Gillian R. Overing

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.

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.