Clare A. Lees

The Clerics and the Critics: Misogyny and the Social Symbolic in Anglo-Saxon England

“The Clerics and The Critics” explores the evidence for debates about gender in Anglo-Saxon textual culture, arguing that different forms of gendered knowledge are at work in this period as contrasted with later medieval periods.

Women and the Origins of English Literature

Literary history rarely associates women with writing and cultural production in the earliest period of English literature (c.600–1150). More commonly this Anglo-Saxon period is ignored even by historians of women’sliterature. In consequence, as scholars and teachers of this early culture we are often asked the following questions. What, women and the origins of English literature? Were women writing? What were they writing? This chapter, however, demonstrates that early medieval women are vital to the production and reception of literary culture. It’sall a matter of rethinking the evidence.

Literature in pieces: female sanctity and the relics of early women’s writing

Credimus autem multo plura quam reperiantur extitisse, que aut ex illius eui torpentium scriptorum negligentia nequaquam litteris mandata fuerunt, aut descripta paganorum rabie ecclesias ac cenobia depopulante inter cetera perierunt. [And we believe that there are many more (miracles) than are now to be found, which through the carelessness of the sluggish scribes of that age were never committed to writing, or were recorded but have perished among other things when the fury of the heathen laid waste to churches and monasteries.]

Of Bede’s ‘five languages and four nations’: the earliest writing from Ireland, Scotland and Wales

As is clear from his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum [ An Ecclesiastical History of the English People ], which he completed in 731, Bede considered the activities of neighbouring peoples to have been an important part of the particular version of English history he wished to relate. Contact between them must have been continuous, and constant interaction occasioned much opportunity for mutual influence and exchange of ideas across a wide area. Notwithstanding this, the written traditions of the British, Irish and Picts – the three groups which alongside the English constituted for Bede his ‘four nations’ ( HE , I .1) – are varied in both the extent and nature of the material that has survived. The cultures shared common concerns yet were moulded by local developments. Overlapping strands in their narratives, however important, form but a part of individual literary histories, each located in a particular time and place. For Bede their Christian strand was most significant and in this regard the Irish in particular are praised. He applauded their conversion tactics, specifically the mission of Aidan, later bishop of Lindisfarne, and Columba, founder and first abbot of Iona, to the Picts and to his own territory of Northumbria. The Irish succeeded admirably where native Britons had failed. Newly converted Anglo-Saxons travelled in large numbers to Irish monasteries to avail themselves of scholarship presumably lacking at home ( HE , iii .7, 25, 27). Among them was Aldfrith, king of Northumbria (d. 704), whose sojourn among the Irish before he succeeded to the kingship had ensured that he became in scripturis doctissimus [ HE , iv .26; most learned in the Scriptures] and during which he may even have acquired an Irish name (Flann Fina). Dealings with Irish leaders may also date from this period and it was on political business that Aldfrith was first visited by Adomnan, abbot of Iona, who sought out the Northumbrian king to plead for the release of Irish hostages who had been captured in a Saxon raid on Brega in the Irish midlands in 685. Writing half a century or so later, Bede deemed these Irish contacts to have been of key importance; Irish influence in English ecclesiastical history is for him a major theme.

Women and Water: Icelandic Tales and Anglo-Saxon Moorings

This collaborative article offers a multidisciplinary dialogue about modern and medieval ways of knowing and understanding water as place and process—as source and resource—and in so doing, explores and unsettles habitual disciplinary associations of place with specific times, identities, and genders. It brings together medieval and modern ideas about water, women, and the monstrous in art, popular culture, poetry, and learned texts to demonstrate how the subject of water connects different times, places, and media. Beginning in modern Iceland, the essay moves through Icelandic and early medieval British tales of the watery, the fishy, and the female, using the work of contemporary American artist Roni Horn, known for her work on place, identity, and Iceland, to focus this criss-crossing of temporalities, cultures, and places.

Introduction: literature in Britain and Ireland to 1150

The Parker Manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 891 records that Dub Sláine, Mac Bethad and Máel Inmain crossed the Irish Sea in a rudderless boat, without sails and with little food. The three risk-takers did not care whether or not their food ran out or where their journey or pilgrimage ‘for Godes lufan’ took them, yet they landed in Cornwall and travelled on to the Anglo-Saxon court of King Alfred the Great. Immediately after this, the annal notes the death of the best teacher among the Scotti at that time, Suibhne (Swifneh in Old English). These celebrated stories of three men in a boat and of the excellence of Irish scholarship are not without precedent in the history of early medieval travel and cultural exchange. In the seventh century, the scholarpoet Aldhelm, bishop of Malmesbury, who may himself have benefited from Irish training, describes the English as travelling to Ireland like swarms of bees to learn from its scholars. The Chronicle entry for 891 opens, however, with an update on the activities of the Viking forces on the continent and the battle at Louvain (now in modern Belgium) between the Vikings, the East Franks, the Saxons and the Bavarians. The cultural world of the Anglo-Saxons, the earliest people to call themselves English, was informed as much by its interests and relations with the continental kingdoms as with its neighbours. In the history of English literature the entry for 891 in the Parker Chronicle (manuscript A of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) is also noteworthy because it provides remarkable insight into how writing, as the technology of script and manuscript production, is a dimension of the broader conceptualization of history as written record in the early Middle Ages. Visible in the Chronicle entry is the moment when the second scribe of the manuscript takes over from the first and, with this transfer of hands, comes a new series of annals

Gender in the early medieval world: East and West, 300-900

Robert Crews has written a distinctive and important book that should serve as the foundation for future study of Islam in the Russian Empire and the imperial management of confessional communities more generally. Drawing on primary sources and scholarship in a wide range of languages, Crews skilfully reconstructs the interactions of the imperial state and its diverse Muslim populations from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. In terms of its chronological and geographical scope, the significance of its argument, and the precision of its analysis, For Prophet and Tsar represents a remarkable contribution to the study of Russia, Central Asia, empire and religion. Departing from an earlier historiography that has focused primarily on Islamic elites, the persecution of Islam, and the boundary between that religion and Christianity, Crews shifts our gaze to the tsarist regime’s attempts to root imperial authority in the various religions of the empire’s subjects, Islam included. Faced with the task of ruling so vast a territory with modest resources, tsarist elites were acutely conscious of the limits of imperial power and therefore sought common ground with the empire’s subjects as a way of ruling with less violence and more consensus than many historians have recognized. On this basis, Catherine the Great (reigned 1762–96) produced a policy of toleration that made faiths such as Islam ‘the basic building blocks of the empire’ (2) by transforming religious authority in each community into an instrument of imperial rule. But if this deployment of Islam seemed to provide the state with a crucial basis for allegiance and discipline, it also compelled tsarist authorities to become guardians of Islamic orthodoxy and to embroil themselves in complex disputes over interpretation of the faith. Religious toleration, Crews astutely notes, was thus not a matter of non-interference. Likewise, if tsarist commitments to ‘correct’ religion permitted greater penetration into local mosque communities, then the state also became a valuable resource for Muslims themselves, who sought to apply its instruments of coercion in interpretive disputes with co-religionists. Indeed, much of Crews’ book demonstrates the ways in which Muslims appealed to the state for intervention in various conflicts, including intimate domestic ones involving wives, husbands and children. The state thus occupied a central place in the minds of at least some Muslims, who did not regard the regime’s avowedly Orthodox Christian character as an intrinsic obstacle to the upholding of Islamic law. Crews concludes that the success of the regime in finding common ground with believers and enlisting their participation in the functioning of autocracy should be regarded as a central source of the empire’s durability. Social History Vol. 32 No. 1 February 2007