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Examines representations of women and femininity in Old English poetry and prose.
2001 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title
Exploring Old English texts ranging from Beowulf to Ælfric's Lives of Saints, this book examines ways that women's monastic, material, and devotional practices in Anglo-Saxon England shaped literary representations of women and femininity. Horner argues that these representations derive from a "discourse" of female monastic enclosure, based on the increasingly strict rules of cloistered confinement that regulated the female religious body in the early Middle Ages. She shows that the female subjects of much Old English literature are enclosed by many layers-literal and figurative, textual, material, discursive, spatial-all of which image and reinforce the powerful institutions imposed by the Church on the female body. Though it has long been recognized that medieval religious women were enclosed, and that virginity was highly valued, this book is the first to consider the interrelationships of these two positions-that is, how the material practices of female monasticism inform the textual operations of Old English literature.
"This is an important and inventive book. Horner uses a supple argument about the discourse of female enclosure—enclosure in a monastery, enclosure in the body, and enclosure in a text—to link a feminist reading of four Old English works not usually read together: the heroic epic Beowulf, the female-voiced Old English elegies, a verse saint's life, and female portions of the Lives of Saints by Ælfric. The result is an elegant and informative feminist reading of all these works and a developed methodology that sheds light on women's experiences as readers of Old English texts and as subjects within those texts." — Jonathan Wilcox, editor of Humour in Anglo-Saxon Literature
Acknowledgments
Dedication
Introduction
The Discourse of Enclosure: Inscribing the Feminine in Old English Literature
Chapter One
Looking Into Enclosure in the Old English Female Lyrics
Chapter Two
Voices From the Margins: Women and Textual Enclosure in Beowulf
Chapter Three
Textual/Sexual Violence: The Old English Juliana and the Anglo-Saxon Female Reader
Chapter Four
Bodies and Borders: The Hermeneutics ofEnclosure in Ælfric's Lives of Female Saints
Conclusion
Christina of Markyate and Legacies of Enclosure
Bibliography
Index