and power structures she inscribes.
In this endeavor, I hope to recenter Hugeburc’s role in the production of
sanctity in early medieval Europe. While this work can in an important way
be regarded and positioned as feminist (in that it argues for the importance
of the female author), I will not argue that Hugeburc represents a form of
proto- or pre-feminism as is sometimes staked out when we endeavor to
reassert feminine voices from the past and in so doing situate in the past
a nascent feminism that charts a course towards present-day feminism.
Rather, in addition to asserting the struggle for equality, I take as axiomatic
that feminism involves praxis as Sara Ahmed describes:
Living a feminist life does not mean adopting a set of ideals or norms of
conduct, although it might mean asking ethical questions about how to live
better in an unjust and unequal world (in a not-feminist and antifeminist
world); how to create relationships with others that are more equal; how
to find ways to support those who are not supported or are less supported
by social systems; how to keep coming up against histories that have
become concrete, histories that have become as solid as walls.5
With Ahmed’s concerns in mind, Hugeburc’s work raises a number of ques-

tions about the type of world she inscribes into being when she writes the
hagiography of her relatives. In writing the biographies of foundational
figures of the ecclesiastical institutions of the region, Hugeburc herself
creates histories that will become concrete for subsequent generations as
“solid” in Ahmed’s terms as the walls of the religious buildings her writing
accompanies. Consequently, a feminist reading must, I believe, examine
the vitae of these two brothers with an eye toward the social relationships,
systems and histories they create in the written record and so in the social
memory of the region. For in confirming and transmitting a particular
5 Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 1.
320 Aidan Conti
form of historical understanding, these stories, in turn, affect and shape

the possible futures that their audiences can imagine.
Approaching Hugeburc: Identifying the Nun of Heidenheim
Typically, Hugeburc’s story involves the academic forensics that led to the
identification of her name in the first third of the twentieth century. While
the works themselves record that they were written by “an unworthy Saxon
woman” (ego indigna Saxonica),6 Hugeburc’s name was only attributed to
the work when the code in München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm.
1086 (fol. 71v, early 9th century) was deciphered.7
In this cipher, which immediately precedes the text of the Vita ger-
manuum, abbreviations, such as secd, are interspersed with consonants, such
as the g thereafter, as well as partial words, such as the end of a gerundive,
rdidando. While it is now clear that the abbreviations stand for ordinal
numbers—pri for “first”, secd for second, ter for “third”, quar for “fourth”
and quin for “fifth”—the abbreviations lack any mark for grammatical
gender (an a following scd would denote secunda for example), nor is the
noun to which the adjectives refer explicit. Consequently, expansion of the
abbreviations is tentative, rather than certain. However, knowing that the
ordinals refer to vowels, we can posit that the adjectives refer to littera or
vocalis (both feminine) and arrive at the following:
Secunda g quarta. quinta. n prima. s prima x quarta n tertia.

c prima. n quarta. m tertia. n secunda. h quinta. g secunda.
b quinta rc quarta r. dinando. h secunda c. scr tertia.
b secunda. b prima m
Alternatively, if we simply replace the abbreviations with Arabic cardinal

numbers, we can envision the cipher in the following code-like format:
2 g 4 5 n 1 s 1 x 4 n 3 (-)
c 1 n 4 m 3 n 2 h 5 g 2 (-)
b 5 r c 4 rdinando h 2 c s c r 3 (-)
b 2 b 1 m
6 Vita germanuum, 86, 27–28.

7 See Bernhard Bischoff, “Wer ist die Nonne von Heidenheim?,” Studien und Mitteilungen zur
Geschichte des Benediktinerordens, 49 (1931): 387–97; also Head, “Who Is the Nun?,” 29–30.
Fig. 11.1 Hugeburc’s cipher. München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm. 1086, fol.

71v, lines 4–78
Image reproduced by permission of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, Germany.
Substituting the numbers for the vowels to which they correspond yields
the following sentence: “Ego una Saxonica nomine Hugeburc ordinando
hec scribebam” (I, a Saxon woman with the ordained name Hugeburc,
wrote these things).8
While similar ciphers were widespread in early medieval written (and
spoken) culture, the specific execution of Hugeburc’s code is said to be
unique.9 Partial parallels in other early medieval code traditions include,
for example, the substitution of a vowel with its adjacent consonant seen
in a number of scribal codes.10 On the other hand, Bede in his De temporum
ratione mentions a code in which letters can be substituted with numbers.
While Bede’s system is described in terms of oral communication (so as to
hide messages while meeting in groups), the principle could, as we see here,
be applied to written communication as well.11 In this regard, Hugeburc
works within a broader tradition, but is unique in her execution, a fitting
depiction of much of Hugeburc’s literary activity.
8 A full image of the cropped detail is available at: http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/0006/

bsb00064004/images/index.html?id=00064004&groesser=&fip=eayaxdsydyztseayaxsxsxdsyd
enyztseayaxsen&no=190&seite=146, accessed August 30, 2021. I am grateful to the Münchener
DigitalisierungsZentrum (MDZ) for allowing use of the image via an Attribution-NonCommercial-
ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.
9 See Head, “Who Is the Nun?,” 30 with reference to William Levison, “St Boniface and Cryp-
tography,” England and the Continent in the Eighth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1946), 290–94;
and also Benjamin A. Saltzman, “Vt hkskdkxt: Early Medieval Cryptography, Textual Errors and
Scribal Agency,” Speculum 93, no. 4 (2018): 975–1009, esp. 983–85.
10 http://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2018/03/cracking-a-medieval-code.html, accessed
April 8, 2019.
11 De temporum ratione, I (272, lines 82–89), C. W. Jones, Bedae Venarabilis Opera, Pars VI,
Opera Didascalica 2, CCSL 123A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997).
322 Aidan Conti
While the recovery of Hugeburc’s name would suggest her centrality,

nonetheless academic attention to the woman and her works has been rather
limited in its interests and approaches, revealing, I believe, a number of blind
spots and prejudices within the field of early medieval English studies and,
indeed, arguably within medieval studies more broadly. Not only has her role
(and indeed her name) in her work been frequently elided, the texts she wrote
are often viewed as peripheral for a number of institutional and historical
reasons. Foregrounding Hugeburc and her cultural work represents part of
a broader effort to assert the pivotal and central role women played in early
medieval textual culture in general and memory culture in particular.12
In a region and period in which ecclesiastical institutions were recently
founded and in which their roles and reputations were in the process of
being developed and consolidated, Hugeburc employs literate practices in
the writing of holy biographies of her kin as part of an emergent monumental
memorial culture.
These literate practices and the form of cultural memory they facilitate,
while seemingly inevitable within a determinist framework of progress (that
is traditional models of development and literacy), are not autonomous or
neutral activities, but rather, when viewed in terms of more recent studies of
literacy, ideologically driven and sustaining acts that establish and re-enforce
political and social hierarchies.13 As a result, in addition to reasserting
Hugeburc’s centrality in our consideration of her work, I aim to explore
from a feminist standpoint the social role of Hugeburc’s works and the way
that they challenge, support, or enable social stratification. Her texts help
elevate her male relations to saintly status within a region in which she and
her relations are new arrivals intent on changing indigenous customs to
conform to those of the dominant ideology of Christianity; we cannot say
12 See, for example, Felice Lifshitz, Religious Women in Early Carolingian Francia: A Study
of Manuscript Transmission and Monastic Culture (New York: Fordham University Press); and
Elisabeth van Houts, Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe, 900–1200 (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1999).
13 On ideological approaches to literacy, see Brian Street, Literacy in Theory and Practice
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Three important studies that form the core of
“new literacy studies” include in addition to Street’s work, that of Sylvia Scribner and Michael
Cole, The Psychology of Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); and Shirley Brice
Heath, Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983). A useful overview of new literacy studies, which at this time
are rather less new and more orthodox, can be found in David Barton, Literacy: An Introduction
to the Ecology of Written Language, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 22–28, or alternatively
Harvey J. Graff, Literacy Myths, Legacies, and Lessons (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers,
2013).
that early medieval missionary activity was steeped in imparting a Christian

way of life without recognizing the hierarchies that this historically and
socially situated imparting brought with it. Against this background, I will
examine two episodes in particular in the lives of Willibald and Wynnebald
that highlight the politics of Hugeburc’s work, namely Willibald’s balsam
smuggling and one of the few miracles attributed to Wynnebald. While
asserting Hugeburc’s prominence represents an assertion of equality for
women writers, I recognize that her work and its social function are not
necessarily egalitarian.
Reasserting the Cultural Work of Hugeburc
In reasserting Hugeburc’s role in the cultural work of her texts, it is im-

portant to distinguish this process from one which asserts the unique
qualities of her work and the achievement of the author. An emphasis on
cultural work, as described by Jane Tompkins, explores how texts provide
a society with means of thinking about itself, of def ining aspects of a
shared social reality, and expressing and shaping the social context that
produced them.14 As a result, while Hugeburc is a central figure in this
cultural work, the aim is not to assert her singularity or the particular
literary merits of her work. To understand better how Hugeburc’s cultural
work has been overlooked, a consideration of traditional academic attention
to her, attention that shows not so much neglect as marginalization, is
in order, even as contemporary work promises to change the traditional
picture of this important figure.15
To a certain extent, the degree to which Hugeburc is overlooked reflects
the disciplinary and institutional focus of early English studies within
departments of English literature and language and departments of history
where England and the Continent are often distinct fields of enquiry. As
a female hagiographer working on the continent and writing in Latin, her
hagiographies fall outside conventional bounds of the vernacular canon of
English literature. Furthermore, her work, written before the age of Alfred,
14 Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1985), 200.
15 See, for example, Diane Watt, “Exemplary Lives of Anglo-Saxon Missionaries,” Women,
Writing and Religion in England and Beyond, 650–1100 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020),
91–116; see also Head, “Who Is the Nun?” and Ora Limor, “Pilgrims and Authors: Adomnán’s De
locis sanctis and Hugeburc’s Hodoeporicon Sancti Willibaldi,” Revue Bénédictine 114, no. 2 (2004):
253–75.
324 Aidan Conti
precedes much of that which is literary in the English language and so is

more visible to those who work within a Carolingian rather than an English
framework. Although her hagiographic works are about English men, their
lives and careers are not part of the history of the island, which they left
when young. Moreover, even within the treatments of the Bonifacian mission
to the continent, Hugeburc and her work occupy a rather peripheral space.
Although her works circulate within a hagiographic dossier which includes
the Vita Bonafatii, she was not one of the many female correspondents of
Boniface’s circle.16
However, the marginalization of Hugeburc is not solely due to disciplinary
configurations. Even when her literary work stands centered, her role is
often overlooked. Academic assessments largely reveal a pattern in which
the activities of Willibald are foregrounded while Hugeburc’s literary ef-
forts are found wanting. Given that Willibald’s journeys were reported by
Willibald to Hugeburc and her associates, some critics, like Walter Berschin,
see Willibald’s account as a separate work that was incorporated at times
verbatim into Hugeburc’s vita.17 Indeed, Hugeburc’s preface asserts that
she repeats the words of Willibald, an authenticating technique to give the
text the authority of truth and to eschew the appearance of fabrication or
embellishment:
suisque oculis venerandi viri Willibaldi corporaliter cognita … haec omnia

intimando pergstringimus … sicut illo ipso vidente et nobis referente de
ori sui dictatione audire et nihilominus scribere destinavimus, duobus
diaconibus testibus mecumque audientibus, 9. Kal. Iulii, pridie ante
solstitia, Martii die.18
(We relate all these things that were known bodily through the very eyes
of the venerable man, Willibald … just as he himself saw these things
and related them to us from the dictation of his own mouth we resolved
to hear them and so write them down—with two deacons as witnesses
who heard them with me—on Tuesday the twenty-third of June, the day
before the summer solstice.)
16 A useful overview of the Bonafatian circle with particular reference to one of the female
correspondents can be found in Kathryn Maude, Berhtgyth’s Letters to Balthard, Medieval
Feminist Forum Medieval Texts in Translation 4, Subsidia Series 7 (2017).
17 Berschin, Biographie und epochenstil, 18–26. See also Aist, Christian Topography, 8: “The
respective contributions of Willibald and Hugeburc are self-evident due to the divergent styles
of their Latin.”
18 VWill, 87, 10–23.
Willibald’s story, she writes, is known not from the turns of apochryphal
stories (non apocriforum venia erratica),19 but because she, together with two
clerical witnesses, wrote from Willibald’s dictation. The idea that Hugeburc
wrote verbatim, or nearly verbatim, Willibald’s own words is often repeated
and upheld with recourse to a mistake in the primary manuscript for the
work. In one sentence which describes a brief stay near the Jordan, the text
states, “pastores dabant nobis acrum lac bibere” (shepherds gave us [nobis]
bitter milk to drink), where one expects “them” (illis) in the third person
hagiographical narrative.20 As a result, so the argument goes, we have an
account dictated by Willibald which was then copied nearly verbatim with
the necessary shifts from Willibald’s first-person account to the third-person
for hagiography. The one instance in which the change of perspective was
not actualized—the retention of nobis—serves to reinforce the hypothesized
method.
Based on this premise, scholars can and do analyze the itinerarium (or ho-
doeporicon) of Willibald as something separate from Hugeburc’s hagiography.
Then, perhaps not unsurprisingly, when the whole work is considered, her
contribution (which is seen to comprise the introduction, Willibald’s early
childhood, and his life after he takes up his position in Eichstätt) is seen
as not only superfluous, but also not particularly successful. For example,
Michael Lapidge calls her Latin style “much indebted to Aldhelm … [and]
often impenetrable.”21 Similarly, Thomas Noble and Thomas Head assert:
“Critics agree that it is interesting that a woman should have tried to imitate
Aldhelmian Latin, but revealing that her education … was insufficient to
permit her to achieve her goal with complete success.”22 These assessments
seem to consider Hugeburc’s efforts to imitate Aldhelmian style as a curiosity,
rather than the common idiom of Hugeburc’s social familiars, other women
in the missionary field.23 By contrast, Aldhelm’s own prose is not seen as an
19 VWill, 87, 20–21.

20 VWill, 96, 9–10. Cited by, among others, Katherine Scarfe Beckett, Anglo-Saxon Perceptions of
the Islamic World, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003), 46 and Eva Gottschaller, Hugeburc von Heidenheim: Philologische Untersuchungen
zu den Heiligenbiographien einer Nonne des achten Jahrhunderts (München, 1973), 89. For a more
capacious understanding of the convergence of the voices of Hugeburc and Willibald, see Watt,
“Exemplary Lives,” 102.
21 Lapidge, in Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England, 246.
22 Noble and Head, Soldiers of Christ, 142.
23 On the general proclivity to disparage the correctness of women’s writing, see Matthew
Hussey’s “A Road Nearly Taken: An Eighth-Century Manuscript in a Woman’s Hand and Franco-
Saxon Nuns in Early Medieval English Intellectual History” in the present volume, especially
pp. 344–45 and 361–64.
326 Aidan Conti
anomaly, but rather the product of a virtuoso, “flamboyant … consisting of

excessively long sentences built up of synonymous phrases often linked by
alliteration and adorned by a dazzling variety of unusual grecisms.”24 Even
as we recognize the grammatical lapses and difficulty in Hugeburc’s Latin,
the focus on its style, an important aspect of modern formalist analysis
and indicator of the contemporary educational environment, nevertheless
pushes aside the cultural significance of Hugeburc’s work. Whatever its
grammatical and stylistic shortcomings, the Vita germanuum promulgates
a vision of sanctity and serves to inscribe notions of model behavior for the
communities in which it was written, transmitted, and copied.
Failure to see Hugeburc’s work as a cohesive cultural work, a failure
facilitated by the plain language of the travelogue contrasted with the
elaborate style elsewhere, have produced curious outcomes. In a particularly
glaring effacement, a recent anthology of medieval pilgrimage writing
excerpts the hodoeporicon of Willibald and ascribes the text as anonymous.25
This denial of her authorship not only underscores an unfamiliarity with
Hugeburc herself, but also testifies to the peripherality of the period to
our understanding of pilgrimage and to Christian relations with the Near
East. Indeed, even if this period is considered a low point in contact, trade,
and travel, nevertheless the very fact that we have a written travel account
from this period should and does in fact demonstrate how entwined these
worlds, often considered distinct, always were.26
In a less immediately striking example, Rodney Aist’s book-length and
careful study is devoted to Willibald’s account, its relation to those of other
pilgrims, and its accuracy. While Hugeburc’s authorship is recognized, the
division of the work into his account and her writing leads to seemingly
quixotic readings, wherein convenience dictates which words are his and
which are hers. For example, in examining the textual description of the
sepulchrum Salvatoris which Willibald is reported to have visited, Aist notes
that the descriptions of the sepulchrum do not show a direct verbal link to
Matthew’s account with the exception of the phrase ad ostium monumenti,
24 Lapidge, in Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England, 26.

25 Brett Edward Whalen, ed., Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages: A Reader, Readings in Medieval
Civilizations and Cultures 16 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011). That Hugeburc is
rendered as “anonymous” stems from the use of the Jerusalem Society translation (1895) of
Hugeburc’s work, which appeared before Bischoff’s identification. That this edition was used
suggests that the earlier medieval period (essentially, between late antiquity and the late Middle
Ages) is less well known to those working on the later medieval period.
26 Michael McCormick, “New Light on the ‘Dark Ages’: How the Slave Trade Fueled the Caro-
lingian Economy,” Past & Present 177 (2002): 17–54 on the travel routes in this period.
a direct quotation from Matthew 27:60 where the phrase appears in the
clause “quem angelus revolvit ad ostium monumenti” (which the angel
rolled away from the mouth of the sepulchre).27 In this case, Aist considers
the possibility that Hugeburc inserted the phrase during her revisions.
However, in the description of the Calvarie locus, which occurs earlier in the
text, Aist sees the echoes of Matthew’s phrasing as indicative of Willibald’s
use of scriptural language, which while echoing the Bible, almost never
shows a literal dependence upon the scriptural text.28 In short, some biblical
phrasing is Willibald’s; in other cases, it is seen as Hugeburc’s. His phrasing
is authorial; hers an interpolation.
The story of Willibald’s travels emphasizes the importance of the text in
creating a Holy Land that readers (and listeners) could envision as a living
testimony of the truths imparted by the Bible. The elision of Hugeburc’s
role in transmitting this knowledge to us rests on a number of points: first,
that the text of Willibald’s travels were dictated, an idea supported by the
incorrect use of a first person pronoun in the manuscript that serves as
the base text; and second, the issue of style, which has been employed to
suggest that Hugeburc’s and Willibald’s contributions to the work can be
distinguished. As noted above, many readers have contrasted Hugeburc’s
elaborate, yet not quite successful, Latin style with the simple, declarative
statements of the travel narrative. Such analysis yields two registers in the
work—one ornate, with neologisms, rare words, and unexpected word
order, the other mundane and matter-of-fact.
There are two challenges to using a distinction in style as the basis for
separating Hugeburc’s work from Willibald’s account. The f irst is that
the distinction does not always hold.29 We see, for example, evidence for
elaborateness within the travel account.30 In particular, in Chapters 8–10
which describe Willibald’s journey to and stay in Rome, the prose is largely
florid with certain phrases that can allegedly be attributed to Willibald.
Similarly, the chapters covering Willibald’s years in Monte Cassino (32–34),
employ an elaborate style although the information, one presumes, relies
on Willibald. Those who endeavor to maintain a distinction between her
writing and his words have posited that Hugeburc deliberately intended to
27 Aist, Christian Topography, 124–27.

28 Aist, Christian Topography, 109.
29 Gottschaller, Hugeburc, 82: “Hugeburcs Stil ist … nicht einheitlich durchgehalten.” This
lack of uniformity posits both that there is an identifiable style that is Hugeburc’s and that it is
difficult to maintain the distinction.
30 Aist, Christian Topography, 8–9.
328 Aidan Conti
distinguish the two styles or, alternatively, began to embellish the entire
work before abandoning the effort.31
Second, insomuch as there is a distinction between the two registers, we
see similar registers in the Vita Wynnebaldi for which there is no basis for
taking Wynnebald’s travel as dictation.32 Eva Gottschaller’s stylistic analysis
finds that the miracle of the church bell (Chapter 11) is richly elaborated,
but that the subsequent miracle at the mill is related in simple terms.33 The
scene for the miraculous ringing of the church bells is set with the decision
to build a new monastery for the saint, which Hugeburc relates in elaborate,
lengthy prose:
Cumque episcopus noster Willibaldus cum cuncta populariae multitudinis

copie, cum iuniorum subditorum agminibus aecclesiam fabricare conpo-
nereque disposuit, ubi sanctus Christi confessor in copore requiescebat,
maioram quam priora, ut, sicut ille vir virtutibus veneratus, mirabilibus
magnificatus, faustus fulgebat, ita iam tunc in augusto almoque Tonantis
templo celeberrima creverint divine laudis modulationes.34
(And when our bishop, Willibald, with all the abundance of a popular
multitude, with battles lines of younger subordinates, decided to build
and set up a church where the holy confessor of Christ [Wynnebald]
rested in body, greater than the previous ones, so that, just as that man,
celebrated for his virtues, magnified by his miracles, shone favorably, so
then at that time, the most celebrated melodies of divine praise would
grow in the Thunderer’s great and nourishing temple.)
This sentence is replete with alliteration (for example, vir virtutibus veneratus,
mirabilibus magnificatus, faustus fulgebat), synonymous phrasing (fabricare
conponereque) and poeticisms (such as the epithet “Thunderer” used for
God).35
31 Aist, Christian Topography, 9 based on Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrims before the Crusades.
32 Gottschaller, Hugeburc, 99–100.
33 Gottschaller, Hugeburc, 99: “Nicht volkstümlich gehalten, sondern sogar besonders reich
gestaltet ist das Glockenwunder in Kapitel 11, das auch in der Bonifaz-Vita vorkommt. Dagegen ist
das sich unmittelbar anschließende Wunder in der Mühle in sehr einfachen worten beschrieben.”
34 VWynn, 115, 1–5.
35 The epithet tonans refers classically to Jupiter, but is applied to God in early Christian
poetry, such as, for example, Dracontius (ca. 455–ca. 505): “Unda beata nimis, meruit quae tecta
polorum, / celsa fauore Dei, iussu suspensa Tonantis.” De laudibus Dei, I, 142–43 in C. Moussy
and C. Camus, ed. and trans. Dracontius: Louanges de Dieu, Réparation (Paris: Les belles lettres,
1985–1988).
Similarly, in relating the miracle itself Hugeburc employs a less verbose but
nevertheless elaborate sentence in which several alliteration-rich ablative
absolutes invoke the presence of Christ, God, and the saint, before the finite
clause which is embellished with two prepositional phrases emphasizing
the lack of human intervention:
Confestim, Christo cooperante, domino Deo dispensante sanctique

confessoris suffragante patrocinio, illa glocka in aecclesia sine manibus
hominum, sine omnium adminiculo se ipsam commovere cepit.36
(Straightaway, as Christ assisted and as the Lord God arranged and as the
advocacy of the holy confessor favored, the bell in the church without the
hands of humans, without the support of anything, begain to move itself.)
By contrast, in the subsequent miracle the depiction of the young woman

who arrives at the mill is related more prosaically. In three periods, Hugeburc
employs a high degree of parataxis, clauses connected by and (-que or et).
Subordination is temporal and causal, rendered in cum-clauses, a quando,
and a postquam-clause. The sequence as it progresses has the reiterative
feel of a story that goes “and when … and … and when … when”:
Cumque illa veniebat ad monasterio, alius homo fuit aduc molans farinam
monachorum illic prope habitantium, et illa moram faciens expectabat,
quando locum haberet. Cumque ille abiret, illa ambulabat et molabit.
Postquam illa molaret, esuriebat, tulit de farina domini sui et fecit sibi
panem et manducavit.37
(And when she came to the monastery, another man was there milling
the grain of the monks who lived nearby. And she tarried and waited
since he occupied the place. And when he left, she walked up and milled.
When she milled, she grew hungry, took from the grain of her master and
made bread for herself and ate.)
We see then in the life of Wynnebald that Hugeburc employs variation in

the register used to depict the miracles attributed to the saint. Whatever
the origins of the difference—one may reflect literate sources and learning,
the other oral accounts related within the community—Hugeburc unites
36 VWynn, 115, 8–10.

37 VWynn, 115, 20–24.
330 Aidan Conti
the different modes of diction within a single literary work that constructs
the sanctity of both brothers.
The debates around style then have served to distinguish and foreground
the travels and ecclesiastical career of Willibald (and to a lesser extent the
career of his abbot brother) at the expense of recognizing the social role
Hugeburc’s text plays in the creation and development of a written culture of
memory in the region. Using the work of Jan and Aleida Assmann allows us to
consider more cogently the role Hugeburc and her work play in the develop-
ment of institutional Christian memory.38 In this framework, institutional
memory forms an important official element of a broader cultural memory,
which entails the handing down of collective knowledge and touches on the
social roles that this collective memory enables and enacts. In the case of
Eichstätt and Heidenheim, the introduction of written texts on foundational
figures represents a form of cultural transformation whereby an oral pagan
past becomes a literate Christian present. Subsequently, the institutional
communication of these texts—that is, the repetition and reception of their
contents—represents an important part of a complex of shared symbols
(such as rites, clothing, food, and images) of cultural formation that creates
and preserves collective identity.39 In other words, as Catherine Cubitt has
argued for early saints in pre-Conquest England, saints “were not … passive
figures for remembrance in Anglo-Saxon monasteries but active figures
since, through their exemplary power, their actions and words informed
the lives of others.”40 In this vein, as Hugeburc’s work is transmitted over
time, it is incorporated within a written tradition of hagiography centered
around Boniface and those close to him, and it is also reworked to fit the
liturgical readings in a later passionale sanctorum. 41
In this respect, Hugeburc’s insistence on her reproduction of Willibald’s
account serves to authenticate the tale (which must have seemed extraor-
dinary) for her audiences. Such a rhetorical stance is similar to a number
of other authenticating techniques that serve medieval hagiography from
the Life of Ethelwold by Wulfstan (d. 1023) to William of Malmesbury’s Life of
38 See, for example, Aleida Assmann, “Memory, Individual and Collective,” in The Oxford
Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, ed. Robert Goodin and Charles Tilly (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006), 210–26; and Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing,
Remembrance, and Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
39 Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization, 119–20.
40 Catherine Cubitt, “Memory and Narrative in the Cult of Early Anglo-Saxon Saints,” in
The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Yitzak Hen and Matthew Innes (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), 29–66, at 34.
41 Palmer, Anglo-Saxons in a Frankish World, 30.
Wulfstan, bishop Worcester (ca. 1008–1095).42 While much scholarly attention

has cited Hugeburc’s authentication to insist on the proximity of the writing
to Willibald’s own speech and words—indeed, this may be the only saint’s
life that is represented as dictated directly by the saint—Hugeburc’s insist-
ence that she writes what he saw, as well as her cryptic self-identification,
also serves to underscore and highlight the obverse, namely that is it her
writing that preserves and presents this account for future generations.
The Social Imagination of the Vita germanuum
In reasserting the centrality of Hugeburc’s role in the construction of saintly

figures for her community (and beyond), the worldview, or “topography of
the thinkable”, that the texts enshrine is paramount for understanding the
political imagination of the period. 43 For as much as her work represents
a form of collective memory, the ideas and forms (the symbolic meanings)
expressed within collective memories also shape the scope of the possible
that is the imaginary, be it political or social, in which the members of the
group see themselves. 44 In Hugeburc’s writing, we come into contact with
a rich storyworld that underscores the complexity of the medieval social
imagination. The lives of these two brothers provide not only an expansive
geography that can be imagined through their travels (especially in the
case of Willibald), but also depict, for example, the wonderous possibility of
healing and the unifying feeling of singing in unison in praise of a common
divinity. In addition, the lives also inscribe a specific vision of a society
ordered by proper and salutary Christian conduct. In presenting hereafter
a reading of Hugeburc that emphasizes the social regimen served by the
models of her relatives, I do not wish to convey that Hugeburc presents a
42 See Vita Ethelwoldi: “ne tanti patris memoria penitus obliuioni tradatur ea que presentes ipsi
uidimus et quae fideli seniorum relatione didicimus in his scedulis summatim perstrinximus,”
Michael Winterbottom, ed., Three Lives of English Saints, Toronto Medieval Latin Texts (Toronto:
Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1972), 33; and Vita Wulfstanti, 1: “cognoscetis me nichil
dicere quod non sit solida ueritate subnixum, quod non sit probablium uirorum testimonio
compertum, adeo antiquorum mentibus insederunt uisa, adeo iuniores amplectuntur audita,”
M. Winterbottom and R. M. Thomson, ed. and trans., William of Malmesbury: Saints’ Lives,
Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 8.
43 Jacques Rancière, “The Aesthetic Heterotopia,” Philosophy Today 51 (2010), 24.
44 Cornelius Castoriadis, “Temps identitaire et temps imaginaire: L’institution sociale du
Temps,” in L’institution imagniaire de la société (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 311–19, translated by Kathleen
Blamey as The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987); Benedict Andersen,
Imagined Communities, rev. ed. (London: Verso Books, 1991).
332 Aidan Conti
joyless and rigid view of the world. Indeed, it is the joy and wonder promised
by her vision of a Christian present that renders the models of behavior
inscribed in the brothers’ lives so compelling.
A poignant example of Hugeburc’s structuring can be found in the
portrayal of the inhabitants of the region around Heidenheim before the
foundation of the abbey. Scholarship has indicted that early medieval mis-
sionary accounts routinely and often depict regions that are to be converted
as more pagan than they actually were.45 However, in depicting the paganism
in Sualaved at the time of Wynnebald’s arrival, Hugeburc seems to draw on
descriptions of paganism found in the Vita Bonafatii and lists of practices
from the Indiculus superstitionum, sources which “reflect not simply pagan-
ism, but a mixed, syncretic environment dressed up as paganism.”46 Indeed
Hugeburc’s account presents evidence of professed Christians and clergy
in the area, even as she emphasizes the many delusions of pagan depravity
such as idolatry, divination, incest, fornication, and others too numerous to
name. Within the same lengthy catalogue, Hugeburc singles out the behavior
of the priests in the region as even worse than pagan practices (quod hiis
adhuc peius est). Rather than serve the holy altar, they are engaged in impure
behaviors and fornication. Moreover, members of both the laity and clergy
were stained by unlawful copulation with concubines.47 In short, the region
has been exposed to Christian practices and order, but in such a way and
with such aberrations that the area is beyond the possibility of reform of
amelioration and must be entirely purged of ungodly behavior. By rendering
the region as entirely overrun by ungodly practices (even among those who
were meant to be godly), Hugeburc creates an imagined cultural landscape
which can then be entirely reshaped by the work and actions of the saint.48
In this manner, pagan, unchaste, and unlawful designate both the non-
Christian in the imaginary, but also always potentially pre-Christian. Given
the portrayal of religion in Sualaved within a pre-Christian imaginary, it
is telling that Hugeburc refers to the Muslims of the Holy Land as pagans
45 Ian Wood, The Missionary Life: Saints and the Evangelisation of Europe (London: Routledge,
2001), 65.
47 “[P]lurima paganice pravitatis prestigia, multos diabolice fraude deceptos idolatria colentes,
alii aruspicia observantes, alii divinationes demonium dicentes, alii incantationum fribola
facientes, alii negromanticas, sed et alios multas, quas nunc longum est enumerare … et quod hiis
adhuc peius erat, quod multi, qui sacerdotalis ordinatione presbiteros et sacre altare deservire
debuerant, inmunditia et fornicatione magis quam divina servitutis sollertia subditi et refrenati
fuerant, aliosque laicorum et clericorum concubinas iniuste copulationis societate contaminatos.”
VWynn, 111, 36–112, 1.
(which is sometimes paired with Saracens). 49 Such terminology facilitates

her audience’s seeing the Muslims of the Holy Land as engaging in pagan
activities (such as the worship of false idols, appeals to divinators and engag-
ing in ruinous rites), but also as a potential missionary field in which they
are imminently ready to be transformed into Christians. In this manner,
the living memory of missionary activity in Germany can be employed to
envisage the unknown customs of the Muslim inhabitants of the Holy Land.
To elucidate further the political imagination that informs and is produced
by Hugeburc’s holy biographies, I will look at two particular episodes from the
Vita germanuum, one relating to Wynnebald, the other to Willibald. Neither
life of these two men is particularly rich in remarkable miracles.50 The life
of Willibald, composed while the saint was still alive, obviously presents no
post-mortem miracles; his travels to the Holy Land seem to be ample merits
for sainthood. As Diane Watt reveals, the work is “less a hagiography, in the
traditional sense … than a naturalistic pilgrimage narrative.”51 However,
a particular episode during his travels evokes a comparison to possible
martyrdom, which I will turn to after looking at Wynnebald.
To Wynnebald on the other hand, a small number of miracles are at-
tributed. Not only does Wynnebald’s story exhibit typical tropes of the
saintly, such as the sweet smell emanating throughout the church after his
death,52 the vita also recounts a few brief stories. In one episode, a daughter
of his uncle is cured of a paralyzing pain in her right arm and hand after
visiting his tomb.53 In another, the bell of the new church built over the
resting place of the saint rings of its own accord, an event also found in
the Vita Bonafatii.54 In a third (and commonplace) episode, the saint’s
body, exhumed for translation, is found to be incorrupt.55 Slightly more
49 “[P]agani Sarracini,” VWill, 94, 14; “ad paginis Sarracinis,” VWill, 95, 24.
50 See Palmer, Anglo-Saxons in a Frankish World, 278.
51 Watt, “Exemplary Lives,” 102.
52 “[T]am magna et tam miranda suavissimi odoris nectar,” VWynn, 114, 33.
53 “Similiter et alio tempore evenerat, quod una de sua parentella, sui avunculi filia, quae plus
quam duos annos magna dolore constricta tenebatur in dextera manu et in brachio illo, et sic
ut iam paralitica et pene arida fiebat; tunc illa properans venit ad illum locum sepulture eius;
nec longum fuit postea quam illic veniebat, quod pristina ille restituta erat sanitas.” VWynn,
114, 40–44.
54 VWynn, 115, 9–10: “illa glocka in aecclesia sine manibus hominum, sine omnium adminiculo
se ipsam commovere cepit.” Cf. Willibald, Vita Bonafatii, ed. Wilhelm Levison, MGH SS rer. Ger.
57 (Hannover, 1905) 53, lines 21–23: “aecclesiaeque gloccum … humana non continguente manu,
commotum est.”
55 “Tunc illi extimplo illum moventes de selpuchro … leviter de terra levaverunt, toto corpore
integrum, omnibus membris munitum, ita ut nec capillus de capite eius minuetur.” VWynn, 116,
11–14.
334 Aidan Conti
distinctive within the litany of curative stories is a short exposition of the

loosening of the bonds of a pitiable man (miser), who, led to the monastery
by guards, is allowed to petition the saint.56 Describing the man as a miser,
evoking compassion and his possible poverty, Huguburc relates that the
man, who was to be punished for his crimes, asks his guards’ permission
to petition the saint. Weeping and kneeling in the church, the miser asks
the saint to loosen his bonds. The saint in turn raises the praying man and
causes the bonds to fall from his hands with no human intervention, after
which the once pitiable, now joyous man is able to depart. The forgiveness
shown to this man, whose crime is not elaborated but whose poverty is
suggested, stands in stark contrast with another miracle that is related
after the saint’s death.
Hugeburc’s twelfth chapter presents the most detailed miracle, referred
to briefly earlier, in Wynnebald’s life, recounting the story of a servant
(ancilla) from the village near the monastery. This servant comes to the
monastery to grind the grain of her lord, but must first wait for another
man to finish at the mill. Presumably due to the wait, the servant becomes
hungry and after she has begun to grind her lord’s grain, she takes some
of the flour and makes herself bread so that she has something to eat. As
a result, she recognizes that the quantity of her flour will fall short of its
expected measure. To remedy the situation, the woman takes some of
the flour from the monks’ store. However, after this substitution the mill
suddenly stops producing flour for the servant. Shaking and crying, likely
due to fear of being found out, the servant tells the miller of her plight. The
two then prostrate themselves and pray to Wynnebald. Only after admission
of the sin does the saint deign to help the woman, at which point the flour
begins again to be produced from the mill.
In this miracle, we see a reversal of the mercy-giving role that one might
expect from a saint who in the case of the pitiable man (miser) immediately
forgives transgression. Indeed, the miracle of this story is not forgiveness or
the appearance of divinely produced flour to address the missing measure,
but the halting of the milling of grain which forces the compunction of the
servant. In this sense, rather than obviating punishment, the saint instigates
it; meal is withheld until the servant confesses. Indeed, Wynnebald’s role
as an enforcer of moral norms and social mores, a prominent feature of
his life, is made explicit at the conclusion of the chapter, where Hugeburc
informs us that those deeds the saint disdained as perverse while he was
56 “Tum ille miser, mente mestus, corpore ligatus, pia suffragia sancti illius petivere desiderabat
licentiamque suos deprecabat ductores aecclesiam intrare.” VWynn, 117, 18–20.
living he continued to forbid after he was crowned in heaven.57 In his life

then, Wynnebald served as a model for Christian behavior. In his death, as
a saint, he continues to enforce ideas of proper conduct. In the case of the
pitiable man, we learn that in some cases forgiveness is possible on appeal
to the saint. In the case of the servant, who took from the monks’ flour,
compunction must be demonstrated by admission of the wrong before
forgiveness can be granted.
In a manner similar to her structuring of class and gender difference,
we see that Hugeburc also structures religious difference in recounting
Willibald’s journeys within the Muslim-held territories of the Holy Land.
When Willibald arrives in Tyre for a second time, this time in preparation for
his departure from the Holy Land, we learn that he had bought some balsam
the last time he was in Jerusalem and that he filled a calabash (bottle-gourd)
with it. While details regarding the rationale for the procurement of the
balsam are omitted,58 the narrative provides full, near technical, details
of Willibald’s efforts to hide the balsam:
emebat sibi balsamum et replevit de petre oleo et fecit intus in munerbam

et secavit illam cannam parem munerba, ita ut in margine ambo erant
similes plane, et sic claudebat os munerbe.59
(he took a hollow reed that had a bottom to it and filled it with mineral
oil and put it inside the calabash. Afterward he cut the reed equal in
length to the calabash so that the surfaces of both were even and then
closed the mouth of the calabash.)
This effort succeeds in deceiving the officials at Tyre who smell only the
mineral oil despite their seemingly complete check of Willibald’s belongings:
Cumque omnia exquirentes nihil invenerunt nisi unam munerbam,

quam habuit Willibaldus, illamque aperientes, odorabant, quid intus
fuisset. Cumque odorabant petre oleam, qui intus in canna fuerat supra, et
balsamum, qui intus erat in munerba subtus petre olea, non repperierunt,
et sic eos reliquerunt.60
57 “Ideo non est dubium, quod ille vir venerandus … facinora, quae prius vivendo abhominaverat
in perversis, tunc coronatus in caelestibus vetaverat in vivis prave agentibus.” VWynn, 115, 34–36.
58 While Hugeburc provides no details, balsam is used to scent chrism, which may provide a
religious motive for Willibald’s actions.
59 VWill, 101, 6–10.
60 VWill, 101, 13–16.
336 Aidan Conti
(But when they had thoroughly examined everything and could find
nothing except one calabash that Willibald had, they opened it and sniffed
at it to find out what was inside. And when they smelled mineral oil …
they did not find the balsam … and so let them go.)
This outcome belies what must have been a rather tense scene for the future
bishop. As we learn later (in Talbot’s translation): “If they [the authorities]
had found anything they would certainly have punished them and put them
to death.”61 Willibald’s evasive tactics, at least in Talbot’s translation, smack
of bravado, a young man tempting death but cheating it with his cunning. In
the Latin, however, the transgression and attendant capital punishment is
phrased so as to enhance the holy credentials of the protagonist. Hugeburc
writes that had they been caught they would have been punished and
martyred: “si aliquid invenissent, cito illos punientes martyrizarent.”62 In
this light, Willibald’s ruse becomes saint-like; Hugeburc’s language elevates
Willibald’s flaunting of local laws to a profession of his faith when confronted
by pagan authorities. The raconteur’s tale of smuggled contraband and the
subsequent brush with death is transformed into an act of Christian heroism.
It is salutary to read Willibald’s actions and would-be martyrdom next
to the experienced martyrdom of Boniface, whose vita precedes Willibald’s
in the earliest account of Willibald’s life (München, Bayerische Staatsbib-
liothek, Clm. 1086). In Boniface’s second attempt to convert the Frisians
in 754, he calls for a meeting to confirm the converted. But Boniface and
his associates are met not by converts; in their stead, brigands arrive who
kill him and his companions. Because Boniface’s martyrdom occurred
during the act of proselytism in the missionary field, comparison with
Willibald’s would-be martyrdom facilitates a link between missionary
activity in Europe and possible conversion in the Holy Land. And yet, from
a more critical perspective—that is, if we observe these events outside
of the Christian framework that Hugeburc constructs—Willibald’s story
justifies a transgression against foreign laws, a transgression ennobled by
the affective language of martyrdom. This use of affective language to elicit
feelings that are not congruent with events is reminiscent of Sara Ahmed’s
analysis of the way in which the language of love is employed by modern
61 Talbot, trans. in Noble and Head, Soldiers of Christ, 59. The Latin, discussed below in the
paragraph, reads “si aliquid invenissent, cito illos punientes martyrizarent” (VWill, 101, 12–13).
62 “Cumque veniebant illi ad urbe Tyro, illi cives urbis tollentes eos constringebant et omnem
scirfam eorum exquirebant, ut repperirent, si aliquid habuissent absconditum, et si aliquid
invenissent, cito illos punientes martyrizarent.” VWill, 101, 10–13.
groups that preach hate.63 The rhetorical conversion of smuggling into

possible martyrdom allows the readers of the Vita to associate Willibald
with the positive value of professing a Christian faith and endeavoring
to convert the pagan. This narrative of martyrdom then repositions the
smuggling Christian subject as one who is at risk of being murdered by
non-believers, by those very people who have allowed him to live as a
guest in their lands for several years. In this regard, Willibald’s travels
are not simply a rare eye-witness account, but an important piece in the
European project of claiming the region of its sacred texts as its own. The
lands of Jesus’s life and teaching, regions presently under control of non-
Christians—non-believers within Hugeburc’s perspective—become an
integral part of Western Christendom’s patrimony.
At the time of Hugeburc’s writing in the last quarter of the eighth century,
the holy lands of Christendom were far removed from the daily life and preoc-
cupations of inhabitants in Bavaria. Being able to present an eye-witness
account of these lands together with the visits of both brothers to Rome
brought the most holy sites of Christianity and the religion’s most important
Latin city into greater proximity for a population that might only otherwise
imagine these places as remote, if at all. By making distant geographies more
conceptually proximate, Hugeburc’s hagiographies present a rich source
for the medieval social imagination, whatever their stylistic or factual
shortcomings. Moreover, they present a way of seeing the world that lauds
a regulated Christian life and those who promulgate the behaviors that are
associated with such a life. In writing the stories of ecclesiastical founders,
Hugeburc presents subjects of model Christian behavior within a community
that is developing Christian habits and identities. She thereby occupies a
central role in the cultural reproduction of the ideals expressed in these
narratives, literary monuments that will serve to inform local and regional
communities. In appropriating the language of martyrdom for smuggling
and in demonstrating that forgiveness for servants is withheld until the
sin is confessed, Hugeburc’s work inscribes notions of social and religious
hierarchy. On the one hand, the prejudices and differences reinforced by
these stories seem obvious, but that they are so self-evident attests to the
power of unspoken ideology. By making these implicit and concrete histories
63 Sarah Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004),
123: “hate is renamed as love, a renaming that ‘conceals’ the ambivalence that it exercises (we
love rather than hate). The conversion of hate into love allows the groups to associate themselves
with ‘good feeling’ and ‘positive value’. Indeed, such groups become the ones concerned with
the well-being of others; their project becomes redemptive, or about saving loved others.”
338 Aidan Conti
explicit they may lose some of their durance and reveal the hierarchies and
social structures that the process of Christianization entailed.
The disposition of the woman behind these histories, and her personality,
remain opaque, sometimes contradictory. As Pauline Head has shown, it is
difficult to determine Hugeburc’s position in relation to her self-declaration
of authorship. She cloaks her work in the tropes of modesty, calling herself
“unworthy”, but at the same time announces herself as a Saxon nun and
furnishes her name through her cipher. Protesting her lack of stature and
asserting her modesty, “half-fearful, half-defiant” as one critic has described
her,64 Hugeburc inserts herself in her writing in a way that both conforms to
and defies prevailing rhetorical conventions and customs of her day as she
forges the hagiographic credentials of her kin. In short, the intentions behind
her endeavor and her self-representation are beyond our grasp and indeed
our remit. While her activities challenge a discursive arena that is almost
exclusively male, we nevertheless recognize in that challenge that Hugeburc’s
writings uphold a patriarchal and Christian dominance. As Janet Nelson
poignantly remarks, “Certain women, in certain contexts, were encouraged,
posthumously and perhaps also in their lifetimes, to speak up; but beyond
them we glimpse other beneficiaries, individual or collective, who were
always male.”65 If making Hugeburc, who remained anonymous for so long,
visible is a feminist act, so too is the unfurling of the concrete histories her
cultural work inscribes, work that serves Western Christendom’s imagined
claims to foreign holdings and its particular vision of a regulated social order.
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12 A Road Nearly Taken
An Eighth-Century Manuscript in a Woman’s Hand and
Franco-Saxon Nuns in Early Medieval English Intellectual
History
Matthew T. Hussey
Abstract
Some medieval studies scholarship has foregrounded perceived shortcom-
ings in scribal hands as well as mistakes in the Latin of a constellation
of texts and books from late seventh- and early eighth-century English
foundations. These assessments have diverted scholarly attention from
these otherwise revealing works. By recentering these textual artifacts by
means of historical, literary, paleographical, and documentary research,
the Frankish influence on early English religion and learning can be
recovered, and at least one extant manuscript may be ascribed to a nun’s
hand: an early eighth-century copy of Isidore of Seville’s Synonyma written
by an anonymous nun in the monastery at Bath.
Keywords: Early medieval England, manuscript studies, women scribes,

literary history
Introduction
In a foundational survey of evidence for women owning and writing books

in early medieval England, Michelle P. Brown notes, “extant books produced
in early Anglo-Saxon England offer only slender evidence of female produc-
tion or ownership.”1 Naturally, we f ind what we look for. As Clare Lees
1 Michelle P. Brown, “Female Book Ownership and Production in Anglo-Saxon England: The
Evidence of Ninth-Century Prayerbooks,” in Lexis and Texts in Early English: Essays Presented
to Jane Roberts, ed. C. Kay and L. Sylvester (Antwerp: Rodopi, 2001), 45–67, at 50.
doi: 10.5117/9789463721462_ch12
344 Matthew T. Hussey
and Gillian Overing have asked and answered, “Women’s writing in the
early Anglo-Saxon period? Women? Writing? What, were they writing?
Of course they were. We just need to read, listen, and write our literary
histories differently.”2 One way to read differently is to examine a cluster
of late seventh- and early eighth-century texts and manuscripts that are
frequently marginalized, and thus understudied, but for which there is some
evidence that they may have been produced in circles of women readers
and writers. These circles can be localized to southwest Mercia in centres
that eventually became part of the Worcester diocese. While the Frankish
church was a powerful influence on the nascent English church, notably
in Kent and Northumbria,3 there is evidence of a localized impact at a
nunnery in Bath in the decades before and after the year 700. This evidence
is largely diplomatic, but it is also codicological; a handful of books and
fragments survive that show Frankish influence in script and construction.
This Frankish influence manifests in handwriting that has been judged
by scholars to be lesser or faulty, thus relegating these manuscripts to the
sidelines of literary and intellectual history. Why examine books described
as “derivative” or “awkward,”4 when the restrained classicism of the Codex
Amiatinus or the ravishing overload of the Lindisfarne Gospels loom so
large? And scholarship has similarly marginalized a constellation of Latin
texts from roughly the same period and milieu. Letters by seventh- and
eighth-century English nuns, especially in the collection whose epicenter is
Boniface, are called emotional, even “heart-rending,”5 but in scholarship, they
are also disparaged and thus devalued. In terms of standards of correctness
(more or less rightly) their Latin is called things like “weak,” “rough,” and
“problematic”6 and whatever literary value they have (whatever that is) is
2 Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing, “Women and the Origins of English Literature,” in The
History of British Women’s Writing, 700–1500, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy and Diane Watt (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 31–40, at 39.
3 James Campbell, Essays in Anglo-Saxon History (London: Hambledon, 1986), 116. See also
Wilhelm Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1946)
for a fundamental study of that influence. Several Frankish foundations had links to early
medieval England. Bede specifically mentions Brie, Andelys, and Chelles and their connections
with Kentish and Northumbrian houses; see Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, ed. and trans. Bertram
Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford Medieval Texts, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 3.8.
4 E. A. Lowe, Codices Latini Antiquiores, 11 vols. and supplement, with 2nd ed. of vol. 1 (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1934–71); cited as CLA with volume and item number: CLA 9.1426 and 2.265.
5 Andy Orchard, “Beorhtgyth,” in The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England, ed.
Michael Lapidge, John Blair, Simon Keynes, and Donald Scragg (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 61.
6 Respectively: Patrick Sims-Williams, “An Unpublished Seventh- or Eighth-Century Anglo-
Latin Letter in Boulogne-sur-Mer MS 74 (82),” Medium Ævum 48 (1979): 1–22, at 7; Lisa M. C.
Weston, “Conceiving the Word(s): Habits Among Earlier Anglo-Saxon Monastic Women,” in Nun’s
A Road Nearly Taken 345
seen to come from their imitation of Aldhelm or Virgil or Arator. In some

of the criticism, the erroneous Latin is linked to emotional excess, in effect
drawing on long-standing stereotypes of women as ruled by emotion, lacking
discipline and control. I hope to counter this strand of scholarly appraisal,
and its unintended (or maybe even intended) dismissal of women’s writing.7
By taking these bibliographical and literary efforts not as shoddy botch jobs,
but as witnesses to intense work, cultural and ideological investments, and a
specific intellectual and embodied striving, I hope to re-evaluate these texts
and books in the history of medieval studies, and to understand better in a
local political, religious, and literary context the kind of women’s writing
Lees and Overing remind us to discover. By reading against the grain, a
counter-history of early medieval English books and letters becomes clear,
one in which women were not ruled out of the sacerdotal and missionary
work of the early church, and one where Frankish books, teaching, and
practice rivaled Roman and Irish.
The Würzburg Synonyma
Recently, Felice Lifshitz has analyzed the manuscripts of the English cultural
province in early medieval Francia to illuminate nuns’ literary, theologi-
cal, liturgical, and codicological work there.8 One peculiar manuscript,
Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek M.p.th.f.79, an early eighth-century copy
of Isidore of Seville’s Synonyma,9 may allow us to thicken Brown’s “slender
Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Hull Dialogues, ed. Virginia Blanton, Veronica O’Mara, and
Patricia Stoop (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013) 149–67, at 165; D. Patricia Wallace, “Feminine Rhetoric and
the Epistolary Tradition: The Boniface Correspondence,” Women’s Studies 24 (1995): 229–46, at 240.
7 Aidan Conti traces a similar dynamic regarding the hagiography of Hugeburc, where academic
“attention … shows not so much neglect, as marginalization,” p. 323), an attention that “reveals a
number of blind spots and prejudices within the field of early medieval English studies,” p. 322);
see “The Literate Memory of Hugeburc of Heidenheim” in this volume, pp. 317–41.
8 Felice Lifshitz, Religious Women in Early Carolingian Francia: A Study of Manuscript Transmis-
sion and Monastic Culture, Fordham Series in Medieval Studies (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2014).
9 CLA 9.1426; Helmut Gneuss and Michael Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: A Bibliographical
Handlist of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England Up to 1100
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), no. 946 (hereafter ASM with item number); N. R.
Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford: Clarendon, 1957), no. 400; Hans
Thurn, Die Handschriften der Universitätsbibliothek Würzburg (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1984),
3.1: 66; Charles D. Wright, “Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek, M.p.th.f.79,” in Manuscripts in
Austria and Germany, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts in Microfiche Facsimile 24 (Tempe: Arizona
Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2015), 183–91.
evidence of female production or ownership” in England. The unusual

uncial script of its first eight leaves strives to reproduce a Frankish uncial.10
The main hand of these leaves is capable and clear when writing in an
insular half-uncial, to which it reverts for a telling moment, but is belabored
and painstaking when grinding out the Frankish-styled uncial.11 This
concerted effort to imitate Frankish uncial would seem to be a witness to
the exchanges between Frankish and English foundations in the seventh
and eighth centuries. My analysis of Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek
M.p.th.f.79 (henceforth the Würzburg Synonyma) takes up the other end
of the relationship explored by Lifshitz, the Frankish cultural province in
southwest England, where this manuscript, and those related to it, suggest
a nuns’ scriptorium in Bath at the border of Mercia and Wessex.
The Würzburg Synonyma is a nearly complete copy of Isidore’s consolatory
dialogue and rhetorical handbook that breaks off just before the text’s
conclusion, suggesting the loss of at least a leaf or two at the end.12 Three
quires remain: the first a quire of eight, mostly written in uncial with numer-
ous erasures and corrections; the second and third are quires of ten, and
are written in a few versions of “Anglo-Saxon minuscule” that ease into
cursive in the last lines of some leaves.13 The sections of text are marked
by simple large initials, some touched in yellow. On the whole, it is a very
spare and unadorned piece of work. The first and second quires are very
sporadically glossed with Old English in various hands using drypoint.14
10 Bernhard Bischoff, “Die Kölner Nonnenhandschriften und das Skriptorium von Chelles,” in
Karolingische und ottonische Kunst. Werden, Wesen, Wirkung. VI. internationaler Kongress für
Frühmittelalterforschung, 1954. Forschungen zur Kunstgeschichte und christlichen Archäologie
3, ed. Hermann Aubin et al., (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1957), 395–411; reissued in expanded form
in Mittelalterliche Studien: Ausgewählte Aufsätze zur Schriftkunde und Literaturgeschicte, 3 vols.
(Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1966–1981) 1:16–34; Rosamond McKitterick, “Nun’s Scriptoria in
England and Francia in the Eighth Century,” Francia 19, no. 1 (1992): 1–35, at 5–6; Matthew T.
Hussey, “Anglo-Saxon Scribal Habitus and Frankish Aesthetics in an Early Uncial Manuscript,” in
Scraped, Stroked, and Bound: Materially Engaged Readings of Medieval Manuscripts, ed. Jonathan
Wilcox, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 15–37, at 32–34.
11 Hussey, “Scribal Habitus.”
12 On the early literary history of the Synonyma in England, see Claudia Di Sciacca, Finding
the Right Words: Isidore’s Synonyma in Anglo-Saxon England (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2008), esp. 47–52; on the manuscript’s full details see Charles D. Wright, “Würzburg,
Universitätsbibliothek, M.p.th.f.79,” in Manuscripts in Austria and Germany, 183–91.
13 As described by Lowe in CLA 9.1426 and his English Uncial (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960),
22.
14 Josef Hofmann, “Altenglische und Althochdeutsche Glossen aus Würzburg und dem weiteren
angelsächsischen Missionsgebiet,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur
85 (1963): 27–131, at 57–60.
More drypoint glosses in Old High German were added for Book I, and these
date to the early ninth century. Based on the structure, scripts, and glosses
of the manuscript, the book has been dated to the first half of the eighth
century, perhaps the first quarter, and was likely written in a Southumbrian
center.15 The manuscript likely had come to an East Frankish center by the
late eighth or early ninth century, perhaps as part of the Bonifacian or post-
Bonifacian mission and network, perhaps via Mainz.16 An ex libris of the
thirteenth century shows the book was in Würzburg by the later medieval
period, and it may have even been catalogued as part of the Würzburg
foundation by 1000.17 Moreover, the editor of Isidore’s Synonyma suggests
that the manuscript served as an exemplar for a ninth-century copy made in
Würzburg.18 In its origins in a southern center in the early eighth century
and arrival at a nachbonifatianischen centre by the late eighth century,
the book’s history reproduces the hypothetical manuscripts requested by
Boniface from Eadburg in Kent: nuns’ scriptoria produced crucial texts for
the early English mission.
Frankishness
Developing suggestions in the work of E. A. Lowe and Rosamond McKitterick,

I have argued that the first quire of the Würzburg Synonyma is an English
manuscript that strives to emulate a kind of Frankishness in handwriting
and structure. To recap evidence for this, the first quire of the codex is of
eight leaves, drypoint ruled in bands (a headline and baseline) with slits
in the margins as guides. The quire is arranged with the hair-side of each
bifolium facing out. These features are more or less representative of early
15 For a conspectus of assessments of the manuscript by Lowe, Bischoff, and T. Julian Brown,
see Wright, “Wurzburg, Universitätsbibliothek, M.p.th.f.79”; for the narrowing to the first quarter
of the century, see Patrick Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature in Western England, 600–800,
Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990),
202–3, and Sims-Williams, “Anglo-Latin Letter,” 9.
16 Hofmann, “Altenglische und Althochdeutsche Glossen,” 58–58, and Hans Thurn, Die
Handschriften der Universitätsbibliothek Würzburg (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1984), 3.1: 66.
17 Wright, “Wurzburg, Universitätsbibliothek, M.p.th.f.79,” 184 citing Hermann Knaus, “Bistum
Würzburg: Würzburg Domstift,” in Mittelalterliche Bibliothekskataloge Deutschlands und der
Schweiz (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1979), 4.2: 948–94, at 987, and Hartmut Hoffmann, Die Würzburger
Paulinenkommentare der Ottonenzeit, MGH Studien und Texte 47 (Hannover: Hahn, 2009),
no. 198.
18 Jacques Elfassi, ed. Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi Synonyma. Corpus Christianorum Series
Latina 111B (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), xliv.
Frankish bookmaking.19 The two other quires are of ten leaves with irregular
arrangement, single-ruled. E. A. Lowe observes that early insular books,
though they vary wildly, tend to be in gatherings of ten leaves.20 The script
in the first quire likewise follows a Frankish model.21 The uncial script is
characterized by thick ductus and square aspect, with heavy forks or wedges
for many serifs or terminals and several unusual letterforms, such as the B
with a flattened and squared upper chamber, looking like a Cyrillic Б and
the uncial A whose bowl is constructed of a banjo-like loop. Despite several
peculiarities, the structure of letters, ductus and aspect, and overall look
of the script seem modeled on an uncial like that which appears in a small
cluster of books from northeast Frankish foundations; I saw analogues in
two manuscripts, now Paris, Bibliothèque National, lat. 152 and lat. 17654,22
and these books have been attributed to either Jouarre or Chelles in the
late seventh and early eighth centuries.23 Taking the physical structure and
peculiar uncial of the Würzburg Synonyma together, it appears that the
scribe aimed to emulate a Frankish book, at least for the first quire. In her
striving to replicate a script her hand was not accustomed to, the scribe’s
performance in the uncial leaves is uneven, inconsistent and marked by
copying mistakes and corrections. By not matching the forms and execu-
tion of higher status manuscripts, books like the Würzburg Synonyma
are often seen as missteps off progress’s highway whose milestones are
Eadfrith and Eadwig Basan and Eadwine. The triumph of the Roman and
then Carolingian church in England may hide earlier Frankish influences
as well as codicological roads not taken.
Network
While the main script in the first eight leaves of the Würzburg Synonyma
betrays Frankish aspirations, some features of decoration show strong
19 Hussey, “Scribal Habitus,” 17–19.

20 CLA 2.x–xi; cf. Richard Gameson, “The Material Fabric of Early British Books,” in The Cam-
bridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume I: c. 400–1100, ed. Richard Gameson (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012), 13–93, at 41–43.
21 CLA 9.1426 and Rosamond McKitterick, “The Diffusion of Insular Culture in Neustria
Between 650 and 850: The Implications of Manuscript Evidence,” in La Neustrie: Les pays au nord
de la Loire de 650 á 850, ed. Hartmut Atsma, Beihefte der Francia 16/11 (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke,
1989), 395–432, at 415.
22 CLA 5.552 and 5.670.
23 Bischoff, “Nonnenhandschriften”; McKitterick, “Nun’s Scriptoria”; CLA 6: xxi–xxii; Hussey,
“Scribal Habitus,” 33–34.
Fig. 12.1 Detail from Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek M.p.th.f.79, fol. 1v.
Image reproduced by permission of the Universitätsbibliothek Würzburg, Germany.
similarities with other early English books, suggesting a tangle of intercon-

nections perhaps located in southwest Mercia, and perhaps, specifically,
the foundation at Bath. Most striking is the lovely large capital initial A on
fol. 1v of the Würzburg Synonyma (see figure 1).
Patrick Sims-Williams pointed out that T. Julian Brown saw this initial,
with its bold outlines and “ribbon-like sweep” to be similar in style to the
initials in Oxford, Bodleian Library Hatton 48, a late seventh- or early eighth-
century copy of the Rule of St Benedict (see figure 2).24
24 Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, 202; Sims-Williams, “Anglo-Latin Letter,” 2–4. On

Hatton 48 and possible dates in the mid-eighth or late eighth century, see ASM, no. 631; D. H.
Farmer, The Rule of St Benedict: Oxford, Bodleian Library. Hatton 48, Early English Manuscripts
in Facsimile 15 (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1968); Michelle P. Brown, “Writing in
the Insular World,” in Gameson, ed., Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 121–66, at 146;
Christine Franzen, “Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 48,” in Worcester Manuscripts, Anglo-Saxon
Manuscripts in Microfiche Facsimile 6 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance
Studies, 1998), 15–18.
Fig. 12.2 Detail from Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Hatton 48, fol. 1r.
Image reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, UK.
Hatton 48 is crucial in this web of interconnected manuscripts because

Sims-Williams has made a compelling case for its origins. As a de luxe
copy in large format with spacious two-column layout and large initials
simply and precisely drawn, it was unique for the eighth century. This was
a period when the Rule was not (yet) popular in England, and here we have
a sumptuous copy. Furthermore, the scribe apparently was aware of more
than one version of the Rule, suggesting its origin in a center where the
text could be compared and studied. Sims-Williams lines up evidence for
Bath as the most likely place where such a copy would be written. Bath was
dedicated to St. Peter, but also, unusually for its time, St. Benedict. Bath’s
foundation charter was attested by Wilfrid, who was a strenuous advocate
for the use of the Benedictine Rule. Hatton 48’s characteristics are best
explained by an origin at a precociously Benedictine abbey in the south
or southwest, probably in the Worcester diocese, to which the manuscript
Fig. 12.3 Detail from Boulogne-sur-Mer, Bibliothèque Municipale 74 (82), fol. 53r.
Image reproduced by permission of the Bibliothèque Municipale de Boulogne-sur-Mer, France.
came at least by the eleventh century: Bath was absorbed into Worcester
holdings before 781.25 Bath fits Hatton 48.26 The Würzburg Synonyma shares
a rather rare trait with Hatton 48, and ergo may have come out of the same
bookish scene.
Sims-Williams points up another rare feature in Hatton 48 that links
its decorative initials to a Frankish-influenced codex: Boulogne-sur-Mer,
Bibliothèque Municipale 74 (82). This eighth-century copy of Apponius’s
commentary on the Song of Songs has large decorative initials that are
marked by “bands of triple black lines” crossing the outlines of the vertical
shafts of letters (see figure 3).
This kind of triple banding is found in Hatton 48; Paris, Bibliothèque
Nationale lat. 17177 fol. 8r; and St. Petersburg, Russian National Library
Q.v.I.18.27 St. Petersburg Q.v.I.18 is the famous St. Petersburg (or Leningrad)
Bede, written in the middle or second half of the eighth century in
25 Sims-Williams, “Anglo-Latin Letter,” 9.

26 This evidence and conclusions from Patrick Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, 112, 118,
201–5.
27 Sims-Williams, “Anglo-Latin Letter,” 3 and Religion and Literature, 202.
Fig. 12.4 Detail from Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale lat. 17177, fol. 8r.
Image reproduced by permission of the Bibliothèque National, Paris, France.
Wearmouth/Jarrow.28 It is clearly not a Southumbrian manuscript, nor

connected to a Frankish-influenced foundation, and its use of the triple
banding is markedly different from the others in this group: several sets
of triple bands are used in each initial’s components.29 Paris, Bibliothèque
Nationale lat. 17177 is a collection of various fragments, and fols. 5–12
preserve a fragment of the Latin translation of Theodore of Mopsuestia’s
Commentary on the Pauline Epistles, written perhaps in Southumbria or
Mercia, or perhaps a continental center with English influence.30 The initial
is triple-banded much like Hatton 48 and also evokes that “ribbon-like
sweep” seen in Hatton 48 and in the Würzburg Synonyma (see figure 4).
As mentioned, the triple banding occurs in large initials in the Boulogne-
sur-Mer Apponius, though without quite as pronounced “ribbon-like sweep”
as found in the Hatton 48, Paris 17177, and the Würzburg Synonyma, though
it may be evoked in the A on its first folio (see figure 5).
28 ASM, no. 846.
29 Sims-Williams, “Anglo-Latin Letter,” 3n25 cites D. H. Wright, “The Date of the Leningrad Bede,”
Revue Benedictine 71 (1961): 265–73, suggesting that the motif in the Bede may have Italian origins.
30 ASM, no. 900.5.
Fig. 12.5 Detail from Boulogne-sur-Mer, Bibliothèque Municipale 74 (82), fol. 1r.
Image reproduced by permission of the Bibliothèque Municipale de Boulogne-sur-Mer, France.
Moreover, the Boulogne Apponius contains as an epilogue to the main text a

poetic letter written by one Burginda exhorting an unnamed youth to a more
devout life. Burginda is a Frankish and woman’s name. The paleographical
evidence, this Frankish name, along with the fact that the text of the Ap-
ponius is based on a recension that circulated in northeast Francia (rather
than the one used in Northumbria by Bede), suggests that the manuscript
was written in a Southumbrian centre with Frankish connections, prob-
ably housing nuns as authors and scribes. Sims-Williams argues that this
Frankish-influenced center would most likely be Bath, and the paleographic
links among these manuscripts bring the Apponian epilogue of the nun
Burginda, as well as the Würzburg Synonyma and Paris, BN lat. 17177 into
this scene as well.
Bath
In its earliest decades, those just preceding and shading into the period
when these manuscripts were likely written, Bath was founded under
at least partly Frankish auspices. Osric, king of the Hwicce, instituted
Bath in 675, when he granted 100 hides of land for the foundation to
be headed up by the abbess Berta.31 Berta is a Frankish name. In 681, a
charter by Æthelmod, with King Æthelred of Mercia’s consent, grants land
to the foundation at Bath, then headed by the abbess Beorngyth, whose
name is English, and her prioress, Folcburg, whose name is Frankish.32
In the first two generations of leadership at Bath, there is first a Frankish
abbess and subsequently a Frankish second in command. Beyond the
leadership roles at the inception of the Bath monastery, the charter
bears further signs of Frankish influence. The list of witnesses of the
foundation charter begins with the king, Æthelbald, and the archbishop,
Theodore, but third is Leuthere, the bishop of Winchester. Leuthere came
as a replacement for his uncle, Agilbert, and both men were Franks with
connections to Jouarre.33 Leuthere’s Frankish influence can be seen in the
Bath foundation charter, which deploys a Frankish “humility formula”34
found alongside Leuthere’s name in other charters as well, showing a
“slight and ephemeral appearance of Frankish custom” in these early
West Saxon charters.35 After Leuthere, the Bath foundation charter is
subscribed by Wilfrid, companion of Leuthere, who had studied and was
consecrated in Gaul. His years first in Lyon and then elsewhere in Francia
likely lie behind Wilfrid’s commitment to Frankish liturgical practices, his
promulgation of the Benedictine Rule (which was esteemed in Frankish
Columbanan houses), and his understanding of episcopal power and
31 This is recorded in a charter now preserved in the twelfth-century Bath cartulary Cambridge,
Corpus Christi College 111; see Sawyer 51, printed in J. M. Kemble, Codex Diplomaticus Aevi
Saxonici, 6 vols. (London: Bentley, Wilson, and Fley, 1839–48), no. 12; on the charter’s authentic
elements see Patrick Sims-Williams, “Continental Influence at Bath Monastery in the Seventh
Century,” Anglo-Saxon England 4 (1975): 1–10, at 1–6; Heather Edwards, The Charters of the Early
West Saxon Kingdom, British Archaeological Reports, British Series (Oxford: BAR, 1988), 218–23;
and Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, 104, 111–13.
32 On the names’ ethnicities, see Sims-Williams, “Continental Influence,” 2–3. On the position
of prioress or deaconess, see William Hunt, Chartularies of the Priory of St Peter at Bath, Somerset
Record Society (London: Harrison and Sons, for the Somerset Record Society, 1893), xxxvi, and
for the charter, 6–7.
33 Agilbert was likely related to the Frankish royal family and was a cousin to Ado, the founder
of the monastery at Jouarre and the brother of Theodechild, who was Jouarre’s first abbess. James
Campbell, Essays in Anglo-Saxon History (London: Hambledon, 1986), 58 and Sims-Williams,
“Continental Influence,” 4–7.
34 Paul Fouracre, “Leuthere,” in Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England, 284.
35 Wilhelm Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth Century (Oxford: Clarendon,
1946), 226–28.
status.36 Bath appears to have been an exponent of a monastic mission

network of the Frankish aristocratic houses that included Jouarre and
Chelles.
This extension and development of a Franco-Saxon monastic mission and
culture in Bath may have a very specific genesis. As Patrick Sims-Williams
highlights, Chelles was refounded as a daughter house to Jouarre by Balthild,
the English widow of Clovis II, between 657–664. As abbess, she pulled
Bertila and other nuns and monks from Jouarre into service at Chelles
(both were Columbanan double houses), and as Rosamond McKitterick has
made clear, there were substantial English influences in these houses: not
just Balthild but other political, cultural, and codicological ties.37 Bertila is
remembered in her vita for her energy and generosity in the Franco-Saxon
mission:
ut etiam ab transmarinis partibus Saxoniae reges illi fideles ab ea per

missos fideles postularent, ut illis de suis discipulis ad eruditionem vel
sanctam instructionem, quam audierant esse in ea mirabilem, dirigeret,
seu etiam qui virorum et sanctimonialium coenobia in illa regione
construerent. Quam religiosam petitionem pro salute animarum non
denagavit, sed cum consilio seniorum, exortantibus fratribus, grato
animo cum magna diligentia et patrocino sanctorum seu et voluminibus
multis librorum electas personas et devotissimos homines illuc direxit,
ut per eam fructus animarum etiam in illa gente accresceret et cum Dei
gratia multiplicaretur.38
(Faithful kings from the parts of Saxondom across the seas would ask
her through trusty messengers to send some of her followers for teach-
ing or sacred instruction (which they had heard that she possessed to
a marvelous degree) or even those who might establish monasteries of
men and women in that region. For the good of their souls, she did not
refuse this religious request; rather, with the counsel of the elders and
the encouragement of the brothers she did send, with a thankful heart,
36 Simon Coates, “The Construction of Episcopal Sanctity in Early Anglo-Saxon England: The
Impact of Venantius Fortunatus,” Historical Research 71 (174) (1998): 1–13, at 1–2; Patrick Wormald,
The Times of Bede, 625–865: Studies in Early Christian Society and its Historian, ed. Stephen
Baxter (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 5–11; Alan Thacker, “Wilfrid,” in Blackwell Encyclopaedia of
Anglo-Saxon England, 474–76, at 474.
37 McKitterick, “Nuns’ Scriptoria,” 1–2, 5–6, 25–30.
38 Wilhelm Levison, ed., Vita S. Bertilae Abbatissae Calensis, MGH SS rer. Merov. 6 (Hannover
and Leipzig: Hahn, 1913), 95–109 at Chapter 6, 106–7.
chosen women and very devout men thither with great diligence, with
both saints’ relics and many volumes of books, so that through her the
yield of souls increased even in that people, and, by the grace of God,
was multiplied.)39
Bath just very well may be one of the ‘coenobia’ established by Bertila’s
‘discipulis,’ two of whom may have been recorded in the early Bath charters:
Berta and Folcburg (and Beorngyth, the second abbess of Bath may be an
Englishwoman returning from Francia to help out, though this is pure
speculation). Frankish books sent by Bertila, not dissimilar from those that
McKitterick identifies with seventh-century Chelles and Jouarre, became
models for scribes at a center in southwest Mercia, explaining the unusual
uncial quire of the Würzburg Synonyma. 40 In the last part of the seventh
century and the first decades of the eighth, scribes at Bath looked to the
Frankish books of their early abbesses and benefactrix, aiming to reproduce
their distinctive script in the same way that Herrad Spilling has argued
happened in Fulda in the ninth century, where older books provided models
to imitate and replicate, or McKitterick has suggested happened in the
Cuthswith Codex: “the book itself acted as a teacher.”41 With the imitative
uncial of the Würzburg Synonyma, the scribe may show an aesthetic and
ideological veneration of her Frankish founders.
It appears Bath was founded through the efforts and resources of local
Mercian aristocracy (Osric), Frankish-influenced missionary clergy (Wilfrid
and Leuthere), and Frankish monastic outreach by Bertila and her followers.
Staff, such as Berta and Folcburg, and books with scripts and codicological
structures like Paris lat. 17654 and lat. 152 could have been sent to founda-
tions such as Bath. And the scriptorium at Bath may have produced books at
least in part modeled on these Frankish donations, as seen in the Würzburg
Synonyma, with the scribes either following the models from Jouarre or
Chelles, or the teaching of Frankish-trained masters. Were this all the case, it
39 Translation by Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, 110.

40 McKitterick, “Nuns’ Scriptoria,” 5–6, and at 27: “we may have to envisage therefore some
instruction reaching England from Francia, as far as setting up a scriptorium and establishing
scribal discipline in female religious houses.”
41 McKitterick, “Nuns’ Scriptoria,” 26 citing Herrad Spilling, “Angelsächsische Schrift in Fulda,”
in Von der Klosterbibliothek zur Landesbibliothek: Beiträge zum zweihundertjährigen Bestehen
der Hessischen Landesbiobliothek Fulda, ed. Artur Brall. (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1978), 47–98.
The Cuthswith Codex is Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek M.P.th.q.2, on which see CLA 9.1959,
ASM 944, Ker 401, and Charles D. Wright, “Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek, M.p.th.q.2,” in
Manuscripts in Austria and Germany, 173–81.
would be no guarantee that the Würzburg Synonyma (or books like it) were
written by women and circulated and read in a women’s (only) community,
because one would expect Bath to have been a double house for both monks
and nuns overseen by an abbess as at Jouarre, Chelles, and other houses
in the Columbanan mission field. Indeed, it is conventional wisdom that
nunneries in early medieval England in this period were only found in
double houses. Frank Stenton perhaps is apt here: “The double monastery
was obviously a normal feature of the earliest English monasticism, and,
indeed, it is doubtful whether any houses for women were ever founded in
this period.”42 Helen Jewell states that “pre-Viking English nunneries were
all double houses.”43 But recently, historians have opened up the question.
Sarah Foot suggests “little is known about the internal organization of early
Anglo-Saxon nunneries other than a substantial proportion (although
possibly not all) housed men and women.”44 Foot returns to this possibility
and the slightness of the evidence, concluding that “it is impossible to say
with any confidence whether or not there were any exclusively female
houses in England in the pre-Viking Age.”45 Despite the general evidence
that nunneries were usually part of double houses, Bath may have been
different.
Foot points up the possibility that there were exclusively female houses in
early medieval England, and some evidence of Bath’s founding is suggestive
that Bath may have been founded as a nunnery, and not a double house.46
The evidence for this is found in the Bath foundation charter of 675. In this
document, Osric donates land:
At uero nunc cum gratia superna longe lateque profusius enitesceret,

cenobialia etiam loca sparsim uirorum sparsimque uirginum Deo
famulantium erigenda statuimus, ut ubi truculentus et nefandus prius
42 Frank M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 161.
43 Helen Jewell, Women in Medieval England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996),
46.
44 Sarah Foot, “Nunneries,” in Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England, 336–37, at 336.
45 Foot, Veiled Women Volume 1: The Disappearance of Nuns from Anglo-Saxon England
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 51; see also Foot, “Flores ecclesiae: Women in Early Anglo-Saxon
Monasticism,” in Female Vita Religiosa between Late Antiquity and the High Middle Ages: Structures,
Developments and Spatial Contexts, ed. Gert Melville and Anne Müller (Berlin: Lit, 2011), 173–85.
The classic account of the Frankish double house and its impact in England is Mary Bateson,
“Origin and Early History of Double Monasteries,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
13 (1899): 137–98.
46 This is suggested by Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, 120–21.
draco errorum deceptionibus seruiebat, nunc uersa uice ecclesiasticus

ordo in clero conuersantium Domino patrocinante gaudens tripudiet. 47
(But indeed now, as the supernal grace had shone out more profusely far
and wide, we have commanded the establishment of monastic founda-
tions, for servants of God, here for men and there for women, so that where
the ferocious and wicked worm of error formerly had served falsehoods,
now, on the contrary, the ecclesiastical order of those living in the clerical
habit might exult, rejoicing in the Lord’s protection.)
Clearly, Osric is in part motivated to found distinct houses for men and
women “sparsim … sparsimsque,” as dispersed and separate, 48 in hopes of
avoiding serpentine sin. This would fall in line with the powerful reform
archbishop, Theodore of Canterbury (668–690), who strongly preferred
single-sex monasteries. In what is transmitted as his Penitential, Theodore
stated that “non licet viris feminas habere monachas neque feminis viros;
tamen nos non destruamus illud quod consuetudo est in hac terra” (it is not
permitted for men to have monastic women, nor women men; however, we
will not abolish that which is customary in this land). 49 The archbishop felt
it should not be permitted to have double houses, and yet was grudgingly
willing to permit them out of respect for custom, and Theodore, indeed,
attested the Bath foundation charter. A new foundation may not have been
allowed as ‘customary.’ Moreover, later in the charter, Osric is recorded as
donating land “ad construendum monasterium sanctarum uirginum” (for the
construction of a monastery for holy virgins).50 The adjective “sanctarum”
is in the feminine. The stated purpose to separate monks and nuns, and
the construction of the monastery for holy (female) virgins may be telling.
Despite doubts about women-only houses in early England in the pre-Viking
Age, it would seem that Bath was founded as a separate women-only nunnery
rather than as a double house, in which case, a manuscript produced there
before the middle of the eighth century would have been written by a nun.
That Bath was for nuns only seems to be taken as given by several historians
of early English monastic history. In his survey of religious houses in England,
47 Susan E. Kelly, ed., Charters of Bath and Wells, Anglo-Saxon Charters 13 (London: British
Academy, 2007), no. 1, pp. 53–54 at p. 53.
48 Richard Ashdowne, David Howlett, and Ronald Latham, Dictionary of Medieval Latin from
British Sources (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1975–2013), 16.3143.
49 Arthur West Haddan and William Stubbs, Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents Relating
to Great Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon, 1871), 3:195.
50 Kelly, Charters, no. 1, p. 53.
Dom David Knowles takes Bath to be an “early mon[astery] of nuns.”51 John

Blair assumes Bath was an “important nunnery.”52 Barbara Yorke proceeds
naming Bath a nunnery.53 As an exclusively female foundation, Bath may
represent an unusual case for early English monasteries, especially in the
sphere of Frankish influence.54 Still, Bath may have been solely a nun-
nery well into the eighth century,55 and there is a tenable case that Bath’s
scriptorium produced a handful of books in the late seventh and early
eighth centuries. The Würzburg Synonyma is plausibly one of those books.
Perhaps rethinking the painstaking script from these books, a different
kind of intellectual and literary history can be recovered.
Women’s Writing in Eighth-Century Southwest Mercia and

Wessex
The Synonyma certainly played an important role in the intellectual

world of the Franco-Saxon cultural provinces in the eighth and ninth
centuries. If we consider the Würzburg Synonyma a book written by and
for a nunnery at Bath, a foundation with Frankish connections, it is also
useful to note the numerous copies made in the English cultural province
in Francia: Claudia Di Sciacca describes the six from Frankish centers
influenced by the English mission of the eighth and ninth centuries.56
The text had “extraordinary status among the women of the Main valley
communities” in the wake of the English mission there.57 This was likely
the case in southwest Mercia and Wessex as well, in light of the Würzburg
51 David Knowles and R. Neville Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses: England and Wales
(London: Longman, 1971), 59.
52 John Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 279.
53 Barbara Yorke, “The Bonifacian Mission and Female Religious in Wessex,” Early Medieval
Studies 7 (1998): 145–72, at 164 and Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses (London:
Continuum, 2003), 26 but cf. 54.
54 Of course, it may have housed at least some men; Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature,
121; Foot, Veiled Women, 52. McKitterick describes it as a double house: “the Vita Bertila records
the contingent of nuns and books sent from Jouarre to the nuns at Bath, a double monastery”;
see “Nuns’ Scriptoria,” 29.
55 Bath had been taken over as an exclusively male monastery by 758 when Cynewulf, king
of Wessex 757–86, donated land to the “brothers” of the community. See Sawyer 265, printed
in Kemble, Codex Diplomaticus, no. 193; Barry Cunliffe, “Saxon Bath,” in Anglo-Saxon Towns
in Southern England, ed. Jeremy Haslam (Chichester: Phillimore, 1984), 345–58, at 349; Sims-
Williams, Religion and Literature, 160–61.
56 Di Sciacca, Finding, 72–74.
57 Lifshitz, Religious Women, 150.
Synonyma. Isidore’s text served as “an extremely rich and inspirational

source for devotional and penitential themes,”58 as well as “justification
for the disciplined monastic lifestyle.”59 Lifshitz compellingly argues that
the Synonyma was especially useful for women ascetics in the early Middle
Ages, as it provides a script for informal penitential practices, and does so
in a way (but for a single section) that does not mark sexual difference.60
The text’s dialogic structure and repetitive style made the lexicon and
sentiment of penitential anguish clear and easy to understand, especially
for those learning Latin as a non-native language. The Würzburg Synonyma
is sporadically glossed in drypoint, in both Old English and Old High
German, suggesting some study in such a capacity. Within the network
of women’s foundations in Frankish foundations in southern England and
English foundations of Francia, the Synonyma was part of a collection of
texts read and copied by women.
Apponius’s Commentary on the Song of Songs might also be seen as
part of this network. As discussed above, the Boulogne copy has initials
that share stylistic features with Hatton 48; Paris, BN lat.17177; and the
Würzburg Synonyma, with its main script an “Anglo-Saxon minuscule”
of a “rather stately type.”61 Sims-Williams makes a case for its origins in
Bath, where a Frankish woman, Burginda, produced a cento of Apponius’s
commentary and added her own colophonic letter to the end, in which she
exhorts a renowned young man (“inclite iuuenis”) to a virtuous life. Burginda
is likely not the scribe of the manuscript,62 but her centonization of Apponius
and her letter represent a literary Frankishness of a sort to complement
the Frankishness seen already in the Würzburg Synonyma. Lifshitz has
shown that another centonization of Apponius’s treatise was made in the
English cultural provinces of Francia in the eighth century, likely by nuns,
to whom Apponius’s allegorization of the Song of Songs’ erotic desire into
58 Di Sciacca, Finding, 174.

60 Lifshitz, Religious Women, 149–71, esp. 161–62.
61 CLA 6.738; the minuscule in the Apponius was compared to the minuscule in the Würzburg
Synonyma by T. Julian Brown; see Sims-Williams, “Anglo-Latin Letter,” 2.
62 See Sims-Williams, “Anglo-Latin Letter,” 7 and 11; Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature,
204 and 213; Richard Gameson, The Scribe Speaks? Colophons in Early English Manuscripts, H. M.
Chadwick Memorial Lectures 12 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Department of Anglo-Saxon,
Norse and Celtic, 2002), 7; cf. McKitterick, “Diffusion,” 419, and James J. John “The Named (and
Namable) in Codices Latnini Antiquiores,” in Scribi e colofoni. Le sottoscrizioni di copisti dalle
origini all’avvento della stampa, Atti del seminario di Erice, X Colloquio del Comité international
de paléographie latine (23–28 ott. 1993), ed. Emma Condello and Giuseppe De Gregorio (Spoleto:
Centro Italiano Di Studi Sull’Alto Medioevo, 1997), 106–21, at 116.
spiritual love appealed.63 Burginda’s cento of the Apponius is distinct from

the Continental version, but her work—indeed authorship—is parallel.
Exegesis of the Songs of Songs had another draw for women theologians
and writers; as Hannah Matis has made clear, early medieval exegesis of the
Songs of Songs, beginning with Bede, systematized “a particular reading of
the Song, adopted and further simplified by the Carolingian exegetes, which
depicted the church and clergy in maternal terms. One of the consequences
was the early medieval exegetes’ articulation of a vocabulary to express
clerical authority through the female body, specifically the maternal female
body.”64 Apponius’s exegesis in particular recast the Song of Songs as an
allegory for the unfolding revelation of salvation history.65 In doing so,
Apponius’s commentary reaffirms the biblical research, pastoral care, and
mission work of monastic women in the early church: they are agents of
this salvation history. The study and interpretation of the Song of Songs in
Franco-Saxon monastic circles in both Francia and England suggests shared
cultural resources and mission.
Accordingly, we can see women copying and reading patristic and
exegetical texts in these early manuscripts, but what of women writing
or composing? Burginda’s authorial act in her centonization of Apponius’s
commentary is one kind of evidence of women writing in the early Middle
Ages, if we listen and write our literary histories differently, but her letter to
the famous youth is clearly her authorial composition. However, the critical
reception, especially the early critical reception, of Burginda’s literary
epilogue has set her authorship apart from the mainstream of early medieval
English literary history. In her letter, even as she strives to emulate some
of the most difficult authors available to her and to refashion them into a
spiritual exhortation, her grammar deviates from classical correctness, and
for this reason her work has been described in somewhat less than generous
terms. Indeed, the Latinity of many of the extant texts by English women in
the early medieval period, just like the handwriting in Frankish-influenced
manuscripts of the circles in which they worked, is frequently impeached.
The judgments on these authors’ Latinity are not incorrect. When held up
63 Lifshitz, Religious Women, 198–99. For the text and a discussion of its relationship to Ap-
ponius’s full text, see B. de Vregille and L. Neyrand, eds., Apponii In Canticum Canticorum
Expositionem, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 19 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1986), xxvii–xxviii
and 391–463.
64 Hannah Matis, “Early Medieval Exegesis of the Song of Songs and the Maternal Language
of Clerical Authority,” Speculum 89 (2014), 358–81, at 359.
65 Arthur G. Holder, “The Patristic Sources of Bede’s Commentary on the Song of Songs,” Studia
Patristica 34 (2001): 370–75, at 372–74.
to the standard of strict grammatical rectitude, often represented by these

authors’ models (Virgil, Aldhelm), and holding to the rigid constancy of Latin
textuality, solecisms in the work of Leoba, Ecgburg, and Berhtgyth (and
others) are clear. However, until very recently, in the relatively few critical
accounts of these texts, scholars have foregrounded these errors. Pointing out
the mistakes in deponent verbs or in mixing up indicative and subjunctive
emphasizes that the writer’s “ambition” is “scarcely-fulfilled,” instead of
elucidating that ambition itself.66 And indeed, often the grammatical
errors are set up alongside these texts’ emotive intensity; though likely
unintentionally, such literary histories suggest that these early medieval
women’s letters and poetry are so excessively sentimental and women’s
Latin training is so basic, that the emotional contents deform the precision
of the language. As Fell pointed out, “we are doing a disservice to the women
of the Bonifacian correspondence if we depict them as more emotional or
more self-pitying than their male counterparts. The letters from men …
over and over again reveal mental, emotional, and physical suffering and
stress.”67 The critics analyzing these works qualify and marginalize them,
even as they seek to understand them.68
Women who wrote letters and poems (in those letters) in and around
Boniface’s circle have been pointedly called out for their errors. Christine Fell
noticed this dynamic in some of the early scholarship on the work of Leoba
(Leofgyth). Fell drew attention to G. F. Browne’s condescending description
of Leoba’s work in his Boniface of Crediton and His Companions (1910): “It is
sad to say that although Leoba declares she has not done this audaciously,
it is an audacious piece of copying from the treatise on the construction of
Latin verse by Aldhelm of Malmesbury. Both in her prose letter and her verse,
66 Sims-Williams, “Anglo-Latin Letter,” 11: “scarcely-fulfilled ambition.”

67 Christine Fell, “Some Implications of the Boniface Correspondence,” in New Readings on
Women in Old English Literature, ed. Helen Damico and Alexandra Hennessey Olsen (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1990), 41.
68 These critical acts are complicated. These writers’ works are ambitious, rich, and densely
allusive, but technically and grammatically, they admit faults. It is a question of emphasis,
rather than one of inaccuracy to call these errors to the fore. And while I am critical of this
emphasis, it is one found in the work of scholars who have blazed the trails that I am limpingly
following. For instance, I rely utterly in this essay upon Patrick Sims-Williams’s foundational
research into southwestern English intellectual culture and religious history, and yet I note
that Sims-Williams is one of the scholars whose work repeatedly points to these errors in script
or grammar. My own essay on the Würzburg Synonyma aesthetically judges the script. Here, I
seek only to follow Lees and Overing in their suggestion that we listen differently and write our
histories differently: grammatical errors or a crabbed scribal hand may occur, but such negative
descriptors tend to win out, and in so doing they occlude the human work, aesthetic aspiration,
and personal and institutional bonds that the early letters, poems, and books can illuminate.
she copies wholesale.”69 As Fell rightly points out, Browne’s accusations of

plagiarism scarcely apply to the formulaic construction of early medieval
literature.70 Ephraim Emerton’s 1940 translation of selected letters from the
Bonifacian correspondence describes Leoba’s verse as “awkward”; and this
volume was important and influential enough to be reprinted with a new
introduction in 2000.71 Sims-Williams describes Burginda’s Latinity several
times: she has “weak command of Latin” and describing the possibility that
Burginda’s short missive may have been preserved as a model of epistolary
style, he adds parenthetically: this “motive is hardly likely in the present
instance!”72 He suggests that “any literary merits in her piece are entirely
due to her use of Vergil, Arator, and the Carmen ad Flavium Felicem.”73 Yet
Sims-Williams remains attuned to the complexities of this difficult text and
its historical moment: “This composition’s scarcely-fulfilled ambition and
its imperfections themselves are an interesting reflection on the education
a vii–viii c. woman might receive. Burginda has been taught grammar, but
not thoroughly.”74 Here, it is worth bearing in mind Liz Herbert McAvoy and
Diane Watt’s challenge to the “stereotypes of women’s illiteracy and lack
of education.”75 Peter Dronke, whose Women Writers of the Middle Ages is
a standard reference on Latin texts by women, describes Berhtgyth’s Latin
as “simple and limited” and “yet this makes her utterances more touching,”
putting together technical errors and poor training with emotive content.76
Ecgburg gets away a little less scathed; her “use of tenses and conjunctions is
69 Fell, “Some Implications,” 38 citing G. F. Browne, Boniface of Crediton and his Companions
(London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1910), 81. Ironically, Browne himself copies
audaciously, for he lifts this passage from his own work and publishes it again in 1919 as part
of his The Importance of Women in Anglo-Saxon Times; The Cultus of St. Peter and St. Paul; and
Other Addresses (New York: MacMillan, 1919), 38–39.
70 Fell, “Some Implications,” 38 citing Michael Lapidge, “Aldhelm’s Latin Poetry and Old English
Verse,” Literature Compass 31 (1979): 209–31, at 230; this has subsequently been explored by Andy
Orchard, “Old Sources, New Resources: Finding the Right Formula for Boniface,” Anglo-Saxon
England 30 (2001): 15–38.
71 Ephraim Emerton, trans., The Letters of St. Boniface (New York: Columbia University Press,
1940), 40; repr. with new introduction by F. X. Noble (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
73 Sims-Williams, “Anglo-Latin Letter,” 16, with many of these descriptions reiterated in Religion
and Literature, 212–19.
75 Liz Herbert McAvoy and Diane Watt, “Writing a History of British Women’s Writing from
700–1500,” in The History of British Women’s Writing, 700–1500, ed. McAvoy and Watt, History of
British Women’s Writing 1 (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 1–27, at 10.
76 Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1984), 30.
idiosyncratic,” and while Sims-Williams praises the virtuosity of Cyneberg’s

letters, he qualifies the letters of Ecgburg and Burginda as “less polished”
and “beginner’s essays.”77 Orchard examines Berhtgyth’s adaptation of the
octosyllabic metrical line, especially that of Æthilwald, and points out that
she is “less ambitious and less accurate than her predecessors [Aldhelm and
his circle]” and that metrically one of her poems is “execrable.”78 Like Dronke,
Orchard’s work links technical error with emotion: Berhtgyth’s texts are
“mawkish and touchingly pathetic.”79 In a standard reference volume, Leoba’s
Aldhelmian verses that close a letter to Boniface are called “halting,”80 and
in 2001, her letter is described as an “undergraduate essay, albeit a rather
superior one” and that she has a “shaky grasp of Latin grammar.”81 Berhtgyth’s
third letter is described as “anguished” but that it “verges on incoherence”
despite aesthetic patterning of sound that intensifies its effects.82 With the
texts by these authors characterized as erroneous and overly emotional in
foundational scholarship on them, it is no wonder that more recent histories
carry on. Jane Stevenson calls Leoba’s a “brief colourless poem,”83 and in
a work of popular history, Michael Pye reports that Burginda’s “wordy”
composition in the Apponius manuscript “misfires” and “makes a mess.”84
These emphases on the letters’ and poems’ faults can result in a shunting
of their real interest to the margins.85
This is also the case for manuscripts that do not rise to the aesthetic
heights that paleographers sometimes seem to expect. Admittedly, in my
own attempt to understand and recuperate the atypical uncial handwrit-
ing in the first eight leaves of the Würzburg Synonyma, I called the script
“inexpert and uneven” not to mention “rough” and “scruffy.”86 Lowe simply
77 Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, 222 and 242.

78 Andy Orchard, The Poetic Art of Aldhelm, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon Studies 8
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 67.
79 Orchard, Poetic Art, 65.
80 Andy Orchard, “Leofgyth,” in Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England, 282.
81 Orchard, “Old Sources,” 32.
82 Orchard, “Old Sources,” 37.
83 Jane Stevenson, Women Latin Poets: Language, Gender, and Authority from Late Antiquity
to the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 93.
84 Michael Pye, The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (London: Penguin,
2014), 64.
85 Or, as Conti makes clear in the case of Hugeburc, such approaches “have elided her role in
the cultural work of hagiography”; “The Literate Memory,” p. 319). However, while Conti recenters
Hugeburc’s work to demonstrate its legacy in constructing social memory that is constitutive
of dominant Christian culture, my essay focuses on marginalized texts that demonstrate a
cultural Frankishness that flourished but then vanished from the early English church.
86 Hussey, “Scribal Habitus,” 16.
notes that it is derivative (from Frankish models).87 The Cuthswith codex is

in a fifth-century Italian uncial that Lowe calls a “beautiful bold uncial of
the oldest type” but the English supply leaves are called, in what rings as
a disappointed tone, “very correct, but distinctly imitative.”88 D. H. Wright
suggests that the English scribe “merely did his unequal best to reproduce the
unfamiliar letter forms”89 (apparently despite being “very correct”). Another
manuscript probably from the Worcester diocese, Worcester, Cathedral
Library Add. 4, is a fragment of Paterius’s collection of Gregory the Great’s
exegesis that evinces some Frankish influence.90 Lowe describes the script
as an “awkward, imitative uncial by a hand not accustomed to this type
of writing.”91 Qualifying these scripts in terms of subjective aesthetic taste
has an effect that Elaine Treharne has argued “covertly either privileges or
devalues” particular scribal endeavors.92 And the language of “awkward” and
“imitative” and “unequal best” tends to foreground a failure in the scribes’
work, even as it paradoxically indexes the effort or ambition, an ambition
a reader might naturally pass over, seeing as these results are poor at best.
Such a dynamic is not wholly dissimilar from drawing attention to gram-
matical and metrical faults in the Latinity of nun’s letters alongside their
emotional excesses, with the result that judging this scholarly and writerly
work substandard devalues or even hides what otherwise might be seen as a
fascinating and illuminating ambition, one that can tell us something about
late seventh- or early eighth-century English literary culture.
Writerly Ambition and the Franco-Saxon Cultural Scene
The Anglo-Latin letters by Berhtgyth, Leoba, and Burginda were undoubtedly

written by women, and a few manuscripts from the same (or an exceedingly
similar) monastic scene may too have been written by women. In these,
87 CLA 10.1426.
88 CLA 10.1433a and 1433b.
89 D. H. Wright, “Some Notes on English Uncial,” Traditio 17 (1961): 441–56, at 450. However,
see M. B. Parkes, who observes that the supply leaves present a trial of word separation, in
“The Contribution of Insular Scribes of the Seventh and Eighth Centuries to the ‘Grammar of
Legibility,’” in Grafia e interpunzione del latino nel medioevo: Seminario Internazionale, Roma,
27–29 settembre 1984, ed. A Maierù (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1987), 15–30, at 18 and 24–26.
90 CLA 2.265; ASM 772.
91 CLA 2.265.
92 Elaine Treharne, “The Good, the Bad, the Ugly: Old English Manuscripts and their Physical
Description,” in The Genesis of Books: Studies in the Scribal Culture of Medieval England in Honour
of A.N. Doane, ed. Matthew T. Hussey and John D. Niles (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 261–83, at 272.
their writers’ intense ambitions can be made clearer by focusing on what

appears in literary and manuscript histories as shortfalls. The Anglo-Latin
letters have been addressed more thoroughly in this regard. These authors
construct their letters from the de rigeur auctores of their day: Aldhelm,
first and foremost, but Virgil, Arator, and others as well.93 As Lisa Weston
has shown, these intertextual performances draw on concepts of kin-
ship, gender, and virginity and construct a literate subjectivity “within a
network of relationships and influences associated with the previous works
of quasipaternal, certainly patriarchal authorities.”94 In their letters, the
women of Boniface’s circle produce their own “membership in an extended
familia.”95 Be they the elegiac longing in Berhtgyth or the claim on orthodox
authority in Leoba, the efforts these writers make in their letters aim for
incorporation in the pastoral, intellectual, and spiritual society of the early
church. The bounds of epistolary convention and poetic formulae are at
times exceeded and disrupted, given the ambition of these texts. As D.
Patricia Wallace has shown for the analogous letters of Ecgburg, and Eangyth
and Bugga to Boniface, the writing fits “longstanding rhetorical and literary
traditions” but “combines … sexuality with epistolary conventions to write
a more intensely emotional letter.”96 In so doing, a letter such as Ecgburg’s
“makes an issue of gender; her letter begins to escape the restrictions of
the epistolary tradition as it exhibits breaks in logic and other slippages
away from conventions.”97 In their claims on authority, their constructions
of social bonds, and their expressions of loss and longing, both personal
and historical, the letters stretch the bounds of convention, and the letters’
ambitions reveal a paradoxical position: both inclusion and exile, member-
ship and isolation.
Stephanie Hollis traced this paradox in the Conversion era. In the earliest
period, women were included in the pastoral work and the evangelical
mission of the church, an ecclesiastical culture that encouraged intense
male–female relationships that Lifshitz describes for Frankish foundations
93 The scholarly edition makes this clear: Michael Tangl, ed., Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius
und Lullus, MGH Epp. sel. 1, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1955); for analysis,
see Lapidge, “Aldhelm’s Latin Poetry,” 230–31; Orchard, Poetic Art, 66–67 and “Old Sources.”
94 Lisa M. C. Weston, “Where Textual Bodies Meet: Anglo-Saxon Women’s Epistolary Friend-
ships,” in Friendship in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age, ed. Albrecht Classen and
Marilyn Sandidge (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), 231–46, at 236.
95 Weston, “Textual Bodies,” 234.
96 D. Patricia Wallace, “Feminine Rhetoric and the Epistolary Tradition: The Boniface Cor-
respondence,” Women’s Studies 24, no. 3 (1995), 229–46, at 235 and 239.
97 Wallace, “Feminine Rhetoric,” 231.
in the English cultural province as syneisactic.98 The nascent church in

Conversion-era England needed women as teachers, scholars, even confes-
sors; it was non-hierarchical in some ways, inclusive, allowing women,
like those in the Bonifacian circle, not to mention powerful abbesses like
Hild in Whitby, dynamic roles. Hollis suggests that in the early years of
Boniface’s correspondence, this strain of Christianity was “humane” and
“egalitarian.”99 However, over the course of Boniface’s career, things changed.
As the church formed and developed, the Roman authoritarian and sacer-
dotal model took hold, transforming roles for women; there was “a Pauline
rejection of women in ministry.”100 Nuns were enclosed and marginalized,
double monasteries slowly dwindled away, and the humane and egalitarian
Christian community was lost.101 The letters of personal lament reflect “the
loss of this earlier version of the Christian familia.”102 Thus, the ambitions
of the letters such as those by Berhtgyth longing for her distant brother or
Burginda exhorting her unnamed youth to weep while remembering her
name strive to express paradox, in the second language of Latin forms. As
Wallace describes, they push at convention to reach for something new:
poetic, gendered, and historical forging of community, while simultaneously
acknowledging distance.
The “derivative” manuscripts of these women’s networks do something
similar. To the people that made these books, on the ground, in that par-
ticular moment, a Franco-Saxon ambition was crucial; it was meaningful
enough to forgo the techniques and results of a typical or more comfortable
English script and stretch out for something else. A nun in Bath copying
Isidore’s Synonyma labored for a specific effect: Frankish allegiance. Such
98 On the origins and developments of the early church and its more open and egalitarian (to
a limited extent) organization, see Lifshitz, Religious Women, Chapter 1; Scheck, Reform and
Resistance: Formations of Female Subjectivity in Early Medieval Ecclesiastical Culture (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2008), Chapter 1 gives a deeper theological background;
Stephanie Hollis, Anglo-Saxon Women and the Church: Sharing a Common Fate (Woodbridge:
Boydell, 1992) discusses the dynamic passim.
99 Hollis, Anglo-Saxon Women, 130; see also Yitzak Hen, ‘“Milites christi utriusque sexus”:
Gender and the Politics of Conversion in the Circle of Boniface,” Revue Bénédictine 109 (1999):
17–31.
100 Sarah Foot, Veiled Women, 63.
101 On this transition, see Shari Horner, The Discourse of Enclosure: Representing Women in Old
English Literature (Binghamton: State University of New York Press, 2003); Hollis, Anglo-Saxon
Women, Chapters 3 and 4, passim; Foot, Veiled Women, Chapter 2; and Clare A. Lees and Gillian
R. Overing, Double Agents: Women and Clerical Culture in Anglo-Saxon England, The Middle
Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001; repr. Cardiff: University of
Wales Press, 2009), 35–37.
102 Hollis, Anglo-Saxon Women, 138.
books were experimental, adapting bibliographic traditions for corporate

and devotional aims. The texts were important, but the material form of
the book mattered too, perhaps emulating books sent by Bertila of Chelles
or another in a Frankish sister nunnery and thus placing the scribe, her
library, and her readers in a transnational intellectual and religious network
spanning the kingdom of Hwicce as far as northeast Francia. Books with
Frankish codicological structures and script might stand as monuments
to an extended familia, including nuns at Jouarre and Chelles as well
as at Bath. These acts, and these material artifacts of these acts, would
remain ideologically active, reminding readers and authors of founders and
networks. Beyond their historical moment, now in our literary histories,
such books can be seen to synthesize and fashion an aesthetic standard
for a manuscript culture in an emerging Franco-Saxon Christian world,
whether or not that standard became mainstream. In a different look at
this codicological history, these deviant books need not be driven into
some cultural dead end. Had not hierarchical and authoritative Roman
ecclesiastical power shut down the more inclusive and egalitarian genesis
of the early mission in England and later Germany, such scripts may have
held sway for a time, as would have the female communities that produced
and read them.
More broadly, these commitments to Frankishness can tell us something
about these writers’ ambitions for their church in the late seventh and early
eighth centuries. Frankish outreach was instrumental to the early English
church.103 This “francitas” would seem to draw primarily on Columbanan,
and subsequently, Benedictine monasticism. Jouarre, the mother house
of Bertila’s Chelles was founded by Ado, a follower of Columbanus, and
the nunnery’s first abbess was Theodechild, who came from Faramoutier.
Faramoutier itself was Columbanan (and Benedictine),104 as were the related
houses Andelys, Jouarre, and Chelles.105 These Frankish foundations were
often double houses, and this is where Bath may differ, under the pressure
of Theodoran redesign of the English church in the late seventh century.
Nonetheless, the women-led houses in Francia and England, including
Bath, were central in the work of the mission in the Columbanan tradition.
Edward James describes the Columbanan model of monastic formation:
rural centres of education and lay outreach, largely independent from the
bishop, mainly foundations for royal or aristocratic families, and involved
103 Campbell, Essays, 59.

104 Bateson, “Double Monasteries,” 151.
105 Campbell, Essays, 58.
in missionary work.106 In following Frankish models of writing, a nun-

nery’s scriptorium evinces a commitment to the mission work, scholarship,
education, and independence of this Columbanan legacy. These principles
would be flexible and useful in the pioneering church in southwest Mercia
(or north Wessex depending on the times) and elsewhere in England, in
which nuns were doing many things that later the church ruled against:
Hollis traces the ministries of abbesses, whose work was quite close to that
of male ecclesiastics. Women such as Hild or Eangyth, like Fara at Brie in
Francia before them, played roles very similar to that of confessors, and their
work preaching or teaching to their communities and lay people verged
on sacerdotal. Drawing on the Irish practices propagated by Columbanus,
and in part out of sheer necessity, the early church in Francia and England
seems to have been more open, flexible, and egalitarian.107 Hollis observes:
“Where the church struggles for survival, at the continental mission and in
England, mutual interdependence prompted a vision of the church, not as
an officially constituted hierarchical entity, but as a mystical unity wrought
through love and suffering of Christ for humanity, which equalized the value
of all its members and endowed them with power to exercise an efficacious
ministry.”108 This vision must have been shared: Frankish women and men,
some of them likely taught by the disciples of Columbanus, came to England
to aid in the foundations of the church, bringing with them this energizing
and powerful idea of Christian community and purpose. Frankish books
by English nuns are signs of the commitment to this idea.
As the work of Jane Schulenburg, Stephanie Hollis, Clare Lees and Gillian
Overing, Sarah Foot, Felice Lifshitz, and others has shown, in its need for
men and women to do the hard work of the mission in the conversion
period, the early church was more egalitarian, but this would change.
Abbesses and nuns served in ways similar to their male counterparts, but
this so-called “golden age” (and it was never that golden, of course) was
ended by the reforms beginning in the mid-eighth century and especially
under the Romanizing institutional reforms of the Carolingian church.
We see the seeds of this transformation as far back as Theodore’s reforms
in England in the seventh century and sharpening in the mandates from
Pope Zacharias propagated by Boniface himself by the mid-eighth century.
106 Edward James, The Franks (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 130–34; for an in-depth analysis of the
close ties between early English royal and aristocratic families and monastic foundations (as
in Francia), see Barbara Yorke, Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses.
107 Hollis, Anglo-Saxon Women, 130–37 and Scheck, Reform and Resistance, 13–15.
108 Hollis, Anglo-Saxon Women, 132.
Hollis, Weston, and Watt have shown how the potent elegiac letters of
some of the nuns in Boniface’s circle reflect that historical change: their
letters mourn the absence and losses they have experienced. And in their
performances of gender and desire, they also challenge convention, in effect
challenging these historical pressures. Still, those pressures prevailed.
Lifshitz illuminates a poignant moment of this change in her reading of
Rudolph’s Vita of Leoba: Boniface had requested to be buried in a single
grave with his friend, conf idant, and ally, Leoba, but with the reforms
of the church, the monks of Fulda thought differently, and buried them
separately in 782 before translating her body and relics even further away
in 836. “It was the end of an era.”109 The ultimate success of the Roman and
Caroline reforms meant that our histories have similarly banished these
women—their lives, letters and books—from the centers of power that
they began and began in. That banishment is in part expressed and enacted
through the pejorative assessments of their work in that formative era.
Not only did that early era end, but that era became a marginalized dead
end in our histories of early medieval England, a dead end constructed by
scholarly dismissal of women’s work.
Early Franco-Saxon cultural experiments where men and women partici-
pated and worked had precedent, but no legacy. Rather than write them out
as halting failures, we might consider their meaning in their moment and
how they might haunt later English historiography: the repression of Hild
by Bede in his history,110 the displacement of Leoba from Boniface,111 the cri
de coeur of Berhtgyth in her isolation.112 These moments demonstrate the
ways in which early medieval English and Frankish institutions deprived
themselves of great thinkers, leaders, and writers in their move to enclose
and marginalize women in the eighth century. Those losses become clearer if
we rethink the bits of evidence that do survive: letters and books. Taking the
Würzburg Synonyma as a book written by a nun at Bath aiming to reproduce
a Frankish uncial reveals the intellectual and literary world and work of
the early church in Mercia, suggesting the spiritual allegiance, ideological
aims, and personal commitment of a road not taken.

110 Lees and Overing, “Birthing Bishops, Fathering Poets: Bede, Hild, and the Relations of
Cultural Production,” Exemplaria 6 (1994): 35–65; rev. and repr. as Chapter 1 in Double Agents
(2001; repr. 2009).
111 Lifshitz, Religious Women, 13–15.
112 See Kathryn Maude, Berhtgyth’s Letters to Balthard, Medieval Feminist Forum Medieval
Texts in Translation 4, Subsidia Series 7 (2017): 1–24 for a full treatment of Berhtgyth’s work; see
also Hollis, Anglo-Saxon Women, 142–43; Weston, “Textual Bodies,” 241–43.
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13 “Historical Accuracy,” Anonymity, and
Women’s Authorship
The Case of the Case for Beowulf
Stephen M. Yeager
Abstract
This essay collates and synthesizes many works of feminist Old English
scholarship in the service of a thought experiment: what if Beowulf was
written and/or inscribed by a woman, by women, and/or for an audience
of women? How might these possibilities shape our interpretations of
the text? In particular, the article identifies possible connections to the
Encomium Emmae reginae, to the lives of women and transgender saints,
and to women’s and dual-house monastic foundations. The themes of
monstrosity and travel are shown to resonate with gendered anxieties
about childbirth and maternity, and Beowulf the “bear-man” is read as
a gender-neutral confessor figure who models the ideal virtues of both
abbots and abbesses.
Keywords: Emma of Normandy, Hrostvit of Gandersheim, Hild of Whitby,

St. Margaret of Antioch, St. Euphrosyne
The term “historical accuracy” in the title of this essay refers to that aspect
of a vision of history whereby it conforms to the dominant positions in
the published, peer-reviewed scholarship that interprets a given corpus
of primary historical evidence. As Adrienne Shaw and other scholars of
historical gaming have argued, unexamined notions of historical accuracy
can constrain conversations about the past to accidental fields of likely
probability, where interpretations of the evidence predominate not because
of their unique adherence to the facts, but because of convention and
doi: 10.5117/9789463721462_ch13
378 Stephen M. Yeager
convenience.1 Similar constraints commonly shape scholarly representa-

tions of the past, as plausible claims go unexpressed only because everyone
assumes beforehand that no one will give them credence, though even this
presumption may be false—the majority may be more open to alternative
framings of history than we expect.
As Diane Watt discusses in the introduction to her important recent
book, early medieval women’s authorship is an excellent example of an
area of study where progress has been hampered by critical deference to
underexamined notions of historical accuracy.2 Though European culture’s
patriarchal structures did indeed limit medieval women’s access to education
and writing, this is hardly a sufficient reason to assume that any given
anonymous medieval text was written by an author who identified as a man,
especially if the text in question seems at all unusual. Such assumptions seem
particularly tenuous in light of that mounting body of evidence suggesting
that women’s readership and authorship was actually rather common in the
early medieval period.3 Hence there is considerable value to what Watt calls
her “speculative” approach, which corrects the tendency of such inherited
assumptions to exclude medieval women (and the scholars interested in
them) from debates about history and its implications. 4
Drawing on these studies, on Carol Clover’s formative arguments about
the configurations of socially constructed gender and biological sex in early
1 Adrienne Shaw, “The Tyranny of Realism: Historical Accuracy and the Politics of Representa-
tion in Assassin’s Creed III,” Loading… 9 no. 14 (2015): 4–24; on video games and cultural heritage
texts like Beowulf see also Xenia Zeiler and Suzie Thomas, “The Relevance of Researching Video
Games and Cultural Heritage,” International Journal of Heritage Studies (2020): 1–3.
2 Diane Watt, Women, Writing and Religion in England and Beyond, 650–1100 (London:
Bloombury, 2020).
3 See also Diane Watt, “Lost Books: Abbess Hildelith and the Literary Culture of Barking
Abbey,” Philological Quarterly 91, no. 1 (2012), 1–22, and Medieval Women’s Writing (London: Wiley
Blackwell, 2007), and also for example Helene Scheck and Virginia Blanton, eds., Nuns’ Literacies
in Medieval Europe, 2 vols. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013 and 2015); Felice Lifshitz, Religious Women
in Early Carolingian Frankia: A Study of Manuscript Transmission and Monastic Culture (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2014); Jane Stevenson, “Anglo-Latin Women Poets,” in Latin
Learning and English Lore, vol. 2, ed. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe and Andy Orchard (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2005), 86–107; Sarah Foot, Veiled Women: The Disappearance of Nuns
from Anglo-Saxon England (New York: Ashgate, 2000); Joan M. Ferrante, To The Glory of her Sex:
Women’s Roles in the Composition of Medieval Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1997); Rosamond McKitterick, “Women’s Literacy in the Early Middle Ages,” in Books, Scribes,
and Learning in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Rosamond McKitterick (Aldershot: Variorum, 1994);
Fred Robinson, “Old English Poetry: The Question of Authorship,” ANQ (1990), 59–64; Peter
Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
4 Watt, Women, Writing and Religion, 1–20, esp. 10–14.
“Historical Accurac y,” Anonymit y, and Women’s Authorship 379
medieval Northern Europe,5 and on our increasingly nuanced understanding

of textual authority in Old English writing,6 this essay will apply to the poem
Beowulf the presumption of Watt and others, that the categories “woman”
and “author” are themselves too fraught to assess the likelihood of women’s
authorship in the irreducibly ambiguous evidence of anonymous medieval
texts and textual traditions.7 Specifically, this essay asks: what would it mean
for the Old English poem Beowulf if we simply chose to read it as if it were
written by a woman, copied by a woman, or intended for an audience of
women? Given that the dearth of evidence is so profound that possibilities
along these lines are as likely to be true as they are to be untrue, why not
proffer full, cogent, and detailed explorations of the possible readings that
such theories would open up, and treat them as seriously as we have treated
theories that implicitly assume the poem’s authors, scribes, and audience(s)
to be men?8 Perhaps the most obvious implications of this framing concern
the manuscript juxtaposition of Beowulf with the poem Judith, but I have
decided to deliberately ignore these points of entry, in favor of less obvious
but similarly compelling reasons to read Beowulf as women’s poetry.9
5 Carol Clover, “Regardless of Sex: Men, Women, and Power in Early Northern Europe,” Speculum
68, no. 2 (1993): 363–87. On the challenges of historicizing categories of gender and sexuality see
also David Clark, Between Medieval Men: Male Friendship and Desire in Early Medieval English
Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1–21, esp. 13–15; Carol Braun Pasternack,
“Negotiating Gender in Anglo-Saxon England,” in Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages, ed.
Sharon Farmer and Carol Braun Pasternack (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003),
107–142.
6 On the different configurations of Old English textual authority see, for example, Manish
Sharma, “Beyond Nostalgia: Formula and Novelty in Old English Literature,” Exemplaria 26, no. 4
(2014): 303–27; Thomas Bredehoft, Authors, Audiences, and Old English Verse (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2009); A. N. Doane, “Beowulf and Scribal Performance,” in Unlocking the Word
Hoard, ed. Mark Amodio and Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2003), 62–75; Seth Lerer, Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1991). On the link between these two topics of gender and authorship see
especially the scholarship of Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, whose work spans not only questions
of authority and scribal performance, in Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), but also depictions of women’s agency, in Stealing
Obedience: Narratives of Agency and Identity in Later Anglo-Saxon England (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2012), esp. 151–245.
7 Watt, Women, Writing and Religion, 2.
8 This essay is hardly the first to make this sort of claim about an early or anonymous author.
One of the best-known examples is Andrew Dalby’s exploration of the idea that Homer (or the
other poet of the same name who wrote the Iliad and Odyssey) might have been a woman:
Rediscovering Homer (New York: Norton, 2006).
9 On Judith see, for example, Hugh Magennis, “Gender and Heroism in the Old English Judith,”
in Writing Gender and Genre in Medieval Literature: Approaches to Old and Middle English Texts
(Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002), 5–18; Susan Kim, “Bloody Signs: Circumcision and Pregnancy
As I have indicated above, there are many critics working in Old

English studies to uncover the evidence for women’s readership and
authorship in the period. Nonetheless, it is my sense that the specif ic
possibilities for women authors and readers of Beowulf have only ever
been tentatively addressed by the dominant scholarly conversation
around the poem—perhaps out of deference to the common reading of
the poem as an aggressively masculinist text, most recently manifest
in the decision by Maria Dhavana Headley to translate the famously
diff icult f irst word Hwæt into the modern slang term “Bro!”10 Be that as
it may, Fred Robinson does briefly cite Paull Baum’s speculations about
a woman author for the poem in a footnote to his argument about the
possibilities for female authorship in early medieval English literature
generally, advanced in a brief article ambiguously titled “Old English
Poetry: The Question of Authorship” that appeared not in a medieval
studies journal but in American Notes & Queries.11 Though we would do
well to respect the ambivalence suggested by Robinson’s circumspect
way of attaching his name to the possibility that we might read Beowulf
as women’s poetry, I think we can still agree that if the co-author of
one of the most respected textbooks in the f ield thinks a case might
be made, then the question deserves at the very least to inspire one of
those arguments that rage for decades before they are entertainingly
summarized for undergraduates in critical introductions to the text. 12
Instead, my sense is that even feminist readers of Beowulf like Gillian
in the Old English Judith,” Exemplaria 11 (1999), 285–307; Ann Astell, “Holofernes’ Head: Tacen
and Teaching in the Old English Judith,” Anglo-Saxon England 18 (1989), 117–33; Peter Lucas,
“Judith and the Woman Hero,” Yearbook of English Studies 22 (1992), 17–27. On Beowulf and
Judith see Andy Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf Manuscript
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 4–12; Peter Lucas, “The Place of Judith in the Beowulf
Manuscript,” Review of English Studies 41 (1990), 463–78.
10 Headley, Beowulf: A New Translation (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). On masculin-
ism in Beowulf see, e.g., 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. See further the queer-theoretical approaches to masculinity in the text overviewed by
Basil Arnaud Price, “Potentiality and Possibility: An Overview of Beowulf and Queer Theory,”
Neophilologus 104 (2020): 401–19, especially Clark, Between Medieval Men, 130–43.
11 Robinson, “Question,” citing Baum, “The Beowulf Poet,” Philological Quarterly 39 (1960):
389–99, at 393–94. See also Richard J. Schrader, God’s Handiwork: Images of Women in Early
Germanic Literature (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), who says of Baum: “while his reasons
are spurious, the idea is not far-fetched” (49). American Notes & Queries is a generalist journal
which publishes short works on the literature of the English-speaking world.
12 The textbook in question is now in its eighth edition: Bruce Mitchell and Fred Robinson, A
Guide to Old English, 8th ed. (London: Wiley Blackwell, 2012).
Overing and Clare Lees, Mary Dockray Miller, Susan Kim, Shari Horner,
Megan Cavell, Stacy Klein, Roberta Frank, Elaine Tuttle Hansen, and
others have rarely done more than intimate the possibility of women
authors and readers in the vicinity of Beowulf, emphasizing instead the
ultimate impossibility of ever answering such questions.13
Of course the caution of these women has been absolutely consistent with
the larger skepticism of postwar medieval studies about the applicability of
modern terms and concepts to medieval manuscript evidence.14 Nonetheless,
I have chosen to simply set aside the methodological issues to address
rather the implicit political ones. As I have said, I am hardly the first reader
of Beowulf to speculate about its possible women audiences, scribes, and
authors. If I am (as it seems) one of the first to express my speculations in
print, it is only because my privilege protects me from the sorts of personal
attacks that commonly damage and even end the careers of queer and trans
scholars, women scholars, Indigenous and Black scholars, scholars of color,
and contingent faculty when they attach their names to speculative theses.
I write this piece at a time when activist scholars are working to transform
the field from a site of white supremacy, misogyny, and other forms of active
harm into a site of active repair.15 My intention in writing it is to contribute
13 For example in Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing, Double Agents: Women and Clerical
Culture in Anglo-Saxon England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Mary
Dockray-Miller, Motherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon England (New York: Palgrave Macmil-
lan, 2000); Asa Mittman and Susan Kim, Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the
Beowulf Manuscript (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2013); Shari
Horner, The Discourse of Enclosure: Representing Women in Old English Literature (Binghamton:
State University of New York Press, 2003); Megan Cavell, Weaving Words and Binding Bodies: The
Poetics of Human Experience in Old English Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016);
Stacy Klein, Ruling Women: Queenship and Gender in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2006); Joan Ferrante, To the Glory of Her Sex: Women’s Roles in
the Composition of Medieval Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Roberta Frank,
“Quid Hinieldus cum femininis: The Hero and Women at the End of the First Millennium,” in
La Funzione dell’eroe germanico, ed. Teresa Paroli (Roma: Il Calamo 1995), 7–25; Elaine Tuttle
Hansen, “Women in Old English Reconsidered,” Michigan Academician 9 (1976): 109–13. Surveys
of feminist approaches to Old English poetry include Stacy S. Klein, “Gender,” in A Handbook to
Anglo-Saxon Studies, ed. Jacqueline Stodnick and Renée R. Trilling (Chichester, West Sussex:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 39–54; Mary Dockray-Miller, “Old English Literature and Feminist
Theory,” Literature Compass 5/6 (2008): 1049–59; Alexandra Hennessey Olsen, “Gender Roles,”
in A Beowulf Handbook, ed. Robert Bjork and John Niles (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1997), 311–24.
14 Summarily presented recently in the introduction to The Medieval Manuscript Book, ed.
Michael Johnston and Michael Van Dussen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 1–16.
15 Histories of harm and plans for reparation are surveyed for example by Mary Rambaran-Olm,
Breann Leake, and Micah Goodrich, “Medieval Studies: The Stakes of the Field,” postmedieval
to these ongoing efforts, answering a request made by Tarren Andrews on

behalf of Indigenous Studies that our field should “ask what it might look
like to ‘extend an invitation to’ rather than ‘engage with’” approaches and
communities that have been historically marginalized within (or even
excluded entirely from) Old English studies.16
It often happens in my real-life conversations that I will realize, belatedly,
that I have spoken over someone else, and cut them off from what they were
planning to say. My strategy for addressing this harm when it occurs is to
repeat the last idea they expressed, as a way of signaling my intention to
listen and my hope that they will continue speaking despite my rudeness.
Even when my paraphrase is wrong, the effort generally seems to work, as
my errors can sometimes give my interlocutors a welcome chance to clarify
their original points. Similarly, my aim in this essay is to synthesize and
repeat my understanding of what feminist readers of Beowulf and other Old
English poetry have argued in their publications about the women authors
and readers of the period, before they were interrupted by the field and its
arbitrary strictures of so-called historical accuracy. My hope is that I might
invite these other readers to return to their thoughts and continue them,
at the same time that they might invite new voices to join in and carry the
conversation even further.
Specifically, I will use the rest of this essay to invite further conversation
about three possibilities: first, that the Beowulf manuscript may have been
intended for a readership of women; second, that it may have been copied
by women scribes; and third, that the poem itself may be attributed to a
woman poet. My summaries of these questions will provisionally synthesize
extant studies and readings, by the women cited above and others, to show
that I believe there is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about reading
the poem in this way. If anything, I believe there are more examples of
existing readings that will come into sharper focus if female authorship
and readership is openly presupposed, than there are new problems raised
by such suppositions.
11 (2020), 356–370; Christine Warmbrunn, “Dear Tolkien Fans: Black People Exist,” The Public
Medievalist (Sept. 24, 2020), accessed February 21, 2022, https://www.publicmedievalist.com/
tolkien-fans-black-people/; Dorothy Kim, “Introduction the Literature Compass Special Cluster:
Critical Race and the Middle Ages,” Literature Compass 16, nos. 9–10 (2019), e1249; Donna Beth
Ellard, Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts postSaxon Futures (New York: punctum, 2019); Jonathan Hsy and
Julie Orlemanski, “Race and Medieval Studies: A Partial Bibliography,” postmedieval 8 (2017),
500–31, 527–31.
16 Tarren Andrews, “Introduction: Indigenous Futures and Medieval Pasts,” English Language
Notes 58, no. 2 (2020): 1–17, at 2.
Women Readers, Women Scribes
The body of our ignorance about Beowulf is vast, but a brief summary of it will
help to define the parameters of the discussion. We do not know who copied
its manuscript, or where they did it, or why. We do not know when it was
copied, and since the evidence of the two scripts is contradictory, analysis of
the question arguably reveals more about the contingency of our dating criteria
than it does about the likely date range of the text.17 Analyses of dialect and
meter have attempted to establish a provenance, but it is my view, at least,
that not everyone agrees about what this evidence means.18 We do not know a
single fact about the person or people who wrote Beowulf: there are no explicit
contemporary allusions to the text, no obvious signatures or other attributions
in the manuscript, and very little concrete evidence of any kind. The story’s best
analogues tend to be brief, tenuous, dated much later, and/or to not be English,
and so they provide little help for establishing an immediate context.19 Finally,
as I have stated above, there are many basic methodological challenges to any
criticism that would engage with early vernacular poetry and manuscript
culture, so for example we do not even know whether modern concepts of
“authors” or even “scribes” are useful for thinking about the people who made
the words of the poem exist on the parchment in the way that they do.
Let us stick, then, to the dominant positions in the secondary criticism
cited above, and assume a date for the manuscript between the start of
Æthelred’s reign and the end of Cnut’s, and an audience in the vicinity of their
courts that spans the secular and religious spheres. Given the connections
noted by Helen Damico between Beowulf and the Encomium Emmae reginae,
I would suggest that Emma of Normandy is a helpful model for imagining
an intended female audience for the Beowulf manuscript.20 Like Thryth,
17 R. D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles, eds., Klaeber’s Beowulf, 4th ed. (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2008), xxv–xxxv; Kevin Kiernan, Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript,
rev. ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).
18 Eric Weiskott, English Alliterative Verse: Poetic Tradition and Literary History (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2016), 23–52; Leonard Neidorf, ed., The Dating of Beowulf: A Reas-
sessment (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014); Roberta Frank, “A Scandal in Toronto: The Dating of
Beowulf a Quarter Century On,” Speculum 82 (2007): 843–64; Robert Fulk, “Old English Meter
and Oral Tradition: Three Issues Bearing on Poetic Chronology,” JEGP 106 (2007): 304–24; Peter
Orton, The Transmission of Old English Poetry (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000).
19 Klaeber’s Beowulf, xxxvi–xliii; Andy Orchard, A Critical Companion to Beowulf (Cambridge:
D. S. Brewer, 2003), 98–162; Theodor M. Andersson, “Sources and Analogues,” in A Beowulf
Handbook, ed. Robert Bjork and John Niles (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 125–48.
20 Helen Damico, “Beowulf’s Foreign Queen and the Politics of Eleventh-Century England,” in
Intertexts: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Culture Presented to Paul Szarmach, ed. Virginia Blanton and
Emma was a foreign bride with a posthumous reputation for difficulty;21

like Freawaru, Emma was a peace offering, first married to Æthelred to
unite England with Normandy against the Danes, then married to Cnut
with similar goals; like Hildeburh, she mourned the deaths and injuries
of both husbands and sons when the peace sought by her marriages failed
to hold; like Wealtheow, she had good reason to fear the usurpation and
death of her two sons Alfred and Edward, and she tried to protect them
with the patronage of a warrior from across the sea; like Hygd, she helped
resolve the difficult question of which of her kinsmen should succeed to the
throne after her husband’s death, and ended up seeing both of her choices
become king in turn.
Let us imagine further, and still arbitrarily, that the scribes or perhaps
commissioners who assembled this manuscript for a woman like Emma
were themselves women, and were, moreover, the inhabitants of a religious
house—say, Wilton or Nunnaminster.22 If a woman’s religious community
Helen Scheck (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2008), 209–40. On
Emma and the Encomium see also Elizabeth Tyler, England in Europe: English Royal Women and
Literary Patronage, c. 1000–c. 1150 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017); Pauline Stafford,
Queen Emma and Queen Edith: Queenship and Women’s Power in Eleventh Century England
(London: Blackwell, 1997).
21 “Thryth” or “Modthryth” appears in Beowulf at line 1931. On this figure see Dockray-Miller,
Motherhood, 78–88; Gillian R. Overing, Language, Sign, and Gender in Beowulf (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 70. The connection between Thryth and Emma is
suggested further by the coincidence that the later legend of Emma and the Plowshares, itself a
possible influence on the Middle English romance Athelston, falls into the same “accused queen”
narrative that also manifests in legends about the two queens of two kings Offa, described in
the Vitae duorum Offarum, one of whom is named “Dreda” and either of whom could be the
figure alluded to in Beowulf: Nancy B. Black, Medieval Narratives of Accused Queens (Gainsville:
University Press of Florida, 2003), 69–71; L. A. Hibbard, “Athelston, a Westminster Legend,” PMLA
36 (1921): 223–244; Graham Drake, Eve Salisbury, Ronald B. Herzman eds., Four Romances of
England: Horn, Havelok the Dane, Bevis of Hampton, Athelston (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute
Publications, 1997); Michael J. Swanton, The Lives of Two Offas: Vitae Offarum Duorum (Devon:
The Medieval Press, 2010).
22 On women’s literacy in Wilton, Nunnaminster, and other women’s foundations at this
period see Watt, Women, Writing and Religion; 117–58; Stephanie Hollis, “Wilton as a Centre of
Learning,” in Writing the Wilton Women: Goscelin’s Legend of Edith and liber confortatorius, ed.
Stephanie Hollis, with W. R. Barnes, Rebecca Hayward, Kathleen Loncar and Michael Wright
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 245–80; Jane Stevenson, “Anglo-Latin Women Poets,” 93–100; Peter
Robinson, “A Twelfth-Century Scriptrix from Nunnaminster,” in Of the Making of Medieval
Books: Medieval Manuscripts, Their Scribes and Readers, Essays Presented to M.B. Parkes (London:
Scholar Press, 1997), 73–93; Thomas Hall, “Preaching at Winchester in the Early Twelfth Century,”
JEGP 104, no. 2 (2005): 189–218; Mary Dockray-Miller, Saints Edith and Aethelthryth—Princesses,
Miracle Workers, and their Late Medieval Audience: The Wilton Chronicle and the Wilton Life of
St Aethelthryth (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009).
gifted a manuscript to a wealthy patroness like Emma, or even if it simply

produced one for its own enjoyment, then one would expect the manuscript
to contain at least a subtext encouraging its female audience to join the
house, become a nun, and bring their money with them, as did so many noble
widows in this period. Such a subtext may indeed be read into the terrible
lives of the women in Beowulf listed above, and also more generally into the
joint themes of monstrosity, travel, and warrior culture in the manuscript,
as these all figure in fairly straightforward ways the horrors of marriage,
maternity, and secular womanhood in this era.23 For example, an aspect of
monstrosity not typically emphasized in relation to Beowulf is its connec-
tion to anxieties around childbirth, as these may be focalized around the
specific fear that one’s children might be marked by congenital disabilities.24
Whether or not the actual children of women like Emma suffered from such
biological conditions, they certainly ran the danger of moral monstrosity, in
the vein of Holofernes, Alexander, Cain, and Grendel. And so I ask: what if
the lurid catalogue of the horrors of the outside world found in the Beowulf
manuscript is designed to first excite the interest of noblewomen like Emma,
but then to warn such women that if they succumb to pride and agree to
(re)marriage, then they risk putting themselves in the power of the foreign
monsters who are their tyrannical and violent husbands and sons?
There are many ways of following up on this hypothesis. For example,
we may build on Donna Beth Ellard’s recent study to read Beowulf as
an expression of a (potential) child-bearer’s ambivalence towards mar-
riage and family. 25 One particularly exciting path forward might be to
conduct comparative studies of the Beowulf manuscript and the works
of tenth-century author Hrostvit of Gandersheim (ca. 935–973), as her
works are concerned with similar themes of paganism, monstrosity,
and masculine violence and she is barely one degree of separation from
medieval English women’s religious houses and their literary output. The
networks of possible textual connections between the contexts of the
Beowulf manuscript and those of Hrostvit’s milieu are complex, but there
23 Discussions of maternity and monstrosity in Beowulf have typically focused on the figure of
Grendel’s Mother, for obvious reasons: Paul Acker, “Horror and the Maternal in Beowulf,” PMLA
121, no. 3 (2006): 702–16; Renee Trilling, “Beyond Abjection: The Problem with Grendel’s Mother
Again,” Parergon 24, no. 1 (2007): 1–20.
24 On monstrosity and the Beowulf manuscript see, for example, J. J. Cohen, Of Giants: Sex,
Monsters and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1999); Mittman and
Kim, Inconceivable Beasts; Andy Orchard, Pride and Prodigies.
25 Ellard, “Beowulf and Babies,” in Dating Beowulf: Studies in Intimacy, ed. Daniel C. Remein
and Erica Weaver (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2019), 97–119.
are some obvious starting points.26 First, Hrostvit praised Eadgyth—the

English wife (and so foreign bride) of Otto I—in her Gesta Oddonis, whose
sister Eadburga founded Nunnaminster and became the subject of a
fragmentary vita in the twelfth-century manuscript Oxford Bodleian 451
that was copied by a Nunnaminster scriptrix.27 Second, one of the most
important collections of early English women’s writing appears in the
“Boniface correspondence” associated with St. Boniface, the archbishop
of Mainz (672–754).28 Boniface’s successors would claim the rights of the
diocesan over nearby Gandersheim abbey in a conflict with the bishop
of Hildesheim that began shortly after Hrostvit’s death (987–1015 CE).
Adam S. Cohen and Anne Derbes have argued that this conflict informed
the representation of the Fall on the bronze doors of Hildesheim (ca.
1007–1015 CE), and they suggest moreover that the bishop Bernward who
commissioned the doors might have been influenced by the Old Saxon/
Old English poem Genesis B.29 There are, then, many possible paths for
future investigation.
Another possible approach to imagining a woman’s readership for Beowulf
is provided by the other virginal dragonslayer in the Old English corpus, St.
Margaret of Antioch. Like Beowulf, Margaret also has a wrestling match
with a black, man-shaped demon, and her fluid gender is suggested by
those early versions of her life in which she disguises herself as a man.30 It is
26 One helpful overview of these connections is Rosamond McKitterick, “Ottonian Intellectual

Culture in the Tenth Century and the Role of Theophanu,” Early Medieval Europe 2, no. 1 (1993):
53–74.
27 Hrostvit, “Gesta Ottonis,” in Hrostvithae Liber Tertius: A Text, With Translation, Introduction,
and Commentary, ed. and trans. Mary Bernardine Bergman (Covington, KY: The Sisters of Saint
Benedict, 1943), 94, lines 75–97. On Eadgyth see also Jane Stevenson, “Anglo-Latin Women Poets,”
91; Simon Keynes, “King Athelstan’s Books,” 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), 143–201, 148–49; Christina
Lee, “Eclectic Memories: In Search of Eadgyth,” Offa 58 (2001 published 2004), 277–85. On Bodley
451 see Hall, “Preaching”; Robinson, “Twelfth-Century Scriptrix.” On Hrostvit’s themes see, for
example, Maud McInerney, Eloquent Virgins (Palgrave: 2003), 85–110; Katharina M. Wilson, “The
Saxon Canoness Hrostvit of Gandersheim,” in Medieval Women Writers, ed. Katharina Wilson
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 30–63.
28 Watt, Women, Writing and Religion, 69–115.
29 Adam S. Cohen and Anne Derbes, “Bernward and Eve at Hildesheim,” Gesta 40, no. 1 (2001):
19–38.
30 Mary Clayton and Hugh Magennis, The Old English Lives of St. Margaret (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994); Paul E. Szarmach, “St. Euphrosyne: Holy Transvestite,” in
Holy Men and Holy Women: Old English Prose Saints’ Lives and their Contexts, ed. Szarmach
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 353–65, 354.
noteworthy that the Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 303 Life of Margaret
(Ker, Catalogue, 57 art. 23) is in a collection that also contains Aelfric’s prose
Judith (art. 73), and that another version, in London BL Cotton Otho B.x (fol.
195), is in the same collection where an Old English Life of St. Euphrosyne
(Ker, Catalogue, 177 art. 10, fol. 61v) directly precedes another witness of the
same Life of St. Christopher appearing in the Beowulf MS (art. 11, fol. 69).31
This context of circulation and the presence of dragons, demons, prideful
pagans and childless heroes in Margaret’s legend make it a relatively close
parallel to the similar convergences of texts and themes appearing in the
Beowulf manuscript.
In later years, St. Margaret would become the patron saint of childbirth.
If Beowulf is indeed a “bear’s son,”32 then his association with this animal
ties him also to the theme of maternity, as the ferocity of mother bears
defending their cubs is already proverbial in the Old Testament (Hosea 13:8).
Yet the poem also makes much of the fact that Beowulf has no children (lines
2729–31), and that he views the entire nation of the Geats as the benefactors
of his will (2797–98). I propose that we think about this connection between
Beowulf and Margaret through Robin Norris’s reading of the Old English
Life of St. Euphrosyne cited above, and so consider that this poem about
Beowulf the quasi-maternal, (apparently) virginal, Margaret-like demon-
wrestler and dragonslayer might be another gender- and genre-bending
attempt to meet the demand among women readers for lives of women
confessors.33 As a work of “woman’s literature,” then, Beowulf would integrate
the matter of an “old wives’ tale” about a monster-fighting bear-man into
the quasi-legendary history of Geats and Danes to figure how the brides of
Christ may operate as sexless but effective political leaders in a patriarchal
heroic society—neither “wifmenn” nor “waepnedmenn,” but something
in between.34 Beowulf’s description of his careful, protective stewardship
arguably sounds more like that of a great abbot or abbess cultivating good
31 D. G. Scragg, “The Corpus of Anonymous Lives and Their Manuscript Context,” in Szarmach,
Holy Men and Holy Women, 209–30. The third and final Life of Margaret appears in Cotton Tiberius
A.iii; see N. R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford: Clarendon, 1957),
186 art. 15.
32 Klaeber’s Beowulf, xlii–iii; Orchard, Critical Companion, 121.
33 Robin Norris, “Genre Trouble: Reading the Old English Vita of Saint Euphrosyne,” in Women
Writing Saints in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Paul Szarmach (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2013), 121–139. See also Clark, Between Medieval Men, 195–209. On Beowulf’s hagiographic
analogues see Orchard, Critical Companion, 149–51.
34 “Women” and “men,” where the marker of the latter’s gender is his possession of a weapon;
contrasted, e.g., in Beowulf, line 1284. Beowulf is famously unable to use a sword effectively, and
the poet herself calls attention to this fact at, e.g., lines 2682–87.
relationships with neighboring lords than it does like a great king expanding
his territory:
næs se folccyning,
ymbesittendra ænig ðara,
þe mec guðwinum gretan dorste,
egesan ðeon. Ic on earde bad
mælgesceafta, heold min tela,
ne sohte searoniðas, ne me swor fela
aða in unriht. (733–39)
(There was no king, of any neighbouring area, who dared to approach me

with warriors or to threaten terrors. In the land I awaited contingencies,
I held well my [possessions], I sought no contrived conflicts, and I did
not swear many oaths wrongfully.)
For the remainder of this essay, I will sketch out how we may apply this framing
to read Beowulf as a sort of mirror for religious women, and abbesses in particular.
Women Poets
Near the beginning of Beowulf, we see the creation of an enclosed space

named Heorot, whose establishment occasions a song whose theme is obvi-
ously connected to that of Caedmon’s famous hymn.35 Given the broad
parallel between this scene and Bede’s legend, I propose that we imagine
the newly founded Heorot as a pagan prefiguration of the dual-foundation
monastic space of Hild’s Whitby, where Caedmon’s miraculous composition
took place.36 Bede’s myth famously effaces Hild herself from the history
of Whitby and of Old English poetry, in a manner that Watt suggests is
35 On the importance of the enclosure as a metaphor connecting virginity to women’s religious

spaces see Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Saints’ Lives and Women’s Literary Culture 1150–1300 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001), especially Chapters 1 and 2. Of particular interest is her discussion
of the many early medieval English virgins who are remembered for acts of endowment and
foundation, at 57–67.
36 The parallel is strengthened somewhat if we allow the possibility that Heorot is coded as a
space of pagan worship, argued by, e.g., J. R. R. Tolkien, Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary
(London: HarperCollins, 2014), 329–38. Then the song that marks the foundation of Heorot would
be parallel to the hymn that, for Bede at least, marks a moment of foundation of the Christian
Old English poetic tradition: Sharma, “Beyond Nostalgia.”
consistent with his larger pattern of “overwriting” women authors in his

works.37 And as Lees and Overing observe in their important reading of
the episode, Bede’s characterization of Hild as a mother is crucial to her
effacement in his text: as they say, maternity is “doubly appropriated” by Bede,
as it is “emptied of its gendered force and specificity and reabsorbed into the
masculine economy as a means of production under masculine control.” In
brief, “maternity is sterilized.”38 I would suggest, then, that we may read the
parallel episode in Beowulf as attempting a strategic version of this same
sterilization and erasure, emptying maternity of its gendered force so that it
may negotiate with but ultimately withdraw from the masculine economy
of power as a strategy for protecting a community of religious women.
It is noteworthy that the poem’s juxtaposition of the story of creation
and the story of Cain and Abel skips over the story of Adam and Eve, but
only after suggesting it in lines 99–101:
Sægde se þe cuþe
frumsceaft fira feorran reccan,
cwæð þæt se ælmihtiga eorðan worhte†,
wlitebeorhtne wang, swa wæter bebugeð,
gesette sigehreþig sunnan ond monan
leoman to leohte landbuendum
ond gefrætwade foldan sceatas
leomum ond leafum, lif eac gesceop
cynna gehwylcum þara ðe cwice hwyrfaþ.
Swa ða drihtguman dreamum lifdon
eadiglice, oððæt an ongan
fyrene fremman feond on helle.
Wæs se grimma gæst Grendel haten… (90–103)
(He spoke, who could describe the first creation of men long ago, and said
that the almighty made the earth, the brilliant plain surrounded by water,
set triumphant the sun and moon lights as light to land-dwellers, and
adorned the corners of the earth with branches and leaves, shaped each
life for each of the species that dwelled there alive. So the noble humans
dwelled in joys happily, until one began to commit crimes, a fiend in Hell.
The grim spirit was called Grendel…)
37 Watt, Women, Writing and Religion, 14–18, 21–39.

38 Lees and Overing, Double Agents, 26. For another compelling reading of this episode see
Sharma, “Beyond Nostalgia.”
The lines I have emphasized here seem at first to be an allusion to these

original dwellers in paradise and their fall at the hands of the devil. Then in
line 102, we learn that in fact the previous four lines were not about Adam
and Eve at all—this “devil” is named Grendel, and so the noble humans
must be the Danes and the paradise defaced Heorot.39 In this feint, which
briefly casts Grendel the descendant of Cain in the role of the devil who
tempted Eve, we see an implicit reading of the story of creation that will
hold for the rest of the poem. Insofar as Cain’s mother is, through her son,
the ultimate progenitrix of the race of monsters that will personify the
culturally destructive forces of masculine territorial aggression throughout
the poem, Eve’s original sin is tightly linked to her decision to have sex and
have children. 40
It is perhaps important here that Grendel is given the longest lineage of
any character in the poem, and that this (monstrous) continuity is contrasted
with the constant subversion of primogeniture in the dynastic successions
described in the poem. Scyld Scefing is an orphan, Hrothgar and Hygelac
are younger brothers, Beowulf is a cousin, and in each of these instances
discontinuity in the royal bloodline leads to long-lasting, peaceful regimes.
Lines 12–19 of the poem, which cite Scyld’s foundation of a royal line as
proof of his excellence as a king, are part of a larger pattern of comparison
between this figure and the childless Beowulf—though perhaps there is
more to be made of the irony implicit in the clearest parallel between the
two, which is that their pagan funerals are both lavishly and mournfully
described. 41 Perhaps this opening blandishment to the effect that filial
continuity in the royal line does indeed bring peace to a nation serves only
to introduce the culturally received notion that the remainder of the poem
will ironize and undermine, starting with the famously ambiguous lines
at the conclusion of Scyld’s funeral: “men ne cunnon … hwa þæm hlæste
onfeng” (men do not know … who received that cargo; 50–52). Scyld may
have founded a royal line, but the question of who inherited his wealth is
pointedly left open for debate.
Read in this way, then it would seem that the poem’s construction of
heroism is directed towards the impossible task of imagining a mode of
39 On Grendel the “enemy in hell” in these lines and his connection to Cain see Klaeber’s
Beowulf, 121–23; Orchard, Critical Companion, 64.
40 On Cain and the race of monsters see Ruth Mellinkoff’s two-part article “Cain’s Monstrous
Progeny in Beowulf,” in Anglo-Saxon England 8 (1979): 143–62 and Anglo-Saxon England 9 (1980):
183–97.
41 On these funerals see Gail R. Owen-Crocker, The Four Funerals in Beowulf (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2009).
gender-neutral virginity that may neither threaten nor be threatened by

the dominant masculine symbolic order, and in particular its impossible
mandate to procreate and pass power to one’s descendants in the future.
While it might be putting too fine a point on it, it is nonetheless the case
that Grendel—whose descriptions, as we well know, slide back and forth
between words meaning “monster” and words meaning “man”42—cannot
be slain with a phallic sword, but is defeated only when Beowulf grips and
constrains him. 43 Grendel’s attempted raptus of Beowulf leads directly
to his symbolic castration (enacted twice), just as surely as Holofernes’s
seduction of Judith led to his own, and just as surely as Roman pagan men
suffer humiliation and death when they attempt to force themselves on
holy virgins in the conventional hagiographic passio.
The great difference between Beowulf and the women in its hagi-
ographic analogues is that his f ight against Grendel is not the climax,
but the introduction of his story. The heart of the poem is what happens
next, in the series of digressions and adventures which model in different
ways versions of the question: how does one live as a virtuous woman
in the early medieval North Atlantic? As many have said, the secular
women of the poem offer no helpful model along these lines: motherhood,
wifehood, and even daughterly f ilial duty all lead only to suffering. 44
The alternatives to their subjected femininity presented by the poem
are threefold: Grendel’s mother, Hrothgar, and Beowulf himself. In the
f irst instance, Grendel’s mother confounds the symbolic order in the
poem through her profoundly literal embodiment of the animal and
biological condition of femininity and motherhood, through which her
precise, measured vengeance for her son practices both the retributive
justice of the masculine realm and the instinctive guardianship of the
bear protecting her cubs. 45 Perhaps the radical suppression of Grendel’s
mother undertaken by the Danes and Geats, who ride out in full force
against her as they never did against Grendel himself, serves to represent
42 Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, “Beowulf, Lines 702b–836: Transformations and the Limits
of the Human,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 23, no. 4 (1981): 484–94. See most
recently Adam Miyashiro, “Homeland Insecurity: Biopolitics and Sovereign Violence in Beowulf,”
postmedieval 11 (2020): 384–95.
43 For a study of binding in OE poetry and its relation to gender see Megan Cavell, Weaving
Words and Binding Bodies.
44 Dockray-Miller, Motherhood, 77–115; Hansen, “Women,” 117; Schrader, God’s Handiwork, 36;
Baum, “The Beowulf Poet,” 393.
45 On Grendel’s mother as a bear protecting her cub see James Paz, Nonhuman Voices in
Anglo-Saxon Literature and Material Culture (Manchester University Press, 2017), 34–58; Acker,
“Horror”; Trilling, “Beyond Abjection.”
the likely consequences that await women who exercise agency so un-
apologetically. 46 They are dehumanized, excluded from the system, and
subjected to violence, and for these pragmatic reasons their efforts must
be categorized as failures.
The second, similarly dissatisfying model is Hrothgar, who is the formal,
rational alternative to the materiality and affect of Grendel’s mother. Hroth-
gar may be feminized, as Stacy Klein has written, and he may advocate
the feminine virtues of patience and humility, but he ultimately remains a
husband and a father, and so he cannot serve in the final instance as a model
for feminine political authority.47 The impossible, quasi-monstrous figure for
the ideal fusion of Grendel’s mother and Hrothgar is Beowulf himself, who
returns to the Geats a sexless synthesis of the two models. Moving beyond
his success as a wrestler of demons, on the model of martyrs like Margaret
and Juliana, Beowulf has been transformed by his journey into a confessor
able to speak to masculine authority for the benefit of his community, and
to keep his enemies at bay. He is gracious when Hygelac condescendingly
questions his strength and intelligence; he sees the folly of Freawaru’s
marriage, and seems not to marry himself; and like so many women leaders
of early medieval religious communities, his greatest failure is his inability
to ensure that his community might thrive after his death without his great
strength and reputation to protect it, as indeed the rich endowment he
amasses to guarantee its stability and autonomy leads rather to its invasion
and destruction—a sad conclusion whose particular consequences for
women are emphasized at Beowulf’s funeral by the mournful figure of the
singing Geatisc meowle (Geatish woman; 3150).
Indeed, given that Beowulf is an elegiac and ambivalent poem about a
vanished age, when communities under constant threat of invasion and
war managed only imperfectly to keep those forces at bay, we may ask:
what if the nostalgia for the nations of the Geats and Spear-Danes in the
poem expressed a memory of the great female and dual religious houses of
46 On the suppression of Grendel’s mother see Trilling, “Beyond Abjection”; Jane Chance, Woman
as Hero in Old English Literature (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 101–2, and “The
Structural Unity of Beowulf: The Problem of Grendel’s Mother,” in New Readings on Women in Old
English Literature, ed. Helen Damico and Alexandra Hennessey Olsen (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1990), 248–61; Dockray-Miller, Motherhood, 88–96; Mary Kay Temple, “Beowulf
1258–1266: Grendel’s Lady-Mother,” English Language Notes 23, no. 3 (1986): 10–15; Helen Damico,
Beowulf’s Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984)
122; Christine Alfano, “The Issue of Feminine Monstrosity: A Reevaluation of Grendel’s Mother,”
Comitatus 23, no. 1 (1992): 1–16.
47 Klein, Ruling Women, 87–123, esp. 111–13.
the early medieval period, that “golden age of female monasticism” before
women’s houses were threatened (and in many cases destroyed) in the
invasions and raids of the ninth century?48 Might not the mournful singing
of the Geatish woman figure the mourning of widows whose desire to escape
the humiliation and slavery of marriage was frustrated by their sense that
in their own time, women’s religious houses only rarely outlasted their
founding royal patronesses?49 Might this not explain why the horrors of
marriage and secular life should be such a persistent theme in this poem’s
telling of the legend of Beowulf, whose half-pagan world of quasi-historical
myth provided a relatively open conceptual space that enabled the poet to
present not only the virtues a great abbess ought to have, but also the sorts
of contradictions and failures that have always faced such women when
they undertook the doomed, heroic, and (in the opinion of some) monstrous
task of pushing back against the patriarchy?
Though it may seem as if I have phrased these questions rhetorically, they
are in fact sincere. I acknowledge that my rapid survey of earlier scholarship
and more-rapid summary of possible readings has surely ignored some obvious
challenges and insufficiently addressed others, moved quickly through or
completely ignored complex and nuanced debates, and committed many other
sins against our basic methodologies. Nonetheless, I hope that I have sketched
out a few helpful points for reviving an overdue conversation about the possible
women’s authorship and readership of the poem Beowulf. First, the many
digressions in the poem’s narrative concerning the lives of women suggest the
presence of women in the audience, who would find such digressions pertinent
to their own experiences. Second, we may identify Emma of Normandy as one
potential audience member who would have found these digressions particularly
pertinent to her own experience, though certainly any noblewoman of the
period might relate to them. By the same token, women’s religious houses are
highly plausible venues for the scriptorium that produced the manuscript of
Beowulf, especially given the theme of monstrous masculinity running through
the manuscript’s texts. Finally, the analogues to Beowulf among women saints’
lives enable us to frame the poem as fundamentally concerned with the question
of how to practice feminine, virginal virtue in a masculine world of patrilineal,
territorial aggression, which framing is highly amenable to theories of women’s
48 Dockray-Miller, Motherhood, 10. See also Foot, Veiled Women. On nostalgia in Beowulf
see Susan M. Kim, “‘As I Once Did with Grendel’: Boasting and Nostalgia in Beowulf,” Modern
Philology 103, no. 1 (2005): 4–27.
49 On the ambiguity of this woman see Helen Bennett, “The Female Mourner at Beowulf’s
Funeral: Filling in the Blanks/Hearing the Spaces,” Exemplaria 4, no. 1 (1992): 35–50.
authorship. It is my hope that whether or not these investigations lead to new

insights and readings, the exploration itself will prove useful, both as a step
towards a better understanding Beowulf and as a step towards our more pressing
task of opening up our field to let new voices speak.
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Index
abbesses 67, 175, 182, 202, 203, 207, 210, 354, Alfred the Great, king of Wessex 95, 96, 97,
355, 356, 367, 368, 369, 387, 388, 393 98, 121, 128–129, 130, 133, 135, 137, 138, 154, 301
Abbo of Fleury 156 n. 82, 323
Abgar, Letter to 293, 298, 300 Alfred the ætheling 77 n. 96, 384
abolitionism 31 Allen, Hope Emily 28
abortifacients 230 n. 11, 244, 245, 290, 304 Alpheidis, abbess of St Stephen’s, Reims 66,
abortion 226, 237, 244, 245, 248, 290, 303, 76
304, 306 Ambrose, St 174, 177, 185, 186
Adams family 46 America, United States of 10, 15, 34, 45, 122,
Ado of Chelles 354 n. 33, 368 241 n. 38, 248, 249 n. 60
Æbbe of Coldingham 204 Amiatinus, Codex 344
Ælfflæd, queen of England 71 amulets 184, 228, 270, 293, 296, 297, 298, 300,
Ælfflæd, widow of Byrhtnoth 74 306, 307
Ælfric (Aelfric) of Eynsham 19–20, 37, 39, 40, anaemia 241 n. 39, 290
266–267, 387 Andelys, France 344 n. 3, 368
homilies 90, 160, 163, 286, 303–306 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 30, 31–33, 49, 84, 85,
Letter to Brother Edward 143–163 86 n. 13, 87–88, 94,
Life of Æthelthryth 197 Anglo-Saxon England (journal) 13, 14
Life of St Eugenia 158 Anglo-Saxonists, International Society of
Passio Sancti Bartholomei 264–265 (ISAS) 13
Passion of St Edmund 156–157 Anna, king of East Anglia 201, 203
Preface to Æthelweard 75 Anna (widow) 158
Ælsie 262 Antiochus, king 149
Ælfthryth, countess of Flanders 129 Antiquaries, Society of 30, 35
Ælfweard 71 Apponius 351, 352, 353, 360–361, 364
Ælfwynn 86–87 apocalyptic 216, 217
Æthelbald, king of Mercia 354 Arator 345, 363, 366
Æthelflæd (Æðelflæd), Lady of the Mer- archaeology 18, 59, 67
cians 19, 73, 83–108 Ariosto 98
Æthelgifu 90 Arius 19, 151–152, 157, 160, 162
Æthelmær 156 arms-bearing 154, 201
Æthelmod 354 Arnold-Forster, H. O. 98
Æthelred (Aethelred), king of Mercia 86, 89, asceticism 155, 206, 360
91, 97, 354 Ashingdon, battle of 154
Æthelred II, king of England 383–384 Asser 129, 130, 138, 301 n. 82
Æthelstan (Athelstan), king of England 70– Augustine of Canterbury 201
72, 73, 87 n. 17, 95, 98 n. 51, 103, 107 Augustine of Hippo 61 n. 31, 137 n. 87, 179,
Æthelswith (Æðelswið) 63, 77 186, 264
Æthelthryth (Æðelþryð), abbess of Ely 20, 63,
90, 158, 161, 197–218 Babylon, Whore of 187
Æthelweard 75, 85, 156 Babylonian Captivity 199
Æthilwald 364 Baden-Powell, Robert 128
affect theory 19 Bald 284
Agape 184 balsam 323, 335, 336
Agatha, St 145, 161, 197, 213, 217 Balthild, queen of the Franks 355
Agilbert 354 baptism 177, 295, 307–308
Agnes, St 148, 214, 215, 217 Barking Abbey, Essex 66 n. 55, 175, 181, 202,
Ailsworth, Cambridgeshire 262 205, 206, 208, 215 n. 38, 217 n. 43
Alban, St 156 Bath, Somerset 21, 74, 344, 346, 349, 350, 351,
Alcuin of York 135, 150 353–359, 360, 367–368, 370
Aldeneik, Belgium 68 Batheaston, Somerset 34, 35
Aldgith 175 Bavaria 318, 319, 337
Aldhelm of Malmesbury 20, 62, 63, 204, 205, Bayeux Tapestry 67, 74, 75, 76
211–212, 215, 325, 345, 362, 364, 366 Becket, Thomas, archbishop of
De virginitate 171–193, 202, 217 Canterbury 72
402 Feminist Approaches to Early Medieval English Studies
Bede 20, 32, 63, 127–128, 159, 198–201, 202, charters 65, 69, 86 n. 13, 158, 175, 350, 354, 356,
203–212, 215–218, 299, 321, 351, 353, 361, 370, 357, 358
388–389 chastity 19, 90, 92, 93, 99, 147, 148, 152, 153,
bells 328, 329, 333 155–156, 157, 158, 161, 175, 181, 184, 186, 189,
Benedict, St, Rule of 135, 349, 350, 354 191, 198, 201, 202, 210, 216, 282
Benedict Biscop 204 Chelles, France 344 n. 3, 348, 355, 356, 357,
Benedictine Reform 145 368
Benedictines 152, 368 Chester-le-Street, Co. Durham 70–71
Bennett, Helen 11, 12, 15, 16 Chicago, University of 29
Beorngyth, abbess of Bath 354, 356 childbirth 88, 89, 93, 147, 217, 227, 229, 232,
Beowulf 14 n. 9, 19, 21, 35, 59, 270 238, 240–241, 244, 247–249, 260–261, 270,
authorship of 377–394 281, 286, 287, 288, 291, 292, 294, 295, 300,
masculinity in 117–139 302, 307, 385, 387
Berhtgyth 362, 363–364, 365, 366, 367, 370 mortality in 247, 248–249
Berngyth 175 childlessness 387, 390
Berta, abbess of Bath 354, 356 Chione 184
Bertila of Chelles 355–356, 368 Christendom, Western 10, 21, 318, 337, 338
Bewcastle, Cumbria 75 Christianity, muscular 123
birth control 226, 230 n. 11, 243, 244, 283, 303, Christianization 65, 319, 338
308 chronology 85, 172, 207
Boccaccio 147 Chrysanthus and Daria, Saints 40
bodies 20, 143, 144, 146, 147, 149, 152, 157, 158, ciphers 320–321, 338
161, 163, 193, 198, 202, 209, 210, 225–228, civilization, constructions of 119, 123, 129,
231–232, 233, 234 n. 19, 236, 237, 239, 241, 130 n. 56
246, 247–249, 253, 255, 270, 274, 309 class 54, 62, 130, 138, 335
Boethius 38 Clovis II, king of the Franks 355
Boniface, archbishop of Mainz 55, 56, 67, 69, Cnut, king of England (Knut) 64, 77, 383, 384
324, 330, 336, 344, 347, 362, 363, 364, 366, Cockayne, T. O. 39, 40–41, 257–258, 259, 269
367, 369–370, 386 codicology 18, 344, 345, 348, 355, 356, 368
Boston, Massachusetts 46 color, people of 10, 14, 16, 17, 381
Bosworth (née Elliot), Anne Margaret 28 Columbanan monasteries 354, 355, 357, 368,
Bosworth, Joseph 28, 268 369
breastfeeding 147, 160, 238 n. 182, 238, 261, Columbanus 368, 369
280, 281, 293, 295–296, 309 commentaries 72, 159, 176, 178, 192, 200, 351,
Brock, E. 41 352, 360, 361
Bucge 63 computistics 200–201
Bugga 55, 65 n. 48, 69, 366 concubinage 71 n. 77, 152, 332
Burginda 353, 360–361, 363, 364, 365, 367 confessors 135, 159, 303, 305, 306, 369, 387, 392
Burke, Edmund 121–122 Conybeare, John Josias 34–35, 36, 50
Buxton, Sarah 31 Conybeare, Mary 28, 34–35, 49–50
Byrhtnoth (Byrhtnoð) 74, 270 Conybeare, William 34
copyists 68, 361, 367
Caedmon 208, 388 costume, history of 54, 58, 59, 67, 144, 188,
Cambridge, Cambridgeshire 37–38, 42, 43, 44 189
Newnham College 43 Coveney, Cambridgeshire 63
Canada 46 Cowley, Oxfordshire 34
Cassian, John 177 Craigie, Lady 29
Cecilia, St 40, 214, 217 Craigie, W. A. 29
celibacy 70, 151–152, 153 crosses 64, 75
Centwine, king of Wessex 63 crossroads 304, 305
Ceolfrith, abbot of Jarrow 205 Crusades 318
Cerne, Book of 297 Cuthbert, St 63, 70–74, 87 n. 17, 204, 211
Chaganti, Seeta 17 Cuthburh (Cuthburg) 175, 180, 181
Chance, Jane 11 Cuthswith Codex 356, 365
Charles, son of Louis the German 154 Cyneberg 364
Charles the Bald, king of the Franks 66 Cynefrith (Cynifrith) 206, 208, 209
charms 21, 228, 254, 255, 258, 259–260, 261, Cynewulf, king of Wessex 359 n. 55
265, 283, 285, 286–287, 288, 293, 294–295, Cynibert 207
296–301, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309 Cyprian, St 173, 183, 187, 188–189, 190, 193
Index 403
Damico, Helen 11–12, 16, 383 Edwin 71

Danes 98, 99, 384, 387, 390, 391, 392 effeminacy 136–137
Danish language 46 Eichstätt, Germany 318, 325, 330
Darwinism, social 123 Elene 59, 134, 270
Day, E. S. 45, 47 Eliensis, Liber 54, 63, 64, 66, 70, 74
Day, George Edward 46, 47–48 Elizabeth, St 299, 307
Day, Mabel 27 elves 271
decolonization 17 Ely, Cambridgeshire 63, 64, 74, 158, 197, 204,
defecation 146 205, 207, 208, 209, 210, 218
deformity 295 embroidery 54, 55, 56, 57, 61, 62–63, 64, 65,
Demetrias 174, 179, 180, 193 66, 67–68, 69, 70–71, 72, 73, 74–75, 76, 77,
demons 386, 387, 392 78, 88 n. 17
demoniacs see exorcism Emma of Normandy, queen of England 54, 64,
Denis, St 156 77, 383–385, 393
Denmark 45, 48, 122 emotion 19, 21, 88, 126, 132, 143, 145, 146, 161,
Derby, Derbyshire 88, 95, 107 163, 267, 268, 269, 271, 272–273, 274, 344,
Dewey, George 122 345, 362, 364, 365
Dialect Society, English 37, 41, 42 Encomium Emmae Reginae 13, 77, 383
dialectology 44, 383 environmental justice 17, 18
diet 287 Eormenburg 209
Diocletian, emperor 184 Eosterwine, abbot of Wearmouth 205
disability 273, 385 epistemology 11, 12, 16, 18, 19, 20, 198
disease 149, 214, 235–236, 241, 271, 273, 287, Erluinus 69
288, 289, 299–300, 309 Ethelburga, abbess of Barking 206, 208, 209
disgust 19–20, 144–145, 146–149, 151, 152, 154, Ethelburga of East Anglia 201
156, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162–163 etymology 44, 127
diversity 16, 118 Eucharist 64, 299
divination 332, 333 Eulalia 175, 213, 217
divorce 202 Euphemia, St 217
Dorking, Surrey 37, 44 Euphrosyne, St 40, 387
dragons 125, 133, 386–387 Eustochium 178, 179, 180, 193
Dryhthelm 206 exegesis 200, 361, 365
Dublin, Trinity College 43 exorcism 243 n. 45, 290
Eadburg (Eadburga) 347, 386 Fabyan, Robert 93–94

Eadgifu 71 Fara, abbess of Brie 369
Eadgyth, empress 386 Faramoutier, France 368
Eadfrith 348 Felix, St 211
Eadnoth, bishop of Dorchester 154 Fell, Christine 12, 362–363
Eadwig, king 90 n. 25 femininity 10, 15, 19, 137, 274, 391
Eadwig Basan 348 feminist theory 10–11, 12, 15–16, 19, 198
Eadwine 348 fertility 227, 232–233, 238, 241, 242, 243, 281,
Eangyth 366, 369 283, 301, 306, 308
Earconbert, king of Kent 201 flax 57
Earcongota 201, 203 Folcburg, prioress of Bath 354, 356
Earle, John 34 Francia 345, 353, 354, 356, 359, 360, 361, 368,
Easter Controversy 200 369
Ecgburg 362, 363, 364, 366 Frankishness 347–348, 360, 368
Ecgfrith, king of Northumbria 203–204, 209 Frithegod of Canterbury 90
Ecgwyn, queen of England 203, 204, 209 Frithestan (Friðestan), bishop of Winches-
Edda 46 ter 71, 72, 73, 87 n. 17
Eddius Stephanus 307 Fry (née Gurney), Elizabeth 31
Edith, queen of England 69–70 Fulda, Germany 356, 370
Edmund, king of East Anglia 121, 128, 156–157, Fursey, St 206
162
Edmund I, king of England 71 Gaimar, Geoffrey 92
Edward the Confessor, king of England 69 Gandersheim, Germany 386
Edward the Elder, king of the Anglo-Saxons 71, Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir 27
85, 87, 92 n. 30, 96, 97, 98, 106, 384 Geats 387, 391, 392, 393
gender 10, 11, 13–14, 15, 16–17, 18, 20, 21, 54, herbs 228, 240, 242, 260, 264, 284, 288, 290,
59, 60, 76, 78, 84, 86, 89, 92, 94, 95, 97, 98, 293, 297, 301, 303–304, 309
105–106, 107, 108, 118, 121, 124, 126, 127, 128, heresy 151, 152, 160, 179, 199
129, 130, 131, 133, 136, 137, 138, 145, 158, 159, 161, Herod, king 19, 149–150, 152, 157, 160, 162
174, 191, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 207, 216, 218, Herodias 150
260, 263, 265–266, 267, 274, 279, 280, 281, heroic literature 11, 60, 101, 106, 122, 128, 131,
305, 320, 335, 366, 367, 370, 378, 389, 391 137, 148, 215, 387, 393
fluidity of 386, 387 Hertford, Council of 204
third 154 heteronormativity 10
gentleness 19, 105, 118, 121, 128, 133, 134, 135, Hexateuch, Old English 74, 76
136, 137, 138 Hidburh 175
geology 34, 43 Higden, Ranulph 92
George, St 156 Hild, abbess of Whitby 202, 206, 208, 209, 367,
Gerald of Aurillac 154 369, 370, 388, 389
gift-giving 19, 53, 55, 56, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, Hildeburh 384
71, 74, 77, 78, 95, 214, 301, 385 Hildelith (Hildilith), abbess of Barking 175,
Gildas 136 180, 202
Giles, John Allen 19, 32–33, 34 Hildesheim, Germany 386
Gilson, Rob 126 Hincmar, bishop 66
girdle prayers 288, 293 Hippocrates 282, 309
glossaries 38, 39, 41, 89, 134, 137, 269, 271, 347 historicism 18, 255
Gloucester, Gloucestershire 85 historiography 96, 118, 119, 121, 131, 132, 210, 370
Gollancz, Israel 27 Holofernes 150, 385, 391
Gordon, E. V. 28 Holy Land 21, 318, 319, 327, 333, 335, 337
Gordon (née Pickles), Ida 27–28 homilies 21, 37, 39, 46, 90, 134, 135, 143, 149,
Goscelin 69 150, 151, 154, 158, 160, 161, 162, 197, 264, 283,
Gosse, Edmund 45–46, 47–48 285–286, 287, 299, 303, 304–305, 307
graveyards 247, 248, 296 Hrostvit of Gandersheim 385–386
Gregory I, pope 61 n. 31, 72, 128, 135, 136, 177, Hrothgar 119, 120, 137–138, 390, 391, 392
181, 201, 208, 365 Hugeburc of Heidenheim 21, 317–338
Gregory of Nyssa 171 n. 1 Humboldt, Alexander von 47
Grendel 119, 120, 385, 389–390, 391, 392 Hume, David 95–96
Grendon, Felix 258 humors 147, 200, 239, 256
Grimm, Brothers 34 Hygelac 120, 390, 392
Grinnell family 46 hymns 20, 198, 210–218, 297–298, 300, 388
Gunning, Miss 37–38, 39, 40, 43–44 hysteria 289
Gurney Anna 28, 30–34, 49
Gurney, Hudson 30, 31 Iceland 48, 147
Gurney, Rachel 30 iconography 54, 72
Gurney, Richard 30 ideology 9, 10, 18, 94, 119, 154, 198, 218, 226,
gynecology 21, 226, 227, 240, 282, 283, 284, 236, 322, 336, 345, 356, 368, 370
285, 287, 288, 289, 290, 292, 301–302, 309 idolatry 332
imperialism 10, 16, 119
Hadrian of Canterbury 181 incantations 264, 265, 266, 293, 297, 304, 306
hagiography 21, 200, 211, 318, 319, 323–324, incest 332
325, 330, 333, 337, 338, 391 inclusivity 10, 16, 19, 367, 368
harassment, sexual 9 incorruption 157, 206, 209, 210, 333
Harley Prayerbook 297 indigeneity 17, 18, 332, 381, 382
Harlindis and Relindis, Saints 67, 69 inequality, social 17, 319
Harrying of the North 75 infertility 296, 299, 300
Harvard University, Massachusetts 46, 47 infirmaries, monastic 232
Hatfield, Council of 204 Ingram, James 30, 33, 34
Haweis, Mary 29 intersectionality 11, 16–17
Haymo 150 Irene 184
Heidenheim, Germany 318, 330, 332 Ireton, Cumbria 75
Henry of Huntingdon 88, 91–92, 95 Isidore of Seville 150
Heptateuch, Old English 137 Etymologiae 89, 207
Herbarium, Old English 230, 284, 285, 289, Synonyma 345–347, 359–360, 367
290, 292 Islam 21, 282, 318, 332–333, 335
Index 405
Jane, Lionel 129, 130, 133 magic 237, 258, 259, 261, 263, 265, 266, 267,
Jerome, St 174, 178–179, 180 305, 306
Jerusalem 318, 335 image 262
Holy Sepulchre 326 love philtres 266, 304
Jezebel 90, 160 sympathetic 309
John the Baptist, St 71, 71, 155, 158, 162, 215, Main Valley 359
299, 307 Mainz, Germany 347
Jouarre, France 348, 354–355, 356, 357, 368 Malaysia 43
Judith (Old English poem) 99, 100, 150, 379 Maldon, battle of 74
Judith of Flanders, Gospels of 13 malnutrition 290
Julian and Basilissa, Passion of 149 Manby mortar 31
Juliana 13, 392 Manchester, University of 28
Junius manuscript 46 maniples 63, 70, 71, 72
Justina, St 175, 183 manliness 19, 121, 124, 126, 127, 129, 130–131,
Juvenal 147, 161 133, 138
Manly, John M. 28
Kemple, Margery 28 manuscripts, production of 21, 135, 297, 344,
Kempston, Bedfordshire 58 346, 347, 356, 360
Kent, kingdom of 205, 209, 344, 347 Margaret of Antioch, St 386–387, 392
Kim, Dorothy 17 Martin of Tours, St 156, 183, 184
martyrdom 145, 148, 156, 157, 183, 184, 191,
Lacnunga 227, 231, 236, 260, 285, 293, 197, 198, 202, 204, 206, 217, 218, 333, 336,
295–296, 297, 301, 305–306, 308, 309 337, 392
Langland, William 37, 41, 44, 153 Martyrology, Old English 280
Lappenberg, Johann Martin 47, 49 Mary, Virgin 62, 160–161, 177–178, 198, 215,
Lastingham, Yorkshire 207 216–217, 307
Latin language 36, 39, 74–75, 90, 134, 136, 147, Mary Magdalene, St 42, 70
172, 181, 192–193, 211, 280, 282, 284, 298, 300, masculinism 15–16, 380
301, 303, 307, 323, 352, 366, 367 masculinity 10, 13, 19, 107, 117–139, 150–151,
quality of 325–327, 336, 344–345, 360, 153–161, 393
361–363, 364, 365 maternity see motherhood
law codes 280, 305 Maxims, Old English 61, 62
leechbooks 20–21, 56, 227, 228, 231, medica, materia 256, 258, 260
254–274, 281, 284–285, 288–289, 291, 300, Medicina, Old English 284, 285, 289, 291
302 medicine 21, 230, 231–232, 247, 249, 255, 258,
Leeds, Yorkshire 28 259–261, 264–265, 272, 283, 285, 287–309 see
Lees, Clare 12, 16, 60, 61, 158, 161, 201, 202, 344, also physicians
345, 369, 381 folk 228
Leicester, Leicestershire 104–105 Islamic 282
Leoba (Leofgyth) 362–363, 364, 365, 366, Meech, Sanford 28
370 Melibeus 38
Leuthere, bishop of Winchester 354, 356 Melrose, Roxburghshire 206
lexicography 354, 356 memory, cultural 319, 322, 330
LGBTQ+ 10 menopause 342, 281, 287, 290
liberal arts 129–130 menorrhagia 238
Lichfield Gospel 54 menstruation 20, 225–249, 268, 281, 289, 290,
Lindisfarne, Northumberland 207, 211 291, 299–300
Lindisfarne Gospels 344 Mercia 71, 95, 96, 98
Lingard, John 96 Mercian Register 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 104, 107,
literacy, women’s 19, 21, 66, 70, 72, 76, 78, 207, 209, 297, 344, 346, 349, 352, 356, 359, 369,
231, 267, 322, 330, 363, 366 370
Lomuto, Sierra 17 Messalina 147
London, University of 29 metalwork 55, 59, 68, 75, 77
Longfellow, William Wadsworth 34 men’s rights 9
looms 54 menarche 287
Lyon, France 354 metacriticism 19
#MeToo movement 9
Maaseik, Belgium 67 Middle Ages, definition of 10
Macrina, St 171 n. 1 Middle English Studies 28
midwifery 226–227, 228–230, 232, 241, 248, Overstrand, Norfolk 31

302, 304 Ovid 147
Milton, John 94–95 Oxford, University of 33, 34
minuscule, Anglo-Saxon 346, 360 Trinity College 33
miscarriage 237, 238, 261, 283, 293, 309 Oxford English Dictionary (OED) 29, 37, 38, 93
misogyny 9, 16, 61, 146, 147, 149, 152, 258, 381
missionaries 67, 181, 318, 323, 324, 325, 333, paganism 19, 58, 117, 133, 148, 150, 152, 156, 157,
336, 345, 347, 355, 356, 357, 359, 361, 366, 181, 188–189, 201, 237, 260, 264, 304, 305, 306,
368–369 308, 330, 332–333, 336, 337, 385, 387, 388,
Miyashiro, Adam 17 390, 391, 393
monasteries 63, 64, 65, 74, 198, 201, 204, 205, paleography 18, 66, 353, 364
206, 232, 301, 318, 328, 330, 334, 354, 358, 359 Palgrave, Francis 31, 98
double 175, 355, 357, 367 paraphrase 129, 211, 382
monks 127, 135, 155–156, 174, 198, 200, 201, 205, Paris Psalter 46, 134
206, 207, 329, 334, 335, 355, 357, 358, 370 Park College, Missouri 122
monstrosity 150, 385, 390, 392, 393 Parker, Frances 41
Monte Cassino, Italy 318, 327 Parker, George 41
Morris, William 34 Parker, Matthew, archbishop of
motherhood 92, 160, 226, 247, 385, 387, 389, 391 Canterbury 77
Paterius 365
nationalism 17, 144 patriarchy 10, 11, 16, 85, 86, 95, 154, 232, 241,
Nelson, Horatio 122 242, 245, 249, 338, 366, 378, 387, 393
New Minster, Winchester 64 patriotism 128
New York, New York 46 Paul, St 156, 185, 215, 367
Newbolt, Henry 128 Paula, St 178
Nicaea, Council of 151 Paul the Deacon 72
Nine Herbs Charm 259–260, 265 Paulinus of Nola 211
Norfolk 30, 31 peaceweaver 59
Northumbria, kingdom of 198, 204, 207, 209, Pehthelm, bishop 56
344, 353 Pelagius 174, 179, 186, 190
Nunnaminster, Book of 297, 384, 386 Penda, king of Mercia 201
nunneries see under religious, women penitentials 21, 135, 233–337, 264, 265, 266,
nuns see religious, women 283, 285, 291, 299, 303, 304, 305, 306, 358,
360
oblates, monastic 153 n. 49, 201, 202, 203, 215 philology 15, 131, 254, 255
obstetrics 21, 280, 282, 283, 284, 285, 287, 288, physicians 46, 56, 226, 228, 230, 246, 247, 282,
289, 291, 292, 296, 301, 302 n. 86, 309 286, 296, 301, 309
Oda, archbishop 90 n. 25 female 297, 300
Odo, bishop 75 pilgrimage 65, 206, 326, 333
Old High German language 272, 347, 360 Plague, Justinianic 205–206
Old Norse language 46 poets 21, 45, 47, 99, 117, 121, 123, 130, 132, 133,
Old Saxon language 272 138–139, 181, 198, 211, 215, 218, 298, 379, 382, 393
Olsen, Alexandra Hennessey 12, 16, pollution 144, 146, 147, 148, 157, 158
operative assumptions 11 prayers 21, 55, 66, 192, 283, 193, 296–297, 299,
ornamentation, women’s 20, 76, 173 300, 301, 308
Orosius 28 pregnancy 226, 241–242, 243, 245, 246, 282,
orthodoxy 19, 151, 152, 158, 160, 161, 182, 200, 283, 287, 289, 290, 291, 293, 294, 296, 302,
366 305, 306, 307
Osburh 175, 180 Prichard, J. Llewelyn 105–106
Osric, king of the Hwicce 353, 356, 357–358 prison reform 31
Ostryth 209 prophecy 72, 205–206, 208, 210
Oswy, king of Northumbria 201 Prudentius 190
Otté, Elise Charlotte 28, 45–50 Psychomachia 54, 190
Otté, Mary 46 purity 145, 148, 149, 152, 154, 156, 157, 161, 163,
Otto I, emperor 386 184, 201
Otto, Miranda 101
outlawry 263 Quakers 31
Overing, Gillian 12, 15, 16, 60–61, 158, 202, 344, queens 60, 61, 69–70, 71, 73, 74, 76, 77, 84, 91,
345, 369, 389 95, 104, 206, 211, 229
Index 407
queer theory 198 Shakespeare, William 124, 125

queerness 210, 218, 381 Shell Shock 124
Sidgwick, Henry 43
race studies, critical 17, 18 Sigebert, king of East Anglia 201
racialism 10, 122, 123, 131, 138 Sigeweard 156
racism 16 Sighard 201
Radegund, St 182 Skeat, Bertha Marian 42
radishes 254, 255–257, 272, 273 Skeat, Clara L. 42
Rambaran-Olm, M. 17 Skeat, Ethel 43
Rappaport, John 128 Skeat, Walter William 19, 28, 37–50
Rask, Erasmus 45 slackness 118, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 136, 138
Ravenna, Italy 68 Smith, Geoffrey 126
Rawlinson Chair 33, 34, 35 soliloquy 125
Reims, France 66 Somme, Battle of the 125–126
relics 58, 64, 69, 70, 206, 356, 370 Southumbria 347, 352, 353
religious, women 20, 21, 55, 60, 62, 76, 78, 156, Spurgeon, Caroline 29
172, 176, 180, 181, 201, 206, 207, 282, 288, 317, stereotypes 98, 106, 121, 136, 259, 345, 363
320–331, 338, 343–370, 384–385, 388, 389, stillbirth 244, 283, 287, 288, 291, 292, 293, 294,
393 303, 308, 309
houses of 344, 357, 358–59, 368 Sualaved 332
reproductive health 226 suffrage, women’s 49
rhetoric 148, 154, 156, 163, 176, 186, 189, 211, 216, suicide 305
241, 243, 248, 330, 337, 338, 346, 366, 393 surgery 56, 226–27
Roland, Chanson de 35 Swedish language 46
Romans 127, 136, 199, 216, 391 Sweet, Henry 136, 137, 138
Romanticism 100, 118, 119, 121, 132 Swefred 201
Rome, Italy 318, 327, 337 Syria 318
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 62
Royal Prayerbook 286, 293, 297, 300–301, 308, Tamworth, Staffordshire 95, 101, 102–103, 104
309 tapestries 63, 67, 74, 75–76
Rufinus 150 tax 56
temporality 20, 198, 199, 200, 203, 206, 215,
Saethryd of East Anglia 201 216, 218
sagas 147 textiles 19, 53–56, 57, 58–59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65,
St Andrews, Fife 45, 46 66, 67, 68, 69, 70–74, 75, 76–77, 78
Santa Cruz, Danish West Indies 45 inscriptions on:
‘Saxon myth’ 10 Thecla, St 175, 214, 217
Scholastica 175 Theodechild, abbess of Chelles 368
Scotland 45, 46, 47, 57 Theodore of Mopsuestia 352
Scott, Joan Wallach 11 Theodore of Tarsus, archbishop of Canter-
Scott, Walter 34 bury 181, 209, 235, 265, 354, 358, 369
scribes 86, 232, 248, 307, 348, 350, 353, 356, theology 34, 72, 180, 182
360, 365, 368, 379, 381, 382, 383–388 Thomas, St 40, 72
scriptoria 21, 346, 347, 356, 359, 369, 393 Thorpe, Benjamin 45–50
sculpture 19, 55, 59, 75 Throsby, John 104–105
Seafarer, The 28 Tolkien, Christopher 125
Seaxburh, abbess of Ely 203, 206, 209 Tolkien, J. R. R. 19, 28, 101, 117–119, 121, 123,
Sebastian, St 156 125–126, 130, 131–132, 133, 134, 138, 139
Sebbi, king of the East Saxons 201, 208 Tondberht 203
Sedburgh, Cumbria 42 trans scholarship 381
Sedulius 211–212, 298 transvestism 159
sermons see homilies travel writing 21, 318, 319, 326, 327–328, 330,
sexual intercourse 19, 78, 88, 89, 146, 148, 331, 333, 337, 385
150, 153, 154, 156, 158, 161, 163, 236, 241, 280, Trench, Reggie 128
390 Trevisa, John 92–93
sexuality 13, 17, 18, 20, 105, 106, 121, 145, 152, Trota of Salerno 282
154, 158, 181, 198, 199, 200 –201, 202, 204, 218, Turner, Dawson 31
366 Turner, Sharon 96–97, 104, 119–121, 122, 128,
sexualization 206 130, 138
Twyford, Synod of 204 Whitby, Synod of 200, 208

Tyre 335 Whitby Abbey, Yorkshire 201, 367, 388
White supremacy 10, 17, 381
uncial, Frankish 346, 348, 356, 364, 365, 370 Whiteness 10
urination 288, 289, 291 Wido, count 135
Utrecht, Netherlands 67 widows 89, 158, 181, 202, 206, 262, 385, 393
Uzbekistan 70 Widsith (Widsið) 59
wifgemædla 21, 258, 268–269, 272
Venantius Fortunatus 181–182 Wilfrid, bishop 203, 208, 209, 307, 350, 354,
Vercelli Book 286, 305 356
Vernon, Matthew X. 17 Wilkinson, Miss 37–38, 39, 40, 43–44
Veronica, St 234–235, 238, 297, 298 William of Malmesbury 88–89, 90–91, 92, 95,
Verrill, Henry Shattuck 122–123, 130, 138 100, 104, 108, 175, 330
Vikings 57, 84, 101, 121 Willibald, bishop of Eichstätt 21, 318, 319,
viragos 19, 89, 92, 93, 98 323, 324–325, 326, 327, 328, 330–331, 333,
Virgil (Vergil) 188–189, 211, 216, 345, 362, 363, 335–336, 337
366 Willibrod, St 67, 68
virginity 19, 20, 148, 153, 154, 161, 171–193, 198, Wilson, John Dover 125
201, 202, 203–210, 211, 215, 217, 218, 366, 391 Wilton, Wiltshire 125
virtue 20, 91, 92, 94–97, 104, 105, 106, 121, 127, Winchester, Hampshire 64
134, 135, 138, 158, 173, 177, 178, 179, 180, 182, witchcraft 21, 228, 253–274, 304–306
184, 186, 189, 190, 193, 328, 392, 393 Woden 260
visions 205–206, 209 Wollstonecraft, Mary 62
Worcester, diocese of 344, 350, 351, 365
Wales 95, 98 World War I (Great War) 124, 126, 128
warfare 96, 104, 154–155, 156, 158 World War II 124
industrialized 123 Wulf and Eadwacer 13
spiritual 155, 156, 192 Wulfsige, abbot of Ramsey 151, 154
warriors, women as 20, 84, 90, 92, 93, 96, Wulfstan, bishop of Worcester 44, 151, 161,
97–98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103–104, 106, 107, 330–331
173, 193 Wulfstan Uccea 262
Wearmouth/Jarrow, Northumberland 198, Wulfwaru 74
200, 201, 204, 205, 207, 211, 215, 218, 352 Wynnebald, abbot of Heidenheim 21, 318, 323,
Wessex, kingdom of 71, 86, 129, 346, 359, 369 328, 329, 332, 333, 334–335
Western Isles 57
Wheelock, Abraham 94, 95 Zurich, Switzerland 42, 43
KNOWLEDGE COMMUNITIES
Scholarship on early medieval England has seen an exponential increase in

scholarly work by and about women over the past twenty years, but the field
has remained peculiarly resistant to the transformative potential of feminist
critique. Since 2016, Medieval Studies has been rocked by conversations
about the state of the field, shifting from #MeToo to #WhiteFeminism to the
purposeful rethinking of the label “Anglo-Saxonist.” This volume takes a step
toward decentering the traditional scholarly conversation with thirteen new
essays by professors, independent scholars, and early career researchers from
the United States, Canada, Europe, and the United Kingdom, representing
a range of disciplinary perspectives. Topics range from virginity, women’s
literacy, and medical discourse to affect, medievalism, and masculinity. The
theoretical and political commitments of this volume comprise one strand
of a multivalent effort to rethink the parameters of the discipline and to
create a scholarly community that is innovative, inclusive, and diverse.
Robin Norris is a Professor in the Department of English Language and

Literature at Carleton University. She has published on Beowulf, hagiography,
and litanies of saints. Along with Johanna Kramer and Hugh Magennis, she
co-edited Anonymous Old English Lives of Saints (Dumbarton Oaks Medieval
Library 63, Harvard University Press, 2020).
Rebecca Stephenson is Associate Professor of Old and Middle English

at University College Dublin. She researches literature associated with
multilingualism and monasticism in early medieval England, with particular
emphasis on scientific texts and computus. She published The Politics of
Language: Byrhtferth, Ælfric, and the Multilingual Identity of the Benedictine
Reform (2015) and has co-edited several collections of essays on Old English
and Anglo-Latin literature.
Renée R. Trilling is Associate Professor of English and Director of the

Program in Medieval Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign. She is the author of The Aesthetics of Nostalgia: Historical
Representation in Old English Verse (Toronto, 2009) and the Oxford
Bibliography of Old English Literature and Critical Theory (Oxford, 2016).
She is also Editor for Old English of JEGP, published by the University of
Illinois Press.
ISBN: 978-94-6372-146-2
AUP. nl
9 789463 721462

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KNOWLEDGE COMMUNITIES

Edited by Robin Norris, Rebecca Stephenson, and Renée R. Trilling

This series focuses on innovative scholarship in the areas of intellectual history

Knowledge Communities addresses the myriad ways in which knowledge was

Amsterdam University Press

Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden

isbn 978 94 6372 146 2

© All authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2023

1 The Lost Victorian Women of Old English Studies 27

3 Remembering the Lady of Mercia 83

4 Be a Man, Beowulf 117

5 Shame, Disgust and Ælfric’s Masculine Performance 143

6 The Ornament of Virginity 171

7 Chaste Bodies and Untimely Virgins 197

8 Monaðgecynd and flewsan 225

9 Dangerous Voices, Erased Bodies 253

10 Women and “Women’s Medicine” in Early Medieval England,

11 The Literate Memory of Hugeburc of Heidenheim 317

12 A Road Nearly Taken 343

13 “Historical Accuracy,” Anonymity, and Women’s Authorship 377

Fig. 3.1 Cassell’s Illustrated History of England from the Roman

In January 2016, the field of early medieval English studies was rocked

in the field’s most prestigious texts. 4 Historian Christine Fell, meanwhile,

to survey the proceedings of the biennial conference of the organization

9 Christopher Abram has undertaken a comprehensive survey of women’s scholarship on

as full participants in scholarship, their presence has not reshaped the

10 Dockray-Miller, Public Medievalists, Racism, and Suffrage.

or material existence; it is better conceptualized as one methodology among

generations of scholars and building new models informed by a broader

Reassessing the Old English Wifgemædla and Witches in Leechbook III,”

been foreclosed by the assumptions, constraints, and blind spots we have

Abram, Christopher. “Does Beowulf Have a Gender Problem? (Spoiler: Yes).”

Many women—mostly in England, and mostly in genteel but not affluent

Anna Gurney (1795–1857)

In 1819, the first translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was published

The “impressively triumphant” life to which Stanley refers is a genuinely

include an unbound copy sporting marbled end-papers and marked through-

Gurney’s translation is presented here by Giles as lacking polish, and

13 See Norfolk Record Office, Gurney of Bawdeswell Collection, RQG 410.

and patronizingly acknowledges the debt to Gurney. Giles’s implication,

In other words, Giles lightly revised Gurney’s translation by reference to

16 Giles, ed. The Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of England, xliv.

Mary Conybeare (1790–1848)

also on early French poetry, and he was a scholar and antiquarian in

The Skeat atelier

An atelier generally refers to a studio in which a master painter leads a

The modern English version of the Homilies, though revised by myself,

Amongst these my chief thanks are due to Miss Gunning, of Cambridge,

As regards the Glossary, I have much pleasure in recording my thanks

special recognition of their contributions. Special recognition does not,

English, and he is particularly well-known for his three-volume Leechdoms.29

Skeat atelier, then, included a broad range of individuals who completed

admission of women to ‘privileges’ of this character.”40 Skeat’s attitude to the

Elise Charlotte Otté (1818–1903)

histories of Scandinavian countries. She also translated and published works

A bookworm and an oddity he certainly was, but he was much more

On Otté, therefore, some further research seems necessary to me. The

Day, E. S. “Letter to The Athenæum.” Dated 7 January 1904. Published 16 January 1904.

Murray, J. A. H. “Preface to Volume I.” Accessed February 20, 2022. http://public.

1 The Lost Victorian Women of Old English Studies 27

3 Remembering the Lady of Mercia 83

4 Be a Man, Beowulf 117

5 Shame, Disgust and Ælfric’s Masculine Performance 143

6 The Ornament of Virginity 171

7 Chaste Bodies and Untimely Virgins 197

8 Monaðgecynd and flewsan 225

9 Dangerous Voices, Erased Bodies 253

11 The Literate Memory of Hugeburc of Heidenheim 317

12 A Road Nearly Taken 343

13 “Historical Accuracy,” Anonymity, and Women’s Authorship 377

Fig. 3.2 The Æthelflæd statue at Tamworth Castle, designed by H. C. Mitchell and